I slowed time as three horse-sized fungus creatures raced out of the shadows and galloped toward me across the overgrown concrete.

Yuta and Geoffrey brandished their weapons and stepped in front of me.

"You don't need to worry, Genneth," Yuta said, glancing at me over his shoulder. "I'll slice them to pieces!"

Not when I'm sliding down an incline! I thought-said.

Colliding into a pile of minced fungus would positively supercharge my transformation. And, for the record, there was a lot of fungus.

While I could have probably whipped up a forcefield to block the ramp and keep the buggers at bay, that would also stop me from getting down to the third basement, where I was needed. I supposed I could have also tried to hack them to pieces with a psychokinetic blade, like I had with the monster that had absorbed Nina and Geoffrey, but would have peppered the ground with even more flesh-kibbles and made it even harder to keep the darn stuff off me.

So, weaving blue and gold around me and speeding time up again, I leapfrogged off the ramp in a long, high, long jump that sent me careening over the oncoming creatures. Yuta and Geoffrey ran along the ground, phasing through the monsters as they moved.

I put all my effort into my landing, summoning another "flight cocoon" and using it to exert just enough force to slow myself to a stop mere inches away from having crashed into the first row of cars. I dismissed the magic as quickly as I'd conjured it, using the split seconds to push off a car and thrust myself as close to the edge of the fungus-riddled section of the floor as I could get, and then slithered the rest of the way, lickety-split.

Unfortunately, things then got worse.

"Beast's teeth," I muttered.

The cars up ahead were overgrown. Fungal wood branched out through broken windows and windshields, as if it had grown up overnight. The growths sported fleshy protuberances shaped like aortas or a pipe organs' pipes that wafted out spores whose currents eddied toward me, pulled along in my movements' wake. Behind them, the fungal creatures snarled and set off in a run, their misshapen limbs drumming over the concrete.

"Fudge."

Andalon flew to my side.

A movement ago, the fungus horses had been in my way. Now, though, our positions were reversed, and you know what that meant, don't you?

It was forcefield time!

But, wouldn't you know it, just when it was my time to shine, Larry and the Lizard-Guy came sliding down the ramp from the first floor. They glided upward instead of hitting the floor, banking in a wide turn that threw them onto my three attackers. Lizard-Guy took one, while Larry took two, wrapping his tail-body around them. The creatures twitched and shrieked, but only for a moment, because the two transformees' bodies were already hard at work assimilating their biomass into themselves.

I was almost disappointed as I dismissed my forcefield. Geoffrey certainly was.

Lizard-Guy's arms and legs sank into the bulky back of the creature he'd grabbed. Seconds later, the monster's features had smoothed over as the entity dwindled into a mere protuberance on the underside of Lizard-Guy's body. Cracking bones signaled the migration of the uptake flesh across his body, which reformed before my eyes, changing his silhouette from a distended humanoid to a bonafide serpent.

Larry's double dose of monster chow made his changes even more dramatic than Lizard-Guy's. If there were any vestiges of the janitor's former humanity, I couldn't see them. All traces of it were subsumed in the biomass freshly assimilated from his misbegotten prey. Ailerons emerged from his sides as reddish-brown scales marched across the fungal masses. It was like Larry's body was a single cell, phagocytosing its prey.

And he grew, all six eyes golden and gleaming.

I knew I had to keep going, but it was hard not to linger on the sight of my companions' vanishing humanity.

"Thank you," I said.

Larry waved a dismissive claw. He flexed his lengthened tail, crunching the cars behind him with its bulk.

"What are you waiting for?" Lizard-Guy said—not that he looked like a lizard-guy anymore.

I started to reply, but then shook my head and turned and slithered away. I could feel that I'd absorbed a little more flesh. I felt it with each spurt of pain that stung at my underbelly as I forcibly broke the connections my body kept trying to make with all the fungal nutriment around me.

The turn down to the third-level access ramp was just up ahead. The entrance to WeElMed's Central Wing's third basement level would be right around the corner where the ramp let out on the floor below.

But then Andalon flew around ahead of me, pointed back, and yelled.

"Mr. Genneth!"

Snarls came rushing at me.

I urged Yuta and Geoffrey forward with a mental yell.

Go!

The creatures dashing toward me were like broken hounds. Grapevine masses slithered along the walls beside them and flicked themselves at me from across the air.

I whipped up plexuses around the warriors' weapons, loaning my powers back to them, lengthening the weaves' to increase the efficacy of their strikes. The time-traveled souls effortlessly sliced through the approaching horde.

But more monsters kept coming.

I slithered forward; I was almost at the ramp.

Larry and Lizard-Guy slithered behind me while Yuta and Geoffrey darted forward. The transformees blasted psychokinesis at the oncoming critters, splattering them like bugs.

Andalon screamed.

