Luci had a single second to turn and see the forest stirring. The next second, something dark burst from the undergrowth. It had no legs, eight spindly arms, held an expression of perpetual curiosity, and she was certain it wanted to rip her head clean off her body.

A quick scan of her internal rolodex of things-that-would-kill-you-faster-than-you-can-meld-a-gust-of-wind proved this to be a monkilyx. It had company. Lots of company.

Luci’s training took over and she started melding. She formed a ball of whim, wrapped threads of conform around it and her body as quickly as she could, then blasted it off with a pulse of blame.

She’d dropped her staff before from the shock and scrambled to pick it up before the monkilyxes struck. She clutched it close to her heart, feeling relieved at its touch.

When she looked up, she met the button eyes of a monkilyx. It was propped up on three of its arms and staring down at her. The rest of its arms were reaching wide to enclose around her. Luci screamed and tugged on her thread.

With a grunt, she was yanked backwards and went sailing through the air. The monkilyx’s arms snapped shut at the last moment, catching and ripping out a strand of hair that had fallen from her cowl.

Luci soared through the air for a few seconds, screaming the whole way. She released her thread and the ball of whim dissipated with it. She drew closer to Wip. Just as she started falling, she burst liquid ease out of her body.

This meld was the most inelegant she’d ever used. Instead of creating a cushion beneath her, she curled herself into a ball and wrapped herself in a soft cocoon. She was too scared to think.

She hit the floor and bounced. The cocoon took most of the blow but still winded her. She’d forgotten to create breathing space and her vision, on top of spinning in circles, was covered with dark spots. Still, she held on, constantly pumping out ease to keep herself safe. She bounced again and again. When the cocoon squished and didn’t bounce again, she rolled across the dark clearing, holding her breath until she thought she was going to pass out.

Then Luci couldn’t hold on anymore and release the meld. She hit the floor hard and came to a stop. She took in a huge gulp of air. Her head was spinning. Her stomach hated her. The air going into her lungs brought her vision back, along with a reminder that she was in danger! Groaning, face flat to the floor, she clawed her way up with great effort.

Then something grabbed her by the scruff of her neck. Luci yelped as she was lifted off the floor. She swung with her staff in a desperate panic, thinking it was a monkilyx. It collided against a quarterstaff, one that was red and twisted like a bonsai.

“Nice swing, but that won’t hurt a monster.”

The world was still spinning in Luci’s vision, so it took her a few seconds to realise it was Wip that was holding her up. With one hand, no less. She let out a sigh of relief.

“Mr. Wip, what are we supposed to do?” she yelled through laboured breaths. “There are too many of them and I don’t think I can—”

“Okay, here’s the plan,” Wip said calmly. “You’re going to catch them, and I’m going to whack them.”

Luci’s head whipped around. Monkilyxes were pouring in from every direction. Hundreds of them—no, there had to be thousands of them, if the rustling of the jungle beyond were any indication.

“Are you insane?” she screeched. “There are too many of them. We have to run. Oh, we can’t. We’re surrounded. A teleporter, maybe? You don’t happen to have one in your backpack, do you?”

Wip released her collar and Luci collapsed onto the floor in a heap. “Less talky; more fighty,” he said.

Luci picked herself off the floor. She saw the monsters closing in, making sharp zigzags as they moved. With no other choice left, Luci took a deep breath and focused on her soul.

“I—I’ll do my best,” she said.

Wip nodded. He pointed the end of his quarterstaff at the nearest monkilyx. “Alright, staff thing. Expand!”

The staff did not expand. Rather, it caused Wip to blur in the direction that he pointed. Given that the afto was warped, the end was a little crooked and Wip’s aim was a metre off. He compensated by spinning on the ball of his feet and whacking the monkilyx with the back end of the quarterstaff. Green ichor spattered out from the monster and sprayed Wip before it went flying back into the jungle.

Luci watched him in awe for a few seconds, then remembered that she would soon be paste herself. She gritted her teeth faced her palm up.

First, she formed a ball of whim. Rather than solidify it into a meld, however, she gripped it tightly with invisible, unformed enma from her soul, through her hand, and into the ball. Then, using her unformed enma, she rotated the ball—the anchor, it was called—around her. The enma emerging from her soul disconnected from her hand, but despite this she had no trouble controlling the anchor. This was a unique property of her path: so long as her enma orbited her, she could control it as though it was in her palm.

