“Does he need help immediately?” Ray asked. He could teleport to Sameer if it was urgent. It might even be good to surprise the Sylvans, take them out early so that they didn’t pose any problems going forward.

  “Not a good idea,” Eliza said. “They’re too strong. Even two of you together won’t be enough.” She frowned. “Especially not both of you.”

  Ray’s initial thought was to take that in a demeaning way. They had worked fine together the last time they’d had to fight together against that demon. Just because Sameer was so disparaging all the time didn’t mean he couldn’t put differences aside, at least for a while.

  But that wasn’t what Eliza was getting at. She meant that there was no need to implicate both Ray and Sameer in the same battle.

  Someone needed to keep going to the end of dungeon, after all.

  “So what’s the plan, then?” Pierce asked. “We need to head onwards anyway, right? We could just move faster.”

  Eliza obviously still didn’t trust him, but she put that aside for now. “We’ll journey forward. Just faster. Sameer will hold them for now. Problem is, they’re going to block our path eventually anyway, so we can’t not take them out. We’ll just have to get to him fast.”

  “Unless Sameer can take them out on his own,” Gritty said. She was helping Marcus back to his feet. Marcus himself still looked a little out of it, though Ray had to give the guy props for being conscious after being possessed.

  “That’s the thing,” Eliza said. “He can’t. They’re strong.”

  Ray tutted. Now she was starting to sound like even if Ray teleported to Sameer, it wouldn’t make much of a difference against the Sylvans. Just how strong were they?

  “No point in wasting time, then,” he said, already moving. “Let’s go.”

  They headed up the mountainside, moving fast. Ray moved closer to his actual teammates as they got going.

  “You doing okay, Marcus?” he asked.

  “Better than ever,” Marcus slurred.

  “Could have fooled me…”

  “Fit as a fiddle. Good as new. Assert your metaphor of choice.”

  “Those are similes, not metaphors.”

  Marcus slurred some more. Ray decided to leave the poor guy alone for now, but his state was a bit concerning. He would be more or less useless in fights going forward. Ray exchanged a look with Gritty, which pretty much confirmed what he was thinking. Marcus might end up being a liability in his current condition.

  Of course, that didn’t mean they were just going to drop him here or something like that. They’d just need to take that into account as they went ahead.

  “Don’t worry, Knight Guy,” Gritty said. “We’ll make sure you don’t die.”

  Marcus mumbled out another unintelligible answer.

  It was nice that the fight against the Demon of Cowardice had dispersed the enemy teams who had been attacking them earlier. Ray wondered if they had gotten caught in the fear too.

  “Come to think of it,” he said. “You guys haven’t told us how you took care of the last demon.”

  “Wasn’t me.” Gritty flicked a glance at Eliza ahead of them. “She just cut it apart with her time powers.”

  “…cut it apart?”

  “Yeah. It’s not just weird time orbs. She can reshape it to like, swords and whatnot. So—”

  Gritty made some swinging motions with one arm to demonstrate Eliza slicing through the Demon of Cowardice. Honestly, Ray was wondering what the demon’s real form would have looked like. But now he was busy re-evaluating Eliza. She was even stronger with her broken time powers than he had thought.

  “You sure about including him?” Gritty asked in a whisper. She didn’t have to indicate who she meant. Ray got it.

  “He doesn’t strike me as… evil,” Ray said. “Someone obsessed towards his goal, sure, but not someone who can’t put it aside when there are other things going on.”

  “Mm. I guess he’s not as stupid as Sameer either.”

  Ray grinned. “That helps too, yeah.”

  They met their next demonic obstacle before long. A literal series of barriers stood in front of them, blocking their path forward on the mountainside. The wide pillars of stone stood too tall for Ray to fly over too. It was almost as though they had met a dead end. Except—

  [Eternal Pulse—Dungeon Obstacle]

  Demons of Obstinance

  Perseverance is often a virtue. The ability to keep going, regardless of hardship and difficulty, ought to be praised. Yet an effort that is meaningless but keeps going regardless is the opposite of perseverance. Stubbornness leads only to dead ends. When faced against overwhelming obstinacy, the only option is to crush it so it may never arise again.

  Crush… Ray frowned. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

  The others were clearly determined to find out if that was indeed the case. Eliza was already attacking with her temporal orbs and the like. Not the blades Gritty had mentioned. Ray would have liked to see those.

  Pierce was joining her. Gleaming javelins came to burning life over his head before shooting forward in fiery arcs. Ray couldn’t recall if he had heard their screeching noise before, but it was definitely present now. Although, not for long. The booms and cracks of the javelins hitting the rocky barriers resonated through the area.

