Hiro didn’t hesitate.

  He leaped from the rooftop, the air rushing past him as the battle below twisted into focus. Bursting into the Zone of Influence, he drew his enormous odachi as Ben stumbled back, gripping his side where the bear’s claws had just cut into him. Hachi snarled, hackles raised, lunging at the faun with a fury Hiro had only ever seen in desperate, cornered animals.

  “I’m going in!” Bianca used her tentacles to launch herself toward the faun, fearless as ever.

  “Careful!” Hiro called after her.

  The fuzzy pink shield cartwheeled toward the faun, a whir of insanity. The faun lunged for her with its bear-maw arm, its jaw clamping down onto Bianca and tossed her to the side. She crashed through the second story window of a brick building.

  The faun turned to Hiro and Ben, its newly fused arm twitching with unnatural energy. The bear’s severed face, now a grotesque gauntlet, snarled as if still alive, its glassy eyes rolling in their sockets.

  “Now, we play properly,” it crooned. The faun moved fast—faster than before as it lunged at Ben first, its massive bear-arm swinging in a brutal arc. Hachi jumped for it, giving Ben a chance to skid away. The bear gauntlet caught Hachi and ripped the dog to shreds, the faun’s arm shaking wildly as it did so.

  “Your dog—!” Ben roared, his voice filled with a sudden burst of anger.

  “He’ll be fine,” Hiro called to Ben, aware that all he needed to bring Hachi back to life was a single strip of his flesh.

  Fwitt!

  He struck the faun with [Blade Whirlwind}, which caused it to drop what was left of Hachi.

  Hiro didn’t wait. He slashed forward with his odachi, aiming for the faun’s exposed ribs.

  The strike should have cut through—but the faun’s newly fused arm reacted, twisting with impossible flexibility. The bear’s jaw stretched open, intercepting Hiro’s blade, biting down on the steel itself. Hiro yanked back just as the faun retaliated, shifting its grotesque limb in a backhand strike.

  Wham!

  The force sent Hiro skidding backward, boots scraping against the pavement.

  His first notion was to try again for the faun and sever the fused limb. If I can do that, we can turn the tide of this fight! But then he remembered the description, how it had come to him in waves, Hiro focusing in on a key point—Explosives, explosives, explosives, he thought, his mind starting to race in a way that told him he needed to be extra careful not to trigger {Terminal Lucidity}.

  “The description, explosives!” he shouted to Ben.

  As it had done to Hiro, the faun reached Ben back-bear-handed him with inhuman strength, sending Ben tumbling into the air. The big man cried out as it hit the side of a rusted-out car, metal groaning beneath his impact.

  Hiro rushed forward and took the brunt of another strike with his odachi, which triggered {Refund}, taking a sliver of the faun’s health bar. It sent the mythological bastard flying into a small iron fence that once surrounded one of the city’s ubiquitous dog parks.

  The faun leaped to its hooves and staggered, its grin faltering. A deep gash splintered through the bronze and stone, black magic leaking out like smoke as its health bar dropped a bit more.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “I’ll distract it!” Bianca rushed toward it to distract the faun, which lunged for her, missing as she zipped around.

  Hiro reached Ben and sent his odachi away. “We need explosives,” he said breathlessly as he helped the big guy up. “And you need gauze.”

  “I have something,” Ben told him with a wince. He was bleeding badly, the blood gushing onto the pavement. “Don’t worry about me. Did you say explosives…”

  “Explosives. I have one attack, but it’s… it’s too strong for this.”

  “Too strong?” Ben asked as the place where the bear had struck him began to glow, his skin stitching back together.

  “You can heal?”

  “A Roulette Skill I picked up last Interim,” Ben said, his voice less strained, “but it only works for certain wounds. What about your explosive? You said it was big.” He registered the way Hiro nodded at him. “Christ almighty, you got a nuke or something?”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “That’ll kill us both. Don’t worry; I got somethin’.” Ben glared ahead to the faun, who continued to engage Bianca. “Didn’t want to use this too early on, but if you got nukes, and ain’t shit else working, fine. Get clear.”

  The faun tossed Bianca away. Its bear-hand snapped open, releasing a sudden surge of energy in Hiro and Ben’s direction. The resulting blast threw both men backward in a violent burst of raw force.

  Hiro slammed into the invisible barrier, pain lancing through his ribs as he tumbled back to the pavement. Every muscle in his body screamed, yet he forced himself upright in time to see the faun standing tall amid the chaos, fissures running down its bronze body, glowing with molten energy.

  Ben’s voice cut through the ringing in Hiro’s ears: “Get down and cover your eyes!”

  Hiro barely caught the motion of Ben’s arm as he hurled something—a yellow brick with a timer strapped to it—straight at the faun.

  The explosion hit like a goddamn thunderclap.

  A deafening boom ripped through the air, sending a shockwave through the confined space of the Zone of Influence. The sheer force of it folded Hiro’s body, slamming him into the pavement as fire and debris howled around him.

  He hit the ground hard, curling into himself as a wave of pressure smashed into his back, wind and debris blasting past in a swirling inferno. The ground shuddered. His ears popped violently, sound warping into a distant, underwater roar. Hiro gritted his teeth and stayed down, his fingers digging into the pavement as dust and metal shards rained down around them.

  The world was nothing but smoke and chaos. Then, through the settling haze, he heard something.

  Laughter.

  A deep, resonant chuckle, growing louder, richer—like the faun had just heard the punchline to a joke only it understood. Its laughter morphed into a death rattle and the prompt finally came:

  [A Sentry has fallen.]

  You have new followers!

  You got cash!

  “You good?” Ben said as he stumbled toward Hiro. “If you’re wonderin’ if I just used an IED to blow up a faun wearing a damn bear gauntlet, you’d be right. Little thing I picked up from a merchant. Only had one.”

  Hiro looked down at his arms. He scanned ahead to see Bianca waddling out of the smoke, her pink form covered in char marks. She carried a piece of Hachi’s flesh. “I think I’ll be fine.”

  “Here’s our dog,” she said as she handed Hiro a bit of its tail. “And someone freaking warn me next time before you start dropping bombs.”

  “Thank you, and sorry.” Hiro took the bit of flesh and placed it on the ground. It started to boil over until a tail popped out, the rest of Hachi’s body soon forming. As if on cue, Mishka started to cry from Hiro’s backpack as he turned back to Ben.

  “You got a baby, too?” Ben asked.

  “Oh, that. Yeah. It’s a Legendary Item from the first Interim that the Doom System has since fucked with.” Hiro opened his backpack, pulled out Mishka, and handed the teddy to Bianca.

  As he reached back inside, his fingers brushed against something unexpected—the panpipes. The moment he touched them, they disintegrated into bronze dust, which surged up his arm, spreading like liquid metal.

  Hiro jumped back, but by this point it was too late.

  The bronze spread up his arm in molten veins that quickly covered his duct tape armor. Hiro’s breath hitched as his fingers locked, the metal twisting, shifting, reshaping—

  A sudden pulse slammed through his body, a weight pressing down on his chest like something ancient had just woken up.

  Hiro’s vision swam and his hand started to morph.