Walking into the chamber where the heart was waiting, I wasn't really sure what to expect, but it definitely wasn't what I found. The place was a war zone. I saw the redheaded form that had to be Fisher straddling a motorcycle, with his arms outstretched to either side. Standing off to either end of the chains extending from them were a pair of people. One of them was the stone woman from before, and the other was a blue skinned man with a third eye on his forehead. They were both straining against the chains, holding him in place while a shorter blonde guy wailed on him.

I wasn't sure why he didn't phase out, but I imagined it had something to do with the chains being hooked into their flesh. The stone woman was hauling on hers as hard as she could to try to stop him from tearing her leg off or pulling her from her feet, and the blue man had the hook in one shoulder and seemed to be purposefully digging it into his own flesh. We stuck by the entrance, trying not to get involved, and I slid up next to the wall to try to figure out what the hell was happening before we got involved. The others followed my lead.

I watched for a bit, noting several odd aspects of the fight before voicing my opinion. "I think...I think he's stuck. I can't swear to it, but if I had to guess his phasing ability takes the chains with him, and anything on the hooks probably counts too. He can't go intangible because he'd have to take both of them with him, and I'm guessing a pair of huge obviously powerful G rankers are too much for his abilities to manage."

Or at least partly. The blonde guy was wailing on Fisher full tilt, and his punches were landing so hard the air was literally cracking when he threw them, but Fisher was offsetting the damage or something, because he wasn't turning into meat paste under the fists of the man I could only assume was MacDonald. Whatever was going on, the situation looked...stable-ish, and that gave us time to figure out what to do.

Callie frowned nervously at the fight. "Whatever is going on it can't keep going on forever. Something is going to break the status quo here, which means we need a plan. The question is, what do we do? We can try to help one of them and hope the other will be able to keep them busy after we do, we can attack them both and hope they don't try to team up against us, or we can avoid them entirely and hope they don't notice us sneaking past them to try to get our hands on the heart. Also HOW do we take the heart? It's huge."

Seeing the insane power the two older freshmen were wielding it was obvious she was starting to freak out a bit, and I didn't blame her. I was freaking out too, but hearing my girlfriend sound so panicked brought me back down to earth. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. "We use the box, it should work fine for that. As for the plan, whatever you decide we're right there with you. You've got this. They seem impressive but they're no different than any random villain you dealt with back in Velan."

She looked uncertain for a moment, but her face firmed with determination and she shot me a grateful smile. "You're right. Sorry. Shook me up there for a second. Let's go with a combination plan. I'll try to sneak around with the bag to get to the heart, Cark, you use that staff to smash them all with a huge wave of fire, Agria, keep him topped up so he can hammer them too thoroughly to pay attention to anything else. Clockwork and Solomon, guard their backs so no one interrupts her energy transfer."

As soon as she decided on a course of action, I saw the conviction in her eyes as she found her footing. I was pretty sure that recursion made doing things like this easier as you got higher level. My own experience with Stricture kind of proved that. I'd been a random H ranker who had barely stepped onto the path of cultivation behaving like I was a hardened warrior. Aside from specific recursion, that was probably something more general to cultivators as a whole, or at least heroes. Still it was helpful here since it snapped her out of her worries.

Cark looked thrilled to oblige and grinned before pulling out the staff and stepping forward. Jessie stepped up behind him, putting a hand on his back, and started pumping in energy. With a grunt of effort our pyrokinetic funnel his power through the staff and dropped an absolutely massive wave of blue flame onto the gathered combatants. I heard a confused roar of pain, though none of them seemed to be actually seriously injured from what little I could see. Still their shadows in the light of the flames seemed to be wilting under the heat as they tried to resist the damage.

Whatever Fisher was doing was protecting him, MacDonald seemed to be using his force field to hold back the heat, and the other two were obviously physical types who were more durable than most. Even with all of that though it was clear this was not a comfortable or easy attack to resist. It was the perfect distraction as Callie slipped off to the side and vanished. Between her ability and the stealth Skill she was more than qualified to bypass some thugs, and that became even easier with a huge fireball smashing them in the face to draw their focus.

Unfortunately, the good times didn't last. With a howl of anger, MacDonald put both hands out and started to PUSH. I expected that to be useless, until the bastard started opening up an actual bubble in the flames with his telekinesis, shoving away the flames to buy himself some breathing room. I could actually see the strain on his face as he shoved the fire even further back, staggering to one side so he could cover the blue guy with his shield. He snarled over at us, saying something to the blue guy I couldn't hear, probably because of the shield.

