Emblems

Chapter 30: Blind

“Watch out,” Calida warned, and something dark – barely a silhouette in the darkness – came flying out of nowhere. Amber ducked behind Calida’s shield as the liquid landed on the metal, sizzling like oil in a pan. More shots came, and she had to dodge back and forth with Daniel, taking aim and lashing out with her whip, severing the heads of several legless worms that had emerged from the depths of the darkness. More came, but Calida’s fireballs finished them off.

That was only the start though. It seemed that the Demons had gone easy on them for the first wave. After that, it was an entire horde of them, charging down the corridor, not even bothering to conceal themselves like the first two types. Massive, humanoid shapes came roaring at them, lips pulled back in barely human like snarls, and raising giant maces in preparation to bludgeon them to death. Dwarfed by them, but still as dangerous, came more humanoids, but headless this time and with rolling eyeballs in their torsos. Below the metal eyes were gaping holes with jagged teeth lining them – mouths that looked like they could devour all three of them whole and reduce them to mince meat.

It wasn’t long before all three of them had their backs to the wall, managing to keep only a tiny semi-circle of space between them and the monsters coming at them. The Demons ran at them directly, like the massive ones with the maces, or from below – the various kinds of snakes and serpents with their multitude of heads hissing and spitting venom were as dangerous as any other Demon – or from above, swooping down to slash at their faces or hands. One came at her and she swiped it out of the air with her magic, turning the wind into something as sharp as knives and shredding the humanoid’s batlike wings, while flicking the wrist of her hand at the same time, putting a three-headed dog down once and for all with a stinging slash from her whip.

But that left her open below, and a snake with multiple heads – she didn’t really have time to count – hissed at her. She tried to back away to get some space and fend it off with her dagger, but her back hit the wall behind. A glance to either side showed Calida and Daniel in the same predicament, and thus nowhere to run to escape the snake monster. She lashed her whip at it, not daring to use her dagger in case something else came at her from the front or above. The Demon hissed again, recoiling, and behind it in the darkness she could see another bigger shape moving towards her, so she sent a gust of wind in that direction, hoping that both Demons would be taken out. The figure behind disappeared, but the snake merely ducked under her wind.

The heads of the snake hissed again, and she tried not to shiver. She and the other two were already so close to the corner where the walls met that there wasn’t any space to dodge if it spat acid at her. Amber shut her eyes when the snake began to slither forward, doing her best to coil her air around it to flick it away, but it kept slipping out of her grasp, its continuous hissing letting her know that she was going to die by acid or venom or whatever it was going to spit at her.

All that met her ears was the sound of metal hitting the floor, muffled by the darkness. She pried open her eyes, registered that the metal fangs of the snake – again, multiple pairs – lay on the ground in front of her. “What?” she muttered more to herself than anything.

“Robert?” came Calida’s voice, raised above the clang of a claw against her shield.

“Yeah,” the boy panted heavily as he replied. “What the hell is going on here?” He backed towards her, and Calida let him behind her, standing in front of him to protect him with her bursts of flames.