We found my sister and Mel without too much trouble, but sadly that was where the convenience ended. Apparently the lizard wolf things were native to this area, because a pack of them had surrounded Chelsea and Mel and seemed to be trying to tear them apart.

Mel had a huge circle of fire around the two of them, golden flames pushing them back, and she was letting one or two of them through at a time to pick them off. Chelsea was fighting them off when they got in close, her purification flame letting her cleanse their obnoxious venom. I hadn't had much chance to start my innoculation with everything going down, but I put it back on my mental list.

"Callen, can you take care of that grouping?" I asked the big man. "I'll work with Callie to pick off the rest, but there's about five of them there that'll be easier to take down quickly with brute force.

I'd fought the bastards before, and I knew exactly how long killing them with Belial would take, not to mention Mel's fire would make it all but impossible to use Moonlit Night.

Callen nodded, drawing his shorter sword and striding forward. I gave him a second to engage then turned to Callie. "Can you get into the shadows with all this light? With both of us playing distraction you should be able to pop out and cut them apart with your Path."

"Fire isn't a stable lightsource." She said with a nod. "It flickers, which means shadows happen between those movements. I can get to them. What about you? What will you be doing? It'll be hard to sneak up on them when things are like this. And Belial won't work as well if they aren't grouped up."

I chuckled, withdrawing my staff, choked up on it to give myself plenty of room, and took a few long steps as I triggered Mephistopheles. As I shifted into my single combat form, I swung my staff like a baseball bat, letting the black flame gather on the end and then explode out, blasting the nearest lizard thing forward and straight into Mel's golden circle of fire.

It screamed as it pitched through, catching fire and hitting the ground inside the circle rolling and shrieking until Chelsea turned and stomped on its head, smashing it under her boot.

I waved cheerfully. "Hey there! Need a hand?" Callen had hit his group, and the others had all turned to look at me as intended, several stray creatures beginning to prowl towards me carefully. I snickered, setting my stance and triggered my overlay. It gave me plenty of idea of where attacks would come from, especially combined with my Danger Sense. They wouldn't have a hope of sneaking up on me.

There was a flash of danger from behind and I picked up on it easily, sidestepping and swinging my staff in the same two handed grip, shifting slightly to make sure I got a good angle for smashing the bastard right past me into the flames.

My black armor piercing fire was catching on impact and burning through their defenses, scales being eaten up. When the second one hit the gold fire it went up even faster, the flames combining with my own in an odd way and basically turning the damned thing to ash on contact. I blinked, staring down at the staff, and so did all the others. I tried to replay what I'd done, and I realized I'd managed to time the explosion of my flame to a flare up in the circle.

The two fires at their peak had mixed, which was interesting. I was glad it hadn't just gone unstable and exploded like the interaction between the flames of Purification and Enshrining Darkness.

As the explosion distracted a bunch of the creatures, I saw Callie emerge from the dark behind one, daggers flashing as lines of black cleaved the air. Her Abyssal Path was interesting, though I still didn't understand the details of it. Whatever it did, it was destructive, and the space itself (or lack of it) seemed to cleave through the flesh of the monsters with ease.

Her blades took the head of one and opened another's guts, letting its intestines spill onto the ground before she vanished again. Just like last time, the disembowled one attracted the ferocious hunger of one of the nearby monsters who jumped on it, feeding noisily. The struggle knocked them both into the fire, rolling through the flames releasing an unearthly scream.

Callen had already hacked his way through two of them and had just caught the horns of a third and picked it up by the horns to physically beat a fourth with its flailing body.

"Mel." I yelled. "Drop the circle!" She did, and as it came several of the things rushed my sister and friend at the same time. "Callie!" I yelled, knowing my girl had felt my intent when I said that. We couldn't read each other's minds, but we knew how the other fought well enough that it was close.

The monsters charged them, bearing down on the two girls, and as soon as their shadows covered the forms of Mel and my sister, Callie slipped through the shadows, grabbing them and dragging them through. The last five or so monsters collided horn to horn in a giant pile, and I trigger Pit of Despair as they piled up, most of them sinking into the pit of dust.

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"Chelsea, Mel, concentrate your power on my staff!" I said as the girls stepped from the dark. I held it up, both hands gripped at the base, focusing my black flame into it. The girls pushed their own flame into the weapon, appearing at my side and putting a hand on each shoulder. My Azure Soul Body was easily able to hold the invocation together, and the three kinds of flames mixed into on crystalline glasslike fire.

Smashing it down on the pile of stacked monsters, I released the blast all at once, a pinpoint explosion in line with Mephistopheles. The crystalline fire created and explosion, consuming every inch of exposed flesh and expanding into a sphere before retreating as quick as it came and leaving behind melted crystal bones.

