Chương 91: Brawl II

The giant metal object half-submerged in the ground was the same shade of gray as all the surrounding rocks. It was metallic only under physical scrutiny, and even then it kept the same coarse surface pockmarked by erosion so common for many rocks around here. It was also, undeniably, flying-saucer-shaped. As my Sense-transformation slowly waned due to lack of fear, the shape and color returned to that of a normal, oddly shaped boulder.

"Do plants pilot space ships?" I asked Addy, who tapped the thing with the hilt of Hocchi, her transforming knife-sword.

"Unlikely."

"What about people who made these aggressive plants? We don't know anything about them, do we?"

"If there was a civilization before their planet turned green, any trace has long since been consumed." Addy walked along the outside of the tilted saucer, tapping here and there with hilt and hand.

"We don't even know if these things aren't just the natural endpoint of evolution. Or, well, one of them. Given how machine and mimic life exists, there seem to be many paths to world domination." Suddenly, a panel under her fingers clicked, depressing half an inch. With a schwoop, a round entryway unfolded itself. Behind it… another door. An airlock, of course, because decompression was just a fact of life no matter which planet you traveled to in this universe. The panel to that door was unhelpfully inactive.

Within moments of determining that the door didn't budge even under moderate kicking, Addy began tearing the broken interface of the panel off the wall.

"Addy, a bit more care please? This thing is a treasure! What if there's an alien race out in space that's been visiting us since before the system times? What if they're friendly? This thing is, in my humble opinion, more important than the battle royale going on outside." [Nuh-uh] That goddamn voyeur. I opened an empty chat and mentally typed out a response. <<Shut up, Mochi.

The moment you and the other envoys started using Custodians to fight your sibling spat for you, and explicitly expect them to lose lives to do so, you lost my support. We are Custodians, we save lives, we fight monsters, not ourselves. >> [Ngh!] Addy grunted.

"Sam. Look." I peered behind the panel.

"Color-coded wires?" I asked.

"There are only two of them. Blue and red." Staring at it didn't make it feel any less prescient.

"Funny how Alex, the literal champion of anticipation, wasn't the one who foresaw this."

"It's a surprise for sure," Addy said and I groaned. We stared at the cables for a while longer.

"You know, this is awfully cliche in, like, a movie sense. You think any aliens are watching our TV series and taking notes?"

"No." Addy cut the blue wire. The airlock opened a handsbreadth, then got stuck as the hydraulics failed.

"Maybe."

"I mean, just, why wires? Why red and blue?"

"Wires are for guiding electricity, so of course they're wire shaped." Addy grunted as she jammed her big hands in there and started wrenching the doors apart.

"As for why it's so simple, it could be a redundancy.

'In case of failure of all other systems, unclamp panel and remove the blue wire. The blue one. Not the red one.'"" Our luck that they made the spaceship idiot proof." We stepped into a room of muggy, dusty air. The smell of decay was unmistakable. But the insides of the saucer looked awfully… human. Here was a fridge, indeterminate organic slurry forming a dried stain at its feet; there was a TV and sofa, though the sofa was oddly proportioned, shriveled like a mummy in a salt bath.

There was a radio-looking thing that sprang to life with a start as we got closer.

"... buy three, get a fourth one for half price… on the second of June, 2041, weather keeping sunny… visitors gathering in the hundreds with picnic gear and telescopes, eagerly awaiting today's meteor shower. And all thanks to our protectors, the lovely Custodians," it babbled. But our eyes were focused on the body laying in repose in the side room. There, on an austere, pragmatic oval bed lay a humanoid skeleton, the right number of orifices, ribs, and even teeth denoting it as closer human than even a grown fae.

"What the fuck," Addy and I mouthed at the same time. It had mostly mummified, lying on its side, two arms wrapped around an alien-looking plushy.

"Someone has to be playing a prank on us," I said as we retreated from the place of rest back into the main room.

"That skeleton was at least a hundred years old, maybe two hundred."

"No sign of physical injury. Looks like they got locked inside. Guess not all of the ship is idiot proof."

"This is important, it has to be." I raised my voice and looked to the sky.

"Mochi, tell me, what the hell is this?" No answer. What a time to be sulking.

"Alright. No problem. We can figure this out on our own." I gave a dry chuckle.

