As Cort grappled with Claws, Leira threw her arms around their foe, locking him down from the back. Her help enabled Cort to shift his grip to Claws’s elbows. He pressed the arms inward, feeling the pins-and-needles sensation of flared Nirva as the man’s limbs resisted against Cort’s force.

  Craaack. Claws’s arm snapped clean at the elbow. Cort curled his own arm around the broken limb, twisting it out of place before rapidly flapping his arm like a chicken to keep the breakpoint jostled—a trick to stave off a Hallow’s healing.

  But Cort’s repositioning had allowed Claws to free his other hand. The man stabbed his blades backward over his shoulder, aiming for Cort’s neck.

  Cort deflected the blow by jerking his shoulder upward. One blade sank deep into his bicep, and the other sliced his collarbone, scraping against the bone.

  Cort sucked in a shuddering breath as Claws stabbed again and again, relenting only after he sliced off the top of his own ear.

  Feeling woozy, his neck throbbing, Cort realized Quez had gone silent behind him, though the sound of metal splatting against soft flesh persisted.

  Leira still clung to Claws, her hands a mask over his face as she tried to gouge out his eyes while spilling a mess of spores everywhere.

  “Leira,” Cort rasped. “Kerosene.”

  She immediately sprinted away. She could be pretty smart. Sometimes. Cort swept his hand over the floor, desperately hoping to find his hammer.

  He and Claws were both slicked with blood. Cort’s neck had been cut badly, but he was still breathing so that was something. He could feel Leira’s spores tickling the wound with cool numbness.

  “Cort!” Leira had returned with a torch taken from a wall sconce in her hand. “Get away!”

  “I can take it,” he grunted. “Trust me.”

  Claws made a hissing noise. “I’m a full Hallow, you idiot demons. A little bit of fire won’t do—”

  Cort’s eyes widened. He’d expected Leira to hesitate, but she did not. He hastily ripped his arms out of the backpack straps and rolled—

  Leira smashed Claws in the back with the torch and then dove away.

  There was a fleeting moment—before the blinding flash—where Cort saw the flames flicker to life along all the globs of ztuff. The whooshing roar came as he scrambled out of the way.

  Then the backpack exploded. The blast threw him further away. Cort’s ears were ringing and pulsing and everything was spinning. He haplessly flapped his hand against the flames sparking across his body. But Leira had taken her jacket off and was beating them down with much more efficacy.

  Droplets of ztuff were still popping, punching into his flesh like bullets, but most of the flames had been extinguished.

  Cort could tell that his body was well-seared. Luckily, he was already so burnt that he barely felt it—though the blanket of pink and white spores might have had something to do with that, too. He felt pretty good, actually.

  Claws had not fared so well. The backpack, full of a hundred tubes of ztuff, had detonated in his face. The man was engulfed in flames, and he looked… more like a rack of barbequed ribs than a person. The backpack was a charred heap beside his head. Boom! It exploded again, ripping some flesh from Claws’s bones and then rocketing upward to land on a third-floor balcony.

  “Help Quez,” Cort rasped at Leira. She ran off and Cort took up a club from the ground. He saw his hammer but couldn’t be bothered going out of his way for it. No need.

  It was a weird thing, knowing his body was ruined, but still being able to move because he couldn’t feel anything. He hobbled over to Claws.

  The flames had dissipated—ztuff burned out quick—but Claws was still smoldering, and a lot of blackened bones were peeking out where his flesh had peeled away. Despite that, the healing was already happening—little pink worms crawling out of burnt tissue. Cort stood over him. Time to destroy the brain.

  Cort went down on one knee and raised the club. A fucking metal shoe blocked his attack. He fell back onto his ass from the impact.

  “Claws!” Legs cried. “Can you stand? Run away. Go help Self! I will stay.” He aimed a few roundhouse kicks at Cort, forcing him to scamper back.

  “I won’t leave you, brother,” Claws choked out. “We must defeat… these demons. Together.”

  Legs backed away from Cort and cradled his clone-brother’s face in his hands. “No. We must protect the Self. I will be reborn. I’m past due. But… try to remember this version of me. I had a long run.”

  Claws smiled and his teeth were extra visible because of the holes in his cheeks. “The longest run, brother.”

