Berra was moving before the barbarian shambler had finished its swing. She knew she wouldn’t get there in time to move her brother out of the way of the hit, but that wasn’t her goal. The best she could do for him was to take advantage of the situation.

She’d stripped while her brother had been killing the first shambler. As she ran her body began to shift. Despite the differences in their human forms the twins were almost identical in their Cloud Treader shapes.

If the shambler had had the capability for higher thought function it might have thought the same animal had suddenly teleported and it’d missed. It might have briefly felt confusion at the realization that this was a different goat altogether. Its confusion would have only grown deeper when the front of its head was nearly flattened by the horns of Berra.

The goat that was Berra back flipped through the air from the recoil of the strike, and landed beside her brother. Bab wobbled back onto all fours. His white coat dripped in red across his face. His eyes, like his twins, were placid.

Hecate was scared. She didn’t have much experience when it came to hand to hand combat. Her people were hunters and she’d been brought up to trap and strike from a distance. For her the path of the warrior could have been described as the path of the hunter with the way that her people walked it.

All of the life or death experiences she should have had were supposed to be on her terms, and the life in the balance should have never been her’s. But that wasn’t her reality anymore and she wasn’t a fool.

She was stunned when Bab killed the first shambler so easily. She felt a spark of confidence and acted on it, it was a good thing she hadn’t waited to see Bab go down.

Fae were known as a species to be tricksters but some were also known for other specific things. The woodland fae could feel the call of nature and manipulate it inherently. Hecate wasn’t one of the fae who specialized in this, those who did took the path of the healer, but she was good enough to sense the corrupted plant energy coming off the skull of the Shambler puppet and creeping through the body like rotten veins.

She couldn't touch that energy but as she’d watched Halus fight these plant possessed corpses, and Bab moments ago, she’d noticed that there was a pulse of energy in the skull where the plants were in control. She felt that same pulse again from the Shambler in front of her just before she reached it.

Hecate paused her forward run as if momentum was a suggestion. Her sudden stop through the monster’s timing and the rusted blade of its clippers whizzed past a foot ahead of her. The shambler had committed to the strike and the force of the swing was enough to almost turn the shambler around 180 degrees. Its head was open for a strike, but Hecate was weaponless.

Unlike the twins she couldn’t headbutt the heads of these things flat. Still, she’d thrown a punch before and knew how to do it. She cocked back and put her whole body into throwing as hard of a straight punch as she could. She should have known better.

It hadn’t been obvious beneath the strength of a giant or the head bashes from goat shifters, but the flesh of the shambler puppets was harder than it had any right to be. It failed to reach the fabled strength of Giant flesh but the skin of the shambler felt like hitting a tree. Unlike a tree, the punch knocked the shambler down.

Hecate’s knuckles ached from the impact but luck was on her side. The hit had been hard enough, and in just the right spot, to shake the plant making it briefly lose hold of its puppet and the puppet lost the clippers.

Ignoring her fingers, that she was starting to think might be broken, she grabbed the falling clippers with her good hand and stabbed the shambler through the skull. It took her a few attempts to pierce the tough skin but she managed it on the third try. The skull itself barely put up any resistance at all. The flower resisted even less and the shambler fell to its knees, unmoving, it’s strings cut.

A second level four shambler was on her before she could celebrate. It’d come from behind and struck her across the shoulder. She hadn’t seen the strike coming and as such hadn’t made any type of attempt at dispersing some of the strikes force. Her shoulder cracked before she was launched like an arrow back in the direction of where Shae and the Prince defended the guide.

Shae braced beneath the weight of the shambler. It weighed more than she had expected but it wasn’t enough to stop her from manhandling the corpse. Her giant's strength, even with it being less than most of her race, was all she needed to catch the shambler as it slid out of the maze wall.

Despite being caught the shambler still tried to nip at her from above with its rusted tools. She squeezed down with the intent to crush the thing in her arms. It proved harder than she’d hoped it’d be but it was still possible. With a grunt of effort she felt the bones of the Shambler shatter. She dropped the twitching thing and moved to defend her Prince from the Shambler that was grabbing at him.

Before she got there Hecate hit the thing. It would have been funny if the fae woman hadn’t screamed in pain and horror at the crunch of the impact. Based on the way she hit the ground the sound of bones snapping had come from her body, not the shamblers.

The Prince didn’t miss his opportunity. The Shambler that Hecate had hit was down and from the looks of it the collision had knocked the flower around enough that it had briefly lost control. The Prince, not willing to take the chance of it getting back up, two feet stomped on the head. He had to repeat the action a couple times before the skull gave way. He then did the same for the shambler Shae had broken.

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While he worked he blocked out the sounds of Hecate’s crying. She was in so much pain but there was nothing he could do about it. He had been trained in medical knowledge when he’d told his parents that he wanted to be a healer but all of that knowledge of his kingdom seemed to depended on him being able to bend ether to his will.

she would have to suffer for a bit longer.

The twins were being pushed back by the barbarian shambler. The monster had been able to regain its feet when the other shamblers stepped in to take on the two shifters. Together they managed to take out another of the level fours before finding themselves only a few feet away from the prone forms of Hecate and Guide Halus.

