Mark paced around the perimeter of the parking garage, his gaze flicking between each of the doorways and crevasses that served as entryways. He brushed his hand across the rubble that blocked off the garage’s main entrance. “Hey, Waia, you can probably clear this out without making the whole garage come down on us, right?”
“Yeah, I bet.” Waia did not look away from the polymer hubcap that she was slowly carving a precise string of Quet’s language of magic, nibbling her tongue as her orange eyes flitted between her work and the reference sheet that Quet had laid out for her.
Horan watched as Mark did another lap around the garage, his work on threading a wide tarp around several dozen feet of rope faltering. “So, like, we go to ground to be on the safe side, and suddenly you’re just on high alert forever? It’s been two hours. If the Servants were able to track us back here, we would’ve actually been attacked by now. That or they’re staking us out and waiting for us to leave. Either way, you can probably stop doing laps and speed up the building of the…” He glanced down at the tarp and rope in his hands, then looked over at Quet, who was presently busy with the same work as him. “…Is there a name for the thing we’re building? It’s not exactly a hot air balloon in practice, is it?”
Quet lowered her length of rope, sucked on a rope-burnt finger, and squinted at the half-assembled contraption for a moment. “…It’s the Voidfish. ‘Cause I kind of imagine that it’ll look like a jellyfish when it’s in the air. And it’ll be dark. And I think that’s cool.”
Horan shrugged. “Alright, sure, that’s a name for this one in particular, but I’m trying to determine what it is. In, like, a classification sense. Is this what parachutes are?”
Quet shrugged back. “It is.”
“I…”
“Now, do you intend to continue quizzing me on the semantics of improvisational magic aircraft nomenclature, or do you see where this is going to keep going if you do?”
Horan went back to his work. “Fair enough, yeah.”
“Are you two done with that?” asked Mark, his voice made echoey by distance. “Because as you can tell right now by me talking, this space isn’t exactly the best for being quiet. I’d just prefer if we didn’t risk… You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Mark hopped away from the rubble as he saw a tendril of ashen-grey dust worm its way through a crack in the concrete and snake across the floor towards his boot.
Mark’s hand went to the chrome rod tucked into his pants. “Guys, I think they fou–!”
The rubble pile exploded outwards, hurling Mark back dozens of feet as fist-sized concrete chunks smashed against the walls and floor. Waia surged to her feet and rushed in front of Quet and Horan, the shrapnel splattering against her form and landing safely as puddles of red-hot slag.
Horan looked to the side and saw Mark struggling to rise to his knees, forehead caked in fresh blood. “Hey, uh… Mark? You still up?”
Mark wheezed from exertion and pointed back to the newly-opened entrance while fumbling for the gas mask on his hip.
More grey dust poured through the entryway, piling up like a rising wave as it surged forward towards the garage’s four inhabitants. Once the pile was a few feet tall, it instantly ignited with blue fire, filling the cavernous room with hateful blue light as the flaming dust began to take a vaguely humanoid shape.
“…That’s a new one,” mumbled Quet.
“This one’s mine,” said Waia, shifting into her true form and scooping a chunk of concrete out of the concrete with one hand. “You guys find us a new spot, I’ll find you.”
“So, are you just going to punch a pile of sand to death?” asked Horan.
“Yup.” Waia pounced forward and punched through the dust pile, sweeping the top half off of the growing form and sailing past it into the street outside.
As the amorphous figure swirled backwards to engage the Primus, Horan perked up when he heard the sound of metal scraping against concrete echo through the doorway leading out into the underground. He quickly grabbed Quet by the shoulder. “I can hear more of them coming, we gotta go.”
“I…” Quet looked outside at the dust pile once again reforming into a twenty-foot hunchbacked humanoid. “Go where?!”
“There’s a…” Mark attempted to stand, but winced and stumbled when he put pressure onto his left leg. He instead opted to point to a doorway on the far side of the garage. “I–I spotted a staircase near where we first came in, you can take it up to the building on top.”
Horan flew over and tried to help Mark to his feet. “Hang on, you need help? I think you hit your ankle or something.”
Mark shooed Horan away. “I’ll be up in a couple minutes, it’s nothing. It’s not me they’re looking for anyway.”
