“GO!” he shouted.
“I don’t know—I don’t know if I can,” she said, her eyes wide with fear.
Gripping her arm, Rolan pressed his forehead to hers, his eyes burning into hers. “Then you pretend. You pretend you can do it until youdo it.”
She nodded, blinking, and he saw her strength in the way her mouth pressed into a hard line. Her eyes flashed. “Rolan Strider, don’t you dare die.”
He grinned, projecting confidence he absolutely did not feel. “I won’t if you don’t!”
Anaya burst into motion, helping the injured man stumble down the road, away from the Cryptic. Rolan watched her go, his chest heaving, his hand trembling around his sword hilt. Only when she turned a corner and was safely out of sight did he turn back to the monster.
The battle was not over by a long shot. The Cryptic’s body arched away over the rooftops, and rather than take the long way round by the roads, Rolan climbed up the face of the nearest building instead. It wasn’t hard to do, given that half the building had been crushed by the Cryptic, the rubble creating a kind of jagged staircase. In moments he stood on the rooftop, blinking at the bird’s-eye view of the monster’s destruction. Entire city blocks lay in smoking ruin.
There was the head, and there was Luc dodging and slicing. He’d managed to sever one of its front legs, but the seven backups were proving more difficult for the Arcanist to reach.
“Right,” Rolan muttered. “Pretend you can do it until youdo it. Time to take my own advice.”
He twirled his sword and hurled himself off the roof, landing hard on the Cryptic’s scaled back. He rolled twice before he managed to jab a dagger into the creature’s tough skin, stopping himself just before he tumbled off the other side.
Grinding his teeth together, he hauled on the dagger, pulling himself to his feet. The motion of the Cryptic as it moved made him dizzy, and he tottered back and forth for a moment before he found his balance and could start swinging his sword.
“Nobody should have this many legs,” he declared. “Let’s fix that.”
He managed to hack his sword halfway through one grisly thigh before the Cryptic caught on to him. Presumably it did not enjoy boys scrabbling about on its back, chopping off its legs, especially when it was down by one already, thanks to Luc. Rolan stood frozen on the center of its back as its enormous head turned completely around, like an owl’s, and roared in his face.
Massive, gooey globs of spit splashed across Rolan, clinging stickily to his clothes and hair, reeking like barrels of months-old fish.
“Yuck,”he gasped, pulling off ropes of goop. “I amsotired of that happening!”
“Rolan!” Luc roared.“Get down!”
The head wasn’t the only part of the creature that could rotate, apparently. The legs turned around too and slashed at Rolan from all sides, while the belly crashed to the ground. Or was it the back now? He was beyond confused about the way the creature fit together. But suddenly the Cryptic seemed to be upside down, and it had made it its personal mission to smash Rolan into bits.
Yelping, Rolan rolled off the Cryptic’s back or belly or whatever it was and sprinted for cover. It adapted again, legs rotating, neckturning. Now its back was its front and its top was its bottom and it was chasing Rolan like a cat chasing a spider. But the alley he was running for, one in which he’d escaped from Hoff many times before—simply wasnot there.
Instead he faced a wall of smoking rubble.
His chest heaved with exertion, his old stitches tearing open. He was cornered by the biggest Cryptic anyone in Crisanth had ever seen, and it was intent on taking his head as a souvenir.
“Rolan!” Luc came sprinting toward him, his eyes glowing blue. “Your sword, Rolan! Use the blastedsword!”
“Huh?” Rolanhadbeen using the sword. Did Luc not see that the creature’s viper of a tail had been shorn off? Pretty spectacularly, too. It was just Rolan’s luck that Luc had been too busy to see it.
“Use the Arcana!” Luc roared, swinging for the Cryptic’s leg.
Oh. Right. What had Luc said? Something about the sword already being imbued with power?
Rolan breathed in, reaching for the Hollow Path, then flinched as Arcana flowed up his arm in a brilliant blue flash of light.
Cords of steel braided over his skeleton, while fire pulsed in his muscles. Traces of blue lightning shivered over his skin to the ends of his hair. Time slowed as his senses drank in every sound, smell, and flicker of movement around him, charting maps in his brain.
He breathed out, a cool blue mist curling off his lips.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t like the power he’d drawn from those small Cryptics hunted down in alleyways. This was more like the power from the large one in the cave.
Oh. This changed everything.
Rolan grinned.
