Rieren led the charge. It didn’t matter if Folend took offence. It didn’t matter that Serace was exceptionally exuberant about attacking and killing the Abyssals, bent on vengeance for his fallen friend. Rieren was the most powerful cultivator here, and she would be at the front of their foray.
“Make sure to stay in a wedge,” Amalyse shouted as the first of the monsters reached them.
Rieren heard her well enough. She activated both her Domain and Tidal Summon as she ran. As the water rose in her trail, her rapid motion caused heavy waves to blast outwards in her wake.
The Armistice Enforcers that might have charged her were pushed back, especially the ones on the side. That allowed Rieren to focus on the bigger, deadlier monsters right ahead of her, the ones who wouldn’t be pushed back so easily by the surging water. At the same time, the now-unbalanced E-Grade Abyssals were easy pickings for her companions.
She supposed neither Serace nor Folend would be happy about essentially taking apart her leavings, but they had to push aside the idea of personal glory and honour. Their main objective was reaching the centre of the chamber. As the one with the greatest power to make that happen, they needed to trust her judgment.
No one complained. Folend took the right, swinging in heavy and hard with his mace. The remainder was left for Serace to mop up with his sword and his windy skills.
Rieren didn’t pay attention to what happened elsewhere. Her singular focus was on the group of D-Grade Abyssals blocking their forward path. She had already come to a jerking halt, her sudden change in momentum sending out several more waves. Each of them crashed into the Blightmanes, though they sadly weren’t strong enough to stagger the monsters yet.
No matter. There was water around them. That was the main thing she had been looking for.
The Blightmanes spread out as she approached them. Each of them took one of the directions around Rieren—one to her left, one to her right, while the last one kept her front occupied. Somehow, it almost felt like the monsters sensed that alone, they wouldn’t have been able to defeat her. Together, however, they posed a far greater threat.
If Rieren had intended to fight them head-on. Her goal here was to get past them, so the chain of events of their altercation was a little different from what the monsters might have predicted.
She turned to her left, exposing her back to the other two Blightmanes. The left monster growled and lunged at Rieren, but she swerved past it with ease. Where the first one had failed to land a blow, the other two were emboldened by the opportunity they saw. In other words, it took almost no effort to pull the Blightmane Lykans towards her.
Rieren dodged one of the monsters’ blows, which brought her in range of the other one. This time, she was forced to use Ground Truth to prevent herself from being skewered by its claws.
Her altercation had allowed the other Blightmane to twist around and follow up with another growling charge at her. It leaped right over its two companions, attempting to bring its entire weight to bear upon her. Only the presence of her Domain, that slowed her opponents while enhancing her own speed, allowed Rieren to dodge roll without suffering any wounds.
More importantly, the Blightmanes had been drawn in far enough. Now, it was time for Rieren to act.
She ran back to the middle. Fast as the monsters were, they were too surprised by her rush to react, especially when she added Fray Passage to the mix.
Thankfully, the others had caught onto her plan. Folend was already leading the charge into the middle of the gap Rieren had created by drawing the monsters away. Amalyse was forcefully pulling Serace away to come along with the rest of them. His fury at the Abyssals was nearly clouding his common sense.
Rieren joined her companions in their charge through the monsters. The Blightmanes had recovered and were now loping towards them, their long limbs and incredible speed reducing the distance between in short moments.
“We will need to stop the pursuers,” Rieren said. “Anyone have any skills with wide areas of effect?”
“Leave it to me.” Folend stopped at the front, letting the rest of them rush past him. “These monsters need to understand they are not welcome.”
As the rest of them hurried on, Rieren paused for a moment. Folend stepped forward and raised his mace. Its spikes expanded outwards just as they had done when they had sparred together. When he slammed the engorged mace into the ground, dozens of spikes burst outwards in an arc towards the pursuing monsters.
The Enforcers that had survived now died instantly as they were skewered. Blood burst and bodies broke apart at every impact. While the Blightmanes weren’t killed outright so easily, they were staggered. All three fell and were trapped in the array of spikes.
Folend grinned ferociously, as though if the monsters dared rise after that, he would pummel them to death with his bare fists and relish it. “There we go. No more stupid, pursuing monsters.”
“Good work,” Rieren said. “We need to—”
“I know what we need to do.” He turned away and hurried past Rieren. “Keep up.”
Rieren sighed. Then hurried along. At another time, she would have struggled against the impulse to surreptitiously push him off into the lava. Then again, at that time, Folend would have attempted to bodily pick her up and do that to her before she could do it to him. How wonderfully far they had come to not need to wrestle with that impulse.
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“We can jump form here,” Amalyse said where they had all come to a stop.
Rieren looked down. She had to agree that it wasn’t impossible. The smaller ledges leading down were wide enough to jump down onto.
“Let’s go then,” Serace said. “No point in letting the monsters catch up to us.”
Amalyse had been about to state why she was hesitating, but Serace jumped off before she could reply. Folend pushed past them and followed Serace down. Rieren didn’t have to look around to see what was causing her to wait. The guards.
“You’ll be fine,” Amalyse said. “It’s only a short fall.”
The guard who had been selected as the de facto spokesperson for the rest of them shook his head vehemently. “That’s easily over a score paces, that is. No way are we surviving that fall. Ain’t no way.”
“He’s right,” another woman said. “It’s too long. If you lot need to get going, then go. Don’t worry ‘bout us.”
There was no time. The monsters were approaching from either side, both the ones they had felled behind them and another large cloister approaching from the opposite direction. That was at least partly why Serace was so eager to get going. As was Rieren.
