I was thrown back by the blast, flying head over heels and landing hard. Fortunately, I ended up falling down onto something softer than the sheer rock around me, so I wasn’t too badly hurt.

  ++”He fell on me. I was badly hurt.”++

  That left me in better condition than most everyone else. Most of them were groaning and rolling around, which at least conveyed that they were alive.

  Except for Gruin. Gruin didn’t seem to have even been hurt by the impact, and he was already on his feet by the time I’d gotten up to one knee.

  “Where is it!” The Grynkori roared, his eyes a pair of erratic whips, jerking from one place to another. The bridge was impossible to see, covered in dust, thrumming with unseen power. Glowing. It was glowing, cherry-red across its entire span like there was magma running through it.

  Something moved in the dust, a Demon’s limb. Winds came up and carried the debris out of the air to reveal Morlo stumbling back from it, blood running down one side of his body as he stared up at the towering monster.

  But the Demon was hurt, too. It must’ve been. I could feel the touch of its magic all around and sense somehow that it had been diminished in the conflagration of power. It was dimming down.

  Not fast enough. A blade materialised in the Demon’s hand, forked and tongued, licking the air, thirsting for blood. It lunged after Morlo and his shield wasn’t half as strong as the last. I threw out my own power, hardening air just as Morlo had without even realising how. The impact made my teeth rattle from twenty paces back and sent the Thaumaturge flying to crash into me. Both of us went down.

  Gruin remained up, and Vara stumbled to her feet next. From the corner of my eyes I saw a lance of flames run across the bridge and smash into the Demon, doing approximately nothing. Gruin was bounding towards it shrieking like a lunatic, about two seconds away from dying, when Cedwin took his shot for the monster’s face.

  Again, the bullet did virtually nothing. Distracted the creature, though, maybe through its sword swing off enough that Gruin was clipped instead of struck directly, lifted off the ground and sent into the far wall…thirty paces back. His armour had a rent deeper than my fist in it.

  Not often you see an impact that could send fifteen stone flying like that, and less often still do you see one capable of laying Gruin out so thoroughly. I wasn’t too concerned with his injury, for the time being my mind was thoroughly captured by the fear of what had caused it. I raised my hands and threw a blast of my own Thaumaturgy at the Demon, watching it fizzle against it like water flicked into a bonfire.

  Morlo was still down, trying to move but apparently as thoroughly incapacitated as any person could be. Vara was throwing her power at the Demon, Cedwin his bullets, Il’vanja backing away and reading to sprint alongside the Arvharest trainees. Devyn had his sword ready, but he looked too petrified with terror to use the damn thing.

  We were going to die.

  Making that realization always tended to focus me, and that moment was no different. I thought fast, changed strategies faster, and this time when I channeled my Thaumaturgy into another clumsy effort at propelling force out as a barrage of thrown rocks, I wasn’t aiming for the Demon.

  Stone, red and weakened by the intense heat, broke easily against the cooler projectiles impacting it. I could never have broken through so much hard material normally, not under my own power. That’s the magic of temperature though. Right at that moment of impact I saw sparks shoot out and glowing debris break off from the surface. Maybe a gallon of material was sheared away instantly.

  Vara is smart. She figured out what I was doing and joined in, a secondary blast of force that, if anything, did even more damage than me. The surprise came from when Cedwin dropped down to his knees and started working on his pack. “Buy me a minute!” he roared.

  I looked at the Demon, approaching fast now.

  “Fucking how?”

  He never answered. Arrows plinked off the Demon where shortbows were hastily raised among the Arvharest trainees, but they did no more than would a few hailstones. I managed another blast of force and timed it well with Vara, allowing us to irritate the Demon really hard instead of just mildly.

  It still kept coming.

  That was when Morlo finally recovered, stumbling to his feet and sending the Demon back a step with waves of rolling power that would’ve broken every bone in my body and liquefied most of the meat. It bought us all a few seconds, maybe, as the air chilled and froze around him to fuel the assault, the old man began to tremble, to pale, to fall.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Cedwin finished whatever he was doing and straightened up. He chucked what I then realised was an explosive charge to land right where Vara and I had been blasting the bridge, and it went off with all the energy of a falling cannonball. Black powder, compressed properly, can blast through rock easily enough already.

  You can imagine what pounds of the stuff did to that weakened bridge.

  A flash of light, an expansion of dirty smoke and a tremble along the stone. The bridge fell apart as one great section split off to tumble down into the void. The Demon fell with it, shrieking and roaring words that I’d never heard, yet somehow knew the meaning of. I’m not sure how gravity seized a thing as irrational as that, but I’d have died had it not.

  Morlo watched the Demon fall, standing there and panting. As soon as it disappeared from his sight he collapsed fully.

