It was only by the grace of my armor that I wasn’t plunged into unconsciousness at best and a bleeding, broken corpse at worst. Not that it had protected me, per se. Plate armor afforded great protection against slashing or stabbing attacks like the claw swipes the rot trolls had favored, but it didn’t do shit against being smashed. The impact force would just go right through, or that’s what the blacksmith had said, when Octavia had asked him—Compelled, I forcefully reminded myself. She mastered and compelled him—to explain the basics of plate armor. Someone comes at you with a sword? You’re gonna be okay, unless you let them stab you in the cracks between the armor plates, which was why I had a chainmail shirt on under all of this.

But I digress. I had survived being kicked straight into a tree some twenty-five yards away from the living nightmare that Dungeo—Labyrinth’s power had dreamt into reality thanks to my armor giving me a convenient means of slowing my flight down to the point my bones didn’t shatter into tiny pieces on impact. So, you know. At least there was that.

“Meteor!” Masuyo cried out as she rushed over and slid to a stop next to me.

The action hadn’t stopped to give me time to recover. I was still dazed to the point of being unable to act as the nightmare creature languidly turned and pointed at Sakura. The hero had just long enough to start to marshal her petals before a bubble of liquid formed just above her head and promptly fell through the air, splashing all over her. She immediately began to scream and fell to the ground, flailing around as Zoom and Chevalier, the people closest to her rushed to her aid. After a few seconds of their worried shouts, her body literally burst apart into petals of her energy that began to swirl violently enough the heroes had to hastily put distance between them and what remained of her.

“It can kill at a distance!” Chevalier barked in warning, his tone dark. “Myrddin!”

The robed man in the air started to gesture with his staff at Labyrinth, and a wall that seemed to be made out of literal diamond sprung up between them, blocking his line of sight. When nothing happened to her, I realized he must have needed that. Faultline wasn’t blocked by the wall, however, and she dropped down into a kneeling crouched position as she swiftly grabbed her large water rifle from her back and swung it around to take aim. Labyrinth must have noticed, as the wall immediately surged in growth, circling around her in a protective barrier. I was left torn. On the one hand, I knew we had gone into territory no cape encounter should the moment Labyrinth’s construct had killed Sakura—though privately I didn’t think she was dead, since her petals were still present—and that Faultline shooting her with Newter’s spit was the best way to end this debacle before it could really begin. On the other hand, I still felt the urge to kill the monster. I knew why I felt it, but that didn’t seem to matter that much as I staggered to my feet despite Masuyo pleading that I stay down.

Not to be forgotten, the nightmare Labyrinth had created began to stalk toward Shade and Druid. I vaguely recalled he had another name, but my brain refused to cooperate with me on remembering what it was. The two of them scrambled away before it could lash out, and thankfully, it didn’t repeat whatever it had done to Sakura.

“Banish the wall!” Chevalier roared as he shot a cannonball at the nightmare.

“My magic’s not working!” Myrddin yelled back, dodging behind a tree as the creature turned towards him.

“His ‘magic’?” I muttered as I summoned my dropped swords to my hand. “Please tell me I’m just hearing things after my close encounter of the tree kind.”

“Nope, I heard him too,” Masuyo replied with a grimace, seeming to have begrudgingly accepted I wasn’t going to sit this one out. “How’re you feeling? Are you still, um…”

“Still mastered,” I acknowledged, my tone making it clear exactly what I thought of that. “I’ve got the urge to kill it.”

Over where the fight was still going on, the creature took a swing at Stardust—her name I could recall, since Faultline had just used it earlier. The water woman tanked the blow and actually flowed around it, reforming on the other side of its arm. I felt it when her body changed from water to metal and her hand reshaped itself into a blade, though as it had with Miss Militia’s gun at the hospital, her body felt slippery if I tried to focus on it. She slashed at the creature’s leg, but the attack seemed to do nothing, and for her troubles she got a splash of that liquid, which at this point I was confident was acid.

