Fighting demons was a thing that never seemed to get easier, no matter how many times Ike did it. Every time, every battle, every demon, worked by its own twisted code of rules and movements. Each one had their own unique cruelty. Like ugly snowflakes. Some fought with fleshy weapons warped into their limbs and some like perverted perceptions of animals that used to prowl the world, but no matter what kind of ugly they turned themselves into coming out of the Blight, one thing could be certain.

They really, really enjoyed kicking the shit out of humans.

While Nerinai and Marcus ran around the perimeter of the pond rubbing their ritual lines on the wall Ike and Isibeil kept the attention of the skeleton. It towered over them. Long limbs made of bone, but given the uncomfortable opportunity of a close look Ike could tell the bones weren’t a perfect match up of the human body.

The left arm came crashing down on Ike. He just dodged its hammering collapse, earning a score of ice cold water sprayed over his chest and face. A tiny window of opportunity opened. Ike rammed the head of the shovel between two of the seven thin bones that made up its forearm and jumped down over the handle, cracking them both.

Shards of bone flew over the water. No use though, the second the arm jerked up those shards came flying back into place.

That didn’t stop Isibeil from flinging herself at one of the legs. Both daggers in hand, she aimed for the joints and started prying at the seams. All Ike could do at that point was hold the beast's attention as best he could do.

“Hey!” he shouted. The hollow eyes and smiling teeth turned on him, sent a shiver down his spine, then followed the body as it lunged for him.

Ike managed to smack away one of the hands. The other grabbed him from behind, sharp points digging into his skin.

Thumb and bony finger found purchase on his ribs and dug in, tearing at the already tender and bruised skin from before. Ike couldn’t help but let out a shout. When his feet started to slip through the water, pulled along by the bone, he focused all that shivering pain in his body into his hands and slammed his shovel into the water praying for a crack in the stone.

He kept sliding for a few inches, then finally his shovel caught something and stayed. A little yelp, “Hah!”, squeezed out of his throat.

Then he risked a turn around to see Isibeil still working on the knee. The other arm lifted up for an attack- one Ike couldn’t block- and suddenly that little victory felt incredibly unimportant.

He was still being pulled back. Thedemonhad him trapped between falling into its pull or getting crushed. Ike waited. Watched the fingers curl into a fist, wind up in the air, and hurtle towards him in the laborious and patient violence of the tall skeleton. Just before it turned his head into a red soup he let go of the shovel and felt himself fly.

He didn’t exactly fly, but the leverage from the Lens pull sent him skirting through the water. It hissed again in anger as it lost its little prize, but when it started to chase after Ike one of the knees gave out and it collapsed into the water.

Ike ended up sitting at the feet of the Raveness. He could feel his ass starting to burn from sliding on the stone, and the water drenching every square inch of his body and dripping from his hair by now.

“Hey!” He looked up at her with a lopsided smile on his wet face, ignoring the burning pain in his sides. “Think we’re doing pretty good?”

Nerinai looked back at him with a swirl of concern, anger, and finally settling on plain irritation. She grabbed him under the arms and helped him up, ignoring his little sounds of protest. When he was finally standing up he noticed the walls were nearly covered in black ichor, and Nerinai had drops of the stuff covering her hands.

“Focus, Guardian.”

“How much longer on the runes, by the way?”

“Focus!”

She spun him around and pushed him forward. Thedemonwas getting back up, and quickly. Great. Just wonderful.

Ike set out on a run- hopped over a flexing limb of bone on the way- and crashed into his shovel to rip out of the ground where it stood waiting for him to return. Thedemoncontinued to rise, slowly, but something was wrong. Where was Isibeil?

He’d have started looking for her had the situation been different. The monster was still picking itself up, elbows sliding on the stone as it pushed up. That left its skull just in reach, and Ike was itching to give the beast a taste of its own headache.

He ran up and made the first strike with the side of the shovel, splintering a piece of the skull. Before it had time to recover he pulled the shovel down and pinned it up between the rounded judges of its left eye. He stabbed three more times in the eye before it reeled its head back and smashed back into his shovel.

