The world was lit with a pulsing, squiggly blue-green glow. Not only could Rasp see, but he could feel, too. Everything. The moss-carpeted arena, the deteriorating stands, columns, and walls, even the beast itself. It was as if Rasp’s tactile sense had been plucked from his body and wrapped around the entire coliseum, force-feeding him every scrap of information the bioluminescent algae could provide. An ordinary man would have lost his mind to the strain. Rasp, on the other hand, didn’t have much of one to lose to begin with. The extra senses slipped neatly into the empty space behind his eyes and merged as one with his aura vision, converting the sensory overload into visual hallucination he could not only see, but feel, smell, hear, and probably taste if he really, really wanted to.
For obvious reasons, he wasn’t all that curious to know what algae tasted like.
Had Rasp possessed the time to sit back and truly consider the mechanics of what was taking place in his head, the whole thing would have fallen apart immediately. Sometimes, when it came to magic, Rasp found it was better not to know. It wasn’t like he needed to understand how or why he’d merged consciousness with a million different, miniscule lifeforms all at once. All that mattered was that it was working. For the first time since being chased down the Iron Ridge, beaten bloody, and left for dead, he could see the battlefield in front of him. And by the gods, that wasn’t the sort of thing you questioned. You made the most of it while it lasted!
Rasp darted back and forth, weaving between the monster’s spindly legs, hacking and chopping as cold blood spurted with each wild swing. June’s green aura signature danced along the edges of his peripheral vision, doing the same. She announced her accumulating tally with each victorious swing. No matter how quickly Rasp butchered away, June kept pulling ahead in numbers. Truth be told, he really wasn’t that bothered she was beating him. She was a Stoneclaw, after all, with the inner strength of a bear on her side. By all rights, she should have been leading the pack.
The only problem was she wasn’t.
“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this!” Hop’s baritone voice was laden with a complicated blend of fear, exasperation, and utter disgust.
Hop, having taken Rasp’s nonsensical advice to wield the sword as if it were a giant scalpel to heart, had surged ahead in numbers. Whereas the others had to hack and chop multiple times to sever a leg, the faun’s sheer strength and years of surgical experience meant he could cleave through an armored limb with a single, deft slice. What’s worse, the overgrown baby wasn’t even trying to win! He’d cut and run —literally — all while bemoaning the arean’s abysmal lack of hiding places.
As the faun had no interest in flaunting his numbers, June kindly kept a tally on his behalf. Alas, having not grown up on the Iron Ridge, she didn’t quite grasp the Stoneclaw tried and true tradition of fudging the numbers. “Seven realms, Hop! That’s eighteen already. Save some for the rest of us.”
Hop’s pale violet aura severed a leg and then ducked aside, trying and failing to avoid the ensuing splatter of bug guts. “Is that an option?” He sounded more than ready to forfeit his title in exchange for being allowed to go cower along the sidelines. “Say the word and I’ll leave all the rest to you two, I swear.”
“Three!” Faris’s incensed voice rang out from further away. Truth be told, Rasp kept forgetting he was there. Between Faris’s lack of magical aura and overall battle prowess, he was easy to miss. “I’m here too!”
“I’ll leave all the rest to the three of you.” Hop corrected himself, adding, “Sorry, Faris.”
“Thank you, Hop. It’s nice to be included considering this was my idea.”
“My original point still stands, however. The three of you should be fine without me.”
“Not a chance, Hopalong,” Rasp said.
Was he miffed that it took him three solid whacks to cleaver a scolopendra leg compared to Hop’s one? Yes. Did a small part of him want to send the blasted faun away so Rasp could claim the title of Champion Leg-Whacker for himself? Also yes. Was Champion Leg-Whacker a stupid title that no one in their right mind wanted to lay claim to in the first place? Maybe. So what if he suddenly wanted it more than anything else in life? A title was a title! And yet, as annoying as Hop’s unexpected cleaving skills were, that wasn’t the sort of thing you discarded for the sake of a bruised ego. The faun would have to stay if they hoped to win.
That said, Rasp didn’t have to lose graciously. “Honestly, Hop, if you can’t enjoy hacking off an ancient monster’s limbs one by one before it devours you, were you ever truly living to begin with?”
“There is so much wrong with that statement that I don’t even know where to start.”
“Good, then don’t. Keep chopping!” Faris shouted. “Both of you!”
“Hey!” Rasp snapped back. “Don’t give me any of that lip! I can chop, argue, and beat your ass at the same time.”
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“Bold words for the man currently in third place.”
“Oh, shut up!” It wasn’t like he wasn’t trying! Rasp was having to keep multiple powers in check in once. Not only was he juggling the combined consciousness of the algae and his aura vision, but he was actively having to keep the dark entity at bay as well. It writhed beneath his skin, eagerly awaiting the moment Rasp’s control slipped and it could feast on the scolopendra’s magic once more.
“Faris!” Hop tried to appeal to the so-called brains of the operation.“Faris, this isn’t working!”
