Lyn appears in midair, and I feel my heart halt in terror. Capita may be crazy, but damn her, she's sane enough to do clever shit like this. Lyn twists as best she can, but there is a hard limit to the kind of movements possible with nothing to push off of, no way to turn force into speed. The chaos implosion is already starting, and while I've never seen what it does to flesh it's not difficult to make a guess.

But Penelope and I planned for this. We are not stupid. We didn't bank on everything going how we want it to. I move immediately, enacting our contingency for dealing with Capita's death zones. I just hope that it actually fucking works.

Core moving down my arm, tentacles extending, I push as much of my soul as I can into the implosion. Mana surges through my metaphysical veins and I pump it down my tentacles, well past their carrying capacity, which violently ejects my essence into the middle of the spell. A wretched screech rings through the cavern, easily audible despite the damage my ears have already suffered in this fight, as my and the Mistwatcher’s mana collide and annihilate each other in an instant. Another whip-crack noise occurs at nearly the same time, pain flowering in my abdomen as Sky uses my distraction to score a clean hit. I may as well fight naked for all the good my armor does, but I grit my teeth and pinch off my many burst blood vessels with threads of soul.

There's a moment of fear as the implosion starts to activate despite my best efforts, but with nearly all the mana in its immediate area temporarily gone, it has no fuel. Lyn is clipped by the now-tiny spell, a portion of her own armor and a few layers of skin getting sucked into nothingness, but she otherwise lands safely like a cat.

"Sorry, kiddo," she breathes, and I don't have the time to be mad about it. "Got close to her and panicked. It won't happen again."

Then we both dodge different ways a moment before Sky fires another shot, and we’re back to bigger problems.

"Evacuate!" Sky bellows, his many minions (and my newest minion) rushing to fulfill the order. "Capita, I need you at full!"

"Oh, hooray!" she cheers, pulling out a glittering ball of some sort. "I'll be so happy to see you!"

The ball disappears from her hand as Lyn blurs, streaking through the intervening space to her target only to be stopped by Sky. He fires at her, forcing her to change direction as he covers Capita with his body. I'm approaching as well, quickly but not quite quickly enough to snap my own bones. Lyn is cut off from approaching—as while getting me into melee range of Sky is ideal, it’s a death sentence for her—so she circles around to the opposite side, forcing Capita and Sky to split their attention. Just like the last time I fought her, Capita is not demonstrating the ability to teleport herself. If that pattern holds, only her ability to teleport us is truly dangerous; her implosion spell takes too long to activate, so Lyn and I are both fast enough to dodge it unless she combines it with teleportation. And if her range is the same as last time, she won’t be able to teleport us without expending absurd amounts of mana or being very close to us. Which is to say, close enough that I can just kill her instantly.

Of course, that bitch just gives me her trademark grin and pulls out a new tactic. Sky cracks the ground, stones flying upward to whirl around him in a tiny hurricane. Capita sticks her arm into the vortex, retrieving a plethora of fist-sized rocks, and I feel an equivalently-sized stirring of mana inside me.

I push it out, my magic resistance up to the task, but a dozen blotches of power follow it. I could stop them all, but doing that over and over again would be exhausting, so I dodge instead. Sure enough, a bunch of stones appear where I was a moment before, and while I'm sure Penelope could tell me exactly what would happen if one of those ended up inside me, it doesn't take a genius to guess. Of course, as soon as I dodge, I find an implosion in my face, which forces me to retreat backwards or pump it full of mana. Damn it, she’s stalling us! I may have a functionally limitless supply of mana, but actually channeling it is far from effortless. At some point, I’ll start to tire, and it takes only a small mistake for things to turn against us.

I need to force Sky and Capita to separate. We have the speed advantage, so if they’re not standing next to each other we can twist the matchup in our favor. As long as she doesn’t make another mistake and get ported again, Lyn can probably take Capita, or at least occupy her full attention. I’m confident I can take Sky. Unfortunately, we currently have no way to stop them from defending with the reverse (i.e. me vs. Capita and Sky vs. Lyn), which is significantly more difficult for us.

Neither Sky nor Capita are worried. They think they’re going to win. They can wait us out, tire us out, force us to come to them while constantly wearing us down. Capita is giving it her all, but Sky is barely even trying.

Then, Rowan finally finds some damn cover and starts casting. I feel his intent, crouch down, and then leap in a random direction, five kynamancy clones of me doing the same. Sky swears and Capita makes a face like I just gave her a birthday present, but he floats in front of her and starts firing, yelling at her to focus on Lyn.

