"No!" Jumble screams and dives for the hole. Her fingers just barely scrape into the opening as the thing slams it shut. "Rrnn! Shelby! Ebb! Help!"

The static protecting her flesh from being crushed underneath the hatch flickers and buzzes with the promise of eventual failure. I summon a shield as I run in to kneel next to her, slip the coin through a finger-width opening, and flare the magic inside. All at once the insistence pulling the hatch down disappears as the monster shifts back to being in-phase.

Jumble throws the hatch open once again with a grunt, staticky magic flowing free from her book in an inky river of whispers. Everything about her seems to swap quickly from one thing to another; a storybook armored hero, a warrior princess garbed for battle, a scribe wearily holding a pen as she stares into the empty distance, and a cloaked figure with exhaustion in her eyes. Each of those stories cements itself into my brain as a real possibility. So much so that I'm not quite sure if any of them are fake, or if they're just past versions of Jumble.

Every inky, staticky persona overlays on top of one another with Jumble herself as the base. They flicker, crackle, and glorp together in a cocoon of stories until everything solidifies as one. Of a woman who looks exactly like Jumble. Part of me recognizes that the four silhouettes correspond pretty closely to Dani, Rina, Ward, and Euro. No part of me believes that that's a coincidence.

She takes a deep breath–five distinct breaths–that quickly coalesce into one singular exhale. Her magic feels… strange. Almost whimsical. Shapes and newfound colours dance about in the mass of whispered noise as she swings her legs over the side, nods for me to follow, and slips down into the hoard. It takes me a second to shake off the strange sensations and move to follow.

"What what what was that?!" Pearl asks excitedly as I stare down into darkness. "Was Jumble holding out on us?!"

I slowly shake my head as realization lights my synapses. She wasn't holding anything against me, no; she was desperately clinging to the hopes that her original party wasn't gone. That's what the overlays were–the chunks of her own magic she put into the book so they could have Class-like powers. All she did was take that power back.

I can't imagine how hard that choice must've been.

Ebb's feet appear above me as I fall into the hoard. My awareness extends to feel at everything inside–treasure, Jumble, and bodies. Everything but Jumble frozen mid-action at the moment the spell hit; a grim reminder that we still know next to nothing about the horizonguard's inner circle. I raise my arms to cover my healing chest and summon a few defensive spells for when the thing reappears.

"Anchors!" Ebb cries as she falls just behind me. "Are there any anchors here?!?"

I look to Jumble for an answer. She looks back at us with a frown of thought, her attention obviously elsewhere, as magic roils over her skin and clothes. Soft whispers just barely hit my ears.

"I can't see anything yet," her words form perfectly clear regardless of their volume or distance. "Our first priority has to be the monster. I have a feeling it'll be going after the anchors as soon as there's an opening."

It's a safe bet. I motion for Ebb to be on high alert and summon the oystershell beacon. She already knows about Pearl, so there's no reason hiding this, I guess. The shellraiser in question squelches out of her shell and rests on my shoulder.

Ebb doesn't even react. I bring the beacon up and create a shield around Pearl as she works to connect my awareness to the thing. If we can't get the monster out into the open, we could be here for a very long time. Which… now that I think of it… could've been the intent. Shit.

Sharpness. A flash of something between spaces. My awareness flares raw, unadulterated danger from all sides. I grit my teeth and summon a few shields to block the attack while throwing down a purification on the off chance of another unknown spell. Claws spark and rake across the surface of my shield with deadly intent, shearing away layer after layer of magic.

A foot slams into one of the claws. The impact doesn't look too powerful, but the thing cracks like shattered glass and rains down on the ground.

"Stay away from the new boss!" Ebb cries, echoed by a wail of pain from beyond the phase. "You want here, you gotta go through us!"

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The claws on the other side of my shield disappear, along with the ones Ebb shattered. She whirls around on her heel, fists raised in a ready stance, as the monster reappears in the exact same spot as before. Reformed claws aimed directly at her chest.

She pivots so quickly her shoe billows sickly black smoke, heel mercilessly crushing into the claws in a very flexible upperkick. The cracks flow further this time as they shatter the claws, disappearing into phase as the monster's shrieks grow louder and far more pained. Ebb tucks her head down to make herself as small a target as possible and darts away from me.

