I lifted up a god, thinking for just a moment before divinity stated intruding that it was just like before: a mossy green humanoid without much shape. It had two arms without hands or fingers, two legs without feet or toes, no neck, just a slab of extra a little less wide than the rest of its body. I couldn’t recall whether it had facial features, because the mouth areas of both creatures were locked together the only other time I’d seen it.

Luckily it was curled into the fetal position, because I had no wish to look between its legs to see what was going on there.

The body was lighter than I’d imagined. It came up off the grassy lawn without much effort.

For about the first three seconds.

“You damn fool,” the Ranger said.

The notifications started, and they were about to come continuously. This one said I had contracted divinity poisoning and I was taking damage, but the onset of that damage had been delayed on account of Healer’s Resistance.

“Clay!” someone shouted from outside the divinity area.

“I was betting your name would be Darryl,” I said, and started moving.

“Hey, hoss, you put that thing down and come on over here. We get you back to HQ and—”

“CLAY!” the magically enhanced shout came.

He turned and bellowed. “Aww come on now, I got ‘im right here. You want ‘im or not?”

“We got bigger problems! Get your keister back here!”

Azalea was big problems. I just hoped the poison Nakamamon and sexpot wasn’t going to do anything stupid.

Oh, who was I kidding? She was going to take on this entire outfit and get herself killed. Amended: she was going to try taking on this entire outfit.

I put some pep in my step and hurried out of this yard, into the next and then into the alley. Clay left to help fight Azalea. I had a sudden and powerful spike of regret and guilt for putting her in this position. She was my Chewy, and I couldn’t just leave her to die like this.

I couldn’t be sure this was going to work, either, so I sprinted over people’s gardens and quaint little wooden fences, around corners, through alleys.

The divine damage started coming on. The initial feeling was its own sort of euphoria; I felt lightheaded and like my body was made of clouds. Harp music and the distant choir began to intrude on my ears. I was pretty sure I had a halo, or a Mandela, or a third eye. Eventually I’d get to the point where I was making hand gestures up towards the sky or down towards the earth. They had deep significance; I was entirely convinced of it at the time.

At the same time, Mender’s Soothing Mental Balm

kept me feeling just peachy. I felt like nothing could stop me. All was well and would continue to be, so long as I kept on my current course. I knew this much, and I knew this beyond a shadow of a doubt. The divinity wasn’t destroying my ability to make decisions.

I will say this: the god in my arms had already relaxed and looped two mossy green arms around me.

By the time I reached the other Lover, I had one hand pointed up, clasping my ring finger while my other three fingers remained outstretched. This was definitely a way to commune with the heavens. The angels had out their horns and were signaling my victory with riotous fanfare.

The calming effect of Mender’s Soothing Mental Balm was beginning to let me know that, despite my good mood, resistances and delusions of godliness, things weren’t quite so okay as the aura was making them out to be.

***

Cinzy remembered being swung between two strong people very differntly than now. Back when she was barely above her parents’ legs and the pressure to be perfect hadn’t ramped up, they’d taken her by the arms, one on each side, and launched her up into the air. If she tucked her legs up, she could swing backwards as well, giggle screaming all the way with the sort of delight that was hard to get nowadays.

Now she screamed as Ivy and Isabelle launched her through the hole in the gigantic sphere. This was not the same carefree weightlessness, surrounded by the love and absolute safety that came with being a child. She knew she might end up smushed by the colossal, town-sized ball slowly rotating around the water-covered pedestal.

They hadn’t paused to take a look at the clone of Larelle, they hadn’t stopped at the top to take in the breathtaking vista. Instead Tara had gotten both her feet into the Guardians’ hands, laced together into stirrups, and they had launched her some bazillion fracking feet into the air. When she hadn’t come sliding down, Cinzy could only assume she’d either splatted on the other side, or made her way into the town’s opening.

Several sentient Nakamamon were watching in disbelief and horror. They sure had tried to stop the four humans from doing something so blatantly idiotic, but none of Cinzy’s three companions wanted to hear it. It was like they could feel what she felt; the presence of Fletcher nearby and the incoming world-shattering orgasms that would be sure to follow.

Or they really were worried for his safety in the face of the Agency—SNORC, pfffffffttt— and they felt time was of the essence.

These thoughts went through her brain in the several mortifying, gut-liquefying instants that followed her being propelled up so high, so fast.

