Right behind him was a cape in silver, ducking through the veil of dust the Fragile One was bringing down from overhead. Slicksilver was a hero from the Wardens. One of Chevalier’s crew. Though he’d been a good guy, dust covered him and dulled the colors, and he had way too much blood on him.

Slick threw a dart. Metallic. I gave the thing a wide berth.

He threw more.

Getting out of the way forced me to get close to Spiderlegs. I swooped low, scraping the ground, and put a hand out to stop myself from smacking face-first into the ground, with how steep the swoop was.

“Melt, Antares! Die!”

At my collarbone, where I’d been lasered, the bone snapped. I screamed. Foaming blood dropped onto the concrete, sizzling on the concrete.

I flew before more darts could be thrown my way. Toward the exit.

“Antares!”

I fought past the reaching spider-legs, and the act of trying to move my arm nearly left me insensate.

“Antareeees!”

It was every part of fighting some of the worst enemies I’d come up against in recent memory. My sanity at stake, black limbs reaching for me, my flesh melting.

I could only tell myself it was a trick. All of this was a master–stranger thing, and I couldn’t trust the reality. I had every excuse to dismiss any part of this as head games, as scary as that was.

“Antares! Please!”

The whispers continued.

I used my aura to try to slow down the attackers. Good old fear. I twisted, fighting to get a bit of an upper hand, grabbing spider legs and swatting aside a dart by picking up a piece of rubble five feet to my left and swinging it.

Slick generated two globs of liquid metal, and let them droop down to the floor. Two lashes. He lifted one, and it reshaped itself, to curve and poise itself above him like a scorpion’s tail. The other lash did the same to the left, parallel to the ground.

I crushed the concrete I’d used to bat aside the dart, then threw it. The lashes formed a shield. All I accomplished was shredding a few of the spider legs.

More legs stabbed out at me. I grabbed a few, tearing them out of the sockets.

The man shrieked in a childlike voice, thrashing in pain as he held hands to the parts where legs had torn out at the roots. The screaming was interrupted by him vomiting, presumably from the pain.

I braced myself for the next onslaught. Another attacker, a warning that another attacker was coming, a whisper of my name. When it didn’t come, I kept my guard up. The beat of warning, attack, warning, attack… it could be misleading me.

The debris had cleared, and there was too much of the Giant visible. The sighting coincided with a pain creeping over my body. Bruises spread.