This doesn't work well. Sky manages to land a few glancing blows on me as I take risks to close the distance, but Lyn has no such trouble against Capita. She carves through the open ground in seconds, staying low to the floor, ready to dodge at a moment's notice. I feel her terror rise as she gets closer and closer, but my mother pushes it down, knives at the ready, her mind and body focused on the kill. I've never seen Lyn shank anyone before, although she's been cavalier enough about my own murders for me to know that she's performed more than her fair share. My mother, for all her warmth and compassion, grew up the same way I did, and did not hesitate to use her talents when they manifested in her youth. Her knives flash towards Capita's neck, Lyn twisting to barely avoid reprisal, and I feel the madwoman experience a spark of clarity as every part of her soul realizes that she is about to die.

Then something that was not here becomes here. For a moment I'm seeing double, feeling double, and I realize that a second Capita has appeared from nowhere, knocking Lyn's attack off course with a blast of short-range chaos magic.

"Took me long enough," the first Capita hisses.

What the hell? Two Capitas? They're mirrors, I realize. Twins. Each of them has had their soul sheared in half and traded with the other. That alone would not be enough to fool my senses, though. If they're different people, they should still feel like different people, shape of the soul be damned, yet they are no more variant from each other than Lyn is from herself one day to the next.

A new surge of fear overwhelms Lyn for just a moment, and immediately after she resumes her assault, going for the throat once again. The new Capita goes for a palm strike, which of course Lyn tries to parry with a dagger, an interaction that general wisdom says ends very heavily in the dagger's favor. It's difficult to read Lyn's emotions when she's like this, her thoughts moving far faster than I can keep up with, especially when I’m still focused on not getting killed by Sky. She must be expecting some kind of trick, however, because when Capita teleports just a few inches forward so her hand is past the blade, Lyn reacts fast enough to stab her anyway.

Unfortunately, this doesn't prevent Capita's chaos magic from going off, blasting point-blank onto Lyn's left hand. It's a trade, hand for hand, but the Capitas have three remaining where Lyn has one. My mother backs off, one dagger clattering to the stone floor as her bloody limb fails to hold it. Purple threads snake out from each Capita's soul, linking with one another. They take a deep breath, simultaneously.

"Got your head on straight?" Sky asks, smirking like it's an old joke.

"Never felt better," both Capita answer in unison.

And I can tell they mean it, too. This is Capita, the entity that Capita considers Capita. With her souls linked like this, each half can properly communicate with its counterpart. From her perspective, there is only one of her, a singular woman that can separate herself into two imperfect parts. Together they share memories, averaging their experiences and becoming one. Now linked, the talents that were imperfectly severed match their other halves, becoming capable of feats beyond the sum of their parts.

The air in the cavern flows towards Capita, becoming thin as so much of it compresses into a tiny, unimaginably dense point. Something about Lyn's danger sense must go wild, because rather than running in to attack she breaks away entirely, circling around towards me as fast as she can. I take the hint and do the same, but Sky starts harassing me harder, forcing me back.

Penelope and I prepared for a lot. We thought about possibilities, options, bad situations and ways to get out of them. I feel like it's probably time to use the trick I really, really do not want to use... but I spend too long stressing over it, and Capita doesn’t wait to fire her condensed air blast. It shrieks forward like one of Sky's shots, and Lyn dodges it like one. But as it's about to pass her by, it explodes. The shockwave nearly knocks everyone off their feet, myself and Capita included, but Sky holds fast and successfully shoots me through the leg as I stumble. Lyn suffers much worse. She's launched like a doll across the cavern, spinning uncontrollably until she slams into the wall with a crunch before falling and shattering a crate below her.

I watched in stunned horror, the instant burned into my mind. I'm certain that's it, that it’s Angelien all over again, hesitation leading to death. Yet somehow my senses confirm that Lyn has not died.

But she’s not conscious either.

Sky fires another shot, which seems like it’s going wide from my location, but I realize in an instant that his target is actually Rowan, the fight having slowly progressed into his direction. I try to jump in front of the shot, but it pierces straight through my arm, nailing a direct hit on my father. The illusions of me wink out, as does Rowan’s invisibility, his hands and attention now occupied with putting pressure on a ghastly wound.

I land hard from my attempted block, earning nothing but a shot through my good leg for the trouble. Both are now bloody messes, and with that, Sky thinks he's won. I can't run in and grab his soul if I can't even walk. He floats slightly higher, just to lord it over me, raising his arms in a 'look around you' gesture.

