"It… spoke?" Gelemia's voice was barely more than a break in the air, her eyes locked wide. The monster's tongue kept twisting, tasting each word like it was reacquainting itself with language dredged up from a rotten throat.
"Hahaha… hahahah! At last… I have returned!" The laughter detonated from deep within, a ragged roar that made the air in my lungs crack like thin ice.
Something was wrong. This wasn't just a beast, its movements, the way it looked at us, even the tilt of its voice… was far too familiar.
"…Father?" Crokard whispered, the word bleeding out of him as if it pulled a vein from his heart.
"Yes, Crokard. Exactly…" The voice shifted, low now, almost gentle, wrapped in venom. "I have returned. And thanks to you… I have a new body. I became one with Pesi."
"How…?" The question slipped from me before I knew it, my fists curling tight.
"This is the will of the gods," it said, each syllable licking the air like a slow flame. "They chose me… made me their heir. But you… you destroyed my village. Because of you, I was devoured. Because of you, this place rotted, dying piece by piece. And you think you can escape? No… the gods have seen your filth. They have judged you. Punished you… as they punished me. And for that…" Its eyes burned, bottomless wells kicked with fire. "…I will have my revenge. I will erase you… and every drop of blood in your cursed veins."
Silence.
Without hesitation, Gelemia pulled her bowstring taut. "Enough." Her tone was flat, but her chest rose and fell like storm tides. A rain of arrows tore loose, but the chief only laughed low, a wet, bile-tinged chuckle. Thick slime burst from his hand, fanning into a translucent, sticky curtain that swallowed the arrows whole, their bite reduced to a insect against steel.
Then he moved, fast, sliding over his slick rails straight toward her.
I saw it, and in that second, my legs carved into the dirt. Breath pulled in, stride wide, my body cut forward like I was chasing my own heartbeat. My hands swept along my arms, gathering every black sphere clinging to me, compressing them into one mass at my fist. It grew, hardened, football-sized but heavy with centuries of brewed vengeance.
I drove it in with everything I had. The detonation that followed wasn't just sound, it was like punching a bullet back into its barrel. The blow smashed into the salamander's temple; scales twisted, its body whipped away and crashed into the ground, sending cracks racing like lightning through stone.
It rose. Slowly. No stagger, only a poise as if the earth itself braced beneath its feet. One clawed hand brushed along its head, checking its flesh, making sure the meat was all still there… and then it turned on me.
The roar that came wasn't just noise, it was a spear of air and hate that drove straight through my chest.
It lunged for me, faster than it had ever moved.
Crokard didn't wait for a call. His spear cut the empty space between, his stocky frame crashing into the monster like a wall trying to stop a tide. But the impact was nothing, it was like striking a wet cliffside. The thing shifted only a hair before slamming him back with pure, raw force.
In an eye-blink, the pig-goblin was airborne, hurled skyward like a child's ragdoll. In the air, streaks of gleaming slime caught the dim light, mapping a glistening rail that the chief, now truly no longer human, followed without pause. He skimmed his own track with the precision of a hunter who had already tasted the blood.
The moment he closed in on Crokard, only a few heartbeats away, his jaw yawned wide, the motion sickeningly familiar. Like a beast reclaiming the livestock it had once called its own.
"Father… damn you!" Crokard snarled, breath ragged and tearing at the seams. He waited, letting his body drop just a little farther, feeling for that perfect pinch of gravity, the split-second window where force would mean something.
Then, without warning, he drove the spear clutched in his hands straight into the monster's open maw. Wood met flesh. Iron braced against those bone-crushing jaws.
Blood burst from deep within the salamander's throat, hot, reeking of iron laced with slime.
Its roar ripped the sky in two. The chief beast twisted, then whipped Crokard with the bladed end of its tail. The blow flung him earthward, his body hammering into the ground with such force the soil split in a spiderweb of cracks, dust leaping madly into the air.
The creature landed in a shiver of muscle, then turned. In its grasp, Crokard's spear, which to it was nothing more than a toothpick to scrape goat meat from between its fangs. With a flick, it hurled it away; the weapon bit into the earth just steps from where I stood, quivering, humming a silent, heavy note.
"Do you still not see," it said, its voice thick, as though spilling up from a pit of burning oil, "that you cannot defy the wrath of the gods? You… are damned. Fated to die. Here. Now."
Its tongue slid out, long and glistening, fire-light rippling along its slick surface. "This is judgment. From me… the Tongue of Fire."
Before I could move, Gelemia's voice tore through the distance. "Hold him! Seven minutes, Fionn!"
I spun toward her. "Seven?"
"Yes! I have a plan! Seven minutes is all I need. However you do it… stall him. I'll buy us time too!"
Her words slapped their way into my skull. Seven minutes? Holding this thing back that long was like carrying a mountain on your spine while running along the ocean floor. But what choice did I have? Refuse and we all die; try and maybe, just maybe, live.
"Tongue of Fire, huh…" I muttered, my lips curling into a smile too thin to be called one. My gaze locked on the monster, and it met mine without a blink. That black, depthless stare clamped down on me. I knew then, this field… this whole village… already lay inside his dominion.
His slime was everywhere, lapping the dirt, varnishing the walls, strung in the air like thick glass threads.
Seven minutes… long enough for him to circle the world three times if he wanted.
Then, something pulsed in my head. A thought.
My hand rose, brushing against one of the slime filaments drifting in the air. Sticky. Slick. Alive.
