Joey gasps for breath when she feels the overbearing weight of too many mason bricks on her back, held at bay by her arcane barrier. The simple but powerful defense spell supported most of the load. She manages to get an alchemical potion off her belt and chugs the ingredients. She can feel the burning sensation as muscles tense across her body, and every nerve feels like it's being jolted with electricity.

“Joey, I can’t move!” Kyle says, in between panicked gasps.

“I’ve still got a card left to play, hang on!” The potion takes several seconds to build to full strength, and she waits as long as she dares with her arcane barrier threatening to destabilize. She lets out a yell of fury and manages to heave the heavy bricks off her back with the incredible surge of strength, and shoves more out of the way. Kyle’s still beneath her, coughing and disoriented, judging by his head darting around warily. She kicks another series of bricks away, and she can see the dim light of sunset reflecting through the lake above their heads. She thrusts her hand skywards, sending more of the wreckage flying off of them.

Her arcane barrier that kept the bricks from crushing them gives out just as they get free, and she drags herself and Kyle out of the debris pile through the narrow opening. She manages to get about a couple of body lengths out before her strength surge fades, and she feels that burning sensation intensify, leaving her curled on the ground, in agonizing pain. She hated using that potion, specifically because of that side effect.

Joey glances down at Kyle, who looks dazed and covered in dirt in grime. “Kyle–hah–you okay?!” she heaves, and winces from even the smallest motion. She lets out a shudder of pain, and he nods weakly. He’s still nursing the bite on his arm, it looks painful but not immediately life-threatening.

“I’m alright. Bastard took his goddamn pound of flesh, but I’ll live. You okay?”

“Regretting my life choices,” she moans through gritted teeth. A narrow cut on her shoulder is still bleeding lightly, that dagger had been too close a call. She wills herself to lift her head up and survey what just happened. To her horror, the shack has been reduced to kindling and Curtis is–less than that. Seeing that man reduced to a mess of kinship carnage is–

The side effect of the potion and that visceral image prove too much for her and she doubles over and retches, and spills her stomach contents out. Her body is wracked with pain, and that awful bile taste in her mouth. Her eyes are watering, and all she can feel is the sting of acid in her throat, muscle aches, and the slight trembling of her hands. The noxious smell of smoke is just the cherry topper of this absolute crap day.

“Gods damn it,” she mutters and wipes her mouth with her sleeve once she’s sure the feeling of nausea fades, and she sits down, utterly spent. Another dry heave wracks her body, and she lets out a sound of anguish. Kyle grabs a blue vial off her belt, and pours half of it over his bite wound, and grimaces at the fast regeneration before he drinks the other half. He grasps his injured arm and watches with morbid fascination as the wounds scab and start to heal. She’s still trying to get back to her feet, and he stops her.

“You’ve got a cut, that’s deep.” he grabs her second emergency vial and pulls back her shirt and lab coat, stained with blood. She holds it back through sheer will while he pours it over the knife wound. She’s always had a high pain tolerance, even if she has a bit of pain sensitivity, and grits her teeth from the rapid healing. He presses the bottle to her lips, and she downs it reluctantly. They both glance at each other, breathing heavily.

“Is he dead?” Kyle finally asks. He dares not look at the mess of wood, metal, and meat.

“Curtis is gone.” She pulls her shirt and coat back over her shoulder, though it’s ruined for good, now. She’s still panting for breath from the exertion. “You saved our lives, Kyle.”

“Good. That man had it coming,” he says with unchecked fervor. “Where’s Lavernius?”

“Ran off. Hopefully to go stall out Val. Fates, did I just make a deal with King?!” she groans and fights the urge to throw up again.

“I only caught part of that, but Joey…I dunno what the deal is with Drenar, but I’m getting this vibe he is not an ordinary person, based on everything we’ve seen so far.”