"I think that about solves things, doesn't it?" he sneers. "You never had a chance, kid. I've barely even been trying, and that's just because I don't want to smash all my stuff. There's valuable things in this room, you know. Which is to say, pretty much everything except you."

I sigh, pulling out a mask and putting it on. It's the one Penelope had made for me, the one that looks like my soul. It's not metal, it has no tricks, no power. It's just a wooden mask. Sky still points a finger at me, readying a stone.

"Hey, none of that. I have been nice, you little brat. Without Capita, all of you would be pulp. If the next words out of your mouth aren't 'I surrender,' I'm blasting your head off, month on the couch be damned."

I should've done this sooner. Should've done it from the start. It would have simplified things a lot, stopped Lyn from getting hurt but... well, it's just not deserved. It’s not right. I'm going to regret this, even though I know it's necessary. I decide on the next words to come out of my mouth, and they are not 'I surrender.'

"Sorry, Norah," I whisper.

I put a shard in my former teammate's soul, feeling it integrate almost flawlessly. I suppose that makes sense, considering she already loved me like a sister. I wonder if she would have forgiven me before the mind control, or if she just doesn’t have any memories of me killing her since it happened so fast. I place her soul in my armor. Sky, true to his word, fires at my face. The supersonic stone shatters on impact, Norah's talent making my mask, my hood, my whole outfit completely inviolable. On two hamstrung legs, I stand up.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"What," Sky deadpans.

I draw my spear, not responding. I'm done fucking around. Leaping forward with all my strength, feeling bones shatter, I burst towards Capita. From now on I am officially on a time limit, though I have no idea how long it is. Because Norah isn’t in a corpse, she will eventually get nabbed by the Mistwatcher unless I pull her back into my body, put her back in stasis, and thereby prevent her from using her talent on me. I have until then to kill them both.

A bit regretfully, Capita aims the whole of her offensive talent against me. It's so damn obvious in retrospect, there being two of them. It explains why her wounds suddenly vanished, and why she wouldn't fight me with all her powers at once. One Capita has the ability to teleport herself but no one else, and uses a short-range chaos explosion. The other Capita can only teleport other things rather than herself, and has the ability to create a long-range chaos implosion. The combined chaos talents stop being a chaos talent at all and show their true form: an aeromancy spell that sucks air into a hyper dense ball, fires it, and then explodes it on command. Likewise, I suspect their combined teleportation spell removes the limits, and most likely becomes twice as powerful. If that's true, she actually becomes the bigger threat. Norah's talent more or less counters Sky, but if Capita can teleport objects inside me or zap me thousands of feet into the air again, I'm fucked.

Capita finishes gathering power and blasts her aeromancy talent straight at me. I try to dodge, and I also try to shove mana into the blast to disable it. This turns out to be a big mistake; there is mana in the air shot, but the only thing it's actually doing is holding all the air together and allowing Capita to detonate whenever she pleases. All of the actual power is in the pressure, and when I annihilate the mana holding the spell together, it explodes right in front of my face.

I'm blasted backwards, head over heels, but I'm protected from the impact if not the acceleration. I right myself in midair, taking the hit against the far wall feet first and cushioning my impact. Sky fires at me and I smack the attack out of the air with my now-invincible spear.

"What the fuck!" Sky growls, as Capita fires another shot.

I wait patiently, jumping directly towards the attack at the last moment before destabilizing it with a burst of mana from my tendril. It explodes behind me, this time launching me forwards. I'd hoped to send myself careening right back at Capita but self-detonation is more art than science so my aim is off. I do, however, end up on a trajectory towards Sky.

That'll do.

His eyes go wide and he quickly tries to fly out of the way, which is marginally successful considering I started my journey from the clear other side of the cavern. I know that in most cases a physical attack will be pointless; my spear would be knocked out of my hands the moment it gets even remotely close to scraping him. My tendrils ignore his power entirely, but to my great frustration, I'm just barely, barely too far away. The tips of my being scrape against the outside of his soul, failing to find purchase. I pour mana into him instead, filling him with as much of my volatile essence as I can during our split-second interaction. Sure enough, a mana annihilation occurs inside his body, causing internal damage and a temporary failure of his talent.

And that's when I fucking stab him. Shifting my grip all the way down to the butt, I reach him. My spear gouges into his shoulder as the two of us pass each other, finally drawing the blood of this arrogant, homicidal prick. He shouts in pain, eyes wide with fear. His own blood probably isn't something he's used to seeing very often, as overwhelmingly strong as he is. Now, for the first time, he has had a very literal brush with death. I land in a roll on the ground, tendrils savoring the taste of him... but I turn to continue my attack on Capita without hesitation.

