The thugs hesitated. Wip waited for them. Flames had taken hold of the walls and furnishings. The room glowed an angry red. They were on borrowed time, but nobody wanted to make the first move. The question was, what did they fear more: Wip, the Cartel’s wrath, or the flames that threatened to consume them.

Luci’s tried to swallow. Her throat burned. Bile and ash mixed together in the back of her throat and she broke into a coughing fit.

Of all things, that was what signalled the start of the fight.

The first of the thugs lashed out at Wip with a sword. There was no way for his blade to reach as he was on the opposite side of the room, but Wip ducked anyway. From the blade’s tip, a rippling force projected outwards and missed Wip’s tuft of red hair by mere millimetres. It struck the wall, carving a line straight through it for the smoke to escape.

Not knowing what to do, Luci struggled to worm away from the growing flames. Wip leapt over her and charged at the man who’d slashed at him. The thug held up his sword in defence. Before Wip could land a kick, a shield made of rose-pink light materialised in the air between them. Wip couldn’t stop his kick in time and it slammed into the light shield.

The shield didn’t move, but the force Wip had generated was explosive. That energy had to go somewhere. It reflected straight back into him.

He was sent flying across the room, where another thug was lining him up with a bat. The thug grinned, thinking she was about to land the killing blow. She swung. The air where her bat had passed flashed a rainbow and oil sprayed from the tip of the bat.

“No, Mr. Wip!” Luci croaked.

The thug missed.

The thug blinked in confusion. She realised too late that Wip was beneath her. Wip twisted and launched a foot up from a crouched position. The thug blocked with her bat. That was a mistake.

Wip’s enma surged into the bat. With a spark of red electricity, he took control of the core and produced a bubble of oil that surrounded the bat’s length. In a panic, the thug waved the bat around, spraying oil all over the room which sprouted new fires here and there. No matter how hard she shook, however, the bubble didn’t shrink. Wip zipped sideways to avoid getting struck.

A spray of oil landed on a burning couch and caught alight. The flame snaked its way up the stream of flying oil until it touched the bubble that surrounded the thug’s weapon. All that oil burst into flame. The thug screamed and dropped the bat. Too late. The oil had gotten all over her clothes and she was up in flames in an instant. Screaming, she scrambled for the door, found the hole Wip had made in the wall instead, and climbed out. Four down, eight to go.

The thug’s screams carved a pit in Luci’s stomach. She couldn’t believe this was happening!

“Mr. Wip, please stop this,” Luci said. “I don’t want you to get hurt for my sake.”

Wip charged down another thug, dodging yellow beams fired by Flak. He gathered electricity in his fist and went to strike, when the shield of light blocked him again. This time he stopped before landing his strike, which caught him a shot to the shoulder from Flak.

“What are you talking about?” Wip said as he ducked under a sword slash. “These guys started it, not me. I’m not doing anything for you.”

He swept low and caught the swordsman. The man’s leg gave with a sickening crunch. Five down.

Luci would have thrown up again if she had anything left in her stomach.

“What are you talking about?” Luci cried. “Weren’t you only humouring me while we were in the dungeon? I was completely useless.”

“Nah, you were pretty amazing.” Another shield stopped Wip’s charge towards Flak, who was firing rounds so quickly that his gun was glowing white hot, threatening to curse him. “Do you remember what the helmet man said about the monkeys? He said that people use walls and shields to stop them and then attack from behind them. I asked Stella and she said this was true. You’d have to be stupid to try catching the monkeys because they’re too fast.”

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Green nails formed in the air next to Wip. They punched at his chest and Wip dived out the way just in time. As he did so, he caught a nail between his fingers. The rest dissipated once they slammed into the wall a few metres away, but Wip managed to keep this one materialised by sending a spike of electricity into it. The nail turned from green to red.

Flak fired another shot. Wip curved underneath the beam and flung the nail at him. It was blocked by another shield of light.

“In other words,” Wip shouted, “you were pretty good.”

