Chapter Eight: Battle

“Preparatory spells first,” Todd reminded us as the monster looked up at us, its yellow eyes unblinking.

“Force Armor.”

“Enchanted Claw. Animal Speech.”

“Blessed Armaments. Radiant Defender.”

“On my mark,” Dad said. He raised up his sword (which was glowing with golden light), and the archers drew their bows back. I stretched out my hand, and Aguin raised his staff. “Three… two… one… Now!”

He swung down his sword.

“Fire Beam!”

Arrows hit the beast – obviously a boss monster – and became embedded in its scales. My fire beam crossed the distance and hit it in the head. Water sliced out of the moat and slashed the creature in a cutting wave.

It rose to its feet, angry, and in less than a second it was at the water’s edge, upturned spider legs twitching. I changed the angle of my hand to keep the fire beam trained on its face – my beam could last for about four seconds before it cut out, and I didn’t intend to waste any of that time. Burns were appearing under the beam and flames licked out further, but it stubbornly refused to actually ignite. It howled in anger as the archers loosed arrow after arrow, some striking the body and some hitting the face, but it didn’t look like it was going down anytime soon. More and more water sliced into its scales and the flesh of its face, shearing off its protective covering and causing it to bleed.

I grabbed my wand and cast another Fire Beam, the spell hungrily sucking out four points of my mana, double the normal amount required for a second circle spell. The effect was immediate and noticeable, as the blue-hot flames set its face ablaze and started to burn a hole in its forehead. No longer content to simply take the damage, it shifted its bulk and turned sideways, sending my beam blazing across its scales, leaving the once-yellow-brown blackened in the spell’s wake.

To my delight, not only was the spell significantly stronger, but it also lasted twice as long, allowing me to focus on a spot and break through the scales, sending the fire underneath the protective barrier. When my spell finally stopped, I finally noticed something I had been too focused to see: the spider legs had all curled toward a central point, and a small ball of darkness was forming.

It turned its head directly toward me.

“Incoming!” I cried out.

The sphere shot toward me with frightening speed, but my father, who was standing beside me, was faster. He interposed his golden-glowing shield, and the ball of black struck it with a sound like a cannon. I saw him stagger from the impact, but he did not falter.

At the same time, the tail rose up and the snake mouth spit something out – something that struck Kekir square in the chest. The birdman staggered midair, then dropped. Renee rushed toward him.

The spider legs started forming another ball, even as Arkenthra the angel managed to stick an arrow in the boss monster’s left eye. Slashing water opened up new wounds on the beast’s flank, and then another glob of venom splashed against a thin shield of water that the mage had conjured to protect himself.

“Restore! Lesser Healing!”

As soon as the sphere fired upon the angel, I stepped out from behind my father and cast another Fire Beam through my wand. While I was still casting, I saw out of the corner of my eye the devastating effect of the ball that my Paladin father had blocked the first time. It blasted Arkenthra back out of my sight, and I heard him slam into the ground with a crack.

“Fire Beam!”

When my spell hit it in the side of the head, the beast suddenly crouched.

And then it jumped.

Unknown tons of feline-reptilian-ogrish flesh landed adjacent to us. I whirled to keep the spell focused on the creature. Claws rose, then descended, but the broken-winged angel, who was trailing light like blood, managed to throw himself to the side. Discarding his bow – which promptly vanished – he grabbed his sword and cut deep into its massive paw.

Another black sphere was already forming.

“No you don’t!”

I changed my target to one of the spider leg joints. It was a race against time.

A powerful cutting wave of water sliced off the snake head just as it was getting ready to spit again.

Arkenthra landed another strong blow before massive claws cut across him, shredding him into streaks of golden light. Sheena, her own claws and fangs coated in an ominous red light, raced to the closest leg – its back left leg – and leapt on, climbing the limb as though it were a thick tree. Rusty, who had been flying around, took it upon himself to fly into its face to distract it, while Shadow…

…Where was Shadow?

Hopefully somewhere safe, because I didn’t have time to think about her.

Just as the sphere completed, my flames burned through the leg, making the top part fall off.

The sphere dropped onto the beast’s back and exploded.

KABOOM!

Scales and blood scattered as the monster was pressed against the ground, and Sheena finished her ascent, leaping onto the open wound and going at it with everything she had. It stood and turned, only to face a charging Svenia. The tribeswoman was grinning like a madwoman, glowing with a silver aura. She swung at the same time as its injured paw descended.

She sliced right through.

The momentum wasn’t completely halted, her having cut through instead of the weapon sticking inside, and the bisected paw slammed into her with somewhat diminished force. It was sill enough to cut through flesh and knock her back.

