I expected the relentless antithesis attack to peter out after a little while. What I didn’t expect was for it to end suddenly, when a wave of gray liquid, multi-colored lasers, and arrows with balloons strapped to them smashed into the rear of the antithesis lines. The assault that had kept us pinned for most of an hour was picked apart and dissolved in seconds.

As soon as the bodies cleared, someone yelled “Clear” from down the hallway, and the last person I expected came strolling out of the darkness.

“Teddy! Whisperer! Good to see you again. Did you see my balloons? This probably wasn’t the best place to test them, but they still worked. I imagine they’d pick the antithesis up, and drop them from several floors up if there was enough clearance,” Magpie declared as she practically skipped down the hallway.

“Maggie… what are you doing here?” Whisperer asked, dumbfounded.

“I’m part of the backup squad! We just dug into the tunnel a hundred meters or so up, and I thought I’d wander over and say hello. The others will be along in a minute. They’re just delayed by the possible third degree burns that crossing molten rock may cause,” Magpie explained casually. Instead of shaking either of our hands, she threw her arms around Whisperer’s cat and started fluffing its fur.

Tina stared at the Magpie in surprise, unsure how to take the woman who just waltzed down a hallway that was previously filled with antithesis like it was nothing. “Then how did you get through it?” she asked suspiciously.

“Insulation with a cooling layer, and cryogenic shielding! I’m so glad I managed to test it!” Magpie replied, head still buried in fluff.

“Tina, Jesse, meet Maggie Artell, also known as Magpie. She’s a samurai from Seattle and an avid collector of Class I catalogs,” I said.

“Nice to meet you?” Jessie said, unsure how to approach the woman. Thankfully, Magpie had that part handled. As soon as she was done fluffing the cat, she practically sprinted over to where Jesse was standing.

“And it’s nice to meet you. Jesse, was it? Nice weapon! It’s from a derivative of the directed plasma projector catalog, isn’t it?” Magpie asked as she inspected his weapon. “But with external cooling! That’s ingenious! Tell me, how long do you get for a burst? And how long is your cooldown?”

Jesse looked my way, practically begging for help, but I just shrugged. “Might as well answer her questions. The sooner you satisfy her curiosity, the faster she’ll move over to Tina.” I heard Tina squeak in surprise behind me, so I turned her direction. “She’s like that with literally everyone, you might as well get used to the idea. She’s mostly harmless.”

While our two rookies were getting the Magpie treatment, Whisperer and I wandered a little further up the tunnel to check out the situation. When we rounded the nearest bend, we found a massive digging machine, half buried in the floor of the tunnel, and a half-dozen samurai I didn’t recognize climbing out of a tunnel melted in the roof. More importantly, at least for me, Humboldt was standing guard over the machine.

As soon as she saw us, she lifted one of her massive power armored arms to wave. “Hey!”

“Hey yourself,” I replied while jogging over. “I didn’t expect to see you down here. Are you… doing ok?” I asked awkwardly.

“For now,” she replied with a shrug. “I have a lot of bad memories of these tunnels, but I’m not the same defenseless girl I was when I entered them the first time. That, and there’s a world-ending threat waiting for us not too far away. Shit like that really helps distract me from my own anxieties.”

I patted her arm in an effort to comfort her, even though she probably didn’t even notice, before stepping past her gigantic armored frame. “Who are your friends?”

“Some of the strongest samurai on the west coast,” she said, gesturing to the group. “The Family wants to do absolutely everything they can to deal with this monstrosity before it becomes active.”

“And that includes sending a giant floating marble?” I asked.

Whisperer smacked me in the back of the head for that. “People don’t judge you for running around with an army of teddy bears. You shouldn’t judge someone for being a floating ball,” she admonished.

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“I guess that’s fair,” I conceded.

“Alright, looks like we’re ready to move forward. Where’d Magpie go?” A woman wearing a skintight, featureless, grey bodysuit asked.

“She’s back assaulting the newbies!” I yelled back. The entire group turned and looked in my direction. “Hey… Teddy here, this is Whisperer,” I said, throwing a thumb in Whisperer’s direction. “We were already on site. Thanks for breaching the tunnel and dealing with that wave of antithesis that was keeping us pinned down.”

