Come, I thought.

I twisted my thinking and my every sense of where my hand was, which was strangely easy to do when my hand was in about five different places at once, in mutilated tatters.

I pushed my hand into, through, and pulled it out in another interpretation. Another side of the same die, another facet of the same me. Buckler attached.

The spike woman reared for another attack, turning her head so the spike that stuck down at an angle would sweep my way. A pillar so wide across I couldn’t have wrapped my arms around it tore its way toward me with surprising swiftness.

And a figure of what could only be described as glass, gold, and glory crashed into her. Golden lights and outlines, a fragile shell with nothing within, all radiating out like light through a prism or a lens flare, except what radiated out had some substance to it.

She broke like a christmas ornament might when hit with a sledgehammer, when the spike woman hit her.

And then she was back, moments later.

I picked myself up, and I ran.

Damsel, off to the side, ran too.

They’d noticed us, or the spike woman had tipped them off. Some of the same fifty were in our way.

And behind them was Teacher. Teacher… broken. Teacher if Teacher had been caught in a lawnmower and the substance of him wrapped around the blades. But the blades were a figure, and the figure was many-spoked. Black and radiating dark lines that stabbed into the ground at an angle, and traced webworks between crystals and thralls.

The figure moved thralls around it like puppets, using the spokes, the threads, the lines.

How long has this agent been in control? I wondered. Because what you’ve been doing makes a kind of sense if I imagine it wasn’t you, but it.

The thralls weren’t fighters, but they didn’t need to be. They just needed to buy a minute or two. Maybe less than a minute.

The edge of my buckler smashed into one nose, the flat of the shield struck someone in the ear.

Behind us, the Wretch was losing its fight against the spike woman. She advanced, and she swiped out.

I threw myself to the side, shield up. It helped with the debris of shattered crystal, but not the general impact of it.

But she’d stopped short of hurting Teacher’s thralls. She turned her focus to Ashley, who was attacking the ground. Clawing at the lines, maybe. Scratching the crystal? I doubted she could get deep enough, but they seemed to care.

I turned, looking the other way, while I still had a distraction.

To take it in. This pillar of a being, this controller.

To see the lines, the systems by which it operated.

The tech that had been carted in and arranged around it.