  They worked. And then they didn’t. That was the thing. Eliza and Pierce’s powers reduced the obstacles to dust—or in Eliza’s case, simply caused them to disappear.

  But the barriers didn’t stay down. Before the rest of them could reach the debris and get through the openings they had carved, the rocks regrew. Ray was actually amazed at the speed of regeneration. It was only moments before the stone barriers were back, as tall as before.

  Like they had never been shattered in the first place.

  Eliza cursed. Peirce came to a stop.

  “Looks like the Obstacle notification wasn’t kidding,” Ray said as he neared them. “We’ll need to find some way of getting past that doesn’t involve destroying them.”

  “Or,” said Gritty as she dragged a barely conscious Marcus closer. “We can just zoom through as fast as we can as soon as they’re destroyed.”

  They all looked at her. Then they looked at Marcus.

  “I’m just pretending to be slowed down,” Gritty said without batting an eye. “Once we get going, I’ll shoot past you all. Even with Marcus.”

  “Yeah,” Marcus said, barely legible. “Even with Marcus!”

  “That won’t work,” Eliza said. “You read the Dungeon Obstacle notification. It’s the same thing with all these demons. They always have some trick to them.”

  Ray agreed. There was some other method of getting past the demons besides using brute force. Or at least, there was an additional gimmick to them that brute force alone wouldn’t solve easily.

  “But what could that trick be…” Pierce said. He threw some more of his javelins, causing the rocky barriers to fall before returning in no time at all. “Force clearly isn’t it.”

  Ray tried to think of what the notification had said. Obstinance. That was what they were facing. Barriers who refused to stay down, no matter how often they were destroyed. Stubborn obstacles that were only an obstacle because of their bullheadedness.

  The only option is to crush it so it may never arise again.

  Weren’t they doing that already, though? Crushing the rocks with their clearly far stronger abilities. Yet they kept coming back with incredible speed.

  “At least they’re… docile,” Eliza said. Despite her words, she was still scowling. “Not that it doesn’t feel urgent anyway.”

  Right. Because even being delayed was bad. No telling how long Sameer could hold out against the Sylvans on his own. They needed to get past this Dungeon Obstacle, and fast.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Look at the mechanism of their resurrection,” Pierce said. He was still throwing his javelins at random barriers, causing them to shatter before arising again. “There’s a specific way they keep coming back. They’re always rising out of the ground.”

  Ray got what he was saying. “So, you’re saying we can hold them down. Prevent them from rising.”

  “Possibly with some kind of weight, yeah.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Eliza said. “But with my powers instead. Keep a constant time bubble where they can never exist. Except, none of us can pass through the time bubble either, so we’d be back at square one.”

  She didn’t ask if anyone else possessed powers that could hold the demonic barriers down. Ray honestly didn’t blame anyone for not offering. Nobody thought of their powers in this very specific context. He definitely hadn’t.

  But banging their heads together revealed some interesting potential among them all. Karkatrix had chains, and Gritty was confident her blood and bones could form an effective cage. Even Ray figured he could use his constructs creatively. A Duskshell formed from Aeon Mana and Impenetrable Shell could cover a wide area and force the demons down.

  “That’ll give you the opening you’re looking for,” Eliza told Gritty with a small smile. “So you can shoot past the demons with your super speed.”

  Gritty grinned back. “Can’t wait.”

  They tried the new strategy. A direct attack with their various powers was followed up by several trapping abilities to prevent the demons from rising again.

  Ray took the lead in the second stage. Resurrect Recollect called up the Impenetrable Sheel construct at a distance right on top of the rubble that the Demons of Obstinance had been reduced to. An addition of Aeon Mana caused the dark shell to turn into the spectral version of the monster it had come from—a large, weighty Duskshell.

  The monster roared but Ray’s command kept it in place. Kept it right on top of the destroyed demons.

  The others followed before long. Gritty used her abilities, crafting a mesh of blood and bones over the debris. Karkatrix sent chains roping over them to form a net. Eliza wasn’t far behind with an enlarged time bubbled holding space within it constant.

  It worked. Ray couldn’t help but laugh. Their plan to trap the demons down was actually—

  He had thought too soon. From the very start, the debris rumbled and grinded together as the rocky demons tried to reform. But, in Ray’s case, the rocks couldn’t push off the heavy monster construct atop them. Ray had believed it would remain that way.

  Except, the fallen Demons of Obstinance were simply gathering strength. Once they had grown strong enough, they burst upwards.

  Ray’s Duskshell construct roared out as it surged a few dozen feet into the air, balanced precariously on top of several rocky pillars. Gritty’s blood-and-bone and Karkatrix’s chain link nets had both been ripped apart as the demons surged back to their original state.

