The field is an agony to cross. The land is at once both a clear path, yet there is no easy way to navigate between the bodies strewn mostly along the paths of the once expansive garden. They hurry, feeling every second slip by. Benson carries the duke's daughter by her shoulders, her already pale face gone pallid and bloodless, the bandage around her leg leaking. The sergeant ahead calls a halt, the men taking a momentary break to clear the few demons that come at them from the west, scurrying over a perimeter wall before attacking the group of guardsmen.

Benson nods toward a bench. Somehow, amidst the destruction, that singular piece of decoration remains untouched, not even a bit of grime on it. Jell, helping to carry Yul'Mari's legs, shuffles with him, gently laying her on the bench while the two men take a moment to catch their breaths. To their left, the sound of fighting continues, the guardsmen stepping forward and cutting down the demons in organized fashion.

For years, the personal guard of the Mari family has dealt with demons, a natural consequence of so many demonic summoners living in the city. They knew how to kill every kind, knew their strengths and weaknesses. Hell, they were each trained on how to summon the monsters in the first place. As Benson wipes his brow with the back of his sleeve, licking the last dregs of water out of his tin canteen, he thanks his past commanders for being so relentless in their training. Just like they'd promised, it kept him alive.

"Not far now," Jell says, nodding toward the dome of energy at the end of the gardens.

"No," Benson croaks out. "No, not far now."

The raucous thunder of energy exploding overhead is like a distant thunderstorm, easily forgotten until you look up to see the explosions of terrible magic. There is a crash far nearer, a wailing cry from the area they just fled from not a few minutes before. He turns, looking upon the combat.

Those two magicians circle the giant entity, one blasting fire down upon the monstrosity, the other striking with an invisible weapon.

"Maybe someone should help them," Jell says.

When Benson looks at his friend, he finds him watching the same battle as he is. The monster screams again as explosions light up her front. Those demons still lingering throughout the estate rush away from the noise. The morale of the enemy stands mostly broken, but it isn't as if the defending forces are in a good place to capitalize on that fact.

"Don't be ridiculous," Benson tells Jell as he pulls himself around, preparing to take the shoulders of Yul'Mari once more. The commander is approaching, no doubt about to order that they move again. "You would have to be a fool to put yourself in a fight between rank threes," he says. "We have a job to do. Come on."

This is not how I expected things to go. The huge monster screeches as it tears away from the fire. Dragonfire clings to it, but as it moves, the flames fall away in burning clumps. I realize the clumps are lumps of skin falling away toward the ground, smoldering and burning up as the tentacle monster drags itself from the fire. As the dragonfire falls away, revealing the creature beneath, its skin glistens, scorched but regrowing at a speed I can see.

The air wave of a lashing tentacle snaps me to attention as it enters the range of my aura. I spin through the air, the rubbery appendage trailing fire as it smacks hard into one of my wings. Bones inside my wing snap, shattered by the glancing blow of the tentacle. I plummet, spinning from the sky, crashing into and flattening a rose bush. For a moment, I think I must be dead after having fallen almost fifty feet out of the air. Other than my wing, I am mostly fine, however, just a few scrapes.

A dark line blots out the red sky as another tentacle arcs down like a whip. I summon as much black sand to me as I can, infusing it with steel mana. It's unlikely that the shield can absorb the blow. It doesn't need to.

In the final second, a blur smacks into the tentacle from the side with a crack that blows out my hearing for a brief moment. Jor'Mari spins backward in the air, the repercussion from his blow against the monster's descending appendage. The tentacle lands, crushing the ground eight feet to my left, a crooked bend now halfway down its rubbery surface, a bit of bone peeking through the glistening skin.

While the bones in my wing begin to snap, knitting back together and moving once more into place, I watch a similar phenomenon occur on the tentacle. The splintered bone stabbing through the rubbery skin retracts, the bend in the appendage snapping and popping as it moves to make itself straight once more.

"That's not good."

I spring to my feet, dashing to the side to avoid the lash of another tentacle. The monster glares down at me from above, the nest of tentacles that make up its bottom half rattling and creating a terrible, shrill sound. My damaged wing finishes popping back into place as two more tendrils descend toward me, allowing me to take to the air to avoid the assault. From above, the thing is even stranger, and I notice for the first time how its tentacles extend and thin when it attacks, giving it far more range than I would normally expect.

It isn't all that quick. The lashes that it throws my way in the air are wild things, imprecise and easy to avoid. I don't strike back against it right away. Instead, I watch as the rest of my dragonfire sloughs off of it bit by bit until it stands, raging, naked and undamaged. This thing has an incredible ability to recover from its injuries. How annoying.

