Enna was jerked, rather rudely, into accelerated time by Orton's frantic evocation; she stumbled, nearly fell into the water, and managed to choke off her own killing word just in time. "What are you doing," she hissed at him furiously.

Wordlessly, Orton pointed across the water; Gentry's actions had ejected him from the accelerated time stream, but there was nothing to be done about it now. All Enna could see was Gentry's form, bathed in a slowly-spreading flare of white light. "Why did you stop me? Let's just kick his ass!"

"The thing in the box," began Orton, trying very hard to remain calm while large parts of his brain were screaming, "was an artifact. You have almost certainly never heard of it, but it is in fact called the Elder Sign of Solomon. It's very difficult to use, not least of which because you have to have it carved on the inside of your own ribcage, but Gentry has figured out a way to do so and is in the process of attuning to it -- a process, I might add, that we can no longer stop."

"So what?" Enna shook her head, trying to clear it -- despite Orton's vivifying utterance, she still felt muzzy and disoriented. "What does it do?"

Orton wiped sweaty palms on his jeans. "Uh, it does a few things, but the main one is that it gives the bearer total mastery of demonology. It basically means he'll become a sort of diabolical Pokémon Master who can literally throw a near-infinite supply of evil gods at us." He winced. "In other words, we're pretty screwed."

"But he can't attack us, right?" Enna struggled to her feet and squinted at the expanding glare now occupying the place Gentry had been standing. "I thought this place protected us?"

"This place," replied Orton tensely, "is very sacred indeed to a large number of Finnish proto-deities from slightly greater than a thousand years ago. The demons Gentry can throw at us go all the way back to around the time humans started writing on clay tablets -- roughly five or six times older and consequently a lot more powerful. They'll rip the bindings on this sanctuary apart like tissue paper."

Enna growled and clenched her fists. "No fucking way he wins. No fucking way he gets away with this." She whirled around, glaring at Orton. "You say he can summon demons to kill us? What does he need to do to summon them?"

"I don't know! It depends!" Orton tore his gaze away from Gentry's transformation and faced Enna at last; she jolted back a half-step, frightened by the torment in his eyes. "If he needs full rituals, it could take hours and tons of supplies! If he's a meta-ritualist like me, he could do it blindfolded and upside-down in an instant!" He squeezed his eyes shut, frustrated and exhausted. "I don't know everything!"

"Fine then!" Enna whirled back to Gentry, her eyes narrowing. "Let's level the playing field."

Before Orton could stop her, she uttered a word of frost; a thick rime began to spread across the surface of the luminescent water, turning what had been a deadly plunge into an icy arena. As Orton watched, helpless, Enna dropped back into real-time as her spell brought her into congruence with Gentry; he sat down heavily as she leapt down onto the ice, majestically soaring in slow motion as he waited for everything to fall apart.

In another few seconds (well, several minutes from his perspective), she'd land, and something awful would happen. Gentry would melt the ice beneath her, or summon an asura to devour her while she screamed, or use a somatic art to teleport behind her and shove his hand through the back of her skull, or any one of a hundred other ways this could end messily and hopelessly. What was he doing, anyway? Who did he think he was to stop this? A two-bit crap-magus from Bumfuck, Idaho, who meddled with forces he didn't understand and had spent five whole lifetimes failing to accomplish anything. And there was no guarantee, he realized sadly, that he could count on a sixth. The Elder Sign of Solomon granted dominion over literally thousands of demons, some of which held sway over esoteric temporal portfolios; he might find himself trapped forever in a hellish nightmare realm if he tried to restart the loop now. And worst of all, that was one of his better options.

Accelerated time is a great place to wallow in your own insecurities, and Orton spent almost a third of a whole realtime second indulging in it; but, eventually, he sighed and rose wearily to his feet. He walked, rather glumly, around the circumference of the ring until he was standing next to Gentry, and began to make what preparations he could.

