He crumpled over and dropped the plasma on his foot. “Shit. Shit. Shit,” he yelled, hopping and cursing as the air around him lightened and the water at his feet dried up.

“Adept Six,” he yelled. “Hold me, so I can smite this son of a bitch with a new spell. Adept Six?”

The Magister turned in time to see his loyal followers sprinting down the escalator and out of sight, Adept Six in the lead.

When the boar hit the Magister, the collision was so hard, he didn’t really feel it. In fact, the only real sensation he had was when a certain vertebra slipped back into place beneath another vertebra. For that split second, the Magister’s back felt great, and he crashed into the wall with a smile on his face.

The boar didn’t think anything at the end, but if it could have, it would have been something along the lines of, Well, damn. Here I am, a demon of the first order, with mighty tusks and hooves the size of porch swings, and it’s all ending because some twerp decided to wax the floors, just before it smashed headfirst into the balcony wall.

“No,” yelled Steve as he rushed to the fallen boar, dropping to his knees beside the crumpled giant. Jerry ran to his father.

“Dad? Dad? Maybe you shouldn’t sit there,” he said. He and Jorge grabbed Steve’s shoulders, trying to pull him away from the fallen beast.

“It’s over,” said Steve. “It’s all over.”

“Damn right,” said Jorge, giving the boar a kick. “Caleximus fucked us. Let’s get out of here.”

“I don’t get it. What did we do wrong?”

“Hey, man, I’m not sure this is a ‘we’ situation.”

“What does that mean?” said Steve.

“It means you were the boss. You fucked something up. Plus, you let your brain-dead kid lose the silver dagger.”

Steve and Jorge grabbed each other and fell over onto the boar. Jerry pulled at his father’s sleeve.

“Goddammit, Dad,” yelled Jerry. “Turn around.”

Steve looked over his shoulder at the horde of vampires and werewolves, the ones that had missed out on Mr. Lemmy and his boys. Their fangs glittered jewel-like in the dark.

“Fuck Caleximus,” he said, and they all ran for the escalator.

Jerry had run track in high school, so even with his aching ribs, he was the fastest down all thirteen floors. When he hit the lobby level, he pumped a fist in the air and whooped. Everybody, the gill people, the ghosts, the human tourists, and the security guards, all stared at him.

When he turned and looked back up the escalator, he realized there was no one behind him.

“Oh, crap.”

Upstairs, a lone figure streaked with other people’s blood came stumbling past the corpses, the dead beasts, and the mass of feeding bloodsuckers and wolves. They took absolutely no interest in the dead man at all.