“Alright Samson,” Lee said. “I know I said that things get a little weird here sometimes, but I want to clarify that this is an outlier even for us.”

“I sure fucking hope so,” Samson said, while Harley and Vell fought off a horde of undead swastika-wearing utahraptors.

The Einstein-Odinson campus had been overrun by Nazi zombie dinosaurs in a matter of moments, overwhelming even the loopers with the sudden and unexpected onslaught. Hawke and Kim were across the island, but the other four had managed to unite before being completely surrounded by the undead fascist dinosaurs.

“I do not like this on several levels,” Harley snapped. She was ambivalent to the undead, but she didn’t like dinosaurs and she definitely didn’t like Nazis, so this was a very unpleasant experience for her. And everyone else, for that matter. While everyone sensible disliked Nazis about the same amount, most non-loopers had a much lower dinosaur tolerance.

“You know, I would enjoy this much more if they were easier to kill,” Vell grunted. As much as he enjoyed shooting Nazis, the zombie aspect made them much harder to kill with just bullets. Having to unload an entire bandolier of ammo into a single mummified utahraptor really took the fun out of it.

“Do you have a plan for this kind of thing,” Samson said. “Or do you just fight dinosaurs until the problem goes away?”

“A little of both,” Lee said. “We prioritize finding the source of the problem, but less zombie dinosaurs trying to eat us would expedite that process.”

“Okay, cool, and on the note of killing zombie dinosaurs?”

Samson held out his empty hands. Lee had an enchanted whip and her magic, Harley had a laser drone, and Vell had surprisingly effective cowboy revolvers, but Samson had nothing with which to defend himself.

“We really got to start handing out weapons before the zombies show up,” Harley said. “Didn’t you put it on a schedule for this year?”

“I did schedule it, but I also scheduled time to ensure we didn’t have another Derek on our hands,” Lee said. Last year’s renegade looper had made her a bit wary of handing out heavy weaponry to just any student to join their ranks. “Nothing personal, dear, just taking precautions.”

“No, I get it, but also, please give me a weapon now,” Samson said. It didn’t even need to be a good weapon, he’d just be much more comfortable with anything at all to defend himself.

“That’s a work in progress, dear, we’re a bit surrounded,” Lee said.

“Speaking of, boss, how’s that big magic nuke coming?”

“Hold on a minute, Harley, this is complicated,” Lee said. She was close to done weaving together a complicated arcane ritual. “And it’s not a magic nuke. It’s a magic cluster bomb.”

“It goes boom and makes things dead, the semantics aren’t important,” Harley said. Her laser drone was running out of batteries, which put her in a bit of a hurry. “Is it done?”

“Give me a minute!”

“I’d give you all day, Lee, it’s the Wehrmachtosaurus over here causing the scheduling issues,” Harley said. “Surprisingly hard to kill these things the old fashioned way.”

“They’ve got thick skin, dense bones, and tiny brains,” Vell snapped. He’d learned the weak points of an undead human by now, but an undead dinosaur had a whole different anatomy to destroy. “Probably even smaller brains than most dinosaurs, considering the Nazi thing.”

Alongside his scathing indictment of their intelligence, Vell also fired off a salvo of bullets into the skulls of nearby zombie dino’s. While a few had the decency to go back to being dead, a few ankylosaurs and pachycephalosaurs had skulls too thick for headshots to be effective, and they continued their approach undaunted.

“Lee, can we get a status update?”

“I could be done now, if you don’t mind dying yourself, Vell,” Lee snapped back. “Trying to make sure our targeting criteria doesn’t include you, Dean Lichman, or any of the other undead we know!”

While Lee could simply create a burst of magical energy, doing so would evaporate anything else that got caught in the blast wave, not just the dinosaurs. She had to weave a very careful selection criteria into her destructive burst, to avoid harming anything that wasn’t an undead nazi dinosaur. It would have been far a simpler task were Lee not acquainted with a suspicious quantity of undead.

“There we are,” Lee said, as the arcane threads finally formed a functioning spell. “Cover your eyes, everyone, there’s a non-zero chance this will fry one of your optic cones and remove your ability to see the color blue.”

“My what?”

“Just close your eyes, Samson!”

Knowing it was better to be safe than sorry, and since he didn’t have a weapon in hand anyway, Samson obeyed the order. Even with his eyes closed and covered by his hands, Samson could still see the bright flash of light flaring as Lee’s spell went to work. The air crackled with energy, but the wave of magical power washed over him harmlessly. The same could not be said for any of the nazi zombie dinosaurs.

When the gathered loopers finally dared to reopen their eyes, they saw a few dozen dinosaur-shaped scorch marks on the ground. Harley took a moment to be satisfied with that outcome and then turned her attention to more important things.

“Lee? You good?”

“I’m a bit light-headed, but alright,” Lee said. She was a bit wobbly even under the best circumstances, so this dizziness was nothing new. “That was a bit more mana than I’m used to spending at once.”

“You take a breather, Vell and I will lead the way to the armory,” Harley said. “You bought us plenty of breathing room, that’s for sure. Should be a while before any zombie dino catches up to us.”

“Unless they’ve learned to ride motorcycles,” Vell sighed.

“Yeah, that’d suck, wouldn’t it?”

