“Yes, sweet man, yes,” Nydarth murmured in my ear. “Use me. Take my power and make it yours. Show me just what you can do with this sword that was given to you.”
“You suddenly like the taste of the lampreys?”
“I have grown accustomed to it, yes.”
The claws of the lampreys skidded off my slippery armor as I sliced into their scaled flesh and spilled their blood and viscera over the pavestones. I ripped the Sundered Heart from the last corpse and turned to see Vesma retreat. Her chest heaved as she hauled in breath and composed herself.
“That’s the lampreys on the street,” she panted. “But look.”
Starsquids climbed the pagodas around us and hammered on the thin wooden blinds of the windows. I’d thought the citizens were safe inside their homes, but it seemed the tentacled monsters had adapted.
“There are so many of them,” Vesma said. “This isn’t a Vigorous Zone. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I can’t explain it,” I said, “but we have to make sure they don’t get inside.”
“I can’t scale walls; can you?”
I could have summoned a Plank Pillar beneath my feet, but there too many buildings with starsquids on them. I’d never kill them all in time. Once the monsters were inside the houses, it would be a massacre I couldn’t stop.
An Untamed Torch wouldn’t lure them all away either. I’d used Burning Wheel as a lure before, and I could always do that again, but it risked igniting the homes with the people inside them.
My eyes flitted over a squat shrine to our right with an open ceiling. Water streamed from fountains on every side of it. Large bowls used to light fires were barely visible inside the structure.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said to Vesma.
Flames flickered around her spear. “It better be good.”
“Follow me.”
I sprinted for the shrine and hit the door with a flying kick. The wood shattered under my weight, and I took the stairs up to the roof.
At the top was an open-air shrine, pillared and roofed but without walls. Statues in poses of veneration stood in the corners. A spring bubbled up from the middle of it and formed the waterfalls as it rushed out every side. A round platform surrounded the source of the rushing water and gave us a centerpoint to hold our ground. But it was the large steel bowls blackened by fire that had caught my attention from the street.
“Starsquids like fire,” I told Vesma breathlessly as I summoned an Untamed Torch.
Vesma’s eyes widened in understanding. She doused the flames on her spear by drawing the Vigor back inside her. Then, she raised her hand, and fire flashed between her fingers. We launched swift bursts of fireballs at the dead fuel within each of the steel sconces. Flames roared suddenly as our Augmentation techniques lit the torches anew. In moments, the shrine was suffused with an almost blinding incandescence.
I looked out, down one of the shrine’s waterfalls, and into the streets below. Sure enough, the flames had caught the attention of the starsquids. Dozens of them squirmed toward us in a mass of suckered tentacles as they left behind the pagodas and raced toward our elevated position at the roof of the shrine.
“Good thinking,” Vesma said. “Now, we’ve got all of them coming at us. At once.”
“Ah, it’ll be fine. This is just a warm up for us.”
“I like my warm-ups with a lot less squirming tentacles.”
“Don’t we all?”
The starsquids crawled up over the shrine edges and cut our banter short.
Vesma lunged at the first one and caught it through the eye with the point of her spear. She planted her feet and swung the monster toward me. I turned one of my gauntlets into a set of blunt knuckle dusters and slammed a punch into the starsquid’s icy carapace. The ice shattered, bounced off my cheek, and I ripped its stomach open with the Sundered Heart. Entrails splattered through the air and splashed into a fountain.
More starsquids invaded the shrine, and Vesma ran in among them as fire flashed from her blade. The bright light instantly drew their attention. They grasped at her, but their tentacles found empty space as she twisted away and sliced barbed limbs from their owners.
I charged past a fountain, toward a starsquid, and put all of my force behind a kick. The blow connected with the monster, and it collapsed against one of the torches, scattering steaming coals over the floor. I found its throat with my blade and bathed the Sundered Heart in black blood. The air filled with a fine mist as the fire of the Sundered Heart melted the starsquids’ armor. There was a smell of burnt fish alongside the smoke of the torches as I engaged the monsters grappling their way up the side of the structure toward our bait.
Vesma cannoned past me as she used Untamed Torch as best she could. Direct fire techniques didn’t do much more than agitate the starsquids. I was about to tell her to focus her efforts on something else when she started using blasts of flame to propel herself from one side of the shrine to the other.
“New trick?” I yelled as I cut down a tentacled monster.
“You like it?”
Vesma used another fire blast to almost catapult herself into a pack of monsters. She hit them with all the force of a jousting knight on horseback. The starsquids scattered in a tangled mess of rubbery limbs, and she went to work on them with her spear.
If one got too close, then she would hit it with a powerful blow that knocked it back into my path and let me cut it down. If more than one closed in, she leaped out of the middle of them and bathed her spear in flames. The monsters sizzled as her weapon cleaved them apart.
Vesma continued to lead the creatures in a merry dance around the statues while I dealt with the stragglers clinging stubbornly to the edges of the shrine.
There was no
