The monsters seemed to be bent on aggravating Rory indirectly. He meant to use their stare down to get to Dez and Trish, whom he could now see hiding behind a pile of debris, but that’s when they started attacking each other.

Rory gawked at the battle for a moment. It was nuts.

The lich and the Knight threw their ice and lightning at each other, summoning both their shields to ward off their opponent’s attacks, metal staff and curved sword waving in the air. Sigils flared on the Knight’s body. But where its electric forcefield repelled the icy blasts, the lich’s shield burst apart into dozens of shards after the first couple of lightning bolts.

One of the lightning blasts took the armoured skeletal monster right off her feet to crash farther down the hall.

Rory didn’t dare move. Just his luck that the lich had been thrown behind him. If he got out of his hiding spot between a column and a debris pile, one of the monsters was sure to spot him.

The lich arose and started approaching the Knight again. There was a burning stench in the air, which didn’t go away. That proved Rory’s theory right—without more souls, the lich couldn’t regenerate or heal herself.

“Will you continue to bar my way?” the Knight asked.

“Your audacity knows no bounds, it seems,” the lich replied. “Very well. You will learn what it means to cross the Blizzard.”

The lich attacked the Knight with its Rending Blizzard again. It cracked the floor, battered the columns, shattered the broken debris to tinier flakes. But it didn’t get past the Knight’s forcefield flickering with lightning.

That had never been the lich’s target, however. She moved her staff in more complicated motions, and Rory noticed the corpses of Thundershells began to move. Their spectral souls rose from their carcasses, only to immediately sink back down into their broken bodies. Then they rushed at the Knight, throwing themselves bodily at their former master.

Rory was impressed. He figured the Knight had thrown the Thundershells forward first to soften up the lich, or perhaps gauge her strength. Now, she was using his own minions against him.

He shook his head. The lich had too many tricks up her sleeve. And all without any apparent Sigils too. So strange.

As the Knight batted away the resurrected Thundershells one by one, the lich refocused its wintry storm into the swirling white tendrils of chaos. She retracted them closer to her, like bowstrings about to release an arrow. Just as the last minion attacked the Thunderclaw Knight, the lich launched her stormy tendrils like springs, punching them straight at her enemy.

That was enough for Rory. With the monsters once again focusing entirely on taking each other out, he moved off, minimizing his profile as much as possible. Now was his chance to secure their safe exit.

He didn’t have to go far. Trish and Dez met him halfway, threading through the forest of debris and broken masonry. Rory grimaced when he saw them. Trish seemed all right, but Dez was haggard, a makeshift bandage made from his torn shirt wrapping around a large wound on his arm. He was being helped along by Trish, with his uninjured arm slung over her shoulder.

“Oh no,” Rory muttered, gingerly getting under Dez’s injured limb to support him. “You don’t look good.”

Dez didn’t argue, and neither did Trish, which was even more worrying.

“We need to use the rear,” Dez said.

Rory grunted. “That’s the plan. Just need to not get caught up in this fight.”

Easier said than done. The monsters’ battle started spreading as their powers combined and exploded outwards, the whole hall shaking under the impact. The three of them cowered behind another pile of broken rocks. Rory peeked out, swallowing at what he saw.

The Thunderclaw Knight had destroyed the Thundershells the lich had reanimated and sent after it. Broken pieces of metallic blue rocks lay scattered all around, large sparks of electricity thrumming through the air. The hammering from the lich’s stormy tendrils had apparently done nothing to it either.

Rory swallowed. Even the lich couldn’t harm the Thunderclaw Knight. How indestructible was it?

Seeing that its resurrected minions had failed, the lich had sent the spirit of the large Emberfang after the Knight as well. That didn’t work either. The ethereal Emberfang leaped at the Knight, but it stabbed through the giant ghost with its sword, a brilliant flash forcing Rory to look away. When he turned back ahead, the Emberfang’s ghost was gone.