“Consider carefully,” she said, staring at each of the guards in their eyes. “You alone cannot fend off the monsters, and we are not going to wait here any longer. We do not even have the time to assist your jumps down the cliffside. Consider, and do what you deem best.”
Wasting not a moment longer, Rieren stepped up to the edge and leaped off. She didn’t wait to see how Amalyse had reacted. Back in the Sect, she hadn’t exactly been fond of the guards, yet here she was, waiting for them to see if she could assist them to make the right decision. But as Rieren had said, they had no time to waste.
The jump was certainly high. It reminded her of the jumping exercise they had performed regularly in their physical cultivation class. Thankfully, she had progressed enough along her cultivation and her class to withstand the impact, even if it did bow her legs a little.
Amalyse was similarly capable. She jumped down to the first of the smaller ledges when Rieren leaped off to the next one.
Near the bottom, Rieren looked up. The guards hadn’t followed, weren’t even attempting to find a way to soften their impacts. Ah well.
Serace and Folend had already moved on to the bottom, where they had climbed upon the enormous carcass of the dead Anachron. Rieren hurried to join them. They were almost in position. Amalyse wasn’t far behind. Her expression was forcefully neutral.
But where the guards hadn’t followed them, the monsters had changed their tack. The ones who had been rushing up the series of rocky platforms to attack them had now turned around to charge back down the way they had risen. Meanwhile, the rest of the surviving Abyssals higher up were jumping right off the ledges with varied success.
Rieren followed Serace and Folend as they headed to where the Anachron’s huge head rested atop the centre of its rootlike body. The body was soft under Rieren’s feet, its stench already making her nose twitch.
Once more, it struck her just how big the Anachron was. The lava had been rising all this while thanks to the flow from the holes in the ceiling far above, yet it had only reached about halfway up the lowest limbs of the dead Anachron.
Rieren evaded some of the earthy offshoots from the humongous monster’s body. There were some straggler Abyssals awaiting atop the corpse, but Serace and Folend made short work of them.
It didn’t take long before all four of them had gathered near the Anachron’s head.
“We’re where we need to be, right?” Folend asked. “How do we signal your little clockwork pet?”
“He’s not my pet,” Amalyse said. “But first, we need to gather all the monsters here.”
She was right. Their journey to the middle of the pit was to attract all the Abyssals to this spot. It was working. The monsters were making their way to their current location from all around them.
Except, they weren’t as together as would have been ideal.
The ones that were closer had to be dealt with directly. Rieren slashed the head off one Armistice Enforcer, while Serace and Folend took care of more monsters that gathered around them. When a Blightmane that had charged ahead of the other Abyssals, Rieren had to step away from their position at the middle of the Anachron’s corpse to kill it. Not ideal.
“Now?” Serace asked.
“Hold it…” Amalyse said.
“Easy for you to say.” Serace sliced viciously to separate an E-Grade Abyssal’s body in two.
Amalyse grimaced. “Just a little longer. They’re almost here.”
Rieren leaped backwards until she was standing near the centre again. Amalyse was right. It wouldn’t be long now. The monsters who were together were nearly upon them.
“Now!” Amalyse shouted. “Gather closer. Hurry. Serace, you’ll have to use your shielding skill.”
The four disciples gathered just before the dead Anachron’s head. Serace whipped up his windy shield around them. Rieren could feel that it had grown quite a lot stronger. As it expanded outwards to encircle them in a protective mesh of whirling wind, her whole body felt as though it was on the verge of being blown away entirely.
A second later, Amalyse whistled. It was loud and shrill, cutting through all other noise.
The signal Kervantes must have been waiting for.
Powerful bolts burst out of the broken tunnel ends far, far above them. The rain of destructive quarrels gleamed with deadly white energy, arcing overhead to land among them.
“Protect yourselves!” Amalyse shouted.
She summoned her greatshield as the bolts rained among them, forcing out a cacophony of screams from the monsters. They hunkered down behind their various defensive skills for Serace’s shield of wind wasn’t strong enough to prevent the bolts from tearing through.
Folend had expanded his mace again and was squatting underneath, much as Amalyse was doing behind her greatshield. Meanwhile, Rieren’s mastery of her sword was enough to slash out any stray bolts that might have come close enough to injure her. Serace doggedly refused to do anything, probably under the pretense that his skill was enough for him.
“I have not heard you whistle in ages, Amalyse,” Rieren said when the deadly rain finally ended, around the same time that Serace’s skill did.
She was flushing. Strange how a simple act like whistling could elicit so many feelings in someone. Amalyse had occasionally rebelled against her family, which had included learning little tricks, skills, and the like that they considered unladylike. Whistling fell under that weird definition.
As much as Amalyse enjoyed the act, she still struggled against doing it, thanks to her upbringing.
“It was the best idea I could think of,” she said.
Rieren smiled. “A good idea.”
“Are they all dead?” Serace asked.
Instead of waiting for an answer, he started running around and stabbing the various monsters perforated by the bolts that had flown in from above. Some of the monsters had survived, but those were still standing and had retreated farther back, gathering at the end of the dead Anachron’s limb and the first wide rocky ledge that would take them higher.
“Great,” Folend said, staring at the surviving monsters. “We still have too many to kill.”
“It—”
Rieren was cut off when Serace screamed. They hurried over just in time to see the side of the Anachron’s corpse explode as something huge shot out and grabbed Serace in a crushing grip. Rieren’s eyes went wide. That was a Shadeborn’s chest-mouth appendage. Less than a heartbeat later, Serace was drawn screaming right inside of the enormous Anachron’s corpse.