Cursing Ketu’s poorly-timed arrival, I dive through the portal. Pulling a soul taut across my forehead, I reactivate the dagger, tracing over scarred skin to form a fresh eye, revealing the centipede in its elemental form.

As the others pass through the portal behind me, I ensconce them in wrappings of Death to conceal their vital signatures. Marcus turns invisible as he phases himself, but wears the Death energy like a shadowy mantle. I charge forward into the midst of the centipede’s body while Marcus heads in the opposite direction, on the centipede’s left. The others stay by the portal entrance, though they’re poised to attack.

Until I actually force the centipede to transform, seeing its elemental form is a nuisance. I close my third eye and rely on my vital perception to more accurately navigate through the centipede’s sprawling mass. When I reach a segment where over ten bodies converge, forming a chitinous sphere, I plunge the dagger into the junction. Ascendant energy courses over the blade like a torrent.

The centipede twitches and stirs. Its body slowly transforms, metamorphosis radiating out from the prick of my blade.

If Ketu weren’t at our backs, I could transform the centipede more gradually, putting less strain on my body. I’m not even sure how he found us, or how he realized that the centipede existed beyond the plane’s atmosphere. Maybe Ash taught him a new skill. Maybe Danessa Fleur can track traces of vitality. But he is coming, and to underestimate his speed is folly.

Blue energy courses like a series of turbulent rivers through my body. My skin feels like it’s buzzing, and a faint glow emanates from even the abyss of my Death energy wrappings. More, damn it! I snarl, imagining myself dredging up every drop of energy into the blade, siphoning myself dry like Karanos when he created the return beacon.

Something snaps. Suddenly, a wave of cracking rocks and sizzling fire courses over the centipede, transforming its body in a radius of fifty feet from my dagger strike.

Retreating backwards, exhausted, I behold the changed centipede with my one good eye, confirming that it really has changed into an elemental beast–at least, the segments of centipede nearest to me. When I open my third eye, I see the centipede as it was before in its living, insect form.

I hear the angered, low chittering of giant centipede heads from Marcus’ location, the Dark practitioner forming a void blade of darkness that stretches at least fifteen feet in length. It’s incredibly thin, but meets minimal resistance when empowered by his ascendant energy, slicing through the centipede chitin like a hot knife through butter. The centipede's heads roll, bobbing and twirling in space, with mandibles–or should I call them fangs?–twitching.

For all that Marcus is deadly, he’s not doing much damage to the giant beast given its absurd size. But he isn’t alone. The elementalists rush into the fray, using their mastery of earth, fire, and air to control chunks of centipede. Rather than using their elementalism to disable and tear the centipede apart, they control the centipede’s elemental self to attack the main body.

The centipede heads flare like blowtorches. Maria redirects their path to scorch the main body just as the wind sinews snap and twist back, Vik successfully interfering with the watery arms. Finally, Alan takes on the most intensive role–controlling the marble body, consisting of the majority of the insect’s mass.

I may have only converted a section of the centipede aggregate into elemental form, but it’s still a staggering amount of earth–tons upon tons of it. Alan doesn’t seem exhausted by the effort at all; I sense the vitality of his face beneath the Death energy mask and realize that he’s smiling frostily.

When I reach Marcus, I join in destroying the living part of the centipede. Its chitin–suffused with the nethereal-like energy of the Vizier’s Crown skylight–resists my attacks. My appreciation grows for the ease with which Marcus slices into the centipede.

The problem with the monster is that it’s a mass of conjoined, large centipedes, rather than a single, city-sized behemoth. Some like Marcus might prefer the former, but the latter is more suited to my skills. If there exist critical, central organs, I can locate them and shut them down, no matter their size, but if the centipede segments are decentralized, that strategy falls apart. Earlier, Maria suggested poison as an alternative tactic, but the mentors cautioned that the venomous centipede would be more likely to absorb and repurpose the poison than to succumb to it.