"Given the state of decay, aliens came to earth decades ago. That means they definitely have faster than light travel. They came here, and began abducting… what, hapless furniture and radio receivers?" The radio at least proved less of a mystery. It was an older pre-2000s device jury-rigged to be gesture-activated.

"It would've been easier to travel through the Cauldron instead of space," Addy noted.

"No way anyone overlooked that option. The ship probably wouldn't have fit through the tunnel without shrinking magic though."

"Shrinking magic? Really?"

"I'm spitballing here!" Addy made a wide gesture.

"None of this makes sense with the knowledge we have, because we can't even ask the right questions. I certainly have one question, why is this here, inside the dome, together with the maneating plants? Is that a big fat coincidence, or is someone seeding earth with hundreds of little sleeper seeds just waiting to sprout under ideal conditions? I mean, the plants are probably the alien threat that performs the poorest in actively breaking through the dimensional barrier.

They arrive on Earth through accidents, through seeds that are caught on clothing of people returning from the Cauldron, or through some random portal picking them up on their world and plonking them down over here. I…" Addy paused for a dreadful moment. She was checking the minimap on her interface.

"... this is directly along our flight path."

"Oh." I blinked at her.

"Addy, you don't think—""What if I brought the seeds here?" I grabbed her hand.

"No. Addy, there are way too many of them here. Plants don't multiply that fast."

"These ones might." Her laugh was dry and boneless.

"They just need the right conditions, remember? Low light, bad conditions, and they become downright docile. Earth-levels of light, and their roots move like a hoard of hyperactive worms."

"But there isn't any convenient energy source around that they could readily mooch off of!"

"Sam. We're standing in an alien spaceship."

"... What are the odds that aliens run their spaceships on something like nuclear power?" We looked around, finding an engine room. I opened it a crack, peeking inside with a spider eye grown on my finger. It looked around, spotting a truly alien-looking engine, showing cracks and a flickering blue light, before I tugged it back.

"Alright. That was definitely ionizing radiation in there, up in the area of several gray."

"Oh." Addy paused, evidently looking what that meant up on her system interface.

"Oh! Shit, are you…?"

"Gonna be alright? Yeah, a lethal radiation dose just stings a bit on my finger-eye. Which I can just remove. Bloop." The finger eyes dissipated. I popped an anti-radiation pill regardless, mostly to calm Addy down.

"Don't worry, this stuff works. It comes complementary with some of the special ammo for the Warcrimer."

"I, you…" She was giving me that look again. Definitely not calm.

"The Warcrimer also comes with salves against burns and frost burns?" I offered supportively. Addy stared at the ceiling and let out a long groaning sigh.

"I want to admonish you for being reckless, but you've probably already preempted my every thought. If I complain now, I'll look like the unreasonable one." Then she looked back at my eyes.

"Please don't use that weapon anymore. I prefer having my girlfriend in one piece. Or, rather, girlfriends now." She muttered that last part with some uncertainty.

"Done, and done." It would become the private property of Smiling Sam, who I could definitely trust to keep a secret, given that she was sorta myself.

"So, the running theory is that you dropped seedlings near the ship's leaky reactor, which they used as energy to spread over the mountainside in less than a day?"

"It's not a perfect explanation. Let's get some recordings and physical proof before we send this to some real experts. A scientist, or some shit. Someone in a white lab coat. Someone with a degree in xenobiology." She tapped what looked like a main console for controlling the craft.

"Sam, do you have a USB for alien ports?" I did not. Matter of fact, there was awfully little we could salvage without disturbing the scene. Paper didn't seem to have been necessary for storing information, that was all likely done in the central computer of the craft. The radios, kitchen, etc. were all clearly made by local companies and either bought or stolen.

It said an awful lot about these aliens that they seemed to value leisure, yet didn't seem to think of equipping their ships with furniture as a necessity. We gave the house-sized insides of the ship another cursory search, looking for anything worth taking, any proof that might get the people outside to stop beating each other's heads in. Which led to me standing in the bedroom, looking at the stained plushy in the corpse's hands. It was the only one.

It was being held like it was this person's most precious possession, even after death. Touching it sent a shiver of electric contentment down my spine. It was shaped like an odd insect, and something about the materials used in its creation felt as if whenever I squished it, it was squishing me back. Addy noticed me staring after she'd finished filming the various rooms.

"What?"

"I want this plushy. But I can't take it. It belongs to someone who cared about it a lot."

