"Chenchen!" Marco rushed around to the other side of the table where the older woman was sitting, pale and clammy. She was in better shape than anyone they had seen so far, but whatever hopes he had of her rising up and helping them overthrow Quill were dashed in an instant when he saw her. "What happened?"

Chenchen blinked up at him, eyes glassy, then focused with visible effort. "What happened? He did. Quill did. He found a way to reach in."

Elisa knelt, steadying Chenchen’s shoulder.

"How are you still lucid? Most people we passed were down for the count."

Chenchen swallowed heavily.

"I’m not really. I drift. I come back. At first whatever he was trying couldn't get to me. I was holding whatever he was trying to do back. He made me see some things, but I could tell they weren't real. Then he showed me Alden."

The name broke out of her like a sob strangled halfway.

"My dead husband, just standing there as he was. It's funny. You really do forget over time. I hadn't realized how fuzzy his memory had become until Quill brought it back, clear as crystal. Every wrinkle on his face. Every hair on his head."

The crew went quiet. Not one of them knew what to say.

"I knew it was a lie," Ashe whispered. "I knew it. But it didn’t feel like a lie. It felt like he was back. That he had really come back, right here, right now. He asked me to go home. To stop fighting. To rest." She blinked rapidly, furious at the tears that came anyway. "I wanted to. I really did."

Marco’s jaw tightened until it ached. She was talking about it like it had been hours or even days of this, instead of just the time it took them to sail in and walk here. He guessed that to her it felt that way.

Riv looked away and then back again, big hands flexing at his sides as if there were a throat nearby he could wring to make the world fair. Marco supposed there was, somewhere on the island at least.

"How did you break it?" Aethe asked, directly. She had to, so they'd know. It might be important later.

Ashe let out a bitter laugh.

"It wasn't hard, not really. He wasn't really different than the other dreams Quill tried to push on me. The only hard thing was wanting to do it. Wanting to send him away."

Riv’s face darkened to storm.

"He used your dead against you."

Marco’s anger steadied inside him. He could see it happening on all the faces of his team. If there was every a question about whether or not they'd do what they had to do, it was gone.

"We’ll end him," he said. "Whatever else happens, we will find him and end him."

Riv nodded. "We'll bury him. I promise."

Chenceh studied them, something like relief loosening the cords in her neck.

"Good. Then I didn’t hold on for nothing."

"Can you help?" Elisa knelt by Chenchen and put her hand on the woman's arm. "I know you don't want to, but…"

"Help? Honestly, I don't believe I can stand. Not and keep control of myself, anyway. This purple in the air is eating away at my mind like an acid. It gets worse the longer I soak. You'll have to take him down yourself."

"I don’t know if we can." Elisa shook her head at Marco. "He's so strong here. I've never even heard of anything like this."

"Don't let it fool you," Chenchen said. "The system is all about balance. He's very strong, but I can tell you this madness is stronger than it should be. You have to pay for that kind of thing somewhere. If he's able to do this, he's not as good at other things. I guarantee that."

"So there's a chance."

"He's still a higher level than you, but there's four of you. So yes, there's a chance."

There was a crunch on the pathway behind them. Marco turned to see Bhul and Tauncy standing there, larger than life. He sprang to his feet fast. He couldn't decide if it was scarier that they had no idea what to expect from these guards or that there wasn't even a hint of insanity in either of their eyes.

"You're fine," Marco said. "How?"

"What do you mean, how? Quill's our boss." Tauncy laughed. "Why would he poison his workers?"

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"You mean you work for him knowing everything? Everything he does?" Aethe looked like she could spit. "You've seen all that and you still choose to work for him?"

"Well, yes." Bhul rolled his eyes slightly. "He pays very well. I never came close to making as much as a pirate."

"Let's stop wasting time." Tauncy waved them towards him and his brother. "Come on. We'll take you to Quill. He said to if we found you. Said you might be resisting his power. We thought it was silly, but he didn't want to take any chances."

"He was right, though." Bhul rested his hand over his belt. Marco had never really been clear on what weapon Bhul favored, exactly. The only thing he could see that came close to that description was a tiny metal tube on his hip. He pulled it out now and did something to the handle. A short blade about as long as a nail popped out. "Now come along. It's where you want to go, right?"

"Don't do it." Chenchen breathed heavily as she squeezed out the words. "Then you fight three of them. Fight them here. Then you have time to recover before their boss."

"Quiet, you."

Quick as a flash, Tauncy had his guns out. He took two shots at Chenchen. Marco had never really seen a gun go off that heavily before. It looked like they were packed out with dynamite. The smoke that came out of the barrels was a dirty, greasy black. The shots that came out of the barrels grew in the air until they were almost the size of small cannonballs. Weakened as she was, Marco genuinely doubted that Chenchen could take a shot like that.

