Time slowed down. Mary saw one of the crimson strings vibrate, then break with a loud, stretched out ting. The shadow immediately sprouted a spike where the broken thread was pinning it down, and then more spikes, striking other strings - and they started breaking one by one.

Mary tried to jump forward and reach out toward her friend but felt like swimming through tar. Her arms moved sluggishly through the thick air as the shadowy creature grew larger and larger, tearing more and more strings with each moment. There was no doubt what would be first - Paolo's full formation would happen well after the monster reached him.

Frank and the rest should have been doing something about it, but Mary couldn't spare the time to look at them. All that counted was in front of her - so she reached forward, knowing it would be too slow.

She felt her heart beating, one beat after another, pumping blood through dark veins under her pale skin. It was slowing down, each beat taking more time than the previous, just as she felt her stomach contract, and something deep inside her stirred.

It wouldn't be enough. The shadow was already climbing up the pedestal, not waiting to fully recover. It was still dragging some fiery lines it didn't even bother to break.

Mary felt the darkness within her, embraced it, let the desperation flow through her. She felt her shadow just as she felt her arm, slowly stretching toward the boy and his doom.

It wasn't enough. She needed to do more, maybe more than she could. But darn it, she wouldn't back down this time. The dark lines all over her lifted from her suddenly snow-white skin, leaving the body and orbiting it like DNA helixes slowly spinning in a biology 101 PowerPoint presentation.

Mary wasn't breathing, there was no time for that. Her heart stopped beating. All that mattered was the darkness she controlled. She felt not just her shadow, but all the shadows around her. They were part of her, part of the wound in the world that hurt her just as she hurt it. She accepted the embodiments of insufficient light as part of herself and became one of them.

And then, she felt the monster, readying itself for the kill. She felt its sense of duty, its pride. She could remember its journey to where it was now, from the birth in the darkest caves on a planet whose sun had already gone out, through the monstrosity school where it graduated at the top of its class despite being bullied by a pair of mean eldritch ones, how it struggled to find a reputable job during a soul-crushing economical crisis, and how it finally managed to get on a government payroll. How it spent millennia making its way up toward a field assignment...

It became a part of Mary.

And she crushed it into oblivion.

Mary felt the creature die, the hurt it felt at the betrayal. They were close, closer than anyone could have ever been - they had been one entity, just like those mean eldritch ones always wanted the world to become. Yet all that became nothing, and only a lingering feeling of deep disappointment remained as the little monster passed on to the other world, a part of her being torn away to whatever the Author prepared for the abomination in the afterlife.

And then, the world went back to running.

“They are alive, HA HA HA HA!” Frank cackled.

“Seriously,” one of his assistants added audibly winded, “you took your sweet time.”

Mary looked around. Most of the assistants were sitting or even lying on the floor, breathing heavily. A lot of their clocks were broken or in pieces. Some lucky ones were just smoking, from pearly white to dark puffs of pure gaseous coal.

“Give me a break,” one woman moaned without lifting her head of the cold sandstone. “She's probably the slowest hero of the decade. Even that one midget managed to get a hold on himself faster, and he took a break to eat a freaking potato in the middle of the action.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Frank waved them away. “Just do your job. You're not being paid for complaining.”

“We're not getting paid, period,” someone murmured too quietly for Frank to hear.

“You did your job, you were great, blah blah blah. Let's get back to our patient, shall we?”

Mary froze as she realised it was done. She slowly turned back and saw Paolo standing upright next to the pedestal and looking around in visible confusion. He was wearing only a white loincloth but seemed otherwise pretty complete - no missing limbs, no visible wounds... his skin even showed a lot more colour than usual.

“Where am I?” he asked, holding his hands relaxed but in position to quickly snap into throwing fireballs all over the place. “Who are you?”

“Camp Quarter-Blood, Frank. Now, my turn. Do you feel any different? Any tingling, burning, freezing...? No? Great, I was a bit worried that we diluted the stuff a bit too much, the Pri always has to squeeze our budget to the minimum of the minimum, and then forces me to deal with the mess...”

“I'm sorry, but why am I here? I can't remember much of the last... eternity, or at least that's how it felt.” He winced, rotating his shoulders around, and looked down. “And what the heck is this?”

“That's just a standard a pg-nator cloth,” Frank said. “Your power seems to be too narrow to regenerate your normal clothes - so in desperate situations, the universe assigns you that piece of cloth. Hmm... it seems relatively nice material in your case, you may make it in the business. Although you'll have a hard time beating the H'din's factory. That guy's pg-nator clothes are really poor quality, but his teleportation cooldown is simply crazy, and he sells them for scraps. I wish he'd let me run those few experiments. I'm sure I could replicate it and further boost the production, or at least find a spell or two to finally introduce some quality to his wares...”

Paolo seemed to have had enough of the mad wizard-scientist and started looking for someone else to talk to. His eyes moved past Mary, then suddenly snapped back to her and widened.

“Mary?” he asked disbelievingly.

The girl wanted to answer, but no sound escaped her lips.

And neither did any air.