"That. Was. Amazing!" Donut shrieked. "Not as good as flying with explosives, but still amazing!"

"Um...yeah," Carl said. He was standing on my feet, my arms around him and holding him close so he didn't fall. That meant that my literally superheroic boobs were pressed firmly into his chest and our faces were inches apart. He very clearly didn't know quite how to react to that and was carefully looking away, studying the crowd of ghouls below us.

"Numb three, exec," I said, trying not to laugh. "Carl, pick your feet up."

My bodily awareness vanished and I shifted, moving Albert down and bending my feet up so that he was sticking out of my knee and pointed down. His cargo bag tumbled out and he expanded, widening out to his maximum diameter and then shifting back up on the outside of my leg so that we were both standing in his cargo space. It was like standing on a trampoline stretched very tight, at least until I shifted a layer of steel across in order to provide a solid floor. It gave Carl better footing and allowed him to step back so he wasn't pressed up against me. He pulled his cloak tight around himself and I tried not to snicker at the suspicion that his boxers were currently providing a bit less modesty than he would have preferred.

"What's the deal with this boss?" he asked.

"May I, ma'am? I have a record."

"Sure." That was a surprise.

An image appeared in my, Carl's, and Donut's chat. It was a snapshot from when I had been hanging over the breezeway. It showed the ghouls, Kralak the boss, the 'Versus' display, and a transcript of Kralak's description as per the AI's announcement.

B-B-B-Boss Battle!

You have discovered Kralak the Battler, Borough Boss of Repair Station G!

Kralak is a real family man and a licensed genealogist (yes, lizardmen have those!) who can track his bloodline back nineteen generations and forward seven. He likes to dandle the kiddies on his knee and tell them how their bloodline is their strength and they should go out and bone, a lot, so that there will be lots of members of the bloodline around. The kids have taken that to heart and been a little indiscriminate about who and what they boned. As a result, the ghouls you see around you are all Kralak's descendants despite being an entirely different taxonomic order. Regardless, he loves them with a great passion and seeing any of them get hurt makes him mad. And the madder Kralak gets, the stronger Kralak gets.

Hey, did you know that when you got here Kralak was a Neighborhood Boss? Too bad he had to watch the four of you murder 237 of his descendants. Wonder what happens if you keep killing them?

"We've killed a lot more than 237 by now," I said.

"That might be a problem," Carl replied.

"It says that he gets stronger if he sees them get hurt," Donut noted. "What if we blind him so he doesn't see it?"

Carl and I exchanged looks.

"It couldn't be that simple," he said. "Right?"

"You did say that every boss has a weakness, and that there are always clues," I reminded him.

Carl looked out across the sea of ghouls. "Or maybe we just kill him first, then worry about the leftovers."

"How? He's got, like, a hundred Wrathers as bodyguards."

He glanced at me with a raised eyebrow. "'Wrathers'?"

I forced myself not to blush, which is easier when you're a doppelganger. "Wrath Ghouls? It's shorter. Well, easier to say." I didn't need one of the other three pedantically pointing out that it was the same number of syllables.

He chuckled. "Fair enough. That blue sphere I saw earlier, that was your new spell?"

"Holy Fire, yes. Only once a day."

"Okay...well, explosives is an option. We'd need to get to him." He looked down. "Can you go sideways?"

"Sorry, only up and down. It's really intended as cargo assist, not as powered flight."

*It's supposed to be powered flight but they locked me out of that. Idiots.*

Carl nodded to himself in thought and then looked up at the rough stone ceiling a few meters above us. "Lift a bit more?"

"Albert?"

We silently drifted upwards until Carl's head was centimeters from the rock. He turned and braced himself against the side of the cargo area, then reached up and dug his fingers into a small crevice in the rock and pulled.

I weighed three tons and Albert only canceled gravity, not mass.

Carl strained for ten or fifteen seconds before giving up and shaking his hands out. There was slight bleeding from his fingertips where he had split them on the rough rock.

I reached up with both hands, got a solid hold, and pulled. We immediately started gliding in the direction of Kralak.

"Show off," he grunted. He was smiling, so his male ego probably wasn't actually hurt.

"Hang on," he said after a moment. "How are you doing that? My Strength is higher than yours."

I shrugged and continued to pull us along. "First, I get a bonus when I've got this much mass. Second, it's all my body and I can move my body the same way a normal person can. Walking, crawling, or pulling us along the ceiling. Same thing as far as the dungeon is concerned. It's only when I'm trying to affect something else that my Strength score matters. What's your idea for killing him?"

"No clue. Get overhead and drop bombs on him, I guess."

"Should I zap him?" Donut asked. "I think I should zap him. I'm going to zap him." She fired off a Magic Missile. We were too far away and it dissipated before coming anywhere near Kralak.