“Damn, you—hang on one sec. Repeat that, Faultline?” Masuyo looked to me and nodded. “Absolutely, one second.”

She fished around in her pockets for a moment then held out her hand. In her palm were two earbuds that were similar enough in appearance to the ones I had used in Providence that I could hazard a guess what they were for. I planted my swords in the ground and briefly glanced back at the fight just long enough to see Stardust had taken on a form similar to yet different from her watery form. Had she adopted a form based on the acid?

I shoved the buds in my ears and heard, “Meteor, are you on the line?”

“Yeah, I’m on.”

“Are you still mastered?” my boss asked, not beating around the bush like Masuyo had.

“Yup,” I confirmed in a strained voice. “I’ve got a sword with that nightmare’s name on it, and nothing’s gonna stand in the way of me introducing it to the fucker’s head.”

“Focus on defense, not offense. This projection is based on a Nightwalker,” she explained as she broke the base of a tree with her power, which Zoom, who was presently gargantuan in size, grabbed and smashed the creature over the head with. “Count yourself fortunate that Labyrinth’s power can’t replicate powers because this would be much worse otherwise. As it stands, she seems to be making acid to replicate its necrotic damage, and it seems she’s still given it its normal resistances. That means most physical attacks aren’t going to affect it.”

“Yeah, this fucker is tough,” Shade confirmed, her voice changing partway through to Stardust’s as she took on the cape’s form long enough to dodge a blow from the Nightwalker by planting her foot in water and turning into water herself, flowing around the attack like Stardust had. She slipped into Zoom’s form next and promptly began to grow larger. “Can we just hit Labs with some of Newt’s spit and haul ass before the heroes get all hero-y?”

“No!” I blurted before clapping my hands to my mouth and growling in frustration. “I mean, can’t we just kill it?”

Druid tried to grab a bite of one of the Nightwalker’s legs while Shade attempted to kick the other one out from under it, but they both got doused with acid. Gregor splashed Shade with something that reduced her scream to a whimper of pain instead, and Paladin rushed to Druid’s side to heal him with his light. Seeing that, Shade twisted into a copy of the tanned man and started dousing herself with light.

“Every second that thing’s alive is another opportunity for one of us to get seriously injured or worse,” Faultline grimly countered. “I can break the diamond shell around Labyrinth, but she’ll doubtlessly try to stop me. Meteor, join Shade and Gregor with trying to keep the Nightwalker contained. Newter and M, watch my back as I break the shell. Go.”

I recognized the order for what it was but couldn’t bring myself to move straight away. The compulsion to let the game end naturally meant there was a part of me that felt the urge to try and stop Faultline from getting to Labyrinth, since they would be knocking her out as soon as they broke through. But I was also compelled to be Fighter and kill the Nightwalker. The two urges warred in me, and I winced and swayed, only managing to stay upright by grabbing my armor with my power. Masuyo had been all set to rush off to join Faultline, but she stilled at the whine of pain that slipped out of me. I waved her away, and when she didn’t move, I added, “I’ll be fine in a moment. Help Faultline.”

She slowly nodded then rushed off, and I turned my attention back to the fight. The Nightwalker was currently being attacked one or two at a time by Shade, Gregor, Stardust, Druid, Paladin, and the heroes. Among the latter, surprisingly, was Sakura, whose costume was practically non-existent and whose exposed body showed absolutely no signs having previously been bathed in enough acid to kill her. I knew she could heal her injuries with her power, but this was something beyond that, and I didn’t know what to make of it.

