Is this all I can do? Cathy thought as she guided her small group toward the veranda. She tried to remain calm, but her nerves frayed at the thought of that … avian lurking about and having to get her classmates out of here.

All she had to do was think, [Signal], and the spell would do the rest for her, attaching a packet of mana to the sound of her whistle that broke apart into a ripple of information that spread wherever it traveled. It wasn’t enough.

How was she supposed to warn her classmates? One of her level-ups had completed the spell for her. She drew on memorized signals, and those didn’t include a warning for, Garden Great Ape! Run!

She tried to organize her thoughts, restructure the spell, and pay attention to her surroundings at the same time.

She wasn’t even sure if any of the disparate groups could hear her. She was running low on mana, only seven of her classmates walked behind her, and Sarah wanted to leave.

Two of them are freshmen, she reminded herself. Cathy had to get them to safety. But what about Laas? What about her other fifteen classmates she’d led into this disaster?

This floor was supposed to have been safe. She had done her research, rented a cart ahead of time, studied up on harvesting strategy … Had she led them to their deaths?

Sarah jogged up beside her and Cathy nearly jumped. “I’m not staying,” she whispered as she took the lead, buckler at the ready. “Just making sure the veranda is safe, then I have to find Lukas. But I think the bird chick will want to be near the action.”

Cathy nodded. That was sound logic, yet her relief was another needle in her gut. “Do you need, uh, trinkets? I have one against germs, one against elemental harm, two mana rings. Uhm, my wand—but you don’t use magic.”

“I have a school healing potion,” Andrew spoke up behind them, “an enchanted crossbow, some alchemical munition, and an alarm talisman—”

Sarah shook her head to reject their offers, but they didn’t stop there. The rest of their group offered up an enchanted dagger, an enchanted shield to replace her buckler, a strength potion, a bottle of stamina tea, a lava bomb—if she waited a minute so he could assemble it—a scroll of [Tangle Thorns]. That last one was her cousin, Mateo. “I wanted to go,” he complained. “I could have at least given them the scroll!”

Cathy frowned. It had been easy, for once, to convince him not to run off into danger, but she didn’t contradict his claim. “If you die, your parents will never forgive me.”

“We have so much stuff,” Andrew mumbled as he eyed the items their circle of hands offered up. “Do you really think she will go after them?”

Sarah nodded. “She wanted excitement, right? Why tell her lackey to kill some teens if she won’t be there to watch?”

That seemed to settle some decision in his mind. Andrew nodded and reached for one of the bottles. “May I? I— I thought I would turn back once I led you to the exit, or maybe go outside and get help, but do you think you can make it back on your own?”

He spoke to the group at large, as if unsure whether or not he should be addressing his classmates who hadn’t joined the fight, then focused on Mateo’s new friend.

The boy nodded—and Cathy thought of him as a boy even though he was the same age she had been when she’d enrolled last year. “Avoid conflict. Wait or turn back if the way is barred. I remember the path to the portal. We can make it without you.”

“We?” Mateo said, and Cathy stole the scroll out of his hand to smack it against his forehead.

“You will go straight to the guild and get help, do you understand? No detours. Use your scroll if you need to.” She pressed it back into his hand. “You can’t study it if you’re dead.”

Her cousin gave her a defiant look, then stormed up to Sarah and grumbled something about scouting out the veranda.

The workshopper with the igneous crystals stopped, but her other two classmates seemed unsure if they should stop, too. They looked like they wanted to leave with the first years, and Cathy couldn’t fault them for it.

“How many times has Mr. Jung told us not to blow up the school with our incompetence?” Andrew asked. “‘Think he was being literal?”

The lava boy smiled. “Let’s find—“

An avian dropped down next to them. They startled, drawing weapons and forming spells, but she wasn’t the same woman who had threatened them before. And she held her unarmed hands out to plead, “Whisperers, stop! We heard your calls. We are here to help.”

‘We’?

Three more figures dropped onto the veranda behind her.

Kyle lurched. His hands were on his axe, but his momentum drove him forward. He had [Strong Grip]. He could fall and still hold on.

“Kyle, duck right!” Delilah barked, and his legs reacted before his mind could. [Quick Feet]. He let go, stumbled over the tentacle, and threw himself to the right.

