“So,” Ellie said, in a tone Hunter had ever heard from adults why did I see an empty jelly jar on the roof, “your magic’s weird, Red.”

“Umm, yeah?” he replied, finishing the bite of his breakfast sandwich. “Magic’s weird, like, in general.”

“I mean it, though,” she said with a little frown, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. “Like the channeling stuff, I get it, mine’s weird too. But your affinity, ugh. It’s not supposed to work like that.”

“Well, sure it is,” he replied, then paused a moment. “Isn’t it?”

“Look, all I know,” she sighed, “is most people just make a thing when they cast a spell. And sure, infusion’s a weird exception sometimes, but I’ve got an infusion spell. It makes me faster when I run, but that’s because it literally makes like, the wind hit me in the back.”

“But like,” Hunter rubbed the back of his neck, “does it, though? Or does it just feel like that?”

Ellie stared at him for a long moment, then held up both her hands in fists and opened them wide on either side of her head.

“See?” Hunter laughed and then took another bite. “Magic’s weird. You think the guys who have like, dancing fireballs are just making tiny bits of fire as little rocket engines? Nah, I figure they’re just moving the fireballs, because magic’s weird.”

“I mean,” she said slowly, “they could be making little rocket engines. But they probably don’t think of it like that. They point and the fireballs follow. So that Instant Whirlpool thing?”

“It moves me around like I’m the fireball. Or I move around and it pushes? I dunno, Ellie. But you’re right, it doesn’t make a lot of water. That is pretty weird.”

“Huh,” she said and sat back, waiting for him to finish eating. “We should go over the plan again, I think.”

“Yeah, that’s probably smart,” he nodded. “So, you think they haven’t closed the Slide because they’re all busy or worse.”

“Right, and closing it’s gonna take like, a lot of Shards, which we don’t have. But there should be some at the Source outpost.”

“Or, at worst,” he frowned, “somewhere between there and the research base that might be near the Slide? That’s the part I don’t like. If someone, umm, or something forced them to abandon a convoy, are we going to have much chance of recovering it?”

“Look, Red,” Ellie put her head down as she spoke, “I don’t know. We’ve got like, two real options here. Either we run for it, get the flip outta here, and hope someone else does something about it, or we try.”

“We’ve gotta,” Hunter said softly, “carry buckets. Even if they’re small.”

“Huh?”

“It’s something Wisp told me, my patron,” Hunter said, and paused a moment to chew on his lip. “This is a mess. Someone out here, even if it’s just us, needs our help. We might not be able to do anything, sure, and then we’ll have to bail. But for now, like, if you need to take water somewhere, even a little bucket helps, yeah?”

“Oh,” she said, then nodded, then again even more emphatically. “I like that. We can carry little buckets, Red, for sure. Gosh, the only thing my patron ever tells me is ‘There is evil in that man’s aura, beware,’ or ‘Do not find yourself alone with him in the dark.’ I mean, helpful but not always applicable.”

“Whoa, Chariot tells you that kinda stuff?”

“Umm, well,” Ellie let out a soft giggle, “Chariot doesn’t like me, or Mom. The day they sat me down and told me to commune with him, I mighta said something about how she said big wheels are compensating for little other stuff.”

“Wait, what?” Hunter said, and then tipped over laughing.

“I know, I know,” she shook her head and tried not to laugh along with him, but failed. “But like, I had to? They’re so, ugh, stuffy. So anyway, I got to talk to this really cool Lady. She’s, umm, The Lady, that when Uncovered, Points to a Murderer. Full name.”

“She sounds super detectivey. Detectivish. Whatever.”

“Oh, she totally is,” Ellie nodded a few times, grinning.

“So like,” he trailed off for a moment, “has she said anything lately, about this? Wisp’s been quiet since I left Winner.”

“Just, umm,” she pointed over to the black chunk torn out of the horizon, “there is a criminal, and a reckoning due.”

Hunter had never been in a forest before, and until that breathless run through the Badlands, had never even been anywhere that wasn’t relatively flat, so there was a lot to get used to. He sat on the back of the buggy, holding loosely onto Ellie, and yawning a lot to get his ears to pop while she drove. They were taking an old, crumbling highway that twisted its way up into the hills toward the Source, and while she wasn’t driving particularly fast, maybe just a bit over his jogging pace, there seemed to be a lot to take in.

“Wow,” he breathed out softly, “look at all the trees. There’s so many.”

“There’s too many,” Ellie grumbled as she took the buggy up and over a broken piece of asphalt. “Chop em all down, gimme a straight path.”

“No way. Think about it, you could wander around in there all day, all week. I bet there’s so much to do.”

“Maybe,” she replied, “in a forest that isn’t Pol territory. They probably burned down just about anything interesting in there before we were born.”

“Oh, yeah I guess.”

“Hey, look,” she said, “we’ll find an actual magical forest someday, and we’ll, I dunno, stop the fairies from stealing babies or something.”

