As usual, Brand was right on the money: Andalon couldn’t interfere with me in here, and not for a want of trying. I surmised that because my consciousness wasn’t entirely inside my body at the moment, whatever control she had over my ghosts had diminished accordingly. It seemed the best she could do was to make Yuta’s body flicker occasionally, but that was little more than an aesthetic glitch.

It was strange: as I’d reached out to select Yuta’s name, I sensed other spirits fidgeting within me, desperate to break free. Their emotions were all over the place. Some were youngsters who’d been watching us through me, keen on lending a hand. Others were mournful or vindictive spirits who yearned to vent their grief and fury. I sensed Nina’s presence, solemn and brokenhearted, still reeling from the news of her parents’ passing. Most of all, I sensed Geoffrey’s soul. It was like an ember-studded thorn jabbed into my side, pulsing with anger and pain. I knew I would have to confront him eventually, but this only made me that much more wary of it.

But I could—and would have to—deal with that later.

As much as I would have enjoyed discussing Yuta’s memories with him, I had a bigger problem to deal with. We could be attacked at any moment, even while we were working in the character creation menu. As such, Brand and I prioritized summarizing the situation to bring Yuta up to speed.

You’d expect there to be difficulties explaining RPG mechanics to a Munine nobleman who was some four-hundred years behind the times, and you would be right. The hardest part was convincing Yuta that the Brand wasn’t a threat. This required me having to take several points of slashing damage from while inserting myself between the two of them and setting the wheels of diplomacy in motion. Fortunately, I was able to quickly parley a ceasefire, after which it was just a matter of explaining the pertinent concepts to Lord Uramaru. It also both hurt and helped that Brand had frozen Yuta in place with a frost cantrip.

I ended up using my claws to break through the ice.

“So,” Yuta said, dusting himself off, “this is a… game?” He chose his words with care. “Entertainment?”

“Did you ever play make-believe as a child?” I asked him. “Did your children?”

He furrowed his brow. “What child doesn’t?”

“It’s basically make-believe,” I said, gesturing at the goblins’ totems and tents, “but with much better production values—”

“—And with rigid rules, grounded in chance and arithmetic,” Brand interjected.

“And why are you…?” Yuta motioned at my pangolinly form with a gyre of his hand.

“A pangolin-man? Well…” I shrugged. “Why not?”

“To think…” Sighing, Yuta shook his head. “The world has made a daydream game out of war.” He looked up at the cavern’s ceiling. “What I wouldn’t have given to have lived in such a world.”

“You played your part in history,” I said. “For better and for worse, your contributions helped make our world into what it became.”

Yuta stared at me, narrowing his eyes in silent judgment. “So,” he asked, “what is it you need me to do?”

Brand and I glanced at one another and grinned.

If you’ve played any RPGs, you’ll know that character creation is a sacred ritual. In it, the player and the game pledge a kind of oath toward one another, a promise of what the playthrough will become. We created Yuta’s character on his behalf, with that (slightly silly) solemnity in mind.

Unlike Brand, whose character bore no resemblance to his real-life appearances, or mine, which sort of did, we let Yuta keep his appearance. Also, he was rather attached to it, and sternly opposed the idea of changing species.

“You said this was serious,” he said, “and so, I am taking it seriously. Shouldn’t you be doing the same?”

“I got locked into this form,” I told him. “It’s… a long story.”

Yuta exhaled in frustration.

After a bit of discussion which Yuta tried his best to take seriously, we succeeded in improvising a tanky melee build meant to address our two-man crew’s shortcomings: a . This was a nimble character class designed to dodge, duck, and leap while dishing out massive amounts of damage, with strong base stats to make up for the equipment restrictions.

The ’s titular Pact was a contract the character made with a powerful spirit in exchange for a magical weapon to which they would be bonded, and whose abilities would grow alongside them.

“I am making a pact?” Yuta asked.

“Yes, with a god or demon or whatever,” Brand said. “Of your choice, obviously.”

Yuta narrowed his eyes in consternation, though he did smirk in amusement as he noticed the weapon that came with the pact with a spirit of calligraphy: a katana made of Munine katakana script.

A kanakatana.

