A part of Quinn balked at having caused Kajaro pain. She looked at him, blinking once as his form writhed on the floor.

Quinn had promised to use compartmentalization sparingly, carefully even. This qualified. If she didn’t have control of her emotions, she feared she’d have flattened everything.

She was completely preoccupied by this one individual, even though her senses extended beyond him, allowing her to understand where everybody was in relation to her and just how quickly she needed to react in case they decided to approach her. She could still sense exactly where Malakai lay.

How still he lay.

However, the other part of Quinn was cold, calculating, and felt nothing. Kajaro, writhing on the floor in agony, had caused so much pain to so many people, including those she cared about who were being patched up by their healer right at that moment. This was not acceptable.

“Tell me, Kajaro,” she finally spoke out loud, her brain a whirr of thoughts trying to figure out what to do, and how to handle this, how to keep a hold over the power she could feel surging inside her. “Why do you want me dead?”

But Kajaro wasn’t exactly forthcoming with answers right then, and Quinn, tired of listening to the squeals as the mind bomb she’d created worked its magic, wasn’t exactly patient. What she’d cast at him was more like a mind worm, because she’d been thinking of the bookworms at the time that she created it, and it bored more into his brain than simply rolling to a stop and staying there subtly.

“Oh, is that hurting you?” she asked. “Do you think that hurts as much as when you tried to kill me with yours, when I didn’t know anything, and you took advantage of that?”

“Quinn?” Nishpa called out.

Quinn held up a hand, and she knew Nishpa wouldn’t be able to speak, because she was keeping the sound away from her. Right now, Quinn couldn’t afford to be distracted. Finally, sick and tired of Kajaro’s lack of coherence, she simply silenced his screams.

“So much better,” she murmured. “Maybe just direct your thoughts to me, and I’ll be able to hear them. What was that? No, you’re still screaming in your mind. Was I too harsh?” she asked no one in particular.

She could sense Nishpa, Ishekal, all of them still fighting. Eric was wounded pretty badly. She sent another healing wave out toward him, and glanced at her statistics. She frowned, with no idea why her energy had filled up. No idea why it was now over three thousand. That was very odd. She was quite certain it had been under three thousand.

3208/3622

2854/3285

Nice. She’d have to look into that later.

Quinn paused. Something niggled at the back of her mind, like a squirrel when it had a nut in its little hands. There was something there that she should think of. But it obviously wasn’t important, or she would have remembered it.

She stepped closer to Kajaro, who finally stopped spluttering as his mental screams died down. She clicked her fingers, and sound came back to him. He drew in ragged breaths and looked up at her, his eyes black, filling the entire sclera, much like a snake’s eyes except those thin slits seemed absent. But this time, there was something else in them, something she’d never seen in the Serpensiril before.

“Why Kajaro,” she said, “is that fear I see?”

Quinn wasn’t sure what she was doing. Her head was light, focused, almost like a pristine clarity that ran through her mind.

Kajaro needed to die, but Kajaro was a conundrum in himself. He had multiple lives, and she wasn’t entirely sure how those multiple lives worked, because she did know for a fact that he had to die for them to kick back in, which begged the question: how long did she have to wait for him to come back? So, even if she killed him, he was going to come back to life. And that...

Well...

That was just going to ruin all her plans right now.

The first thing they needed to do was get Kajaro out of the way.

He staggered, first to his knees, and then he put a hand down on the floor. “You,” he rasped, “you will pay for this.”

She cocked her head to the side. “I will pay for this,” she said, as if tasting the words on her tongue.

Energy flared through her. She could sense fire creeping through her veins. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that her very own power would overwhelm her if she let it. It was such a vast sense of power, such a vast realization that she had to keep things in balance. That was all that caused her to put on the brakes. “Explain, I’m getting bored.”

And while he spluttered, she reached out again. Hal was fighting Dravishk, not giving him any chance to interfere with Quinn and Kajaro’s fight. She noticed that Garon, Escadril, Ishekal, Erik, Nishpa, all of them were fighting so that Quinn had her chance to keep Kajaro at bay. And she had to, because she couldn’t allow him another one of those vortex attacks. It would, it would kill them.

She couldn’t power up a second time, although... maybe she could. But Quinn did know she couldn’t do it without severe damage to herself.

She pushed out with her own energy, gifting an abundance to those around her, and drew in ambient energy and mana from the whole world around her. This place had it in abundance, but it was all tainted with chaos energy. Easy enough to filter out after she’d absorbed so many books on the subject.

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Just with a thought, just with a flick of her wrist. The energy swirled, passing through her and out to the others. For several precious seconds it gave Quinn a sense of vertigo, not unlike the one she’d had when she got pulled into the larger universe.

Kajaro finally, fully on his feet, looked a bit worse for wear. He worked his fingers, but Quinn wasn’t about to let him. “I’d stop that if I were you,” she said.

“You don’t have the guts to hurt me.” He snarled out at her, anger replacing the wariness once again. Even still, his body was bruised and battered.

Quinn raised an eyebrow, and she pushed back at him again. This time, when he landed, she grounded him with gravitas. One word, bitten out in a command, so he couldn’t refuse.

“I do believe I can do worse than that,” she said, grinning at no one.

He tried, he fought against the pressure, trying to push himself up. “Nullify,” he screamed out.

But it didn’t, it couldn’t, because Quinn bound his own body to the gravity, and his simplistic attempt to undo the spell didn’t factor that into the equation.

Kajaro continued to thrash, and Quinn allowed the binds of gravity to keep him prone. She heard a gasp off to her side and didn’t need to look to know that Ikeshal had been badly wounded. Luckily, he finally downed the last of the sedimentites in the process. With Eric’s backup, it seemed that he’d barely managed to overpower them. She could sense that their wounds weren’t exactly trivial. But she didn’t have in-depth knowledge of all their physiologies to make sure.

