The next day, Shar slaughtered floors eighteen and nineteen. Elach could barely tell that the circumstances were more dangerous, since he never got within fifteen feet of a live obstacle. Shar devastated a path forward, Flow picked on the carrion like a scavenger, and Elach followed.

Yet she couldn’t clear the final hurdle for him. A small book sat on a pedestal in the middle of obscuring ankle-high mists, flipping through its pages as symbols drifted through the air like a cloud of insects. Shar motioned for Elach to take the first steps into the mist, and after taking a moment to place an anchor close to the tome, he pulled himself to it.

“Don’t let the mist touch you or this will become infinitely harder.” Shar called as Elach was about to drop down. “You need to find the page that has the correct symbols on it and tear it out of the tome. That will reveal the ascent to the next group of floors.”

Elach sighed, wrapping his chain once more around his wrist. Maybe Shar couldn’t solve it for him, but she could completely blank the challenge. He reached down to touch the glowing white pages of the tome and froze. There were thin threads of Issi woven everywhere through this place. And none of them touched the tome, the symbols, nor the fog. He followed one with his eyes, and found that it ended in midair, attached to nothing.

“Are there supposed to be Issi threads here?” He asked. “Because there are a lot of Issi threads here.”

As the words left his mouth, Elach felt the nothing the threads connected to shivering. Issi poured out from the blank spaces, cold and sharp, and Elach remembered almost too late that he’d been given an obvious warning about this exact thing.

“Shit!” Elach yelled, pulling himself upwards to dodge a spinning disk of frosted glass that would have taken him out at the knees. It shattered into a swarm of broken glass that shot towards him on a freezing wind, pelting and barely digging into his skin. “What the…” he muttered as his Issi became sluggish, flowing through his pathways like syrup. He barely managed to muster enough Issi for another pull back to Shar, who went from confused to concerned the moment Elach touched down in front of her.

“What happened to you?” She worriedly asked, leaning over to inspect the shards that were spreading a very light blue aura over his wounds. “Is that glass?” Her face snapped to look at Elach, jagged edges showing through a line that was her mouth. “Elach. Tell me. Did someone attack you while you were in there?”

Shaking his head as the rest of his body shivered, Elach tried to push out a laugh. It sounded like chattering teeth, and nothing more. “I could see you, but you couldn’t see me? Flow? Is she telling the truth?”

Flow chirped agreement as they bounded forward, trying to get their beak around a glass shard to pull it out. They squawked in surprise as the Issi lashed out against them as well, screeching defiance as their beak dug into Elach’s flesh and removed the parasitic shard.

Elach flinched back as Flow bit out a chunk of his flesh, watching as blood sluggishly dripped from the gaping wound. “Okay, that’s probably a horrible sign that that didn’t hurt at all.” He bent down and closed his eyes, forcing his Issi through his pathways to start healing the wound. “Can you get the others, Flow?”

As his partner crunched down and shattered the shard they had in their mouth, they moved to get in position to remove another shard. Shar’s maw opened to reveal a long tongue that lashed over jaws full of jagged shards, her Issi bubbling to the surface like the warm blood of a fresh kill. She was no longer paying any attention to Elach, fixated on the tome that now had splatters of blood marring its pages. He couldn’t sense any of the Issi he’d felt moments ago.

Flow crunched down on another glass shard, and Elach redirected the focus of his Issi. “We should move. I felt at least two people in there, and I’m pretty sure they’re Glasrime’s apprentices.”

“They can’t attack through the ward, just as we can’t see through it.” Shar hissed, itching to burst through the ward and bring slaughter. But she didn’t. “There are others here. The heat to Glasrime’s cold, but they are far away. Moving in from the other exit point to close us in. Once Flow extracts the last of the shards from you, we will move to them. Fighting inside the mists is a huge disadvantage for us, so we’ll have to try and lure out whoever is in hiding.”

“Did you know this was coming?” Elach asked, feeling the cold disperse in his left leg. Where it fled, pain took hold.

Shar laughed cruelly, focused completely on a point in the distance. “If I’d known, none of these people would be alive to harass us.” She raised a closed fist, opening it to a jagged triangle of Issi that radiated cruelty. “They have one person who’s Issi concentration is much higher than the others, who I’ll leave to you until I deal with the others. Can you handle that?”

“That depends on how much stronger than the others they are.” Elach grunted. “I’m not exactly in prime shape, but I have a lot of Issi left. I should be able to stall them for a little while if they don’t immediately break out of my chains.”