“Yeah, but–” Horan flinched as the brawl outside the garage smashed a car to pieces, resulting in an ear-splitting screech of tearing metal. “What if they–?”
“Get out of sight before something else spots you,” insisted Mark, “and worry about me later!” He fished his chrome cylinder out of his waistband and pushed the button near the handle, making the device unfold into a sawn-off shotgun. “I’ve survived… I’ve survived worse. Take Quet and start running.”
Horan hesitantly nodded, turned and ran for the door that Mark had pointed out, Quet following closely behind.
Mark donned his gas mask and pulled up his hood. Taking care to not put too much immediate strain on his foot, he unsteadily got to his feet and looked at the scene outside the garage.
Whenever the flaming blue Chosen gained any semblance of physical cohesion, Waia bolted forward and slashed at the swirling column of dust that formed the nearest one of its legs, partially collapsing the creature. This tactic formed a dance of in-and-out strikes, repeating every few seconds as the Chosen rarely even got an opportunity to swipe at the far faster Primus.
Mark stumbled out of the garage and into the street outside, his boots becoming soaked through as the heat radiating off of the twenty-foot Chosen melted through inch after inch of the snow covering the ground. He looked ahead at the two immovable objects before him, cringing away slightly as the searing heat sliced through the cold around him.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the flaming effigy was taking less time to reform whenever Waia struck it down. After a moment or two, it had the time to take a single swipe with a pudgy, burning claw at the Primus. The attack was nevertheless dodged easily.
Mark observed helplessly as every last grain of ashen dust flew back into place whenever it was struck out of the Chosen’s form. Hesitantly, he called out to the diminutive shape in front of the enormous creature. “W–Waia, this isn’t wor–!”
“Not now, Mark!” Waia knocked the Chosen to its knees. “I’ve got something to pro–!”
Her attention diverted by the human, Waia was caught off guard by the Chosen’s massive palm flattening her from directly above, the burning dust flowing around her to bury in a swirling pile of whatever this Chosen was actually made of.
The ghostly blue fire of the Chosen seemed to triple in intensity, turning artificial night to artificial day as the tarmac underneath Waia bubbled and sagged from the blistering heat of the monstrosity on top of it. Waia, meanwhile, noticed only one thing from the inferno around her: Just barely out of the range of the conducted heat of the Chosen, she could feel an underground gas main that still had a pocket of as-of-yet uncombusted methane swirling around inside it.
“That’ll work,” she mumbled, and squirmed to jam one arm into the ground.
Mark shielded his eyes from the intensity of the heat and wondered if he could shapeshift his gun into a water cannon or something, but before he could test that theory, he was hurled to the ground by an earth-splitting explosion.
Waia rocketed fifty feet straight up into the air, trailing a column of smoke behind her. At the zenith of her arc, she twisted around to see the Chosen already reforming itself in front of the crater that Waia had left behind her. She grimaced, patted her elbow twice, and prepared for impact.
The featureless oval of the Chosen’s face angled up to regard the small shape slowly falling towards it, her glowing orange eyes making for an easy target against the backdrop of the clouds behind her. With a single colossal hand and plenty of time to wind up, the Chosen swatted Waia out of the air and sent her skidding hundreds of feet down the street.
Mark watched Waia leave a titanic trail of wrecked cars and half-melted snow as she slid along the pavement. Hoping desperately that she could hear him and the Chosen somehow couldn’t, he cupped his hands around the part of his mask that covered his mouth. “This thing is a distraction, Waia! It’s just going to keep–!”
Before the last of the displaced cars had hit the ground, Waia raced past Mark with the speed of a dozen Olympic sprinters, headed straight back towards the Chosen. Once again, the flaming behemoth struck her aside before she could make contact, sweeping her off the ground and into the side of the building that she and her companions had been hiding underneath.
Mark flinched and ducked to the side as shards of broken glass pelted the ground around him, desperately shielding his head as he slogged across the flooded street and tried to reach a safe distance. He looked over his shoulder to see the Chosen’s luminous fist cleave through a dozen feet of concrete and rebar like wet paper as Waia leapt out of the way of the comparatively sluggish creature’s follow-up strike.