“That was not a hypothetical, Harley, they’re coming this way,” Vell said. He turned Harley’s head in the direction of the approaching dino’s. Sure enough, a squad of six dinosaurs of various species were barreling down at them on dino-sized motorcycles.

“Nazi zombie dinosaurs on motorcycles,” Harley said. “I feel like I’m in an edgy teenager’s fever dream.”

It was already nightmarish, and it was about to get worse.

“There they are!”

The conspicuously thick German accent and growled intonations made it very clear who was talking. One of the dinosaurs, specifically one that resembled a small ankylosaur with a harsh, narrow face and slightly stunted right foot, was talking.

“And they talk,” Harley groaned. “God I hate this.”

The loopers had started to flee as fast as they could, but the motorcycle-mounted zombies were more than capable of catching up and then overtaking them. The six dinosaurs formed a curved blockade ahead of the group, centered on the only one who had spoken.

“There you are, you little untermensch interlopers,” the talking dino said.

“Yes, bitch, it’s us, the band of diverse plucky upstarts,” Harley said. “Who are you supposed to be? Dino Mengele?”

“I am Goebbelsaurus,” the dino declared. “And I will be the end of you.”

“Of course you will,” Harley said. Talking nazi zombie dinosaurs on motorcycles. They were rapidly approaching dangerous levels of pointlessly convoluted chaos.

“So you’re like, in charge then?”

“Only of this division. I serve at the leisure of our mighty Fuhrer, Lich T-Rex Double Hitler.”

“Oh my fucking god,” Harley sighed. “Can you guys tone it down a little? Please? Like drop at least one layer of the ridiculous bullshit, I’m begging you.”

Goebbelsaurus hesitated for a moment. He wasn’t really sure how to process the fact that his enemies primary concern was not the fact that they were genocidal undead dinosaurs, but that they were being too silly.

“Indeed. You could drop the Nazi angle, at least,” Lee said. “Being undead and being dinosaurs both offer some unique challenges, but the Nazi bit is really just superficial, isn’t it?”

“Could at least go with a more interesting faction,” Vell agreed. “Nazi’s are a bit, uh, played out.”

“Agreed. Greek hoplites, maybe, or cossacks. That might be interesting.”

“Anything but samurai,” Vell said with a shudder.

“You got to at least lose the motorcycles,” Harley said. “It just looks silly.”

“Silence! We will do no such thing.”

As the Goebbelsaurus held his ground, the situation continued to escalate. This time, at least it escalated in the looper’s favor.

“Incoming!”

A blindingly bright streak of metal and flame impacted one of the mounted dino-nazi’s, knocking them clear off their bike and into the next dino down the line. The other zombie dino’s turned their attention away from the loopers and towards their new assailant.

Kim stood, ablaze with white-hot fire, burning fists at the ready. Since realizing she was capable of pyrokinesis at the end of last year, Kim had embraced the fiery magic as her primary means of combat. Most people who did so refined their pyrokinetic control skills to avoid setting themselves on fire, but since Kim’s new body was made entirely of heavy metals, she didn’t need to fear the flames. The escalation continued as a flaming robot dove into battle with the undead nazi dinosaurs on motorcycles.

Another fiery metal fist slammed into a dinosaur, hitting it with a burst of flame and a crushing blow at once. Newly enhanced robotic strength lifted one dinosaur right off his motorcycle and hurled him into another, putting both out of commission. With yet another opponent crushed, Kim made a diving leap for Goebbelsaurus and put him in a flaming headlock, ripping him from his motorbike.

“Hey guys,” Kim said, as she casually crushed the dinosaurs windpipe.

“Hey Kim. Is Hawke with you?”

“Nah, he got eaten,” Kim said, with only mild hints of regret in her voice. He’d be back, but it was never fun to lose a friend. “Downsides of being made of meat, right?”

Harley nodded uncomfortably. She was glad Kim had embraced her identity as a robot, but she got weird about humans being made of meat sometimes.

“Anyway, I got the dinosaurs,” Kim said. She held up the arm she wasn’t using to choke out the Goebbelsaurus and made a flexing motion, showing off the slight scuffing of multiple bite marks. “My shell’s too tough for their shitty zombie teeth, so I pretty much got nothing to worry about.”

“Be careful regardless, dear,” Lee said. “We’re going to get Samson a weapon and then be back to help you deal with...ugh. Lich T-Rex Double Hitler.”

She hated having to say that. Everyone else hated having to hear it.

“You know, I got to wonder about that. I get the Lich part,” Harley began.

“Naturally,” Lee agreed.

“I get the T-Rex part.”

“Of course.”

“And I definitely get the Hitler part.”

“Unfortunately.”

“But what I don’t get is the ‘Double’,” Harley said. “Where does that come in? Are there like, two of them?”

“Well that’d be double Hitlers, wouldn’t it? Plural?”

“I’m not sure how Hitler pluralizes,” Vell said.

“Well it’d be just like any other last name, wouldn’t it?” Lee asked. “If you’re going to visit the Miller family, you’d say you’re going to see the Millers, right?”

“It could be different in German,” Samson suggested.

“Maybe we should call Joan.”

“Yeah, great idea bud, let’s just call the only German person we know and ask her about Hitler,” Harley said. “That’s not weird at all.”

“Point taken. Come along, Samson, let’s get you a weapon.”

“Please.”

Lee led, and Samson followed, along with everyone else but Kim, who headed out to find more dinosaur nazi’s to punch.