Neris Vale arrived at the abandoned quarry looking like someone had invited him to a funeral and then forgotten to tell him whose.
He stood on the broken stone road near the upper ridge, clutching his worn notebook against his chest with both arms. His hair was messier than usual.
Then his eyes landed on Roan.
Roan was sitting on a flat rock with one leg crossed over the other, eating a piece of dried meat.
Neris swallowed. “Thank you for bringing me here…”
Roan gave him a thumbs-up.
Neris flinched.
Eiden watched the exchange and immediately knew this was going to be difficult.
“So,” Eiden said. “thank you for coming here.”
Neris nodded quickly. “Yes. I—yes. You said it was important.”
“It is.”
“How important?”
“How much time until the Wave?” Eiden asked quietly.
A panel appeared.
Time remaining until the next Wave: ~23 hours
Current survival chance: 35%
Eiden stared at the number for one second too long.
Then he looked back at Neris.
“Pretty important.”
Neris went pale. “What does that mean?”
“It means we’re going to kill some things.”
Neris blinked. “What things?”
“Bad things.”
“What kind of bad things?”
“The kind that need killing.”
Neris’ mouth opened.
Roan pointed his dried meat at Eiden. “He does that.”
Neris turned toward Roan. “Does what?”
“Answers questions in a way that makes you wish you hadn’t asked.”
“That’s not true,” Eiden said.
Roan raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, it is a little true.”
Neris hugged the notebook tighter. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”
“You’re here because you use Ice,” Eiden said.
“Yes…”
“And Ice is useful.”
Neris looked as if Eiden had accused him of something.
“Useful?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“For what?”
Eiden pointed at the quarry basin below them. “Slowing things. Single targets. That’s what I know you can do.”
Neris blinked several times. “Those are still very broad categories.”
Roan hopped down from his rock and brushed dust from his sleeves. “And I’m Roan Veyr. Spatial mage, battlefield cartographer, occasional genius, permanent victim of other people’s urgency. But i like helping.”
Neris stared at the hand Roan offered him.
Roan smiled.
Neris slowly reached out.
The moment their hands touched, Neris panicked.
A thin layer of frost flashed over Roan’s fingers.
Roan yelped and pulled his hand back. “Cold! Cold! That is cold!”
Neris’ eyes went wide. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to— I get nervous and sometimes the mana leaks and I—”
Roan shook his hand rapidly, staring at the frost coating his knuckles. “Control your mana man.”
“I am really sorry!”
Eiden sighed. “Good start.”
Neris looked like he wanted to disappear into the ground. “I can leave.”
“No, no,” Eiden said immediately.
Neris froze.
Roan rubbed his hand against his coat. “No, no, stay. If my fingers fall off, I’ll name them after you. And took your fingers as revenge.”
“That’s not helping…” Neris said weakly.
“It was not supposed to help. It was supposed to make me feel better.”
Eiden clapped once.
Both of them looked at him.
“Okay. Introductions are done.” Eiden turned and walked toward the ridge overlooking the basin. “Come on. I’ll show you the battlefield.”
Neris followed carefully, stepping around every suspicious mark in the dirt. Neris looked at him. “There are glowing orange marks everywhere. Are they dangerous?”
Eiden pointed down into the basin. “First rule. Do not step on anything glowing.”
Neris pointed at the crescent of marks in the basin. “These are traps?”
“Fire Mines.” Eiden said.
Neris looked at him. “You made a new spell?”
“Yes.”
“Successfully?”
Eiden paused.
Roan laughed.
Eiden slowly turned his head toward Neris, then pointed at the narrow passage. “If anything comes through here, I need it slowed down. If it moves too fast, it’ll run past the mine pattern. If it jumps, climbs, scatters—whatever—it ruins the layout. I need it forced into bad choices.”
Roan pointed at the same passage. “The Throat.”
Neris frowned. “Why is it called that?”
“Because things go in,” Roan said, “and hopefully do not come out,” Roan said.
Eiden stood and pointed toward the basin floor. “You said you can slow things down.”
Neris nodded carefully. “Yes.”
“What I don’t know,” Eiden said, “is whether you can block a path.”
Neris blinked. “Block a path?”
“An Ice Wall,” Eiden said. “Can you make one?”
Neris looked down at the basin, then toward the narrow passage.
His fingers tightened around the notebook. “Maybe.”