I grabbed my bow off my back and nocked an arrow, noting that Renee was running up to Svenia to heal her, Lartha to guard my sister, and my father to intercept the follow-up attack. Which happened to be a bite that he deflected with his shield. Rusty, seeing where things were about to go, flew out of the way.

“Lightning Grasp,” I cast, using the two second casting time to activate Focused Shot. And True Foe – whatever that thing is, I added mentally. My arrow sparked with lightning magic. I let it fly.

It buried itself up to the feather in the undamaged eye, discharging its magical energy.

The beast froze.

Lartha added her taser to the equation.

Then my mother and brother simultaneously chucked bottles filled with orange liquid at its face.

KABOOM!

It roared in pain, completely blinded and badly burned. It shook itself like a wet dog, trying to shake Sheena loose, but she clung on tight. Dad and Svenia charged in again, slashing at its front legs.

Kekir peppered it with arrows as it tried to fight back, but both of the frontliners were sturdy enough to block its attacks, though the momentum did push them back.

I nocked another arrow, aiming at its neck. I wasn’t sure whether this would work, but I had to give it a try.

“Fire Beam.”

The moment the lattice completed, I released the arrow. It sank all the way into the side of its neck… and then burst into flame, the beam’s point of origin the arrowhead instead of my palm.

The monster’s cry was deafening.

Seconds passed.

The creature slumped.

Ding!

[Congratulations: you have passed the Sub-Trial: Guardian of the Pyramid. Your rating is: Flawless Victory. For defeating the Guardian without suffering a single casualty with under ten Champion Contestants, you have earned 250 Experience and one Flair Tally Point.]

[Congratulations. By defeating the Guardian of the Pyramid, you have unlocked the next stage of the Trial of Champions. Enter the Pyramid when you wish to continue.]

[Congratulations: you have cleared the first stage of the Trial of Champions in less than 72 hours. You have earned one Speed Tally Point.]

[Congratulations: you have leveled up from level eleven to level fifteen. You have earned 64 Sorcerer CP and 32 Ranger CP.]

[You have a total of 3 Flair Tally Points and 1 Speed Tally Point thus far. Continue to accumulate these and the strength of the Boon granted you will be increased.]

[Defeating the Guardian has earned your party rewards.]

The corpse of the guardian began to glow and dissolve into motes of light, dropping Sheena from its back onto the ground. That light then swirled and coalesced into shimmering objects before the illumination faded away, leaving only the objects behind.

There were, counting the one pile the same as a single object, a total of nine things, each slightly separated from the others. I immediately made to approach.

“Wait!” Todd shouted. “We all have a lot of points to spend, right? We just leveled up a bunch; I went all the way to level ten. I think I might have a spell that will be able to help us tell exactly what these thing are. First… Magic Sight.”

I followed my brother’s lead, murmuring “Magic Sight.” The world tinted gray, like it did when I was using Animal Stealth, but the items before me suddenly blazed with light, most surrounded by a colored aura. So, they were magical.

“They’re definitely magical,” Todd said, “which means we need to identify them. Give me a second… how do you spend your points?”

“Say ‘advancement,’” I told him.

“Advancement. Ah, okay, I see how it is. Go to first circle spells…. And there it is. Select Identify. Okay, now I should be able to figure these things out.”

While he talked to himself and learned his new spell, I came closer and examined the rewards without touching them. The only thing that wasn’t magical was a pile of fabric with a handful of gemstones the size of the end segment of my thumb; I couldn’t be sure without feeling them, but I thought the fabric might be silk.

Next was an amulet on some kind of lanyard-like necklace; it appeared to be made of bronze and had an embossed design that made me thing of a spell lattice. Beside that was a gold ring with something engraved along the outside. A spiked collar sized for a tiger was between a white badge with a cloud pattern and what looked like a glass decanter filled with water. Some kind of sci-fi gauntlet rested not too far from what seemed to be a simple orange headband. And finally, there was a full set of plate armor (with an open-faced helm) that was made of polished silver.

Todd began his identification, touching each magic item and casting his newly acquired spell.

“This is the Amulet of Overdrive,” he said, passing the bronze amulet to me. “When you are out of mana, it lets you cast from your physical energy instead. Use too much, and you can knock yourself out, so be careful.”

He handed the collar to Renee. “The Harmony Collar. Instead of boosting everyone in the vicinity with your magical performance, you can focus solely on your tiger while it is wearing the collar and have the effects greatly magnified.”

“This one is definitely yours,” he told Kekir, who accepted the badge from him. “The Talisman of the North Wind. It allows your wind magic to also have frost effects.”

Todd merely gestured at Dad when he got to the armor. “I’m assuming this one is yours, Dad. It’s called the Armor of the Moon. It has two effects: first, it protects against elemental and magical attacks just as well as it does against physical attacks, and second, you can command it to release blinding light that only effects evil beings.

