2103:12:03:12:48:02

  Seeing Crowsong fight against Charoniskos, I realized I’d never seen my mentor go all out before. Not really. Whether it was training, fighting henchies or dealing with other masked, there was always something stopping her from going full-throttle. Either she held herself back, was forced to go non-lethal, or her momentum was halted by her opponent’s power.

  Not so now.

  Crowsong struck with whip-sword and war-cloak, with throwing knives and taloned kicks in a non-stop assault of beyond-human skill. And while Charoniskos was no slouch himself – in his hands, his polemace seemed anything but heavy, anything but unwieldy, anything but unbalanced – when comparing the two purely based on their fighting skills, Crowsong outmatched him thoroughly.

  Savage strikes and elegant swipes bypassed any block the comparatively simple polemace could make, cutting into the man behind it, shredding skin and cloth with ease. But Charoniskos tanked it, both his clothes and body regenerating with similar ease from their wounds. And then, once he’d moved closer, he swung his mace at hurricane-level force.

  Crowsong jumped like an acrobat to avoid it and threw out near-invisible miniature daggers at the same time, then twirled around Charoniskos’ follow-up strike like a dancer. She used that same twirl to unfurl her cloak of chained-together knives and slashed at her opponent, her war-cloak wrapping around Charoniskos arm and side, biting deep and carving him open when she pulled it back.

  Unfortunately, skill wasn’t all that mattered.

  Crowsong was flagging, leftover exhaustion from last night and today’s trip wearing her down faster than usual. I could see it in her dodging sways turning a bit too far and deep for her otherwise-perfect dodges. I could see it in the cord of her whip-sword growing slack as she mistimed their return to blade form. I could see it in how she, thrice, landed on her feet and nearly twisted her ankle, slipping just a centimeter more than intended.

  Fortunately, she had Darion on her side.

  The golden armored figure – lamellar, I now recognized – was slower than Crowsong and clearly wounded. He must’ve gotten caught by Charoniskos' longmace earlier in the battle as there were cracked plates dyed red on his left side. Add to that his near-drowning experience before I distracted Snorkel, and it was clear the Acolyte wasn’t in the best shape.

  Still, he filled in where Crowsong faltered. Charoniskos blocked one of Crowsong’s whip-sword and caught the spiked cord in the head of his mace, tangled within its spiral flanges. When Charoniskos tried to pull my mentor closer, Darion attacked, striking the villain from the side with his blade. The attack was countered easily and Darion thrown back and to the floor by the butt of Charoniskos’ longmace, but it was enough for Crowsong to recover and strike back, taking another pound of flesh.

  If it weren’t for the fact that Charoniskos regenerated so fast, he would’ve been a dead man thirty times over.

  That was the rhythm of their struggle, at a beat of three moves a second between Charoniskos and Crowsong, with the occasional beat added by Darion. Superhuman skill, each move anticipated, assessed, then either counteracted, evaded or ignored – whichever proved more advantageous.

  But while Crowsong and Darion could – and did – strike the other teen a dozen times, they made no progress. And all the while, Charoniskos would only need to hit once properly to ruin either of their lives.

  I glanced at Snorkel one last time. His legs and feet were still bound together, hogtied. He struggled against their bonds, but while the interlocking strap between zip-ties allowed flexibility – and thus breathing room – that same flexibility would snap him back long before he made any headway. Water moved to follow his restricted gestures, but couldn’t gather. It didn’t form a bubble, a dome, or even a proper tendril.

  He was done for, and wouldn’t escape without aid.

  I turned, shifted into a rhino and charged. There was no reason to hold back. Charoniskos’ regeneration could tank any hit from what I saw. And if not, well, my mentor’s wellbeing took priority. So I ran, aiming for the Greek-themed Dead Hive villain.

  Yet before I could get close, I slipped. The ground underneath me heaved and moved out from under me, right feet smashing into my left feet, tripping me. With my center of mass so shifted, I crashed to the ground and kept rolling as whatever it was that kept dragging it out from underneath me continued.

  I quick shifted twice to end up a crow once more, and took to the air.

  A scene I’d never imagined. Asphalt peeling like skin after a sunburn, rising into the air as hundreds of gravitational orbs flashed in and out of existence, each of them pulling at the former road. And in their pulling, the asphalt moved and writhed like a worm in pain, splitting into a dozen separate strips before compacting into pitch-black tendrils.

  It seemed Darkstar had had enough. The golden knight Darius and skull-faced Irkalla had withstood his orb’s direct attack, so he’d decided to get creative.

