Cernunnos, eh? Having managed to heave herself up to the standing table, Sadea was now searching for a tumbler, glass, or bottle that still contained something she could drink. One of them, a delicate sky-blue bottle, seemed promising. She blinked blearily at its label.

Red wine, aged for a century. Not very strong, but it’d do, for now. She eased the cork out of the bottle with her teeth, tipped it back, and let the dark liquid slide down her throat.

Mutants invoking Cernunnos meant a cult of the Green God had taken root in Neo-Mizuru, which was surprising. Such heretics preferred the remote forested regions and raiding defenseless villagers. For them to be here, fighting nobles in a megapolis, was highly unusual.

Speaking of fighting, things definitely weren’t going well for the cultists. Sadea belched. Over the years, if she’d been paid one credit every time she heard a diatribe from some uprising’s leader about how they would crush or eat the Hegemony’s rich and powerful, she’d have joined the latter’s ranks already. Many outlaws, rebels, and heretics often underestimated the nobles, writing them off as pampered wastrels who would crumple in battle.

But the Hegemony was built on war, and it was dedicated to bloodshed in its entirety. It made sense, then, that its rulers were sublime killers, trained to fight from the day they could walk, their flesh rich with the finest combat augmentations their Houses could buy. As Sadea watched, the noblewoman who’d glared at her just now giggled, a clutch of severed serf heads held by their hair in each of her fists. She had torn them right off the necks of their owners and was now bowling them into the midst of her attackers with bone-breaking force.

Three sword-wielding noblemen butchered their way through dozens of serfs, their perfectly painted faces alight with amusement. Two others had seized a screaming female serf and were tearing her clothes off her frame, along with chunks of her flesh. Another noblewoman to Sadea’s left was trying to see how many severed ears she could stack on a tiny tea saucer.

“Well played, Antonius.” Sadea emptied the bottle of wine and hurled it into the face of a serf who’d been trying to sneak up on her. The man shrieked, clawing at the broken glass embedded in his eyes and cheeks until a passing noblewoman ripped his throat out with her teeth, turning his screams into a wet gurgle.

The aristocrats were slaughtering the serfs, but they wouldn’t be having such an easy time against the mutants attacking Raksha. Hell, even the martial scientist wasn’t exactly having everything go his way. In fact, if Sadea wasn’t mistaken, he was not faring very well at all against the mutant named Fiadh.

Her curved blades bore an apocalyptically potent enchantment of keenness, and they had cut his flesh more than once. But the psychic venom dripping off their edges was simply burning up in Raksha’s aegis. Sadea could see the confusion and frustration in Fiadh’s eyes. In return, Raksha had already broken the mutant’s right cheekbone with his pommel and opened up a nasty gash along her thigh.

Sadea took another swig of wine. Normally, she wouldn’t be able to track Raksha’s movements with her eyes. That was how quickly he moved. But the stubbornly resilient psychic link between them gave her a crystal-clear picture of the battle in her mindscape.

Nearly a week had gone by since their interview with Leona, and yet what should have been a simple psi-comms link had remained, resisting all her half-hearted attempts to terminate it. Sadea shrugged. Even if it were some potentially calamitous effect from their trip through the Ethereal Tides, there was nothing she could do about it, and she’d be damned if she asked Viktoria for help with something like this.

“Boo! You’re terrible, dummy! She’s beating you like a drum!” Sadea jeered at Raksha.

He’d gone down on one knee, clutching a cut across his chest. It was a severe one, reaching right to the bone and perhaps a bit beyond that, but his aegis was mending the wound. Raksha shot her a sidelong glance and stuck a middle finger up.

“Shut up!” he growled.

She blew a raspberry at him and hurled an empty tumbler that bounced uselessly off his shoulder. “She’s not going to sleep with you, dummy! And besides, you’d have to be some kind of heretical deviant to want to bed a mutant! Just kill her already, so I can go find something to drink!”

Meanwhile, Fiadh was staggering back, black, tainted blood pooling at her feet. She clutched her opened stomach, trying to keep her innards from spilling out. Her demeanor and sour expression suggested that she’d had enough of Raksha.