The orbiting anchor was pushed further and further away. With each metre that it separated from her, the anchor spun faster until she could barely see it. Now came the hard part.

Maintaining the orbiting anchor, she melded into her palm once more. This meld wasn’t easy given that it used two of Luci’s weakest forms. However, she had enough conform to compensate. She started by melding the net out of conform in her hand. Next, she stuffed needles made from torment into the middle of the net. Finally, she placed a solid lattice inside the net which was formed from urge, then strung the base of it up with tensioned strings of blame infused into conform threads. At once, she compressed it and the meld locked into place, forming the bazelbind net. It looked like a glowing, crochet sunflower in her hand, with a tangle of dark spikes in the middle that formed its disk.

Taking a deep breath, Luci looked up and searched for the nearest monkilyx. She nearly peed herself when she realised that just twenty or so metres away from her, the monsters had formed a ring around her and were closing in. The only reason they hadn’t completely overwhelmed her was because Wip was beating them down one at a time. He’d flash in, splat it with his quarterstaff, then move on. However, he wasn’t dealing with them fast enough, and the ring was slowly, slowly closing in on her.

There was no time to worry about that! Luci tracked one of them and waited until it reached the orbit of her anchor. As the anchor wasn’t fully melded, it could pass right through anything that wasn’t forged from enma and soared harmlessly through the monkilyx’s torso. She waited a second for the anchor to come around again. When it did, she grabbed the bazelbind net with unformed enma and swapped it with her anchor.

The moment she released it, the net unfurled. It burst up and out like a flower, right over the monkilyx she’d dropped it on. Then, once it reached its full length of nearly ten metres, its urge lattice snapped. The meld slammed shut like a trap jaw, catching the monkilyx and dragging it into the middle, where the torment needles waited.

Torment was a strange form and generally didn’t manifest physically. Therefore, when the monkilyx struck the needles, they went straight through but didn’t penetrate the monster’s flesh. What they did instead was pin the monster’s limbs in place. Unable to move its body, the monkilyx collapsed to the floor, trapped. The net then vanished to nothing, leaving the monster exposed.

An instant after the monster hit the floor, Wip blurred up beside it and clubbed its brains out—or whatever green soup the monster had in its skull—with his quarterstaff. Luci had no idea how he moved so fluidly with that oversized backpack.

After swapping with the bazelbind net, the anchor had fired off in an elliptical orbit around her, sweeping back within arm’s reach. She adjusted the orbit then set up another bazelbind net. This one took eight seconds to make. Two monkilyxes were getting close on her right. Luci spun and, panicking, swapped the net too soon. The monkilyxes dived to the side and the net missed both of them.

Stolen story; please report.

A second later, Wip blurred towards one of the monkilyxes and sent it flying. He then ran over to the second and slammed it against the floor, killing it instantly.

“Idiot,” Luci berated herself. “You have to do better. You’re the Daughter of the Waxing Moon!” She looked to her staff. “Just use it, idiot. That was the whole point in coming here.” She gritted her teeth. Her hand holding the staff trembled.

She couldn’t do it. She tore her gaze away and continued fighting as best she could.

Luci threw one net after another. About half of them missed. The ones she did never caught more than one monkilyx at a time despite their size.

After five minutes of this, Luci’s body felt heavy and she was struggling to keep her eyes open. Bazelbind nets, plus the orbits used to place them, took a lot of work. With fear causing her heart to race and her breath to come too quickly, she was wearing out.

Each subsequent bazelbind net was taking longer and longer to make. The monsters, however, were pouring in with no end in sight. If it weren’t for Wip running a cyclone around her, Luci would have been dead within seconds.

Eventually, she released the orbit and decided to sling the decaying monster corpses at other monsters. It was macabre, but her mind was too addled to care about such things. This meld only required a bit of blame and conform and was much simpler besides.

If Luci was useless before, she was deadweight now. She missed almost every single throw. The monkilyxes moved too erratically. Unlike the instant placement of bazelbind nets, the corpses she threw moved far too slowly. She just couldn’t hit the nimble monsters. She needed to throw them harder. She needed more enma! No, she needed a bazelbind net large enough to capture a hundred monkilyxes. She had a way to do that.

