The blast had bought us a bit of time, but Cara was starting to shake with the effort of containing the magical energy.
“Cara!” I shouted, sprinting toward her through the piles of broken enemies.
“Leo! I can’t control it!”
I ran up to her and grabbed the staff. I gritted my teeth as the force of the Persona’s magic flooded through me. Ironside’s essence seemed to reach out through my armor and begin to absorb the energy.
Together, Cara and I began to bring the emerald lightning under control.
That was when Yakuna decided to make his move.
He had become an amorphous thing, a massive, bloated corpse-like giant. He stood on his stone block now and raised his sagging arms. The voice of the Festering boomed out an incantation that darkened the very air with its evil influence.
“To me!” he called. “To me!”
Kai and Toshiro had made it over to where we stood, but now the air was full of a rain of flying metal. All the suits of armor we had broken were rising up from where they had fallen and were knifing through the air toward Yakuna. They hit his massive form and coalesced around him.
“Now! Now!” I shouted. “We have to try the projectile weapons again! Cara, get your bow ready!”
I reached for Kitsune, and the shinobi aspect washed over me with a cool wave. I reached to my shuriken sash and pulled a handful of shuriken stars out, feeling the cold magic nearly burning with its intensity.
Cara fired a volley of arrows at the same time as I hurled a flight of shuriken stars. Fire and ice combined into a massive explosion, but as before, the thick orange flames and black smoke washed around Yakuna as if he were covered with a glass shield.
Nika, the woman in the cage, screamed wordlessly.
A sudden thought struck me. “The Persona powers! Let’s combine the Persona powers as we did before, but this time, let’s use them to counter a spell!”
Cara looked hopeful. “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “There’s a chance it might work. What spell?”
I didn’t have to think about it. “The lightning. It will flow along the ground and up under his shield. We can blast his spell from the inside outward.”
“I’m ready,” she said, looking grim but determined.
“We’ll hold off any enemies from this side while you do it,” Kai said, and Toshiro nodded. The horde of armored skeletons hung back for the moment, but they still menaced us from a distance with their swords and rusty spears.
“Now!” I said to Cara.
Together, we reached for the spirit realm, and as we did so, Cara slammed the staff into the ground and sent a bolt of lightning along the ground toward the obscene figure of Yakuna. Metal was slamming onto him from every side, and he was beginning to look as if he were some gigantic titan made of rusty steel. He roared with glee in his strength and power, and he laughed and beat his chest as more and more metal flew to him to build up his armor.
Cara and I were like a single combined awareness, hanging somewhere between the material world and the spirit realm. I could perceive her clearly and could also see the delicate way she held the lightning spell. I reached for her and wrapped my control of the spell around hers. I felt like a master swordsman gripping the timid hand of the apprentice to show her how to grip.
Instinctively, she understood. Her control of the magic steadied and expanded, and I fed my strength into the spell. The effect was massive. The lightning crackled along the ground, rushed up Yakuna’s stone block, and crackled around him. It blasted outward, filling and giving shape to the previously invisible dome that he used to protect himself.
Yakuna roared and gloated; the lightning didn’t seem to be able to harm him. But harming him with the lightning was not our plan.
“Now!” I said to Cara, and together we put all of our power into blasting outward with the spell.
There was a deafening crack as his protective barrier shattered like an eggshell under a hammer, and the shockwave threw everyone except me onto their backs. It washed around me like water around a stone. Yakuna roared his rage.
His protective field was broken.
In my mind’s eye, as clearly as if it were painted in front of me, I saw General Koshu, Yasei, and our other companions. The magical barrier holding them back broke, and they saw it. Like a gush of fetid water through a breaking dam, the Festering poured out around them, washing up the green valley and over the ridge, turning all the land gray, brown, and rotten.
Luckily, Cara’s potion was still affecting them, and they didn’t lose their courage. The horses screamed, and the tiger-like Byakko roared, but the riders were grim-faced and ready. Koshu gave the order and they thundered into the plain.
The vision passed.
Cara was clutching my hand. “We did it!” she cried. “We broke the barrier!”
“And Koshu and the others are coming. It won’t be long before they get here.”
“Let’s finish this horror off before they arrive,” Cara said fiercely.
“You keep Yakuna busy with arrows. I have an idea.”
She nodded once, and as another wave of armored skeletons rushed her, Kai and Toshiro leaped into action, holding the attackers off while Cara loaded up her bow and fired.
Still wearing the shinobi aspect of the Kitsune Persona, I sprinted toward the grotesquely armored Yakuna as fast as I could. Fire bloomed all over him as Cara’s arrows landed home, but through the thick plate metal, they couldn’t do much good. I could have tried using a coat of ice to blow his armor off, but I had another idea.
I wanted to try out my misdirection power.
As I sprinted over the ground
