“As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.” -Vaarsuvius, Order of the Stick-

_____

One of the interesting things about shield bracers was their limitation. From an academic perspective, it was a fascinating look at how magic could often be arbitrary in its precision. The shield would always form .835 meters away from the center of the bracer, unless a shift was required to encompass part of the wearer. This was especially helpful for camraconda knights, but it started to become hard to predict at that point. Still, you could, with reliable confidence, say that a shield bracer would manifest its domed panes of light to intercept incoming attacks before they actually hit you. No matter what shape you were, your bracer would either be entirely predictable, or slightly chaotic within the bounds of doing its job of being a magical shield.

The limitation, then, was that if you switched what the bracer was blocking while that thing was within the minimum of .835 meters, the bracer wouldn’t actually see it.

In practical terms, and in the Order’s continually expanding and developing training plan, this didn’t really matter. The time it took something to close a two foot gap was often shorter than the reflex time for any of the knights, whether they were human, camraconda, ratroach, or Ben. It was always possible to swap blocking modes in preparation for a strike, but once something crossed that line, you had to make your own arrangements for either dodging or getting hit.

This had led to a discussion within the Order’s ranks on whether or not it was possible to bypass shield bracers by having attacks only start from inside their bounds. Preliminary research - which was to say, the easy tests - said yes. If your bracer was set to stop a bladed weapon strike, and your opponent moved a knife inside the bracer’s range slowly enough to not trigger it, they could stab you all they wanted. There were a bunch of other tests planned for the next week or two that James knew of from one of his side jobs as ‘Research proposal sanity checker’, each of them getting increasingly convoluted and most of them containing the justification that the Order might one day need to fight someone with similar abilities.

It might be possible to save time on at least one of them, though.

Fresh from a very relaxed dungeon delve and successful diplomatic contact, riding high on the gained information about not one but two dungeons, happy to be well on the way to closing off one thread of the ongoing tangled mess happening around here, James and the rest of his party teleported back into the living room of their rented AirBNB suburban home.

Already in flight and inside the radius of the twenty shield bracers massed around him, nothing did anything to stop the bullet before it hit James in the head.

Training helped with a lot of thing. Practice drilled reflexive uses of magic and tactics in, made it possible to react smoothly and without second guessing to a lot of situations. Dungeon delving gave hands on experience with handling bizarre situations, that just weren’t possible to predict or train for. But neither of those things could prepare someone for pain.

People got stung in training or hurt on delves, but there was simply no way to be ready for the nuclear agony of being shot in the face.

James reeled backward, leg clipping a dining room chair as his hands tried to grab something but found only air, and he crashed to the floor with every coherent thought smashed into fragments. Around him, he vaguely processed that some of the others were screaming, pained sounds of shock and injury briefly being the only thing that could be heard. He might have been screaming too. He was definitely screaming too. A hoarse yell that was louder than he ever raised his voice ripping out of his throat.

And in the aftermath of the pained yells and the tailing end of gunshots, James heard a mildly surprised man speak up. In the same tone that a person would use to say that their microwave dinner was tastier than they’d anticipated. “Huh. Didn’t expect that to work.”

”God points, we shoot. Told you.” Said another man James couldn’t see from where he’d landed on the hardwood floor, before the speaker raised their own voice to bellow. “All of you drop your weapons, and get on the ground!”

His own yell was rapidly joined by others, men with guns pointing at the members of the Order team that were still on their feet yelling for surrender. Half of them were shouting contradictory commands, as footsteps from upstairs indicated that more of the intruders were on the way.

Anesh was still standing, frozen in confusion and fear, his bullpup rifle held at ease on his chest as he wanted to keep it secure during the teleport. The fact that his friends had been shot only started to dawn on him after people began shouting at him to drop the gun. After even the fact that someone had shot him, they’d just barely managed to graze his armor. The fact that people were shouting at him only barely made it to the part of his brain that actively processed information after one of them tried to shoot him again.

He must not have dropped his rifle fast enough, because one of them pulled the trigger. And then the others, still shouting, still with their pistols leveled, did the same

Shield bracers had, apparently, one big flaw. But every other time, they worked. And the flare of golden light as his intercepted the bullet aimed at his chest snapped Anesh back to the present real fast.

Anesh started moving. Pulling speed from James through their relationstick link let him know that his love was alive, so that was a burden off his heart at least. And James wouldn’t be needing that right now as much as Anesh did. As he brought his gun up, Anesh was doing math in his head; eleven shield bracers on their side that he knew of, averaging twenty charges banked each. Six - no, seven men - with more approaching, five of them with what looked like standard fifteen round magazines. Two had rifles, Anesh didn’t know how many bullets those had, but it couldn’t actually be enough. The conclusion : the enemy would need to reload before the shields ran out.

He let his eyes flick over the scrambled space. Keeka was on the floor with Arrush trying to drag the smaller ratroach behind the door to the basement stairs. Momo was holding her stomach and hunched over, but still standing next to him. Rho was bleeding on the floor but conscious so the inhabitor would be fine. Ink-And-Key had been facing the opposite direction in their teleport circle and was only just starting to twist around. And in the corner of the living room behind the attackers, Lincon sat in the house’s plush armchair, half his face covered in blood, a gag in his mouth.

Anesh would need to be careful about that.

Bullets splashed against their shields as he let the coldly analytical part of his mind take over and brought the rifle up to his shoulder. He was terrified, but there wasn’t time to be terrified, only to loosely feel it from a great distance. Panic and anger weren’t his tools. Instead, he needed patience, and clarity.

The gun slid into a firing position. The bullets from the enemy stopped. Anesh opened his eyes, the flickering of the shield no longer able to ruin his vision, and sighted on the nearest person in his line of fire.

The man had a strong, boxy chin, with just a bit of five o’clock shadow. He looked like someone who would have made a good addition to a community football team; tough, but with a composed vibe to him that could have felt comforting in most situations. Anesh wondered, maybe, vaguely, if this person had a family. A wife and kids, parents he talked to every weekend, anything.

Then Anesh put a five round burst through his target. The spray of inky black liquid against the wall next to the fireplace indicating good penetration on at least some of the rounds, as the man dropped. If the missing chunk of brain didn’t kill him instantly, the shock and blood loss would get him eventually. Assuming whatever type of dungeon life he was had blood or brains.

