For the first time in her life, Akemi put her trust in someone that wasn’t herself. Or a horse.

She still had every intention of killing Pyre afterward. But.

“Fine,” she said, pushing against Pyre’s chest and bringing up her inventory. “Bamo, if she makes any moves to steal it and run, you bite her straight in the neck, you got that?”

Bamo saluted her. “You’ve got it, boss.”

“I can still hear you, you know,” Pyre said, glaring at him. The bat just shrugged. He had done his best to orchestrate them not killing each other—now that the chances of that outcome had gotten slimmer, he was giving himself a moment to take a breath.

The scroll dropped from her inventory and into Akemi’s open hands. This was her last chance to reconsider, she realized, eyes peering just above the top of the scroll to meet Pyre’s own. After Pyre saw the rune, there was a fair chance she’d be able to memorize it. And if that was the case, that meant this advantage would no longer be hers alone.

Which meant she had to be sure about this. If it wasn’t for the drotlings, she would have assumed Pyre was lying to her about the whole runes aren’t just drawings crap, but those mulch kids had told Akemi a variation of the same thing. When they had gotten busy drawing a hundred Locking runes on the makeshift cage, Akemi had asked why they didn’t draw a more advanced version of the rune—she had seen it herself, it wasn’t much harder, just a few more lines and circles—but they insisted that they lacked the skill.

She had thought at the time that they somehow lacked the motor function to draw it, but given their proficiency in pottery, that would have made no sense. So it had to be deeper than that—a magical barrier that went beyond the superficial motions.

“He’s getting closer, Akemi,” Bamo warned.

She pinched her temple, and shook her head. Oh, fuck it.

She flipped the scroll around.

Pyre’s entire face lit up.

The fire-headed girl reached for the scroll instinctually, but Akemi pulled it away, threatening her with two raised eyebrows. “You can look, but you’re not touching.”

“But—”

“I’d rather let the viscount run me over with a bulldozer twice than hand this over to you. I’ll hold it up, you draw. No discussion.”

Pyre frowned, but she saw Akemi wasn’t budging, so she relented with a grumble. To Akemi’s surprise, she didn’t reach for her backpack for any special brushes, but instead reached up and broke a twig off one of the trees. It was a crude painting instrument, serrated at the edges, but that didn’t stop her from beginning to etch into the ground with it.

“Seriously? A twig? Do you not have anything better?” Akemi asked, genuinely lost.

“You’re my easel, not an art critic,” Pyre said, unable to resist getting a jab in. She kept looking back and forth between the ground and Akemi, her eyes studying the parchment with deep concentration. Of course, this was Pyre, so she ultimately couldn’t help herself. She continued to say, “It’s better to use a tool that best matches the material you’re working with. If I’m drawing a rune into dirt, using a rock or a twig is about as good as it gets.”

Akemi hummed. That girl really was an encyclopedia.

An encyclopedia that just tried to kill her, but hey, who’s counting.

Despite the imprecise edges of the twig, Pyre’s lines were impressively smooth. She drew like a real artist, from the arm, instead of the hand, carving large circles in the ground with one fluid motion. At each point of connection between the symbols, a faint, red light began to glow. Insects scattered from the dirt where she drew, almost as if they were fleeing.

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“I just realized something,” Akemi mumbled. “It’s a rune of heroic consumption. Do you think it’ll work against other villains?”

Pyre swooped another large circle in the ground, spraying dirt at Akemi’s feet.

“It should,” she said simply. Bamo made another comment about the viscount’s arrival—he could hear each individual flap of the chimera’s wings, which meant he was close—and Pyre bit her lip in concentration, leaning even closer to the ground, so her nose was almost kissing the dirt. “This is basically the same rune they use to sacrifice villains. I don’t know everything about runic art, but I think the change they made makes it so villains are able to take the role of the hero in the sacrificial process. It’s not about who the sacrifice targets, but who is doing the sacrificing. You can see it here.”

