Choices had to be made.
What was initially a battle which Elwin believed he and others could survive had evolved to betray all sane expectations. It was not Professor Thales they were fighting – not even a human being – but an eldritch horror that'd managed to devour even Hûnbaba, the great spirit guardian of this city. In the face of such a harrowing difference in power, what hope did any of them have? They were mere mice in comparison, waiting to be caught in its coil and eaten alive in its maws.
There was no hope of rescue here, and no hope of making a viable signal to the outside world. It was either to do or die.
In the split seconds between the demon's glissades, Elwin's head flurried with calculations, possibilities. He had promised no one would die here, and he intended to keep his word. The only way the sixteen of them could survive was if they could vanquish the demon here and now, or manage to evade it and somehow escape to the surface. But escaping to the surface was impossible: all the Artens had seen the individual passageways leading into this hall blocked off by not just basalt, but Tenebriton, which robbed the use of their Mahamastra in close proximity. Katherine's Dance of the Apprentice's Flame, and Elwin and Mirai's past strategy of freezing and cracking the boulders open were not a possibility. Yet, what if he could bait the demon into attacking the Tenebriton-laden rubble that blocked a passageway? It was not immune to physical force, and if the path opened, Elwin could let the others escape through the tunnels. Even if they did, however, what was to stop the demon's centipedal form from crawling into the tunnels and eating them one by one, their screams echoing through the labyrinthine passageways? Could Elwin stop the demon from advancing into the tunnels? It was not viable.
All souls depended on him to make the call.
He looked up at his kismets, shuffling them quietly towards the back of another pillar, away from the demon, and made a low, desperate whisper.
"Guys... I'm sorry to have brought you into this. But no matter the impossible enemy in front of us, we must still try. There must be a way we can all survive."
"Just how?" Katherine breathed with effort, desperately trying to muster a calm that wouldn't come.
"Remember what Professor Aionia taught us back at the festival? She told us to remember back to her speech when a time comes that drives us to despair."
"Which speech?" cajoled Isaac.
"She told us not to fear just because the spear we hold is too small to use."
"That means –" commented Mirai, aware of what Elwin was going to say.
"Look at the demon," Elwin elaborated in quiet rasps, clutching his head. "Only Hûnbaba's claws had any effect on its scales. Water and ice and stone just bounce off of it. And even when Hûnbaba tore the scales off, they grew back. Just like that."
"So?"
"No form we know in the Four Mahamastra can vanquish the demon, at least individually. But we're forgetting their potential."
"What're you suggesting?" pleaded Katherine, her head shaking at the sight of the tail slithering above her.
"I KNOW YOU ARE HATCHING A PLAN!..." The demon rang out into their heads, making them momentarily flinch even though its jaws were sniffing at least four pillars away. "I KNOW YOU ARE. YOU ARE CRAFTY AND SLY, AND THAT'S WHAT I LOVE ABOUT YOU. A DELICIOUS INTELLIGENCE, SO FAR REMOVED FROM THE TARNISHED REFUSE OF THE TEEMING SHORE," it continued in throaty hisses. It took all willpower of cognition to defend one's mind from descending into madness by the voice of the demon alone. Elwin peeked behind the pillar as cautiously as possible, seeing the demon coil itself higher up on another series of pillars to get a better view of the hall below. The only advantage the Artens had was the fact that the hall was vast and dark; scattered enough, there were sufficient hiding places. But hiding places or not, their doom was near certain if they did not act.
"Mirai," Elwin continued, his heartbeat throbbing in his head, "back in Terayasna, you said some idiot almost blew up the laboratory because they left an antaric wire running for too long in water, and it separated into hydroton and pyroton, right? Isn't the two combined a highly flammable gas?"
Understanding came over their faces.
"I remember... hadn't someone told us that Atomionic reactions could prove useful?" remarked Isaac.
"But how exactly are we going to destroy the demon using just hydroton and pyroton?" rebutted Katherine. "It's way too long! There's no way we can cover its entire body with those gases!"
"We won't need to. Mirai," said Elwin, turning, "when the demon ate Hûnbaba, didn't it chomp down on a glowing orb that looked like a heart? And once it did, his eyes shone no more?"
"Yeah, it did."
"If the demon is a being of spirit like Hûnbaba, then it must also have a heart of its own. If we destroy it, doesn't that mean we can destroy the demon too?"
A transient hope grasped the kismets.
"For this to work," Elwin explained, lowering his head and leaning into them, for the demon's tail and spikes were sparking the stone like nails to a chalkboard on the pillar just next to them, "we need water, antaricity, and a spark. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to run out there, run at the demon with a huge lance of ice. I'm going to use my Asha to feel where the demon's heart is, and I'm going to pierce through its scales to skewer it."
