Eve chuckled dryly, scanning the mist with her scope. “Complain quieter, clown, unless you want the shadows to start mimicking your whining.”
We kept moving. The fog thickened, curling around us. Every few seconds, shapes flickered at the edge of sight, faces, wings, limbs that didn’t move right.
When the first one lunged, it barely had a form. Lionel’s shot cracked through the silence, the bullet splattering black mist.
“More!” Jaden shouted, raising a jagged wall of stone from the ground, before letting it fall flat towards the shapes, pulverizing them. New shadows climbed over them like oil.
The air sang as I summoned my threads, thin red blood cutting through smoke and flesh alike. Each strike was precise, restrained. I couldn’t afford to lose control again. Not now.
Ashley fought near me, wild grin flashing in the murk. “You’re getting tame,” she said between swings.
“And you’re getting slow.”
“Bite me.”
“Not… like literally bite, right?” Jaden asked confused from the other side.
Nate laughed breathlessly from somewhere behind us. “Are you sure you two aren’t flirting?”
“Shut up, Nate!” Ashley and I growled at the same time.
The fog began to thin ahead, replaced by a darker shadow, one that didn’t move. A shape towering above the horizon.
“There,” Faelin whispered. “The castle.”
Through the shifting blackness, spires rose towards the gray sky, twisted and impossible, the castle’s walls pulsing faintly like the veins of a living thing.
The sight hit me like a blow. The tether flickered again, even fainter this time, almost gone.
Then, the air changed.
Faelin gasped. Her shield of wind shattered like glass as something struck from above, a blur of claws and smoke. She crumpled before anyone could react, blood spurting across the ground and when she coughed for air, blood followed.
“Faelin!” Eve screamed, firing blindly into the dark. Another shape lunged out of the fog, slamming into her. She, too, went down hard, rifle skidding across the rocks.
“Cover them!” Lionel shouted, spinning towards the noise.
Ashley detonated a flash charge, white light ripping apart the mist for a heartbeat, revealing dozens, maybe hundreds, of shapes crawling towards us.
Jaden slammed his palms to the ground, the earth cracking open under his feet. “We’re surrounded!”
I grew impatient, we didn’t have time for this.
Shedidn’t have time.
The blood ripped free, glowing bright against the blackness.
The demons screamed as I tore through them, my bloodlust growing.
But even through the chaos, I could still feel it, that faint, dying pulse in my chest, her fire faltering somewhere inside that castle.
And for the first time since she’d been taken, I was afraid I might already be too late.
I snapped.
The air around me took on a crimson glow. My threads pulsated as they began knitting together; coalescing until they became four thick arms. The power was out of my control as one of them whipped against a dead tree, crushing it into splinters. Another swept towards the line of demons, smearing them into black ichor, annihilating them.
Lionel was already moving before the echo of the dying demons’ screams faded. He slid through the fog towards where Eve had gone down, firing short, controlled bursts with his gun. He shifted, the flash of his rifle carved stuttering shapes out of the dark—limbs, teeth, too many eyes.
