The wyrm-trees in the Garden Court oozed in the light of the green Sun. It was a shocking sight, and Ibrahim wondered why the others weren't already hard at work trying to make sense of it. Dr. Rathpalla's question answered itself as he and Larry slithered out into the Garden Court.

The answers had mechs, a hoverwagon, fearsome weapons, and high-tech armor.

Strangers.

Larry let out a fraught roar, not that the Strangers needed any help noticing his and Ibrahim's arrival.

The walker-mechs' rose to action, legs hissing and clacking. A handful of the silver-armored soldiers over by the hoverwagon assumed a protective formation around the mechs as one of the mechs unfolded its wing-arms and established an intangible link with the wagon.

Ibrahim took to the air, levitating close to the ground in a loose S, ready to fight, but the mech turned around and lumbered down the street, with the wagon and its contingent of soldiers following behind. The mech and the wagon quickly disappeared from sight, turning down Merchant Boulevard.

If they kept going that way, they'd cross over the Daum River bridge.

The geometric machines floating near the third floor of the Pediatrics building like semi-polished stone turned around. Luminous spots glared on them in an incensed red, like eyes. The lights around these eyes thrummed with power as it brightened.

The remaining soldiers brandished their weapons: energy swords, crystalline guns, poleaxes with mumbling blades that vibrated like chainsaws. Plasma crackled at the centaur warrior's arms as it summoned a sorcerous bow.

Ibrahim's third pair of eyes twitched. He could faintly make out lines of violet latticework in the Pediatrics building's third floor.

That must have been where the other wyrms were hiding.

Suddenly, those same lines swerved, flaring with power, and the next thing Ibrahim knew, the hospital's wyrms burst out from the Pediatrics building. They took the walls down with them, and rode the debris like surfboards. Brand, Karl, Yuth, and the others pushed off the sections of falling wall with their tails and darted upward, while launching the masonry at the enemy soldiers.

Down below, the soldiers scattered, except for the centaur, who stood in place beside the hoverwagon. Right as the falling walls were about to crush them both, the centaur spread his arms, disappearing his bow and trapping the falling walls, making them hover in place, as if stuck to the surface of a sphere. Then he flexed his arms again and launched the walls back at the wyrms.

The wyrms pulled up and away, trying to dodge, and while some managed to evade it, several—including Nurse Costran—got slammed against the buildings by the centaur's more powerful attack.

And all of it happened in the span of a few seconds.

Brand shot up like a rocket and caught one of the incoming wall blocks with a psychic hand, and then twirled it up and around himself and chucked it back at the centaur.

"Doc!" Larry yelled.

The other Strangers were charging at them.

The janitor took flight.

Ibrahim nodded and followed suit, surging upward.

The mech walkers strafed to the side and fired their blasters, aiming upward at Ibrahim. Dr. Rathpalla yanked his tail out of the way of one of the lasers. Brand levitated his stone to catch the rest, which broke into melted pieces under the force of the bombardment.

Down below, the centaur set off in a gallop. One of the Strangers leapt off the ground, flying around around in a blur of thwick-ing wings.

He raced toward Ibrahim and Larry.

The other wyrms snarled and spat, charging at the soldiers, slashing at them from above. The soldiers leapt deftly, dodging the spore breath attacks or deflecting them with pataphysical shields if they didn't, and then replied to the wyrms' attacks with blows of their own. Blades of ice and plasma hissed as they struck wyrmscale.

The flying Stranger stabbed Ibrahim in the flank. Roaring in pain—the sound was like a marching band exploding mid-air—Ibrahim countered with slashes to create to some space and followed up with a psychokinetic shockwave to send the little bastard flying, but the aerial warrior evaded it, moving so quickly, he might as well have been teleporting. Plasma knives appeared in his hands, siphoned off from the mech's blasters. They glowed like fire.

He zipped forward and struck, lopping off one of Ibrahim's horns. Ibrahim flew up to get away, causing the Stranger's knives to slide down his snout and flanks, slicing him open in the process.