Multitasking, I strip all the energy from the pieces of centipede that Marcus dismembers while sinking hooks of death energy into the nearest living segments. A soul gem forms in my left hand while the centipedes writhe and begin to wither, white vitality turning gray.

The insect segments don’t take our punishment peacefully. I dodge out of the way when they surge forward, fang-like mandibles gnashing and legs whirring like razors. Marcus has it easier since the centipede’s attacks phase through his body. And since the elementalists attack at greater range from the main body, they’re successfully pushing their offensive without needing to worry about retaliation.

It’s at this point that Ketu and Danessa show up.

I’m disappointed, but not that surprised they arrive before we finish it off. Danessa passes through first, likely to test for any traps; as the Life practitioner of their party, she must have the survivability of a cockroach. But the infinitesimally small moment between her arrival and Ketu’s is what I need to plan my next move.

I can’t communicate with the others fast enough over the wind to relay commands, but there is one person I can talk to near instantaneously. Maria, I transmit. Aim the centipede blowtorches at the portal!

It won’t be enough to hurt Ketu or Danessa, and Maria knows it. There aren’t more than fifteen elemental centipede heads, and sprawled as they are around us, only a handful are close enough to the portal to attack in time. But as Ketu passes through the veil, he’s going in blind, and his unpreparedness might make all the difference.

Maria only has time to move three fiery centipede heads in front of the portal before Ketu emerges. Vik’s wind fans the flames, billows of fire assaulting Ketu just as he breaches. On reflex, he thickens the protective ice cladding his skin. That’s when I launch an attack of my own, using discarded centipede viscera as a medium through which to smear Death energy over his skull. He keeps himself alive, but blood weeps from his eyes and mouth.

Danessa enters in Ketu’s shadow, using him as a human shield. Sensing the damage, she throws a cobra-topped whip and the snake sinks its teeth into Ketu’s head. Instead of envenoming him, it heals all sustained damage, darkened vitality returning to bleach-white.

The ability to quickly heal Ketu’s injuries at range–fantastic.

Danessa turns toward me and her blond, blunt-cut hair falls over her left eye. Green energy manifests around her hands and a trio of hissing cobras fly my way, spanning two hundred feet in a moment. They clamp themselves around my body, their muscles contracting to cut off my circulation as their hooded heads dig into my hands and neck, seeking unprotected flesh.

I sneer as fresh centipede chitin slides over my skin. The fangs scratch but fail to find purpose, unable to inject whatever toxin Danessa has prepared. The snakes exert bone-cracking pressure with their bodies, but coming into close quarters with me is a double edged sword. Danessa has obviously reinforced the snakes with her ascendant energy, but with near skin-on-skin contact, I overpower them in less than a second and drain the snakes of their vitality, reinforcing my own soul gem stockpile.

Danessa suddenly shifts into a large, feather-winged serpent, its body completely different in appearance from Sah’s. She must have a personal ring of flesh shift. I never saw her use it during the pageant, but that isn’t surprising–a large, flying drake is ill-suited for combat in a citadel with low ceilings and crowded halls. And in the second round, she had no need for her personal shift ring.

No wonder she controlled the dragon’s body so well when she faced Ketu, going as far as resizing its body on command–she’d had practice with a similar form.

As Ketu skates on ice to reach Alan and Danessa spirals forward, her wings somehow able to propel her even in the void, the centipede spasms. This is it–the moment we’ve been waiting for, when the centipede’s vitality-seeking array kicks into gear and kills Ketu and Danessa like it did the others.

But it doesn’t activate like we hoped. Instead, like squeezing a viscous solid through a tiny hole, the centipede gushes out the portal, legs scrambling to push its mass through faster. It’s retreating. Ketu slides out of the way, nearly bowled over by the rushing mass, while Danessa rakes her claws against the rushing centipede. As the monster eviscerates its chitin on her nails, the damage sinks beneath the surface, curdling its vitality like poison.