Waia arced through the air, grabbed the more-or-less solid top of the Chosen’s head, and yanked it under her legs so that the colossus was shoved into the side of the skyscraper, bending the tower and making it look like it was about to buckle. Waia used the extra momentum from the push to continue all the way to the other side of the street, where she landed on the side of the opposite building, sunk herself up to her ankles in the brickwork, crouched, and sprung off the vertical surface straight into the Chosen’s back while it was still trying to free itself from the growing crater in the building’s side.
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That third impact to the skyscraper’s frame turned out to be the last straw. Mark looked up in horror as the dark concrete obelisk loomed over him, clamping down like the jaw of a vast predator. There was no way he could move out of the way in time, he could tell. The corner of the tower would just about wing him, still crushing him under enough rubble to render his corpse unrecognizable. Nevertheless, he kept trying to futilely run out of the way for the few remaining seconds he had.
A second before the building landed on top of him, Mark felt heat seep through his clothes and saw the ground in front of him. Offering himself a quick look over his shoulder, he saw the enormous Chosen holding the falling building in place, keeping the enormous mass off the ground with a single vibrating arm. No other movement was made. The Chosen did not use the collapsed tower as a shield against Waia, or a weapon, nothing. It simply held it up, its blank face fixed on the ant-like human scurrying out from under the building’s shadow.
A few seconds later, half a moment after Mark had cleared the building’s impact site, Waia hurled her bulk into the Chosen’s chest, the beast’s arm was wrenched away from the building, and four thousand tons of glass and steel slammed into the ground, throwing Mark away like a scrap of paper.
–
Horan barely had the time to cushion himself from hitting the wall of the falling building with a burst of air. When the wall-now-floor came to a stop and he floated back down, he saw that Quet had not been quite so lucky.
“Ahqua…” The Aztec pried herself free from a massive beanbag chair that she had just about managed to summon from a pocket-glyph, the light her eyes momentarily flickering from exertion.
Horan helped Quet to her feet while she tapped the cushion against her glyph to retrieve it. “C’mon, it looks like Waia and that fire thing are keeping each other plenty busy. Mark… Let’s not worry about Mark, we should probably get clear of here before we get squashed.”
Quet nodded and rolled her shoulder. “You, uh… You said you heard something else coming this way?”
Horan’s eye lit up with recognition, then shut as he tried to listen through the sound of snow hissing in evaporation for anything closer by. A moment later, he ducked down and pulled Quet behind an overturned desk, shifting into his human form to snuff out the light from his eye and indicating for Quet to do the same. Once she had, he put a finger to his lips and twitched his other hand. “I know those footsteps,” came a whisper next to Quet’s ear.
From the other side of the desk, the sound of glass shards being swept aside came from near the doorway that the two Primoi had entered from. “You did not leave through the main entrance,” came Torch’s voice, “and there was only one other direction you could have left in. I do not need to be told in order to know that you are here.”
Horan twitched his hand again and made the sound of his voice come from the other side of the room, hoping blindly that it wasn’t too obviously fake from Torch’s perspective. “What do you even want from me? You can hear Waia outside, go be her problem.”
Something outside impacted a building hard enough to momentarily drown out any voices within the overturned building. Quet and Horan took the opportunity to quickly move behind a chunk of concrete slightly further away from Torch.
Once the sound subsided, Torch continued, their voice moving away from where Horan had made it sound like he had been. “Mrs. Waia is presently occupied for however long I require her to be. Additionally, she is presently considered indispensable, and there is thusly no requirement for me to engage her. You, Mister Horan, are no longer considered indispensable. And you have already proven yourself to be vexing as an unneeded variable. For that reason, in order to reassert my status as inviolable among relevant parties, I have deigned to arrange circumstances so as to eliminate you personally. This time, no armed human will arrive to send me off on your behalf.”
Horan looked to Quet and saw her desperately rummaging through her myriad pockets for anything that could be useful against Torch. He sent his voice to a different room nearby, just barely still within earshot of Torch. “So, what, you’re calling Mark a human now? What’s that make you, o savior of humanity?”
