O'Rin was dead, but her talent hadn't died with her. The music she drew from her shamisen was still devastatingly mournful—enough that Bella had nearly lost her composure on several occasions after listening to a full piece.
O'Rin's accompaniment, paired with Sadako's cursed videotape: if anyone put that combination on TV Tokyo's airwaves, half the Kantō region would be dead by morning.
"Stay hidden. Improvise." Bella gave O'Rin a single instruction, then drew Glamdring, took her Smith & Wesson Model 500 revolver in her left hand, wrapped herself in an Invisibility spell, and stood guard, scanning the darkness around her.
"Die, insect!" A thunderous snarl erupted behind her. Her invisibility might as well not have existed—the Balrog was there, gripping a flaming sword, and it brought the blade down toward her skull with everything it had.
She didn't try to block. The gap in raw strength between them was simply too wide. She threw herself backward, firing the Model 500 at the Balrog's head in rapid succession with her left hand while her sword arm feinted—psionic energy seized the rubble underfoot and flung it in the creature's face.
"Vermin! I will kill you, grind your bones to dust, and hold your head in the flame for seven days and seven nights!" The Balrog had no techniques to speak of—it just raged, using its massive size and strength, swinging its flaming sword in furious hacks.
The blade carried its hatred. Stone columns so thick it would take four men to encircle them were sheared through in single strokes; a Dwarf-king's statue, seemingly carved from the mountain itself, was shoved off its plinth. Slag from the flaming sword hit the dark floor and bored deep, smoldering craters into the rock.
The Balrog's assault was relentless—it never gave Bella an opening to counter.
Against sweeps of that power and speed, she could only dodge, weaving back and sideways, casting spells to disrupt and harry when she found half a second.
Mind Blast still hit hard—the creature's mental state was already in ruins. But the Balrog had found its own answer: ignore the blast, convert the fear into rage, extract strength from that rage. Something like a berserker's fury. It stopped caring, stopped thinking about anything except cutting her down, and that single-mindedness made control spells like Frost Nova nearly worthless.
She tried to seize its mind—but the Balrog's consciousness was solid hatred. Mind control under these conditions was extraordinarily difficult.
"Die, woman!" She'd been cornered against the wall. The Balrog, ignoring the catastrophic state of its own psyche, wrung the last of its energy reserves and raised its flaming sword high—a blow aimed with enough force to split a mountain—and swept it straight at her.
The superheated blade hadn't even touched the stone wall before the grey rock began to melt, a deep channel flowing open in its wake.
Then the Balrog saw something it hadn't expected. Bella became impossibly fast—faster than anything she'd moved before. She slipped the strike entirely and materialized at its flank, driving an ice lance hard into its left eye.
The Balrog tried to dodge. Time seemed to slow.
Thud. The lance punched through the left eye socket and twisted inside for good measure.
The inferno within the Balrog's body melted the ice lance almost immediately—but the aconitine had already dissolved into the meltwater and begun flowing toward its brain.
A magical creature it may have been, but it was still a creature. Eyes. Hearts. A brain.
Over 800 milliliters of aconitine entered via the bloodstream, racing toward the cranium. The fire in its veins burned through most of the toxin quickly, but the disorientation still cost it a full breath's worth of reaction time.
Both of the Balrog's eyes were blind now. Bella wasn't doing much better—decelerating a target for less than two seconds had felt like her skull was splitting open.
But she bore through the headache, and laughed, and vanished.
You could see through invisibility when you had eyes. Both eyes are gone now. Can you still see through it? Even a magical creature ought to follow some basic rules.
"Rat!" the Balrog bellowed, sockets hollow and dark. "You disgusting, contemptible little rat—come out! COME OUT! I will tear you apart!"
Its mouth was all fury. Its instincts, meanwhile, were already looking for an exit.
At that moment, a sorrowful, aching melody drifted through the dark beside it. Both eyes lost, the Balrog crashed out of its berserker state—its mind had been pummeled from within by Bella's psionic assaults until it was riddled with cracks; the only thing keeping it on its feet had been its ancient lifespan and its innate resistance as a magical creature.
Now the desolate music rose inside it, and from the shadows Bella layered suggestion after suggestion onto its already-crumbling will. The Balrog's drive to fight weakened by the moment.
Gathering the last of its resolve, it cracked its fiery whip—and sent O'Rin back to revive.
The cost: two more ice lance strikes. The second pierced through its chest and burst one of the remaining hearts.
Battered, broken, it was done fighting. I can't beat you. Can't I just run? Come back in a few days and try again. And even if I can never get revenge—in five hundred years, I'll outlive you anyway.
Balrogs all possessed certain spell-like abilities; this one in particular was extremely skilled in spatial magic—the reason it had pursued Gandalf and the others across the bridge with something approaching a teleport, the reason it had set the Dimensional Anchor, and later appeared out of nowhere for that ambush. All of it pointed to deep, genuine spatial expertise.
Now, blind, it wanted nothing more than to teleport away.
It folded its wings around its head and face to block any incoming attack, then extended one massive hand to begin the spatial teleportation.
It had spent untold years in the Mines of Moria—most of them in slumber, true, but it still knew the mine's passages well enough to navigate blind.
In its magical perception, it suddenly detected Bella manipulating her own spell, building a teleportation channel.
It didn't think twice. It charged.
In a straight fight it had no path to victory, but combat inside a spatial channel was a different matter entirely. In that environment, it was confident its superior spatial mastery could turn the tables—kill the sorceress, take the Ring of Fire.
It abandoned the idea of flight. Its body became a streak of fire, and it plunged into the spatial channel right behind her.
It was halfway through when it realized something was wrong. The channel was empty. Where was the sorceress?
Bella coughed blood—violently. Using two temporal spells back to back had left her badly injured. The first had slowed the Balrog, buying her the window to dodge the killing strike and blind its remaining eye. The second had accelerated a localized zone, making the Balrog perceive events that would only occur three seconds later as if they were happening now.
The reality was that Bella's teleportation channel had never been completed—just a half-built framework. The Balrog had charged into it anyway.
With the Balrog's spatial expertise, even a half-finished channel couldn't hold it for long. A few moments and it would reshape the passage on its own.
"Die, monster!" Bella terminated the Teleport spell. The sudden halt caused the spatial barrier to collapse inward at speed, and the immense crushing force caught the Balrog clean across the middle and severed it.
"Ha—ha ha ha—what an idiot—" She looked at the halved Balrog, her face chalk-white. And she laughed.