With that, Jack whooped with a warrior’s mirth and came at Gunmar with both blades whirling. Blinky heard the signal and charged, dragging his dead tentacles behind. The conscious calculations of every fighting technique I’d learned faded away. I could feel all over my skin the prickle of pure instinct, and I dove under the towering figure, rolling beneath knuckles the size of medicine balls, springing to my feet to slice at one of his heels. The tendon snapped like a rubber band and he stamped in such fury that the twenty-yard line cratered into a car-sized hole. Blinky knotted his tentacles around Gunmar’s lowest arms, while Jack used his cutlass to climb up a leg, driving Victor Power to the hilt into Gunmar’s knee.

It was the paragon of coordinated attacks, one we could be proud of when we met together in the soldiers’ heaven of Valhalla. With a single twist of his body, the three of us were tossed aside like bugs. Back we came, limping and bruised, and again we were dispelled, this time sporting an assortment of sprains and cuts. My lungs hurt inside of ribs that I thought might be broken, and when I rose a third time my knee gave way. I fell with my chin in the turf, leaking furious tears, looking on as Jack was backhanded to the ground. Pints of steaming saliva poured over him from Gunmar’s jaws.

My bleary eyes landed on the RoJu set, familiar to me from a glorious alternate life where I’d been poised to receive the applause of the whole town and even get the girl. I gazed at it for a delicious moment, longing for the comfort of the fake stones and artificial drawbridge.

That was where I found Claire Fontaine cradling one of the prop swords in her hands as if it were speaking to her. She turned it right, then left; she brought it up, then down; she began to make circles with it in the air, then figure eights, then patterns too complicated for me to follow. Faster and faster the sword went, and behind the blur of the blade I saw her mouth curl into a smile of sorts, as if she’d realized the purpose of her life at the exact second that it was about to end.

To the disbelief of anyone who saw it, she ran across the field, sliding through troll guts and dodging Dad’s mower, and reared the prop sword like a javelin. She threw it, holding the release pose like someone who’d done it a thousand times rather than once. The sword flew through the air with a whistle and embedded itself in the center of Gunmar’s open mouth.