“Move!” Alarion shouted, though it was far too late.
Anastacia met the strike head-on.
Or tried to.
Her saber flashed in a precise silver arc, blade turned to either slice through or deflect the descending maw. It was a perfect parry against a human opponent, and utterly useless against something with such malleable biology. Steel screamed against scales, the snake head evading by inches with a twitch of muscle and magic, then racing in for the kill.
Its fangs sank deep into an outstretched arm, newborn glands drowning the limb in toxin. Its eyes glowed with satisfaction, its purpose for existing fulfilled with a single killing blow.
New Condition! Fiend Birth Toxin – Fatal.
Or at least, what would have been a killing blow to anyone else in the 238th.
[Orphan’s Fortitude] has taken effect. The secondary effect of [Orphan’s Fortitude] has taken effect.
[Fiend Birth Toxin - Fatal] has been resisted due to user’s VIT score. Condition reduced to [Fiend Birth Toxin - Severe].
“Take its head. Now!” Alarion ordered, his free hand clamped down hard against the snake’s head, pinning it into his arm with its own fangs while it writhed and struggled.
Anastacia cut him off with a slash. No flourish, no battle cry—just a brutal, angry stroke that severed the head with finality. It twitched and sagged in a wave of black blood, its fangs still rooted in Alarion’s arm until the dead weight finally dragged it free and it struck the floor with a wet plop.
But the fight wasn’t over.
The severed limb whipped backward in a frenzy, crashing to the floor and sending lumps of flesh and chips of stone flying in every direction in its death throes. But it wasn’t truly dead. The severed flesh was already scabbing over and regenerating, the impossibly long arm retreating toward a main body that was itself beginning to shift and flex like someone waking from a deep slumber.
“We need to get you to a healer,” Anastacia said without preamble.
“I will be fine,” Alarion told her. He had one hand clamped over the deep wound in his left arm to stem the worst of the bleeding as [Superior Mend Flesh] worked to repair the two massive puncture wounds the exchange had left in his arm. “It will take a minute, maybe two in order to—”
“Look at your Status, Sergeant! That thing is a False Heart,” Anastacia interrupted angrily. “My bodyguards will cover us, but we might still be able to save the limb if—”
“I will be fine,” Alarion repeated, lifting one hand to show her [Alarion’s Rejection]. “This ring makes me immune, but if it bites you—”
This time she cut him off with a laugh.
“Mothers, no wonder you took the bite. I thought you were a brave suicidal idiot, but you are just an idiot.” Anastacia turned away from him, still laughing as she advanced on the waking monster. “You really thought my family would send me out here without drowning me in enchantments?”
He... had, actually. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that he hadn’t even considered it.
Not that he intended to admit it.
“I’ll take the left,” Alarion told her, crossing in front of her to put the fiend on his healthy side as they closed the distance. “Watch for the arm to regenerate, and—”
With a tremendous tearing of flesh and cracking of bone, the False Heart peeled itself free of the wall. Strings of purple and black meat dangled from its body—along with the remains of its unholy umbilical cord—some still attached to chunks of pockmarked stone. Its torso heaved as it took its first true breath, and it gave one full body shudder, as though revolted by its own existence.
Then it came down on all fours, a grotesque parody of some great hunting cat that surged forward clumsily with unsettling speed. Its two clawed arms spread wide as it pounced, but it was the ragged stump where the snake-limb had been that struck first, lashing out gracelessly toward Alarion like an enormous whip.
“Orphan!”
“I see it!” he snapped with annoyance.
The False Heart was no Or’Valde; it wasn’t clever or subtle. It attacked on pure animal instinct—a whip crack to pressure him, a swipe to drive Anastacia back, and a second to disembowel him. Any melee fighter in the 238th could read its amateur intentions, even if the weaker ones might struggle to keep up with it.
Alarion stepped into it instead of away, his high strength and oversized weapon batting away one attack after the other. He swung from low right to high left with ugly efficiency, the sharp edges of his mace leaving nasty gashes in the fiend’s flesh wherever the two clashed. Then he was on the attack, Isha smashing into the creature’s lower ribs with a sickening mixture of squelch and crack. Bones caved, and blood poured down Alarion’s hand as the monster was thrown sideways.
Right into Anastacia’s offensive.
Where he’d done his damage in one attack, she struck in a flurry. Her rapier darted in, targeting vulnerabilities wherever she could find them. Wrist, elbow, and shoulder, she left three deep punctures before it even knew she was attacking, each wound purposefully aimed to reduce its ability to return the favor.