An orb of acid splashed down where he had been standing a moment ago. It bit into the cloven wound but left his axe untouched. Immediately after it, a yellow orb splashed onto the corner of the hallway, and a beehive glued the tentacle to the stone.

His teammates were catching up. Golsa ran alongside the length of the tentacle with two fingers pointed down at it. A narrow cone of frost shot from her hand to freeze its flesh, tiny snowflakes drifting from it that smelled of cold mint.

Delilah emptied a pouch of marbles and crystals in front of her and they slowed as they cascaded into the air, then picked up speed to swirl around her like a cloak. “[Floating Armory],” she cast and plucked three crystals out of the rotation. “[Spell Subversion: Swarm of Bees!].”

From the hive, a clashing buzz like a drawer of cutlery picked up, and a swarm of metallic grey bees shot into the air. Half dipped down and sunk needles into the tentacle. The other half buzzed around the corner to attack the Ape itself.

Ajay rushed forward, knocked, and loosed arrow after arrow that strafed just past the corner in a steady rhythm of zips.

Quin mixed powders in an empty bottle, glancing between the enemy and the gaps before and behind them. Because Tuhrie was still an issue.

Kyle drew a knife just to have something to hold as the Ape, slowly, turned. The mop of blue tentacles that hung over one of its shoulders swatted bees out the air with lazy efficiency. It stepped back to glare at them with one eye—

An arrow struck that eye and splintered. The eyelid twitched as a thin line of blood shot across its brow, but the rest of its face didn’t budge. Its eye was only a little red. It looked … unimpressed.

Its tentacle rose, breaking through the hornet hive and layers of frost with casual ease. His axe was still stuck in it like a tree stump, and the beast whipped it out, from right to left.

Kyle ducked. Chips of stone pattered down on him as the wall cracked. It didn’t stop. He stumbled forward, rope skipped, and dodged the shaft of his axe before it could clip his chin. The tentacle had slammed down, tried to sweep their legs out from under them, and lashed up in a wave.

It was enough to occupy them for the moment, and the Ape turned back again. In the corner of his eye, Kyle saw why.

Micah burst out of the cover of fog, trailing white tendrils like a cloak. He ran into the intersection with a bottle of acid goop in either hand, spotted them, and made a face.

Kyle only caught a glimpse in the rush, but it looked like a mix of relief and annoyance, and he snapped, “We came to save you, you little shit!”

“I had a plan!”

The Ape lunged. Despite its trundling gait, despite its size, despite its stone skin, it wasn’t slow. It thrust both hands out at Micah like a cat trying to catch a mouse, who wasn’t looking, and a sudden burst of wind blasted him away.

Micah hurled both bottles at the Ape as he flew, stumbled back with quick steps on his landing, and cast a wide net of shifting colors.

Kyle didn’t catch it all. When the Ape landed, the ground vanished beneath his boots. Its impact made them all jump, and he fell. The tentacle rushed toward him, he grabbed his axe like a handlebar and rolled over it.

He leaned on the axe for a beat to shove down the sickness rising in his throat, planted his feet, and pulled. It still wouldn’t budge, so he thrust a knife into the wound to cut it free.

A constellation of glowing crystals shot by, leaving streaks in his vision, and exploded into bursts of wind, fire, and rotting clouds on the Ape’s hide.

“Stop attacking it!” Micah called and fired a glowing paintball of his own. It exploded into a starburst cloud of purple smog that engulfed its head, and the Ape stopped clawing at the net around its face, shook itself, and lumbered forward with huffing breaths.

“Attack me!” Micah had only moved a few meters back. The Ape could still lunge at him, and Kyle knew he would run out of wind magic soon. He was gambling his life. Why, if he could have escaped …?

Oh.

Micah fired another glowing shot. This one exploded into a patch of glue that rippled like ferrofluid across its fist and face. He followed it up by downing a vial and spitting a cloud of brown fog at the Ape that rapidly dried the glue until it resembled porous rock.

It clenched its fist and shattered that as well, just as it had everything else, but Micah had its attention. He used that moment to lead it away—from Kyle and the five alchemists sneaking out behind the beast.

One of them pulled on the reins of the Giant Toad, but the sumpter summon hobbled forward on mangled legs and gave up. The guy dropped the reins and hurried away.