"And?"

"And taking it away, when it's the only comfort they have left…"

"Sam. They're dead." After a moment, she put a hand on my arm.

"That made you sad. Sorry." If I were in their position, I'd feel lonely too. There was no ghost hanging around for me to chat with or hug into the next life. Whoever this person was, they died alone, on an alien planet, with no comfort but for unliving things. Logically, that meant their soul had been yoinked up into space, and their possessions were free real estate. Practically, I was more sentimental than greedy. The plushy would remain where it was. Distantly, the earth rumbled.

"Let's get out of here before someone turns this into collateral damage." The sun was glaring at us, angry at our sins, while alien and earthborn trees shuddered in the near distance fearfully. A small forest of brambles had closed in on our position, or revealed itself from hiding. They burned, popping and crackling merrily while the weight of the world felt ever heavy on my mind. I took a deep breath.

"You don't think they came to an amicable solution to this whole battle royale problem already, do you?" One moment triggered. Addy was already mid-duck as I pulled her flat to the ground, an entire tree wooshing over our heads and splintering against the untouched hillside a hundred yards that way. Mister armor and Mister Polkadot, aka Alex and Will, variably skidded and bounced to a halt in front of us.

The former was still standing tall, though his face looked like it had kissed the backside of his shield a couple times too many. Mister Polkadot was spasming on the ground, glitching like a videogame character, his legs definitely bent the wrong way. With a shaking hand, he grabbed his polkadot suit and tore it off. With a pop, he appeared standing in place, wearing a snazzy new outfit that looked like gym clothes covered in emojis, all laughing at whoever dared to observe him.

"Surprise! Tear-away pants, bitches!" He did a little dance with his legs, which were now doing perfectly fine.

"At least you're using it on yourself this time," Alex muttered. What an odd pair they make.

"Mff." I released Addy, silently apologizing for pushing her head into the dirt. She rose with a start, yelling at the rest of the world, at anyone but me.

"Watch it! Someone could've died." The forest filled with laughter, deep and dark, the sort I wished I could do on command as the Evil Queen Arachnia. Genesis strutted out from between the fronds.

"That's the point, numbnuts? Or what, can your baby brain not comprehend the concept? Waah, waaah, I'm such a baby, look at me, waaah." Okay… she's really… I'm afraid to say 'good', but I barely know her and already looking at her face is giving me an aneurysm — wait, is that Smiles? She was holding my body double in her giant robo fist. Genesis didn't even bother with choking her out; her giant robotic arm-glove clutching the entirety of Smiley Sam's chest made breathing laborious already.

Smiles was struggling, biting and gnawing at the metal to little effect. For a moment, the image of an overripe tomato popping flashed through my mind. Genesis squinted at me, and then at her catch.

"Oh come on, that annoying little shit was one of your doubles? Ah well, at least that means she won't make a mess." If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Genesis raised her arm.

"No!" She paused. Tilted her head. Looked straight at me.

"I, uh… please don't?"

"What? Why not?"

"Because I asked nicely?" For a short moment, her gaze felt like it was trying to pluck me apart with an awful methodical nature at odds with who she was, or presented as. I could read the question on the wrinkles on her forehead.

'What are you getting at?', to which the answer was quite mundane. I didn't want to see anyone die, here, or anywhere else. But she wasn't as good at reading people as I was.

"You're shitting me." Her grin widened. Genesis let out an earthshaking laugh. Smiley Sam hissed in her grip, legs flailing futilely in her general direction." This is the real one? All this time, all those videos, and you were using a double? Of course, sneaky sneaky. Not exactly photogenic, are you? You'd scare kids from a mile away!" Idly, I scratched a scar on my face. I… you know what, let's roll with this. Can I offer myself in a prisoner exchange? Better hurry. Smiles looks particularly unwell.

I typed a message to myself in an empty chat room. <<Act natural. >> Smiley Sam paused, then redoubled her escape attempts.

Genesis, or Naledi, hard to tell who was at fault here, squeezed her that little bit harder. In exchange, Smiley Sam blanched, then threw up all over the arm. The arm shivered, and swore in a robotic voice.

"Goddammit Genny, this is what you get for fucking around. Squish her or toss her into the stratosphere, but stop letting them make you monologue."

