As soon as the other two said they were as ready as they were going to be under the circumstances, I transported us right into the thick of things. Now wasn’t the time for subtlety, it was time to hit these guys hard and fast. And do our very best to hope that this was the right thing, timeline wise. We knew these Fomorians had to have made it through the rift, so jumping in now to help them was the right move, wasn’t it? Hell, at the very least, we could hope that this was so far back in the timeline that killing a few people who hadn’t been killed here before wouldn’t have too much of an effect on things. And yes, I was doing my best to convince myself that that made sense. Otherwise I would just sit around frozen by indecision until it was too late.

  I already had my weapon out in its bow form, with the largest energy arrow I could use already locked and loaded. Or whatever the equivalent bow term would be. Drawn and nocked? When we appeared, I sent the arrow straight into the back of the biggest and meanest looking alien guy there. He stood a full two feet taller than most of these guys, putting him at a solid nine feet. Mostly thanks to the fact that his entire lower half was cybernetic. The guy looked like a robot kangaroo from the waist down. Not only that, but he had two additional robot arms added to the four his people already had. Clearly this Wreth guy hadn’t stopped at only using cybernetics to enhance himself.

  Between that and the giant cannon he was lugging around that was even bigger than him, I was willing to bet that if this guy wasn't in charge, he was at least one of the most dangerous threats out here. Well, that and because of the massive amounts of damage I had already seen him do through my ghost spies. That big gun had torn through several of the robot dinosaurs, opening up holes in some of the larger ones so other members of his little army could take advantage of the exposed insides to do even more damage and bring them down. He needed to be stopped.

  That guy, and the ones accompanying him, had been heading for the crashed Fomorian ship rather than toward the water. About a third of their forces were trying to get to the ship, probably to shut down whatever they were using onboard the thing to make and direct the robots. The rest, meanwhile, were doing their best to get to the water, clearly to assault the sub. Or just to find the rifts themselves. Either way, we had to stop all of them from getting to their targets.

  “Go!” I snapped to the others, waving a hand for them to get moving, “I’ve got these guys!” To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure I did, but we still needed to split up. I would focus on protecting the ship so it could keep sending out reinforcements, while the other two did their best to help those robots keep the rest of Wreth’s troops away from the water. With help from ghosts on both sides.

  My energy arrow had taken the big man in the back by that point. Even that wasn’t enough to actually put him down, but it definitely got his attention. He stumbled forward a bit, even as the two slightly smaller troops flanking him were blown to either side by the concussive force.

  As soon as the arrow hit him, the big guy was spinning around, bringing that gun of his into position. But I was ready for that. While he was still turning and trying to take aim at us, half a dozen ghosts came up out of the ground and grabbed that huge weapon. He didn’t even know what was happening before it was torn out of his grasp and pulled up into the air to disarm him.

  Not that that actually left him harmless, of course. He gave a quick kick of those kangaroo legs, launching himself all the way across the field in an instant before coming down right in front of me with enough force to send a spray of dirt in every direction. One of his mechanical arms came slamming toward my face, while the other tried to grab my shoulder. The four biological arms were already producing some sort of humming, vibrating knives to stab me in several places.

  Fortunately, I was ready for that too. I’d seen how fast this guy could move and how far he could jump while watching him with my ghost spies. My weapon was already back in its staff form, and I snapped it up to smack his incoming metal fist away from my face, hitting it hard in the wrist. Even then, with my not-exactly-insubstantial strength (I was up over five thousand pounds by now), it was barely enough to knock his punch off-course. The guy wasn’t exactly weak himself, gun or no gun. Though I did have the pleasure of seeing and hearing his grunt of surprise when my staff smacked into his metal arm to knock it out of the way. He’d clearly thought the fight would be over in a second, as soon as he put a fist through my head so he could get back to his mission.

