I made a shitload of noise as I fled the wraith, but I didn’t care. I just moved.

Well, I also ate every one of the pearl beads in my domain. There weren’t enough to make a gold but I still saw an immediate effect:

Health: 27/57

Mana: 2/24

That was better. It wasn’t good, but it was better.

By the time I’d crawled through the tunnel and reached the exit leading into the kobold village, Tiral-ur’s screaming had stopped. I gave a little shudder then paused to check for Kathina in the valley, where she’d ben earlier. If she ambushed me again, she’d knock my health down to three before I even saw her. Then she’d knock it down to nothing.

This time, I needed to ambush her. I needed to get in close, inside her shield. She was badly injured already. She had to think that Tiral-ur had wounded me, or finished me. So if she was still in here, licking her wounds, maybe I’d have a chance.

Of course, the other possibility was that she was already chasing Usim, Wren, and Tansy from the Old City. If she still had the mana, she could levitate like fucking Magneto. She could made her shield lift her up the center of the lighthouse and deposit her on the higher floor. What if she’d already left?

Well, then I couldn’t do anything to stop her.

But if she was still here, I couldn’t let her leave. Partly because she was the most determined, most fanatical danger to Usim, but mostly because I’d made the decision already. She’d murdered that whipping boy. Usim’s friend. Lemmy. The one I’d made silly faces at back in the wagons.

And I didn’t know what had happened to my moral code since entering this world of floating islands, but I knew I wouldn’t hesitate to hunt her down and finish her. If you murdered a child, I did not forget.

Princess echoed in my mind.

Wow. I hadn’t expected her support about passing a death sentence on someone. Except maybe I’d been naive about that. Maybe some of my new callousness had come from sharing a mind with a born predator. She was sweet and silly and kind, and no stranger to death.

So I send her a feeling of agreement and determination as we scanned the valley.

There was no motion in the kobold village. There was still just one hidden kobold at level 2. No pile of bloody, frilled clothing where Kathina had laid, though. Just a bunch of corpses littering the ground at the steeple.

SUCCESS! Look at you, killing the indestructible man. Well, with a little help from a wraith.

REWARD: Expoi.

BIG NEWS! Level up. You’re a nine now. Just one more till you reach the next tier.

I immediately invested the point in Spirit because I kept almost running out. And the different was staggering.

Mana: 4/25

Yeah, not staggering in a good way. Still, it was something.

SUPPORT: With every tier increase, your abilities grow more refined.

“Refined how?” I thought.

SUPPORT: Increasingly efficacious. So twenty-five mana at tier two will last longer than twenty-five mana at tier one.

“Please tell me it gets twice as long.”

SUPPORT: That’s what she said.

I stopped and stared across the valley. What the hell? What in the absolute hell was that? C’mon. It wasn’t bad enough that I was hearing voices, and now they were making dick jokes?

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SUPPORT: Not twice as long, no. Not nearly. To her dismay. But noticeably longer. Even this magic, Alex, is not reducible to mathematics. Language is a gauge with which we measure magic, with frankly laughable imperfection; it is not a law the we impose upon magic. You must learn flexibility. What matters isn’t numbers, what matters is technique. Just as she said.

After I inwardly told the insufferable prick to screw off, its presence obligingly faded in my mind. With, I swear, the echo of a laugh. As Support receded, I caught a flash of movement near the lighthouse.

Among the corpses sprawled just outside the entrance.

One of them was moving. Oh, shit. Zombies!

It shifted and moaned, then rose to its feet with a filthy, staggering motion.

For second I thought: Okay, headshots. Headshots take down zombies.

Then I realized it was Kathina. Apparently she’d taken a little breather among the dead before continuing on toward the lighthouse. She looked bad. She was clearly out of gold beads. Her once-fine dress was in tatters, and covered in ugly stains. Her hair was wild and she dragged one leg as she walked. Right before she limped into the lighthouse proper, she turned to scan the valley and her faceted face was caked with blood.

I probably didn’t look much better, but I couldn’t let her recover and follow the others. So I slunk from the tunnel and onto the balance-beam of a fallen walkway. Kathina stood with her back turned in the lighthouse and I approached slowly, trying to develop an ambush plan, but I was out of ideas. Too much had happened too fast, so I ... I just kept approaching.

I thought.

She didn’t answer, exhausted from having puppeted me.

I stepped, balanced, stepped, balanced. Every second that passed felt closer to Kathina recharging her mana enough to chase the others. I needed to stop her but I didn’t know how. So I came up with my own stupid plan. Listen, sometimes you have to rely on your most fundamental strengths.

