A mouth opened in the middle of it. It snapped in my general direction.

I pushed my aura out as hard as I could. The mass of flesh withdrew into itself. The breaker stopped.

I stared down at the changer-in-flux. A mess of hands, a mess of legs, teeth, fleeting facial features.

My aura radiated intense fear and awe, enough to stop grown men and monsters in their tracks, and in the midst of it all, I felt that melancholy.

“This?” I spoke. “What you’re feeling is a four. The dial goes up to ten.”

The breaker’s fingers traced the side of a tree. The wood became goo and it stretched.

“You can feel the intensity of it, can’t you?” I asked. “You do not want me to turn up this dial. Because this? This is a six.”

I was close enough to trees and ground that when I brought the wretch out, it could reach those things. It broke up the dirt and it bit into wood with fingers. The wood creaked until hands clenched hard enough to break it, and then it broke explosively.

“If I turn it up any higher, you’ll feel that too,” I said. I had the handgun. I looked down at it to figure out how to release the magazine. I threw the magazine down to the ground and held out the gun.

There was a moment’s pause, and then the wretch took hold of the weapon. It flung it out, slamming it into a tree hard enough that it sank into the wood of the trunk.

Still maintaining a grip on the weapon, the wretch dragged it about a foot toward the base of the trunk before it couldn’t anymore. A moment later, the metal began distorting. Something broke and fell.

“You, blue breaker. Go back to being human. All of you stand down.”

Goatee looked at his friend or brother. The wretched thing at the base of a tree. He didn’t stand down, and the breaker didn’t go human.

Maybe it was a minion for goatee guy. It was a hell of a minion, if so. Whatever it was, minion or breaker, I wasn’t about to change my policy on staying the hell away from it.

The breaker started toward me. It stopped when orange motes began appearing. I dismissed the wretch, watching as they looked around.

“That,” I said. “Is an eight.”

The breaker reached out and touched a mote. It stretched the mote in the air. There were lines around it, and it pushed through trails that had been left behind motes, distorting them too, stretching them like it had the leaf.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do that,” I said.

It stopped.

Sveta’s hand reached through the trees, grabbed goatee guy, and hauled him into the orange motes.