The familiar churn of mana roiled in Logan's chest as his Life-aligned Invigorating Flame reconciled with his Void affinity.

Invigorating Flame (Life) is now CryoPyre (Void)! Consume Fire to unleash Ice. Consume Ice to unleash Fire. It's backwards and it absolutely shouldn't work, but it does. Convert mana into its opposing element at double strength. Because why follow the rules when you can melt and freeze things harder?

Skill level is retained. Return to Invigorating Flame when Life Affinity is reassumed.

A conical blast of frosted air shot from Logan's dangling fist at his side against the stony floor.

Shocked, Logan hopped away from the affected terrain, nearly slipping on the icy surface. The lingering ice crystals dissipated as rime dissolved into frosty mist. He glanced over to the others, who had also paused at the outburst.

"What was that about?" asked Alden. "I thought you didn't have any frost skills."

"Me neither," said Logan. Since the Life version of the skill had focused more on buffing, he figured the Void version would somewhat match. He hadn't expected something offensive.

He lifted an open palm to the slope beside him and put only a trickle of mana into the spell as he tried it again. This time, he focused specifically on fire mana.

A six-sided lattice of frost bloomed along the wall with sharp crackles and pops as Alden and Cassandra gathered closer.

"So, it is a Fire-based skill," Logan said, drawing his conclusion out. "But it feels like… it flips."

He narrowed his focus, this time calling up frost mana instead. It slid into his hand like winter wind creeping beneath a collar, sharp and invasive. Then the Void-borne elasticity inside him compressed it, coiling it up, until—

CryoPyre!

The frost mana collapsed inward and then burst outward as a jet of flame from his palm. A spiraling gout of fire blazed far brighter than expected for the small amount of mana he used, curling in a hot ribbon before snapping against the cavern wall.

CryoPyre is level 9!

Alden ducked with a curse. Cassandra stumbled back, shielding her face.

"Be careful, Logan," she said. We don't want to draw atten—"

*SCRRAWWKK!*

From a shelf high in the stone, a flock of warpincer raptors swerved sharply midair. They had been headed for the slope of fallen forest but now they diverted course, eyes gleaming with predatory intent as they zeroed in on Logan's ledge.

"Nevermind," Cassandra said.

Alden conjured twin frost lances at the first of the birds as it folded its wings for a killing dive. "This one's mine!"

Null Pulse!

Logan launched himself skyward, but he wasn't done testing this thing yet.

CryoPyre!

CryoPyre!

Mana coursed in and around his two hands, one icy, the other burning, yet neither hurt. Frost rimed one gauntlet, while heat shimmered off the other like a forge about to scream.

He grinned.

One kick, then another. He pinged between raptors, sometimes with only the open pit beneath him if he fell, slamming into their sides with gauntlet-strikes enhanced by Null Pulse, slowing time with Meditate just long enough to strike clean.

Critical hit! x2

Gauntlet Mastery is level 16!

CryoPyre is level 10! CryoPyre is level 11!

Aerial Combat is level 12! … Aerial Combat is level 15!

Null Pulse is level 23!

You are now level 14! +1 END, +2 DEX, +3 INT, +4 PER, +2 WIL You have 14 free stat points.

As he descended, well aware he didn't have access to Eldertread to soften his landing, he aimed his body toward the flight trajectory of an approaching, lower raptor and crashed down with a bone-jarring impact that stunned the raptor.

Sharpshooter is level 6! Sharpshooter is level 7!

With his breakneck pace broken, he sprang without any skills beyond natural leg strength and landed in a low tumble. As he passed the bird, though, he sucked in fire mana and blasted it in a fan of ice so cold his messy hair tips clattered against one another like tinkling icicles.

"You're—attracting—more!" Alden snapped between hurls of frostspears. Another bird spiraled down behind him, feathers withering midair as necrotic deterioration withered away the pinions of one wing entirely. He was holding his own, but Logan could see he was burning through mana.

Far more mana, in fact, than Logan.

"I'm not trying," Logan said. How was his usage of the skill costing so little?

Aetherlens!

CryoPyre!

The world sharpened as the currents of ambient mana sprang into view.

He compared his and Alden's blows; Logan spent only a third the mana Alden used to generate a similar effect, but the result was nearly identical in force.

Aetherlens is level 23!