Not that I have time to ponder that right now, I thought to myself as my swords snapped to my hand and I did my best to focus on the Nightwalker and only the Nightwalker as I rushed forward. Sakura’s unexplained revival did remind me of one key fact as I closed the distance to the fight: Getting close meant getting doused in acid. That meant I needed to fight smarter, not harder. Once I was closer, I flung first one sword then the other at the monster and accelerated their flights and spin. The blades were spinning so fast they were producing serious wind by the time they struck, but just as Faultline had warned, they didn’t seem to do much. Not that they didn’t do anything—twin bloody lines were left on its flank—but the damage done simply did not correspond to the attack, and it wasn’t just me. There were at most a few teeth marks on its leg from where Druid had bit it earlier, and I watched as Myrddin drew a dark sigil in the air that drew in all the mud, grass, and water from an area at the edge of the clearing before launching a huge projectile at the Nightwalker, which made it stumble once struck but otherwise left the monster only looking a little battered.

A brief lull followed where nobody was rushing in, and Paladin took advantage of it to practically flood the monster’s vicinity with his light. I shielded my eyes and turned away from the blinding light, and the light suddenly vanished a moment later, replaced with screaming. I tried to blink the spots from my eyes as quickly as I could, but I didn’t need to see to feel what was happening to Paladin’s armor. I split apart the melting armor and curled the edges of the split back to try and prevent any excess acid from getting through to him as I tossed the ruined material away. He might very well be my enemy depending on how culpable he was in Octavia’s madness, but until I could confirm otherwise, it was all too possible that he was just as much a victim as me. I rushed over to him, and when I saw his flesh was still sizzling, I dropped my swords, grabbed him, and raced over to Gregor.

“Gregor!” I yelled as we neared, and he didn’t hesitate to fling something at us. The smell of his excretion was noxious, and I nearly lost my lunch, but Paladin’s flesh stopped smoking. “He’s a healer,” I told my teammate, fighting down the nausea. “Watch his back!”

I didn’t wait for a response as I rushed back towards the fray as the Nightwalker hit Zoom away with enough force he bounced several times before coming to a stop. There was nothing I could do for him, at least not directly, so while Shade and Stardust held its attention and Sakura rained hell on all its exposed areas, I threw my swords again, trying to compound the damage I gave it earlier. Unfortunately, we were all still having practically no effect, and I was reminded uncomfortably of the Endbringer footage the school had shown us back in middle school as a part of a lecture about safety during an attack. This wasn’t on the same level of destruction, thank god, but it was still unnerving to realize that Labyrinth, my sweet Elle who loved to bring the books we read to life, could do all of this with her power too.

The Nightwalker turned to face Labyrinth’s direction just as I heard the sound of Faultline’s power surging, and before I could properly think through what I was doing, I was moving to intercept it as it rushed towards the diamond shell.

I’m fighting the Nightwalker. I’m fighting the Nightwalker, I chanted to keep myself from paying attention to what was happening behind me and instead focus on the monster bearing down on me. But what could I do? My swords had almost no effect, and my arrows would be just as ineffective. I knew I had more options as Meteor, but for at least this fight, I couldn’t take advantage of them, at least not intentionally. No answer came, and with it almost upon me, it reared back its arm to strike me aside. I braced for impact as it swung down, desperately wishing I could push my armor… into… elsewhere?

What the fuck?

I felt my pauldron shift into elsewhere just before the blow struck it, and the recoil of the Nightwalker smashing an immovable object threw it off course and crashing to the ground while I only felt the air be displaced. The feeling of the atmosphere around us shifted in some way I couldn’t describe, and I heard Faultline’s voice over the comms announce, “Labyrinth is unconscious, and we have her. Gregor, Shade, grab Meteor and make for extraction point alpha. You know what to do.”

I felt my armor leave elsewhere, and my head snapped up as Gregor and Shade rushed towards me, the latter of whom currently looked like me. Oh, that makes sense, I thought as they came to a stop at my side. “Thanks, Shade.”

“‘Twas my honor, fair maiden!” she pompously declared, striking a silly pose. “Meteor, lady knight of justice, was all too happy to defend you from that foul creature’s assault!”

“Oh god, stop doing that while you’re me, you asshat!”