"Easy there, partner, I was getting to that." A bottle of Tidyblank Instacleaner appeared in Genesis' hands, which she proceeded to make liberal use of, dissolving bits of gunk wherever the magical juice touched.

"There. Now, if you open your pretty little eyes, you'll see that I've got a hostage. Let's negotiate: Your alliance forfeits this match, and I don't turn her into paste."

"I mean…" The moment she finished that sentence, I noticed that Addy wasn't by my side. The prodigious shadow beneath Genesis quivered. A sharp, thin sword pierced the armored glove and her arm from bottom to top, right through the elbow. The tall woman was strong and fast, but her reaction speed spoke of a neglected Mind, allowing Addy to follow up with a slash to her armpit, neatly severing the axillary artery. She was in her shadow and back beside me before Genesis' backhand swipe could hit her.

The woman grimaced as Naledi sparked, clutching the second wound spurting blood.

"You bitch!" Her laughter turned cruel.

"Have it your way. I haven't had the opportunity to play much with this, but here we are, five against three. Cataclysmic transformation—""Shit, get her before she transforms," Mister armor yelled, his sword glowing ominously.

"Wait!" I jumped right between the two. For a moment, all eyes were on me. Carefully, I materialized a pair of Time Bandaids and tossed them at Genesis, who caught them out of the air with undisguised suspicion.

"Take it. Stopper your wounds. Really, this is just stupid. Why do we have to fight each other? Let's play a game of Backgammon, or monopoly. Or hey, better idea, let's all act like grown adults and talk this out!"

"If talking it out were so easy, the envoys wouldn't have had to incite this shit," Genesis said, giving the Bandaids a cursory glance before slapping them on.

"RANCOR wants more share of the pie so it can give every person on Earth a soulbound custom-made pistol. The pistol will recharge on so little anger even normal people will be able to use it. Imagine, nine billion armed humans with unlimited ammo. You can't invade that shit, Earth'll be impenetrable." I blinked at her in disbelief.

"You can't seriously think that's a good idea." Naledi blooped.

"Charging the laser pistol will inevitably train people to increase their ECC efficiency. The better they get at charging emotions, the more we can utilize them for big spells. It'll make finding the prodigies for wizardry and Custodianship easier too."

"Okay, I… suppose that makes slightly more sense." I massaged my forehead while Genesis just crossed her arms.

"None of you think the idea is as cool as I do, so you can talk to my fist."

"Not that it'd make her any more eloquent," Addy muttered, flicking her sword.

"I… just out of curiosity, have you asked what the plans of the other envoys are? Has anyone?" In response, all I got was embarrassed shuffling and people more interested in the tips of their toes than looking at me.

"Really? Wow, okay, let's start with you." I pointed at Alex. He straightened up, Swim trunks swaying majestically in the wind.

"Vigilance, Envoy of Anticipation, is creating a fallback plan. In case this discussion isn't resolved by the time of prophesized apocalypse this year, the Aegis Protocol goes into effect, erecting a barrier dome around Earth, cutting it off from magic and the outside world, fueled by the emotions of every living being inside. Given the right setup and at least a twenty percent share in resources, the barrier will become self-sustaining near indefinitely."

"Oh yeah, that sounds sooo great," Genesis said mockingly, patting down her giant armored fist.

"Love being an isolationist planet. Love not having magic. I'm sure everyone in the world agrees. Boooring!"

"Arguments after, presentations now. You there, glove person. Naledi, right?" Genesis' giant armored glove turned a few degrees. Was she looking at me? How was she doing that?

"Your envoy is Fear, right? What's Eep's plan?"

"Eep is too afraid to do anything with her slice of pie. I've decided to take it in my own hands. I'm supporting Genny because, genuinely, the best thing we can do is lean into emotion-magic to make it Earth's unique magic system." Her gem-eye scowled at me.

"There will be issues, of course, but a training tool that doubles as a self-defense weapon will buy us time and build a tangible future. That is why I support her."

"And because she's got her hand up your ass," Addy muttered, not quiet enough to not be overheard as the glove-Naledi jittered and spasmed.

"Excuse me!? You're not even a champion, what the heck are you even doing here?"

"Making sure you don't off my girlfriend, Kermit." That got a couple inappropriate chuckles from the assembled throng of champions. It didn't help Addy and Naledi's relationship. Sparks were flying between the two, dammit, gotta hurry it up.

