Trying to slip into the right state of mind to sense a heartstone was not easy when literal tons of dirt and stone was bearing down on her, but all the practice with Alyr had paid off. At least, Mira thought it had until it started rolling around inside the earth demon’s body. In a way though, that made sense. It was a living landslide roughly shaped like a human. Calling its movement a run was stretching things when it was really more of a blob of cascading earth sticking legs out and pushing off of them, then sucking them back into its main bulk and creating new ones.

The heartstone started in its head, but quickly circulated through the body down into its stomach region. Once, it made its way down to the earth-clump of a foot and she could actually see it poking out through the dirt. Then that sliver of black soil-colored stone disappeared as it was sucked back into the main body.

That was all Mira had time for before it reached her. It rose up over her like a wave about to crash down, but before it could, she leaped forward and slipped her hand into it. It felt just like digging into a pile of loose soil, except that there were little rocks throughout it that spun around and smacked against her fingers.

She fought through the pain and grabbed hold of the one she wanted. As soon as she made contact, the earth demon froze in place. Its makeshift body quivered and a sound like a bucket of rocks being dumped into a wood chipper came from somewhere near its head. Mira’s fingers curled around the heartstone and she jerked it out.

“Oh well done!” the shadow cried from across the field. “So bold. They’ve given me a daring one this time.”

Whether the demon needed its heartstone to maintain its shape or was merely fleeing from Mira by returning to the ground, it broke apart into pieces that were quickly absorbed into the dirt. Mira looked down at the black soil-colored stone held in her hand. It was oblong and rounded, flecked with brown and grey spots. It smelled like freshly turned earth on a hot day, so strong that she could almost taste it.

With her new understanding of the mechanics of a Montrose demon hunter’s power, Mira could tell exactly how tenuous her connection to this heartstone was. At the same time, she knew how to strengthen it, and unless she was vastly overestimating herself, she thought she might just be able to bond with it well enough to use it despite already having a bond to the vilraf heartstone.

While she was studying it, the shadow said, “Better hurry up or you won’t have a weapon for the next round.”

“Is this some kind of game to you?” she snapped.

“Of course. I can’t wait to see how far you can go. It’s been over a thousand years since the last time anyone was able to challenge me directly.” It paused, as if lost in thought. “I don’t expect you’ll make it that far, but it’s nice to dream.”

Mira ignored the shadow thing’s ramblings. The heartstone was inferior, like that sensory amplifying one she’d once had for not even an hour. Without her bond to reinforce it, it would crumble away almost instantly. Even if she made the effort to preserve it, she doubted it would last more than an hour or two.

She could sense the ground through it. She knew where there was clay, where there were rocks, where the roots of plants had tunneled into it by the voids they left in her awareness. Without using her eyes, she could tell where the healthiest, greenest patches of grass were just by looking at the composition of the soil. That was interesting, but not really helpful in a fight. Any attempts to actually manipulate the earth like how Alyr had moved stone with his will met with failure.

It was better than nothing, but hardly the advantage she needed to ensure her survival. All it was really doing at the moment was letting her know that there was a rumbling in the earth, and that it was getting stronger as it moved her way. Whatever was causing it was closing in on her, rising up to the just below the surface and charging unerringly in her direction.

Mira watched it pass through a slab of stone wider than she was tall as if it wasn’t there. Through the heartstone, she could vaguely sense the stone reconfiguring itself, like a gelatinous liquid that stuck itself back together after being passed through. Then the source of the vibrations reached directly under her feet, and Mira had just enough time to throw herself to the side before it exploded out of the ground in a hail of loose dirt and small rocks.

It looked something like a greyhound, smooth and streamlined, built for speed. The demon shot straight up over Mira’s head and arced in a graceful backflip before striking the ground snout-first and slipping back under the dirt like a diver. It circled her once, picking up speed, before it burst forth again.

Instead of coming up straight under her, it shot out at an angle. It was faster too, but Mira still managed to predict its trajectory and slide out of the way. It slid back under the ground, leaving another patch of earth that looked like it had been rototilled.

Over and over it did laps around her, lunging out from different angles at different speeds. Twice it was so close that she could feel it brush against her. It didn’t seem to be slowing down either, and she was getting tired. It was only a matter of time before she made a mistake.

It was a demon though, she was sure of that. Both times she’d made physical contact with it, she’d been able to sense its heartstone using the power of the one she’d taken from the first demon that had attacked her.

Her current heartstone didn’t have any offensive capabilities. That meant her only means of ending the attack against her was to take the new demon’s heart stone. Mira was very aware that even if she managed to pull that off, it was only a short-term answer. The shadow-thing was still there, watching her, no doubt waiting to send the next demon after her. She needed to take it out so that she had a chance to figure out where she was and how to escape.

She dodged the dog demon’s next few lunges as she waited for the right opening. Each time, she evaluated whether she could last long enough to keep waiting for the perfect opportunity, or if she should just take what she could get before she was too tired to act at all. It was a gamble, trying to adjust to the demon’s variable speed on the fly, trying to get close enough to brush up against it and get a read on its body, trying to plot out the optimal point to attack.

Then it happened. It burst out of the ground right in front of her, practically between her feet. She let herself fall backwards amidst a shower of stinging dirt and stones and raised one hand. The dog demon’s own momentum carried it into her outstretched hand and she felt that strange sensation that accompanied sticking her arm into a demon’s body.