Roan slowly turned his head. “What an answer.”
“It’s not a no,” Neris said quickly. “I learned the structure. I can form a wall. I just… don’t usually use it.”
“Why not?” Eiden asked.
“Because if I make it too thin, it breaks. If I make it too thick, it eats too much mana. If I panic, it comes out crooked.”
Roan lifted a finger. “Important question. How crooked?”
Neris looked at him. “Once it trapped my own foot.”
Eiden stared.
Roan lowered his finger. “I respect the honesty.”
Eiden pointed at the passage. “Then we test it. If you can block exits, good. If you can’t, we use your slowing spells and single-target attacks.”
Neris swallowed. “I can try.”
“Are you sure?” Roan asked.
Neris swallowed again. “Yes.”
Eiden nodded once.
By the time the countdown reached thirty minutes, everyone had taken their positions.
Roan stood on the broken platform to Eiden’s right, one hand resting near the silver dust mark he had drawn for their first fallback.
Neris waited near the mouth of the Throat, half-hidden by the stone wall, both hands flexing at his sides. Frost clung faintly to his fingers.
Eiden sat on a flat stone overlooking the basin and tried to breathe like a normal person.
His chest felt too tight. His hands were cold even though fire waited inside him. The Ember Core pulsed behind his ribs, small and warm, but it did nothing to stop the shaking in his fingers.
He curled his hands into fists.
Stop shaking.
His hands kept shaking.
He wanted to make a joke.
Something stupid. Something like, Well, if I die here, at least I won’t have to take Magic History again.
The joke came, then vanished as quickly as it came.
Because he remembered dying.
He remembered the wall. The noise. The gun in his hands.
The black sea climbing over itself to reach him.
He remembered the creature that reached him.
The spear-like limb. The hot pain in his stomach. The sudden emptiness after the pain became too large for his him to understand.
He remembered being lifted.
Eiden pressed one hand against his stomach.
He didn’t remember who that man was as a person. He didn’t know whether he was that man—or truly Eiden. They had both died the same way. The scar on his stomach and back was still there.
Well, at least Eiden didn’t have to deal with the Swarm. Well… he is now.
Now he was here, on a different world, with magic instead of a gun, friends instead of soldiers, Fire Mines instead of grenades.
And he was still afraid.
He was not alone this time. That should have helped. But it did not.
Eiden swallowed, but his throat felt dry.
“How much time?” he whispered.
The panel appeared.
Time remaining until the next Wave: ~20 minutes
Twenty minutes.
That was nothing and forever at the same time.
Eiden stared at the number until it blurred.
The wind moved through the quarry, soft and cold. It carried dust across the basin in thin sheets.
Eiden looked down at his palms. If he survived tonight, he promised himself he’d never complain about having to study magic again.
No—that was a lie.
He would absolutely complain about studying.
Time remaining until the next Wave: ~10 minutes
Ten.
Only ten.
Roan finally spoke, voice low. “Still nothing?”
Eiden looked up at the sky. “Have some faith, Roan.”
His knees felt weak for a moment. He hated that. He hated that his body knew before he did. Hated that fear could make a person smaller from the inside.
He walked to the edge of the platform and looked down into the basin.
This was the place.
If the system was right, the first Wave would emerge near him.
Near his soul.
What a stupid thing to be anchored to. His soul. He barely understood his own name, and apparently his soul had become a disaster beacon.
He wanted to be angry, but fear was stronger than anger.
Eiden forced himself to breathe.
He was afraid.
Time remaining until the next Wave: ~5 minutes
Eiden clenched his teeth.
Time remaining until the next Wave: ~1 minute
His heart hammered so hard it hurt.
Time remaining until the next Wave: ~ Thirty seconds.
Something above them pressed against reality.
The air grew heavy.
Eiden could taste metal.
He looked at the sky. It was clear, blue.
Then a line appeared.
Thin. White.
“What the…?” Roan whispered to himself.
It cut across the sky without sound. Then the line cracked open.
He formed a Big Fire Bolt in his hands.
The crack widened. The edges twitched, bent inward and outward at the same time. The air around the line darkened, then brightened.
A black shape dropped from the crack, legs curled tight against its body. It hit the basin floor with a hard, wet crack that echoed between the quarry walls.
For half a second, it did not move.
Then its eight legs unfolded. Six main legs and two shorter hooked limbs near the front, twitching like little blades.