Hunter nodded and went quiet for a little while as they rode on. Something about that bothered him, about his first forest being just as boring and stripped bare as any midwestern field he’d ever seen. He squinted as he peered between the trees rushing by there are wolves in the woods, but he didn’t see anything that looked too interesting. Ellie slowed down as they drove through a partially-ruined town, looking from side to side.

“Huh,” she muttered.

“Is this the outpost?” Hunter asked as he frowned. “It looks, umm, wrecked.”

“No, this is just like, where they get the shipments ready?” she said. “But it wasn’t in this bad of a shape last time I came through here. Like that,” she pointed at a large building that looked like it had caved in right down the middle, “wasn’t all busted up.”

“Oh,” he mumbled as she revved the small engine and they drove toward one of the last places still standing. “Think there’s anyone left in there?”

“Dunno,” she said after pulling up to the building, but she hesitated before getting off the buggy. “I’m like, sorta sure this is the transit station. If we’re lucky, they’ll have boxes of Shards and other crystals in here. But, umm.”

Hunter followed her gaze, and then frowned. The structure may have still been standing, but the large roll-up door in front had been shot at apparently, scorched in a few places, with holes melted all the way through in others. They both climbed off the vehicle and crept up toward the building, and then Hunter peered through one of the holes, clicking on his armor lights. It looked completely empty inside, except for some scattered tools in one corner he could see, and the stripped-down remains of what probably was, at one point, a car.

“Gosh,” Ellie said as she looked through another hole, using a narrow flashlight. “They took all the trucks, like all of them. There probably isn’t anyone left here, everyone would’ve needed to drive something out.”

“So,” Hunter stepped back and turned to look at the giant silver column in the sky, the burning flare he’d been ignoring all day, so bright even in the midmorning sun that it hurt to look at. He shuddered briefly, feeling like he could hear it roar, hear it tear itself open, hear it scream as it shot its essence out of the earth. “I guess we’re going to the Source.”

They were only twenty or thirty minutes from the Source at the moderate pace the buggy could handle, but they stopped after barely five when they found the first destroyed vehicle on the road. Ellie pulled up alongside it, and both teens just stared at what was left for a little while before saying anything. It had been some sort of van, Hunter figured, a long, tall box on six wheels, but now it was split open into a V shape from front to back, splayed like an open zipper. The driver and passenger definitely hadn’t survived, judging from the splatter across what was left of the cabin.

“Wow, ugh,” Ellie said and then tipped over a little, retching. Hunter put his hand on her shoulder and shook with her while he forced himself to peer deeper into the wreck. Near the back, where it was still almost intact, there was a heavy-looking black sphere, too big around for his arms to reach even halfway. He looked up and down the road for wherever it could have come from, biting his bottom lip, then just shook his head.

“Trips,” he mumbled, and the little bot climbed out of his satchel and onto his shoulder. “Eye on the sky, please. It must have come over the trees, because I don’t think it came through em.”

“They didn’t even, ugh,” Ellie paused to spit, “make it halfway. I think I got it figured out, though.”

“Yeah? Do we have any chance?”

“Umm, well, ok,” she said as she sat back up and took a deep breath. “Hear me out. Something went wrong with the Slide, or the Source. Both eventually, but one had to be first, right?”

“Right, ok,” Hunter held onto her again as she started driving.

“I think it’s the Slide, actually. So they messed up the Slide sometime two days ago. Went from teeny and manageable to big and getting bigger. They shot off a local, non-Infra emergency, so all the townies in Rapid got into the shelters, and all the troops came out here, avoiding the shadow people, to Keystone. By that time, they’d messed up the Source, too, and whatever came out of there started shooting. That hotel looked like it got hit by a bigger version of what pulped that van.”

“Yeah, it did, actually,” he nodded along.

“So the Keystone folk and whatever caravaners happened to be there locked themselves up in the depot, because maybe that could take an impact better than any of the oldtech buildings. The Pols get there, burn their way in, and commandeer all the vehicles, and all the people to drive them this way, to the Source. But why?”

“Well,” Hunter scratched the back of his head, pretending not to look at the next two demolished cars they passed, “the Slide could have been an accident, and they cracked the Source on purpose. You get a lot more Shards when you break em than when you do the other thing.”

“Ok, right, right, Red,” Ellie said and nodded. “So they broke it and then everyone went to collect the loot and take it up to the Slide. That must have been yesterday, though, and they didn’t manage it.”

“So, wait,” Hunter frowned as he went over all that in his head. “Why didn’t they just grab the Shards into their currency folder and run them straight there? Why do they need all the trucks?”

Ellie made a noise somewhere in between a sigh and a really sad chuckle. “Because,” she said, “SysPol can’t do proper accounting on its large currency denominations if they’re sucked up into someone’s Infra. So all those Shards have to stay out, in boxes, even in an emergency. Even if they woulda saved a lot of lives doing it another way.”