"Capita!" Sky shouts. "Get out of here! Get to the backup deployment site and teleport every shred of metal we have! We're doing this today!"

Shit! The perception event is the absolute worst thing that can happen! I feel my legs crunch a little again, but despite my speed Capita just gives a sad synchronous nod, vanishing before I can get my hands on either of her bodies. I huff out an annoyed breath, skidding to a stop and taking a moment to try and make sure my poor, abused bones are properly set and held in place.

"You're just going to end up telling me where she is," I grumble at Sky, still glowering at the spot Capita vanished from.

"Over my dead fucking body," he snaps back, clutching his wounded shoulder.

"Yes."

Bones as secure as I can get them, I leap at Sky without warning. He retreats upwards, scraping rocks out of the ceiling as he flees. Each stone circles around his body exactly once, accelerating before firing in a rapid, nonstop blast. I dodge as best I can, but he can alter his aim faster than I can change direction. On the upside, none of these skull-shattering shots can do more than slow me down. Norah's soul pulses, frightened and confused but still driven primarily by an unrelenting love for me. In the same way that all Revenants do, she sees and hears, fully aware of her surroundings despite currently being little more than my gambeson. Exactly what's going through her mind, however, is a mystery to me. Though since I've currently made her little more than a tool, I suppose it doesn't matter as long as she doesn't run out of power.

My former teammate does not disappoint. Sky is blisteringly fast, but so am I, and slowly but surely I am forcing him into a corner of the room that’s mostly devoid of exits. The whole experience is very similar to my spars with Lyn, funnily enough, and the thought of that puts a smile on my face. Lyn is tough, and if she's not dead yet she's not going to be in the next few minutes. The fact that she isn't conscious, though, is worrying. Sky gets more frantic and desperate the closer I get to corralling him, panic rising within him.

"Fuck!" he swears. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!"

I decline to trade banter with him, all my focus on avoiding or deflecting as much of his counter-fire as possible. He mixes things up, sometimes hitting me with the rapidfire, sometimes gathering a bunch of shards at once and blasting me with a spread of them simultaneously, sometimes trying to carve as big of a rock out of the ceiling as possible and launching it at me as a huge chunk. The last one is the easiest to dodge, but would absolutely be the most dangerous of the three if it hit me, and I think he picks up on that possibility. When I push him to the edge of the room, he starts picking up and tossing the contents of crates at me instead of stone. Most of this is easier to ignore or avoid, especially the wood of the crates itself which just splinters uselessly on impact. Sky is used to being able to punch through anything, sending small projectiles at massive velocities, but with Norah supporting me I cannot be pierced. Instead, my loss condition is running out of time before the Mistwatcher tries to either eat Norah or half the damn city, and to stall me, large, slow projectiles do very well. They may not injure me on impact, but they can knock me back, and when Sky rips open an entire crate full of swords and tosses them all at me with the speed of arrows, I absolutely need to dodge or get forced away by the sheer weight of them smashing into me. Still, I make inevitable progress, one step back but two steps forward every time he attacks.

"Why are you invincible all of a sudden!?" Sky roars, launching an entire crate of barley at me at once, which mostly has the effect of pissing me off at the waste of it.

I want to taunt him, I want to rub his helplessness in his smug fucking face. I don't, I just move. He tries to fake going left, but I'm already moving right. He tries to fake faking a juke left, and I cut that off easily. His soul can’t lie to me. More and more, his options dwindle as he throws his stock as if wasted wealth is going to slow his death.

"Damn you!" Sky shrieks. "Why couldn't you just listen?"

Um, because you're an idiot? Because you hurt my family? Because I don't need you to whip the nobles into shape when Penelope will do a far better job? Because you’re summoning a giant fucking murder tentacle in the middle of my city? I don't say these things, of course, because I refuse to waste my breath on a dead man. Seven and a half feet. That's all I need. When I get him within seven and a half feet of even the tips of my fingers, he is mine forever.

He throws more crates at me as I close the distance, his desperation delicious. I stop keeping track of whatever is actually inside them, mixes of weapons and armor and food, much of which is better in quality to the shit even his own men get, which is infuriating. He peels off the lid off another collection of crates as I stomp through the wreckage of our fight, tossing it like a discus. I dodge to the side and take a face full of whatever was inside, some kind of floppy thing that bursts on impact into a light blue dust. He tosses more of it, rapid fire style rather than all at once to ensure it hits. I do indeed fail to avoid a few of them, but they barely slow me down. What they do accomplish is filling the air with that dust, which gets in my eyes, nose, mouth, and would easily blind anyone that actually relied on those things. I, of course, can still sense him no matter how dense of a smokescreen he makes, so I press onward.

