The battle started off immediately, and insanely. Dez hadn’t come alone. The rest of the cavalry had arrived with him.

Both the jeep and the pickup blared their horns loudly enough to make Rory’s ears ring. Everyone within them jumped out with shouts and yells, ready to fight before their feet had even touched the ground.

The Revenants had seen them coming, of course, but the invaders’ ferocity was still a surprise. Powers from multiple Sigils flashed into being and struck into the monstrous mass from a distance, preventing their signature time-slowing powers from working efficiently.

Rory saw April firing off multiple bullets fuelled by her Time Burn and her Distant Detonation to throw the ranks of the Revenants into disarray. Alia had summoned not one, but two Dreadraptors to harass the enemy ranks. The chaos allowed Miles to bathe the entire area with his Stormfire, shading everything in brilliant blue. The Revenants screamed in unison.

Nearer at hand, Dez was approaching the banks of the small canal. Rory and others had climbed up beside him. Hauling Trish’s unconscious form next to them. One of the healers from the palace had accompanied them. Dr. Jace was looking over Trish’s wounds, his hands glowing with a soft green light. He had already given Ned enough attention to make sure he wasn’t in any danger.

“How is she?” Rory asked.

“She’ll be alright,” he said. “Still breathing. Pulse steady. In tremendous shock and pain, and the blood loss is significant, but nothing that can’t be fixed.”

“Apart from the trauma,” Ned muttered.

“We’ll trust you to take care of her, then,” Rory told Jace.

Viv frowned down at Trish. “I should have seen that coming. I was there when there were two of them, and I still forgot.”

Rory was shaking his head as well. “You’re not alone. I wasn’t expecting an attack from behind like that either.”

“But what’s done is done.” She stepped forward, her Thunderclaw arm and crimson lightning back. “You ready to finish this, Dez?”

“Oh, I can’t wait.”

The Ifrit who had been thrown down into the water was now climbing back out. His goat head glowered at them with devilish eyes, the feathers on his cloak flaming to burn away the water. “Finish this? Oh believe me, I have no intention of allowing you to finish anything.”

“Abscond, calm down,” said the other Ifrit just behind.

Abscond ignored him. “You will feel true pain when I am done with you. You will wish you had never been born. My fires will turn your body to ash, and my poison will raze your soul to cinders. Prepare to suffer great agony, mortals!”

The other Djinn, Fumigate, sighed heavily. “This is why I wanted to kill you all before he got here.”

“Enough talk. Rory.” Viv jerked her chin to the right. “Think you can take care of that?”

He tried to see what she meant. The Revenants who had been slammed by the rest of his party were beginning to recover. That attack hadn’t taken care of all of them. Several other Revenants had positioned themselves around the woods, and they had charged in to reinforce their comrades. The invaders’ attack on the tunnel mouth was forced to stop as they dealt with the ones who’d come too close.

Which meant the ones at the tunnel were free to resume their counterattack.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Rory said. He gave his wife’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “I’ll leave the Ifrit to you guys. Ned, you’re with me. Let’s go.”

They quickly climbed down and began approaching the disarrayed Revenants. The Djinn tried to interfere as they hurried off, but both Dez and Viv acted quickly to refocus their attention. A barricade of dark fire and a salvo of crimson lightning stopped the Djinn in their tracks. Rory didn’t see what came next. He had to concentrate on what was ahead of him.

With the rest of their party kept busy dealing with the monsters that had burst out of the surroundings, they wouldn’t be able to assist with the rest of the monsters near the tunnel. That was fine. They had their own problems to deal with.

Up close, it was all too likely that the time-slowing powers of the Revenants would have a worse effect. But they had prepared as much as they could in the short time they’d had.

Rory hoped they’d be all right. He trusted the others to win.

“How are we going to stop them?” Ned asked. He had received some on-the-spot treatment from Dr. Jace but there were still some small wounds left open.

“I can take care of their auras,” Rory said. “I can’t promise anything about their fighting abilities, though. You’ll need to shoot at them from a distance.”

“Perfect.”

Ned came to a quick halt as he pulled out his crossbow. The Sigils Rory had Warded into it came to life, summoning an ethereal bolt wreathed with crackling energy between the flanges.

Now, it was Rory’s turn. He threw out his hand to send a wave of white Weaving light straight at the monsters coming towards them. Rory didn’t think it would truly bother the Revenants for a second.

But he didn’t need it to last long. All he had to do was remove their time-slowing auras. Which worked perfectly.