"Hold your fire," Carl said. "We want him to stay where he is, not be running around trying to get out of your range."

"Fooey."

A minute later we were over the stationmaster's building and had sunk to a more convenient height. The building was ten meters below us, a wide flat roof covered in black tar paper. The mezzanine breezeway was narrow, not more than two meters, and jammed end-to-end with Wrath Ghouls. Kralak stood on the landing of the starboard stairwell, leaning on his massive poleaxe. Now that we were this close I could see that there was blood dripping off the blades.

The monsters saw us hanging above them and went berserk, howling and screaming and shouting words I couldn't understand but were probably along the lines of 'Get down here, bitch!'

"This basket we're standing in...it's pretty tough, right?"

I nodded. "It's Albert on the inside and two centimeters of dwarf steel on the outside."

"Ahem. I am a quantum-based intellect embodied in a Special Warfare field harness, ma'am. Not a 'basket'."

"Sorry, it's Albert's cargo area," I corrected myself. "It's made out of some magic space material. Basically indestructible."

"Not magic, ma'am. Science."

"Hush, Albert. It's sufficiently advanced, it's magic."

He sighed, long and gusty. "As you say, ma'am."

"Pretty snarky, isn't he?" Carl asked, smiling as he read the chat message.

"Constantly. Ready?"

"Yup." He tossed three sticks of dynamite over the side and ducked down into the cargo area. I joined him, crouching as far as I could so that I was covering him and Donut.

It was a good thing I did. The dynamite went off and the blast slammed us into the ceiling. I hadn't quite managed to get all of myself below the lip of the basket and so the metal covering my back got pancaked against the stone roof, hard enough to knock my health into the yellow. I immediately took a potion and activated my Heal spell. Between the two I was back to full.

We straightened up and peeked over the edge. Below us, the stairwell and half of the breezeway were destroyed, leaving a gaping hole with jagged concrete and rebar at the edges. Kralak was gone and most of the Wrath Ghouls were dead. There were one or two on the far end who were still twitching and trying to push themselves back to their feet, but the rest were mostly jelly.

I listened expectantly. As I had almost come to take for granted, the boss music had not stopped.

"Why isn't it ever easy?" Donut griped. "We blow them up but they never die. Carl, I think it's your explosives. There's something wrong with them. Is it performance issues? Miss Bea used to talk about performance issues."

"Goddamnit, Donut," Carl griped, his face blazing red. "I never had performance issues with Bea, and it's not my fault if some super monster is too tough to be killed by dynamite."

"I can't see him anywhere," I said, searching carefully. Something flickered green on the ground below the broken breezeway as Albert helpfully marked an important item for me. "Oh, there's his axe." I frowned, squinting at the ground twenty meters away. "Is that...what is that next to the axe?" It was a little too small and a little too far away to make out. "Albert, can you see?"

"Sorry, ma'am. There's no 'zoom and enhance' here. I can only see what you see. I think faster so I can study the image subjectively longer, but I can't see better than you."

Carl grunted, bending over the edge of the basket with his hands on the rim. "Whatever it is, it's getting bigger."

"It's Kralak," Donut said.

We both looked at her. "What?"

"You humans and your pitiful senses. Honestly, how are you the dominant species?" She sniffed in disgust.

"Thumbs," Carl said, holding up both hands and wiggling the relevant digits. "Now tell us what you see."

"He's regenerating from the blood that's coming off the axe. It's hard to make out because we're looking down and he's curled up but he should be standing up...now."

The lizardman straightened and looked up at us before shrilling furiously and waving the axe at us. He was only half the size he had been, but fully formed and growing rapidly as blood continued to flow from the head of the axe and be absorbed into his body.

Carl slid down inside the cargo area, his back to the wall, and thumped his head back twice. "Why is it never simple? Just once, I'd like it to be simple."

"What do we do?" I asked.

He sighed, sounding exhausted even though he wad slept only a couple hours ago. "We need to get the axe away from him. It's clearly the source of his regeneration. Maybe if we break it that will do the job."

"I don't think he likes us," Donut said. She was perched on the lip of the basket, staring down in fascination. "Oh, and he's bigger."

I had been looking at Carl but at Donut's words I turned to look down. Sure enough, Kralak was at least thirty centimeters taller than he had been. Before, he had overtopped his bodyguard of Wrath Ghouls by a head, but now he was head and shoulders taller. He was also more muscular and the claws on the ends of his fingers were longer, at least the size of my pinky. I could tell because he was thrusting one hand into the sky, claws spread wide. It was either a threat display or the lizardman equivalent of the middle finger.