  But this degree of control exceeded all I’d known of him, all that had been known publicly about the Jannacht’s villainous alter. His orbs could push and pull at selected targets or over wide areas, but only ever in one direction per orb. And as in my battle with him earlier in the Jannacht Wars, him needing to put in effort to control them should’ve limited the number of orbs to perhaps a couple dozen at a time.

  Not hundreds at a time, nor cycling through them so quickly.

  As Darkstar’s asphalt serpents attacked the Guardian and the head of Dead Hive, I felt the urge to join in and attack him, but resisted. They’d lasted this long, and even if I managed to distract Darkstar, it might break the alliance of convenience between Irkalla and Darius.

  Crowsong’s fight had moved off the now-stripped-bare road and onto the less-destroyed curb, the battle continuing as if nothing had happened.

  I flew there and, as per doctrine, calculated a trajectory toward Charoniskos’ back. Crowsong spotted me flying behind him and started an intense assault, burning out the last of her energy to occupy the villain. Likewise, without knowing why, Darion followed Crowsong’s lead and slashed and hacked at the villain whenever he could as well.

  Charoniskos went fully on the defensive. His longmace moved like a staff rather than the hunk of summoned steel it was, blocking the strikes aimed at dismembering limbs or fingers while enduring those meant to gouge and maim.

  Then, as I adjusted angle and shifted to base form, Crowsong yelled, “Back!” at Darion. He moved out of the way in an instant while Crowsong made one final swipe of her war-cloak before letting go of it, entangling Charoniskos' arms in its metal web. With Darion now understanding what was going on, he threw his sword like a javelin at the villain, piercing through his calf and shin.

  Fearing what was about to happen, Charoniskos turned around but fell to one knee as his shin cracked and broke fully under the strain. Desperately, he tried to lift his mace to either hit or block me, but Crowsong’s cloak held and tied them down.

  I shifted into a rhino the second before the impact.

  Two thousand kilograms of meat and bone crashed into the villain at nearly fifty kilometers an hour. Strong though the man might be, Charoniskos was no match for such a force. He crumpled instantly.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  But a rhino was never meant to fly.

  As I hit the pavement behind the villain, my own weight and momentum pulverizing my knees. The first pavement tiles shattered under the weight of my body, while others were thrown up as my body continued to slide, leaving a ditch behind. At last my chin smacked into it the earth, meeting resistance strong enough to bend my thick neck and head downward. Nose and horn ground against earth until catching on something underneath. I heard my skull creak and crack as my head came to a near-complete stop in an instant.

  Yet my body continued on. My neck compressed as the weight behind me slammed into it, muscles and ligaments tearing as it did. My body lifted up using my neck as the fulcrum. Vertebrae cracked under the immense weight and power, threatening to break entirely.

  Waves of agony dulled by adrenaline and shock threatened to overwhelm me as darkness crept in from the edges, but in the last second before I faded completely, I shifted back.

  The burgeoning pain stopped growing and the darkness vanished in an instant.

  But that didn’t mean I was doing great. Phantom pain – the one true downside of my powers – wracked my body. My nose felt broken even though it was whole, and the empty space that had once held a horn felt bruised beyond bruised. My neck was simultaneously stiff and overly limber, any movement making my body scream not possible! Not possible! I put my all in repressing the urge to hyperventilate and cry out.

  “You have Strongarms?!” My dulled mind registered Crowsong's words, and I remembered where I was.

  Against my body’s desire, I put the knees my subconscious believed to be shattered underneath me and crouched, then lifted my upper body. I pushed up to one knee, put all my weight, will and power behind it to rise up.

  On trembling feet and with shaky knees, I stood up. The world spun and my eyes desperately wanted to close, but I resisted. After taking a few steadying breaths, I turned and walked to the origin of the voice, ready to help my mentor.

  Every movement I made helped my body realize it was not, in fact, dying, but it wasn’t instant. Muscles shook and spasmed. Bile threatened to rise up, and more than once did I have to spit out the bits that succeeded.

  But I continued to walk.

  Crowsong loomed over a body. Charoniskos, I presumed, and felt relieved that I hadn’t actually killed him, his death threshold high enough to withstand a falling rhino. Charoniskos was struggling against Crowsong’s advance, but it wasn’t the life-or-death one that it had been before. Instead, it was that of a criminal resisting arrest and failing.

  Darion was next to her, helping her hold him down. He’d handed Crowsong a pair of oversized, overly-complicated metal handcuffs – Strongarms, for when regular arms fail – while he held another pair of his own to restrain the villain’s legs.