Their plan was to distract the Ape. The same plan they’d come up with in a panicked rush. It was a shit plan because Micah wouldn’t survive.

The tentacle stopped attacking them and returned to the intersection, and Kyle dropped his knife to grab onto his axe and dig his boots into the stone. It dragged him along as if it hadn’t noticed his weight, but he had to do something.

Golsa joined in. She dumped the rest of her paintballs on the tentacle, dumped some borrowed powder from Quin on them, and ignited it. They exploded into a massive chunk of ice that froze the tentacle to the floor—and which it shattered.

Mason grabbed the entire tentacle under his arm then and joined Kyle like a game of tug of war.

The mop of smaller tentacles on the beast’s shoulder were still swatting at bees, and the alchemists had to inch along the wall to squeeze past them.

“Delilah,” Ajay hissed.

“I can’t control them, only drop the spell!”

It barely mattered. The Ape lunged again and the alchemists made a run for it. Kyle saw it more clearly this time as Micah puffed his cheeks out like a pufferfish and a bubble of wind burst out around him. It changed directions, condensing downward to push against the ground and blast him up and back.

The Ape swatted the ground, looked up, tore a chunk out of the corner. Micah kicked off the stone a split second before it, dug his bare hands into the rock ceiling, and used it as a high bar to swing over its head.

The beast tracked him, and the tentacle tore away with sudden force, throwing them into a heap, to swat him out of the air—

Micah thrust his left arm up into the rock and pulled himself up flat against the ceiling as the tentacle whipped by underneath him.

Another volley of gems and arrows crashed into the Ape then, to cover him when he fell, and Micah slowed himself with a guttering thrust of wind. It seemed to cut out too soon. His leg gave out when he touched down and he slammed into the wall. His face was covered in sweat. He cradled his left hand in his arm and called with a choked breath, “Forester—!”

The others reacted too soon. A clay apple and a box of twine flew over Kyle, the five alchemists, and Micah. Their fuses burned like sparklers, and Delilah called, “[Wall of Wax]!,” at the same time as Ajay called a retreat.

From the wall, Rowan flapped his wings and two waves of force met, rising on each other to construct a wall of yellow-tinged wax that cut off the last third of the hallway. It muffled the force of the explosions. Yet, the tentacle tore through it like paper. Rowan exploded in a puff of smoke when the curve of its strike smacked him against the wall. Mason vanished. It had whipped him off his feet.

Kyle’s axe appeared with a rush of wind, hovering where the tentacle stretched past his face into the distance. He froze.

The Ape scooped a part of the wall up and lunged. It flung a chunk of wax that knocked Delilah off her feet, moving with a sudden fury and quickness that hadn't been present before. Kyle realized, just because it hadn’t run yet, that didn’t mean it couldn’t.

It was covered in wounds and welts, burnt by fire and acid, littered with arrows, and missing entire chunks of flesh from the explosions and rotting poisons and … It didn’t care. They couldn’t put it down. They couldn’t slow it down. It could catch up whenever it felt like it.

At least, while it had chased Micah, it had been distracted for a few moments, but the guy hurried after his classmates holding his left hand. He was in no condition to fight.

Kyle took the axe. A premonition of the future, of a series of gore splatters that trailed to the veranda, burned in his mind. He pulled and the head budged, but the motion of the tentacle dragged him off his feet.

The Ape charged. He shoved more mana from that sickening whirlpool inside him into it, to burn it free if he had to, but the flames only glowed like embers. It wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough, and he had nothing more left to give except—

His blood that stained the axe, trailing from glove up to his jawline, lit up in a familiar rose and red metallic glow. It began to crumble away like petals. As the earth shook under that beast’s loping weight, he wondered if he was hallucinating. An old panic thrummed in his chest—don’t let them see; hide the mark! But … he still wore his glove?

Then the Ape was upon him, the moment came rushing back, and Kyle yanked the axe free as he pushed— not mana. That rose glow around him sank into the weapon. Its flames roared to life as he severed the tentacle and scored a deep line across its arm in one fell swoop.

Cease fire, a voice rang in his mind.

The Ape staggered in its charge.

His axe had doubled in size, extended by a layer of material like flames hammered straight, and he swore he saw eyes and teeth roiling up from within its depths.

