Time Since Reckless Self-Endangerment: 5 Days 18 Hours

Goal: Save Tarquin

There were moments before the fight started. Three things happened of importance.

One, Nic crushed the last of the pills down his throat, ‘wasting’ them to regain his energy. Essence was a luxury, but aura was his lifeblood.

Two, Nic ran his own hand against the blade of the centipede axe. He braced himself, ready for the pain, and tore down. Blood stained the sand. The silver ring of Day-Into-Night fell to the ground, still wrapped around his severed finger.

Three. Redjaw slid silently down his body and into the sand.

The humans charged.

They came as a single, coordinated mass. The boy with the parasitic vines thrust his hands to the ground and a mass of thorns erupted beneath. They tried to seize Nic-

And Nic responded with three forward steps, lifting a wave of sand to carry him over the grasping vines. Each footfall built momentum. He had reached the peak of F-Class in Physical Strength, and at twice his normal size, each motion carried with it a cannonshot strength that made his seven-foot-tall frame blur as it rushed towards the human foe.

He leapt through the air and brought his axe swinging down in a brutal overhand blow, moving so fast the bone handle creaked and warped under the impact. The golden-winged warrior threw himself into the path, wings lifting like a shield of feathers to absorb the brutal strike. Nic landed and kicked under the wings, slamming a foot into the warrior’s undefended left leg. As the bone disjointed he reached down, grabbed the edge of one wing, and hurled the man away with a deafening roar.

Nic wanted to dispose of the hard target and move on to the softer, easier prey behind.

But as Nic flung the man aside, the golden wings snapped open and saved him, guiding his wild flight through the air into a graceful swoop. Chains erupted from his chest and wrapped around Nic’s right arm, using the momentum of his own throw to pull him off-balance.

In the instant his guard was down the man with the arms made of ice crashed into him. All four arms extended into a flurry of open-palmed blows, each strike pouring frigid, deadly aura into Nic’s body to slow and freeze the flowing stream of his own energy.

For a split second his Shards lost their luster. He reached to exhale a killing blast of Poison Mist and found his pathways blocked.

He roared again and stomped his foot down, lifting a platform of sand just wide enough to stand on as he regained his balance.

Nic’s head slammed forward. He headbutted the ice-limbed man so hard the assault broke for a moment, and Nic was able to jab forward with his axe. He used it like a spear, slamming the blunt top into the man’s gut and sending him crashing through the sand with broken ribs.

Grasping the chains that wrapped around his arm, Nic grunted and swung. He swept the golden-winged warrior through the air like a flail, flinging him up and swinging him down towards the earth. But before he could finish the blow, the chains simply vanished. The man was released, sent flying back instead of breaking every bone against the sand, and his wings carried him to a gliding landing.

Nic snarled in frustration.

Every moment he didn’t kill them was a moment they had to encircle him, slow him down, use their numbers. He needed to take one down- now.

But as he advanced on the dazed, disoriented man he’d knocked down, a stag made of interwoven thorns erupted from the vine-wizard’s palms. It rocketed towards him with horns lowered. At the same time, Jessie closed from one side, the woman with the blazing whip striking from the other.

Nic caught the stag head-on. Its horns pierced through his palms as he gripped them like handlebars and turned the momentum of the charge, whipping the beast off its feet and turning, spinning it through the air to swing like a club at Jessie.

Whatever the curse had changed about her - she’d learned to use her abilities properly. A trio of swirling air vortexes erupted, each exploding out as Nic’s swing crashed through them. Each one sapping the momentum. A blue-green blur of wind tugged at her hair and manifested under her feet with each step, lending her a supernatural grace as she darted aside.

As the stag crashed into the ground its body dissolved back into thorny vines. Vines that whipped around his arms and held him fast, burrowing into the ground to anchor against his attempts to rip free.

At the same time the whip-wielder had time to completely circle around him, her arm blurring as the blazing lash tore against his back again and again, opening wounds that burned with a lingering hellfire. They were shallow, but her aura was eating into his skin from each and every cut. Slowly cooking him alive.

She rounded to the other side and her whip-arm drew back, aiming a lash directly for his eye.

Nic stomped down and a spike of earth erupted. She was mid-movement, trying to circle around him in an awkward, sidelong way that made it hard to stop if an attack came from directly in her path.

The spike stabbed up and skewer her through the jaw and skull. Gore exploded out as the tip emerged from above her ear.

Feeling sick with rage Nic broke through the icy cold restraining him and spat poison mist across the vines restraining him. The dense black smog boiled from his open mouth and shriveled the bindings to nothing.

He rose to his full height, arms flexing as he ripped apart the last of the withered thorn-vines.

Jessie lunged forward. Her hand drew back and she concentrated a wind vortex in her open palm, trying to strike for his lower leg.

His axe swept through the air in a blur of white-red and intercepted her arm. By all rights, the blow should have shattered every bone and left an unhealable ruin. Instead, a brilliant blue shield erupted and absorbed the blow, rippling as the blunt back of the axe struck against it.

It only lasted a split second.

