Lord Uramaru flung himself backward with a nimble leap. The clockwork ants didn’t waste a moment. A half dozen of them clambered over their fallen brethren’s bodies as they spilled through the gap between the rocks and the totem and barreled toward us. Behind them, I could swear I saw fog rolling in in between the patches of smoldering flames, though I lost sight of it once Brand lobbed his fireball.

The explosion was even more terrific than its predecessor. The totem and the rocks acted like a basin, trapping the flame, which lapped at the basin’s rim in a fiery tide as it slammed the ants into the obstacles. Bits of molten metal and crystal hissed through the air as they rained down onto the ground.

Brand turned to me. “Now, Genneth!”

I spoke the activating words and threw the with all my might. The blue-white sphere started its rapid expansion before it even hit the ground. Icy gales whipped out from the explosion’s core, pelting us in frost and snow. The magicked ice dueled against the fading heat of Brand’s fireball, sending up clouds of steam and rain that froze back into rime and hoarfrost as they fell to the floor. Glowing eyes and twitching antennae waved through the clouds.

The metal bodies of the advancing swarm of clockwork ants started to crack, crunch, and groan. The ants’ movements were becoming spastic and stilted. I could hear the gear shafts breaking. The jeweled eyes flickered as their machinery began to slow.

“Attack!” I yelled.

We all joined in. Brand ran forward, swinging his staff, and Yuta went alongside him, with his kanakatana looking like a club, the way it was sheathed in a layer of hardened ink. Brand flicked repeated cantrips in between strikes of his staff, pushing away swaths of steam and snow to give me a clear shot with my crossbow.

I fired bolt after bolt.

The result was something like a Maikokan piñata party, only with bits of metal instead of candy.

In a moment, everything went still. Pools of water and melting ice were scattered across the floor, making the chamber humid and lukewarm. The dankness smoldered the remaining flames on the goblins’ tents and totems as. Fallen clouds sunk low, hovering at the periphery.

The humidity was really oppressive. My scales and skin were slicked with moisture. Little water droplets condensed on the short fur on my stomach and chest beneath my undergarments and my chainmail hauberk.

Yuta and Brand stood back to back, surrounded by a wreckage of ants. Springs and gears popped out and rolled to a stop as the last lights died in the robot insects’ jeweled eyes.

The two of them turned to face me.

“That was pretty intense, wasn’t it?” Brand asked.

But then, my nose twitched.

Over the smell of machine oil, the stench of ozone I’d noticed before had grown thicker. A lot thicker. Looking past my friends, I saw that the clouds and fog hanging low to the ground hadn’t dispersed. If anything, they’d thickened, too.

A tide of fog was coming in.

“Brand…?” I asked.

I stepped forward, to get a better look.

My companions watched me with trepidation.

Suddenly, the cavern shook. It wasn’t drastic, but it was certainly startling.

Something crashed in the distance.

“What was that?” Yuta asked.

Then, the approaching fog moved, lunging toward the gap between the pile of boulders and the now-charred totem.

“Fudge…” I muttered.

I loaded a fresh bolt into my crossbow. “Guys!”

Brand and Yuta drew close to me.

“The floor!” Yuta yelled.

The fog trickled in, pooling around our feet. It hung low to the ground, like something you’d see out in Elpeck Bay’s marshes in the early hours of the morning, only this fog, with its ozonic stink and its pale, rosy hue was anything but natural. I felt an electric sting where the fog touched my toe-claws where they jutted out from the holes in my boots.

A couple seconds later, the fog had already risen up to our knees.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this…” I said.

Speak of the Norm, as soon as I said that, I spotted crystalline cubes flowing through the fog, bobbing about like leaves in water. Each of the cubes bore a single, inhuman eye.

Brand and I looked each other face to face.

“Boss fight,” we muttered.

Yuta was about to ask what that meant when one of the cubes rushed up at us. It spun as it rose up from the fog, carrying the fog with it, which then condensed it into a pseudopodial tentacle that stretched tall, and snapped down and across in a wide, grasping sweep.

We started to run, but then stopped ourselves almost as quickly.

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More of the cubes were rising up from the fog, shaping the clouds around them into tentacles of their own. They snapped as they struck.

Yuta managed to dodge the blow, but Brand wasn’t so nimble; one of the tentacles wrapped around him. More and more fog flowed into the tentacle, revealing some of the cavern floor. In a moment, the translucent tentacle seemed almost protoplasmic.

Brand screamed as the tentacle constricted him. Bolts of purple electricity flowed out his body and into the protoplasm. Brand tried blasting it with simple cantrips—, —but every one of his spells sputtered out without effect.

“Flibbertigibbet!” I yelled. “Yuta, it’s draining him!”

“What do we do?” the warrior asked.

“Get the eyes!”

When something had a very conspicuous eye, you shot for the eye. That was just Gaming 101.

The eye-cube bored up and down in the translucent limb. Aiming for the crystal cube, I fired, only for the darn thing to dodge by deftly flowing down the tentacle at just the right moment. As if to add further insult, the tentacle’s protoplasm dissolved back into gas and then re-solidified once my crossbow bolt passed through it harmlessly.

“Yuta!” I yelled.

I ran from a foggy tentacle, leaping off the floor to avoid getting caught by the living plasma. I darted behind one of the totems.

Purple bolts crackled through the fog. The big tentacle curled tighter and tighter around Brand.

The eye-cubes plunged back toward the floor, the protoplasmic tentacles following them about as the cubes roved through the chamber. The cubes spun about, sweeping left and right in wide arcs, trying to suss me out.