“These silks and gems aren’t magic, and I figure they probably are meant for the merchant – meaning you, Mom.”

Todd put on the gold ring. “This one is a Storage Ring. Extradimensional storage. Meaning we won’t have to worry about how to carry stuff.”

Aguin took the decanter from him as soon as he finished the identification. “Endless Water Decanter. Basically, it produces a limitless amount of water, and by saying the command words written on the bottom of the bottle in runes you can make the water come out in one of several speeds and quantities.”

The gauntlet, appropriate called the Tech Gauntlet, was Lartha’s prize, and it fit perfectly over her left hand. It served to let her do… something with solid holographs? “Manipulate hard light projections and elemental energy.” It was a solid illusion generator and energy gun, I thought.

As for the headband, which Svenia eagerly tied around her head…

“The Quintessence Headband,” Todd told her. “It allows you to temporarily surpass your physical limits and gives you a temporary boost to your ki. It can only be activated once per day, and it leaves you exhausted afterward.”

“Perfect!” the warrioress said excitedly.

After we all had our rewards (either on our person or stowed away), we had to decide whether to take the time to spend our points now or to cross over the moat and enter the ziggurat. We had just started the discussion (well, Dad was already working on his upgrades) when I felt indignation, anger, and pain through my empathic bond with Shadow.

Right! Shadow had gone missing during the fight! Where was she?

“Shadow!” I shouted. “Where are you?”

Sheena’s nose and ears twitched, and she turned toward the… well, it was north, according to my inner compass. The ziggurat was east, we had come from the west, and the north was the direction where the three humans had been hiding in the trees. The south was where the other group was.

The air rippled, and creatures appeared to step out of invisible portals about thirty feet away from the northernmost person – me. There were a half-dozen of them, and they looked like they had been summoned from the pits of hell. Two were red skeletons with black voids in their eye sockets that wore black armor and carried wicked curved swords with crimson blades. Two were obviously hellhounds, with burning red eyes, blood-soaked fur, black teeth and claws, and flames spewing from their mouths. One was a tiger even bigger than Sheena (who, as I previously noted, was bigger than a male Siberian tiger) which instead of being black and orange was black and red, with soulless black eyes. The last was a biped that stood about ten feet tall and was all muscle, with black and red skin, and carried a flanged mace.

“Ward Against Evil!” my father cast immediately – and I do mean immediately; the spell’s light flashed around all nine of us – and Sheena – the moment he finished talking. I guess his spells didn’t need a lattice painstakingly built like mine. Then, before the foul beasts even finished registering where they were, Dad clapped his gauntleted hands together and a magic circle appeared in the air around him.

“I call upon the holy monsters of virtue, inhabitants of the upper planes,” he started casting.

“Don’t attack them!” I called out. If his “Ward Against Evil” worked like its similarly-named game equivalent, it would protect us from evil summoned creatures – at least the ones that didn’t have weapons – completely. “Only guard! Dad’s spell will protect us!”

“…come and fight to defend my people!” my father finished as the evil creatures attacked.

Evil Tiger bounded toward Sheena, recoiling as soon as it came within striking distance. Hellhounds charged me, doing the same. Svenia rushed forward, drawing the attention of the presumed demon, which swung its mace only to have it blocked by Sheena’s blade. The skeletons ran past my chanting father toward the rest of the group, and my sister and Lartha blocked their swords with their own weapons (Lartha used her energy blade).

Then Dad’s spell completed, and four spheres of light appeared around us. A split second later, the lights exploded out into the shapes of creatures, all with golden-white fur: two giant bears that were at almost twice as big as a grizzly in every dimension and two tigers that were the celestial counter to the fiendish tiger.

They reacted faster to their summoning than the evil ones did. A golden-white tiger pounced on the black-and-red one; its partner slammed into the hellhounds in front of me. One of the bears roared as it crashed into the skeleton attacking Renee, and the other one smashed into the skeleton assaulting Lartha.

“Sorry, Yuan!” Svenia said. “I’m a warrior, I can’t just block!”

Wait, she just called me Yuan! Was that because of my performance against the Guardian?

Svenia parried another swing of the mace. She swung in an almost horizontal slash from right to left, her blade slicing through skin and flesh but doing far less damage than I had seen it do to animals or the Guardian, leaving a gash rather than completely ripping through.

Why? Was it because she didn’t have her aura around her?