It was the size of a cat. Its shell was black, glossy, and segmented, with a low spider-like body and a narrow head that seemed to have no eyes until several dull red points opened across its face.
Its mouth split sideways, and its mandibles clicked.
“Ew! I hate spiders!” Neris shouted, peeking through his fingers.
Another one fell.
Then three more.
Then ten.
Then thirty.
Black shapes poured through the crack, small bodies hitting stone, dust, and old quarry roads. Some landed badly and cracked open, twitching in dark fluid. Most did not. Their shells absorbed the fall with a sickening flex, and they rose almost immediately, legs scratching against stone.
A panel appeared in front of Eiden.
Wave Initiated
Enemy Count: 50
Detected Entity: Lesser Swarmling
The creatures did not immediately charge. The moment their legs unfolded, they lowered their bodies close to the ground and began moving in sharp, twitching circles, mandibles clicking rapidly as if they were tasting the air with their mouths. Their heads jerked left and right, red points flickering across their faces. They were searching. Smelling. Listening. Whatever sense they were using, it was fast and aggressive, and Eiden understood with a cold certainty that if he waited until all fifty of them found him at once, the first seconds of the fight would belong to them.
So he did not wait.
The Big Fire Bolt between his hands was already complete. He had started forming it the moment the crack opened, because for once in his life he had decided not to wait until something tried to bite his leg before preparing a spell. His arms trembled from the pressure of holding it, but he forced his breathing steady and aimed not at the creatures themselves, but at the section of the basin where Roan had marked the densest mine cluster. If he threw directly at them, he would kill some. If he threw at the mines, he could turn the whole area into a furnace.
He threw the Big Fire Bolt.
The spell flew down into the basin, leaving a red-orange trail behind it, and struck the ground just beside the first mine cluster. For a tiny instant, nothing happened except the fireball spreading across the dirt. Then the first Fire Mine triggered. The ground flashed orange. The explosion swallowed the nearest group of Swarmlings before they even finished turning their heads. The blast immediately kicked burning fragments into the second mine, and Eiden felt his stomach tighten, afraid that the entire field would chain at once. But the spacing held. Only the first cluster detonated, exactly the way they had planned. Three controlled explosions rolled through the basin one after another, each one tearing apart a different part of the swarm. Black shells cracked open. Hooked legs flew through the air. Several creatures were thrown against the stone walls, leaving dark smears behind them.
“Take that you little bastards!” Eiden said, unable to stop a grin from pulling at his mouth.
The surviving Lesser Swarmlings finally found him.
All at once, every remaining head snapped toward the broken platform. Then they rushed forward together, skittering so loudly the entire basin sounded like a sack of knives being shaken. Some headed for the ramp. Some sprinted toward the Throat. Some climbed over the smoking corpses of their own kind without slowing at all. Eiden’s grin vanished. The first attack had worked—yes—but it hadn’t frightened them. It had only told them where he was.
“Neris!” Eiden shouted. “Floor!”
Neris, who had been frozen for exactly the wrong amount of time, snapped back to himself and thrust both hands toward the entrance of the narrow passage. Pale blue mana spread from his fingers, racing over the stone in thin, branching lines. Frost crawled across the ground, then thickened into a slick, uneven layer of ice. But when the first Swarmlings reached it, three of them immediately slipped, crashed into each other, and tumbled into a twitching pile of legs.
“It works!” Neris shouted, sounding more surprised than anyone should sound about their own spell.
“Of course it works!” Eiden shouted back. “You cast it!”
“I know, but still!”
Eiden brought his hands together again. They were shaking with fear. This time, he didn’t aim for the mines. They couldn’t afford to use all of them, that was the most important part. The first explosion had been good, maybe too good, and it was tempting to throw everything into the basin and watch the whole place burn. But if this was only the beginning, then spending all sixteen Fire Mines in the first minute would be the kind of decision future Eiden would hate present Eiden for making. And present Eiden already had enough enemies without adding future Eiden to the list.
He aimed at the open ground ahead of the advancing creatures, just far enough from the nearest mine that it would not trigger unless the blast spread wrong. The bolt struck the stone and exploded in a wide burst, catching four Swarmlings at the front and throwing two more sideways. One rolled directly toward a mine marker, and Eiden’s heart jumped into his throat, but the creature stopped short.