He just shook his head, and was about to reply when the highway turned gently and out from behind the trees, he saw something in the distance.

“Stop!” he said, shaking Ellie’s shoulder with one hand and pointing with the other, “Giant!”

Ellie finished wiping the tears from her cheeks, still giggling and hiccuping, and Hunter couldn’t help but laugh along, even if it was at his expense.

“Ok so,” he muttered, then giggled again, “how was I supposed to know?”

“I dunno, Red,” she said. “I shouldn’t have laughed. It was good instincts, it was.”

Hunter walked away from where they’d parked the buggy on the side of the road to where he could get a good view again, hands on his hips, staring at the giant stone face in profile that was a few miles away, just next to the column of silver fire. He shook his head, glanced over at Ellie who was picking herself up off the ground finally, and then looked back again, squinting.

“You’re sure,” he asked, “that’s always been there?”

“I’m for sure, I promise,” she sniffed a little before breathing into her elbow slowly, her voice muffled. “Since like, a long time ago. Totally oldtech, totally stationary. It’s like presidents or something, apparently, and if you go, I mean went I guess, into the Source, those guys would talk to you.”

“Well, that sounds pretty cool,” he muttered, “I guess.”

“We should go,” Ellie said once she’d stopped hiccuping.

“Yeah, we-” Hunter paused, still looking off into the distance, as another stone face, this one attached to a stone body, slowly lumbered around the mountain and into view. He ran for the buggy, stammering, and finally managed to gasp out, “There’s another one, this one’s moving, we gotta go now.”

“We still need the Shards though, Red,” Ellie hopped onto the front of the seat, revving the engine without going anywhere. “We can’t take empty buckets.”

“I know, I know,” he said softly, then made a decision. “We gotta do the Hunter special. Go the dumb way, the really dumb way, and then cross our fingers that we squeak by.”

“Ok ok,” she said quickly, and then the buggy jumped as she put it into gear, barrelling down the freeway twice as fast as before.

They drove quickly, weaving around more broken vehicles and ruined pavement, Ellie focused on the road while Hunter counted how many wrecks they were passing. He was up to a total of thirteen by the time Ellie turned hard, off the old road and onto one paved with the same brown material as Rapid City was. They had a straight shot toward the monument, toward the silver flare erupting out from behind those silent stone faces, toward the giant, humanoid rock golem that marched back and forth with a long rifle over its shoulder. Ellie opened up the throttle a little bit more, the ride bouncy but tolerable as they accelerated. Then there was a boom, and Hunter looked around scanning the sky, but Trips was silent, and it took a few seconds for him to realize it was a word, not gunfire.

“HALT,” echoed through the forested valley, and Ellie slid the buggy to an abrupt, screeching stop. They both looked up at the giant, over four hundred feet tall probably, and she reached back blindly to take Hunter’s hand.

It was, and Hunter would never be able to figure out how he had the sense to see that, dressed very oddly, even for an enormous monster. It had boots on that reached its knees, tight pants, a long coat with sashes across it, and long hair tied with a ribbon, that even as big and as heavy as it must have been, was swaying like there was a gentle breeze. Around its feet were at least another dozen smashed vehicles, some shot, some that looked stomped on, and off to the side behind it, Hunter could see a partially destroyed, shiny white building that probably used to be the outpost.

Most importantly, however, we are going to die the giant had at some point on their approach aimed its monstrous rifle directly at them, and even from a couple hundred yards away, the barrel was big enough he could see up inside it and not even know it.

“ARE YE WITH THE RED,” the giant, already speaking slowly, paused for at least thirty seconds, during which the only thing Hunter could do was squeeze Ellie’s hand weakly. “SCARVES?”

“What?” Hunter whispered, dumbfounded.

“Umm, ok, I got this, Red,” Ellie whispered back, then turned and shouted at the golem, “Nope! We’re Americans! Just regular ol’ Americans!”

“FROM WHAT COLONY DO YE HAIL?” was the booming, teeth-rattling reply.

“Oh!” Hunter said softly, “I know this one. Colonies means states.” He took a deep breath before yelling out, “We’re from Kan-”

“No!” Ellie gasped and slapped a hand over his mouth before he could finish. “Kansas wasn’t one of them. Aww, nuts, what were they though? Umm.” He could see her start to panic, to breathe harder and faster, before she relaxed all at once, grinned her little crooked grin and winked at him, then turned to scream out, “Virginia! We’re from Virginia!”

“AH, VIRGINIANS,” the giant nodded once. “GOOD, FINE FOLK, THE VIRGINIANS. KEEP A STERN WATCH IF YE BE HEADING UP THE NORTHERN PASS ON THAT STRANGE HORSE OF YOURS. THERE MAY BE A SMALL NUMBER OF RED… SCARVES WHO EVADED MY GRASP.”

“We, umm, absolutely will!” Ellie shouted. She sat on the buggy, breathing hard for what seemed to Hunter to be a very long time, and then slowly drove down toward the enormous stone feet of the rifleman. She reached down briefly as they passed a discarded, broken-open trunk, and stuck her hand in as they went by.

