"Dryth, I'm going in! Time for big!"

  "Wait!" Dryth scrambled to his feet and started running along the hill, moving as far as possible from John and Tobias. "It takes me time to pure cast that, I need a free moment!"

  He slid to a stop near a singed tree that was still hanging in after getting sliced into by a heat ray and threw out another couple of Sparkle Darts at the crab's eyes. The red glow at the edges of the shell was gathering again, but more slowly. The drawing of an eye that had floated above the tower and fired the heat ray had vanished after the attack had ended, and Dryth assumed it was part of the attack itself. With the ray of death not repeating immediately and the other's taking the crab's attention, Dryth crouched down and began to concentrate with one hand on Sindri.

  Without a card for it, the spell to shrink or grow something was time consuming. He had to touch the object or being he wanted to change, the more powerful versions could do it at range but Dryth had to work his way up to those, and he had to concentrate both on what was being changed and how he wanted it to be while picturing both in his mind. He'd succeeded in casting the spell in the lab enough times that Ewan had allowed him to use it in the field, but it still took a few moments to get right. Dryth pictured Sindri as he was, a gold and white coatl, about three feet long, with his fangs and scales and feathers, and then how he wanted him to be, the same, but big. Piece by piece he built both images and then overlapped them until the larger version was superimposed over the smaller version and became "the truth".

  There was a drain on Dryth's mana as he coalesced the magic into what he wanted, and he wished he could cast inside his soul space. The measuring device in there would be able to show him how much mana this was costing, if only he could use it that way! He knew the spell was a mana hog but he also knew it cost less mana the more familiar you were with the object being changed, thanks to Ewan's lessons. While he didn't have any exact knowledge of Sindri's organs or internal structure, which he was sure would help reduce the cost, he knew Sindri. How could he not? His partner literally lived with him every waking moment of every day.

  Dryth opened his eyes as Sindri surged under his fingers and expanded rapidly until he was almost ten times his previous size. Originally around the size of a fairly normal snake, he ended up as large as an apex boa. Normally, such a drastic shift in size and mass would be a hindrance to anyone or anything trying to fight, but this was magic and magic didn't care about the laws of physics.

  "You're doing it again!" Sindri shouted as he charged forward toward the crab. It was turned away from them thanks to Venna kiting it around in circles, and he made it all the way up to it's rear legs without being noticed.

  Dryth started moving again, keeping an eye out for a good opportunity to throw an attack. Making Sindri grow was less expensive than doing it to anything else but it was still expensive and even without having a solid number Dryth knew he didn't have much mana left. "What? What am I doing?"

  "You're having those weird emotion-thoughts that-"

  "Now is not them time to deal with that! Wreck that tower!"

  Sindri wound up one of the crabs legs in a flash and tightened around it. The stone cracked under the force of his enlarged muscles and the crab staggered under the sudden addition of his weight. Sindri reared back, exposing his fangs, which began to glow and grow as he activated Fangs of Light. Kay could just make out the tiny card against the contrast of one of Sindri's scales as he bit deeply into the leg he was wrapped around. The ruin crab's leg completely collapsed and it began to thrash in pain as it let out another loud burble.

  "The tower, Sindri!"

  "I'm getting to it!"

  "Well get to it faster! That glow is getting brighter!"

  Sindri slithered up onto the shell, which was tilted in his direction thanks to the rear leg buckling and he began slamming his body into the shell, sending cracks throughout it and tilting the tower a few inches with each impact. The crab began thrashing even harder and trying to reach backward with it's claws to grab Sindri off of it, but even with his increased size Sindri was more flexible and faster and easily evaded the clumsy grabs as he continued breaking the tower.

  "By the king's shiny ass!" Venna shouted a curse as she ran away from the stamping and slowly spinning crab. "Since when could you do that!?"

  "The whole time! I said I have support spells for him, didn't I?"

  "That's- Whatever! Can you make him any bigger?"

  "No, that's all I've got!" Technically if he'd had more mana to start with he could add a bit more, but that wasn't relevant and no one needed to know that. "I'm almost tapped out of magic, too!"

  "I think you've done more than enough!" She spotted an opportunity and ran back in, slicing up one of the legs that wasn't fully covered in stone and cutting deeply into it.

  Sindri slammed one last time into the tower and the stone shell plus the stone of the tower itself finally had enough. It crumbled into chunks of loose rock that tumbled off the shell or got stuck in crevices between pieces of ruin. The crab slammed its claws repeatedly on the ground like a toddler throwing a tantrum and it's burbles got higher pitched either in rage or frustration. The red glow began running like water again up the shell, although with a much weaker glow than the first attack. Sindri pulled away from it, watching it warily as he continued coiling around bits that stuck out and trying to crush them or wrest them loose. In the span of one second the red energy ran up four separate spires and spikes and formed four separate, smaller, eyes that turned to point at Sindri.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "Mo-"

  "Oh, shit!" Sindri unfurled his wings and threw himself backward with a mighty flap. The majority of his body unraveled from the shell, making him look like a kite rising into the air as he stretched himself out away from the four beams that were fired at where he'd been. The heat rays traced their way across the shell, just barely missing the end of Sindri's tail that was still wrapped around a spike near the front of the crab. They left neat lines with melted edges in the stone as they burned a path before running out of energy.