“Don’t waste the mines you little shits.” Roan called.
“Wise words!” Eiden shouted.
Roan raised his right hand and drew a short silver line through the air. The line flashed and snapped forward horizontally across the basin, low enough that it did not try to cut the world in half, but high enough to meet the bodies of the climbing Swarmlings. It struck three of them across the legs. The cuts were not deep enough to kill all of them, but that was not the point. One creature lost two legs and flipped over. Another stumbled directly into the path of the one behind it. The third collapsed against a rock, mandibles snapping at empty air. Roan immediately made another short cut, then another, each one smaller and flatter than the last, slicing across legs, joints, and the thin gaps under their shells.
“What a disgusting way to use a spell…” Neris said.
“If it’s working, don’t fix it, right? It’s one of my failed spells turned out good!”
The battle became strangely controlled after that. Eiden stood above the basin and sent Big Fire Bolts into clusters that moved away from the mine patterns, careful to keep his blasts away from the buried traps unless a group grew too dense to ignore. Neris kept spreading ice across the paths the creatures wanted to use, making the ground slick, uneven, and treacherous. Whenever the Swarmlings tried to rush through the Throat, their legs slid out from under them, and those that dug their hooks into the stone found themselves slowed just long enough for Eiden to burn them or Roan to cut their legs out from under them. Roan kept his Space Cuts small and horizontal, using them like invisible blades sweeping across the swarm’s movement instead of trying to kill everything with one attack.
One Lesser Swarmling broke through the ice and climbed the right side of the passage wall, moving with disturbing speed. Neris saw it late and stumbled back, raising a hand. An ice shard formed between his fingers, but his aim shook. Before he could release it, Roan’s Space Cut flashed across the creature’s front limbs, and the Swarmling dropped from the wall like a puppet with cut strings. It hit the frost-covered ground, slid several meters, and slammed into another Swarmling hard enough to send both spinning.
Neris stared at it, then at Roan. “Thank you.”
Roan did not look away from the basin. “Don’t thank me yet. I need to say something heroic, right?”
“Please don’t say anything heroic yet!” Eiden shouted.
“That means I can say it later.”
Eiden threw another Big Fire Bolt into the center of a group trying to circle around the mine line. The explosion caught five, killed three outright, and sent the remaining two tumbling into the icy section Neris had prepared. Eiden wanted to follow with another spell, but stopped himself when he saw how close they were to a mine marker. Instead, he used a normal Fire Bolt, then another, burning them one by one. It was slower. It was less satisfying. But the mines stayed buried.
He checked the battlefield quickly. The first mine cluster had been spent. A few outer mines were still safe. The Throat mines were untouched. The fallback line near the broken ramp remained ready. Good. They had already killed a large portion of the wave and still had traps left. For the first time since the crack opened, Eiden felt something close to confidence.
The remaining Swarmlings tried one last rush toward the left ramp.
Roan saw it first. “Left!”
Eiden turned and shaped a Big Fire Bolt between his hands, forcing the core tight so the blast would not spread too far. Neris dragged his frost across the lower stones of the ramp, and the front Swarmlings slipped just as they began to climb. Their bodies piled together, legs stabbing at stone, at air, at each other. Roan’s horizontal Space Cut flashed through the mass, cutting legs and cracking shells. Eiden threw the Big Fire Bolt into the center of the pile.
The explosion rolled upward along the ramp, contained by stone on both sides. It burned hot and fast, but it did not reach the nearest mine. When the flames faded, only twitching black shapes remained.
For several seconds, none of them moved.
Eiden kept his hands raised, waiting for another rush, another body, another clicking sound from behind the smoke.
Nothing came.
The basin was filled with cracked black shells, curling smoke, and patches of melting ice. The wave was done. The plan had worked.
Roan slowly lowered his hand. “That went… suspiciously well.”
Neris, breathing hard, leaned against the stone wall and swallowed. “Please don’t say that.”
“How much mana do you have?” Roan asked to Eiden.
Current Mana: 41/80
“Half,” Eiden said, more to himself than to the others.
Roan looked at him. “Half of what, man? I don’t know your mana cap.”
“Forty,” Eiden said.
Roan blinked. “Wait. Forty is half?”
“Yes.”
“So your max mana is eighty?”
“So you’re a math genius as well.”
“How is your mana cap that low? You throw fireballs like crazy.”