  Cort tried to stand as Legs helped Claws up, but he needed some help himself. By the time Cort was on his feet, Claws—dripping blood and trailing smoke—was limping away.

  Legs flipped onto his hands and grinned. “You won’t get past me.”

  Cort lowered his gaze. “You’re dead.”

  “You’re in no position to fight. And even if you beat me, I won’t die. I embrace the Second Gener—”

  Quez, crawling on hands and knees, reached between Legs’s arms and slashed him across the throat. A wave of blood spilled as the top of the man’s head smacked the floor. He flopped down onto his back, his metal shoes landing with a clatter.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Invigorated, blood rushing in his ears, Cort retrieved his hammer and dragged it behind him. Legs lay on the floor, his hands clamped over his throat. He spasmed and sputtered, but the blood flow was already slowing as he healed.

  “Wait,” Quez wheezed, waving his hands and then falling onto his side at the effort. “Don’t kill him.”

  Quez had been brutalized to near unrecognizability. Blood spilled from his mouth, oozing through the gaps where he’d lost teeth and squirting from a missing chunk of his tongue. Two nasty lumps bulged from his forehead and his face was so swollen that his eyes were barely visible.

  Leaning on his hammer, Cort shook his head. “No time.”

  “He can give the people the truth. They need… to hear the truth.”

  Cort gave those words no consideration. Maybe he was tired or something. His head was empty as he raised his hammer. Leira scurried over and pulled Quez away from Legs.

  The hammer fell. The splat-and-crunch was sickeningly satisfying, as always. Cort gave it a few more swings for good measure, but as he did so, the entire body melted into pink goo and white dust.

  Huh. That didn’t usually happen, but…

  ‘The sheer ambition, to call upon such a superior being, to dangle such tantalizing bait, seeking not to murder, but to control. The entire cosmos shudders at your audacity.’

  Hearing the Deathwish, Cort sighed, and a chill prickled his skin. Another dead Hallow.

  Quez whimpered.

  “Sorry,” Cort grunted. “I’m not that kinda guy. I don’t care about that stuff. Maybe Gwil…” He shrugged.

  “It’s okay, Quez,” Leira said brightly. “We’ll get one of the other clones to do it. Or better yet, the big guy himself. Do you think anyone would’ve even listened to one of these Jaguars? They’d probably just think we corrupted him or some shit.”

  “I… don’t know,” Quez said.

  Leira clapped Cort on the back, which made his legs buckle, but she helped him stay upright. Then she took her backpack back from him. “I wasn’t worried. I would’ve used the Erithist Spike if we needed it.”

  Cort’s stomach plummeted. He shook his head, mouth agape. “What the fuck, Leira? Why didn’t you use it!”

  “Calm down, you didn’t need it. I don’t like the feel of that thing. It’s bad mojo.”

  He could only muster a grunt.

  “Damn,” she said. “That cost us a lot of ketchup.”

  Cort nodded and tongued his missing teeth. He’d been lamenting that, too.

  ***

  Gwil shrank and was immediately stepped on by a leather sandal. He grabbed hold of a strap as the unaware Malikauan took a step and then climbed up their leg. Gwil swung off a tassel that hung from their sash and flung himself onto the top of another person’s head.

  Tezca was a couple dozen paces ahead, stampeding through clusters of frantic Malikauans. Leaving Challe to get through on her own, Gwil hurled himself forward, jumping from head to head.

  Pop. He grew back in a dive and wrapped his arms around Tezca’s neck. Gwil pumped his knees full of Nirva and rammed them into Tezca’s back, using them as leverage to bend Tezca’s neck backward.

  The Warden proved sturdier than an oak tree, so Gwil tightened his arms into a chokehold, flared Nirva, and wrenched himself every which way, trying to throw the prodigious man off balance. It was like wrestling with a hippopotamus.

  Heedless, Tezca mashed his way through all the folks who were trying to defend him, shoving aside the lucky ones and crushing the unlucky ones underfoot. They came to a landing that ran above and along a staircase.

  Green light speared Gwil’s vision and kra-koom! The floor exploded and crumbled into chunks of burning rubble. Gwil shrank and secured himself within a neck flab as Tezca lost his footing and fell down onto the stairs.

  They’d rolled almost to the bottom when Tezca got stuck, crammed between the two narrow walls with his limbs all tangled up.