  "Hey, wait a second, I can just..." Sindri kept flapping mightily and began dragging the crab to the side. The legs scrabbled in the dirt as it tried to stay stable, but it's own attacks slamming into the ground had made the terrain unstable, plus the injuries inflected on it's legs made it difficult for it to support it's own weight. It managed to keep itself upright with a concerted effort and by using it's claws as braces, but it didn't have any freedom to attack. Venna and Xinath both dove in with a fury, cutting at the legs they could reach and tipping the scales farther and farther out of the ruin crab's favor.

  Everything went against the crab when John was able to contribute again. Dryth hadn't been watching closely, but there were spots all along the crab's shell where the material wasn't stone but something else. Some of the splotches looked like jelly, some were glittering metal that shined like silver, and there were some that didn't look like anything Dryth had seen before, but were definitely not the crab's original shell. There were some spots on the ground that had changed too, but none that were large enough to completely trip the monster up. That wasn't true of John's final contribution. An orb as big around as a man's chest hit the ground right underneath the legs Sindri was pulling hardest against, glowing a faint white color. The color spread out along the ground then solidified as the material changed properties.

  The crab's legs slipped out from under it as the terrain under it became a slick sheet of ice. It flew up into the air with comically wide eyes swirling frantically and turned completely upside down in midair. Sindri let go with his tail and let the crab sail off, where it landed on the ground with an intense crashed. Bits of stone and ruin went everywhere as the crab's own weight flattened it's rocky hoard. The entire thing was like a cartoon pratfall in real life.

  "What's a cartoon?"

  "What? I don't know, where did that come from?"

  "You thought it, just now. Something about a cartoon fall?"

  Venna gasped and started sprinting toward the ruin crab. "The reliquary!"

  "Ah, crap she's right. Finish off the crab we can talk about weird thoughts and feelings after we're safe!"

  "Easy peasy!" Sindri tucked in his wings and dove down to the ground, flaring them to turn it into a short glide. He coiled around one claw of the convulsing crab that was trying to get back upright, without any success. Pinning the claw down he used Fangs of Light again, lighting up the area around him and making the crab try and flinch away to cover it's eyes. "Bye crab, hope you taste good!" With ruthless efficiency Sindri drove his glowing fangs through the stone where the eyes sat and into the Crab's brain. It's thrashing, kicking legs continued for a long moment that tipped it over on it's side before it finally went still, the legs shooting straight out into spiring points before dropping and curling in over the body. "It's dead!"

  "I noticed." Dryth stood up straight and started stretching out his tense muscles while carefully watching the corpse for any movement.

  Venna slowed to a halt mid-charge, Tobias' arrow bounced off the dead ruin crab, and John had to send a tiny orb of transmutation magic into the ground nearby as they all realized that their prey was defeated. Everyone stopped and stared at the massive creature's body, all of them in more than a little bit of shock from the sudden cessation of battle.

  Sindri rapidly shrank to his normal size as Dryth let go of the spell, and his head popped up among the broken bits of stone and ruin that covered the crab. "Hey! I about to take a bite! Turn me back big!"

  "I am out of mana, bud. You were going back to normal in a few seconds no matter what."

  "But I wanted to eat crab!"

  "You still can, and now it'll last longer. Dryth was not going to bring up his worries about what would happen to Sindri if he ate more than his normal sized body could hold. The argument would take way too long to get through, especially since Sindri would rightfully point out that Dryth had no basis to back up his fears. Still, Sindri exploding because his mass changed but that of anything he ate didn't would kill them both, and Dryth wasn't risking that.

  "Oh! Good point." He turned around to look at the ruin crab. "But we can't take much of this back with us... Couldn't I eat more if I was bigger?"

  "I'm sorry, but there's no way I can make you big again for a while."

  Sindri sent the mental sensation of a tongue clicking along the bond but stopped asking to be grown. He slithered over the body and stopped just out of sight. "I'm at the reliquary, it still looks intact."

  "Thank you." Dryth waved weakly to get Venna's attention and pointed in the direction Sindri had gone. "Reliquary's over that way. Sindri's marking it for us."

  She blinked a few times as she snapped herself out of staring at the body. "Right... Um... Right, the job, right." She shook her head and started moving in that direction before stopping and spinning around. "Everyone alright?"

  One by one they all called out their statuses. Everyone had a few scrapes or bruises from getting smacked around by debris or throwing themselves away from the red beam attack, but no one was hurt enough to need treatment right away.

  John started peering around after telling everyone about his injuries. "Where's Xinath?"

  "Right here."

  He tilted his head backward to look up into a hooded face without even jumping, unlike everyone else. "Oh, good. You alright?"

  "I didn't get hit by anything."

  "Great!"

  Dryth pushed himself to his feet and started stumbling toward where Sindri was waiting. "Got through the fight without any big injuries. Good job team."

  Venna let out a slow breath and the tension holding her body stiff faded away. "Hot damn, was that a fight. Xinath, since you're uninjured could you keep watch while the rest of us rest up and look at getting the reliquary open or ready to transport?"

  They nodded in response. "Of course."

  "Thanks. Right, let's get the goods, loot what we can, and get back to town. It wasn't easy, but we're about to make some good money!"