CHAPTER 31 - THE TEMPLE FIGHT

  He was almost through.

  Using both hands helped, for whatever reason.

  And he’d adjusted his feet—instead of standing shoulder-width apart and planted evenly, he placed one foot forward, one foot back, like a headstrong business man in a suit on his way to work in the face of a heavy wind, tie fleeing behind his neck, jacket blowing.

  His hands were spread out in front of him, like a superhero in disguise, holding up a great beam that had fallen from a collapsed building, while people ran out from under it.

  This placed his head naturally to look down at the floor.

  To look at the door across the room he had to angle his neck upward. Although not driven necessarily by defiance, it look, and felt, like defiance anyway.

  The crust on the door was nearly destroyed.

  It had taken him two hours.

  He could have broken through with the pickaxe in less—but things had changed. He could get by, for his own sake. But to get Sal out, he had to think a bit smarter, value his own strength and growth a bit more—even if just for the afternoon.

  Though this self-compassion and ambition was lessened significantly upon transfer from Sal’s well being to his own, it still made a difference.

  He readied himself, his Transversal recharged for this final round.

  His foot slid back slightly, bracing and finding a solid position on the ground. The moment his boot ground into place, blue and green sparks danced from beneath his heel. A slight wind, invisible to most, but tracing thin lines of ghostly green and blue, wound past him in a tumult of directions, as if fleeing the direction Levan was facing—like this was his last stand.

  “Save yourselves,” Levan was saying to the elements of Aether. “I’ll hold them back.”

  And the Aether obliged, rushing past him, and that made the wind.

  But some, as if seeing his heroism, turned back.

  I’ll fight with you, the Aether said, and once past him, they returned, gathering first at his back, finding his shoulders, rushing down his arms, joining him. Building, they sprinted hastily to his fingertips, pleading to leave, to join him, to enter the world to fulfill his purpose.

  “Aether Burn,” Levan growled.

  Aether leapt zealously from his fingertips. Embers, blue and green and ghostly spiraled out in a ring of flame of the same color, rushing against the door, scouring its center.

  That was a good one.

  [ Skill: Spellcasting | Novice, Rank 4, 54% ]

  The last crust of the door melted under the pseudo-heat of the aether, until, finally, after almost three hours of alternating constant spellcasting and rest, he could see the door itself on the other side.

  Levan nodded to himself.

  Good enough.

  He’d spent enough time in this foul-smelling lair.

  He strode up to the door without thinking, and, without breaking stride, kicked it open.

  ***

  “Aether Burn!” Levan shouted.

  The ring of embers caught the Lost One mid-jump.

  The aether fire washed over the distorted reptile, and for a moment it hung in the air, before flying backwards, slamming into a pillar to his left with a crumble of salt and seaweed from the ceiling.

  Without stopping his momentum, Levan spun and cut forward, the [ Short Sword ] held at a low diagonal, and the [ Iron Sword ] held at the opposite high-diagonal.

  He caught another attacking Lost One on the cheek and it made as sound between a hiss and a scream, and a second one during its leap, cutting clean through the neck with the iron sword.

  He stumbled out of the windmilling pirouette, and when he saw another pillar in his peripheral vision, it became the new plan.

  Plans didn’t last long, it seemed.

  [ Objective: Free Sal ]

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  > Task | Find the artifact keeping Sal prisoner, 1/1

  > Task | Disable the artifact 0/1

  He’d found the key.

  The path to his friend’s freedom was at the end of a temple much like the one he’d arrived through the Emberlaines in, much like the one he’d found Sal himself trapped within.

  Instead of a summoning circle, or the window to a glass prison, the apex of this temple held Sal’s escape.

  It was also festering with Lost Ones.

  They clung from the ceiling, scoured the floor, crawled on the statues, hissed from the pillar-tops.

  Beyond the Lost Ones, past the pillars, at the end of the length of the temple, was a raised dias like the others. Up the steps was an object of indiscernible shape, so covered in shell, spines, and protrusions. Power emanated from the object, he could feel it—feel it even as it was stifled from beneath the chaotic growths and crustacean plates.

  He probably should have thought longer on a better plan. Usually he wasn’t the type to rush in. But it felt right.

  At the time.

  He kicked a hunter in the head, and the creature skidded along the floor, sliding into a group of three or four other Lost Ones that immediately fell upon it, and began eating.

  Levan kept running.

  Distance played tricks on a man, here.

  The bismuth temple, alien and strange, had a way of bending things, fooling the eyes, disorienting inexplicably.

  The sprint might have worked, if the length and size of the temple had remained consistent. But the pillars had gone from small enough for him to hug them and have his fingertips touch to the size of broad-trunked trees, to well beyond.

  Now the pillars stretched a hundred feet high, and yet, the metallic ceiling plunged inward, bars and rectangles shoved down the temple’s throat.

  It’s like I’m shrinking, Levan thought in a panic, passing a pillar whose base was up to his waist height, and whose diameter took a full three seconds to sprint past.

  Another trio of Lost Ones peeled onto him like flanking predators, and he cut at them with the short sword.