Luci couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was good? The words sounded so foreign to her.

“So you,” she began, before breaking out into a coughing fit from the smoke. She cleared her throat. “You wanted me to be in your party because—”

“It’s fun!” Wip shouted.

He caught another nail mid air, aimed it at Flak, then twisted just before the throw. The light shield formed in front of Flak but there was nothing to block. The nail soared through the air and thwacked into the chest of a thug who wore an emerald-green gauntlet. In his flailing, green nails formed all around him and whizzed in random directions across the room. Six down.

Wip leapt to dodge the nail storm and landed on all fours. Luci squealed as nails splatted all around her. One of them missed her head by a centimetre.

“But I’m not fun,” she shouted. She strained to lift her head to get a better look at the fight. “I’m too serious. I take everything so seriously that I worry myself into a pit.”

“Nah, you’re plenty fun,” Wip said.

He threw a round kick at another thug’s chest, then dropped his leg low at the last moment. The shield formed and he missed the bottom of it by a hair. His foot slammed into the ground and shattered the concrete beneath, causing the thug in front of him to stumble.

“How?” Luci cried. “How am I fun?”

“Because you’re strong. A strong party is a fun party.”

Luci was left speechless. She was strong. Those were words she’d never heard before. She would have burst into tears at the sound of them if not for the fact that she was dehydrated, and the room was on fire.

One of the thugs used a telekinesis-type afto to fling a burning cupboard at Wip. The scarred man dodged at the last moment. The cupboard didn’t clip him, but he’d forgotten that his foot had been drenched in oil a few moments ago. His leg burst into flames.

“Mr. Wip!” Luci shouted.

Wip took one look at the flame, then his face split into a grin. He pivoted on his non-burning foot and charged at the man who’d just flung the furniture at him. The thug panicked at the sight, of a man with a flaming leg charging right for him.

But that annoying shield of light stopped Wip’s path again. This time, he forgot to account for it and slammed a flaming kick into it. He was sent flying across the room, fire spraying everywhere, before crashing hard into a wall.

Luci instinctively tried to push herself off the floor and rush to his aid. The effort and consequential pain reminded her that her body weighed over two hundred kilograms right now.

At that same moment, Flak, breathing heavy and sweating bullets from the heat, shouted to get the thugs’ attention. “I’m calling the rest of the soldados. You lot keep him busy.”

With that, he trudged across the room, ignoring Luci as he stepped over her. When he reached the door, he didn’t bother with the handle. Fire had crept up the rotting wood, making it unusable.

Grunting, Flak turned a dial on his handgun’s side and fired. Rather than a yellow beam, a cone blasted out from the nozzle. It smashed the door and knocked it right off its hinges. The thug Flak had shot for trying to escape lay dead in front of the door, charred and unrecognisable. Flak walked over him and out the door, grumbling to himself the whole way.

Luci wanted to cry. Flak was bringing backup. And not just any backup, but backup from the Black Talon Cartel. She wished the building would just hurry up and collapse on her to put her out of her misery.

“What am I thinking?” Luci croaked. “I’m strong. I need to help.”

“But your enma is suppressed,” she argued with herself. “Just get out before the fire gets you.”

“No! That doesn’t matter. If Wip says I’m strong, then I’m strong. So I’ll fight, because that’s what you do when you’re strong!”

With a great strain, Luci turned her head around to look at the opposite side of the room. With her hands cuffed behind her back, it took everything she had to get her shoulders to raise just a little off the floor. Panting, she looked around for a way to help.

Luci’s eyes bulged. During the chaos, one of the thugs had picked Lunacogita out of the wall, likely to take the expensive afto for themselves. The thug was hiding around a doorway, the staff only visible because she’d left the now-sockless head lying on the threshold. She wore a breastplate whose pink aftocore was exposed and rested square in middle, housed in a shield-shaped ornament. The ornament flashed and a shield of light materialised in front of Wip, pressing him flat against the wall that he was still prying himself out of.

Luci knew how she could help.