  On the other side of the bridge, and on the other crossings far along the gaping abyss, wretchlings began to gather.

  “We need to go!” I snapped, dragging the old man up and carrying him as we all started on a run. I was doing a lot of running lately, and with Morlo’s weight added onto the resistance of my armour I was actually among the slower parties in our group.

  I wasn’t the only one dealing with dead weight though. Two of the trainees were sharing Gruin’s form between them. That slowed them as much as Morlo slowed me, and we were all tired from the running done so far.

  But we were also close to what looked like an exit. Stairs leading up, not down, and what felt suspiciously like a breeze from them. The hope gave us all a final burst of speed.

  We were in another tunnel, a tight corridor of jagged stone with protruding edges that threatened to flay us as we tore past them at full tilt. The wretchlings at our heels were drawing closer. They were fresh, unladen, and apparently just as motivated to kill us as we were to not die. They were cutting our thirty pace lead down steadily. How many minutes before they reached us? Maybe two, I estimated. And if we were half as deep as I suspected, it’d take longer than that before we were outside.

  Even once we were, would they really stop?

  “Cedwin!” I snapped, “do you have enough powder to bring this tunnel down?”

  He looked at me like I was mad. In fairness, most people who asked that would have to be. Mad or terribly ignorant about what black powder is and does. In fairness, I was certainly ignorant. Cedwin was probably worrying about the tight confines and how they’d squeeze its shockwave down after us, about the reverberations in the corridor. Hearing loss. About fractures sent through the stone and collapsing more than just the one section. Entombing us.

  Me, I was more worried about the wretchlings. I know Cedwin came around to my way of thinking after a moment, though, because he started digging out more powder. His hands were fast, practiced. Too slow. Too inexperienced. I threw Morlo—threw, because to my arms the old man weighed little more than a bundle of rags—into the nearest person and turned.

  “I’ll hold them off,” I barked, “Cedwin, focus on the charges and for fuck’s sake give me some warning.”

  It was simple mathematics. We couldn’t escape by running, so if I tried that my odds of survival would be no greater than if I stayed here and fought. Worse, actually. And that made my decision no decision at all. The wretchlings reached me, five paces ahead of Cedwin.

  But in a tunnel this tight, they could only come on so fast.

  I said hello with a jet of flames borrowed right from the gushing heat of their endless bodily tide, torching the first few to come anywhere near me and giving the ones behind them pause. Fine by me, any seconds they spent hesitating were seconds my guts weren’t being removed.

  Those seconds were nice, and I savored them before the time for killing and dying came back to lunge at me. A wretchling jumped higher than I’d have expected, propelled up by his comrades. I booted him hard in the chest and sent his tiny body flying five or six body-lengths to land atop the ones behind him.

  More wretchlings were already surging ahead before it fell though, trying to catch me unbalanced and succeeding. My plate armour turned away their shitty spears like two sets of steel magically interconnected being stabbed by creatures the size of small children. I kept chopping away, and found my own weapon meeting less resistance than that.

  Funny, you almost feel bad fighting wretchlings. It’s a bad idea to do so because, again, most of them are cunts. It’s not that they can’t help themselves, they just choose not to. I wouldn’t have worried about that either way back then though, my concerns were chiefly on not being stabbed to death.

  And I was slowly failing at that goal.

  There were just too many. Cramped or not, this tunnel couldn’t deny them all. They were so small that the bastard things came on in threes and fours where humans would’ve barely managed pairs, slashing and stabbing, scraping at the steel of my plate. Getting lucky. Getting lucky a lot. There was chainmail between the solid steel plates, all of it Thaumaturgically bound to another set kept safe back in Arvharest. Chainmail isn’t nearly as tough as an unbroken plane of metal though, I knew I was taking a chance every time I let even one of these weak blows hit it.

  Scraping steel on steel and the pressure was building all over me, more blows landing as more wretchlings pressed forth, forcing me back, threatening to bowl me right off my feet. Not good. If I went down now I’d never get up again, that’s the sort of fight this was.

  And I would never have lived to see another one if Cedwin hadn’t finished his work right that instant. Just lucky enough to survive, as always.

  “DONE!” He roared, his warning hitting me harder than if I’d taken a blow from every wretchling there at once. I was moving before my mind even consciously registered what he’d said.

  Five steps, one dive. Even with all the armour I managed to move myself a good twenty paces with all said and done. One yard less and I’d have been crushed to death when the roof collapsed.

  Instead, I got to watch all the wretchlings experience that fate. The explosion had been more fearsome than I’d imagined, and immediately went a long way to explaining why Cewdin had been so hesitant to bring it about.

  What explained the rest, what made me stop wondering at all, was the sound of stone cracking and shivering even after it ended. Of a cave-in imminently approaching.

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