His power was still greatly drained from his assault on the temple in Lucknow, but he was far from defenseless. He didn't dare summon servitors to bolster his capabilities -- they were technically also demons, and there was a chance Gentry could turn them against him -- but he did have a lot of very fancy spells, and some of them were simple charms that didn't need an animating presence to direct them. He cast The Cantillation of the Hair's Breadth, The Canzonet of Shadows, and the Antiphon of the Asymptote; he poured as much power as he dared into the pools and channels of his physical essence, marshaled his thoughts and spiritual principles, and sent a short prayer to every god he could think of. And then he did the one thing he'd been wanting to do for more years than he could count: he wound up, sucked in a great breath, and punched Gentry right in his smug goddamn face.

As Enna leapt down onto the icy surface of the frozen tarn, she saw Orton turn into a blur in her peripheral vision. In the blink of an eye, he rocketed around the ring-shaped bridge towards Gentry, moving like a bolt of lightning; as she watched, he collided with the nacreous glow where Gentry had been standing with a thunderous impact.

To her, it seemed like Orton was both on fire and being viewed through an old television set; prismatic bands of color surrounded him in a shifting, streaming pattern, and light seemed to flicker and fray around him dramatically such that his features and limbs were always in shadow no matter how he moved. His eyes blazed with magenta radiance, and billowing currents of heat bent and twisted the air around him. His first blow knocked Gentry nearly fifteen feet back, toppling him off the bridge onto the surface of the ice she ran across; for a moment, she hoped that the fight might already be over. But even as she thought it, she saw Gentry somersaulting gracefully through the air to land poised on his feet, his two fists held upright in front of him in a comical-looking boxer's stance. He can't possibly be serious, she thought in astonishment.

To Orton, on the other hand, Gentry looked scary as fuck. His sight beyond sight was showing him a near-infinite array of Gentries, fractally superimposed on each other and each subtly different. This one had hawk's eyes; this one had feathers on its left ring finger. That one had a horn, but only on the right side; another had skin tinted the palest shade of lavender. As he brought his hands up into what Orton recognized as an exceedingly powerful baritsu guard position, Orton felt the battlespace expand outwards explosively; seven hundred and twenty-nine demons (plus one actual, physical Gentry hosting the rest in his consciousness) annihilated Orton and Enna billions of times over in the panoply of possible futures. Orton reeled; he couldn't handle the influx of information with his own unaugmented mind. The gulf of information drowned him, smothered him; he felt all control slipping away from his mind as Gentry cast his first spell, making the distant walls and roof of the cavern dance and flicker as dizziness washed over them both.

With a shout, Enna dispelled Gentry's illusion; the still air of the cavern reasserted itself with a practically-audible snap. "Keep him busy!" she shouted at Orton as she ran, slipping and twisting on the slippery surface of the ice; her hands curled into claws as she prepared to vent the impotent rage she'd been hoarding for the last twenty-two hours and nineteen minutes.

Orton, who had been somewhat despondent about the current situation, paused. Oh. Oh, I'm an idiot. He beheld a surge of hope within himself, starkly bright in his mind's eye against the bleak stygian blackness of his incipient despair. I don't need to win. I just need to not lose.

Ignoring Gentry entirely, he plunged his grasping fingers violently downwards into the very fabric of causality; to Enna, it looked a bit like he was angrily playing a chord on an invisible piano, but to Gentry, it was a searing burst of agonizing chaos. Orton tangled the threads of destiny around his hands and ripped them upwards with a two-fisted clawing gesture, snarling the warp and weft of fate into a Gordian knot of irretrievably disheveled precognitive havoc. Gentry staggered, and Orton saw the multifarious phantasms become desynchronized; they stumbled, halted, and got in each others' way as they each attempted to play the part of very small cogs in a very large number of disjointed and discontiguous machines. Orton, who hadn't even cast any divinations or precognitive spells yet, grinned. Well, at least this'll be cathartic.

As Enna crossed the halfway point of the distance separating them, Orton finally engaged Gentry in mêlée; he dove low, somersaulted backwards in a flash kick that shot through Gentry's guard to loosen two of his teeth, and came down spinning in a flurry of spiraling limbs culminating in a vicious 540° kick to Gentry's left knee. As he landed, Gentry shot forward like a bull; taking his weight on his uninjured right leg, he whirled around for a powerful backhanded blow that knocked Orton flying.