  “Ha!” Eliza said, her eyes shining as she took in the fact that her method was the only one that had worked. None of the demons could rise through the orb of constant time. “You weaklings.”

  “Weak, huh?” Pierce said, eyeing her sceptically.

  He had good reason to not take Eliza at her word. Despite succeeding, she wasn’t going to be able to maintain it for long. Sweat beaded her brow. Her arms trembled. Ray wouldn’t be surprised to see her collapse any moment now.

  “Looks like that plan didn’t work…” Ray said.

  Gritty growled. She nudged Marcus at Ray, who had to act a little fast to make sure their partly conscious companion didn’t fall to the ground.

  “What are you—”

  Ray’s question was answered by Gritty’s own actions. She raised her arm, her face scowling. He had to wonder if she was mad at the demons frustratingly rising back up no matter what, or at the fact that Eliza had showed her up.

  Gritty attacked. Ray was quite content to sit back and watch just how far her skill stretched, and just how strong it was.

  Two bones spiked out of her palms, which she stabbed into the ground. A delta of fissures snaked out from the points of impact, the cracks glowing brighter and brighter red as though the blood they undoubtedly held was turning into magma. In seconds, the fissures had covered the entire area under the rocky demonic barricades.

  Then they climbed up the demons. They all watched as the glow within fractures brightened to the point Ray was thinking he was really going to need to squint.

  A moment later, it all blew apart. The blood surged out and surged through. Bones spiked outwards everywhere from within the fissures. Rocks went flying as the detonations sent up a cloud of dust, smaller blasts rocketing out everywhere as Gritty’s power spread farther.

  Impressive as that was, Ray was about to ask what the point of all that was besides just venting out Gritty’s frustration.

  But a singular detail caught his eye. Gritty’s skill had spread so far that she had destroyed not only the Demons of Obstinance, but a huge chunk of the surrounding area as well. The path just ahead of them, the path farther behind blockaded by the demons, and even the mountainsides around them.

  It was the destruction of the mountain itself that Ray was now staring at. He had thought that trying to hold the demons down by trapping them wasn’t going to work.

  Wrong.

  The landslide crushing in from either side were doing the same thing, but much more effectively than any of their abilities could have.

  A slow grin was worming out on Ray’s face. “Gritty, you’re a genius.”

  “I am?” She turned to him with a questioning glance, then looked back to see where the debris was holding down the demonic rubble. She grinned too. “Of course I am.”

  “Destroy the mountainside!” Pierce shouted. “That’s what’ll keep them down.”

  They were on it in seconds. Ray crafted a Windbane maw around each of his hands before firing their compressed lasering breaths at the rocky walls. Gritty caused more of the bloody fissures, and even Karkatrix attacked with his overly extended chains.

  The mountain around them collapsed. Ray’s construct might have failed to hold the fallen demons down, but the enormous landslide they all caused did the trick.

  No more pillars of rock rose high to block their path.

  Although…

  “You know, we might just have blocked off our path in a different way,” Ray said, looking at the mountainous pile of broken rocks towering over them all.

  “But at least this one is something we can climb.” Pierce followed his own advice, grasping the rocks and pulling himself up.

  Ray stared for a moment. “Amateur.”

  Then he used Soaring Wings to throw himself up. Even with Marcus in tow, it wasn’t hard. The others complained about it, naturally, which only made Ray grin as he was the first to reach the peak. Normally, he wouldn’t have been able to scale the barrier the Demons of Obstance had created because they were basically vertical. Impossible to scale.

  The debris of the collapsed mountainside was far less steep. There were little steps up its surface that allowed Ray’s wings to gain more and more elevation. It was why the others were able to climb up without a lot of trouble too.

  “What are you waiting for?” Eliza asked as she huffed after reaching the peak. “We don’t have time to waste.”

  “Right,” Ray said. “But…”

  He hadn’t dismissed the Windbane heads around his hands for a very clear reason. There were dozens of demons coming straight at them.

  Eliza growled in frustration. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m tired of dealing with these things. They aren’t even that rewarding. They’re just pests!”

  The new ones coming at them were a weird mix of birds and reptiles, kind of like pterodactyls. Except, they flapped their wings fast as hummingbirds and sported a mosquito-like needle sticking out of their mouths. Or maybe that was the mouth. Not fun.

  Ray fired off a lasering blast of compressed blue flames at the onrushing demons. The monsters were fast. Most avoided the flames with rapid ease. Ray wasn’t satisfied catching only one of them, not when there were at least several hundred flying from all over the surrounding mountainside.

  “I’m serious,” Eliza said. “We don’t have time to waste on these things. We need to go.”

