The burning blue shield vanished in an eyeblink and suddenly there was a bowie knife clutched in the Cendral’s hand. Jakob gave the blade a quick twirl, then drove it through Mohawk’s palm, pinning his hand to the floor.

“If you want to keep the rest of your body parts,” Jakob said coolly, “you should just lie there and play dead.”

Mohawk grunted weakly and made no further move to retaliate.

Honestly, it was one of the most lopsided fights I’d ever seen. Like watching a toddler go all out in a no-holds-barred fight against Mike Tyson.

In less than thirty seconds, the hulk was nothing more than a lumpy sack of bloody meat with a badly misshapen head sticking out like a hitchhiker’s thumb. He was still alive, however, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why. Obviously, Jakob could kill the man in a heartbeat if he wanted to, yet instead he seemed to be playing with him. Jakob was looking down on the battered and broken Mohawk in pity or disgust. Maybe both. Then he sighed and tsked.

What a shame, that expression seemed to say.

I fully expected Jakob to put the man out of his misery, but instead he turned back toward the entryway, where a lone enemy still remained. Croc had killed one Brawler, and Face Tattoos was dead and thoroughly butchered not far from Temperance’s furry white feet. Her boots and outfit were splashed with bright scarlet arcs of blood, which made her look even more feral than before. Croc was splayed out on the floor, a pool of sticky blue liquid spreading out like a halo.

The mimic had reverted into its true form—a nauseating mass of tentacles and eyes and too many mouths—and didn’t seem to be breathing.

I felt cold panic as fear grabbed me by the throat.

Was he dead?

No, couldn’t be. I refused to believe it.

Croc had endured so much; there was no way he’d go out like this.

Then, just when I was about to give up hope, the dog that wasn’t a dog took a ragged, hitching breath and I caught sight of its Health bar. There was just a sliver of red remaining, so small I’d almost missed it entirely. But Croc was alive, though for how much longer, I couldn’t rightly say.

The last of the Red Hand thugs was loitering not far off, though he wasn’t in much better shape than Croc. He had one hand pressed against an enormous hole in his side and half his face was just… missing. As though it had been burned off by acid. Which was probably the truth, considering that was the douchebag I’d hit with Drain-O Bolt.

Jakob slowly made his way toward the man but stopped a few feet away. “This is the part where you run very, very fast and reconsider all of your poor life choices while you do so, verstanden?”

The color drained from what remained of the man’s face, and he nodded frantically. Then without saying a word, he turned and sprinted back into a connecting corridor before the Cendral could change his mind.

“That will cause no small number of headaches, I expect,” Jakob muttered, watching the man’s retreating back until he disappeared around a corner. With a resigned shake of his head, the tower shield collapsed in on itself until it wasn’t much larger than a circular metal frisbee. He slipped it from his forearm and hooked it to his belt with practiced ease.

The lizard man bent over and scooped Croc into his arms as though the rubbery mass of tentacles and eyes weighed no more than a small child.

Meanwhile, Mohawk was stirring on the floor.

His red skin had faded away and he’d shrunken down considerably, though he was still enormous. The catastrophic damage he’d endured was even more apparent. The man’s face was a colorful mosaic of blacks and blues, intermixed with splashes of red. Although the white, bone-like spikes had disappeared, they’d left a legion of deep lacerations in their wake. With a weak groan, Mohawk managed to prop himself up on his elbows and crane his neck toward the approaching Cendral.

“Please, let me go,” he wheezed, his voice weak and the words dripping with desperation. “I’m Hudson’s right-hand man. You spare me and I can get you anything you want. Anything. You just name it. Loot. Relics. Women. Whatever.”

Jakob growled at the man, the sound emanating from deep in his chest. “Quiet,” he hissed. “I will deal with you in a moment.”

“Or I could just deal with him now,” Temperance said.

She leapt upward and sprinted across the air itself, closing the distance between her and the Mohawk in five long strides, never touching the floor once. I’d seen the gunslinger perform a similar feat during his battle against the Monarch, so it must’ve been a fairly commonplace Relic. She landed on Mohawk’s chest and buried her cleaver right in the man’s skull, splitting his head nearly in two.

Mohawk was dead before Jakob could take two steps.

“Verdammt, Temperance,” Jakob said, though he sounded more exasperated than angry. Almost as though he’d expected nothing less from her. “Why did you do that?”

“Because I knew you wouldn’t have the testicular fortitude to do it,” she replied, standing.

“I believe the correct phrase is intestinal fortitude,” Jakob corrected.

“I know what I said,” she replied, jerking her cleaver free. She regarded its bloodied edge, then casually banished the streaks of crimson from the blade with a flick of her wrist. “We both know you weren’t going to kill him, so I took care of the problem for all of us.” She paused and stared down the hallway where the other thug had retreated. “You should’ve let me kill the other one, too.” She pressed her lips into a thin line of disapproval.