Anesh pivoted, leaning into the recoil, and picked another target.

Momo didn’t fight calmly. Momo realized pretty quickly she’d been hit, and that her bracers were going off. She also knew from the totem on her that there were nine hostile humans in the building, which meant there were at least nine enemies. Instead of getting her bearings, Momo turned her hobble into a lunge and a roll, ducking behind the couch and forcing anyone who wanted to shoot her to approach at a weird angle. Or shoot through the couch. But that was what bracers were for.

A line of sharpened floating pencils trailed after her out of the coat she’d kept on over her armor, her self-made tricks fanning around her head like a crown as she tried to make sense of what was happening. Before she could actually do that, though, some fat asshole with an assault rifle ran down the stairs and took the u-turn needed to run toward where the fight was happening. Lined up with Momo, she decided as a spur of the moment thing that this guy didn’t get to participate in - or live through - the fight.

Pave wasn’t a hugely impactful spell. If Momo had to rank it against traditional fantasy spells, she’d put it underneath the classic magic missile. But if you’d been using the crown that compacted your Velocity, and if you aimed well, it could be a little dangerous. So she spread her fingers in the guy’s direction and put three overcharged paves into his throat and one more into his dick just in case. It wasn’t purely spiteful; that kind of debilitating pain would keep him down long enough for her to go kick his teeth in if she needed to.

As bullets flew overhead in both directions, she saw the next guy coming down the stairs pause at the sound of his buddy’s flesh pulping. A second later, he wasn’t there, and a slither of grey fog snaked its way through the bannister and down into the front hallway where the man reappeared. Momo threw a flashbang pilfered from a Townton police station his direction and slammed her eyes shut, but after the concussive bang added to the cacophony of battle, she looked again to see that he was right in front of her and apparently unharmed.

He’d lost his gun though, but that didn’t stop him from snagging Momo’s throat with a barely visible grey line, and snapping her with a forced movement to her feet as her unarmored neck slammed into his outstretched hand. She gave a gurgling panicking squeal and tried to punch him in the face, but he caught her wrist and twisted in a way that brought more tears to her eyes.

And then he froze.

Ink-And-Key found that he couldn’t speak. Someone had put a bullet through the compact and durable router that he used for his arms and voice. And usually, that wasn’t a big deal; he didn’t think of himself as disabled, exactly, but there were certain considerations for what he needed technological help to do. The skulljack let him do more than normal, and that was useful. He could rely on it.

And now someone had taken that away. Violently. Which was, of course, always going to be how people tried to take from him, if it came to it. Ink-And-Key was a shy person, a cautious person, and a very wary person. But he was also, sometimes, in quiet moments where he wouldn’t be a problem for anyone else, very angry at the fate he’d been handed.

In this moment, that anger shifted to the people who had done this. Were doing this. Not just to him, but to the people who understood him and helped. And Ink-And-Key was furious.

One of the riflemen locked up before whatever magic he was weaving could let him dodge Anesh’s gunfire, and then died. Ink-And-Key let the corpse drop, the object no longer required to be locked in place. He swept on to the next shooter, moving right to left and flickering his vision to force them to falter and pause, every irising of his lens having an outsized effect on the actual incoming damage as he weaponized confusion.

And then someone was strangling Momo. And Ink-And-Key was going to kill that one.

His vision locked on them as he started slithering forward as fast as he could. His own shield bracer must be dry, because a pair of bullets hit him in the side as he rushed the enemy mage, cables snapping and his unique form of blood spattering sideways. It hurt, and he screamed. But if it would be a problem, it would have to be later. Right now, he needed to focus.

At his height, he actually had to duck his head down to bury fangs in the attacker’s exposed arm. The texture of skin and too much body hair awkwardly disgusting against his tongue coiled in his mouth as Ink-And-Key pumped venom into the target. Letting go, he ‘blinked’ just long enough to let it take effect, the paralytic and mild muscle relaxant causing the man’s grip on Momo’s throat to slip and the girl to jerk away from him.

Momo’s own anger came with jamming all eight of her sharpened floating pencils up into her assailant's throat as soon as she realized that she could do that. Being choked had driven her into a flurry of terror that had locked her out of actually planning, but now, she was at least capable of fighting back. Which she did by grabbing one of her floating tools and wrenching it out of the man’s neck along with as much blood as possible.

Then she paved him in the face, and dropped back from the immobile form to land behind the couch with Ink-And-Key.

James blearily came to his senses to see Anesh crouch-walking and effortlessly carrying Rho’s body in one arm, his boyfriend providing his own covering fire as he hauled the canine inhabitor behind the kitchen counter. Then he felt movement himself, claws scraping at his armor as someone tried to haul him backward, shield bracers still pinging off 9mm or .45 rounds as their attackers recovered from the retaliation.

He tried to blink, and couldn’t. Or he could, but it wasn’t working properly. His eyelid slid down, but the light didn’t change in half his vision. In a haze of pain and dizziness, James felt every small bit of the normally seamless sensation, and so he felt as his eyelid bumped over ruptured parts of his eyeball. Felt as blood mixed under the edge of the membrane with a hot sting. Felt when the layer of skin peeled back and popped up from its normal path as it met something metal wedged into where he was supposed to blink. The sensation of his eyelid not being fully closed, of the wet pop as it folded back over itself, and yet still not changing what he could see at all, sparked something in his brain.

He’d been shot in the eye. He couldn’t blink because there was a bullet buried in the bridge of his nose and he couldn’t see because that bullet had punched through his aqueous humor. This was, the delirious thought spun across his mind, worse than how he normally got shot.

“I seem to have hit my head.” He slurred out to Arrush, who frantically dropped him at the top of the basement stairs next to Keeka. James kept compulsively trying to blink as bullets started to shred the thin wood of the interior door behind them, scanning the downed ratroach quickly to see what had happened.

Keeka had all four of his hands clutched around his throat, luminescent blue blood spilling out like thick gel from under his fingers as he frantically kicked to try to stand. Arrush was trying to get him to stay still, but Keeka was trying to get up and move; a lifetime of instincts on how to survive injury, how to survive fights, serving him poorly as the mortal wound leaked his life away.

