On the way to the rest area, once Tanya had asked Nathan about it, the Millionborn shared the not-entirely-fascinating details of how he’d handled the several moments of fighting against the shadow spawns.

“I spun Saucer,” he explained simply, putting action to words. Saucer obligingly became a slender web of darkness and hunger, stretching only a few inches away from Nathan as it whipped around him in utter disrespect for the laws of physics. “It ate the shadows as they spawned.”

It had been precisely as simple as it had sounded; he’d killed the second set of shadows with a spinning sweep of something not entirely unlike a glaive, and then he’d sat down and casually spun a web of ravenous death which had disrupted the summoning of the shadows around him and feasted on the glimmering motes of power which would have comprised them.

“The nicest thing about it,” he said after a moment, “is that it was… easy. I mean, also that it fed Saucer a nice sack, but I think there was so little power in the shadow things that it didn’t really make a difference. But I was able to relax a little and just watch the two of you. Though I really wasn’t able to keep track of what you were doing when you really got moving. How did you do that?”

Tanya shot a look at him which he was completely incapable of interpreting, but which, if put into words, could have been described as you are the absolute most asexual person in the world if you were watching both of us instead of just my partner, who is not only supernaturally beautiful and was radiantly enjoying herself, but is also divinely attractive in the most literal of senses. “You are,” she said bluntly, “the most asexual fucker in the multiverse. I can’t imagine anyone having their eyes on me instead of Honey when she’s all tarted up and jizzing lightning all over.”

“You think I’m pretty,” the wizardess in question murmured in a delighted sing-song voice. “Yay.”

“Yes, dear,” Tanya said with quelling fondness. “I think you’re pretty.”

“I’m sure she is,” Nathan agreed easily. “But you’re right. I used to think it was something that was wrong about me, a way that I was broken. Then I decided that everyone else was just weird and into something weird.” He shot both of them a faint smirk, failing to keep a straight face. “Which is fine, of course. People being weird about something is valid.”

“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes, indicating the other door out of the summoning chamber which had brought Nathan into the level of the Layer of the Eternal Endless Multi-Dimensional Megadungeon which she and her lover had been delving, and which had also contained a squad of undead which Nathan had fought the tail end of. “Get the door, yeah?”

“Sure.”

“You know,” she said a moment later, stepping through the doorway behind him, “you’re awfully trusting for someone with a weapon that’s way cooler than mine. Have I mentioned that I hate my sword? Do I get your shit if I kill you? It’s not like Honey’s, y’know, mentally here, and I was the one who voted to kill you instead of teaming up.”

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“Oh, I guess that’s true.” He shrugged, unbothered by the suggestion that she might have intended to murder him against the previously and explicitly declared preferences of her partner in order to loot his corpse. “I literally couldn’t see you move, when you were fighting that thing. If you wanted to kill me, I figured you’d just… do it?”

“Spoilsport,” Tanya muttered.

“I like him,” Honeydew giggled airily. “He knows you’re just a big softie. Biggest! Softiest! Also soft,” she observed distantly. “Warm. Cuddle blanket!”

“Yes dear. We’re almost there.”

“You don’t, by the way.” Nathan paused a moment, looking back at Tanya as she stepped over the threshold into a sprawling, sepia-toned near-perfect snapshot of a high school science lab, except with all of the equipment in glass-fronted cabinets ten feet up in the air. One of the faucets was dripping into a sink, and one of the buckets was upside down at a different station, but otherwise everything was lifelessly immaculate. “Don’t get Saucer,” he clarified when the others looked puzzled. “It’s a, uh. PROTEAN PRIMORDIAL LIVING SOULBOUND GLORIOUS ETERNAL ULTIMATE GROWTH WEAPON, SHIELD, ARMOR, AND UTILITY CHEAT ITEM.”

“Ow,” whined Honeydew as the intonations of the incanted words grated at the fabric of the universe, feeling momentarily as though they were going to tear apart reality. “Ow, ow.”

“Please don’t do that again,” Tanya said politely. “Also, what the fuck.”

“Uh. I… what. I was just saying—” Nathan stopped himself just in time, owing largely to the fact that he had become allergic to the word just in his thirty-and-some years of life. “You know,” he said grudgingly, “I think I became allergic to the word just somewhere along the line. It’s the most useless word. Like, all it says is ‘I am going to invalidate everything’ or whatever.”

“Why does he speak Primordial?” Honeydew roused enough to lift her head and shoot a piteous glare at the Millionborn whose incomprehensibly useful initial purchase of language superpowers had just almost destroyed her as a side effect of a side effect. “Even most of the Gods don’t speak Primordial. I don’t speak it, and I’m the best and prettiest and most amazing, so how is that fair?”

“It’s not,” he said with a smile mostly defusing the bluntness of his words, which was a strategy he had learned and begun to apply in his early thirties to increasingly good effect as he became less self-conscious about its usage. “Anyway, uh. Saucer is…” Nathan cleared his mind of Saucer’s actual name and description as best he could, trying to force his brain to think sideways about words which were nearly equivalent in surface meaning but completely different in implication and density of meaning. “Saucer is a thing which is morphic to the utmost, whose nature is of the same word as the language you just used, and is both alive and inextricably linked to my soul. It is very excellent, will exist forever, the absolute most awesome, and will continue to become stronger. It’s versatile and can be defense, offense, an accessory, or anything else including a mixture of all of those; and it’s total bullshit and I’m a fan of it.”

Saucer, agreeing, wrapped itself around his arm and squeezed lightly.

“Huh,” said Tanya, and that was the end of it as far as she was concerned.

Honeydew was asleep, and when she woke up and heard that description, it was very much not the end of it as far as she was concerned.