The creature stepped into the clearing.
Up close, it was even worse. Its arms hung so low that its fingers almost brushed the ground beside its knees. One shoulder sat higher than the other, and its whole body seemed twisted slightly to one side. When it moved, it looked clumsy, almost broken. But Owen had heard what it had done to the forest on its way here, and he could see branches as thick as his wrist snapped and hanging behind it.
The smell of blood came across the clearing with it.
Behind Owen, the girl was already backing away, pulling at the injured boy’s good arm.
"That’s it," the boy said. His voice was ragged. "That’s— it killed Tobin. It—"
He couldn’t get the rest out.
Owen heard him. He didn’t look round. He was watching the blood around the creature’s mouth, the strange length of its arms, the way its eyes had found him and stayed there.
The creature lunged.
It covered the distance in two strides, one long arm already swinging. Owen threw himself to the side, and the arm went past him into the tree behind where he had been standing.
Crunch!
Bark exploded off the trunk. Splinters sprayed across the leaves.
Owen came out of the dodge already cutting. The burning sword swept across the creature’s exposed side.
Shhk!
The blade bit deep, and the flames hissed in the wound.
The creature didn’t recoil.
It didn’t even seem to notice. Its body twisted around in a way no spine should have allowed, the top half turning almost completely on the bottom, and its other arm came at him from behind its own back.
Owen saw it too late.
Claws raked across his upper left arm.
Shrrk!
"Agh!"
Pain tore through him. His sleeve ripped open, and the flesh underneath with it, and he felt the hot rush of blood running down toward his elbow before he had even finished stumbling away.
The creature came after him.
Its first arm swung back the other way. Owen got the sword up just in time.
Clang!
It was like being hit by a falling tree. The blow drove him backward across the leaves, his boots skidding, and the shock of it went straight through his arms and into his side. His ribs, the ones he had nearly forgotten about, lit up all at once.
"Hngh—!"
He caught himself a few paces back, gasping.
Blood was dripping off his fingers. He could still move the arm, and he could still grip. But it hurt every time he did.
"GRRAAAHHH!"
The creature howled and came for him again.
Owen moved away, circling, trying to think through the pain. That arm reached farther than it looked, and it bent where it shouldn’t. Two exchanges, and it had already opened his arm. If he fought it like any other monster in these grounds, it was going to kill him.
"Eveline!" Elias shouted behind him. "Get them out of here! Marianne, cover them!"
Out of the corner of his eye, Owen saw Eveline go to the injured boy and take his good side. The girl clutched at him for a moment, then let Eveline take some of his weight, and the three of them started stumbling toward the far trees. Marianne moved between them and the fight with her spear out. Elias planted himself just behind her, shield up.
The creature swung at Owen.
He slipped under it and went in high, at its chest. He needed to know how much it could take.
As the blade came down, something moved under the creature’s skin.
Ridges pushed up across its chest, hard and pale. Bone. It shifted and thickened beneath the skin, spreading over the upper part of its body in a rough, uneven layer.
Owen’s sword hit it.
Thunk.
The flaming edge cut in. Then it stopped.
It was stuck.
The blade had wedged itself in the bone, and when Owen pulled, it didn’t come out.
A long hand closed around his wrist.
The grip was unbelievable. For a single moment, Owen hung there, staring up at that blood-smeared jaw.
Then the creature threw him.
He flew across the clearing. The sword tore free of the bone as he went, and he slammed back-first into the trunk of a tree.
Thud!
The air left him all at once. He dropped to the ground in a heap, and for a second, he couldn’t see anything at all except white. His ribs were screaming. He couldn’t get a breath in.
He heard it coming. The heavy, dragging footsteps, crossing the clearing toward him.
Get up. Get up.
He couldn’t.
"Hey!"
Elias.
He came charging across the leaves and planted himself in front of Owen with his shield up, just as the creature swung.
The arm hit the shield, and Elias fired Rebound.
THOOM!
The shield threw the arm back so hard that the creature reeled away, staggering, its whole body twisted around by the force of it.
But the blow had been too strong. Even with Rebound, it was too much. Elias was lifted off his feet and sent tumbling backward across the clearing. He hit the ground and rolled and came to a stop in the leaves.
"Ugh..."
He wasn’t moving.
Then he was. Slowly. Pushing himself up onto his elbows, shaking his head, his shield still on his arm.
The creature was turning back toward Owen.
Shk!
Marianne’s spear drove into its side from behind.
It didn’t go deep. The creature’s skin was too tough for that. But it hurt, and the creature whipped around toward her with a furious snarl.
"That’s right!" Marianne backed away, her spear held out in front of her. Her face was white. "Over here! Come on!"
It came at her.
Owen dragged in a breath at last. It hurt so much that his vision swam. He got one knee under himself, then the other, and pushed himself up the trunk.
Across the clearing, Eveline was running back. She had left the girl with the injured boy at the edge of the trees, and she came in fast and low behind the creature while it was turned toward Marianne.
Her sword flashed across the back of its leg.
Shhk!
"GRRAHH!"
The leg buckled. The creature staggered.
And then it turned on Eveline.