Neither of them was seriously injured; Gentry's fashionable suit concealed nearly two dozen warding talismans (many of them granting near-immunity to kinetic force for at least one blow apiece), while Orton's Antiphon of the Asymptote halved the force of any strike as it crossed half the distance between the striker and himself (until its energy was exhausted). By the time it actually made contact with him, it had barely a thousandth of its original momentum, but the air pressure of the sweep of Gentry's arm was still more than sufficient to knock him off his feet and toss him back a good ten yards through the frigid air. He spun and twisted as he soared, coming down with a graceful rolling motion that left him poised to rocket back towards Gentry. He launched himself forwards, trading blows at lightning speed with Gentry as both of them punched, kicked, blocked, and dodged furiously.

In most of their previous duels, their contests were decided in two ways: by one of them exhausting the other's wards and magical strength, or by one of them getting in a lucky blow along an unprotected vector. But this time, the parameters of the situation were different in many ways: for one, Orton was fighting much more defensively than normal, and for another, he wasn't fighting alone. He had just blocked a rather nasty elbow strike concealing a venomous psychal vector when Enna's first attack -- a thunderous tsunami of pure constrictive force -- struck Gentry like the squeezing fist of a giant. He dodged, avoiding most of the blow, but his left hand was caught in the edge of the blast, and Orton couldn't help but wince involuntarily in sympathy as it was crushed into a mangled pulp of bone and blood. After a split second, it flickered and returned to wholeness, but he hadn't imagined it -- Gentry had been hurt, and had had to expend power to heal himself. He smiled, tentatively. Shit, this might actually work. He was tempted to tell her to keep disrupting Gentry's concentration, but figured she'd do better on her own initiative; deprived of divinatory insight, Gentry was blind to whatever she might do unless Orton tipped him off by doing something stupid, like yelling out instructions. He redoubled his assault, pouring the last dregs of his power into his Prajna Yuddhan trance; it was all-or-nothing by this point.

As he fought on, Enna's evocations kept wracking Gentry at every stroke -- a staggering blow here, a stunning burst of sonic cacophony there. Gentry was too strong and too heavily protected for her to kill him with a word as she had the mustachioed cultist, but he was clearly having great difficultly repelling her raw power. Twice, he attempted to break away from Orton to deal with her; twice, Orton leapt in for the kill, forcing Gentry to defend himself at the cost of his attack. The walls of the cavern, nearly invisible in the darkness, echoed with impeccable acoustics of the grunts, shouts, and impacts of the battle.

Step by step, they forced him back; blow by blow, they wore down his defenses and wards. Finally, a primal scream of rage from Enna knocked Gentry off his feet; Orton, rushing in, raised his fist for a hammer-blow to knock him through the ice. His eyes met Gentry's for the briefest of instants -- and to Orton's surprise, there was no fear in those eyes. There was no pain, no anger; not even an animalistic alertness at his current predicament.

Only triumph.

Orton whirled, trying to shout a warning to Enna, but it was too late; Gentry gestured, and Orton simply vanished, seeming to fall through the ice as though it were mist to plummet into the depths below. Enna drew breath to scream again, but it was all wrong; everything was jumbled, coming apart. She was drowning, she couldn't move; her limbs were caught in thick, syrupy air like cloth, her mouth stuffed full of sudden fear like a wet rag. She gagged, reeling. I'm going to die, what happened, we were winning...

She was blind; her eyes couldn't see anything but white, like she was under the ice herself. She tried to claw at her face, but her hands wouldn't move; she was frozen solid, she was imprisoned in... in...

In blankets?

She struggled. Something was wrong. There was something she was supposed to remember...

There was a sound. A door, unlocking. How can there be a door underwater? she wondered madly, and then wondered why she had wondered that. There wasn't any water in here, everything was so dry, so painfully dry...

"Got ourselves into a bit of a muss there, did we, miss?" A low, rumbling voice was coming from somewhere. Suddenly, she could see again; dimly, but everything was too sharp, too sterile. "Gotta be careful, them straps'll choke you if you get too tangled up."

"Straps...?" Her voice sounded hoarse, like a frog's croak.

The strange man's voice hitched up into a breath, choked off. "Madre de Dios." She heard running steps, a phone being dialed. Where'd you get a phone in a cave, she thought curiously, then shook herself. What am I thinking? I've never even been in a cave.

"That's right, doctor, she's awake and speaking. Patient 914, Juliette Atborough."