Page 84 of Forging Bonds: Part One

The ground rumbles, and I plant my feet. I get the sense that it would not be a good time to go down. Out of the dunes bursts an enormous figure.

The creature is big, maybe twenty-five feet tall, it blends in with its surroundings almost perfectly apart from the completely black eyes and shockingly bright red tangled hair that cascades down its back. It’s human in shape, although it has an extra arm on the left side and a long lizard-like tail that has three spikes on the end and is extremely powerful.

As I understand it, from what I can remember anyway, they are souls that have been lost to the desert and succumbed to the elements and creatures here. They then get turned into these sand creatures. Their bodies are almost completely made up of sand, with only a small part of them that is solid enough that you can kill them. All they want to do is pull the water from you until you turn into what they are, and they ensure that they do it in the most painful way possible. They feed on your pain.

It releases a gurgling kind of roar that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I glance at the team, they all look ready to fight, but Kylen turns to me and smirks.

“This one’s for you,” he says.

His team looks at him questioningly, and Coen’s expression darkens.

I raise my eyebrow, “Seriously, you realize these are tests to test us as a team?”

Kylen shakes his head, “The way I see it, they’re to test you and see if you’re good enough to be on my team.”

Even his teammates look at him like he’s losing it, but none of them argue with him.

Not even Coen.

“You’re fucking crazy,” I comment, but I roll my eyes and focus my attention back on the creature.

I don’t have time to deal with him. He’s absolutely lost it if he thinks that making me fight this creature on my own is going to mean that I get put on his team.

Idiot.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Neith

Iput Betty on the floor. Unfortunately, bullets won’t make a difference in this situation, mainly because I don’t know what I’m aiming for yet. I need to find out where the heart is. That’s the only part of the creature that stays solid when it shifts to sand. Every now and then, the sand shifts and swirls before the creature reforms again, and it’s this that I need to pay attention to. The heart can’t shift and reform, so the sand moves around it. If I can spot it, then I’ll know what I’m aiming for.

“I love you, Azael, but it would be really helpful if you were two swords right now,” I mutter under my breath.

I shouldn’t be surprised when Azael seems to do what I’ve asked and splits himself into two, allowing me to have a sword in each hand and keeping me armed from both sides.

I don’t have time to thank him though because the creature is obviously bored of waiting for us to do something and charges toward us. Well, more specifically, me.

“Are we really going to just leave her to fight it alone?” I hear one of the team members that I’m not that familiar with ask Kylen.

“Yes,” Kylen replies simply, with no inflection in his voice at all. He is completely emotionless and thinks that he is sending me to my death.

What I don’t understand is why. The whole point of the Choosing is to prove who is the better team for me, and by him making sure that no one helps me in a situation such as this, all he is doing is ensuring that I don’t get picked for his team. Why did he call the Choosing if he didn’t want me on his team?

Unless it’s not about that? Unless it’s about me dying.

Asael buzzes angrily in my hand, and I know he’s admonishing me for not paying attention. It turns out that was the right thing to do because I barely manage to dodge the big meaty fist heading in my direction. I know that I’m not going to get any help from Kylen and the team, so I don’t waste any more time thinking about them. I only risk losing my life if I do.

I swing using one of my swords at the fist, but before my swords make contact, the creature dissolves into sand and then re-forms again, and therein lies the problem. How can you kill something that you can’t actually strike? I decide to go on the defensive and strike out wildly; it may look like I have absolutely no skill by doing this, but every time that I swing at him, he dissolves into said and then re-forms again, which means I should be able to find the solid heart.

It's not easy keeping an eye on the swinging limbs and tail, all while trying to look for the heart. I can hear the others arguing and one of them laughing at my expense, clearly thinking that I have no idea what I’m doing.

I ignore it all.

It seems like it takes forever, but finally I see it, the heart. It’s not where a human heart is because, of course, it’s not, that would make it far too easy to know how to kill it. Instead, it’s in his third eye that’s slightly off center in the middle of his forehead and at least twenty-five fucking feet up. There is absolutely no way that I can throw one of my Asael swords that accurately, which means I’m going to have to fucking climb him, and while he is big, he is not big enough that he’s going to lose sight of me climbing him if he were it would mean that I could get up to his heart and stab it so much easier.

I pull a little bit on that place of magic inside me, asking it to give me more speed. That is the only way that I’m going to pull this off. I’ve also got to get up there quickly enough that he doesn’t re-form, and I fall to the floor. I frown, actually, now that I’m thinking about it I really don’t think this plan is going to work. I don’t have another one though, so I may as well try this, I can’t kill him any other way, and I doubt that he’s going to get bored and decide to call it a day.

My magic surprises me when it answers, and I grin, swords in hand, as I rush toward the creature. As I get closer I will Asael to disappear so that I can climb up the creature. Fortunately, I have always been good at climbing, and the creature is obviously not used to the things that it attacks, running toward it instead of away from it because it seems to freeze in place.

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