I found the arm that looked like it was straining to bear the most weight and I punched at the purple-tinted cordage with my buckler’s hard edge. Light danced with blinding brightness from the damage I’d done, so I hit it again, my eyes averted. Every muscle in my shoulder, arm, and forearm hurt, and the old bullet wound in my bicep was shot through with a feeling like I’d been stabbed. Because of course it was turned into a part of me.

Four hands came plunging down, one for me, three to provide support that this many-handed monster wasn’t getting from the one I’d punched.

I backed out of the way of the one, and used my hood to shield my face from the cloud of granules and dust that exploded around the impact site.

I could see phantom images in that dust. Traces of writing hanging in the air in three dimensions with diagrams. Shadowy figures, like people who were too stooped over, almost bean-shaped, their faces lost in a puckered mess I couldn’t interpret. They even wore clothes. Three large and one small, as they placed a limb on the small one’s side, where no limb had existed before. As the dust got thinner, the clarity of the images gave way to lines and numbers, like some vast over-blueprint written throughout this space.

As I moved away from the scene, it changed. Distance correlated to other things. Or perhaps correlated to quantity, still, but the memories took on another, fuller form when viewed in aggregate. Written behind the air here to be uncovered like pencil rubbings on a sketchpad.

You fought the same fights we’re fighting now, I thought to myself. And if they moved on, that means they got you.

I couldn’t stop moving, so I ran like I normally flew, straining my legs, seeking any opportunity to reverse course, feint, and make my path hard to predict. It swiped at me, brought hands down, tried to bar my way by laying one arm flat to the ground.

When it didn’t come for me specifically, and when there were joints in plain sight, I punched the buckler into the vulnerable spots. Here and there, it cut. In other places, it bent rigid filaments and components.

It pulled entirely away from the others. They were fighting their own uphill battle, and as it twisted, facing me more than anything, they were given a reprieve. Time to get an injured Colt to her feet, to run forward unmolested, to find their equilibrium.

The entire room groaned as the many-handed, planet-sized guardian shifted its ‘stance’, for lack of a better word. Arms found positions on walls far too out of our reach to access, and others were placed strategically where it would take far too long to run to, or near broken sections of ground.