"Let me get this straight," Carl said, now standing beside me and looking over the edge with the rest of us. "If we kill any of the ghouls, he gets stronger. If we kill him, he comes back to life and also gets stronger."

"Well, at least—"

Before I could finish my thought, Kralak reared back and hurled his axe at us. It flew up and up, spinning end over end in an uneven loop, and slammed into the bottom of our basket. Albert wasn't pierced but the steel flooring over him was, the axe pushing his fabric through the jagged tear in my body.

"OW!" My health dropped by a quarter and I hit my Heal spell again even as the axe fell away and spun back to Kralak's hand. I also smoothed out the hole.

"Holy shit!" Carl said, his eyes wide. "I thought you said this thing was indestructible?"

"It didn't cut Albert, it just tore through the floor!"

"Excuse me, ma'am," Albert groaned in my ear. "That hurt rather a lot. Could we please not do that again?"

"That was more off your health bar than the cut should have been," Donut said. "One of those life draining spells, maybe?"

"He's winding up again," Donut said chinning towards the boss.

"Crap!" Carl's xistera extended from his hand; he whirled and threw, a hard metal sphere lancing down towards the boss in hopes of spoiling his aim. He was too late; the axe was already in the air. Albert hit the gravitic lift hard and we zipped upwards, the axe spinning below us and boomeranging back to Kralak's hand.

"Katia, you can make your arms really long. You think you could catch that thing?" Carl asked.

I looked at the axe dubiously. "It spins. My Catcher skill is only level six."

"Six levels higher than what Donut and I have."

*Try Force Shape, ma'am.*

"Right. I'll try Force Shape," I said. "Wait for it." I visualized something like a basket on a stick: A long pole that stretched from my extended fingertips down three meters, spread out to form a large, curved wall that would serve as a backboard, and then a solid bucket underneath into which anything hitting the wall should drop. All the experience I'd had sculpting my own body made it easy to visualize. I made sure I had the image firmly in mind and then hit the appropriate slot on my hotlist. The spell activated and a faintly translucent shape appeared in the air below us.

"Can you see that?"

"See what?" Carl said.

"Good." It was like with the Confusing Fog scrolls—as the caster, I could see it but no one else could.

I had gotten the spell ready just in time. Kralak reared back and hurled his axe at us once again. It spun in a flat disk, headed straight for my face...and then it hit my force-based backboard. It bounced back and fell, dropping into the catcher bucket.

"Hah! Got it!" I raised my arm, expecting the scoop to rise along with it since the spell description said that it would remain fixed in place relative to me and I had visualized it as anchored to my arm.

It didn't move.

"Uh-oh."

"What?" Carl asked, suddenly tense.

"I've got the axe trapped in a bucket but I can't move the bucket the way I thought I could. Looks like it's fixed in relation to my center of mass, so if I try to climb down it'll move with me."

"How long does the spell last?"

"About another thirty seconds."

"Crap." A coil of rope fell out of his inventory and into his hand. He tied a quick stopper knot in one end and handed it to me. "Hold this while I—Donut, stop!"

The cat had hopped to the near edge of the basket and then stepped casually off and dropped. She hit the top of the bucked and stopped, apparently balancing on thin air. She peered around curiously and then slid down into it it. The poleaxe was starting to rattle and judder around; far below, Kralak was standing with his hand out in demand, visibly calling the axe back to himself.

Donut grabbed the haft of the poleaxe in her mouth, jumped flawlessly up onto the edge of the bucket, and paused to shake her butthole at Kralak before leaping back to the basket where Carl and I waited.

A meter and a half before she reached us the poleaxe froze in midair; Donut yowled in pain as she effectively ran face-first into it. I knew what was about to happen and I lunged forward, frantically shifting my arm longer as I reached. I just barely got my hand around the haft of the poleaxe before it went flying back to Kralak, taking Donut with it.

Donut leaped clear, running up my arm and into the basket just as the poleaxe went berserk. It flipped and spun and struggled against my grip, desperate to get back to its master. I fused my hand together so that the axe was embedded in a solid chunk of metal instead of held between potentially bendable fingers. Once it was under control I put it into my inventory.

Rejected! This item cannot go into inventory.

"Crap," I muttered. I reached out with the other arm and got a grip on the haft of the axe right under the head. I fused that hand like I had the first, and only then did I lean back until I was fully inside the basket again. I kept the axe extended out to the side; blood was continuing to flow from the blades of the axe and I didn't want it getting on me.

"Nice catch," Carl said to me.

"Hrmph. I had it under control," said Donut, sounding vaguely offended.

"Thanks. It won't go into my inventory. Now what?" I kept my eyes on the axe, which was still struggling to get free. Having no success, but struggling.

"Can you break it?"

