“We’re sure Anza will be okay, right?” Mikayla worried as the three teenagers rushed through the underground halls.

  “Yeah, probably! Lahlee’s definitely weaker than her at base. But, that weird arm of hers,” Asika grimaced.

  “What about it?” Keldryn quirked an eyebrow, his tail bristling.

  “My Mana made contact when it grabbed me. It . . it felt . .” Asika screwed up her face. “I’m probably wrong, nevermind,”

  “You know more than I do. What was it?” Mikayla pressed.

  “It felt like a Kaiju,” Asika burst out, shaking her head. “It was full of the Kaiju’s Clutch,”

  Mikayla recalled that explanation. “The weird corrupted mana that turns animals into Kaijus? I thought sapients were immune?” She paused. She hadn’t put the pieces together before, but remembering what Asika had told her about the secret war between the Divine Scales and the Canopy, and how some people betrayed civilisation for power, led her to worrying conclusions. “Do you think she’s received a Quest?”

  “I dunno,” Asika shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like whatever that was. Which means neither has the Cosmic Isles,”

  “Our blood. All those people’s blood that they took. We still carry the Clutch, just in a dormant state,” Keldryn suddenly realised. “What if someone concentrated it? Like, putting an entire village’s worth of Clutch inside a single person? Could that overpower a sapient’s immunity?”

  “Star it, I think you’re onto something,” Asika snapped her fingers. “There’s gotta be more to it than that - Lahlee wasn’t getting huge after all - but if you’re right it explains a lot. Like why they never took from me! Faeries are creatures of order and stability, my blood would be a cure to the disease they’re trying to cultivate. And . . if they’re trying to create a version that can infect people . . this is a violation of everything my ancestors ever fought for,” she realised, grim lines settling into her face. “I can’t let this stand. We need to alert the Cosmic Isles. Right now!”

  “Doing what we were gonna do anyway!” Mikayla nodded. “Got it!”

  <=====}—o

  Artefact of War formed around Lahlee, her spiky club settling into her left hand as the stunted right arm with its integrated shield came out and covered her chest. Her extended tentacle of flesh burst out of the right right shoulder, giving the impression that she had a third arm covering her flank.

  Anza glanced down at Amazonian Aegis, checking on Bismuth Knuckle and Splinter Striker. It didn’t seem that her babies had suffered at all in her absence, thankfully.

  She span and slammed Splinter Striker to the ground, Mana flowing from her wrist into the earth. A wall of stone condensed and grew into the doorway, blocking off the corridor that the teenagers had escaped into. Thanks to Anza’s [INSTANT EARTHWORKS] Technique, Lahlee would have no opportunity to go after them.

  With that done, Anza extended Bismuth Knuckle towards Lahlee and made the universal ‘come at me’ gesture.

  Eyes narrowed, Lahlee took slow and measured steps through the Core Storage room, her grotesque extra limb waving back and forth above her right shoulder like a cobra ready to strike. She circled, trying to drive Anza towards the corner and pin her down, but Anza knew better than to let herself get trapped. She circled in turn, ducking behind the rack of Cores that was still intact.

  For a moment, they lost sight of each other. Expecting that Anza would be rushing towards the other end of the aisle, and Lahlee rushed to intercept, shield raised and ready. She rounded the corner, already bringing her club down - on empty air.

  She cast around, needing to find her opponent once more, but Anza found her first. She’d circled back around the aisle, and by the time Lahlee registered the sound of heavy footsteps approaching, Anza was already punching her back through the doorway and into the corridor beyond.

  Lahlee skidded, her writhing black arm digging into the ground and steadying her. Anza followed, emerging into the corridor and squaring off once again.

  “You just ain’t that good at this, are ya?” Anza suddenly observed.

  “Hold your tongue, cur,” Lahlee retorted.

  “No, I mean it. When was the last time y'all fought for your life? Killed a Kaiju? Has it been months? Years?”

  Pink light blossomed around Lahlee’s left arm, a line of energy drawing itself up the length of her club. She swung it in Anza’s direction, and the blade of wind was released.

  Golden fissures ran through Bismuth Knuckle, and it momentarily swelled into a shield of clenched fingers as Anza punched the wind blade with enough force to disperse it. She shook her head, flexing her hand to prevent it from going numb. “I can’t believe I thought you were a serious threat,”

  “YOU WILL NOT LOOK DOWN ON ME!” Lahlee’s eldritch arm writhed and split apart, its fingers ripping away from one another until there were four limbs like spider legs growing out of her right shoulder that each ended in a serrated talon. Bloodlust filled her eyes as she lunged, and Anza had to retreat, fending off wild blows from the furious claws while catching Lahlee’s spiked club with Bismuth Knuckle to keep it out of play.

