When it was needed, I could be patient. I’d spent days staking out a Russian corporate headquarters in Barcelona, just waiting to see if one woman turned up. But that had been in other circumstances, without lives immediately at stake based on my presence or absence. This was different. As long as I was away in the spirit realm, my friends didn’t have my help against the monsters roaming the Gonki Valley. And as long as we left things in Gonki the way we’d found them, people would be starving and suffering beneath the cruelty of the Straight Path. I needed to find a way to make it fall apart faster.
The earth spirit had nearly reached me again. I set off at a steady jog around the perimeter of the lake bed, with the spirit close behind. As we ran, I glanced back and was pleased to see that it was still shedding plenty of sand with each footfall. Running would mean he lost more that way, but it was only a start, and for all I knew, the spirit could keep running forever. Even in the spirit realm, away from my frail and mortal body, I had stricter limits.
The wounds in my arm itched and throbbed. I ignored them. As long as I survived, they would fade when I left this place. I simply had to shake off the pain as a distraction and work out how to leave.
I put on a fresh burst of speed to increase the distance between the spirit and me. He kept coming, shedding sand as he came, slowly diminishing over time.
The dirt banks around the outside of the lake bed were steeply and irregularly sloped. Looking ahead, I spotted a section with a series of protruding rocks and clumps of dirt that I could use to climb. Beyond them, there was a heap of rocks halfway up the bank and crumbled earth on the slope beneath it.
Perfect for what I had planned.
I sprinted for that stretch of the bank and dashed up it. I practically jumped from one foothold to the next as I scrambled along and up the bank. Many of my footholds broke away as I pushed off, but I kept from sliding back down to the spirit that was watching for me at the bottom.
The spirit didn’t immediately chase up after me. Instead, he followed on a parallel route along the base of the bank. He stood patiently, arms wide, sand trickling from him, while he waited for me to miss my footing and fall.
At last, I was in the perfect position, halfway up the towering bank. I stood on a heap of protruding rocks and dirt, above a patch of broken ground.
“Come and get me!” I shouted.
I pulled a rock from the bank above me and flung it at the spirit. The stone burst through the creature’s chest in a spray of sand. I pulled out another and another, doing the same with each one. Sand flowed down to fill the holes I had made, making the creature just a little shorter, but that wasn’t my main aim. Far more important was his response, as he came to the bottom of the bank and started trying to climb straight up the steep slope.
Taking such a direct path, the spirit struggled to get higher. He had found his own straight path and, as in the human realm, it was a destructive one. The rocks he got hold of couldn’t take his weight and so, they gave way beneath him. Twice, he slid down the bank in a spray of dirt.
On his third try, I didn’t wait for him to be his own undoing. I braced myself against the bank and kicked at the rocks beneath me. For a moment, nothing changed. Then came a sudden cracking noise as that section of the bank gave way. I leaped clear and landed on another dirt outcrop while the place where I had stood fell.
The dirt and rocks went crashing down on the spirit. He was flung from his feet and was almost buried beneath the weight of earth. Sand flew as sections of the creature were knocked away. The rest of him lay trapped, pinned down by the weight of dirt.
I watched in triumph as a sandy hand stretched out from beneath the heap but couldn’t get a grip to clear any of it away. The sand was still crumbling.
I closed my eyes and leaned against the bank.
When I opened them, I was back on the top step of the Sunstone Temple, between its guardian dogs.
The power of the earth was flowing through me, but I needed to test the Ground Strike technique that Tahlis had said the cores would give me.
Off to one side of the path, in front of the temple, was an area of open ground. I stood in the middle of it and emptied my mind as I focused on the sensations of the Vigor in my body. It was flowing from my stomach up through my chest, across the muscles of my shoulders, and down my arms until it pooled like heavy boulders in my hands.
Trusting the Vigor to guide me, I clenched my fist, sank to one knee, and punched the ground.
It was a cautious blow. I didn’t know if it would work or what it would do. If I ended up breaking my fingers, then I wouldn’t even be able to fight.
I needn’t have worried. The ground yielded as I hit, then rose back up as a shockwave ran through the earth. A wave of dirt and stone rippled away from me. It hit a dilapidated wooden shack
