I’m not going to panic. I’m going to behave like everything’s okay. Low probability that they just happened to be approaching right as I got the spell working so they’ve likely been following us. So they have some way to know where we are and may be watching us. So I should behave like nothing has changed so they aren’t tipped off and Heather has a chance to counter-ambush them.

“Check the rest of the forest,” Heather orders me quietly. I slowly pivot to the right, sweeping my cone through a full circle. No other dots show up, thankfully, so it’s just those two.

Two dots. Upper dot is the flying mount. Worst-case is the lower dot is his high-end zombie. Best case is that it’s Axelos and he shows up on radar passively.

“Keep it on them,” Heather tells me. I nod shakily. “Agnes, Bob, cover Whitney, keep us informed. Everyone else with me or Liv.”

Radar to tracking mode, sounds good to me. Now I just have to not freak out.

I jerk around to see what everyone else is doing and find only Agnes, Bob, and a bare whisper of movement as the entire rest of the party finishes vanishing into the underbrush. I wildly look back to Heather and she’s gone too.

Okay. It’s not the densest patch of forest, the coppices are big here and have shaded out all the undergrowth, but they’re still growing closely enough together to block vision past about thirty feet, like a bunch of green pillars. Everyone’s probably like five feet away from me and I have Agnes and Bob to cover me anyway.

Agnes steps off the path and takes up an easy stance in front of me, warhammer held at the ready.

“I got ya’, yer’ fine, jus’ this way,” Bob says quietly.

It’s strange. I don’t feel out of control or anything, I think I’m still thinking clearly, but I feel like a clock wound way too tight, just barely on the edge of going twang and sending parts flying in every direction. I’m not having trouble holding the cone on target, exactly, but my hand is shaking enough that I can notice it.

I follow Bob as we slowly advance into the woods. “Wer’ gettin’ closer in case they run,” he murmurs. “Liv an’ I’re good enough to talk at this dist’ so I’ll be tellin’ her what they’re doing.”

Another dot appears in my cone, off to the side of our targets.

“New dot t’ his south,” Bob says under his breath. That makes sense, our path was moving northwards, Axelos was off to our right. We’re about twenty feet into the woods at this point. “Katell can’ assassinate the big nasty or the necro’ she’s takin’ his mount first so ‘e can’t run. We’ll hol’ here.” He squeezes my shoulder reassuringly and lets go to move his hand to his staff. I’m not sure where the Grimoire went, I really hope he stashed it somewhere safe. He’s still looking intently at my display. “Steady, stead-”

All hell breaks loose.

The passenger-jet-being-tortured howl gets going just enough to shake me to my bones and then it cuts off instantly, like someone had unplugged its microphone.

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The top dot - Axelos’s mount - blinks out and another lights up a couple inches away and starts falling. The bottom dot - the thing that Ewald called the Caulfield Night Snatcher - launches itself at Katell’s dot and is batted away by a fourth dot that flares into being just long enough to engage the attacker. Bob’s muttering a mile a minute, “snatcher moving south Axelos falling and casting—”.

Then my cone is full of dots, uncountable specks of light in a ground-level plane that’s densest underneath Axelos and thins out as it expands.

I realize that Axelos spawned a bunch of zombies right on top of me just in time to look up and see something clawing itself out of the ground.

Then Agnes’s warhammer whizzes past my ear and splatters something with a nauseously wet krunch. Bob’s still muttering wildly - “area summon hundred plus shamblers snatcher north north north east up two yards now south just keep holding it steady south south” - and I have no idea how he’s simultaneously following a single dot, talking, and blurring his staff around to obliterate anything that gets past Agnes. I also have no idea how Liv can possibly hear him over the sound of Bob and Agnes smashing zombies and throwing their green-grey pieces all over the forest, whock-squelch-thud.

Thankfully I know that these were never people, so I can treat it like video game gore. That’s not a spleen, it was never a spleen, it’s just a high-quality cosplay spleen.

On my radar I see the horde of zombies closing in, drawn to the base of the cone and a rapidly-growing zombie-free spot surrounding where Katell was.

Then I catch a pair of stacked dots flying to the left and freeze, wondering if I should—“follow them! north north north left left right!”, Bob says urgently—I track their path, keeping them centered as they zig and zag together on their course away from us and Bob calls out their evasions. Agnes explodes a zombie all over me and I flinch and claw at my eyes with my left hand, but I manage to keep my right hand with the spell pointed-

The lower dot I’m tracking winks out just short of the end of my range.

The upper dot goes a bit further, then comes to an abrupt stop and vanishes.

I hold my radar centered on that spot.

“Axelos is down,” Bob says, crushing a zombie’s face and blasting its knees out in a single fluid staff spin. His lazy slurring is suddenly back. “I’m swappin’ with Liv so I kin keep ‘im alive. We’ll clear ou’ the zombies an’ regroup.”

I’m just kind of forcing myself to stand where I am and not fall over, but I somehow manage to squeeze out an “Okay”.

Then he zooms off, effortlessly weaving between zombies and trees. He’s not quite as fast or graceful as Ji, but I still have trouble tracking him with my eyes. He vanishes in seconds.

Agnes turns another few zombies into meat shrapnel. At some point she and Bob managed to kill enough zombies fast enough to clear a safe zone around me, and now she’s doing smooth circuits, sweeping the forest clear of zombies at every turn.

I don’t even notice Liv until she’s already cut two zombies off at the knees, leaving them for Agnes to finish off on her next pass.

“Whitney, slow full-circle sweeps,” she orders me, short and to the point.

Liv watches intently as I do a slow, shaky spin, slewing my magic radar across the whole swarm of zombies. For the most part they’re still making their way toward us, but a few on the outskirts have lost the plot and are drifting off in random directions.

“Ji, two to your north! Ewald, go south a bit!” For the next minute or so Liv shouts out directions for the rest of the party as they run down the last of the zombies.

Eventually the only blips left are allies and we’re done.

“Clear. Good job, everyone,” Liv says. “Especially you, Whitney. You can drop the spell and take a break now.”

I don’t even bother to figure out how to dismiss it. Probably something like “putting my finger away”, but I don’t care at this point. I just stumble over to the nearest tree, my knees suddenly full of jelly. I carefully fall over, leaning on the tree so I don’t face-plant in the dirt, and try to stop shaking.