Not that it wouldn’t try.
It answered pain with fury, refusing to retreat in the face of the twin assault.
There was no pretense of caution as the monster exploited its bulk and reach. Anastacia’s blades cut several more weeping holes in the creature’s foul meat, but it bulldozed through them as if she were no more than a biting gnat. Its claws raked sparks along the floor after a narrow miss, and it filled the room with a tremendous crash when it tried—and only narrowly failed—at pinning Alarion to the wall with its weight.
For Alarion, it was a familiar fight.
His oversized weapons sometimes provided him a substantial reach advantage, but they did nothing for his stature. Alarion was small, and many of his opponents—particularly fiendish opponents—were larger than he was and more than willing to throw their weight around. He’d fought half a hundred brute-type fiends that fought similarly to the False Heart, but the challenge went back even further than that—to his first days of training.
He’d fought a ‘dragon’ just like this, back when he knew nothing at all about fighting. Elena’s fiction had used a tail instead of a snake arm for its reach attack, but the sensation of fighting the False Heart like this was almost... nostalgic. No spells, no skills, just an oversized weapon and an enemy he could read like an open book.
Sadly, the fiend didn’t seem to share his sense of wistful longing for days gone by, and he was soon forced to shatter its deformed leg in two places when it came a little too close to landing a hit on Anastacia.
It didn’t roar; it didn’t cry out in pain or anger. Like all its kind, the False Heart was eerily silent as it reoriented to focus on the man who had wounded it. That was a mistake, but not a fatal one. Yes, turning its back on Anastacia allowed her to sever all of the tendons in its remaining leg, but that only shortened its life expectancy from ten seconds to five.
As the fiend faltered, Alarion took two brisk steps forward and launched his mace into the fiend’s chest like a thrown javelin.
Isha struck the beast in its mid-section, the impact alone forcing the beast to double over—presenting Alarion with the perfect target for a follow-up as he raced in only a few steps behind. He activated his [Hilt Wrap of the Lost and Recovered] to reel the weapon back to his hand, then swung his whole body through a tremendous uppercut that tore away the entire front half of the fiend’s head.
It wavered on its broken legs—as if deciding how best to proceed—then slumped to one side.
“The core should be in the torso. Somewhere near where the heart would normally be,” Alarion said with the sort of exuberant calm that followed a good workout. “Taking the kill on this will not be worth much to me, but it is at least novel for you.”
The way she looked at him, Alarion wasn’t sure if she was thankful, confused or angry.
Rather than try and puzzle it out, he said, “One hundred and nineteen, by the way.”
“Hmm? Oh. Right. One hundred and thirty-two,” she replied.
“Excuse you?”
“Is there a problem?” Anastacia asked, trying—and failing—to keep a grin from her lips.
“You were in the seventies when I asked you to stop counting.”
“Mhmm,” she readily agreed as she pressed the tip of her rapier against the torso of the fallen fiend. She thrust once, scowled in annoyance, then thrust a second time against considerably more resistance.
Your ally has slain [False Heart– UCL 141]
“Two hundred and four,” Anastacia corrected.
“I have been keeping count since you stopped, and you did not kill...” Alarion frowned suddenly as the obvious answer occurred to him. “You were not keeping an accurate verbal count, were you?”
“No,” she admitted without hesitation.
Alarion opened his mouth, ready to argue—to denounce her—but the words failed to materialize. It was the quintessential Vitrian lie, that of omission. She’d never said she was keeping count of her kills; she’d just started saying numbers at a certain point, and he’d made the obvious assumption.
“If it makes you feel any better, I do not think I would have beaten you,” she said, turning her attention to the True Heart and its erratic, frightened beats. “I am not sure if you were humoring me out of pity, worry, or if you were just feeling lazy, but if you were going to keep us neck and neck the whole way, then the only way to win was to throw off the count.”
“I—” Alarion met her eyes and tried not to scowl as he chose his words. She wasn’t lying about the count; no Vitrian would stoop to something so low, but he couldn’t tell if she was humoring him—giving him an out to keep his pride—or if she really didn’t realize that he’d been taking it seriously. He also couldn’t tell which was worse.
“Something wrong? Orphan?”
Alarion took a deep breath, then gave up.
“What kind of introduction am I giving, Madam?”
“Something nice. Short. A few hundred words.” Her smile was sickeningly sweet as she added, “And you can give the men the full day. No reason to punish them just because you cannot count.”