Sore from the long climb and fight with the wyrm, they stumbled out of the cave's opening into an expanse of thick forests. Arakash emerged first, then stopped and sniffed the air.

Ada was right behind him. "Ugg, what is that smell?" She stepped back, bumping into Shiara.

Shiara would have enjoyed that more, if she wasn't distracted by the stench in the air, some incomprehensibly awful blend of rotting flesh and unidentifiable acrid substance that made the air itself feel greasy. "It's worse than that time I set the sewer on fire." She looked at Ada, who was now looking right at her. "It was an accident!"

Arakash took some amusement in knowing Ada's ability to steal his protection didn't include the Noctrel's lack of concern over scents. "I take it neither of you have experience with goblins." No surprise; the default reaction to a goblin nest was to burn them to the last. "By the smell of things, there must be hundreds of them in the forest. They're so toxic that the air here is probably poisonous. Shiara, you should transform regularly to protect yourself."

He stopped for a second to wonder why he said that, then realized the binding was forcing him to help her, because she was helping the princess. He swore to himself that when he broke free, he'd kill them all.

"Thank you," Ada said without recognizing the motive.

Further conversation was ended when shrieking came from a tree, soon to be echoed in nearby trees.

"They found us!" Though reluctant, Arakash stepped forward and took on his demonic form and batted away a viscous glob of brown goo with his wing. Most of the slime remained glued to him. "There's little they can do to hurt me, but you should avoid getting hit. Even though you're immune to the poison, the acid will destroy your equipment and supplies."

"They throw acid mud?" Ada asked.

Arakash slapped away another incoming glob. "It's not mud." If there was one consolation for him, it was the dawning realization from the girls. It wasn't much of a consolation.

"Then what..." Shiara realized, or at least was willing to say it, first. "That's disgusting!"

Ada fired back, using her newly granted earth-launching spell, which seemed to have longer range than her ice crystal. There were agitated screeches as branches were ripped out of the tree by the force of the spell. One goblin struck the ground, letting them get a good look at its loose, muck-encrusted gray scales, tiny yellow eyes, and broad mouth full of jagged teeth before it rolled to its feet and scurried to another tree.

"How do we fight them?"

Arakash considered it for a moment. As fun as watching the girls' revulsion was, it wasn't worth literally being pelted with shit. "Without their toxins, they're not that strong, but they're fast, climb like a monkey, and use swarm tactics. That screeching is how they communicate."

Shiara smiled. "How do they feel about fire?" When their tree burst into flames and goblins jumped away, screaming and trailing fire behind them, she got her answer.

Soon, the trees they fled to caught fire as well. Oh, right. Shiara's smile faded when she realized they were surrounded on all sides by kindling coated in what appeared to be very flammable goblin slime. "I may have made a mistake."

"No time! Run!" Arakash grabbed Ada's arm and tugged her into action, before beginning his own retreat right ahead of her; to his logic, the goblins ahead were more of a threat than the ones on fire behind them. If not, then Shiara was better equipped to deal with things that were on fire than he was.

"What about the cave?!" Shiara shouted as she ran to catch up to the others.

"You don't want to fight goblins in a cave!" Arakash shouted. "Out here, we stand a chance!" A chance that was dwindling by the second. His superhuman hearing was picking up on the sounds of the forest, as new packs of goblins started screeching, communicating with one another in a staccato of cries far more nuanced than a human could make or comprehend. This forest was crawling with life, and the dominant species was coming for them.

Behind them, an upsurge of mana was answered by a downpour of water, extinguishing the forest fire before it grew out of control.

"They have mages!" No longer as afraid of the consequences, Shiara began blasting every treetop they passed, if only to slow the pursuit. "How do they have mages? And what is with all the shrieking?"

"Of course they have mages!" Arakash shouted back, over the approaching cacophony of goblin-communications. "And language! They're not animals!"

The trio ran as best they could, but they were flanked on all sides and Arakash was beginning to see the trap they'd stumbled into. He stopped running and took to the air.

"What are you doing?" Ada shouted at the demon.

"They're running us to exhaustion!" Arakash yelled down. "We have to take the fight to them while we still can!" The creatures were sapient, however alien their minds might be, and so those minds were vulnerable to manipulation. He couldn't use lust magic on them, but they experienced hunger, and pain, and hate... but beneath all of those was the emotion that oozed through the deepest part of all living creatures' motives: Fear.

He reached out, twisted the emotions of those who were burned, those who knew that in this battle they, too, would burn. Death would come to them from the black beast in the sky, or the fire mage on the ground.

Several hesitated, their grating, hideous song interrupted by unnatural panic. Goblins weren't like humans, they didn't spend their lives suppressing and pretending away their feelings. The goblin way of thinking, of living, was one that embraced their desires. It made them resistant to most forms of mind control, but it left them with little discipline.

They hesitated, cowed by the sense of their impending doom, screeched their fears of events unseen ripped up from their subconscious mind and memories. The other goblins reacted, looked around, sought the source of the terror that they could not sense.

