System Report:

  The Girl in Pink

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  Yenna had, quite honestly, no idea what was going on.

  Every sensible instinct in her body kept screaming they were in mortal peril. Mari’s still-warm body was lying right there, the church burned and groaned like an elderly shipyard around them, a god-like Core hovered above the abyss, and murderous townsfolk lurked at the edges of her vision.

  But even they, much like Yenna, seemed to be struggling to make sense of what their eyes insisted was real.

  The girl in the pink hoodie should have been dead. Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Properly dead. The moment she’d been smashed across the length of the church by the High Priest’s first attack, she should have died. She had ploughed through over half a dozen pews with her body before coming to a halt. By all accounts, she ought to have been screaming, twitching, or perishing in several unsightly pieces.

  Instead, the girl had simply gotten up, dusted herself off, and fixed the High Priest with a smouldering glare.

  A High Priest, mind you, who was no longer a man so much as a nightmare. Hovering a dozen feet above the ground on a tangle of twitchy limbs, he radiated the sort of unholy menace that would make most sane mortals turn and run.

  And yet, the girl—dusty, bruised, and apparently indestructible—glared up at him and shouted, with all the righteous fury of someone who’d been interrupted mid-conversation:

  “Hey, you oversized daddy long legs, I was—”

  “Insolence!” Amadeus North bellowed, a pale sceptre materializing in his hands. It arced through the air like a blade meant to split the world.

  The floor did not so much break as explode. Stone and dust erupted in a violent gout of debris, carving a line of destruction straight through the church. Fires were extinguished, pews obliterated, and faced with the sort of attack that would bisect most foes before they even had time to realize their tragic last words were going to be something like, “Wait, what’s that no—” the girl naturally…

  Started cartwheeling?

  As the spot she had been occupying seconds earlier exploded in a deluge of shattered stones, a pink blur whirled through the church at accelerating speeds. It bounced off a wall, it curved around a crumbling pillar, and by the time the girl came to a sliding halt within the main aisle, she was grasping a burning piece of wood—possibly a vital support beam, or possibly an ex-pew living its final moments in glory—brandishing it like a hero of legend.

  Even as dust and masonry kept trickling down around her, on her lips was the smug grin of someone who, quite confidently, was declaring:

  “I win.”

  With a cry of determination, eyes set on the High Priest’s horrific form, the girl twirled around and hurled the piece of wood like a mythical javelin forged to slay dragons.

  It flew. It spun. It gleamed in the firelight like destiny itself…

  And then it clattered to the ground approximately six steps in front of her.

  There was a long, echoing pause in which even the flames seemed to consider the awkwardness of the moment.

  Amadeus North, sceptre still raised, could only stare as the girl dusted off her knees, gave a small, embarrassed cough, and scampered over to retrieve her splinter-javelin with all the determination of someone refusing to admit—even to herself—that no, that had not been the plan.

  With admirable confidence, she reset the situation. As if they were the fools for pretending her first attempt should ever have counted.

  Another smirk. Another chin raised in the smug certain of victory.

  The second time, she took a running start.

  A truly heroic throw. One that sacrificed every ounce of her balance, dignity, and relationship with gravity and…

  Splat—her perfect form, betrayed by an undone shoelace, leaving her to meet the floor like an uninspired pancake. Face-first.

  The javelin, naturally, clattered down even shorter a distance than before. It didn’t so much as threaten a single hair on the High Priest’s many legs.

  Was…she even taking this seriously?

  “Stop messing around!” Amadeus North roared, rising higher into the air. Half his legs punched into the walls in search of an aerial foothold, leaving his figure to ascend into blackened smoke as the other half of his limbs grasped for bits of rubble and flaming debris with the clear intention of hurling them at anything that looked even slightly smug or pink.

  Whether any of the debris reached the girl, Yenna had no desire to find out. Her head already ached enough as it was, and even if she didn’t have to worry about becoming the direct target of a flying altar just yet—shattering against a stone pillar in a swarm of angry shards and smouldering wood—swaths of the remaining townsfolk had begun to stir in unsettling ways throughout the church.

  Keeping low, Yenna darted along the walls until she reached Alana, huddled against a rogue pew and clutching the gaping wound in her side with one hand, while the other cradled her head like she was trying to keep it from escaping her. The woman was shaking, lips moving as she whispered and muttered incomprehensible words to herself.

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  “We need to get out of here,” Yenna hissed, the words sharp and urgent, careful not to attract the wrong sort of attention—by which she meant any sort of attention at all.

  Behind them, something exploded, leaving the entire building to groan in protest.

  Even if they had been forgotten about for the moment—and that was a very fragile “if”—there was no telling how long that blessed oversight would last. Or when a flying flagstone would accidentally clip them in passing.

  Unfortunately, Alana didn’t seem to share her urgency.

  The woman just dug her fingers deep into her scalp as though hoping to find a reset button somewhere underneath, her lips twisted in pain. Possibly a headache, possibly something worse. Nothing worth dying over, Yenna decided.

  “We need to get moving,” she urged, grabbing Alana’s arm and trying to pull her upright. “We can’t—”

  “Why’d you show up so late?”

  The words were cold. Not the simple chill of anger, but that sharp, glacial tone people used when they wanted to make sure the knife went in clean.

  Yenna froze.

  “If you’d only been here from the beginning,” Alana continued, still staring at the floor, “we could’ve fought. The ritual wouldn’t have been completed. Mari wouldn’t be dead. This is your fault.”

