Ortho stared at Luci aghast. From the sharp scent rolling off her, she was completely serious.

“Hug him,” he repeated.

Luci nodded.

Ortho took a deep breath, then let loose on her. “Did that staff turn your brain to mush or something? You think I’m here to flirt with him?”

“Hey, we don’t have the time to argue about this.” Luci flung an arm towards the third crater on the wall, where Hyena was slowly prying himself off. “He can heal, remember?”

Ortho raised his shield. “Then I’ll kill him so dead he doesn’t have time to heal.”

He didn’t give Luci time to protest and shot off across the dungeon, directly at Hyena.

The insane monster-man tipped his head back and started laughing. Bringing his legs up, he kicked off the wall and charged straight for Ortho.

“Yes, this is the way!” Hyena screamed. “The warrior fights, and then they die. Just like everyone else who tried to stop me.”

Ortho let out a long howl at the top of his voice. Threads chased behind him from Luci and he outran them using his wadis at full strength. Hyena was faster still and had closed the hundreds of steps across the chamber in a few heartbeats.

When Ortho was ten short steps from Hyena, he leapt with everything he had, trying to catch Hyena by surprise. He braced his shield and pulsed, but to his shock, Hyena had braked suddenly and dashed back. Ortho had expected him to dodge sideways, so he’d reduced the pulse’s range in favour of width. Hyena had anticipated that and the pulse missed him entirely.

Hyena shrugged. “But, I mean, of course they die. They’re all amateurs compared to me.”

Ortho howled his fury, charged in, and threw a punch. Hyena brought an arm up and blocked it. As he did, electricity ran between his forearm and Ortho’s arm guard. This time, Ortho had enma flowing into the afto, and through it he could feel what Hyena was doing.

It wasn’t a destructive force, but more like fingers driving themselves between his binding with the afto, then seizing and ripping it away at once. And when he did, the force was so destructive that it shattered whatever odd logic kept the aftocore pinned to reality. It was like he’d just pulled frozen water straight out of an ewer, keeping the ice in the shape of its container. The rupture travelled up and along the afto, infecting the enma circuits etched delicately and precisely into the arm guard’s surface. Then the whole thing shattered at once.

The curse struck Ortho harder this time, using his flow of enma as a conduit. Colour exploded in his vision. A nauseating riot of indecipherable smells commandeered his sense of smell. The hairs on his body prickled as though electrified.

Ortho gritted his teeth and pulsed with his shield. He paid for that move with a violent swirl of colour and smell. Through the confusion he saw Hyena dodge back, avoiding the blow.

At that same moment, Luci hounded Hyena with threads, trying to wrap him up. Hyena sprinted to the side and let them chase him down.

Ortho took advantage of the gap in the action to recycle his enma. The confusion of his senses was suppressed, but that made it harder to keep enma flowing to his armour.

It was rare that Ortho felt enma fatigue. Using aftos exclusively meant you usually took a curse from overuse long before that happened, but he was several curses in and recycling his enma like mad. In Ortho’s case, his fatigue came in the form of hallucinations: phantom smoke was filling his nostrils and the chamber was glowing as though it was on fire. There was no way to correct this with recycling since it was using enma that caused it. His body reacted as though it was real: he was coughing, his body felt like it was burning up.

It was eerily similar to the curse he took from the broken aftocores, and that was no coincidence—the souls of the Nubah Kilebhi warriors were altered to better handle the aftocores of the monsters that roamed the Kilebhi Veldt, the same aftocores that his equipment was made from.

Ortho was determined not to show weakness and chased after the retreating Hyena. He tossed his shield to the side, aiming for a three-pronged strike. His shield approached Hyena from one side, Luci’s thread from the opposite, and he charged in through the middle. However, when Hyena saw him, he didn’t step in or back to avoid the more dangerous threats of enma and afto, like Ortho expected. He dashed towards the shield instead.

Cursing, Ortho threw enma into the shield to send it away. That shield was his life—he wouldn’t be here today if not for it. Too late. Hyena leapt up and caught the shield with his mouth. When he did, red electricity ran along it.

From his connection with the shield, he felt like it was being ripped from his grasp. Then, to his horror, his shield, the shield that had saved his life more times than he could count, spun through the air in a blur of red light and headed right at Luci.

Ortho could only watch as the shield caught Luci on the side. She’d barely had enough time to wrap some threads around her to cushion the blow, but they only did so much. With a grunt, she went sliding across the floor. Her staff dropped from her hands and all her threads vanished with it.

Ortho ground his charge to a halt and pushed everything into the control on his wrist. “Leave her alone!” he bellowed. “You’re fighting me.”

The shield jilted then clattered to the ground. Hyena looked at it with surprise plastered on his face. Then he turned to Ortho, and his face shifted to a terrible grin.

That was when Ortho’s muddled senses picked up on the burning under his feet. The ground he was standing on was green, though Ortho couldn’t tell through his helmet and the flashing colours that clouded his vision. Managing flows was an important part of his training in Nubah Kilebhi, but with his mind going haywire from the combination of curses and enma fatigue, it was hard to make the right decisions.

