“Marco!” Elisa called. Marco could hear it now, if only just. Maintaining three of Quill apparently put some level of strain on his ability to maintain this place. It made sense if this was a short-term skill, and the power of what he was seeing made that feel likely. He was slipping. “We are trying something.”

A burst of arrowfire came from nowhere, catching two of the Quills off guard. Not much damage was done, but Quill scowled in annoyance at the distraction.

“Truth inside this place is mine to influence. Truth from outside can get in. Next time, I’ll have to budget power to keep enemy fire from entering. Thanks for that lesson. Luckily, nothing your team can do can do much to me, anyway. I think it’s time to end this.”

Marco wouldn’t let that happen, he decided. Unfortunately, the decision no longer appeared to be his. He tried to lift his sword arm in defense and found his arm no longer followed his commands. He was losing blood, or else Quill had poisoned him, or else he, for once, was just beaten. Whatever it was, the next backhand from Quill put him on the ground. The three clones homed in on his position, claws ready for a final strike.

“Marco! Riv is going eighty percent. Captain’s Cry!” Elisa yelled. “We are doing operation Slicing Dark.”

Memories of the battle with the bat in the cave washed over Marco as he let loose with his buffing skill. Something about it shook the space just enough that he could see his friends, which strengthened himself just enough to curl into a ball and cover his face. Quill seemed to think he had given up, and the man was more or less right. Whatever happened next was in Riv’s less-than-capable but entirely enthusiastic hands.

Gold washed over the space, which was powerless to stop the sheer brightness of Riv’s overdrive effect. Eighty percent was an awful lot, and though Riv would never be able to hit a target as fast-moving as Quill with it, he didn’t need to when the target stood as still as stone and waited for it. From inside of Quill's house, Riv’s club made contact with the front wall and evaporated the entire thing into a storm of boulders, chunks, and razor-sharp slivers of stone.

None of the fire coming at Quill was magical or system-enhanced, but it was moving so fast Marco only heard it after it started to hit the area. He suspected he would have died right then if he wasn’t completely under the protective cover of all three of Quill’s bodies, which took the brunt of the damage for him. A wave of dust obscured his vision for a second as Quill screamed in terror, then went silent.

When the dust cleared, two of the Quills were dead. One had a spike of stone as long as an arm through its head, and the other had been sliced so thoroughly through its neck by some sharpened piece of shrapnel that no amount of regeneration could have saved him.

The third Quill was alive, if not well. He fell to his knees, grasping his chest with both arms and breathing in a heavy, wet-sounding kind of way that did not bode well for his continued survival. Marco couldn’t move, really, but he didn’t really need to, either. He had a good idea of what was going to happen next.

“Hey, jackass,” Aethe said. “That’s my captain.”

She put a fully charged arrow through his head at point-blank range as Elisa looked on with grim satisfaction. In the distance, a weakened Riv gave a little cheer just before he fell to the ground. Marco smiled with bloody teeth as he joined Riv on the ground.

Elisa had plenty of power left for healing, having not used all that much during the fight. Several minutes later, Marco was more or less stitched up, though he felt sore in a way he was sure wouldn’t clear for days. Whatever hope they had of looting more of Quill’s house evaporated as the Riv-inspired structural instability and gravity of the situation caught up with it, leaving the entire structure as little more than a pile of rubble.

Marco and his team took a short breather on the hill between Quill’s house and the town, looking down at the wreckage of both while the shakiness of worn-off adrenaline steadied out.

Marco set that aside for later. Knowing all of this information would make him want to make decisions or try things out, and he simply didn’t have the energy. It would be much easier to just tolerate not knowing for a while.

“It looks like it calmed down, down there. I guess there’s only so long you can go all-out, no matter how strong you are. They are either injured or exhausted down there,” Elisa observed.

“Or dead.” Marco said. “Riv, can you walk?”

“I can walk.” Riv stood, a bit shaky but mobile. “I actually only used seventy-nine percent of my strength that time so that I’d be at least conscious for this part of it. I would have felt really bad if it didn’t quite work.”

