FOES IDENTIFIED!

  Sir Theodore the Slayer (LVL 235)

  Sir Leifblade of Sanctum (LVL 184)

  Raxel braced, staff canted across his chest, palm open to the now visible threat.

  Even though his mind raged against the sheer ridiculousness of this damned reality.

  A rat and a Salamandrike…these are the Archon’s final line of defense.

  It would’ve been an insult in any other context.

  But lately, Raxel was beginning to see that in the Hybrids world, things were not quite what they seemed.

  Heat licked cracks through the stone at his feet. Sir Leifblade swept his blades throw the air, steadying his rat-mount with deliberation as his eyes flicked towards the two councilmen.

  “Don’t worry about us!” Cormyr shouted as the grey Petrification kept creeping up his thighs.

  Fraxx smirked as the Salamandrike met his beady eyes.

  “Give the bassstard hell, boysss.”

  Revok had heard enough. He leveled his staff, summoned his shield, and lunged with the confidence that the beasts couldn’t break it.

  But he was nowhere near fast enough.

  The salamandrike came in first—no flourish, no warning—blades kissing together and then parting in a clean X that struck like a carpenter’s square laid across his throat. The shield took it and rippled the chamber with a hard ring, but the second cut chased the same fault. Raxel turned his wrist and dumped force downward; tiles leapt, the council table shifted along its fracture, and dust fell in a sheet.

  The rat did not pause. It didn’t even flinch.

  [Roar]

  Air hit like a pushed door. His barrier thinned a shade. Raxel answered the only way such beasts understood—heat, straight and narrow. The cone took the rat at a slant and painted a scorch across its shoulder. Fur curled. It kept coming, low and fast, claws biting stone with the patience of a siege engine.

  Leifblade’s follow-up was surgical—one blade high to occupy the eye, the other low to cut travel. Raxel rose a handspan to let the low scissor pass under, snapped his fingers, and turned a rune under the salamandrike’s boot. The pop threw the knight half a stride to the side, but he rode the blast and came back on the near angle with a thrust set at rib height.

  [Twilight Edge]

  The steel took on a faint dusk and pressed through the outer skein with a will. Staff met blade and vented heat along the binds. Metal colored, then cooled the instant the Leifblade broke the drag and reset, not wasting a breath.

  Sapphire felled the silence.

  Spectral bolts climbed Raxel’s torso one after another, sewing a line over his sternum. He felt the ward’s weave go thin there, nearly clear. He tore a grey pouch from his belt and cracked it wide, throwing the Petrification Dust inside in a flat fan across the stones. The rat’s rear paws went heavy; calcification spidered up to the ankle. It stamped once, twice, then simply accepted the weight and drove forward on mass alone.

  It’s…it’s resistant, Raxel realized.

  That fact alone was what allowed the pair to get within striking range of the perplexed mage. He’d simply never seen a creature on Argwyll that could shrug of Petrification like that damned rat could…

  The salamandrike dipped the onyx in his guard. Raxel Appraised the Skill it was charging with a curse under his breath:

  [Summon Wraith]

  Cold unrolled behind the Grey Mage like a curtain opening. Hands with nothing human in their shape closed around his elbows through a seam in the shield and locked them together. He blasted backward; heat blew the shape thin, but it held. He drove a lance of fire through its center and pinned it to the fresco. The force took a supporting column with it. Masonry split. A hole big enough for a wagon opened into the long gallery.

  The three of them left the chamber the way a blade leaves a scabbard—straight, unavoidable. Banners tore from rings. Portraits slid. Leifblade loped through, boots placing only on sound stone as if he’d memorized the building’s bones. The rat hit the breach with a crash, skidded, and ran, a Lysandus standard caught on one ear and streaming behind until an impatient shake freed it.

  Raxel threw orbs of flame down the right-hand wall in a diagonal that would shear a man at knee and shoulder. They bloomed one-two-three, monotone and efficient. The salamandrike threaded the beats and cut across the weakening seam on the shield, turning the pressure line into a tear. The rat slid under the last detonation and loosed another chest-born shock at less than five paces. The floor lost its argument with gravity. Stone went out from under them, and they dropped a level with the debris.

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  “What the FUCK are you creatures made of!?”

  They hit hard. Raxel bled off the fall with a brace of force; Leifblade with a three-point landing that already had an exit vector; the rat with everything it had, shaking mortar from whiskers before it even finished sliding. The dusted crust still ringed its paws. It set itself anyway.

  Raxel raked grit up from the cracked mortar and sent it forward in a black wave. The salamandrike crossed the lane through it without flinch, blades close and quiet, cutting only when the line was clean—wrist, hip, throat—testing, not gambling. Frost hissed from his off-hand and froze the crust on the rat’s paws until the stone turned brittle; a neat drag of steel shattered it off. The remainder of the cold ran toward Raxel’s shins and locked. He kicked heat down his greaves and stepped free with water hissing at his heels.

  The corridor cooked by degrees. Stone reddened at the corners. Raxel twisted both hands and drew a tight cyclone of flame to grind the air itself. The knight’s scales dulled but did not split. He walked through heat as though through heavy rain, guard shouldered, blades a steady metronome. The rat hooked its claws into the grooves the builders had cut for drainage and bullied forward, low and sure.

  Two orbs collided mid-hall and rebounded off three walls. The hammer came back twice as hard. The rat slipped right, took the returning wave in the chest, and used it to accelerate into a lateral line that put its muzzle at Raxel’s left shoulder. More sapphire punched the same translucent patch the first string had thinned. The ward failed there with a dry sound. A bead of red answered the light.