“How would I know?” Eiden said, throwing one hand up. “Do I look like I came with an instruction manual? I woke up with holes in my memory, holes in my body, and a woman in my head who answers questions only when she feels like it.”
Roan opened his mouth, then closed it. “What?”
“Don’t you worry,” Eiden said. “But it is really all I have.”
Neris slid down the wall until he was almost sitting, then immediately forced himself upright again. “Was that all of them?”
Eiden looked up at the crack. It was still there. Thin, white, and silent.
“Probably.”
A panel appeared.
Phase 1 Cleared.
Proceeding to Phase 2.
Enemy Count: 80
The crack widened again.
Eiden shouted at the air. “Why didn’t you say there were phases?!”
[This is the first time we’ve been able to experience the Swarm’s first influence on the world. We’ve never been this close before. We’ll learn with you. All you can do is try your best. Good luck.]
“Good fucking luck!?”
“Eiden, Neris—to your positions!”
Roan’s shout cut through Eiden’s anger like a slap. The crack above the quarry was already widening again, and the air beneath it twisted as if something enormous on the other side had just exhaled. Eiden bit back the curse in his throat, turned away from the panel, and ran along the broken platform toward the upper ridge. Staying still had worked during the first phase because most of the swarm had fallen into the basin, right where the plan wanted them. That was over now. Smaller tears had begun to split open around the quarry, thin white cuts appearing above the left ramp, near the old road, and over the stones around the Throat.
Neris pushed away from the wall and ran toward the mouth of the Throat. He nearly slipped on his own frost, recovered with a panicked little hop, and threw both hands toward the narrow passage. Pale blue mana spread from his fingers and crawled across the stone in jagged lines. He was not trying to cover the entire ground anymore. Instead, he placed patches of ice where the creatures would have to step/
Roan vanished in a fold of silver light and appeared on the lower road beside the basin, then vanished again and reappeared on a side ledge above the broken ramp. He kept moving before the creatures even landed, touching the silver dust marks he had drawn earlier, checking whether the fallback points were still clear, and kicking loose stones into better positions like a man arranging furniture during a house fire.
Black shapes dropped through the cracks in thick clusters, slamming into the basin, the upper ledges, the left ramp, the old quarry road, the stones around the Throat, and even the broken platform Eiden had just left. Some landed badly and split open, twitching in dark fluid, but most unfolded almost immediately. Their legs scratched against stone, their mandibles clicked, and their dull red eyes flared across their faces like tiny sparks in black glass. The sound filled the entire quarry, not as a single roar, but as hundreds of tiny scraping noises layered on top of each other until the whole place seemed alive. Eighty had sounded bad when the panel appeared. Watching eighty bodies hit the ground made the number feel far worse.
“Left ridge!” Roan shouted.
“Right ramp!” Neris shouted almost at the same time.
“Why are there so many sides?” Eiden shouted back, already forming a Big Fire Bolt between his hands.
He did not throw it at the first cluster he saw. That was the hard part. There were so many targets now that every direction looked urgent. A group was already rushing across the basin toward the remaining mine line. Another group was climbing over the lower rocks near the right ramp. Several had fallen near the upper road and were skittering toward Roan’s ledge. Eiden wanted to burn all of them. His hands wanted to throw the spell immediately. But if he started throwing at every movement, he would spend his mana in seconds and still leave half the swarm alive. So he forced himself to aim at the place where the most bodies would be forced to pass. The Big Fire Bolt flew into the lower basin, struck the ground in front of a cluster, and exploded just wide enough to push them sideways without touching the closest mine.
The blast killed some, injured more, and drove the rest into the path Roan had marked the night before. Three Swarmlings stumbled over one another. One slid directly onto a buried Fire Mine. The ground flashed orange. The explosion took the whole cluster, eight or nine at once, and sent black shells tumbling into the air. Eiden barely had time to feel satisfied before another group came pouring over the left ridge.
“Too many coming from above!” Roan shouted.
“Then stop them!” Eiden shouted.
Roan drew a short silver line and snapped it horizontally across the ledge. The front three Swarmlings lost their footing and tumbled down the slope into the basin, knocking several others off the path. Roan immediately blinked away from the ledge before the ones behind them could reach him, appearing near a pile of loose stones he had prepared earlier. He kicked one through a small portal, and it shot out from the side of a ramp, striking a Swarmling in the shell and knocking it sideways into another mine. The explosion lit the ramp orange for a moment.
