Book 3, Chapter 37

Nothing in Samael’s notes had indicated that the lightning doll was in fact a pure elemental. Nothing in Sorin’s reconnaissance had pointed to that fact. If he’d known, he’d have laid out Elemental Anchor from the start. Its effectiveness was sharply limited against monsters that used elemental magic, and it hadn’t seemed worth the cost when Lightning Rod would have been more than sufficient.

Then again, it still would have been less efficient to maintain Elemental Anchor when it was still in its statue form. The real mistake was not realizing it was transforming when it let out that pillar of lightning. If I’d gotten the anchor up just a few seconds faster...

While one part of his mind was reviewing where things had gone wrong, the other part was focused on regaining control of the situation. He needed to intercept the lightning doll’s attacks before the rest of his team was killed, and he needed to keep it contained until they had time to recover. Worse, once the lightning was cut off, the floor’s swarms of monsters would return, and the rest of his team was in no condition to fight them off.

Yoru and Azlo were in the arena near Rue. Azlo had taken the fall the best, but Yoru was unconscious with copious amounts of blood streaming down his face. He’d smacked his head on something, and Sorin could only hope there wasn’t brain damage there. Odric and Nemari were still up in the tree, which made defending them even more difficult since he couldn’t be in two places at once.

With the problems categorized, he turned to coming up with solutions. That was where decades of experience dealing with problems like this came in handy. By the time Sorin hit the tree, recovered, and returned to the arena, he’d figured out what he needed to do. The whole process took three seconds, and two of those were spent being thrown through the air.

A quartet of lightning rods preceded him, two for the ground group and two for the duo in the tree. Elemental Anchor was already starting to fade, but he reinforced that right about the same time his feet touched the curving slope of the bowl. With those two defenses in place, the lightning doll lost the bulk of its offensive power.

In fact, the anchor served a second purpose. Controlling five copies of the guardian was impossible, but forcing it to condense back down to one was very much within the anchor’s power. The way the anchor functioned was to restrict the elemental’s ability to reach beyond its own body with its magic, and that included maintaining multiple vessels.

Three of the copies flickered and vanished the instant the anchor fully settled over the arena. Of the remaining two, both were on the ground and near each other. If they moved more than ten feet apart, the tether would probably snap. Then the last copy would disappear, leaving only the original to deal with.

The drawback was that splitting itself also split its power, so forcing it to return to a single body would also bring it back to full strength, but that was an unfortunate necessity. Until the rest of the team was back on their feet, it was better to limit it to a single location. Combined with the decreased range and lightning rods liberally scattered around his team, the tree duo might even be safe from the guardian’s magic.

That left the two on the ground to intercept, which was exactly what Sorin did. Whatever passed for a mind in the lightning doll’s body wasn’t that smart, and it happily engaged with Sorin when he appeared in front of it. Considering it normally just attacks everything in the arena all at once, it probably doesn’t have much of a sense for prioritizing targets.

He pulled on the stone and summoned thick spikes to impale the lightning dolls while watching closely to see how they reacted. The pair were utterly indistinguishable, but the copy would struggle to cope with the introduction of a new material in its corporeal form, which would tell him where to focus his efforts.

It was a good counterattack, one that bought Sorin a vital handful of seconds. But the guardian wasn’t content to just sit there and let him have it all his own way, and when he impaled it, it blinked away from him. It didn’t go far—the anchor wouldn’t allow it to—but it vanished and reappeared ten feet to the left.

Its copy went with it, which would have been an impressive feat of coordination if they weren’t being directed by a single mind. But it was a split-second behind the original, if only because it had struggled to free itself from the stone spike.

There’s the duplicate, he noted as he repeated the attack.

Once again, the lightning doll seemed to teleport. It was far, far faster now that it had shed its statue disguise, and as much as Sorin would have liked to go for a third round, he had to shift to defense as more of his lightning rods were overpowered and shattered. Arcs of electricity jumped across his body, burning him where they landed before he could refresh the magic.

Something penetrated, sinking into his muscles instead of just dancing on his skin, and numbness swept all the way down his left arm. His fingers twitched uncontrollably, but he didn’t need both hands to keep fighting. In fact, he didn’t need either. For the moment, he couldn’t even commit fully to battling the portal guardian.

Instead, Force Weaver rose out of him to condense into a hundred needles that shot up to the canopy to protect Nemari and Odric from the next wave of monsters. Observer showed him where he needed to hit, but directing so many at once was still beyond him. He took care to avoid shooting his allies, but otherwise was less discriminant about being wholly accurate. Numbers made up for his lack of aim, and the magic bought them a few more precious seconds to get back in the fight.

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He was rewarded for his effort with a burst of flame that scoured the area clean. She might not have been fully recovered—she almost certainly wasn’t—but Nemari was aware enough of her surroundings to defend herself. That was a relief; it meant Sorin could tighten his own focus to keeping the guardian occupied until Rue and Azlo could get back upright.

Yoru was probably out of the fight unless he got some emergency healing, and Sorin was too busy to administer it. Odric was too far out of range to help, too, which meant the best they could do was drag him out of the arena and defend his comatose body from the jungle itself until the fight ended.