  At the exact same time that the top part of my staff was smacking his incoming fist out of the way, I hit the button to send a blast of concussive force out of the bottom of the staff, knocking two of his biological arms away just before they could actually stab me. The third knife-wielding hand went right past my back as I pivoted on my left foot, missing me by barely more than a couple inches. The same motion helped us evade the other metal hand as it tried to grab our shoulder.

  Simultaneously, Locke made our right foot snap up to kick the fourth biological arm away just before it would have stabbed into our side. Then she tucked our leg back before snapping it out again without lowering it, kicking the cyborg guy in the chest hard enough to make him stumble. Being able to lift more than five thousand pounds meant we could kick pretty damn hard. Before he could recover, I pushed off with the leg that was still firmly planted on the ground, using a short burst of force from the staff for a boost to get far enough in the air that the next time Locke snapped our raised foot out, it took the staggering guy right in the face. That hit with just enough force to knock his head back, some sort of blueish-black blood spraying from his mouth.

  The other two had already taken off to play reinforcements for the robots holding the line by the lake. I caught the briefest glance of them while I was pivoting in the air, just enough to see Jazz and Theia hit the troops on that side from behind. They were taken completely by surprise, clearly not expecting the Fomorians to have friends who could jump in to help. Which, well yeah, who would ever expect that?

  In any case, that brief glimpse was all I had time for, because my own target wasn't exactly ready to throw himself to the ground and surrender. The kick to his face had made him stumble and spit blood, but it also made him angry. I saw the fury in his eyes as he spat something I couldn’t understand. Well, I couldn't understand the details at least. The overall gist was pretty clear. Especially when he followed that up by transforming one of his metal arms into a gun barrel--wait no, flamethrower barrel-- and filled the air between us with a burst of blue fire.

  I probably would have been in pretty bad shape as the flames engulfed me before I could even come back down from that jump. But the second I saw the arm transform, I was already focusing on my energy-absorption power. Which turned out to be the right move, since even with that, I could still feel my skin getting pretty toasty. I couldn’t absorb all the heat from that burst of fire. My skin was somewhat painfully red. But I would live. Especially with my regeneration kicking in.

  My opponent, meanwhile, had an arrogant, vindictive look on his face as the flames stopped. It was pretty clear that he was expecting me to be a freshly-baked corpse about to fall over. Or maybe just a pile of ashes. Boy was he surprised when what he saw instead, as soon as the flames had stopped, was the bladed end of my staff stabbing right through his throat. Or at least, partway into it. Turned out he had some metal there too, and it stopped me from doing as much damage as I wanted to. Still, his expression shifting from gloating superiority to shock when he processed that I wasn’t dead just in time to take the blade into his throat was pretty damn satisfying.

  Plus, even if that wasn’t actually enough to kill him, I was at least able to twist the blade a bit and yank on the staff to pull the big guy down toward me so I could punch him twice in rapid succession, each blow knocking his head back a bit more. I had to keep hitting the guy as hard and as quickly as possible, not allowing him any time to recover. All while hoping things were working out for Jazz and Theia. I just had to trust that the two were still doing okay over there. At least they had help from the robots and a small army of ghosts, the latter of whom were being directed by Doctor Manakel. He knew what he was doing, and the other two weren’t helpless. With any luck, they could hold out long enough for those scout probes, and the ghosts I had sent to join them in the underwater caves, to find the rifts and confirm the one on top was what the Fomorians had spent so long looking for. Once they did that, they could summon the rest of their people and we could get this migration on the road.

  By that point, the big guy had managed to rip his throat free from my blade. Two of his hands caught the staff and used that grip to yank me off my feet, trying to hurl me away from him. Just as he let go in midswing, however, I froze the momentum of my own clothes to stop myself. He let go and I stayed right where I was, frozen in midair basically face to face with him. I could see the confusion and mounting frustration in his face. He knew how to fight this version of the Fomorians and their robots. He had been expecting anything they could throw at him. But I was something utterly new, and the poor guy just could not figure out what I was or what my limits were.

