Ted gave his best crash course in house-to-house combat, he really did. But I had an inkling that no amount of prep talk could prepare me for what we were about to find inside this mall.

  Oh, I totally listened to Ted’s five minute abstract on sightlines, on how to stack up correctly when breaching a room, and on the benefit of grenades. I knew grenades were great in the abstract, but I already had my volatile laser batteries if I needed to flash-clear a room. Even if I wanted to blow up every single room, this was the entire freaking mall we were talking about. I didn’t have enough money to afford that.

  [Soulcoins: 3]

  This was also a hostage-rescue mission. Hostages and indiscriminate bombardment don’t mix well.

  “Ready?” the heavy-set man asked, gesturing to the sludgy window we’d chosen as our point of entry.

  “Not really.”

  I held up a finger while mentally, I ran through the critical pieces of this puzzle. Huge mall. Time limit — 47 minutes now. Kill the elite mimic holding up the barrier inside of it. Safely escort upwards of two hundred people outside.

  Yep, that was definitely enough fear for another pair of eyes.

  “[More Spider Eyes]”

  Two pinpricks of pressure appeared on the back of my neck. They grew, but unlike my two extra front-facing ones, remained little more than thumbnail-sized bulbs of black. These were the secondary eyes spiders had for increasing their effective field of view, which meant no colors, and only a fuzzy outline of general shapes. For me, my vision split for a second, a migraine thumping in my head as my unenhanced brain struggled to conjoin the images into a cohesive whole. Yeah, no, this was too much information. I needed more Mind if I wanted to have super high quality eyesight plus secondary eyes.

  Luckily, secondary eyes were cheap as heck.

  “One-one moment.” C’mon, don’t get stuck halfway through transforming. That would be terrifying! I mean… oh nooo, how scary. “[More Spider Eyes].”

  “That’s your spell?” Ted asked as my big eyes folded into my forehead, replaced by a further two secondary eyes. “More spider eyes?”

  I sighed, half in relief, half in sadness as the world returned to normal human-eye fidelity. It was like switching from a 4k monitor to 720p. At least my migraine was gone.

  I turned to Ted, who had an incredulous look on his face. “So what?”

  “You can cast magic, do anything in the world with it. And you asked for more eyes, specifically of the spider variety?”

  “Hey, it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are restrictions and caveats.” Restrictions like ‘hey, choose one of the three abilities this monstrous alien invader had and graft it onto your body’.

  “Hm.” Ted gave me a look with a raised eyebrow. “Do you have to yell the spell’s name every time you use magic?”

  “I, er, think I can whisper it? It feels right to say it. I haven’t managed to cast a spell without saying it. Is that bad?”

  “It’s hilarious, until you give our position away.” He snorted before forming up on the window covered in chunky pink sludge. “Now, private magical girl Samantha, ready up. Three, two… breach.”

  We both heaved massive bricks through the goop, hopefully shattering the glass behind. There was no audible sound. The bricks were just enveloped by the nightmare, and then they were gone. Ted didn’t even pause as he stepped through first. I hurried in after, heart clenching, afraid I was about to walk over his corpse.

  I had 360° of vision with my front and rearward eyes combined, but even then I couldn’t describe what exactly happened as we crossed the precipice. It was as if I’d walked through a waterfall on one side, and came out of a solid wall on the other.

  Pressing through the membrane set my hairs on end and popped my ears as if reality was a layered cake and we’d just moved down by one. Sound felt muted and echo-y. The air was thick as molasses, filled with a dank fog that stunk of brine and gasoline.

  I didn’t get a chance to take in the odd surroundings because the moment I breached through the veil, a mimic jumped at my chest, because of course they would try some horsecrap like this. Four limbs constantly shifting between serrated claws, knives, and thin needles hit my chest armor and failed to puncture it.

  I tore it off, tossed it away, and blasted it the moment it hit the ground. Then I turned to Ted, who was having difficulties with one mimic on his assault rifle and another trying to climb his back.

  Two cracks rang out as I hit the front one. He threw his entire weight backwards against the wall and there was a loud squishy sound, like a giant bug going pop.

  “You alright?” I asked, hurrying over.

  “Fuckin’ assholes.” He patted himself down, whincing as his hand came away bloody. There was a puncture wound on the right side of his body, around the rib cage. Shit, what a great start.