The weapon’s inky blade was formed by multiple glyphs (kana) fused together, end to end. Strange though the weapon was, Yuta was definitely pleased with how it handled. Much to his surprise, when swung, the sword sent out trails of ink which Yuta quickly discovered he could move and shape at will He could send arcs of sharpened ink slicing through the air, or solidify an upward cut’s black splash into a crystalline outcrop that jutted up from the ground.

“Think of what I could have done, had I possessed such a weapon in life,” Yuta said. The kanakatana’s fluid aura glittered in his eyes.

And then, the ink from one of his practice swings curved into the tunnel up ahead and, for the sound of things, struck the ancient door.

Brand and I looked at Yuta in unison.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

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I wagged my tail in agitation.

Brand stepped back and held out his staff. Green light swirled around the emerald at its tip as he built up power. “They’re coming,” he said, changing his face display back to radar mode.

Yuta narrowed his eyes. “What is that?” he asked, pointing at Brand’s changed face.

“We’re the green dots,” I said. “The red dots are the enemy.”

Yuta’s face blanched as the familiar pitter-patter of clockwork ant-legs pistoned in the tunnel up ahead. It rapidly got louder.

I turned to Yuta as I cast low-level defenses on the three of us. “I hope you are a quick learner.”

Steadying his weapon, Yuta rapped his fingers along its sable hilt. “Dr. Howle,” he said, with a smirk, “for once, let me surprise you.”

The approaching ants’ footsteps now sounded like an oncoming rockslide. Oddly, above the sound of my racing heart, I noticed an acrid, ozonic stench.

“Alrighty, then,” Brand said. “Genneth?” He glanced at me.

I nodded.

Brand and I ran to the back of the cave—as far away from the door as we could get—letting Yuta take up position in front of us in the middle of the cave, near the campfire. Then, my robot companion and I got to work doing a time honored spellcaster specialty: casting buffs right before battle. Brand cast while I spammed through my shortlist of low-level blessings and defensive orisons.

From down the cavern, there was a series of awful thuds, and the ancient Precursor door flew into sight, smashing into the wall. The clockwork ants came spilling out of the tunnel.

There had to be a dozen or more.

“Brand!” I yelled.

“On it!” he said. His cloak billowed as red wisps began to swirl around him. The flames coalesced in front of him, pouring into an orb that grew and grew, like a miniature Sun.

Was this what stars looked like up close?, I wondered.

Meanwhile, I steepled my claws together and began to pray—but not to the Angel. I was intoning my most powerful blessing: the . It could only be cast during combat, and the time it took for me to cast it left me open to attack, but the results spoke for themselves, like they had in our fight with the mother terrorworm.

Brand lobbed his fireball with a wide sweep of his arm. The tumid orb hit the ground right in front of the front row of ants. Lacking a specified target, the ants’ arcane magnetism was powerless to stop it. The explosion’s blast wave scattered the ants like billiards, slamming them into the tunnel walls. The ants’ plate-metal exoskeletons clanged as they clattered against one another and crashed onto and scraped along the surrounding stone. The explosion ignited nearby tents and totems, turning the front half of the cavern into a forest of flame.

“Holy Shit!” Yuta yelled, awed.

The ants scrambled, legs flailing as they righted themselves. Several of the automatons had had their legs crushed or snapped off. Plate-metal and structural frames rubesced from the heat. Brand’s spell bought us a couple of seconds, as well as precious breathing room.

I heard Yuta yell again as he struck the oncoming ants. Looking up from my claws and the golden aura that was rising all around me, I saw Yuta moving against the fiery backdrop like a living silhouette. Metal clanged as he struck, lopping off more of the ants’ legs. Slashing his kanakatana loosed arcs of ink that sliced through the air. The arcs hissed as they hit the ants’ superheated bodies. The ink burned on contact, giving off black, acrid smoke.

In the thick of combat, Yuta was more impressive than I could have ever imagined. He cleaved at groups of ants with wide sweeps of his character blade. His attack took out the front wave, only for the rear guard to charge forward with a vengeance. Red-hot mandibles crushed his left arm, tearing through his dark blue haori. Yuta yelled in pain as the metal seared into his skin, though there was a look of surprise in his eyes.

The pain must have been far less than whatever he’d been expecting.

He smacked his weapon’s hilt into one of the glowing jewel-eyes of the metal insect that had lunged at him. Electricity sparked as the eye shattered, leaving the ant stunned, unable to react quickly to what came next.

