“Cara!” I shouted. “Be ready with your lightning power! Kai, Toshiro, stay behind us and don’t risk yourselves. There’s magic to deal with here, and I doubt your swords will do much good against it.”
It was time to try out my mace.
I reached for the Ironside Persona and let out a battle roar as the strength of it flooded my body. The enormous mace was in my hands, and Cara was at my side with her bow at the ready. I made sure that Toshiro and Kai had their backs to the wall, then I waded into the approaching mass of rusty figures.
I swung my mace, and the animated suits of armor crumpled like paper under the massive strikes of the powerful weapon. I circled it around my head and caved in the chest of an armored skeleton, then crushed another two on the back swing. The fallen skeletons tangled the feet of the others, and I stepped up and drove the mace’s head into the helmet of the leader. The skull inside the helmet shattered, and the whole suit crashed to the ground. There was a hollow scream from inside it.
“Time to see what fire will do, I think!” I called to Cara.
“Luckily you have just the right person for the job!” she called back.
I glanced over at her to see her face alight with the joy of battle. She laughed out loud and loosed a flight of arrows into the midst of the armored skeletons.
The resulting boom rocked the thick air of the gloomy hilltop, and pieces of bone and rusty armor flew flaming in all directions. Out of the smoke, another wave of the undead lumbered.
Cara was treating her arrow with fire potion, so I ran in, tackling the biggest armored skeleton with my mace. He was armed with a naginata, and he caught my first blow on the shaft of his polearm and turned it, stepping back and trying to get enough distance between us to use the rusty blade. For a moment, I gazed into the darkness of his helmet. Twin points of glowing red burned deep in the skull’s black eye sockets.
Battle-fury filled me, and I changed tack. I slammed the mace forward, just as I felt a rain of blows scoring my armor plating from behind. I drew on the stone shield spell, flinging up a curving wall of stone between me and my dead foes. With a twist of my will, I hurled the spell at them. It shattered into a million pieces and blasted outward with a wave of force that sent them flying backward in a hail of razor sharp stone fragments. Cara followed up with another rain of flaming arrows, clearing a space in the encroaching sea of rusty enemies. I fell back to talk to her.
“You all right?” I asked.
She nodded, a little breathless. We glanced back to see Kai and Toshiro standing with their backs to the stone wall and their swords at the ready. As I watched, a wave of armored skeletons came rushing around the corner. Kai leaped into action. As I looked at her, I caught her smile and her challenging glance as she charged, and I understood its meaning; she wanted to make sure I was seeing what she could do.
Kai stepped up swiftly and swept her graceful sword through the necks of the first two who came at her. As they crumpled, a third raised a rusty samurai sword for a killing blow. She hit the skeleton’s sword with such force that it cracked in the middle. As she shoulder-barged the armored skeleton out of the way, Toshiro dived in to take out two others.
“Their swords seem pretty effective after all,” Cara said wryly.
“For now,” I said. “They’re buying us a little time. Let’s see if a fire arrow will have any effect on Yakuna.”
The terrible, corrupted form of Yakuna still sat, squatting like a giant frog on the stone block at the center of the courtyard. He had grown, bursting out of his black robes to reveal gray, puckered skin. He was bloated, monstrously large, and his huge distended belly hung down between his legs. He looked like a bloated corpse that had floated in water for a week.
Making a sound of disgust in her throat, Cara whipped an arrow out, treated it, and fired it. The potion-imbued projectiles multiplied in the air, but Yakuna made a gesture with one swollen hand, and the fire burst before it hit him. I snatched a throwing axe from my belt and threw it at Yakuna, but that too met an invisible force and clanked to the ground. I reached my hand forward, and the throwing axe returned to me, but it was no use trying again. It was as if Yakuna was protected under an invisible dome of glass.
“He’s got a protective barrier like the one which stopped us at the border!” I exclaimed.
“No time to wonder how to get past it now,” Cara said. “Look!”
I looked where she was pointing. Kai was hard-pressed by a crowd of the armored skeletons, and one had got between her and Toshiro, separating them from each other.
Cara lifted her hand. She held the humble-looking Tree Persona staff, ready to use. She raised it up. I kept one eye on Yakuna while I whirled my mace and smashed back a sudden wave of armored skeletons that attacked from the side, trying to push a wedge in between me and my friends.
Then Cara struck.
The emerald lightning that blasted in an expanding circle out from her staff made a
