In the dark, murky forest stood a small, hastily build wooden shack. Not really a shack, more of an elevated platform with a roof. In its centre was a small fire and a trench surrounded it, catching drips of water. Really, if the shack hadn’t been in the middle of a bloody battlefield, it would have been a rather nice place to camp for an evening.
Unfortunately, instead, there was blood and gore everywhere. The corpses of larger and larger creatures began to pile up both in the trench and forming a wall around the little shack, its occupants continuously chopping away at the seemingly endless horde. Retvik, Litvir and Arkay had been taking shifts between gracious murder, moving corpses and keeping their area clear, and this eternal, gruesome work was just beginning to take its toll of them.
Suddenly, in the middle of chopping up a bloody body and throwing it into a pile, Arkay exclaimed in both shock and surprise.
“We’re fucking idiots!”
Retvik looked up from the fire he was tending to. Litvir grunted as he upheld his telekinetic fields, slicing the limbs off anything that passed through it.
“Pardon?”
“We’re fucking idiots, we’re doing this all wrong! They’re just going to keep on coming because we’re in their home! We need to move away from here to fulfil that stupid “until you’re alone” thingy!” With a tut, Arkay picked up the corpse he was holding and threw it into Litvir’s telekinetic shield, disintegrating it. He then rushed over to Retvik, moving the fiery deity to one side and pointing at the ground, where Retvik’s fire pit had been built. “We need to dig down! Get out of this sphere! We’re inside it and we need to get out! If we get out and seal the hole behind us, then we’ll be alone!”
Litvir sneered, slicing through yet more ugly, black, bloody creatures. He no longer cared what they were, all he wanted to do was make sure they were dead. “And how the fuck are we supposed to dig down?”
“Explosions, probably…” Retvik shrugged. “Someone will have to continue covering our backs, but if we have two of us working to move ground, we could… feasibly get out of here.”
“Assuming there is an “out of here”! Litvir snapped. “We might be digging forever!”
“We’re already fighting forever!” Arkay hissed back. “We’re not getting anywhere doing what we’re currently doing! Listen, if I can get high enough and if you guys clear some space, I can at least blast a crater into the ground to get us started.”
Sighing, Litvir relented. “Fine, fine. Should clear us some space anyway… How do you want to do this?”
“We’ll have to fly upwards, get ourselves off the ground…”
Before Litvir could argue, Retvik grabbed hold of both him and Arkay and leaped into the air, using blasts of heat to keep the three of them airborne. Arkay immediately wriggled free, summoning his own pair of star-filled wings, hovering elegantly. Below them, the monsters had realised that their prey was trying to escape and were clawing wildly at the air, trying to work out how to resume their endless attack on the Decaylings.
“Litvir, can you make a protective shield around you and Retvik, please?” Arkay gently asked.
“Of course.”
“Alright…” Arkay smiled weakly, lowering himself so he was below Retvik and Litvir. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his hands. The air around Arkay cooled briefly, before abruptly heating up. This too though was temporary. The heated air collapsed in on itself, and Arkay thrust this collapsing vacuum downwards, towards the vicious masses below.
A bright, white light illuminated the sphere, blocking out even the cold sun in the sphere’s centre, just for a moment. As everything faded to blackness, all that was left was a horrific crater cutting across the forest’s surface, tearing down through the blood-soaked ground, revealing something shiny beneath. At the edge of the massive crater, the ground began to move, as the monsters in the darkness, those that had survived, tried to work out what had just happened.
“Is that… metal?” Retvik gasped, wiping his eyes with his free hand. “Are we inside a metal sphere?”
“Seems so…” Litvir grunted. “And at the very least, we have cleared some space…”
“Oh…” Retvik’s gasp faded into a smile. “Actually, I think I can work with this… You two cover my back, I am going to melt a path out of here…”