Mira sent her needles flying forward as fast as she could. Fingers digging into her temples, her nails puncturing her skin.
Five of them, arranged in a V formation she'd been practicing for six months – the configuration that gave Theor the clearest line of sight, the best angle for the precision work she needed. He was the strongest, but the most fickle. She closed her eyes. Let her vision fracture into five separate points of awareness.
The golem moved, swatting and deflecting a striking blow from Simon's lance.
Mira adjusted. Sent three toward the eye, two toward the knee joint – the seam Kael's fire had found earlier but failed to weaken, the place the stone was thinnest. Theor led the charge toward the eye.
He missed.
Not badly. A centimeter. Maybe less. But the golem's eyes were small openings, only a couple centimeters in diameter, and a centimeter was the difference between piercing the core and skidding off the surface like a stone across ice. Mira needed both speed and accuracy to damage the golem's core effectively, from the distance she was located, it was like threading a needle while on a skateboard dodging rocks.
She pulled them back. Repositioned. Tried again. Blood dripped down her nose. She sniffed it back up.
Theor wobbled.
She felt it through the connection – his uncertainty, the naive stubbornness of a consciousness that was almost ready and wasn't quite there yet and knew it and was frustrated about it. Two years and he still had days where he didn't listen, where the connection felt like trying to wrangle a moody teenager with abnormally naive confidence and fluctuating insecurity.
Come on, she thought at him. Come on, Theor, I need you. Trust me.
He wobbled again.
Mira had been communing since she was nineteen. Seven years of this – the devoted practice of pressing herself against something that didn't speak yet and waiting. Her mother had been an armament type. Her sister as well. Women who understood that a weapon didn't become itself overnight and that the communing was not a technique but a relationship and relationships took time.
Theor was the fifth. The others had actualized in order – the first at year two, the second at year three, the third and fourth together in the same week, something she still didn't fully understand. Theor had been different from the beginning. Picky. Particular. The needle with opinions about everything. Proud and prickly.
She loved him for it.
She also needed him to fly straight right now. Spat out a red cough.
Come on–
The golem saw the needles, clocked Mira and angled its head towards her.
The laser fired.
She felt Sera's hands wrench her backwards as they tumbled through grass, dodging the explosive fire – the grip sudden and sure, pulling her out of the beam's path before she'd even processed it coming. Her vision crashed back into her own body with a lurch. Her needles dropped from the sky instantly.
"Cover me," she gasped.
"I am," Sera said with a groan, the full weight of Mira squashing the air out of her.
Mira closed her eyes again. Sent the needles back out. Theor leading.
He stuttered, flinching mid flight, dropping a few feet in the air before recovering.
She gritted her teeth. The others were stable – the four needles moving precisely where she directed them, finding joints, finding seams, picking steadily at the golem's weaknesses – doing the work she'd trained them for. But Theor. Theor kept listing. Kept sliding off the angle she needed. She needed his strength.
Come on. Come on. Come ON–
Something moved.
Through Sera's fingers. Through the connection at her neck. Something that wasn't pollution and wasn't clean mana – something lighter, something that moved the way water fell easily through moss, finding the path of least resistance through her core and directly toward Theor.
And then something that sounded like Sera spoke. Gentle and lilting, kind and effeminate.
Do you need help?
Mira's eyes snapped open.
"Of course I need help," she said.
Sera's voice came from beside her, dry and immediate. "I'm helping, aren't I?"
Mira looked at her.
Sera's red eyes were on the golem. She hadn't looked away. One of her hands was on Mira's neck, steady, the guide work running continuously. The other wrapped around Mira's waist, ready to pull her to safety if the golem attacked again.
Sera hadn't said anything.
Mira's mouth went dry.
The voice came again – softer this time, not through her ears but through the connection itself, arriving the way Theor arrived, through the mana rather than the air.
Do you need help? Your partner is struggling. If you keep forcing him, you'll lose the others too.
She didn't answer. Couldn't. Her thoughts were running a mile a minute – simultaneously managing her needles as they pried at joints and openings while trying to determine exactly who was speaking to her.
The voice didn't wait.
I'll help.
Something flowed.
Through Sera like a doorway. Through Mira like a current. Directly toward Theor – and she felt him flinch, the sudden confusion of a consciousness that had only ever known Mira's presence and was now encountering something else entirely. Something wrapping around him. Cinching.
Mira almost called him back.
I've got you, the voice murmured to Theor. Not to Mira. To her needle. You're alright. You're just young.
He stayed stiffened for a second and then relaxed.
And then the scent hit her.
Lilies. Clean and cold and faintly luminescent – a cooling scent, mountain air, and shifting winds. It flooded through her core and Mira was suddenly remembering something that she had never experienced.
Peering up at the starlit sky in a valley full of herself, beetles crawling over her soil, a sensation of relief and excitement at someone's heartbeat. A feeling of reunion when a familiar mana plunged into the earth, curled around her roots, and met her.
She felt Theor right himself.
She looked through his eyes.
A red mana drifted off his surface – not hers, not green, something else entirely – bleeding into his own green waves and muddying into brown, two different things working toward the same direction. A metaphorical hand curling around his own, she felt a sensation of peace and resolve course through him.