“Irrelevant,” replied Torch. “And your attempts at diverting my search for you are poorly thought-out. I can easily rule out several points in this complex that you are not currently located in, Mister Horan. Indeed, if this diversion proves to be an excessive waste of my valuable time, I have many means at my disposal to expedite this search. I would recommend you make things easier for both of us.”
Horan wind-spoke to Quet again. “I don’t think they know you’re with me. I’ll keep them distracted and fly out later, you go now.”
Quet bit her lip and looked down at her fingers drumming against the wall-floor. It visibly took effort to stop herself from audibly protesting.
“You want to argue, or you want to live?” Horan waved a hand and rustled a patch of glass shards on the floor halfway across the room. Now, instead of throwing his voice to offer a false location, Horan opted to simply shift the sound of his voice from point to point while speaking. “Look, dude, I don’t know about you, but I’m perfectly happy to keep up this game of hide and seek for as long as I feel like it. It’s not like I’ve got anywhere better to be, thanks to you.”
The sound of a sigh came from Torch’s position while Quet slunk clumsily from the concrete chunk to another overturned desk slightly closer to an outside-facing window. Quet froze in place when she saw a string of pale blue glyphs, spiralling and eldritch-looking, etch themselves into existence in the air half an inch in front of the window’s entrance. Similar glyphs appeared over every other exit to the room, filling the space with eerie radiance.
“I suppose, then,” said Torch, “that you will be continuing to hold out hope that some external third party, all of whom I have already pointed out are presently occupied, will come save you again. If that will continue to be your mindset for the foreseeable future…”
Quet, while trying to decipher what it actually was that the glyphs over the windows would do to anyone who touched them, accidentally scratched her hand on a jagged piece of rebar. Reflexively, she jerked her hand away and quietly hissed through her teeth. A quarter of a second later, a monolith of jet-black fabric appeared in front of her crouched form in a momentary flash of blue light.
“…I shall have to skip ahead,” said Torch.
In the split-second between Torch drawing their sword and planting it in Quet’s neck, Horan lunged forward and extended a hand. Torch was swept off their feet and slammed into the wall opposite Horan by a compressed burst of air.
“Hide!” shouted Horan. Already glistening with sweat from all the immediate exertion, he turned, repeated his previous motion, blasted a person-sized hole in the wall leading outside, and flew out.
Torch picked themselves up from off their floor, snarling as their pearlescent mask slipped slightly from their face. Without affording Quet a second look, they extended their own hand towards her, which made similar glyphs to the ones on the windows light up on the hand’s glove. More glyphs flashed into existence around Quet. An instant later, she found herself crashing to the floor as her own weight quintupled in an instant. In a flash of light, Torch vanished from the room.
Flying up and away from the toppled building as fast as he could manage, Horan twisted around in the air to see Torch flying towards him far too fast for him to escape, riding their sword like it was a surfboard. With a split second to spare, Horan summoned a sword and raised in front of his face just before Torch blinked in front of them, their posture altered during their instantaneous trip through space so that their sword was already back in their hand and mid-swing.
In the process of blocking Torch’s lightning-fast blow, Horan’s sword was knocked out of his hand and sent tumbling down into the snow beneath the two of them. Desperately taking the opportunity while Torch’s sword wasn’t in a position to redirect them, Horan dove straight down and swooped into an alley, hoping to shake Torch’s trail.
It was quickly made apparent that there would be no such luck. More blue glyphs filled the air along the length of the alley, and a split second later, the brick walls hemming Horan in bulged inwards in a dozen different spots, sharpening into wicked spikes and gnashing against one another like the flensing teeth of some ancient monster. Horan twisted between the pulsating brick spikes, shifting into a falcon and flying through before one lucky blade got any further than piercing his jacket.
Horan emerged into the street outside, still in the diminutive form of a bird. He banked hard to the side, and came face-to-face with Waia battling the flaming Chosen in the middle of the street, the Primus weaving between the colossus’ legs too fast to form a target. Caught between the duel and the growing sound of Torch breaking through the obstacles they had left in Horan’s path, the Egyptian chose the more distracted option.