  Ineffective.

  The temple was a cacophony of shrieks, spits, and hisses, and as he cut once more at this new wave of joined attackers, even more sounds joined.

  Archways on the sides of the temple, dark and hidden, began revealing figures.

  They poured out, some quadrupedal like the more animalistic Lost Ones, some hunched over like the ones that attacked Garrow’s Claim. Others were even more upright, with even more human features. They wore clothes, tattered and ruptured by salt and time. They stumbled blindly out of the archway and into the dim light of the temple, and Levan shuddered.

  Reptilian features were hidden behind red and brown carapace that blocked their face, stuck to their skin as if melted on.

  It blocked their eyes, their mouths, their chins and brows. They screamed, voices muffled by the melded carapace that suffocated them.

  Fingers, wrinkled and pale from the saltwater, torn and fleshy, and semi-scaled, tore frantically at the carapace, tearing uselessly with bone-nubs from what must have been centuries of trying.

  One stumbled over his own legs and threw his hands out in front of him. He found a pillar, and, hugging it best he could, smashed his carapace-face as hard as he could into the stone.

  The stone cracked, slightly, but the carapace was unharmed.

  Shrieking in muffled frustration, the robed Lost One flexed every muscle in its body, and jet black bolts of lightning edged with blue escaped his fingertips and wrapped around the pillar.

  A quarter of a second after the black-and-blue flash, and the pillar cracked, white rock exploding in jagged stone that mimicked where the lightning had struck.

  Hearing the sound, the other robed Lost Ones, began twitching, flexing their bodies, and searching with full-head turns.

  Can they see me?

  Can they see me?

  No way they can see me.

  Another of the reptilian hunters lunged up at his wrist, and he only just in time turned the sword in his grip, striking downward to pierce the thing against the floor.

  The hair on the back of his neck perked up and rose, but it wasn’t until the hair on his scalp and the crown of his head began to rise too did he realize what was happening.

  Ah, crap.

  I think they can see me.

  Levan dodged to the side, diving behind one of the pillars just before another lance of blue-black lightning arced from one of the suffocating priests.

  Another explosion of rock dust, and the static sensation faded.

  Only for a half a moment—

  Then it came again as a priest stumbled manically after him, finding him behind the enormous pillar.

  Levan scrambled the only direction he could—forward and up towards the pillar base.

  The room was continuing to scale up in size, and by now the pillar base was shoulder-height.

  Levan turned to face the priest.

  “Euagh!”

  He hurled first the short sword at the priest, and it flew by pommel first, missing by feet.

  The priest flexed desiccated fingers, arms, robes, pectorals, shoulders, neck—everything from beneath the tattered robes, and Levan felt the lightning.

  He shifted balance and hurled the other sword.

  The crackling lance of ocean lighting jolted through the air.

  Some reached him, and pain along with jet-black burns scoured his arms.

  The iron sword caught the lightning, lifted and carried out into the heights of the temple, but the metal calling most of the lightning with it.

  “Aetherize!” Levan screamed through the pain, as the iron sword caught the lightning.

  [ Short Sword added to Aetherial Stores ]

  Behind the priest, his short sword on the floor of the temple dissolved into aether dust.

  “Blade,” Levan uttered quickly, as the rest of the priests caught up with him. “I call you from the Aether.”

  [ Item Equipped: Short Sword (Aetherized) ]

  With a mental urge to the Codex, Levan hid the notifications. There would be quite a few.

  He hurled the short sword the moment it was back in his hands, and, without even watching his throw, he turned to the pillar base and threw his hands up.

  “Aetherize,” he said, and swung himself onto the pillar top.

  He watched as the sword turned to pale green dust yet again.

  It had been buried deep in the chest of the priest, who collapsed when the blade suddenly left.

  Levan stowed the short sword, and Aetherized his iron sword, calling it back and stowing it as well.

  Both hands free, swords at his hips, he sprinted across the pillar base, making his way towards the end of the temple.

  The static sensation came, and Levan split left as a bolt of lightning passed by his right. Then he zagged right—and a bolt screamed past his left.

  His legs cried out in exhaustion.

  That extra sense—the invisible, and as of his current Inner Workings level, unspecified tenacity with sending and retrieving from the Aether, was desperately low, too.

  He was running out of options, running out of tools.

  Running out of running, if such a thing could be said.

  And I think it can.

  The altar was getting close.

  The area around it, leading up to it—a festering mess of ocean-born refuse, of crustacean carapace crowding the lizard scales and lightning-scoured hides of the dead. Then, at the top, pinnacle of this fallen altar, was the artifact, so buried beneath corruption that its shape was still a mystery. It was close, now. So close.

  “I’m almost there, Sal,” Levan thought, more as a way to push himself on than anything else.

  “Do….try to make it…if….if you could…please, if not, of course, I understand, and to even try as you have is enough, and—,” his friend began.

  “I’m gonna make it, Sal,” Levan said through gritted teeth, somehow picking up speed.

  I’m gonna make it.