“Dammit! Wasn’t payin’ any attention just now!” I chided myself, then broke right out into a run. “Do you have to take everything so seriously?! At least give us a chance to catch our breath!”
I scrambled over the uneven boulders stacked on top of one another and ran across the cracked ground with everything I had.
When I looked back up at the sky, I saw two pegasi and Sasha Shidoh Zultania’s teammates riding atop them. I could already tell her two summoner teammates (who were good-looking themselves) were prepping to cast their next electromagic spell. That was obvious, though. I didn’t have to check to know.
I mean, see. Just as I was wondering when the blitz would come, a bunch of lightning bolts touched down right behind me.
Cyril was huffing and puffing as he carried Myfila out of there, running right alongside me.
“Sasha’s teammates are her number one worshippers! Of course she would go all out after you teased her with your little slime stunt!” he yelled.
“What teasing?! And who kills someone over a difference of opinion?!”
Lightning bolts were raining down on us one after another in rapid succession.
They might not have been lethal, but they sure would’ve knocked any of us out if we were hit. We both knew exactly what would happen if we slowed down even in the slightest, so Cyril and I had cast aside any hopes of looking respectable and just made a break for it.
“Stop right there, Feil Fonaf!”
“How dare you resort to such vulgar ploys! Have you no pride?!”
The girls were bellowing at me from above. I shouted right back at them, facing them head-on. “Sasha’s the slowpoke who let a slime hop onto her, ya nitwits!”
That earned us double the number of electrical spells, but their aim got a whole lot messier. No, wait, scratch that. They were just striking at random, like they were playing with us.
I scrambled over a pile of rubble as fast as I could. “They’re not even breakin’ a sweat. They’re toying with us…!” Sure, we were being driven into a corner, but now things were getting interesting. I smirked as I asked Cyril and Myfila, “Okay, what’s next?! What’s our play?! What can we do?! Whaddaya wanna go for now?!”
Then Cyril shouted, loud enough to rival the thunderclaps ringing out right next to us, “You haven’t given up yet?! We’re lucky the three of us managed to survive this long against Sasha and her entourage! How about we throw in the towel before we end up dead?!”
Then I shouted back at him just as loudly, “You’re joking! They got a warning for using an unblockable attack just now! Next warning they get, they’ll lose on a technicality! This is the perfect opportunity!”
I pointed at the horizon, at the archangel right below the scattered clouds. There was a guy on top of a creature with the upper body of an eagle and the lower quarters of a lion—a griffin—who’d appeared barely a second ago. It looked like the summoner guy was saying something to the archangel.
Cyril immediately followed my finger. His handsome features screwed up as he replied, “You’re serious about winning against Sasha?!”
“’Course I am! I wouldn’t go into a battle expectin’ to lose! Same as always!”
“I’ve never heard of Sasha ever being upset before, you know!”
“Then if it’s a first for her, maybe she’s gotten weaker! Not everyone gets more powerful just ’cause they’re mad!”
We’d been pursued by the onslaught of thunderbolts and running for our lives for a whole minute.
My blood was pumping so fast to my muscles, it didn’t feel like any of it was reaching my brain. I pummeled the side of my head just to see if that’d help, but I still wasn’t coming up with any ideas for a counterattack.
My lungs burned. I needed more air.
Then right as I was on the verge of surrendering to helplessness, Myfila whispered to me, “Feil, let’s try that.”
“‘That’?”
I didn’t know exactly what Myfila meant in my oxygen-deprived state…and then, three seconds in, I finally laughed. “Ya mean the combo summon.”
I dug the heels of my boots into the ground.
Before I could fully stop, I used my momentum to flip around onto one knee. I concentrated my spirit into my fingertips until blue light flickered into existence on my index and middle fingers, then I began tracing a summoning circle directly on the ground.
It only took me two seconds to finish drawing it.
Right as I finished etching the two squares contained within a circle, I declared the magic words: “Land Rising!!”
“Feil Fonaf!”
“Now you resort to sly tricks!”
The next moment, a gigantic pillar of stone flew out from the ground and created a thick wall to shield us from the lightning bolts hailing down from the pegasi overhead. Since they couldn’t stop quickly enough, they speedily flew away from us. That probably bought us some time since they’d need to do a one-eighty to get to us.
And that was also our opportunity to attack.
I pulled out a small leather-bound book from the inner pocket of my summoner’s robes and started to recite an arcane verse.
“Ye that writhe nocturnal, spirits entombed of the land internal. A gale gloomy spied by eyes of many, they who leave the Great Woods Vanuka empty. The flowers of yore now abloom, the time long bided for glory thy shall assume.”
When I looked over, I saw Myfila open a book much like my own as Cyril held her in his arms.
“God Croaka of the lachrymal, begotten children of the tranquil. The titan falls as night of moonlight breaks. Dawn shall come as thine corpse awaits. A tranquil cloak keeps the wind at bay for the corpse in the chill of morning day. Anon, the time has come without delay for thine silence to be cast away.”
Cyril started to panic. “Wait, wait, wait, wait!”
He ran over to me (still carrying Myfila) with an eyebrow raised. “Stop, you two! By ‘combo summon,’ do you mean that thing you did earlier? That’s not allowed!”
But I replied, “It’s not? We ain’t breakin’ any rules. We’re just bein’ ‘inventive’ is all.” I overruled Cyril’s attempt at stopping us. Anyway, I’d already found the page I needed from my book, so I was too busy tracing the line of verse I’d recited from memory just now with my finger.
Then I let out a forced laugh—it didn’t benefit anyone to think too closely about things now that we’d gotten this far into the battle.
“You’re definitely going to get in trouble!”
“Fine by me. If I’m goin’ to do it, might as well do it right.”
Then Myfila and I simultaneously closed our books.
The effects were immediate. A gigantic blue summoning circle rose from behind me as a purple circle appeared on the ground under Myfila, where she was still in Cyril’s arms.
“I’m gonna make the Sasha Shidoh Zultania scream.”
Just as I grinned, I heard a loud crash, like a bunch of glass breaking.
I searched for the source of the sound and realized a gigantic arm was reaching toward us from overhead. It was pale but muscular and gargantuan. So far, it was elbow deep into our world.
The arm had ripped through the barrier of worlds to appear in our own realm. I caught glimpses of starlike lights twinkling in the indigo beyond. We didn’t just have an arm. Eventually, the rest of the giant broke through the barrier and appeared, its form so large that it could have easily had an overhead view of any two-story building.
Its brown hair was long, and its thick torso was covered only by a single loincloth.
Instead of a sense of gallantry, it seemed to give off an unearthly air, which was likely because the gigantic body was just that—a carcass no longer of this world. Its eyes were empty, its long tongue lolling out of its half-open mouth and its blue skin showing no sign of blood flow. Though it was large enough to brawl with a dragon, instead of moving of its own volition, the giant was being manipulated by the necrospecter within it.
The peculiar and powerful elementals, which ranked after the four elements of fire, water, earth, and wind, had a penchant for putrefaction and could even control the smell coming from rotting corpses. Many people were even devoted to them, believing they were the messengers of the god of death, Croaka.