Laughter.

That’s what Jack hears behind him. The maddened cackle of Death echoes across the canyon, loud but mirthless. Jack turns away from Harris and sees Thegn pushing himself to his feet. The blast from Harris’s air cannon was enough to knock him down, but it doesn’t look like it hurt him all that much. At least it stopped Caffiel from doing his sleepytime thing. The rat is still on Thegn’s shoulder, shaking his head clear.

The old Reaper’s nasty, crooked teeth show behind his beard. It’s a sneer, more like a wolf baring its teeth than any kind of smile. A cloud of crows collects above them, cawing and screeching as they blot out the last remnants of the weak sunset.

Jack hears Corva’s voice yelling over the din, “I thought you said you got half of his crows!”

“I did! There were a fuckin’ lot of them!” Jack doesn’t take his eyes off Thegn. What are they going to do? The wrinkled old coot isn’t going down easily.

Thegn stops laughing as one of the crows lands on the blade of his scythe. All at once, all the crows above them stop making any sound. An eerie silence settles and Thegn speaks easily over the hushed flutter of wings. “At least you’ve collected everyone in a single spot. Like they’re gift wrapped with a nice little bow. This will go much faster now.”

In the distance, Jack can hear the unsettling throat-clearing noises of all the remaining Umbrati grunts in town converging on their position. In a matter of seconds, everyone really will be in one place.

An idea starts to form. Jack has no clue how to pull it off, but he has to know Thegn’s play first. Whatever it is, it’s probably going to involve that rat trying to pull his sandman mojo on everyone at once. That’s the first thing they need to stop. Jack touches the red ultrasonic kneak behind his ear and starts murmuring a short message to Zeke. Hopefully the monkey hears him and can make sense of the message. Maybe Slim hears him, too. Maybe.

Thegn notices. “Mumbling is rude, boy.”

Jack straightens his back and tries to stand like he’s casual. Everything hurts. The painkillers from his chembraid can only do so much. But he needs just a bit more time. Just a few seconds. “I’m just tryin’ to figure your play, Wrinkles. We got the numbers, but that didn’t matter before. Maybe it don’t matter now, either. But before, you weren’t fightin’ us direct. Before, we weren’t fightin’ back.”

The response from Death is cold and slow. “Oh, I think I’ll manage.”

A spike extends from Thegn’s scythe and skewers the crow sitting upon it. Only, the bird doesn’t react. It doesn’t even bleed. It just stares forward with its beady little red eyes.

Suddenly, he hears Corva yelp in pain. He turns and sees her holding her head. Her attention is on the grunt that’s holding the crow that both he and Thegn used to get back here. Jack follows her gaze and sees the problem. The other half of Thegn’s spike is coming out of that crow, impaling the grunt through its head.

The grunt wavers for a moment before crumpling to the ground. The crow in its hands and the spike through its head disintegrate in a puff of ash.

As if on cue, all the crows circling in the sky above them restart their cacophony of squawks and cackles, taunting. All at once, the mob of Bule townsfolk comes to the realization of what’s about to rain down upon them from the swarm of crows.

It’s now or never.

“Zeke! Now!”

In a single fluid motion with his tail and hands, Zeke uncaps the cylinder Jack gave him earlier, extracts an orange bead, and hurls it at Thegn’s head.

The reaper dodges easily with a simple shift of his head, but the bead wasn’t intended for him. It zips by Thegn’s head and hits Caffiel the rat, broadside. The rat loses grip on Thegn’s shoulder and drops to the ground, stunned but still moving.

It’s a signal for everyone to act.

Corva and Zeke charge Thegn with Zeke leaping off at the last moment to engage with Caffiel. Thegn sends dozens of spikes from his scythe through the crow sitting on it. They detach and zing as a hail of black arrows from the cloud of crows and ash. Jack turns to Harris and points to the sky. “Aim for the crows!”

Harris nods in understanding as a few people around him fall prey to Thegn’s spikes. He shoulders his air cannon and fires it at the sky. All of the other Bule townsfolk with weapons follow his lead and do likewise. A few without weapons grab rocks or chunks of stone and throw them up at the birds.

The spikes are far more accurate than the people are, and the crows more evasive. Harris and the mob hardly have any cover or protection at all. Worse, because she’s focused all of her effort on fighting Thegn, Corva seems to be losing her control over the grunts surrounding their rooftop and crowding the alleys below.

First things first. Gotta help the folks.

Jack puts his attention on Thegn. He’s struggling with Corva, but still holding his own. The crow that was sitting on his scythe circles around as Thegn and Corva fight. Every chance he gets, Thegn sends out another volley of spikes through the bird.

“Slim! Where are your nanobots?” Jack grips the handle on his knife, useless in his hands when everyone else has so much more skill being up close and personal.

Slim’s voice crackles in response on the comm kneak. “I’d sent a chunk of them up to that swarm of crows. Why?”

A small string of explosions lights up the dusk sky.

“That’s fine, but I need you to focus on that crow right there.” Jack points to the one circling over Thegn and Corva’s fight. “Take that one out and then stop any others from gettin’ close.”

“Roger, kid.” A blast detonates right next to the crow. The bird falters, but still manages to avoid the majority of its force. Slim curses. “Slippery little rot-eater. Don’t worry about me, Jack. I’ve got this. Go find Lyia.”

