Like the last time Zoey had fucked a goo-monster into submission, her opponents lay on the ground, their bodies seeming to dissolve. Blaze lay collapsed on her back, her hand on her forehead as she panted, and Ignis on her stomach, groaning softly, the two of them turning into lava pancakes as their bodies lost solidity.

Though Zoey was also exhausted and would very much like to lay back and catch her breath, she forced herself to sit up after only a moment. Because the fight wasn't over. She knew without an explicit announcement that she had won against Ignis and Blaze, but that didn't mean the bigger problem had been solved—the rampaging twenty-foot elemental who was the real boss.

Rosalie, Delta, and Maddy had been fighting the thing tooth-and-nail the whole time. Zoey's encounter against the two smaller elementals had hardly lasted forever—or even all that long, considering how good their bodies had felt—but even a handful of minutes was a long time when fighting for one's life.

"So, I won?" Zoey asked, just to confirm.

"Don't be … too proud of that fact, human …" Ignis groaned, the words muffled by how she was lying stomach-down, face pressed into the floor. Or rather, her own gooey body, since she was melting.

"I don't know, Ignis," Blaze panted, her words clearer because of how she was lying on her back. "I think she can be proud. That was amazing."

Ignis huffed, shooting her ally an irritable look. Then she looked at Zoey. "So, what is it you wish of us, then?"

"What I wish of you?"

"You've asserted your dominance," Ignis said, sounding not entirely pleased by the fact. "We're yours for the rest of the fight."

"You … are?" Zoey asked. Mel hadn't worked like that, but then again, Mel had been a solo encounter. Would all fights with 'add-ons' work similarly, or was it just this one?

Getting to her feet—and swaying a bit as she did—Zoey appraised the fight. She considered the best way to join back in. And also the best way to utilize her two hard-earned allies. Though, considering their gooey exhaustion, Zoey had maybe done too good a job of fucking them to their breaking point.

Zoey was two things, when it came to combat: a mage, but also an alchemist. And there was one category of potion she'd yet to put to good use. The extinguishing potions.

"Could you rejoin him, you think?" Zoey asked, an idea forming in her head.

"Rejoin him?" Blaze asked. "Why would you want us to? Shouldn't we fight?"

Zoey pulled a potion out from her inventory and presented it to Blaze, waggling it between two fingers. "I've got a feeling," Zoey said, "that if I can get this thing to go off from inside an elemental, it'll do some serious work."

Blaze tilted her head, presumably reading the item's description. If monsters could even do that. "Hm," she said after a moment. "I suppose it's worth trying."

"It won't hurt you though, right?"

"Of course it will," Blaze snorted. "It'll be going off on us, too. But we're all the same boss. And it's not like you can kill us."

"It's our duty as the defeated party," Ignis grumbled.

Zoey didn't like the idea of her two partners getting caught in the crossfire, but as Blaze had said, boss monsters couldn't actually be killed. They were the shard itself, if anything Mel had said was to go by. Their defeats would always be temporary.

"Okay, well, not to rush you or anything," Zoey said, pulling out the second potion, this one for Ignis. "But yeah, join back into his body, and get as deep as you can. Then break those potions. Head or chest, I guess, wherever you think will do the most damage."

With visible effort, the two melting lava-girls tugged themselves back into coherency. They staggered to their feet. Zoey sympathized with their exhausted motions. They'd wrung her out as much as she had them, after all.

She placed the two flame-extinguishing potions in either of their outstretched palms.

"You fought … adequately," Ignis said, eying Zoey. "I shouldn't have underestimated you. If we went again, the outcome would be different."

Zoey laughed. "I liked fucking you too, Ignis."

Both lava girls blushed.

Then, they faced the hulking body of the main boss monsters. Gripping their respective potions, they shoved the items into their chests, bodies parting to suck the glass vials in. A moment later, they melted down, turning into a pile of goo, losing their bodies entirely. Rolling forward as sentient balls of liquid, they rushed toward their master, carrying the deadly payload with them.

Rosalie and Delta, aware of their surroundings like they always were, saw what was happening. They disengaged. The boss didn't pursue, seeing his two elementals coming to rejoin his main body. Zoey wondered whether he knew the betrayal was coming. To some degree, he had to; again, the entire shard was one organic entity, wasn't it? Were their minds even split? Were Ignis and Blaze the same person?

Who knew? In the best of cases, Zoey suspected shard biology was weird.

That said, the roar the boss released sounded pleased. He was ecstatic he would be regaining his two arms, which Ignis and Blaze had formed from.

But, of course, that wasn't what happened.

Blaze and Ignis rejoined his body, slithering up his legs, then, out of sight, presumably deep into his chest.

Zoey didn't hear the cracks of glass, but she knew the moment the potions went off. Behind thick plates of stone armor, the lava composing his body shuddered, then imploded all at once, sucking inward and then bursting outward, globs of lava splattering the ground in all directions. But more importantly—spots of lava cooled rapidly across his entire chest, darkening as it solidified into hard obsidian. One went off inside his skull, too, as Zoey had requested, and his gruesome features froze over and turned black.

It didn't seem to kill him outright, but the roar that ripped from his half-solidified mouth wasn't so much a roar as a whimper. He staggered side to side, dropping his weapons and his hands clawing at his chest and face.

Rosalie and Delta, like the predators they were, surged forward, sensing weakness.

Zoey started to pull together her own spells to help finish the thing off, but it wasn't necessary. Rosalie, Delta, and Maddy had already been fighting this thing at full tilt since Zoey's encounter against Ignis and Blaze had begun; they'd whittled it down in that time. The massive heat implosion issued by Zoey's potions had put it on its last leg.

Not more than a minute later, the boss collapsed to its knees under their combined assault, providing even easier access for Rosalie to execute it with a spear through the face, the blade sneaking between chunks of frozen obsidian to slam deep.

And so, the third-shard boss was defeated.

Approaching its corpse, Zoey hoped to see the two busty lava elementals reemerge, but no such thing happened. Despite that she should have expected it, her heart twinged. She'd have liked to give them a proper goodbye. Even if all they'd done was try to fuck each other senseless. In a possibly life-or-death situation.

As a squad of four, they gathered around and looked down at the collapsed beast, now a lumpy collection of lava, rock, and obsidian.

"How'd that happen?" Delta asked, glancing at Zoey with a curious look.

"Had them drag the extinguishing potions inside," Zoey said. "They became my allies when I won, I guess."

"Huh," Delta said. After a moment of digesting that explanation, she followed up: "You have fun, then?"

Zoey considered the question.

"Lava girls are something else," she answered succinctly.