A warm feeling spread up from his waist, too, cleansing that sickness inside him, and a faint red shell overlaid his vision, twitching like the folded wings of a beetle …?

Ceasefire!

The tentacle dropped and vanished like chalk in the rain. The hallway shook as the Ape crashed into the wall. It held its bleeding shoulder and finally, roared in pain.

Kyle welcomed the overwhelming pressure like the fanfare of victory. He stepped up—

—and threw himself aside. A giant white fist snapped where he’d been a moment ago. Where the air shot out between its fingers, Kyle imagined sprays of his blood instead.

He countered with a swing, and the Ape yanked its arm back. It pushed itself into the rubble of the wall to put distance between them. He could grievously wound it, and the Ape kill him, in one strike each. So long as he had his …

His axe. Both hands on its shaft, Kyle eyed the giant red weapon in the corner of his vision and, for a moment, wondered where it had come from.

In his moment of confusion, he finally heard the words battering against his ears. They were no longer contained within a spell. Cathy stood at the end of the hallway and yelled, “Kyle, stop it!”

Tuhrie dropped down in front of him. He nearly took her head off, but she put herself with her back to him and her arms stretched out as if … as if to protect him from the Ape.

Then another bird woman dropped down to his left and strode toward the Ape, speaking in a waterfall of foreign words, and his momentum faltered in his confusion.

A third slipped out of the distant gap near the intersection, close to the ceiling, and propped herself up with her chicken feet against the wall to overlook the hallway. She aimed a crossbow at the Ape, spotted Kyle, and her crossbow shifted targets as she called out a warning.

The bird woman in front of him startled, turned on him, and stepped back in a panic, saying, “Don’t strike!”

Kyle recognized her voice, but he couldn’t place it with his heart pounding in his neck. He realized … she wasn’t Tuhrie. None of them were. The one in front of him was shorter. Less athletic. Her feathers were a drab shade of green and she didn’t carry knives.

The one speaking to the Ape had light brown and grey feathers and a small beak. The one sitting in the wall had patches of autumn brown and yellow that bled into her green.

Unlike the other two, the crossbow woman looked excited as she commented something in that foreign tongue … and Kyle recognized a word. Or rather, its meaning. It carried that same weight to it, information pressing down on his mind that translated itself to—’Pretender.’

She glanced from the Ape to Kyle, to his axe, to Micah … and her beak twitched up and over in the same way Tuhrie's had earlier. In disgust ...?

The green one replied with a single word, and Kyle put a stop to that right here and now, “Hey, no, no, you don’t—”

The Ape shot up at the sound of his voice. It let a bestial huff that shook his lungs and searched with wild eyes until it found him, and glared at him past the two bird women standing between them.

Kyle shut up, but Micah must have caught his intent. “Don’t speak in your language," he said in a tentative tone. "We can’t understand you.”

The crossbow woman snapped at him, “And that is our fault?”

“Please, don’t fight!” Cathy pleaded.

“I thought you were here to help?” Delilah asked.

“He just commented that one of the Pretenders disappeared,” the green one said. “Now know we why.”

‘He’?

Kyle glanced at the … bird man. Aside from his feathers and, maybe, his more elaborate clothes, he barely looked any different from the women. His voice might have been more androgynous than theirs …

“Tuhrie must it have kidnapped,” he said and it sounded like a snide comment directed at the green one in front of Kyle.

Her voice was firm, “She should not have been able to do that.”

“It is here, which means that Tuhrie also must be here—”

“Go away,” Tuhrie whispered in their ears with that crackle in her voice again.

The bird woman shot up straight and searched the tunnel for her in a frantic spin. “Tuhrie! Where—?”

“Now you chase after me? To drag me back down to your speed? You’re so boring, Pijeru.”

So Pijeru was the green one? She replied and her voice was everywhere, “Yourself is not well. You have yourself— nearly lost. Tuhrie, come home. Please!” She spoke with barely a crackle in her voice, compared to Tuhrie, and Kyle suddenly remembered where he recognized her voice from. Tuhrie had imitated her earlier. Was Pijeru some sort of nurse?