  I joined their struggle, still dazed. Meaning that all I did was throw my body on top of Charoniskos, with him letting out a wet, gurgling hrgl as I did.

  Whether it was the edge they’d needed or I was just dead weight, I didn’t know, but they were done quickly after.

  Crowsong gently lifted me off of the villain. Once she’d put me on my back, her crowliness’ twin beak appeared in my field of vision.

  “Jester,” she said – twice in fact, her voice echoing strangely. Did I have a phantom concussion or something? Was such a thing even possible?

  “Jester,” she said for a third time, though now without an echo. Fingers snapped together in my field of view, drawing my eye. “Are you alright?”

  ‘Aftershocks,’ I tried to say – our term for this condition – but actually said, “Aphlterslocks.”

  “Aftershocks?” she asked. I nodded, the movement shocking to my mind even though my neck was perfectly fine. “Thank God. You’ve really got to stop doing those divebombs.”

  I would never, but I didn’t say that.

  “Dlarkstr?” I asked.

  She looked at me for a second in confusion, then turned her head. “Still fighting. Peakstar has arrived though, so it should clear up soon.”

  Peakstar registered something in my brain, but the fog was too thick.

  I cleared my throat. “Hlep meup?” I asked. I was starting to sound better; that was almost a correct sentence.

  She nodded and I felt two pairs of arms lifting me from under my elbows. I quick glance to the side revealed Darion. “Hey,” I said to him, words coming out clear for once.

  “Hi,” he returned strained, young voice echoey in his lamellar helmet. “Thanks for the help, by the way – both of you. Don’t know if I would’ve lasted much longer.”

  I smiled at him. Then I remembered I had my mask on, so I gave him a thumbs up instead.

  The battle the further into the street had taken on a new form. Darkstar’s asphalt serpents lay to the side in broken apart or melted into steaming black puddles. Now, Darkstar’s orbs had turned defensive, focus purely on bending away Peakstar’s beams.

  Dozens of purple orbs altered the course of dozens of differently-colored beams, then those shots bent back as Peakstar adjusted them to Darkstar’s power, only to then be turned away again by Darkstar for the second time. A constant tug-of-war about who would eventually decide where Peakstar’s beams end up, both sides evenly matched.

  At the same time, other orbs were summoned to pull at Peakstar herself. The heroine would shift into light, freeing herself from Darkstar’s hold, yet in doing so allowing the villain to more permanently remove her attacks from the field of play. Then Peakstar transformed again and casted new beams, returning to the same dance as before.

  This process made their fight looked like hell to get involved in. A rainbow-colored spiderweb of deadly rays with little room for anyone else to get through.

  Irkalla and Darius must’ve figured the same, since their truce had broken down. They had turned on each other, Irkalla hounding Darius by shooting cone-shaped blast of graying fields that sapped all color, all energy and, eventually, all life from whatever it hit.

  But Darius in his gold-plated, self-made maker-tech armor was too nimble to get caught by the blasts. He and his jetpack zoomed around the villain like a bee, taking potshots with a kind of miniature rotating gun. Unfortunately, none of the projectiles came even close to hitting the villain, disintegrating into dust as it hit an invisible death-field centered on Irkalla. The same field likely prevented Darius from getting in close.

  Seemed that besides being a caster, Irkalla was an alter as well. Something I hadn’t known about.

  “Should we help?” I asked as our viewing stretched on.

  “How?” Crowsong argued. “I’m dead tired, and I have nothing to reach Irkalla or Darkstar anyhow. Darion is both wounded and has the same problem as I.”

  “I can-” I tried.

  But was predictably cut off. “Like last time?” Crowsong said. “Darkstar will just chew through your forms now that he knows it won’t kill you – if you can even get past the lightshow at all. And then you’ll have the same problem as us.” She looked me up and down. “Besides, you don’t look that hot yourself.”

  I grimaced. It was true, but still. “So we do nothing?”

  “We’ve done what we should have. We’ve secured-” She gestured toward Charoniskos, lying surrounded in a pool of his own blood; Snorkel, struggling against his restraints; and Acute Puncture, still tied to the pole we’d left her at, “-their juniors and wait for backup.”

  “Speaking of…” a joyful voice spoke. Startled, I turned around, the movement sending tingles down my neck and spine along phantom fractures. “Have no fear! Reinforcements have arrived!”

  Bizz-Buzz struck a triumphant pose with his chest out and his fists on his hips. It looked silly, doubly so with the bee theme he had going on.

  I looked behind him, beside him, and around us. There was nobody else there.

  “You’re it?” I asked.

