A chitinous fist crashed into Jass's shoulder with enough force to send spiderwebbing cracks racing across her Earth Armor.
Rolling with the impact rather than trying to absorb it directly, already pulling more stone from the platform beneath her feet to flow like liquid across the damaged sections and seal them before the next strike from the Antlion Prince could exploit the weakness it created.
She came up from the roll with her glaive already in motion, swinging it in a vicious horizontal arc that forced the Antlion Prince to abandon its follow-up attack and retreat two steps to avoid having the poison-coated blade carve through its thorax.
"Fuck."
Jass slammed her palm against the platform and channeled her mana downward, and a barrage of Earth Spears erupted from the stone directly beneath where the Antlion Prince was landing, the sharpened spears of rock shooting upward with enough speed that they should have impaled the creature through its center mass or, at the very least, its wings.
However, the Antlion twisted in mid-air with that unnatural flexibility, its body contorting at an angle that would have snapped a human's spine, and wings fusing to form a segmented tail. It landed on the side of one of the Earth Spears instead of being skewered by it, using the momentum to launch itself directly at Jass's face like a bolt from a crossbow.
Jass barely got her glaive up in time, raising the weapon horizontally across her body to block, and the Antlion Prince's mandibles clamped down on the shaft with enough force that she felt the wood creak and threaten to splinter under the pressure.
They were eye to compound eye now, close enough for her to smell its rancid breath and see her own reflection fractured across hundreds of facets in its alien gaze.
The poison-greased blade of her glaive gleamed inches from the creature's thorax, so near she could feel heat radiating from its chitin. But the Prince's mandibles were locked around the shaft of the weapon, denying her the angle and leverage she needed to drive the blade forward into flesh.
The Antlion Prince suddenly shoved with all the strength its brute form could muster, and Jass felt her boots lose traction as she was forced backward across the platform, the soles carving deep furrows into the stone as she desperately tried to keep her footing and not get thrown completely off balance.
Behind her, she could hear Sam's staff crack against the platform, and a pillar of sand rose up from the ground like a geyser to intercept one of the Elite Sand Golem's massive fists that had been descending toward where Bonehead was frantically swirling another alchemical vial to prime it.
The construct's arm shattered against Sam's hastily erected barrier with a sound like breaking pottery, spraying hardened chunks of sand in every direction, but even as that appendage crumbled, three more were already forming from the Golem's massive torso, the sand compacting and hardening into new limbs with terrifying speed.
Sam spun on his heel without pausing to catch his breath, his staff already tracing a complex blazing sigil in the air that left trails of orange light hanging in its wake, and fire burst from his outstretched fingertips in a concentrated stream that caught the nearest forming arm mid-swing.
The flames superheated the sand faster than it could finish solidifying, turning it into molten glass that shattered like crystal when it struck against the shimmering barrier Sam had erected between himself and the Golem, but his hands were shaking now from the sustained magical output, and sweat was pouring down his face in rivulets that stung his eyes as every spell he cast pulled from mana reserves that were rapidly approaching empty.
A flask sailed past Sam's ear close enough that he felt the displaced air brush against his skin, and it exploded against the Elite Sand Golem's torso in a splash of viscous liquid that immediately began eating through the compacted sand like acid through cloth. The affected section hissed and slumped, losing the cohesion that held it together and sloughing off the Golem's body in wet chunks that splattered against the platform.
"Fuck off!" Bonehead shouted as he pulled free a belt of flasks filled with the concentrated antlion insecticide and hurled it at the Antlion Prince with all the strength his undead frame could muster, but the creature's enhanced perception caught the incoming projectile and it jerked to the side with that inhuman speed, causing the belt full of vials to sail past its head by inches before shattering against the platform behind it, though the noxious fumes that billowed up from the impact point made the Prince shriek in obvious distress and jerk sideways to escape the cloud.
Jass caught the opening created by the creature's momentary distraction and lunged, her glaive sweeping in toward the Antlion Prince's midsection. It recovered faster than she expected and sprang back, but its movements were clearly slower now, a faint twitch running through its motions as the insecticide fumes began to bite into its nervous system.
She didn't let up.
An Earth Spear erupted from the ground beneath where it had just landed, forcing the Antlion Prince to leap again before it could fully regain its balance. She pressed the attack without pause, hurling spell after spell from shifting angles, keeping the creature moving, off-balance, and unable to mount a proper counterattack.
Meanwhile, Deacon was pinned to the ceiling, struggling desperately to grasp the sand that had embedded itself through his body and into the stone above, nailing him in place like some butterfly.
The living sand alternated between hardening and softening with every attempt he made to grip it, responding to his touch by either loosening into flowing grains that slipped through his fingers or sharpening into cutting edges that sliced into his hands.
At random intervals, sections hardened without warning, driving deeper into his flesh or scraping across his ribs, tearing apart what remained of his chest armor until it was reduced to tatters, staining the living sand a deep, dark crimson that grew with every passing second.
Deacon thrashed, pulled, and clawed at the sand, impaling himself with growing desperation, utterly indifferent to the additional pain he inflicted on himself in his frantic struggle to break free. The sounds of his friends fighting for their lives below only fed his anger, rage, guilt, and burning embarrassment at being unable to help them when they needed him most.
Those emotions were further amplified by the corrosive poison spreading through his body from the Nerve Rush pill he had taken, the greenish-red tendrils now covering the upper twenty percent of his torso and still creeping downwards.
Below him, Jass, Sam, and Bonehead fought on in a desperate struggle against the Antlion Prince and the Elite Sand Golem. Spells tore through the air in brilliant arcs of condensed magic, leaving luminous trails hanging in their wake.
