Chapter 69: Puppet

I stepped out of the door, fog releasing from within it at the same moment as me. Arthur came down right behind, his boots hitting the mud with a wet, heavy thud, already scanning the treeline before he had even finished landing.

All of the Calfeeths, looked at us at once.

Eighty pairs of deep, void-like eyes turned in our direction, and for one stretched-out second, nobody on either side moved. The forest around us had gone eerily quiet, the only sound was the faint, wet dripping of serpent blood off broken bark somewhere behind them.

Then Sera lifted Sun’s Grace and put it between her lips, before blowing it.

Light poured out of the whistle and rolled across the clearing like the sun itself had decided to reach down and touch this rotten little corner of the world, warm-colored but strangely cold, no heat at all, just pure, blinding purification.

It hit us too. Washed over my skin like something scrubbing me clean from the inside out. But the Calfeeths screamed.

They actually screamed, those high and wet and wrong screams.

Smoke curled up off their opaque bodies in thin grey ribbons.

Sizzle!

’Well. That’s one way to say hello.’

One of them, eyes rolled back, mouth foaming, lunged straight for Arthur without any of the caution the rest still had.

Arthur didn’t flinch. His forearm hardened mid-motion, bark-brown wood slided over skin smoothly, and his fist connected with the thing’s skull hard enough that I heard something crack from ten feet away. It whimpered, silver blood spraying from its mouth, and dropped before it finished the sound.

His palms opened next, and thorny vines shot out in every direction, wrapping tight around a full cluster of them, twenty at once without a flinch or so, cinching down until the clearing was filled with a chorus of whimpers and choked, miserable shrieking.

A few tried to gnaw through the vines. None of them managed it before the thorns did their work.

Sera was already moving, a sword bloomed in her palm. The blade of its was filled with golden Divine Fire. It raged while radiating a comforting golden glow.

She swept it in one wide, unhurried arc, almost lazy, like she had all the time in the world.

Sizzle!

Fifteen Calfeeths dropped where they stood, their bodies smoking, the fire was eating through whatever passed for their insides before they even hit the ground.

The stench that followed was somehow worse than anything the forest had put out so far.

Theodore had gone full brawler mode a few feet away, fists glowing faintly with augmented strength, sending Calfeeths flying in every direction like he was swatting oversized flies.

One connected with a coral-like outcropping hard enough to snap it clean in half.

"Two hundred percent and counting!" he shouted, not even looking at any of us, grinning like a maniac mid-punch.

Mary carved her own space open with spears of pure light, each one thrown with brutal, surgical precision, clearing a bubble around herself that none of the Calfeeths seemed eager to test twice.

I wasn’t about to stand around watching everyone else have all the fun.

I summoned Thunder Sunlight, and heat rolled through my chest the second the blade solidified in my grip, it was aggressive and hungry while it had the kind of warmth that made my skin prickle in warning even as adrenaline drowned most of it out.

Sweat had already started beading along my hairline before I had taken a single swing.

I jumped.

"Die!"

Sizzle! Shrrrrkkk!

The blade swept clean through two of them, fire licking along the wound and lightning cooking whatever was underneath before they even had time to fall.

I could feel the heat climbing in my own veins with every swing, my body had already started to protest, muscles tightening in warning, but I pushed it down and kept moving, chasing the next opening before the last one had even closed.

Something crept up behind me.

I spun, as the was dagger already in hand, and drove Hunger of the Creepy Dagger straight across the throat of the Calfeeth closing in from my blind side.

It dropped without a sound, the blade’s golden hilt pulsing brighter, hungrier and satisfied, like it had been waiting all day for exactly that.

Another came at me from the front, jaw unhinged, saliva dripping in thick, dark strings from its mouth, eyes locked hungrily on my throat.

I shifted my weight, already moving to meet it, my dagger rising, Thunder Sunlight was already swinging back for a follow-through I never got to finish.

And then I stopped...

... Not by choice.

My body simply refused to obey me, muscles locked mid-motion like every string connected thought to action had been cut and re-tied to something else entirely.

My arm, halfway through a swing, hung frozen in the air.

My legs wouldn’t shift.

Even my breath seemed to catch somewhere in my throat, refusing to move any further, my lungs burned with the effort of pulling in air that suddenly didn’t want to come.

’What—’

I felt it before I understood it. A cold, invisible pressure settled over my limbs, threading through me like something reaching in and pulling on strings I hadn’t known were there.

Puppet strings, drawn taut, holding me exactly where I stood.

Panic flared, sharp and immediate, cutting straight through the adrenaline and the heat still coursing through my chest from Thunder Sunlight.

My thoughts slowed...

They turned thick and sluggish, like wading through mud that kept rising higher with every passing second, and somewhere behind me, distantly, I could still hear Theodore shouting, still hear the fire crackling and the Calfeeths screaming, all of it fading further and further away like the whole fight was happening on the other side of a thick pane of glass.

But I couldn’t turn my head to see any of it.

The drooling one in front of me kept coming, closer, closer, jaw stretching wider with every step, and I couldn’t so much as flinch.

’Move. MOVE.’