Incoming! Kristy’s combined shout and gunfire startled me awake from a nap I didn’t realize I had been taking. I shook my head and looked up to see Albright rush forward to take a position opposite Kristy, firing down the tunnel at whatever was coming.

They’re thralls, Albright said calmly. I can’t shake whatever is controlling them, which has me worried. Switch to verbal communication.

Why—I suddenly realized my thoughts were no longer being broadcast to the group. “Why the change?” I shouted over the gunfire. I got to my feet as quickly as I could, rotating my shoulder to work the stiffness out of it.

Suddenly Roy moved in front of me, waving me back with his free hand as his left lifted one of the belt-fed machine guns he and Greg had been carrying. “So the boss can focus on defense,” he said as he walked up to relieve Kristy.

Kristy’s gun ran dry and she dropped the mag, reaching for another one. She stopped as Roy arrived and backed away from the tunnel entrance before replacing the spent magazine. Suddenly gunfire could be heard from down the tunnel and Kristy’s face broke into a giddy grin.

“Finally!” She cried as a kind of magic I had never felt before bloomed out of her. She started to cackle like a lunatic as the bullets from the tunnel hit an invisible wall and… what was happening to them? I had to focus and squint because there was a… mental component to Kristy’s magic. It looked like the bullets were being eaten?

“What the fuck is she doing?” I asked Albright in a voice I was hoping was loud enough to get over the gunfire but wouldn’t carry to Kristy. Albright had fallen back towards me as soon as the return gunfire had started.

Albright inspected his rifle before shooting me an amused glance. “Kristy’s magic is pretty unique. It’s a weird mix of inertia stealing, entropy, and sacrifice magic. Doesn’t have broad application, but for the situations it was meant for it can be scarily effective.”

As he finished his explanation he tilted his head towards Kristy and I noticed that her scary backpack was vibrating like an overpowered subwoofer. Kristy continued to cackle as she slung her gun and pulled at the straps of the backpack, swinging it in front of her and holding it forward like a shield. As she lifted it, a big, fanged mouth appeared on it and the backpack screamed a war cry. From its mouth dozens of tiny bullet-shaped, glowing pink comets floated out and then shot down the tunnel, briefly bathing the room in a warm pink corona.

The gunfire from the tunnel petered out over the next few seconds.

My curiosity overcame my caution (as it usually does) and I slipped up to the tunnel and peaked down it. I sucked in a surprised breath through my teeth, not expecting the dozens of bodies to carpet the relatively small tunnel. Each body was perforated with dozens of burning bullet wounds. I raised my eyes to look further, to see the angry pink comets diving in and out of more people down the tunnel, causing havoc and death of which they could do nothing to defend.

I glanced at Kristy, who was grinning at me insanely.

“A part of me feels ambivalent about a spell so tailor-made for slaughter,” I said in the sudden lack of quiet. “The bigger part of me realizes you probably can only use it after being shot at so, you know, I think it’s kind of rad.”

Her smile took on a much more happy, goth-flavored “girl next door” vibe. “Why thank you, Colm,” she said as she put her backpack back on. “I am rather fond of it.”

Kristy fell back as Roy took over her position by the tunnel, the giant knight holding the big machine gun with one hand like it was a Nerf rifle. We settled in to wait for a bit, as Greg was still recovering. He was awake and conscious, but was non-verbal and responded to prompting with a significant delay. Beats acted like this was normal and ran Greg through a few diagnostic exercises while occasionally casting a spell that felt to my magical senses as if you wrapped the THX noise in honey. It doesn’t make sense but it filled me with a desire to have that magic cast on me.

I sat against the wall near Greg and Beats, and when no one was looking, I studied my hand. What the fuck had happened? Obviously, I had grown claws in a moment of panic, but then I had undone it. Can I reverse this transformation? If I can influence this, does that mean this spreading transformation has a psychosomatic component? I wished I could dive into my borrowed knowledge of my silent passenger, but I barely risked even thinking about it while being near Albright. Thankfully, he seemed to be on the lookout for outside influences now, so I think I had less to worry about.

I focused on my hand, willing it to change to my old skin tone—which is when it occurred to me that, with the growing patch of black skin on my torso, the skin I was born with was now in the minority. I sighed and set aside the maudlin thought, focusing on what I wanted my hand to do. I felt… something. I spent several long minutes staring at my hand, without seeing or feeling a change… until a shift in attention caused me to stumble in my effort, causing my skin to lose some of its smooth, inky texture. It looked more like normal skin.

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The effort was mentally draining, however, so I dropped the attempt and looked up while shaking my hand. I could feel the change to my hand revert as soon as I took my attention off it. Greg was sitting up now, speaking in short, truncated sentences with Beats who kept casting that weird, oddly comforting spell every few moments. Albright was back near the staircase, muttering some spells and attempting to figure a way out of here if I had my guess. Roy and Kristy were watching down the tunnel we had opened up (I ignored the blood that was flowing from the tunnel). Walt was passed out opposite me against the far wall, snoring lightly.

