Quince’s request for her to come to midlane was extremely poorly timed.

Because Jeremy seemed to be less experienced than her at mist diving, the very first thing she’d done, as soon as she’d taken out her own starting monsters, was rush into his area before he got to his mud golems.

Given that they were particularly valuable and that she was particularly suited to taking them out, it was an extremely easy calculation for her to find it worth stealing them.

Or, at least, it would have been. With Quince calling her to midlane, she would need to take a different, and potentially warded, path through the mists. She could avoid that by jumping up to the canopy, instead, but that ran the risk of alerting Nathaniel.

She hadn’t actually played with him, herself, but based on what Jess had told her it seemed like that would be asking for trouble.

Plus, she didn’t trust this gank to be successful if Jess herself knew she was coming.

So, instead, she’d just said okay and was now working her way through the upper mists while Quince described Jess’s midlane abilities to her. One was missing, unfortunately, but it was also guaranteed to be her mobility or defensive choice, which narrowed things down, at least.

The walls and rocks that made up the dividers that divers usually dealt with were difficult to get up to, but she had a cheat for that that also allowed her to jump between sections. Using it liberally, she even managed to jump over the area that was likely to be warded, though a particularly observant watch on that particular ward would have spotted her out– she was fairly certain that some part of her legs would be visible from the typical ward placement.

That left her with less in the way of shields she would have liked, but it also got her to the lane while Jess was pushed up.

Quince had two spires down, one within the area of the base’s coverage and one just outside of it that he was in right now. There was also the remnants of one that had been destroyed, much closer to the center of the lane, its pieces slowly dissolving.

So Jess had figured it out, then. Not exactly the most difficult thing in the world, but it also meant that a fairly significant part of the element of surprise was lost.

Reshaping her shields was a simple matter of thought. With Jess using a physical weapon, she decided on a twisted rhombic dodecahedron.

With someone who wasn’t aware of her abilities, something simpler would have done fine, but while her ability to shape her shields was an obvious strength, there were also downsides.

Specifically, if any of Jess’s shots hit straight-on in any of the flat sections, it would deal more damage than if she’d just left the shield to its own devices.

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Of course, if she could prevent their exact shape from being found out and exploited, it did much better than the sphere usually would, increasing damage resistance tremendously.

She pinged Quince to start them off.

While she could lead with her own damaging ability, she had enough experience playing with and against Jess to know that if the only sounds were those ones typical to the lane, she’d almost certainly hear the activation of Shardbomb, possibly even getting out of the way of it before it hit.

Even with the poor line of sight offered by her position, she could still tell when he changed the mode of his gun. Where before, it had been three small shots in sequence, now a single, larger-and-faster-moving projectile shot out, making contact with Jess’s shields.

He hadn’t used that yet, then. It wasn’t the biggest advantage in the world, but she’d still take it.

Now all she needed was…

There!

Jess stood still for a fraction of a second, lining up and hitting Quince with a single shot.

He kept pushing forward, and Emma fired off Shardbomb as she left her hidden position behind Jess.

The slide her friend dropped into, popping off two shots against Emma’s shields as she did, was enough to tell Emma that she’d been seen or predicted at some point along the way. It wasn’t enough to completely avoid the damage, but it got her out of the explosion enough to maintain about half of her shields.

Dropping a Null Zone over Jess’s current location was, technically, a bit of a risky choice. While it reduced the damage and speed of anything moving through it, it was usually best practice to use it to slow down the quarry, not to try to reduce the damage.

The Fan Fire that followed convinced her that she’d made the right decision. Even with the reduction, the blue-green wobble of Quince’s shields that characterized the eighty percent strength changed to the yellow-green that was more like sixty. Her own shields were barely touched, but given that they were already low from the casting of Shardbomb, that was still enough to set them right on the verge of collapsing, and the follow-up shots were keeping it low as Jessica ran south, simultaneously bouncing at impossible angles to wear even further on Quince’s. Neither of their shields broke, but her own were uncomfortably low at forty percent and Quince’s were working on getting there when the regeneration ran out.

Luckily, she wasn’t the only one there. Quince’s rifle was spitting those bolts of plasma a few times a second, and that was starting to wear on Jessica’s shields badly enough that she couldn’t keep up the run for much longer. While Emma couldn’t cast Null Zone again, her presence in lane, behind Jessica’s position, forced a strange retreat that was perpendicular to where she’d actually want to go.

Jess ran into the mists on the south side of the lane, firing as she went.

Only a last-second feeling from the back of her mind stopped the instinct to chase.

“Any idea where the other two are?”

Jade’s short laugh confirmed it. “South side. Nathan gave me a bridge to help Jeremy rush our snakes.”

“I thought that the mids are supposed to make the calls this game.” Quince said, sounding annoyed. “It’s not exactly a fair­–”

Jade cut him off, but Emma didn’t need to hear the rest of it. No, this was a Jess play. She was theoretically supposed to be the one getting the most income, and this took a lot of sacrifices, particularly on mid, but ultimately?

She couldn’t stay out on thirty percent shield strength this early, especially when the enemy ranger and diver knew where she was. And while Quince could manage against Nathaniel if he was sent to hold the lane, he wouldn’t be able to stay once Jess came back, either.

It could just be a mistake or being too trusting, though, so she didn’t say anything beyond telling him that she needed to jump over to the constructor. Maybe, hopefully, it would be nothing, but the worry nestled into her and started growling.