"Nice, cool, uhh, Mister Surprise, go!" Will giggled.

"It's a surprise!"

"I should've expected that. What about the zipper lady?"

"Zeb?" Glove-Naledi said, looking around with a huff.

"You'll have to ask her yourself. She's made herself scarce. Again."

"Yeah, not chummy enough with anyone to spill that. Constantly switching sides too, the little rat." Genesis flexed her robotic arm and turned to me.

"Well? You not gonna tell us what your envoy wants?"

"I, uhh…" [Moon base! Moon base!]"Mochi wants… a moon base." I cringed.

"I'm… sure it will help us all somehow?"

"Maybe it's to let people settle it, should Earth be lost?" Alex offered.

"Much of the system's mundane and magical energy banks are stored on the moon," Will noted. Genesis snorted.

"Yeah, ain't no way I'm moving to the moon. They don't have burritos or bumper cars up there." Also air. That's probably more important. Mochi, do you even have a plan beyond that? The sound of metal slapping on meat pulled my thoughts back to Genesis as she ground her hands together.

"Alright, anybody keen on switching sides?" There was a long pause.

"No? Not even you, Zeb, wherever you're hiding? Great, let's get back to it. Cataclysmic—""Wait!" I cried, quickly instabuying a burrito and tossing it at Genesis in a subtle bribe.

"Oh come on. What?" The burrito was gone in two grumpy bites.

"I just… is this all of us? What happened to the envoy of sadness' champion?"

"Trust killed her." Genesis stared me straight in the eye, and for some reason I knew she didn't mean just the one time.

"Every envoy only gets the one champion. We're their physical arguments, and if we're gone, well… it was a wake-up call to the rest of us. Get real with it, or get dusted. And honestly, it sucks balls, but that's just life, am I right? Run around, headless-chicken style, then get tossed into some prime-grade bullshit while some digital god sits up there, jerkin' it to our misery, dick in hand.

Fuck man, I hosted a podcast episode about this, but all people do these days is get angry and then don't do shit about anything. Welcome to the hamster wheel, how about you feel something before you bite it?" She cracked her neck, sighed a sigh of so much stress and apathy, then looked us in the eyes.

"What? Why're you all staring like that?" She followed our gaze. There, in the blue domed sky far above the forest of muck and murder, hovered a magical girl. She looked rather short, wearing a poofy, frilly dress in sky-blue color, and completely out of place in this smoking, burning, freezing battlefield. Idly, some part of my brain wondered why she was blue.

Every Custodian, whether intentionally or not, wore some spec of color denoting who their envoy was, from the red of Genesis' scales, to Alex's orange armor, to the neon-green hair of Naledi and the light blue smattering of color across Mister Surprise's varying costumes. Trust was a light green in color, somewhere between the yellow of Joy and the dark green of fear, but she was blue, not green.

The only answer I could provide was that light blue was the ideal camo for someone attacking from above on a cloudless, sunny day. There was a coldness to her eyes, even as she twirled a pair of heart-shaped wands in each hand. One gesture and one word was all it took." Rise." Shivering trees and squirming rootwork of alien plants the size of houses lifted off the ground around her as if she was plucking weeds, forming a solar system of orbiting plants and rocky debris.

They smashed into each other, grinding plants into pulp. Within moments, her kill count soared over two hundred. She disappeared behind the ball of debris, filling the air with a cacophony of things just breaking. Then the ball of violence slowly moved towards us.

[Trust, Trust, Lvl 104] In one collective moment, everyone decided that the best thing to do was skidaddle. Because holy crap, that was the highest level I'd ever seen, and this Custodian was not screwing around. [Creating Groupchat. Members: Sam, Addy, Alex, Will, Genesis, Naledi, Zeb] <<Alliance? >> I asked. <<Alliance, >> Will answered. <<Alliance, >> came Genesis' text. <<Definitely Alliance. At the rate she's going, she'll equalize points with all of us combined in a couple minutes. Don't let that happen.

Keep running, keep killing plants, and whatever you do, don't let her catch you. >> Easy plan, difficult execution. The whorl of splinters and other renewable shrapnel was growing by the second, reaching a ridiculous size"What the hell even is her build?" I yelled at Genesis over the tornado din.

"What?" she yelled back.

"I said: invest in some stats other than Body, you numbskull!"

