Chapter 13 #2
He landed on a larger, more stable slab of pumice near the center of the river and spun around.
Nymeria was halfway across. She was terrifyingly agile for someone so exhausted, her torn tartan skirt flaring as she leaped from stone to stone. But the heat was taking a catastrophic toll on her depleted body. Her jumps were growing shorter.
She landed on a small stone three yards away from Drystan. The rock wobbled violently, dipping dangerously low into the boiling mana. She teetered, her arms windmilling as she fought to keep her balance, her heavy bust swaying with the frantic motion.
"Jump!" Drystan roared over the bubbling sludge.
Nymeria pushed off the sinking stone, but her legs lacked the necessary explosive force. She launched herself toward Drystan’s slab, but her trajectory was shallow. She was going to fall short. She was going to drop directly into the liquid fire.
Drystan threw himself forward. He dropped to his knees on the edge of the pumice slab, reaching out over the boiling river with his functional right hand.
Nymeria’s fingers locked around his wrist just as her boots brushed the surface of the boiling mana.
The heat radiating off the sludge instantly singed the soles of her boots. Drystan screamed, the muscles in his right arm bulging as he hauled her upward with sheer, brute strength. He dragged her over the edge of the stone, both of them collapsing onto the center of the slab.
Nymeria was gasping frantically, her face buried in the rough pumice. "I slipped. I'm sorry, I slipped."
"You're alive," Drystan ground out, his chest heaving. "Keep moving."
He pushed himself up to a crouch, ready to map the final sequence of jumps to the far shore.
Before he could calculate the distance, the boiling river of mana around them violently erupted.
The ambient thermal radiation and the chaotic disturbance of their crossing had triggered the localized defenses of the Caldera. From the bubbling red sludge, four pillars of superheated rock and liquid glass rose into the air.
They weren't mindless geysers. They were Slag-Stalkers.
The elementals formed crude, humanoid shapes out of the molten environment.
They had no faces, only glowing, hollow cavities in their jagged glass skulls.
Their arms were long, dripping whips of boiling red mana.
They radiated a heat so absolute that the heavy leather of Drystan’s duster immediately began to smoke.
"Elementals!" Nymeria shrieked, scrambling to her feet. She raised her hands, trying desperately to summon her twilight magic, but nothing happened. Her mana was entirely, catastrophically depleted. She was helpless.
The closest Slag-Stalker lunged, swinging its molten whip-arm directly toward Nymeria’s exposed chest.
Drystan didn't have his glitched kinetic blast. He didn't have a sword.
He had only his own physical brutality.
Drystan threw himself between Nymeria and the elemental. He raised his ruined left arm—the dead limb encased in the heavy, warped brass plating of the Weave-Gauntlet—and used it as a crude shield.
The molten whip wrapped around his left forearm. The heat was unimaginably intense, instantly melting through the dark linen sleeve and superheating the brass. The stench of boiling blood and searing flesh filled the air.
Drystan didn't scream. The victim who would have wept at the pain was gone.
He used the elemental’s own attack against it. He clamped his right hand over the molten whip, ignoring the severe, blistering burns instantly forming on his shredded palm, and yanked the Slag-Stalker forward with terrifying force.
The elemental stumbled onto their pumice slab.
Drystan didn't hesitate. He drove his heavy, steel-toed leather boot directly into the creature's jagged glass knee.
The joint shattered with a loud, crystalline crack. The Slag-Stalker dropped in front of him. Drystan released the whip, raised his right boot high into the blistering air, and stomped down with every ounce of kinetic force his predatory body could generate.
He drove his heel directly through the elemental's hollow skull.
The creature exploded into a shower of harmless, cooling black glass and steam.
The remaining three Slag-Stalkers converged on the slab. Drystan stood over Nymeria, a towering silhouette of blood-red leather and silver-white hair against the blinding crimson glare of the river.
He didn't wait for them to strike. He went on the offensive.
He grabbed the heavy lapels of his leather duster with his right hand and ripped the coat entirely off his shoulders, enduring a blinding flash of pain in his ribs. He gripped the thick collar of the heavy garment like a weapon.