Your group has looted thirty-two (32) [Fount Shards] and eight (8) [Perfect Fount Shards]!

Your share is sixteen (16) [Fount Shards] and four (4) [Perfect Fount Shards].

Hunter rested his head on Ellie’s shoulder from behind as they left the golem and all its victims behind, murmuring softly as he held onto her, “It’s ok, it’s ok. You did so good.”

“Red,” she whispered shakily, after they’d driven far enough north that they couldn’t see the monument anymore. “I couldn’t see the level, but like, ugh. They used to send in teams of like forty transcendents with at least five sublimed doing bodyguard duty, to clear that Source. That thing coulda sneezed and obliterated us both.”

“But yeah, it didn’t?” he said as he just hugged her armored torso tighter. “Hunter special, step two, is to pretend after like it never, ever happened.”

Hunter had, now that he sat, looked through it, and actually counted, copied a large number of Infra rituals into his notebook. He had the four extended class rituals Ellie might be interested in one, oh flip Miracle would too, he had currency rituals for combining or splitting essence crystals, he even scribbled down part of the late mortal path change ritual just in case. What he didn’t have, he found with a groan, was a large-scale Slide closing ritual.

“I’ve got the, umm,” he said weakly, “the rubric. The general idea, some rules. But that’s about it.”

Ellie sighed, nodded, and sat down next to him after she’d paced back and forth across the road a few more times. They’d driven a couple miles north, until the SysPol road had stopped twisting around the hills and settled into a mathematically straight line toward the Slide. Both teens just stared down the highway at it, close enough that there was texture in the blackness, some kind of clouds or grotesquely large shadow beings, twisting and combining on the other side of the portal.

When he used his binoculars, Hunter could see what was left of the research facility, tucked between the giant, black rent in the world and a small lake to the west. There didn’t seem to be any movement except for the shifting of the Slide and the group of shadow monsters that exited to the east every one hundred and five seconds, exactly.

“Alright, so,” Ellie murmured, “here’s what I know. If it’s a normal, small to medium Slide, you make the most regular shape you can by keeping the Shards like, fifteen to twenty feet apart. Or twenty-five to thirty. Maybe more than that, I dunno.” She drew in the dirt at the side of the road, a triangle, a square, a pentagram.

“Ok,” Hunter nodded, “that makes sense. That’s in my notes.”

“But bigger ones,” she drew a rough circle made out of dots in the earth, “that doesn’t work, you can’t make a twenty-sided shape and expect it to hold, apparently. Too weak.”

“Right, right,” he nodded, read a little further in his book, and pointed to a diagram he’d less than carefully drawn. “You need to make a star, with the inner parts ‘disrupting the directional coefficient.’ Or something.”

“Which, ok,” Ellie took the binoculars and peered up the road for a while before continuing, “we know the directional thing. Every single group has come out that one side. Maybe it’s not a coincidence, maybe it’s just really lopsided?”

“So, like,” Hunter drew a circle on the ground, and then scribbled in a number of spikes on the right side. “We surround it, and then use the perfects to punch whatever’s coming out back in?”

“That’s my best guess, yeah,” she sighed and leaned against him, while Hunter sketched out another drawing in his notebook. “Hey, Red. Tell me a story or something, that’s going to make all this seem less awful.”

“Ok, so, umm,” Hunter started his story poorly, while he worked on the new diagram. “You know how my mom almost beat up my uncle’s friend Pete the first time they met? I’m pretty sure when I first heard it, I messaged you about that, like I think I told everyone about that, even strangers.”

“Devil Hallahan, right,” Ellie nodded and got more comfortable against his side. “I still like Secret Fighting Genius better.”

“Oh, for sure. So like, the Bears and Fourex, that’s Ernie’s group, they hated each other after that, but not like a punch each other in the nose kind of hate. More like this simmering, festering, every so often do awful things to each other when they think they can get away with it kind of hate. Like, the Bears tricked the guys into drinking tainted water one time, and Fourex left them in this weird catacomb place without a light or a ladder another time. Really awful stuff, but I mean, people were doing worse in the apocalypse for even dumber reasons, I guess.

“So I was talking to Addy, a couple weeks back, about what I’d been up to in the city.”

“I love Addy,” Ellie murmured. “She was my favorite Bear.”

“The worst babysitter out of all of them, but she’s pretty cool, yeah. We were talking, and I mentioned all the sparring I did with Breaker, Ernie’s really big, really cool friend. I think that’s how I said it, even, and she’s all ‘Oh, he’s still around? Must be too big and dumb to die,’ but like, she didn’t say it in a mean way, if that makes any sense.

“So I, you know, asked what’s up with that? That’s when she told me some of the stuff that went down between them, and then she told me how it all got fixed, at least for her and Breaker.