Yuta responded with broad slashes from his kanakatana, both with ink and without it. He was able to impale an eye with an upward strike that sent a small inkcicle spearing up from the ground. The cube shattered, freeing the eye, which he quickly cleaved in half with a second slash, after which the eye dissolved into nothing.

From where I was, safely hidden behind the totem, I stuck out and fired a pair of distracting shots at a tentacle that still had its eye. Seeing—and hearing—tentacles rising up behind me, I ran toward another totem, my tail scales scraping against the stone as I pushed my back against the cavern’s wall.

Yuta was able to shatter two more eyes—both of which had been zooming about in the fog over the floor—before his ink ran dry. A moment later, an eye rose up in a tentacle behind him, which then wrapped around him and bore him high.

The warrior screamed.

You would have thought the monster would just throw us against the wall, but no. This thing was smart. It was keeping my companions immobilized, trapping them like flies on flypaper.

Three tentacles swarmed toward me, one from each direction: up ahead, from the left, and from the right.

What to do? What to do?

My crossbow!

I still had one shot left.

By the Angel, I hoped this worked.

Muttering an incantation under my breath, I stuck out my claws at Brand, whose robot body glowed as the low-level spell infused him with precious extra HP.

I fired my third and final silver-flame blast of the day.

The explosive wave of silver fire scattered the fog, launching eye-cubes in every direction, shattering them against the cavern’s walls. Brand fell to the ground with heavy thud, as did the eyes, which dove into the fog and swerved about, desperate to avoid getting shot now that their protections were gone.

“Brand!” I yelled.

Glancing at him, I saw digital snow hissing across his LED display face, matching the staticky, crackling noises that poured from his speakers.

I ran around like a maniac, firing more bolts. “Attack the eyes!” I yelled. Wisps of silver flame faded from the ground—the last remnants of my enchanted bolt.

Using my crossbow shots, I worked to corral the eyes, following up with liberal applications of my orison, hounding the eyes with its blue magic bolts whenever I had to reload my crossbow.

“Now!” I yelled.

Yuta pounced on the eyes, slicing through them with nearly inkless strikes. We’d nearly gotten them all when the fog rolled back in, coalescing around the surviving, scattered eyes like a king’s mantle.

The stuff was already rising up to form new tentacles! I would have used another enchanted crossbow bolt to scatter it and finish this monster for good, but I was out of my daily supply of magic ammo.

Fudge!

“G-Genneth!”

I turned. Brand’s stylized face was just barely visible through the static on his display.

“Cold,” he mumbled. “Use cold. Like from… desert… crossing. Condensation…”

Brand passed into unconsciousness. Green static once again dominated his LED display.

I lashed out my tongue as I ran, dodging a sweep of the tentacles. I stuck my tongue in my backpack and fumbled through my inventory.

There!

I pulled out my last . Wispy, almost fibrous, white vapors swirled within its blue depths.

I spoke the magic words, and then chucked the at the eyes and their fog. Once again, blizzarding cold whipped out from the impact site as the orb expanded. The effect was instantaneous: the pink fog condensed, its movements slowing as it took on the consistency of an airy gelatin.

The eyes trembled in place, unable to move.

They were afraid.

Darn right, they should be!

“Yuta, now!” I yelled.

“Right!”

It took only five seconds for us to destroy them all. The gelatin began to shrink away the instant the last eye dissolved into nothingness.

“You… you did it…” Brand muttered.

Unfortunately, the entity seemed to have one more trick up its sleeve. Purple lightning crackled through its now-eyeless body.

“Oh fudge…” I muttered.

Fresh pink fog billowed out from the dissolving gelatin as a swarm of eyes suddenly winked back into existence.

“What!?” Yuta yelled.

My blood ran cold.

“It’s channeling the energy it stole from Brand!”

The eyes crested up in tentacles, shrugging off the last bit of the gelatinizing cold.

Brand tried to push himself up off the ground. “Use the save!” he said. “Use the—”

—But then the cavern rumbled again, and I caught a scent that shook me to my core. I knew what it meant.

“Terrorworm!” I yelled.

Even the eyes darted about in fear.

Yuta stared at me. “What?”

“Grab Brand!” I yelled.

He ran over to the downed sorcerer with preternatural speed, snatched him off the ground and slung him over his shoulder.

“To me!” I called. I might not have known exactly where the approaching annelid was, but I could certainly smell where it wasn’t; I ran toward that wasn’t like heck.

The fog followed us, with its tentacles tilted forward, ready to swipe us up. But just as I ran into the tunnel, the cavern wall at my right exploded as a gigantic terrorworm plowed through the goblin camp. Its mouth was a cone of death, studded with drill-like fangs that spun at high speed, filling the tunnels with the sound of ten thousand chainsaws.

The thing had to be as wide as a bus.

“Jump!” I yelled.

I leapt forward, Yuta did too, using Brand as a cushion to brace his fall.

As we skidded along the rock of the tunnel floor, I looked over my shoulder just in time to see the fog’s eyes stare in final terror before they were obliterated by the terrorworm's maw.

Man, what a way to go…

As the saying goes, there’s always a bigger fish (or, in this case, worm).

The terrorworm merrily continued on its way, storming rock fragments across as it burrowed into the opposite wall.

For a minute or so, everything shook. We didn’t dare reenter the chamber until the sound and feeling of the terrorworm’s digging had receded into the distance and the rubble that had fallen and filled in the gaping holes finally settled. The only light was the soft green radiance from Brand’s staff, still clutched in his hand.

“Well,” I said, looking over all the carnage, “I guess that works.”

Yuta gave me such a look.