But it was enough for Jessie to slam the vortex into his leg, the contained fury exploding out to tear a huge chunk from his calf and mutilate her fingers in a single brutal hit. He dropped to one knee, but as he did, one hand left the haft of the axe and grasped her by the back of the skull.

He slammed her head into the earth. When he lifted up, she spat blood and sand, and he hardened the ground before slamming her back down.

Dead or unconscious.

He hoped for the latter, but didn’t have time for mercy.

Chains shot forward and wrapped around his axe, and the golden-winged warrior leapt into the air, using the strength of his wings to try and tear the weapon away from Nic’s hand. At the same time roots and vines erupted from below, digging into his ruined leg and preventing it from healing. The combination left him anchored by one limb as the other was pulled forward.

Holding on, Nic grasped the chains with his other hand and pulled. Inch by inch as the thorns and vines encircled him, he dragged the angel-winged warrior out of the sky. Screaming, he unleashed Centurion. The centipede manifested around his shoulders and jabbed forward, darting through the air to sink its jaws into the man’s arm.

Venom met blood with brutal results. The wings vanished, dissolving into shreds of golden light. The man toppled from the air, Nic met him with a devastating sweep of the axe before he could touch ground again, batting him away with a jagged wound across his chest and stomach.

Spears of vine stabbed upwards from the earth and pierced into Nic’s gut.

He coughed blood, convulsing and choking, losing Centurion as three breaths passed in the ragged span of a single moment. He was bound from the waist down, pinned to one knee, and now the roots were growing inside his flesh to tear apart muscle and cripple him.

The vine-mage, the dark-haired healer, and the girl whose doppleganger he’d destroyed were all grouped together as one defensive wedge. The weakest three fighters were right in front of him. Maybe ten feet away.

But he couldn’t reach them.

The vines burrowed like worms inside his skin, shredding muscle, grasping bone. The pain was excruciating, and without the Wintertusk Bracer to numb his mind he would’ve blacked out. Without his regeneration, they already would have torn him apart.

He flung his axe. It whistled through the air and the doppleganger-girl extended an arm, deflecting it with a bronze shield that appeared from nowhere and unfurled like a flower made of shining metallic petals.

He groaned, the vines wrapping around his shoulders. His hand went for his bag, trying to seize a talisman, a tool, anything. The vines ripped the mystic sack from his belt and grasped his hand, pulling him down.

He was dragged to the earth. Fully covered in dark, writhing vines. They obscured the light above him, growing into a dense and tangled forest that slowly squeezed down around his flesh, constricting him. Crushing him into a darkness made of a thousand sharp thorns.

But he could still breathe.

They wanted to kill him slowly, but with every split second Nic rotated his cultivation to shift the sand and earth aside, creating a thin tunnel that stretched from the earth beneath him towards the trio.

As the last grains of sand twisted aside, he’d opened a long, thin pipe in the earth directly between him and the vine-mage.

And with all the fury in his body, Nic vented a beam of poison smoke into the tunnel, racing underneath the earth to explode upwards from below. The mage let out a single, hideous scream and fell apart, poison clinging to his flesh as it melted to black rot on his bones.

The vines lost their strength, going limp around him.

With a screaming effort Nic ripped himself free, one hand emerging, then the next, pulling the deadly coils apart and ripping through the last of his restraints to stumble forward. One leg hung limp and useless, blood drooling from his midsection to paint his legs and lower body red. It looked as if he’d waded through a sea of gore.

“Kill him.” The healer said. It was a shaking, desperate whisper. “KILL IT!”

The girl advanced, the shield flowing in liquid metal to take the form of a flowering axe. She moved delicately, fast on her feet, and Nic’s attempt to meet her with a lance of poison smoke was met with a lightning-fast pivot. Her axe lashed out, extending to halberd length.

It cleaved across Nic’s left arm and broke the flesh open to the bone.

She advanced, whipping two more blows down as he struggled to breathe. One of his lungs felt oddly heavy, like it was filling with blood.

The first hit slammed against the Wintertusk Bracer. The second, he dodged by letting go of the bracer’s enchantment and abruptly shrinking to half-height, slipping below the cleaving swing.

But that was it.

The exhaustion of using the bracer and the weight of his wounds drove him to his knees. He couldn’t see straight, and his world was narrowing, a fuzzy darkness crawling in from the edges of his vision.

She lifted her axe and he raised his hand.

Redjaw sank his pincers into her calf. The poison sting made her weapon shiver and break apart, dissolving, ribbons of bronze-colored light unfurling from the suddenly empty space in her hands.

With a savage roar Nic threw himself forward and his scarf shot out like a biting snake. It wrapped around her neck and pulled her down, down to eye-level, her dull, curse-afflicted gaze meeting his wild and desperate glare.

He grabbed her face and spat poison mist point-blank.

Her corpse slumped to the ground. Nic dropped too. He watched the doctor run, retreating desperately through the dark sands, as he slowly keeled over and lay against the ground. His vision shook, blurring until there were two doctors. Three. Four.

A blur of colors.

Darkness.