My ears flatten in a too-little-too-late attempt to protect me from all of the loud I've just been assaulted with.

Alesha hisses in a breath. "That's DEFINITELY Scylla and Charibdys."

"Agreed. Cavitation Bubble Implosion is a distinctive spell." Hikaru's grimace is even less concerting now that he has a pixie's needle-like teeth. "Please do not stand in the mechanics."

"The bugtesters did A TERRIBLE JOB with this place!" Ace howls, and you think she's hyperventilating.

"Somehow, I don't think this is something that you would normally test for!" I say.

"And this is definitely not a normal proving grounds," Siobhan adds.

My eyes light on more glowing runes. The same invisible hands that made the magic circle are now inscribing lines of text emanating from the pool of salt water corroding the wards on the road, a twisting path of words of power inscribed with symbols. Another spell of Scylla's, likely equally devastating, warning us all where to tread lightly or - better - not at all.

Ace stares, frozen, breathing hard, eyes and ears on a swivel, waiting until she sees something to hit. Something she can do for it.

"If you can't make your foes come to your sargasso sea," Hikaru murmurs, staring at the runes and the growing saltwater pool with star-flecked black eyes, "then bring the sargasso to them..."

He takes a wand, writing his own rune, soft blue tucked between angry red-gold spell traps. Then sights over the top of his staff, squinting. Straining.

He chuckles, and nods.

Ace allows herself to breathe, and so do you.

"Fortunately, the Auspex Sight spell still works," he says. "Something like a heat haze within the pool. Lurking."

He pauses, drawing an electrical spark from the gem on his staff. "Weak to shock," he adds.

"Guys, where do we go?" Ace asks, almost pleading. "What do we do, here? Do we book it for the space thing? Or just- Turn around?"

Alesha takes a look at her, sighs, then steps up.

"Ace. Step forward, ready whatever AoE attacks you have," she says. "I'm going to try and lure in the add."

Ace straightens, shifting her stance, shouldering her hammer. "Yes, sir," she says, and I can't blame her.

Alesha walks, then marches, then runs. As she goes, she beats her shield with her sword, slowly, but speeding up to match the tempo of her military march.

"Scylla," she says, projecting without raising her voice. "In Aurora's name, by the oath I swore to her, I call you out. You do not belong here. Strike me if you dare, and in so doing show yourself, and be driven from this place."

Something stirs above the pool of seawater.

Movement like iridescent oil through clear blue water, in a hemisphere intersecting with the sky. I have the impression of a baleful eye.

On Alesha.

"Nice to see you again, too," Alesha says, with a nod to the thing above the sky. "Wish it was better circumstances. Meanwhile, let me rephrase: fuck off."

I suddenly understand why that particular resource is called tension. Alesha was - is - electrifying, in her element.

Ace exhales, and inhales, breathing finally under her conscious control.

"Forward and AOE," she confirms.

She screams and leaps, her hammer describing deadly arcs, dancing along and over the shining magical tripwires. She hits nothing, but I'm breathing easy, now that she's back on her game.

"Nothing around there, Alesha," Ace says.

"I definitely pulled aggro; it'll strike me soon," Alesha replies. "Keep your eyes open."

"Must be further in," Sekhmet says. An arrow flies from above us, down past Ace, into the unnatural tide pool in the forest.

And I hear the noise it makes when it strikes something, which flickers. Like sparks.

Or static.

"Okay," Sekhmet says, ears back and eyes wide. "That drew blood. Or ichor, or whatever. You heard it wail, right? And it's echoing?"

"Yeah," Ace said. Keeping it together, but still frayed.

"Like sonar," I say, shuddering.

Siobhan takes a deep breath, nocks her bow...

And aims.

"Come on, come on, you've got to know what to do," she whispers, and you think I can only hear her because of Sylphan's gift of mousehunting ears. "Tell me. Help me. Please. My eyes are yours tonight, oh please..."

I close your eyes, listen to her pray.

Sekhmet winces. "Come on, Sio, It's right there..." she whispers, a prayer to the only thing Jules ever believed in.

Siobhan pauses, exhales, nods. "Yes, oh yes, blood and breath for you, from my first kill of the hunt tonight - the first to bleed blood instead of ichor," she vows.

She opens her eyes.

She fires her bow.

And then my party and I can all see the blinking, moaning tentacle of the thing she hits.

The Scyllan Terror was always meant to be a Lovecraftian kraken, even before things went off the rails and me and my friends saw it face to face through a broken sky. A single enormous eye with a single bar for a pupil, socketed in a cone of mottled rubbery flesh, stared at me and mine through a impossibly large spherical drop of startlingly blue ocean, hanging 10 meters above our party and the Neverglades in the middle of a newly forming gray cloud full of gathering storm.

I briefly recall that the high elves of the Neverglades should be able to control the weather in this space - to prevent that kind of cloud from gathering.  Then I wish I hadn't.

Sprouting through the ground, tunneling through space, are three grabber tentacles taller than some of the trees here. Each with a smaller eye, a smaller brain to relay orders, and the capacity to cast smaller, weaker spells than the main body.

It's one of these, wounded by arrows fired from Sekhmet's shortbow and Siobhan's formidably long one, that Ace just dodged lightning to charge. The bright runes of shock and wrack laid down by the Scyllan Horror had triggered a second after she sprang right over them, hammer raised, ready to slap this thing through increasingly non-euclidean geometries and back to the sargasso sea it came from.

Which is exactly what it was prepared for, as it conjured an imploding field of ice, brine, and slow time to stop her in mid-leap, leaving her body below the neck hanging in mid-swing, agonizingly slow. I see her armored form flex, inward, briefly, from the immense pressure, and she coughs up blood.

Not much. Too much.

Time seems to slow further. Not just in the bubble, but all around. As the bubble fades, and Ace lands in a heavy one-knee crouch, I hear her scream.

It’s not a scream of anguish or agony. Not from pain. Some part of me wonders if screams of pain and terror would have been better - the part that already realized what's happening to her.

She looks up, rising to both feet in an expression of fury, and I see her bare fangs with a telltale glint of red in her eyes.

Oh god she went Lolzerker, I had thought back when I'd met her, thinking about it in terms of a newbie trap. Not thinking about what that would look like if you were your character, and your character sheet says when you're in critical danger you go berserk.