"What?" A tree hit her across the head, exploding into so many wooden splinters. Genesis tumbled to the ground, leaving a dent in it, before pushing herself back to her feet. I looked back only to see her eyes going wide." Oh crap, oh shit, oh fuck — Cataclysmic transformation." The large woman disappeared in a ball of light, an oddly wet-sounding theme song playing for the brief seconds it took for the ball of violence to overtake and swallow her entirely. The music stopped.

A moment later, something massive leapt from the whirling blender. I was expecting a dragon, or at the very least, some sort of giant serpent. Instead, she had four glossy, powerful legs, a wide mouth, and big eyes which she moistened with a flick of her thick tongue.

"You're a toad!?" I asked as she hit the ground, bouncing everyone as if the earth beneath us was a waterbed.

"American Bullfrog Mimic, baby."

"Frogs don't have scales!"

"Yeah, well, I don't fuckin' care. Ledi, we're leaving." On cue, her robot arm turned back into the green-haired cyborg.

"You don't mean — wait, wait wait!" Genesis giant tongue caught her, wrapped her up, and in one big gulp she was swallowed, safely contained within tons of armored fat, flesh, and scales.

"Later, losers!" In one leap, she was hundreds of feet ahead of us. Two more, and she was barely a dot halfway across the dome. She was going to keep her promise of an alliance, but she was also going to start weeding the plants as far away from Trust, and us, as possible. Which was a reasonable tactic, assuming she didn't care that we were about to be turned into mulch. That slippery amphibious… gah! We can't stop taking down targets either.

I summoned my warcrimers and tossed one to Smiley Sam, who immediately began peppering the surrounding area with fire. A kill rolled in here, a couple soulcoins there. It felt like giving a drowning person a single drop of water. An area multiple football fields long had been scoured of all life behind us. It wasn't even a question of skill, just of sheer, magical output, of scale of violence. How was she even channeling enough emotion for a spell that large?

It was a small comfort that for all her power, she didn't seem to be able or willing to fly all that fast. She was absolutely going to kill us, but only if we didn't keep far enough away from her. Maybe this was as fast as she could go. Maybe that was her one and only weakness, though hey, I was just spitballing at this point. At this rate, she was going to win purely on points. [Targets remaining: 991] [Targets remaining: 956] [Targets remaining: 907] Suddenly, she started speeding up.

"She's spotted us!" Mister armor yelled. Mister Armor was floating next to Addy and I on a summoned shield in the shape of a surf board. It seemed to have some difficulty keeping up, given the high whine of whatever engine was powering it. Not a magical construct, just some really expensive gear. A barrage of rocks and tree shrapnel emerged from the ball of violence. I swerved, ducked, dodged, but even then, Addy took a hit for me, fur once again metallicized. Alex swerved left and right.

Will was hit dead-on with a truck-sized boulder, but I swore that his body turned into a crash dummy moments before impact. He was ragdolled like a frisbee hundreds of yards away, disappearing into the distant fronds. His text came shortly after. <<I'm out. Good luck people. >> In just that moment, Trust plucked the flying saucer from the ground. My breath hitched. In a micromoment of panic, I opened a chat to her and sent a message. <<Don't toss the spaceship! Please! >> There was no response.

Surrounded by a scattershot of stone and wood, the flying saucer flew again, and this time it shattered against the massive stone cliff ahead. And space turned… squiggly? My best guess was that something in its reactor cracked, something that was beyond just mundane fusion or fission technology. Magic. It twisted space and flipped it, warped it until it was inside-out, shifted things around as if sorting and unsorting a puzzle box.

Trees appeared growing sideways, or with their leaves in the ground and roots in the air. It rained dirt for a brief moment, then earthworms. And a hundred yards behind us was Alex. His shield-board was scrunched up like a paper ball, wrapped around his left foot. Slowly, it lifted under a telekinetic force that wasn't his own.

"Fuck," he exclaimed in pain before lifting up towards the ball of violence. I shot him a rope of spider silk, hitting him across the shoulder. Which of course meant now I was being dragged up into the sky as well. Boulders the size of houses and trees so large it would take two or three of my doubles to create a circle of hugs around them wooshed in my direction. Many things happened at once. A flying Rhododendron tried to strangle me.