"Huh." Said my sister in a shocked tone. "That happened." She paused. "HOW did that happen? Invocations aside, different alignments of fire don't really mix like that. Purification flame in particular doesn't mix well with most things. I'm not sure what that gold flame is exactly, but the black fire you were using seemed...deadly. It doesn't seem like something my flame would play nice with."

I frowned, I'd been wondering about that myself. I'd seen from Zeke that some powers didn't mix, and she was right, death was a big aspect of my hellfire. Or at least destruction. "I think because Afterburner is part of that stance." I said after mulling it over. "My meta skill for power enhancement. It makes up part of the flames and it works on everything. I guess it makes my flames compatible with other flames? Not sure if it works on non flame attacks but whatever the case, I don't hate how this turned out."

Chelsea snickered. "It's certainly a pretty pile of melted crystal bones." She leaned down, kicking the ground near the bones. "Actually I think you glassed the whole pit. The bones dumped a bunch of heat and melted all the fine sand. Think we can take it with us?"

"Probably not." I said with a laugh. "I'd love to, it's awesome and I could totally put it in my room or something, but prying out a ten feet wide, ten foot deep chunk of F-ranked crystal full of crystal F-ranked bones sounds like way more of a time suck than we have time for."

I turned to Mel. "Thanks for the assist by the way. Sorry about...beating you mercilessly to within an inch of your life."

She shrugged. "It wasn't real anyway. I'm not thrilled about it, but it's not like I haven't been through worse." She glanced around slowly. "What about Abel? He still around here? Because I'm NOT happy he switched sides, and he's got a lot of groveling to do to make it up to me."

"Do you really think he's the groveling type?" I asked in amusement. I couldn't see Abel doing that.

"Well...maybe not groveling." She said smugly. "But he'll make it up to me. Every time I get mad at him he gets all sheepish and tries to make it up to me by fighting anything that annoys me. It's rarely successful, but watching him try to earn my forgiveness amuses me."

Callie giggled. "I should make you do that kind of thing when you make me mad." She said to me wickedly. "I bet you'd jump through all the hoops."

"No." I said bluntly. "I'll just stop cooking you dinner." She flinched back in horror and it was my turn to laugh. "See, I already have a way to make it up to you when I'm stupid. Now come on, let's get back to the others before Bethy successfully baits Abel into attacking her and turns him into a wombat or something."

"Can she do that?" Mel asked worriedly. "I didn't know transformation like that was part of her powers."

I shrugged. "If she decides a wombat is a type of bat? Probably. Who fucking knows what her powers are. Regardless, that fight would go poorly for him."

She obviously agreed, because she and Chelsea were ready to go quickly enough and then we all headed back to the main group. Despite her annoyance at him, Mel still hugged Abel close when she saw him. Fight or not, they had to take the reunions where they got them. Not to mention their bond was at least as developed as ours. She probably wasn't that mad, and could feel his reasons for what he'd done.

Everyone greeted our wayward friends, said hello to Chelsea again and then turned to me to figure out the plan. "Ok, Gabe is the last party member missing, and we'll have to find him later. For now we're together and he's strong enough to handle himself. We need to focus on the Academy building." I said firmly. "Specifically we need to find out exactly what the hell the BMP are HERE for."

"We still don't know?" Said Chelsea worriedly. "Any chance we could wish for the information?"

I shrugged. "Doubtful, secrets are the most expensive thing you can wish for, and the higher the level a secret, the more it costs. I'm pretty sure they're looking for a way to revive Hatescream, so that secret will be a doozie. Or hell, that could have been a misdirect, who even knows?"

My sister turned to stare worriedly at the building. "That's not good. Hatescream was...scary, from what I've heard. The other gods worked together to put him down. His ability was dangerous and he used forbidden rituals and methods to create powerful underlings. It took five gods to kill him last time. The Wishmaster, The Revenant, The Emperor, The Faerie Queen, and even Black Sorrow. All working in tandem, it's barely ever happened before."

It reminded me of the whole thing with Suvaya. Why exactly did the gods feel the need to destroy other deities. Were they just a threat? Or was there some other reason. Would Black Sorrow and the Red Revenant really work together for something as simple as paranoia?

Whatever the case, she was right. We needed to stop the Blood Murder Palace initiates from achieving their goal whatever it was. And the only way for that to happen was to find it first. I'd have to use my divination to try to track it down. Which meant we had to actually enter the Academy. "Alright." I said grimly. "I suppose we'd better get going then. We have to beat them there."