Chapter 93: Fire Breath
The Hestia reared back, preparing to strike again, and Lucas met the charge head-on.
Flame roared stable around both of his fists as he ran forward alongside Eleanor and Mark. The three of them moved together now, no longer scrambling, and no longer playing defensive. Eleanor’s blade carved low arc across the beast’s foreleg, Mark’s gauntlets caught the retaliating swipe and turned it aside with a grunt and Lucas drove in from the opposite side and hammered both flaming fists into the Hestia’s ribs hard enough to stagger it sideways.
They pressed on...
The creature’s earlier speed and power still made every exchange dangerous, but the rhythm had shifted. Eleanor called angles. Mark absorbed the heaviest hits while Lucas exploited every opening the other two created.
The Hestia’s roars grew shorter and more frustrated. Its flaming mane guttered in places where Eleanor’s blade had bitten deep.
Lucas felt the familiar heat of [Ignition] flooding his arms and grinned through gritted teeth.
"We’re getting it," he said after another roar from the beast.
Mark laughed, "Don’t jinx it, princess."
Eleanor didn’t waste breath answering. She simply drove forward again, forcing the Hestia to plant its weight and defend.
Lucas and Mark closed the flanks and for a moment, the three of them had cornered the beast against the open ground before the bridge, its massive body turning in tighter and tighter circles as it tried to keep all three attackers in front of it.
Then, the Hestia stopped moving.
Its jaws opened wider than before and it seemed like the air itself seemed to draw inward.
Within its throat, something swirl as a ball of some kind began to take place.
Before Lucas realised what was happening, it was already too late.
A torrent of concentrated flame erupted from the creature’s throat, firing straight towards them.
Eleanor shouted something. Mark cursed, but the sound of the roaring flames seemed to blur out everything as Lucas threw himself sideways on pure instinct.
**BOOM**
The world lit up in a combination of light and smoke
He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up coughing. The heat kept going, racing past the front line and straight into the denser cluster of survivors still trying to reorganize near the center.
Screams rose at once, and soon, bodies ignited as People ran while others fell and began to burn..
Lucas’ eyes widened in horror.
This wasn’t in the plan. Nothing about a ranged attack had been accounted for.
The Hestia had been pure melee force until now and the sudden shift left him frozen, unable to do anything but just watch while the firestorm tore through the Faction.
"No"
Eleanor was already moving, blade still lit and sprinting toward the nearest group of burning survivors. Mark followed behind, his gauntlets raised as if he could somehow shield people from the torrent of fire.
Lucas heaved a shaky breath as he forced his legs to work and ran after them.
They reached the people, but they were too late.
The Hestia advanced through the chaos it had created, no longer cornered, no longer pressed as it simply walked into the smoke and the screaming and began to kill anyone still alive.
A swipe of one massive paw sent three fighters tumbling in broken heaps. Another breath of flame turned a defensive line into ash. Survivors who tried to drag the wounded clear only added themselves to increasing pile of corpses.
Lucas watched it happen in fragments of dodging and desperate attempts to pull people out of the fire. Bertram went down under a single crushing step. Iris’ last arrows vanished into the beast’s hide without effect before the creature’s jaws closed around her, and by now, the front line that had held moments earlier simply ceased to exist.
Eleanor reached a group of half a dozen peopl, and the Hestia turned its head toward her as if noticing a particularly irritating insect.
The next torrent of flame caught her full across the left side of her body.
Lucas heard the sound she made, the fire clinging to her clothes and the flesh beneath it.
Half of her torso blackened and peeled off as the flame tore through her. Her flaming sword guttered out as she staggered, and the other side of her body blackening. The Hestia’s paw came down and finished what the fire had started, crushing her into the dirt in a wet sound as it pounded her flesh flat.
Mark roared and charged, and the beast met him in one giant stride. One paw sweeping low with a blow that caught him across the upper body and drove him into the ground.
"Argh—!" He gasped as he could feel something breaking...
Before he could rise, the Hestia’s other paw came down on his head.
**SPLAT**
The sound was dull and wet, and when the paw lifted, Mark’s face was smeered all over it like how half eaten gum stuck to the back of a shoe.
Lucas stood in the middle of the burning ground, fists still lit and staring at the two bodies that had been fighting beside him seconds earlier.
Almost no one else remained alive. The Faction reducing to burning shapes and the stench of cooked meat mixed with flesh.
The Hestia turned its full attention on him now, flame pouring from its jaws again, washing over Lucas in a wave that should have ended him the same way it had ended the others.
It didn’t....
The fire roared across his skin and simply... slid past. His clothes charred and fell away in places, but the flesh beneath remained unmarked.
’Ahhh right, I’m fireproof...’
His gaze fell onto Mark’s dead body involuntarily as th thought of him being fireproof brought up a particular memory...
The torrent of flame finally siezed, the Hestia’s breath attack left him standing in a circle of scorched earth, unharmed and very much alone by now.
The beast tilted its massive head, as if mildly confused before charging again.
Then it closed the distance in two strides and simply killed him.
There was no clever strike, no struggle. He didn’t fight back, he couldn’t. Not when the only people he was fighting for had been burned to ash.
One enormous paw slammed into Lucas’s chest hard enough to drive the air from his lungs and the strength from his legs. He hit the ground on his back, and the second blow came down on his head before he could even register what had happened.
His skull split open, blood and brain matter oozing out.
The last thing Lucas registered was the taste of blood and the familiar cold hands of death coming to take him...
[You have died].