I reeled Alex in to within grabbing distance, and in the same motion he cut the plant apart. Addy sent me a system text, which was immediately pushed down a couple pages as Genesis spammed me with offerings for a collab on one of her shows called 'You lose, you schmooze'. I ducked under the plant, grabbed Alex's hand, and mentally cursed that smug toad. Then, there was only wood splinters, stone, dirt and water vapor, and… surprisingly little pain.

We passed the wall of wood and stone with remarkably few injuries, entering the eye of the manmade storm. There she hovered, a magical girl straight out of my earliest fantasies. A poofy dress, colored hair, frills and ribbons everywhere. She held the uncaring wrath of an old testament god in her eyes, and in her hands the wands that determined our fate.

"Surrender," she demanded in a voice that boomed with the support of some unseen force.

"Why?" I asked.

"Can't we just all be friends? Why do we have to fight?" Her gaze fell on me, and she tilted her head.

"Isn't that what we're supposed to do?"

"Oh, so it's because your envoy told you to," Alex ground out.

"I, for one, didn't use that as an excuse to execute my fellow Custodians even after I anticipated that you're an ass." The creases on her forehead deepened.

"So you don't surrender?" The telekinetic force around us tightened. Suddenly, zipper-like tears opened up all across the rotating objects around us. Before we could be squished into paste, bullets and grenades flew in from all sides, aimed right at the center, right at Trust. They never reached her, caught in place by the same overwhelming telekinesis carrying us. But then lasers followed after, and though they too were blocked by Trust's shield bubble, some hit the levitating grenades.

The explosions were enough distraction that we started falling again — and fell right through a zippered-rock and out of the convergence event. I tumbled into a heap of limbs, gasping for air I didn't know I was missing. Alex's voice came as a scream. His lower left leg was completely missing, torn off in a jagged mess. He uncorked a regeneration potion with shaky hands, spilling half of it before it reached his mouth. I wanted to help him, but before I could jump up, another Sam was already on the job.

"Sam! Oh my god, I should've noticed earlier." Smoothie hopped over towards me as her body double continued assisting Mister Armor.

"I was having breakfast when I started getting random message pings about conversations I never started. What the hell were you even fighting in there?"

"I'm not hurt," I mumbled.

"Get him first." She raised two of my six arms, ugly purple swelling growing fat around the wrist. Haha. Whoops. Those're definitely broken. A fourth person cleared their throat. It was the cyborg with purple hair — Zeb, the unzippable champion of disgust.

"You're both damn lucky I touched like half the forest to prep for Genny's fight. I saved your life," she said before stretching out a hand. Not to help, but like she was expecting something.

"A thousand soulcoins. That's with a first timer discount. You won't find a cheaper life anywhere else." I blinked at her, slowly.

"You're really going to squeeze money out of me?"

"I don't risk my life for charity, sex, or just the fun of it. Unlike some people." Her unblinking stare with those two purple-glowing robot eyes reminded me of Medusahead somewhat. Awfully mercenary. I paid the toll and kept any grumbling to my thoughts.

"Good business," she said before tossing me a plushy.

"Here, complimentary gift." It was the plushy from the saucer. Zeb stole it, even after I chose not to. I stared at the six-armed grub-thing, feeling just about at the end of my wits and bodily ability. [The Convergence Dome Barrier has been cleared. Total Score:] [Trust: 1690kills] [The 'everyone else' alliance: 1475 kills] [Trust is the winner! Members of the 'Everyone else alliance' loses 2% stake each. Trust gains 12% stake.] I closed my eyes and mumbled a curse.

"Dammit." [Nooo! My moon base! Q. Q] I feel terrible. Despite everything, I'm sorry Mochi. And yet, somehow, I was simultaneously relieved. As the dome dissolved, and Addy limped her way over here, held upright by a dirt-blasted Smiley Sam, I knew that this chaotic mess at least, was over. Smoothie was glowering at Smiley Sam as she leaned Addy against my back and started spraying both of us down with Tidyblank.

"I seem to have missed a lot."

"I'll… fill you in later." I sighed.

"Did I miss anything on the Kobayashi's end?"

"Besides breakfast with the rowdiest tanuki family out there?" Smoothie sighed in the exact same tone and pitch I usually did when I was trying to hide disapproval.

"You really chose the worst time to disappear, y'know."

"Why, did someone burn a house down?"

"Worse. You should probably check the news. Doesn't matter which channel. They just confirmed a new alien race. They're hailing us from their space ship, right above Antarctica."