“I meant to do that!” Roan shouted.
Neris was forced out of the Throat when a group landed behind him. He turned too late, saw four Swarmlings coming over the stones, and threw a line of frost under their feet. Two slipped. One dug its hooks into the ground and kept moving. The fourth jumped. Neris stumbled back, and fired an ice shard at the one in the air. The shard hit its front leg instead of its head, which was apparently enough to ruin the creature’s day because it spun sideways and crashed into the wall. The one that kept moving reached him anyway. Neris raised both hands and created a small Ice Wall between them. It came out crooked, as expected, and the Swarmling slammed into the thicker side hard enough to crack it. Neris yelped, but the wall held for the one second Eiden needed.
A Fire Bolt struck the creature from above and burst against its shell. It fell back smoking.
They moved again. The quarry that had seemed too large when they were planning now felt barely large enough. They used the basin first, drawing the largest groups across the remaining mines, then abandoned it the moment the swarm began climbing from too many directions. They shifted toward the left ramp when the creatures tried to use the slope, then cut back toward the old road when another cluster dropped from a smaller tear above it. Neris froze the lower stones so the creatures lost speed, Roan sliced across the front line with small Space Cuts, and Eiden dropped a Big Fire Bolt into the cluster only after enough of them gathered to make the mana worth spending. Every spell had to matter now. Every Fire Mine had to take more than one creature. Every patch of ice had to slow a group. Every step had to lead somewhere useful, because standing still for even a few seconds meant the swarm started turning the quarry into a closing fist around them.
One group broke through toward the broken platform, nearly reaching the first fallback mark. Roan saw it and swore so sharply that Eiden glanced over despite himself. Roan blinked to the mark and fired off three quick Space Cuts in a row. The first took legs. The second cracked shells. The third was so thin Eiden almost missed it, but it sliced through the lead creature’s mouthparts and made it collapse into the others. Eiden used the pileup to trigger another mine with a normal Fire Bolt, and the blast cleared the platform approach.
“That was too close,” Roan said.
“Then don’t let it happen again!” Eiden shouted.
“Oh, wonderful, I hadn’t considered that strategy!”
The next several minutes blurred into heat, ice, dust, and motion. Eiden felt his mana draining like water from a cracked bucket. He threw three more Big Fire Bolts, each one placed carefully to avoid wasting the mines until there was no other choice. One blasted a cluster off the broken ramp and sent burning shells rolling down into the basin. Another struck the old quarry road, collapsing a cracked stone lip and dropping half a dozen Swarmlings into a pit they had used earlier as a fallback marker. The third he saved until the swarm bunched near the Throat, and when it exploded, the fire rolled between the stone walls like a furnace door had been kicked open.
He used regular Fire Bolts to pick off Lesser Swarmlings that got too close, but even those started to feel costly. Each spell came a little slower, not because he had forgotten how to cast, but because his body was starting to fail him. His palms throbbed. His shoulders burned. The heat that usually felt like part of him now felt like something he had to wrench out by force.
Neris was the same. He kept moving along the side road, then down into the basin, then back toward the Throat, following Roan’s shouted directions and Eiden’s fire. His ice became less like a clean spell and more like desperate handwriting across the quarry floor. Several times he nearly fell. Once he actually did fall, sliding on his own ice and landing hard on his back. A Swarmling lunged at him before he could get up, and Roan blinked in, grabbed his collar, and pulled him sideways so violently that Neris left a frost smear on the stone.
The last mines ran out faster than Eiden wanted. One had to be spent when twelve Swarmlings poured through the Throat at once. Another went when a cluster tried to climb the broken ramp and Roan shouted that if they reached the upper road, they’d get behind them. The final mine was used when a group of eight slipped around the basin and headed straight for Neris, who had both hands out and no time to run. The mine was close—too close to waste, too valuable to spend, but necessary to save.
Eiden threw a Fire Bolt at the ground beside the marker.
The explosion swallowed all eight.
“There!” he shouted, breathing hard. “That was the last mine!”
Roan appeared beside him in a flash of silver and pulled him backward just as a Swarmling lunged through the smoke. “Wonderful! I love being out of traps while surrounded by enemies!”
“Do you want me to make more?”
“Can you?”
“No!”
“Then why would you ask?”
“I wanted us both to feel worse!”
