“Too far to loose from here. We’ll hit Vergil.”

Already the boy danced with Erisa with a spryness she hadn’t suspected him capable of. Tallah formed fireflies and set them to pop against forming barriers. The first one almost got Vergil bisected. For the next he understood what she meant to do and he fell in a rhythm of dodging killing cuts by a hair’s breath, only by listening to the pop-pop-pop of fireflies detonations.

Anna lent her unique perception and unloaded Tallah’s focus from guiding the fireflies. She surrendered a measure of control to the ghost.

Erisa was forced to move, sweeping her terrible arms to grip Vergil. She slammed against an alien barrier. The barrier dropped instantly, shattered by the impact, but Vergil was already there, swinging his axe to bury it in the folds of her flesh. It did nothing but enrage the monster, especially as he chopped down again, and again, blood spraying.

Tallah had enough stored power of her own. Any more of that poisoned mist and she’d burst apart at the seams. It would need to do.

Bianca shot her across the battlefield to close the distance. Exhilaration thrummed in the pit of her stomach as she passed beneath bleeding edges to impact heavily against the girl’s back. She scrambled for purchase, hand gripping anything they could, digging fingers into wounds, hoping not to lose them.

Erisa shook and pranced in place, fought and screamed in agony as Tallah’s lances burst through meaty pockets of flesh to cook her alive. This close no barrier could be stable enough to protect her from the flames and the axe. The boy hacked at her limbs, just a breath faster than she, always moving, always cutting, always a step far enough.

Tallah spared him only a moment’s appreciation while she burned holes in Erisa, trying to find what it was inside that kept the girl moving. Where was the heart in that mess of mutation? Lungs? Something to trip up the thing enough to stop her moving.

Christina wove the black bolt and discharged it into the girl’s side.

Nothing happened. Erisa shook violently, redoubled her efforts of escape, did not seem to feel the moment. She crashed against the wall of the ravine, rolled down on the bones, tried to get Tallah off her and push Vergil away.

She succeeded on one account as the boy slipped on the treacherous bones. Erisa cast a barrier to section him and very nearly succeeded. Tallah leapt off and barrelled into him. Luck held to her side as she escaped with all limbs still attached, and Vergil held by the scruff of his neck.

More barriers bloomed in an explosion of fury. She couldn’t counter them all even as she fired her lances and Christina lent her lightning’s aid. It was too much, cut after cut after cut, endlessly repeating like the cadence of a heart, wreathing Erisa in an impenetrable armour of thorns where she lay on the bones, panting with the effort of the fight.

She bled and tired. Somehow, the bloody thing tired, but did. Not. Stop.

It was all Tallah and Bianca could do to keep on the backslide, Vergil anchored to her as they spun and twirled in the air, trying to avoid the murderous streaks. She smashed her shoulder against one of the flat invisible walls, caught by surprise. A cage formed on the sides, closing in as Bianca fought to gain height.

She’d closed the distance but it wasn’t enough. Now or never!

“Close your eyes!” she instructed and took aim at Erisa, ignoring Rhine over to the side. “Now or never, Christi.”

The Punishment erupted from her fingers and struck the earth with the force of a meteor. It punched straight through Erisa to explode the mound of corpses on which she made her stand. A geyser of bone shards blasted her and Vergil backward to smash into the rock face, the wind knocked out of her chest, sight stolen by the grit.

They slid down and were half-buried under the avalanche of corpses.

“Sil?” she wheezed out. “Where are you?”

“I’m alive,” the healer answered from somewhere farther down. She’d had the good sense to run as far from the fighting as possible.

“Did you kill her?” Vergil asked as he gripped her shoulder to steady himself.

“I don’t know.” Illum roiled in the impact crater, a mess of jagged power that defied coherence. If successful, then the trap would activate and finish the job.

If that was the main body.

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…was it?

“I… require… this one… be mended.”

Tallah’s blood froze as she understood what she saw in the illum. Erisa lived. Not only, but she’d healed herself! Given Panacea’s earlier intervention, it struck her as profoundly odd that the goddess would answer the prayer.

