Will

"We've still got a decent chance," Will said. "I think his armor is leading off heat, keeping him from going too hot. Without that helmet, he might just fry his brain out if we push him hard enough."

Captain started to reply, but they both had to scramble apart when Brimstone came leaping for them, not afraid to go on the offensive despite the sustained Cancel hobbling him. He kept after Will, obviously seeing him as the weak link, hobbled as he was.

Captain was still wrapping back around to help when, independent of anything they were doing, Brimstone suddenly dodged to the side. Avoiding… nothing.

[At this point, inside the library, Serene is following her orders to the letter. She was told not to fire her gun. And while she has set up the rifle and is aiming at Brimstone, she does not fire a shot.]

[Instead, she mimes it out. Resolves to fire, lines up her aim, even puts her finger on the trigger, and stops herself just shy of actually pulling it.]

[Since Danger Sense is intended to grant foreknowledge of perils befalling its user, the intent to attack causes the ability to trigger even before this attack has been completed.]

[By pretending to shoot, Serene is causing Brimstone to experience a false Danger Sense spike without the downside of risking friendly fire.]

[She is quite proud of herself for coming up with it.]

Will tried to capitalize on the brief distraction by rushing in, but Brimstone spun away from the blade that came for him with about an inch of clearance.

Will became aware that Brimstone was continually throwing skills against the Cancel effect even though they were all getting nullified, showing hardly a spark for his efforts. Brimstone's AP rapidly dwindled, unable to be replenished by the incredible regeneration he enjoyed while under his Rest trance.

Will did not feel comforted. Brimstone was pushing against the Cancel effect to wear it out as quickly as possible. It probably wouldn't last too much longer—could fail any second.

The second time that strange pause came over the enemy, halting him in the middle of a counterattack, Will was ready. Evidently Captain had the same idea, rushing the lord from behind. Brimstone spun away from Saint Capitaine with a few inches of breathing room, but this left him just slightly out of position as Will slid past in a Dash-assisted swipe.

A shallow cut opened up on the side of Brimstone's jaw below his ear, beading with dark blood. He prodded curiously at it, eyes narrowed. His neck twitched, tendons jumping.

Will felt a cautious surge of relief. A small cut was all it took for Anathema to Inject the lethal agent he had prepared—the prince of poisons—into his bloodstream, along with a healthy dose of the sword's spectral hatred. He had made damn sure that poison would be strong enough to put down even someone like Brimstone, with two ranks in Poison Resistance. It would start to take effect in roughly thirty seconds.

Brimstone clamped his gauntlet down on his neck. He cast Spark once unsuccessfully, twice, then…

The Cancel effect shattered; overloaded.

There was a loud sizzle of meat frying as wisps of smoke rose off of Brimstone's gauntlet. Captain conjured a fresh quarterstaff and swung with it, but Brimstone caught the weapon with his unarmored hand and snapped it, causing it to disintegrate. When the lord took his hand off his neck, a large black handprint remained.

"Fuck," Will muttered. "Burning out the poison. You just love being obnoxious, don't you?"

Brimstone gave a demented grin. "Heeeh…"

Will called to Captain: "Cancel's over! Now's the time!"

Captain nodded.

"Semblance Art: Forget Me Not."

"Semblance Art: First Responder."

Will thrust his sword into the blackened earth, let it sink down until nothing remained. His semblance expanded rapidly outward, shifting the landscape around them, instantly washing away the smoke and fire and darkness to replace it with pure, tranquil white.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Once the semblance settled, the positions of the three caught inside had been shuffled around so that they formed the three points of a triangle, set an equal distance apart from the sword sticking out of the earth between them.

Last time, there had been eleven graves of black, overturned earth centered around the sword. Now there were more than twice as many.

Brimstone, some hundred feet off, swayed back and forth, tramping his feet. Though he didn't move his head, Will got the impression that he was observing his surroundings. Trying to figure out what the point of it was—where the danger lay.

Captain, the third point of the triangle, was not in fact alone over there. He stood in the shadow of a wooden colossus; twelve feet tall, its body constructed from a random jumble of bits and pieces to form the rough shape of a humanoid, pieces jutting out this way and that. It loomed still and silent as a statue, three-fingered hands hanging limp by its sides.

"Okay, let's finish this fucker off," Will sighed, and began laboriously making his way toward the center of the circle to retrieve his sword.

The golem that made up Captain's autonomous-type semblance bent down and offered out its huge hand. Captain used it as a springboard to jump up and land in a crouch up on the golem's shoulder, one hand resting on its head to keep balance. The golem straightened, stood there a moment, then burst into a breakneck sprint, throwing up huge black-and-white sprays of earth as it tore across the wide flat ground of the semblance field.