  “I lost everything when that damn monster chewed off my arm! My pride, my fighting skills! My respect!” Lahlee raved. One of her talons slipped through and found a gap in Anza’s Armour, leaving a bloody scratch in her gut. “Everyone forgot who I used to be! Everyone like you just pitied me! Looked down on me! Confined me to a desk and left me to rot with the starring paperwork!”

  “You lived. Most don’t,” Anza had no sympathy. She ripped the spiked club out of Lahlee’s hand, felt it disintegrate, and her arm flew forward to land a blow to Lahlee’s cheek. Sliding sideways, out of range of the spiky appendages, she launched a series of blows at Lahlee’s left side, pushing her back and making Artefact of War fizzle with every touch. “You coulda retrained. Developed a new style to compensate for your injury. Or you coulda become a teacher, pass on your experience to the next generation. You had plenty of options that didn’t involve doing this to yourself,”

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  “Dead ends!” Lahlee howled. Her extra limbs wrapped around her body, forming a crude sort of armour that absorbed Anza’s blows. “I’d never have regained my power by doing any of those. Being reduced to a shadow of the glory you once had is no way to live! Besides, now I’m stronger than ever! Ha ha!” She twisted on her heels, peals of deranged laughter spilling from her lips, and her arms snapped out like a mousetrap, slamming into Anza and sending her sprawling.

  Anza hit the ground on her ass, bracing herself with her gauntlets. Before she could even try to regain her feet, Lahlee was approaching. The spider legs had wrapped around her shield and sprouted bony thorns, turning it into a spiky plate that would mash her into the ground if she let it.

  There was only one logical thing to do in response to this, and that was to collapse the ceiling.

  Anza’s Mana called to the earth around them, and stone spears erupted from the ground, filling the corridor and stabbing into the ceiling. Lahlee hesitated, not quite slowing in time to avoid crashing into one and demolishing it. As the dust flew, she grinned, confident that Anza’s Technique was only an inconvenience.

  Anza shot a savage grin at her as she put some distance between them, every step kicking up more pillars to obstruct Lahlee’s pursuit. Anza’s Mana was dropping precipitously, but she didn’t let up.

  Rocks falling from the ceiling warned Lahlee about her predicament, and she glanced upwards to see cracks in the stone shell that held up the roof. “Oh, damn you to the Divine Dungeon, you bitch!” she shrieked, smashing her way through the forest of stone that Anza had created to stall her. Behind her, the tunnel started to collapse, and Lahlee quickened her pace as the crumbling dirt lapped at her heels.

  Anza raised her fists, ready to write off that plan and take advantage of the fact that Lahlee had been cornered, even if she had escaped the collapse.

  But then, with a thunderous rumble, a massive chunk of the ceiling came down all at once and crushed her underneath it

  Anza hesitated, keeping her guard up. It was one thing to successfully catch someone in a landslide, another to assume that had killed them.

  Sure enough, her suspicions were confirmed when a glowing pink figure emerged from the dirt, being dragged upright by erratic tentacles of black flesh and spikes. She threw a punch into Lahlee’s chest with Splinter Striker, but her strike glanced off, and in retaliation Lahlee!s entire body twisted to strike with her club.

  Anza rolled with the blow, feeling it shave away a chunk of her Health but taking it to put some distance between them. She needed to reassess, because something had been different about Lahlee’s motions in that punch.

  Scrutinising her, it seemed like the rigid armour of her false right arm had been extended over her whole body, encasing her in a perfectly contoured sarcophagus. The only exception was the waving black tentacles that had further multiplied and were now holding her body aloft like a grotesque spider.

  “What do you think? It’s a Technique I developed to make sure I never lose another limb,” Her words were lisped and hard to make out, spoken through frozen lips, sounding more like 'thwat foo yoo fink'. “It makes my body as rigid and indestructible as a diamond -“

  “If you’re trying to make conversation, quit mumbling!” Anza snapped.

  A snarl escaped Lahlee’s frozen lips. “How rude. Even if I can’t move while using this Technique, my little friend is happy to compensate,” Lahlee chuckled macabrely, her words coming out distorted through frozen lips.

