The battle was going.

  Calvin wouldn’t say it was going well. But it was going.

  “Whole thing’s a fake-out. We misdeployed. Wrong objective.” He stared at the brilliant orange beam of light that had erupted from the factory lands a couple miles south of his hill. No one was talking to him. That was normal; he was used to being ignored.

  But people were listening to him. That was something Calvin still hadn’t gotten used to. After a moment, he shut up and watched the beam. Then he cleared his throat. “Alright. Listen up. The West End people ended up on, of all places, the west flank. That’s where the Fireborns are strongest. I need runners. Get the message to the folks on the east flank. We’re going to push in, try to take prisoners if we can, and see if we can wrap up the city hall and casino. That’s where most of our weight’s going. If we break through, push west.”

  A slight humming filled the air as a technical pulled up. A single man got out of the transport, looking pale. “Hey, Mr. Rollins. We ran out of shots, and they sent me back here,” Pedro said.

  “Perfect. Just perfect. No artillery support, either. We should have kept Tori in reserve,” Calvin muttered.

  Then he focused again. “You were close to that light beam. Any chance of us getting there?”

  “No. I had to take the long way around to avoid the Fireborn. That whole side of Whiting’s a mess,” the man said.

  Calvin cursed. Then he nodded. “Fine. You’re on ambulance duty with that thing. Our people first, then the Fireborn—but only if they’re unconscious. You. You’re with Pedro as a guard. Keep him safe, and don’t bother with medic shit. Just get people back to Jessica and the rest of the healers.”

  The air smelled like coal and diesel fumes. The Summersent’s flames roared, and Taven’s laughter echoed from the row of grain silos.

  I understood. The boss wasn’t fightable. At Level Thirty-Five, the fight would have been solvable. The monster wasn’t that big at Level Thirty-Five. But whatever Taven had done, it had more than doubled the Summersent’s strength—and more importantly, its size. It was gigantic; it dwarfed the grain silos and the all-but-derelict ship that was slowly pulling up next to them.

  My skin blistered. I shouted and swung the Siege Hammer, just in case. It passed right through the flame and smoke monstrosity, and I bit back a curse. Fire rippled out from it across the prairie.

  “Give up yet?” Taven asked. “No? So be it. The Crusade will see your bones melted.”

  I blinked. Then I glared. The Summersent’s blaze roared, and I focused on surviving the tide of embers and ash that rolled over me.

  The next time I looked back, Taven—and the barge—were gone.

  “Ideas?” I coughed. Zane was still with me; he stood on the concrete pad next to the massive row of silos, watching as the Summersent pulled massive chains of smoke from the racing fire that was currently cooking the grass and flowers we’d just enjoyed.

  “No. Let me think. Maybe.”

  “Maybe? We need more than a maybe!” I yelled.

  The Summersent’s blaze flickered. It guttered like a candle without air. For a few seconds, I thought the fight was over. And then the smoke shape of its body collapsed. My vision blackened, and soot filled my lungs and battered at my eyes. Zane yelled something—I didn’t know what—and a moment later, the heat redoubled as the Summersent’s body washed over us.

  Then, as the smoke sank to the ground, the monster reappeared in all its flaming glory, in a section of unburnt grass.

  “We need to kill this thing!” I said.

  But how? The Summersent couldn’t be harmed or interacted with. It was Ephemeral. And it wasn’t Elite. Whatever the Fireborn Crusader had done, it wasn’t a temporary buff. No, this looked like a permanent empowerment. He’d sacrificed both of his Flamecallers to do it, too.

  And we hadn’t even seen the monster’s Elite, Myriad state—or its lair.

  “Idea.” Zane stared at the monster. I glanced at him, then back at the towering behemoth. “We need to remove Ephemeral.”

  “How do we remove Ephemeral?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. You’re the problem-solver.”

  His voice was both calm and empty and angry and frustrated at the same time, but he was right. I was the problem-solver. He’d given me a solution—and now, he was trusting me to figure out how to make it happen. It was just like replacing a piston in an engine. It was easy to say ‘Yeah, the piston is the issue,’ but a lot harder to know how to fix it.

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  So, Ephemeral.

  The Summersent reared up again, then crashed down. This time, I ran for the grain silos. They were the only cover that wasn’t on fire. Then I stopped. Grain silos. That could mean flour. And flour could mean…

  That was one option. The other was the chains of smoke reaching from the prairie and feeding into the boss. If we could cut those off, we could—possibly—starve the monster to death. A fire with no fuel had no choice but to go out. Surely, the Summersent was no different.

  I chose both.

  “Zane, get behind it. Stay in the black. Light fires everywhere you can out there. It’ll get bad for a while, so get ready!”

  “What?” Zane yelled.

  “Light everything on fire!”

  “Sure. If you say so.” He moved, heading west into the field, fire sprouting up behind him as he went. The smoke poured into the air—and then into the chains feeding the Summersent. I winced as the flame elemental’s size ballooned, but we didn’t have another option. Not a long-term one, anyway.

  I ran the other way—toward the grain silos.