  I was already beside him with one of my time bandaids, but he waved me off.

  “No, don’t waste your fancy-schmancy magical boo-boo bandaid on ol’ Ted. I’m a sturdy guy. It’s just a flesh wound.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll live. More importantly, mission’s on a time limit. We need to move.”

  I grumbled, but if the man wanted to tough it out then he could be my guest. There was, oddly enough, no followup ambush that hit us immediately. That was as good a sign as any that we’d gotten the drop on the mimics, and wasn’t that just the greatest thing this morning, er, evening?

  Now, if only everything going forward could go this smoothly.

  Don’t jinx it.

  I kicked some of the glass from the window off of my shoes. Its tinkle was awfully muted as the innumerable pieces floated in the air for a moment before sailing down.

  Air. This was… air? I took a deep breath. It smelled like rotten eggs now, which was hopefully not a sign of a gas leak, and it was heavy, halfway between gas and liquid. Breathing quickly turned from a passive act into an active struggle as I scanned the area with four eyes.

  By this point it was a certainty that mimics knew how to use magic. It didn’t make sense how they could morph their shapes in blatant disregard of physics otherwise. The whole nightmare was another giveaway. This place was the inside of a ward, another application of magic that I couldn’t understand, but for the information the system granted me.

  [Atmosphere: Breathable]

  [No alien pathogens detected]

  Helpful, if not for the worrying implication that make these notifications necessary in the first place.

  Unlike the ward around Clem’s house that just subjected intruders to electroshock therapy, this one changed the insides.

  The marble floor was cracked. All along the too-wide plaza, rectangular benches stood at odd, round angles. Beyond the cold mist that clung to every surface like moss, a decorative tree was split open from crown to root, growing a coral reef inwards like a cavity. Deeper within the tree was darkness, a swirling and heavy thing. It almost sounded like I could hear voices on the other end.

  No, wait, that was a voice, but it wasn’t coming from inside the tree. Quiet, near indistinct sobbing echoed from inside a well-lit boutique as we stalked past. I peeked inside through the open door and found a naked woman standing with her back turned to me.

  “H-hello?” I asked, even as my brain was ringing the alarm bells that something was off and — oh god, that wasn’t a woman.

  The creature turned, its front half a pink craggy mess of polyps where its back had presented a realistic facsimile of the human form. It split down the middle, grew an extra pair of limbs, then ran at me on all six of them, The Ring-style, screaming and making choked, guttural noises.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  I shot at it, first with the Toothpick, then my Goop Gun, but I missed, I was missing and — no, I was hitting, but it was going right through the thing? Crap, were ghost-mimics a thing now?

  As I tried to step back, my leg snagged on something and I fell. A dozen hands came out of the ground, grasping, clawing, holding me down. The boutique grew eyes, then a mouth, leering over me with drool and bad breath before, like a giant gulper eel, it swallowed me whole and—

  “Private Samantha!” A heavy hand tore me away from the darkness and back onto my two feet.

  “W-what?”

  “Get yourself together, Private.” It was Ted, just Ted. He smelled of burnt hair. I noticed that the beard around his left cheek was singed, and his skin looked slightly sunburnt. The wound perfectly fit a near miss from my Toothpick.

  “I-I, there was a woman, and a thing and mimics and I tried to shoot but…”

  I… I did that. Five inches to the right and I would have taken his head off instead of his beard. I fucked up. Gun safety was paramount in any setting. It was easy to kill your target with bullets. It was even easier to kill a lot of people who weren’t your target. Friendlies, bystanders, a random person getting a haircut at two hundred feet past where you were shooting.

  The Toothpick was supposed to fix that. The laser fizzled out after a while. It didn’t go through objects. And still, somehow, I almost managed to kill the only damn person that was willing and able to help me not crash, burn, and die a second time today. And now he was looking at me as if I was the liability.

  Maybe I was. ‘Tis I, your favorite magical girl, Friendly Fire Samantha’.

  “Calm down,” he said, but it didn’t sound like an order. “I am alright. You made a mistake, but it was a nonlethal mistake, the best kind. That means you can learn something from it.”

  I nodded glumly.

  “You saw something, right? Was it magic? Some sort of mental mumbo jumbo?”

