The trolls’ screen-like skins melted under my watchful eyes as the broad breath of fire washed over them mid-rush. They hadn’t expected it and honestly, neither had I. One moment Nick only watched them barreling toward him; the next, his face shifted into the snout of a red drake. Scales crawled across his skin, his nose elongating, his jaw stretching, rows of teeth blooming along upper and lower gums. Then he opened that new maw and spat pure flame straight into the oncoming wave.

  They sizzled and staggered forward on leftover momentum, their bodies still trying to run while their tendons were already losing the structure to obey. Charred meat slid from bone, dripping onto the ground beneath them.

  Then he leapt.

  Through the eye I’d painted on his forehead, I saw it in first-person: the surviving trolls clustered behind the one that had taken the brunt of the blast, and Nick crashed into them with an arm already reshaped into the scaled musculature of a young wyrm. He tore through them one by one. It didn’t matter that they swarmed him, clawing at his back, trying to slip under the armor to reach soft flesh. It wasn’t enough. Not when he carried the power of the drake.

  The group Peter took on didn’t fare any better. He let me see through his point of view too, and at first it was just three trolls he’d managed to sneak up on. He moved far more methodically than Nick. Maybe because his powers were still new, still settling into him, but he wasn’t any less lethal.

  He seized the first troll from behind, grabbing both its arms and wrenching them backward as he planted a foot squarely between its shoulder blades. Blue-white shadowlight surged under his skin, veins glowing like cracks in ice, and his muscles swelled with sudden power. The strength came on so fast it seemed to snap into existence, and in the same instant he ripped both limbs clean off. He hurled them behind him like discarded branches and kicked the troll forward; it skidded across the concrete with such force that it carved a trough through the dust and debris.

  Blood spun in the air. Droplets flung free from the severed limbs and Peter caught them within his aura. They hovered, trembling, then coiled around his arms in thin red ribbons as he advanced on the remaining two.

  The blood twisted faster.

  He struck the next troll with a sharp, precise punch. In that exact moment, the droplets snapped forward with violent acceleration, slamming into its eyes. The hit came so fast I couldn’t tell whether its vision blurred under the wash of fluid or whether its eyes burst outright from the pressure.

  A quick pivot. Another punch.

  The last troll hit the ground with a wet, concussive crunch. Bones collapsing, its screen-skin fracturing beneath the impact. Peter stood over it for a heartbeat, shadowlight still flickering around him.

  On the shattered skin, a single word blinked in jagged letters:

  Cheater!

  He didn’t linger long. Peter wiped the blood from his forearms with a flick of his Authority and sprinted toward another cluster of trolls detaching themselves from their computer-trees.

  Liora wasn’t idle either. He streaked between solitary trolls like a bolt of lightning, slipping in and out of solidity just long enough to latch onto unsuspecting targets from behind. His claws sank into their eye sockets, and with a savage twist of his hind legs—each tipped with long, hooked talons—he tore their heads apart. Any troll that strayed too far from the main group met the same fate, all while he served as an extra eye for me to see through.

  While the boys kept up their mayhem, I worked on something bigger. Bait for the kind of monsters we were hoping to draw out. Nearly an hour later, I was putting the last touches on it: a wide floor mural, metallic and intricate, the kind of thing that had become second nature to me in both armor and weapon… except this time the purpose was purely lethal. Beautiful death, laid out in paint and shine.

  I shook the last two cans, stepped back, and admired the gleaming pattern still drying on the concrete. Peter arrived just as I stood.

  “Wow,” he breathed. “You outdid yourself. The resemblance is uncanny.”

  “You think so?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Exactly like the photos. You really think it’ll be that deadly?”

  “I think so. Light and sound leave the images just fine, so this should too right? And as for the other part… it depends on what we’re trying to catch. But by Ideworld standards?” I shrugged. “It should be attractive enough.”

  “It’s pretty shiny,” he said with a thoughtful nod. “Now that your trap is done, want to join us in the melee brawl? I think Nick got too into it.”

  “Well, he did have that drake steak ready for our second shot at Solitary Twin and never got to use it.”

  “He says it tasted ‘mildly tolerable,’ even with his family cooking talent.”

  “So probably tasted like absolute crap,” I laughed, stretching my arms out. “Yeah, I’d actually love to get up close and personal with some trolls.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  And together we sprinted straight back into the fray.

