While he supported him, the scantily dressed girl stepped in front of them, cupping the young man’s cheeks in both hands and lifting his face.
“You won, didn’t you?” Joanne murmured. “You really are incredible…”
As her healing magic began knitting his wounds closed, Joanne stroked his head like she was petting a dog.
It didn’t feel like being treated like a child so much as being indulged by some higher being, and the mix of embarrassment and discomfort made Oakley’s skin crawl.
He gently pushed her hands away and looked down at his own left arm and shoulder, both of which had been speared clean through.
The wounds were swollen and almost closed over, and thanks to the magic, the holes themselves had vanished completely.
There was still numbness and pain lingering there, but it was far better than walking around with gaping holes.
The real problem was his right arm.
The skin that had been roasted at close range by the holy fire was horribly burned, oozing yellow fluid.
Because the injury was caused by Saren Deputy’s flame, healing magic barely worked on it at all.
If he kept using the Flame Blade like this, his right arm would rot off. Joanne had warned him as much.
But if he wanted to fight the Hidden Insect Corps, he had no choice but to borrow the power of the holy fire.
So, Oakley proposed a compromise. What if they turned Gerugoroi’s long spear into a second Flame Blade? Up until now, he hadn’t been able to convert ordinary spears because the blades were too thin and snapped under the stress.
The longsword he’d modified into his flame sword had a thick, heavy blade. Gerugoroi’s signature spear, however, had a broader, thicker head than a normal spear, not to mention longer.
He’d heard it had originally been taken off a famous Orthodoxy soldier.
Compared to a sword, the extra distance between blade and grip would give his hand more breathing room, hopefully slowing the pace at which the burns worsened.
While Joanne worked on modifying the weapon for him, Oakley eyed the spear and felt a small shiver run through him.
Hard to believe I survived getting skewered by this thing, he thought. Then again, I’m not exactly unharmed, am I? Hard to say if I’m lucky or not.
Joanne dug her fingernails into the spearhead and scored the surface with a series of shallow grooves.
Then she pressed in the catalyst, a resin kneaded with special agents, smearing it into the carved channels before sandwiching the blade between her palms and squeezing.
A thin, sharp clang of tortured metal rang out, and just like that, the Flame Spear was finished.
Work that would normally require heavy machinery was reduced to a heartbeat in Joanne’s hands, thanks to her monstrous strength.
Oakley ran his eyes along the curves where steel and catalyst met, confirming the pattern, then transferred the holy flame from his sword to the long spear.
Gerugoroi, it seemed, had used a spear heavier than standard, no doubt to increase the power of his strikes.
Some things only became clear afterward.
Oakley gave the Flame Spear an experimental thrust and was genuinely startled by how naturally it fit his body.
“So,” Joanne said, “what happened to Celestia?”
“Giather’s summoned beast was lurking in this city,” Oakley replied. “She’s fighting it now.”
“There’s an Orthodox executive here, too, huh? That’s scary stuff,” Alex chimed in, wincing.
“The blizzard getting stronger is the summoned beast’s doing, then?” Joanne asked.
“Most likely,” Oakley said.
“That’s a problem,” Joanne murmured. “We may have more executives on our side, but they’ve got the terrain and the weather. If we dawdle, Cress might show up. Best to finish this quickly.”
Having convinced herself, Joanne headed toward the yawning mouth of the mineshaft. Oakley and Alex followed the small figure, stepping into the dark. Their targets were the Hidden Insect Corps and Stella Belmont.
The Raid Unit and Gerugoroi were only one fragment of the Aros Temple Cult.
Only by killing the Hidden Insect Corps and Stella would they finally come close to collapsing the cult itself.
The moment they crossed the threshold into the mine, Oakley could feel a faint haze clinging to the air, a poisonous gas that made even breathing feel taboo for a heretic.
Every breath sent tiny stabs of pain from his nose down his throat and into his chest, like a shower of minute needles.
It was a haze of insecticidal smoke blended with the toxic fumes left behind by the phoenix flame’s heat.
Even Joanne grimaced, her expression tightening. The environment was brutal enough to make her face twist.
But there’s no way something like this killed Stella or the other executive candidates, Oakley thought. If they walked into a trap this simple, they’d just be idiots.
It had been several hours since the fumigation began.
Climbing down the first vertical shaft they came across, they found a mound of ash and scattered bodies near the remains of the device he’d kicked down earlier.
The ash piles were what remained of cultists burned by the holy fire the device had carried.
The bodies were those who had inhaled a lethal dose of insecticide and sacred smoke at point-blank range.
The bodies of the dead insect-hybrids were shriveled, their torsos collapsed like balloons with the air let out. From their mouths and eye sockets, the parasites had crawled halfway free, then died on their backs, legs curled tight.
They were such perfect corpses that Oakley didn’t even feel the urge to finish them off.
“Looks like it’s working,” he said quietly.
“My chest’s killin’ me, though…” Alex wheezed.
“The concentration’s probably thickest around this shaft,” Oakley replied. “Don’t let your guard down.”
The three of them stepped over the bodies and headed deeper in.
As they moved away from the vertical shaft, it went just as expected: they ran into surviving cultists.
They were writhing on the ground, half-mad, groaning in pain as they thrashed. The insecticide must have disrupted the balance between host and parasite, unraveling whatever harmony they’d had. Oakley went through them without pause, driving the Flame Spear through their heads one by one, then pushed on toward the next level.
Once they reached a section where the smoke had thinned, the entire mine seemed to tremble.
He stopped instinctively. At the same moment, the other two halted and glanced upward.
“The ground just shook,” Alex said.
“Maybe some flammable gas ignited and exploded?” Oakley suggested.
“No,” Joanne said, head tilting slightly. “This isn’t the kind of shaking you get from an explosion. It’s probably Celestia’s fight with Giather heating up.”
The minor tremors came again and again after they first took notice, low, distant growls rumbling through the rock.
Threaded through those muted groans, a new sound reached them from somewhere: the murmur of flowing water.
Oakley’s thoughts flicked to a TIP from the original story, a bonus nugget of information.
The area around the city of Jade is renowned for its hot springs, with abundant groundwater and mineral resources.
That was how it had been described. If that were the case, there might be an underground river flowing through a hollowed-out space nearby. He listened harder and realized the sound was coming from below.
“Let’s move,” he said at last.
Judging from the faint booms and roars still audible from above, the cultists on the surface were almost certainly all dead except for Celestia.
Some had fallen to Oakley’s Flame Blade, others had been killed by the summoned Frost Giant Frimslus, and the rest would have frozen to death or succumbed to frostbite.
There can’t be fifty enemies left, he calculated. We finish this fast. Kill every last one of them and end this.
They walked for a while into a section of the mine where the structure had grown far more complex, tunnels branching, weaving, twisting.
And here, he couldn’t feel a single living human presence. No trace of Stella. No sign of Whip.
Either they’d passed them by, or the three of them were on an entirely different level.