said Mizuki, and Verity screwed her eyes shut. Even with
them closed as tight as they would go, she saw the flash of it, and when
she opened them back up, there was a faint afterimage. The monster had
lost one of its arms, which continued to flop around in the water. With
the other arm, it was going for Alfric, who was yelling at it and trying
to hold its attention. It was all happening frighteningly fast, so fast
that if Verity had stopped to think, her mind would have ground to a
halt. She focused on the song and held its magic, boosting Alfric.
Three arrows zipped through the air, all one after the other, and Isra
had moved across the room, right at the edge of the pool. She fired
again, and the arrow struck the thing in its chest, cracking a few of
the mussels there, but it seemed unperturbed by the damage, even as the
arrows vanished back into Isra’s quiver.
said Alfric as he swiped at the monster’s other arm.
As if to punctuate it, the monster brought its arm down,
and while Alfric lifted his shield to meet it, the force of the blow
brought him to his knees. He rolled out of the way of the follow-up
attack, wincing, and got back to his feet.
said Hannah, barreling her way forward toward the pool.
said Alfric, whose eyes went wide as he saw her moving
in.
asked Hannah, hesitating at the edge of the pool.
said Alfric. He rushed forward, screaming at the top of his
lungs and waving his sword wildly in the air. It arced with electricity,
more threat than anything else.
Hannah moved forward, and Isra shot again, three more arrows in quick
succession, this time with two of them flying wide. She’d been aiming
for the head rather than the chest and, facing a smaller target, landed
only one.
As soon as Hannah was in the water, Verity changed the magic, putting
almost everything onto the cleric and doing her best to enhance the
clerical power. It was a difficult thing to do, given that Verity had no
clerical power of her own and only a vague sense of what the godly
connection was like. It was so much easier to enhance those things she
had some personal familiarity with, when the song could be drawn from
her own life in some way. In their practice, it had gone poorly, but
Verity did it all the same, as they’d planned.
The monster’s other arm fell off as though severed by a giant invisible
blade, and Hannah splashed back away from the leg she was touching,
soaked to the bone and moving as quickly as she could.
The monster, disarmed, roared with the vibrations of a thousand small
mussels, loud enough that Verity almost lost the thread of the song. The
creature staggered once, moving toward Alfric as though it meant to slam
its head into him, but Alfric easily stepped to the side, and the
monster fell to the ground.
he said, though Verity had already been shifting her magic
in that direction. He brought his sword down with multiplied strength,
severing straight through the monster’s neck, then without hesitation
stepped up onto its back and plunged the blade into its center. The
monster, or what was left of it given that it had neither head nor arms,
shuddered once and then was still. The small mussels all slowly opened,
like a hand releasing a blade in death.