After that, the fight became pure survival. Just three exhausted mages using the entire quarry as a weapon because they had nothing else left. They ran through the collapsed ramp and let the loose stones slow the swarm. Neris iced the gaps between rocks so the lighter Swarmlings slipped when they tried to jump. Roan blinked between ledges and cut legs whenever the front line got too close. Eiden used the high ground when he could, then abandoned it when the swarm climbed too fast. They crossed the basin, retreated through the Throat, circled the broken platform, then dropped down to the lower road Roan had once labeled as a bad idea. The swarm followed them through all of it, pouring over the quarry like spilled ink, never stopping long enough for the three of them to breathe properly.
One Swarmling came from the side faster than Eiden expected. He saw the black blur at the last second and tried to twist away, but his legs were too tired and his body answered too late. The creature’s hooked front limb struck his side and tore across his ribs like a hot knife dragged through cloth and skin. Pain flashed white behind his eyes. Eiden stumbled, slammed one shoulder against the stone wall, and nearly dropped to one knee.
HP: 10/20
It had taken half of his health with one hit.
The Swarmling lunged again, but Eiden shoved a normal Fire Bolt into its face from barely a step away. The blast threw it backward and left it twitching on the lower road, its mandibles opening and closing as smoke rose from its head. Eiden wanted to say something clever, but breathing hurt, so he settled for glaring at the corpse.
Eiden burned two more Swarmlings with normal Fire Bolts, then tried to form another Big Fire Bolt for the last dense group coming down from the upper road. The spell began between his hands, flickered, and collapsed into sparks.
His chest went cold.
“Right…z” he whispered.
He tried again.
Nothing.
A panel appeared.
Current Mana: 2/80
Eiden stared at it while three Swarmlings rushed toward him across the cracked stone.
“Bad time,” he said. “Really bad time.”
Neris raised both hands from behind him, teeth clenched, and forced one final sheet of frost across the ground. The ice caught the front Swarmling’s legs and sent it sliding into the second. The third jumped over them both. Neris tried to form an ice shard, but only pale mist gathered around his fingers.
His eyes widened.
“I’m out,” he said.
The jumping Swarmling came down toward him.
Roan blinked between them.
His Space Cut was so short it barely looked like a line at all, but it struck the creature across the mouth and front limbs. The Swarmling crashed into Roan’s shoulder instead of Neris’ face, knocking him sideways. Roan hit the ground, rolled with it, and kicked the creature off before it could bite. Eiden, with no mana left and absolutely no better plan, grabbed a loose rock with both hands and smashed it down on the Swarmling’s head.
Once.
Twice.
The shell cracked on the third hit.
Eiden stared at the dead creature, panting.
Neris sat down on the stone, pale and trembling. “I have no mana left.”
“Same,” Eiden said.
Roan lifted one hand weakly. “I have… some.”
Eiden turned his head slowly. “Some?”
“Half, maybe.”
Eiden stared at him. “You’re only at half? Man, you’ve been spamming those cuts and blinks like there’s no tomorrow.”
“Spatial efficiency,” Roan said, still lying on the ground. “Also, I have a better mana cap than you, apparently.”
“If we get through this, I’m going all-in on this whole ‘mana cap’ thing.”
“Don’t get dramatic. If anything goes absolutely wrong, I’ll blink all of us out of here.”
“We can’t let it come to that, Roan.”
“Yeah, I don’t even know what these little shits are,” Roan said, kicking a Lesser Swarmling’s corpse. “I don’t want to let these bugs live. I’m going to pest-control the hell out of them.”
One final Swarmling dragged itself from under a fallen slab near the basin. Half its shell was burned, two legs were missing, and one side of its head had been cracked open, but it was still moving. Slowly. Stubbornly. Toward them.
Then Roan groaned, lifted two fingers from where he lay, and drew the smallest Space Cut Eiden had ever seen. The silver line flickered forward, almost lazy, and cut through the creature’s remaining front legs. The Swarmling collapsed, mandibles snapping uselessly against the stone.
Eiden picked up the same rock and threw it.
It hit the creature’s head with an ugly crack.
The quarry went silent.
A panel appeared.
Phase 2 Cleared.
Proceeding to Final Phase.
Enemy Count: 21
Detected Entity: Lesser Swarmling Alpha
Additional Entities: 20 Lesser Swarmlings
Current survival chance: 5%