I didn’t even need to designate Geoffrey as my selection. He selected himself. One moment, Brand and I were cowering beneath our ’ pulsing green protection, bathing in clouds of acid spores; the next, a figure stood beside us, clad in armor and feathered glory. Unlike Yuta, Geoffrey’s avatar was not quite human. Perhaps moved by the sight of the murdered hummingbird beings, Athelmarch chose a form not unlike theirs. His human face was framed in green feathers on the side and stubbled blood red on his chin and throat. Hummingbird wings and tail-feathers extruded from his back. His wings beat so fast, they cast blurred shadows on his white and green plate armor. As in life, he wielded a halberd, but its blade was jade, if jade could shine with the golden of the midday Sun. Electricity sparked at the blade’s edge, wafting out ozone-stench, and threatening to ignite the clouds of streaming spores.

By some miracle, he’d spawned with all the buffs I’d already cast. He came pre-equipped with a protective green sphere of .

He would definitely need it.

Geoffrey didn’t bother to give us more than a contemptuous glance before his thighs bulged like steel cables as he squatted down and sprung, launching off the ground. The beating wings roared like a gasoline engine, The breeze he left in his wake scattered the spore clouds and set Brand’s cloak aflutter.

“Brand!” I yelled.

“Right!”

Brand started to cast his spells. I did the same after gulping down a big breath of air.

“,” I said. My head throbbed as the power flowed through me, though, mercifully, the effect of my spell quickly remedied that.

It no longer felt like my head was about to split in two.

Shaking out my head and tail, I lifted my forelimbs off the ground and stepped back. I made sure to stay close enough to Yuta’s body to keep him within the radius of my .

Yuta’s body was more than halfway reformed. Muscle and sinew knitted together right before my eyes. Tendons unfurled, fat filled in the gaps. Skin and clothes started appearing a couple seconds later, as if someone was drizzling them over his body.

Raising my head, I saw Geoffrey barreling toward three wyrms with his halberd outstretched, crackling with energy.

The wyrms swam toward him with a roar.

I needed to give Geoffrey some kind of blessing—protection, enhancement, something. Unfortunately, I was running out of higher level spells to cast. But I’d rather be safe than sorry, so I cast one anyway, and made it a long-lasting one, too.

Settling onto my haunches, I raised my arms and yelled. “!”

I had a terrible feeling I was going to regret this.

Rays of light appeared around Geoffrey’s body, covering him with a golden aura as they whirled around. was my second-most powerful combat blessing, after . The spell Was like a , , and a all rolled into one.

The effect was immediate. Geoffrey’s flight speed doubled, making him move almost too quickly for my eyes to see. I had an easier time tracking the green than Geoffrey himself; he seemed to flicker from place to place.

The sudden speed caught the wyrms off guard. Geoffrey cleaved his halberd through them with mighty strokes, darting forward on hovering wings. He zipped from blow to blow.

A broad horizontal slash.

A stab of the halberd’s spear-tip.

An aerial pirouette, whirling the weapon round and around.

Each strike was a thunderclap. Lighting clashed and crashed, sparking down the wyrms’ bodies.

The wyrms fought back with claw-strokes and corkscrew twists, blasting out spores in stream after stream.

Geoffrey deftly dodged, changing his momentum at the drop of a hat. The sparks from his halberd strikes ignited the spore streams, chaining explosions all the way back to the serpents’ maws.

It was fudging awesome.

Beside me, winds whipped over the acid-eaten depression as Brand charged his spell. Energy swirled around him, lifting his cloak off his back.

Yet, high above, the fungal sky loomed large.

I gaped at its sheer immensity, muttering under my breath. “Beast’s teeth…”

With each passing second, it was getting bigger. Closer.

My thoughts raced.

A war in Paradise, I thought.

A shiver crawled down my spine.

That was it. That’s what it had to be. It was all the evidence I needed. That was the answer to the mystery. This place? The Incursion?

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There was a war in Paradise. Hell itself—the fungus—had broken into Paradise. The Scary-Shinies were in league with it; coalitions of Angels and their creations at war with one another.

Andalon was either an Angel in her own right, or the creation of one. Perhaps &alon was her maker. When she’d first appeared to me, in that dream, she was injured because she was a refugee of this war, having barely escaped with her life.

As Andalon had shown me, I knew that &alon was a physical being, immense beyond words, with awe-inspiring power.

I shivered again.

How much more powerful were the other Angels, then, if they had Andalon on the run.

I became almost numb to the battles around me. So many puzzle pieces were coming into place.

This place, these hummingbird beings… long ago, this must have been Paradise. But no longer. That explained why Andalon told me the afterlife only exists in wyrms’ heads. True Paradise had been lost. The fungus had gotten to it first, and all that remained was this, a memory of the fall.

&alon must have put Paradise into the wyrms as a last resort. Now, the fungus was trying to finish what it started: destroy Paradise for good.

By the Angel…

Below me, Yuta gasped, drawing in breath. The sudden loud sound ripped me out of my contemplation. I looked down in shock.