Torch burst through the alley, digging their gloved fingers into the brickwork of the alley’s corner to turn the corner faster. They spotted a lone falcon, a pitch-black silhouette against the burning blue of the Chosen, diving under a tree-trunk-sized flaming arm and putting yet more space between itself and its hunter. Growling behind their mask, Torch flew in pursuit. With no message needing to be sent, the Chosen momentarily broke away from its assault on Waia to step out of its master’s way, allowing Torch direct passage in their pursuit of Horan. Any attempt that Waia made to track the black-and-blue blur moving over her head was quickly stifled by the Chosen’s fist sweeping her off her feet and straight into a clothing store.
Horan blasted air in from the side in order to redirect his lightweight form faster than he could ever manually turn. Desperately hoping that he could keep outmaneuvering Torch for the time being, he attempted to double back and pick Quet up. He’d acted on pure adrenaline-fueled instinct when he’d drawn Torch’s attention, but he still wasn’t going to leave his friend in the dust.
With a reflexive twist to dive out of the way as Torch blinked into existence next to him and sliced down close enough to shear off a few of his wing-feathers, Horan emerged into the street that the collapsing tower had split in two. With a split-second glance, Horan spotted the dim green light of Quet’s eyes on the ground and dove down to intercept her.
Once he was about thirty feet from where Quet was standing alone in bewilderment, she noticed the falcon flying towards her. She then immediately saw the vulturine silhouette of Torch’s billowing cloak in close pursuit behind him as well, but before she could shout any warning about what Torch was doing with their hands, a translucent square of shimmering blue material appeared in the air a foot in front of Horan’s face.
Horan slammed into the barrier beak-first and fell straight down, hitting a streetlight on his way down and shifting back into a Primus upon impacting the ground. Looking up with gold trickling from his nose and mouth, he watched helplessly as Torch dismounted from their sword and landed between him and Quet, their mask glaring impassively down at their cornered prey.
With a whistle, Torch’s sword flew to attention, hovering perfectly still four feet off the ground with the tip of the blade angled straight toward Horan’s throat. “As I previously stated,” said Torch, “any attempts to flee are a waste of both of our time. I offer a modicum of gratitude, however, for alerting me to the presence of Miss Quetlachticicue.”
They raised their arms skyward, the glyphs on their gloves once more igniting into focus. Around Torch and Horan, dozens more of the glyphs faded into view, forming a dome that fully encased the two of them.
“She may have developed into a minor inconvenience otherwise,” finished Torch.
Before they could whistle their blade into action, Torch was interrupted by Quet shoulder-charging through the dome of intangible glyphs and into their back. As they staggered forward from the impact, Torch was impaled through the chest when Horan, responding to the opening that Quet had offered him, summoned a new sword into his hand and hooked it between the plates of Torch’s form-fitting chest armor.
Torch soundlessly tumbled to the side, their mask and gloves burning with incendiary blue light while their sword continued to hang motionlessly in the air. Quet followed her hunter to the ground, yanking their gloves off their hands and planting an elbow into their mask with a terrified and enraged scream.
Through their cracked and glowing mask, Torch mustered a whistle to bring their sword to life. But a split second before the pristine blade sliced through the back of Quet’s neck, Horan reached out and wrapped a hand around Quet’s ankle. Both Primoi vanished with a mild puff of air, leaving Torch’s blade half-buried in the snow between their splayed legs.
After a few seconds of writhing in the snow, Torch ripped Horan’s completely bloodless sword out of their sternum and hurled it to the side, where it buried itself up to the hilt in a rusted letterbox.
Torch slowly rose to their feet and whistled their sword back into the scabbard. They struggled to maintain their footing as their mask thrummed with blue light in a crude imitation of the rhythm of a heartbeat. After a moment, the hole in their chest closed up and the split plates of their armor popped back into place before being swallowed once more into the depths of Torch’s cloak.
Torch drew up their hood and paused while they withdrew their hands from their head. Their mask stared in fixation at their two pale, quivering, bare, gloveless hands. After a moment of motionlessness, they wheeled around and punched the pole of the streetlight next to them, crumpling the aluminum and bending the pole into an unnatural angle.
Torch breathed slowly through their mask, the noise rasping as the tissues in their lungs continued to knit back into place. “I do not know if your attention remains on the Hawaiian presently, but if you are listening, I hope for… both of our sakes… that the two of them do not disrupt the contingency before I am once more able to intervene.”