I was used to the dark.

  Every boss room started the same way. In darkness. I assumed it had been designed that way to keep most of the team from walking and setting up traps and stuff around the room while they waited for the timer to count down for the boss to emerge.

  I didn’t have to wait in the darkness long before I heard Justia’s voice.

  “LIGHT!”

  It was a simple spell, but one we’d learned would trigger the fight to start.

  The room illuminated and I was glad that I hadn’t walked around. We were on a circular island. There wasn’t a beach that slowly faded beneath the water. It was a straight drop.

  The island itself wasn’t that large. Less than twenty feet, if I had to guess, which gave me about eight good steps to go from one edge to the other. There wasn’t a lot of room to be fighting in. If there had been walls, then we could have at least moved to the edges, but since stepping off the edge meant sinking into who-knows-how-deep water, we were going to have to be even more vigilant.

  I pointed my pistol at the water to my right. “Freeze!”

  A crescent of ice half the diameter of the island spread out towards the wall. The room itself was a fifty-foot square. It was going to take more mana than I had to cover all the water with ice, but it was nice to know that if we needed more room, I could give it to us.

  The boss was bubbling out of the ground in the middle of the island, so I had a moment before the fight would really start. I hopped onto the sheet of ice to test it. In theory, I believed it would hold, but I wanted to test it just to make sure.

  The surface was slick, but it was firmly anchored to the island. I shuffled my feet as I got back on solid ground. It would keep us from drowning, but I had my doubts about how well we’d be able to walk on it and knew for a fact that we weren’t going to be able to run.

  “It’s almost here!” Ether raised her shield, then slammed into the gelatinous body. “LOOK AT ME!”

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  The ten-foot-tall mound of goo flailed its arms at her. Water splashed off her shield as it hammered away.

  “FREEZE!” A stream of frost sprayed out of the barrel of my weapon. I held the spell, which ate into my mana, but I wasn’t too worried; this was our only fight and once it was over, I had a feeling that the people I was going to be around would make anything I could do an insignificant contribution.

  The first thing I did was freeze it in place. While letting it move around and leave a slushy mess on the ground might have been a more effective way to wear it down, given our limited fighting space, I didn’t want to make it difficult to move if we found ourselves in an add phase.

  The Giant Water Slime wobbled but didn’t take its focus off of Ether. The two arms pounded away at her shield while Aelin shot over my shoulder, driving the core closer and closer to the frozen part.

  The marble the size of my palm zipped and twisted around as it avoided her arrows. Aelin didn’t panic, keeping every shot fired at a constant rhythm and making sure that the core didn’t retreat into the top third.

  It didn’t take long for the frozen part to reach the arms. The mound of gel turned its attention to me, but only for a second before Ether refreshed her taunt. With less room to move around, Aelin was able to nick the core, cracking it and knocking the crystal out of the main body.

  “GET IT!” I pointed at the transparent object rolling towards the edge with my left hand as I moved the stream of freezing air to the right arm of the Giant Water Slime.

  The arm was trying to grab the core, but Fray sliced the hardening substance off. The ice splintered as it hit the ground. The green woman looked at the main core but turned her attention back to the one in the pile of ice. A quick stab of her sword broke the core and part of the frozen slime parts vanished into smoke.

  Nakten dashed by Fray, racing the core to the edge of the island. For a moment, I thought she was going to try to stab it, but instead she twisted her right foot around it and kicked the crystal ball into the air.

  “ATLAS!” The Anubis pointed at the core hurtling towards the ceiling.

  Part of me wanted to divert my attention from the other arm to shoot at the boss core. Most of the fight would be over if I did that, but it was also something that Aelin could do and there was no reason for both of us to be shooting at it when I could help Fray finish off the left arm.

  I trusted that Aelin would take the shot and gripped my pistol with both hands as I pointed it at the remaining arm. Channeling such a cold spell for so long made holding the weapon uncomfortable, which was why I switched which palm was against the grip.

  Most of the body that I’d frozen vanished in a puff of smoke. The arm shattered as it hit the ground. Fray was ready and the moment the last core rolled free of the ice debris, she sliced it in half, disappearing the rest of the frozen slime parts.

  “Well…” I looked over at a disappointed Nakten. “What did you think of your first boss fight?”

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