  Peter veered toward a larger cluster gathered on a forum-like platform, where trolls sat plugged into thick electrical cords that snaked upward into the computer-trees towering above it.

  I, on the other hand, rushed toward Nick, who was getting angrier by the second, smashing his fragile opponents left and right. Watching him in that storm of violence, feeling the weight of his strength and precision, all I could think was how much had changed in just a few weeks.

  “No!” Nick roared, drowning out the trolls’ whispered you sucks and all their other pathetic insults. He swung wide, and two oncoming trolls had no time to alter course. His massive, scaled fist unfurled into an open palm, claws the size of my head arcing out. Cut clean in half, the pair rolled across the floor in two separate pieces.

  Nick braced with his other hand, pivoting and bending his body with inhuman fluidity, driving an uppercut straight through the torso of another charging assistant.

  The fourth would-be attacker never reached him.

  I slid beneath Nick’s striking arm, summoning Ghostflame with a flick of will into my right hand, the blade angled along opposite to my thumb as I drove it deep into the troll’s thigh. Shocked by the sudden lack of motor functions in its leg, it toppled forward just as I turned and flicked a steel card into the back of its skull.

  “Are you done with the trap?” Nick asked right after spitting a brutal breath of flame at three more trolls. Their flesh sloughed off in seconds, the bodies staggering a few more steps before collapsing into wet, charred heaps.

  “Yes.” I answered. My right leg was still extended from my slide, my left braced behind me for support. I planted my left hand on the ground, making myself a tripod, and raised my right arm forward with middle finger pointed like the barrel of a gun.

  The nuclear-reactor painted on my arm answered my intention instantly. The military-grade laser painting on my finger manifested a thin, furious beam, and for the briefest second I swept it across the ten or so trolls rushing at us.

  The air sizzled with ozone. The smell of scorched meat and melting glass drifted through the cavernous concrete. Trolls lost arms, legs, entire torsos mid-stride, collapsing in shredded pieces along the floor, along with parts of concrete flora caught in the wake.

  “Woah,” Nick breathed, wonder creeping into his voice as I rose to my feet.

  “It finally attracted bigger fish, Nick. Get ready.” I told him, even as my attention snapped to Peter finishing his end of the skirmish. One more troll caving under the sheer force of his punch.

  And that’s when they noticed us.

  Through Peter’s viewpoint—through the eye he’d let me paint—I saw them first: three giants pushing their way above the concrete-trees behind the forum. They were similar in height and posture, but each carried different hair, different faces, different shapes of muscle and fat wrapped around colossal frames. Yet all three held the same massive hammers, resting on their shoulders as they shoved the towering trees aside.

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  “Three giants incoming!” I shouted, vaulting onto a troll’s shoulders. I squatted for half a heartbeat, then drove Ghostflame into its neck. With arteries severing in a hot rush I kicked off and landed hard beside Nick. “Follow me!”

  We sprinted toward Peter’s position. With all the shadowlight links running from me to my various paintings, and the extra eyes painted onto my hood and the guys’ foreheads, the whole concrete jungle unfolded around me like a living, real-time map.

  “Three?” Nick asked. His face was already shifting back. Scales retreating under the skin, draconic muzzle folding into a human nose and mouth, eyes sliding into their proper places. “We taking them one-on-one?”

  “Let’s do this!” I yelled, leaping ahead between two concrete trees. I kicked off one trunk, caught an oncoming troll by the head, used the momentum to spin around its body, and then stopped dead, redirecting all that force and hurling it deep into the forest of pillars.

  “Show-off,” Nick called. “I’d do the same if I were as small as you, rabbit.”

  “Sure you would,” I shot back, matching his pace as we rejoined. We reached the forum just in time to see Peter finish an unfortunate troll with a punch so heavy it sent a shockwave through the stone beneath him. The ripple ran up his arm too. His skin shimmering with small, vibrating rings of shadowlight.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked Nick as we closed in. “The transformations?”

  “Some of them,” he admitted. “But I bet it’s nothing compared to what Peter just did to that poor bastard.”

  “He had it coming,” Peter said as he straightened up, and only then did I notice the concrete-like droplets and ribbons floating around him, caught in the pull of his powers. “He was very vocal about what he’d do to me if I…” He paused, glanced at me, and shook his head. “Nevermind. Not repeating that.”