The monster is rocked sideways as Jor'Mari hits it in the side with his mace. He can barely reach above its waist without having to jump in the air. The snap of the monster's pelvis is louder than the crunch of stone as Jor'Mari breaks the floor beneath him with his swing. The monster groans, folding over itself before straightening again. A hideous bruise blossoms on its side, already a deep purple, but begins to fade just as fast.

"I'm not really hurting this thing!" Jor'Mari shouts up to me as he jumps back to avoid more tentacles coming his way.

The earth below shudders with every blow the monster misses. Cracks start to race across the ground, riveting the grass and courtyard. Recent experience tells me that there are hollow places beneath Danfalla. If we don't finish this soon, this thing might just destroy the ground and end up inside one.

I call my sand to me while Jor'Mari keeps the demon occupied below, pushing the swirling mass of particles together into a single orb that begins to elongate and form a spear. I've never had to form a spear this big; it requires me to flex out my aura to encapsulate the surrounding space just to manage it. An errant tentacle lashes out at me as I concentrate on creating the spear, forcing me to soar higher to escape the demon's reach. When I have completed the weapon, a few seconds later, it hovers at over ten feet long, a thin octahedron of compact and heavy metal.

I wait. Hovering in the air, my hand outstretched above my head with the spear floating just above it, I allow time to tick past. Below, Jor'Mari continues to weave in and out of the demon's range, avoiding it with ease. His movements are a blur, his speed far higher than my own just now, but every strike he lands on the hulking monster is repaired in seconds.

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Finally, an opportunity presents itself. Jor'Mari jumps, leaping between two tentacles that lash down at him. He clasps his invisible weapon in both his hands, raising it above his head as his leap propels him into the demon. At the last moment, he hammers down with all of his might, right on the center of the demon's chest. Jor'Mari is sent skyward as his swing connects, flipping over himself again and again, his weapon sent soaring away by the aftershock. The demon is driven backward, its back slamming into the ground in an eruption of dust and dirt. Its chest bends inward wrongly, the breastbone beneath the skin cracked right in half and collapsed.

The monster's belly pumps up and down, trying to choke in air, but it doesn't seem quite able to get a breath. I cut down with my hand, and the spear of black sand falls from the sky. The demon's eyes focus on the dark shadow falling from the crimson sky. It isn't fast enough to avoid the blow, all it can do is lie in the dirt and await the inevitable.

Clink!

The spear connects with the monster's naked skin, but instead of sinking in, it bounces off. The sheer absurdity of it all stuns me for a moment. That spear is heavy enough to puncture stone. Yet, when it falls from fifty feet up, it bounces off the monster's already injured chest like an iron coin off steel armor. There is something in that, something in the pitiful noise of my lavish weapon scratching against the demon's skin, that drives me wild.

The spear falls to the ground, digging a crater into the soft earth, and I dive downward. My moonsilver staff appears in my hand, a gout of blue dragonfire pouring downward to wash over the demon's face. I bury its head in a continuous conflagration, pouring out reserves of dragonfire I have kept back. The cold fire washes out, spilling over the monster in a roar that drowns out its squealing pain, flooding out onto the battlefield like an unleashed river, freezing the mud, blood, and bodies where it touches. I can still see it inside the bloom of the fire's light, squirming beneath me for a moment before falling more and more still.

The dragonfire pouring from my staff never fully ceases, but grows less and less as I push out my frustration onto the monstrosity. A white light begins to blossom among the raging blue. I pause for a moment, the fire escaping my staff disappearing, as the idea that I might be adding a growth affix to the blaze scares me into stopping. No, the white in the fire isn't the growth affix; it is too concentrated, too focused.

I realize the peril a second before the attack comes. Flapping backward with my wings, a beam of white light fires up from below. The beam is a thin thing, barely as big around as a fist. My last-second movement stops it from punching straight through my chest as it was intended, but I feel it connect with my leg instead.

There is no heat to it, no burning or any other strange magic in the attack. Instead, as the light connects with my thigh, I feel like someone has stuck a spear right through my leg, a spear as big around as a fist. The world becomes a dizzying blur, one part red, the other part black and brown. Wind hisses past my ears as I tumble. My wings lash out, but it is like when I first tried to master flying. I never really did master flying, did I? I just found a way around that by using the sky affix. Such strange thoughts go through my head as I plummet from the air.

