Fucking hell, Conner, I thought as I dove under a table, narrowly being missed by a wickedly barbed tentacle. Why couldn’t you have been kidnapped by a drug cartel or something?

I tried to get my kinetic fire going again, but the shoggoth wasn’t giving me time to concentrate. I crawled under the benches and tables, the shoggoth hot on my heels, tearing through the thick stone furniture and kicking up clouds of dust. I couldn’t see what the other two were doing.

“Beats!” Albright shouted from somewhere.

I crawled out from a table and found myself in the far corner of the room, near the kitchen but not close enough to matter. The shoggoth was nearly on me, and I had a split second to figure out what the fuck I was going to do to it. I couldn’t afford to fuck up my kinetic fire, so I tried to make my claws grow—

The air became chaos as Beats rose from her work on Roy, holding up a thin sheet of metal that was hooked to her fingers. As I watched it vibrated violently, distorting the air in a wave, cascading in a bloom toward the shoggoth that was about to render me into chunks. The wave enveloped the shoggoth and—

Boy, did it not like that.

Whatever that wave was, it hammered the shoggoth with violent waves of pressure, hammering it away from me. Any part of the monster that stuck out was violently sanded off, like it had been fed into an open-air wood chipper. The attack was weirdly silent, but I could still feel it in my chest like the reverberation of concert speakers.

The attack gave me enough room to begin to create my kinetic fire again. I fucked up once, feeling a twinge in my brain, but quickly restarted and brought forth a thin line of my new fire ability. I thickened and lengthened it and sent the magic to wreak havoc on the shoggoth.

Sadly, the shoggoth was made of sterner stuff than the demons were, so it didn’t instantly get carved up like a hot wire through Styrofoam. Even still, the line of fire dug its way into the shoggoth’s flesh, the monster’s thrashing making my work easier as it hurt itself against the fiery rope. I tried not to focus on how lovely it felt to burn the thing.

Beats saw I had this one in hand and redirected her attack across the room. With her other hand, she pulled out a metal tube, covered in what looked like ancient Greek script, with a slightly flared end. She held the tube in front of her other hand, which resulted in her attack being concentrated into a line. It shot across the room, pulverizing the stone furniture in its way and crashing into one of the two shoggoths Greg was barely keeping at bay. A large portion of the thing's mass liquified and splashed onto the ground, while the rest of the energy of the attack hit it with enough force to push it into the other monster.

Albright grunted with effort, and another one of those big-ass metal cubes that he had summoned in the other room appeared—above the shoggoths. I don’t know how many pounds of metal fell on them, but it was enough to cut one clean in half, like it had been caught in an industrial press. Greg soon went to work on the survivor.

As Beats cut off her magic, she collapsed in a pile on the ground, barely keeping her eyes open. I was mildly disgusted with myself that I had been unconsciously drawing out the fight with my shoggoth so I could keep feeling the effect of my fire. With a savage twist of my will, I tightened the coils of fiery rope and within the next few moments, shoggoth cutlets were smoking on the ground.

I glanced over at Albright, who was bleeding from a scalp wound, his right arm hanging limp. Greg looked… Like a ground beef sculpture someone had slapped a breastplate on. Kristy didn’t look injured, but she looked just as wiped as Beats.

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Where the fuck is Walt?

I jogged back through the stone tables, most of which were destroyed by this point, and scooped up Albright’s Garand. “Does your infinite ammo thing work if you’re not holding the gun?” I asked him as I approached.

He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a few seconds before shaking his head. “It’s something I actively do.”

I swore softly and checked the gun, trying to see how much ammo was in it without unloading it. I was vaguely familiar with the gun because it was famous, being a mainstay of the US military during the Second World War, but I hadn’t operated one personally.

Albright grunted and a bandoleer appeared and fell to the ground with a clatter. I examined it and found it to contain a couple dozen loaded clips for the Garand. I nodded my thanks, grabbed the ammo, and looped it over my head and shoulder. With a quick glance around us, I ran toward the double doors and took the spot Greg had been holding, glancing through.

I didn’t see any more monsters, thankfully. The next room looked like a vestibule you might see in an office, except everything was stone. The only light came from the open balcony on the right, similar to the room I was in, and the walls were interrupted by several more double doors. Across the way, I could see some movement through the slightly opened doorway, which was likely where all our new and recently (and no longer) alive friends had come.

I glanced back as a scuff alerted me to Greg’s approach. His big sword was sheathed across his back. A lot of skin was missing from the left side of his face, the bloody bone of his jaw exposed to the air. A strip of his scalp was also missing. He was holding his left arm together with his right hand, mashing the almost severed forearm into the stump. He had several puckered holes in his arms, hips, and legs, with his right leg missing several strips of flesh up and down it.

“You look rough, bud,” I said in a low voice as I turned back toward the other room.

“Feel it,” Greg muttered. He plopped down next to me, heavily falling into a seated position. He leaned back against the wall, his sword scraping awkwardly against the stone. I could see the strap that held the scabbard was loose, probably kept intentionally so, for just this occasion.

Heavy footfalls came from the other side of the room, and I was relieved to see Roy back on his feet. He was shaky, taking his time, but every step was taken with more confidence as he crossed the room. His helmet was gone, and I was surprised to find a Denzel Washington look-alike under the knight helm. The dude was handsome as fuck. He gave me a small nod as he took up position next to the doorway.

...The same position he had when he had been injured.

“Glad to see you back on your feet,” I said, then stepped away from the door. “Why don’t you take my spot?”

Roy’s eyes slowly turned to regard the hole in the wall the demon had made when it had grabbed his head, then turned back to me. He nodded once and took my spot. “I need to chat with Albright,” I murmured, receiving a firm nod from Roy and a tired one from Greg.

Kristy was doing her best to dress Albright up as a mummy, wrapping layers of gauze around the telepath. I walked up and stood in a way that I could see him and the double doorway at the same time.

“Where’s Walt?” I asked without preamble.

Albright regarded me tiredly. “Locating the cynosure,” Albright said.

I frowned. “It’s not the big static light down there?” I gestured toward the balcony. As I said it, I knew the answer. I suspected I knew what it was.

Albright saw my expression change, likely guessing at my thoughts. He tilted his head at me, making Kristy hiss at him in displeasure (she was trying to tie off the gauze on his head). “No. ‘Cynosure’ is a bit of a misnomer. It’s often not at the center of the domain.”

I swore softly.

“Once he finds it, he has the tools necessary to disrupt it,” Albright continued. “Which is when I’ll call a retreat.”

I wanted to protest but stopped myself. Aside from myself (which is debatable) and possibly Roy, we were all walking the ragged edge of exhaustion. If the cultists had anything more to throw at us—which they likely did—we weren’t in much shape to fight back. The best call would be to escape, regroup, and push in with a bigger force.

I checked my brother's location again. He was so close!

I nodded slowly. “Then I’m going to get my brother.”

Ignoring Albright’s protests and Kristy’s shout, I walked over to the balcony. As I walked, I slung the Garand over my shoulder and focused on my hands, trying to recapture the feeling of need I had had when the hand had grabbed me. I felt something in my stomach shift, like a muscle twitch, but across my entire torso, and my hands changed. From one moment to the next, my fingers grew slightly longer and claws extended out.

“I’ll try to be quick,” I said over my shoulder as I placed a hand on the balcony ledge and hopped over.