Another oversight she needed to correct.

Nishpa was low on energy despite Quinn’s replenishment, but at least the Aracnios were badly wounded. While Hal and Hoody appeared to be evenly matched, she could tell that Hal was beginning to tire, perhaps because he was trying so hard to prevent Dravishk from interfering in Quinn and Kajaro’s fight.

The Petraligno and Escadril were beginning to worry Quinn despite how far she’d pushed her compartmentalization. It seemed some emotion was still leaking through. Escadril didn’t appear to have the upper hand, she thought he should have. The Petraligno’s abilities were simply capable of rotting anything Escadril threw at him, and she could feel that one of her allies’ limbs had already been affected. She’d be able to help, she was sure of it, once Kajaro was dealt with. Ikeshal should be able to move to help the others now that the sedimentites were out of the way.

She turned her full attention back to Kajaro just as a ripple passed through her, a power, a shuddering fiery energy.

Quinn tried to grasp onto all the skills Hal had taught her, everything he’d done to make her understand how to utilize her powers, but it wasn’t working. Even with the calmness, even with the detachment, she couldn’t quite grasp onto that power. It was angry. It wanted to be used and it wanted to get out of her. Not much in her readings had prepared her for such a circumstance. She wasn’t entirely sure how to go about using it safely.

She tried to center herself, not let herself get carried away. “I can do this,” she told herself. And yet the fire still bubbled just underneath the surface. A brief orange hue passed through her blue and gold scales. They still protected her.

Taking in a deep breath, Quinn reassured herself. She was part cosmicisodracus. She could do this, but that was just it. But just what was this? She hadn’t been ready. They hadn’t trained her fully, always acting like there was plenty of time for her to be ready. All she’d learned was rudimentary control. And right now, it was slipping.

Quinn took another deep breath, even if it was a little shakier, refusing to let it get the better of her. She could feel the heat coursing through her veins. Heat and brief pain flashed through her, causing momentary loss of control of the gravity shield she’d placed over Kajaro. It buckled, and he burst free, shattering it in all different directions. Luckily, he’d had to waste quite a lot of his energy to do so, and Quinn had been purifying the chaotic energy around them, turning it into mana and energy replenishment for her team. Another thing, she had no idea how she’d done.

But at least it meant that there was less chaos energy for him to pull from.

She gasped from the string of backlash losing the shield caused, panting, as Kajaro leveled one of his vortex discs directly at her. It flew, catching Quinn in the forearm as she raised it to protect herself. But it ripped into them, because they weren’t as strong as they should be. She hadn’t fully morphed into a dragon or anything. These were just extra armor that her species provided to her, just like it had during the car crash so many years ago. All her scales did right now was give her an extra layer of protection.

She screamed in pain as the scales were cut, but not just because of the Vortex disc that Kajaro threw at her. The fire inside her begged to escape, pouring out like molten lava. It wanted to escape. It wanted to engulf Kajaro in everything that it could, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

Quinn held up a hand, aiming the palm toward Kajaro, and screamed as fire poured out of it. He barely dodged out of the way. It caught his cloak, and it caught his tail, and she could smell singed flesh. She recalled some of the elements Hal had given her, some of the information he told her, the stories he described, where, depending on the situation, she could utilize different elements, different attacks.

It was difficult to focus through the pain and the fire, which seemed to almost have a will of its own.

Quinn tried to focus, and pulled the fire back down into her in an attempt to calm it, to settle it. The fire, which was ripping through her veins and trying to come out the other side, just burned harder. At first, she didn’t realize the whimpers came from her. Even so, the good old mind concentration she’d practiced for hours with Milaro came to the rescue.

She managed to form a stream of ice over her limbs, a cooling down that hissed out of the wounds in her arms. But she didn’t stop there. Aiming her right hand, the only one she could still move slightly directly at Kajaro, she leveraged that geyser straight into Kajaro’s face.

The Librarian panted and fell to all fours, most of her energy gone. She only had about 500 energy left, and her mana was close to depleted, but as she looked up, Kajaro was currently in an ice block. She panted, and fell the rest of the way to the ground, and even as she did, she heard a massive explosion from where Hal had been, and knew, just from what her senses continued to tell her, that he had thrown Dravishk into one of the large rock formations nearby, and suddenly, Hal was there, hands on her shoulder, lending her a calm she hadn’t been able to get to on her own.

“Quinn, breathe, and remember to focus. Remember to calm, and snap out of that damned ice prison you locked yourself in.” But Quinn didn’t want to, because if she came out of that ice prison, she might find Malakai dead. She couldn’t sense him properly, just his body, just that he was prone, and just that he was so badly injured she didn’t think he’d recover.

She turned to Hal, reaching for that cold element inside her, for that sense, that trance, that would just let her not feel. “We need to finish imprisoning him.”

“No, Quinn, we need to kill him,” Hal said. “You have to stop this compassion you have for your damned enemies.”

But Quinn laughed. “Don’t be silly. It’s not compassion. He’s got like nine lives, and I don’t even know how it works. The best we can do right now is imprison him, so he can’t harm anybody else, until we figure out how his nine lives work.”

Hal stepped back, glancing around. She watched several emotions play over his face before he nodded. “Then do it.”

Quinn stood up to finish the prison, throwing one comment over her shoulder. “This time, maybe don’t let him disintegrate in your custody.”

Hal went to retort, but Quinn’s next words halted him. “Help the others finish this off and...” her voice cracked. “Please check on Malakai.”