“You know, there are places in the world where not murdering people indiscriminately is actually considered a virtue,” Jakob replied flatly.

“And none of those places exist inside the Backrooms,” she fired back. “The man you let live? He’s going to bring back others, and they will not be inclined to show you the same courtesy.”

“I cannot control the decisions or impulses of others,” Jakob said, shrugging his shoulders, “only my own. But your point is well taken, which is why we’d better mop things up here and get moving rather quickly, don’t you agree?”

“What about him?” Temperance asked, waving her cleaver toward me.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about him,” the Cendral replied. “You take care of the corpses, I’ll take care of him.”

I didn’t much like the sound of that.

Stolen novel; please report.

Jakob took one last long look at the dead brute, then sighed in disappointment and made his way toward me with Croc in his arms.

His black boots clicked softly on the tiles as he walked.

I braced myself, resigned that this was probably the end for me. I hadn’t stood a chance against Mohawk, and Jakob had just ripped him a new asshole without breaking a sweat. He could probably kill me with an aggressive fart from across the room if he wanted to. Especially since my HP was under ten percent and I couldn’t move my arms or legs.

“Just let Croc go,” I croaked out as the Cendral drew closer. “He’s a good boy.”

Even speaking that much felt like running a marathon up the side of Mount Everest. While dragging a dump truck. With flat tires.

Jakob snorted, little puffs of smoke lazily drifting up from his nostrils, then dropped to a knee beside me. He set Croc gently on the tiles.

“I am not here to kill you or your pet—”

“Not a pet,” I barked, “a friend.”

“Sehr gut, your friend, then.”

“Will he be okay?” I choked out through sheer force of will.

“Mimics are versatile and resilient creatures,” the Cendral replied. “He will need time to recover naturally, but he will be fine. I would be more concerned about yourself.”

He grimaced, evaluating me through hooded eyes. I felt a cool chill wash over me and knew he was scanning me—though what sort of information he could glean, I wasn’t sure. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be able to see the Emblem tucked away in my Spatial Core, or I was a dead man walking.

Not that I could walk.

“Looks to be some sort of Bone Splinter effect. Nasty business.” He rubbed his chin, then reached into his coat and pulled out a pair of items. The first appeared to be a small tin of shoe polish and the other was a bottle of Zima. Probably one of the very elixirs I’d sold him a few days earlier.

“I’ll need to realign your skeletal structure before I heal you,” he said, his yellow, reptilian eyes boring into mine, “or you’ll be irreparably crippled for the rest of your short and unfortunate life.”

He unscrewed the tin and scooped out a glob of black polish, which he smeared across my forehead without any fanfare or ceremony. The stuff smelled strongly of almonds, and it felt oddly refreshing against my skin. Jakob spread a little of the goop along his own forehead, then sealed the tin and stashed it back in his leather jacket. “Brace yourself, this is going to hurt like a bitch, as you Americans say.” He pressed a scaly hand against my chest.

I found it hard to believe that whatever he was about to do could possibly hurt worse than having half of my bones turned to dust in the first place, but as a wave of power flowed into me, I realized I’d been so, so wrong. A swarm of angry fire ants crawled beneath the surface of my skin, acid burbled through my veins, and it felt like someone was breaking and rebreaking my bones a thousand times over all at once.

The world trembled around me and black crept in along the edges of my vision.

I was right on the edge of passing out—which honestly would’ve been a blessing—but then it was over, and the pain passed as abruptly as it had begun. My HP was still pitiful low, but it had finally stabilized, and I could suddenly move my limbs again.

Jakob pulled away, suddenly looking drained and sickly. Bright lines of crimson and black sludge leaked from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth.

“You okay?” I asked.

He waved away my question with one hand, then took out a linen rag and began to mop the gore from his face.

“Just one of the side effects of that particular Artifact,” he replied with a scowl. “It’s a transference salve. Unpleasant, but effective.” He lifted the Zima and popped the cap with a thumb, then pushed it into my palm. “Now drink.”

I accepted the bottle with a trembling hand. “Seems like I owe you a debt of gratitude,” I said between gulps of delicious refreshing Zima, the number one bone juice on the market. “Though I’ve got a few questions. Like how the fuck did you find us? And also, did you throw a fucking couch at that guy?”

Jakob grinned then reached up and affectionately patted the barrel of his bazooka as though it were a beloved pet. “Sofa launcher,” he said by way of explanation. “Most of my Relics augment strength or physical resilience, so it’s always good to have a little ranged support. As to how I found you…”

He dipped his fingers into the pocket of my bathrobe and pulled free a tiny bit of red yarn. A matching piece of yarn was wrapped around one of his fingers.

