“God fucking dammit! I had such high hopes for you.” Enki’s voice was swamped with rage and frustration.

Doom’s mouth was gaping before me. There were hairs of a second left for me to act.

The obvious course of action was to try and roll away, kick on my Footfield, and streak away from this foolish endeavor as rapidly as possible.

But there were eyes on me. Claw was watching. Olaf was watching. The gang of Burghsmen was watching.

And I needed this. This might be my last chance to gain the levels that had been asked of me, that I had promised.

And there was something else. That incessant pull. The pull to prove myself. The pull to lay evidence on the face of the planet that I was greater than I had been estimated to be.

And I couldn’t let Doom win. I needed it.

With 1 count of POWER remaining, I might have had as little as seconds before my ability to compete with Doom expired.

I was on my back, a heartbeat from death as the energy lit up inside Doom. Even the time it would take to get to my feet would probably be more than I had.

I acted almost without thought.

I pulsed SHIELD with the greatest might I could muster, deflecting it against the earth beneath me. I was reflected from the surface of the planet, the recoil from the pulse punching me forward. My legs reacted to the motion, kicking down as hard as I had ever done anything as I rose from the ground on the cushion of repulsion.

There was only one direction for me to go.

My arms and shoulders rose with the motion, adding to my momentum, directing me. The light flickered in Doom’s hideous eyes, the pulses faded momentarily from the gaps between the rough dark scales. Doom was staggered by the fright of my action.

I dove into the cavern of its mouth, my sword leading the way like the tip of the human arrow I had suddenly become.

Inside was blackness, wetness, slick and vile and sticking and hot. The humidity of the air of the beast’s throat stuck to me instantly.

But it wasn’t perfect darkness. There, deep in the recesses of the cavern of the massive throat, was a flicker of light. Even as I speared in, my sword raking the pulsating sides of the monster’s pharynx, the glow flared brighter. The organ. The fire organ. It was there.

Enki had said that it was a biological device to contain and manage entropy. Concentrated entropy. Heedless to the details of the consequences, fixated only on doing anything, absolutely anything, to win, I flexed BEAM without thought.

The organ flared brighter; the fire beam would return in a heartbeat. Doom was defending itself from the intrusion of my body.

But my BEAM was faster. Light flared in the darkness, illuminating dark red and black flesh, membranes that bulged and squirmed on every surface. The line of light licked into the darkness, raging toward the pulse of energy deep inside the fiend.

Everything that came next was one chaotic event, impossible to detail.

Impact, there was impact. The sensation of being punched in the face—no, the entire body—by the fist of a thousand gods. My bones jarred, my momentum reversing, being driven back while everything from my armor to my skeleton seemed to be crushed into dust.

Light, brighter than the sun, brighter than a million suns, blinding me, driving splinters of agony through my eyes and into my brain.

Heat, like nothing I had ever felt or imagined. I could only imagine the armor melting from me; nothing could withstand this terrible heat. Every inch of skin I had seemed to ignite, seemed to be on fire.

Meat and fire and smoke everywhere. Being airborne. Not quite blind, looking down on wreckage as I soared away, lifted on the arms of explosion. A crater, a crater painted with gore and blackness, the air full of flesh and bits of bone and streamers of black ichor.

Stolen story; please report.

Hitting the ground on my back, a hundred yards or more from the site of the explosion. Messages flashing rapidly across my visor. Level 17. Level 18.

Pain and distorted thoughts, my ears ringing. Twisting on the ground, not trying to rise, trying to curl up and die like an insect.

Level 19.

Enki’s voice, at first elated, then grave. “Holy shit, kiddo! I can’t believe you did that! That was one hell of a show you gave those stinking cavemen on the other… oh, wait, this isn’t that great. You’re dying.”

Level 20.

Blackness closing in, my vision, what there was of it, shrinking into a narrow corridor of light as darkness folded in from all sides. The whining in my ears growing louder, drowning out Enki’s voice.

Level 21.

Then nothing.