There was no time to grope around for the heartstone. She had only a fraction of a second before it was past her and the window closed. Mira knew where to reach though, and her hand snagged the heartstone and held on. The demon kept going over her head and she landed on her back, a lump of charcoal grey rock the size of an Easter egg in her hands.

There was a crash behind her where the demon smashed head first into the ground. Instead of slipping into the dirt like normal, its body rebounded back into the air and it flipped end over end to roll several times before coming to a stop in the dirt. Dazed, the demon pushed itself to its feet and took a shaky step.

Its paws dug at the ground and it whined in confusion. For the first time, it was still and Mira got a good look at it. Her earlier assessment of it being greyhound-like hadn’t quite been accurate. It was definitely dog shaped, but when it wasn’t moving a hundred miles an hour, she could see that it was actually thick through the shoulders and chest, and its head had no eyes or nose or mouth. Even its ears were more like backwards-sweeping spikes.

The demon didn’t react to her at all when she took her first wary step toward it. Mira didn’t know if that was because it couldn’t perceive the world around it or if it was just in the same funk every demon seemed to suffer when they lost their heartstones. As she understood it, all the demons she’d beaten so far had been relatively weak in the grand scheme of things. Stronger demons like Jorath and Shy would be crippled by losing their heartstones, but not insensible like the dog demon in front of her.

“Impressive,” the shadow-thing whispered into her ear. She flinched and spun away from its voice.

It floated behind her, still cross-legged with one elbow on its leg and its chin in its hand. “The timing, I mean,” it continued. “You’re not the first to snatch a heartstone out of a gelgrat like that, but still, impressive. Just for that, I think I’ll give you a ten-minute break before we start the next round.”

Mira winced as she flicked a piece of gravel embedded in her cheek away. “How many rounds are there?” she asked.

“That depends entirely on you. How many can you survive?”

“Let’s assume I can survive them all,” she said. She hoped that was true.

“Then it depends on how entertaining you are while you do it.”

In other words, she was fucked if she tried to play by its rules. She needed a better weapon than the heartstone she had though. Hopefully whatever she’d just taken from the dog demon had more offensive capabilities than the dirt-detector she was using. She focused on it, trying to get a feel for what it could do.

Immediately she got a sense of falling, like the earth had shifted away under her feet. The only thing keeping her from falling through the ground was an effort of will to keep herself up. It wasn’t much of a leap to figure out that the heartstone would let her slip through the earth like the demon dog had. She wasn’t sure if she’d have its speed too, but even if she did that was only going to be good for running.

Somehow, she didn’t think the shadow creature that was tormenting her was going to let her escape that easily. Wherever she was, it was in control, and she didn’t know enough to say whether it was possible to defy its rules. She was still fucked.

With any luck, the next thing that attacked her would have something useful for her to take. That whole plan assumed she survived it, whatever it was. That wasn’t really a comforting thought. It did spur her to look through the ground around her with the heartstone she’d taken from the first demon.

She completed two full scans of the ground in every direction before she realized that she was using both heartstones at the same time. She’d never consciously stopped accessing the newer heartstone and still held her feet above the grass through sheer willpower.

“What the hell,” she muttered to herself, studying both heartstones.

Each one had a unique resonance to it, but not nearly as different as the inferolisk and vilraf heartstones she’d tried to use at the same time. It was like watching a movie, but the video and audio were out of sync by a fraction of a second. It was noticeable, but she could almost forget about it if she didn’t think about it too hard.

Alyr’s lesson came to mind, the one about changing the tempo of a heartstone’s beating to match her own heart. They were so close together already; it was easy to get them lined up. Suddenly, a whole new sense unfolded in her brain. She wasn’t just aware of the ground, she knew the best paths through it, knew how to slingshot herself forward to reach incredible speeds.

It looked like running away might not be off the table after all. The only question was how far could she get before she reached the end of whatever world she’d woken up in this time. She shot a glance at the shadow-thing and saw it was smirking at her. Before she could say something, the heartstones quivered in her hands. The first one started to wobble, and with a sudden jerk, it leaped out of her hands to smack into the new one.

The two stones spun around each other, practically flying out of her hands, and Mira’s heart rate spiked in panic. She clung to them, terrified that she’d lose her only weapon, even if it wasn’t much of one. After a moment or two though, they settled down and melted into each other to form one rounded lump the color of charcoal specked with brown and white.

Mira focused on it, used the connection to calm her heart back down. Then she turned to look at the shadow creature, who had its chin rested on its hands while it sat cross-legged in the air again. “Neat trick,” it told her. “I haven’t seen anyone do that in a while. You have three minutes left, by the way.”

She couldn’t decide if the shadow creature was floating in the air to keep out of reach of anything she might try with the earth-based heartstones or if it was a coincidence. It wasn’t like the shower of loose dirt and small stones the dog demon had sprayed her with was anything more than a minor annoyance anyway, but the fact that it was avoiding being on the ground made Mira think that maybe it knew more about what the heartstones could do than she did.

Before she could follow that train of thought, a sensation came to her through the heartstone. It felt like a rolling ball of dirt, except underground and slowly pushing its way up to the surface. As it rose higher, it collected rocks and left loose dirt in its wake. Mira tracked its progress until it breached, where she got her first good look at it.

Thanks to the heartstone, she’d already had a good idea of its size. It was easily twice her height, made of slabs of stone with clusters of smaller rocks forming the joints of its human-shaped body. Some hard-packed dirt rounded off the rough edges and gave it a bit of flexibility. Obviously, the shadow-creature was operating on a theme with the earth demons.

“Thirty seconds until I let it loose,” the shadow creature told her, glee in its voice.