“Anyway this is the story. Somewhere out in Kentucky, there’s this regular old coal mine, at least it used to be a regular mine. It got all charged up with essence, and now the folks that live there are super rich, cuz they’ve got all this magic coal to dig up. They’re also super paranoid, they don’t want anything to do with SysPol, they don’t even want a Guild. If there’s a problem, they throw money at adventurers they trust and that usually solves the problem.

“Then they get a real problem, a Slide right in the middle of their mine, and for a while they’re like whatever, but then they have to call for help.”

“Oh no,” Ellie whispered, “they called both groups?”

“Yeah, but it didn’t go as bad as you’d think. Ernie and Cass are professionals, and these coal miner people are weird rich hillbillies but they’re smart, so if they say they need both groups, they probably do. They got along. Not great, but enough to work together. So they go into the mine, and it’s full of these furry beetles with huge mouths, and it takes them a week or so of constant fighting to kill their way to the Slide. They were tough beetles.

“They get there, and the Slide’s way bigger than they thought, like it’s not the size of the tunnel they find it in, it’s been eating into the walls and floor. Pete and Olive, they make this plan, and Addy couldn’t remember what it was, if she even understood it in the first place. But her and Breaker, they had to hold this tunnel, not let any of the beetles out, while everybody else did their thing and fixed the mess.

“Then something goes wrong, Addy doesn’t know what, but like Pete and Olly are smart but they aren’t perfect. The Slide goes wonky and then tons of the beetles come out, pouring out, just a stream of them, and they’re like three feet tall but piled on top of each other there’s so many.

“So, Breaker turns to her and says, ‘Adelaide, I wish I coulda met you in better circumstances,’ and she just says, ‘Likewise, James,’ because she’s gotta be cooler than everyone, right. Now, he’s got his giant mechanical gauntlets, and she was still using a pair of magic aluminum bats before she got the tonfas, and all they’ve gotta do is smash beetles until someone closes the Slide, finally.

“Except, no one closes it. They’re in there an hour, two, they’re pretty sure both of their teams are all dead, because the plan wasn’t supposed to take this long. But there’s more beetles, and if they get out of the tunnel, then for sure even more people are going to die. Addy says, she kept thinking every time she’d get close to running out of vigor, of resilience, of the will to keep going, she’d think ‘any minute now,’ because that would be properly dramatic, but the Slide still didn’t close, so she just kept going. Breaker too.

“Finally, finally, they’re exhausted, bloody, the floor’s apparently just a foot or two deep in beetle soup-”

“Eww,” Ellie giggled and punched his arm lightly.

“For sure, eww. But then the beetles stop coming, at some point.”

“They closed the Slide?”

“No, it’s still open, just no more beetles. Addy goes and looks through it, and there’s a giant cavern, like huge, and it’s empty. Like, every single one of em that was in this massive, monstrous space came through the portal and got smashed. So then they wait around, another half an hour maybe, the Slide closes, and they wander out. They meet up back at the entrance with everyone, they’re all fine, and the rest of their groups are all satisfied and feeling pretty good about themselves for getting it done.

“But Addy and Breaker, they’re not ready to celebrate. They didn’t get that sudden relief of the plan working, of everything ending great. They just held on and fought until there literally wasn’t anything to fight anymore. Then that was it. No rescue, no fireworks, no abrupt, happy ending. Those two went through something, not something good, or particularly rewarding, but something necessary.

“I’m not saying, umm, that’s what we have to do now. We can’t kill all those shadows. But we can’t go in like we expect something good to happen during or after. We just get it done, ok? And Breaker and Addy are two of the coolest people I know, so if there’s anyone worth trying to be like, it’s them. It’s not awful, it’s just, you know, what we do now.”

“Set timer for,” Ellie murmured then waited a beat, “now.”

1:45

“Ok, there they go,” she whispered, peeking over the buggy to watch the group of shadow people swarm off to the east. “They look bigger.”

Hunter couldn’t tell, but he watched the mass of tall, indistinct figures until they crested a small hill and went out of sight, checking his timer constantly.

1:30

“Go,” she said, then she vaulted the vehicle and ran straight north to the back side of the Slide, her ponytail flapping as the breeze made her sprint faster and faster.

[Ellie]: infra only til it’s done

Hunter took off toward the south end, skidding to a stop when Trips told him, “here,” then he summoned the first Shard and jammed the sharp end into the ground.

1:05

“back. rite. here.” the bot on his shoulder said, and Hunter looked around, feeling anxious, like there were eyes or whatever those shadows have on him already, and then planted the next crystal before running to just about where the third one should go.

0:48

Hunter turned and ran back while Trips repeated “nope. nope. nope,” over and over, yanking up the third Shard and shoving his hand down into the hole it left in the dirt, feeling around.

0:36

He grabbed the rock at the bottom of the hole that had skewed the crystal’s angle, shoved some dirt back in, and slammed the Shard back down.

0:18

“four. here.”