A raptor clipped low, aiming for Logan's neck. He ducked in time to evade it, but another bird burst from the side, claws extended with warped force mana and barreled into him.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The label said this one was a Warpincer Raptor (Corrupted), and showed it as a Bird-Monster hybrid. The only additional item from the description state the demi-monster imbued Life affinity into its war attacks, which Logan found terrifying.

Only his earlier dip saved his life. The claws scraped his shoulder instead of carving through his throat. Even that was enough to inflict him with Bleeding, though. Logan suspected any attack from these corrupted beasts would do that.

He hit the ward's surface hard, skidding, nearly tumbling off the ledge. With a slam, Alden's boot pinned the fabric of his shirt just inches from the edge. His ribs throbbed from the catch, and something metal clanged off his chin.

Logan coughed and looked down.

Of course. The Ashwake Emblem. It had fallen from his neckline, where it had been tucked beneath his shirt, secured on the same chain as his Amulet of Bleed Immunity.

No wonder his fire—and even his reversed frost—was hitting harder. The emblem tripled the strength of his fire-based skills. Even if CryoPyre was converting frost mana into fire, the emblem was amplifying the result. And he couldn't be sure, but it looked like there was more ambient fire mana in the air than there had been moments before.

He scrambled up.

Aetherlens!

CryoPyre!

He let ice flow through him again. Only when he loosed it did the reversed combustion take place.

The quantity of ambient fire mana spiked after the blast, as he suspected, but only a sliver compared to what he had consumed of its reciprocal.

CryoPyre is level 12!

"Darn," Logan said. For a moment he had wondered if his tripled strength might create excess ambient mana he could use to power his next attack, but now he abandoned the idea of infinite feedback loops generating exponentially more ambient mana.

But that was fine. He didn't need infinite. He just needed enough.

He leaned back into a fighting stance and watched as another two monstrous hybrids zoomed in for a kill. He was ready for them, but before they even reached him, a golden forcefield sprang into existence in front of one bird, which hit it with a sickening crack, stunned and falling into the distance. It recovered midflight, but at least Logan only had to face down one bird at a time.

As he kicked the bloodied feathery carcass over the ledge, he called over his shoulder to Cassandra. "Even just actively looking at all the ambient mana, I was so laser-focused I didn't even consider that radiant mana was back." His bleeding affliction was already gone, too, cured by Cassandra before he had realized it.

"Believe me," Cassandra said, glancing up at the hole in the surface where starlight streamed in through, "I noticed the moment it returned. Force mana still feels foreign to me. Besides," she said with a coy smile. "I haven't had a chance to try this yet."

She whipped her hands in the air and tendrils of searing gold light whipped the backs of warpincer raptors, dispersing the flight in moments of chaos.

Before long, they fell into a flow between the three of them. Senna cursed, angry she couldn't participate, but she was only half-finished deconstructing the guild-given rod and needed to be ready for when Mishki and Bromlin returned.

Logan held the narrow ledge while Cassandra created staggering blockades of force mana to disorient incoming war pincer raptors, her eyes lit with intensity as she guided her spells with precision. Alden stood just behind her, alternating between icicle lances and blooms of necrotic decay, every splotch of death energy aimed at crippling wings mid-flight or thinning the neverending flocks. Logan, for his part, was growing increasingly comfortable with CryoPyre. His left hand shimmered with cold, the right pulsed with heat, and he swapped them in rhythm with his breath, leaping between falling raptors and launching himself into the air with elegant arcs of Null Pulse.

They moved like the spokes of a single wheel. When Cassandra frazzled a raptor, Alden followed with a frosted spear. When a bird zigzagged out of range, Logan slashed it from above or hurled back a blast of converted mana, gaining two more levels in both CryoPyre and Aerial Combat. And if anything survived all that, Senna tore herself away from her project just long enough to hurl small explosives.

The coordination allowed them all to recover their mana and Stamina, but even Logan, with his ability to recover faster than the others, was feeling it.

When the barrage finally slowed, then trickled into silence, Logan, Cassandra, and Alden all leaned against the rocks.

"That it?" Senna asked, holding the separated rod between her two hands. "Come on, I'm finally ready to join in. Why can't—"

Shrill screeches ripped through the vacuous dark and Logan turned just in time to see Mishki racing toward them from the forest slope with a red-faced Bromlin trying to keep up.