I can't tell if the monster follows. A few quick glances show Jumble working away at something or other, her attention split between Ebb and a pile of something on the ground. Mountains of treasure–so much that it's unbelievable the horizonguard's people got all this from the quest–quake with the weight of cratermaking steps. The monster's affecting this side from across the phase.

"Pearl, how much longer?" I whisper.

She slaps her hand against the beacon, then slaps her other hand to my cheek. "It shouldn't suck as much this time thanks to all your progress. Ready to be overwhelmed?"

I nod. Pearl presses her hand to my cheek a little harder as the shellraiser bits in my body vibrate to her influence. The connection feels way deeper than before. Almost like there's no connection at all; we're just two parts of the same whole. Pearl blinks. I blink. Her awareness seeps into mine, and our combined abilities give light and purpose to the beacon.

Jewelry. So much jewelry. Most of it plastic. Some of it metal. My awareness feels every individual piece; every bangle, every pendant, every earring coated in blood from where it was ripped out of an unexpecting lobe. It's only about a tenth of the entire hoard, with the rest being gems and precious metals and other assumedly expensive things like everdriftwood.

I feel all of it. I see all of it. Especially a simple locket, set with plastic gemstones, half-crushed and buried underneath a mass of other half-destroyed jewelry. Part of the unnaturally stopped wave of destruction that Jumble's right at the foot of. I can't say why I latch onto it. But it feels important.

"Wow," Pearl sighs, her voice ethereal in my mind. "I… I didn't realize how much I needed this. How much I missed this. It's going to attack Jumble, Shelby. Pull it out of hiding."

I shift, and my awareness follows. The beacon shines through the phase, placing my awareness at every single possible point in the hoard. One of them drags the monster into our phase. A sinuous, horrible thing with a serpentine body half as thick as a city hallway and long enough to curl around each and every pile of loot in the hoard. Each of its scales, if they can even be called that, float a few inches off its body while constantly shifting between a foot-wide hexagonal plate and a very long claw.

It screeches in fear, or anger, or… whatever a horrible construct monster screeches in. Slowly, it dawns on me that the thing doesn't actually have a head to screech wiith–just clean-cut stumps on both sides of its body where the screeching noise screeches from. Imagery reminiscent of a bisected vertebra decorate both stumps, except every piece of that vertebra is a hexagon. Far too much of this imagery for this to be the horizonguard's creature.

Meaning the system gave it to him as a guardian. Goddamn favoritism.

"Back up!" Ebb warns and puts herself between the thing and Jumble. "Can it wait?"

Jumble looks down at her hands, then drops a tiara and spins to face the monster with Ebb. The two of them stare down the bizarre lump of construct design, scales-turned-scythes littering the air around them with a hailstorm of the deadliest possible kind. Jumble spreads her fingers and holds out a palm, staticky magic taking on a sunflower yellow tint as her maw cracks open to reveal every single one of her teeth.

Her magic howls a single word; goodbye.

Even with my awareness, I barely see it. A flash of static so overwhelming that devours a massive chunk of the monster in the blink of an eye. Whispers linger in its aftermath, filling the air with clicks and pops that repeat 'goodbye' over and over and over again. Ebb stands frozen in awe as Jumble lowers her hand, sunflower yellow retreating from her palm to be replaced by a cool, oceanic blue.

"It's not done for," she says confidently. "System creations like this never play by the same rules as we do. Don't let your guard down."

Scythes litter the air. I toss out a few shields to safeguard my friends. The scythes scream through the air as the monster writhes in confusion at the fact that it's missing a good chunk of itself. Construct material spurts free from the wound, Jumble's magic whispering to slow the regeneration.

Magic soaks into my mind. Cold, stagnant magic that fights my awareness for every inch of purchase. I blink once. Everything skips forward a few seconds. Nobody's hurt, though. The scythes aren't in the air anymore, either. Where the hell did they… no. No, god, no.

The pile behind Jumble. All the anchors.

Churned to tiny little pieces.

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