Ibrahim gushed out spores as he screamed. He flew into his screams.

"We have to get out of here!" Yuth cried.

As if on cue, two wyrms flew up high, thrashing their tails, desperate for more speed.

Suddenly, there was a bright flash in the corner of the Garden Court, accompanied by a crackle of lightning. Ibrahim turned just in time to see the centaur let an arrow fly from his thunderlight bow. The sparking energy punched smoking holes through the two wyrms' bodies. The wyrms' flight fell into disarray as they screamed in pain. Both of them fell. One slammed into the Pediatrics building, demolishing another wall, while the other crashed into the street behind the Crusader Hill tunnel.

Ibrahim glanced down. The winged, knife-wielding maniac was still flying after him.

"Get away from me!" he roared.

Instead, the little bugger vaulted up and stabbed him in the back. Larry blasted a psychokinetic projectile at the gnat, but the Stranger dodged it like nobody's business.

Ibrahim flattened out and banked in a wide turn. Below, the centaur fired several more bolts as he raced down the street. Windows and wall ornaments shattered and fell from the shockwaves that emanated from the centaur's attacks.

His arrows of light took wyrms down like flies. Karl, Brand, and Yuth were nimble enough to dodge them, but Bethany and Maryon weren't as lucky. They got hit, and they fell.

The bolts moved so quickly…

Right as the centaur galloped by, Charles Twist leapt out of the Pediatrics building with a scream, flocked in blades and vortices of kinetic vacuum flocked like so many birds. He flung them and himself at the centaur with another roar and slashes of his claws, using his body as a battering ram.

The centaur pushed off Mr. Twist's underbelly with an arm, and then a burst of force sent the two rocketing away from another. The centaur hit Charles with one of his light arrows before either of them had even hit the ground. The energy punched a hole through Mr. Twist's attack, scattering the flock. The wyrm crashed into the Pediatrics building back-first; the centaur skidded backward along the dirt.

After coiling around mid-air like a maniac, Ibrahim finally managed to get a hit in on his winged tormentor, smacking the flying Stranger with the broadside of his tail. Larry seized the opening this created to blast himself at the centaur while the archer was still skidding to a stop. Larry mauled the archer with a force-enhanced claw-strike that tore through the centaur's armored torso.

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Ibrahim slowed his perception of time, just to gawk at the humanoid portion of the centaur's upper body, which, through the slowed time, jutted out past the edge of Larry's flank. More of the creature's form came into view as the janitorial wyrm slowly hurtled forward, revealing a perverse fusion of man and machine.

Well, lizard-man and machine.

The exposed, frontal portion of the centaur's quadrupedal lower body appeared to be entirely composed of the silvery, metallo-crystalline material as the flower-ships and the Strangers' body armor. The lower body's build was bulkier and more muscular than Ibrahim had initially thought, closer to a lion than a horse. The dark, blue-green torso mounted on the lower body, meanwhile, looked vaguely reptilian, or even amphibious, but with two sets of eyes and a head garlanded in many long, fleshy tendrils. Mechanical components studded the torso's chest and neck, and one of its arms. Even one of its eyes was cybernetic. Eerie veins spidered out from the implants, whose roots protruded beneath the creature's moist skin.

Speeding up time, Ibrahim flattened his body and zoomed forward. The lizard-centaur had to waste precious seconds avoiding Larry's follow-up attack and putting some distance between himself and the wyrm, and it was in that window of opportunity that Dr. Rathpalla chose to strike.

Inhaling deeply, Ibrahim brought himself to a silent stop, coiled directly above the lizard-centaur and then blew out the biggest spore stream he'd ever blown. But one of the other soldiers came running over with an outstretched hand and diverted the green torrent into two streams.

The currents blasted away dirt and pavement, blowing troughs into the ground. Spores spewed out like steam.

Other wyrms followed Ibrahim's example, mounting their own breath attacks of their own, but to no avail.