  The accusation hung there, heavy and bitter. Yenna heard it, felt it, and—quite admirably, she thought—didn’t bite back. There would be time for guilt later. For anger. For screamed words and regret. Assuming, of course, there was a “later”.

  Bits of the ceiling kept trickling down around them in trails of dust and masonry. Flames and smoke rose all around. And another crash! had just split the air, followed by the unmistakable sight of something pink hurtling through the church and screaming “Wallaaaaace!”

  Yenna didn’t even try to make sense of it.

  “Not now,” she said, forcing her voice calm. “We need to—”

  It wasn’t Alana shrugging her off that stopped her.

  It was the movement.

  Just beyond them, one of the fallen townsfolk were beginning to twitch. Not the slow, noble twitch of the recently deceased either—no, this was the active, purposeful sort, like a marionette remembering it had strings.

  Fingers curled. Nails—no, claws—scraped against the stone. Glistening ooze seeped down their wrists, thick and unpleasant, accompanied by the wet, squelching gasp of something trying very hard to remember how lungs were meant to work.

  “Shit. We need to go.” Yenna yanked at Alana again, but the woman just slapped her hand aside.

  Worse than that, she yelled:

  “No!” Her voice broke, fingers twisting deeper into her own hair. “You’re going to get me killed as well. Just like how you’ve gotten everyone else killed. All for your own gain, you fucking bastard!”

  It wasn’t the words that made Yenna’s blood run cold—it was the volume. The kind of volume that bounced against walls. That cut through crackling flames and thick smoke. The kind that drew attention and made things notice you. Things that had absolutely no business doing so.

  Across the church, several heads snapped toward them. Eyes—glassily vacant a heartbeat ago—suddenly gleamed with focus. Without even the courtesy of hesitation, the townsfolk that’d been standing around like mindless puppets broke into a dead sprint, not stopping for either falling rubble or rising flames.

  Before she could as much as curse beneath her breath, the first of them hit Yenna with a reckless lunge.

  It wasn’t a graceful tackle—nothing about it was—but it was effective. They rolled across the slick stones, air ripping from her lungs as the world turned into a blur of noise and pain and movement.

  By the time she remembered to fight back, rough fingers had already found her throat. Cold, unyielding, and squeezing tighter.

  With a strained gasp that failed to fill anything of notice, Yenna clawed at the middle-aged man, reeking of sweat, smoke, and singed flesh. Her nails raked across his face, but he didn’t even flinch. His grip only tightened, the world around her pulsing and darkening like a dying lantern.

  “Fuck…you!”

  Her defiance drowned beneath the screams pounding into her ears. Thrashing, flailing battle echoed all around. Yet through it all, somewhere close, there was…

  A hiss. A very guttural hiss.

  Yenna barely had time to register the sound before a blur of motion cannonballed into the man pinning her down. Not Alana, but something equally hot-tempered and considerably slimier. It had claws, fangs, and scaled skin the precise shade of green usually found on old porridge and bad decisions.

  Gasping for air, Yenna scrambled backward, each wheezing breath helping her brain reassemble the bloody, chaotic mural before her: shadowy figures locked in furious combat, clawing, biting, punching—human shapes twisted by the Core’s madness into something beyond reason.

  Staggering upright, she didn’t bother trying to locate Alana as she stumbled toward the only way out she could see: the Core itself, pulsing at the centre of the carnage like a glowing heart. The pink-sweater girl must’ve emerged from somewhere down there.

  She’d barely locked eyes on the crumbling hole when something cold and wet raked across her side.

  With a pained gasp, Yenna hit the stone floor once more. This time, though, instinct beat shock. She twisted, rolled, and narrowly got out of the way before her assailant could rip her apart.

  This one was even less human than the last.

  Its head was far too big, its eyes far too small, and its mouth far too enthusiastic. Several rows of jagged teeth came snapping her way as the creature launched itself forward like a torpedo wearing dentures, headfirst and single minded.

  Instinct kicked in; legs went up; and Yenna narrowly managed to keep the rabid thing away with a hastily delivered kick. Which did nothing to keep the rancid gust of salt water and rotting fish from slamming into her senses.

  She barely had time to gag as the creature spun around and charged at her again with all the forethought of a hurled brick.

  Another kick, and Yenna rolled onto her stomach, no longer trusting her legs as she desperately, inelegantly, scrambled for that hole in the floor. The world had reduced itself to a single pounding heartbeat and the distant chorus of screaming, smashing, and architectural collapse.

  The hole in the floor—that yawning, dreadful promise of escape—was her only goal.

  And then, just as she could feel the rabid creature lunging at her once more, teeth snapping for her neck—

  Clang!

  The unmistakable sound of metal meeting flesh.

  Gasping for breath, blinking through the haze, Yenna briefly wondered if she’d died without realizing it. It was the only way she could explain what she was seeing right now.

  A tall figure rose before her, smeared with artistic streaks of blood and grime as she wrenched six feet of iron candle holder back into a ready position.

  “You… you’re alive?” Yenna croaked.

  “Either that, or we’re both dead,” Gami replied, offering her hand, “and we’ve both been dragged to hell to continue our little adventure together.”

  Around them, pillars were erupting in clouds of dust and shattered stone; limbs were being ripped apart by eager claws; flames and smoke mingled in a sickening inferno; and an abominable High Priest was rampaging with enough fervour to leave the floor quaking.

  Yenna took her hand. “Yeah,” she wheezed, as a large chunk of roof vanished into the storm outside, “hell sounds about right.”