“I don’t think I can walk backward on this road,” Prancer said.

“Try moonwalking?” Moose asked, trying to crack a joke, failing. He sounded as despondent as he felt.

“No. Too much of a grip on me.”

“Don’t suppose you could concentrate real hard, then?” Moose asked.

“I am.”

“I want to see it. The concentration,” Moose said, moving closer to Daisy and the others. Prancer’s ‘girlfriend’ and the other people who had come to party and never left. He shielded them with his body.

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that,” Prancer said. “Are you trying to distract me by confusing me, slow down the transformation?”

“Jus’… give me the reassurance you tried. Something to keep in my memories.”

“You’re so lame, Moose.”

“I’m a simple guy. I like it straightforward. Would you?”

Prancer frowned, then closed his eyes, expression contorting.

Moose, seeing that, reached back to Manuel, fumbling at the guy’s side.

Manuel handed him the weapon he was reaching for. A gun. Moose checked it, aimed it for the part of Prancer’s face that was still Prancer, and not this grossly mutated breaker body, and—

Prancer’s body acted. All Moose could see was the part of its face that was already in its breaker form. A glowing eye open, while Prancer’s was shut.

The gun went off. It struck Prancer in the side of the head, blowing off a chunk. Prancer’s body, in turn, struck Moose with a black claw bigger than Moose was. Moose tried to fend it off, parrying with a blast of force, but it still struck him back and down into the ground.

Numb, Moose lay there, listening to the small gasps.

He looked down and around him, and saw that he had been thrust into the midst of three of their friends, Daisy included. He had survived the hit because of his powers.

They… they were alive, but in a minute, they would be dead from the way he’d been shoved into and through them. Bodies in tatters. Daisy’s eyes were so impossibly wide. Manuel’s stare was somehow vacant and accusatory.

The numbness got worse.

He’d been here before. Experienced this before. In a past life. He turned, aiming with a hand that shook too much to aim well. Shot Daisy twice—once as a near-miss, again to actually end her pain as he intended. He turned to Manuel, and he didn’t get a chance to do the same for their buddy.

The thing that had been Prancer attacked. Another crushing blow, another blow Moose only barely fended off. The thing punched with the force of a train crashing into something, and leaped back with his hypernatural agility and speed.

Prancer charged in, leaped, using the momentum of falling from two hundred feet in the air to augment the force of his blow.