“But that’s what makes it fun!” she joked, though she did release the transformation, letting herself be engulfed in shadows and reemerge as herself, a wicked grin on her face.

“Meteor,” Gregor rumbled, pulling my attention from my bickering with my doppelgänger. “Are you free to leave now?”

The question brought me up short. Octavia hadn’t been very exact with describing the win condition, since presumably she would have been conscious and present to declare for herself whether or not we were done. As it stood, she had only ever said the goal was to ‘defeat’ the evil witch of the swamp, whatever that meant. The swamp had not begun to vanish, nor had the Nightwalker been killed, although it was true the latter had stopped moving. But then, that wasn’t how Labyrinth’s power worked. It took time for the environments she had twisted to unravel, and while I had never seen her be struck unconscious while her power was fueling a pseudo-living creature, it seemed plausible enough that her projections would lose their semblance of life when she was no longer in a position to control them.

Looked at from a certain angle though… We never did see the witch, and Labyrinth hadn’t spoken while she was ‘Dungeonmaster.’ Close enough. “The witch has been stopped,” I replied, saying the words as much for his benefit as for my own. I reached out to the surroundings, and I relished in the feel of all the metal. “So yeah, let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

“Leaving so soon?”

Chevalier was advancing towards us, and though his sword was sheathed on his back, I had seen firsthand the ease with which he had wielded that monstrous weapon and knew he could draw it in a flash. “We have no quarrel with you,” Gregor replied as the three of us warily turned to face him. My friend kept his arms held at his sides but tensed and ready to move. “You should tend to your wounds and round up the remainder of the Eight.”

“Straight to the point,” the knight-themed cape retorted. Behind him, I watched as Zoom tossed a foam grenade at Paladin, who seemed to still be unconscious after being hit by acid earlier, then shrunk down the foamed man and stuffed him in a pouch on his belt. Off to the side, Myrddin was talking to a cautious Stardust, and Sakura was standing guard over a battered Druid. “I can get behind that. But see, we have a problem on our hands. Some of the Eight are currently not present or accounted for. By my count, two are missing: The one calling himself Bard, and most importantly, the Master controlling the group—Octavia.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up at that. That bitch was still loose? I thought they had Reconnoiter watching everything? For that matter, I thought Newter touched her directly? She should be out for ages!

“Disengage,” I heard Faultline say over the comms. “Get to the extraction point ASAP.”

I had no idea what was going on, but there was no time for my teammates to catch me up. They bolted, and I quickly raced after them. Behind us Chevalier started to draw his sword, and I shoved it into elsewhere, hoping to slow him down. The moment I did so, however, it split into three swords of the same size but vastly different weights that all fell to the ground. I was so caught off guard that I tripped and would have smashed my face in the ground if I hadn’t caught myself by my armor.

I twisted around in the air, no longer feeling the compulsion to limit myself, and I stared in surprise at Chevalier, who looked to the three swords with matching shock before turning his attention back to me. “Myrddin!”

The other cape turned his attention our way, and I shoved aside my confusion in favor of bolting. I could feel Myrddin’s metal mask move in hot pursuit, and the three closest of Reconnoiter’s drones were moving to get close while several others moved to mark the path Gregor and Shade were taking. I reached out to the drones and crushed them, then—

Suddenly I was floating in nothingness. I twisted around, trying to find something—anything—but I couldn’t even feel any metal in my range besides what was directly on my person. I was starting to panic—