Galloping away, the lizard-centaur wove power between his hands, holding it like the threads of a cat's cradle. Making sweeping gestures with his arms, he reared up on his hind legs and pulled in the many streams of spore breath, drawing them in like bolts of cloth. The wyrms—Ibrahim included—flung psychic boulders at the lizard-centaur, but the soldier's subordinates intercepted them, and, worse, somehow managed to negate them altogether with odd, gauzy energy shields

More spore currents gathered around the lizard-centaur. They whirled around him like flying hammers. The lizard hurled the spores at the wyrms. Anyone who tried to repel them got their forcefield shattered like glass. The impacts flung the wyrms aside.

It was then that Ibrahim realized that he and the others just might be outgunned here.

Apparently, wyrms weren't at the top of the food chain, after all.

Who knew?

Ibrahim raised his head and roared.

"Run!"

He kicked down with his tail and swam upward. A bolt of lightning crackled over his head, singeing his horns. Ibrahim glanced down.

His pesky, humming-winged assailant was now shooting at him!

Wait, Ibrahim thought.

Was it a hummingbird?

"Go!" Larry yelled. "I'll hold them off!"

Larry slammed his body into several of the soldiers, and together, they rolled across the ruined Garden, tumbling down the Undergreen Galleria's collapsed ceiling, into the pit in the middle of the courtyard.

Brand and the other wyrms took the sky, and Ibrahim followed them, swerving out of the way of the mechs' laser blasts and the machine-pixies' blistering red death-rays.

"Oh… bollocks!" Mr. Twist barked.

Ibrahim looked away from his winged pursuer.

Shit.

Things had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

The Strangers had sent reinforcements.

A squadron of four flower ships was rapidly descending toward the hospital, scarlet light already building along their fuselages.

Their death rays were readying to fire.

"Down!" Brand roared. "Get down! Scatter!"

Several of the wyrms scattered onto the side streets, only to bellow in agony as arrows of light lanced through their bodies. Swooping down toward the Garden Court, Ibrahim spied the lizard-centaur running galloping along the walls of the building, firing shot after shot from his light-wrought bow, in between the rhythmic bursts of his drumming machine-paws.

Suddenly, wyrmsong chorused through the air.

Heads of all sorts looked up in shock.

Off in the distance, Ibrahim could see a swarm of silver-eyed wyrms inbound for their location. Their roars rumbled through the streets, which responded with shrieks and worse as the dead city came alive with fungal shamblers that burst out of windows and storefronts and skittered down walls.

Behemoths of all sizes flooded the streets, shaking the ground.

The hummingbird-warrior raised an arm, and fired a bright flare nearly straight up into the sky. The recoil from the device knocked him toward the ground.

Suddenly, squadrons started pulling away from the dogfights with the wyrms over the Bay, with the rest of the fleet providing covering fire for the disengagement. The flower-ships raced toward the hospital with fearsome speed, faster than the approaching silver-eyes. Charging death rays kindled on their hulls.

&alon responded by pulling her forces away from the Bay and toward the hospital.

The cloud of war began to move across the city.

If we don't get out of here now, Ibrahim thought, we'll be fried!

Suddenly, Dr. Nowston yelled. "Garage! Greg! The garage!"

"What!?" Ibrahim yelled.

Brand swerved to dodge a laser beam.

"Greg! Get Greg!"

That's right… Dr. Rathpalla thought.

Mr. Pfefferman was still down in the garage. He was so big, they'd had to take the stairs to get to Letty because there wasn't any room left to slither through the garage's 2nd floor.

Dodging ice blades and mech's lasers, Ibrahim swam down into the galleria hole and then pulled out of his descent and zoomed through the ruined glass barrier that separated the galleria from the garage, his underbelly skirting mere inches over the debris-covered floor; he pushed off cars and columns, half flying, half slithering, zipping across the first floor, turning down the ramp to the next level and tumbling down to the garage's second floor—SLAM!—right into a wall of dark wyrmscale.

