Rian saw Yoru catch Sera.
The tentacle whipped like lightning and Sera was thrown flying backwards – doomed trajectory. Yoru intercepted her mid-air and the two of them crashed through the undergrowth into the far distance. He registered it cleanly. She was alive, maybe.
Yoru had her body, at least.
He was on the monstrous vine in a second. Sliced it lengthwise in a single arc, the dark mana billowing ferociously through his scythe, and the fleshy, green thing collapsed in two into the earth. A teetering rage in him he didn't want to examine. Swallowed the foreign sensation in his throat. Turned back to the rest of the fight.
The formation had held but barely. Two espers down in the last ten minutes – the creatures testing edges until one gave. The raid force was tired. The tentacles were relentless. They needed to finish it.
Arlen appeared at his left.
Arlen's icy blue eyes found his and something passed between them that didn't need language – the shorthand of people who had fought beside each other for eight long years. Shared danger that had developed into shared trust. Rian looked at the tentacles burrowing up from the ground and the jungle around them. Arlen looked too.
Then they looked at each other. Rian nodded.
Arlen held out his fist.
Rian knocked it.
"Got it," Arlen said.
Joel materialized on Rian's right a moment later.
He hadn't been asked. He had read the formation – read Arlen's positioning, read the silent conversation between the two, and inferred the geometry of what was about to happen. He placed himself correctly without being told. He was new and young and didn't have the shared history that the Triad had. But he had something else. Aptitude and observation – he learned fast and integrated faster.
Gertrude sat easy in his hands – a staff, steely blue, cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. Twin of Kael's Beatrice. Something he'd never admit. Blue waves roiled off it in slow pulses. He listened carefully for the next steps.
"Right before the temple steps," Rian said to Arlen. "Drive them into the earth as deep as you can."
Arlen looked at him, eyebrow raised, but didn't question.
He nodded.
Ice erupted beneath his feet like a bolt – a column shooting upward, carrying him with it, the jungle canopy rushing past and then gone as he cleared the tree line and kept rising. Building like a stalagmite – the pillar cracking and extending, continuously reinforced with more ice and snow, Arlen's mana feeding it from below, driving him higher until he was fifty feet above the clearing, then a hundred, the dungeon sky opening around him.
He started casting.
It started as shimmer.
The air around Arlen's outstretched hands condensing – the dungeon's humidity answering his mana, moisture gathering. A haze first. Then droplets. Collecting around his hands and pulling from the clouds above him, the sky darkening slightly as he drew from it.
The water became ice.
A hundred spears forming in the air around him – precise, each one angled with practiced calculation. Arlen's eyes were closed, his brows furrowed in concentration – static electricity pulsed through his hair, lifting loose ends.
The tentacles sensed the danger, began climbing and twisting up the pillar of ice to the threat.
Rian and Joel followed quickly after. Rian flew up high, dark wings billowing from his back, as he cut down the tentacles desperately surging up to Arlen.
Joel protected the pillar, slamming his staff onto the ground, a shockwave of blue lightning burning the monster flora around it to a crisp.
The tentacles came faster now – the creature sensing the incoming disruption in the atmosphere temperature, the probing sharpening into something more aggressive. Tentacles exploded in mass and aggression.
Rian cut left, culling three of the vines at once, before turning around.
A tentacle got through on his right, he missed, saw it in the periphery of his vision heading towards him with aggressive speed.
Lightning cracked. Electric blue spiraling up from the ground in a flash to meet it.
The tentacle burned to ash in mid-air, the air around it crackling with a vibrating static. He saw Joel's Gertrude move with a flash below him on the ground, already onto the next tentacle. Sweeping a low arc, the crackling blue energy leaving afterimages in the humid air.
Another from the right.
Rian caught it with an upwards pull of his scythe, letting his dark mana burn through the vine as it fell limply down towards the earth.
Joel was already elsewhere – three tentacles testing the eastern edge, Gertrude striking in sequence, each impact precise and cold.
