Dennis motioned her back with an imperious wave of his sword, toward the darkness that hid Gannon and would preserve Aria from the wild thrashings of the battle to come.
Rakastava’s whole body glowed a deep red, like the surface of a banked fire in the early morning.
The stump had withered like a snake’s cast skin. The creature slid forward with its two remaining heads raised high, a great one and a lesser one to the side. The tongues flickered, and the manes flowed with the dark sheen of cobalt glaze.
As before, the creature glided to a halt just short of the coping. “Did you bring my head, little human?” the central head asked Dennis.
“Your head is here, Rakastava,” Dennis shouted through his visor.
“And I will put the others with it when I take them.”
The mouth of the lesser head opened so wide that the lower jaw pointed to the water and the upper jaw to the cavern’s distance-shrouded roof. Dennis braced himself.
Instead of striking directly at him, the open gullet spewed an arc of liquid against his chest.
Dennis staggered. Where the heavy fluid spattered onto the sea, water fizzed and sputtered.
Where it struck the floor and coping, stone cracked and bubbled away in white foam.
The main head opened its jaws part-way. Dennis advanced, raising his sword for a stroke, not a thrust, at the knot of scale-armored muscle where the head met the neck.
Lightning bathed him; his ears rang with the shock of thunder.
Dennis’ armor protected him from the worst effects of the thunderbolt as it had from the gout of acid, but his eyes were flash-stunned and his skin was momentarily too full of needle-prickling pain to have any feeling. He stabbed out blindly, knowing he was about to be swept beneath Rakastava’s rush—
And amazed, an instant later when he could see, to find the monster in the slim, serpentine tentacles of Chester who was trying to clamp shut both fanged mouths at the same time.
Rakastava’s forepaw gripped the robot’s carapace and slammed Chester down in the shallow water. Dennis rocked forward, aiming his sword again for the blow the shock had forestalled.
The forked, suckered tongue from the lesser head caught Dennis’ sword-wrist. The stroke chopped scales and drew blood from the main neck, but it didn’t bite deeply enough to do fatal harm.
Lightning blasted Chester as the robot writhed in Rakastava’s clawed grip.
A scallop of sea vaporized in the sizzling flash. Instead of a natural shore, Dennis could see a pavement of fitted stones extending outward at a steep slope.
The blast threw Chester into the air. The robot’s limbs thrashed in mindless convulsions with blue sparks popping from their tips.
Dennis didn’t let his conscious mind consider what the battle might already have cost him. His eyes gauged the distance and angle. Then, with all his strength and the pull of Rakastava’s own tongue to aid, he struck a backhand blow at the neck of the head which held him.
The core of the stroke was his heart’s memory of Chester flailing in blue fire.
The sword bit clean and deep. The tongue gripping Dennis jerked the youth to his knees in the instant before the retracting muscles went limp and the fire died from the two blazing eyes.
The newly-severed neck spasmed. Acid sprayed out as from a hose; Dennis covered the slots in his visor with his left forearm, hearing the droplets snap and burn as they runneled off the armor.
Rakastava’s remaining head reared. Dennis braced himself against the lightning he expected when the mouth opened.
“Two are off, but one is on, human,” the monster thundered. “The third day is my day.”
The serpent body pulsed a brighter red with each syllable; the sea around Rakastava began to steam. As the monster sank into the deeps, Dennis could follow its glowing descent for hundreds of feet through the dark water.
Chester curled a tentacle around his master’s armored ankle and pulled himself up onto the coping. The robot’s carapace was unscarred, but the eight limbs trembled noticeably as Chester lifted himself.
“Water extinguishes the fire,” he muttered. “But the water boils as well.”