0:11

Hunter was definitely shaking now, his Infra window with Trips popping up “nope,” and “left,” too fast for him to figure out what he was doing wrong. He looked around quickly, judged how far he was from the last Shard, then back down to the ground to aim again.

0:05

[Ellie]: down

[Trips]: down

[Hunter]: down

1:45

Hunter was too far around the back of the Slide to see the monsters come out, so he just kept his gaze on the edge as he pressed as flat to the ground as he could. Nothing came around the outside, as far as he could tell, and he did his best to ignore the piercing headache the hazy border gave him from staring at it for too long.

1:30

[Hunter]: clear

[Ellie]: clear here, too

He sat up, jammed the crystalline spike into the right place in the ground finally, and then bolted for the next spot in the pattern as fast as he could. Hunter raced from spot to spot at full speed, tearing his pants as he slid at one point, scraping his hand bloody as he fumbled the Shard at another, but he stayed moving and kept up the pace.

[Ellie]: done

[Ellie]: anchor in

[Ellie]: come on, red

[Ellie]: plz

0:29

Hunter, with his left hand, desperately wiping the right off on his pants, twisted the Shard as he shoved it into a particularly tough patch of dirt. Trips let him know, “here, done,” and then he ran again toward the white building behind the Slide.

0:06

He slid in next to Ellie on the ground feet-first, his toes just barely brushing the white wall of the facility, panting, but still managed to flash her a grin and a thumbs-up. There was already a gleaming, iridescent spike, about half again as long as the others, buried partly in the dirt, so Hunter quickly summoned one of his own perfect Shards and slowly slid it into the ground, so sharp he didn’t even have to push hard.

[Hunter]: down

[Hunter]: anchor in

[Hunter]: can we take a break?

[Hunter]: just one cycle, the front side’s going to be way harder

[Ellie]: for sure

[Ellie]: what do you think, we do 2 each and then we hide? or as many as possible

[Hunter]: i dunno, but you were right. i think they’re bigger

[Hunter]: you might be able to kill them still, not sure if i can

[Ellie]: ok, we go slow, we go even. hopefully if they see us, they don’t split. better if all of em go for 1, then whoever that is transfers their stuff and bolts

[Hunter]: ok, got it. you check the door?

[Ellie]: ya, locked up tight

[Hunter]: shoot, ok

1:31

[Hunter]: now?

[Ellie]: now

Hunter got up and ran the direction Ellie had come from, while she went the opposite. He and Trips glanced down at the Shards she had implanted, counting that he’d done the same number, then he skidded to a halt at the far north of the Slide, where she had started.

1:02

[Ellie]: looks good here, s end

[Hunter]: all set here

[Hunter]: let’s do one and hunker. we’re screwed if this thing gets much bigger

[Ellie]: got it

1:40

[Hunter]: clear, i think

[Ellie]: clear

Six left, Hunter thought, then the perfects. He waited the ten seconds for the shadows to move down the road, then got up and moved to the next position, taking his time to get the Shard in the right spot. He checked the time again prudently not compulsively, and jogged a little further.

0:45

Hunter planted the next spike, then lowered himself to the ground as flat as he could. He was just shy of the northeast corner, but far enough back that he could see the side the monsters were coming out of. He slowed his breathing, stopped drumming his fingers on the hard packed dirt, and waited, knowing Ellie would be in the same position, just barely blocked by the black portal.

0:10

[Ellie]: ur down right?

[Hunter]: yeah, you?

[Ellie]: ya

1:45

He made himself very small, he visualized flatness, he was one with the earth, and he watched as a mass spilled out of the Slide, the size of one of the bigger clumps of infiltrators. Then it split apart into separate figures, six hulking humanoid forms, and instead of going east to join the hundreds in Rapid City, they started drifting toward him. Or, he noticed a moment later, half of them did.

1:42

“Incoming!” he shouted as he sprung to his feet. Hunter backed away a few steps, working his satchel off stupid extra strap, then filled it with as many of his remaining Fount Shards as he could fit before tossing it toward the next spot. “Trips, it’s all you.”

“Same! Nuts!” he heard faintly a few moments later, but he tried not to worry about that, he just moved to put himself in between the larger shadow monsters and the small robot, already working on burying its first spike.

1:35

Two were headed to Hunter’s left, the third angling to the other side, some kind of uneven flanking maneuver he didn’t want to let them complete. The moment they were close enough to start swinging, he twitched his arm the way Pete had shown him, his focus detached and fell into his hand, then he tossed it to his left quickly. As the two rings started to spin in the air while they flew, he could see the upper bodies of the monsters ripple slightly, the way the infiltrators looked when they turned, apparently following the trajectory.

Hunter moved, from one side of their loose formation to the other, and with one practiced motion, turned and summoned his staff all at once, jabbing the end directly below the misshapen lump of the middle monster’s head. There was a cracking noise, his arms went briefly numb, and he pulled back a foot less of his wizard stick than he started with, the entire end splintered.