James grabbed at one of Keeka’s shoulders with a fumbling hand, while his attention was spent on pulling out two blue orbs from his armor pockets. Handing them over, he watched carefully as Keeka cracked both blues with twitching fingers; if the first one had worked this would have been easier because James only had two of those and he could have used the other for himself. But it took both before the injury was replaced by bandaged stitches underneath the clasped paws.

Hopefully it would be enough. The blue orb that gave medical treatment was close to a healing potion, but it really wasn’t the same. It wasn’t going to magically make the injury vanish, just treat it. Which meant Keeka wasn’t going to be fighting, or even talking, for at least a little while.

There was one surefire way to make sure it was enough, though. James, his head screaming with pain, grabbed his two most useful tools out of his armor. A telepad, and his phone.

For once, this one time, when it mattered, neither of them had been shot. Though it didn’t stop the shooting outside, as another bullet punched a splintered hole through the interior door and lit up his shield bracer.

What he wanted his hands to be doing was clawing at his face, digging the bullet out of the bone where his nose met his eye socket, and then maybe punching something for catharsis. Instead he did his best to control the trembling of his fingers, scrawled the Lair’s address on the telepad, and pressed it into Keeka’s hands. Then he made a call.

”Operat-“

”JP. People are at our rental shooting at us. I’m sending you Keeka, get him to medical. And send backup. I don’t know how many are left and I need to go.” James didn’t know how he got through that without his voice splintering. In truth, he had stammered and repeated at least three words, but even realizing what he was saying was a little beyond him at the moment.

James didn’t even hang up, the phone already having disconnected, instead keeping eye contact with Keeka and what he hoped was a firm look on his face. The smoothly chitinous ratroach stared back at him with wide eyes and a wordless whine.

”Y-you too!” Arrush raised his voice to be heard over the gunfire, pushing James with other knuckles of one of his offset paws, the rest of the appendage in use currently holding a knife. “I wuh-will follow! Get our friends!” He set two of his hands on the door, armored chest heaving with a deep breath as he looked back at James and Keeka bleeding on the upper landing of the basement steps. “Love you. Go.”

James and Keeka gave in, and tore the telepad together. And were plunged into an icy grey void, a thorned vine of meaningless smoke holding them stuck fast with bronze brambles that had no color and flickered when looked at.

Then they were still on the landing, the bullets that had been shot through the door slamming into the drywall over their heads inside the shield bracer radius.

”Ow.” James wanted to throw up, rolling sideways and gagging as Keeka made a clicking scream behind him. At some point, he must have been tagged with the same binding spell Lincon was under, whatever it was that kept him here. Not just in the region, but unable to use a telepad at all. “Oh shit.”

From his sprawled spot on the hardwood ledge, James saw through his remaining eye Arrush crouched next to the crack of the door, the mammal half of his eyes widening in a look of pure terror as James and Keeka failed to make their exit. His hands were clutching weapons, two of them holding the sword tight to his side while the stronger arms had drawn one knife and two batons. He started to flinch forward before another bullet punched through the door, and James realized that Arrush had turned off his shield bracers. Or run out. He hoped it was the first one.

Out in the living room, the shooting died down, and a voice James didn’t recognize shouted to be heard over what would certainly be a lot of ringing ears if they didn’t have the same high quality ear protection that the Order always wore on delves. “They’re out! You three, around the house! Pin them down! Mark, get the ones that ran!” Heavy footsteps sounded, one set in particular closing across hardwood in a rapid dash as someone closed on the door. Arrush met James’ eyes, partially opening his muzzle to say something, before he jerked to focused attention, took a deep breath, and made a gagging noise that set James’ stomach roiling again.

As the footsteps got right to the door, James braced his leg to catch the door when the intruder kicked it open, the wood slamming into his armored shin and stinging slightly but not doing much else. The heavyset bearded man didn’t hesitate to raise his pistol at the two people laying injured on the floor, but James didn’t bother to kick the door back at him, or exert himself at all.

Because Arrush hit him an instant later. One of the folding batons coming down with enough force to break a wrist, and sending the too-slow reflexive shot into the man’s foot instead of into James. The second baton hit to the yelling man hit him across the face, jerking his head back. Arrush pressed the advantage, turning into a flurry of strikes, but keeping his bladed weapons back as he brutalized the attacker. After one stunning hit staggered the man forward, James rolled onto his knees, grabbed the man’s belt, and applied leverage to fling him down the stairs, at least one bone audibly snapping on the flight.

The motion was enough to make him nauseous again, but he still tried to stand to help Arrush. Except the ratroach was already gone, out through the door, and into the fray.

Arrush didn’t know how he fought.

In his past, so long ago he sometimes forgot it, it was with a feral need to survive. Then it was with all those ruthless instincts, but for someone, for Keeka, the alien sensation of protecting. Then it was alongside the Order. But the first time he’d tried that, he’d been… not chastized exactly, but he’d horrified them. The disregard for his own body, his own life, had been the catalyst to establish very clear foundations for training plans. And he had been improving, he could see it clearly. All the training, the drills, the practice, it helped him hone the knife of the self into something more durable.

But despite having been on many delves since that first incident, Arrush hadn’t ever really fought since then. They’d gotten into small altercations, little skirmishes, but nothing like what he had grown up with. Nothing where it came down to kill or die, not really. The closest had been here in Utah, protecting Alice and Dance, and even then… not really. Not quite the same.

He was grateful for it. But also it meant he didn’t know how he fought.

Now he found out.

Through his connection to James, he borrowed Breath. Not a lot, he didn’t need a lot. Just enough to offload the backlash from a single use of Fractal Avalanche as he burst out of the door toward the men who were moving as a pack around the front hall toward the back entrance to the kitchen. For a moment, there were three of him, all of them racing forward to strike, one of them leaping over Momo’s prone form while another dodged where Ink-And-Key was trying to stay low.

Then someone shouted “Demon!” And the shooting started again. One of him vanished, the spell that ensured that all three of the mirrored Arrushes were ‘him’ losing traction when he died. Then another one. Then the last. All three having popped like mirages when the invaders tried shooting them.

The intruders had also nearly shot each other, the two groups firing at Arrush between them. They had bad tactics, he decided.

He decided this as his Move Person use, the third of his chosen vectors and the reason that the second him had vanished, placed him in midair by the stairs, directly above the flanking group.