Headshots did nothing to stem the beast. The sound of vibrating metal filled the air and Ike’s arms were trembling from the force. His teeth started gritting together in his mouth, frustration at the futility of everything he tried to hit it with.

Then he noticed Isibeil finally, crawling under the beast with her knife in hand. She jammed a knife into the skeleton's groin, to no effect.

It’s not that Ike wasn’t paying attention, he was just hard of hearing from the last time he had his ears caved in from the Lens harmonica. When the arm came flinging towards him he didn’t notice, and it landed square in the middle of his back.

At this point, Ike was ready to give up. While a very vocal and feral voice in the back of his mind cried for him to get up and do his duty as a Guardian or else this plan wouldn’t work, the rest of his body screamed back. Screamed in utter agony. His legs burned from the effort of fighting in water, his toes were a distant cry of numb solitude, his back now felt like it had been broken in several places and his skull was starting to throb again from the lingering effect of their previous battle. Not to mention his arms.

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So that would be the end for Guardian Ike, no last name, no legacy to speak of. Death to scrawny bone man who barely moved faster than a groggy child in the morning.

Then, laying in the water barely holding himself up, he felt a sudden warmness wrap over his body. He thought maybe, this was what death felt like. A sudden warmth of being out of the cold, cold world. But there hadn’t been a final blow, so Ike risked a glance above his head.

In his eyes twinkled the light from the burning monster. It reared back, away from Ike and collapsed itself into the water. Scarlet flames wrapped around its ivory chest and kept burning even without the right fuel, even through the water.

Even mystified by the spectacle of its burning body, he could see Isibeil moving his way as fast as she could. She helped him up to his feet and threw his arm over her shoulders, pulling him to the other wall with Nerinai and Marcus.

“Did you do that?” he asked through gasps for air.

She only shook her head and pointed with a knife at Marcus. He heard her say, faintly, “I’m gonna kick his ass.”

She dropped him unceremoniously by the wall and left to, Ike assumed, berate the living hell out of her charge. Ike would have laughed had the very idea not made his ribcage ache and the skin around it tingle with anticipation.

Nerinai drew his attention as she always did. He watched from the wall, because now the runes that had been painted all around the water were beginning to burn with the soft glow of black embers.

The skeleton stood up. Scarlet flames on its chest be damned, it let out the loudest hiss a thing could manage. Almost like it wanted to yell but without the lungs or throat to do it, both things it had lost with the magic that turned its harmonice to an empty piece of wood. Nerinai did not flinch as it began to charge at her, just lifted up her hand and waited for it to get close.

Thick lines of black ichor shot out from her hand. They splintered in the air and took the demons three spots, then dropped in the air and on its body. The ichor began to spread. Tendrils wrapped around bone, expanded and grew through the body of the beast like a poison in the veins of a human and began to sizzle with the power of a shaman.

It didn’t take long for the bones to turn to ash, leaving just the four humans in their soaked clothing. Ike grinned. Any day he escaped death would be a good one.

Isibeil offered to help him up again but he refused. Mostly for the sake of self respect, but also because somehow he managed to hold on to his shovel and that would do him fine in standing on his own. Nerinai left to inspect her handiwork and the next section of the room.

Ike moved to follow, but he would’ve passed Marcus on the way. He stopped and looked at the scholar, with his trimmed up brown hair sullied by the water he looked only slightly less professional then he had before.

“How’d you do that?” Ike asked.

Marcus grunted, then looked away from the book in his hands. “Hm? I’ve no idea what you mean.”

“Yeah, right. If it was Nerinai I’d know. She doesn’t really do red, right? And even if it was just a happy coincidence, she was still busy with the runes.”

“Blood magic.” Isibeil said, stepping between the two of them but totally focused on Marcus with a sharp glint in her silver eyes that spelled out a murderous intent. “The scholar bled himself for an off-the-cuff ritual.”

