“Wow.” Elisa faltered for a moment, then caught herself. “That packs a punch. I’m not terrified, but I’d hate to see what that would do if the ship wasn’t filtering it.”

“It’s magical?”

“More like amplified.” She held up her magic notebook. “This is treating it like an attack. It’s basically a blast of the feelings of whatever’s making that noise.”

“So something on the island is so scared that it’s scaring us?” Aethe hopped down from the prow. “Are we sure we want to tangle with something that complex?”

“We’ll have some resistance from the ship even after we leave,” Marco said. “We can bank on that to an extent. And having the smaller boat means we can run faster.”

“We also don’t have much of a choice,” Elisa said. “Remember how the other place Quill sent us to? There’s a reason the mist from the island just engulfed us, and I’m guessing running is at least as dangerous as staying put and fighting.”

“Then it’s decided,” Marco said. “We stand and fight until we figure this out. Gear up, everyone. Leave the chickens some feed. We don’t know how long this will take.”

They gathered what the team generally thought of as light expedition provisions, enough to keep them going through a few meals and more than a few days of water. Aethe restocked her arrow supply, and overall everyone did a quick check to make sure their gear was in order. After that, they all got into the boat and began paddling towards the island. The difference in how they felt was immediate.

“Oof.” Riv shuddered. “This little boat doesn’t give us nearly as much defense as the big one did. It’s bad.”

“We’ll handle it,” Elisa said. “Over time, we’ll get used to it.”

“I hope so,” Aethe said. “I keep wanting to shoot my arrows into the mist just in case anything is sneaking up.”

They made landfall quickly. Luckily, the effect didn’t get any worse the closer they got to the island. It did change, though. What had been straight fear morphed a bit, eating at their perceptions of what they were seeing around the edges in a way they had trouble adapting to.

“This rock is terrifying,” Elisa said. “But it’s just a rock, right?”

“It should be. Elisa, heal yourself. Just a little. You can bolster mood a bit, right?” Marco said.

“Right. I forgot.” Elisa let her hand glow green and slapped it against her chest. She looked better almost immediately. “Wow. Yes, that helps.”

“What does the rock look like now?” Once Elisa had drawn his attention to it, Marco couldn’t keep his eyes off the towering, menacing thing. Rather than answer, Elisa zapped him with some healing too. The rock was immediately much more like a normal boulder sitting on the ground. It was a little looming, he supposed, but it was hard to see the threat in it that he had seen before. “Is it better?”

“It’s just a rock.” Marco sighed. “How often can you do that? How long will it last?”

“Mine wore off while you were talking. But if the smallest version of this spell I can do has the same effect, I can do it pretty much forever? I can cycle through all four of us keeping the effect off our backs. I just wouldn’t be able to do anything else.”

“Then do that,” Marco said. “That’s plenty. And everyone spread out a little. Give each other some space.”

“Why?” Aethe said. “That’s not usual.”

“This isn’t a usual place. If the island messes with how we see each other, I want some warning before you fill me full of arrows.”

Elisa did some quick experiments with her healing, then started a cycle of pulsing each of them with a tiny, almost insignificant amount of healing energy aimed at keeping them calm and effective. When she had treated one person, she’d move immediately on to the next, and then back.

They pushed into the island’s interior once they were confident they had things under some level of control. Now that they had the psychological effect of the island reduced to a more or less manageable level, things were much easier to approach on their own terms. The rocks no longer towered over them, and the trees no longer appeared to be thinking. Still, they had little resistance to the one element of the island that did attack them more actively.

“The screams,” Riv said. “The damn screams. Every single time this island screams, my nerves feel like they are going to rip out of my skin. If it lasted any longer I’d bolt. There’s nothing we can do about this?”

“Nothing that I can think of,” Elisa said. “I could give you bigger doses of the healing magic, but it would run out pretty quickly. I think we just have to deal with it.”

“At least that’s the worst of it, so far.” Marco didn’t feel any more brave than the others did. “Keep your eyes open. This can’t be all of it.”

It didn’t take long for the island to send them something worse. A moaning emerged from the fog as they got closer to the center of the island, a terrible sound that felt like a deepened version of the scream in terms of what it did to their spirits. Just behind it, human figures began to accrete out of the mist, dragging themselves forward with wild eyes.

