Trollhunters are born for this, and to do what you are born for feels like nothing else in the world. Each twirl and slide we made provided the survival buffer of a few essential inches. Every second was both dodge and attack, thrust and parry, and sustained by planning three moves ahead. You couldn’t call the noise from the bleachers cheers, but the hoarse cries were encouragement nonetheless. And you couldn’t call what Dad was doing a victory parade, though he circled in tighter and tighter coils, his golden machine gobbling up every last mini-troll. All of it helped: we fought, our eyes slit, teeth bared, muscles aching, bones singing with the war song of the blade.

Claire was the best of us. Even Jack paused to gape at her fearless climb up Gunmar’s vertebrae and how she dug Doctor X into Gunmar’s armpit and clavicle, trying for the elusive softies that hid beneath protective plating. We were piranha, nipping at his extremities, and he was caught in an extended state of preparing to ruin us, always lifting his arms for the fatal blow, always backpedaling to get the momentum he’d need to stomp us for good. We had him at the goal line; there was little farther to go. Beyond the goal was a tall chain-link fence and a ravine, but this fight wouldn’t get that far and we knew it.

A swipe of a middle arm caught a tangle of Blinky’s tentacles. He was lifted from the ground and sent like a bowling ball into the opposing team’s vacant bench. In the same instant, Gunmar’s wooden arm, slotted with the fresh kill mark, swung through the air like a massive golf club and shot Jack ten feet away, where he hit the turf and curled into an injured ball. I grimaced and stood firm. It was left to me, on the ground, and Claire, holding onto his back.

Gunmar slapped blindly at Claire and squatted so as to catch me between clawed hands. The flap in his gut that Jack had sliced open dropped to my level and on instinct I clambered into it. Gunmar squealed and began pawing at the invader inside his body. The world around me went black and Gunmar’s interior organs assaulted my head and shoulders as they jounced in their nets of entrails. A sliver of light entered the body cavity as Gunmar stood and I saw it, the gallbladder, the same as any troll’s except larger: an orange thing of leafy texture, the size of a basketball.

I’d had more than enough of threatening basketballs.