  “Ouch, harsh much?” he said, taking a step backwards and clutching his chest. “I expected this from our broodier vigilante, not our friendly court Jester.” I’d bet he and Millie got along swimmingly.

  “ETA?” Darion asked.

  “Five minutes, give or take. Looming Thread and Needle Knight are coming by helicopter. If we can stall another ten minutes, Rostam and Tahminah should be here as well. Plus whoever the WCW scrounges up.”

  “That should be enough to take on Darkstar and Irkalla,” Darion said.

  “Irkalla is done for anyhow,” Crowsong interjected.

  All of us turned to look at the battle. Apparently, Darius had had a battle plan all along. The dust his bullets had left behind was starting to pile up, but more importantly, still had color in them. Even from more than a hundred meters away, I could see Irkalla struggling, hunched over and coughing as more and more of the colorful dust filled the air. She’d stopped casting at Darius entirely, only her alter death field protecting her – and dooming her.

  “Well, that’s good,” Bizz-Buzz said cheerfully, watching the spectacle. “Maybe we don’t even need-”

  In the midst of his sentence, the battle between Peakstar and Darkstar took a dark turn – literally, as the entire area they’d been fighting in was suddenly devoid of all light. What was going on?

  “Shit,” Crowsong said standing up. “Bizz, go to Acute Puncture! I’ll secure Snorkel!” She rushed off.

  “Huh?”

  My eyes widened, the memory of our previous fight with him coming to mind. “Darkstar’s-” I tried to explain, but it was too late.

  Up above us, racing towards the dark void like a missile, was a light post with a screaming Acute Puncture attached to it, followed shortly after by her maker-blade. Then, trailing behind her, there was the hog-tied Snorkel soaring through the air, though at least he managed to keep his panic to himself – that, or he was knocked unconscious.

  All of us watched in stunned silence as it happened, knowing we could do nothing about it.

  Ten seconds later, the field of darkness vanished, the entirety of the Jannacht disappearing along with it.

  “Not again,” I whined. Acute Puncture had escaped us twice now, and Darkstar had robbed us of a clean victory twice as well. I did not like the pattern that was starting to form.

  “Well,” Crowsong said, patting me on the shoulder as she returned to my side. “At least we caught one this time.”

  I looked at the mess that was Charoniskos, but found little to enjoy.

  X

  Cleanup arrived. Questions were asked, reports were given, civilians calmed and first aid administered wherever necessary. Charoniskos and Irkalla were taken away, restrained and airlifted to whatever prison the Guardians kept masked in.

  It was an odd kind of victory, I found. This was the Jannacht Wars, and yet we captured the ones who fought to force them out of the city. It made me remember the conversation we had with Blazin in the trainyard. About how we should cooperate rather than fight against each other.

  They were still villains though; I held no regret refusing him, or with capturing Charoniskos.

  “You certain neither of you want to come to headquarters?” Peakstar asked, voice deep, melodious and… inspiring? It was overly and overtly heroic. Though the odd disorienting effect her visor had kind of ruined that image. Was this like what that veil did back at Rennie Island after the bridge incident? Millie’s had that one as well, though it’d vanished after she unmasked. “I was informed you both got along with LieSpy rather well. Besides, you two could use a change in clothes.”

  It was true; Crowsong and I were quite dirty, and I was soaked through and through from the fight with Snorkel.

  “No thanks,” Crowsong replied tersely. “Once was enough, and I’ve already met her twice.”

  Peakstar frowned – visibly, as she was only wearing a visor for face covering. I also remembered she was the one that ‘killed’ Samantha back in the day. Small city.

  “I liked her,” I said before Crowsong could sour the mood further. “But I need to get home.”

  Peakstar turned to me with a bright smile – literally, as her too-white teeth shone with incandescent light. Was she still partially in her shifter form?

  “Good to see your heroism stretches to the home front,” she said. “But before you go, I would like to pass something along to you: an invitation.”

  “Invitation?” Crowsong asked, no doubt narrowing her eyes behind her mask.

  “Indeed,” she said. “As you’ve seen – as you are seeing, the Jannacht are escalating. So in turn, the side of the angels have to escalate as well. As you’ve probably already noticed, cooperation between the Wardens and Guardians have been going a lot more… smoothly, as of late.” Both Crowsong and I nodded in response. “Well, we’ve decided to extend similar offers to the vigilantes.”

  I looked to Crowsong, waiting for her response.

  After a few seconds, she said, “Alright. When?”

  “Next Sunday,” Peakstar said.

  The ninth of November then.