I heard myself yell, “Where was he from?”

Kathina spun toward me, still standing in the very center of the lighthouse. Too far to reach me with her shield ... and maybe too weak to start levitating. Or unsure if her shield could stop me after all her injuries.

I didn’t know why else she’d answer me at all, but she said, “Who?”

“Lemmy,” I called.

“The whipping boy?”

I kept walking toward her. “Where was he from?”

“He was from whatever unfortunate creature whelped him.” She paused to cough up some blood. “He can’t have meant anything to you.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said, and took another step.

“Stop right there!” she snapped.

I didn’t stop. I stepped forward and summoned a hatchet into my right hand. “Or what?”

“Or I’ll--” she looked around in a panic. “Just stop! Stop!”

With a flick of my wrist, I threw the hatchet at her.

Her shield sparked to life. Weakly. Still, my hatchet bounced off, and I recalled it into my domain. “Where was he from?” I asked again.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! Six Coves somewhere.”

I threw another hatchet, and she deflected it again. But still weakly--and I wondered if she had enough juice to stop me if I lunged for her.

So I took a step into the lighthouse, just a few yards from her. “What was his favorite food?”

“What?”

“Tell me Lemmy’s favorite food and maybe I won’t carve you into ribbons.”

“My uncle will kill you,” she spat at me. “He’ll kill you, then he’ll kill your family.”

“Good luck with that,” I said.

“He’s the viceroy, he will kill your cousins, your neighbors--everyone you ever shared a meal with.”

“You think Lemmy liked horses?” I asked, edging closer. “A lot of kids like horses.”

“Take one more step!” she shrieked. “One more step and I kill us both. Look at the floor, you bilious cretin. I will drop us. I will drop us both into the plague-ridden depths to die.”

So I looked at the floor, and yeah, the planks were cracked and teetering from Tiral-ur’s plummet and Wren’s jump. I guess that’s why Kathina had been sticking to the very center of the space, on the most intact-looking patch of flooring.

“I may be weak at the moment,” she told me, breathing hard. “But I’m strong enough for this. I’m strong enough to snap those broken planks in half. Then we’ll both fall. Why do you think I let you approach this close? Look in the empty spaces between the planks. That’s a long fall, human. That’s a deadly fall.”

She was right. So I froze there, trying to calculate if I could leap backwards outside of the steeple. But then what? I’d just stand there throwing hatchets at her while she recovered? I didn’t know how quickly she regained her strength, but she was a lot higher level than I was, so that sounded like a bad gamble.

“This is what’s going to happen,” she said, seeing the indecision in my face. “You are going to stay right there. One step in any direction, and I kill us both. I have nothing to lose, human. If I let you get close, I’ll die.”

“Screaming,” I agreed.

She took a shaky breath. “However, once I regain a little strength, then I’ll have everything to lose. I’ll have a chance to live, just a chance, and I’ll take it. I’ll retreat and we’ll both live another day. That is why you’ll let me leave ...” She pointed upward. “You don’t have leverage over me now, I die either way. I’d rather take you with me. So let me leave and ... we shall meet again. This isn’t the end between us. I’m a patient woman. I’m not claiming that I wouldn’t prefer to remove you before I go, but I won’t take that risk.”

“No?”

“Not today,” she said, with a cold smile. “However, if you somehow manage to return to the surface ... well. I know your weakness now, don’t I? Lemmy? He was a filthy nobody, just some wretched worthless child, and you pretend to care about him? I’ll line up a hundred Lemmys and kill them once an hour until--”

At that point, my keen strategic mind chimed in with a suggestion: “fuck that.”

And with a tactical plan, too: “fuck her.”

So I lunged forward, my hatchet already swinging, to end her before she shattered the floor underfoot. To take advantage of the slightest fraction of second during which she hesitated, to hack a chunk of brain from her skull.

There was only one problem: she didn’t hesitate.

Her shield buzzed immediately into place, but not between us. No, her shield appeared around us, surrounding us, but oriented inward. Electricity fried me and screwed my aim. My hatchet bit into her upraised arm and cleaved halfway through the bone and she howled and the sparks intensified and I felt myself losing control.

I turned to smoke and pushed outward, trying to flee her shield, but the sparks slowed me, and consumed my mana: 4, 3, 2, 1.

At zero my body reformed, two feet above the floor. Well, two feet above where the floor had been.

Because apparently Kathina really was ready to die. She really was ready to kill both of us. Her screams turned to whimpers as her shield cracked against the planks underfoot and shattered them.

We fell into the darkness.