The scent of burning tar assaulted Elach’s senses, drying his throat and bringing tears to his eyes as black smoke wafted in from where Shar was fixated on. Flow let out a garbled warble and redoubled their pace, removing and shattering the last of the glass shards with a fevered vigor as panic spilled over their bond. Elach wrapped them in chains and pulled them into his headspace the moment he started feeling warm, and he got a thankful feeling emanating from his headspace.

“The plan has changed.” Shar decreed as the cloud of black smoke rolled over the golden yellow field, setting fire to everything remotely close to it. “You will fight off the other five while I delay the monster behind this technique. If either of us manage to win our fights, we will help the other immediately.”

“Is the practitioner stronger than you thought?” Elach asked, peering into the wall of black. He couldn’t feel anything through its overwhelming power. A true smokescreen.

Shar shook her head. “No, but they will not be leaving that smoke. And unless you’ve developed a technique to hold your breath for minutes at once and have a strong enough Issi sense to feel them through the mass of their power, you won’t be able to lay a finger on them.”

With a gutteral roar of Issi, Shar waded into the smoke. Screams soon emerged, followed by five shaken practitioners with various light injuries that looked like they would bleed for a long while. They breathed a collective sigh of relief before their eyes trailed over Elach, nervously assessing him as their postures relaxed. One of them barked an order to disperse and surround him, and to take him alive if at all possible.

They were underestimating him. Elach set his mouth into a line as a trio of Issi types welled up in the five practitioners, no more than one in each of them, and much to his surprise, they all had less Issi than he did. Even after he’d stymied the bleeding from the Glasrime practitioner’s ambush. He quickly scanned the group to form a plan of attack.

Two of the practitioners, a man and a woman with dirty white swirls on the palms of their hands and the pads of their fingers, had something that wasn’t quite rock Issi. But it was close enough that Elach was comfortable treating them as if they had rock Issi, which meant they wouldn’t be attacking him at a long range with anything more than pebbles in the field. He’d take them out last.

A single practitioner blew black smoke out of a hood that completely obscured their face, rising into the air as a small cloud that smelled incredibly acrid. They had to be a weaker version of the practitioner that Shar was in the process of dismantling. Which meant they were priority one, since breathing was generally considered necessary for staying alive. Elach placed an anchor in their path, waiting for them to come between him and it so he could try to take them out in one shot.

Which left two other practitioners, both men, who had globs of molten Issi dripping off their fingertips. If the ‘Lava’ part of Lavassil was literal, then those practitioners would be extremely dangerous if they could land even a single blow. But from what he’d learned from his mom, lava moved glacially slow. So the Issi they’d expend to make it into something useful would run them dry especially quickly. Baiting these practitioners’ techniques would be the key to defeating them.

With that, Elach had a plan. Sucker punch the smoke practitioner, run the lava practitioners dry, then stall the stone practitioners until Shar finishes off big smoke. It seemed so simple when he laid it out like that, but the reality was that he was fighting five other living, thinking beings. They wouldn’t let everything happen without doing something to stop him. Hells, they could already know everything about him and were baiting him to attack the smoke practitioner. But if that was the case, he’d already lost, so there wasn’t a point in preparing for that.

As long as the Glasrime practitioner stayed behind that veil, he had a chance. His fingers twitched as the smoke practitioner took one, two, three steps towards his anchor, billowing out a caustic mess as they went, until they finally fell in line.

The straware blurred under Elach as he pulled himself through the smoke practitioner. His knee crashed into their gut and carried them with him to his anchor, a belch of black smoke emerging from their hood along as the wind was promptly knocked out of them. They rolled along the ground to a quick stop, clutching their stomach while shivering, and Elach kept one eye on them while he waited for the others to make their moves. He’d be ready for when they recovered.

With his Issi sense focused on the smoke practitioner, Elach backed away through the opening he’d created. The stone practitioners and one of the lava practitioners seemed to be registering what had just happened, but the closest practitioner to him lumbered towards him with a thin rod of lava that distorted the air around it with an intense heat. Issi condensed on the rod in molten globs, shaping itself into a spearhead with a strip of thin cloth-like Issi just behind it.

The practitioner barked orders at his comrades, a thin layer of molten armor forming over his clothes. He charged before the armor had fully finished forming, leaving seared footprints as he went, but he had absolutely nothing speeding up his advance. Elach chained himself towards the unprepared lava practitioner and swung a kick at their head, wrapping chains around his shin to lessen the recoil and increase the lethality of the blow. He brought the man down to the ground with his follow-through, bloody gashes cut on the side of the man’s head from where the chains had ground against his skin. Whatever technique he’d been gathering blinked out, and Elach felt the man’s Issi disperse into nothing.