She guided Akemi’s attention briefly to the very top of the circle, where there was an X symbol surrounded by squiggly lines. It looked like a whole lot of nothing to Akemi.

“The top of the rune specifies any requirements about who is casting it. All the advanced runes Nocturne draws have an X at the top, meaning they’re specifically made for villains to use,” she said, continuing her work. “I believe the symbols at the bottom, the X and O, mean that it can be cast on both villains and heroes.”

There wasn’t much free space left in the circle. It was nearly completely cluttered with symbols now. Which was good, because now even Akemi’s dull human ears could hear something flapping in the distance. She snapped her head up, and several leagues away, swooping up and down through the mile-high trees, was the unmistakable head of a bat.

“Okay, that’s all great,” Akemi said, beginning to tap her foot nervously. “But how the hell are we going to trick him into stepping into it?”

Pyre looked up at her very briefly to glare. “Why are you asking me? I’m the one doing all of the work here. You figure it out!”

Akemi gaped. “You’re the one who insisted I trust you to save us. I thought you already had a plan!”

“I said we’d figure it out together. That involved you using some of your braincells, too! But that was clearly too grand an expectation.”

Akemi took in a deep, balancing breath, as to avoid murdering Pyre, and put her mind to it.

After a moment, she asked, irritably, “Do you think the rune will fire if I put one of my dummies on it?”

“Your… dummies?”

“My illusions. The ones I used back at the castle. They look like people, but they’re not. I figure if I combine them with the noise of the steel armor, it’ll confuse him enough to come barreling at them before he realizes they’re not really us.”

“It… shouldn’t,” Pyre said after a moment, distracted. She was carefully etching the last symbol in the rune, a crown-shaped one that sat in the middle of the entire thing. “Consume illusions, I mean. The rune will know the difference.”

“Okay. Wonderful. Phenomenal. So you finish the thing, then—”

The ground exploded beneath Akemi. Pain ricocheted through her as she was sent flying into a nearby tree, her leg colliding with a crack against hard bark. Disoriented, she looked up to see the viscount hovering in the sky above them, his staff pointed down, and red, crackling magic bursting through the head of it. He had a ragged, exhausted look on his face, like a parent that’d been chasing an escaped child.

Whatever restraint he had been showing before, there was none of that left now.

Akemi tried to move toward the steel armor, but she nearly screamed as soon as she tried lifting her foot. It was completely limp, broken, jutting out at an unnatural angle from her ankle. There was no way she was going to be able to cross the distance in time.

“Bamo,” she called out, breaking the bat from his paralysis. “The armor—”

She gestured toward the forgotten helmet. It wasn’t far from him at all. He got the message and grabbed it, but hesitated before slamming the pieces together. Pain was visible in the wince in his face just thinking about it. He wouldn’t be able to cover his ears and make the noise at the same time, so Akemi could see why. But still.

“Just do it!” Akemi yelled. The viscount was charging another attack, this time aimed for Pyre, who had finished the rune and was now backing up slowly from it.

“I—I can’t,” he said. “It’ll burst my ears right open—”

“Give me that.”

Pyre backed herself into Bamo, grabbing the armor out of his hands. He hid his head in his hands as fast as possible, at the moment just before Pyre slammed the pieces together.

The sound reverberated through the forest. The viscount shrieked again.

“Eugh, you insolent—worms!”

Akemi clenched her jaw as she watched the viscount clamp his hands over his own ears, fizzling his attack. Even as effective as the sound bombardment was, it was a very temporary solution. It didn’t mean anything unless they could get him onto the ground and into the circle. And, if he was going to continue to barrage them with aerial attacks, even using her dummies would be useless. Any attack by him would incinerate them in seconds, and ruin the rune, too.

Shit.

She opened her mouth to yell something to Pyre, but quickly remembered—with a glance upward—who else was listening.

Staring very intently on the tree across from her, Akemi used [Mind Paper].