Karen watched as Elaine stood in front of the raised dais, trying to fix everything. Reggie stood in the corner, holding his daughter, barely a month old. The girl was already starting to regrow her tufts of black hair, while she’d been bald, she’d reminded Karen of a chubby Andrew.

Andrew was gone.

Karen blinked her tears away as she studied the marble platform inscribed with intricate spellwork, scrawled by the gods themselves.

The Kingdom of Malkenrovia was at the forefront of summoning techniques, and usually a virtuous maiden would be trained from childhood to take on the role of High priestess, and perform the summoning ritual to conjure a hero from another world.

She was one of them, now, taken by the creature on the other side of the door. The virginity of the High Priestess was just a formality anyway. All that was truly required was knowledge of Conjuration and lots and lots of Bent.

Elaine had that in spades.

In the distance, they could hear the king and his retainers scratching at the door with their bare hands, reducing their fingers to bony claws. The creature’s magic had made them into animals under his control.

“Reggie! Come back to us!” came a woman’s shriek from outside the summoning room. His mother. A moment later a chunk of the door was torn away, revealing bloody hands with inhuman strength.

“Gah!” Regginald shouted, setting the infant down and grabbing the statue of the First Mother, hoisting the stone representation of the goddess with all his strength. Karen rushed over, and between the two of them, they managed to carry the solid stone statue past Elaine and brace it in front of the door.

Elaine seemed to perceive none of this. Her hands were pressed into the hand-shaped depressions in the dais, Bent flowing from her arms to fill the arcane script.

Her mouth moved at a constant pace, whispering to some unseen thing, haggling with it in a language beyond Karen’s understanding as it searched for the perfect solution to their problem.

“Hey there unassimilated boys and girls!” a jolly voice came from the other side of the door, followed shortly by a pulse of blue that seemed to burrow through the air, dissolving the door that was designed to keep a Legend at bay, and the stone statue of the first Conjurer.

After a breathless moment, the blue energy faded, leaving a sizzling wall of smoke in it’s wake.

“Fuck,” Karen cursed, sprinting toward the opening, followed by Reggie. The first one through was the king, an enormous man of middle age with raven black hair with streaks of black. Long ago he’d been a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield, wielding a war pick and shield to great effect.

Now he was a mindless thrall, lunging forward with snapping jaws, no more value placed on him than any of the other of the others taken by the creature’s magic.

Karen cut him in half.

Reggie let out a shuddering gasp as he watched his father struck down in front of him.

“Reggie, keep your head in – “ Karen watched as Reginald froze, allowing his mother to tackle him to the ground, her claws peeling up bits of Reginald’s armor.

“Head in the right place!” Karen shouted, taking one hand off her great sword currently fending off a courtier to draw her short blade and ram it through Donnova Entremond’s temple. The queen of the country shuddered for a moment and collapsed on top of her favorite son.

Karen hooked a toe under Reggie’s back and flipped him to a standing position with a kick, returning her attention to the well dressed fop in front of her. Reggie stared at the Queen for a moment, then raised his sword and started chopping at the flood of meat sprinting toward them.

She couldn’t see his expression through his helmet, but she could hear his screams just fine.

“Motherfuckers! I’ll kill every last one of you!” Reggie’s voice echoed above the snarling of the possessed royal family.

Karen leaned forward, using her armor and weight to shove her great sword through the courtier’s unarmored flesh, the width of the blade nearly severing him in half.

The man coughed, and his expression became confused.

“Why?” he asked, an instant before her iron boot shoved him off her sword. Karen wasn’t a stranger to the confusion of the last seconds of life.

“Aaah!” Reginald shoved two thralls back with his shield, decapitating one and burying his sword halfway through the other.

Karen calmly weighed the situation as her body went about its violent work. She could walk close to a week without tiring, or fight non-stop for an entire day, but Reginald wasn’t going to last nearly as long. Through inexperience, or simply lower endurance, he would eventually fold, and then she’d be surrounded. They would simply be able to stream past her while she fended off others, and tear Elaine apart.