Jass's glaive rang against the Antlion Prince's chitinous claws, the metallic clashes echoing through the chamber like a blacksmith's hammer on an anvil, while magic slammed into animated sand in violent bursts that sent dust and stone fragments billowing across the platform, obscuring visibility beyond a few meters.
As the clash dragged on, the situation worsening by the second and their stamina draining at an alarming rate, Bonehead had an idea.
Reaching into his Spatial Satchel with his skeletal hand, the bony limbs trembling from the stress fractures lacing through them as he struggled to use his newly gained Racial Trait to mend the damage, he pulled out a large wooden barrel filled with his supply of pure water. It was water he reserved exclusively for alchemy, free of any impurities that might contaminate his mixtures.
With what strength remained in his undead frame, he rolled the barrel across the uneven platform toward the battlefield, then gave it a solid kick to send it hurtling faster, shouting to Sam over the chaos of his spells, the Elite Sand Golem, and Jass holding back the Antlion Prince.
"Sam!" Bonehead yelled, his voice cracking slightly from the strain of moving while under assault from two elite-level enemies that were both actively trying to kill him and his Party members with every passing second. "Soak the bastard!"
Heeding Bonehead's suggestion, Sam continued fighting the Elite Sand Golem, doing his best to keep the construct's attention on himself rather than letting it turn on Jass or Bonehead, who were far more vulnerable to its crushing physical attacks.
At the same time, he watched for any chance to strike at the Antlion Prince when it strayed too close or threatened to break through toward Bonehead, who was frantically mixing alchemical compounds.
In one fluid motion, Sam drove his staff into the platform. The earth beneath the rolling barrel surged upward like a stone fist punching toward the sky, launching the barrel high into the air in a smooth arc that carried it cleanly over the Elite Sand Golem's massive head.
Three Wind Arrows formed in rapid succession around Sam's outstretched hand, the compressed shafts of air shimmering with magic as they shot forward. They punched into the sides and bottom of the wooden barrel, and the container shattered mid-flight in a burst of splinters and water.
The contents cascaded downward in a crashing wave, drenching the Elite Sand Golem from head to base and soaking the sand that made up its body. Almost immediately, the water began to undermine the construct's integrity, the saturated sand growing heavy and sluggish, robbed of the speed it had wielded moments before.
Simultaneously as this was happening just a few dozen meters away where the platform was more heavily damaged from earlier combat, Jass was fighting what felt like a losing battle against the Antlion Prince, barely managing to keep its razor-sharp claws from piercing deep into her flesh and vital organs despite her Earth Armor providing some protection against glancing blows and strikes that didn't land with full force.
Her defensive construct was now in ruins with massive cracks spider-webbing across its surface like a broken window, and chunks of stone and sand were missing from where the Antlion Prince's strikes had landed, and blood was coating her body from numerous shallow wounds where the creature's attacks had landed.
Her mangled left arm — healed enough to be usable thanks to the regeneration potion Bonehead had given her during a brief respite between waves of Sand Golems — still felt weak and unresponsive. It refused to grip her glaive with the same strength as her dominant hand, sending sharp jolts of pain up into her shoulder whenever she tried to put real force behind a block or parry.
The only real advantage she had in this nightmare unfolding around her was her exceptional finesse with Earth Manipulation. It allowed her to constantly raise barriers between the Antlion Prince and her more vulnerable party members, preventing the creature from simply ignoring her and charging past to slaughter Sam or Bonehead — either of whom would stand no chance in direct melee combat against something of the Antlion Prince's speed and killing power — while also providing her with weapons to strike back.
However, due to her intense focus on tracking the Antlion Prince's movements and predicting its next attack based on the subtle shifts in its weight distribution and the positioning of its limbs, Jass was completely caught unaware when the water barrel exploded above the Elite Sand Golem, a dozen and a half meters away from her.
A large jagged piece of wood from the shattered container came spinning through the air in an erratic trajectory that she couldn't have predicted even if she'd been watching for it. The wooden shard buried itself deep into her stomach just as she was in the middle of blocking one of the Antlion Prince's claw strikes with the shaft of her glaive.
The Antlion Prince, still in its assassin form with its enhanced perception and speed that made it nearly impossible to track with normal human reflexes, immediately recognized the advantage that Jass's sudden injury presented and doubled down on its efforts to kill her while she was compromised and unable to properly defend herself, its movements becoming even more aggressive and precise as it pressed its attack with renewed vigor that suggested it could smell the blood in the water and knew the kill was close and shifted into its brute form mid-thrust.
Its outstretched hand shot forward with blinding speed that made it appear as little more than a blur, claws extended to spear straight through Jass's heart and end the fight in a single devastating blow that would leave her dead before she even realized what had happened. But even wounded and bleeding from multiple locations across her body, Jass wasn't one to freeze when the scythe of death neared her heart.
Twisting her grip on her glaive, Jass managed to bring the shaft of her glaive up to block the strike at the last possible moment.
The impact of the Antlion Prince's strike, combined with its sudden shift into brute form, which added hundreds of pounds of muscle in the span of a heartbeat, was far more than the weapon could withstand.
The reinforced shaft snapped cleanly in two with a crack that echoed across the platform like the sound of a wishbone snapping in two.
The force of the blow hurled Jass backward through the air, her body tumbling in an uncontrolled sprawl as she bounced across the platform multiple times before finally coming to a stop dozens of meters from where she had stood, her chest visibly caved inward, with her grips on both halves of her glaive going limp and them rolling out of her hands.