“You wanna help a bit more?” Bab asked. Shifters weren’t capable of speech as we know it in their shifted forms. Instead they were able to project their thoughts on the Ether and have it speak for them. Back home it had been a whisper, here it came across like Bab had spoken at the same volume he would in his human form.

The sarcasm got Shae moving. She’d been helplessly hovering over a whimpering Hecate. There was nothing any of them could do for the girl but she could help the twins.

——

Halus was having one of the worst experiences of his life.

The world stopped making sense the moment he took the skill, Split Mind. He'd felt a ripping sensation in his skull and then he was different. There was more than one of him trapped in his skin. To make a weird situation weirder, the two versions of him couldn’t agree on how to move.

One version of him wanted to roll to the left to get up while the other wanted to roll right, as a result he did nothing. One version of him tried to lift a hand to their head but the other version wanted to use that same hand to start pushing his body off the ground. The two versions of Halus were both him, yet they were contrary. On and on this went, two versions of him pulling the reins like his body was a child's toy to fight over.

Seconds turned to minutes. This fight for control was the most difficult thing Halus had ever had to deal with, even if the will was the same the two minds were contrary. The two were barely aware of the world around them. For a time the struggle was everything, but both sides of Halus were growing worried about his aspirants.

As if on queue there was a scream so filled with pain and anguish that it caused both sides of the guide to freeze. For the first time the two of them were on the same page and in that moment they knew they had to make this situation work for them somehow.

Halus and his charges weren’t from a cruel world, but he had seen his share of violence and even war as a child. In defense of his aspirants, he had fought monsters that invaded the mountains that the temple stood on. He had been trained to guide and in extreme cases defend his students from any that would harm them. Be it an assassin from a rival group, or in this case monsters.

One side of Halus reached out with his soul sense while the other opened the eyes of their body. He saw the world two times at once and found himself having the same thought twice over: His aspirants needed him.

There was a new type of shambler beating down on the twins. They'd shifted but his soul sense could still recognize them. Bab was bloody and still taking head on blows from the thing while Berra shot around more like a grasshopper then a goat. Striking from the sides when the monster was open. The creature had a defense that seemed almost comparable to the skin of a young giant, but Berra’s blows were making progress.

A few feet away from him, and the first thing he noticed when he opened his eyes was the bloody crumpled and shivering form of Hecate. Shae stood over the both of them, her gaze stuck on Hecate with a lost look on her face.

“You wanna help a bit more?” Bab asked. And the question looked to snap Shae back to reality, she was a warrior after all. She rushed forward to help hold off the other shamblers.

Now that both parts of him weren’t actively trying to steer the ship Halus was able to assign one version of him to control the soul sense and the other to move his body. Although he’d been split, he was still one man. Both sides of his mind were subservient to his single will and he leaned on that will to take back control.

His body moved to attack while his soul set out to defend his aspirants. Walls of hardened soul force blocked strikes meant for Bab before shattering and reforming to take a blow Shae would have gotten to the head. Before anyone could wonder what was happening Halus came crashing down on the Barbarian shambler with a haymaker that dented the head like an overripe melon. Instantly ending the things pseudo life.

While Bab and the other aspirants looked on with shock, Halus’ body kept moving. He spun to his left and crushed the spine of a shambler that tried to move past him towards Hecate, with a squeeze. He couldn’t have her getting any more injured before he could get the Prince set up to help her.

There were three more until Shae, in a mirrored move to his own strike, crushed the skull of the shambler she was facing. Berra accomplished the same thing with a headbutt led by her horns. Then there was one. The last level 4 shambler showed no signs of fear or trepidation as the twins advanced on it. It lashed out with fingers tipped in nails so long they could have been claws. It missed every strike, its wild swings throwing it off balance.

Bab stepped in and launched himself forward, he’d forgotten about the sudden coordination the things could show but Halus hadn’t. Just as the shambler tried to surprise Bab and knock him from the sky, a barrier of Halus’ hardened soul stopped the swing at its inception. The shambler’s face was as placid as the rest of them when Bab crushed its skull.

“We need to move on from here.” Halus said, surprisingly it wasn’t his body that spoke. Just like the shifters in their shifter form the half of Halus in his soul sense had imprinted its thoughts on the Ether to convey its message.

“What was that?” Shae asked, even as she ran to the side of her Prince and Hecate. The former already had a lost look in his eyes like he’d started going through notifications, while the latter had long since passed out from her pain.

The twins had turned back to their human forms and quickly dressed as the part of Halus in his body encouraged them to move faster.

His other half had taken full control of his soul sense in a way that he had never known was possible. Before, his soul sense had been like another appendage, fully at his beck and call like his own fingers. He used it that way to touch the world. Now, with part of his mind inside the soul sense he went from being able to feel the world around him to actually seeing it. And there was a canyon of difference.

That part of him watched the garden around them like a sentinel, waiting for something else to move as the group ran through the maze.

Halus’ body carried the broken form of Hecate as gently as he could at the speed they were going. With any luck the Prince had already taken the healer class.