Nobody said anything for several seconds.

  Neil was just watching, sword held loosely in his hands as he breathed heavily. One of his hands was pressed against the wound on his thigh, which was starting to turn black. He would definitely need healing soon, but he seemed pretty calm about it. Maybe he had a plan.

  Cassie wasn’t in such a positive state. She was staring unblinkingly at me like she had seen a ghost, presumably because she thought she had. She was positively gasping for breath, almost doubled over with blood flowing from her nose like a waterfall. Her eyes were red and puffy, but there were no tears. She seemed exhausted.

  I opened my mouth and let the thick bile the necromancer had called blood fall out so that I could talk. “Hey,” I started, and then stopped again. I didn’t really know how to deal with this situation, given all that had happened.

  “L-Lia?” Cassie asked weakly, her voice broken. She slowly straightened up and staggered towards me, stumbling a bit but staying mostly upright. I hurried over to help her, only then remembering that I was currently in the form of a tube with legs.

  I used most of the vitae I had managed to take from the necromancer to start rebuilding my body, sticking to the basics while I had limited resources. By the time I had an upper body built on top of my tube body I had to slow down, since my body was a bit unbalanced. After another few moments I stood once more as Lia Prime, which felt quite satisfying after being a lump of meat.

  When Cassie reached me she did not tackle me as I expected. Rather she stopped, frozen as she looked me over. She glanced over at the pile of rotten fertiliser that remained of my body.

  “I can explain-” I was cut off by a choked sob from Cassie.

  I always hated hearing Cassie cry. It was so rare, even when she was sad she normally just went silent, forcing her tears to fall in a vacuum. In all of my years of knowing her, I had actually heard Cassie cry maybe five times, and four of those had been when we were under the age of fifteen.

  This was the fifth.

  I pulled her into my arms, ignoring the blood and dust and general filth on both of us to comfort her. She buried herself into my shoulder, shaking as she wept out her grief. It hurt, hearing her like this and knowing that, to some extent, I was the cause. I couldn’t bear it.

  “I am so sorry, Cass,” I mumbled, quiet enough that only she could hear. “I didn’t mean to worry you, really I didn’t.”

  The only response I got was her squeezing me tighter, as though I would leave if she let me go. If only she knew how unlikely that was.

  Neil finally limped over, standing quietly for a moment. Eventually he just nodded to me. “Glad you’re alive, Julie. Be more careful next time, yeah?”

  I nodded back to him, which caused him to move away to meet up with Jenny and the Revenant on the other side of the room.

  Cassie and I stayed in each other’s embrace for a while as she recovered from her mourning. Eventually she quietened down and her shaking eased, but she didn’t move. I didn’t want to end the moment, so I just held on to her and rocked gently, more for the sake of movement than anything else.

  Finally, after maybe ten minutes of rocking back and forth, Cassie separated herself from our embrace. Her eyes were still a little puffy, but she definitely seemed calmer than before as she wiped the blood from her face, which had slowed to a trickle.

  She stepped away and looked me in the eye. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.” Her voice was firm, although there was an undercurrent of that fragility beneath the surface.

  I shook my head a little. “I won’t. I promise.” I meant it, too.

  A tiny grin flickered across Cassie’s lips for a second, which lifted a weight from my heart. She was healing, albeit slowly. She’d recover from this, just like always.

  “Good. Think I get how you felt now, when you thought I was going.”

  I risked a joke. “Yeah, condensed into minutes instead of like a day.”

  She didn’t laugh, instead stopping as though she was weighing the options of something important. “Screw it, we deserve this. There’s something I need to do.” When she started speaking she seemed to be talking to herself, but by the end she was definitely talking to me. She stepped up to me again and I assumed that she wanted another hug, so I opened my arms to her.

  To my surprise, she pushed my arms down to my sides before moving in. When she stopped she was incredibly close, closer than I let most people even get to me. For a few eternal moments she did nothing but stare directly into my eyes with an intensity that I hadn’t seen in a while, her hands locked around my wrists.

  For these few moments I couldn’t have noticed the outside world if I’d wanted to. The entirety of my world was caught in the way that our breathing subtly synchronised, the way that there was so little distance between us that I could feel her body heat, the way that the smouldering fervour behind her eyes had my heart beating like I had just slain a dragon.

  That intense gaze flickered down to my lips, just for a moment. Then it did so again and stuck there like a fly trapped in a web. “This is probably stupid,” she murmured. “But I’m not risking losing you again."

  Before I could unpack those words she leaned in and kissed me, and for the briefest of aeons the world simply. Nothing mattered beyond this moment. My life was happily contained within the softness of her lips on mine and the way that my body folded and shifted to make room for hers, like a puzzle piece my subconscious had cut out just for her.

  The moment may as well have lasted forever, but when she pulled away it was still too soon. I felt out of breath and giddy and exhausted all at once. I felt alive in a way I never had before, and despite recent events and our environment I couldn’t help but smile a little dopily as she leaned back.

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  Her grin was smaller but no less passionate, at least if I was reading her right. I was sure I saw literal sparks fly from her hair. Then again I was a little unsure of everything in the moment, but she clarified for me. “Finally. You don’t get to run off this time, okay? We really need to talk. Soon.”

  I nodded, still feeling like my head was full of fluff. “What about?” I asked absurdly.

  Cassie chuckled. “Come on, the others are waiting. They won’t be happy when they learn I broke you.”

  “Huh?” I responded intelligently.

  She just shook her head and took me by the hand, leading me towards the entrance of the laboratory where Neil and Jenny were watching with matching grins, albeit for presumably different reasons. I slowly regained my wits as we made our way through the carnage, but whenever I thought about what just happened all I could focus on was the rush of warmth that flooded the entirety of my being.