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  Well, he was about to be even more upset and surprised. Because even as that big cyborg guy tried to react to the fact that his attempt to hurl me off into the distance ended with me simply staying right in front of him, he found himself being grabbed from behind and yanked backward by dozens of hands. And not by ghosts either. While I was fighting him, I had also been sending waves of Necromantic energy through the battlefield, into the bodies of his own people, the ones who had just died. Yes, I didn’t want to enslave sapient beings against their will, not even ghosts. That wasn’t the sort of Necromancer I was going to let myself be. It was one thing to use the ghosts of those I had fought in an emergency and later ask if they wanted to stay, but permanently enslaving them and bending them to my will forcefully? No, I wouldn’t do that.

  So no, he wasn’t grabbed by the ghosts of his own people. Instead, the big guy found himself being yanked backward by their animated corpses. I hadn’t focused as much on zombies as I did on ghosts, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t capable of using them. Especially in an emergency.

  If this guy had been surprised before, seeing the animated dead bodies of his own people yanking at his arms, pulling on his legs, just generally grabbing any part of him they could as they bodily yanked him away from me really got to him and made the poor guy freak the fuck out. I didn’t need to understand his language to know he was cursing frantically, words spilling rapidly from his lips as he struggled and flailed.

  Judging by his reaction, I was going to guess that these guys didn't have much experience with Necromancy. Actually, they probably didn't know much about magic in general, if it was really so utterly unheard of for the Fomorians. Considering those guys have never really encountered it, obviously it wasn't something these people tended to use. Part of me wondered why that was, and how so much had changed in the universe to make magic used or at least recognized by basically everyone. Or at least, everyone who wasn't under a planet-wide memory curse, ahem ahem.

  Actually, he really was freaking out. I kind of felt a little bad about it when I heard the strangled cries and frantic cursing as he flailed against the undead hands holding him. It wasn't just him being angry that I was turning the bodies of his own people against him. The guy was seriously losing it. He kept struggling wildly even as the zombies were dragging him right to the ground.

  This guy wasn't alone either. I had a mix of my ghosts and the reanimated bodies of all the alien troops who had already died here attacking the rest of the living ones. I had honestly thought it would take everything I had just to stall them from getting to the ship long enough. But as soon as I started unleashing their own dead people against them, all of these guys just completely lost their minds. A few of them started running away. Others tried to talk at the zombies, apparently attempting to reason with them, or at least get answers about what was happening. It was… uh, kind of sad, really.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the troops had shifted their focus to fighting the zombies to put them back down. Almost all of these guys seemed to have completely forgotten about getting to the ship, or about anything else they were supposed to be doing. I’d expected turning their own dead against them would be some sort of distraction, but I’d really underestimated just how effective it would be.

  You know, Locke noted a bit thoughtfully as we took all that in and realized how much it was making these people freak out, sometimes I think we forget just how completely fucked up some of the stuff we can do is. I mean, imagine if we did all this to an army of Bystander humans.

  With a grimace at the image she'd painted, I shook my head. I'd really rather not think about that, thanks. It’s still a little too easy to picture us as the bad guy in a horror film right now.

  And speaking of being the bad guy, even after everything I’d said to myself about how this was happening so far in the past that it shouldn't affect the present too much anyway, and that us being here to fight these people must fit the timeline if the Fomorians here made it through the rift, I still felt hesitant about killing any of them. I just kept thinking about the very tiny chance that it might change everything and make us go back to a future we wouldn’t be able to recognize.

  We don't have a choice, Locke snapped at me even as she took control of our arms to stab the big cyborg guy through the hole we’d already started in his throat while he was still distracted by the swarm of zombies holding him down. With a quick sideways thrust, his cursing and threats were cut off,even as I felt the delightful rush from his death. It wasn't like the Boscher sense of overwhelming pleasure and euphoria. This was more like the sense of satisfaction and dopamine from finishing a really good meal. Which, in some ways, was almost as disturbing as the other version. Kind of a lateral move in weirdness, really.

