Geoffrey pushed the man off his halberd with his leg, and then slid his grip back into position on his weapon’s blood-slicked shaft and turned to face me.

“Genneth!” he yelled.

I’d frozen stiff.

“The way is clear,” he said. “Hurry!”

With a gulp, I staggered forward, shocked by what I saw. It was a scene worthy of an abattoir. All the soldiers were dead, and my allies had done the butchering.

A tingle sparked at the back of my neck.

Andalon looked at it, wide-eyed and numb. She was still on her knees.

“I think I’m going to be sick…” I muttered.

“Duncan!” Karl shouted.

Oh God.

Karl’s fellow rifleman was dead as dead can be.

Bever kicked the dead soldiers’ corpses as he rose up and flicked the blood off his armor. “We’ll sing the Cant for him when the battle is done,” he said.

Meanwhile, Morgan clutched his wounded flank.

“There should be some wound epoxy in the labs,” I told him, “if we hurry, I can—”

Morgan shook his head. “—There’s no time.” He tamped the haft of his pike on the floor. “Where are the captives?”

I stammered. “I…” But then I shook my head.

Focusing on my wyrmsight, I managed to pick out the auras of the infected. All of the rooms around us—behind the walls of frosted glass—had at least some of the captives. However, the majority of them were concentrated in the lab to my left, directly ahead.

I rushed toward the door. As you’d expect, the lock was controlled by the console beside the door.

I pointed at the door. “Here.”

I didn’t know if my status as a Ward CMT member would be enough to grant me access to the lab, but it was worth a shot. Approaching the console, I lifted my right hand, but before I could sweep the chip in my cufflink over the scanner, Bever trudged forward and slammed the head of his axe into the semi-transparent glass wall, shattering at and granting us passage. We tromped inside, leaving bloody footprints on the vinyl floor behind us. Yuta and Andalon followed close behind me.

I immediately recognized the room as the one from Alon’s memories. Indeed, even now, I could feel him stir from his realm within my mind.

Bullets had destroyed the glass divider that separated the control area from the rest of the lab. Glass littered the tables and floor like shaved ice.

All the knights made the Bond-sign. I merely stared, trembling.

“How could they do this…?” I muttered.

The scene inside the lab was nightmarish. It was a torture fetishist’s wet dream. A welter of death and terror. Dozens of examination tables had been brought into the lab and rolled up against the walls, one next to another, raised nearly to the vertical. There was a person in nearly every one, and they were infected down to the last, defaced by ulcers and the fungus’ subdermal lightning. I had to dim my wyrmsight to keep my eyes from feeling like they were boiling inside my skull. A couple of hideous, slivered flesh-things littered parts of the floor like dead grubs. It looked like they’d once been human, or were made of something that had been.

I swallowed hard.

By the Angel, it looked delicious, and I hated myself for thinking so. I had to fight the urge to rip my hazmat suit’s helmet off and feast on them.

Nearly half of the test subjects were unresponsive. Their consciousness auras were so faint beneath the fungus’ aura that I couldn’t tell whether they were living or dead, not without the proper medical equipment.

Andalon, I pleaded, there has to be something we can do!

But she looked at them and looked at me and then shook her head.

“Break the Tablets…” I muttered.

As for the other half, they squirmed haplessly, writhing against the leather restraints that bound them to the examination tables. And they were petrified. Many still screamed, even though the gags in their mouths muffled nearly all the sound.

Stepping forward, I yelled: “We’re here to help!”

I mean, we were covered in blood, and had just blasted through the lab’s outer wall to get inside. I figured it was worth clarifying that we were the good guys.

The people stared at me.

I noticed that Nina wasn’t among them. Nor, for that matter, was anything that I could recognize as Alon Lokanok’s corpse.

The knights, however…

“Eylon!” Geoffrey yelled.

All of them gathered by the red-head. He was bound to one of the tables in the middle of the room.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Cut the restraints!” Geoffrey yelled. “All of them! Now!”

“They’re around their wrists and ankles!” I added.

I pushed power back into the weave around Yuta’s katana. “Help them!” I said.

He nodded and joined them.

They made quick work, slicing through the restraints. The blue and gold phantom blade thwicked and thwacked across my thinned wyrmsight, breaking one restraint after another. The subjects toppled forward, falling to their knees. Those that could move tried to get up, but many simply stayed on the floor, trapped in a catatonic state.

“Bever,” Karl said, “help me with him!”

The boy was trying to get Eylon off the metal table. He’d managed to get him sitting upright.

“It’s alright,” I said, “I’ve got it.”

Stepping toward the table, I diverted power from the plexus around Yuta’s katana to summon a psychokinetic scooper that lifted Eylon up and helped him to his feet. Immediately, I had to draw even more power in order to stretch the scooper and wrap it around to the front of Eylon’s body, to keep him from toppling forward.

“K-Karl?” he said, with tired eyes. He looked around in confusion.

“Yes, sir,” Karl said, “I’m here.”

“I… I…”

Eylon wasn’t completely catatonic, but he was far from being shipshape, either. He was shell-shocked, overwhelmed by both the disease and the terror of what he’d experienced.

His hands trembled, his fingers contracting oddly, as if he didn’t know how to move him.

“Can you walk?” I asked him.

It took Eylon a moment to look at me, and, even then, he didn’t look me in the eyes.

“Howle!” Geoffrey shouted. “We could use your assistance!”

I bit my lip.

“What am I supposed to do?” Karl asked me.

“Just… stay there.”

I ran off to help the others. Morgan and I helped people to their feet, while Geoffrey and Bever continued to break the restraints.