The thing outdistanced Will in less than two seconds, and made frighteningly quick time in cutting the distance to the enemy. Brimstone calmly raised both hands in anticipation of the several-ton pile of flotsam stomping his way. His hands sparked, then roared to life with energy. The fire rushed to the empty space in the air between his palms; compressing, compressing, compressing until it was the size of a marble, barely a speck from where Will was standing.

Brimstone waited until the sprinting giant was almost on top of him, then…

Boom.

Wood and earth scattered everywhere. Dust whipped up off the ground and covered the whole area, leaving Will in the dark. He cursed under his breath and limped faster. He tried a Dash, but the sudden acceleration jolted his bad leg too badly, and he tripped over onto his knees. Growling, he fought a bout of vertigo as he tried to stand. He eventually crawled his way up to the sword, and used that as a support to finally get up successfully.

The wraiths beneath the soil reacted predictably to the sudden upset. They screamed and thrashed riotously, rotting corpses that chomped on gray foam as they dragged themselves shrieking from their graves all around him. They streamed past him, running or limping or clawing themselves forward. They paid Will no mind.

One wraith shouldered into him and upset his newly won balance, toppled him forward. He tried to get up, but suddenly found that he no longer knew where 'up' was, ground falling away on him, spinning. The only sounds he could make out were mad, distorted screams.

He flailed mindlessly, vision blurring over, seeing only a field of black and white and gray. His body cramped, and he gasped as his back arched painfully. Then he found himself lying down, arms outflung as he stared up at a pale sky. Then he was on his knees, unsure how he'd got there, his breathing loud in his ears.

He had no idea how much time had passed by the time consciousness began to bleed back into him. Looking down the other end of the field, he saw a chaotic melee of flailing bodies. Captain's golem had been blown in half at the waist, and the upper portion was grasping onto Brimstone, huge hands clamping down on one arm and one leg and pulling them wide. Wraiths were climbing all over like ants, fighting each other more than anything in a mad scramble to reach Brimstone. Those closest were peeling his armor off in pieces and taking bites out of his flesh.

[First Responder is slotted with Extinguish, a skill uniquely useful to Captain as it allows him to quickly put out fires. This skill is expressed almost identically in his semblance, the golem automatically suppressing any fire in a twenty-foot radius around itself, with an especially pronounced on-touch effect.]

[However, Extinguish can only put out ordinary fire—it can't negate skill effects.]

The scattered pieces of gray limbs and smoking flesh dotting the ground suggested that Brimstone had already figured out the method for bypassing the fire suppression of Captain's semblance, as well as the wraiths' intangibility.

[The wraiths are also vulnerable to skill effects. While immune to all forms of physical damage, skills with the correct targeting parameters can still touch them.]

[Spark creates a physical flame—however, the initial combustion is anomalous and considered a skill effect.]

[As such, the main part of Brimstone's flames are unable to harm the wraiths, while the first part closest to the casting point is a different matter. Additionally, only the physical flame can be Extinguished, so the initial part still considered a skill effect is immune to such tampering.]

By focusing his attacks around quick bursts of destructive potential rather than creating widespread fires, Brimstone could still deal damage effectively.

Captain circled the whole mess warily, content to let the hired help do the work rather than wading in there for no good reason. Things were still looking pretty good until a series of dense explosions went off in quick succession, tossing wraiths aside like so much chaff. The golem slammed Brimstone against the ground, but this did not seem to faze him much. Another two blasts took the golem's left arm off, and Brimstone fought his way free of its remaining hand. He got up on one knee and pointed a finger at a screaming corpse leaping for him, a whipcrack of explosive power tearing it to pieces midair.

Seeing that the situation was rapidly devolving, Captain jumped in to shore up the attack. Brimstone snarled at the man and brought his hands together, arms outstretched, in a sharp clap. Captain attempted to dodge, but it didn't make a difference. Henri Saint Capitain was a deconstructed trail of body parts before he even had time to look shocked.

A few wraiths were still moving to attack Brimstone, maybe six or seven, but most of them had been reduced to twitching chunks of rotted meat. They could not be killed outright as far as he knew, but they could evidently be incapacitated. The pieces were beginning to coalesce, pooling toward some semblance of their original shapes, but it was too slow a process to be of any use. Meanwhile, the actual semblance itself was beginning to unravel from suffering such massive trauma.

"Shit," Will whispered. "Shit, shit, shit, fuck."

[First Responder ends.]

[23 seconds later, Forget Me Not ends.]

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