A strand of electricity erupted from the lightning doll and leaped to its copy. From there, it arced back to the original, now twice as thick, before being passed to the copy again. That had all the makings of an ultimate attack, and Sorin could easily picture how devastating it would have been if it had managed to maintain all five of its bodies.

In a single second, the bolt of lightning leaped back and forth enough times to go from string-thick to being a bar of blue the circumference of Sorin’s arm. Summoning a new lightning rod to draw the attack off to the left, Sorin leaped to the right and called up a low wall of stone in a curve to swoop over his prostrate companions.

The bolt leaped out, suddenly freed from its maker’s control. It curved to the fresh lightning rod, melted through it in an instant, and continued toward Yoru and Azlo. Rue was far enough out to the side that she was partially exposed, and the lightning took that path eagerly. Even weakened by the rod and with Elemental Anchor dampening it at the source, it was still strong enough that fear for Rue’s life jolted through Sorin.

There was nothing more he could do to protect her, but he wasn’t the only climber in this battle. Rather than remain prone behind the foot-high wall, Azlo leaped to his feet and brandished his shield overhead. It did nothing to protect his body, but some enchantment in the metal drew the lightning to him rather than let it descend on Rue.

He let out a roar of pain as the lightning doll’s magic flowed through the shield into his arm, then he raised his free hand and pointed a finger off at the jungle. Lightning coursed through his body and out through the extended digit, striking a tree hard enough to cause an explosion of wood splinters so strong that Sorin felt them plinking against his skin a hundred feet away.

There’s no way he can afford to do that again. I’ve got to shut down that last copy before the guardian fires off a second bolt.

That was easy to say, but thus far, the lightning doll had proven to be remarkably resilient. Its copy was weakening, and Sorin was confident he could destroy it if he was given enough time, but he was measuring the fight in micro-seconds. Time was in short supply, and he could already see the monster’s aura stirring as it reformed the spell.

“Nemari! Dump all the water you can on it!” Sorin yelled.

He extended the earthen rampart to cover Yoru and Rue completely. If Azlo had crouched back down, Sorin could have included him, but they just didn’t have that kind of familiarity, and there was no more time to shout instructions. He’d have to fend for himself, but he was best suited to survive what was coming after Sorin himself.

The string of lightning started its journey between the lightning doll and its copy. Through Observer, Sorin saw what his eyes couldn’t. It jumped once, then twice. Three and four passed, and then the first beads of water formed around it. By the tenth jump, the water was coalescing in the air. Twenty-two jumps. The lightning was three-quarters as strong as the first one had been now.

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, Sorin silently counted, his mind churning so fast that he wasn’t even consciously thinking the numbers so much as acknowledging them going by.

If the doll had released the attack there, someone would have died. Maybe it had seen its first attempt as a failure, though, or maybe it simply wasn’t taking any chances. Maybe it didn’t understand what the water would do, though its own senses were certainly powerful enough that there was no way it hadn’t noticed Nemari’s magic forming around it.

Whatever the reason, the doll didn’t stop at thirty jumps. It kept going, past forty, then fifty, until the lightning bolt was thicker around than Sorin’s chest. That extra second allowed Sorin to throw lightning rods up next to both himself and Azlo, and he prayed that they’d be enough to save the young climber if everything went sideways.

Then the water finished condensing and splashed onto the elemental.

The bar of blue and white death shattered into a thousand-thousand pieces. It exploded out in lines so thin that Sorin’s eyes couldn’t pick them apart, appearing as more of a cloud of light than individual bolts, even though that was exactly what they were.

They raked across his body, some drawn away to the lightning rod, but many more hitting him. The magic still had its bite, still jolted him with pain that went from his scalp to the soles of his feet, but it lost its weight when Nemari interfered with the buildup.

Sorin wasn’t thrown from his feet. Azlo wasn’t left a blackened, smoking husk on the ground. Rue and Yoru were safe beneath the stone that encapsulated them. Nemari and Odric were outside the range of the explosion.

The copy was gone, leaving a diminished lightning doll standing in the center of the arena. Its body twisted and writhed, limbs shortening one instant, then tripling in length the next as it struggled to hold its proportions intact. Given time, it would stabilize itself and the fight would continue as if nothing had happened to it.

Stone reached up around it, a maw full of jagged, rending teeth, and slammed closed. Through Observer, Sorin watched the stone thicken, quickly filling the interior until there was no space left for the lightning doll. Its body lost all cohesion, becoming nothing but arcs of lightning desperately seeking an escape route that didn’t exist.

It was pressed down until nothing remained but a white-hot core of electrical energy, one that threatened to erupt and blow its prison to pieces. Sorin pushed more of his own magic into the stone, calling on Veins of the World to its fullest potential, and held the stone’s structural integrity against the onslaught.

With one final shove, the two jaws of the trap slammed together. The lightning doll dispersed, its body fully grounded out, and anima flooded into Sorin’s soulspace. With a groan that was equal parts pure exhaustion and pain, Sorin dropped to one knee.

What had turned out to be the most difficult and dangerous fight of his time in the red tower was finally over, but he had three teammates down. Two of them hadn’t moved since the lightning doll had revealed its true form. There was no time to rest; Sorin had to heal them before they died.

He just hoped he wasn’t too late.