“No! I wasn’t trying to hurt them. I was trying to…” Her expression changed, growing hard. Her eyes darkened, and black veins seemed to push at the skin of her face and neck. “Yes,” she said in a voice that was now cold. “Exterminate the runts. Retrieve the Core. Kill the betrayers.”
The sudden shift was more than a little unnerving. Even Ajax backed slowly away, edging nearer to Benin, and he did not move to attack when she closed her eyes and resumed communing with whatever was wreaking havoc at the summit.
The gnomish warrior instead turned and began using his spear to clumsily saw at the vines twisting around Benin’s legs. He’d have preferred the gnome to begin by freeing his hands, but they were currently beyond his reach.
The wait was agonizing. Ajax’s spear made little headway against the magic-reinforced vines, and Benin was frozen in a torture of imagining what carnage was happening above.
His nose twitched.
What’s that smell?
For a bizarre moment he thought he’d caught a whiff of the fetid marshes. But that was impossible. No way was the breeze strong enough to have carried it so far, no matter how pungently the place stank.
There was a different smell, though, much closer.
Burning.
From the corner of his eye he saw smoke curling up from the vines enwrapping Pyra. The little emberfox was focusing her essence, concentrating the heat of her body up to its surface in an attempt to counter the magical vines. And it was working. The fox was glowing almost white, hotter than he’d ever seen her, and the vines were starting to blacken and crisp. Flames licked along the surface of the thickest ones, and they seemed to flinch, finally retracting enough for Pyra to wriggle herself free.
The emberfox wasted no time. As soon as she was out, she leapt toward Lila, jaws opening wide as a torrent of flame spewed forth to engulf the ranger.
A wall of vines sprang up between them. The flames splashed against it, blackening and igniting the greenery but leaving Lila unharmed. She stepped out from behind the shield, glaring, clearly furious at having been pulled away from her task yet again.
More vines sprouted, this time forming a cage around the emberfox. Pyra howled her outrage, though Benin knew her Flamethrower ability could not be used again for another two minutes.
“Interfere again and you die,” Lila growled. Pyra growled right back at her. The emberfox’s frustration seared across their bond, but Benin’s gaze was fixed on the darkness behind Lila. I swear I just saw something move. Something big…
The ranger saw him staring. “What, damn it?”
Her ranger reflexes saved her life. Lila threw herself to the side of the trail, and the Marsh Zolom’s jaws snapped shut on empty air. Hissing in annoyance, it drew its head back, close enough now to be illuminated in Pyra’s glow. Its tongue flicked in and out; for a moment, it faced Benin and Coll. Ajax froze in the act of cutting him free, and all three of them waited helplessly for the fanged blow to fall.
The Zolom hissed again. Its black eye sockets seemed to promise that they’d be next. Then it lunged for Lila again.
The ranger threw up another wall of vines to shield herself. The snake smashed blindly into them, and Lila took the opportunity to scramble off the trail and up the rocks of the mountainside. The vine shield kept the Zolom busy for a few more moments as it bashed its head stupidly against the barrier.
A grunt from nearby drew Benin’s attention back to Coll. The warrior strained against his own vines. He caught Benin’s eye, looking a little bewildered, but there was no longer any sign of the berserk rage that had driven him minutes earlier. The greater threat of the Zolom seemed to have snapped him out of his strange state, for now at least.
“Call yourself a guardbreaker, Rutherford?” he grunted in an uncanny impression of Shieldmaster Severs. His muscles strained, tendons pushing against the skin of his neck.
The vines snapped. Coll shrugged them off, gasping from the effort of having broken free, then he hurried over to Benin. Though his stamina was obviously running low, he was able to tug the slimmer vines away from Benin’s hands, allowing the mage to cast something to free himself from the rest.
The old Benin would have set them on fire, not caring about the damage to his robes so long as he could be free. Now though, he’d been considering how best to escape, and began casting Sheathe. Usually employed by warrior-mages as invisible armor, it followed similar principles to Levitate in that it involved forming air into a sort of “cushion”, except this time it was spread across the entire surface of his body.
His mana drained alarmingly as Sheathe spread along his limbs. When he was down to his last globe, he reached for Pyra; she willingly gave over her essence to him, and he seamlessly transitioned to drawing from her pool instead.
Once the Sheathe was in place, he fed more mana into it. The hard air shell expanded bit by bit, forcing the vines further and further away from him, until eventually he had enough room to wriggle free. Despite the circumstances, he allowed himself a moment to congratulate himself on such an elegant solution.
While Benin was occupied, Coll brought his hammer down on Pyra’s vine cage. The tendrils had already started to burn and blacken from the emberfox’s aura, and the first smash of the hammer made them crackle. The second hit made them crack, and finally the third broke through. Despite Coll’s somewhat barbaric technique, Benin knew by now that he had full control of his weapon, and that Pyra herself was never in danger of being crushed by the hammer.
“We should get back to the gnomes,” he said once they were all free. “They might need our help.”
“Shouldn’t we take care of snakey-boy first?” Coll looked worried. “We don’t want to