Just as she said it, a trickle of red escaped down the scholar's sleeve and leaked out onto his hand. He tried to wipe it away and just sighed.

“Yes, Sister Isibeil, I utilized blood magic in order to save the lives of both you and the Guardian here. Would you have preferred I sit idly by while the two of you die?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, you can do blood magic too?”

“Of course I can. Anybody can, given the right tools and information.” Then he smiled in a way that Ike felt nobody should smile when talking about blood and magic in the same conversation. “Thankfully the university is home to a vast and incredibly varied wealth of information. Incredibly useful, wouldn't you say?”

Ike made a grunt of approval and moved on from the scholars pair. Now that the demon was dead, they had free reign to study everything in the temple. Good for them, Ike thought. That fire had seared its way into Ike’s brain and knowing that a man like Marcus who seemed so normal and intelligent had access to it through rituals with blood just made him even more uncomfortable. Shamans were supposed to be the pinnacle of magic in the world. Black ichor their fuel, and their byproduct. Nerinai had mentioned that blood was an even more ancient ingredient though, so who knew what kind of power it really had?

Those were thoughts for the scholars and the shamans, he decided. Ike should have concerned himself with the present moment; like Nerinai opening the door to the next chamber in the temple and stepping in without him.

Leaning on the shovel made him a slow mover, but it gave him plenty of time to marvel at the room while he crawled over to Neirnai. Someone planted neat little beds of flowers and ferns here ages ago, with pockets of light scoring through the ceiling from somewhere far above. All those plants had spread out since then and turned the temple garden into a temple forest.

Nerinai stood in the middle, leaning against what looked like a bird’s pond of water. Ike came over and leaned on it too, hand just inches away from heres, to get a better look. In the middle was a statue of a man playing the harmonica with a ring of happy children dancing around his legs.

“It’s the seal,” she said. Before Ike could respond, she wrapped her hand in black and slammed the stone to dust.

Two seals she broke alone. One Ike broke in the dreamy cafe. The last one was here, and now it was gone. The victory didn’t feel so sweet for the battered Guardian, and from the looks of it, not for his feathered friend either.

“So that’s it then? I guess we go for the gate to hell itself next. Whoo. Big steps.”

Nerinai let out a sigh, laced with enough melancholy to have a theater man gasp. “Look at yourself, Guardian. You look like shit, to be entirely frank. I pushed you too hard. This was exactly what I was worried about doing, and now-”

“Hey.” He leaned over the dusty bird pond to look into her pitch eyes. “Don’t forget who asked to be here. A few broken ribs in your name wouldn’t hurt as much as a paper cut by myself, got it?”

“If only that were true.”

“Thing is, it is. See? I’m telling you that’s what I mean, so that’s exactly what I mean!”

She slammed her fist against the edge of the stone. “Damn it! Do you have any idea what I… the things I…” she let go of whatever protest she was mustering and let out a shaky sigh. “Of course. Of course, Ike, you would choose to be here. No matter what I do, everything plays right into his hand.”

Ike was about to ask who ‘he’ was before Nerinai looked back up at him. “At some point all of this is going to come crashing down on us. This, breaking the seals, hasn't been done by anyone before us. Not even attempted. All I can ask is… could you forgive me Ike? For bringing you here. For not trying harder.”

Ike could only focus on her eyes, frantic and pleading. “You’ve tried plenty hard, I think. Are you all right?””

“No, Guardian. Not at all. But you’re in an objectively worse situation, so why don’t we get you somewhere comfortable and warm before we do anything else.”

The way her voice shifted from pleading desperation, to timid melancholy, and then back down to barely a whisper left a sour taste in Ike’s mouth. Something was wrong with the Raveness that he couldn’t explain, and it seemed, neither could she. She was right about him though. Ike’s body was too tired to object to any more of her redirections.

Back in the temple room, Isibeil and Marcus stood by the staircase leading up. They had worry written into their frowns. Marcus turned to them, and asked, “Did you two hear that? A scream.”

Ike felt a sinking in his stomach. So much for getting a break.