We moved again, deeper into the forest. Quinn slipped ahead as usual. I've barely caught him on Arcane Sense now. A smear of intent, then nothing.

  Melissa fell into step besides me. She was reading to herself to tell me something.

  “So,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I evolved my barrier.”

  She glanced at me, then smiled, the corner of her mouth twitching. “It evolved during the fight, and it’s… different now,” she said, searching for words. “I can shape it more freely. Thinner, thicker. I can curve it and create multiple shapes simultaneously. And when something hits it hard enough, the energy doesn’t just vanish.”

  “Stored,” I guessed. I had a similar option for mine.

  She nodded. “Yes. I can feed it back into the barrier to reinforce it, or…” Her fingers flexed. “I can let it go.”

  “How? Like an explosion?”

  “More like… a release,” she said. “But I still have to test it, of course, so we’ll see.”

  That fit her fighting style; she was extremely good with barriers already. If her barriers could now be used to inflict damage, she would likely be able to confront one of the monsters.

  “I understand,” I said. “You want to get your achievement.”

  She exhaled, some tension leaving her shoulders. “Yes, now I have what I was missing. I could stall forever, but killing things was nearly impossible.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “If it works the way you think, you can take one down on your own.”

  She straightened a little at that. “I plan to.”

  I believed her.

  Quinn reappeared a moment later, melting out of the trees like he’d always been there. I didn’t notice him while talking with Melissa; I got distracted. “Not far ahead,” he said. “Another stretch of forest. Dense with them.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. A lot. And they’re different.”

  Different was not good.

  “How?”

  He grimaced. “More… wrong. Vines and roots come out of their bodies in any place imaginable. The ones I manage to look at don’t even have eyes. Flowers grew out of the sockets instead. Pink.”

  The forest around us seemed to lean closer at that, trunks thickening, undergrowth twisting.

  Marco snorted. “So what? We handled them before, and now we’re even stronger; if their eyes don’t work, that’ll work to our advantage too.”

  The silence that followed was sharp.

  Alya shot him a look. “We handled them barely and paid for it anyway. If you pull another stunt—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Please,” I said.

  I raised a question. “Who’s against going through?”

  No one moved.

  Fear, pride, resolve. Hard to tell which was winning.

  “Alright,” I said. “We go straight. Formation stays the same, but we face them at our rhythm now.”

  We advanced another ten minutes before I stopped. “Quinn. Pull a few. You good?”

  He grinned. “Better than good.”

  He vanished again.

  A minute later, the monsters screamed between the trees.

  Quinn burst back into view, fast as a cheetah. “Eight,” he said as he passed us. “Incoming.”

  The ground trembled. Two shapes broke through first.

  Like he said, these eldir looked wrong. Roots burst from their limbs like tumors— black and wet. Pink flowers bloomed from empty sockets, twitching as they screamed. No hesitation. No fear.

  I raised my hand. “I'll take one. Fighters, the other. Melissa, help with your barriers and take the last one solo.”

  The first eldir lunged.

  I stepped forward as Alya intercepted the other. Her axe flared with a dull red sheen and came down hard on its raised arm. Bone cracked. The creature was knocked sideways, howling, its limb bending the wrong way.

  Mine hit my barrier a heartbeat later. The shield fractured instantly, creating a spiderweb pattern across its surface, but it held just long enough to dissipate the momentum of the charge. I didn’t waste time reinforcing it.

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  Instead, I tried something new.

  I reached past the obvious vectors of speed and strength and pushed a hex sideways, at an angle I’d never used before. I didn’t weaken the eldir physically. I weakened its resistance to parasites. A more conceptual weakness, subtle and ugly.

  The effect was immediate.

  The creature screamed and collapsed, thrashing as the roots inside it began to writhe. I followed with Malign Intensification. The parasitic growth responded greedily, swelling and tightening in seconds, vines cinch around limbs, bursting through flesh. Blood spilt freely wherever the roots tore their way out. The eldir lost all coordination, reduced to a spasmodic crawl.

  Good enough.

  I closed the distance and raised my left hand, stopping half a metre away. Keeping Arcane Sense running while maintaining a barrier was already taxing, a dull pressure building behind my eyes, but I pushed through it and activated Drain the Accursed.

  Nothing happened.

  The spell scraped uselessly against the gap between us. No contact, no flow.

  I clenched my teeth. That wasn’t acceptable.

  Magic wasn’t a switch. It wasn’t supposed to be rigid; I just knew it. Rhea could pull life force with a ritual circle and some hearts. I had a hex embedded in this thing. A direct link. Willpower was my axis, and this was my skill.

  I forced it.

  I leant in, my hand hovering inches from the creature, and I pressed my intent through the hex like a wedge. My head throbbed sharply, pain blooming behind my eyes, but then something gave.

  The connection snapped into place.

  Lifeforce surged up my arm in a violent rush. To my senses, it looked like motes of dull gold tearing free from the eldir’s body, spiralling together into a thick ribbon that poured into me. I gasped, instinctively redirecting the flow, feeding it multicasting and arcane sense.

