Page 161 of Of Nine So Bold

With hurried words, my friend chanted something unintelligible. The blast curved before it could reach my idiot cousin, the power slamming into the stone instead. The other spells rippled as it struck. That wall started to crumble too.

Ozias stepped in quickly, molding the stone around itself, fighting to keep the entire place from crashing down.

“Lars!” Byron yelled to me. “Send your power to me!”

I had no idea what he was planning, but I didn’t care. As another blast of defensive magic built in the wall, I let my magic rush out at Byron. In my haste, my power was laced with flames that flickered visibly and charred the dust in the air.

But my friend didn’t even blink. His gifts twisted the energy in midair, sending it through the wall and deep into the stone.

The burgeoning blast from the magical defenses suddenly pulled back, not striking out at us but instead chasing his power like an attack dog going after its prey.

“It should read the heat as a person attacking the walls,” Byron said. “That’ll buy us some time. “

“Good.” Dex nodded, though his attention returned quickly to the shuddering walls that Ozias was fighting to support. “Keep it up.”

Byron’s eyes darted to Ignatius. The older man nodded. “Well done, scholar.”

It was a compliment. I knew it was.

But even as he nodded back, Byron didn’t look pleased.

Gods, our group was a mess.

I shoved the thought aside. Yeah, a mess that might drown if we didn’t concentrate—and thank the gods Byron seemed to know that too. Turning back, he drew hard on my power andsent it racing through the stone like he was throwing glowing balls of heat through the earth.

Creating a diversion just in time.

More defensive spells swelled around us, crackling on the stone walls like lightning. But Byron never stopped. Over and over, he flung bundles of my magic and his back into the rock, while around us, the others worked frantically to keep the tunnel and the temple above from crashing down into a sinkhole.

Time blurred. The air became thick and harder to breathe from the panic around me. The ground shuddered and quivered, and at any moment, I expected the earth to crash down and end us all.

But slowly, the shuddering began to fade.

Blinking sweat from my eyes, I looked around as Byron stopped pulling on my magic.

The tunnel still stood. The giants and the dwarves slowly lowered their hands from the walls, all of them eyeing the tunnel and each other like no one was quite sure what to do now.

I raked a hand through my sweat-soaked hair. We’d done it. Gods, we’d really done it.

But the tunnel wassignificantlytaller than before.

I paused. How much rock had my friends and the others needed to pull from the surrounding countryside to keep this place standing? If I went back aboveground, would the hills even be there?

But the walls around us were more stable. I could feel that. The ground overhead was too.

I could even hear water rushing through the aqueducts again.

A breath left me. The magical defenses around us weren’t raging anymore, either. We probably had Ignatius and Byron to thank for that. Rather than a smear of muddy paint or tangled lightning, the spells now twisted through the rock like threadsof a fine net, supporting the earth and extending up toward the temple.

In fact, now that it wasn’t trying to kill us, it was even kind of beautiful. That kind of spellwork wasn’t exactly my forte, so I could only pick up on the barest edge of what the scholars had done, but the intricacy was shocking.

“Good job, everyone,” Dex said, including Ignatius and, gods, even Brock and the larger giants in his acknowledging nod.

Norbert scoffed. “Bet you learned something from therealgiants here, didn’t you, runt?”

“You fucking—” Clay started forward, but Dex caught his arm.

“Don’t,” Dex said quietly.

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