Fiadh gestured to her mutant lackeys, most of them having recovered from the effects of Raksha’s roar by then. Several advanced, blades ready, to serve as a rearguard for her withdrawal.

Sadea sighed. Mutants, heretics, and cultists were so predictable, with the leaders always ready to expend the lives of their followers for whatever cause they deemed greater.

The sacrificial mutants swarmed Raksha, and he lashed out with his blade. Sadea was thinking of another insult to hurl his way before she noticed how Fiadh was maneuvering the rest of her troops.

They weren’t going to withdraw. At least, not yet. Fiadh pointed at Sadea. Her lips flapped. A dozen mutants charged at her, some running on all fours. Fiadh trailed behind, one hand on her abdomen and the other brandishing an enchanted blade. Their inhuman agility allowed them to circumvent Raksha’s reach, mired as he was in a suicidal cluster of their fellows, and slip past the grasp of some overly enthusiastic nobles who’d joined the fray.

“Goddamn it.” Sadea reached into her clutch and activated its spatial enchantment. Her war-staff, dumped earlier into one of its compartments, filled her fist, and she began pulling its length clear. Laden with drink, her limbs felt heavy and uncoordinated, her every move as if performed underwater.

“Sadea!” Raksha roared, as the tide of mutants filled her vision. She yanked her war-staff out of her clutch, but it tumbled from her shaky grasp and fell somewhere. Somewhere unreachable, for all intents and purposes. The room spun. Sadea sighed, clutched the side of the standing table, and steadied herself.

Raksha crashed down in front of her, two mutants holding on him with their blades embedded in his back and shoulder. He sliced them off his body with his sword and raised it high, in readiness to meet the charge of Fiadh and her lackeys.

Acid surged up Sadea’s throat.

“Get back!” Raksha snapped at her.

Mutants reached out with psi-venom blades…

Sadea vomited. It emerged from her mouth, backsplashing slightly through her nostrils, and it burned all the way up. But what came out was lightning, unbound and unfettered by her war-staff, focus gauntlets, and training.

Lightning. Torrential, furious, elemental.

The ballroom lit up with a cobalt blue radiance. The mutants leading the charge fell apart, de-atomized. Those behind them turned into blazing humanoid torches. The marble floor cracked under the lash of wayward electrical tendrils. Nearby jade pillars shattered from psychic feedback.

Fiadh grasped a pair of her lackeys by the scruffs of their necks and thrust them in front of herself. Another predictable move, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The mutants burned away into extinction. Fiadh avoided a similar fate by hurling herself face-first to the floor. Still, as the torrent of lightning blazed above her, stray arcs of energy lashed her prone form, singeing her flesh and drawing out agonized howls from the mutant.

Unfocused, Sadea’s lightning didn’t travel more than several paces away from her before it unraveled into lesser wisps of electricity. These zipped in every direction, striking down and stunning every other soul in the ballroom.

Except one, of course. Raksha stood just in front of her, untouched by her lightning thanks to his aegis. He blinked a few times. Then he shrugged, plucked the blades in his back and shoulder out, and tossed them away.

“Gotta do everything by myself,” Sadea complained as she wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

Fiadh scrambled to her feet, too. Equal parts of awe, horror, and pain were evident in the mutant’s eyes. Smoke trailed from the charred ends of her hair, and weeping burn-blisters streaked her exposed flesh. The bone necklace she wore crumbled into ash, its protective enchantment spent and exhausted after weathering Sadea’s electrical onslaught. Wordlessly, the mutant turned and ran, scurrying toward the kicked-in opening of a ventilation shaft and disappearing into its shadowy depths.

“She’s getting away!” Raksha snapped. “We’ve got to—“

Sadea caught Raksha by the sleeve, halting his pursuit.

“Wait,” she said. “Stand closer.”

“Why?” he grumbled. “For what?”

Ectoplasm materialized in the air above Sadea, the inevitable by-product of her unfocused and unrestrained psychic manifestation. The greenish foul-smelling slime cascaded all over Raksha, drenching his face and his clothes.

“Ah! What the hell?” he cried.

“For this.” Sadea clutched her belly and laughed.