As the brown energy disappeared to coalesce into Sigils on Rory’s hand, Ned fired the crossbow. The bolt shot with frightening speed. It punctured into a Revenant’s armour and sent the monster staggering back. A fraction of a second later, a blast of lightning erupted out of the point of impact, sending the hapless monster flying even farther backwards.

The rest of the Revenants roared and charged. Rory kept up his Weaving to prevent their auras from doing affecting them.

That allowed ned to keep up a steady barrage of crossbow bolts. They flew in and hammered into the Revenants one by one, but Ned’s firing pace was fast enough to keep the two of them safe. Some monsters were set aflame, some were frozen over, while a few others were trapped by roots bursting free from the ground.

Of course, Rory wasted no time taking care of the felled Revenants. The effects of Ned’s Sigils weren’t permanent. The flames wore off. The lighting was smothered. Several of the affected monsters were attempting to rise back up and continue where they’d left off with their assault.

Not on Rory’s watch.

He stabbed his staff forward with several bolts of Frozen Lightning. None of the fallen Revenants had their auras about them anymore. The blue bolts of energy struck home and immediately burst into ice and lightning, trapping the monsters far more permanently. That was what Rory had to do with the tunnel mouths. He simply needed to blockade them properly again, make sure none of the monsters could exit.

“You got them?” Miles asked.

Rory turned to see that they had all taken care of the monsters around the vehicles. The Revenants were down, destroyed into shattered armour and pieces of bones. His group bore a few wounds here and there, but they were overall fine. A decisive victory.

“I think so,” Rory said. “We just need to finish up and fix that opening.”

“You got that covered?”

“Well…”

He looked back, and the rest of them followed his gaze to where Trish was still being attended to by Dr. Jace. She hadn’t woken up yet. Rory needed her to come in with her Sigils of Concrete and Permanence to properly block up the tunnel.

“We need Trish,” Rory said.

“You mean her Sigil of Concrete?” April nudged Miles’s shoulder. “Don’t you have a Sigil of Earth? That could work too, right?”

Rory shook his head. “Lots of things could work, but what we really need is the Sigil of Permanence. Otherwise, any barrier we throw up will just dissolve once the fighting is done.”

Miles nodded. “Then I’ll go wake her up.”

Just as he was about to head off, the tunnel groaned and a heavy earthquake shook the whole area. Rory’s heart immediately started hammering in his chest. He’d experienced those same quakes before. They had heralded the approach of that gigantic monster they’d seen deep in the dungeons, the one that had been responsible for causing all the flooding everywhere.

“We’ve got company,” Alia said, a second before more monsters popped out of the tunnel.

Thankfully, the only ones that charged at them were more Revenants. Most were humanoid, but there were a few monstrous variants spread amongst them as well. For a second, Rory had thought they’d run in and get caught by the Frozen Lightning, but it seemed they had learned their lesson. His trap only worked when it touched the monsters’ bodies. The Revenants were armed with swords, spears, and shields, and they used that to safely batter onward.

The others jumped down to the tunnel’s entrance and met the monsters head on. Rory would have helped, but in the chaos, it would be impossible to target and use his Weaving without confusing the fighters on his side too.

“Ned,” Rory said, raising his voice over the din. “Go wake up Trish. We need her. Now.”

Ned hurried off with hasty nod. His Burnwing appendages took him straight to Dr. Jace and her patient, where the middle-aged woman tried to protest Neds’ treatment of her patient.

Rory left him to it. Before him, the fight was spiralling out of control as more monsters flooded out of the tunnel opening. It didn’t matter that he shot his Frozen Lightning bolts into the midst of the battle. Nice thing about that power was that it only worked on monsters. On the rare occasions that his aim was off, or the less rare times when someone was accidentally hit due to the battle’s chaotic nature, it didn’t affect them.

That wasn’t Rory’s only contribution. As the gaggle became too convoluted and the Frozen Lightning started obscuring more of the battlefield, he decided to throw his blue arcs over the press of bodies. That meant they struck down on the monsters rushing out further into the dungeon itself. Hopefully, that would slow down the process until they were ready to block the place up.

Though that made Rory wonder how many of these creatures were there. The rush seemed unending, more and more monsters hurtling out with wild abandon with a desperate bid for freedom. They couldn’t keep up the fight forever. Mana only lasted so long.

“Take that!”

The shout behind Rory came a split second before one of the Djinn splashed into the water a few yards away. The stray droplets came close to stinging him.