He took slow steps back, retreating toward his classmates who were doing the same, and tried to keep his eyes on everyone and the distant gap at once. As he did, a quiet sound chittered in his ears. It was barely audible, quiet because it was distant, not because it was magical, and it scratched like … metal scraping against stone …

A distant tink drew his eyes to the floor. A marble rolled over the stone. And above it, a knife—his knife, the throwing knife he'd dropped—floated as if it had a life of its own. It withdrew from the empty socket near the end of the laser hallway and began to leverage the second marble out.

Behind him, someone yelped in pain as the first laser in a cascade nicked them.

“Bird man!” Kyle shouted, and the Ape drew itself up. “Stop that knife!”

“Tch—”

Something flew at him from the rubble and froze a foot from his eyeball. A broken arrow dragged by its metal tip. His vision focused on it as, behind it, a blurry Pijeru cried out, “No!"

The arrow marched forward at a walking pace, trembling as if Pijeru was wrestling for control against some unseen force, and Kyle scrambled back.

“Grab it!” Delilah yelled. Kyle glanced back, realized what she meant, and did. He reached past it to grab the shattered wood and the moment his hand made contact, both of the forces dropped. Aura interference, he remembered. She couldn’t levitate objects they carried on them—?

Them the Ape’s fist slammed into him. The translucent wings of the beetle shell around him shattered like glass. The hallway rushed by. The floor hit him, his vision blurred, the wall hit him, the hallway revolved in circles around his head.

By the time Kyle realized, I’m flying!, he was already on the ground again, rolling in a heap like a sack of broken bones.

People were shouting. Something exploded. Someone—something?—dragged him over the stone. He began to thrash and hands pinned his arms down. “You’re done,” Andrew’s voice spoke into his ear. “You’re out. We’ll handle it from here.”

Kyle threw up.

“Is it a concussion?” Cathy said as someone helped him up. “He’s wearing a helmet but—”

“No blood,” Andrew noted. “That’s good, right? Less chance of internal bleeding?”

“No,” Kyle groaned. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the sounds of combat. “No, I just drank your shitty ass potion, you hack.” He spat out the last word and began to hack and cough, curling in on the warm glow radiating out from his waist.

Andrew gave him a weary chuckle. “Nice belt, tough guy. Pink suits you.”

“He did say he had an emergency item. Belt of Regeneration?”

Cathy and the stranger dragged him around the corner, and Kyle shot a desperate glance back at the battle, but his brain refused to translate what his eyes were seeing into coherent thought.

Andrew was staying behind. He wouldn’t be chuckling if someone was dead, right?

… He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead? For a second there, Kyle had begun to hope that things would resolve themselves, that the bird people would sort things out. He should have known better than to hope against anger. Yet somehow, he’d survived the punch. Like he always had.

It’s like nothing changed at all.

His life. That would have been his final thought. At least, his dumb brain had dreamed, if he could have turned all those gore splatters into a single one, nobody could say he wasn’t a patriot. And he’d thought he would be the sensible one. Kyle was an idiot after all.

I messed up. Micah had had the thought when an impatient fist had shattered a wall rather than wait for it to descend.

He’d had the thought when he saw a giant blue tentacle whip Mason off his feet, and his friend now clutched a limp arm.

And he had the thought as he watched Kyle tumbled through the hallway in a violent flight after a giant Ape punched him. Even with his tattoo, would he really …?

He didn’t know who these odd bird spirits around them were or why Cathy insisted they were allies when the rest of his classmates eyed them like enemies. He didn’t know why Kyle was glowing or how he’d summoned a giant flaming axe of fire essence that Micah could see—his fire axe’s enchantment was far weaker than that, and the dropped weapon had shattered in a burst of flame the moment it had hit the stone.

He had no information, no control, again, and this time, it was his fault. A failure of imagination, of preparation, of judgment. He should have listened to Cathy and fled rather than lead his classmates into this battle. Then, none of the others—not Mason, Kyle, or Delilah—would have had to fight. His preservation was secondary to him but not them. He should have known that.

And— and his fingers really stung. You’ve survived worse, a voice said inside him, and Micah nodded weakly. He knew that but breaking off fingernails sucked.

For once, he wished he could make the right choices, learn the right lessons. But it always seemed to go wrong. He wished he could just … let someone else take the reins for a time.

The Ape punched Kyle. His classmates, who had been retreating slowly this entire time, ran toward the exit where a series of lasers were closing in on them.

The brown and grey bird woman spoke to the Ape in a frantic tone, half attempting to soothe it, half ordering it to stand down with words that carried weight in his mind.