Great googily moogily. She made the mistake of turning her head to view how high up she was, and saw the entirety of the nearby landscape. She wasn’t just above the trees, but above several foothills as well. Never mind that the pedestal with the rushing water was some eight or ten stories high. She was in the fracking stratosphere, and she wasn’t in a fracking airplane. And then she was sliding against the polished stone of the sphere… and then the opening swallowed her up.

The moment she was through the opening, her momentum changed and she fell to the inside of the sphere. Tara’s face was looming over her a second later, radiant with excitement or oncoming motherhood or both.

“You made it!” she bubbled. “When I got airborne I thought ‘oh my goodness, Cinzy’s not going to like this, she didn’t like—“

“Oh my gods get out of my face, your hair… tickling…”

Both froze as the distant sounds of screaming drifted over to them.

“Come on,” Tara said, and hauled her to her feet.

A second later, Ivy was struggling to get through. She turned to Cinzy, looking pained.

“Isabelle?” Cinzy asked.

“She doesn’t have enough Tokens to make the jump by herself,” Tara supplied.

“Okay, it’s okay. It’ll be fine,” Ivy said, eyes gone distant.

The expression she turned Cinzy’s way absolutely broke her heart. The naked terror and hopelessness didn’t belong on that tattooed face.

“Hey,” she said, and turned on an ability before reaching out and pulling Ivy into an embrace. “She’s not gone, okay? The entrance will come around in less than a day. No problem.”

Ivy let herself be hugged tight. After a second, Cinzy heard the barest hint of a whisper.

“Hmm?” she asked.

“S-sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s fine.”

“This… is… I made fun of you for this.”

“We gotta get moving,” Tara said. “There’s… a very strange fight going on. I don’t see Airaconda or Poppins or Muppin. But there’s a purple girl, and a… hopefully not Tweedle Dee. I thought Dee was a male.”

“I forgive you, you big marshmallow,” Cinzy whispered. “Now we need you to keep us safe and save Fletcher, okay? And then we go get your boo and you two can make out for hours.”

“Okay,” Ivy breathed.

“And make gross squishing sounds—”

“Eww stop.”

“—and moan ‘I love you boo’ and stuff.”

“When this is over you’re getting punched,” Ivy breathed.

“Atta girl.”

***

Tara couldn’t be sure what she was looking at, except that it involved a full-on team of Agency people doing something she hadn’t seen before: fighting Nakamamon.

A whole lot of emotions and thoughts rolled through her, but she ignored them and focused on the here and now. A griffin-rider was pelting the two Nakamamon with arrows. Several of the Guardians had their big magic shields up. Another Ranger had closed on the purple Nakamamon with the tentacles, had been hit somehow, and was down for the count. Whether she was dead or not was a question Tara couldn’t answer until she got closer. A Rogue was trying entirely too hard to get a clear shot, but the purple tentacled Nakamamon did something that kept him flinching back into the cover and safety of a large house. She caught movement: another Rogue, this one standing immobile behind the purple Nakamamon and the fox one, who mostly stood there looking boobalicious.

The fox Nakamamon radiated purity and goodness, and also was also in the process of blasting the second Rogue with a cloud of pollen. He fell limp to the cobblestones.

“We aren’t here for you!” the Guardian shouted. “Cease this attack at once or we will use deadly force!”

Not far off, a yellow Nakamamon that appeared very much like Shakindria floated on folded legs, hands resting placidly upon them. The Mindela must have said something telepathically to that Guardian, the leader because he sneered.

“My people are under attack,” he said, and pointed toward the purple-skinned female with the writhing tentacles. “Those… I don’t care if they’re not your citizens, and I don’t care what the treaty says!”

A big conglomeration of rocks rumbled up next to the Mindela, followed by a squat cat person, just about double the size of a house cat. It had creamy fur and that imperious look only cats can pull off perfectly.

An arrow thudded into the purple Nakamamon and she fell. The fox girl screamed, a sound that made even Tara regret all her actions from the last several days. They could’ve killed people! Those poor Agency stooges were the lowest rungs of the Agency ladder. They couldn’t possibly deserve—

“It’s a fairy aspect effect,” Cinzy said from beside her, and some kind of glowing pink Bard magic coming off her helped to calm Tara’s horrid feelings of betraying everyone and everything. “I’ve got a resistance to it from Poppins. Come on. The sooner we get into this fight, the sooner we can help find Fletcher.”

Cinzy hauled her and Ivy to their feet, and got them moving just in time for one of the Wizards to point a glowing, jewel-tipped staff toward the fox girl and blast her with several tiny fire bolts. The pressure of all of Tara’s impurities and faults fell away with the fox screaming and falling away.