  Pop. Kneeling on the man’s back, Gwil beat his fists into the back of Tezca’s bald head. It felt like punching a bag of sand. Oh right.

  Gwil felt around in the pile of still-hot rubble until he found a particularly jagged chunk.

  “Imperv—”

  Gwil slammed the rock down—not on Tezca’s head, where the man was likely focusing his Nirva—but on his hand, which was sticking upright, splayed flat against the wall.

  The bones cracked and Gwil followed up with a couple of horizontal slashes, severing one finger and leaving another dangling.

  Tezca’s fingers were chunky and sausage-like, but the digits were not nearly so protected by flab as the rest of his body.

  “Ow! You stupid motherfucker!” Tezca wailed at a blood-curdling pitch.

  Gwil blinked and smashed the rock down again, drawing another anguished squeal. Tezca appeared to have a low tolerance for pain. Gwil found that strange, because when he himself lost a finger, he barely noticed. When Nirva was flowing, even getting disemboweled didn’t hurt exactly. He’d describe it more like… crippling discomfort.

  Prolly ‘cause he’s such a whiny asshole, Gwil concluded as he smashed Tezca’s thumb. Then he had the idea that, if Tezca was suffering so much, it’d be better to stave off the healing than go for more damage. Gwil shifted his grip on the chunk of stone and then drove the pointiest end into the stumps of Tezca’s severed fingers.

  The man squealed and writhed, kicking his feet like an enraged toddler. Gwil grabbed Tezca’s wrist and bent his arm backward against the socket while continuing to drill the rock into the exposed bones, grinding them into little bits.

  Gwil caught a flash of movement in his peripheral, but it was just Challe bounding down the stairs.

  Screaming “Why, why, why?”, Challe shoved Gwil aside with her two right arms and kicked Tezca in his sputtering face.

  “That doesn’t work, Challe,” Gwil said. “You gotta cut him if you wanna hurt him.” He held up his extra-sharp rock and then put it in his pocket.

  Gwil’s eyes went wide as Challe took his suggestion to heart. With one of her left hands, she jammed two fingers into Tezca’s nostrils and pulled upward. With the other, she drove a thumb into Tezca’s eyeball.

  “Perfect,” Gwil said, giving her a thumbs up. “Keep doing that so he can’t heal. But watch out for his teeth!”

  “Why did you do this to us?” Challe screamed with such force that Gwil’s bones vibrated.

  “Your asshole ancestors killed me first!” Tezca blubbered.

  A couple of heavy somethings landed on top of Gwil. “What the— Hey, go away!”

  Malikauans were filling the staircase, pouring in from the top and jumping down from above.

  “I’ll deal with them, Challe,” Gwil said. “You two have your chat.”

  Gwil knocked a few people back while getting to his feet. The staircase was packed, and more were piling on. “Stop that, you idiots. You’re gonna hurt yourselves.”

  He pulsed Nirva into his arms and pushed upward, heaving a bunch of people back up onto the remnants of the landing. Few of them had weapons, so Gwil was able to corral everyone away in short order.

  “Listen to me!” Challe said, and the force of the storm became as breath in Challe’s lungs. “I am no Vessel. There is no Goddess.”

  “Blasphemous traitor!”

  “Trust in the Elder Warden!”

  Gwil felt the swelling of thick, stifling heat. But he noticed something. The storm outside wasn’t ebbing away like it had before when Challe channeled it. The thunder continued to rumble and boom; the hail delivered its incessant battering.

  He looked up at the temple’s ceiling and used Mir. The hewn stones flashed away to reveal a churning black mass, a fearsome sea as wide as the horizon. Slivers and specks of jade painted the storm’s violent breadth, but Gwil could sense their insignificance. The storm belonged less to Challe and more to the sky.

  Gwil shrugged, hoping that maybe it was a good thing.

  “Silence!” Challe commanded. The Malikauans recoiled and cowered. Several of them bled from their ears.

  Challe grinned and something like a skull shadowed her face. Tezca whimpered as she tore at his nose. It was already halfway ripped off.

  “All of you will hear me,” Challe said. Gwil could see that she was only whispering, but her words carried like a furious wind.

  Gwil grimaced. Something was off. Something had shifted. What the hell is going on with her powers?