Songs of real pain and terror joined the victims of illusion, as the confusion slowed them enough that they were caught by Shiara's magic. Flames doused by mages not long after the fact, but ending the fire did not cure the wounds. It also gave him a target.

He plummeted down at the spellcaster, and found himself swarmed by the goblins as he did so. More concerned with protecting the mage than their own lives, they clawed and gouged and bit wherever they could reach. Arakash slammed into the ground, an act which cost three goblins their lives.

Others climbed onto the pile. Arakash gripped one, and began sapping its strength. It didn't take long before it died and he grabbed another, slowly restoring his strength at their expense. They were far too weak to kill him; no doubt they expected their toxins to do the job where their frail bodies could not. Being intelligent was not the same as knowing that no amount of poison could kill a Noctrel, or that a tactic that no doubt worked countless times was a liability against one foe.

Nearby, the two girls weren't doing as well.

A wall of fire guaranteed the goblins could not rush them from from behind, but it was a fire creeping ever closer to the pair as they faced the wall of goblins ahead. Shiara could set those tree alight, but doing so would guarantee Ada's death.

Ada realized it first. "Run. You can save yourself."

Shiara almost laughed. "Never." With Arakash gone, it was now her time to save her princess. "I told you I'd keep you safe." She again dipped into that well of anger, the inhuman power within her that was growing easier to access with every transformation. Her body caught fire, became fire, and it felt incredible.

With a wave of her hand, another stream of flame consumed one of the nearer trees, and several goblins hit the forest floor dead. No longer bound by gravity, she took to the sky. "Flee, or I won't stop until this entire forest burns! The only things that will remain are me and your ashes!"

It wasn't a bad threat; perhaps it would have worked if even one goblin could speak her language. But their religion taught them that there could be no peace, no communication, with the mammals. To them, she was a thing that needed to be stopped even at the cost of their lives, rather than one which could be negotiated with. Twin streams of water struck out from the remaining trees, dousing the elemental.

"Ah!" Shiara fell back, weakened by the attack. "How..." Her flames flickered, and it was more luck than anything that saw her touch the ground before she reverted to human form. As her vision blurred, she saw the monsters rush forward.

Several six-limbed lizards the size of large dogs charged with more speed than a reptile had any right to move. Ada caught one with a burst from her ice crystal; when it kept moving in spite of the attack, its front leg shattered from the cold, causing it to fall and thrash about in pain.

Two kept charging Ada, while the other three went for Shiara.

Weakened though she was, she had enough power to force herself into her elemental state right before the creatures bit into her, which left them reeling with burnt tongues and eyes. It was all the power she had left, and when she heard Ada scream, she didn't have the strength to apologize before she fell to the ground.

The monsters biting Ada met with a different sort of surprise thanks to her effective invulnerability. While Arakash felt the pain as teeth ripped through the tendons in the wrists, and his back and shoulders cracking as the beasts shook their heads and twisted like miniature crocodiles, Ada experienced nothing but her inability to move her limbs. These monsters, bred to kill and trained to do so in a way that would incapacitate mages, kept doing their best.

Sooner or later, their prey would die, and they would be rewarded by their masters. Such was the life they knew, the only life their kind had known for generations.

"Help!" Ada screamed. She panicked; for the first time, she was alone. She'd believed herself alone, time and time again, but she'd never truly been alone. She had her servants, then her entourage, Shiara. Even during the worst parts of Arakash's rebelliousness, she still could rely on him as a protector. But not here, not now; all her allies were beaten, and while she knew she'd be dead if Arakash wasn't still alive, it was now a matter of time.

In panic and desperation, she lashed out with her magic. Past and future... her magic always warped space, warped time... driven by instinct alone, it slid through the monsters and altered the flow of time.

For one brief moment, in a line thinner than a single ray of light, time was slowed to a stop along one plain and doubled along the other. Divided by past and future along a line where the present could not exist, gore gushed from the monsters in the brief moment before their hearts realized they could no longer beat, then two bodies fell in four directions.

The goblins screeched another set of orders, and six more monsters were released to charge the depleted mages.

Shiara watched, helpless, as she tried to at least force her skin to catch fire. Ada wasn't much better; one more use of that attack spell she unleashed was all she had left in her.

Then the fireworks exploded overhead, unleashing a sound that had both girls gripping their heads in agony as they thought their ears were going to burst.

For the goblins, possessing hearing more than ten times sharper than a human's, it was a killing strike. The closest fell, their ears and eyes bleeding. Those further away fell from their trees and began the laborious effort of scrambling from the noise as best they could through vertigo and blindness.

The lizards, having little sense of hearing to begin with, kept advancing until they were struck down by a series of arrows from some hidden spot in the trees.

Moments after the goblins fled, a figure wrapped entirely in leather, complete with a hood and facemask, approached the pair. In a language neither of them knew, she muttered. "Humans? What a waste of Screaming Lilies."