She kicked the chunks of flesh off to the right, intending to make a better chokepoint with their own dead. It definitely wouldn’t work forever, but it might buy them the time they needed.

“Heel! Bad court, bad!” Elliot strode through the smoke as the remaining possessed slunk out of his way, awkwardly moving on all fours.

And there he goes, putting a damper on everything. Karen thought, gritting her teeth as the creature in the shape of a man walked through the bloody hall toward them.

“Ah, Karen, truly a flower that bloomed in adversity. You know I-“

Reginald screamed and charged, his enchanted blade held high.

“One second.”

Black Bent travelled down Elliot’s arm in the blink of an eye, creating a blue wave of force from the tips of his fingers that caught Reginald in the chest and flung him across the room, cracking the stone walls of the summoning tower.

“You know I have a thing for big, dangerous women?” Elliot continued. “Dates back to middle school, when Jenny Kinsley-”

Lightspeed Slash.

2/8 Bent Remaining.

Karen’s sword flickered, swinging forward at a speed that was impossible to follow.

As if by magic, Elliot separated into two halves, beginning to fall toward the ground. A moment later, he flickered too, and his body was once again in one piece, continuing his grating monologue.

“ – Started wrestling with me out of the blue, and I just got the hardest boner.”

Karen lashed out with her boot, and Elliot caught it on a blue field of force.

“All that being said, I can’t really afford to waste a piece like you when the Harbingers are still out there, can I?”

Karen tried to pull her foot back, but her iron boot was stuck fast to the blue section of glowing air.

“Let me help you with that,” Elliot said, reaching his other hand toward her foot. She could not let him touch her. Not if she wanted to avoid winding up like the others.

With a scream, Karen hauled back and wrenched her foot out of the boot, bending the metal plating out of the way as she flung herself back, tumbling along the ground.

“Oh, wow.” Elliot said, dropping the boot to the ground with a metallic clatter. “I gotta admit, that’s pretty impressive, you-“

His head snapped to the side, where Elaine was kneeling in front of the summoning circle.

“Hero summoning?” He said with a frown, glancing over the circle. “Pretty late in the game, don’t you think? I don’t know what the hell Doug was thinking when he added this to the System. He had to bend so many rules and beg all the way up the chain of command to get this added, but the guy was a total weeb and refused to compromise.”

“Let the Deal be struck.” Elaine said before collapsing in front of the summoning circle.

Elliot crossed his arms, watching the circle and not paying any attention to Karen as she stood up, eyeing the baby. She was only a few feet away from her, and Reginald was still alive, too.

“Alright, let’s see this savior guy,” Elliot said, tapping his forearm impatiently. “I know for a fact Doug doesn’t have permission to add Cheats, so let’s see what the System thinks can beat me all by itself.”

At first nothing happened, then a visible field of energy began to whirl around in a vortex, barely contained by the bounds of the summoning circle.

“Ow, ow, what the hell?” Elliot said as a shade of himself began to peel away from his body, tearing away from his physical form like stitches popping loose on a blanket.

What’s going on? Karen thought as she watched. The spell was supposed to reach out and summon a person capable of rectifying their situation, but it seemed to be…targeting Elliot?

“Oh, I get it, Hahaha!” he said as it separated further and further from his body, mimicking his every move. “Well played, Doug, well played.” He began slow clapping.

An instant later a brilliant circle flashed into existence beneath him, mimicking the Summoning circle just a few feet away. Elliot’s shade was drawn into it, and his body collapsed like a puppet with its string cut.

There was a flash of light on the dais and Karen raised her sword, ready to smite whatever was left of the creature. When the light faded away, there was nothing…nothing but a confused looking infant, staring at the room with bright blue eyes.

“What happened?”

“I…I don’t know,” Elaine said, picking herself up and studying the infant, her newly discovered maternal instincts urging the mage to pick up the baby. She glanced over her shoulder at the empty corpse that until then had caused them so much trouble.

