We barreled down the street, streaking through fire and fury. Merritt, Kurt, and Brand sang battle-cries as they absorbed the remaining zombies and then chased after us.

"Fudge!" I cursed.

There were more abandoned cars up ahead!

Everyone hit the brakes as we turned around the corner. Wheels screeched. I activated my car's horn with a push of the back of a claw.

Brand got the message. Trumpeting in response, he flew over the convoy and swooped down onto the street, shoving cars aside as he glided forward.

Merritt shuffled forward and grabbed an overturned sedan with both arms, though instead of moving it out of the way, she flung it backward, sending it crashing into a storefront not far behind us.

The way was clear again.

Heggy yelled. "Go, go, go!"

The convoy sped ahead.

We made it down one block, and then two and three. Our wyrm division zipped ahead and knocked vehicles out of the way, with Merritt helping as much as she could.

"C'mon," I muttered. I tightened my two-finger grip on my steering wheel. "C'mon…"

If we could just keep up this pace…

The next obstacle arose on our sixth straight block of speeding past skyscrapers.

I moved my plexus off the accelerator and onto the breaks. The L85 screeched to a halt. Inertia jiggled my tail-body with its last gasp.

"Criminy…"

I bent my head back, drifting my gaze the long way up.

A wyrm had slithered around an office building overrun by the fungus—a forest housed in glass and steel. The thickening growth strangled entire sections of the building, like a fig tree from an Arrakan jungle. The wyrm's elevated forepart reached a good twenty feet high, and had not one, but two heads, their necks forking apart in a steep V.

It was like the kaiju all over again, only smaller.

Its body had a ragged, patchwork quality to it, irregularly alternating between dark blue and green. The two wyrms must have been ripped or blown apart, with their bodies having merged during the regeneration process. The hydra was also asymmetrical, with two arms on one side and one on the other, and from the way it moved, it seemed all three were under the green head's control. The blue head was covered in still-healing wounds.

The only shred of light in this situation was that the gnarled creature was still golden-eyed.

Without warning, the blue head lashed up and to the side, slamming itself into the bottom of the office building's third story. Shards of glass and broken walls rained onto the street. The green head returned its partner's blow, smacking the blue head at the back of its neck. The green had shoved the blue head down and clawed at its eyes.

I doubted this was the first time the green head had attacked its partner.

But there was no time for sympathy.

As the blue head roared and flailed, the wyrm pushed off the skyscraper with its right arm and slithered around the corner. Seeing our convoy, the green head's eyes widened in surprise. It honked and brayed.

The feeling of cruelty that vibed through my skull told me it was laughing at us.

Great, the green head was a psychopath.

"Are you sure you don't want my help, Genneth?" Yuta asked, within me.

"Not now!"

I reached out with a plexus and shifted my car into reverse, right as Merritt charged at the two-headed wyrm.

It knocked her back with a strike of a plexus and a flick of an arm.

Brand took the air as had Merritt launched her attack, and came flying in from around the hydra's side. The two-headed wyrm roared and swung its other arm, conjuring a forcefield directly in Brand's path.

He hit the forcefield like a bird crashing into a window, and fell to the ground.

I winced. Just watching it made my face hurt.

The blue-and-green wyrm ducked low to the street and slid forward, swiping its double arms at Ani's bus.

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The convoy went into reverse, myself included. Ani's bus swerved to the left. Gunfire flashed from the troop transport, bombarding the wyrm's body with bullets. They landed a direct hit on the green head's eyes, but the bullets bounced off the golden globes like sprinkles.

Making a hole in my forcefield helmet, I opened my driver's side window, stuck my head out and yelled: "Kurt!"

As Merritt and Brand recovered—Brand shaking his head while his neck un-broke itself—a surge of pataphysics bristled behind me.

I glanced back just in time to see Kurt launch through air and crashed into the two-headed wyrm's chest, right below the point where the necks forked.

"Now that's what I'm talking about!"

I flicked my tail-tip against the back window in jubilation.

It was a knockdown blow, with Kurt slamming the wyrm down onto the street, back-first. The hydra's arms flailed as it fell, scraping the air. Plexuses sputtered and burst around Kurt and the hydra as the two dueled with their powers.

Merritt slithered out in front of Ani's bus and wrapped her body around it while raising a forcefield.

Heggy's bus veered to the left side of the intersection to dodge Kurt's falling tail as he and the two-headed wyrm grappled one another, nearly matched in size. The blue head flailed about, fluid weeping from its shredded eyes. Despite its blinded state, it kept trying to damage its body-mate, though mostly causing damage all around. It slammed into Kurt's chest as often as it bashed the green head's neck. Eventually, Kurt clawed the blue head's neck; half of the hydra recoil in agony.