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“Insane,” Elisa said. “They are all insane.”

A green bolt flew from her hand into one of the approaching people. It did nothing to blunt the look in their eye.

“My healing isn’t working!” she yelled. “Not at all!”

“What do we do?” Riv said. “We can’t…”

“We can,” Marco said. “If that’s what it takes, we can. They are armed. If they attack us, we fight. You can try to hurt them instead of kill, but we don’t have choices here.”

The first of them lunged just after that, swinging a big one-handed sword at Marco. He leaned back out of the way and shot at both the man’s knees, hoping his opponent would be squishy enough to go down just from that. The man wasn’t. He grunted against the pain, screamed, and pushed Marco back with the sheer sound of it. Across the way, he saw a woman with a battleaxe tanked several arrows and another man scrambling back to his feet as he recovered from some half-hearted hit from Riv’s club.

They wouldn’t be able to do this fight with half measures. He could see that. Someone had to call for the switch to brutality, and the only one he knew would do it for sure was himself.

“Take them down!” Marco said. “Then run forward! Use whatever you need to!”

The crew jolted. Marco saw Elisa tearing up, though her healing efforts never stopped. Then the team burst into motion. Marco ran his man through while executing a point blank shot with his pistol. The man jolted, but his insanity had meant he had done almost nothing to protect himself. That one jolt was all he got before he crumpled to the ground. Aethe’s arrows stopped aiming for non-vital points, and Riv’s club was finally swung with full force. They teamed up on the last few people who had emerged from the fog together before they could close the distance and left them in heaps on the ground as they ran forward.

People were coming from all directions now. The team would move as far as they could before they were blocked, then fight whatever was standing in their way. Some of them went down easily, while others took a huge amount of effort to disable or kill.

“Crews.” Marco murmered to himself. “These are whole crews.”

They were fighting against captains, combat classes, and guards. They were also fighting against cooks and sail-makers. There was no way to tell which was which before they slammed into them. Breaking through another group, Marco felt his equipment getting stronger for the second or third time on this island. That meant he had taken down another captain.

He almost threw up. A scream emerged from the mist as he tried to keep it down, another huge, loud scream like they had heard from the boat. As rough of shape as the team was in, it hit like a sledgehammer. He saw the insane approaching his team as they all reeled, powerless to recover in time to do anything about it.

Except him. You didn’t need to move much to yell, and he had a tool for this exact situation.

Marco yelled. Just like that, they were on their feet. RIv used his moment of clarity to sweep a group of the insane to the side before running through the gap he had made, followed by the rest of the group. They had thirty seconds of this, and just about that much time left before they reached the deepest section of the island. It would be close.

By the time they reached the center of the island, they had taken down ten or twenty people in total. Marco had not been able to count them all. When a roiling, illness-green ball of energy finally revealed itself at the dead center of the land, there was nothing he could do to stop Riv. The Sturdy spent every point in strength he had to launch himself at the orb, blazing in light as he slapped it so hard it slammed into a nearby rock wall. Marco hadn’t thought anything smaller than a cannon could do what Riv did to it in a single blow. Aethe’s follow-up arrows were hardly needed.

The mist blew away from the island on a shockwave as the energy came apart. A second later, Marco knew they must be doomed. As many people as they had fought, there were dozens more, all of who could see them now. There was no mist obscuring the team now, which has apparently been all that gave them a chance in the first place. With Riv out of strength on the ground, they were vulnerable and tank-less. If the insanity persisted, they’d die. If it dissipated with the mist, they’d live. It was as simple as that.

A third thing happened instead. All of them screamed at once, a faint hint of black coming out of every mouth. It was clear where the noise from before was now. This time was different, something Marco could tell even without having seen it before. Whatever the scene had looked like when it was covered by mist, it just couldn’t have been the case that almost all of the people involved in it died at once, like they did now.

The crowd of enemies thinned to just a few small parties as the lifeless bodies of the rest crumpled to the ground. Marco pushed down nausea as the notifications hit him one after the other, but read them anyway. He had to know what was going on.