Suddenly, the Wizard’s staff was wrenched out of his hands, to screams of protest from the Guardian in charge.

“They’re still alive!” he shrieked. “Your treaty hasn’t been broken!”

The Wizard’s staff suddenly hung in the air some fifteen feet, before dropping. Guardian and Mindela stared at one another, the former furious and arrogant, the latter calm and unperturbed. More Nakamamon were assembling behind the three townsfolk, watching a full team of Agency humans fight off two little girls. The leader sneered, muttered something dismissive, and turned back to the tentacled one, and the fox girl.

The purple girl might’ve been able to dish it out, but she couldn’t take it. She was barely able to lift herself off the cobblestones and stare venom at the humans.

“I want that poison one bound tight,” he commanded. “Wizards, take your Guardian partner over there and get to work. Lots of ropes, and make them tight.”

“That one’s mine,” Cinzy and Ivy said simultaneously, then shared a smirk of dark glee.

“Good,” Tara said. “I’m looping around for pot shots. I’ll down the griffin rider and find Fletcher.”

Tara did exactly that, manifesting her magical bow with her ability and raining a multitude of stun arrows at the Agency team. With them focused on her, she fired off another several arrows, which split off and split off again, until they were four, then eight, then sixteen. It was an ability that had never seen use outside of training, and it worked wonders on catching their attention.

“That’s Fletcher’s Ranger!” one of the Wizards declared.

“Subdue her. Lightning damage. Let’s get that bow out of her hands,” the leader called. The glint in his eye told her she had done a bit of miscalculation; this man was supremely pissed off, probably at having a treaty waved in his face.

“Oh sh—” Tara only got that far before three different Wizards raised their jewel-tipped staves and let loose their shock and lightning spells.

***

Ivy had only a split second to clamp her hands over her ears before Cinzy’s ability pierced the air and sent half the Agency team to their knees. Waves of visible energy pulsed out of her and slammed forward in a wall of booming sound. It pulsed toward, into, and through the Wizards, crashing their spells and bringing them to their knees. It dropped the griffin rider out of the sky, and the three Guardians who’d spotted her hunched behind their glowing blue shields. Those three were driven back by several inches.

“—never seen you do that before,” Ivy shouted over the din.

“I never had Muscularity before,” she responded, and batted her eyelashes at the tattooed Guardian.

The leader grimaced, looked left and right, and immediately flashed with magic. Instead of the blue shield, he manifested an entire set of heavy plate armor, the kind you’d see in a MMORPG that loved shoulder pauldrons. Ivy didn’t like the look of this, but she had her own set of tricks up her sleeve. When they inevitably tried to go after the squishy Bard, she engaged Intercept and teleported over in between them with her own armor manifested.

The nature of all Guardian abilities was tanking hits. You could take out the hits others had to dish out. This made all of them pretty terrible attackers; after all, they weren’t supposed to do violence, but survive what violence was done to them, and protect others from Nakamamon attacks. The Wizards were terrible at it.

Her Shield had leveled up not into armor, but into a spell mirror. It appeared as a tower shield, a literal wall, and not convex like the tower shields of old, but slightly concave.  The leader crashed into her, bounced off, and went rolling into someone’s flower garden, only to have several Wizard spells bounce off her shield and directly into his face. Her Agility and Muscularity were high enough that she lightsabered several magic missiles, fire bolts and lightning zaps down into the Guardian leader.

And here’s the thing: the system knew. It could tell when you were going on the offensive and when you were standing your ground trying to keep danger away from others. It gave her experience for keeping herself and others out of danger. Right now, she would be getting experience by the truckload. And the same went for the Wizards: they were rewarded for research, learning, and mastering a variety of spells. These guys were doing it wrong. The system knew and it would reward her for doing it the right way.

It was the Rangers you had to worry about. Although they got the most experience and the best results from being out of town in the wilderness, and although they got better results from befriending wild, non-sentient Nakamamon, they still got results from hunting and using their magically manifested bow and arrows, or their swords.

The griffin rider popped up and loosed a hail of arrows her way, so Ivy pulled Cinzy close and ducked behind her shield. Several more Wizard spells went off, but they were drawn to her shield. Without her deflecting with intent, they bounced about randomly. One or two hit squishy Wizards and they quickly figured out they ought to stop.

This is Christopher with the cavalry coming to get him. This is Ivy hoping they weren’t too late.