Page 107 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

Pritkin pulled him back up while simultaneously sending a fireball ahead of us. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t send it the other way, and then I realized that it was too small to do us much good on offense. But it could burn through the hanging mass ahead, clearing a path.

And it did a pretty good job. Vines went up in garlands of fire before crumbling to dust, while others on the peripheries continued to burn, lighting us up for our pursuers. However, that hardly mattered now that they had our scent, and at least we could run. Only I didn’t know where to until I spied something up ahead that looked familiar.

“We’re headed . . . back there?” I croaked. “To the tunnels?”

“It’s Bodil’s fiefdom,” Pritkin reminded me. “She said she could hold it.”

Well, I damned well hoped she was right! Although it didn’t look like we were going to find out. The creatures chasing us moved like the wind and were almost on top of us already, prompting Pritkin to yell, “Go! Get her out!” and turn back around.

And me to start fighting, and Alphonse to start cursing, and Æsubrand to spin on a dime to join a helpless cause because they could not win this! Or even buy us enough time for their sacrifice to matter! And they couldn’t have, at least not alone.

But they weren’t alone; they were on the territory of a seriously pissed-off demigoddess who had decided to show what she could do. And I guessed that all those tunnels Pritkin and I had fought our way through must have been directly beneath all this. Because suddenly, it was as if they were trying to come out of the ground.

All of them.

All at once.

What felt like an eight on the Richter scale hit, causing the dirt to crack and the massive stone pillars to calve, splinter, and break. And topple over to meet the cascade of boulders bouncing down the surrounding cliffs to join the fun. Only it wasn’t.

It wasn’t fun at all.

Alphonse fell into a fissure that opened under his feet and only grabbed the edge at the last second, allowing him to launch us back out again before a pillar slammed into it, filling it up. Æsubrand flipped over a boulder almost as large as he was, dodged another, and was nearly taken down by one of the creatures until a rock the size of a car crushed the life out of it. And Pritkin must have found and enchanted some more discarded weapons because a sword and a wicked-looking knife were now fighting a rearguard action on their own.

None of which would matter in a moment because the mountain was about to come down on our heads!

Or go up, I thought, blinking, as a mass of stones and dirt took that moment to erupt from the newly created fissures, spewing multiple stories into the air. And making me wonder how the hell this was supposed to be helping us, Bodil! Only it was.

I wrenched my abused neck half off, looking behind us, and saw something that resembled a beaded curtain explode out of one of the longer fissures. Only those weren’t beads. They were jagged pieces of rock blasting outward at bullet-like speeds, and they took a toll on our pursuers, the leaders of which foolishly tried to run straight through.

Limbs were slashed, bodies were pierced, and although these things healed quickly with demon magic behind them, it wasn’t quick enough. Not when the leaders had just run into what was essentially a meat grinder, although how Bodil was doing this, I didn’t know. She wasn’t supposed to have earth magic!

And then I understood when the rock eruptions suddenly changed into something else. I realized it wasn’t the tunnels causing the explosions after all but muddy geysers flooding through every fissure with enough force to send the soil and rock above them flying. And then came the water, in sparkling vertical rivers that were clean now and shooting up twenty stories or more into the air from the immense pressure behind them.

I felt spray hit me from the rain created when all that water started pelting back down, and it was hard enough to sting. But I barely noticed through the cracking sounds going on everywhere, the boulders falling from the cliffs above and bouncing around us, and the leaping, scale-covered thing that came at us from the side, screeching. Only to encounter a razor-thin fissure that opened up beneath its feet—

And cut it in half.

It fell neatly into two horrible pieces, and my mind started gibbering. Shut up! I thought because this was no time to lose it. Not with blood and rain falling everywhere and thin blades of water spurting up without warning, doing what steel could not and slicing and dicing through the horde behind us.

But they didn’t slice enough. Or maybe there were just too many creatures back there. Despite the roar of the water and the rumbling of the stone, I could hear them howling, chittering, and screeching from all directions as more came running.

Not that they needed more, as the dozens pursuing us had barely broken stride, ignoring their losses and staying on the hunt.

The moon took that moment to come out from behind some clouds and flood the scene with light. Giving me a clear view for the first time: of toppling black pillars, each larger than the biggest obelisk, shattering against the ground; of shooting silver geysers, now spearing skyward all around us; of what looked like every demon in hell being slammed by the first and bisected by the second. And in one case, shot straight in the face by a geyser that erupted sideways from the cliff face and sent something with scales and bat wings flying over the lakebed, like a belt from a giant’s fist.

And yet, it still wasn’t enough. They kept coming, dodging, twisting, and trampling the sundered bodies of their kind as if they were just more debris on the field. We were almost to our goal, but suddenly, we were out of time.

Until a crazy redhead jumped out of the mouth of the tunnel that Pritkin and I had escaped from and threw up a shield.

It was a shitty one because she was drained, and it had to cover a lot of territory. So it didn’t repel the thousand jagged pieces the cliff was shedding or the bodies slamming into it at top speed. It trapped them instead, leaving them to punch inward at us like a bunch of heavyweight boxers fighting through a cloth.

But it was heavy-duty cloth, and Alphonse was an old hand at dodging blows.

He ducked and whirled and danced through the line-up and then threw the two of us into the tunnel entrance and utter darkness, so hard that we tumbled halfway down the incline before I managed to free myself and start back up. Because Pritkin was still back there! Only to have that son of a bitch grab my ankle.

“Let me go!”

“Make me.”

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