  Locke continued sharply. You heard what our new friends said back in the sub. These people are gonna get their own reinforcements pretty soon. And they won't be distracted by our little army forever. Maybe there's a slight chance that something changes because we kill the wrong guy. But there's a much bigger fucking chance of shit changing if we screw up here and the Fomorians never make it through that rift. So buckle up and let's ride this whole thing out. We made our choice, no waffling now.

  She was right, of course. We didn't have the luxury sitting around debating about the whole thing. I just wished it would be as simple as using that stone that Ehn had given me to determine if they were important to the timeline, but it wasn't meant to examine people this far in the past. As useful as that would have been, Ehn had obviously never intended for us to come this far back. Actually, I didn't think that even he would have been capable of that, if it actually took more power the further you went. Ehn had been strong, but sending us over a hundred million years into the past level strong? This might’ve been beyond even what he could do, at least alone.

  Then I didn’t have any time to think about that, because those reinforcements we had been worried about showed up. And they did so rather dramatically. Even as it started to look like we might have these guys relatively in hand, the sky above our heads was abruptly filled with half a dozen starships of varying sizes. They went from a fighter that was roughly the size of one of those double-decker buses from Britain, all the way up to a truly massive semi-circle ship the size of several city blocks hovering high enough up to blot out the sun like a giant cloud. Wreth’s people were here. And unless I missed my guess, probably--

  “Wreth!” The voice came through the little wristband that Kaur had provided. “His Throneship has arrived, he’s here, what--what do we do?”

  “Keep going!” I snapped after activating the thing. “Call your people, get them here and get to that rift. One way or another, it’s the only chance you’ve got. We’ll deal with this. Just go, now! Make the call, you don’t have time to waste!” Even as I said that, my eyes snapped over to look across the battlefield. Theia and Jazz were each riding their own robot dinosaurs, Theia on another stegosaurus, while Jazz was perched atop a metal version of one of those allosaurs we’d been riding earlier. Both of them were helping direct the cybernetic monsters in between using their own powers and weapons to add to the damage. In Theia’s case, she made herself into a very obvious target, redirecting any damage done to her.

  It was helping. It was all helping, especially when the Fomorians’ crashed ship opened its doors to release another wave of freshly-built robot dinos, a wave of a dozen metal monsters that crashed into the attackers while those guys were still reeling from being attacked by the zombies of their own dead people. But now, with these other ships here, terrifyingly looming in the sky, that was about to be over. We might be able to fight a relatively small ground army like this, but those things? The big ship by itself looked like it could fire once and wipe out this entire battlefield.

  So let’s stop them from doing that, Locke put in. Only question is, can we--

  Let’s find out! I interrupted, already knowing what she was going to ask. I focused on that big ship in the distance, the largest of the small fleet that had just shown up. Seth, I needed him. With a thought, I summoned the vampire ghost as close to the big ship as I could. The second he appeared there, he was already flying right through the wall into the ship itself. Another benefit of them not having any experience dealing with magic, they had nothing to stop that sort of entry.

  With another thought, I transported myself over to where the other two were. “Time to end this!” I called to them. Then I closed my eyes, looking through Seth’s own. He was right there, surrounded by what looked like a small army of troops of all different sizes. They looked like they weren’t sure how to react to his presence, but that wouldn’t last for long, and I didn’t trust that they wouldn’t find a way to hurt him even as something they clearly had no experience with.

  But he wasn’t alone for long. Because I immediately transported the three of us, plus the robots the other two were riding, right up into that large hangar bay. We appeared right there, around Seth.

  As dozens of weapons were pointed at us, shouts rising in what was very clearly an order to attack, Chas’s ghost was already using his translation power. So they heard and understood me as I called out, “Okay, I always wanted to say this.

  “Take us to your leader!”

  Joke Tags: Boy Fighting People With No Real Defense Against Magic Really Isn’t Fair Huh?