The Ape turned an enraged eye on her and let out a huff that shook Micah’s bones.

She cursed and warned them, “It is too early, the Pretender is still wearing its cloak. We have to—”

It squashed her. Micah expected to see blood, out of principle. He expected to see a burst of essence, then, because he thought she was a spirit. But its fist slammed down, and her form collapsed into yellow sand that vanished in an eyeblink.

Micah froze, staring at her empty set of clothes. Had she just … died?

“Woris!” the bird man screeched and a bolt of spiraling red wood thunked into the Ape’s temple as it loped toward its next victim, Pijeru. The explosion carried enough force to hurl it into the wall and then slowed, like fireworks frozen in ice. Slowly, the flames reversed directions and pressed down on the Ape as if two giant hands were trying to cram it into its skull.

The bird man ran along the wall toward them. He was shaping the explosion, Micah realized. He blinked the tears out of his eyes, and blinked between lenses, but he couldn’t see how he was doing it. He wasn’t sure he cared.

People were shouting. He didn’t hear them. Pijeru wrapped an arm around his shoulder and pulled him away from the wall in time to dodge an archway of wind that rushed by.

This time, he felt a pulse of something familiar. Wind magic, like his own, but only almost. It felt at the same time as potent as his aero and somehow off, like someone had taken the essences he could extract from elemental mana, ‘a dream of wind,’ and nurtured an aspect out of that rather than actual wind essence. An almost perfect forgery.

Ahead, a fourth bird person stood amid his classmates. She had brown striped feathers that reminded him of a falcon. She closed her fist and—

Micah looked back. Rhul had run past the Ape and jumped. It lunged at him, but the archway shrank down to slam into the beast and stagger it back. Rhul fired a different crossbow bolt straight behind himself without looking and sprinted toward them.

“Can you stand?” Pijeru asked. “Jump?”

Huh? Micah perked up at the tender concern in her voice, as if she were speaking to a wounded child.

He noticed the lasers flashing into existence ahead of them and caught on. His hand was hurt, he was somewhat battered, but an obstacle course? That was easy. Familiar.

He nodded and picked up speed. As another dense groove of heat essence appeared in front of his eyes, he hopped, dodged, and dove through the web of lasers. It almost lifted his spirit, but it was over too quickly when he caught up to his slower classmates who were threading their way through the lasers with care.

He took a sip of stamina tea and glanced at Pijeru when she landed next to him. He was about to offer her a sip when he noticed her eyes above her pale beak. She stared into his.

Her hand twitched, he drew his dagger, and their eyes widened in alarm when a laser cut between them. One nicked her leg. Another one drilled into his shoulder. They hadn’t appeared; the ones around them had suddenly begun to move.

His world seemed to slow, and his heart thumped in his chest, as he watched the trail of smoke rise from his shoulder. The laser moved toward his neck.

Then it curved. The rays around them turned back on themselves like tuning forks to sear the walls instead, forming a circular passageway leading to the exit.

“Move!” Rhul snapped, holding a hand out to shape the lasers as he sprinted toward them.

Micah saw Pijeru’s arm reaching for him, his dagger a moment away from skewering the small of her wrist. Her alarmed eyes. Simultaneously, they exited the hallway, keeping two steps of distance between them.

Andrew was there. He placed a hand on a clay apple Quin held, then a bottle of silver liquid Ajay had—it was the potion Forester and he had made together, that he still hadn’t thrown. Though Micah couldn’t blame him. Delilah had stolen their one good chance to use it.

The bomb looked unchanged as he cast, “[Expand Volume],” but the bottle of silver liquid filled to the brim until it began to leak. They lobbed them through the lasers.

“I’m sorry,” Micah said as he ducked behind cover. Something wet exploded in the hallway behind them. Had he misunderstood her intent? For a moment, Pijeru had looked like she wanted to tear his throat open, but she was alien to him. He kept making mistakes today.

A wave of sizzling heat surged past them, and the Ape roared in defiance.

She ducked her head, her beak nearly touching her chest. “I should apologize. I did not intend to do that.”

He was about to argue when he noticed a small group standing still behind them, and he missed a step to turn on them and shout, “Come on!”

Rhul was among them. Delilah, too. Their reaction to his words was delayed, and he leaned back to see what they were staring at.