"But you just said ice won't be able to pierce its scales!" begged Katherine. "Don't go out all alone with –"
"Not with ice, no. But with this," assured Elwin, holding the handle of the obsidian knife that Lucian had dropped, "I think I can. It sliced through the Celendir wool like it was made of butter. I'm going to tip the head of the lance with it at the last moment."
The demon sniffed around a corner not far off.
"And once you skewer its heart?" asked Mirai.
"I'm going to melt the ice into water immediately. Here's where your lightning comes in. I want you to fire off your lightning just as you did against Ursus. It'll follow the path of the water and reach its heart."
"And because lightning is antaricity, it will split the water into hydroton and pyroton?" whispered Isaac, hope on his face.
"That's right. And when that happens, Katherine, I need you to set fire to it. Snap a spark at the end of the trail of where the water was, just like you would do to a fuse. With any luck, it will explode its heart."
The kismets gulped in anticipation.
"We're going to live. All of us," Elwin assured, allaying their worry.
He wasn't going to sacrifice himself again, was he? Katherine thought.
"Let's do it," nodded Elwin.
It was time.
Elwin emerged from behind the pillars at the end of the great hall. The demon was slithering some way off, licking the stone with its tongue to feel the residual heat from the hiding Artens.
"Hey!" Elwin hollered.
Instantly the demon reared its head into sight.
"AH. ELWIN ERAMIR GREETS ME," it sibilated. "ALWAYS THE BRAVEST, HMM? BRAVE ENOUGH TO DIE?"
"You can't even find us with all that sniffing and licking? I – I got tired waiting for you!" Elwin said, mustering his courage against all the protests of sanity.
The demon let out a dishonored hiss as it uncoiled itself and landed all its body on the road, making a quaking thud.
It began to charge in a glissade towards Elwin with its jaw open, teeth bared, miasma oozing from its fangs, its chitinous legs clackering against the cold hard stone, accelerating, accelerating.
With a single flick of his finger to signal his kismets, knowing that they would not let his sacrifice be in vain, Elwin launched himself at the demon, his eye closed, feeling the tendrils of ORI in his Asha.
The thousand threads of gold faded and disappeared to nothingness towards the presence of this demon-creature; under normal circumstances, the hearts of many beings appeared the brightest. But if this demon consumed the ORI in its malfeasance, then its heart would be where the painting was the darkest.
"MAIOR FORTIOR!" Elwin exclaimed, as his Quan breathed to life, pulling all the vapor in that hall into the shape of a lustrous lance, carrying its weight beneath his right shoulder, the wind whistling past its tip and ruffling past his hair.
"SILLY BOY," mocked the demon into his head, chomping at Elwin with its mighty jaws. But in its overconfidence it missed its snap as Elwin dodged out and below with a deftness unusual for a Fradihta, and instead one of its fangs that got briefly tangled upon his hair tore a tuft from Elwin's scalp, drawing blood.
Elwin raced past the jaw and was below its body; he raced faster and faster, ignoring the pain from his head, of his aching body, of his uncooperative muscles twitching from Lucian's poison. He slid to dodge a lash of the demon's spiked tail, which lobbed off rocks from the pillars like it was nothing, and a swiping grip from many of its legs; finding dead center, the center of its body where its heart should be, Elwin struck the demon in its abdominal shell with the frostlance, shoving his entire weight onto the shaft and handle. The demon made no effort to avoid it, for no rhythm weaved in the Mashurmastra by a mere Fradihta could endanger it, but shock shuddered through its thoughts as it suddenly felt its shell fracture and felt the cold of ice penetrate its flesh.
Elwin at the last moment had tipped his lance with Lucian's obsidian blade.
The demon-centipede screeched in fury and flailed its many legs around, but in its confusion, it could not reach the dead-center of its belly where the lance was lodged, its newfound size a disadvantage; Elwin was driving it deeper.
The demon rolled its serpentine body sideways with the frostlance in it, nearly hurling Elwin off had it not been for him holding on with an impossible will; angered at the boy's tenacity, the demon rolled its serpentine tail forward and gripped Elwin with it, intending to squeeze him, to fling him away, but the boy wouldn't budge; Elwin had locked his own legs in raised basalt. The demon squeezed him harder, intending to crush him, and Elwin felt his spine pop and organs begin to displace, and cried out in pain, his robe beginning to burn with black fire, his face and wrist and arms feeling as if spiked by a thousand needles.