If it could only move along this track… then—
I stared at the clear bubbles Gelemia had wrought in my palms, each now the size of a football. The black spheres I'd shaped felt denser too, their power thrumming in my grip like something alive, straining to be loosed.
But this time, I didn't need one massive sphere. I needed many, small, quick, scattered wide enough to creep into every path he'd laid.
The monster watched me with that hunger, an appetite that seemed to eat the air itself. From the lattice of slime streaking earth and air, it shot forward, swift and certain, like an arrow loosed from an invisible bow.
Gelemia's arrows hissed from afar once more, but they were too slow; the salamander had climbed into a speed that no flesh-and-bone creature could ever match.
My fingertips still brushed the slime strand before me. The space between us shrank, one meter… half… no more than the span of my foot.
And in that razor-split instant before impact, I snapped my fingers. The vibration from the black sphere leapt into the slime.
It should have crushed me, I knew it would, but instead, at the last moment, its trajectory twisted.
The beast skated past, smashing into the house behind me; the wall gave way like a brittle eggshell, raining splinters and dust into the air.
It rose again, fury rolling off it in visible waves, as palpable as smoke over a fire.
I vaulted back, each landing deliberate, touching every slime-track I could find. Sometimes only for a heartbeat, sometimes holding longer, letting the pulse sink deep.
"Running is useless!" its voice tore across the gap. "As long as my rails are here, I am faster!"
This time, I didn't move.
I stood my ground at a safe distance. The spheres in my hands spilled upward, crawling over my wrists, climbing my arms, wrapping across my chest. The spheres at my feet slithered higher, sealing around my waist.
Within seconds, my whole body was clad in black sphere, sleek, seamless, leaving only a gap to see, to breathe.
The chief coiled through the air again, threading the slime rails with impossible ease, as though gravity had forgotten his name.
But my hands began to move with him. At first, I couldn't track his dance, his speed breaking every rhythm I knew.
Then, bit by bit, his path began to echo the twitch of my fingers.
He didn't notice it yet, but his body was moving to my tempo now, the rails conducting not just him, but me, right into his pattern.
I reeled him down toward the earth, slamming his head into the ground until the soil itself wailed.
He rose again, defiant as stone, and I let him spiral back into his aerial waltz.
When he lunged, I slid my stance half a step, he missed, forced into a wide loop to circle back. He came from behind, jaws yawning wide.
And there, waiting for him, I did it again.
"What are you doing, you wretch?!" the chief roared, his gaze raking across the square now flooded with his own slime. "This place… it is my web. I should be limitless!"
But as his eyes traced the glistening rails more carefully, he saw them, the tiny black dots drifting within every line. Pulsing. Creeping through the veins of his domain.
Dots he knew all too well.
"You! Miserable human! You dare taint the tracks of a god?!"
I only answered with a thin smile.
He lunged again, muscle, scale, and mucus cutting through the air like a hurled spear. But this time my wrist turned sharply, seizing hold of his path, hurling him sideways. His bulk slammed into another house; the roof split and collapsed like an old coconut dropped from a tall tree.
The monster reeled, but I knew, this wasn't about hurting him. It was about keeping him occupied, ramming him into wall after wall until Gelemia finished whatever she was preparing. How long I could keep this up... I had no idea.
The chief still rode his slime rails, refusing to abandon the patterns he'd carved into the village. My hands rose, ready to twist his course again, to sling him into the next ruin.
But this time, he leapt.
Like a train tearing itself free of its own tracks, the salamander severed his glide and dove straight for me. His jaws yawned wide, enough to swallow me whole.
Reflex beat fear, I sprang sideways just as those fangs clamped shut.
KRANG
The sound rang like a hammer of steel striking a tombstone.
My heart pounded against my ribs. He'd torn free of my rhythm that quickly.
"Why?" His voice climbed, oozing mockery. "Your little trick not working anymore?"
I ran, over rooftops, down to the ground, weaving through gaps in the wreckage. Gelemia's arrows streaked from above, some swatted aside, some missing entirely, but each one stole a fraction of a second from him. Just enough to let my breath limp on.
A bubble drifted into my periphery, one of Gelemia's. Bigger now than my own head. Thanks to it, my black spheres clung intact, unbroken. But if it burst… that would be the end of me.
The chief didn't let up.
I kept twisting his path, sometimes forcing him to smash clean through another house. But now, he shifted tactics.
He vaulted, slamming into a different home, then spun in a vicious snap-turn straight toward me.
I sprang high, driving my fist into the top of his skull. The shockwave rippled the air… but the result—
"Not a scratch…" I snarled between my teeth.
His tail whipped around, this time the hit was clean. And perfect.
Gelemia's bubble burst and with it, every layer of black sphere that had sheathed my body shattered into nothing.
The blow flung me like a rag in a storm. I smashed through not one but three houses before coming to a halt. Chunks of wall and timber rained down around me like a slow, heavy hail.
"Fionn!" Gelemia's voice reached me, distant, broken filtering through the ringing in my skull.
"Ah, hell… that's cracked," I hissed, palm pressed to my ribs. The pain was a white-hot spike, clean and unforgiving, one rib down for sure, no need for a second opinion.
Blood welled at the corner of my mouth, iron and bitterness flooding my tongue.
Worse still, the thin black spheres I'd sown across the square were already vanishing. Not evaporating… but unraveling, collapsing the moment that bubble burst.
And without the black spheres… I had no control over his rails.
Bad.
Really, really bad.