“Won’t the fox just use them? I don’t want my fire to kill you.”
I put a hand on Kegohr’s left shoulder. “It won’t.” I summoned another wooden pillar and realized I didn’t have a lot of Vigor left in the tank. My wood reserves were running low. I still had a lot of fire channels primed with Vigor, but fire was completely useless against these foxes.
“Put your Flame Shields around me,” I told my friends as I forced another protective wall into being. “Give them as Vigor much as you can. The Daji won’t be able to control your combined energies.”
“How do you know that?” Vesma cried out as the beast destroyed my last pillar.
“Come!” Kegohr grabbed her, and they both took refuge near the wall. There was nowhere to take cover, but they wouldn’t need it.
I planned to be the fox’s only target.
Flames surrounded me, but not those produced by the other initiates. The heat intensified, and I felt like I was encased inside a roaring furnace. Then, a coolness washed over me as a different kind of flame enveloped me. I could see it grow weaker, then stronger, then weaker again as the final monster drank it in. The force of its attacks slowed my progress, but I was getting closer to it. Kegohr and Vesma were giving it all they had, but the Daji was able to take every last ounce of Vigor and use it against me.
As I came to the fox, I swung my sword through the air. My arms could only move an inch at a time, and it felt like my weapon was passing through a thick soup. I clenched my teeth and forced the blade onward as the heat around me started to rise. When my blade touched the fox’s head, I doubted I would even have the strength to pierce its skin, let alone chop its head off. But it was so focused on manipulating my friends’ Fire Shields that it wasn’t even bothering to move out of the way. Its eyes rolled to the back of its head as though it was living a dream of pure ecstacy.
Then I realized my hunch had been correct.
I dropped my sword, and it clattered to the ground. My muscles cramped from the effort of pressing against an onslaught of fire, but I raised my hand and shot a fireball at point-blank range. The fire evaporated on the beast’s skin as soon as it left my hand, but I wasn’t trying to kill it with my attack. I wanted to feed it. I continued releasing Untamed Torch until my fire channels were almost completely dry of Vigor. The fox suddenly yelped, and the fire from its nostrils vanished.
“Did it work?” Vesma called out.
The beast toppled onto one side with its legs dangling. I reached down and picked up my sword. The fox’s stomach was bloated like some kind of bullfrog, and it snarled at me as I approached. I took my weapon in two hands, raised it up, and brought it down with all the force of an executioner.
Kegohr walked over to me and looked down at the headless corpse. “I think decapitation is the best means of killing. It’s the most civilized.”
“Skewering brains takes more skill,” Vesma said as she approached.
“Well, that’s two kills for me,” I said. “Who gets the cores?”
“Let’s eat first. You bring anything?” She rose up on her tiptoes and pulled at the flap on my pack.
I laughed as I evaded her attempts to peer at my provisions. “I did. Would you like some? You want to ask nicely?”
“Would you two quit playing?” Kegohr said. “My stomach is growling, and it’ll be worse than a Daji if I don’t feed it.”
After we sat at the side of the chamber, I rummaged in my bag again, pulled out some dried beef, and passed it to the others.
“Reckon we ‘burned’ through a lot of calories there,” I said.
“A lot of what now?” Kegohr asked.
“Like Vigor, but for the body instead of magic.”
“Then, yeah, I reckon you’re right.”
Next, I took out the bandages and herbs. None of my wounds were very deep, and the heat of our attackers had seared them all shut, but Kegohr’s burn looked nasty.
“I don’t need that,” he said as I held up the herbs.
“Idiot.” Vesma punched him on the shoulder. “He let us help. You let him.”
“Fine,” Kegohr said. “Just to make you happy.”
Without water, it was hard to clean the wound, but I did my best using some moss from my bag. The moss also had an anaesthetic quality, and by the time I was done, Kegohr was grimacing a lot less. I chewed some other herbs into a paste and smeared them on the wound, then bandaged it.
“That should do,” I said. “At least until you can see a proper healer.”
Kegohr wasn’t paying attention; he was too busy looking out across the cave. “That’s a lot of cores,” he said.
“Then, we should harvest them.” I drew my knife, ready for the grisly work. “What can we get from absorbing Daji cores?”
“Flame Empowerment.” Vesma drew her own knife. “It lets you increase the power of an existing flame, making it hotter or larger.”
“We can’t enhance the abilities of other things?” I asked as I recalled what the foxes had done to the sprites.
“Not right away.” Vesma pried a core from a sprite corpse. “That’ll take a lot of training. But maybe at some point.”
“Shouldn’t take too much effort, now that we know how to change our channels,” I said. “The world is our… whatever the equivalent of an oyster is here.”
“An oyster is an oyster.” Kegohr ripped open an Ember Sprite with his bare hands. “Did that Daji fry something inside your brain?”
As we gathered the cores, I was struck by how many there were and how powerful some of the creatures had been. As we went deeper into the cavern, there might be even more