The only thing I wanted right now was to lie down and pass out for a few days, but Conner was waiting somewhere ahead. Now that I was focusing on the blood stick that was still attached to my arm, I could feel my connection to my brother… but I couldn’t pin down a location. At most, I got a sense of direction. Guapo had said they hadn’t found a magical defense that could block it, but had they tried it in a domain? I doubted it.

I sighed and slowly got to my feet, resisting the urge to grunt and groan with every motion. Even if I was recovering thanks to the modifications I’d made to my body, I had had a rough week. I wanted nothing more than to take a hot bath and sleep for an epoch. I shoved my gripes aside and crossed over to Albright.

“Any luck?” I murmured as I came up beside him.

“No,” Albright said. “Though, honestly, I don’t have much experience with trying to leave before dealing with the cynosure. That ward was… surprisingly difficult to deal with.”

“Cynosure?” I asked.

He gestured behind us, toward the domain. “The center of the domain. There’s an item or spell at the center holding all this together. Breaking it releases a wave of chaotic magic that starts to tear everything apart, allowing escape.”

“And were you going to tell me this before or after I discovered I couldn’t escape with my brother?” I asked.

Albright turned and regarded me silently for several moments, before closing his eyes with a sigh. “I apologize,” Albright said, surprising me. “I have been—no, we have been under a lot of stress and I have been, perhaps, more combative than the situation warrants.”

He opened his eyes, his expression less hard, more tired. “To tell the truth, one of the reasons it took so long for us to investigate the reports of the Martinez clan was because similar situations have been happening all over the planet,” he took off his glasses and produced a cleaning cloth from a pocket. He began cleaning them with the deliberate care that seemed meditative rather than utilitarian. “I haven’t done fieldwork in a decade, but it's an ‘all hands on deck’ situation. Even the boss is putting out fires.”

Albright being new to the team made sense, what with how Walt had been acting. I would assume Walt to be the newest member, and thus not used to changing personnel or figuring out the way the new boss did things. It would go far to explain how passive the rest of the group had been when I first met them, watching how the new boss did things. I ran a hand through my hair, undoing some tangles caused by some sticky substance. Jesus, I hope that’s not vomit in my hair.

I nodded. “Yeah, I had hoped this was an isolated thing but figured it might not be, if only for the fact they seemed spread all over the country. Also…”

I took a deep breath and let it out in a puff. “A lot of the blame can be aimed at me, for the sourness in our interactions. I’m—not good—with people,” I said with a stilted cadence. “Authority figures in particular.”

Albright frowned. “I’m an authority figure?”

“You’re literally the magical secret police,” I retorted.

He barked a surprised laugh. “I guess so.”

I regarded the stairway for a moment. “So we gotta kill the thing at the center before we can leave. I assume since this is an extra-dimensional space, destroying the thing holding it all together will put a timer on how long we can stay?”

“Yes,” Albright said with a nod. “Though it isn’t like a movie self-destruct timer. We’ll have days before the space begins to revert.”

I relaxed some tension I didn’t know I’d be holding, nodding. “That’s good.”

I regarded the stairs again. “Should we be expecting backup?” I asked.

Albright’s face fell. “I don’t think so. I haven’t been able to reach anyone outside. I have multiple ways of contacting Gendry, and they are all failing in a way that makes me think this domain is a time bubble.”

I sighed and ran both my hands through my hair this time, shaking the shaggy strands as I massaged my scalp. “Of course. And we don’t know how severe it is.”

“Can’t be too severe,” Albright said. “My dimensional storage magic only has a delay of a few seconds, so the time dilation won’t be measured in years. But it’s still significant enough that it’ll be hours in our time before we can expect reinforcements. Maybe days.”

We both turned to look at the tunnel behind us. “And who knows what they’ll cook up to deal with us in that time,” I muttered.

Albright hummed in agreement, returning his glasses to his face. “So, once Walt’s done with his nap and Greg’s back on his feet, we’ll be continuing on.”

“Better rest up while I can, I guess,” I said quietly.

Albright nodded before handing me a canteen he hadn’t had a moment ago. “Here.”

“So you’re a telepath and a mule?” I asked with a small smile as I took the canteen.

“Pretty much,” Albright said, picking up his rifle that he had leaned against the wall. “I decided I didn’t like reloading, one thing led to another, and now I carry around an interdimensional warehouse.”

That’s… pretty dope, actually. I made an appreciative noise as I drained half the canteen.

Albright went to check on Greg and Beats and I went back to my spot by the wall. I told myself I was just going to rest my eyes for a few moments...