  I turned to the empty boutique. There were scorch and acid marks next to the ‘for sale’ sign. The door wasn’t even open.

  “Take a minute to collect yourself, then tell me in exact detail what it was.”

  “An illusion,” I muttered. “The mimics can use magic. They make you see things that aren’t there.”

  “Wizard mimics,” he muttered. “How many? What do they look like?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  At least one of them created an illusion. Was it hoping that I’d accidentally kill Ted? If it was testing me, it had to be observing, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell from where. It could be disguised as any of the objects in this entire mall mall, any at all.

  I felt like a lunatic as I explained what I had just witnessed to Ted. He didn’t seem to think much of the revelation. The way he took in my words, my thoughts, and my speculations, was downright clinical, neutered. By the end, I was pretty sure that he had put the fact that the mimics could create mental illusions in a neat mental box right next to wherever he filed his taxes.

  Then again, not the best place and time to go geeking out over magic. It was enough to know what to expect and how to counter it — a rough shake of the shoulders would do it.

  Next time, I wasn’t going to be the one who needed saving.

  Magical girls don’t need saving. They ought to be able to do it all by themselves and—

  Oh. I think I know how Addy feels a bit better now.

  I rubbed my face, trying to sort away the things I wanted to focus on in favor of the things that I needed to focus on. People, Ted, mimics.

  My guns needed reloading too. Ugh. At least I didn’t fire a high explosive bazooka shot, or I might’ve exploded both of us at once.

  I kept six eyes fixed on our surroundings as we walked through the abandoned structure. Odd lights shone in from every window. The odd distant wailing of a whale every now and again made me utterly convinced that this nightmare was linked to a different place, somewhere otherworldly.

  And all the while, questions were mounting. Why were the mimics hiding? Where were the people? How much time was left? If I turned the corner only to find the disassembled corpses of my parents, could I continue functioning at all?

  Get a grip. Stop spiraling. Mimics aren’t smart enough to exploit human social dynamics.

  Moe clearing his little throat nearly made me jump out of my shoes. The large display window of a shoe salon — the intact part of it at least — threw my terrified gaze back at me like an insult.

  Not terrified. Worried.

  [Channeling emotion: Fear]

  Oh screw you, system.

  I formed up on Ted, who’d been scanning the area through his dark brown glasses, courtesy of a small supernatural family business called OptiCo. They made lab-glasses that reduced the strain when looking at magical anomalies. They worked just fine against the mimics.

  “So, they’ve got some magic mumbo-jumbo that makes you see things,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “They’re changing the terrain, the air, the… have you found any people yet?”

  He shook his head. “Not seen a single mimic either. Reckon they’re gone, or that they’re hiding all around?”

  The screwy geometry certainly wasn’t convincing me that finding mimics in this place would be easy. When I looked for longer, I could make out shapes poking out of the fog, toppled shopping bags and discarded drink cups. Spilled soft drinks made the ground sticky in places and slick in others. “They’re waiting, probably for one of us to slip up. Watch your toes.”

  The odd geometry and screwed up plantlife continued as we made our way through the west wing, guns held at the ready, head constantly scanning for threats. And there were many possible threats.

  Was that movement behind a display window? Was that rubix cube on the table the right size and color? Did that trashcan just grin at me?

  The easiest solution was to shoot everything once. Given that there was not a single sign of any people around, it seemed a prudent course of action. My Toothpick was ideally suited to the task of intermittent, low-pressure blasting. I went through an entire battery pack in one go for the first time in… ever. Huh. Usually those exploded before I could shoot them empty.

  “Vibe check,” I whispered as I blasted the eleventh energy drink can that we were passing too close for comfort.

  [Soulcoins: 11->13]

  I blinked.

  Wow, that was a mimic. I am not getting anywhere near enough points from lasering all those trashcans though. I might run out of ammo if we keep this up. Better buy some more battery packs just to be safe.

  [Soulcoins: 13->1]

  The fact that I’d gotten any soulcoins at all confirmed that there were mimics hiding out here. Just not a lot.

  One of the coral pustules on a tree wriggled, then popped with an eldritch screech. Ted and I whirled on it, watching as three small 1.5kg mimics slimed their way out like a trio of slugs.