“Howle, what about the door?” Bever asked, pointing with his axe.

Unlike its front wall, the lab’s other three walls were solid, one of which had a door in it, a door which led to a slightly smaller, more specialized area. The door was a heavy slab of solid metal, likely hydraulic, and was currently closed tight.

It was very much foreboding to look at.

I started thickening my wrymsight—at this point, it was basically X-ray vision—only to flinch as shouts reverberated down the main corridor.

I turned toward the sound.

My wyrmsight showed a dozen or so infected soldiers rushing into the building.

“We have company!” I said.

They must have come through the garage.

Andalon started shaking her arms in panic. She shot fretful gazes my way. She didn’t need to say, “Do something!” The look of fear in her big blue eyes told me all I needed to know.

Geoffrey and the others—except for Karl—ran toward the broken wall as quickly as they could, ready to meet the enemy in the hallway.

“Dr. Howle!” the boy cried. He was trying to walk Eylon with him, with little success.

I gritted my teeth. “Hold on,” I’m coming.

“Dr. Howle?”

I turned to face Yuta.

“Dr. Howle?” Karl said.

I stuck out my arm. “Just hold on, ghost things!”

“I will not use your power without your consent,” Yuta said. “What shall I do?”

I froze.

All I could think of was the bloodbath we’d already made, and there’d only be another massacre if I sicced Yuta on this next wave of soldiers. Of course, if I did nothing, my allies would die, and I imagined the test subjects we’d rescued wouldn’t fare too well, either.

They were witnesses, after all.

By the Angel…

My imagination ran wild as my hyperphantasia acted up again. Fresh blood dripped down from the ceiling, pooling in the tiny lines in the vinyl floor. I yelped as figures stepped into the room, only to fall apart as an unseen force sliced to pieces.

Biting my lip, I focused.

It’s not real, I told myself.

The blood and gore vanished.

Behind me, the test subjects we’d saved were huddled in the corner of the lab, utterly terrified. Many of them didn’t even know where they were.

I couldn’t leave them here.

I made the Bond-Sign.

Andalon, I thought, please forgive me.

She stared at me in confusion. “Mr. Genneth?”

I had no other choice.

“Geoffrey, get back!” I yelled. “Fall back! Fall back.”

Morgan was the first to turn around, hobbling back into the lab. His injuries were definitely slowing him down.

I walked up to Karl and Eylon, joining the boy in supporting the ailing time-traveler. I noticed Karl’s transformee aura had just about engulfed his entire body.

“Let’s get him to the rest of the captives,” I told Karl.

The scruff-haired kid nodded. As we led Eylon toward the corner in a three-legged walk, I looked over my shoulder and gave Yuta the orders he’d asked for.

Go, Yuta, I thought-said, flicking my arm toward the main corridor. Go!

I fought back tears.

I’d just issued a death sentence. There was no way the soldiers could stop the spectral samurai. He was an absent, asomatous presence, welding a weapon that barely even existed.

Yuta swung his katana as he phased through the wall, disappearing from sight. All I saw was his phantom blade, aswirl with spectral threads, rushing forward, colliding with the tight clusters of infection aura. The screams broke out a moment later. Heads and limbs took flight and plunged, radiant with fungal aura.

It was a massacre. Bever regarded it in slack jawed and horror.

If he wanted to judge me, he could do so after the captives were safe.

Karl, Eylon, and I reached the corner where the other captives cowered.

“Set him down,” I said.

Karl turned to me. “But—“

I shook my head. “—No, no buts! Look at him,” I said, as we set him down.

Eylon sat down trembling.

“He can hardly move,” I said. I grabbed Karl by the arm. “Listen, we need to help as many as we can. First the ones who walk, then—”

“—Mr. Genneth!” Andalon yelled, running up to me.

I pulled away.

“Doctor H—”

—But I’d turned away from Karl, and was looking toward where Andalon was pointing, on the opposite side of the hallway.

Granted, I couldn’t see the hallway—there was a wall in the way—but that wasn’t the point.

Across the hallway, I saw motes of white light blink in the distance. I recognized that light.

It was Nina’s light.

“Nina?!” I yelled.

She must have been in one of the other labs!

“The Blessèd?” Geoffrey asked.

“Yes,” I said, not stopping to turn around as I hobbled toward the hallway and the blood and the bullet-fire, shattered glass crunching beneath my soles.

Slowing down, I grabbed the edge of the door, ready to push off it to fling myself across the hallway, only to wince at the feeling of stray glass cutting into my palm, through my glove. My skin tingled for a second as my transformation sealed the wound shut.

Down the hall, the soldiers were firing wildly, trying to shoot at an enemy they couldn’t see. Yuta’s strikes, meanwhile, were nothing short of balletic. His haori fluttered as he turned and spun, slicing men in twain.

“Mr. Genneth!” Andalon yelled. “What is that!?”

I looked just in time to see threads of black energy burst out from the frosted glass. Before I could make out the source, the shadow magic wrapped around Yuta’s katana, and the feeling of my magic suddenly changed. It was as if someone had wrapped a garrote around my plexus and cut off all circulation.

The grasping black devoured the blue and gold filaments around Yuta’s katana. The energy I spent was still where I’d projected it, but it wasn’t doing anything. The flow of the black threads out from the wall stopped, but the remaining threads did not die away. Instead, they quivered midair, wrapped around Yuta’s sword in a strangulating scribble.

What the heck!? I thought.

“Howle!” Yuta yelled. “My sword!”

I gasped. “Andalon, what just happened?”

A soldier yelled: “There’s someone down there!”

Oh fudge.

I turned back. “Geoffrey! Help!”