Caen bid Chasma to cover his head entirely.

Even with his maximally heightened processing speed, Caen could not track the movements of the largest spider summon. Before he could blink, it was in front of him.

As was Sormot, thankfully.

She barreled into the creature, smacking it aside with her bident, as Caen belatedly leaped backwards, heart thudding in his chest. He split his mind four ways.

A beam of Planar light from Sh’kteiro shoved back the giant shadeling that had been gliding towards Caen.

A portion of Caen’s mind Mimicked Zeris’s Fire affinity as six large fireballs formed above her head. She conveyed the spell components directly to his soul while he added his intent to the working. They both Impassioned the entire construct.

At the same time, the horde of spider summons and two-tailed shadelings surged outwards, surrounding their group. A different portion of Caen’s mind was flickering Soul-sense at some of the shadelings, preventing them from making clones.

Six double-Impassioned fireballs immediately shot out in six directions towards the rear end of the attacking creatures. An instant before impact, Caen dismissed his own portion of the shared spell.

A deafening staccato of explosions echoed through the silence of the night as flashes of light brightened the area, and the temperature suddenly rose. So many spiders and shadelings were blown forward from the explosions. The night air was filled with the scent of burning flesh, clouds of miasma, and the shrill, warbling screams of the summons.

Passionfire clung to skin, to grass, to anything it came in contact with. Zeris withdrew her Impassioning quickly, however, even as the creatures—most of whom had survived—reached their group.

The entire area had become chaotic, but a separate portion of Caen’s mind noticed as more spiders appeared out of thin air. They surrounded one spider that wasn’t joining the fray. It looked no different from them, but its soul structure was weightier than theirs.

Had it summoned more spiders? That portion of Caen’s mind continued to observe.

With a Fire spell, the blade on Caen’s glaive glowed red as it became searing hot. He Impassioned it immediately.

Body empowered, he ducked under a gray substance that a spider shot out at him as it scuttled quickly towards him on viciously spiny legs. He cleaved through the creature with preternatural might, Passionfire spreading through its mangled body. Caen withdrew the Impassioning before cutting another spider in half. Both spider corpses vanished, as was natural for summoned creatures.

Three shadelings flowed nimbly towards him, slipping past two of the mercenaries. Caen crashed his existence on all three shadelings as he decapitated one of the creatures in a spray of black dust.

At the same time, a new shadeling bit down on his Chasma-covered shin, its teeth piercing deeply into the fragment. As he handled the other shadelings, he manipulated a group of vines to wrap around the biting creature’s neck and strangled it viciously.

The Percipients kept the three large spiders and the ten-foot-tall shadeling occupied, having relocated their own fight a fair distance away from the Attuners. Both Sh’kteiro and Hshnol were moving faster than Caen could follow with his speculon. Neither of them was a physical combatant, which was terrifying. He couldn’t even see Sormot or the other spiders. The large Shadeling was the easiest to track.

Caen pivoted, dodged, bore attacks, made liberal use of the surrounding vines, and delivered vicious strikes with the glaive. All while flickering Soul-sense, which disrupted the smooth movements of the two-tailed shadelings enough for him to kill them.

Though his companions tried to keep them off him, the creatures swarmed Caen. He was clearly their primary target.

Each creature Caen hacked through with his Impassioned glaive was consumed by Passionfire. He withdrew the said Impassioning each time, even though the spider corpses always vanished seconds later.

The spiders’ sticky, gray webs sought to bind his limbs or cover his head, but his fragment greedily absorbed any nonliving substance that came in contact with it—even the rain. Spiders scrabbled against Chasma, tearing into it faster than it could reknit itself.

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There were far more spiders than there’d been at the start. And he’d identified more of those responsible for the new summons. Their souls gave them away every time a new batch of spiders arrived.

While he fought, a portion of his mind connected to a summoning spider nearby, and then he extended that connection to another similar spider, threading their souls together. Then he linked their souls to yet another. And another.