***

Movement, jostling. Pain everywhere. The bouncing sensation of running, but also the sensation of being carried. Agony as my tender flesh bounced and ground against something else. A human shoulder pressed against my midriff.

I was being carried.

A voice, not Enki’s. “Ti! Ti! We need the Footfield! It’ll take us too long to run back! Ti! Goddammit!”

Blackness closing in. Wanting to vomit.

***

Cool golden relief on my face. Coughing, spluttering. Eyes opening. No, not on my face, on armor’s skin. Water splashing on my head from a canteen held above me. Olaf’s face beyond it.

“Ti!” his voice angry, desperate, urgent. “Come on, you fucking dick! Wake up! You don’t need to walk, but we need the Footfield!”

Understanding creeping into me.

Enki’s voice, “He’s right! You need to reach for the Footfield. You can keep lying and dying away, no effort required; this big dope will hoof you off for help, but you need to put the Footfield going, and you need to do it now.”

I wanted to say that I couldn’t. That I couldn’t feel my body, let alone the fields. That I didn’t want to, that I wanted to pass out again. Being unconscious was way more fun than this. But Olaf’s face crystallized my thoughts. He was worried, anguished, desperate. He was watching me die. That wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t make him watch me die.

Enki said, “That’s it! You’re doing it, reach out. And for God’s sake, keep a hold of it—if you fuck this up, you’ll melt the two of you into one very unattractive lump of meat and armor.”

I felt the strands of order gathering. I tried to ignore the rest of reality. I told the suit to switch off all sensory inputs.

I felt movement again, the lift and jerk of Olaf heaving me back onto his shoulder. As he started to bound away, my vision began to dull as the enhanced eyes of the suit were reduced. Only my human eyes peered out of the visor now. My hurt diminished as I stopped receiving the sensations of my damaged suit. There was still plenty of hurt in my meat-bag body.

I raised my head slightly. The world was blurring past us. Olaf was running faster than I would have credited possible for a man of his size. I could see a huge, thick pillar of roiling black smoke climbing from the distant slopes. We were already covering a lot of ground.

Time lost meaning. Everything was just hurt, the struggle to stay awake, and the desperate fight to hold onto the strands that held the Footfield together. I couldn’t kill Olaf while he tried so valiantly to save me. That wouldn’t be appropriate—I needed to keep the field together.

The droning eternity of rhythmic bouncing. The steady impact of feet on the ground. The constant pain. It all blended into something that wasn’t that dissimilar to unconsciousness.

And then, some time—days, weeks, months, years later—a fist thumping on my side. Letting my consciousness open back up, to absorb a little bit of reality.

“Turn it off! Turn it off!”

The hell was he talking about?

Enki’s voice joined Olaf’s, “Turn off the Footfield, dingus. You’re here.”

I couldn’t process any of the realities of that, but it was a relief to let go of the strands and let the Footfield dissipate. Thank the Oracle, at least now I couldn’t meld all our atoms together if I passed out.

Being dropped on the ground. The impact making me scream out loud. A glimpse of Olaf dropping to his knees alongside me, then to all fours. His skin sheening with sweat, his chest heaving as though he were trying to inhale the whole atmosphere. Olaf vomiting.

Just about able to turn my head, I could see the Tower. Not Boston’s Tower. No, that would have been too far away.

Pittsburgh. He’d brought me to Pittsburgh, the closest Tower, the closest priests, the closest source of Mystorium. But no pod. I could only use my own pod.

Olaf retched again, his body fighting with the conflicting goals of emptying his stomach and filling his lungs. He coughed and spluttered, tried to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, puked some more, and then just stayed there, gasping for air.

He turned his head and looked through my visor. He looked like he was focusing hard. He might have been trying to discern if I was alive or dead. His guess was as good as mine.

He said, “Hang in there, they’re coming, they saw us coming.”

His voice was an exhausted wheeze. Then he fell to his side and just tried to breathe.

I lay there alongside him and just tried not to die.