“See now, sister?” Erisa stalked on her impossible legs down the settling ash, towards Sil, flesh gripped in the flux of mutation. “Our lying goddess answers my prayers, yet she’s done nothing to save me. Nothing to protect me from what was happening. Why serve her? Why deny me?” If anything, she paid no more attention to them, relegated to annoyances that she chose to keep away with barriers. They formed in the air, layered one atop another, a box closing in on Tallah and Vergil.

“Bugger, she’s resilient,” Tallah groaned.

“We can’t kill her.” Vergil swallowed. “What do we do?”

I’m spent. Christina’s presence flickered on the edge of consciousness. I don’t know what else to hit her with.

Disintegration would probably trigger a catastrophic collapse in the girl. But could she risk that? If she failed, she’d be useless, especially with all her limiters broken. Not so much a gambit as a suicide attack.

The box halved in size. Then halved again. Dust settled on invisible barriers and hung suspended in the air. If Bianca dropped her tethers, they’d still remain quite high off the ground.

Sil kept her distance from Erisa, running and slipping across the bones.

“Hold your breath,” Tallah ordered. “This will hurt.”

Vergil obeyed.

She fired off a lance at full power towards the farthest edge of the invisible box. Air super-heated in the enclosed space, bit back, nearly cooked them alive.

Barriers shattered, dust and smoke rushing in. Bianca shot them out and up in the lull between attacks. Erisa had figured out the way to box her in and it was only a short matter of time before that happened again.

I have a solution, Anna mused. It will not be pleasant.

“I’ll bloody take anything right now.”

I need the girl’s blood. You need to drink it.

Tallah hesitated. Even if Anna had been spectacularly adept at poisons once upon a time, would something like that work here? Erisa could simply purge it with a prayer.

Don’t be daft. Poison works on everything. The ghost sounded affronted. Get me a sample of her blood. Leave the rest to me. I dare that goddess purge my work.

“Where’s your axe, Vergil?”

He pointed at Erisa’s back, to where the blood-slick handle of the weapon protruded from the girl’s skin, flesh healed around the weapon’s bite. “Had to let go. Sorry.”

Blast! She couldn’t move them in or reach out Bianca’s tethers to yank the weapon out. She was barred—

Something barrelled through the barriers, shattering them like glass. In the sight of the Ikosmenia, it was a blur of illum fragments roughly coalescing in the shape of a spider.

“Mother!” Luna cried out. “Mother lives. Mother comes.”

Mother crashed into Erisa. It bled illum and ichor as it rolled with the girl among the corpses. It bit and stabbed and stung in the moment of distraction before the girl counter attacked.

“Stay dead, creature. Leave me be. You’ve tormented me enough.” Erisa whined and growled, her words slurred. Some balance had been tipped. Tallah marvelled at how mutation flooded the girl.

They took advantage of the distraction and zoomed past the fight to land where Sil cowered in the bones, panting with the effort, hands on her belly.

On landing, Tallah’s knees buckled beneath her. Even infusing didn’t help as she sunk to the floor, gasping for air. She’d reached the limits of her endurance. Bianca barely had enough reserves left to help her rise, but that would be a waste of power.

“Sil…” Her voice sawed out of her. “I need your help.” Vergil dragged her up and she slumped over his shoulder.

Erisa and the Mother screamed above them again, this time the fight drawing to a fatal conclusion as the girl hacked the spider to pieces. A gnarled leg crashed paces away from them.

“I don’t know… I don’t know what to do, Tallah.” Sil stared at the twitching limb. “We’re going to die here.”

That kind of talking didn’t bear answering. Tallah looked to the battle and, in the sight, saw the axe as a dead space in the illum storm. It took Bianca three tries to reach it and yank it back. Vergil caught it as it came flying through the dark.

How?

Didn’t matter. She’d consider his changes if they survived.

“You needed this?”

Vergil presented her with the weapon. Blood dripped off the edge, oily black, illum-rich.

The more you drink, the better I’ll fashion the poison. Anna forced an image of a grin. Drink up. Let me brew a weapon fit to slay a queen.

She swallowed down her disgust and licked the axe’s crescent smile. It tasted of iron and bile, rot and death. Most of all, it tasted bitter. Her stomach rebelled violently against the indecency but Anna took control.

Right then, let’s see here.