All of a sudden, the spores around the green head's snout reversed direction, getting sucked in as the green head curled up over Kurt's back.

It was breathing in…

Still going in reverse, I turned my car and stuck my head out the window and yelled. "It's gonna use its breath weapon!"

Brand had just taken flight. He flicked his head toward me and abruptly changed course, managing to just barely avoid crashing into the overgrown skyscraper's side.

The two-headed wyrm knocked Kurt back, and, pouncing, blasted spore breath at Ani's bus in a narrow cone.

Brand swerved upward, racing along the building. His reflection chased him across the shattered windows.

I pulled my head in and set my car into forward drive, pushing the steering wheel in a stark turn.

Merritt widened her forcefield to block the breath weapon, but the hydra throttled its spore blast with a plexus and frayed the current, spreading it around the expanding forcefield's edges. Merritt panicked and roared, but Brand then swooped down in a divebomb descent, straddled Ani's bus in his arms, and then flew the darn thing up and out of the incoming spores, blocking any stray trails with shields of his own. The bulk of the current hit the end of Brand's tail, not that it did anything.

Brand's scales completely protected him from the acid.

Rearing up again, thumping its tail on the street, the two-headed wyrm turned and heaved force in a sharp sheet to cleave away the spore cloud, but Kurt grabbed it by its double arms and pulled the hydra down, shattering the monster's aim in the process.

The forcefield smacked the spore cloud onto the street. Green mist swept over the road like morning fog.

Behind the hydra, Brand set Ani's bus onto the street halfway down the block.

I didn't bother to close the window as I drove down the street. Instead, I spread out the biggest plexus I'd ever made to form a wall that spanned the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, and slid it forward ahead of my car. My magic swept the spores out of the way like a giant brush. I opened archways in the forcefield to keep from brushing up any vehicles along with the spores. I worried I didn't have the strength to push the cars and the spores at the same time, and. I made sure to close the gaps as soon as the vehicles were out of the way.

The spores had to stay contained!

Once I'd gotten the spores into the intersection, I made an indentation into the forcefield in the shape of an upside down V, and then split the weave open at the tip, leaving a pair of plexuses running parallel to one another—much like the wyrm's two necks—that I pushed out to the left and right, sweeping the spores down the intersection's branches.

Merritt slithered forward with her head barely inches off the ground. The hydra tried to attack her, but Kurt batted it back with his pataphysics, starting another exchange of blows. The attacks crushed abandoned vehicles like tin cans, and left the road battered and pitted.

Pulling my power back, I shrank my plexus down to the size of a thimble while pushing down on the accelerator. Frustratingly, my forcefield hadn't kept the spore from eating away at the road, which was now liberally coated with sizzling furrows and spore-filled depressions. It didn't matter how deep they were; the L85's wheels would be toast if I drove over any of them. The whole car might be destroyed.

But, fricassee me, they were everywhere, and they were getting wider with every passing second, linking together like splatters of cooking oil.

There was only one thing I could do. I just hoped I could do it even half as well as Brand had.

I expanded the plexus around the accelerator and threaded it through the chassis. Once the energy was outside, I pulled it around and slipped it underneath my car.

"Please work…" I muttered.

I pressed down hard on the accelerator as I flooded the levitation weave with energy. The magic lifted the L85 a foot or so off the ground. The car rattled like an aerostat as it coasted over the spore fields, "catching major air," as a skater kid might say. Passing over the morass' edge, I dialed the levitation down, smoothly lowering the car back to the street, though there was still a fierce slam as I hit the road and dug into the wheels' traction.

Heggy was rushing down her bus' aisle up ahead, carrying her rocket launcher over her arm. She stuck the Koenig CC1701 out of one of the broken windows, and yelled.

"Timber!"

Her hair flailed in the wind.

She fired. The rocket took off like, well… a rocket.

Looking up at my rear-view mirror, I spotted Kurt frantically slithering away from the office building and the shattered glass on its ground floor. Behind him, the hydra's blue head had regrown one of its eyes.

Heggy's rocket zoomed over Kurt's head

Bellowing with hate, the blue head flung itself onto the fungal clusters in the building's lobby. The raw biomass flowed into it, as if the blue head was slurping it down. A cerulean arm cracked out from its flank, fingers and claws popping into existence and squeezing the fungal walls in a death grip right as the rocket struck the two-headed wyrm.

I caught a split second of the green head's futile effort to pull away before everything lit up in flame.

The explosion was tremendous.

A second explosion followed half a second later, higher up on the building, followed by another and another, in a chain reaction that vaulted up floor after floor as the spore clouds combusted. The explosion sprayed molten glass from the spired top. The falling glass glittered with a starry twinkle as it caught the rays of dawn.

I plexus-pushed on the accelerator and drove like heck as the building collapsed like a house of straw.

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