A familiar, spine-tingling growl made my breath vanish. Hot and foul-smelling air tickled the side of my face. I managed to look up. Six pairs of eyes growing on the same deformed head watched me, the eyelids flicking shut occasionally. A Shill. A Shill had pounced on me, and I had no idea what would happen next.
Sure, Death had made it so that I wouldn’t die. But that didn’t exempt me from any excruciating pain, I figured. I’m about to find out.
Taeral
I felt its claws digging into my skin, having pierced the thick material of my combat suit. They were like sharp knives, going deep into my shoulder and calf muscles. I grunted from the pain, horror gripping me by the throat and tightening its grip. I couldn’t breathe anymore, heat coursing through me.
My hands burned. My instincts kicked in. Fire exploded from within. The Shill screamed as the blaze swallowed it whole. A second later, I was free and aching. A pulverizer pellet was shot, disintegrating the fiend before my fire could consume it. There were other Shills around here, summoned from the pink waters.
“What the hell, Pyrr?!” I asked, picking myself and my weapons off the ground.
“I made those long before you arrived here,” the Fire Hermessi replied. “It seems like they caught up with you.”
It was too much for any of us to handle. Nethissis could barely stand. Lumi was running out of physical strength to keep launching her swamp witch magic attacks. Herakles, Varga, and Eva were on the ground, though still conscious. Riza and the Widow Maker did the best they could with their ability to cast attack spells. Unlike Riza, the Widow Maker wasn’t restrained by Pyrr’s teleporting blockage as a Reaper unbound by the physical world, so he could even zap around and deliver more significant blows to the enemies. Eira and Raphael were worn out, gasping and sweating.
But there were too many hostile elements here. The Shills were just the top of the pile, easier to handle with pulverizer weapons. The earth itself came at us with swirling roots that aimed to constrict and suffocate like giant snakes, and spikes that were big and sharp enough to tear through us with remarkable ease. The Hermessi had their weapons, and we were only a handful resisting them. Unless I or Riza teleported us out of here, we were all screwed.
Maybe Eira, Lumi, and I would be able to go on, somehow, banking on our inability to die. But what would that say about me, if I didn’t do everything within and beyond my power to protect my entire crew, to make sure we all made it past the finish line, victoriously?
“Pyrr… Let me help you. Let me try to stop Brendel,” I said, my breaths short and uneven.
The Fire Hermessi hesitated, but eventually, he raised an arm, his fire burning brighter for a split second. Suddenly, I felt a string snap somewhere inside me. A string I didn’t even know had been there.
“Go,” he said. “Take your people and go.”
Without hesitation, I roared and dashed across the small battlefield. Putting my weapons away, I grabbed Eira and Raphael by their hands. They looked at me in confusion as I jerked them toward the others. Pyrr expanded into a massive fire ring that surrounded and protected us for the few seconds I needed to get everyone together.
Riza and the Widow Maker pulled Herakles and Eva off the ground. Nethissis helped Varga, and Lumi grabbed Amelia and joined us as we all came together. With our hands linked, I closed my eyes and allowed us all to disintegrate. I understood what the string snapping had been. We’d been tethered to this place by the Hermessi, but we were free now.
I teleported us away from the Hermessi cluster. We reappeared about a hundred miles north of where we’d almost lost this fight. We all collapsed, dropping to our knees and heaving, struggling to breathe normally for once.
My hands were shaking, and my legs had turned to jelly. Eira stayed close, putting an arm around my shoulder. “You’re okay. We made it out of there. All of us,” she said softly.
“Yeah, Tae, thanks for that,” Amelia replied, flat on her back. Raphael sat next to her, using a cloth and healing potions from his backpack to treat her more visible wounds. It didn’t take long for her to spring back up, downright energized and fully healed.
I got up and chugged down half of my volcanic water reserve. I could feel it working on me, its warmth spreading through every fiber of my being. The others did the same, pushing the regeneration process into hyper speed. Back where we’d left the Hermessi, the sky had darkened to a pitch black. Thunderclaps echoed across the fields of gold and green as lightning spread across in flashing lights.
Explosions tore through the plain as Pyrr and the local Hermessi went hard against Brendel’s allies. Fire blossomed in orange, blue, green, and white, everything swallowed by black smoke as the elementals went head to head in a devastating battle. I couldn’t see more from this far, and I was thankful for that.
“We needed this breather.” Lumi sighed, washing her face with some water from her flask. Nethissis drank the rest, closing her eyes for a moment as she enjoyed the healing sensation. The beauty of the volcanic lake water was that it regenerated everything in an organism—wounds and worn-out structures. The tiredness we’d all experienced from such intense fighting had begun to subside.
“Pyrr broke the block they had on us,” I said. “Whatever the Hermessi were using to stop us from teleporting, it’s gone. They’ll use it again, first chance they get, though.”
“How are you feeling?” Eira asked me.
“I’m okay. You?” I replied and glanced around at the crew. “How are you all holding up?”
Herakles groaned as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. He grabbed his volcanic water flask and chugged it, while Riza pressed bandages soaked in healing potions over his thigh wound. The Faulty looked paler than most of us—then again, he’d lost a lot of blood. “I’ll live. For now.”
“I can’t believe they brought Shills out for us, again.” Amelia scoffed, shaking her head.
“I think Pyrr sort of apologized for that,” I said. “He claimed he’d made them before we got here. That all the creatures did was catch our scent and come after us.”
“You know what, I am really confused about that guy,” the Widow Maker replied, hands on his hips, his scythe out of sight. “Why did it take him so long to help us? Is he a sadist? Can a Hermessi be an actual sadist?”
Eva chuckled. “You’ve met Brendel, right?”
“Pyrr is scared,” I said. “He cares about my father the most. He was willing to step on all of us, if that was what it took to save him.”
“What changed his mind?” Raphael asked, raising an eyebrow. “We were all a little too busy fighting for our lives to pay attention to your conversation.”
I smiled, inwardly thrilled to see them all conscious and rapidly recovering. Our quest had just begun, after all. I needed each of us in tip-top shape, especially since we had no idea what the release of Zetos would require.
“I told him about Derek and Sofia’s mission,” I said. It got me scowls from Varga and Lumi.
“Now, why would you do that, Tae?” Varga grumbled. “What if they go after them, now?!”
I shook my head. “He helped us. Don’t you see? He let us go, basically. He’s fighting the other Hermessi as we speak. He’d have told them about Derek and Sofia while they pummeled us into mush back there, if he wanted to stop us.”
“Sherus is on Yahwen, isn’t he?” Lumi murmured, her eyes glimmering as she put two and two together, like I had, earlier.
“It’s where Brendel keeps the other Hermessi children. In her mind, it’s probably the most secure place for them,” I said.
I let Amelia pass on all the information we’d gathered to my mother through the group’s Telluris link, and to Phoenix via the comms system. She mentioned my father’s Hermessi heritage briefly, and it came as an understandable shock to my mother, but Amelia also mentioned that I’d have a more in-depth conversation about this later and in private. There simply wasn’t enough time to go over all the details now.
Amelia had taken it upon herself to be our liaison to GASP when we were all together, to simplify the communication lines during field missions such as this. It was easier, since she was able to play down some of the damage we’d sustained, knowing that my mother was worried sick about me, in particular.
“Who were you talking to earlier?” I asked the Widow Maker. It caught him by surprise, and he stared at me, quietly, for about half a minute.