  “The solution’s clear.” Pierce pointed his spear at the screeching demons getting closer every second. “Some of us will need to stay behind to deal with those things while the rest of us move on.”

  Gritty got up behind them. “We’ll take care of it.”

  Eliza scowled at her. “Who’s we?”

  “You, and me, and anyone else who’s staying behind to deal with bullshit.” She turned to Ray. “You can save their idiot, right wingman?”

  Ray wasn’t so sure he even wanted to save someone like Sameer, but he supposed he was contractually obligated to do so. “If you guys can hold them back, and assuming it’s not too far from here without any other obstacles, I can reach him.”

  “I’ll come too,” Pierce said. “Lent can remain behind and assist the others.”

  Lent didn’t argue. Ray wasn’t sure he could trust that, considering Lent hadn’t even acted much against the Demons of Obstinance. But then again, they hadn’t needed any real help.

  Eliza looked like she wanted to argue, but then she appeared to recall that they were running out of time. Honestly, Ray was surprised Sameer hadn’t ended the fight one way or another by now. “Fine. Go ahead. But Karkatrix will go with you.”

  “He will?” Ray asked.

  “I will?” Karkatrix asked.

  “Yes.” The look on Eliza’s face made it pretty clear she wasn’t about to brook any arguments. “A representative from all the teams. To keep things fair.”

  They were already heading towards a member of Eliza’s team, but Ray didn’t care enough to argue. “Alright, let’s go.”

  They headed down. Ray led the way, Karkatrix and Pierce following not far behind as he climbed down the mountainous pile of debris. It was shaking a little as the Demons of Obstinance once more tried to build themselves back up. Thankfully, they stayed down.

  Several of the newer winged demons were rushing at them, but they had cover now. Even better, they had artillery now.

  A storm of rocks shot in from behind. They ranged in size from finger-sized pebbles to boulders that could demolish a house. Wasn’t surprising at all how the demons dropped like flies under that barrage. Ray and the other two had to be careful not to get hit by one of the falling rocks or dead demons.

  Pierce laughed as they ran on. “That’s Lent for you.”

  Under the barrage of falling demons and raining rocks, they forged onwards. Interesting to note that Ray wasn’t even present long enough to get another Dungeon Obstacle notification. He figured there had to be another trick to these ones too, but at least he wouldn’t need to worry about it.

  It turned out there wasn’t that long to go before they arrived where they needed to be. About ten minutes after passing on from the battlefield with the numerous flying demons, they were nearing the area that Sameer had told Eliza and Karkatrix.

  “Where exactly is he?” Ray asked Karkatrix. “And where are the Sylvans? We shouldn’t just barge in.”

  It would actually be pretty cool to barge in and save Sameer’s ass just as it was about to get whooped. Sadly, Sameer wasn’t the kind of person to let it get that bad.

  “I believe Sameer is currently surrounded by the Sylvans,” Karkatrix said. “Perhaps he allowed it himself, or perhaps the Sylvans are trying to enact their own trap and—” Karkatrix bent to calculating something on his many, many fingers. “Perhaps—”

  “Karkatrix,” Ray said. “Where is he?”

  Karkatrix sighed, his large chest heaving. “Come. Follow me.”

  With little other choice, Ray went after his ally. He did create a Windbane construct to stay back. Never hurt to have insurance.

  They saw Sameer before long. He was standing in the middle of a wide, flat area with several portals surrounding him. There were no signs of any of the Sylvans, but Ray figured they had to be close by. His muscles were tense. He was ready for action.

  Pierce was scanning everything around them with a sceptical look, his form now that of the swordsman with the glowing red blade.

  “So you’ve arrived,” Sameer said. “Took you long enough.” His eyes briefly took in Pierce. “And you really did bring that guy too. I didn’t believe it when I heard it.”

  Ray wanted to rebut that, but the truth was that Sameer had done a good job of surviving on his own for this long. “Why are you just standing here? Aren’t the Sylvans—”

  Sameer didn’t answer him directly, raising his voice instead as he said, “We’re done here.”

  The Sylvans arrived the next second. They appeared through one of Sameer’s portals. One first, followed by a second moments later. No sign of the third. Weren’t there three?

  Ray whirled to Sameer, the draconic maw around his hand brimming with compressed flames. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “What does it look like, peabrain?” Sameer said as he stepped through another of his portals. “I’m betraying you.”

  “Sameer,” Karkatrix said urgently. “What is the meaning of thiiiiii—”

  His words got lost as a portal popped up under him, swallowing him whole.

  “See you later,” Sameer said, then he too disappeared.

  Leaving Ray—and Pierce—alone with the Sylvans.