The lich was stepping back, clearly faltering. So much for her bravado. But worse than that, if they headed out now, they’d surely be spotted by one of the two monsters. Rory would have cursed if it wouldn’t have given away their presence.

“Will you now cease barring my way?” the Thunderclaw Knight asked.

The lich stopped for a moment. “It seems you have exceeded my expectations. You may pass, for now. However, the outcome will not be the same if you return.”

“You are correct. I will make sure the outcome will be different.”

The lich had been attempting to retreat, perhaps thinking that the Knight’s willingness to talk meant it suffered from the willingness to spare its foes as well. That turned out to be a mistaken assumption.

The Thunderclaw Knight cleaved its curved sword down again, launching another salvo of furious lightning bolts. Despite her surprise, the lich still raised a block of ice around itself, another transparent, hemispheric shield. As before, it shattered and vaporized. Pieces of it went flying, bolts of lightning hammering into and flinging the lich back.

She screamed, which quickly cut off as she choked. Rory watched, mouth slightly agape, as her soaring slowed to a pause before her momentum reversed. Now, she was flying straight at the Knight. It must have used its electricity to reel the lich in electromagnetically.

The lich attempted one last desperate defence. She summoned her storm to wrap herself in chaos, but the Knight tore through it with ease.

Two slashes of his now-glowing sword, once vertically and once horizontally, created two enormous crackling bolts. One hammered into the ground and towered into the sky through the cracked ceiling, the other bursting through the walls on either side. They stuck together to form a cross, flashing with incredible brilliance. Then, they rammed forward.

“Now’s our chance,” Trish hissed. “We’ve got to move.”

She was right. Rory grunted as he raised himself, helping Trish pull Dez along with them. They started hurrying away as fast as they could, which wasn’t all that fast. Even with their support, Dez’s wound made him slow and ungainly. He tried telling them to get going and let him make his way on his own, but neither Rory nor Trish was having any of that kind of talk.

Unfortunately, the Knight ended business a little too early. The whine and buzz of the lightning grew impossibly sharp and heavy, and the lich screamed.

Rory had to close his eyes when he involuntarily looked back. Just before he did so, he caught the lightning cross carving a trench in the broken floor as it rushed the soaring lich. The impact deafened Rory—the combination of the lich’s ear-piercing shriek and the tremendous boom of thunder nearly shattering his eardrums. He only hoped Viv and the others were far enough away.

The shockwave that burst from the explosion threw them all to the ground. As pain hammered all across Rory’s chest and shoulders, his ears made out the crash and crumble of rocks and masonry, the grinding and tearing of all the debris. At least, nothing fell on his little group.

He blinked. The area was shaded, and he realized that Trish had summoned a steel shield to protect them all. Ah, she was a life-saver.

“That doesn’t look good,” Dez said.

Ignoring how his pained voice sounded a little too quiet—more than the need for secrecy, it sounded like he couldn’t raise it higher—Rory stared farther down the hall. The Thunderclaw Knight had killed the lich. Her body had been speared through with the Knight’s enormous sword, which it had raised high as though the lich’s burned and crumbling corpse was a major trophy.

Rory swallowed. Just like that, it was over. The Knight had won, and it had hardly broken a sweat.

The Thunderclaw Knight shook off the lich’s crumbling corpse, which fell into the pit that held the Emberfang’s body. “And now, onto matters of import. I know you are here, Weaver.”

Rory’s heartrate spiked another notch. Now he was in trouble.

“You two will need to get out,” he said. “I’ll try to keep him busy for as long as I can, so—”

“What, I can’t sacrifice myself, but you can?” Dez was glaring at him. “Shut up, man, we’re all getting out of here.”

“Don’t you get it? If it comes down to it, you young people need to survive and keep things running. Let us old folks deal with things.”

Dez grunted as he forced himself up. He grimaced, clearly feeling the effects of the pain from his wounded arm. “I refuse. If needed, we’re going to fight and kill that thing for good.”

“You just saw it annihilating that lich.”