I exerted myself for several seconds. "No. Maybe if we were on the ground and I could use my weight. I'm not strong enough to do it directly."

"Hold it over here," Carl said. "Let me see if I can kick through it."

"Be careful," I said, twisting so that the haft of the axe was vertical with the head down, the whole thing conveniently positioned for Carl to punch. It would have been an awkward position for a human, but it was easy for me, and wasn't it lovely knowing that I wasn't even human anymore. "I don't want any of the blood on me. It might be toxic, or blow up, or curse me or something."

"Got it." He lined up, set his feet and cracked his neck, then lashed out with a sidekick that would have shattered steel. It did nothing to the axe.

"Ow. That sucker's tough."

"What about my Hole spell?" Donut suggested. "If it's in the hole when I turn off the spell it should be cut, right? It worked with the war mage's neck, and with those steel things we used to make the litter for Brandy."

Carl shrugged. "We can try it." From his inventory he conjured a slab of dwarf steel, yet more of the wreckage from the mech that we blew up. He balanced it on the edge of the basket. "Here."

Donut hopped up on the slab and cast her spell, conjuring a hole through the middle of the thick metal.

Very carefully, I maneuvered the axe so it was head-down with the blades centered in the hole. Not for any particular reason, but it seemed that destroying the blades would be more important than breaking the haft.

"Ending the spell in three, two, one, n—"

BOOM!

I cried out in pain as dwarf steel shrapnel peppered my body, moving so fast that they put fist-sized dents in my face and chest. Something wet splashed across the part of my body that was the basket. I barely noticed, because all my attention was taken up by the screaming agony of having my hands torn off.

The pain completely vanished, along with all sensation of my body.

"Your pardon, ma'am. I hope you don't mind?" Albert asked.

"No," I said, gasping in relief. The axe was flying back to Kralak, having torn through the metal of what had been my hands. Fortunately, there had been no flesh in them so they were easy enough to reform.

It was only at that point that I realized neither Carl nor Donut had said anything. I turned to look and saw Carl bleeding out on the floor of the basket. Shrapnel had pulped his stomach, chest, and half his face. His health was solid red and the only reason that I was sure he was still alive was because I could see his blue dot on my minimap.

I frantically grabbed the packet of Heal scrolls from my inventory and read them one after another, then pulled a health potion and poured it down his throat.

He sat up, choking and gasping out the part of the potion that had gone into his lungs. "Thanks," he croaked. "Jesus." He looked around. "Where's Donut?"

I jerked upright and scanned frantically.

*Slower, ma'am. When you pan that fast it's a blur. There!*

Four concentric green circles pulsed around a spot on the ground two-thirds of the way to the slowly-contracting boss field. Thousands of ghouls were running towards that spot, screaming in rage. I couldn't see Donut but I could see fighting and dust in the air.

"Shit!" Carl cursed. "Get us there!"

"Albert, down!"

I grabbed Carl and we plummeted. I was shifting as we fell, pulling myself back into my Battle Body. The basket contracted around us, pulling Albert back inside me and Carl against my back. By the time we were on the ground I had him piggyback, his thighs around my hips, with steel bands around his back and under his butt. I free-shifted, borrowing mass from my torso armor in order to lengthen my legs so I could make better speed. I lashed my scorpion fists back and forth in front of us, knocking enemies out of the way where possible and dodging around clusters where I couldn't. A Wrath Ghoul came at me from my ten o'clock; I stiff-armed him to slow him down and push him aside as I swayed around his grip and kept going, while simultaneously swinging low with the other arm to smash the legs of a group of ghouls coming from my one o'clock.

Skill unlocked: Melee Weapons! Each level of this skill increases your damage by 33% when wielding a weapon.

Skill unlocked: Natural Weaponry! Your bodily armament, be it spikes, horns, claws, teeth, or just your big swingin' dingus, all count as melee weapons for purposes of the Melee Weapons skill. Also, you gain an additional +25% per level damage when fighting with only your natural weapons.

Bonus: Natural Weaponry is a doppelganger racial skill! It is raised to level 3!

"Go, go, go!" Carl shouted, thumping frantically on my shoulder. I didn't waste the breath to tell him that I was going as fast as I could, I simply waved the system messages away and focused on covering ground. The ghouls had well and truly noticed us and were charging from all directions, screaming their rage as they came.

I caught a flicker of motion on my right; Carl grunted and I felt his weight shift as he punched one of our attackers away before it could tackle me.

The lesser ghouls were no match for me; they didn't have the strength or the mass to stop me as I plowed through them. The line of four Wrath Ghouls coming in from ten o'clock, those were going to be a problem.

"Look out!" Carl shouted, pointing.