“Just use it, idiot!” she panted. “Look at this situation. You’re nothing but a burden to Mr. Wip. Do you want to spend your whole life failing and running away from your mistakes? Then use Lunacogita!”

She gritted her teeth. With a grunt, she ripped the sock off the end of her staff.

The staff’s head was shaped like a crescent moon. The metal it had been forged from, oxium, hummed with an ethereal silver glow. Just like the moon, it didn’t emit its own light but rather reflected light. Eight aftocores dotted the staff’s crescent-shaped head. From bottom to top, they represented the eight phases of the moon—a crescent, to a half circle, to a gibbous, to full circle, then back again. The topmost orb, representing the new moon, was as black as an abyss. Only the bottom three cores glimmered while the rest were dull. Those were the only three she could bind with at her level.

“I’m sorry for taking so long, Mr. Wip,” Luci said. “I won’t hold you back any longer.”

She pulled away a layer of the staff’s coverings, then gripped the oxium shaft firmly. Luci took a deep breath then reached out to it with her soul. The connection was instantaneous. Her soul, once somewhere near the centre of her gravity, was now above her as well. Two souls, one orbiting the other, one larger and one smaller. Yet they were both one. They were both her.

And with two souls, the amount of enma she could meld had gone up by a couple orders of magnitude.

There were monsters surrounding her. They were well within her orbit. And, looking closely, they were all weak. A smile split Luci’s face. She thrust her staff towards the incoming horde.

Silvery torrents of conform burst from the staff’s head. The sheer magnitude of it made her whole body thrum with energy. A roar was in her ears. A radiance was in her eyes. She felt weightless. She felt alive!

With little effort, Luci controlled the torrent of enma with even more unformed enma as easily as she moved her own body. She wrapped it around the nearest monster. With a flick of her staff, the monster bulleted off into the jungle where it landed with a crash.

Luci stared at her staff, her mouth twisted in amusement. Then she covered her mouth as she tried to contain her laughter. A few giggles later, her head was rolled back and she was cackling madly.

“What? It’s that easy?” she howled. “You can’t be serious. Did you seriously think that I, the Daughter of the Waxing Moon, can’t kill a few of these weakling monsters?” She bent over from a wave of laughter. “Oh, Mother—Mother, watch me. Watch how easy this is.”

Monsters closed in on her. She looped threads around one of them and squeezed until goop oozed out of its flesh. Then she spun the monster around her, smacking it into anything that tried to pass through its orbit. She repeated this with a second orbit, further away, then a third, creating a triple defensive ring.

While maintaining the orbits, she picked up one monster and slammed it headfirst into the stone floor. Luci grinned at her handiwork. It was like squashing fruit, both in result and in how easy it was to do.

She took another monkilyx then flung it right up into the sky. She squinted upwards and watched it soar higher and higher.

“Surely there has to be a ceiling there,” she thought aloud.

There wasn’t, and the monkilyx fell and splatted onto the stone floor.

“Huh.”

She flicked another one up even higher this time, just to be certain. It came crashing down all the same. Luci shrugged, flicked her staff, and smashed another monkilyx into the ground.

One of the orbiting monsters finally disintegrated, opening a gap in her defence. A monkilyx snuck in and charged up behind her. Luci only noticed at the last second. She pointed Lunacogita over her shoulder and torrents of enma poured out, gripping the monkilyx like a vice. She spiked her enma, squeezing the monster harder and harder, until it popped like a blister. Luci’s eyes bulged as the dead monkilyx’s goop burst out towards her. She quickly melded a rough barrier made from blame to push it away.

“Ew, these things are so gross!” she said, before returning to her slaughter.

One by one, monsters were squashed or pummelled or flung to all corners of the dungeon. There was no elegance to Luci’s actions. She overpowered them. She had no need to do otherwise. Brute force was the fastest way to dispose of anomalies, and it felt amazing to do so.

Then one of the monsters resisted when she tried to squeeze it. Luci’s grin twisted in confusion. She tried to sling it instead but it wouldn’t budge, feeling as though it was heavier than a mountain.