  Anza squinted, cracking her neck. “Aight, I got it figured out,”

  Lahlee blinked. “You’ve what?”

  Anza didn’t bother responding. It was time to use her strongest Technique. Because, to her, ‘as rigid and indestructible as a diamond’ - or what she’d actually heard; ‘ath rithid unt indefuctithul ath a diafund’ - sounded like a challenge.

  Drawing on her Mana and Stamina both, she wove them into a complex pattern, Stamina rooting her legs to the ground while her fists flew out. Bismuth Knuckle and Splinter Striker peeled back, exposing her fists, and she punched the air with such force that it left cracks in the world. In less than two seconds, she’d carved a pattern into the air, a white symbol that somehow evoked the same feeling as a howling wolf.

  “Wolf Queen Hunting,” Anza growled as her two gauntlets reformed, throwing herself forwards and through the glyph she’d punched into the world. It shattered into crystalline dust, splattering across her arms and torso and lighting up. Anza gritted her teeth as she felt her Technique take effect, the dust leeching her stamina out of her body to boost her strength and speed.

  It was a problem that Guardsmen at high levels often ran into, that their capacity to inflict damage was bottlenecked not by the size of their vital energy reserves, but by how quickly those resources could be used up. A common approach was to develop ‘finishers’, powerful Techniques that dealt absurd amounts of damage in exchange for consuming massive quantities of Mana or Stamina all at once. Anza, though, took a different approach. Her Mana created an effect that allowed her to burn the candle of her Stamina at both ends. By widening the metaphorical aperture through which she could expel Stamina, Anza could leverage greater power faster and more flexibly.

  Lahlee’s serrated limbs went forward to intercept her, but Anza ducked and weaved around them, never ceasing her assault. One of the legs shot past Splinter Striker, and it was too good a chance to pass up, so her drill-like gauntlet expanded into a localised maelstrom of shredding shards of stone. The backlash from it glanced off her armour and ripped chunks of black-blooded flesh from Lahlee’s eldritch prosthetic.

  Anza stepped on the lowest of the limbs and kicked off, crushing it into the ground and feeling bone crunch under her feet. Her arm came up, readying a blow that would have been telegraphed and easy to dodge if not for the sheer speed she was moving at. Lahlee, though, barely had time to blink before Bismuth Knuckle was burying itself in Artefact of War’s face.

  Lahlee’s defensive technique shattered, chunks of frozen skin flying from her face amidst flecks of blood. She screamed, her body losing its rigidity, stumbling backwards into the landslide. Artefact of War fizzled out around her, letting Anza see the damage.

  It was as though someone had taken a knife to her face, strange bloody cracks running from her chin and across her face and neck. With her good arm, Lahlee clutched at her right eye, blood leaking through her fingers, and her black tentacles formed a protective canopy like an angry willow tree.

  “Give up. You’re done,” Anza commanded.

  A snarl of wordless fury split Lahlee’s lips, which was all the warning Anza had.

  A Sports Car erupted into existence around the traitorous Branch Head, sleek green panes woven together by pink light and four wheels that only barely fit inside the corridor. Anza had just enough time to raise her arms before Lahlee floored the accelerator and rammed straight into her.

  Her fingers carved furrows into the bonnet of the car as it hurtled through the corridor. In her peripheral vision, Anza saw the end of the corridor, and clawed her way up before Lahlee could crush her between the car and the wall.

  Anza’s eyes locked with Lahlee’s, and she saw the bloody ruin of her right eye, with what was left of her face narrowed into a hateful sneer. Her distorted black limbs smashed through the windscreen, and Anza couldn’t dodge all of them, one finding her sternum and punching a hole in her gut.

  The wall exploded behind her, the car plunging straight through and suddenly falling. Daylight filled the space above them, and Anza realised they’d emerged from the face of the cliff that gave Cliffwatch its name. Which meant they were now falling into the Kaiju Kill Box.

  The Sports Car vanished, and Lahlee manifested Artefact of War once again, her appendages swelling and pinning Anza as the purple Armour rapidly grew to full size, preparing to crush Anza underneath her massive shield.

  Anza didn’t know how to escape this. The Wolf Queen buff was still active, though her Stamina was precipitously low. Changing Amazonian Aegis to full size was a possibility but wouldn’t help, she’d still be crushed.

  All that was left to do was use her remaining trump cards and hope they were enough.