I slashed at the fire with my sword to test whether it would dissipate around the blade, but it remained strong.
“Could we jump through?” Kegohr asked.
“Not a good idea,” I said. “The heat’s intensifying.”
I shot a thorn into the flames, and it burst instantly into a fierce glow. The wooden spike was nothing but ash before it even reached the far side.
“What can we do?” Vesma asked.
We backed up together and Kegohr’s shoulder knocked my bag.
My bag! I opened it and pulled out a waterskin. It didn’t hold enough to put out all these flames, but maybe…
“I’m going to make a gap,” I said. “I need you to go through before they can close it. Ready?”
The others hefted their weapons.
“Ready!” they replied.
I pulled the stopper from the waterskin and flung the contents at the base of the nearest flames. After a gout of steam, a hole three feet across and 10 feet high formed in the burning wall. I jumped through the hole first, and Vesma followed immediately after. The hole was quickly closing, and Kegohr was too big to fit. The flames closed over the gap with a whoosh, and Kegohr was trapped on the other side.
“Shit!” I commented as I turned to Vesma. “We’re going to need him. Scatter the Dajis. Stop them from working together.”
I ran into the center of the Dajis and swiped at them, but they easily evaded my blade. Vesma took a running start, jumped, and struck a fox with a flying kick. It yelped and staggered, and I immediately positioned myself between the other two monsters. With a series of hacking motions, I forced them to concentrate on me, and the flaming wall flickered and trembled. Vesma cornered the other fox while I continued breaking their focus by harassing them with my sword.
I nicked a Daji’s nose with the tip of my sword, and a drop of lava trailed down its snout. It snarled and pounced at me. Immediately, the wall of flame came down into separate, roaming fires.
“It’s about time,” Kegohr said as he darted between the fires and joined the fray. His mighty, two-handed mace clobbered a Daji in the abdomen, and the sound of steel and flesh connecting was like a thunderclap. The fox slid across the cavern flow, but it shook its head before returning to face its attacker.
I knew my fire techniques were ineffective against creatures in the Cavern, but they would distract the foxes, so I produced an Untamed Torch that curved around one of the Dajis. The light from the flames blinded the creature for a second before it slashed at the attack. The fox used the flame I’d produced and sent it flying back toward me in a beam of intense heat. I jumped over the firebeam and twisted in midair, a Vigor-filled move I’d practiced a hundred times while sparring in the yard.
My sword lashed out and cut the beast across the stomach, but it twisted at the last moment, and I couldn’t complete the stroke. The blade should have gutted the creature; instead, it only produced a deep laceration.
Lava dripped from the wound and splashed onto the ground as my target shook its head. The lava bleeding from the cut suddenly hardened and turned to something like volcanic stone.
I risked a glance at my friends and saw their foxes bearing similar battle scars.
“They heal!” Kegohr called out.
Without any fire to manipulate, it was teeth and claws against muscle and steel. The Daji had much bigger teeth than me and had talons for fingernails, but I’d already killed dozens of Ember Cavern monsters. This fox would fall before my blade like all the others.
“There’s one thing they can’t heal from,” I said.
My Daji sprung forward, and I summoned a Plank Pillar that shot me 20 feet into the air. I pirouetted as I fell and delivered a spinning slice that carved through the fox’s neck. The beast’s head rolled across the ground as I landed.
Yes, it seemed Dajis couldn’t heal from decapitation.
“Cut off their heads!” I yelled as I ran to Vesma.
She swiped a fox, and it hopped aside. She rotated her spear and stabbed the spiked end into its skull. The fox snapped at her, but she drove the weapon deeper into its brain. The beast yelped before it grunted and collapsed in a bundle of limbs.
“Two things they can’t heal from,” Vesma said as she heaved the spike from the fox.
We both gathered around Kegohr and the final fox. The fur on his right shoulder was singed, and he had nasty burns all over his face.
“They manipulate fire,” he said with a grunt. “I can’t turn my fire off. It burns through my veins.”
The last fox snorted, and I noticed two deep amber lines running along its snout to the back of its head. They weren’t wounds but a kind of marking. From the superior size and more intelligent glean in its eyes, I suspected this was an alpha Daji.
As if it wanted to prove my conclusion, two streams of fire erupted from its nostrils. I summoned a Plank Pillar in front of the blast, and the wooden wall barely gave us enough time to dodge. I produced another pillar, this one beneath the fox’s paws, but the wood burned up before it even had a chance to rise up from the ground.
“Get back!” I yelled, and my friends took cover behind me.
I hauled pillar after pillar out of the floor to protect us from the Daji’s waves of flame. My Vigor was quickly depleting, so we only had a few seconds to come up with a plan.
“You’re fueling it,” Vesma said to Kegohr. “Can’t you stop?”
“You know I can’t,” he snapped at her. I’d never seen him like this before, and I worried about the despair gathering in his eyes.
“Flame Shields,” I said as I recalled what Rutmonlir had done inside Nydarth’s Shrine. “You must be able to project them.”
“Uh, I haven’t done it before, but