Your [Oak Staff] has suffered critical damage! You now have [Broken Oak Staff].

Warning: broken equipment cannot be used for talents and will provide a large (-50%) penalty to use with skills.

1:19

Hunter tossed his staff away, backing up as his focus fluttered back in an arc and settled into its usual place at his side. Arms up, hands loose, he kept his footwork light and steady, making sure only one of the steadily approaching figures could attack him at once. Their swipes were just as telegraphed as before, and a bit slower, but he could feel they were much more powerful. Each near miss seemed to make a stiff breeze and each time he parried one of their multiple arms away, Hunter could feel the impact behind it, even if it didn’t hurt.

1:05

One of the trailing monsters lurched, its form blurring even more than before, and suddenly it was at his side. Hunter ducked and tried to get an arm up, but it still clipped him on the shoulder and sent him stumbling briefly toward the Slide.

[Shadow Bruiser] has struck you with a glancing blow for six (6) damage!

0:51

He glanced past his opponents for a brief moment, saw Trips was hammering down its third Shard already, and then heard a series of screeches from behind him. Not wanting to chance it, he Flicker Stepped backward before twisting around to look, then froze momentarily. He saw Ellie down on one knee, her sabre dripping black fluid, her other hand plunging one of her own Shards into the ground.

He also saw his arm, gone at the elbow, plunged halfway into the maw of the Slide, a giant, flickering black mass where his forearm and hand should be. He jerked away from the portal, trying to figure out how he’d gotten so close without knowing it, and only briefly checked to see that he still had an entire limb when he pulled it free.

0:45

Ellie started to get up, hesitating, looking like she was going to head his way. He waved her off and shouted, “Just finish,” before having to dodge out of the path of another swipe.

0:41

Two bruisers were coming from one side while the third edged along the border of the Slide, and Hunter darted toward that one. It reared up with two of its arms and slammed them down as soon as he approached, but he was balanced, he was centered, he was in control, and while he felt the ground shake as its limbs pounded the dirt, the attack missed him cleanly.

The light in his affinity and the wave that wanted him to crash both guided him forward as he pulled a Water Burst into his hand, and then he slammed it palm-first into the side of the monster. There was, maybe if he squinted, a steaming hole much smaller than his fist where his spell hit, and he leapt away as the shadow started to sweep its arms at his feet, seeming unhurt.

0:39

Hunter felt a thrumming beneath his feet as all three bruisers glided closer, pinning him in. He looked around not in a panic, but couldn’t see what was going on in the short window he allowed himself to search.

“Almost got it,” Ellie shouted to him, “just the perfect ones to make the star parts!”

0:30

[Shadow Bruiser] has struck you with a glancing blow for four (4) damage!

[Shadow Bruiser] has struck you with a glancing blow for seven (7) damage!

0:22

“No, Trips!” he heard Ellie yell, “Not there! Bad robot!”

0:14

Hunter took another blow to the side while he weaved in between the shadows, doing his best to keep at least one out of range and still hold their attention. He was in the middle of trying another Water Burst, and when his fingers slipped past the amorphous lower body of one of the monsters, he felt his affinity roar in response. He twisted around the next blow and cast his spell again, and this time, with the Wave Charge, it at least made the bulky shadow fall back a few steps.

0:08

“No no no,” Ellie screamed, and he saw her out of the corner of his eye, rearranging two of the perfect shards, then she turned and ran back to the outer ring. “I screwed up!”

0:01

The Slide flickered behind Hunter, and then grew in an instant, just a few feet, but enough to envelop him and the shadows all at once.

Hunter’s dad, when the farm wasn’t doing so well, had often said he was just going to pack up and move the whole family to the ocean. Then, when things were going better, he’d say something similar, but more of a promise than a resignation. But between his dad’s place on the redoubt’s council, the work his mother had her hands full with because of a slowly increasing population of village children, and the various disasters and everyday work that came along with owning a farm, they never made it out to an ocean. They went to a lake, once, and Hunter thought that was pretty alright.

He didn’t actually mind not going, though, as much as his dad talked up the idea. “A long, sandy beach, with the waves lapping at our toes,” he’d say. Hunter thought, however, that the river was pretty good for wet feet. “The water goes as far as your eye can see.” The dirt in Kansas goes that far, too, and Hunter figured it’d be just as boring if it was another color. “You can swim out until your feet don’t reach the bottom and float where nothing can ever bother you. Seawater’s a different buoyancy than sweet.” That part seemed kind of alright, he thought.

There was something about that, about a perfect weightlessness, or at least as close to it as you could get without magic or going into space, that Hunter longed for. No more fidgeting, no more intrusive, racing thoughts, no more stumbling over his words, worried he’d say the wrong thing. Meditation got him close, and closer every day, and he was pretty sure just the act of growing older had curbed a lot of his worst impulses, his destructive, thoughtless fits of boredom.

