As I hesitated over my own actions for a moment, Lia and Silva tore into the moving plushies, likely happy to have something to tear apart after hours of cautious trudging and avoiding traps. Both of them were beings of action and being subject to repeated attacks that they couldn’t fight back against couldn’t sit well with them, but now, they had something to take their frustrations out on—namely, the plushies.

Next to me, Luna was using her own, slowly growing, divine abilities, doing her best to support the other two by ensnaring the plushies with her conjured plants. Similarly, Alex was doing their best to hinder our foes, only instead of plants their weapon of choice was a strange contraption that delivered something similar to silly string. Their efforts had some effect but the plushies turned out to be surprisingly unimpressed, eagerly tearing themselves apart to get rid of the bindings. Tying down an arm or leg was normally enough to take an enemy out of a fight but these things simply tore out their own arm, before throwing themself at Lia and Silva.

As for me, after watching for a few moments, I decided that they could deal with the plushies without needing my help, allowing me to focus on the thing I had seen in the shadows. If my guess was correct, that thing was responsible for the situation in the first place, so why shouldn’t I do battle against it where it resided? The Shadows were my realm and I wouldn’t let myself be denied by some toddling pretender.

Delving into the shadows, I took a moment to consider how to attack the being. A quick Observe told me something strange: the creature before me was named Anomaly, and had a level of ??. I could hardly ask for more detailed information, I was almost suffering from information overload just knowing that bit of highly useful data. But, as the joke went, when violence doesn’t solve a problem, you are not using enough of it. So, in this case, there was no such thing as Overkill, only not killed enough.

Without hesitating any further, I activated Overflow, channelling a massive amount of Astral Power into Darkness Magic and letting that power surge into the Shadows. If it was trying to hide within the Darkness, I would simply take the Darkness and let the thing be devoured. Immediately, I felt a force trying to absorb the power I asserted and switched tactics, feeding a creature like that would only make it stronger but if I could take the power from it, just as it tried to take my power, it would suffer for it.

With that idea, things turned into a strange sort of tug-of-war, with the anomaly and me both trying to wrestle control of the shadows from the other while harnessing the power we both had channelled into them. To my surprise, I soon realised that the creature had contributed far more power than I had, though maybe it shouldn’t have been one, the anomaly was here the entire time, a permanent resident of the shadows, allowing it to constantly channel power into them while I had only seconds to match its output. Even with my fairly prodigal powers, there was only so much I could do without time to apply my power.

But where the anomaly was stronger in the quantity of power, I enjoyed greater control over my powers and thus over the shadows in general. Amusingly, a part of my mind was greatly reminded of my training before being directly taught by Mrs Wu, when fighting other people, all of whom were larger and stronger than myself. Avoiding to meet the enemy head-on, applying leverage and using their own strength against them had been some of the most important tools in such confrontations and while I couldn’t use the same techniques, the principle still applied.

For a bit, I was making progress, not quickly but steadily. The way things were going, it wouldn’t take too long for me to overcome the anomaly and defeat it, here, where its powers were greatest, at least that was what I thought until the entire battle suddenly changed and the anomaly disappeared from the darkness.

For a moment, I was completely flabbergasted, straining to keep the suddenly completely unbound power from flaring out of control and destroying me. I was even tempted to leave the shadows myself but only took a glance into reality where I could see the anomaly flailing around, still floating above the crib while it kept my companions away from it. Bearing down on the power around me, I started to make rapid progress, taking control of the unleashed energies in the shadows while I tried to decide what to actually do with them. The easiest would be to disperse the power here, to funnel it back into the Astral River, as there was no way I’d be able to contain even a fraction of the roiling power the anomaly had channelled into the shadows prior to our arrival. That way, I should be able to return the area around us to a normal state, maybe even remove the dimensional weirdness, though I couldn’t be certain. Either way, taking that much energy out of the equation sounded like a good idea, as that much power just floating around would be incredibly dangerous.

My efforts were interrupted when the anomaly returned, only now it wasn’t able to use the darkness around us any longer. Instead, it lashed out directly, forcing me to choose between controlling the darkness and defending myself. However, instead of doing either, I decided to use a third option and used the Darkness I was controlling to strike the anomaly. It wasn’t an elegant attack, nor was it even remotely efficient, but I had a massive hammer of Darkness and I was using that hammer in the most obvious and blunt way, smashing the anomaly with all the power I could control and direct.

For a moment, the shadows turned weird, reality started to ripple and waver as if a stone was dropped into a still pond, the power I had unleashed was that potent. Holding on to my shape was difficult, to say nothing of keeping the powers filling the shadows under my control. Instead of trying to keep control, I decided to retreat, letting myself drop out of the shadows as the anomaly was torn apart by the rippling reality, its innate magical strength far from sufficient to protect itself.

Looking around the nursery, I could see that it wasn’t just the shadows that had been affected by the strike I had unleashed, even the physical world was rippling and changing from the blow. Noticing a few items that seemed to be strangely solid in a fluctuating room, I quickly grabbed them before calling out to my companions, trying to get them to move. Silva and Luna were both using their divine powers to keep a bubble of space around them from the distortion, a bubble just large enough for the five of us, but that didn’t help too much. Sure, we had a small area where we were safe but given that it seemed as if the entire hotel was breaking apart around us, we couldn’t just stay here and wait out the devastation.

Feeling the maelstrom of powers rippling around us, I took a risk and channelled some extra power into the world, not to contain the destruction, that would be impossible, but to give direction to a part of it. Instead of letting the forces around us continue on randomly, I managed to direct a sizeable portion of it towards one of the walls. As it impacted, I could only stare with wide eyes, the wall turned dark for a moment, before falling apart, parts of it melting away into strange, dark slime, other parts turning to dust and getting carried away by the wind that was blowing out from inside the hotel.

With the wall removed, there was nothing keeping us inside. Sure, there was a bit of a drop but given that the world was seemingly falling apart around us, getting out and falling a few metres was far preferable to being inside a building as everything went wonky. A quick exchange saw Luna sitting on Silva, holding on to the newly acquired cape, while Alex took their place on Lia’s shoulder, the two physically weaker people trusting their physically more capable companions to keep them safe. Then, we took a few quick steps and leapt through the hole in the wall, getting smacked by the tendrils as we exited. Luckily, the tendrils seemed to be just as wonky as the rest of reality, leaving them with only a fraction of their strength. The hits I took weren’t pleasant but they lacked the bone-crushing force the things had displayed earlier, leaving me battered and bruised but the worst damage I took came from the fall.

Lying there, in the high grass around the hotel, I rolled on my back, letting my head loll to the side as I watched the hotel. For a minute, it kept shifting and flexing in a manner no solid object could until suddenly, the entire thing started to fall apart, quite similar to the way the wall had disappeared. And then, with one final blast of wind, strong enough to rustle the leaves some hundred metres away, the hotel disappeared. Leaving me with so, so many questions and only a few notifications to grant me answers.