“And you haven’t seen how much stronger I’ve become over the journey.”

“In one day?”

“He’s not alone,” Trish said.

She got up too and let Dez go so that he was standing by himself, unsupported. They couldn’t fight like that after all. Rory considered arguing, but then the Knight was approaching.

“Ah, so you have chosen confrontation in pace of subservience?” the Knight asked, floating towards them with wild electric sparks flying off its body.

“You know, we could still do things amiably,” Rory said. “We could make a deal. You get what you want, and we get what we want. Everyone lives.”

“What deals do you make with animals before you slaughter them for meat? What deals do you enact with plants before you harvest them?” The Knight came to a stop before them. “I know how your kind works, and it is far, far beneath the time I waste bandying words with you. Prepare to die, mortals.”

The Knight raised its sword high while Trish and Dez prepared to use their own Sigils. But before anyone could attack, a whooshing sound grew loud, distracting them all.

Before the Knight could react, a crimson arc exploded against its chest with enough force to send it stumbling backwards several feet, ruining its serene floating. The arc of red light had flown in from the left, leaving no time for the monster to shield itself. Rory turned to see Viv stalking forward with her Omnipresent Sabre bared and burning.

“I thought you guys were getting back,” he said to her. His face twisted. “This thing—”

He was cut off by the Knight righting itself. It attempted to attack but Viv was faster, slashing her sword with blurring speed to launch a volley of crimson arcs. Rory found himself being pulled away from the site of the enfolding battle. He could do nothing but gawk.

This time, the Knight was able to set up its shield. The hemisphere of electricity messed with Viv’s arcs of crimson energy, but only for the first few. She’d flung so many that they overloaded the Knight’s shield and burst through, striking it on the shoulder, the chest, one even slicing into its head. The Knight made no sound, but it fell back under Viv’s assault. It tried to raise its sword, but another burning slash from Viv took care of that notion.

Rory couldn’t believe it. Viv was actually winning. She’d taken the Knight by perfect surprise, and now she was capitalizing. They could actually win this.

There was a furious flash of sparks where the Knight was retreating. Rory frowned. The lightning made it harder to see since it was too bright, but he did manage to get enough of a look to see that the Knight was still fine. For all that Viv was pushing it back, the Thunderclaw Knight had suffered little damage. Certainly nothing extensive.

Maybe Rory had thought too early.

It looked as though the Thunderclaw Knight was about to implode with a bolt, but Dez interrupted it. He hammered the Knight as he had done back at the substation, overwhelming it with a flurry of his dark flames.

This time, Rory did believe that the Knight was falling. Its body was taking step after step backwards, slumping towards the ground as Viv and Dez combined to unleash a fury with the weight of a mountain range.

It was not to be. Rory shouted out as he saw the preliminary twitch from the Knight, and then the monster burst out of the pit had been carved into. Its movements were incredibly rapid—in between the next salvo of crimson arcs and dark flames, the Knight swung its sword in a vicious, blistering, explosive slash.

Lightning shattered everywhere and everything. Several circular bolts spread outwards overhead like ripples on a pond, vertical bolts hammering down all around them. They were locked in a perfect, electrical storm.

Distant brother, the lich had mentioned.

Instinctively, Rory raised his hand and used his Weaving to ward them off. It worked. He was safe, though things were too chaotic for him to tell if the others had made it or not.

But at least he didn’t need to worry about Viv. With a crimson flash, she disappeared and reappeared right on top of the Thunderclaw Knight. Well, maybe he did have to worry after all. His heart leaped into his mouth as he shouted out in warning. What was she thinking getting so close? Viv didn’t hear him. Instead, she raised her sabre and stabbed down.

Her red sabre never connected. Sparks flashed off the Knight’s body, coalescing in milliseconds into a blue bolt.

Viv was blasted right off the Knight’s shoulders.

Rory could only stare, then scream, then run after heedless of the danger or what stood in his path. His wife had been hit. There was no way he was letting her die.