Hop’s pale magical signature ducked to avoid being stabbed through by the retaliated swing of a giant centipede leg. Rasp felt how the wet ground trembled beneath Hop’s hooves and the way the scolopendra’s armored appendage sliced through the air, missing the faun’s hunched form by a fraction. “We’re trying to drain an ocean one drop of water at a time!” Hop scrambled backwards to avoid a second strike. “It doesn’t matter how many legs we cut, it won’t bleed out quickly enough to make a difference.”
Rasp felt a ripple surge through the earth beneath their feet. The soil erupted, ripping the ground out from under them as a torrent of rubble shot skyward. Rasp lifted his hand and stopped the wave, preventing it from crushing everyone below — even the bellyaching ones, because he truly was just that generous. As much as he wanted to hurtle the razor-edged shrapnel back at the beast, doing so counted as using magic against it, exactly what the creature wanted. It fed on magic, including any spells used against it. Reluctantly, Rasp maneuvered the airborne rubble away from the arena and let it drop.
The creature screeched, infuriated by Rasp’s sense of control, and whipped its mighty body about to punish him for it. A hundred different legs shifted above him. Rasp rolled onto his hands and knees and scuttled across the upturned ground like the rat in the kitchen, managing to avoid being skewered by the beast’s blade-like appendages. The ground shuddered softly as someone ducked and dodged the maze of twisting legs to reach him.
The lack of a magical signature should have given the culprit away, but Rasp was still pleasantly surprised to find Faris snatching him from the ground and pulling him to safety. “Come on, Dinglehead, this way!”
A phantasmal leg struck into the soft ground directly in front of them. A second and third followed suit, cutting off their escape, and trapping the pair within a cage of barbed, armored legs. Rasp felt a fourth leg position itself into a strike-formation above them. “Move, Frais!” he shrieked as he hacked away at the legs being used to cage them.
The fourth leg struck the same moment a familiar purple aura came cutting through from the outside. Hop slashed and kicked his way through. His bloodied blade met the fourth leg as it came crashing down and severed it at the joint with a single swing. He even added a war-cry, which went something along the lines of “I’m dirty and gross, there’s blood in my mouth, and I want to go home!”
The war-cry needed work, but Rasp appreciated the part where he and Faris weren’t rendered into meat sack kabobs. “Hopalong,” Rasp gasp, scuttling out of the way, “I love you.”
“No, no love. Think up a different plan instead.”
Faris grabbed Rasp by the arm and dragged him behind the nearest green-blue column. “I think he might be right.” Faris didn’t sound too happy about it, either. “This thing has more legs than we can chop. We’ll tire long before it does.”
At which point, the nameless one would have four hot and ready snacks waiting for it. That didn’t sit too well with Rasp. He peeked around the crumbling column, keeping his gaze fixed on the shifting body above in case it turned on him again. “You think it’s just messing with us?”
“I think it was expecting an easy meal, not this. It’s a bit of a lose-lose situation. It’s not getting fed, and we’re not going to win,” Faris said. “If we keep harrying it like this, it might go back underground.”
Rasp’s ears perked at the suggestion. “Why are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?”
“Because we can’t leave until we kill it. I don’t know about you, but I’m sure as chaos not going to hang around for the next two centuries waiting for it to come out of hibernation again!”
Rasp flinched when earth groaned and screeched beneath the surface. His consciousness zipped to the affected area in the question. He could feel the beast’s original tunnel, the one it had used to gain access to the arena at the start. The tunnel walls were shifting, widening, opening up again in anticipation of a quick getaway. “Fuck,” he snarled, glaring out of the corner of his eye at Faris’s murky shadow. “Are you sure you’re not some kind of mindreader?”
“It’s about to bolt, isn’t it?”
It was Rasp’s turn to play mindreader. “Yeah. And you’re about to tell me something stupid too, aren’t you? Like, ‘hurry up, Rasp, we’ve got to stop it’.”
“We? No.” Faris snorted. “You’ve got to stop it. I’m perfectly happy to stay right here and shout encouragement from the sidelines.”
“Fuck me! How am I supposed to do that if I can’t use magic against it, huh?”
“Collapse its tunnel.” There was what felt like a deliberate pause before Faris added the missing piece. “With your magic, not your hands.”
“I knew that!” Rasp snapped as he broke into a run. Thanks to the algae, he didn’t necessarily have to be close to the tunnel in order to collapse it. He could literally feel it from across the arena. He just didn’t want to be anywhere near Faris and his backseat spell casting when it came time to bring it down. He channeled his focus as he raced across the broken ground, feeling every crack and cranny within the tunnel for a weak point. He found one near the entrance and poured his magic into the split, ripping it wider.
Rasp slowed to a halt as the ground shook and buckled beneath his power. He dug deep, pouring more and more into the weakening tunnel. Yellow light leapt from his outstretched hands and burrowed into the soil until every splintered crack glowed the same color of his magic. It was working. He could feel the tunnel walls beginning to give way. The walls trembled and bowed as clumps of earth shook free. Enraptured in his spell, Rasp failed to notice several important details.
Firstly, the scolopendra had stopped at the entrance at the tunnel and was now standing stock-still, testing the air with its mandibles. Secondly, was the sudden presence of wind in a place where wind did not exist. The third, possibly most important detail, was the giant, dragon-shaped magical aura currently barreling down towards the open arena in a lethal blur of outstretched talons and teeth.