My brain catches up to the spin, the directions of up and down solidifying in my mind. I'm not fast enough in my recovery. Ribs pop, bending but not breaking, as I collide with a marbled statue standing in the center of the garden. A brief bout of weightlessness later, and I am splashing into the water of the fountain that surrounds the statue. There, I finally come to rest, floating face down in the dirty water, my head still spinning, pain racing all through my body. As the dizziness begins to fade, I continue to float, counting the coins that glitter in the red light penetrating down through the water. There is something oddly serene in the moment, watching as the light bounces off the coins at the bottom of the deep fountain. The pain grows a bit more distant, the coldness of the water a balm.

The illusion breaks after only a moment. A dead hand enters my vision, floating across the water in front of me. I sputter, heaving for breath as I pull my head from the water. Gasping, I crawl forward, spitting out the water I had nearly swallowed over the side of the fountain. Behind me, a long line of crimson snakes through the water from the enormous hole in my leg.

A hand clamps down on my own as I pant at the edge of the fountain. Sneering, I raise a hand, orange dragonfire already in my palm, before I see Jor'Mari standing over me. There are rings under his eyes, like the man has gone without sleep for days.

"Are you alright?" he asks, his eyes straying to the blood floating in the water behind me.

"I'll be fine," I say. Pulling myself out of the fountain is not a fun time. Jor'Mari catches me beneath my right arm and helps lift me from the water, gingerly setting me on the stone lip.

"Exeter's balls," he swears, staring at my leg.

I look down and immediately wish I hadn't. My stomach lurches at the sight of the hole bored through my leg. Inside the nasty wound, the bone knits itself together as I stare. A shiver rolls down my spine. Breathing out, I force myself to look away. The wound is familiar, the pain something I experienced for nearly a month, but I never had to watch myself heal from it before.

Jor'Mari's eyes flick between my leg and my face. "Are you certain?"

"Tits and honey!" I swear. After pushing the wet hair out of my face, I finally spot the demon. The monster has moved away from the lingering dragonfire on the ground and managed to make it to the tree. Already, it is a good thirty feet up the side of the trunk, its tentacles sticking to the bark as it drags itself higher and higher up.

"We should leave that thing for the rank three magicians," Jor'Mari says. There is a shakiness in his voice. "Nothing we could do was able to hurt it for long. It has to be rank three, probably a mid-rank monster."

"There are no rank threes," I tell him. "The only two I know of are inside that dome. Illigar is injured, and the other is a healer. Everyone else is wrung out, and the city won't stop tearing itself apart until that thing is dead."

He bites his lip, looking between me and the demon now. A spike of irritation is quickly quenched. He is worried about me. The fact that he thinks I can't handle such a monster is probably logical; nothing I have tried has been all that effective. After spending twenty-three days trapped in a prison of spikes, seeing the concern that my insidious mind had told me wouldn't be there is almost enough to melt my heart, to make me give in to his worry and retreat. We could let someone else handle this. If the battle went on long enough, surely the other armies would find out what happened and come to help. In just a day or two, this city could be crawling with several rank-three magicians and powerful adventurers. That would be the prudent choice.

"You remember what the tower was like," I say to him.

Jor'Mari's furtive glances cease. He looks down at me, slowly stilling. He nods.

I gesture vaguely to the burning city spreading out beneath the high district. "It is like that, everywhere. People are killing each other out there, Jor. They don't even understand they are doing it. If they live, they will wake up with bloody hands, wondering what happened. I can't let that happen. I have to stop it. I have to save as many as I can."

Silence passes between us, the only sound the distant crackling of fire and the warm breeze. I can see it on his face. He knows I don't mean the people who will die.

"I lost my weapon," he says, setting his shoulders.

Reaching into space, the hilt of a buzzing sword falls into my palm. As I pull the magical blade from my vault, lightning races up and down the length of the weapon. Jor'Mari's eyes widen as he stares at the greatsword I took from Ferro.

"Try this," I tell him, handing the blade over. He grunts as he takes hold of it, not expecting it to be so heavy. "It heals quickly, so maybe cutting pieces off is the answer."

Jor'Mari tests the weapon with a few swings. "This is an amazing weapon."

"Think you can handle it?" I try to push myself to stand, but my wounded leg won't respond to my commands. Instead, I unfurl my wings, using my magical flight to lift me from the lip of the fountain.

"There were a few swordplay lessons that I didn't sleep through," he says, flashing his smirk at me. "What will you do?"

I stare up at the demon as it continues to slowly crawl its way up the side of the huge, dead tree. "Me, I'll figure that out."

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