  He turned toward the three giants. “One for each of us?”

  “That’s what we thought too,” Nick answered, already shifting his weight forward.

  I focused on the giant farthest to the left. It was the smallest of the three. It still was massive though and stood roughly sixty feet away like the others. While the boys exchanged a look and sprinted toward their chosen targets, I raised my hand and steadied my breath, lining up my laser finger on the creature’s head.

  Its skull bobbed with each thunderous step, rising and dropping in a slow, heavy rhythm, but I tracked it carefully. Then, with a tiny flick of will, the beam snapped to life, connecting the tip of my finger to the giant’s eye.

  I dropped down as my soul protested the strain. The first laser shot I had supported myself with an arm and two legs; this one I tried to deliver with flair, while standing upright, and it bit back. Still, the giant I hit snapped his head backward from the impact.

  I watched him closely while Nick turned mid-run to see what I’d done. I’d hoped the beam would kill him. Drill a hole right through the head. Of course it didn’t. This one was made of much harder stock than the trolls. When he finally leveled his gaze back toward me, half of his face was a melted ruin. His left eye was simply gone, replaced by a smoldering crater, but the other one, bloody red and burning with fury, locked straight onto me.

  He hitched up the belt holding his oversized shorts, tucking it under his sagging belly, and then accelerated, almost breaking into a run. He grabbed the hammer with both hands and dragged it behind him, sparks skittering from the concrete.

  Did he really expect me to just stand there and wait? Amateur move. I’d never wait.

  Instead, my attention flicked to Peter. He had gone for the middle giant and was already sprinting between its legs to get behind it, as it smashed the hammer to the ground, with a ring that reverberated through the surface. I found the eye painted on Pete’s forehead inside my aura and turned it into my anchor. A heartbeat later I was appearing on his shoulders, using them as a springboard and dropping down behind my own target.

  “What the—,” Peter said, stumbling half a step before regaining his balance. “This teleportation needs, like… a warning sound.”

  One of my thoughts flickered to Malik as he’d said something almost identical not long ago.

  My other brain stayed anchored to the fight, holding me centered and sharp as I sprinted toward the giant I intended to bring down.

  As I closed the distance, I grabbed a handful of eye-cards and thrown them out in quick succession, planting them in a loose ring high around myself and the giant. My vision blossomed outward—third-person angles sliding into place—letting me watch all of us from above and behind at once. In a fight with opponents this size, that kind of perspective was worth its weight in gold.

  Peter, meanwhile, engaged his own giant with the steady rhythm of someone who fought by calculation rather than fury. Barely a moment after regaining the balance I’d thrown off, he lunged forward and seized the massive shoe the giant wore. With both hands clamped around it, he surged power through himself—water-strength filling his muscles—and yanked. Hard. Hard enough to rip the giant’s leg right out from under him and send the colossus pitching face-first into the ground.

  Even as the behemoth fell, Peter was already shifting. He redirected most of the water in his body to his legs; the muscle there swelled, dense and powerful, and he launched himself upward. He shot high enough to land on the giant’s shoulder as it crashed down, catching himself by a single stray strand of its tentacle-hair. When another of those tentacles swept up to grab him, Peter let the concrete water swirling around his arms whip into motion, spinning so fast it blurred into multiple saws of pressurized liquid.

  It looked spectacular, but it was also lethal. The spinning water sliced clean through the reaching tentacles with surgical precision.

  Nick, on the other hand, took the straightforward approach.

  The first thing Nick did was pepper the giant with fishbone quills from a safe distance. He flung them in volleys, shaking his arms in sharp, practiced motions as fresh quills grew in to replace the ones he’d fired. The giant responded with a furious sweep of its ban-hammer, trying to swat them out of the air.

  But Nick’s face had already shifted, his features sliding back into the scaled, sharp contours of a drake. He spat a stream of thick, fiery liquid at the hammer’s handle and the colossal hand gripping it. The stuff clung like napalm. Flames bloomed instantly, racing up the giant’s palm. A heartbeat later the weapon’s head thudded to the ground, the charred handle dropping away as the giant clutched its burning arm with a howl that sounded like an entire wolf pack suffering at once.

