Masked teenagers swarmed around the window that they’d broken by repeatedly ramming the masked head of one of their own against it. However, only one of them could fit through the window at a time, and only slowly if they wanted to avoid slicing themselves to ribbons on broken glass.

The result was a doozy of a bottleneck of screaming, gibbering, laughing teen like things, pushing and jostling each other as each tried to be the next to get inside.

So preoccupied with their breaking and entering were they, that none of them even noticed the steadily growing glow behind them and the steadily rising pitch of the whine it emitted. Only when the air started tasting faintly metallic and the sound began making it hard to hear each other did a few of the rearmost ones look around and spot the small group that had moved up behind them.

By then it was far too late.

The world behind them lit up with a piercing red light as Zaxier finally released his spell, and a deep, sonorous roar washed over the assembled mob as the fireball flew right at them. The blazing, dark red sphere of liquid fire smashed into the packed mass of bodies, burning a hole right through anything it touched, before finally detonating deep inside the mob.

The closest few bodies simply evaporated, reduced to ash in a heartbeat. The flaming shockwave scattered a hefty part of the remainder across the façade of the building in variously sized chunks. The effect was not too dissimilar from using a shotgun to paint a wall.

Even the survivors were left scattered and reeling. Those closer to the window had been mostly shielded from the blast by the bodies of their fellows and a number of the Masked had been surrounding the building, either searching for other entrances or trying to prevent their prey from escaping. They came running when they heard the commotion, but before they could arrive or the stunned survivors of the blast could figure out what the hell had just hit them, the Anima arrived.

There were only a few of them, less than ten, but they came in a wide variety of shapes. They ranged from skeletons of a few large animals to shambling hybrids of thing that appeared to have been stuck together by a mad scientist on a stitching bender.

A half-alligator, half-flying snake coiled its long, thick body around one Masked, simply squeezing until it popped. At the same time, it grabbed another in its powerful jaws and tossed it through the air to land nearby in a broken heap, next to a pair of things that looked like children with deformed faces. They had jumped on another Masked and were simply tearing at it with their tiny hands while it curled into a ball and refused to look at them.

While the force seemed small compared even to just the number of survivors among the Masked, what really set the attack apart was the way each dead Masked was another potential fighter. And the way Ava was rapidly switching between them. Two Masked pulled a zombie badger off another Masked and began beating it with metal pipes, only for the badger to go limp and the one it had just mauled to smash one of its saviours in the knee with a club, sending it down with a screech of pain. The moment the remaining Masked turned to smash the newly raised Masked zombie, the badger stirred back to life and jumped on its back and began gnawing on the back of its head.

As soon as all the Anima were engaged and the Masked started to rally after the initial shock of the attack, Gora and Samual came charging into the fight. Every single remaining Masked that wasn’t half dead or currently fighting for its life snapped their attention to the two fighters and with near single-minded focus, rushed right at them.

Many never made it. They were grabbed, skewered, impaled, chomped or simply crushed by Animations as they ran past, never even noticing what hit them. But some did make it. They didn’t fare much better.

Gora could feel the annoying itch she felt whenever Samual tapped into whatever power it was that fuelled him. It felt like a mosquito buzzing on the inside of her ear, or an itch slap dash in the middle of her back where she couldn’t reach it no matter how she tried to contort her huge, muscular arms. It also made his short hair float up off his head as if he was drifting underwater, which she thought looked damn stupid. She couldn’t deny its effectiveness, though.

The first Masked that reached him tried to strike him with the wooden staff it was carrying but was intercepted by Samual’s shield with a deep ‘GONNNNGGG’ sound. It emitted a shockwave that visibly washed over the area around him and knocked the second Masked to reach him off its feet and back into its friend. The staff itself vibrated for a moment before disintegrating in a puff of dust.

Then Samual counterattacked. The piddly little mace he carried swung around and connected solidly to the Masked staring in stupefied amazement at its staff blowing away in the wind. Normally, Gora would have expected such a blow to crush a few important organs, perhaps even break a few ribs. Either way, it would have been fatal. When Samual swung it, it picked up the Masked and chucked it. Its body struck the side of the top floor of the building they were approaching and just kept going, right through the wall. Gora wouldn’t have been surprised if it had gone clean out the other side. Then he turned and smashed down on the prone Masked, turning its body into paste and the stone ground beneath it into an impact crater.

One of the last few Masked came charging at Gora. It had run from the complete other side of the building and had been one of the last to arrive. To its credit, it actually held a spear with a sharp, albeit rusted tip at the end. Where it had gotten that was anybody’s guess, but it was, if she had to be honest, the single most dangerous weapon these things had had so far.

She lifted her weapon. It wasn’t really a sword. Calling it a sword would be an insult to masters who spent decades learning how to fold steel until their fingers bled. But then, it also wasn’t quite an axe. Axes were generally smaller. And lighter. Even the two-handed ones.

