So, yeah, a fierce battle was developing—but at least there was some good news: slithering in the hallways turned out to be a lot easier than in the comparatively cramped confines of Staff Lounge 3.

The extra wiggle room made all the difference.

As for the bad news… well…

"Mr. Genneth!" Andalon shrieked.

Not only were Verune's transformees strong, they were organized, and—even worse—seemed to actually know what they were doing. Case in point: a robed transformee hovering above the Garden Court had just used their psychokinesis to chuck a dump truck—an entire truck!—at WeElMed's central wing, right where I happened to be.

"Fudge!"

As I yelled, I weaved a psychic scooper at my back and used it to fling myself forward right as the truck crashed into the hallway's wall. Glass, stone, insulation, and wrecked metal blasted through the external wall and kept going, knocking down the wall behind me and continuing on for a good dozen yards, punching through wall after wall, pulverizing any medical equipment and plague patients unfortunate enough to be in the way.

I briefly slowed my perception of time to give myself a couple seconds to look out through the gaping hole the dump truck had smashed in the wall.

Fighting heck… I thought.

I didn't see so much as a single silver-eyed wyrms after all.

Andalon turned to me. "Isn't that a good thing?"

No! I thought-said. Well, yes, but…

Mentally, I groaned.

Sure—technically—it was a good thing that the evil Angel behind the fungus wasn't the one responsible for this impromptu attack.

No, this time, we just had to contend with the forces of the insane, time-displaced Lassedite who currently had my family trapped in his organization's clutches. And, man, talk about forces.

Even if this was the majority of Verune's forces—which I highly doubted—the number of transformees he had on his side was simply terrifying. For every wyrm or transformee I saw on the ground, I must have seen three in the air. There were dozens of them.

Beast and Queen, why did people have to be like this? It was the end of the world, what was left to fight over?

Oh, right: me.

Somehow, Verune knew about my recently acquired necromantic powers to control the bodies of the infected, both zombies and not.

Did he somehow know about &alon, too?

Darn it! What the heck was going on?

Well, there was only one way to find out.

Letting time resume, I tumbled forward, flopping onto my belly and bouncing off the floor, whisking the hem of my coat across the vinyl. I scrabbled my arms across the floor, clawing furrows before I finally managed to get a grip and right myself and slither forward, with Andalon flying alongside me.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Free as many transformees as I can!" I answered.

I rounded a corner, using one of my crumbling leg stubs to push off the opposite wall to help speed myself along.

I needed to get to the garage, stat!

Nurses, doctors, and ailing patients screamed, ducked, or both-ed as I slithered by.

Uh-oh.

Some occupied hospital beds were lined up against a wall. I crashed into them, and it was awful; bodies got flung out of the beds, smacking onto floor and wall, with a limb often breaking off in the process. I didn't know whether they were dead or alive, and I didn't have time to check, mostly because the impact of them hitting the floor caused the fruiting bodies growing from and in their bodies to explode like so many gas grenades, leaving the hallway awash with caustic spores.

The human screams and polyphonic shouts echoing in the distance were now joined by fiery explosions and the sounds of tanks' cannons firing. Some aerostat engines started to roar, but then there was a sequence of detonations, followed by a tremendous crash in Garden Court that instantly blazed into a ball of flak and flame.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Seeing people running my way, I leaned to the side, pushing myself up against the wall to make room for them to run past, while also whipping up a forcefield to split the spore clouds down the middle. They glanced at me at the clouds in terror, but only for a moment.

I released the forcefields as soon as the group was clear of the spores, revealing sizzling walls charred and cracked by the spores' acid coating.

That probably wasn't a good sign, but I couldn't stay to worry about it. I continued onward and turned left, out into the second floor of the atrium in the Hall of Echoes. From sheer force of habit, I reached for the balustrade at my right as I descended the short flight of stairs from the second floor to the mezzanine level where the Hall of Echoes had its first walk-around gallery. Well, that's what I meant to do, but I ended up slipping down the short flight of stairs, my claws ripping out a chunk of the balustrade in the process. A quickly weaved plexus placed between myself and the walkway's marble floor kept me from landing flat on my face, which was good, because people were running up the stairs and walkways, screaming like mad.

The grand old wooden doors at the front of the Hall of Echoes had been torn off their hinges by the burning wreckage of a military aerostat, which lay smoldering where it had crashed against the base of the big staircase. The doors themselves lay on the floor, face-down, half covered by the nearly complete wyrm that had slithered into the Hall of Echoes. Spores puffed out from its snout-holes, and the holes in its back, giving the bystanders their reason to run.

