System Report:

  Together

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  She plummeted in a smouldering trail of embers and ash, like a very determined, very Gremlin shaped meteor. Her hoodie, once a proud pink, was now more of a “charred despair” sort of colour—held together by stubbornness and whatever gods of modesty were on duty.

  Even so, through the blur of heat and wind she could still see it, floating mockingly against the bruised clouds: the Core, drifting out of the explosion’s haze without so much as a smudge. “Damn it, Wallace,” she wheezed as the storm ripped past. “It wasn’t enough. I—”

  A building’s silhouette flashed by in the corner of her eye. Instinct took over. She curled into a ball and squeezed her eyes shut. Falling was never pleasant, but this one, this one was going to hurt.

  She braced for impact.

  And then—it came. Except not the hard, uncompromising sort she’d expected. More the soft, surprised, “oh-for-the-love-of—” sort. Something gentler. Something capable of groaning and cursing under its breath as its shoes—very nice ones, she noted distantly—skidded through puddles on account of breaking someone else’s high-speed fall.

  “Shit,” a familiar voice grumbled. “For something so small, you sure do fall like a sack of bricks.”

  She cracked an eye open.

  There he was, right above her, holding her in his arms. His breath carried the faintest hint of strain, and for once his usually immaculate appearance had abandoned its post. He must have run. In quite the hurry. There was even a thin ribbon of blood tracing down his lip, as though his dignity had tried to escape and gotten stuck on the way out.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, genuinely baffled.

  “Showing up when you need them the most,” Lionel said, managing half a grin—the other half having been forcibly relocated when Annabell’s elbow introduced itself to his face mid-fall, “isn’t that what friends are for?”

  Annabell stared at him for a full, perfectly silent second.

  Then she shuddered, pushed off against his chest, rolled out of his arms, and landed in a crouch accompanied by several deep, operatic retching sounds.

  “Wallace,” she rasped between heaves so dramatic they should have had spotlights, “that one… was even worse, wasn’t it? Who is this guy? Did he wander straight out of some comic book written for teenage boys with emotional constipation?”

  “Hey—”

  “No, just…” She raised her hand to another tidal-wave gag. “Give me a second. I’m still recovering from the physical trauma of the words that just came out of your—”

  A sharp, guttural croak cut her off. She raised her head.

  There, right in front of her—in the very direction she’d just been mock-vomiting—a band of frogmen stood, each wielding a rusted blade at the sort of angle that indicated they had very specific ideas about her future. One lunged—

  —and Annabell was promptly yanked backward by her hood before the blade could give her something else to moan about.

  “I was just going to say—” Lionel hissed, hauling her around and shoving her into a staggered run, “—this isn’t the time for tearful gratitude over me saving your life. Save that for later!”

  Around them rose the gargling battle-cries of the Deep Ones, accompanied by the clatter of rusted metal and jagged carapace you wanted nowhere near your vitals.

  “Tearful?” Annabell snapped back over the rain, skidding through slick puddles as two wildly swinging mermen barreled toward her, “The only one who’ll be crying is you, late at night—”

  She slid neatly between the first one’s legs.

  “—as you lie in bed—”

  The second one received the full force of her boot to what could only be described as its egg-laying department, a move that would have inspired sympathy had the creature not made such an offensively squelchy noise.

  “—remembering all the mortifying lines you spout!”

  “Says the one who renamed our tenuous cooperation to the ‘Friendship Trial Agreement’,” Lionel shouted back, ducking under a scything hook. He came up with a sharp uppercut that introduced the offending turtle-elder’s jaw to new and exciting concepts, such as “critical damage” and “sudden nonexistence.” His fist emerged on the other side in a spray of, what could politely be described as, previously thinking matter.

  Annabell stared at him, jaw slack and brow thoroughly furrowed. They remained that way for the full, crucial instant it took for a harpoon to whistle toward her neck. She rolled aside with an indignant huff.

  “So, you could fight all this time," she snapped, “but what, you were just too stuck-up to lift a finger to help?”

  “No,” Lionel barked, having appeared behind the harpoon-wielding merman in a blur of shadows. A heartbeat later, he tore the creature clean in half. With his hands. Hands that, up until now, she had only seen used for passive-aggressive gesturing. “We’ve simply crossed the ‘sod the rules’ line of this adventure and entered the ‘let’s end this quickly’ part.

  “And it seems,” he muttered grimly, “that thing agrees.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She didn’t have to look to know he meant the Core—still hanging in the sky like a judgmental chandelier. The moment her last bomb had failed to so much as scuff it, something had shifted. Not just in the Core, but in Ashenmoor itself.

  It wasn’t that the rain was falling harder—there had been enough water coming down all day to satisfy even the most demanding hydrologist—but rather that it had stopped going anywhere. As Annabell got to her feet, what had moments ago been scattered puddles had unionized into a single ankle-deep body of water, spreading across the town square like a shallow lake.

  She could still feel the cobblestones under her boot, even as inches of dark water sloshed over them. The street was still there. Solid earth. All very reassuring.

  And yet, ahead of them, at the centre of the square, a massive fin now rose from the water. Not the kind, cute dorsal fin of some stray dolphin either. Spines, taller than a grown man, unfolded with leathery membranes large enough to serve as sails upon the ship of the damned.

  Lionel’s grip loosened around another two fish-folk he’d disposed of, causing them to splash weakly into the rainwater pooling around their ankles—water that, by any reasonable standards, should not have been deep enough to conceal anything more threatening than a sardine.

  And from his lips, a quiet, “Oh, gods damn it,” escaped.

  It was the last sound either of them managed before the titanic sea-serpent breached the surface—rising higher than the old church spires as it let out a piercing shriek that must have been felt at the ends of the world.