The demon brought down its mace with a two-handed vertical swing, roaring in anger. Svenia swung up, meeting the strike with one of her own, and I swore the impact caused a shockwave that I could feel nearly twenty feet away. The demon pressed down, trying to overpower her, but just as her knees were bending and her sword starting to slide down, her silver aura erupted around her. She overpowered it in the next moment, throwing its mace to her right, then twisted her sword and slashed diagonally down to the left. The blow was devastating, sinking deep into its body and shattering bone. And yet, she still couldn’t cleave through, her sword stuck inside its torso.

It released the mace with its left hand, then swept it toward her with its right. Realizing she wouldn’t free her sword in time, she released it and…

Holy shit. She just grabbed the mace with her bare hands by its flanges.

Her muscles bulged, and she yanked the weapon right out of the demon’s grip, tossing it aside.

“Nice try, hell warrior!” she shouted, and I could hear the glee in her voice. She adjusted her stance, stepping into something that looked like eastern martial arts to my untrained eye, pulling her right fist back while her left hand remained forward, palm facing toward her foe. She took a breath as the bewildered demon stared down at her, reaching for her sword to pull it out.

And then she punched.

The demon’s stomach caved in and the monster rocketed backwards, slamming into the ground and digging a small furrow as its momentum carried it even further on its back.

A man winked into visibility as he was knocked over by the sliding demon.

Ah. The human trio had summoned the monsters to attack us, while hiding just behind them under the cloak of invisibility.

I heard a cry of pain, and Shadow appeared not far away, dropping from chest height and immediately racing toward me.

I grabbed my bow and let loose an arrow at the spot where she had appeared.

Another man appeared, clutching at the shaft protruding from his chest, his eyes wide.

I fired another arrow at him. He fell backwards.

I glanced to my left at the ongoing combat between the celestial tiger and the hellhounds. It was going rather well, with the tiger having the upper hand, and I didn’t see the need to intervene. I twisted to look further back at the other celestial tiger engaged with the fiendish tiger. That was also going well, mostly because Sheena had joined the fight and was keeping the fiendish tiger from being able to focus all of its attention on the celestial tiger, which was doing most of the damage.

There was no way the giant bears were losing to the skeletons, so I turned back forward.

Svenia was standing on top of the demon, sword in reverse grip. She slammed it point first into the demon’s face.

The demon smeared and disappeared, much like Arkenthra had when defeated by the Guardian.

“Master Yuan!” Shadow said as she rubbed up against me. “Thank you!”

I’d leave the question of what, exactly, happened to Shadow for later. I shot an arrow at the other man as he struggled to stand, taking the extra second to adjust my aim and end him. I had no idea what capabilities the two men had, but they were dead now so I supposed it didn’t matter. The final man, though… would he attack or run? He was still invisible, so running was probably the smartest…

…

The ziggurat entrance!

“Aguin!” I yelled, spinning around. “Get me a bridge!”

To his credit, he didn’t even hesitate. With a sweep of his staff, he solidified a path across the moat. I took off running, my feet pounding on the ground as I sprinted for the entrance. I crossed the moat in barely a second, the water as firm as stone. I raced across the earth toward the entrance, crossing it in seconds. I had no time to marvel at how much more in shape I was than I had ever been, because less than ten feet from the open square doorway I slammed into something invisible, which immediately became visible.

I fell, tangled with the third man, and we rolled to a stop with him on top of me. My bow had flung away from me, but somehow my arrows were still in their quiver on my back. The only reason my leg wasn’t bleeding from my sword was the presence of my Force Armor.

“Goddammit!” he swore. He was a thin man with roughly the same build as me, wearing distinctly modern clothes, unlike his two companions. And he was swearing in English.

Another Champion Contestant from Earth.

He pulled back a fist and swung down.

I caught the blow with both hands.

“Asshole!” I yelled back. “You just tried to kill us!”

He froze.

“You speak English?”

“Yeah, I do! Not that it matters! You tried to fucking kill me and my family! You think I’m going to let you get away with that?”

His face twisted. “This is a fucking death game! It’s kill or be killed! You killed the men I was with, too, right?! Don’t pretend you’re a goddamn saint!”

He pulled back his other fist. I twisted and yanked, pulling him off balance and rolling so that I was on top.

My heart hammered, and I could feel my heartbeat all throughout my body, hear it pounding in my ears. Even through the adrenaline, I realized something terrible.

I was going to murder this man.

I grabbed his arms and held him down with superior strength. Whatever classes he had, they hadn’t done much to enhance his physical prowess.

“Magic—”

KABOOM!

I was falling. It took me a moment to realize that, to be falling from several dozen feet up, I had to have been blasted up that several dozen feet. I couldn’t hear anything, and I hurt all over, but especially in my chest. My Force Armor was gone, likely shattered. The ground rushed up at me.

The air grew thicker, and I slowed. I slowed… but not quickly enough. I smacked into the ground with a crunch.

I blacked out.