They walked down to the town together, slowly but steadily. They felt like they were there too soon anyway.

The aftermath of the battle was not pretty, but it also wasn’t nearly as ugly as any of them had feared. That was a comfort in limited ways. They had expected everyone to die, and many people had. Most people who lived in Quilton were monsters of one sort or another, but that didn’t mean they were equals in all ways.

Those who had survived tended to be both the weakest and the strongest. The strongest, like the Fowl Wizard, lived because they had been able to plow through all the resistance in their way, or else they were at least strong enough to escape when the situation turned against them. The weakest had been prey, had known it, and in some cases had been able to hide.

But not all.

“Looks like we won’t be getting any more rudder adjustments.” Riv looked down at one of their few friends on this island, a crumpled heap of what he had been. “I didn’t know him that well. I don’t think it should matter as much as it feels like it does.”

“It’s okay for it to hurt,” Elisa said. “None of this should have happened.”

“We had a lot of chances to take down Quill.” Marco bent down and laid a canvas over the man’s body. For now, that was all they could do. Until the other townsfolk recovered from their own battles, there just wasn’t the manpower needed to dig the number of graves they’d need to bury everyone.

“What’s going to happen to Quilton now?” Aethe asked. “No leader. No real reason to stay.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Chenchen approached them from behind with some flasks of water and bread-wrapped meat. “Eat this. Drink. Recover. You can’t do all of this yourself.”

“Thanks.” Marco took the food, unsure if he could eat a single bite. From the moment the first fragment of food hit his stomach, though, he found he was as hungry as he would have been if he had been starved for days. He focused on the meal, eating it in no time at all before drinking his water down in a few huge gulps. “I needed that.”

“Thought you would. Danger tends to produce hunger. I’ve seen fellas keel over and have to be revived after not realizing it soon enough. Big, tough fighters.” She looked down at the covered woodworker and shook her head. “It is a shame, I won’t deny that. But some people will stay. It’s a nice enough island, and I’m guessing some amount of us weren’t here just because Quill tricked us into it.”

“Does everyone know that’s what happened?”

“Most. When the effect cleared, the system indicated to enough people where its source had been that there wasn’t much question.” She shook her head at the burned-out husk of what had once been her town. “Impressive what he did, in a way. It was like he was tying a leviathan up with button strings. It shouldn’t have been strong enough to hold any of us, but once he had enough strings in place, he could make us all dance to whatever tune he chose. Quite the power, when it comes down to it.”

Marco was sitting on the potential to have that same power now.

“One I could take with me, if I wanted to,” Marco said. “I told you this before, but it’s portable.”

“Do you think you will?”

Marco caught Elisa’s eye, and she nodded for him to go ahead. They had work to do as a group and weren’t in a splitting-up type of mood, but it was hardly work that demanded four of them. He could spare a moment for a chat.

Chenchen led him to a bench, one that had once seemed worth sitting on but now looked almost diseased. Marco had an idea of how the field the temple power mentioned could actually make things better, just looking at it. The negative, controlling field had made things much worse in reality even as it made them seem better to the people it imprisoned. It would warp what things looked like so much it would actually change them. It was a lot of power to give away.

“I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t touch a single thing Quill ever thought was a good idea with a ten-foot pole. The system keeps talking about how this will affect my path, and I can’t think of a path I want to take less,” Marco said.

Chenchen puffed a breath behind her lips before letting it out. Marco wasn’t sure if it was relief, acceptance, or some other emotion he’d understand better when he was older. She nodded once, then leaned back gingerly on the rotted wood of the bench.

“Hoped you’d say something like that. I was hoping you’d be okay with having to give up that much power. It’s a lot to give up.”

“It’s not,” Marco said. “Because it’s not what I want, and it would cost me what I want.”

“Yeah?” she said, looking out over the terrain towards the open, endless sea. “I can guess, I think. Whatever’s out there.”

“Well, that, yeah. But really it’s seeing whatever’s out there with those people.” Marco nodded towards his friends. “And I don’t think they’d want to see it with a guy who ended up like Quill did.”