  That was when Liora decided to join the fight. He darted around the head of the giant Peter was battling, drawing some of the hair-tentacles’ frantic swipes toward himself. Each time one tried to strike him, Liora slipped into pure shadowlight, phasing straight through the attacks and reappearing somewhere else in a blur of rainbow shimmer.

  With the attention split, Peter made his move. He vaulted onto the giant’s head and began hammering down on its skull with brutal precision. The concrete-water that had been swirling around his arms moments earlier condensed into overlapping, spinning blades around his fists. Each punch tore away fragments of skin, muscle, or hair, sending them flying. As soon as blood joined the mix, spurting with each brutal impact, Peter caught that too, weaving it into the cyclone already encircling his fists.

  It was a deadly dance, each strike weakening the giant, each drop of blood feeding Peter’s strength.

  I, on the other hand, circled my opponent. Showing myself just long enough to hook its attention before vanishing behind it with a quick repositioning. These giants weren’t exactly masterminds. From the start it was obvious that all they cared about was swinging their hammers, smashing trolls, or smashing us. Even the hair-tentacles whipping around their heads seemed to have more tactical sense, choosing their targets with a weird, twitchy intelligence the giants themselves lacked.

  So I took advantage. Step by step, taunt by taunt, I herded my giant toward the one still staggering from Nick’s assault. Nick wasn’t nearly as nimble as Peter. He stayed grounded, close-range, spitting flame when he could. But even from a distance I could feel the strain in him. His soul was strained from supporting so many transformations and effects.

  And though the giant he fought was now weaponless and desperately cradling its half-burned arm to keep it from tearing off entirely, it was still alive

  I intended to change that.

  With a quick leap and another off the giant’s leg, I slipped between the two beasts. Despite its massive size and slow wits, my giant was quick to react, tracking me with a hammer swing I dodged by sliding to the side. I flicked two steel-edged, fire-kissed cards into its beard the moment its hammer dipped low. It tried to swat them away, but with only one good eye it couldn’t judge their path. The cards vanished into the matted tangle of hair and it caught fire.

  Enraged, the creature lumbered after me. I darted beneath the legs of the one Nick was still burning, giving him a quick wave as he retreated, flame sputtering. I summoned Ghostflame again, carving rapid jabs and slashes into the giant’s leg, each cut leaving a thin, hungry glow.

  That was when Peter’s giant finally crashed to the ground, its skull half-caved, a sliver of its tiny brain exposed. Peter launched himself off its body with water-charged legs, an arc of motion too fast for the eye to follow, and landed hard on the shoulders of the weaponless giant.

  His jump and my cuts made the beast lose its balance, allowing me to move from between its legs, shining the light beams on top of my knuckles to attract my own toward my position. He followed in suit, making a rage-fueled run, that ended , when he ran straight into his falling comrade.

  Peter jumped off of the giant as those two hit the ground, one on top of another. Liora already above them, where my other brain asked him to be through the link with Anansi, served as an anchor point for my teleportation.

  I appeared at Lio’s position in the air, Equinox already in both my hands, its barrel pointed straight down at the two giants lying tangled atop one another.

  A single flicker of thought nudged my Authority into the stabilizers along my arms.

  A second thought-strand let me twist my body in freefall. Arms angled downward, legs spread just enough to drag at the air and slow my descent.

  In the split second all this aligned, I took aim and pulled the trigger.

  “Night’s might!” Noxy’s call rang through my mind as he inhaled the darkness around me, drinking the shadows until nothing but a raw, pale canvas of undimmed light remained.

  That light raced along Equinox’s frame as the coils hurled the bullet downward into an executioner’s verdict cast like the wrath of a small god.

  The resulting sonic boom tore through me. My bones buzzed. My muscles clenched. My arms jerked upward with the recoil, and Equinox ripped free of my grip. My personal calamity.

  But below, a greater one bloomed.

  Both giants slammed deeper into the stone under the force of the shot, then bounced up slightly as the impact recoiled from beneath them. Blood and shards of bone erupted skyward in a grotesque geyser that clawed its way toward me.

  I caught Noxy within my aura and sent him home just as I blinked to Nick’s position, appearing beside him while he stared at the devastation unfolding below.

  “It’s on its way,” I said. “It’s flying here.”

  Through the eyes painted on my hood, I had seen the winged reptile above and as if answering the thought alone, the drake loosed a roar that shook the caverns.