Arrush fell into their midst, the vomit and chunk of one of his lungs that he had brought up into his throat spraying out into the faces of the two who were most likely to get their guns up on him. He tried to stab the one to his left, but the skinny man twitched with a grey outline where he’d been, jerking just out of range of the knife. Then again. Then again. Arrush had disarmed one of the others and dropped a third as the screaming people realized he was among them and started to fight back, but still his target wouldn’t stop dodging his knife.

So he stopped trying, throwing his armored body backward as they tried to shoot him, shield bracer sparking with light as he hit the floor in front of the open front door, and rolled sideways into the small odd smelling room that led to the garage.

They came running after him - the ones that still had their guns and weren’t blinded - perhaps thinking that Arrush was running. Instead, the first one around the corner, Arrush hit in a full run. Move Person had put him back into position, and he was already moving, ignoring the problem of rapidly using blue orb powers. Claws and one knife sinking into skin and drawing a scream from the man, grey lines trying to make contact with Arrush’s arms as he tore into his foe in the spare seconds, before he ducked an attempt to hit him in the head with the butt of a rifle.

Coiled on the floor, one antenna cracked and stuck in his fur from the hit, Arrush exhaled. Tasting bitter bile and some of his own blood from where he’d lost a tooth at some point, his eyes flicked across the remaining standing combatants; one of them trying to shoot through his shield, draining charges; one of them calling out his own sword, a mirror of Arrush’s own to replace his lost gun; and one of them yelling out commands or demands or something. Arrush wasn’t listening.

He breathed, and spent his own Breath, cold making his chitin hurt more than normal where it tugged at the lines of his hide. Fractal Avalanche sending three of him out in a fan with the intent to meet by the front door, all three of him twisting as he rose up, bones and chitin popping as he leveraged half his body into a textbook perfect slash with the blade.

One of his targets went down with a bloody slash across his chest, nonlethal but painful enough to put him out temporarily. The second man, the flickering one that was hard to hit, lit up; the sword wreathing itself in a similar grey flame that clashed in a frozen moment with his target, until the blade broke through and Arrush carried on past the man with hot blood splashing against his paws from the cut across the throat. The third one he never hit, instead one of the half dozen swan-necked furred demon things that erupted from a point in space took the strike, bleating in pain as it went down in Arrush’s wake.

Then he was one again, and a fourth man had the hot metal of a gun barrel pressed against Arrush’s throat. But he wasn’t moving, and Arrush jerked away, raking claws across the face frozen in place by Ink-And-Key who had sprawled flat on the hallway floor to get a vantage on the fight. Line of sight broke for just a second, and the bullet went into Arrush’s abdomen, but it was a low priority concern right now. Dashing up the stairs in a crouched burst of speed, six limbs propelling him upward while one hand dragged the sword along, Arrush decided he wasn’t going to bleed out from one low caliber bullet. His hand had broken at some point; claws weren’t working properly, bent out of place. That would be for later. He kept low, disabling his bracers again as the screaming bleats of the demons filled the house, along with more gunfire from the kitchen where Anesh was still alive. That was good. Arrush liked Anesh.

Bullets hit the wall overhead, shattering glass frames of hanging paintings and ruining drywall as Arrush scuttled upward. At the top of the stairs he threw himself flat, pulling his tails up out of sight, and triggering the invisibility effect on his earring. Rolled to the side, gripped the bannister in two claws, and prepared to throw himself over.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Then new shouting started. Six figures in familiar body armor flooding through two doors and one window, some of them rapidly and professionally restraining anyone who wasn’t resisting while the others quickly pinned down and mopped up the fragmented survivors of the fight. Even the surviving demons, not at all capable of fighting at their full capacity indoors where their wings were better for knocking fragile glass off tables than for flying, got tackled or tasered, and zip tied.

The demands for surrender from the others in the house were met with shouts in return, but no more shooting erupted. Arrush paused, backing off from the railing and starting to prepare himself for the crash that came after combat.

”Well heck, that’s bad.” The voice nearly made him jump out of his chitin, a sandy blonde haired man that had been standing around the corner and peeking over to the foyer watching as the shield team retook the house. “Okay. No problem. Sorry Mark! Three, two…” he gripped his gun, stepping out and becoming slightly easier to perceive, but still slippery even to Arrush’s vision while Arrush was staring right at him as he spoke. The heavy revolver was leveled at one of the Order soldiers downstairs, something that looked like an army of grey thorns creeping from the man’s hands into the gun.

Arrush grabbed him from behind, yanking him around in a spin as he tried to throw the man into a pin, claws ripping through fabric and flesh on the way mostly by accident. The gunman hit the floor and rolled, bringing his revolver up to try to get a shot in, but Arrush had fallen with him, and in the close melee on the carpeted floor, wrestled for the firearm, all five arms coming to scratch and grab as he dropped the useless sword. The man under him screamed as Arrush’s blood got onto his skin, jerking sideways and landing a punch that cracked the chitin of his snout before fumbling the pistol up and against Arrush’s shoulder.

Arrush grabbed his hand, meeting the man’s eyes in a dead stare as they matched strength against each other. Until, bit by bit, the gun was twisted and pointed back at the invader.

The human’s eyes widened. “No, no don-!” was all he got out, voice rising to a terrified scream, before Arrush’s claw, sinking into flesh down to the bone, forced the trigger to pull.

The recoil was bad, though not particularly worse than slipping during practice and getting kicked in the shoulder by Karen. But Arrush hadn’t really expected the single shot to carve a two foot wide angled column through the house. Floor, carpet, ceiling, hanging lights, kitchen table, hardwood, basement, foundation, all of it burned in a flickering flash of ethereal fire. All that, and one of Arrush’s arms that had been pinned by his target. And then it was gone, just a jagged hole that he was halfway to falling into before he used Move Person to put himself back on steady ground, about half the gunman’s body meeting the same fate as the house. The dead man stared up at him with what remained of his face twisted in fear.

Arrush stood back up on shaking legs, blood dripping from injuries he didn’t remember getting, head spinning. He couldn’t hear anything. He wasn’t sure he could see anything; it was just afterimages of the fire. In a perverse twist, the singing pain from his missing arm felt good; like he’d cut away something that had been wrong about himself. He tried to laugh, and made no sound.

A hand moved into view in his peripheral, and Arrush almost exploded into motion again. But the shield team member moved slowly and carefully up from behind the panting and bleeding ratroach, gently edging into view with an open waving hand. And Arrush turned to stare blankly at the woman as she got his attention and closed on him quickly to catch him as he sagged.