He strained his existence till he’d formed a bridge between seven of them. Two portions of his mind handled the sensory overload of being in eight different places at once.

Only one of these creatures on the bridge was in his immediate vicinity, but Caen had determined days ago that pain and heat could spread along this connection. Fire practicians were highly resistant to their own attacks, and Caen was confident in his passive augmentations.

An Impassioned fireball formed over his head and slammed into the closest member of the bridge. It wasn’t one of those responsible for summoning more of the creatures. Still, it would suffice for his purposes. As expected, the spider caught fire.

But Caen had not been expecting to erupt into flames as well. Passionfire consumed him and six other creatures, straining his volition severely as it spread to the surrounding creatures who were in contact with them.

The fire was… pleasantly warm. It did not hurt in the slightest.

Shadelings and spiders alike recoiled from him.

Chasma expressed concern for Caen and sent him an impression of ‘not food’.

A separate portion of his mind sent regard and understanding to the fragment, as he hacked into another shadeling. “It’s not hurting me, Chasma. I’m fine.”

Chasma expressed regard.

At the same time, Caen terminated his connection to the spiders with whom he’d threaded his soul. He withdrew all his Impassioning and extinguished the regular fire on himself, as he tore into the surrounding creatures, the scent of charred flesh filling his lungs. Even without Passionfire, the spiders he’d set ablaze still burned.

Zeris, in her scale armor, which now glowed red, blasted the creatures around her with Impassioned Fire spells. Aunt Vensha was beside her, slashing through spiders with crisp and ferocious movements. She worked seamlessly with Amni and Mafrolem, whose vines were binding creatures.

The three mercenaries that had arrived with Sormot ruthlessly cut down the creatures around them, but more kept coming. At this point, there were only so few shadelings left. More spiders were still being summoned.

The portion of Caen’s mind tasked with doing so found more of those responsible for this. They blended in with the newly summoned spiders, looking indistinguishable from them. As before, he threaded their souls together. This time, he set himself on fire, knowing that the effect would spread to them.

He and the summoning spiders erupted in Passionfire.

After a few seconds, he once again terminated his connection, withdrew his Impassioning, and extinguished the fire on himself. This gave him and the other Attuners the chance they needed to severely thin the creatures’ numbers.

Caen located a few more summoning spiders, and once again, he threaded their souls together and set himself on fire. Shortly after ending the connection and withdrawing his Impassioning, their group mopped up the last of the spiders.

“Ancestors!” Mafrolem exclaimed, looking between Caen and Vensha. “Remote ignition as a mid Attuner? Vensha, what the fuck? You said he’d fixed his abjection, but this—ancestors.”

“I told you he had a weird Fire bloodline, Mafrolem.”

“Right, right.”

One of the mercenaries was giving Caen an odd look, but didn’t say anything.

Caen looked over the group and verified that no one had been heavily injured. He had injuries himself, but he could tend to those later. He and Zeris had made enough noise with that initial detonation that Caen expected city deputes to be here any moment.

The blur of movements in the distance as the Percipients fought had only grown worse. Just moments later, though, it all came to an end. The shadeling fell to the ground with a large thump, a fist-sized hole through its head. Sormot’s bident burst through one of the spiders, and it vanished immediately, as did the other two. Sh’kteiro, Hshnol, and the Body-enhancer seemed fine.

“Wow, I thought they’d keep sendin’ more,” Sormot said, spinning her bident.

“I have divined the location of the Summoners,” Sh’kteiro said to Caen. “They are here in Drenlin.”

Caen felt a presence materialize, as the shadeling slipped out of his shadow, darting for the corpse of the giant one-tail. But the shadeling was immediately flattened on the ground by the auras of the three Percipients.

“Where do you think you are going?” Caen asked the shadeling in Klakalk.

“Let go of me!” the shadeling's many whispers echoed back urgently. “I need to retrieve what is rightfully mine. She has my tail trapped inside of her.”

“You owe me answers,” Caen said. “And now I have a few more. What did you steal?”