Across the ceiling, two spider things skittered, leaping at me from a height and angle outside of my spirits' reach. Thinking quickly, I summoned buckler-shaped barriers around my arms. Due to the power I'd leased to Yuta and Geoffrey, the bucklers were a little smaller than I would have liked, but they did the job.

With a scream, I fudging slammed the things into the spider monsters, as if the forcefields on my arms were wrought iron pans. Both blows landed, and sent the spiders flying.

Andalon cheered me on. "Yeah!"

I hoped Heggy would be able to hold out for a little while longer.

One of the fungus hounds leapt at me, tendrils writhing in its trumpet-flower head.

I raised my arms to block and slithered back and pulled my tail out of reach. The hound grappled my arm, thrashing against my force buckler. I flung it off, but the hound rebounded off the ground, launching tendrils my way, one of which hit my right flank.

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No!

The flesh wriggled inside me, opening up holes in my scales, crawling in, and marching down the underside of my hide.

But my spirits protected me, as did my allies. Larry, who now totally dwarfed me, slid up beside me, stuck out an arm and summoned a wall of force he used to sweep all the slice-n-diced creature detritus out of the way.

There was a small crash, like a stone clattering onto the floor.

"Oh fuck…" Lizard-Guy moaned. The sound was almost musical.

I turned around to look.

Behind us a narrow section of the wall had fallen onto the ground, as if it had been punched from behind.

Oh God…

A fungal octopus struggled to push through the opening. Its efforts sent rapid cracks spreading out from the hole.

Whole chunks of the wall started to fall away. Clawing scythes and flailing limbs broke through the cracks.

I yelled. "Run!"

We slithered away as fast as we could.

A second later, all hell broke loose.

"Mr. Genneth!"

Hearing Andalon scream, I looked over my shoulder and saw that that whole section of the wall had broken open, revealing what had to be an old, decommissioned subway tunnel.

The thing was overrun.

Fungal monsters beyond number exploded onto the scene, both deluge and horde. Tiny critters tumble-twitched across the floor. Two bear-sized quadrupeds with tentacle-rimmed mouths bombed toward me, cracking the concrete beneath their paws. In the middle was the biggest of them all: a thing like a six-limbed gorilla, but with a frenzied mop of tendrils failing where its head and neck ought to have been. The tendrils tore through the ceiling, spraying fine particles of concrete onto us.

Yuta and Geoffrey ran toward them, weapons at the ready, but I dismissed the weaves around their weapons.

They skidded to a halt.

Geoffrey turned toward me and roared. "Dr. Howle?!"

I need the power, I thought-said. I could almost feel their mental protests at my intervention.

But I needed every ounce of strength I had.

I enclosed myself in a box of forcefields as the tidal wave of swarming flesh came at us with all its fury. The little creatures skirted around Larry and the Lizard-Guy; the big ones leapt over Larry's back. The medium-sized creatures crashed into the two transformees' bodies and began to get absorbed right before my eyes—though they didn't go peacefully. In desperation, the fungus' minions rebelled against the two transformees' hungry flesh and reached out to grab me. The gorilla-thing left behind most of its limbs as it ripped itself free from Larry and staggered toward me. It hit the ground and stumbled toward me. I tried to jump away, only to trip over myself and tumble. The gorilla fell on my forcefield, bashing at it with whatever limbs it still had with impacts that made the plexus' colors destabilize and flicker.

I rolled along the floor like a log. The gorilla-thing bashed and clawed. Everything spun.

The next thing I knew, I rolled into a warm, writhing wall that slid up against me and pinned me between a car and a support pillar. I grabbed the top of the warm thing and pulled myself up.

My eyes went wide.

"Larry?"

The janitor was absorbing the flood, growing large and long on the biomass spilling out from the wall.

The chassis of the car at my side groaned. The metal buckled and snapped.

It wasn't me!

Overhead, Andalon pumped her arms, chanting and cheering.

"Wyrmeh! Wyrmeh!"

The two transformees' bodies strained against the cars and support columns as they trembled with growth spasms. The sea-anemone-gorilla bear-things scrambled up, down, and over the hill and valleys of Larry and the Lizard-Guy's lengths in their effort to reach me. Segments of the fungus creatures' limbs snapped off as they fused with Larry, as if they were being ground away by a scrimshander's knife.

Larry's wayward tail split one of the structural pillars down the middle with a tremendous crash.

Oh no…

The janitor's expanding body pressed against mine, tighter, tighter, until it hurt. It squeezed me like a tube of toothpaste, making me hawk up spores. I tried to yell out, but the sounds wouldn't come; there just wasn't enough air in my chest, and I couldn't breathe in to replenish it. I pushed and pushed, but Larry's flank only bore down on me with more and more force. He seemed impossibly heavy, as if he was made of solid metal.

I panted and wheezed.

"Stop!" Andalon yelled. "Stop!" She spread her arms. "You're hurting Mr. Genneth!"

But they couldn't hear her.