  The strain of keeping so many spells up eased.

  It became more manageable. It just became more manageable.

  And as Arcane Sense got its empowerment, the world opened to my new, magical senses.

  Energy was everywhere. Threads, currents, and pressure points I’d been walking past blind. The eldir closing in from the flanks burned hot in my perception. Alya was still hacking at her opponent, with the axe biting into the flesh but not finishing the job. Marcus had three thin spears buried in another’s chest, and it was still standing.

  My eldir was fading fast. Too fast.

  I examined the situation more closely and discovered the cause.

  The parasite – because what could this thing be if not a parasite? – I don’t think it was the work of a symbiote.

  A dense knot of roots had claimed the creature’s upper chest, drinking just as greedily as I was. I didn’t stop draining. I wanted to see what would happen when the host ran dry.

  When the eldir finally died, the flow cut off abruptly. A familiar notification flickered through my vision. Level 29. Nothing unusual.

  The body collapsed into a husk.

  Then the roots moved.

  They tore themselves free, peeling out of the corpse in a wet, grinding mass. Vines and flesh twisted together, reforming into something vaguely humanoid. Tendrils writhed in every direction. Two pink flowers opened where eyes should have been.

  It looked at me.

  Then it lunged.

  It slammed into my barrier, vines slithering across the surface, probing, searching for a way in. The force wasn’t impressive. The shield could hold it easily.

  Still, every instinct I had screamed the same warning.

  Do not let it touch you.

  The thing wrapped itself around my barrier like a constrictor.

  Vines slid and tightened, tendrils probing for weak points, and I felt the pressure spike as the shield began to strain. Not enough to break, but enough that leaving it as it was would be a mistake.

  I reinforced it, then twisted the structure.

  The barrier folded, opening at my back and curving forward and around the creature instead of pushing it away. The geometry felt wrong; again, the spell wasn’t made for this, but it obeyed in the end. The plant was suddenly trapped inside a sealed, translucent bubble of mana. It thrashed, lashed, and slammed itself against the inside.

  No real damage. Just furious impotence.

  “Listen up!” I shouted, not taking my eyes off it. “They’ve got a parasitic plant inside them. When the eldir dies, it comes out and tries to get inside you. Do not let it touch you!”

  A chorus of startled curses answered me, but they heard.

  I didn’t wait to see if they understood.

  Three more hexes went out in quick succession, snapping onto three different eldir. I saw them fall as their bodies betrayed them, limbs buckling, collapsing. They went down hard, not dead, still twitching and crawling towards my companions.

  I deliberately didn’t intensify the curses.

  I didn’t like what happened when the parasite got too much room to grow.

  I turned back to the thing in the bubble and layered a weakening hex directly onto it. Plants or not, it was still a target. Then I reached out again and forced Drain the Accursed to connect from outside the bubble.

  The strain hit me immediately.

  My head throbbed, a sharp pulse behind my eyes that made the world tilt. I ground my teeth and redirected part of the life force flow, not into power this time, but into stabilising my own mind. It was inefficient and clumsy, but it helped.

  The parasite shrivelled, vines losing tension as their stolen vitality bled away.

  The others were still struggling. They weren’t killing the eldir quickly, but they were keeping them busy, buying time. One more charged in from the side.

  “Melissa, disengage,” I called. “The last one’s yours.”

  I broke off and moved to support Marco. The guy was flailing at the eldir with my shield, a mana-formed blade in hand, similar to the one he used against the gorg mage to finish it off. The spell had power; I’d give him that. What he didn’t have was footwork, timing, or any sense of distance.

  If not for Melissa’s barriers, he’d have been dead already.

  You have a magical shield for fuck’s sake, use it.

  I slipped a reinforced barrier between him and the monster just as its claws came down, the impact rattling my barrier. An eldir was unaccounted for. Quinn’s work, most likely. The rest were either grounded or engaged.

  Good enough.

  I fed life force into the barrier protecting Marco and scanned the creature with Arcane Sense, ignoring the torn muscles and leaking wounds. There. A dense knot in its belly, slightly to the right. The parasite’s core.

  “Right side,” I said sharply. “Belly. Aim there.”

  Marco didn’t argue for once. He lunged with a reckless frontal stab that would have resulted in him being gutted if I hadn’t braced the barrier harder. His blade punched through, sinking into the mass of writhing vines inside.

  The eldir shrieked.

  The roots spasmed, then went limp. The body collapsed in a heap and didn’t get back up.

  “Yes!” Marco shouted in between wheezes. “Level ten, baby!”

  I ignored him.

  Around us, the others were finishing their fights, hacking down the crippled monsters before the parasites could fully assert themselves. And ahead of us, Melissa stepped forward alone.

  She walked straight towards the charging monstrosity, calm and deliberate.

  Her jaw was set, eyes sharp. Barriers bloomed around her in layered arcs, some tight, some wide, their surfaces shimmering faintly as they locked into place.

  Now the situation was going to be good.

  20 chapters ahead!