A web of lasers, and a web of sticky strands, minced the ruined hallway behind them. The lasers burned through the spiderwebs here and there, or a stone would fall from the ceiling to take a few strands down with them, but the Ape was covered in them as sputtering heat rays drilled into its thick hide.

Worse than that was the blanket of lava that hung over its shoulders, melting the skin and muscle from its bones. After everything, Micah had doubted his potion of sticky webs would be able to slow the Ape down but ... he thought it might have taken too much damage. It might have become physically unable to move anymore.

The sight made him sick, but the feeling was drowned out by a cloud of confusion brewing up within his skull, thundering like a headache.

Delilah voiced his thoughts, the reason they weren’t leaving yet, “It’s not … dying.”

“Did you think we could kill it?” Golsa asked.

She gave a tiny shrug. “Iunno …”

Micah agreed with her, “Everything ends.” How was it still persevering? He searched it, switching between lenses to find answers, but his eyes spotted the set of empty clothes in the rubble behind it, and he had to look away. The heat wasn’t helping. He wiped at his eyes with his good hand.

“If it truly only a Garden Great Ape were,” Rhul said, “would it already died. We fight them in the Gardens. However, this is a Pretender. A … a coat changer?”

“Shapeshifter?” Delilah supplied, her voice oddly curt. She glanced from the bird man to Micah. He would have thought she’d be more excited about … all of this, but maybe she felt the same as him.

Just don’t think about it, a thought said in his mind, and he wanted to but … that bird woman hadn’t even known them. And she’d died for them.

Rhul was the one who seemed off. He sounded far too excited considering she had been his teammate, considering the way he had screeched after her death. “Is that the word for it? In any case, you are damaging its coat, not hurting the person underneath.”

Ah. The others nodded in recognition. It was like the stone golems, then.

They walked through more destruction—a giant broken scythe. An acid puddle. A demolished spear trap—and stopped at an intersection. To the right, another stone wall had cut off the path to the veranda. To their left, a pair of their classmates ran into the hallway at an oddly stiff pace and even jumped to catch up with the group waiting for them.

Micah saw why an instant later when a seam split the stone and the ground fell away into a massive pit trap.

“Here along,” the aeromancer said, “we can you toward your valley portal guide.”

“Our mission was— to get Tuhrie,” Rhul said.

“Did she the exit block?” Pijeru said. “Why? We found her. She should flee— Tuhrie!” Her voice was suddenly everywhere. “Stop! Let the children leave! There is nothing exciting about murder! This is not a game!”

The aeromancer gave Rhul a hard look. “She wants them to hunt, no?”

She waved a hand and two streams of wind lifted the floors until something clicked and they continued to rise on their own.

Micah pulled his hand out of the wall. He had wondered if it could hold his weight, but there was no sense in going forward on his own. He would have to wait on his classmates behind him anyway. And the ones in front of him only made slow progress down the tunnel as they checked for traps.

Tuhrie’s voice whispered on the wind to answer Pijeru, “It wouldn’t be fair with you helping them anyway, Piji. You used to take risks with me. Where is that adventurous girl I knew?”

“Can you locate her?” the aeromancer whispered, but Pijeru didn’t look like she had heard.

“If you’re taking the scenic route, I suppose I can stay for a while longer. Maybe I can light that fire in you again. But first, I’ll have to take my star player off the bench.”

The bird people cocked their heads slightly as if they didn’t understand, but to Micah and his classmates, it was obvious. “The Ape—”

“Can you levitate us across?” Golsa demanded.

Delilah shook her head. “They can only move metal.”

“I meant with wind—”

Delilah cut her off by taking her hand. Her other hand fiddled with her wand as she glanced left and right.

They seemed too distracted to notice her suspicion when they caught on to what Tuhrie was planning. “Stop her!” the aeromancer snapped at Pijeru at the same time as Tuhrie’s singsong voice echoed through the halls.

“—play the part of a Garden Midnight Raptor, please?”

There was a pause before something cried in the distance, a high-pitched stuttering cackle like a mix between a hyena and a bird song. It hooted then, but the sound was a low reverberation like a drowned owl. Its cries echoed from the gaps between the cubes as the light essence dimmed and the tunnels began to fill with shadows.

