Chapter 514
A second serpent rose behind them, its body arcing overhead like a flaming bridge.
Lava dripped from its coils, eating through the stone walkway. Each drop hit the trail and melted through it in under a second, punching holes in the only solid ground between them and the molten river below.
The walkway was dissolving behind them like a fuse burning toward a bomb, and the bomb was gravity and the gravity was terminal.
“MOVE!” Dex barked, voice carrying that Alpha command that shook the air. The command hit every person on the trail at the same frequency, the one that bypassed decision-making and went straight to legs, and the legs obeyed because Alpha commands were democracy’s natural enemy and democracy had no jurisdiction on a volcano.
They sprinted.
The trail was barely wider than a table edge. Loose gravel skidded beneath their boots, tumbling into the molten river below.
Every breath felt like inhaling fire. The heat was inside them now, cooking their lungs from the inside out, each inhale producing a burn that was making Hyran’s breathing exercises from the tunnel look like a spa retreat by comparison.
Another serpent shot upward. Its head exploded out of the lava like a geyser. Gavriel grabbed Aeron by the back of his armor, yanking him out of its path. The yank was brutal, graceless, Aeron’s body whipping sideways at a velocity that his neck was going to complain about for weeks, but the complaining was preferable to the alternative, which was being swallowed by a serpent made of liquid fire and digested at approximately eleven thousand degrees.
“Thank you,” Aeron said.
“Send a card,” Gavriel replied, already running.
Hyran was yelling spells, half of them useless, half of them panicked. His hands were producing constructs that lasted fractions of seconds before the heat ate them, gold magic flickering and dying against temperatures that exceeded the thermal limits of every ward he had ever built.
“NOPE. NOPE. I CAN’T FREEZE LAVA. WHY WOULD ANYONE BE ABLE TO FREEZE LAVA.” He fired another construct. It evaporated on contact with the nearest serpent’s body. “I HAVE A DOCTORATE. MY DOCTORATE DID NOT COVER LAVA. LAVA WAS NOT IN THE CURRICULUM. I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH THE CURRICULUM BOARD.”
A serpent tail whipped across the path. Fin saw it before Serena did.
“LEFT!”
He tackled her, rolling them just under the swinging molten tail as it obliterated the ledge where she’d been. The stone vaporized. The vaporization was instant, the trail converting from solid rock to superheated gas in a single frame, the space where Serena’s boots had been standing ceasing to exist as a concept, and the ceasing was producing a wind of heated air that singed Fin’s hair as he rolled them clear.
Serena gasped.
Fin picked her up and was carrying her before her gasp finished. She was in his arms at full sprint, his legs covering ground at Alpha speed, his grip locked around her body with the specific tension of a man who had just watched the ground beneath his mate vanish and whose vanishing was producing a carrying instinct that was going to last until either the volcano stopped trying to kill them or the universe ended, whichever came first.
Maelor glanced back. “It’s gaining!”
That was generous. It was ON them, fire spilling from its mouth like liquid sunlight. The heat was so close that the back of Maelor’s thermal weave suit was beginning to smoke, the material reaching its design limits, the limits being tested by a creature whose body temperature existed in a category that materials science had never been asked to address because materials science assumed you would never be RUNNING FROM LAVA.
Another serpent surged ahead of them, cutting off the trail entirely. The creature coiled across the path like a flaming barricade, its body spanning the entire width of the ledge, its coal-eyes watching them approach with the patient malice of a predator that knew they had nowhere left to go and whose nowhere was producing a satisfaction that was visible in the slow, rhythmic pulse of its molten coils.
Trapped. Behind them: serpent. Ahead of them: serpent. Left: cliff wall. Right: molten river. The tactical options were “through the fire” or “off the mountain,” and both options ended in the same temperature.
Dexmon tried to throw up a shield but nothing happened. His hands flared gold for one second, the magic sputtering, the construct forming for a fraction of a heartbeat before collapsing into nothing.
The magic was there. The magic was refusing to cooperate. The magic was a new skill being asked to perform under the worst possible conditions and the conditions were producing a performance failure that was timed with the precision of a cosmic joke.
Gavriel shot him a sideways glance. “You constipated, buddy?”
“Shut the HELL up, Sterling.”
“Just asking. Your face is doing that thing.”
“My face is doing the thing because a LAVA SNAKE is blocking our ONLY EXIT and my magic just took a SHIT.”
“So yes. Constipated. Got it.”
“When we survive this, and I stress WHEN, I am going to punch you so hard your wolf feels it.”
“Noted. Looking forward to it. Can we survive first?”
Maelor muttered something that sounded like a long, articulate prayer to every god he’d ever heard of. The prayer was comprehensive. It covered the primary pantheon, the secondary pantheon, three regional deities, and two gods that Maelor was fairly certain he had invented during a fever as a child but was including on the off chance they were real because the situation warranted a wide net.
Hyran just said, “Wonderful.” The word was flat. Dead. A single word containing the entire weight of a man whose vocabulary was extensive and whose extensive had been compressed into seven letters because the seven letters were the only ones left that could survive the heat.
The serpent reared back. Its jaw unhinged. The opening revealed a throat of white-hot fire, the interior of its mouth producing a light so bright it cast shadows behind them on the cliff wall, shadows that looked like the silhouettes of seven people about to become a cautionary tale.