“Hey! Where’re you all going? Who said we were done playing?”

Tygge, freed from the wooden coffin prison by her arachnoid army, grabs a Servitor to launch it at us like ‘shot put.’ The rocketing projectile's carapace hits my flame construct the moment I slow to align us properly with the tunnel leading back toward the surface. As I said before, my flaming wolf head has taken a lot of hits this fight, and my mind can’t maintain the construct’s integrity any longer after all that abuse. The Servitor itself shatters on impact, sending chitin shrapnel through the flaming wolf head, and ultimately demolishing its structure.

Spilling out of the disintegrating skull chamber, we land with varying degrees of grace. Megan is still rousing from her regenerated injuries and would’ve taken a rough fall if Sue hadn’t wrapped her in an embrace. The Froglin gets a few scrapes for the trouble, but stumbles to her feet and sprints away when I shout, “Run! Everyone run!”

All Cottontail has to do is a few flips and she lands on her feet with her arms outstretched for applause (her expression, on the other hand, is quite distressed) thanks to her Performer’s Body.

Although Dura skids to a halt on her ass like the lovable lug she is, the Ogress brushes herself off, grabs Cottontail, and throws the Showbunny over her shoulder while lumbering to follow Sue.

I take the rearguard despite suffering from a splitting headache after my flame construct’s shattering. My explosive double-jumps allow me to stay in the air when everyone else fell from the fragmenting wolf head.

Looking back, I see Tygge and a hundred skittering arachnoids right behind us.

Without the luxury of time to form a new flame construct, I turn and shoot streams of fire while Cottontail pulls some area-denial tools from her hat by the handful. As I fly backward along the tunnel, burning the pursuant Weblings as we go, I watch as caltrops litter the ground beneath me, followed by hundreds of marbles, scores of wadded gobs of gum, and dozens of banana peels. Servitors get stuck on the sticky pink clumps, Black Widows skid on the marbles before screaming as they fall onto the caltrops, and the Centipede trips on a banana peel—blocking the tunnel with its prone bulk. My flames sweep across anything that gets past the gauntlet to approach us.

Tygge navigates all of this by gripping the rocky surface of the tunnel with feet-maws as she runs past her roasting arachnoid allies. The Darkling Horror climbs the wall and starts sprinting toward us upside down on the ceiling like a true freak of nature.

“Your fire-thingies seem pretty interesting, but I really want to play with the bunny girl, okay?”

“Not happening.” I throw a blast of flames at Tygge’s face, which splits open into a toothy maw that swallows the burning gases in a single gulp. At this point, I don’t know what I was expecting.

“Mmm, spicy!”

Okay, I’m going to need some flame constructs after all! Thinking back to an earlier attempt of mine, I find reforming my wolf-headed fiery fists is easier now than before thanks to my practice and experience. “Chew on this!”

I double-jump at Tygge, swinging with a right hook of burning canine fury as I come. The Darkling Horror counters with her palm-maw going to grab my wrist, but I give her a knowing grin. I’ve been studying her movements with Fast Learning all this time! My attack was a feint, and now I release an explosive blast from a paw, rocketing my leg up for a kick. Hastily formed flame greaves rock Tygge’s head backward as I solidly connect with my opponent.

That exposes her neck-maw to lunge at me, but I follow with another kick to the solar plexus that forces her away for a few precious seconds.

Megan comes to her senses, takes in the situation, and hops over to Dura’s free shoulder to perch there in a sprinter’s start. “THUNDER…!!!” She knows by now we need stronger firepower to leave a dent in Tygge’s carapace—the Horror is barely singed from my flame-strike.

“Mistwess Megan, don’t! You’ll be behind enemy lines after!”

Yeah, if Megan throws herself down the tunnel at Tygge, whether she hits or misses, she’ll be surrounded by enemy Weblings in a de-powered state. Not even I’ll be fast enough to save her then.

“Damn, you’re right, Sue. Cottontail, sweetie, give me something that packs a punch!”

With a determined expression, Cottontail rummages through her hat while I hold Tygge off. What she pulls forth this time is a pair of mouse-girl-sized boxing gloves.

“Wow, first try! Great job; but, umm, I don’t know how much good they’ll do…” Megan frowns at the gloves while puzzling over them.

“Not done,” the scowling Showbunny grunts before reaching back in the top hat. She then produces two tiny metal horseshoes fit for a miniature pony, drops one in each glove, and hands them over with a small, serious nod. “Fuck em’ up, sis.”

Megan slips the gloves on and flexes her fists as sparks crackle in her hair, making the horseshoes glow bright yellow through the layer of fabric covering her hands. She gives a grim grin and says, “I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

The Denki Nezumi zips over to join me as I fistfight Tygge. I’m treading midair on double-jump paw explosions while the Darkling Horror sprints upside down on the ceiling, both of us throwing hands at one another when Megan comes at us from the side in a blonde blur. The electric mouse girl runs circles around the tunnel using her speed to climb the walls and ceiling, spiraling along the cavern as we move while dodging stalactites, punches Tygge in the side, and darts away before the Horror can retaliate. Her weighted and electrically charged boxing gloves leave a horseshoe-shaped singe on the Horror’s black carapace, not to mention how the shock momentarily staggers Tygge. That leaves the insectoid living experiment open for a flame-greaved kick to the side.