  It was, indeed, a gods-damn-it moment.

  The sound waves alone sent ripples skittering across the water, rattling loose stones and reducing the nearest Depth-dwellers into trembling, hemorrhaging heaps. Its glowing yellow eyes found them, and the serpent dove back into water that, by all sensible measurements, should not have been able to contain even a fraction of its mass.

  Yet now, the water bulged as towering fins carved through the square with a single-minded, murderous purpose—coming straight for them.

  “Run!” Lionel shouted.

  He needn’t have bothered.

  Annabell, having a much keener understanding of priorities, was already sprinting away, boot and sock-clad foot sending up panicked splashes. Sharp, shallow breaths wheezed out of her as she rounded a corner in a spray of water, only to discover that the alley ahead of her was just as flooded as the square she’d just escaped.

  Rain struck the rising flood like a thousand tiny hammers at once, and on either side, cascades poured off the weeping rooftops as if the buildings themselves could sense the fate that was rapidly approaching.

  Please go after him instead… please go after him instead… please go after… was the frantic mantra that looped through Annabell’s mind as she pelted down the alley, arms pumping at her sides.

  She didn’t reach the end of her third repetition.

  The building to her left shuddered ominously—then, with all the decorum of a drunk being thrown out a window, it exploded. Debris rained across the alley as a flared serpent head burst through the foundation, arcing across her path in a cacophony of destruction and loud shrieks.

  Maybe the shrieks belonged to the serpent.

  Maybe they belonged to Annabell.

  Both were equally likely, and frankly, equally justified.

  ***

  Lionel felt salty brine wash over him as he de-shelled another crustacean fencer that’d intercepted his path, sending it to the afterlife with a bubbling gargle. This one had been tougher than the last—physically, temperamentally, and possibly spiritually—and he barely had time to inhale before a pair of twin sabres scissored through the space where his torso had been a moment earlier.

  The Deep Ones weren’t just getting tougher. They were getting better. More coordinated. More skilled.

  He’d expected as much the moment he joined the fray, but things were escalating faster than his calculations.

  Baiting the next violent slash, he slid forward and twisted his hips, planting a sharp elbow into the back of the dual-wielding lobster-warrior’s head. The creature folded with an offended clatter.

  He allowed himself the luxury of a breath.

  Moving was becoming increasingly troublesome. The water rose rapidly, already lapping at his knees and he suspected it would be at his waist in short order. And up ahead—

  “AAAAAaah!”

  Annabell’s panicked scream sliced through the rain just as the alley she’d last waddled down exploded in a geyser of water and debris.

  A pink projectile launched skyward, soaring like the final sardine in a water show that had become dangerously interactive. And behind her rose the massive sea-serpent, hissing and gaping for her frantically paddling legs that were doing nothing for her altitude.

  Lionel was running before he even knew where she would land, hand scrambling for the utility belt on his side.

  With his teeth, he uncorked a flask of shimmering green liquid and nearly choked as he downed the stuff mid-stride. An alacrity potion—faster-than-fast and priced accordingly, the sort of “limited-time offer” only an alchemist with no moral compass could sell without blushing. Expensive, yes, but needs must when enormous sea-serpents are nibbling on your coworkers.

  The effect was immediate.

  The water around him burst into froth and gushing waves as he surged forward at a speed normally reserved for irresponsible wizards only. Any lingering Deep Ones in his path became little more than confused eddies as he shot past, vaulted off an abandoned cart, sprinted up a crumbling wall, and hurled himself upward.

  Ahead, gravity had just issued an official notice clarifying that no, arm-flapping—Gremlin or not—did not count as aerodynamic propulsion. Betrayed, Annabell began tumbling down toward a very wide, very toothy maw.

  And just as it snapped shut with an eager hiss—it did so on nothing at all.

  Lionel didn’t so much “heroically rescue her” as violently extract her from the jaws of death. Her wild midair thrashing made it impossible to grab anything except her tattered hood, which meant their downward trajectory transitioned from “plan” to “problem” almost instantly.

  They hit the ground—well, shallow water—with the force of a disgruntled deity and the sound of a gargling windpipe lodging a formal complaint.

  Tumbling, splashing, and choking followed.

  It was only after several gasps, an alarming amount of coughing, and a great deal of water indignantly displaced from its proper place, a thoroughly mistreated Gremlin broke the surface.

  “Hey!” she sputtered between strangled breaths. “Are… are you trying to kill me?!”

  “Quite the opposite,” Lionel panted, barely upright himself as the enormous splash of the sea-serpent re-entering the water boomed behind them. The resulting wave nearly toppled him over again. “You’re welcome.”

  “Oh, I feel so—Grrgl!”

  Her gratitude, sarcasm, or imminent complaint (all equally likely) was abruptly cut short as Lionel’s hand located her hood again, solving her oxygen problem by removing access to it entirely. Behind them, a vast sail-like fin came slicing through the rising water once more. He could almost hear the daunting orchestra playing as he bolted.

  But no matter how fast he ran, Lionel wasn’t outrunning that thing in knee-deep and rising floodwater. So, with Annabell flapping behind him like a soggy tail, he sprinted for the last scrap of dry ground in sight: the ruined church.

  He didn’t look over his shoulder.

  He didn’t listen to the increasingly strangled noises of the girl he was hauling along like an unwilling kite.

  He didn’t need to. He could feel what was approaching—the massive sea-serpent cutting through his wake, the predatory eyes glaring into his spine; the hunger gathering speed, the maw pulling closer, closer—

  Without looking back, Lionel ran faster than he ever had before as death itself breathed hot, fish-scented air down his neck.

  Coming back for her had been a terrible, terrible idea.