Ibrahim flopped onto his belly, and then scooted backward and shook out his head. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.

Greg.

Mr. Pfefferman had really been putting on the pounds.

Not knowing what else to do, Ibrahim rapped his fists against Greg's flank.

"Help!" he screamed. "Mr. Pfefferman, do something!"

But there was no response.

Just then, an old saying popped into Ibrahim's head: let sleeping dragons lie. It was a useful maxim, though in this case, it couldn't have been more wrong.

As Ibrahim pulled back his arms, spread his claws, and swathed them in power, he really, really hoped he wasn't going to regret what he was about to do.

He raked his down Greg's flank, gouging gashes through his flesh. The magic whirling around Ibrahim's claws sprayed wyrmscales everywhere, like dark stucco.

All of a sudden, everything shook. Cracks rived through the walls and ceiling. Ibrahim set up a protective force-field bubble just in time.

The garage came tumbling down: walls fell, the ceiling collapsed, and the horizon of wyrmflesh thundered forward.

In seconds, the debris was so thick that Ibrahim could hardly see anything at all. He had to shut his second pair of eyes to keep from drowning in the cacophony.

The ramp underfoot juddered and then split like a cracker, the floor heaving and falling away. Twisting his force bubble, Ibrahim doubled its purpose, using it to power flight, swimming up through the chaos like a living drill, passing through the tempest until he burst through the surface of the broken, mosaic ocean.

He gawked as he gained altitude.

He turned around in a measured corkscrew.

The General Labs building was collapsing in on itself. It was like a bomb had gone off. The structure's haggard walls had finally given up and caved in. The collapse rippled out from the epicenter, sending fissures through the grounds. The Hall of Echoes buckled. One of its curtain walls sloughed off, split in half, and crashed. Metal, tile, pipes, and vinyl telescoped inward, sinking into the earth in a chain reaction as the old garage's floors collapsed, one after another, dragging the ruin down into the grave.

And from the collapse, there rose a wyrm.

A wyrm greater than any other.

"Angel's mercy…" Ibrahim squinted his many snout holes. Shock rippled down his mane.

Mr. Pfefferman emerged from the collapsing hospital like a serpent from the primordial chaos. He was as long as the horizon, and as thick as a house. More of Elpeck's walls crumbled as he pushed off them with his massive claws. His savage antlers tore through the wreckage. He coiled as he rose, casting a spiral shadow on the courtyard below. The mechs fired their lasers, the archer shot his lightning bow. The explosions sent more debris raining down, but as the dust cleared, not even a single wyrmscale had been knocked out of place.

The approaching flower ships fired their red rays. They burned through Greg's hide, making him turn his head as he roared in pain, shaking rubble from his antlers like fallen snow.

The sight left Ibrahim awed and conflicted. He was humbled and terrified at the thought that this was what he might one day become. But, as the ships closed in and bright lights built up on the motherships high, high overhead, there was one thing Dr. Rathpalla was absolutely certain about: shit was about to go down, and he didn't want to be there when it did.

Opening his second pair of eyes in panic, Ibrahim looked around, up, down, left, right. Massive heat rays began to slice through the air, forming a crisscrossing, ever-shifting network that was already slicing buildings and wyrms in two. With fear rising in his heart, Ibrahim looked down and saw the contours of the former garage's walls echoed in sound waves bouncing off the concrete. Using his sound-sight, he picked up the locations of tunnels of the hospital's severed bowels opening onto the empty space where the garage had once been, and among them, there was one tunnel that didn't belong. It was more like a hole in the wall than anything else, and it went deep, and in a direction away from everything else.

"This way!" Ibrahim yelled. He waved his claws. "This way! Through the dust!"

Up above, the giant wyrm bellowed, and then inhaled a great breath.

The other wyrms swam after Ibrahim as fast as they could, while Ibrahim made a beeline for the tunnel. Then, right as he slithered in, from up on high, there came a terrible din, followed by a flash of heat and light unlike anything Ibrahim had ever known.

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