With Bever at his side, Geoffrey rushed through the shattered glass wall and out into the hallway. Karl followed up behind them, his hands trembling as he struggled to reload the pistol.

Yuta screamed. “Genneth!”

Shaking my head in focus, I wrapped a fresh sheet of pataphysics around his katana as quickly as I could, overwriting the black scribbles. My power glowed; rings and filaments swirled around the sword once more.

More soldiers streamed in, only to scream in terror as we caught them in a pincer maneuver: Geoffrey and Bever striking at them from up front, Yuta slicing at them from behind.

Karl fired off shot after shot, though his accuracy left much to be desired. He hit a few soldiers in the legs or chest, but just as many of his bullets ended up lodged in the thick glass.

Andalon floated ahead. “Mr. Genneth!” Her face tightened in alarm.

I sensed a buzz as power built off to the lab at my left.

Please, no, I thought, not again.

But it happened again. Another burst of black erupted from the wall and wrapped around Yuta’s katana, instantly snuffing out my spell.

Andalon, what is this?

“There,” she said, pointing up ahead. “There! I can sees it!”

The spell-source had gotten closer, close enough that I could see it and its aura more clearly. Magenta colors danced in a mass of fungal aura that swaddled a large, dark, blurry lump on the other side of the frosted glass.

Magenta was the color of the fungus’ will.

No. No no no.

The fungus had taken control. It was making a plaything out of Nina’s body.

“Mr. Genneth, she’s—”

I couldn’t let Hell have Nina’s powers.

“—Andalon,” I shouted, “let’s do the thing!”

“I’m ready!” she yelled.

Yuta, I thought-said, I’m going to need my power back!

Running down the hallway toward the soldiers, the circles of blue and gold around Yuta’s katana vanished as I sliced my arm through the air and slammed a wave of pataphysics at the soldiers from the side. A few of the soldiers toppled over as my attack shoved them against the wall, but then more of that dark energy spooled out from the glass wall. It grabbed my plexus like a hand of worms and squeezed, crushing my weave and cutting off my power’s flow. The wall of light I’d sent sweeping across the hallway vanished, strangled by the dark—and leaving me a sitting duck.

I screamed for help.

Bever plowed into two of the soldiers. He cleaved his axe through a forearm as both targets toppled to the floor. Unable to run out of his way, I got swept up in his momentum. He all fell together, slamming into the floor.

In the chaos, screams rushed out from the shattered lab. I flipped onto my belly and looked up to see hospital gowns whipping by.

The captives were escaping, fleeing down the main corridor.

They were running for their lives.

It started as a trickle, and then grew to a torrent: dying, frightened people scrambling in a mad dash to escape the hell they’d been trapped in.

Even Vernon’s men took pause.

But I didn’t see Eylon among them.

Even more soldiers streamed in through the mouth of the corridor—reinforcements from the garage; elite troops, in sleek, white armor. They started firing before any of us could react.

Two or three of the fleeing patients fell dead, their fungus-riddled heads or chests sliced open by the heat rays from the elite troopers’ rifles. The cauterized bodies smoked and burned.

Andalon screamed in horror. The sound was overwhelming. Near the exit behind the soldiers, a transformee had barreled through the frosted glass wall of the lab to the right. Glass rained in the corridor.

Andalon leapt up, shouting in triumph. “Wyrmeh!”

It was the most fully changed transformee I’d ever seen.

No, it wasn’t a transformee. Not anymore. This was a wyrm, fully transformed.

The familiar violet and ultramarine runic circuitry was nowhere to be seen.

A living wall of otherworldly muscle rippled beneath a wall of amber-brown scales. It was more than twice as thick as a man, and many, many times as long.

I screamed for help as I focused all my willpower on the wyrm. It would have wyrmsight, it would be able to see I was its kin.

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And kin help one another, right?

The wyrm slithered into the hallway, knocking soldiers to the ground. It reared up its forepart.

It was a serpent out of myth, with arms and claws and a dragon’s head, tipped in a snout that had no mouth. Two fang-like horns jutted from the back of its head, glowing with a pale orange bioluminescence. Spikes ran down its spine, lambent in that same color, tearing through the walls as the wyrm moved, while short, stubby holes studding its back spewed up spore streams like fumaroles.

At the edge of the cone of shadow, I could see green wisps play at its snout’s many holes.

If it had a gender, I didn’t know it. The only indication it had ever been human were the blotches of pallid, unchanged skin that still remained on its chest and underbelly. The blotches coated it like an apron.

“Wyrmeh, help!” Andalon screamed, leaping up and down. “Wyr—”

—But then it turned to face us, and Andalon covered her mouth and shrieked.

Its eyes.

Andalon stumbled back, and then tripped on her nightgown and fell to the floor. She crawled back, head trembling, with a voice like glass.

“W-Wyrmeh…?”

And like glass, it broke.

The wyrm’s horns bashed holes in the ceiling as it raised its head, freeing flaky debris that fell to the floor. One of the horns struck one of the fluorescent ceiling lights. The light died with a zort, raining a panoply of sparks.

The wyrm slithered toward us.

I barely noticed the gunfire blasting into the wyrm’s flank. The bullets bounced off its scales, cascading onto the blood-streaked floor. A couple of the heat rays grazed it, leaving white-hot trails on its hide, but the heat faded a moment later, totally ineffective.

A wyrm’s eyes were golden: six golden globes, three on either side of its head, one in front of the other, all in a row.

But not this wyrm. This wyrm’s eyes were silver.