No, it looked more like a really big butcher’s cleaver had forced itself on a woodsman’s axe and from the resultant spawn, selected the biggest and meanest. To this offspring, it then did unspeakable things that involved a full moon some kind of living sacrifice, before finally realizing its mistake and burying the result for six months. Only for it to rise from the dead, thirsting for more dainty metals such as mithril.

Basically, it was big, it was ugly, nobody knew what it was made of, and it was far too heavy to ever be an effective weapon for a human in any sort of realistic fight. Gora hefted it in one hand and the muscles on her arm creaked as they flexed. As the spear wielding Masked neared its strike range, she swung.

There was a crack and her attacker’s weapon simply… burst. A cloud of splinters scattered over the ground, leaving him with nothing but a short, jagged handle and a confused look on his… mask.

Her reverse swing took it in the torso and a faint red mist splattered the road behind where he had been. The blade had gone right through him and turned half his torso into soup on the way.

Gora the Destroyer sniffed. All the Masked outside were dead or unable to move and she’d barely had to do anything. But that was good. As long as they didn’t run into anything too strong, the kids should be able to take care of themselves just fine.

“Everyone okay?” she called out as Ava, Bob and Zaxier caught up with them.

“I think I burnt my fingers” Bob reported as he sucked on a few fingers of his left hand.

“That is because you made a mistake with the induction array structure, you idiot boy!” Zaxier chastised him. “You can be lucky I compensated, or you could have taken off your entire hand!”

“I said I was sorry, Mr. Zee!” the young man complained.

The cat gave a dramatic sigh. He was still sitting on Bob’s shoulder, his butt nestled comfortably in his portable basket and his paws crossed in front of him like the lazy bum he was. “Sorry doesn’t regrow limbs, Boy. The theory for that is far more complex.”

While riding around on the Idiot allowed him to really focus and squeeze every drop of juice into his spells, the Idiot was still an idiot. Being forced to channel through his familiar meant Zaxier’s spells were both slow to cast and liable to failure when Bob waggled his fingers in the wrong way. That was the third time Bob had almost blown himself up since they set off from Grailmane.

Apparently, Bob was also not the first ‘apprentice’ the cat has had.

“Zaxier, can you take care of the loose essence? Just scoop it all up, we can process later” Gora asked, bringing him back on task. Ava had already gotten started on her harvesting.

“Oh, if I must” he replied as if she’d asked him for an incredible favour. “Bob, retrieve the Arcane Essence Collector Manifold!”

“Eh?”

“The spinny thing, you dolt!”

“Oh shucks, right you are Sir, Mr. Zee, Sir!”

“EEEEEEEEEK!” Ava screamed from nearby as one of the only mostly dead Masked reached out and wrapped his hand around her leg. She’d been going around, stabbing the Essence Needle into the more whole ones to suck them dry of the valuable Arcane Essence. “GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!”

Gora rolled her eyes as the girl screamed and flailed. Notably, Ava did nothing to actually improve her situation. Even the remaining Anima scattered around them did nothing but watch. And that was her problem. For some reason the girl completely freaked out whenever anything got close, completely forgetting about all the tools she had at her disposal to deal with the problem.

Samual casually walked over and cracked the thing holding her leg on the head before giving Ava a questioning look. There was no sign of the crazy power he had displayed earlier.

Ava yanked her leg away from the - now properly dead - thing’s grasp. If she’d tried that earlier she could probably have broken its hold given how weak it was. Then she blushed even as she glared back at him.

“I… I could have handled that myself” she spat, despite all evidence to the contrary. Samual just stared at her intently for a few moments before turning back to Gora.

“Are we going in?” he asked simply, gesturing at the broken window. Several of the Masked had crawled inside, not to mention that spider thing. Gora couldn’t remember ever seeing one of them before and she couldn’t help but be a little curious.

“Yes. Zaxier, Ava, stay and gather whatever Essence you can get from this lot. If anything slips out behind us, shred it. If anything comes from elsewhere, blast it and get inside if it’s still standing after. Samual, you’re with me” Gora rattled off orders. The kids had made it through the Wilderness Zone easily enough, they should be able to survive the City Zone for a little while unsupervised.

Gora lifted her foot and gave a lazy kick. The door to the building folded inwards with a resounding crack, several pieces of it flying off into the distance.

“Come on.”

As the two of them headed inside, Bob finally found the spinny thingy in his bag. It looked like a set of concentric partial metal spheres, the largest about the size of a tennis ball. Spliced into its wired frame was something resembling a laptop cord. In fact, it looked pretty much exactly like an old laptop cord, complete with the single green light that lit up as the concentric spheres started to spin erratically inside each other. Blue, purple and red sparkles condensed out of the air and the smaller pieces of gore around them, before getting sucked into the centre of the spinning sphere.

Ava glared at Samual’s receding form until he disappeared from sight before blowing out an annoyed breath and turning back to the job at hand. She hefted her own device and tried again to stab the needle part of it into one of the dead bodies. This time it stayed dead.