“I planted it on you back in the store,” he said. “Between the Twinning string and my own racial abilities, it was easy enough to find you.” He paused, staring at me with unnerving intensity. “I’ve been following you for several days now.”

My eyes narrowed and suddenly the scaly Delver was a little too close for comfort.

“That doesn’t exactly fill me with warm and fuzzies,” I said, voice hard. “You saved our ass, but it’s sorta offset by the fact that you’ve also been stalking us for the better part of a week. I guess my question is, why? Why follow us at all, especially if you aren’t planning to murder us and loot our bodies.”

“You don’t have to worry about him killing you,” Temperance interjected. “He doesn’t kill anyone. He’s a pacifist, isn’t that right, Jakey?”

“I told you not to call me that,” Jakob replied, glowering at her over one shoulder. “And I’m not a pacifist in the strictest sense of the word.” He waved at the battered Mohawk. “I will remind you that I did break both of his legs and remove one of his hands.”

“Plus the knife thing,” I added.

“Plus the knife thing,” he agreed.

“But you would have let him live,” Temperance said, “because you just don’t believe in killing.”

“I don’t believe in killing Delvers,” he corrected. “Which is fine since you enjoy killing enough for both of us.”

“Someone has to do it,” she said, idly twirling her baseball bat.

“That still doesn’t explain why you’ve been following us,” I pressed.

“The answer is not so sinister as you might think,” he replied after a brief pause. “I was simply curious about you. It should come as no surprise that I didn’t entirely believe your story. Which is why I followed you. Watched you. To see where you would go. Who you would talk with. I fully expected to see you liaison with one of the sovereigns’ emissaries. Which sovereign I wasn’t sure, but one of them, certainly. Imagine my surprise when I turned out to be wrong.

“For several days you explored this floor, leaving your survival tips and bits of Twinning string. But no one ever came for you. Even still, I was not convinced. Not fully. Not until I saw this.” He reached into his coat and drew out the caricature sketch. There were droplets of blood splashed liberally across the paper. “It seems you weren’t lying about being hunted by the Skinless Court.” He tossed the wanted poster toward me and it flipped and fluttered to the ground.

“But that still didn’t explain why you chose to help Temperance, here,” the man continued. “You risked life and limb in a hopeless fight to save a person I am certain you have never met before.” A thoughtful look flashed across his face. “I couldn’t make sense of it. What does he have to gain by doing this? I asked myself as I watched you fight a battle you surely could not win. But I could think of no reasonable answer. And then it occurred to me. You were helping because you believe it was the right thing to do.”

“And that’s why you saved our asses?” I asked, choosing my words carefully. Self-proclaimed pacifist or not, this guy could still mop the floor with my intestines if he wanted to. “Because we helped out some rando who was about to have her ears cut off?”

“Among other things,” the Cendral replied. He stole a sidelong look at the barely recognizable corpse not far off. “As I told you earlier, I have no great love for the Aspirants of the Court. And, as an added benefit, this gave me an opportunity to prove to you that I wish no harm on you or your strange companion.” He ran a hand along one of Croc’s tentacles.

“I’m sure you will have more questions, but perhaps those are best left for later. As Temperance so insightfully pointed out, the man I let go will likely return with reinforcements, and their leader, Hudson, will not be so easily dealt with as this lot. Best we not be here.” He turned an eye toward Temperance, who was crouched over Mohawk’s corpse. “Have you looted all the bodies?” he asked.

“Is the Pope Catholic?” she called back, standing with a strange Relic clutched in one hand. It looked like the bright red skull of a demon. She disappeared it through space and time, presumably depositing it into her own personal storage space.

“Very good,” Jakob said, helping me to my feet.

Even after the salve and the Zima, my muscles were still sore and my joints felt oddly tender, but my legs were steady enough to keep me upright. I bent my arms a few times and flexed my hands, just to make sure everything still worked, then I bent over and scooped Croc up, cradling his rubbery body against my chest.

A bleary eye blinked open at me from the mass of Eldritch limbs, then a mouth hole spoke.

“Dan?” the voice asked, hardly more than a murmur. Even though the thing in my arms didn’t look like Croc the dog, it had its voice. “Did we do good?”

“Did great, buddy,” I reassured it, squeezing the squishy mass tightly against me. It should’ve been gross but wasn’t. Croc may not have been human, but it was my friend—multi-mouth orifices and all. “Now let’s get you back to the shop.”

“Just promise me one thing, Dan,” Croc whispered again, its voice ragged.

“Anything, buddy.”

“Please make sure Princess Ponypuff doesn’t watch me sleep. It’s super creepy. Also, I’d like more Froyo.”

I snorted, rolled my eyes, and made my way for the nearest door. “You got it, buddy. You can have all the Froyo you want.”