“What’s happening?” I subvocalize, relying on Vik to transmit my words to the others on a thread of wind. The three elementalists are wreaking havoc on the retreating segments of centipede, but at the rate the monster is retreating out of the portal and towards the surface of Vizier’s Crown, they won’t be able to take advantage for long.

“No idea,” Vik replies, her eyes scanning the surroundings. “Maybe it’s running low on energy defending itself. Since it lives off of the nethereal skylight above Vizier’s Crown, it’s fairly obvious where it’s headed.”

In other words, the surface, where all the other ascendants will see it and attack. We’ll almost certainly lose our chance to finish it off as the conflict devolves into a competitive blood bath.

Ketu and Danessa turn to stare in our direction. As the only one with a human mouth, Ketu nods at Vik and begins to speak. “There’s no choice but to kill it before it reaches the surface,” he says. “There can only be one winner, but I think both of our chances are better if we end things in the void.”

The problem with Ketu’s statement is that he assumes we want to win. We do, but I’d rather see Ketu lose. The best case would be snatching victory from his clutches directly, but I won’t overestimate our abilities. Besides, from my perspective, losing to Ketu again would be the worst outcome possible.

We already discussed this possibility as a team, so there’s no need to debate our strategy now.

“Suck it,” Vik says. The centipede heads that Maria controlled earlier erupt into an inferno, forcing Ketu and Danessa to fall back–straight into Marcus, who’s been lying in wait. Incorporeal, his vitality fades to a smudge, and Danessa fails to notice before he slices across her stomach, the dragon’s back half separating and spewing viscera.

Ketu’s eyes narrow with surprise that we’re not going along with his plan. He snarls, then ducks into the portal, Danessa following behind while restoring the back half of her body.

Not to be left behind, we fly forward, Vik’s wind propelling us from behind. When we emerge on the other side, Sah cowers with the mentors, beholding the rushing centipede mass with undisguised fear.

Sorry, Sah, I think as Marcus and Allen approach the dragon, reaching for his harness. I can empathize with his instincts screaming to retreat–the centipede is fast and too big for a dragon like Sah to kill; not to mention its ability to create End traps. We’ll keep you safe.

I pause at that. Sah may not be too powerful offensively, but the dragon has incredible constitution. That won’t save him from the centipede’s arrays, if it deploys them again. We still don’t know why it hasn’t used its life seeking array to kill Ketu and Danessa.

“Alan, Marcus: While on Sah, keep a large distance. When we reenter the atmosphere, dismount and Vik can take over.”

To their credit, the two don’t protest. Alan is useless until I either stab more of the centipede with the dagger, transforming it, or the centipede’s elemental half comes through the portal and enters Alan’s range.

Ketu and Danessa have a lead on us, the two trying to slow the centipede down as it hurdles like a missile through space, its segments spiraling wildly, legs thrumming, green, iridescent energy shining over them. I suspect the energy gives the centipede purchase in the vacuum, else it wouldn’t be able to control its movement.

Ice encases the centipede over and over again, but it breaks through each time, much to Ketu’s annoyance. The centipede is just too big, too sprawled out. Danessa harries it with blasts of green acid that attack its vitality directly, but it ignores her as well.

I want Ketu to lose more than I want to win, but I have to wonder if I’m underestimating myself. The ornate dagger clenched in my hand is useful, but in these circumstances its a support tool for the elementalists, transforming the centipede into a vessel that they can disable and control. That means that it’s just as likely to help a water elementalist like Ketu as it is my allies.

I narrow my eyes against the flare of light from the elementalist artillery, Maria and Vik syncing to melt Ketu’s ice and help the centipede reach the surface.

It’s at that moment that I realize the answer to this fight isn’t the dagger. While the others lose energy as the battle goes on, there’s one person who only grows stronger, who harvests each sundered scrap of centipede flesh and adds it to his arsenal.

The answer is me.