Liam swallowed the dull ache in his throat. He had done nowhere near enough grieving. Their trajectory from Jove’s funeral to Novus Lucus had happened so fast. Time had not felt normal to Liam in weeks.
A sealed door at the end of the corridor awaited them. Scrawled upon it in white paint marker was another message.
“Remember why they want you,” James read the message out loud. “Hm. Why do they want me?”
“Who are they? Chrysid?” Liam said.
“Who knows, who cares…”
A large, open chamber lay beyond that door as their next designated battleground. Neon hues of lucidium pulsed through vein-like circuitry along the walls.
“Nym, scan the area for any potential enemies.”
“Running a scan. Getting a read on an air-innate mob somewhere in here. My mapping module’s scrambled in this tower, though.”
“Set visor mode to spectral imaging,” Liam said. “Scan the room for invisible gasses.”
“On it.” As Nym spoke, Liam’s view of the room filtered into darkness with only their silhouettes shining stark and white against the shadows around them.
“Oh, I hate this view,” James griped as his visor shifted into spectral imaging mode. “I can’t see shit.”
“Just watch for any target alerts on your heads-up display.”
James conjured a frosty spear of ice and gave it a small flourish as he eyed the room’s dark corners. “Not seeing anything, Professor.”
“Don’t let your guard down, it’s just waiting for us to have our backs turned.” Liam conjured a lightweight chain whip.
James glanced upward. “What the hell—?”
Liam looked up in time to glimpse a bold shadow descending upon him. Several unseen tendrils gripped his body and yanked him off his feet.
“Liam!” James shouted. He attempted to stop the beast with a slew of ice, but even the tallest pillars he conjured were too short for the room’s highest reaches.
The aerial mob squeezed the breath from Liam’s lungs as he struggled. He held the chain whip tight and manipulated the metal links to split off into a web of thinner cords.
“Liam! I can’t… I can’t reach you!” James shouted.
Liam’s body jerked as the creature whipped and writhed. As the metal cords tangled around the mob, Liam fixed his sights on the floor. A drop of at least twelve meters left him reeling. He wrestled one arm free and pointed his palm toward the ground.
“Hook!” Liam shouted to James.
Lucidium erupted from his palm and launched a hooked metal cord. With practiced accuracy, James caught the hook inside a column of ice. The fleeing, aerial mob came to an abrupt, jerked halt as the cords around its body tangled and pulled taut.
Liam focused on directing all conjured metal to one singular point at the hook. The creature flailed and thrashed in the air as the cords retracted toward the ice pillar. He wrestled not to crush himself along with the mob in the tangled fray.
Aiming again, Liam shouted, “…hook!”
A second hooked cord lashed out for James to catch within ice.
Finally, the creature’s resistance gave. Both Liam and the mob plummeted to the floor.
“Shit—wait, I got you, I got you, I got you!” James rushed over, summoning a frozen wave of ice.
“Wait—James, wait—!”
Although the ice hill halved Liam’s descent, the impact left him seeing stars.
“Oh, man. I’m so glad I caught you,” James’s voice came over the comms. “I thought for sure I was going to miss. Are you okay?”
Liam rolled out from under the stilled creature and stumbled slightly. “You couldn’t have padded that with some snow?”
The creature hissed again and snapped back to life. It lunged for Liam and another drop followed, straight for the cold, marble floor. Metal tendrils rose from the ground and curled around the shadowed creature.
Ice pillars jutted up as James approached, working to pin down the creature with an ice lance. The mob caught his weapon in three heavy arms and then darted for the ceiling once more.
James released his weapon and landed on his back with a grunt.
“You just gave it a weapon!” Liam yelled.
“What?”
The two looked up in time to see the creature wind back its arms to throw the javelin back at them. The brothers screamed and scattered as they dodged the incoming projectile. It shattered on the floor just inches from Liam’s shoulder.
Liam snapped his chain whip at the beast and hooked it. Liam slid across the floor as he wrestled against its attempts to escape. With the creature’s trajectory slowed, James unleashed one final avalanche, creating a wave that froze everything in its path. The tension on Liam’s cords released, finally, as the creature froze and dropped.
When the frigid powder cleared, all that remained of the creature was a heavy, frozen carcass.
Liam dropped back into the ice beneath him, exhausted.
“These things were much easier to take out when we had Jove,” James muttered.
Liam’s memory flit back to the Trial of the Fifth Pillar—a challenge designed to test them against air-innate mobs. It had taken them too long to even figure out how to spot them—air-innates had been a blind spot in Liam’s combat strategy.
By luck alone, Liam thought to try spectral imaging. If that filter on their visors could detect invisible gasses, it made sense to him that they may see an air-innate mob transmuting lucidium into some gas state for levitation.
Liam crossed over to the frozen creature and searched for any sign of an orb trapped inside. Sure enough, he could make out a faint pulse of a light source hidden within its belly.
Liam turned off the spectral imaging filter as the creature’s form faded into plain sight. It was every bit as pallid and haggard as he expected. Large, clear eyes stared wide and lifeless toward the ceiling. Within a large, slack and parted maw, Liam saw hundreds of little teeth.
After a few moments, the carcass shriveled and crumbled into feathery flakes of lucidium, leaving only a red orb behind. On that orb, Liam recognized the alchemical symbol for salt.
* * *
EXP:+27,000 EXPEXALT ADJUSTMENTS: WILLIAM STERLING || LV.82 → LV. 83|| EXP: 1064029|| statsATK - 189 →