“A strong one, huh?” she mused. “Please, don’t even bother. I haven’t been giving it my all.”

She spiked her enma higher than ever. Her body felt heavy from the effort. She spread her legs and braced herself. With all her might, she tried to swing her staff. But the monster wouldn’t budge. Through the tempest of enma humming in her ears, Luci heard the monster scream. She howled back.

Something red and quick burst from the monster. It ran down the mass of conform that Luci held it with. Before Luci could break the meld, the red thing slipped into the tip of the staff then vanished from sight.

As though someone had flicked a screen on, visions started playing in her mind.

Blood. The taste of silt and iron in the air. An eyeball dangling from its socket. Her own voice reverberating in her head, Vesi! Vesi!

Luci dropped her staff with a gasp. With the connection broken, the power that was rushing through her vanished in the blink of an eye. She sunk to her knees and cupped her hands over her mouth. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes.

“Vesi,” she whimpered. “I—I didn’t mean to…”

She blinked away a tear and that was when she saw the “monster”. Except, it wasn’t a monster at all. It only had two legs and two arms, and it had a large canvas bag strapped to its back. It laid face down on the floor, unmoving.

With morbid realisation, Luci’s breath caught in her throat.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. It happened again. Mr. Wip, I didn’t mean it. Please, stand up—”

The “monster”, Wip, thrust his hands out and pushed himself off the floor. A shuddering breath escaped Luci as Wip stood up and brushed himself off. He scraped up his quarterstaff from the floor. A monkilyx ran up to him and, with one hand, he smacked it so hard that it burst into a green goop.

“He’s alive, Luci,” she breathed. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

With a flash of electricity, Wip rushed over and skidded to a halt in front of Luci. The look he had in his eyes was harsh. She’d seen them before, when her mother had seen what she’d done to her sister.

Scared, filled with guilt, she crawled towards Wip. She abandoned all reason and pressed her head to the floor in a kowtow.

“Mr. Wip,” Luci managed through her sniffles. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m a fool. I’m a pathetic, stupid girl. If you wish to punish me for what I did, I’ll gladly accept. I deserve as much and more.”

She risked a look up at Wip. He wasn’t looking at her. In fact, he was staring right over her. That was fair. Luci didn’t even deserve to be looked at. He raised his quarterstaff. Luci’s eyes bulged. Then she closed them, laid her head back onto the stone floor, and whimpered. It was fair. This was what happened when she failed in her duties—she wore that failure on her skin.

Lightning cracked through the air. The staff wooshed.

Thwack!

Luci didn’t feel any pain. That realisation got her thoughts ticking. She looked up. A monkilyx flew through air behind her, then landed in the distant forest. Gaping, she turned back to Wip. He was grinning ear to ear.

“Wow, that was pretty amazing,” he said. “You sent, like, thirty of them flying. That’s more than twenty!”

Luci stared at him with her jaw slack. “But… aren’t you angry? Aren’t you going to punish me?”

Wip scratched the side of his head with the end of his quarterstaff, which by this point was twirled like a wet noodle. It was clear the afto was completely busted, which meant that, for a while now, he’d been using it like a club.

“Actually,” he went on, “you probably shouldn’t attack your party members. That’s kind of bad. I think. Um, what are good manners for dungeoneers?”

“M-manners?” Luci stammered, trying to process her thoughts.

At that moment, the hoots and hollers of the monsters echoed around them. Wip spun and raised his staff. Electricity raced along it.

“Ah, I think I should deal with these things,” he said. “Now that I look at it, I think I might have overdone it a bit.”

Luci saw the monsters hop in from the forest. There were hundreds of them, and they’d fixed their sights on Wip.

“Wait.” Luci pushed herself off the floor. Her body weighed as much as a mountain. “Let me help. I can still be useful.”

Wip considered her from the corner of his eye. “Nah.”

“But—”

“It’s fine!” he said. “I’ve got plenty of aftos. I can deal with this lot, no problem. Too bad you won’t get to see me fight, though.”

“What do you—”

Wip kneeled down. He raised a finger and electricity crackled on the tip of it. He pressed the finger to Luci’s forehead and she dropped to the floor like a stone, unconscious.