"I see them! Hold on tight! Albert, boost us!" Still at a full run I leaped up and forward. Albert was right on time, slamming the gravitic assist to the stops and then tailing it quickly down so that I arced up and across the battlefield, shaping a tighter and tighter parabola as he adjusted my landing spot to be in one of the comparatively clearer areas. At the last second he gave a surge of lift so that we hit softly. I took two long steps and leaped again. Once more we soared, superleaping like early-years Superman.

"DONUT!" Carl shouted in the middle of the leap. "WE'RE COMING!"

I looked forward and saw the cat scrambling towards us, racing across the heads and shoulders of the ghouls as though her tail were on fire. They slashed and bit at her with claws and teeth; she eeled around most of the attacks and when they did manage to connect she went flying like a ping-pong ball, HIDER protecting her by rendering her almost massless.

I leaped again, up and up, pointing at where I wanted Albert to bring me down so that I could link with Donut and—

Pain ripped through me and I tumbled, hitting the ground hard. I barely managed to get my arms out to the sides so that I could control the fall and land on my face instead of bouncing and tumbling and crushing Carl like a bug. I hit hard and skidded, leaving a furrow behind me in the dirt and dropping me from full to 50% health in one shot.

I could think of only one thing that could have been: Kralak's axe.

No, some part of my brain muttered. Remember your socials and be Birgit. 'That fucking toothpick.'

I jumped again, and in midair I slammed my Heal spell twice to get my health back to full. I was running low on mana.

"DONUT!" Carl shouted. "OVER HERE!"

Albert was already reducing the lift, bringing us down quickly so that we wouldn't be easily predictable targets for that darned—for that fucking axe.

I hit the ground on my feet, the shoes keeping my balance for me, and kept running in the direction of Albert's green 'Donut last seen here' arrow. Carl kept yelling for her.

We were out on the very edge of the station's free space, the boss-battle energy barrier only a couple dozen meters to my left and getting closer. The crowd of ghouls was relatively diffuse in this area, meaning that I could avoid many of them. The ones I couldn't, I smashed aside with sweeping blows of my scorpion fists. I glanced to the right and saw a dozen Wrath Ghouls charging towards me, along with two of a kind I hadn't seen before. Wolf-headed, they had multi-jointed arms and they wore metal chestplates and carried harpoons.

Whale Hunter Ghoul

Level 36

Get over here! The Whale Hunters are the elite warriors of their tribes. Aggressive, strong, smarter than your average ghoul (which isn't saying much) and dangerous with their preferred weapons.

Seven levels above me. Crap.

Two of them reared back and hurled their harpoons. Heavy rope trailed out behind, gripped in each thrower's left hand. My Catcher skill let me swat the first one aside and leveled up in the process. The second hit me in the side of the thigh and would have penetrated if Albert hadn't been in the way. The impact was still powerful enough to knock 5% off my health.

"Behind you!" Carl shouted.

I spun, arms whipping around to gain momentum and swinging high and low. A Wrath Ghoul had been about to leap on me from behind. My right fist caught him in the knee and sheared it off, but that didn't matter since my left fist caught him in the head and crushed it like a grape.

"I need to turn around so I can fight!" Carl said. "Loosen the ropes!"

Crap.

I stopped running and widened the steel bands holding Carl in place, shifting so fast that it felt like ripping my back apart. Simultaneously I pushed a shelf out of the top of my butt. As soon as I felt him hop up to sit on it I tightened the bands up again, clamping Carl firmly in place, and started running. Carl and I were now back-to-back and it was some measure of comfort to know that he could keep watch for attacks from the rear.

The pause, brief as it had been, had cost us. According to Albert's HUD there were '100+ ghouls, 22 WG, 7 WHG' closing in on us and the empty spaces I'd been running through were closed.

"Go, go, go!" Carl shouted. I felt him shifting around and heard a toonk! as something bounced off his gauntlet. I jumped right in case there was something else coming at us from behind, slapped another harpoon out of the air, and swung my fist through both knees of a Wrath Ghoul. He screamed and fell, tangling up a bunch of the monsters around him and giving me just enough space to slip past before they could block me.

"Reducing your weight, ma'am. Take long steps."

Suddenly I was lighter—not enough to lift off the ground but enough that each step became a three-meter bound and I was moving faster. A group of regular ghouls were in front of me, too many to rush through. I leaped, pulling my legs up and trusting Albert to get the memo. He was there for me, raising the gravity assist so that I could leap over them entirely. At the top of our arc I caught something moving from the corner of my eye; the assist suddenly cut out and I plummeted, barely sliding under Kralak's spinning axe. It hit the barrier, bounced off, and looped back to its master's hand.