  When we reached the others I moved to take my hand back on impulse, but Cassie just gripped it harder and arched an eyebrow at me. I shrugged and settled my hand back into hers.

  “Right, now that you two are done,” Neil said, looking between the two of us. “We should discuss precisely what went down here.”

  “Our Task Is Incomplete. Only One Facet Was Accomplished Here.” The Revenant spoke up, once more animate and freed from Jenny’s bindings.

  “Wait, we did all of that and we aren’t done?” Jenny spoke up. She was seeming a lot better than she had been when I’d left her. Now that I thought of it, Neil’s leg seemed better too. Far from healed, but much improved from where it had been.

  “I have a question,” I interrupted.

  “Is it where you can find some clothes?” Jenny snarked.

  Shit, my clothes were all on my old body.

  I flushed a deep dark green, the misty teal patterns on my skin twisting with sudden energy. After a moment I removed anything even remotely sensitive from my body, which technically helped. I still felt exposed though, so I started layering thin, versatile plates of chitin over large parts of my skin in a vague imitation of clothing. I didn’t have nearly the vitae recovered to make the transition into bug form right now, so this was the best I could do.

  “No,” I finally answered. “I was going to ask why both of you are healing.”

  Neil raised his hand. “My doing. One of my teammates is an alchemist, so I had a couple of healing potions. Not nearly as fast or potent as an actual healer, but its the best most people can get.”

  I furrowed my brows. “Why would a witch need to use alchemy to heal someone?”

  Neil shook his head. “They… wouldn’t? But my teammate isn’t a witch, he’s an alchemist. He doesn’t know any magic, he just works with magical ingredients.”

  “What? That’s a thing?” I asked. That seemed like the kind of thing Almon would have mentioned, but I didn’t remember anything about non-magical alchemists.

  Neil shrugged. “Apparently it’s a pretty new technique. Regardless, we should probably put that aside for now. We have more important things to discuss right now.”

  He turned to the Revenant. “How many of them were there?”

  The Revenant answered instantly, like this information was drilled into their very being. “Our Task Calls For Five. Two Have Been Dealt With, Including The One Who Hides.”

  Three more of these guys? This one was rough enough.

  “Are they all going to be necromancers?” Neil asked.

  “No. Our Remaining Foes Are The One That Kills, The One That Lies and The Enemy.” Much like when they mentioned their task, the mention of the one they called ‘The Enemy’ caused their many voices to harmonise as one. Clearly this one was important.

  “Okay, that wasn’t helpful at all,” Jenny muttered. “Listen up, big guy. We need information on these people.”

  The Revenant didn’t turn to face her, instead looking directly at the corpse of the necromancer. “We Do Not Have More Information. The One That Hides Was Static. A Known Variable. Our Next Target Is The One That Kills. They Will Seek Us Before Long. Prepare Yourselves For Our Return.”

  With their piece said, the Revenant twisted their arms in the increasingly familiar gestures for teleport, blipping away without even a goodbye.

  “Ungrateful bastard,” Neil grumbled before turning to us. “Right. First things first, how are you doing, Julie? You took the biggest hit of us all, and even with your healing I can’t imagine you’re just fine.”

  I shook my head. “I’m running on empty here. I can’t even spare enough to heal your leg right now, unless you want me to down size for it.” I gestured to the decayed crater in his thigh, which he was surprisingly good at operating with.

  Neil raised his hands. “No worries. It’ll close up at some point. Healing potion plus life enhancement is pretty good at long term healing, just not in-the-moment stuff. Next,” He turned to Jenny. “What do you think about the Revenant?”

  She grinned. “Oh yeah, they’re a beauty. Probably the most focused Revenant I’ve ever seen. Probably only two or three of their counterparts had other needs. Other than that, all of them died in some way related to these people their targeting. As long their targets keep being evil necromancers living in sewers, we’ll be fine.”

  Neil grimaced. “And if they target somebody innocent?”

  Jenny cackled. “Oh, then we’re all dead. We just killed probably the only necromancer in the city who could control them without help, after all.”

  “Seriously?” Cassie sputtered. “There’s one?”

  Jenny rolled her eyes. “Was one. And yes. Not exactly a popular school of magic, if you didn’t notice.”

  Neil clapped his hands, drawing our attention back to him. “Okay, we can work with that. Cassie, on to you. What happened there?”

  Cassie shrugged, seeming a little sheepish. “I, uh… I’m not really sure what to tell you. I got really upset because, well,” she glanced uneasily at the pile of decayed flesh she had thought was my corpse. “You remember. Next thing I can tell, I’m burning up and everything’s so simple, you know?”

  “...No,” Neil answered. “Regardless, if you don’t know either then we can circle back to that later.”

  Jenny spoke up. “Hey, since you like planning and taking charge so much, what are we doing now?”

  Neil seemed to consider this. “Well, first we should probably look around here for some information. If these people are as related as the Revenant seems to think, maybe we can prepare better for when we get dragged into dealing with them.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Neil. “You know, you’re always going on about preparation and planning, but you didn’t even let us eat breakfast before you dragged us off to be taken here.”

  Neil waved his hands placatingly. “Hey, I didn’t know we were going to get dragged into a battle to the death. I thought the Revenant was going to come bearing information, not a mass teleport.”

  Cassie shook her head. “I am starving though. You’re paying for breakfast when we get out of here. And lunch. Dinner too.”

  “Speaking of getting out of here,” Jenny interrupted. “How are we doing that, exactly?”

  “This guy must have had a way in and out, right?” I propositioned.

  Cassie glanced at me. “You think the ‘One Who Hides’ got out much?”

  “We’ll figure that out when we need to leave. First, we need information. Get looking, people,” Neil ordered.

  all been waiting for that to happen for a while, am I right?