Rory looked up and smiled. It was good to see that Dez and Viv weren’t just holding their own, they were winning. The entire area around them was a sea of dark fire that rose high into the sky. Apparently, the battle had been raging like an inferno of its own.

Viv’s crimson lightning was the only spot of difference. She threw bolt after bolt at the lion-headed Ifrit, occasionally slamming him with a storm of red thunderbolts at the same time.

It didn’t work. Fumigate always had his black flames ready . With one hand, he dissolved the bolts into a flash of crimsons sparks that did nothing against their attackers. At the same time, he was keeping Dez busy with blasts of his Abyssal Inferno from his other hand. Dez deflected them with a combination of his own dark fire and a shield of polished steel.

That was what was keeping the area flooded with darkness. The Djinn was specifically aiming for it to limit Viv’s movement. She couldn’t teleport anywhere as she’d only end up caught in the ravaging dark fire.

“Dez, wait!” Viv shouted all of a sudden.

“I got this,” he yelled back, then started running right into the Djinn’s flames.

Rory couldn’t believe his eyes. That Abyssal Inferno would consume him. He had wrapped himself in a cloud of his own blue-shot, black fire, but the Ifrit’s variant was stabbing in from every direction, roaring up to try to wrap around his body as he passed through. Somehow, for the moment, it was working.

Except for the other Ifrit’s interruption. He jumped out of the water with a heavy splash, but he was too distant from the battle to get either Viv’s or Dez’s attention. Violent wounds marred his shoulder and back, but he was fine enough to move.

Until Rory got to him, of course.

As the goat-headed Djinn’s feathery cloak blazed to life, his whole posture arrowing at Dez to stop his charge, Rory acted. He threw a bolt of Frozen Lightning at the monster’s back. The goat-headed Djinn shrieked for a second as ice and electricity combined to wrap him in a rapid trap.

That alerted Viv. She twisted, frowned, then understood what was happening in the next second. The next red hammering she slammed down atop the Ifrit’s head had enough force to send the scummy water rising high like a geyser. Abscond shrieked once more, then sank into the depths below.

Viv and Rory exchanged a moment’s glance before turning back to their individual duties.

Rory only caught Dez screaming as he reached the lion-headed Djinn, before forcing his attention to return to what he had to focus on. Just at the perfect time too. Ned flew in and landed with a groggy Trish. She was trying to muster up a fierce expression at the sight of the battle at the tunnel mouth, but her eyes twitched and she looked too exhausted.

“I hear you need my Sigil services,” she said.

Services. Rory shook his head, trying not to snort at a time like this. “We sure do. Once they’ve cleared enough of the path ahead, we can start blocking up the entrance again.”

“Got it.”

They didn’t wait for the others to finish the fight, of course. Rory, Ned, and even Trish despite her condition, all rushed in together to lend a hand. The Revenants began falling back as more of Rory’s icy blasts started freezing them on spot. Ned’s crossbow bolts and Trish’s javelins did well to throw back the monstrous reinforcements farther back inside the tunnel.

“Hey, old man.” Trish said. “I think you got your opening.”

She wasn’t wrong. A little space had popped up between the mess. Somehow, the fighters had pushed their assailants to either side.

“You mean, you’ve got the space you were looking for,” Rory said. “Time for the concrete, Trish.”

She nodded. Her Sigil’s image flared on the back of her hand, and she threw enormous blobs of grey liquid into the tunnel mouth. Several of the onrushing monsters shrieked as they tried to get the gooey stuff of them and make their way to the real fight.

Rory didn’t waste a second, activating his Barricading Blizzard at the same time to cool the concrete down immediately. He focused its destructive power on the monsters around them, and the preserving power on the concrete Trish was throwing into the tunnel. With the storm set up, Rory also added several rounds of Frozen Lightning into the mix to spice up the blockage.

The monsters really didn’t like that. They cried out in unison, their struggles against their binds rising to a desperate, feverish pitch. It would have alarmed Rory if they weren’t on the verge of success.

And then they succeeded. Trish finished sealing up the tunnel with Rory’s help. There was nothing there but a giant mass of solid concrete covered in frost and sparking with electricity. Monsters hammered against it, but it faded within moments.

“We’ve done it,” Miles said. “We—”

The ground started shaking again. Rory’s heart jackhammered as, instead of dissipating as it had before, the shaking grew in intensity until they were all shouting out in warning while they lost their footing.

Then the tunnel mouth exploded.