The two Fallen with enhanced speed looked related. They sped up, but as they did, their bodies deformed. Legs bent the wrong way, operating digitigrade, the tops of their heads twisted, until their lower jaws pointed the opposite directions that their upper jaws, noses, and eyes did.

From the way he reacted to their hits, they hit hard too. Strength, speed, but at a cost to fluidity of motion, steadily increasing clumsiness and facility.

He shook them, and the first fell, the second slipping and the getting a hold of one taloned foot. Fallen advanced on Chris as a larger group.

The two awkward Fallen speedsters were bleeding, I saw.

Just as the group seemed poised to go after him, I pushed out with my aura, hard.

Heads turned.

I hadn’t even meant to. It was instinct, and it was instinct on behalf of Chris. I didn’t even care that much about Chris.

The act on his behalf brought the pledge to Valefor to mind. I’d promised to serve, and it was a loop in my thoughts now. The usual techniques didn’t help to break it.

It was a peculiar battlefield, so many people frozen in place, the combatants on the Fallen side not wanting to break the spell by jarring anyone too much. I hadn’t experienced it myself, but it seemed that if people were told to stop, and were set to moving by a stumble or a push, that was enough that it needed to be renewed.

Damsel had broken her prosthetic hand to make her power spark, each stumble forcing a renewal. Now she stalked toward the group. Her last order had been to kill her friends.

Thought process: I needed to help Valefor. I needed to help the others. I couldn’t break the mental loop and I couldn’t remain neutral anymore, now that the thought was heavy in my mind’s eye. I would help Valefor.

I flew to Valefor, while everyone’s attention was on Chris. Fallen turned, the woman in black first among them, skin red and sunburned beneath the cracked black paint. There were veins of red through the paint that weren’t sunburned skin peeking through, either, and I saw she had horns, now that I was closer.

I brought the Wretch forth as she lunged for me.

The Wretch was invisible, and she had planned her punch and tackle to hit me, not a force a few feet in front of me. She bounced away, and the Wretch disappeared. Others were so distracted with Chris and now Beast of Burden, who had been jostled in the fighting, they didn’t even seem to notice.