Kralak, ~30m appeared on my HUD along with a blinking red arrow pointing down somewhere to my right. More importantly, a green arrow ahead was labeled 'Donut' with an estimated distance that was dropping like a rock.

"DONUT!" I shouted. "Over here!"

She came bounding across the crowd of ghouls. A claw swipe smashed her to the ground; she touched down and rolled, barely avoiding a stomping foot that would have broken her in half, scrambled through a pair of legs and deliberately let herself get punted into the sky, shooting up like a spear.

"Boost!" I leaped, sucking all my spikes back into my body as I left the ground. The four of us—Donut, me, Carl on my back, and that fucking axe—came together in midair ten meters up.

I swatted at the axe with my right hand, desperately trying to deflect it before it hit Donut. With HIDER canceling her mass the blade of the axe shouldn't be able to hurt her but I had no idea about whatever magical effect had allowed it to hurt me so much through Albert's protection.

It would have been nice if I could have caught it. Snatched it cleanly out of the air, landed with a slight bending of the knees to absorb the impact, then straightened up with an insouciant and totally boss comment. Maybe something like, "Thanks for the toothpick, shithead."

Nope.

The axe slammed edge-first into my wrist and carved straight through. My hand—or, rather, the metal that I had shaped into a hand—fell to the dirt and I screamed as something that wasn't electricity went through me and ripped at my health.

However painful it had been, the encounter had deflected the axe enough that it didn't touch Donut, which was the important part. I grabbed her out of the air with my undamaged left arm, trusting her HIDER to keep her from being crushed by the impact with my arm, and pulled her in close. Simultaneously, I gulped a healing potion out of my hotlist. I had four left.

"Get down beside Carl," I said as we touched down. Albert pulsed the lift as we were about to hit, slowing us almost to a stop and taking the sting out of the impact. Donut didn't argue with me; she skittered over my shoulder and eeled down to sit beside Carl on the shelf that I quickly widened to make room for her. It left her behind four centimeters of dwarf steel, which was the best protection I could offer right now.

The ghouls suddenly froze and pulled back, opening a huge clear space around us. A freezing hand clenched at my stomach; there was only one reason I could imagine this happening. I turned right and, sure enough, there was Kralak.

He was bigger than he had been, almost four meters, with a black leather harness crisscrossing his powerfully-muscled chest and a faint red glow around him. He stood tall, the head of his poleaxe on the ground in front of his feet, both hands resting on the bottom of the haft.

"My, my," Albert said, sounding unimpressed. "I do believe he stole that pose from a Frank Frazetta painting."

I couldn't help it, I giggled. I also retracted the shelf from around my waist and withdrew the bands, dumping Carl and Donut to their feet. We didn't all have to die here. Hopefully I could keep Kralak distracted long enough for the two of them to find somewhere to fort up and figure something out.

"You guys should run," I said quietly. "I can—"

"You can shut up," Donut said crossly. "We're not going anywhere. He's taller and all glowy but he's still just a borough boss. We can take him."

"We need to get control of that axe," Carl said, stepping out to stand beside me with Donut on his shoulder. "I don't know what it's doing but it cuts through our strongest defenses. Without it I bet he'll be a lot more manageable."

"I'm on it," I said. Wait, remember the viewers. "Like candy from a baby." That sounded lame.

"Would this be a bad time to mention that I'm at 0.7 points left for HIDER?" Donut asked. "I'm not sure how much longer that gives me but it's probably not long."

"Yes, Donut, it would be a bad time," Carl said grimly. "A bad time for you to be low, I mean."

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Seems like a good time to me. The other option is for her to be completely out."

Huh. Out of energy. That was a thought. Kralak was tough, but he probably had limits and cooldowns like the rest of us.

"Get behind me, fast," I muttered out of the side of my mouth, setting my left hand on the ground in front of me and stiffening the arm so I could lean on it. "Numb exec."

My body disappeared from my senses; I pushed Albert out my chest and widened him to his maximum extent. His cargo bag tumbled out, the bottom of it dragging on the ground. It made me look ridiculous, as though I were leaning up against a circular shower curtain, but hopefully it would absorb some of whatever attack was about to come.

I slammed back the first of my three mana potions and watched my mana refill.

"Taunt," I said.

Error: Taunt spell must be immediately preceded by an actual taunt, visual or auditory, that the target can perceive. Make it good enough and I'll fudge the dice for you.

Seriously? The AI was weird.

My initial impulse was the classic 'your mom dresses you funny' but that was weak. "Hey, ugly!" I shouted to Kralak. "C'mon over here! I've always wanted lizardskin boots! Taunt!"