She glances down, making sure she doesn’t have any other significant injuries–Kyle looks like he’s okay, except for the healing arm wound, and aside from a few cuts and a deeper gash on her leg, she’s still in one piece. She pops open the last regen potion for the gash, and braces against the stinging sensation she knows is coming. The wound closes and fades to a manageable level before she rolls up her jeans leg. It’s a good thing I can get that arcane barrier up with zero delay, or that wall would have crushed me and Kyle.

“Joey, we can’t call SAF. Curtis betrayed all of us like we didn’t mean a damn thing to him other than a paycheck. Who knows how much information he fed to Valosterla?” this dread is just getting started, and she nods weakly. “SAF is corrupt as all hell, the Talons are just one giant chaos machine, and the Valkyries are nowhere to be seen while this shit goes down! Who do we have on our side?!”

“Kyle, calm down–”

“No, I’m not going to calm down!” he shouts, and his attempt to rise is met by his legs buckling. “I just atomized a human being–a Kitsune! I am as far from calm as I can get right now!”

She shifts over and puts her hands on his shoulder to get him to sit down. He’s unfocused, dazed, and coming off an adrenaline rush that is seriously messing with his thought process, and her hands are shaking a little, too. That trembling is the other side-effect of that alchemical booster. “Kyle, he sold out everyone we know. He would have killed us. He made his intentions clear as day. You did nothing wrong in defending us. Breathe, for Fate’s sake, take a deep breath, please.”

He does take a breath, and almost whimpers on the exhale. She hears shouts in the distance, and quite frankly she’s amazed everyone sprinted at record speed over to the garden currently lined with shreds of wood, shrapnel, bone, and blood. Explaining this one is going to have to wait because Kyle is not okay.

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“Joey, what have we become? We’re killers.” The shock is setting in, she needs to redirect him, quickly! This danger isn't over yet.

“We defended our home, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.” She’s killed monsters before, in self-defense. Nick had been there, as well as Amaranth. It hadn’t happened often, but often enough she could rationalize it as bad luck. Monsters hunted, and sometimes they hunted Kin.

This…this was…almost as bad as that. But Kyle is going to lose it unless she can get him to focus. “Kyle, just listen. You are okay. It's going to be okay. We stopped a threat.”

“I stuffed a goddamn grenade down a man's armor set, Joey. That is not okay by any measure.” She can also feel the anguish in her own heart, too. It's different from her own emotional house of cards that is one stiff breeze away from collapsing. Kyle is truly breaking down in a way that she doesn't know how to stop.

“Kyle, I would have made the same choice. I was ready to kill that man to keep him from hurting you.” Slowly, she feels that tangles of awful feelings loosen, dissolving into nothingness. She can't see it, but she can feel it while holding him tightly, and he's sitting there, almost on the verge of tears from a truly awful series of events.

His pulse does come down, and his breath is less shaky. He glances at her, head tilted. “Hey, what did you do?”

“It's called being a friend, Kyle,” she says softly. He rubs his hands together, and his eyes focus on the people she can hear behind her. She's been tuning them out, because he needs this moment of calm and clarity.

“Okay. I think…I think I've got less of a chance of freaking out.” He takes a deep breath, and she helps him to his feet. She peers over her shoulder, and Zameren is rushing up the slight hill to the orchard path at full tilt, along with a number of the staff. “Joey, we gotta move. But seriously, who is left on our side?”

She locks eyes with him and gives a determined smile. Because she needs to have faith that the most unlikely collection of people is hopefully on the way.

“A bunch of misfits who just curb-stomped an invasion force, that’s who we’ve got on our side,” she says with enthusiasm. “That said, we gotta run damage control, fast.”

She reaches for her ID badge and taps it to activate it. “Lavernius, I need to know right now, do you stand with us, or the monsters?”

“There are monsters on both sides, Joey. The Conclave, and Val's killers. King and Crosomer are different, but their influence only goes so far. We will help stall this as long as we can, but Curtis could have been working on other means for ingress, keep looking. I'm disabling the first teleportal at the loading bay, on the first floor by the kitchen.” She hears a grunt and a gentle click. “But will you help us?”