She was too close. She had committed everything to that cut, and she was still coming out of it, and there was no time to get away from the arm that was already swinging at her head.
Owen moved.
He didn’t think about it. He threw himself across the gap between them, and as he went, he pushed Steel into his left forearm.
Armament Extension.
Cold weight flooded through the arm. He felt it harden beneath the skin, from the wrist to the elbow, until it felt more like part of a sword than part of him.
He got the arm up between the creature and Eveline.
CLANG!
The creature’s arm smashed into his forearm and stopped dead.
The steel held.
But everything behind the steel didn’t. The force of the blow went straight through it into his bones, into his shoulder, into the torn wound above his elbow. His whole arm went numb from the fingers to the shoulder, and he heard himself make a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
Eveline stumbled clear behind him.
"Owen—!"
"Get back!"
He shoved the creature’s arm away with the last of the strength in his left side and swung his sword at it with his right.
Shhk!
The creature recoiled, hissing, and backed off a step.
Owen let the Steel drain out of his arm. It hung at his side, heavy and useless for the moment. Blood was still running down it.
Eveline was beside Marianne now. Elias had got back to his feet, a little unsteadily, and was raising his shield. All four of them were facing it now, spread out in a loose line across the clearing.
The creature looked from one to the other. Its chest was heaving.
Owen looked at its chest, too. At the patch of bone where his sword had stuck.
Fire wasn’t enough. It burned the flesh, but it couldn’t break the bone, and he couldn’t afford to get stuck again.
He needed something heavier.
He pushed Steel into the sword.
He felt the blade change in his hand. It grew denser, harder, heavier, its edge turning into something that could break rather than slice. He kept the Fire burning on it too. The flames ran along hardened steel now, and he could feel both of them, the cold weight and the heat, held together in the one blade.
The creature came at him.
This time, Owen didn’t try to slip past. He met it.
He ducked the first arm, came up inside its reach, and swung the heavy blade straight into the bone on its chest.
KRRACK!
The bone cracked.
The creature shrieked and swung at him. He slid away from it, came back, and hit the same place again.
KRRACK!
More of it split. Pale fragments sprayed off into the leaves.
The creature didn’t only swing at him. It swung at whoever was closest, wildly, and every time it did, Marianne’s spear was there to jab at its arms, or Elias’s shield took the edge of a blow, or Eveline’s sword darted in at its leg. None of them could hurt it much. But none of them let it focus on him, either.
And as Owen fought, he was looking at that bone.
It hadn’t come up just anywhere. It was thickest in one place, high on the torso, and it spread out from there.
He had seen that before.
There had been a book in the Ferrers library, an old illustrated volume about monsters. He had read it so many times as a boy that the spine had cracked.
The creature swung at him. He ducked under it, struck.
KRRACK!
Near the back of the book, there had been a section about humanoid monsters like this one. Hunters knew them. Adventurers, too. The scholars who wrote the book believed they had once been people who tried to force their Awakening and were twisted into something else. They had been careful to say that was only a theory.
What they had been certain about was the warning.
These things could survive almost anything. Wounds that would kill any other monster, again and again. But they had a core, deep inside. A vital core.
Destroy that, and they died.
The creature caught Elias’s shield with a backhanded swing and knocked him sprawling. Marianne stabbed at its side to drag it off him. It spun toward her.
Owen saw his chance and swung.
KRRACK!
A whole section of bone broke loose and fell away.
The creature screamed. It turned on him, and for a moment, it seemed to forget everyone else. It dropped low, its long arms spread wide on either side of it, its breathing turning into a hoarse, rattling growl.
Owen saw what was coming.
It threw itself at him.
Both arms swept in at once, from either side, closing toward the middle like a trap. There was nowhere to step. Left or right, one arm would have him. And behind him, there was only another tree.
The Steel wouldn’t hold it. Not from both sides. Not with one arm already half dead.
He let the Steel go.
The weight drained out of the sword, leaving only the fire. Steel and Vapor wouldn’t work together.
Then he let go of himself.
Vapor took him. His body, his clothes and the burning sword all loosened at once into grey mist, and the world went cool and soft around him. For a single moment, there was no pain. No ribs. No arm.
The creature’s arms passed straight through him.
Its hands met in the middle, where his chest should have been, and closed on nothing. Its momentum carried it on through the place where he had been, and it slammed headfirst into the tree.
Crunch!
The whole trunk shuddered. Leaves came raining down.
Owen pulled himself back together.
Weight first. Then the ground under his feet. Then the hilt in his hand, the flames still running along it.
And the pain, all of it, crashing back into him at once.
He clenched his teeth against it.
The creature was tangled against the tree, its arms still spread out on either side of the trunk. Its chest was half turned toward him as it tried to drag itself free, and the broken patch of bone was right there.
Owen poured all the fire he had into the blade until it roared, and cut.
Shhk—CRACK!
The bone split wide open.
Through the gap, through the burned and torn flesh behind it, Owen saw something. Something hard and dark and distinct, sitting high in the creature’s chest.
And he remembered the last page.
A cutaway drawing of a body, with the core marked high in the upper torso. Behind a thick, dense cage that protected it.
Exactly there.