For a moment, Owen didn’t think the man would listen. Then he pulled up, breathing hard, and returned to his place, his face set and his knuckles white around the shaft of his spear.
Something had changed in Owen as well. Until then, part of him had been measuring the fight against everything he had learned in training: distance, configuration, timing and energy. Some quiet part of him had still been trying to prove that Edith had been right to clear him. That was gone now. He needed this creature dead before it killed anyone else.
It didn’t make him any stronger. It made him pay closer attention.
That was when he noticed that the steel was moving.
When the Ferrers swordsman attacked the left flank with fire, the metallic sheen thickened there. When Gareth went for the neck, the plating shifted toward him. When the Mowbray heir threatened its face, the skull and the front of its shoulders hardened more heavily than anywhere else. The boar was extraordinarily durable, but it was still choosing where to put its protection.
"The steel moves," Owen called. "It goes wherever we push hardest."
Gareth tested it at once. He threatened one side with lightning while the Mowbray heir attacked the opposite flank, and Owen watched the plating slide across the boar’s body to answer both of them, thinning everywhere in between.
"He’s right," the Ferrers swordsman said. "Keep making it cover somewhere new. Stop hitting where it’s already thickest."
They changed tactics together.
The Ferrers swordsman and Owen kept fire on one flank. They didn’t expect to melt the steel. They were forcing the boar to keep spending its power protecting the burned flesh underneath. Gareth used his speed and his lightning to strike at the existing wounds whenever the plating moved away from them. The Mowbray heir used his wind at carefully chosen moments to spoil the line of each charge and open new angles, and the older spearman stopped trying to block the boar outright and braced only long enough to disrupt its footing or stop it from turning cleanly.
Owen built his blades around what the others created. A rapier thrust pulled the plating toward a narrow seam. A sudden change to the arming sword kept him dangerous when the boar crowded him. The greatsword came out only when there was enough room and someone else had already forced the boar to commit.
The fight went on long enough that exhaustion became a real limit.
The Ferrers swordsman’s flames grew smaller each time, and Owen could hear his ragged breathing between exchanges. The older spearman couldn’t harden his stance as strongly as before. Owen felt the strain building in his core after so much fire and stopped spending energy on attacks that had no opening. Gareth was still the strongest of them, but he was also carrying the largest share of the pressure, drawing the boar away from the others again and again.
Eventually, the damage they had been building began to show. The boar was bleeding heavily from several places. One plated section along its neck and shoulder had been scorched, pierced and struck so many times that cracks now ran through the metallic surface. Its breathing had turned into a harsh, wet rasp, and one of its front legs was no longer landing cleanly.
It was still dangerous. When Gareth’s lightning tore into the weakened shoulder again, the boar let out another enraged bellow and threw itself into its hardest charge yet, straight at him.
SKREEEEEE!
Gareth began to move. This time, the rest of them were ready.
The Mowbray heir drove his spear forward and released the strongest burst of wind he had used all fight against the side of the boar’s face. He couldn’t stop something that heavy, but he forced its head over and pushed one foreleg onto a worse line.
The older spearman planted his feet, stone climbing through his spear and his stance, and drove the point into the boar’s damaged flank as it passed. The impact threw him backward with a grunt, but the spear held long enough to stop the boar from correcting at once.
Gareth took the opening they had made and thrust straight into the cracked section of plating. Lightning exploded through the damage with a sharp crack, the boar squealed, and the steel flickered and split further.
Kzzzzt!
Owen saw his chance.
He changed to the greatsword as he moved, and he committed to the attack only after the boar had already been forced off its line. He held his fire back until the last moment, the same way he had against Edith, then drove a concentrated burst through the blade as it struck the damaged steel.
CRACK!
The plating finally broke with a sound like snapping iron. The greatsword tore through the cracked section and opened the flesh beneath it, and the boar shrieked.
It wasn’t enough to kill the boar.
It jerked violently and swung its head toward him. A bloody tusk was already coming around, and Owen was too close to recover the greatsword safely. He didn’t try to force the heavy blade through a recovery he couldn’t make. It changed in his hands to the arming sword as he slipped inside the path of the tusk.
He drove the shorter blade into the wound his last strike had opened in its neck and released the last heavy burst of fire he could safely control.
The boar convulsed, and a gurgling squeal tore out of its throat. Owen wrenched the sword free and threw himself back before its weight could come down on him.
The boar stumbled several steps and tried to stay on its feet. Then it crashed onto its side with a deep thud that shook the ground under his boots.
BOOM!
Nobody celebrated. Gareth kept his épée raised, and the Mowbray heir watched the boar’s legs. Owen badly wanted to bend over and catch his breath, but he backed away instead, because the creature had already surprised them too many times. Only when Gareth stepped close and checked its eye, and nothing in it reacted, did any of them accept that it was over.
The silence afterward was nothing like the silence before the fight. Owen could hear his own breathing, the faint crackle of fire dying out in the torn vegetation, someone coughing through the dust, and the slow, wet sound of blood dripping from the boar onto the leaves.
Then he looked toward the tree where the younger spearman lay, and whatever relief he had started to feel went out of him.
Before anyone could go to him, something crashed through the trees deeper in the forest.
All of them reacted at once. Gareth turned toward the sound with lightning still crawling weakly along his épée. The Mowbray heir raised his spear despite his exhaustion, and Owen forced his aching arm back into a guard. After what they had just survived, nobody was going to assume the forest was safe just because one monster was dead.
Branches snapped one after another, each time closer. Someone was coming fast.
The first figure broke out of the trees, and it was Edmund.
Lord Mowbray was right behind him, with several soldiers following, all of them with their weapons ready. Owen understood at once. They had heard the boar.
His father came into the clearing ready to fight, and then he stopped.
Owen watched his father’s attention move across the clearing. It went over the shattered trees, the churned earth and the scorched vegetation, then the enormous boar lying dead in its own blood. It went to the Mowbray soldier lying motionless at the foot of the tree, and to the five of them still standing, battered and exhausted, with Gareth still holding his épée. Finally, it came to Owen, standing near the carcass with blood across his clothes and his sword.
Something changed in Edmund’s face when his eyes reached him. Owen couldn’t tell what it was.
Beside him, Lord Mowbray had seen his fallen soldier.
Neither of them said anything yet. The fight had been won, and the cost of it was lying in plain sight between them.