If I couldn’t beat him with arms and hands, then I would have to do it with my whole body. I slammed my feet against the ground and arched my back, throwing him off me. Free once more, I rose to my feet and found myself standing waist-deep in the pool, with the fishman pulling himself upright in front of me.
I summoned a Plank Pillar beneath the water, hoping it would propel me back to dry land, but it only bubbled to the surface like a floating raft.
“You ain’t going anywhere, softskin,” he snarled as he plunged beneath the water.
I was out of weapons, and I knew fire would be ineffective, but I had other tricks up my sleeve. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, focusing on more recently learned and challenging channels—ash.
As I opened my eyes, the fishman dived out of the water like a dolphin. I gestured, and the Vigor flowed from me to form a cloud of ash that caught him in mid-air. He dropped to the water like an anvil, and I ducked beneath the surface. The clear water had become muddied by our struggle, but I could just make out my knife and sword laying in the silt. The knife was closer, so I snatched it up and emerged once more.
The fishman jumped above the pool’s surface and scrambled to wash the ash from his lungs. The ash around his head was starting to fade as particles trailed down his slimy skin and stained the water a dark gray. Before it could break down any further, I lunged forward, grabbed hold of him, and plunged the dagger into his side. He thrashed, and blood flowed out across my hand as I drove the blade deeper. With one final spasm, his life gave out, and his body went limp.
I dropped the dead weight in the shallows and dived back into the water to grab the Sundered Heart Sword. As my hand closed around its grip, I felt a sense of warm familiarity, as though it was welcoming a long lost friend.
“You’ve returned for me,” Nydarth said.
“You’re too beautiful to leave behind,” I answered as I rushed back to the battle.
“You really know how to woo a lady, don’t you?”
I strode out of the pool and saw Kegohr and Vesma each engaged with a fishman. Kegohr’s mace swung in brutal arcs while Vesma’s spear darted in and out of the space between her and her opponent. A Flame Shield blazed on her forearm, but it was fading away, quenched by the Smothering Mist billowing from the fishman. Unlike the lampreys, these fishmen had a more powerful form of the technique, so fire wasn’t capable of dispersing it. As Vesma’s shield faded to embers, she called up a one-handed Untamed Torch and flung it at her opponent, but it burst harmlessly against his shoulder, only causing a fresh cloud of steam.
At least Vesma’s weapon gave her as much reach as her enemy, who was fighting with a trident. Kegohr’s opponent was the leader with his long barbed spear, and the fishman was using that reach to keep Kegohr at arm’s length. Kegohr’s two-handed mace, combined with his long arms, gave him more range than many warriors, but not as much as his opponent’s trident. Kegohr tried to close the gap, but the fishman wheeled away with the same flowing movements my opponent had used.
I rushed to Kegohr and joined him in combat. Blood oozed from a series of wounds down his side, none of them deep enough to be fatal on its own, but, put together, a painful mess that would eventually slow him down.
“You killed yours?” he asked me as he blocked our opponent’s trident.
I slipped my sword into the fishman’s open guard, but he batted it away a second before it would have killed him.
“I thought you’d be done with yours by now,” I answered Kegohr as the fishman flowed forward and thrust his weapon. I pivoted, and the bronze prongs flashed past my ribs.
“Is that a challenge, Effin?” Flames flared across the half-ogre’s skin as he fed more Vigor into Spirit of the Wildfire. He flung his head back and roared, a noise that echoed off the cliff and shook the treetops.
When Kegohr opened his eyes, fire flashed there, too. He rushed past me and stomped toward his opponent like a living embodiment of the inferno, all flames and rage. I followed along behind, looking for a moment when I might possibly help in the presence of such strength.
The fishman quaked at the sight and backed away with his spear raised. Kegohr spun around with his mace outstretched, and he almost looked like a shot put thrower. His opponent jumped over the weapon, and Kegohr’s mace struck a tree instead of his enemy. The tree exploded in a shower of splinters, but Kegohr didn’t slow down. He continued spinning toward the fishman, and I backpedalled so that I wouldn’t get caught in his warpath.
Vesma was still locked in battle with her opponent, and Kegohr was inching closer to them by the second. As much as I wanted to leave Kegohr his kill, he could harm my girlfriend.
I dipped into the power inside me and called on wood. A stream of energy rushed through my body and down my legs, then arced through the ground. As it reached the fishman, it emerged as a Plank Pillar directly beneath his feet. The force of the rising pillar flung him into the air and sent him