He let go of the shield and put his enma into his remaining shin guard, then expanded the barrier to cover both legs. Without using his wadis, he backed off the green ground onto something he thought was purple. When he looked up, he saw death approaching.

Without Luci to harass him anymore, Hyena was charging at Ortho uncontested, making that terrible, high-pitched cackle the whole way. Cursing, Ortho stood his ground and ran enma into his cuirass and one wadi for a counter strike. Hyena was too fast to chase, and without the shield he had few options left.

Hyena’s eyes were fixed to Ortho’s head. Ortho assumed this was where the next strike would come and raised his remaining arm guard to block it.

“Boo!”

Hyena ducked low at the last moment and swept at Ortho’s shin with a foot. Ortho cursed. He’d fallen for a trap. He raised a leg to guard with his shin guard. That was also a trap.

He took the impact with no trouble, but then red electricity sparked between Hyena and the afto he’d struck. Ortho abruptly cut off the enma flow to it to lessen the blow from the curse, even if it only helped a little. Then he went straight to recycling his enma.

At the same time, Ortho threw a punch to maintain pressure. Hyena deflected with an arm. He hadn’t used the arm that was still armoured so Hyena’s forearm collided hard with his. Through that connection, electricity fed into Ortho’s wrist and he felt woozy for a moment. The only thing keeping him from dropping to the floor was that he was maintaining his recycling technique.

Ortho stumbled back, trying to keep to his feet within the confusion. Hyena pivoted on the ball of his foot and kicked Ortho’s chest hard. The impact sent shockwaves through the dungeon and rattled Ortho’s head.

“Point to the handsome warrior!” Hyena cackled.

The force didn’t send Ortho flying like before. He’d been maintaining a flow of enma into his cuirass and it had taken the brunt of the force, which he broke immediately after taking the strike.

Ortho took another step back from the shock and his cuirass cracked and fell off him in fragments. He was down to one arm guard. And his helmet.

Letting out a howl, Ortho went to punch again with his bare arm, hesitated, then switched to his armoured arm. His vision blacked out as he accidentally dropped the flow to his helmet. He didn’t need to see to know what happened. Hyena’s raised a casual arm to guard the blow and Ortho’s remaining arm guard was shattered.

By that point, the only way that Ortho could tell up from down was by the fact that he’d slammed hard onto the ground. His senses were overwhelmed. Bile threatened to come up and he swallowed it.

“You—you…” he grunted. Slowly, he pushed himself up, feeling his footing out rather than relying on his currently confused sense of balance. “I’m a… of the Nubah…”

He expected a hit at any moment. He was weak, reeling, struggling to stand. However, Hyena didn’t attack. He walked to Ortho’s side and leaned in so that his face was level with Ortho’s. Even through the confusion, the scent of rot overwhelmed Ortho and Hyena’s two red, glowing eyes, a mere finger’s length from his helmet, pierced through the riot of colour.

“Yes,” Hyena said. “Yes, you are…?”

“A warrior,” Ortho forced out. “Of the Nubah… Kilebhi.”

Hyena’s face split into a wicked smile. “And what does a warrior do in the face of certain death?”

Ortho swallowed. “They… fight.”

“They fight,” Hyena repeated.

A fist appeared before his eyes, flashing brightly. It landed hard against his helmet, and then his vision went black. Ortho’s legs came out under him and he flipped around, maybe twice, before crashing hard on his back.

He couldn’t move. Pain stole his will to move, the effort to maintain his recycling took everything else. His vision returned to him as his helmet crumbled. Ortho lay on the hard dungeon floor, panting, trying to hold back bile, wishing that blow had just killed him instead.

Hyena stood over him, red eyes the only thing he could make out in the swirling haze of his vision.

“And what if the warrior can’t fight?” Hyena said. Ortho barely heard him over the phantom screaming in his ears—the product of his curses.

Ortho closed his eyes. Even with them closed, visions still haunted him. A thousand sensations piled on top of him: the smell of freshly cut grass flooded his sense of smell, fire licking at his arms and legs, needles pricked his tongue and he tasted dried blood, fur trying to push its way through his pores. None of those feelings were real, he knew, but they felt as real to him as a cold shower.

He tried to block it all out and remember the face of his mother back as she was during his earliest memories, of her training him with the spear and praising him when his strikes against a straw target landed true.

He was going to join her soon. He wasn’t saddened or scared about that. It was where he belonged. And, in truth, he’d been praying for this day for a long time—to fall in battle against a fierce opponent. There was nothing more honourable than that, no matter what his father tried to preach.

He took a deep breath and released it with fits and starts. “They… they die.”

“They die,” Hyena repeated, his voice breaking with suppressed laughter.

“No!”

Ortho’s eyes snapped open to see Luci charged Hyena from the side, screaming. Threads wrapped around the two of them and Luci pinned herself to Hyena in a hug.

“Come back, Mr. Wip!” she cried. “Please, come back.”

That was the last thing Ortho saw before his mind reeled from the sensory overload and he passed out.