A tentacle came from Rian's blind side again.
Joel was there, again.
Thunder cracked upwards once more and burned it to a crisp.
Rian noted, not for the first time, that Joel was very good at this. Different from Arlen – nothing replicated eight years – couldn't read his mind or intuit his thoughts, but his aptitude was real. He had slotted into a dynamic he had no history with and found the load-bearing points without being shown them.
Briefly thought about inviting him to their group dinners.
Above them, the hundred spears finished forming. Arlen's eyes were bright electric blue – glowing, unseeing, fixed entirely on the ground, his target, far beneath him. His lips curled into a grin, his chanting almost done.
"Scatter!" Rena's voice cut across the fight, her gaze tracking Arlen's mouth. It was time – the raid force needed to dodge now, lest they get impaled by their own commander. Espers broke with speed outward from the clearing's center, getting clear of the temple steps and the earth around them, pulling guides and support along the way. Joel retreated cleanly. Rian flew up to Arlen's side.
Arlen finished his chant and brought his outstretched hands downward.
The spears plunged toward the earth at speed. And they thundered down with a crash.
Spears drove into tentacles, boring through flesh, and then deeper – through the earth and dirt and the overgrown stone of the temple clearing, driving into the ground in front of the temple steps, the earth turning and cracking from the force.
The sound was continuous – a hundred simultaneous strikes driving deep.
The tentacles screamed. Organic tissue rupturing, the sound moving through the ground rather than the air, vibrating up through the soles of their boots.
The earth in front of the temple steps cracked.
Then split. Then caved. And something, large and fleshy, dark green and bruised red rose to the surface.
A flower – the wrong kind, the kind that had no business being called that. Massive. Wrong. Petals the color of dark red and bruises, each one the size of a wall. An orange mouth at the center lined with stained yellow teeth in concentric rings, each ring rotating slowly in the opposite direction. Black and dark green vines and tentacles twisting wildly from the exposed root mass, the ice spears still buried in its limbs and body, corrosive yellow liquid pouring from a dozen punctures and splashing across the temple steps and eating into the ancient stone.
The rage coming off it was palpable.
Where the liquid hit the ground, the grass ceased to exist, melting into a brown, bubbling viscous goo. The earth beneath staining into a corrosive black.
The raid force was defensive and wary, on the perimeters, fending off angry tentacles. Rena carefully watched the writhing monster ahead laid bare.
Arlen whistled beside him.
Rian looked at the flower, his wings keeping him afloat.
He thought about his twenty-eighth life – or somewhere around there.
The method had been accidental that time – the monstrous flower drawing him inward by chance, the corrosive interior, and forty seconds of burning flesh and blinding pain before the threshold found him and his blessing triggered an evolution.
Then he died one month later in another gate.
He knew what was inside that thing. He knew the threshold could find him there. He knew it could also not find him – and the flower could finish what it started and he would regress once more. Back to that same humiliating morning. Same bed.
Forty-four times.
Something in him, quiet and tired and not examined, noted that it wouldn't be the worst thing if this time the regression didn't come.
He let the thought go.
The odds were what they were.
The flower's mouth echoed a screeching howl, concentric rings of teeth sawing and twitching in fury.
He changed his grip on the scythe. Purple flames burst forth and cascaded off the blade.
He folded his wings and aimed for the center of the mouth.
"Rian–"
Arlen's voice.
"Wait!--"
Rena's in the distance.
He was already moving.
The plummet was fast – faster than falling, the wings tucked neatly against his back, his body spiraling downward, eyes locked on the creature, the purple flames trailing behind him. The flower's dirty yellow teeth caught the light. The corrosive liquid still pouring from its wounds, steaming where it hit the jungle floor.
He heard Rena shout his name.
The mouth closed around him with a snap.
✦ ♡ ✦
Dark. Warm and wrong.
The corrosive liquid found his leathers immediately. Sour liquid burning through the armor and seeping onto his skin. A prickling sensation – the awareness of damage beginning.