I don't know if I amused the AI or rolled well but Kralak screamed in fury as a red angry-face icon appeared above his head, a 25-second countdown next to it. He lifted his axe up and slammed it into the ground. A ring of translucent red fire rushed outwards. It spared no friendlies; every ghoul that it touched turned instantly to ash. The attack had a massive radius; Kralak had just killed more of his people in one moment than we had since our arrival at the station.

The moment he lifted his hands to initiate the attack, I covered my face with both forearms and pulled my eyes and mouth down below Albert's rigid segment. A moment later, Kralak's fire passed over me and I watched 97% of my health disappear. I tapped a potion and used a Heal scroll since I didn't have the mana for a spell. Albert was still numbing me so I couldn't feel the pain.

"Un-numb, exec," I said, launching myself forward and trusting Donut and Carl, assuming they were alive, to do the right thing.

Mongo's furious squonk assured me that my teammates were still alive. An instant later three murder chickens streaked past me and leaped at Kralak, claws first. I couldn't tell them apart and I doubt that Kralak could either, since he threw his axe through one of the clockwork duplicates instead of the original living Mongo. The first of the surviving Mongos raked its claws down Kralak's chest and bit at his face. The claws caused Kralak's health bar to appear, meaning they had done at least one point of damage, but the health bar disappeared a moment later as Kralak healed. He blocked the bite with his fist in the process of punching through his attacker's head—thankfully, it proved to be the other clockwork Mongo.

The last surviving Mongo, the original, jumped higher than his duplicates had. He landed on Kralak's shoulders and leaped again, this time forward so that the push knocked Kralak to the ground while simultaneously ripping at the lizardman with vicious claws.

Kralak faceplanted from the impact but immediately pushed himself upright. His back was healed by the time he was upright and his red aura was stronger as he started to turn towards Mongo.

"Hey, fuckwad!" I shouted, the words coming out of nowhere before I even thought about it. "I'm still wanting that belt! Get over here or admit you're scared!" Wow, that was juvenile. Also, didn't I say boots before? Oops. Well, I was clearly getting the hang of cursing.

Juvenile or not, it worked. Kralak spun back towards me and pounded his chest with one fist while howling in rage.

I charged forward, desperately hoping that I could get close before he threw that darned axe. I had no good defense against it; having it touch me was enough to cause massive damage and it carved through any part of me that wasn't...oh. Right.

The axe came at me, almost too fast to see. I dumped Albert and everything he contained into my inventory.

The vast majority of my mass was in Albert, far more than the 50% threshold that would revert me to a puddle. Two seconds later I was back in my 60-kilogram human form with no protective metal or strength enhancements from weighing three tons. I pulled Albert's invisible poster-tube form out of my inventory while leaving all his contents there.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! I CAN'T PROTECT YOU LIKE THIS!"

"I know. Trust me."

He followed orders, although he continued to complain in his very frightened posh British way.

I put my back to Kralak, trusting Carl and Mongo to keep the lizardman off of me. They were working him like a wolfpack; Carl would feint an attack and Kralak would turn to block, only to find Mongo biting at the tendons in his legs. He would spin to counterattack Mongo, but the murder chicken had already jumped back out of range and Carl was throwing a kick into Kralak's knee and then moving past him. They circled around the boss, never facing him directly, always attacking from behind. Donut was off to the side, blasting the lizardman in the head any time he looked like he might catch up to one of the others.

Unfortunately, I was pretty sure that at least part of their survival was down to the fact that Kralak wasn't interested in them. The Enraged debuff that my Taunt spell had hit him with was still active; he was trying to get to me and not focusing on the others even though they were the primary threat right now. That knowledge sent chills up and down my suddenly-nonmetallic neck but I pushed them aside and looked for the axe.

Fortunately, the Enraged debuff had inspired Kralak to throw far more powerfully than necessary. It had taken me just under two seconds to reclaim my human form after going puddle, and the axe was only just starting to return. I could see it looping back, still spinning furiously. It paid no mind to friendly fire; ghouls of various kinds flung themselves down or to the side to avoid being cut in half, and a few didn't make it.

I watched closely and adjusted my position to make sure that I was on the axe's flightpath. I was only going to get one shot here...

"C'mon, you overgrown butter knife!" I shouted. "Come and get me!" The axe obliged, picking up speed as it approached.

"Here we go," I muttered. I waited, turned slightly so that my profile was to the axe in some instinctive yet futile attempt to minimize the target area. I held my left hand high, ready to swat down on the axe as it came close. In my right hand I held the 50-centimeter rigid tube that was Albert's compact yet indestructible form. Most importantly, his invisible form. I didn't know if the axe could see or not but when I thwapped it with my Clarketech friend I definitely wanted it to be a surprise.

At the very last moment I shouted to Albert, "Maximum size!" and swung him forward.