I grunted as I fell to the ground of the swamp. Disoriented, I looked up and saw for just a second that Shade was impersonating Myrddin, a look of intense concentration on her face, only for a cannonball to slam into her legs and send her spinning violently to the ground with a pained scream. A boom cut through the noise, and Myrddin—the real one this time—appeared out of nowhere, looking unsteady on his feet. Remembering how Labyrinth had broken his line of sight earlier to prevent him from getting to her, I immediately seized control of his metal mask and, careful to not pull it off, I spread out the material until it was just a metal sheet with no eye holes to see through. Blind but apparently not deterred, he drew a new sigil that glowed brightly in contrast to the one he had used earlier against the Nightwalker, and the three of us were blown back by some invisible force. I caught myself by my armor, and though Gregor slammed into a tree, his unique biology meant he grunted on impact but otherwise didn’t seem perturbed. Shade’s on-going wail of pain, however, kicked up a couple of octaves as she tumbled across the ground with her legs bending in ways they shouldn’t. I winced in sympathy but forced myself to focus on solving the immediate problem. I didn’t have a lot of metal in my immediate vicinity, but I did have the shattered remains of Reconnoiter’s drones, and I hurriedly pulled them around Myrddin’s arms and torso in as tight of a ring as I dared, not wanting to cut off his circulation. He started to tilt his staff up towards the ring, but I shoved it into elsewhere.

Gregor rushed over to check on Shade, and I broke more drones and began pulling their parts over to us so I could make a stretcher. Zoom was rushing over along with Chevalier and his reforged sword, the two apparently having left Sakura to supervise Stardust and Druid. Myrddin had by then realized he couldn’t affect the ring, and he remarked, “We were willing to extend you and your crew the benefit of the doubt, but sabotaging Reconnoiter’s drones in order to secret away the woman you’re asserting is the Master necessitates action. We cannot let someone that dangerous go free!”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but we didn’t have time to debate who did what. “Keep him still,” I whispered to Gregor as I reached out to my helmet, which was still on the ground back where the fight with the Nightwalker had been. Gregor tossed a glob of sticky slime at Myrddin, and I released the ring around him from elsewhere. My helmet zipped around in front of Zoom’s crotch, and I immediately shoved it into the elsewhere before he could hit it early or notice and dodge it altogether. The giant man released a pained noise that was half grunt and half moan as the immovable helmet slammed into his junk, and his upper half’s momentum kept moving forward and sent him falling into a tangle of limbs.

Chevalier expertly side-stepped his falling comrade with barely any effect on his sprint forward, and I hurried to form the makeshift stretcher.

“I’ll hold him off,” I told him. “Get Shade ready to go!”

As Chevalier got closer I prepared to throw some piece of his armor into elsewhere, but he abruptly slowed to a stop and sheathed his sword before holding up his hands. “It’s over. You’ve won. I just want to talk.”

I eyed him warily as I summoned my helmet over to my hand. “We don’t have that bitch Octavia, and I don’t know why you think we do.”

“Your file pegs you as either a Tinker whose technology has Shaker effects or else a Shaker pretending to be a Tinker,” he carefully explained. “After everything I’ve seen today, I’m guessing it’s the latter, but in either case, you’re the only person in the area who can remotely damage Reconnoiter’s drones. And that’s not just theory—you’ve done it twice in just the past few minutes.”

“So?”

“So Reconnoiter had drones posted over where your teammate, Newter, left Bard and Octavia, the alleged Master. The drones were damaged and knocked offline. By the time she got more there, the two of them were gone.”

“Octavia is the Master,” I weakly argued, but my heart wasn’t in it with my thoughts racing as they were. Who did it? How? Did she escape?

“You’re the only person who could have done it, Meteor, and it was your teammate who planted them where they vanished from. On top of that, your team just got done breaking Canary, another high level master, out of a prison transport. You tell me what I’m supposed to think.”

I grit my teeth and bit out. “We didn’t help her. We’d never help the fucking bitch who mastered me!”

I felt something huge enter my range from above, and when two more followed it, my eyes widened.

“Noticed them, have you?” he remarked, his voice casual as can be. “It seems your power’s range is fairly substantial. Roughly an eighth of a mile, would you say?”

“Meteor?” I heard Gregor ask behind me. “What is it?”

I gulped, daunted. “U-Unless I’m off base… Three Dragon-craft are above us.”