He never bothered his dad about it, never tried to encourage him to take them, because he could never figure out how to say it. I want to float, Hunter thought, and never stop. I woulda thought it’d be warmer, though.

Everything was cool, quiet, and dark. His feet were still on the ground but it didn’t feel like he was standing, just suspended. It was nice, but not as nice as his dad had made it out to be. Where’s the sun? Where’s the blue water? Where’s the sand? It’s supposed to be sand, not some weird, hard dirt. He drifted from side to side, slowly seeing patterns in the blank darkness that surrounded him as his eyes adjusted.

Hunter’s body jerked, almost on its own, bending backwards as something in the void swept at his face. He let himself fall, thinking he’d drift off and away from whatever it was, but his back hit the ground and he was already rolling to his feet by the time he realized what had happened. There were more swirls of black on black and he slapped one away, but didn’t get a solid blow on the other, feeling something hard and unyielding drag across his ribs.

[Shadow Bruiser] has struck you with a glancing blow for three (3) damage!

There’s the blue, he mused to himself, but we’re still missing the-

Everything black went suddenly white, and Hunter shut his eyes, staggering. The darkness returned, and he heard splashes like water balloons bursting, and then it was bright again. He stumbled forward, covering his eyes, as something pushed him from behind, pushed his entire body like a wave of pressure. Then he fell, and rolled, and felt himself be dragged by the collar, felt his own weight again, saw the sky and loosely curled brown hair.

Hunter sat up and stared at the Slide, still just as big as ever, but twisting and flashing between the almost perfect black and a blinding white. He looked over his shoulder at Ellie and asked, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured, “but it doesn’t look good.”

Hunter sat, his satchel almost empty but back on his shoulder, using his resilience focus while he watched the portal refuse to go away, or even get smaller. The shadow bruisers were still coming out every minute and forty-five seconds, but they’d evaporate a moment later when the Slide turned white. Ellie was off retrieving the buggy so they could leave and get help, and he looked over where she’d walked to when he heard a shout.

It wasn’t his friend, though, who was yelling. Walking around the Slide was a tall man, wearing a SysPol scarf like a bandana around his head and a very long coat.

“I said,” the man said, not quite yelling, but in a very loud, shrill voice, “what have you children done to my experiment?”

“Your experiment?” Ellie shouted back as she drove up on the buggy, and she could really shout when she wanted to. “All we’re doing is trying to fix this mess, and you-” she started, but got cut off when the man drew a long pistol, lightning quick, and shot her off the vehicle with an angry red beam.

“That was rhetorical!” he screamed, and then aimed at Hunter with another jerky, almost instantaneous movement, but the teen was already running when the second blast came.

He glanced briefly at Ellie, who was flat on her back behind the buggy, but awake enough to grab her share of the last two favor cookies out of one of her many pants pockets. He recast his spells as he ran diagonally in the general direction of the shooter, watching him intently. The man was tracking him with his foot-long handgun, but the moment Hunter saw his arm tense, he Flicker Stepped out of the way of the beam, turned, and sprinted as fast as he could, directly at him.

The Pol shot again, but this time Hunter was close, and slapped the barrel away while the gun went off. He went for an immediate counterattack, water affinity compressed tightly in his hand as he tried to brush his fingers across the taller man’s stomach, but was rebuffed almost instantly.

“That’s not going to work, child,” the man hissed, his free hand wrapped around Hunter’s wrist, having grabbed it so fast it took the teen a moment to even process what had happened. Then he heaved and Hunter went stumbling a few feet, catching his footing and whipping around to keep his eyes on his opponent, but there wasn’t an immediate followup shot like he assumed.

Instead, the Pol, probably an officer Hunter figured, if he had a coat like that, was fiddling with his pistol. Then he aimed it again, but Hunter was ready and leapt out of the way of another beam.

He heard Ellie shout from behind and over to the side, “Look out, reverser!” but he didn’t really understand until he felt something slam into his back and he fell to his knees.

[Franklin Gregory Warren] has struck you for eighty-one (81) damage!

Warning: you are at critical resilience levels! (10/117)

Hunter wobbled, reached into his bag, and moved to the left, but almost at the same time he watched the next shot go ten feet past where he previously was, then turn at a hard angle and slam into his hand, pulping the cookie he’d just grabbed on the way to blasting into his chest. His Infra flickered out before he could see how much damage that was, and he tipped over onto his side, vision blurring.

He heard a scream, even if it was really far away, and his head hit the dirt, so now everything was blurry and sideways as he watched what happened next. He saw his friend Ellie, which was nice, thinking Hey, when did she move back?

Ellie had a sword, and she was shouting something, that if it wasn’t so loud, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hear. He still didn’t think he heard it very well, because it sounded like, “The Lady has judged you, and found you lacking,” which didn’t make any sense. Her eyes were glowing, which was weird, too, and then she waved her sword around in the air. There were a series of wet thumps on the ground, and then his friend Ellie ran over to him, and that was nice too.