Through my wyrmsight, I could see a magenta aura flare beneath the transformee’s luminous circuitry.

Magenta: the color fungus’ will.

“No!” Andalon screamed, shaking her head. “No! No! No!”

Rearing back its head, the wyrm lunged forward, blasting a sporey torrent out its many nostrils. The stuff moved like floating liquid. Screams went off like misplayed notes, snuffed out in half a second as the acid spore breath reduced three soldiers to fizzing faex. The green cloud lapped against the surrounding walls, stirred by moving bodies. In seconds, the glass gave way, dissolving into bubbling slag.

Sirens and gunfire flashed on the other side of the cloud. Bullets tore holes through the cloud; people ran in every direction.

I whipped up a forcefield to shield the knights and the captives. I didn’t care if the darkness reached out and quashed it. It only needed to last for a moment. And it was a good thing that I had conjured the forcefield because, a moment later, a laser struck the cloud, suddenly igniting it. A fiery wave rippled through the hallway as spores combusted, leaving us stranded in choking smoke.

Bullets bounced off the wyrm’s minutely scaled amber-brown hide as the creature turned around, unhindered by the blast. The wyrm’s movements whisked away trails of smoke, revealing glimpses of bodies burnt and burning stumbling through the dark-light, or writhing on the floor. Everyone screamed.

And through my wyrmsight, I saw the fungus take control.

Magenta crept into everything. A few of the soldiers fell to their knees, only to start moving with twitches and shudders. Hands spasmed and then turned violent, clawing at the nearest face or limb.

“Help!” someone screamed. “I can’t stop!”

Shrieks and growls erupted from the broken labs.

The infected swarmed out through the shattered glass. Tables with captives still bound to them crashed to the floor as their occupants spasmed and thrashed.

I dismissed my forcefield before the shadow magic could crush it.

Geoffrey, Morgan, and Bever brandished their weapons, cutting down the zombies charging their way. The trails of spores still in the air ate away at the knights’ gowns, revealing their armor for all to see.

“Andalon!” I yelled.

She floated beside me.

“Now!” I said. “Connect with &alon!”

And with a nod, she began to glow. Getting down onto my knees, I held her hand as her power flowed into me.

The wyrm threw itself at the infected. Dead or alive, they stuck to it like glue, giving it a mane of dangling bodies. Bellowing, the wyrm flicked its body, hurling itself through the hole its breath weapon had eaten into the nearby wall Glass, metal, brick, ash, and spores were sucked out through the hole, following the wyrm’s momentum as it slithered into the Main Labs’ reception area.

The half-charred zombies followed, spilling out through the openings.

Thrusting out my arms—with Andalon hovering beside me, glowing with power—I felt through the unseen connections &alon was forming between myself and the infected.

It was just like the mélèe in the lobby. I peeled off the fungus’ magenta will, scraping the baleful color from their auras like so many scratch cards. All at once, the zombies calmed. Their roars and snarls broke into sobs and screams of pain. Some of them fell to the ground weeping, others just kept on running.

Anywhere but here, you know?

“No!” Geoffrey bellowed, charging forward. There was panic in his eyes.

“That way!” he yelled, pointing down the hallway in the direction from which we’d come. “That way!”

It was a good call.

Those who could ran. Others stood like statues, lacking any senses to which they could return. Some just fell limply to the floor.

The garage boomed with sound: screams, gunfire, sizzling acid, and the wyrm’s unearthly cries. Fusillades blasted through the lobby’s frosted glass. Karl ran toward me, stepping over blood and body parts. “W-What—what do I do?”

He was crying.

“The other labs,” I said, “there are people in there, we need to get them out!”

And I still needed to free Nina from the fungus’ control.

“What about Eylon?” he demanded. “Wh-what about all the injured? The in-infirm?”

I was going to need to have a long, painful conversation with him, wasn’t I?

But it would have to wait.

I pointed to the lab closest to the source of the shadow spell. “This way!” I yelled.

As we rushed ahead, a second bright light bloomed in my wyrmsight—a mammoth form of pure fungal aura.

The source of the shadow spell was moving!

“Mr. Genneth!” Andalon screamed.

“I know!” I yelled.

“W-What?” Karl asked.

“Get back!” I said, sticking out my arm to block his path.

We both skidded to a stop just in time.

A creature came charging out through the opening the wyrm had made in the wall. Parts of the wall and ceiling were torn free.

By the Godhead…

The creature was the physical vessel for the cluster of infection aura that wielded the shadow magic against my powers. If you squinted, you’d have thought it was some huge animal, but the truth was so much worse. I didn’t know what to call it, other than: “abomination”.

It was a composite creature, built from human beings, living and dead. They’d been arranged in a mammal-like form, but with six legs instead of four, each capped with wicked claws. Its limbs were like caryatids, only assembled from more than one body, and without restriction to gender. The bodies had melted together, fusing in places—bricks held together by fungal mortar. In some places, over its monstrous bulk, the fungus had completely replaced the flesh of the infected with its own. They were thick, vaguely hexagonal plates that overlapped like scale mail. It had neither head nor tail. The bodies on its front and rear were living friezes, bound by the fungus as it consumed them and fruited, fungal branches erupting from ears and mouths and eyes.

And then it turned to face us.

I gasped in horror. “No… No!!”

Nina was front and center, embedded at the heart of the frieze. Her face was expressionless and wan, and drooped lifelessly. A fungal crown had split open the top of her skull.

Was this a demon, rendered in flesh?