The armor hurt against the parts of his fur that were exposed from under his own damaged armor. It would probably hurt her too, his blood was going to get into the cracks and hurt her. Arrush tried to push away, and was instead gently guided down to the carpet to lay down. The shield was yelling something over her shoulder, but he couldn’t hear any of it. He might actually have gone deaf, he didn’t know.

Maybe he’d pushed too far. Or been too violent. Arrush wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he’d done what mattered. Kept the people who’d come to kill them from getting to anyone else. All the tactics and the possibility space of combat narrowed and vanished from his thoughts, and he was left with just the feeling. The feeling of having done something good, and something bad, all in one. The feeling of pain, omnipresent but worse right now, and the feeling of hollow resignation in his chest.

He was going to lay here, and rest for a little.

_____

Through repeated orb use on top of more traditional education to fill in the gaps, Deb was edging closer and closer to being a supernaturally good doctor. Actually she was well past being supernaturally good; empowered by her authority (she had named them Scrub), by a few Climb spells, by access to shaper substance, and of course by the unending supply of yellow orbs, Deb was capable of filling almost any role that a hospital would need short of brain surgery. And that was only a matter of time.

Deb’s position as medical leader earned her quite a lot of the Order’s internal and unnamed currency, almost all of which she put back into either known copies of relevant yellows, or just piles of untested yellows when she’d exhausted the current supply. Most of them didn’t pan out, though she did know how to kayak now and it sounded fun enough. She’d also managed to quickly advance the Sewer lesson she had for writing from a long time ago.

The writing lesson offered Study, Understanding, or Poise, and it was notable for being a fairly simple concept, that was the first one they’d seen that shared offered stat upgrades with other lessons. Deb had picked Poise first so her back hurt less after a whole day on her feet, and it seemed like a good plan so far, and Study second so that she could do more of that, which also seemed to be making her faster at reading research reports if nothing else. No part of the lesson made her handwriting better though, which she assumed was some kind of naturally occuring doctor curse.

All this was to say that she was making use of the magic the Order had, in a way that was different from most knights. In a very deliberate and targeted way, to make herself the best at something specific.

It was a work in progress. Deb wanted to be the kind of healer that could snap her fingers and make injuries disappear, but on that front she was continually shown up by random blue orbs. Still, she was good at things no orb could do, and when it did come to treating immediate injuries, she had the advantage of not needing a resource that was scarce for the Order.

Momo had serious damage to her trachea, having been grabbed by the throat and thrown around twice in the last twelve hours. She was going to have serious bruising, might need steroid treatment if things got worse, and Deb suspected that she was also dealing with at least a few cracked ribs. She’d also been shot, the bullet going through her armor but slowed enough to hit nothing vital.

She was also only the third most injured person from the Order Deb had to deal with. Or maybe third easiest would be the best way to put it. She was human, which meant all of Deb’s easily acquired magical skill ranks did their job at full power, and she knew exactly how to check the airway, check for a concussion, bandage the wound, and prescribe a course of antibiotics that Mercy would make sure Momo actually would not be able to forget about. She didn’t though, she left that to Aaron, who was competent enough to do all of that and needed to learn how to put that knowledge into practice.

Ink-And-Key was harder. But Deb had real hands on experience with treating camraconda injuries. Still, the giant camraconda presented a unique challenge; the bullets that were lodged in him… might not be a problem. Deb actually didn’t know. Only two shots had hit through his armor, but they were sunk into cabling, having left damage in their wake. That would be easy to fix; camraconda cables were semi-organic, and clamping them back into place before wrapping with a degradable adhesive would allow them to heal. But she didn’t know how bad the internal damage was, and unlike with a human where the answer was easy, Deb didn’t know if rooting around inside Ink-And-Key’s body for the projectiles would make things better or worse.

So she hadn’t done anything for them. Or rather, she’d done what made her a good leader rather than just a competent one, and handed the task off to someone who could do better than her. Warmth-Of-Sunshine was a proficient medical helper, and once he was no longer needed to hold Momo in place, Deb put him with Delia, a human who’s authority had the unique ability to replicate something like an x-ray. They would sort Ink-And-Key out, and either solve the problem themselves, or get Deb back for more serious surgery.

Which left Arrush.

Well, it didn’t just leave Arrush, but he was the most critical in their triage. Others were hurt too, Order and otherwise. And the medical team that had deployed to the site in an unprepared rush was doing their best to make sure no one died that hadn’t already. There were surprisingly few deaths, most of them apparently being attributable to Anesh’s ruthlessness in the moment. The fight had gone as a lot of fights tended to; people got hurt and either dropped or ran, and the real death toll would come later when untreated wounds caught up to their bearers.

Arrush, though, had held back. And that left Deb feeling conflicted as her specially gloved hands rapidly checked his corrosive injuries. Because while she was glad he hadn’t simply scythed through his enemies without any compassion for the real lives he would have been taking, that had cost him severely. Blue orb powers and Breath use taxing his unprepared body, as well as an accumulation of injuries that he hadn’t even bothered to tally himself as he had struck.

She kind of wished he’d just done what Anesh did. Make sure he was safe first, and then worry about not killing his potential murderers.

Ratroaches healed fast, but still, Arrush was in a lot of trouble. And it didn’t take long into her examination mundane and magical for Deb to make a decision.

”He’s not going to live.” She said in a crisp voice to Nik, who had helped her get Arrush off the floor and onto a folding gurney. “I think he’s experiencing organ failure. His lungs are shutting down, and his purple effect isn’t keeping them working, which is bad. Internal bleeding is killing him and we don’t have anything that can handle that without…” she motioned to the hissing corrosion that was leaking off him.

Nik’s face was a mix of anxiety and worse anxiety, but he nodded in rapid agreement, his authority giving him a similar indication. “The blues only work for first aid. He needs…” he looked at Deb with a wide eyed expression.

”He needs a new body.” She said flatly. “Which we can deliver. Lift your side.”

”No!” Nik’s exclamation made her jump, but he explained quickly. “No, we can’t. Something down here is messing with telepads. We can’t risk moving him like that.”

Deb didn’t like the delay that was going to lead to. “What do we need. Absolutely need, for this?” She demanded rapidly.

