The world swung vertical as violent updraft punched under his ribs and wrenched him off his feet. He tried to gasp, but his mouth refused to open. His breath vanished. His spine arced as the gale hauled him, as though the entire corridor had flipped and gravity no longer had jurisdiction.

He slammed into the upper wall. The world spun as stone crashed into his shoulder.

His fingers scrabbled against rough stone. For a disorienting second, he hung there, pinned three meters above the floor, held aloft by the pressure column knifing beneath him.

His vision cleared in a jolt of adrenaline.

Stalactite, right there, jutting from the ceiling half a handspan from his temple.

The wind kept him pressed just shy of death, air roaring past his ears with the hot, metallic taste of panic. If the gust had thrown him a couple inches higher, his head would’ve been impaled. He would’ve been headless, if not dead, as one generally couldn’t survive without a head.

Below, the shattered crystal block still glistened with a viscous smear of black substance. He couldn’t tell if that was tar, sap, or some sort of insect bodily fluid. He labelled it tar for now.

The smear of black below rippled, then lifted.

The mantis humanoid rose with it, ascending on the same wind column pinning Fabrisse to the ceiling. Its wing-limbs vibrated with a chittering hum, the Feather and Guard runes on its frame illuminated in a syncing green. This creature has runes etched alongside its body? Only now he realized.

One hook-like forelimb angled toward him. A bead of the black substance welled at the tip of that limb—then it fired.

A jet of tar sliced shot the air.

“Searing Judicant!” Then Tommaso flung himself into the air and blocked it. He hurled upward on a pillar of his own fire, staggered against the strong wind yet got there anyway. He planted himself between Fabrisse and the mantis, all the while nurturing fire so bright they looked like miniature suns in his palms, and detonated them forward. The twin bursts met the tar jet; heat ballooned.

Fabrisse’s lungs spasmed, producing nothing except a wheeze that wasn’t even a proper sound. His tongue felt stapled to the roof of his mouth.

Another tar shot toward them.

“Down.” A crystal lasso spiraled out of the ground at Severa’s gesture, forming in a heartbeat and gripping around his torso. It wrenched Fabrisse off the ceiling, and he dropped like a cut rope.

The crystal band dissolved into powder the moment his boots hit the floor.

Severa was already shaping her next spell. A fresh crystal block surged up from the ground, slamming into place beneath the mantis’s wind column. The updraft broke around it with a shriek. The pressure that had been crushing Fabrisse’s spine vanished instantly, replaced by a full-body throb of pain.

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Then—

Fire Lance. Fire Lance. Fireball.

She cast spells after spells at the oncoming swarm in clean succession. It almost looked aesthetically pleasing.

Tommaso crashed down beside her, fire still rolling off his arms. “My flames work,” he said, “but that thing’s tar has heat resistance. It’s barely trying and still matching me. Not smart going head-to-head.”

Severa didn’t answer; she couldn’t. Since the left humanoid was the swarm orchestrator, the swarms kept coming. Her spells carved through them in blistering rhythm. Fire Lance. Fire Lance. Fireball. The corridor strobed orange-white with every cast.

Tommaso surged forward to cover the swarm. “Switch! I’ll handle offense!”

He didn’t wait for confirmation. His arms swung out, and a booming swell of fire howled from his hands. This time, the mantis humanoid flinched. Its movement lost its elegance, and with a sharp swing of its limbs, a cluster of the smaller insectoids materialized out of the swirling black tar aura around it. They didn’t fly so much as get thrown into Tommaso’s inferno.

They hit the fire wall and ignited instantly, screaming in pitches that made Fabrisse’s teeth hurt. Their bodies burned and frayed into streaks of chitin. They sacrificed themselves in a grotesque, instinctive defense—fuel for the flame, not barriers to it, and the booming fire washed over their disintegrating carcasses, diffused but still roaring.

“The plan’s the same?” Tommaso shouted over the roar of wind and fire. “We protect Fabrisse so he shuts off the damn gust?”

“Yes.” Severa pushed herselfforward like pushing into a hurricane. Her crystal ward pushed out ahead of her, the tunneling lines in it writhing as they redirected trajectory after trajectory. Tar splattered across its face; fractures splintered outward. She gritted her teeth so hard Fabrisse could imagine them clattering together even over the wind.

She was clearing space for him.

A long fracture split down the center of her ward. Fabrisse knew he didn’t have long.

She shoved the damaged ward forward another half-meter, planting it like a shield in the corridor’s throat. “Move,” she growled.

He sprinted after her, and immediately a stabbing ache pulsed along his lower back—delayed punishment from being slammed into the ceiling. It flared so violently he nearly sucked in a breath through clenched teeth.

Not now. Not helpful.

Another throb hit, almost electric; his knees buckled an inch. But he had urgent matters to attend to, and with that thought, the pain became background static. His mind compartmentalized it the way it always did under pressure: Put it in a box labelled ‘Later.’

The moment he reached her, Severa stepped aside, and his back pressed against her for the briefest second. He slid along the stone, shoulder scraping rough ridges as he returned to the array of spirals.

The mantis surged again with the upward wind and immediately tried to overwhelm Severa with a torrent of tar. Her ward shuddered but held, and Tommaso shot out discs of fire from his fingers. His Scattershield. They whirled through the gale like blazing sawblades, intercepting the descending tar stream before it could collapse Severa’s ward entirely.

One of the feather runes on the mantis’s frame had flashed exactly when the creature lifted on the updraft. Fabrisse turned quickly to the wall, and sure enough, a single feather rune was also flashing.

Fabrisse shouted, “Does that Mantis have a set interval when it surges?”

“I think so! Every twenty seconds!” Tommaso yelled back. “Less than twenty before the next column hits. Make it count!”

Good. That was enough. He just had to interfere when the creature committed fully to the Wind Surge and catch the rune at the exact moment it synced.

But when Fabrisse reached for the Feather rune, his fingers met nothing. The rune simply drifted, weightless, insubstantial, like a loose mote of light before falling back in place.

“No, no, no, come on—” He swiped again. The rune bobbed, floated, and refused to anchor.

How do I interact with it?

And he had less than ten seconds.