And the darkness attacked.
The Inferno
THE WILDLY REVOLVING tip of the shadow tornado slammed into the ground between Abi and me, then forked off into whirling dervishes that chased after the rest of my team. The unexpected assault threw us to the ground, and Abi skidded away from me across the dusty stone floor with his arms and legs flailing. Elemental aspects darted and danced through the tornado’s ripping winds and lashed out at me with a blast of fire that caught me in the chest and set my robes ablaze. My friends cried out in alarm and pain, and I knew that they too were under attack.
I stifled the instinct to run from the flames and rolled over to smother them against the arena’s floor. Another blast of fire splashed across the stone where I’d been only moments before, and yet another sizzled through the air just past my head.
Apparently, bringing light to the arena had only been the first step of the challenge. Our true mission was destroying the darkness before it killed us all.
Another burst of fire glanced off my shoulder, and I slapped it out before it could ignite my robes again. I sprang to my feet and raised my hands defensively while I surveyed the battlefield. My arms wouldn’t fare any better than the rest of my body against fire, but I’d rather take a shot to my limbs than my face.
My teammates attempted to defend themselves against the attacks, but the darkness went after their weak points. Eric struggled to deflect blobs of water that launched out of the tornado with the speed of crossbow bolts. His flaming hands intercepted the bolts with stunning precision, but every successful defense drained more of his strength. Clem had thrown herself into a series of whirlwind kicks that deflected shards of earth aspects with arcs of wind. Unfortunately, the larger stone darts couldn’t be stopped by the wind, and she was dotted with ugly bruises and splashes of blood. Hagar’s bloodweaver techniques were powerful against living creatures. They had no effect on the storm of metal aspects that shredded her webs and shrugged off her attempts to drain away their vitality. A cut across my handler’s forehead bled into her eyes, and she cursed her attackers louder with every passing second. And Abi’s defensive techniques were utterly useless against the wooden roots that had swarmed under his shields and wrapped tightly around his legs.
I jumped and spun, ducking and darting around the fiery blasts, but I was running out of gas, too. I needed to fill the channels in my arms and legs, to give myself the strength and speed to keep moving until I figured out a way to bring down the tempest. But that meant pulling jinsei in through my core, and the short-term gain wouldn’t be enough to offset the damage that would do.
A flurry of fireballs sent me leaping back across the arena. I tumbled through the air like an acrobat, twisting and dodging away from the flames. I landed on the very edge of a pit that left me with nowhere else to dodge. I took a solid flaming hit to my left wrist and smothered the hungry fire under my right arm. The attack had chewed through my robes and raised ugly red streaks of blisters across my skin. It had also broken my concentration, and my Borrowed Core technique unraveled, snapping my connection to the Army of a Thousand Eyes.
I couldn’t keep this up. I had to end this fight.
Now.
The tornado somehow sensed that I was at the end of my rope. It didn’t send fire aspects after me, but twisted its tail off the ground and plunged it straight at my chest.
I stood my ground, praying my timing would be precise enough to keep me from being burned alive. I activated the Thief’s Shield technique at what I hoped was the precise moment the tornado touched my aura.
It worked.
My technique slurped the incendiary aspects from the dark storm. But it didn’t funnel them into my aura. The technique had come solely from the vessel, and that’s where the aspects went. The metal talisman grew warm against my chest as the fiery corruption flowed into it. The channels I’d stitched the vessel to filled with an intense itching sensation that quickly escalated into a burning pain.
I’d made a terrible miscalculation.
The medallion could hold enough jinsei to activate the Thief’s Shield technique. But its aura was weak, and without the Army of a Thousand Eyes and my connection to the rats’ auras to diffuse the tornado’s power, the vessel was failing. I didn’t know what would happen when it finally cracked, and I didn’t want to find out.
Ishigara had warned us that removing the stitches from our channels would take time. Unfortunately, I only had seconds to remove the vessel.
Brute force it was.
The stitched object scorched my palm and fingertips as I ripped it away from my skin. The threads of jinsei that had bound it to my channels tattered and snapped, and the scrivenings on the medallion sparked and cracked. Fire aspects melted through the metal surface to destroy my engraving. I flung the metal disc away from me, and it melted into slag before it hit the arena’s floor.
The danger was far from over, though. Eric was on his knees, his hands crossed above his head to ward off crashing waves of water aspects. Hagar held metal aspects away from her throat with her bloody hands.
I had to end this.
I cycled jinsei through my core.
The sacred energy hit me like a prizefighter’s uppercut to the solar plexus. I gasped against the pain and held onto the power I so desperately needed to save myself and my friends. With an agonized roar, I triggered the Thief’s Shield technique again, charging into the burning vortex.
Elemental aspects flowed through my core and into my aura, surrounding me in a burning corona. My core screamed as if it