”We could use the bathtub, if we had twenty gallons. Or bring the bed down. Can anyone do that, right now?” Nik asked.

She was already asking. Holding three conversations through her skulljack, telling the Order what she needed. It took thirteen seconds for Deb to get an answer, before she nodded at Nik. “It’s on the way. Monitoring totems are too. This’ll be messy.”

Two priceless minutes and sixteen valuable seconds later, four Response knights proudly wearing their blue patches and awkwardly linked together as they held a custom made medical tool between them appeared in the lobby of the house. Deb and Nik began carefully maneuvering Arrush’s gurney down the stairs rather than ask that the thousand pound secured piece of furniture meant for giving people shaper substance baths be moved upstairs. It just seemed easier.

”He didn’t want a skulljack but I’m making an executive call here.” Deb said as they moved the unconscious ratroach. “Get me his records and preferences, now.” Nik didn’t make any indication that he’d heard, but two files rapidly arrived in Deb’s mind and she started her pre-surgery review.

“We’ve never done something like this.” Nik told her quietly.

”Yeah, which is why I need you to shut up and help, not give me a bunch of doubt. Got it?” Deb snapped, looking back up the stairs. “Did you find his arm? We’re going to need the mass.” Nik shook his head, trying not to look around the blood splattered foyer. “Okay. Armor off.” They started rapidly stripping away the kevlar and hard plastic shell, the blood having half-melted some of the straps making it a little easier. Underneath, what was left of his clothing was in bad enough shape that it cut away easily.

The shield team had moved their prisoners, and they’d been treating people in other rooms. Which left the area empty of anything except the lingering damage of the fight. Which meant that Keeka, no longer supervised with the others as Warmth-Of-Sunshine and Aaron came to help Deb and Nik prepare for something they categorically could not prepare for, was in the perfect position to peer around the open hallway and see his partner laying in a bloody wreck on the gurney.

Deb was giving a count to the group, the mix of human hands and camraconda sight making transferring Arrush across to the surgery bed a breeze, when Keeka crept up to the edge of that bed unnoticed. “…Arrush?” His voice was a hoarse rasp, his own accelerated ratroach healing doing a lot to repair his throat with his body otherwise fully perfected, but it would still be a while before he could speak properly. “Wh-what?” His eyes leaked luminescent tears as he looked around at the gathered medical team.

Nik moved up next to him. ”Keeka. We’re going to need you to move back in a second.”

”Is-is he…?” Keeka’s voice was a stammering chitter as he stared at Nik.

”He’s not doing okay. We’re going to do everything we can, okay? But you need to move back for safety.” Nik said, trying to be as reassuring as possible. He looked down at their camraconda assistant. “Warmth, can you take him back to the others please?” He asked.

Warmth-Of-Sunshine gave a bobbing nod. “Come. Let us sit together. It will be alright, they are very good at what they do.” He said as he let Keeka set a trembling paw on his head and led the ratroach back to where the others were waiting. They passed by Anesh as they did, the frayed looking man standing awkwardly leaning on the empty frame that separated the foyer from the living room as he let the blue and green camraconda guide Keeka past.

”What can I do to help?” He asked, making a conscious effort to not pick at the bandages on his hand.

”Sit the fuck down.” Deb told him, pointing without looking. Anesh was crashing from an adrenaline rush that would have incapacitated a pony, and he was starting to shake to the point that he wasn’t going to be able to stand soon. Her command was as much for his sake as her own.

Anesh stared at her with blank eyes, before looking at Arrush for a long moment, and then silently turning to go sit with Keeka and hold his boyfriend and maybe have a breakdown. Nik watched him go, shaking his head. “I want that power.” He muttered.

”No you don’t.” Deb informed him bluntly. “Aaron, is everything set up?”

The nurse emerged from under the surgical bed where he’d been adjusting settings. Modifying the depression that Arrush lay in so they could use the most efficient amount of shaper substance. “Yeah. Here.” He handed Deb a cable that would be her main skulljack connection, adding to her braid for the surgery. “I’ll get you a chair.”

Nik double checked the tanks of shaper substance they had while Deb did another read through of the final shape of Arrush’s preferred form. She was going to do her best here, because the more someone used shaper substance, the harder it got to do well. The slipperier a body got. And Arrush had used it a lot before coming to the Order’s care. So this was going to be uniquely hard to do. Not to mention that they’d never used it to repair injuries before, only alter healthy bodies. Deb knew it could be done, but, again, a first time for this level of difficult.

First she’d make sure he lived though.

Aaron used a disinfectant swab to make sure the back of Arrush’s neck was clean before using his own skulljack to transfer the arcane cybernetic port to the ratroach, and then quickly disconnecting before he ended up as a hive mind. “Well that’s bad.” He muttered, the brief moment of connection enough to leave him with phantom pains in his arms. Steadying Arrush’s unconscious body, Aaron got him plugged into the secure port in the surgery bed while Deb situated herself.

”Ready?” Nik asked.

”Do it.” Deb said flatly, connecting the cord and taking over Arrush’s thoughts. It wasn’t even hard, he was barely conscious, his self having diminished and retreated to the darkest corners of his mind. Deb briefly touched on his thoughts to let him know she was there, and that it was going to be okay, and then Arrush ceased to exist as an individual in a meaningful way, and it was a good thing Deb was busy or that might have bothered her that she was doing to someone else what had been done to her in Officium Mundi. Most of it wasn’t just her though; Mercy, living in her thoughts, twisted through the connection like a glittering eel, a reassuring whisper that would keep them both safe.

She kept her eyes open, because she needed the dual perspective on his body, which meant Deb knew exactly the moment that the shaper substance was poured into the recessed basin. Nik and Aaron started out filling the space in unison until it was halfway to the proper level, at which point they split and one of them started twisting the monitoring red totems into place.

Pieces of clinical information lit up in Deb’s thoughts. Organ function, pain levels, heart rate, all of it next to the more visceral and primal feelings of agony and physicality through the skulljack. She ignored everything she didn’t need, Mercy in her head screening the thoughts from her that would be distractions. Instead of getting lost in what it meant to be a dying ratroach in an intentionally broken form, Deb was looking down at herself, and seeing some minor imperfections that could be neatly patched up. An overlay of a desired body onto the real thing, preferences and notes sitting buffered in her thoughts through the efficient little computer her brain was tethered to.