I pretty immediately figured that he was going to get the guy to attack us, so I triggered Sucking Mud without any hesitation. Considering these two were stuck in a small confined area by the bubble, it was pretty effective, and they were distracted enough by plotting our demise not to notice it for a few seconds. Sadly, the skill really shined against huge enemies, and people could pull free if they noticed it early enough. That normally would have been a difficult feat without any leverage, but MacDonald had other means.

His snarl deepened and his face turned bright red as he heaved and...lifted the whole bubble off the ground. He hauled the telekinetic construct slowly out of the flames, and I watched in horrified fascination as they slowly but inexorably inched toward the edge of the flames. I could hear the roar of the flames as I watched them float out toward us. I paused. The roar I'd been hearing grew louder, and then, without warning, a massive motorcycle came barreling out of the fire.

My eyes snapped back to the floating shield, where I noticed that the chain had fallen out of the blue guy's chest as the two of them were jostled around inside. Fisher had apparently taken that opportunity to go fully incorporeal and take the rock woman with him, driving his bike full speed through the flame and then through CARK as he roared across the chamber and pulled into a sharp turn cutting off the exit to the cavern as the rock woman returned to solidity and swung wide into the wall with a teeth rattling crash.

I bellowed to Cark. "Defense!" And our pyrokinetic condensed the massive cloud of flame covering the room into a tight spherical shield around us. It was MUCH hotter than the dispersed flames and much better for keeping the bastards off us, though it was also a huge risk. Callie was still out sneaking by them, I could only hope that the sphere was distracting enough to pull focus while I came up with another plan. These guys were WAY too strong to fight head on.

We'd outnumbered The Wavestriders like four times over counting the wolves, but these people were all as strong and the last fight had proven in no uncertain terms there was no way we stacked up this early. We needed to fight smarter, not harder. Unfortunately Cark was clearly exerting massive amounts of effort to keep all that fire packed down so tight. His face was bright red and dripping sweat, and if Jessie hadn't been here topping him up I doubt he could have even managed this.

I was kind of freaking out. We were trapped in here while a whole bunch of powerful G rankers were getting ready to attack us, my girlfriend was alone outside with only all the hatred we had just stirred up keeping anyone from looking for her, and I didn't know what to do. I spent a few seconds panicking, and then realized it wasn't helping anything and forced myself to stop. I closed my eyes, breathing deeply, and tried my best to figure out our next move. We needed to distract them all, and that meant I needed to see what was going on.

I looked around at the surprisingly muted dome of blue fire and noticed a few things. First, Cark was literally pinning the heat into place. We should have been sweating our asses off at least, but I felt basically nothing. He was straining hard to make sure this shield didn't cook us. Secondly, he hadn't covered every inch of space, which made sense because we could still breathe, and being trapped in a dome of flames, even if you had a way not to get air fried, should be a one way ticket to suffocation city.

Third, and lastly, he wasn't going to last much longer, even with Jessie helping. She could top up his energy, but despite a slightly euphoric feeling when you got charged there was nothing dulling the edge of mental exhaustion he must be feeling at the moment. "Cark, can you open a small hole in the top of this thing? I think I have a plan." The straining pyrokinetic slowly turned his head to stare at me, shaking with effort, and nodded slowly and tightly. Almost too subtly to be noticed a window opened up on top of the dome. Not big enough to be noticed from the ground, but just enough for me to see.

I stared up at the ceiling of the cavern silently. The whole thing I'd gone through getting in here was easily one of the most uncomfortable things to ever happen to me, but it was also a new direction for my abilities. DS Mastery especially had a lot of ways to be used other than direct confrontation. I had options for applying my skills, not just by altering their nature, but by taking advantage of it. I scanned around the top of the chamber for a minute or two before finally finding what I was looking for.

I'd needed a specific spot, somewhere near enough to the enemy to implicate them and cause chaos, but far enough that Callie wouldn't be in any danger, and I found the perfect place. Once I did, I cast Sucking Mud again, but not on the ground this time. At least not the ground we were standing on. I leveraged my skill up and created a plane of liquid stone right through the base of a hanging stalactite a hundred or so feet up. We'd been slowly moving down since we got here, and this chamber was huge.

The H rank rock wouldn't kill our competitors, but it wouldn't be fun. I didn't even need to flex the skill, all I had to do was create the weakness in the stone and the incredible weight of the stalactite did the rest. The huge spear of stone came barreling down into the chamber, smashing into the ground with the speed of a charging bull elephant, and a massive boom shook the cavern as it hit. I barely kept my feet as it made contact, but I couldn't help but grin. Let's see them ignore THAT.