In the blink of an eye, Albert went from something the size of a poster tube to something the size of a small dumpster. The air caught his fabric and flared it out as he moved forward, spreading him like a massive net, and he looped over the axe as though we had practiced it a thousand times. It wasn't a perfectly clean catch; the head of the axe was in Albert's cargo compartment but the end of the haft was sticking out. I yanked down and threw myself on top, pinning the axe to the ground as I wrestled for control of it and prayed that it couldn't hurt me through Albert when Albert was not actually part of me.

As it happened, I won my bet. Right now, Albert was just your average, run-of-the-mill, absolutely indestructible piece of Clarketech fabric. He was not part of my body and therefore the dungeon felt no need to make him vulnerable to the life-draining (or whatever) effects of the axe. And, of course, since the axe blade wasn't touching me, I wasn't hurt either.

"Whatever you're doing, hurry it up!" Carl shouted. "We can't keep this up forever!"

"On my way!" I grunted, struggling to get a grip on the disgustingly warm and faintly squirmy haft of the axe. It was a lot harder than the last time. I weighed my Earth-normal sixty kilos, and that wasn't a lot to pin down something as strong and determined as this stupid piece of cutlery.

Finally, I got a two-handed grip and got it under control. The axe gave one final effort and then went quiescent. I could feel it throbbing very slightly, pressure waves running up and down its length.

"Albert, go visible," I said. "Donut! I need you!"

The cat was there in a moment. "This better be fast."

"Pull Albert off of the head of the axe," I told her, chinning towards the black plastic sheeting that was my field harness. "Just get a grip and walk backwards slowly. Then put him in your inventory."

"NO! I AM YOUR FIELD HARNESS! NO, NO, NO, PLEASE MS KATIA! PLEASE DON'T—"

The desperate pleas cut off as Donut pulled him backwards and out of contact with me.

I kept a careful grip on the axe, turning it slightly to ensure that it didn't catch on Albert as she pulled him free. I also watched for any last-minute attempts on the axe's part to escape once it found itself disentangled; there were none. The axe was quiescent. Malevolent, pulsing like a weak heartbeat, and disgustingly warm to the touch, but quiescent.

I got to my feet and ran towards the battle, keeping a death grip on the axe. Something in the back of my head was shrieking at me to run the other way—I didn't have the skills or the armor to survive this fight. The best I could hope for was to be a distraction for a moment so Carl or Donut or Mongo to finish it. Without Albert, without my metal, I was useless.

The battle of Kralak versus Mongo and Carl had taken a nasty turn while I'd been occupied: The Enraged debuff had worn off and suddenly Kralak was no longer distracted. He was fighting smarter, throwing feints towards one enemy and then launching an attack at the other. As I reached them he caught Carl in the hip with a back kick and sent him sprawling to the ground, his health suddenly in the yellow. Kralak hopped back, trying to land on Carl's chest, but Carl rolled to the side, barely avoiding the attack. Kralak went after him again, a series of stomping attacks that had Carl rolling frantically, barely a hair ahead of the attacks any one of which would have flattened him.

Mongo roared and charged. I ran after him as fast as I could, desperate to do something to intervene before what I thought was going to happen actually happened. The dinosaur's lightning-fast strides sprayed dust and gravel in my eyes. I didn't dare take a hand from the axe to wipe it away. God, if I could barely see how was I going to help? Fannar's voice whispered in my ear, God, you're just useless. Pathetic, Katia.

Kralak bounded forward, leaping right over Carl and turning in midair so that when he landed he was facing back towards the charging dinosaur. Mongo was directly between me and the boss so I couldn't see the expression on either of their faces, but I could see Kralak's clawed hands, raised in a wrestler's ready stance. I could tell when Mongo realized that he was about to step on Carl himself and that he was going too fast to stop; he leaped, claws out and aimed right at Kralak's head. I shouted in panic, nothing coherent, and dug deep, trying to find just a little more speed but I was panting for breath and my legs felt like lead.

Mongo was still blocking my sightline to Kralak, but I heard the lizard boss hiss in satisfaction as he slipped half a step to the side so that he was out of the way of Mongo's attack, and then I watched him throw the same straight punch that had previously gone all the way through a clockwork Mongo. Our Mongo, the real Mongo, was in midair, unable to turn or dodge—

—and then he was gone, vanished into Donut's pet carrier.

Kralak stumbled forward, off-balanced by the unexpected lack of resistance to his punch, and his eyes went wide at the last sight he would ever have expected and would ever see: The blood-dripping head of his own axe, wielded by tiny, useless little Katia.

The axe carved through Kralak's head like a fine sword through soft cheese, stopping only after it was halfway through his chest. He collapsed at my feet, dead before he hit the ground.

"Who's useless now, motherfucker?" I snarled.