The shaper substance, a viscous slime that was a radioactive shade of blue, took hold. She could feel how her flesh opened itself to the possibility of being reshaped. Feel things begin to shift toward unknown designs. And Deb got to work.

Injuries were actually easy, it turned out. Even with the resistance to control that the body had. They weren’t supposed to be easy, from everything they knew about the stuff and the interviews with ratroaches who had used it, but Deb found it all quite doable. The information was right there at hand, and the substance-submerged body responded to how she thought it should work.

External wounds were left for later, they’d be handled in the full sweep, except for the hole where his arm had used to be, and the end of one of his tails that had been crushed. That was handled now. Internal bleeding was sealed off, her authority guiding her to the right spots. Organs were repaired, reinforced, and then altered to be in line with working parts and not devices meant to be just functional enough to torture the user.

The lungs were the hardest part, the purple effect Arrush had meant that a solution needed to be long term; so Deb reworked them to have an organic timer. It was something she’d been planning for a while, just for Arrush, and now she was doing it under harsh pressure. Every new lung chamber that grew from the purple effect would replace one that would be reabsorbed by the body and reprocessed for nutrients. He’d never have to worry about breathing properly, or fully starving, again.

The body fought that change, bucking and twisting in her mental grip. But Deb had done this before, and knowing that when that happened she actually could just use her skulljack’s mental storage program to lock something in place and wait for the shaper substance to settle down, it made it manageable.

”Heart rate dropping.” Nik’s voice informed her, needlessly.

That happened sometimes. Deb would let the other two manage it, as she moved on to large scale bodily changes.

Hide and chitin rejected each other, because of intentional design by the dungeon. By now, the fix for that was easy, but it was easier to move the chitin patches around before applying it. So she focused on where should be exoskeleton and where should be hide, moving and adjusting that first before purging the remnant infection and fusing the two together in a harmonious blend. Flesh swirled and warped, and if Arrush had been conscious then the speed at which she was moving might have killed even him with the shock of pain.

It was all so easy. Deb’s thoughts thumbed through facts about proteins and cell structure like she was flipping magazine pages. She understood nerve endings on a tactical level. Her knowledge, arcanely accrued over time, was suddenly all useful all at once, and Deb was happy to admit that she was in fact smarter than the shaper substance was rebellious.

Next came bodily fluids, and the corrosive effect. That wasn’t fully biological, with some kind of magical component that wasn’t fully understood. So the solution didn’t involve getting rid of it fully, since this particular body modification process didn’t let them make up new magic; instead causing the liver to produce a trace compound that had been found to perfectly neutralize the corrosion. It worked on every other ratroach, and it worked on Arrush too without complaint.

Eyes were wrong, both in function and how they failed to match the desired outcome. Deb adjusted them with a clinical understanding of optics and perspective. Muzzle was wrong, the overbite crooked and painful. Deb adjusted that too with a clear insight into bone and muscle structures. Teeth were harder; she couldn’t actually modify those, but she could set up a second set of growing teeth that could come in and replace the current ones with something better over the course of a month. It was very clever improvisation from her, and she wondered if Mercy would let her feel proud of it later.

”Hey doc.” Aaron’s voice was a distraction. Deb was working on limbs. “Doc. Deb.” She flicked her eyes to him, and looked down where he was watching. Arrush’s legs were warping, without her input. That was too soon; that kind of degradation took hours on most subjects. He must have been reshaped more repeatedly than even he had realized.

”I’m abandoning limb placement.” Deb said. She’d gotten Arrush’s four remaining arms into an uneven but still more preferable configuration, but she couldn’t waste more time if she was going to have to focus on keeping his knees from sliding off for the rest of this. “Focus on pain management.”

She was speaking out loud for the benefit of herself, mostly. Staying on track as she tackled every tiny piece of the problem that Arrush had told them about over the past months in the sessions with Lua. Skin irritation, joint aches, vocal cord strain, food sensitivity, every spot that hurt for seeming random reasons, Deb swept through to try to identify causes and erase them.

It hurt Arrush. A lot. She could tell through the totem just how much pain the body was in, but she kept his conscious mind suppressed so he’d never know, and Mercy let her fail to feel it herself. “Okay, I’m calling it.” Nik said. “Ten seconds, finish whatever you’re on, and… shit.”

”Fuck.” Aaron had the same thought at the same time. They weren’t in the medical, they didn’t have the dedicated shower and flush system to purge the shaper substance from the patient.

”Done.” Deb said, pausing briefly as the two men ran in opposite directions from the table. “We… oh, shit.” She ripped the cord out of her neck, struggling to move.

Nik called from the front door. “There’s a koi pond!”

”Why the- you know what, I don’t care. Aaron!” Deb got her feet under her, Scrub snapping into place around her arm in a shielding field as she hoisted Arrush upward. Her nurse grabbed the lower half of the ratroach, careful to avoid touching the shaper substance himself as the two of them gently rushed the unconscious body out the front door that Nik was holding open for them. The koi pond wasn’t the right size, it was too narrow and too shallow, but it was water close by, and importantly it didn’t have any koi in it.

They dunked Arrush in, Aaron producing a brush and sponge that he used to quickly scrub any trace of the glowing magical goop off the ratroach’s back. The table’s help with a more even distribution was critical for stabilizing changes, but it meant that his entire backside was coated in the stuff.

”Water’s contaminated.” Aaron told her. “This is barely getting any better.”

”Get him turned. Barely is still some.” She told him, using Scrub’s protective layer to wipe away the last of some of the slime on Arrush’s upper arm. “I’m seeing a lot of inert sludge here.” She looked over at Aaron’s side. “Any still active?”

”Not that I can spot.” He said, eyes glinting as he focused more than a normal human was able to. “We should still get him a full bath.”

Deb nodded, standing up and shaking her hand so that her authority would purge the biological contaminants and refit himself to her. From out of the air around her, draping herself across her shoulders, Mercy took form. The pink and gold serpent watching everyone around with loving eyes as she settled onto Deb. “You did very good.” She whispered to the doctor.

Deb nodded loosely again, her feelings slowly coming back to her as Mercy let the filter go. And then she started laughing. A simple little laugh, the relieved sound rapidly escalating to a manic and uncontrolled cackle. She’d done it, and it hadn’t even been that hard. Arrush had been on death’s doorstep, and Deb had casually dropped by to pull him back, like she’d just happened to be in the neighborhood.