“Shit. Lyia.” Jack had forgotten that she said she was coming out to heal him just before Thegn showed up. He scans the skyline for some sign of her. Please be okay. Please be okay.

There she is. Same rooftop as Harris. She’s tending to one of the people who’d been speared by one of Thegn’s spikes. It’s great that she’s okay, but there’s no way he can get over there to her. The bridge between rooftops is still gone and the horde of grunts is growing larger. Corva’s rooftop grunts are starting to struggle to hold them back. He has to stay here. But what is there for him to do?

He can’t help keep the grunts back. Even one-on-one with a grunt, he’s hardly a match without Corva’s help. He looks at the fight between Corva and Thegn, a fight between War and Death. They’re moving so quickly, he can barely track them. An explosion arcs above them as one of Slim’s nanobots finally catches its crow.

“Gotcha!” Slim’s celebration is short-lived though, as another crow swoops in to take the previous one’s place. Immediately, Thegn looses another volley of spikes. “Dammit!”

Near Corva’s and Thegn’s feet, another epic brawl is happening between Zeke and Caffiel. The monkey and rat are a spinning flurry of teeth, claws, and fur, with neither one quite getting a full advantage over the other.

Everyone needs help, but Jack can’t help them all. He tightens his grip on his useless knife and feels the collective pain of all his injuries weigh down upon him at the same time. He can hardly help himself.

He casts his eyes downward, and that’s when he sees it. The cylinder he gave to Zeke, opened and lying on the ground. A single blue bead has rolled out and sits there, leaned up against the cylinder.

He kneels down and picks up the bead. All the sound and commotion around him seems to have fallen away, muffled and distant. In truth, Jack has never used one of these beads on himself. Too often, he’s seen what happens when people do that. He wasn’t lying when he told Corva about the consequences.

“Side effects.” He hears himself murmur the words, but they sound removed and far-off.

Jack made this bead, put a lot of work into it. There’s a tiny little bit of his essence living in that glowing blue capsule. There’s a chance that nothing could happen at all. Just energy going home. Of course, there’s just as much of a chance of him bursting into flames. He looks up to see how the fight is going. It all seems like it’s in slow motion. He imagines the folks he cares about—Zeke, Corva, Slim, Lyia, even Old Man V—stopping whatever it is they’re doing to give him a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

That’s not what’s happening, though. They’re all caught in their individual challenges, trying against all hope to hold their own. And here he is, staring at a little blue bead like there’s even a choice.

Reality slams back into full speed as Jack tosses the bead in his mouth and swallows. Having nothing happen wouldn’t help at all, about as much as him spontaneously combusting. So Jack finds himself hoping for the lesser of the potential side effects. “Come on, explosive diarrhea!”

The effect is immediate. The first thing Jack notices is his pain, or more specifically, the lack of it. His ribs, his face, his arms, even the itch from his chembraid—all that discomfort is gone, replaced with a soothing tingle that starts in his gut and pushes out to each of his extremities.

The sensation could stop there and Jack would be pretty pleased with the results. At the very least, he wouldn’t be hurting anymore. He could jump into any of his friends’ fights with renewed vigor and strength. The thing is, however, that it isn’t stopping. It’s like that bead dropped on a door inside Jack and blew it wide open.

What was a soothing trickle of energy transforms into an avalanche. Jack can’t contain it, can’t control it. His hands open involuntarily, and he hears his knife clinking to the ground.

Somewhere deep in the back of Jack’s mind, he hears a voice. Vardin’s voice, maybe? Whoever it is, they’re old. Doesn’t really matter though. There’s a voice in Jack’s head and it’s talking to him. Give up on control. Direct it, Jack.

Jack nods and then immediately feels stupid. How’s a voice in his head going to know he’s nodding?

Focus, Jack!

Jack shakes the distraction from his mind and pulls himself back to the moment. Whoever the voice is, it’s right. There’s no point in trying to control this. A renewed pain erupts across the surface of his skin. It feels like he’s burning from the inside out. He feels each of the connection points of his chembraid spark and singe. The matrix of kneaks burns behind his ear. Control is futile. Guiding this energy is his only option.

It takes a lot of effort, but Jack manages to put his attention skyward, to the throng of crows swarming in the sky. Thegn’s spikes still pelt down with startling precision, almost always finding a target.

Jack feels his body rotate to face the swarm, like he’s levitating a hair’s distance off the rooftop. He notices that one of the spikes has directed itself toward him. It soars at him, almost faster than he can perceive. By the time he knows it’s coming, there’s already a hole in his chest. That doesn’t seem to matter, though. The gate is already open and Jack has already told the avalanche where to go.

An immense glowing light erupts from Jack and fires up at the cloud of crows. Jack’s ears ring with the rush of thousands of voices screaming at the same time. Not a single bird escapes the rush of shadows in the flood of light and energy. Each crow vaporizes in turn, and a haze of ash snows upon Bule.

As Jack feels himself collapse, he’s vaguely aware of shouting all around him. Sounds of explosions and gunfire echo in alleyways. The softest of touches as he’s caught. The faintest light of stars in the sky.

And then the world is bright and empty again.

“Ya done good, kiddo.”