His reflexes were too slow to do much about it. A few steps away, intercepting the bullets would have almost required him to anticipate them being fired before the guns had cleared the holster. He had been focused on Bhul the second before and never had the chance to act until it was too late.

Riv did, somehow. Like magic, he appeared between Chenchen and Tauncy with his club up, catching both of the bullets on the hard wood. They hit as heavily as Marco assumed they would, if not more. Riv skidded back a full foot on the ground, glaring at Taucey the whole time.

"I guess that's that. No more wasting time," Bhul said. "Crush them."

Elisa dove behind Riv, saving Marco the trouble of telling her to do it himself. With bullets that could hit that heavily, it wouldn't take more than a shot or two to put her on the ground permanently. She snaked energy around him as he charged in, swinging his club at the much faster gunman. Aethe began to alternate shots between the brothers, which Marco left to her judgment. Then, throwing out a Captain's Cry, he rushed forward himself, trying to distract Bhul with his gun and hoping that the man would be a soft target.

Bhul wasn't. For all that he was a bigger person, he was quick and evasive, able to weave through Marco's thrusts and cuts without so much as a scratch. To do this, he had to tank whatever damage the gun was putting out, so it wasn't a total loss, but the actual harm he took from this looked pretty minimal.

Aethe was doing a little better the few times she managed to hit him, but that all went away as Bhul learned Marco's rhythms, became familiar with what he was capable of, then moved in to work his own offense. As fast as he had been on defense, he was even more distressingly quick on the offense. The only saving grace Marco could see was that Bhul’s knife was very, very short, which allowed him to keep him at bay for much longer than he thought he otherwise could have.

"Watch out!" Elisa yelled. "My book says that knife is bad news."

"I bet!"

Marco didn't understand system balance in the same way that Elisa did, but he knew that you didn't give up that much reach and leverage unless there were some pretty substantial gains to be made from doing so. He redoubled his efforts, managing to keep Bhul from closing in even as his Captain's Cry buff wore off. Sooner or later, though, he was bound to make at least some mistake, to get crossed up or twisted up, and to take a strike.

Finally, inevitably, he did. Without doing so much as a scratch's worth of damage to Bhul, Marco managed to catch his foot on the other man's shoe, stopping him in place for just a split second. It was enough for Bhul to nick his hand with the blade. Marco braced for the worst, but surprisingly nothing seemed to happen.

"It's not that bad!" he yelled at Elisa. "Why did the book say it was?"

"I don't know! Just be careful!"

He pushed back into the fight, finally managing to nick Bhul a few times as the bigger man became more and more daring. Then the situation reversed. Bhul landed one cut, then another, then two in one forward motion. Somehow, he was getting faster and faster.

Or, Marco finally realized, he was getting slower. When the eighth or ninth cut landed, he realized once and for all that Bhul wasn't working with a knife that did a lot of damage. What it did do, and what was now binding Marco to the ground, was inflict some kind of paralytic effect.

Marco expected Bhul to end it then, but the man was too methodical for that. He immediately turned his attention to Aethe, who was hard to hit but had very little to protect her once Marco was out of the way. Lacking much in the way of endurance stats in her build, she went down in only three cuts, followed by Riv and Elisa not too long after.

It was horrifying to watch, but Marco could do nothing about it. Nobody was seriously injured, outside of the paralytic. It even left them capable of speaking. He just couldn't move a muscle.

"Well, that's that," Bhul said once it was all done. "I don't look forward to carrying them back."

"Really, Quill just told us to make sure there was someone left to talk." Tauncey leveled his guns at Marco and Riv. "We can kill these two. Neither of them seems that smart. Then we just have to choose between the book one and the one that watches everything."

"Don't," Marco said. "Don't do it."

He added Chenchen to his crew, or tried to, hoping that she'd have the presence of mind to go with it. If nothing else, it would add a little oomph to the power of his ship, which might help with what he was trying next. He then let loose a Captain's Cry, trying anything he could to break out of the paralysis. It didn't help. As far as he could tell, it didn't do anything at all.

"Quiet." Tauncy kicked Marco in the face, hard. Marco felt blood fill his mouth as he spit out one of his molars. "The only thing I want out of you is that sword. I'm going to melt it down into musket balls. I only have to do it once, you know. Should be a good upgrade."

"Don't sleep on that armor. It's pretty good too." Bhul holstered his knife, letting the blade return to the interior of the canister. "Too bad you didn't get to Quill. You might have had a chance there. He's not that much for actual combat. Doesn't matter if he gets people with his little tricks, but you all seem pretty good with that."

"Oh well," Tauncy said. "Too little, too late. Grab that sword for me, Bhul. We can cut the clothes off him once he's dead."

There was a sudden blur of movement, terminating in Tauncy finding himself face-to-face with a very pale, very angry Chenchen.

"Excuse me," she said. "Those are actually my late husband's things."