Kibbles and dregs of detonated corpses dripped down the walls, courtesy of the wyrm's psychokinetic attacks.

Many of the fleeing bystanders were too sick to flee, collapsing to the ground after only a couple steps, spewing up black ooze tinted in green, green spores. The bodies piling up at the base of the stairs quickly became crushed corpses.

Rearing its head, aiming at the stair-climbing crowds, the wyrm inhaled, sucking in spores, ready to drown them all in acid death, and Andalon—bless her heart—had the temerity to float over the balustrade and yell at it.

"Bad wyrmeh! Bad bad wyrmeh!"

I didn't bother pointing out that it couldn't hear her.

Again, I slowed my perceptions of time to a crawl, this time to figure out the best way to deal with the wyrm's imminent breath attack. But then, I felt a spirit stirring in my mind.

I shifted my awareness, recentering my consciousness inside the spirit's soul crystal.

The next thing I knew, I was standing in the Munine gardens of Yuta's Trenton estate, a human in my mind. It was daytime. Hummingbirds buzzed among the flowering trees. The koi shimmered beneath the pond's placid waters. There was a low lying table on the veranda, beneath the curled, blue-tiled roof, on which a game of Go was playing out—Geoffrey vs. Yuta, all over again.

Though it would definitely be a stretch to say that these two once-bitter enemies were now fast friends, it was absolutely undeniable that they were far, far less hostile toward one another than they used to be, though at the moment. By the look on Geoffrey's face, the Trenton crusader-knight was losing, possibly badly, though that stopped mattering the instant the two of them noticed my arrival.

Geoffrey looked up first, following a path between a garden of moss and a garden of raked sand and stones as he approached me.

"What's going on, Dr. Howle? I sense… tension."

With a sigh, I closed my eyes and shook my head. "The hospital is under attack by Verune's forces!"

Yuta rushed up at my words, reaching for his katana.

"Show me the battlefield," Geoffrey said.

Turning, I opened a window in the air, giving them a view of what I was currently seeing: namely, that wyrm down on the ground floor.

"I was heading over to free as many transformees as I could, so that they could help with the fight, but I'm worried the hospital won't survive that long."

Yuta stuck out his katana glancing first at Geoffrey, and then me. "Let us fight for you," he said. "It will be as it was before: give our weapons your magic's edge. I will try to keep the enemy occupied for as long as I can while you get our reinforcements."

That…

"That's a really good idea," I said.

I brought Geoffrey and Yuta's spirits out with me as I recentered myself back in my body. I wove my power into being around Geoffrey's halberd and Yuta's katana. I watched through my wyrmsight as their weapons were engulfed on whorls of gold and blue.

"What if they fly off the battlefield?" Geoffrey asked.

I gifted their spirits the power of flight right then and there.

Feel free to chase them, I thought-said.

Immediately, both warriors' ghosts rose a couple inches off the marble floor.

Yuta grinned. "Oh… I could get used to this…"

I coiled a third plexus around my back.

"What are you doing?" the samurai lord asked.

"Speeding things along," I said, right as I made time to do just that.

I let the power flow, launching myself across the Hall of Echoes from corner to the other. Andalon grabbed me from behind, screaming as she held on for dear life. The scutes on my underbelly scraped against the marble as I crash-landed on the other side, my tail piling up behind me.

That was certainly an odd sensation.

Suddenly, a buzzing sensation shot through my whole body, as if I'd stuck my finger in an electrical outlet.

I groaned. "Ugh!"

A big swath of power got ripped right out of me. It was enough to make Andalon flicker in and out for a moment, as if our connection was about to break.

On a hunch, turning my forepart around, I peered over the gap where I'd broken through the balustrade on my landing. Down on the ground floor, the wyrm's now-headless body fell to the marble.

"Well, hot dog!" I muttered.

Yuta and Geoffrey had decapitated it head-on with a combination strike. Spores burbled out from where the wyrm's severed neck lay on the floor, forming a puddle that hissed and steamed as the acid ate into the marble.

Andalon stared in shock all the while.

I turned to her. "There's no time, let's go!"

Slithering down the hallway, I turned around the corner, past the ice cream sandwich vending machine where I'd defeated Frank Isafobe's demon-touched spirit days before. That hallway led straight to Room 268, where a bunch of transformees awaited me, ones I knew had combat experience.

I was home free!

Then, with a crash, a clawed fury tumbled onto me from behind.

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