But his job wasn't done. He had to drive the lance deeper until it struck its heart for his kismets to have a chance.
The demon reoriented its head, reared it up and prepared to strike: to chomp down on Elwin for good –
Seeing his left arm useless and his right arm give way, ever cognizant of the demon's jaws and oozing fangs racing to devour him whole, Elwin held the lance sideways with his own teeth – biting down on it, tasting the enamel upon the ice, he drove the lance deep with the totality of strength from his birth to the present, whereupon it skewered the muscle of the centipede's heart.
It was just enough.
Elwin melted the lance into water at once.
"ENIN RAKURAI!"
An arrow of gold shot like a shining spear through the dark, heating the air to thirty-thousand degrees, impressing its release into thunder across the halls. The lightning, like a dragon, followed the path of water that Elwin had drawn with his foot, and latching onto the melting lance, entered the demon's heart, ripping the liquid into the two constituents that they'd learnt in Professor Aionia's class, two Atomions utterly combustible in combination that only a spark needed to set it alight:
Hydroton and pyroton.
The demon recoiled, jerking its head away mid-strike towards Elwin, to face the source of the lightning and to assess the threat it now faced:
But the girl in its vision was crumpling to the floor. Having performed her part by expending the totality of her Kaha into lightning, Mirai fell to the cold hard stone; it was now Katherine's moment to prove herself, racing forth from behind a pillar to the left.
At the foot of that terrifying demon Katherine ran; and below its toothed maws she came to stand, her face and head lashed with a spike fired from the demon's tail, tussocks of her hair ripped off from her scalp, against all her senses, against all her instincts. The demon bodied her sideways with a glissading strike, rocketing her into a pillar with such monstrous force that it dented her uniform and robbed her of every ounce of breath – but wanting to hide nor run no longer, never to abandon her friends again, Katherine snapped her finger full of fury and will, lighting ablaze the tip of the fuse that she knew was just yards away.
F I Z Z Z Z T -
Brilliant orange flame came alive upon that alchemical brilliance, following the path of the droplets of thick gas, racing at the demon before its eyes went wide with horror; it penetrated the creature, and with a titanic blast and bang, ruptured its tenebris heart like a cannonshot to a drum, spearing fires out back as a volcano in its wake.
The demon dropped Elwin, and Isaac caught him and Katherine, pushing the air around and away so the flames did not engulf them; a terrible wail came upon the demon as a sound of a hundred creatures being slaughtered, and its heavy head thudded down to cold basalt, bouncing several times.
Its pupils dilated – in but a moment its crimson eyes went cold and dead.
Isaac in astonishment grabbed all of his friends and pulled them behind a pillar; Elwin was half-conscious, his skin blistering with violet burns, but still alive. Barely alive.
They had prevailed against insurmountable odds; the next mountain to climb would be to bring Elwin to the care on the surface.
But a cricketing noise behind them sank all of their hearts.
When Hûnbaba was destroyed, his body fell around him, and his spirited form all but disappeared; but it was strange that the miasmic form of the demon-creature was far from gone.
In fact, it had begun to spread upon the stone and the pillars once more.
"INDEED... HEARTWARMING..." it spoke into their heads.
It snapped its jaw close once again, the pupils of its eyes rolling back into place to stare at their huddled figures like a crocodile waiting for ambush.
It twitched its chitinous abdomens, growing back the pierced scale that had been blasted apart, reshuffling its pairs of legs. It reared back in the sky, entwining its lengthy body across the columns of basalt.
"YOU... DARE REVOLT AGAINST ME..." it hissed in incandescent rage,
"AND TOUCH THE HEART OF A MORA OF THE KING?!"
Before they could react the demon seized Elwin and Isaac and held them up to the roof, their shadows reflected pale on the other side of the hall in massive shapes.
"I WILL TEAR YOU FINGER BY FINGER AND LIMB BY LIMB UNTIL YOU ARE NO MORE THAN NUGGETS OF FLESH!"
It made a sickening guffaw, opening its maw to reveal a series of lamprey-like teeth embedded in its throat, drilling and vibrating away on their own accord, ready to rip them to pieces.
Isaac screamed and flailed about as the demon-creature lowered them ever closer to its mouth; Elwin sputtered and kicked his feet and slapped his right hand upon the appendages, but it was no good... he had no strength left in him. Katherine upon the ground threw lances of fire which had no effect; Mirai could only crawl to stab the demon's scales with rocks in her hand. Both could only gaze in terror as their comrades were about to be eaten, in desolate prayer for someone, somebody, to save them.