She’d told Jeremy to run.

For him, that was the right choice. He would get to the Worm before it died. While she wasn’t sure he would survive the fight there, there was a good chance he could win if it was 1v1, and a decent chance he’d still be alive if it were a 1v2.

She didn’t like leaving that to him when he was obviously the newest player here, but they didn’t really have a choice in the matter.

“It’s fucking Looming Shade!” Nathaniel yelled over team chat.

Emma had jumped down from the bridge, slowing herself slightly before she made contact with one of the boulder piles, then threw herself towards the next one, making up the physical strength with an application of Wavedash.

“Don’t group, and if you’ve taken ten hits you’re a time bomb, cause she’s got Shadow Arms, too.”

That made things difficult. She could open with Shardbomb, but any use of it after she’d been hit a couple of times meant that a single activation of Shadow Arms was liable to kill her.

So she did.

Trigger the active conditions of her passive, launch the Shardbomb.

Immediately bail out of where she’d just been standing as a dark bolt splashed against the nearby tree.

The enemy ranger was pulling towards Jess, taking steps that teleported him forwards a few feet each time, while she appeared to blink in and out in place. The Carry had, luckily, turned to face her instead.

The support’s attention had been caught as well, and, from what she could see, damaged even through Cover’s effect, though the shield appeared to be broken.

Not terribly surprising, given the somewhat extreme strength of Shardbomb in general. Still, that skill being what it was meant that she wasn’t completely prepared for the follow-up teleport, then the strike with the shield.

She could see Jessica and Nathaniel turn to push back, but the appearance of the enemy team’s ranger from the side offset that.

While she was distracted by that, the support activated her final ability, creating a pillar behind Emma and throwing her forward.

On top of that, a gray instability appeared over her skin and shields, signaling some kind of vulnerability.

Which, given the carry’s focus on her, was a problem.

The first Shadow Bolt hit her shields on a glancing angle, barely damaging them, but Emma didn’t plan to give more space than was necessary.

A Wavedash nearly straight down pulled her out of the way of the next bolt, and while the landing was hard, it wasn’t enough to keep her from diving to the side, activating both her passive’s second mode and Spatial Flux.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

That didn’t do good things for her damage resistance, but this was a sprint more than a marathon.

The effect from the support was still on, but she didn’t really have the freedom to deal with it. Instead, Emma charged the carry.

A dangerous strategy at this point in the game, but there wasn’t much else that she could do. Null Zone was generally a powerful ability, but couldn’t reduce the intensity of dark- or cold- aligned abilities. Her Ultimate wasn’t available yet, and reshaping her shields wasn’t yet going to be effective.

A sphere of darkened area popped into existence around them and four Shadow Bolts on the shields before contact, with her shields hanging in the low forty percent range, the regeneration from Shardbomb’s secondary effect keeping her beleaguered shields in the game.

Finally drawing the wand she’d bought, Emma threw a few blasts into the carry’s shield to finally strip them completely. Before she could push that, though, the extra hits she’d taken to manage that came back to bite.

The carry threw herself prone on the ground, and before Emma could do the same, several arms made of shadows reached up from around her, smashing into her shields and bringing them down to the last bit of strength.

At which point, Looming Shade took its toll.

The first wave of slicing shadows slammed into the remnants of her shield and that of the enemy support.

When the second wave came, the support still had shields.

She didn’t.

It opened up a gash across her torso bad enough that she was absolutely certain that only the game’s pain reduction allowed the nauseating swirl of consciousness to remain.

Just enough to fire two more shots into the carry, before the woman, seemingly shocked, managed to put one more Shadow Bolt into her.

[You have died.]

“Yes, thank you.” Emma said, affected politeness coloring her tone, then she immediately reddened.

There was nobody else in the respawn room at the moment, but snarking at the game messages was still a habit she found embarrassing.

She was a little bit shocked that she hadn’t been kicked out of her body before that second Looming Shade had hit. She’d seen some of the way physically tougher people take hits like that, and it was on some level based on how much pain that the game thought you could take. Both had been on her workout schedule, though the pain thing more as a secondary consequence and benefit than the goal itself.

And yet, the fact that it applied to her enough to actually make a difference was something of a new experience.

The number it gave her for endurance was a hundred and seventeen. While the average was ninety, she hadn’t expected the effect to be quite that extreme.

And she could see, from the display screens on the respawn platform, that it had made a difference.

Those extra two hits had given Nathaniel and Jessica a little bit more time to react to the carry’s shields being gone.

Usually, with their mobility, that wouldn’t be an issue, but the ranger’s Curse of Zeno on Jess had kept the two halves of the fight separate just long enough that, had the shadow-carry been able to run as soon as Looming Shade went off, she would have gotten away safely.

Instead, Jess had teleported with three strikes on the support in a row, bringing her just into range to fire on a strange angle, guiding the arrow to kill the enemy carry.

With that, the ranger and support had been made unable to continue– with Jeremy tying up the enemy diver at the Worm, they had to run, no longer possessing the damage to really keep up the fight.

And with Nathaniel and Jess’s mobility, they were able chase the support down, landing Jess a double kill.

On the macro, worth less than the space control and team credit bonus presented by the base.

On the micro, worth more credits to Jess than that structure takedown to the enemy carry.

Somewhere in the middle, Jess was now on the board. They just had to keep that going.