He aimed straight, hovering in the air for a fractional second before something in him, in the voice, and in Mira had found the opening in the golem's position.
There, they had thought all at once.
He hurtled toward the golem with a terrifying speed. Slipped directly into the hole that was its eye like an arrow hitting a bull's eye. Pierced the golem's brain with a crack that she felt in her back teeth – driving through the dense orb of mana, and punctured through to the other side, stone and debris flying as Theor landed deep into the earth behind it.
The mana inside the golem flickered.
"NOW!" Rian thundered.
His voice broke across the field and the espers moved. Simultaneously, his team launched an attack on each of the golem's limbs, severing each one as quickly as they could – bringing down the giant while its mana was unstable, unable to reform its body.
The golem fell with a thundering crash and Kael was there, already above the monster, once more, ready with a final attack. He raised Beatrice, glimmering and golden, up high, a volley of fire erupting surrounding her as he brought down his staff with a thundering crack onto the head of the golem. The stone split, the dirt moved, and the dense orb of mana that made up the golem's brain cracked with a shnnk and scattered into the air as fire burned and blazed through it.
The golem was done.
Mira sat in the grass, heaving, and wiped her bloody nose with her arm. Sera's hands withdrew from her neck and waist – efficient and fast, already moving to other gasping espers for guiding, her red eyes calculating the fallen construct and aftermath.
She hadn't noticed.
Mira looked at Theor embedded in the far grass beyond the golem. The red was gone. Just green, drifting off in familiar waves. Just her needle.
But something had been here.
"...who was that?" she whispered to herself.
Her needles, the four of them – Kay, Maurice, Effie, and Wen – were buzzing – vibrating with interest, her two actualized needles chattering within her. Deducing conclusions and making guesses of who the guest in their consciousness was.
Theor was quiet for a long moment.
She felt him thinking and was surprised when he responded for the first time, to her and the others, in their shared consciousness.
A…friend, he determined.
Also, he murmured, I would like to share my name.
Mira spat out a glob of blood and looked at Sera's retreating back.
✦ ♡ ✦
< Dungeon Quest >
Defeat the golems. 1/5
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
Sera looked at the top-right side of her field of vision, the blue interface flickering for a millisecond before updating with the kill. Four golems remaining.
Sera straightened from Kael's shoulder and looked across the plain.
The other fights were still running. She could hear them – the distant crack of something large impacting earth, the sustained grind of prolonged engagement, occasional shouts carrying across the open grass.
Joel's formation to the east, methodical, their golem missing one arm but reforming it already in process. Arlen's squads circling to the west, adaptive, probing, his ice preventing the golem's feet from finding stable purchase. And north – Rena's three squads airborne, two golems between them, the white feathered wings catching the dungeon light as espers wheeled and dove.
After recovery, they were all watching, waiting for their opening. Waiting for Rian's command, whose eyes were also peering into the distance, watching the golems – analyzing which one would be the smartest to tackle next. What would give them the greatest advantage.
Sera watched too.
And then she and the rest of Rian's team saw it.
She couldn't see it clearly from this distance – just the shape of it, the golem's attention fixing on one point, the robed figure that had been directing the flight spell from the center of Rena's formation suddenly the only thing the nearest golem was looking at.
The golem's hand dove and caught him mid-flight in an instant. Its fingers wrapping around his body tightly. The esper was flailing desperately, pushing his arms against stone trying to get his torso out of the golem's crushing fist.
She squinted. It was La Forta. The esper that had applied flight to every one under Rena's command. She watched in horror as the golem's other hand came up to grab his body as well. Espers in the far distance were screaming and attacking the arms with desperation.
It wasn't working.
And then the golem wrenched him apart in an instant. One hand pulling his legs, one hand pulling his upper body. His body tore apart like a stretched rubber band – intestines and organs and blood tumbling and falling toward the ground. His remains caught the mid-day light as they fell and Sera felt a wave of nausea rise up her throat.
The feathery wings – on ankles – on Rena's team dissipated with a clean snap. La Forta was dead and the mana sustaining their flight died with him. The spell breaking at its source, the mana dispersing into nothing – people who had been airborne were suddenly not.
They fell.
Hibiscus gasped in horror.
Sera saw Rena falling too, her rifle pointed at the golem's skull, body focused on aiming, disregarding that the fall from that height would definitely kill her.
"Rena!"
Rian's voice broke across the plain like something tearing.
Sera felt it before she saw it – the dark mana surging out of him the way it had when he decapitated the hippogriff, that same suffocating force, humid and vast and nothing like the contained atmosphere he wore everywhere else. It billowed from his core and calcified into wings on his back – black, dense, absorbing the dungeon light rather than catching it.
He was airborne before she finished processing it.
She caught his face in the fractional second before he was gone.
She had been watching Rian Thern for a while. Had catalogued the contained stillness, the minimal adjustments, the horizon-watching, the quiet way he absorbed things for a very long time without being surprised by them.
She had never seen that.
Pure panic. Pure fear. Anguish. The face of someone for whom apathy had stopped and something rawer had taken over – something that didn't run numbers, that didn't drift, that didn't manage distance.
Something that just – moved.
He was already a dark shape against the sky.
Sera began running.