The auditorium dimmed as the ushers lowered the shutters on the last of the lanterns. The fire spirits within the lanterns held onto tiny slits to peek out at the play, and when Lisa turned to look at one of them, Ryan capitalized on her moment of distraction. He stole a fistful of spicy nuts from her paper snack bag and poured some of his trail mix back in exchange. The taste was too boring after all.

She swiveled on him, but he held a finger over his lips to soundlessly shush her. She must have heard that lady explain it to them, no? They had to be quiet and respectful.

Her eyes narrowed into a glare, and he was about to pour her more trail mix as an apology when she stabbed a finger in his side. He felt a zap that made him jump, and the electric shock made his hand squeeze his paper bag, spilling trail mix over himself.

The man in the seat behind them cleared his throat.

Ryan hunched his shoulders and sat still and proper.

On the stage, the narrator had just finished setting the scene—a deep forest, the only village that had survived the end of the world, and their protagonist who was cursed by the spirits. Haley.

Frederick and his two co-actors for this scene crept onto the stage. A few layered, giant photographs depicted a dark forest behind them, illuminated in dim lights that were supposed to make it look spooky, Ryan was guessing. The dialogue was the same; the three teenagers talked about ghost stories, an earthquake that had caused a landslide, and dared each other to go near the haunted ruins that landslide had unearthed.

Ryan snacked on his stolen goods with a smile. How long had it been since he had seen a play? A little over a year ago, he’d dragged Lisa and Micah to see the one about Garen, but the most entertainment he had seen since then had been the arena.

The Tower itself was performing for them. The respite at the end of their quests. He let himself be drawn in into the story as a shadow rushed across the stage.

The teens swiveled in fright. “What was that?”

“It was probably a bunny,” one of them said in that cool tone actors used to make it obvious their character was pretending to be brave. “Stop wetting yourself over nothing.”

Another shadow dashed over the stage, but Frederick was the only one who reacted this time. “I swear. There is something following us. It’s in that bush!”

“That bush?” the third ‘boy’ pointed. The paper man looked like he could have been in his twenties, but he was supposed to be playing a teenager.

Frederick nodded earnestly, and the man mimed throwing a rock. Someone off-stage produced the sound of leaves rustling and two rocks hitting each other. They waited for a beat, and he turned on Frederick with a swagger in his step. “See? Nothing.”

Behind him, spectral fog spilled onto the stage. It flickered with dark blues and avian purples, and someone waved a metal sheet while a drum trembled to underline the spooky atmosphere.

Frederick and the other boy stumbled back in fear. The paper man, seeing their expressions, turned around with a frown and jumped. The music picked up, and the trio fled in circles around the stage while the forest imagery behind them began to revolve to convey the distance they had traveled.

Frederick was doing a worse job of selling his fake ‘run’ than the other two, but Ryan knew he'd only had hours to prepare, and he appreciated the special effects too much to focus on him.

The fog snapped at the actors’ heels, forming phantom shapes like their nightmares come to life, and those nightmares spilled off the stage and ran up the stairs between the audience's seats.

Lisa looked bemused by the illusions, and she could probably manage something like this without having to rely on magical components for a spell, but Ryan was amazed. He turned his head to track a spectral centipede up the stairs. As it ran by, it glanced at them and grew into the shape of a wolf.

His smile faltered. After an awkward beat, Lisa tilted her bag toward him, but Ryan shook his head. He had lost his appetite.

The spectral wolf snarled at two children in passing. They leaned back and shrieked in delighted terror, and the screams made his heart race, but the delighted laughter that followed made him smile.

For all that Demir was a bitter, weasely little man who had nothing good to say about his family and who embezzled funds from the theatre, he knew his stuff. In hindsight, Ryan was glad he’d collected the ingredients he needed to do the special effects for tonight. If it meant bringing some wonder to this audience.

The tension of the scene was broken by a loud baahing sound as a herd of sheep puppets stampeded past the three actors’ hiding spot on the stage—a fake tree that was part of the set design.

And when the herd had fled from stage left to stage right, Frederick stood tall and proclaimed to the audience, with the gusto of someone who had practiced a single line over and over again for hours on end, “There is a monster in the forest! And it’s taking the sheep!”

An illusory wolf snarled, and the first member of the audience shrieked in real pain.