And I stumble, the ground no longer where I think it is. Sky tries to bolt past me towards a tunnel to escape, and the world twists when I try to cut him off, my head spinning. Powder is in the air all around me, filling my lungs as I barely choke in a breath. I collapse to my knees, the ground feeling blue in my hands. The smoke of powder settles to the ground, and I see the walls of the cavern are colored like the smell of peaches. I'm hallucinating. Sky just threw his fucking drug stash at me! My soul still sees clear, tasting Sky's fear as he barrels through the tunnels, not even remotely interested in trying to take advantage of my current incapacitation. I can't let him escape! I need him! He has to tell me where Capita is, so I can stop god from killing us all!

I force myself to my feet, growling defiantly as my body rebels against my soul. I ignore my body, using bad habits like a lifeline as I disassociate from the feelings as much as I can, sprinting down the tunnel after Sky. I ignore my dizziness, my urge to vomit, the glowing bright sound of footsteps, the assault of nonsense synesthesia attacking my mind, trying to claw its way into my deeper perceptions. I move with soul alone, letting my muscles go slack as

I find the orders I give them continually corrupted. I try to keep my mind focused on Sky, on the feelings I know are true, but when I close my lying eyes to block the madness I start to see a bubbling pond of putrid shit behind them, bits of corpses floating on the surface.

I shake my head and keep running. I slam into a wall as the tunnel takes a sudden turn that only half of me can see. I feel myself giggling, and even with the eye of my soul the bubbling pond starts to appear. Maybe it's real after all. Maybe the corpses can be used. In the back of my head I scream at myself not to stop, to keep running, but I laugh it off and approach the pond. It smells like the sewers and screams of death, but it can’t be that bad of a place. Angelien’s head floats to the surface, bobbing ominously next to Norah’s.

The next thing I know I'm lying on my side, dried blood caking the inside of my nostrils and vomit dripping from my lips. Memories flash back to me. In a panic, I search for Norah, immediately relieved to find her wedged firmly back inside me, not taken by the Mistwatcher. I must have returned her to my body at some point during my hallucination. Other, familiar souls are around me as well. Lyn and Rowan are here, along with… Penelope and Vitamin?

"Where am I?" I groan, opening my eyes.

"Oh good, you're up," Penelope says. "I flushed the gleeshroom spores out of your system. It looks like things got a little out of hand?"

I blink a few times, seeing the darkness of a tunnel lit mainly by something behind me, my guess being the opening to the cavern. Penelope is treating Lyn's wounds, her back to me.

"What happened?" I ask.

"Well when I woke up, you were running around the room screaming 'I am the queen of the broken and the dead! Supplicate before me or I will curse you with zombie frogs!'" Lyn answers, grinning through the pain as usual.

“Fuck frogs," I growl, irrationally angry about them for some damn reason. "I meant what happened to Capita and Sky?"

"You tell us," Penelope answers. "When Sky left my session early today he said he 'forgot something' and just flew off. He's not a good enough liar for that to have been a plot, so I think he actually had somewhere to be… but of course I ran to find someone anyway. I found Vitamin at your house and she brought me here, with the three of you… uniquely indisposed."

"Sky was here, and I waited too long to bring out Norah," I grumble. "I didn't want to Revenant her, but they kinda smacked us around until I did. There's two Capitas, by the way."

"Oh," Penelope murmurs. "I guess that explains some things."

"…And they ran off to start the perception event!" I suddenly remember, jumping to my feet. "Shit, we have to find them! Otherwise it's not going to be long until we—"

A terrible and unmistakable weight hits my soul, a dread formed by inevitability. I am not even close to the focus of the Mistwatcher's attention, but I feel it all the same, as even being in the barest edges of its periphery is enough to quell my being into near-mindless terror. I once likened myself to a baby, the same sort of creature as this incomprehensible god but smaller, weaker, ungrown. It's a laughable comparison, to consider myself even so developed as a child. I am not a baby, I am not a fetus, I am not even a single cell in the face of this power so large it is indistinguishable from infinite. I am the queen of death, but it is the god of all things, be they life, death, or beyond. And it’s coming.

"It's too late," I realize out loud. "We have to run."