She felt good. Better than good, she felt vindicated. Every orb, every spell, every change to hospital procedure, every late night studying, it all led here. To the point that life and death and biology itself were all hers to bully around.

”Let’s get him inside before the neighbors notice.” She said as she calmed down, the crash from the elation coming on fast and harsh. “I’ll go tell the others.”

”Have fun.” Aaron smirked at her. He knew what part of this job she secretly enjoyed the most. “I’ll make sure no one touches the medical waste. Oh, there are no neighbors; something about the Mormons and a dungeon? I think? Heard it from a friend, so I’m not sure exactly. But this street is pretty empty.”

Deb smiled, and gave a professional incline of her chin toward Nik and Aaron. “Thank you.” She said simply, getting smiles in return. The kind of smile when you knew you’d done good, and couldn’t help but feel satisfied. And they deserved those smiles. “Nik, pack up the totems before Mercy gets tired.”

”Oh, right! On it doc!”

Deb felt so elated she didn’t even bother to tell him not to call her that. Taking a spare moment to catch her breath and stare blankly at her reflection in the mirror over the front bathroom sink as she leaned forward over running water. Between the authority and the gloves, there wasn’t really anything on her hands, but she still felt like she needed to wash off. And not be near anyone for just a moment.

”You’re doing okay.” Mercy murmured to her. “Do you need help?”

”I’m good.” Deb told the infomorph.

Mercy hummed in harmony with herself, gaps that weren’t quite mouths and weren’t quite pores opening in her side like the vents of some incorporeal woodwind. “Young lady, lying to me is bad enough, but please don’t lie to yourself.”

”You’re one.” Deb poked at the assignment’s coiling body with a laugh.

”And so I do not lie to myself!” Mercy gave a glittering smile along her whole body, comfort flooding Deb as she prodded the emotion into place. “Be kinder to yourself. You know the value of care for others, accept some for yourself.”

Deb nodded at the firm but kind reminder. “Yeah. Okay. Alright, let’s go let them know. And then see who needs help next.” She left the front hall bathroom, skirting the shaping table, moving aside for a pair of the shield team that were double checking the house, and walking into the living room. She tried not to stare at the hole stabbed through the house and crumbling bits of dust and debris as people moved around upstairs. “Hey.” She said to the gathered group on the couches and chairs.

Keeka saw her and instantly slumped, luminous tears streaming down the chitin plates of his face and into his fur. “No!” He yelled abruptly, voice a wet rasp through the gunshot wound in his neck.

”Correct, no.” Deb nodded. “Arrush is… not fine, but he’ll live. I think. I hope. We’ll need to do… a lot of observation.” She breathed deep and regretted it as she was hit with the smell of blood, tar, gunfire, and falling bits of fiberglass insulation. “We had to use shaper substance, and since I didn’t know if we’d ever be able to safely do it again, I tried to put his body into working order while I was at it.” She didn’t see it as worth bragging about that she had mostly succeeded, they’d find out quickly enough. “Now. Nik says there’s a telepad issue, so we can’t move him?”

”Sorta.” Momo said, voice coming up from where she was not moving, laying flat on the floor against Deb’s express orders to not lay on the fucking floor. “It’s sporadic. James was locked down earlier, but I was teleporting around with him all day, and we came back fine. But he and Keeka couldn’t leave, so it could-“ she broke off into a coughing wheeze, curling up as her chest started hurting.

A jittery Anesh, holding a relieved Keeka who had sagged awkwardly into his armor, finished for her. “Probably something to do with their magic. It might even be unintentional. It’s certainly intentional on Lincon…” he trailed off, shaking his head, hands weakly clenching on Keeka’s back as he lost track of his thoughts. “Sorry. So Arrush is okay?”

”Arrush is okay.” Deb assured them, skipping all the caveats and conditions. She’d ensure it anyway, so it was fine. “Now, I don’t know where my triage team put him. Where’s James?”

Keeka looked up at her with a distant stare in his broken ring of eyes. “Where did you put him?” He asked.

”I didn’t put him anywhere.” Deb chuckled once. There were about a dozen extra people in the house right now between her people and the shield team and the others who had come to help. It wasn’t a disorganized mess, but there was an amount of chaos, and she didn’t know what flat surface her triaging nurse had put James onto. “But I should get to him next, he was-“

”Yes you did.” Ink-And-Key’s voice was at the wrong pitch, the painkiller he was on making it too hard for him to alter the settings on his unfamiliar replacement speaker. “You took him into the basement.” He said as he subconsciously coiled protectively around Rho’s sleeping form. The inhabitor would be fine, gunshots and all, but the camraconda was too out of it to process that bit of information.

”…No I didn’t.” Deb said. “I haven’t been in the basement at all.”

“Well. Then. Where the hell is James.” Anesh asked quietly, gently moving Keeka’s paws off of him with his own twitching hands, and standing up slowly. Deb turned to watch him nervously as he stiffly approached the shield team leader. “Evans, do you know where James is?”

”Deb triaged him, he’s in the basement, room next to two of the wounded opposition.” The sandy haired man said without hesitation.

”No I didn’t.” Deb hadn’t fully caught up to how alarming this was, she just shrugged and shook her head. “Okay, I’ll find-“

Evans’ eyes twitched slightly and he tilted his head minutely before a message came through everyone’s skulljacks. “Shapeshifter, paladin Lyle is missing, secure the house and look for signs of exit now.” He looked at Anesh, who gave him a tired stare back. “We fucked up.”

”That we did.” Anesh said.

”Wait, where the hell is James?” Momo yelled from the floor.

”I have no idea.” Anesh said, composing himself and trying to pretend that the last day full of dungeon delving and gun fighting hadn’t happened. Trying to put on the mask of someone who was good at this kind of adventure. “But good news. He got shot, and was bleeding everywhere, so I’m going to find out very quickly.”

“That’s not good news!” Keeka squeaked out.

”That’s actually terrible news.” Deb added. “He has an eye injury. There’s a limited window in which we can do something about that, even with medical authorities.”

Anesh nodded and tried not to groan as every sore muscle in his body protested even that simple action. “Alright. Everyone who can walk and isn’t on prisoner duty with me. Let’s go find who kidnapped my boyfriend.”