Senna pumped a fist in the air. "All right! Next round!"

Alden groaned. "I don't particularly care to fight any more of these birds."

"That shouldn't be a problem," Logan said, eyes narrowing at the dark blurs chasing the stout duo. "You can focus on the prowlers they're bringing along, too."

Shapes emerged as goble and dwarf sprinted toward them, wind in their faces and determination in their stride. A streak of flicktail squirrels trailed behind, each carrying unbroken moonbloom pods in their pouches to shield them from the moonlight.

"Cassandra!" barked the dwarf. "Remember Dustfall Valley?"

Cassandra grinned and wove her hands through the air, a wall of radiant mana appearing just after Mishki reached them. But Bromlin was still a good twenty feet away, with the prowlers gaining on him, and the wall would keep him out.

"What are they doing?" Logan asked.

Senna chuckled. "Dustfall Valley. You had to be there. Or, I guess, here."

"He ruined my favorite hat in Dustfall Valley," Alden muttered darkly.

Before Logan could ask what the hell happened in Dustfall Valley, Bromlin jumped into a sideways dropkick. The short dwarf's knees scrunched up as his momentum carried him forward, and then he sprang backward at his two pursuers. The first beast flinched at the dwarf's fury and skidded to a halt, just in time for the prowler behind it to slam into its rear. Both toppled into the dark with startled yowls. Then Bromlin followed up with an attack at a swooping bird. He must have been fighting a few off, because his axe and beard were both red with feathers.

Senna grabbed Logan's arm and pulled him aside. "Okay, time to get to work. I need to show you how to use this, and we don't have a lot of time."

While Cassandra, Alden, and Bromlin regrouped to hold the perimeter and Mishki whistled his squirrel army toward cover, Senna dropped behind a stone outcropping. The flicktails dropped off their cargo at her feet before darting away, while she pulled out her metal containers.

"Give me your hands," she said, "and hold this right here. Yep, like that."

Without looking up or taking a breath (and without angling her mouth away from Logan's ears), she shouted to Cassandra. "Half-ward, please!"

Cassandra cast one glance at Logan with the metal cannister and Senna holding a moonbloom nodule and nodded, raising a golden ward around their hands just as the tinkerer bore a hole into the seed. One at a time, Senna cracked open the moonbloom nodules inside the sterile safety of the ward as Logan held the organic container steady. Each nodule she tipped poured out its soft blue toxic spores, some of which missed the narrow opening and clouded the small ward with a faint glowing haze. Even behind the barrier, Logan's fingers tingled with the sting of the spores.

She worked quickly, hands efficient despite the battlefield around her, until she had dispatched around 30 nodules taken from her pouch.

Then she took a piece of wiry filament she extracted from the miscalibrated guild rod and fixed it in place while sealing the cannister.

Crafting is level 15!

Instead of laughing over the minor gain for his minimal assistance, Logan frowned. "Do you think that's going to be enough?"

They called Mishki over.

With his friend linked to the furnace, he believed they could imbue the toxin into the fuel source and amplify it. It was starting to really feel achievable.

They didn't get to savor the moment.

A deafening shriek pierced the cavern as the Devouring Coil burst upward again. Its gaping maw swallowed an entire flock of war pincer raptors in a single snapping motion. A massive sweep of its body smashed another group into the rocks, leaving nothing but broken wings and twitching limbs sprinkling into the depths like grotesque glitter.

The furnace pulsed brightly again, and the pustules along the Coil's spine glowed with terrifying brilliance in response.

At the shockwave rolling outward, Logan's skin prickled. The sheer energy output felt like standing too close to a star.

Mishki wrung his hands. "Logan…"

"Yeah," Logan said. "We should go."

As he turned to face the incline leading toward the furnace, he paused and glanced back at the others. "Maybe you all should head back to the—"

Cassandra cut him off. "We're helping, Logan. You and Mishki will need us to distract as much attention away from you as possible."

A prowler lunged from the shadows, only to smack into a freshly conjured ward and then have a spike of earth jut up beneath its chin from Alden's doing. Neither mage blinked.

He turned to Mishki. "You ready to contaminate an ancient being's power source?"

"Not exactly," the goble said.

Logan cracked his knuckles. "Me neither. Let's go."

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