Thin trails of smoke rise from both burn marks on our enemy’s sleek chitin. Tygge reels, shakes her head, and rallies with a disturbingly wide grin, never ceasing her dead run along the ceiling, “I take it back, you all are way more fun than I thought! I’m having the time of my life~!”

“Let’s see how you like it after this,” I yell while diving in to pummel the Darkling Horror.

My wolf-headed fists connect again and again with Tygge’s head, shoulder, and sternum, each hit slowing her pursuit of my fleeing friends. Megan comes around and around with the regularity of an ancient human metronome, pummeling thighs, knees, and abdomen. My constructs protect my flesh from retaliation when her carapace segments open to counter-bite at me, and I’m constantly learning the best approach angles to minimize that threat. Megan, meanwhile, is simply too fast to catch.

It seems like we’re finally piling on noticeable damage when Tygge changes things up yet again. The Darkling Horror preemptively opens a maw on her abdomen when Megan approaches next and a wave of flames shoots forth from that throat. My mousy companion gives a shocked, ‘Eep!’ as she dodges the fire with an evasive ‘S’ along the walls and ceiling as she runs. I find myself the next target when maws on Tygge’s upper torso spit carrot daggers my way.

“She can spit up what she swallows?!?” I shout while batting aside the vegetable missiles and ducking under a banana cream pie. Then I realize I’ve made a mistake when my wolf-headed fist crunches down on a can of shaving cream. There’s an explosion, and all three of us are covered with thick, inedible foam. “Wait, is this stuff flam—”

*WHUMP!*

“Whaaa!”

“Eek!” Megan squeaks.

My flaming fur and hair ignite the shaving cream instantly, tiny droplets of burning foam spraying from me in all directions as I flail in surprise, “Oh, God Beast, how is it so flammable!?!”

Thankfully, this amount of fire can't reach me through my control, but the other two need to address the issue.

The Denki Nezumi zips over to Sue, who hoses her down with Froglin Water Magic before the heat does her much harm. Tygge, on the other hand, drops from the ceiling to roll on the ground in an attempt to put out the flames.

“Here, use this to smother the fire,” Cottontail calls while tossing a large white sheet of fabric at the Darkling Horror, who obediently grabs it and wraps themselves up—all according to plan.

“Wow, that’s cold, Little Lady,” I comment as I watch this unfold.

“She hurt my sister,” the Showbunny growls with an arctic glare. “Abraca-fucking-dabra.”

The white shroud falls flat on the cavern floor, the Darkling Horror beneath it having vanished without a trace.

I pat out the flaming foam on my heat-resistant skin and survey the scene. Dura is catching her breath; she has Ogre Toughness, not ‘Endurance,’ and she didn’t select Stamina for upgrading this morning. Sue is fussing over Megan, who motorboats Cottontail’s fluffy-tailed rear to heal her minor burns with a static charge refill. The Servitors, Weblings, and Centipede scowl at us over the burning barricade of residual shaving cream from the initial explosion, but don’t seem inclined to follow.

“Let’s get out of here before something else crazy happens,” I decide. Nods all around. A flash of purple from under the white sheet catches our attention. Everyone startles at the unexpected jump-scare. “Keep running!”

Reality shivers under the strain of two irreconcilable rules clashing. Then Tygge’s form reappears beneath the sheet as if she were climbing stairs up from beneath the tunnel floor. The fabric wrinkles, twists, and gets slurped up as the Darkling Horror’s face maw swallows the sheet.

“Yum, tastes like something pretty!” We don’t stick around to explain how Cottontail’s summoned laundry somehow smells like flowers. We’re already a hundred feet down the tunnel away from the Horror and her disturbing menagerie of allies. This time, it seems we have a far enough head start that Tygge doesn’t choose to pursue. “Okay, bye-bye! Come back soon so we can play again~!”

----------------------------------------

We all sigh in relief as we exit the caverns and afternoon sunlight bathes our skin. Megan sits in Sue’s lap, motioning for Cottontail to come put her weary head on the Froglin’s plump thighs as well. I plop down next to Dura and reach over to pluck a few more crystal-blood feathers from her back that she missed earlier.

“Dura, how’re you doing?” I ask. The Ogress may be Tough, but she’s far from invincible. Frankly, considering the number of cuts and other injuries accumulated on her frame, she isn’t in any condition to continue adventuring today.

“Dura fine.” Megan pokes the Ogress on a purpling bruise. “Ow.”

“Yeah, you’re not fine. Cottontail, do you think you can repeat whatever you did earlier to heal yourself and fix up Dura?”

The Showbunny furrows her brows for a moment even as Megan daintily massages her scalp. “You mean when… Ahem. Um, Miss Suka, I didn’t—I-I mean, I can’t do healing magic, yet.”

“So, then…?”

“That’s weiwrd.”

“Dura confus.”

“Cottontail, sweetie, then who healed you?”