“I can’t make them do anything. Nothing at all. Is he doing that?” Ven asked with disbelief and badly hidden wonder. “He doesn’t have negation or control Issi, but I can’t make the lambs dance. This is…” All of Ven’s hands grasped at nothing. “This is amazing. How does location Issi do any of this?”

“It must be the manifestation around his wrists. That, and whatever foci he’s made into techniques.” Kellick blinked twice, his Issi coming out sluggishly and blurring his vision. He rubbed at his temples and killed his technique. “The librarian’s coming to his help. Glib showed his hand too early, and now he’s good as ground meat. So, Ven, what do you want to do?”

Ven’s manifested arms wrapped around his chest like a ribcage of inky Issi. He pressed his lower lip out and tapped a finger to it, then shook his head with a sigh. “We should pull out. Glib’s going to die, our mark’s too interesting to kill, and the librarian will kill us if she finds out we aren’t residents of the pillar. Now, I know you’re going to say something about the way I talked a few minutes ago, but she’s dangerous. We could take her out if we worked together, but without meat shields, it gets risky. And I’m not losing you over a contract.”

“I feel the same way. So do we go now, or do you want to stay and watch the show? Not that it’d be much of a show, since Glib hasn’t properly prepared for a fight.” Kellick rested his chin on his hand, looking down without his Issi empowering him. Even now, it looked as if it would be a fair fight. It wouldn’t be the moment the librarian stepped through those doors. “Stupid man. If he’d listened to us, he could’ve killed everyone in this place. But then we wouldn’t have seen our mark’s true colours, would we?”

Ven put a tender hand on Kellick’s shoulder. “We need to leave, Kel. We’ll give Glib a nice little celebration of life. Torture some animals and practitioners with Screech in remembrance. But we can’t throw our lives away for the slim chance of saving him.”

Kellick put his hand on top of Ven’s and squeezed. “I know, Ven. I know. Screech is going to be heartbroken.”

The sound of a door opening behind him coincided with a burst of inky black and copper Issi from the roof of the hotel, but Elach couldn’t focus either of them thanks to the monster in front of him whose face fell as if he got a glimpse of his own funeral, looking up at the hotel for a split second before swiveling desperately to the opening library doors. He started to scream, something about a Ventral and a Kellick, the Issi claws disappearing in the blink of an eye and reappearing around Elach. He set a chain to pull himself out of the claws, pausing as he saw the brilliant green point of Issi with rings of chain orbiting it that took the place of the nothing that had replaced the symbol flower that had initially been his anchor. His Issi was changing a little too fast for his tastes.

He didn’t get a chance to pull himself as a red mist thundered through and past him, reforming in front of the practitioner as Shar. The practitioner’s eyes grew wide with fear, a monstrous spray of blood and meat coating the practitioners behind him in a good fifteen foot cone. If he’d had any doubts Shar was a slaughter wisp manifestation, they would have been put to rest as he watched Issi rise from the mangled halves of the agony practitioner’s corpse and meld into Shar’s Issi mist. He hadn’t even felt her use a technique.

She turned to Elach, her arm dripping blood as it transformed from a jagged saw to her normal arm. She flicked the blood off of her fingers with disgust, then cleared her throat into her other hand. “Sorry you had to see that. He almost destroyed some rare and valuable books. Do we need to deal with the rest of these people?”

Elach shook his head, trying to get the image of that spray of death out of his mind. It stayed stubbornly lodged in there. “We need to get that guy medical attention, if he’s still breathing. Him and all the others were controlled by someone’s Issi. Someone who…” Elach pointed up at the roof, noticing that all the inky black Issi had dissipated. “Someone who ran away, I guess. The dead guy called out for a Ventral and a Kellick, so I’d guess they were the practitioners controlling these poor people.”

Shar moved to the severely injured practitioner, kneeling over them and wrapping them in her Issi. “I’ll keep him alive for a few minutes. Go get doctor Everrest and bring her out here; oh, and tell her to bring everything she classifies as overkill. This poor man’s going to need it. Wait, how are you talking right now?”

A smile showed fresh white teeth. “My teeth grew back. I’ll go get the doctor. If you can split your attention, can you start asking these people if they remember anything? I’d bet they don’t, but it won’t hurt to check.”

“Of course. And get that shoulder checked out with one of the nurses before you come back. You could be hurt far worse than you think.”

“Will do.” Elach nodded, then reached out and chained himself over to the clinic. It felt smoother, as if he was actually taking in everything as the world zipped past him. The same doctor who’d given him the tooth seeds earlier answered, getting halfway through her first word before letting out a gasp and disappearing in a puff of pure white smoke.

Elach stepped through the doors, watching as the doctor poofed from cabinet to cabinet gathering up supplies. He walked up to the receptionist’s counter, his eyes still fixated on the doctor ravaging the back rooms through the open doors. “Shar sent me here to get a Dr. Everrest.”

The receptionist chuckled and pointed a thumb towards the back. “She’s the one in a tizzy trying to find all of her supplies. I kept telling her she needs to be better organized, but she kept claiming she knows where everything is. Does that look like someone who knows where everything is?”

It did not, but Elach wasn’t going to say that out loud. He leaned to the side and called out to Dr. Everrest. “Shar told me to tell you to bring the overkill!”

“Damn it!” Dr. Everrest cursed, dropping all her supplies on a tall table before appearing next to Elach. “She used that word exactly? Overkill?”

“Mmhm. She told me to tell you to bring everything you classify as overkill. Those words exactly.”

“Oh eternals, that’s bad.” Dr. Everrest muttered, stepping to the side and tapping on a random section of wall. It swung open with a hiss of white smoky Issi to reveal a six-foot tall metal locker, Issi markings scouring every available surface of the dark grey and white speckled surface. She pulled what looked like a drawstring backpack out of the heavily protected locker safe, Issi exploding from it the second it passed through the threshold into the clinic. Whatever was inside that bag was valuable and powerful. Before Elach had a chance to voice a single question, Dr. Everrest disappeared. He swiveled his head to see her reappear next to the man Shar was keeping alive, frantically digging through the bag for something.

“It’s that bad?” The receptionist asked, worry replacing the teasing tone they’d had moments ago. “What happened out there?”

“I got attacked, and some bad things happened.” Elach said with a shrug. It was a gross undertelling, but he didn’t feel like explaining something Shar or Dr. Everrest would explain later. “My shoulder got all banged up in the fight. Is there a nurse or doctor who can tell me how bad it is?”

The receptionist nodded. “Pull up your sleeve.”

Elach did as the man asked, wincing as his fingers traced an angry purple bruise.

“Ooh, that doesn’t look good. I’ll get you some painkillers and a general Issi accelerant. My name’s Jori, by the way, so you don’t have to keep calling me ‘the receptionist’.”

“Are you reading my mind, Jori?” Elach asked. He hadn’t felt the man use any Issi whatsoever.

“No, nothing like that. Just something I picked up over the years working here.” Jori said as he stood, walking into the back room and stepping up to a cabinet. “Now where did she… no, not here… Not here either… Ah! Found it!” Jori muttered as he went from cabinet to cabinet, raising a vial of silver liquid to the sky. “Now I need to find the accelerant.”