“I will trust King only so far as I can throw him, but he clued me in on Curtis. I don't know if he guessed, or if he already knew he was Val’s inside man. We need these journals out of here, period. We’ll discuss the next steps once we have them.”

“...I can live by those terms,” he grunts. “King says to hurry. He can only run interference for so long. Get the staff ready. I know I don't have a leg to stand on here, but…if you can't choose a side, choose your own and those you protect.”

“Like your family?” Zameren is calling out to them, other mages are fanning out to put out the fire, and that noxious burning scent is just killing her mood at the moment. Lavernius sighs.

“I would do anything to protect them. You have my word on that.”

“Then focus on that.” She clicks off the transmitter and turns to address Zameren, who is out of breath, as is her friend Claire, who despite being five-foot-short, is one hell of a runner.

“Joey–what–hah–what the hell happened?!” Zameren heaves, and his salt-and-pepper hair is frazzled. “Are you two alright?”

Kyle grimaces beside her. “Do you want the long version, or the short version on why we blew up the botanical gardens?”

“I’ll take any version, as long as I understand why you two are beaten to hell and blood-soaked!” he answers in exasperation.

“SAF betrayed us. Curtis was working with the Onyx Talons to recover a journal that contained runic translations to a device in their possession. That device brought that dead biozone back to life over in town where we visited, two days ago,” Joey explains calmly while trying to wipe the blood off of her hands. It’s not a good look, for sure. Zameren is speechless at the moment, and trying to grapple with her calm, collected summary.

“Lavernius was also involved, but they work in independent factions. Curtis was rigging the teleportal for a groundside invasion and would have killed every single one of us. He’s…” She looks to Kyle and points to the burning shack. “Curtis confessed to being a traitor, there was a fight, and he suffered an untimely end with an alchemical explosive.”

Claire-bouncing, always cheery Claire, the one who got her out of her shell and got her to do trivia nights, gasps in utter shock. “Joey, how can–oh my god, Curtis is dead?”

“He sold us all out for money, Claire!” Kyle shouts. “He’d been at it for six months, our only saving grace is that the Talons seem to have semi-competing factions that disagree on one thing: how many bodies need to fall to achieve their goals. Lavernius is busy taking a sledgehammer to the teleportal networks, we need to disable them right now before the Talons murder army can activate them. They can bypass the security protocol if they bridge the connection to the cargo transport network!” Kyle gets up on his feet unsteadily, and waves away one of the other personnel who tries to examine his arm. “Zameren, Claire, I know this sounds insane, but you gotta believe us!”

“No. I believe it. The Talons launched a multi-pronged assault in town and elsewhere less than an hour ago. The garrison took a beating but some civilians held them back–three dragons working as a team, by the sound of it,” Claire says with reluctance. “Are the Talons on their way?”

“We stalled them, but Curtis had access to the entire facility, he could have put in a ticking time bomb of an entryway for them! Also, those three dragons that threw the Talons a beating? They’re also on their way here.” Joey glares at Kyle because now he’s pushing it into a realm of truly unbelievable. “Joey might also have a crush on one of them, he’s hella crazy, and some kind of possible chosen one.”

“Kyle, focus!” Joey snarls. “Someone get in that shack and see if anything survived, we’ve got teleportals to smash, right now!”

“This is insane!” Zameren protested.

“So were the Talons starting a war out of nowhere, and it’s way worse at several other locations!” Claire interjects, and puts a hand firmly on Joey’s good shoulder. The other still stings from the healing underway, just past her skin. “Joey, fill us in on the way, Kyle, you’re decent with the teleportal tech, can you move?”

“Damn right, I can, and don’t shoot Lavernius when you see him. We still have an IOU to King that I don’t think we need to fulfill–” Joey motions to him for silence, then looks back to Claire, puppy dog brown eyes and bouncing brown curls accenting her face. “Okay then, too much info, we should go.”