“It was unintentional,” the woman replied.

“Right…” the two of us stared at each other awkwardly for a moment, until Magpie came running back up the tunnel.

“So much interesting tech! Is everyone here now? Let's go!” she cried, as she jogged past the entire group and barreled further into the tunnel. Tina and Jesse were following slightly behind her but had the common sense to come to a stop when they met up with the rest of our group.

“She’s going to get herself killed,” the glowing, skeletal man mumbled.

“It didn’t happen when we cleared Victoria,” the woman with the purple hair replied.

“Or when she got caught by that trap near Spokane,” the girl in the fancy-looking goth dress said with a giggle.

“By any proper measurement, she should have died many times already. I’ve run the numbers,” the ball announced.

“We should probably start following now, before she gets in trouble,” I announced. As the group started down the tunnel, I turned towards Bob. “Could you maybe try and catch up with her and distract her long enough for us to catch up? If you can’t, just keep her in one piece,” I whispered to the big bear.

“Got it, boss,” he replied before sprinting down the tunnel.

The woman with the purple-green hair turned towards me, questioningly. I noticed she didn't appear to be wearing any real armor, just a leather jacket and jeans. “She likes new, shiny objects,” I explained. “And even if she doesn’t stop, the only thing that could possibly stop Bob is, hopefully, still gestating inside the hive.”

The woman laughed. “That’s kind of you to worry about her, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is you can’t really control Magpie. You direct her somewhere and hope there’s only minor collateral damage. I swear, the way she walks into situations, she must have specialized in entropy control,” she said before sticking out her hand. “I’m Temporal, nice to meet you.”

“Teddy, nice to meet you,” I said, with a firm shake of the hand.

“Sorry about Grey back there. She’s usually pretty friendly, but she tends to get extremely stressed during ops,” Temporal explained. “And trust me, this is far from a standard op, even for us.”

“Yeah, I can understand that. The week hasn’t exactly been smooth for me either,” I replied. When I noticed that Tina and Jesse had caught up, and were walking a couple steps behind Humboldt, Temporal, and I, I waved in their direction. “That’s Jesse and Tina. They’re from Edmonton and barely had any experience before this fiasco. They’ve experienced quite the on-the-job training the last few days.”

There was an audible gasp from the front of our group, and the woman in the dark-blue gothic dress came shooting back towards us. I stepped back when she skidded to a halt in front of me. It actually hurt to look at her. The air around her didn’t quite shimmer, it was more like I was looking at her through an infinitely shifting series of broken windows. I could tell what she looked like, but my brain really had to work to put the image together. “You can’t let those two go into battle without giving them nicknames!” the woman declared. “That would be inhumane!”

“Alright, Dreamer, settle down,” Temporal said, trying to placate her friend. “Based on what we’ve heard, they haven’t exactly had a lot of downtime to do that the last few days.”

“They do now!” Dreamer countered. “We’re approaching the end boss. Everyone should have memorable nicknames in this situation.”

“Actually, we’re only a couple hundred meters from the scariest monster on the planet. Shouldn’t we be preparing instead?” I said, before being quickly silenced by a look from Dreamer.

“Pesti and Grey are handling the chaff. They’ll melt anything under a Twenty before we even see it, between the nanites and plague. We have time,” Dreamer said.

“Plague?” Tina muttered, but it was drowned out by Dreamer’s tirade.

“You’re their senpais, so it’s your responsibility! Do it!” Dreamer yelled.

“Fucking… Fine, Arachne,” I said, pointing at Tina. “and…”

My brain failed, so Whisperer stepped up. “Plasmalanx, it’s a portmanteau of plasma and phalanx”.

I glanced at her, slightly confused by the choice, but Dreamer smiled. “That’s perfect! Now you two are real samurai. Congratulations!” She ran over and shook both their hands, then jumped back. “Alright. NOW we can kill some antithesis.”

Temporal patted my back as Dreamer skipped away. “Magpie’s not the only one in our group that has a reputation for being a little strange. Sorry about that.”