  And the boss, looming overhead, followed.

  The Summersent’s heat touched the grain silo behind me.

  The explosions rocked the entire dungeon.

  I’d gone shooting with a few friends, and once or twice with my dad. He’d used the rifle to cull sick livestock occasionally, too. He’d had to, to keep disease from spreading and wiping us out, like that one time with the pigs. But I’d only heard something like this in movies, and those sounds were nothing like the real thing.

  In the movies, an explosion was a roaring, echoing sound that bounced off the walls and cracked like a firework, and a shockwave that people could survive by throwing themselves to the ground or hiding behind a wall. In the movies, they were cinematic, bright-orange things, then towering columns of smoke. In the movies, the heroes could hear immediately after, unless it was funnier if they couldn’t.

  This was nothing like the movies. It came in three waves.

  First, the pressure. It slammed into me hard enough to flatten me against the concrete and force the air out of my lungs. The entire Summersent reeled back as the wave of air hit it. Its smoke blew across the prairie and engulfed Zane a moment before the shockwave blew him to the ground, too.

  Then the sound. It hit me a split-second later. My eardrums both popped, then ruptured. That was a mercy; it meant the massive, never-ending ripple of ‘Whumps’ as the grain silos slowly exploded was only deafening instead of head-shattering.

  And finally, the heat.

  I’d thought the Summersent’s heat was overwhelming. This was worse. Thousands of tons of wheat, flour, and corn went up in the space of about twenty seconds.

  The only thing that saved me was the pressure. It got a grip on me and tumbled me into Calumet Lake. The sludge that coated its surface was on fire—an unholy mix of oil, tar, and chemicals that burned my throat, but it wasn’t as bad as the shore. I took a deep, acrid breath and went under. Then I waited. Counted to ten, then twenty. Then thirty.

  Then, and only then, did I resurface into Hell. If it could burn on the shore of Calumet Lake, it was burning. If it couldn’t, it was melting. I couldn’t find Zane through the black haze that hung thick in the air.

  But I could find the boss.

  Summersent: Level 80 Elite Boss

  It was down.

  No, not down. Split. Where there’d been one single pillar of smoke and flame and burning eyes, now there were dozens of smaller ones. We’d pushed the boss into its Elite phase—and its Myriad one. And, as I looked at its nameplate, something else stuck out. It wasn’t Ephemeral anymore. We could hurt it. We just had to figure out how.

  The Siege Hammer wasn’t the solution. It might work, but it’d be slow and messy. No, at this point, it was up to Zane, not me. I’d have to get creative to hurt the boss. All he’d have to do was—

  One of the Summersents disappeared, winking out like a candle in a glass bottle. Zane had done exactly what I’d expected him to—he’d grappled with the fire elemental’s source of heat, just like in the Stronghold dungeon, and taken control. Then he’d cut it off.

  The Summersents were Myriad. But Zane got a hold of each of them, one at a time, and squeezed with his magic, and one by one, the swarm of elementals vanished along with the boss’s levels, until…

  Boss Defeated: Summersent

  Dungeon Delvers who were not in the arena will receive fifty percent of your team’s experience.

  Level Up! 70 to 72

  The last Summersent winked out, and I stared at the three purple items for a moment. Zane shook his head. “Later. We need to cross the lake somehow.” He pulled all the loot into his own inventory. I nodded.

  I stared at the sludge, then felt the residue it had left all over my body. My skin felt like it was peeling, and even as I put four points into my Charge stat, the itching grew more and more until I wanted to peel my gauntlet off and tear at my own arms to fix it. I pushed the feeling down as best I could. “I don’t think we can swim it,” I said.

  “No. So then what?”

  The lake was at least five hundred feet across, and at first, I couldn’t think of any way to make it before the ponderous barge did. Then I got a stupid idea. “I think we need those items.”

  “Fine. Take a look.”

  Tome of Flameheart (Epic)

  User learns the spell Flameheart, which allows the caster to create a superheated point in their body without suffering damage. While active, Flameheart can act as a catalyst for fire Ritual spells. The tome remains intact, but loses its ability to transfer magic after use.

  Perfumer’s Bottle (Epic, Charge 25)

  +6 Mana, +2 Awareness

  The bottle’s user can aerosolize a spell, producing a trap that triggers when an enemy walks into the scented area.

  Flamescarred Curiass (Epic, Charge 10)

  +12 Body

  The wearer may use the Curiass twice a day to temporarily become resistant to heat damage. This does not offer protection from burning, merely from the effects of heat. This armor acts as a set of plate mail in all other respects.

  I stared at the loot for a moment. Then I nodded. “This’ll work.”

  “It will?” Zane asked.

  “Sure. You take the Tome and the Bottle. I’ll take the armor. Just, listen—we’re going to build something. It’s going to be messy, but it’ll work to get us across. I’ll need you as a power source, though. Think you can do it?”

  “Yes, Hal,” Zane said quietly. He stared across the water at the receding barge. I didn’t look directly at his eyes, but I didn’t have to. They were burning.