Leaping back, Yuta cut through the air in a horizontal slash that sliced off the ant’s antennae and shattered the eyes of two more ants that were clambering forward just behind it. Ink streamed off the kanakatana in a fan-like blot and smacked into the head of the ant in front, knocking the automaton back.

I noticed the sites where Yuta ink attack had hit the ants had both darkened and cooled.

Heating and cooling made metal brittle, right?

I wanted to yell it out, but I couldn’t say anything without losing the , which I was nearly finished casting.

Fortunately, Brand said what I couldn’t.

“The ink cools the metal! It makes it—”

“—Brittle!” Yuta shouted.

Seeing several more ants coming our way—moving off to the side, trying to attack Brand and I from our left flank—Brand dropped several more clusters of summoned stones, but this time ahead of where the ants were, to cut off the ants’ path of approach, which it accomplished splendidly. Legs and antennae flicked side to side where they stuck up over the top layer of boulders.

Three ants skittered between two goblins’ tents, coming around to strike us from the right.

I guess they were hoping they’d succeed where the others had failed.

“To the right!” Brand yelled. “The right!”

Yuta ran toward the ants, but then dashed to the side and aimed for the totem next to the tents. He struck the totem with a concentrated stream of ink that sliced through the totem’s wood and bone like a water cutter, toppling it to the ground, crushing the three ants. The impact opened cracks on their bodies between the various ink-cooled spots.

With the rocks at our left and the fallen totem at our right, if the ants wanted to attack either Brand and me, they’d have to clamber over the blockage or go through the opening up ahead where Yuta was standing guard.

Finally, I belted out the last words of the .

Yuta yelped in surprise, and then in glee as his body lit up with a transparent, spectral aura, like a plume of white flame. The burn wound on his arm vanished. Blue light streamed from his eyes.

The blessing doubled the warrior’s already speed. Yuta seemed to teleport about as he moved, flickering from place to place, slicing trails of ink along the clockwork ants bodies. He doubled back, clanging their carapaces with his kanakatana’s hilt. The ants’ metal carapaces cracked like ceramic, exposing their inner machinery. Yuta manipulated his ink slashes to flow through the openings in the ants’ armor, where it then bit and bashed at the ants’ delicate internal mechanisms. Three ants skidded across the ground in quick succession, their eyes flickering dark as their gear-work came to a stop.

Brand and I yelled in triumph, pumping our fists, only to gasp and stagger back as a fresh wave of ants seethed out of the tunnel, clambering over the crumpled Precursor door. They poured into the goblins’ camp, surrounding Yuta on all sides.

So many of the ants were piling up against our improvised barriers that the next waves of ants to enter were able to climb over their brethren and over the rocks and the totem and flank Brand and I.

“Back!” I yelled. “Pull back!” I shot several crossbow bolts to distract the ants.

Yuta seemingly flickered from place to place as he returned to our side and joined us in our retreat. We gathered at the mouth of the camp’s entrance tunnel.

“Genneth!” Brand said. “I’ve got one more Fireball left. You should use one of the with it!”

“Brilliant!” I yelled.

“What?” Yuta said.

He was busy knocking ants back with strikes of ink fans.

“You’ll see!” I said.

There was a look of disgust on Yuta’s face as I extended my pangol tongue and snaked it into my Backpack of Holding. I didn’t bear him any umbrage for that.

Pangolins were weird. Weird, adorable, and heck’ awesome!

I knew I’d found the when an icy chill pressed against my tongue.

With a soft yelp, I retracted my tongue, whipping out the and dropping it in my hand. My sticky saliva kept me from dropping the golf-ball-sized blue and white orb.

After this one, I had only one more left to use, so I couldn’t afford to miss.

Yuta’s speed was enough for him to keep the ants at bay, but not for much longer. He wasn’t holding them back so much as he was slowing their advance, and the ants’ metal bodies had cooled enough that his ink-strikes no longer brittled them.

Worse, I noticed the amount of ink he was conjuring was decreasing with every swing.

“Hurry!” he yelled.

He must have noticed it, too.

“I’m already on it!” Brand said.

I could see Brand’s burgeoning fireball reflected in the clockwork ants’ jeweled eyes.

“Yuta!” Brand yelled. “Get back!”