Yuta shook his head and stood up. His clothes and equipment were fully restored, his pitch-black kanakatana sheathed once more in the scabbard at his waist.

Above, wyrms roared.

I looked up.

Wyrms were slithering out from the ruins and the fog, turning to Geoffrey en masse. They spewed spore breath at him from every direction, making the crackle, impossibly bright.

There was no trace of reason within these silver-eyed wyrms. They attacked Geoffrey like wild animals, swerving and diving, claws slashing through combusting clouds as they chased the hummingbird .

But as fast as the wyrms were, Geoffrey was nimbler still. He darted through their coils and flew circles around their heads. His every movement was an attack. He sliced off arms, snouts and tails.

Beside me, lightning crackled at Brand’s feet. It rose up, whirling around him. Energy flashed and snarled as it spun and spun.

Faster. Faster.

Grabbing Yuta with my tongue, I plopped him onto my back and yelled, “Hold on!” as I fell forward and galloped off. As I ran, I looked over my shoulder and yelled: “Geoffrey! Run!”

The pulsing energy waves streaming out from Brand quickened, scattering bits of broken hummingbirds. Thick light whipped around him as he rose to his feet, obscuring his form.

Turning sharply, I scrambled into one of the hollow skyscrapers. I could see Brand through one of the entry arches across from me.

Brand screamed. “Intuición!! !”

Brand’s trump card was worthy of the Lass Herself. For a breathtaking moment, earth and sky were linked by a massive column of solid plasma. If it had a color, the light was too bright for me to tell. Everything was monochrome, as if the sky had turned on the wrong set of lights. Rock disintegrated at the columns’ base—bits of black, dissolving in the all-consuming light.

Black and white afterimages flashed in my eyes as the spell petered out. Up above, I could make out Geoffrey’s protective green sphere zooming away. He’d escaped the devastation just in time.

I blinked until my vision half-worked again, resisting the urge to rub my eyes. The destruction was exquisite. Brand’s magic had carved out a miniature Cranter Pit in the middle of the dead city. Fires smoldered at its rim, and whole swaths of the ground had liquified, turning to molten rock and glass. Chunks of wyrms—a tail, part of a torso—stuck out from the column’s radius where they’d flopped to the floor, bearing the charred edges where the rest of their bodies had been destroyed. Entire swaths of the surrounding buildings had been erased.

A shaft of light streamed down onto the pit. Looking up, I saw Brand’s spell had punched a hole all the way through the great fungus, creating the largest Ceiling Eye any world had ever known. The hole filled with shadows as the fungus began to repair the damage. Tendrils writhed out from the wound, plunging their tips into the opposite side.

I saw the sky through the hole—gloriously blue—but only for a moment.

Below, Brand’s robot body stood at the center of the pit like a broken toy. Brand’s emerald-topped staff fell from his hand and clattered to the ground. A moment later, Brand’s body did the same, toppling forward, rigid and unmoving. None of the lights on his body were on.

I ran out from the massive gap that had opened in the hollow skyscraper’s wall.

“Brand!” I yelled. “Brand!”

Yuta leapt off my back as I scrambled down to the bottom of the pit.

Settling down by Brand’s side, I flipped my friend onto his back with a gentle flick of a single claw, sighing with relief as I saw green text displayed on his black LED screen face. I lowered my head to the ground to read them:

Power Depleted.

Recharging.

Time until completion:

23:58

The numbers flashed on and off like a digital clock waiting to be set.

“What’s wrong with him?” Yuta asked.

“His battery needs time to recharge,” I said.

Yuta’s brow furrowed. “His what?”

I started to explain, but my reply was immediately drowned out by an engine-revving hum.

Geoffrey landed right in front of us, his armor clinking as he folded his wings against his back. His halberd’s golden blade crackled with electricity.

Metal scraped as Yuta stepped forward and unsheathed his blade.

Geoffrey glowered at us in frightful rage.

I raised my hands in a defensive gesture, only to fold my arms against my chest when I remembered I had massive, threatening-looking claws. “Please, Geoffrey,” I said, “just… calm down.”

“I’ve had enough of your lies,” Geoffrey hissed. He glared at me, and then Yuta. “You betrayed us, Howle. You betrayed me. You betrayed your people…”

Yuta pointed his kanakatana at the half-man, half-hummingbird warrior.

“The war is over, Lord Athelmarch,” Yuta said. “It was a hollow cause then, and it is a hollow cause now. There has been enough bloodshed.”

A tear glinted in the corner of Geoffrey’s eye as he shook his head. “Our cause was not hollow, Mewnee.” He spat out the word, pointing his halberd’s head at us. “I fought for God and country. For my people’s freedom!” Geoffrey said.

“Everyone is dead, Geoffrey,” I said.

“But causes endure, Dr. Howle,” Geoffrey replied, “and good and evil are set in stone. Time has no meaning when a cause is righteous.” He stamped his halberd’s haft on the ground. “I don’t care what is real and what is false. I know what I’ve seen. I know what I feel.” Shuddered, he stuck out his arm and squeezed his fist.

“Geoffrey, please,” I said, “don’t do this.”

He glared at me as he stepped forward.