“Ugh.” Reginald muttered, trying and failing to drag himself to his feet. “Are we still alive?”

“Apparently.” Karen said.

“did we win?” Reginald asked.

An animalistic howl sounded from deeper in the castle, drawing their attention.

“You just had to fuckin’ ask that,” Elaine said, hustling over to her daughter and picking up the other baby before retreating to the other side of the summoning room.

“Without him, it’s just cleanup,” Karen said, squaring her feet in front of the door and hefting her oversized sword. “I can handle that.”

“You can kill a whole city?” Reginald asked incredulously.

“Give or take,” Karen said with a grin.

The flood of howling people charging toward them on all fours was no less than it had been before. The entire city had practically been under the creature’s control.

Karen had her sword ready to tear apart as many of them as it took when something strange happened.

The lead creature’s body slumped to the ground, but it’s shade kept flying straight ahead, through Karen’s swing, through Karen’s armor, and through her.

A cold shiver went through her for a split second before it was gone, and the shade was flying past her. She turned her head to look despite years of training to the contrary, and saw the shade dive into Elliot’s corpse, creating some kind of invisible drum-beat that shook the dust on the ground beneath him in a circle.

Karen glanced back forward, and saw the next three creatures slump to the ground, their shades racing past her to dive into the corpse, creating three more drum-beats, each a little stronger than the last.

He was trying to come back.

“Damn!” Karen shouted, turning and running toward the body.

With five swift hacks, she’d decapitated the body and torn it limb from limb before splitting the entire torso in half.

The drum beats continued as the possessed humans gave their lives to the thing on the floor, making it ever more powerful. Each drum beat brought the creature’s components closer to each other, sealing them back together as though they had never been apart.

“I can’t stop it forever!” She might be able to kick a specific piece out of range of the creature, but the drum-beats were getting stronger, and the pull that was bringing it back together was becoming more and more irresistible.

Reginald shared a look with Elaine and dragged himself to his feet.

With a suicidal strength, he picked up the statue of the First Hero, and slammed it through the cracked wall, allowing the light of day to pour into the stuffy room. The statue fell hundreds of feet, shattering on the rocks below. Even further than that was the bay, where the common folk went about their fishing and trading, with no idea what was going on in their own capital.

“Karen!”

“You’ve got a plan?” Karen asked, glancing over her shoulder, kicking the torso away from the rest of the body.

“Yeah, come here!”

“What is it?” Karen asked, spotting the hole in the tower wall.

“Can you make that jump?” Elaine asked, pointing to the bay hundreds of feet below them.

“Sure, but not carrying someone, can you make a ramp or something?”

“I’m fresh out. No potions, Reservoir is empty. Can you make the jump with these?” she asked, holding up the two infants.

Karen put it together. Elaine wasn’t planning on leaving.

“Fine,” Karen said, not wasting any time unbuckling her armor as quickly as she could. it was dead weight. She’d left friends behind to die before. How was this any different? “But just Jinnei. I don’t trust that…thing.”

“You have to take him,” Elaine said gently. “He’s God-sent. I know the spell summoned the person that can save us, just not…yet. Don’t be a bitch.”

“Fine, damnit,” Karen said, the last of her armor clattering to the floor as the creature’s eyes flickered open.

“I am number One, my purpose is…vengeance.” Elliot’s body said, sitting up. The creature craned its neck unnaturally, studying them like an insect before clambering clumsily to its feet.

Karen scooped the babies out of Elaine’s arms and jumped out the window.

“Cradle the head!” was the last thing Karen heard her friend say.

****

Kala woke up in the morning, and for once, she’d not screamed herself awake, although her bed was drenched with sweat. She now knew she had witnessed the fall of the Malkenrovian kingdom, the time sixteen years ago when the country had replaced all of its diplomats and become a strange pit where people and information went in, but nothing came out.

The rulers of Gadvera had at first assumed it was because of a coup, but Malekenrovian diplomat’s strange behavior and Kala’s dreams seemed to point at something much more sinister.