The first spawn came after they had been descending for seven minutes.
With the speed of their descent, they could not see the red twilight sky above anymore and were now deep into the earth.
It came up the wall toward them in silence, and it was not the same kind of spawn they had been killing on the surface.
Smaller and sleeker, with longer limbs in proportion to their bodies, these spawns were the oldest who had killed the most lives, and so their bodies had developed better than the multitude.
The first one rose past Theron's outcrop without being seen. It had hugged the curve of the wall and come up the side opposite the angle of the red glow, where the shadow was deepest. By the time Theron's instincts caught the pulse of it, it was already at his ankle.
He kicked, and his boot caught its skull. The spawn's head dented inward, and its body let go of the wall and fell, but a second one came up behind it, and then a third, and then a line of them, climbing in single file along a vein of darker stone that none of them had noticed.
"Wall!" Theron called. "Below!"
"And above," Tarian said. "Above us. They came down while we were descending; they were waiting in the stone."
"By the fallen gods." That was Sera, and her sword was already moving. The steel of it extended, but adhered to the fleshy wall, projecting a long, thin ribbon down the wall ahead of the climbing line. The ribbon bisected a dozen spawns at once; the ones behind ducked the slicing ribbon and kept coming.
"We lost the ambush window," Tarian said. "They held until the last of us crossed the threshold. Clever."
"How clever does a spawn get? These things just rush towards death." Theron's voice was tight. He had a spawn at his throat now and was breaking its neck with one hand while the other clung to the outcrop.
"They are not clever," Elara said, below. "Whatever sends them is."
Elias understood the thing below could not have stopped them at the rim because the rim was open and his Lumina Construct had the space to wreak havoc, but here, in the pit, with them not even able to find a stable footing, it had its terrain.
The pit was where it had been waiting to fight.
"Down," he said. "Now."
Elias dropped, falling in a controlled descent, his boot striking outcrop, releasing, striking the next, releasing again.
His weight and Stone-Souled seem to bond him to each surface for the half-second he needed to redirect and continue.
He passed Sera and Theron and landed on Elara's outcrop, glanced at her for a moment, and kept falling.
"Move!" Tarian called, and the rest dropped after him, understanding that they could not truly fight these creatures in this tunnel, or they would be exhausted to death. They were here to find the source.
The spawns swarmed the wall above where the candidates had been, found nothing, and began descending in pursuit. The line below climbed faster.
Elias and the five were now caught between two converging columns on a vertical battlefield, and the only direction that made any sense was down, faster than the spawns could reach.
The cleaver in Elias's right hand sang once, briefly, as he killed the first of the climbing line. It was a short song, but it did not need to be longer.
Ⓔ
The fight, when it joined fully, was unlike any fight Elias had been in.
Being vertical changed everything. He could not plant his feet. He could not anchor. The Lumina Construct was not available.
His shield was a hindrance more than a help. On the wall, the shield wanted to slide, and the slide had to be fought every second by Stone-Souled, which cost him the concentration he needed for killing.
He compromised and pinned the shield to the wall with his back, fed it the trickle of will that bonded it, and freed his right hand for the cleaver and his left for blood-work.
The Crimson Vein in his chest woke at the change. He let two of the small reserve coils unspool from his spine, the blood-iron whips emerging through his armor at the shoulders, and he set them to work on the column below him while the cleaver took the column above.
Theron was beside him, one outcrop to the left, and the big man had become terrible in the close confines of the pit.
His arms reached further than arms should reach, and when the spawns came to him on the wall, he caught them by the throat and threw them into the dark below. Each throw ended a spawn as their fall ended in silence, because the pit absorbed all sound, and the bottom was farther than fall-sound could carry.
Sera worked above him. The steel ribbon of her sword had become a long, narrow blade adhering along a line that sliced any spawn that crossed it. She did not have to swing. The fence did the work. Her job was to keep the line where it was needed, and she was the only one who could.
Tarian fought from the outcrop above hers. He did not unleash his lightning. He used small flickers of lightning that appeared like sparks at his fingertips, and each flicker found a spawn's eye, or its joint, or the soft crease behind its skull where the climbing musculature met the spine.
Precise, economical, lethal. He killed three spawns for every flicker, sometimes four. He was not hurrying.
Elara was below them. Her light bent around her in a sphere that twisted the spawns' approach; each one that came at her missed, swinging through the space where she was not, falling past her into the darkness, never quite understanding what it had reached for.
She did not kill many, as she did not need to. The spawns who came for her removed themselves from the fight by their own momentum.
Kaelen was deepest. Whatever Kaelen did with his hammer and the wall, none of the others fully saw. The wall around him pulsed. Spawns climbing toward him would reach a certain distance and then drop, losing their grip suddenly, falling cleanly, as if the surface they had been adhering to had simply forgotten them.
His free hand was always on the wall. Whatever he was doing, it was not loud, and it was not flashy, but it was extremely effective.
They killed for perhaps three minutes. In three minutes, between the six of them, they killed perhaps four hundred spawns.
When the wave thinned, Tarian called out, his voice was tight, and he sounded tired, "Anyone hurt?"
"Whole," Sera said.
"Same," Theron said.
"Peachy," Elara said.
"Mostly." That was Kaelen. Then, after a beat, "I'm fine. Keep going."
Elias's vitality had dropped to 5,800 from the few claws that had found his armor's gaps.
His Stamina was holding, fed by the trickle of damage Blood-Forged Flesh was converting, and his Lumina pools, he noted with a private flicker of attention, had crossed 1,400 meters of circumference at some point during the fight; he had not even noticed when, and the threshold had passed.
Peak Fury Forge.
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