She stared at me in terror.

The limbless fungus creatures snarled and flailed, battering against the exposed portions of my forcefields.

I started to lose feeling in my tail.

No!

With all that I'd seen, I knew that I'd survive even if my human bits got crushed to a pulp. The problem was, the regeneration process that would ensue would take away my remaining humanity, and that's assuming the fungus didn't manage to take over my mind in the interim. Could I still think as pulp? Could I even mount a defense against the fungus' attacks?

I had no clue, and that hecking terrified me.

Slowing time, I went over my situation again and again, but each time, the answer was the same.

There was only one way out: I'd have to push Larry off me, and the only way to do that would be to dispel my protective forcefields and use that power to augment my physical strength. But that would also expose me to a thousand and one fungal horrors that wanted to supercharge my transformation all the way to the finish line.

Fudge.

No matter what, I couldn't do nothing. If I did, I'd go from wyrm to flatwyrm in no time!

And then, I heard a really, really awful sound: a long crunch, like a glacier tearing loose from a mountain.

The structural pillar Larry was pressing me up against had begun to crack. My altered perceptions had stretched the sound along the rack of time.

Great, now the whole garage was going to collapse on top of us!

"Mr. Genneth!" Andalon yelled.

I know, I thought-said, I know!

I had to do something, I—

—Blur.

Everywhere, blur. Everything doubled as it was swathed in vibrations a millionth of a millimeter thick. Spores and cement particles came alive in cymatic patterns that danced across every surface.

And then came the light. It unfolded out of nowhere in florets of rouge and rage, orange and heat. Scalding illumination sparked, spreading out in every direction, with a bias toward the ground, scattering in raindrops that crackled as they kindled and flared.

Fire—and it was spreading.

I had to speed up time just to keep my senses from getting overwhelmed.

Metal roared. Glass broke. Things crashed into the walls and floor, blowing gorillas and dogs and anemone bears and a thousand other things of litter and despair as a magician's will stirred it like a hurricane.

Burn, baby, burn.

The horrors shrieked and flailed as the firestorm claimed them. Tendrils blackened and crumbled, all crispy-like.

But… it didn't make sense, and not just the inexplicably helpful master-rank fire magic. The creatures were being blown toward the source of the blast.

Shouldn't they have been getting pushed away from it?

Well, either way, they were all on fire now, so that was a plus.

Suddenly, Larry's tail was yoinked out of my way, slamming onto the concrete onto my side.

"Gennef!"

Brand?

I turned toward the source of the blast.

My surprise flattened the stubby spines on my back once I saw that the reinforcements had arrived.

Finally!

Brand, Greg, and several other self-help group transformees had blasted open the garage-side entrance to the hospital's second basement level, obliterating the sliding glass doors and much of the surrounding entryway. Greg was the MVP. He looked impossibly badass, with his forepart erect and a single arm outstretched, toward which the firestorm churned, where it whirled against his hand, intermingling with his pataphysics' sweeping lines of blues and golds.

How the fudge was he doing that?

Andalon squealed in glee.

The tempest disappeared into his hand with a slurp and a backdraft of bitter cold. Everything in sight was encrusted in black. Cracks began to break in the carbonization as the fungus regenerated within the husks of its ruined creatures, albeit greatly reduced from what it had just been mere moments before.

Brand flew toward me with a psychic leap, careening over the field of crackling black. Pieces of the incinerated flood stuck to his tail and leg-stubs, layering new flesh onto him, lengthening his tail lengthened and streamlining his as he crash-landed on the ground nearby. I slid out a forcefields to cushion the impact, bending the plexus into a cup.

Larry and the Lizard-Guy had absorbed maybe a third of the swarm. Lying side by side, they struggled to fit into the space between rows of cars. The vehicles crunched and buckled as the two wyrms—one bloody brown, the other pale blue—tried to move. But as impressive as that was, it paled in comparison to what was happening over by the demolished entrance.

Greg had drawn them all in. His body had sent hyphae all over the burnt swarm. The already murky distinctions between the creatures' bodies melted away as Greg made them his, gathering them around himself in a great wizard's cloak that swept up everything in its path—cars and corpses and fragments of concrete—and smoothed it over in walls of Night-black spores.

A moment later, a line of three golden eyes opened in the middle of the dark, each as big as a dinner plate.

Mr. Pfefferman's head alone was nearly the size of a car, but his body was larger still, if that was even possible. It continued behind him, threading its way through the second basement's hallways like an arm through a sleeve. And Andalon watched it transfixed, eyes wide, as if it was the best thing ever.

She floated over and petted Greg on the snout. "Such a good wyrmeh…"

As Greg's snout reformed, a fog machine's worth of spores spewed out from its openings, making the garage rumble with sounds that, by comparison, made the Melted Palace's pipe organ seem like a kazoo.

"Greg says get going!" Andalon said. "Down to floor three!"

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