  Raxel sealed the space.

  The dome fit the passage like a kiln lid—tight, bright, air-starved. Heat crawled across stone in a tide line at chest height. The salamandrike set a heel to the bare floor and pulled cold outward in a glittering fan until the shell crazed, then shattered in a ringing breath. Steam rammed the stairwell mouth open and made flags ripple along the wall. Raxel, for the first time, gave ground he hadn’t chosen to surrender.

  The rat’s lungs drew deeper than seemed possible for an animal built to scavenge.

  [Roar]

  The close wave ripped nails out of old wood and shook soot loose in a choking fall. The reactive layer on Raxel’s shield flickered and died, then tried to reassert itself in patches like torn parchment. His elbows snapped again under fresh cold hands. A second wraith had uncoiled from the salamandrike’s guard without announcement and fixed his joints with competent malice. The knight’s blades arrived a half-breath later and set their crossing at the throat. The points held off the skin by a hair.

  Raxel broke them away with a floor-level shove, not elegant but honest. The pulse shoved bodies, steam, and loose brick in a radial. He burned vertical, cleared two meters, and salted the air with another pinch of stone’s slow death. The salamandrike slipped aside without a grain touching him. The rat, mid-launch, took the edge across both forepaws. Stone flowered again. It did not complain; it re-committed to momentum and came on like a thrown anvil.

  Raxel dragged a wide line of heat across the lane. Fur crisped. The rat plowed through anyway, a banner still stuck to one bristled ear like a child’s cape, ridiculous and stubborn and perfectly wrong for this hall. The sight was absurd enough to sting.

  The stair run to the lower kitchens presented itself as an afterthought—two short flights, a sagging landing, rails that had never been meant to hold this much history. Raxel went down backward, half-skip, half-glide, dropping force on each stone to break pursuit. The rat reached the top step, opened its chest, and tore the iron anchors free with another breath. The stairs slithered. One of Raxel’s feet caught air where a tread ought to have been, and he stabbed a rune into the landing to give himself something to stand on. It obliged by erupting. All three fell three stories in a jumble of stone and broken meals.

  They landed in the service spine of the palace. Hooks swung. Two kettles dropped and burst like iron fruit. Steam shot sideways and made the corridor a white river for a count of three. Raxel rose with ash along his cheekbones and heat-haze wavering off his shoulders; his mana-lines sputtered like wet fuses along his forearms. He raised his staff with form only because he had taught his body to do it tired.

  The rat hauled himself out of a rack of pans, both paws still narrow-banded with stone. He set his weight forward, dragging a line that squealed on flagstone. The salamandrike emerged through the steam in a straight line, reset his guard, and cut twice, not fast, not slow, simply inevitable. Leather parted at Raxel’s hip. A second line opened high on the forearm. The staff caught the third; the fourth never came, held in check by discipline.

  Raxel made the corridor ugly. Cinders spattered and stuck. He slid right, left, rose a handspan, fell a handspan, bought inches with will. The rat hammered the same breach above the clavicle again with measured light until the flesh beneath was honest about its vulnerability. The knight pressed with an executioner’s care, blades crossing tighter, elbows locked, every joint stacked.

  Raxel looked for options and found stone, steam, and a rightward hall choked with a fallen pier. Left was clear enough to run, not clear enough to live. He pushed a breath and reached for heat one more time. It came, but without weight. The staff felt light in the wrong way.

  He stood in a world he had cracked open with his own hands and took stock the old way: lungs, limits, line. Shield: shattered. Strength: there, but spent. Cuts: three, deep enough to matter later. Now, he needed to move the blade points a thumb’s width off his throat and survive the next half-second.

  The rat’s chest swelled, a glow building behind the teeth for one more set of precise bolts. The salamandrike’s wrists eased in infinitesimal, telling ways that said the final line had been found and fixed.

  Raxel’s jaw set. He squared his shoulders to the steel and the animal and drew what heat remained into his bones. The knight’s twin edges angled for the cut that would end argument. The rat held a line that would put light through the breach and into the heart in the same beat.

  They were one motion away.

  I’m dead, Raxel’s mind murmured as it saw the blades of the Salamandrike arc towards his throat.

  And yet still, when he needed it, his staff came up in his hands.

  He felt the crack of its oaken length at it met the dual blades of the Salamandrike and broke apart in his hands, sparks of flame drizzling out its innards like blood from a severed corpse.

  He let go. He tried to feint to the right, but while the Salamandrike was forced to reorient himself, his partner had no such issues.

  Raxel felt a force grip his arm, and then came the distinctive crunch of bones breaking, cracking, and splitting apart as Theo’s teeth ripped his arm clean out its socket. The pain was immense – beyond any intensity he’d felt in his life. But behind it was purpose. Resolve.

  He dropped to the floor, rolled to the end of the room and spilled his life essence across the carpeted ground. Gasping for air, desperate to activate any and all healing reserves he had left, he found the eyes of the green knight and his steed – his arm still being munched on in the ratling’s mouth.

  He saw them, and they shared a knowing look.

  Because in the instant he’d felt his arm come loose, Raxel had primed his one last trick.

  Theo’s eyes bulged as the arm in his mouth began to glow. Above, Sir Leifblade of Sanctum managed to give a single croaked command to his noble steed just before Raxel whispered his own to his severed limb:

  “Implosion.”