He didn’t manage to touch it. Sveta grabbed him and Valefor both, dragging them out of sight. The afterimage of the diagram hung in the air for a moment before disappearing.

Another was going breaker, arms and bony limbs reaching skyward in a fountain of parts that grabbed their other parts and forced them down in the swell, a large human skull that ate their head, then was swallowed up by a larger animal skull, like a wolf’s, only horned.

They grew larger as they rose skyward, all white bone and jet black body parts.

I tried to fly so I could fly to it before it grew any larger, and my flight only sputtered out.

The one with the intestine snake lashed out, snake lunging from the palm of their hand to Capricorn and I. They aimed and fired the gun at the same time. Wild shooting.

I brought out the Wretch, stepping between Capricorn and the shooter, and even with the Wretch being a larger target, none of the bullets hit it.

I heard the shooting stop, the sound of the small pistol ringing in my ears. I dropped my defenses for just a moment, so I could have the Wretch closer to me when I connected my fist to the Snake’s ‘head’. It slammed into a building, shattering the stones and mortar that lined the lower half of the ground floor. A half-second later, white noise filled my vision.

If that had happened a second earlier, I might have missed. The noise persisted.

I scowled, stopping in my tracks, trying to find out what I needed to do. I couldn’t run in and use the Wretch, not when people lined the ground like that. Not when I couldn’t trust my eyes. She wasn’t making me hallucinate, but she could obscure what I saw.

“Down!” Capricorn said, behind me. “Give me a clear view!”

There were blue motes appearing around the snake-intestine cape and the giant breaker thing, which was slowing in its growth, but was a pretty considerable size already. I realized the noise had gone away.

Ahead of me, the Fallen woman disconnected the snake-thing from her left hand, and passed the gun to it. The motes above and behind her turned to water, spraying down on her and at the giant breaker.

The motes snapped into a solid form, making a creaking, cracking noise as they became a growth of stone that encased part of the snake-woman’s head and shoulder and part of three of breaker’s arms.

The weight of the stone pushed her down and snared the breaker. A moment before she was crushed beneath the stone, it became water again. She was down on three limbs in an awkward position as it all cascaded and sprayed down around her, stirring the packed dirt road into thick mud spray.