The egg-spider-mech crashed into the grass, and Nathan kept running.

Tiffany was ahead of him, he said to himself by way of self-justification. And they were apparently teammates, and wouldn’t it be rude to let her down by not covering her back?

Of course, Nathan was fully aware that he had no competence at fighting even compared to a trained baseline human, much less a six-foot-tall muscled demi-lioness who could run fast enough to get pulled over on the freeway while still having a steady enough heartbeat and breath to fire her weapon with verve and precision. He was also strikingly lacking in any belief that he had a duty to engage in chivalry directed towards someone whose life he had already saved and whom he had no real attachment to.

He did not, however, have any better tactical options for the apparent duel to the death—or temporary death—in which he had found himself engaged. So he charged into battle some distance behind his ally without anything so coherent as a plan.

The Flatlanders wasted no time in beginning to fire a wild array of weapons. Everything from fantastical lasers which left lingering bars of color in the air and wailing plasma rounds moving slow enough to dodge to bullets, arrows, and rocks fired from slingshots flew, almost all of them towards Tiffany. She disdained such absurd trivialities as dodging, instead accelerating to throw off some of their aim; the rest, she ignored as their impacts battered her and toasted her ineffectively.

Enough of the cavorting geometric figures had leveled their weapons at Nathan that he had no time to worry about her, not that he was inclined to do that in the first place. Unlike his companion, he did not have anti-ballistic sympathetic resonance between his skin and his nanotech bodysuit; unlike her, he did not have fur which cushioned against minor impacts such as a hundred-Joule strike from a slung stone. He could not casually catch arrows in flight, nor throw them back as they crackled with electricity while alternatively boiling and freezing anything that touched them.

All Nathan had was a mounting degree of panic, a fading disorientation and dissociation that was keeping that panic at bay, and a soulbound artifact whose value eclipsed that of the median universe.

Reader: do not misunderstand, this is a wild underestimation of the artifact’s value. The median universe contains nothing; it is a blank canvas, a void whose only use is to act as a heat sink for those whose desire to vent energy overcomes the fact that doing so is a fundamental act of violence against the universe they are operating in. It may detract from this exercise in context that a list of such people is a nearly complete mapping to those who grow or wield power, but nonetheless, there are an infinite number of such universes even for every iteration of the infinite material universes.

A median universe is effectively without value. Nathan’s gifted equipment is almost similarly without value, but only in the sense that one cannot place a value upon it—and so Nathan’s story arc does not end here, in an ignominious death so early in the game show.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

There were, when this digression began, twenty-one geometrical figures standing, prancing, wriggling, or otherwise showing signs of life through motion and signs of enmity through the use of ranged weaponry. There were also seven armed with melee weapons, jagged sawtoothed cuboids and cylinders festooned with fractal paintings.

Eighteen and six of those, respectively, were focused on our still-discombobulated protagonist’s ally as she shrugged off the incoming fire and drew her sword. That left three and one to face Nathan—and with the invaluable help of his soulbound piece of precursor magitechnology, for that is what the so-called PROTEAN PRIMORDIAL LIVING SOULBOUND GLORIOUS ETERNAL ULTIMATE GROWTH WEAPON, SHIELD, ARMOR, AND UTILITY CHEAT ITEM was, the four of them would deeply and in some cases momentarily regret their estimations of appropriate force allocation.

In fact, the living equipment in question treated the combat as though it were an opportunity for a tutorial.

Step this way, the visor informed Nathan. Now that way, but faster—too slow, it informed him with a blast of red as it intercepted a bullet. It ate it out of the air as it navigated him around an arrow, had him drop to his knees as a blast of lightning coursed through the air with a crackling auroran aura. It exhorted him to his feet and spun him as the knife-wielder threw a blade which snapped out of existence and returned to the thrower’s hand as soon as it missed its target, and it bade him shift the vector of his motion suddenly to avoid an arrow.

It did all of these things with nothing but iconography. Nathan had played a very large amount of Spaceteam with symbols-only mode on, and he quite reflexively interpreted icons in ways that imputed relatively vast amounts of information given the tiny size of the visual itself. A flashing figure on its knees flashing first green and then yellow? He knew what that meant deep in his bones, or perhaps the intelligence behind his current audiovisual input was able to derive exactly the iconography best suited to conveying meaning to him as a first-order, causality-reversed query.

This may have been NP-Hard, but since it was older than most universes, partially made out of literal magic, and completely impossible, there really should be no surprise that it was capable of hypercomputation—and remains so; dear Reader, it will outlive this tale, your sun, and the last useful energy of the very last quark in your universe to possess such.

But we digress.

However willing the spirit and however accurate the instructions, the flesh was not capable of following the last maneuver. Nathan’s feed skidded on a vine and his arms cartwheeled as he nearly lost his balance, and the arrow he’d been instructed to dodge went cleanly through his shoulder.

“Motherfucker!” he screamed, which was somewhat inaccurate—but while an exchange of scurrilous gossip with regards to the Flatlander social dynamics and the equivalents to surrogacy and step-parents would enlighten any reader who was limited in their awareness to only one clade’s habits, the margins of this text are too narrow to contain it.

The visor returned to its monocular configuration, adjusting its magnification to avoid a recurrence of Nathan’s previous migraine. It flowed down his arm as he closed the last few feet of distance to the group of trianguloids, and it tickled the space between his fingers as it formed into an absurd battle-claw just in time for him to grab the teasingly telegraphed stab coming his way.

As was proper for an overpowered piece of equipment, particularly in this stage of the narrative, it ate the knife and tore the wielder’s life force asunder, casting it away in a bright arc of blood-black. And Nathan’s other three foes, for a brief, stunned moment… stopped laughing.