Forty seconds. Maybe. He thought.
The scythe was still in his hand, pressed against his chest. The purple flames had died – no space. He stopped fueling his wings and let the mana disintegrate. Viscous and humidly warm plant fleshed pressed around him. He was completely still inside something designed to dissolve him.
He waited.
The prickling stopped and the burning started.
Skin taking damage, the acid burning through towards his muscle tissue. His face twitched. He clenched his teeth.
Twenty seconds.
He had done this before. He knew what came next – the threshold or not. The blessing activating or not. He had no way to force it.
Just wait. And suffer. And burn.
Ten seconds.
Something opened.
Structural – real – a door under sufficient pressure. Heard a heavy bell toll, clanging and reverberating through his body and vessel. His mana output spiked – felt a surge of power unlock in his core and spread through his veins. The quality changed. The purple flames reignited in the confined space, drifting in thick waves off his skin and scythe, outwards and moving through the creature's interior with focused intention.
He poured his mana out with a burst ferocity and drove his scythe forwards through flesh.
The interior lit purple.
He held on. His eyebrows furrowed.
The burning was very bad.
He held on. He closed his eyes.
The explosion came from inside.
✦ ♡ ✦
The flower came apart in pieces, flesh flying out in chunks like something internally had combusted.
Petals peeling back and withering. Root mass convulsing. The tentacles going limp simultaneously across the clearing. The corrosive liquid hissing where it met the dungeon air.
The temple entrance was still.
Rian flew out and landed, then dropped to his knees, then crumpled and fell flat on his face.
He lay there face down on the jungle floor. Breath slow and deep, tolerating the burning that scorched through his body and limbs. The monster quivered, writhing in its death rattle, in the aftermath – warm drops of plant matter hitting his face.
Alive.
The evolution settled in his chest – a new ceiling, higher than before. He could feel his power – a little more accessible, a little stronger, and a curious mental shielding around his vessel that he had come to know after the first evolution.
Rena appeared above him. He looked dazedly at her.
Her face said several things her mouth wasn't.
She grabbed his arm and hauled him upright – and stopped.
His leathers were mostly gone. What remained of his skin from the neck down was serious – the corrosive liquid having done what it did, the burns extensive and immediate. Splotches across his face where the liquid had found gaps in his position. The damage would not undo itself. Some of it had already set. Scars in the future.
She didn't say anything. But Rian could see it, an agony squashed behind her firmly set mouth. The shimmer in her eyes as she catalogued the damage across his body.
Easy price to pay, if they stayed alive this time, he mused. He was in pain – searing pain – blocked partially by familiarity and partially by sheer will. He could feel his body's mana frantically threading through his muscle fibers, staunching the bleeding, trying to repair skin. His head was muddled from the sudden expansion in his mana, fatigue crashing through him. He wanted to pass out.
She pulled pollution from where her hand was around his burned arm – already working, the guide instinct running before the rest of her had processed what she was looking at. Her white mana threading through the damaged tissue, pulling the corrosive residue before it could go deeper.
"I'm fine," he said.
She looked at his face, said nothing but glared.
"Relatively," he said.
"Don't," she snapped.
"It worked," he said.
"Stop," she said again.
Arlen appeared on his other side. Said nothing. But his face said everything too. He had watched his best friend deliberately get swallowed by a monster and was still processing the information at a speed that felt too slow.
Arlen looked at him for a long moment. At his face. At what the corrosive liquid had left behind. He brought his hand, flickering with snowflakes and blue mana toward Rian, and cupped his cheek.
Cool and soothing. Rian leaned into Arlen's hand, closed his eyes, and breathed slowly.
Under Joel's command, the raid force was already moving. Setting up a temporary encampment. Battered. Short more espers than they'd been an hour ago. Rest and reorganization before entering the temple.
He saw Sera in the distance, limping, supporting Yoru, also limping, as they headed towards Ophelia for healing.
A smile touched his lips. Not just the body then.
Closed his eyes and let the darkness take him.