  They looked slow, downright sluggish and soft. The way they flopped around reminded me of baby sea turtles right after hatching.

  Rebecca had an entertainer at one of her birthdays with a big turtle. It bit my toe. It probably mistook it for a piece of lettuce since I was experimenting with an ugly green nail polish. I still have a scar.

  No mercy for turtles.

  “Don’t shoot them, I need the coins,” I said, taking aim and blasting each one of them in turn, netting me an easy six coins.

  “Fuck me, they’re making more of themselves,” Ted swore.

  I blew on the tip of my Toothpick. “I suppose they have to take every chance they can get.”

  The eerie silence continued even as we left the west wing, walking through a small connector bit that was plastered with ads.

  New KFC, grand opening September fifth. Sign our petition — all drones are lethal weapons. Vote for Mendoza, the man who finishes what he starts.

  A few lines of yellow tape and traffic cones informed me that we were now in the part of the mall that was still actively being worked on. The nice marbled floor turned dusty, then made way for gravel and wooden planks.

  A suspicious traffic cone seemed to be following us wherever we were going, always standing there thirty feet or so away from every corner we rounded. I shot it thrice. It gave me four points.

  I also shot the wooden planks. Those just caught fire.

  I hope the fire alarm and automatic fire control systems are already installed.

  Then we were there. The central dome. Escalators brought lazy souls up and down five stories of undiluted consumerist dreams. Every brand that was even remotely successful or influential was represented among the filled and to-be-filled stores. Above an old tree, a candelabra weighing as much as multiple cars hung from a glass and metal dome that normally allowed for plentiful sunlight to shine on through. Now, all I could see was darkness, deep, dark, and cloying at the recesses of my mind.

  “Samantha?”

  My heart stopped. I turned to the side. “Elise?”

  The tall-ish, normally composed girl was hunched under the black woven table of a Starbucks. Her raven hair was a mess, her trendy short jacket missing, her crop top and designer jeans torn. Combined with the blood on her hands and chest, and the runny mascara, it all turned her face into a visage of horror. She had never looked worse in her life.

  I… couldn’t feel happy, or vindicated, or anything else. When seeing my tormentor in this state, all I could feel was pity.

  “Y-you...” She staggered to her feet. I readied my Toothpick. But Elise didn’t even seem to notice as she stumbled over to me and tried to grab at my shoulders. This was way too realistic for an illusion. Or maybe it was way too unrealistic.

  One way or the other, she was desperate. “I want out. P-please, get me out.”

  “Elise.”

  “I know I was a mean bitch to you. Tanya spread rumors about the slug thing. I… was also involved. Sometimes. There, I said it, ok?” She looked as if admitting to it was already too much of an apology for me. “Now please, please get me out.”

  “Elise, look.” I grabbed her hand. It went right through mine. The look on her face morphed from confusion to shock. I gave her my weakest smile. A single tear rolled down my cheek.

  She’s dead.

  “I’m sorry, Elise. I really, really am.”

  She doesn’t deserve your apologies. She ruined highschool for you. She beat you down so much you only tried getting back up when you were in college.

  But she’s dead. Nobody deserves that.

  “There’s nothing I can do.”

  Maybe if you’d arrived earlier you could have.

  Ghost-Elise collapsed onto, then through a chair. “No. No, no, no. I saw it turn them all into Salsa a-and I got away and, I just—just can’t. It took my face, Samantha. It took my fucking face.”

  I perked up.

  “Elise. You need to tell me what you saw. I can still save people, no, I am going to. But I need your help.”

  “My help?” She was crying. “Why should I help you if you can’t even be bothered to help me? You’re a terrible friend, you disgusting, gay-ass whore. Fuck you. Fuck everything that you stand for—”

  A twitch of movement caught my eyes. The tree at the center of the mall — a huge oak that had been transplanted only to probably suffocate and die in its planter box — was twitching and shivering, as if it couldn’t keep itself together in one piece.

  It was full of mimics, probably, like a wriggling pink cavity.

  I motioned to stop, which we did behind some concrete planter beds. My laser wasn’t good at penetrating anything, so Ted aimed a cursory shot at its trunk.

  “Ted, wait!”

  The moment it hit, the entire tree split down the middle and unfurled like an anemone out of hell.