The squelchy parts of the ground were semi-solid at best, though there were plenty of sturdier patches in between. I could hardly see my own feet beneath me. Surfaces jutted out of the ground at low-lying angles, like swamp-bound logs.

UP ahead, dark objects came into view.

"What is that?" Mr. Himichi asked.

At first, I thought they were the legs of a giant spider. Half a dozen dark, stilt-like growths stood around a central point. Looking up, I could see that they joined together at a point in the middle, past which they grew upward in a sort of trunk.

"It's like a giant mangrove tree…" Ileene said.

A breeze blew away some of the fog, bringing more things into view, along with a nauseating scent.

The ground underfoot reminded me of my Main Menu's water-slicked floor. Warm, icky fluid rose up to our shins, beneath which was a layer of mud. We were surrounded by miniature lagoons left and right: sections of the muddy ground where the fluid suddenly deepened. The objects jutting out from the ground were, in fact, the trunks and broken roots of the "mangroves".

Something swished in one of the deeper ponds.

"My word…" Mr. Himichi said.

More things came into view

We were in some kind of swamp. The giant mangroves dotted the landscape at regular intervals. In a way, it reminded me of my first, failed attempt at world-building, only far more haunted and unsettling.

Ileene pointed at the 'plants' growing at the edge of the deeper pools. "Those look like horsetails," she said.

The things she called "horsetails" were pale, sickly stalks that grew in clusters on the mud at the water's edge, as if someone had submerged a bone-built pipe organ in the ground.

Ileene yelped, covering her mouth with her hand.

Creatures skittered by, weaving in and out of sight at the far edge of my field of vision. They were darkly colored and had too many legs, and scrambled past far too quickly for me to make out much more than that.

"What's that?!" she said.

"Ask later," Suisei said, "flee now." He flicked a nervous glance at one of the ponds. "Just… watch your step. And stay away from the pools."

Every few seconds, I heard the sound of something slender zip through the air. Unnervingly, small-scale explosions wetly punctuated that noise a couple seconds later.

In the distance, something shrieked; a lot of somethings. It was like howler monkeys in trees, only shrill and sibilant.

We moved as quickly as we could, crossing the stretches of mud where the water was shallowest, hopping along floating bridges of fallen mangroves. At one point, Ileene slipped, but I managed to grab her just in time.

Well, almost.

Something slimy and sinuous—a creature? a limb?—darted out from the lagoon and wrapped around her leg.

She screamed, flailing her arms.

The tentacle squeezed tight around her leg and tugged her toward the water. Its bristled surface ripped the lower half of her jeans apart like paper.

Suisei dashed over to us and helped me pull, and we managed to yank Ileene's leg free from its grasp. The upper layer of her skin sloughed off, stuck to the tentacle's texture. Blood spilled everywhere.

Ileene screamed. "Angel! Angel!"

"We'll fix it later," I said.

Something inhuman shrieked in the fog. I froze in place. The sound broke out again and again, moving each time, growing in number. I looked left and right, my nose smearing through the rancid fog.

"Where's it coming from?" I yelled. "Where's it coming from?"

Turbulence rocked the fog, and I couldn't tell if it was the wind, or something else. Terror shivered down my spine.

Mr. Himichi screamed. "Genneth!"

"By the Godhead!" I said.

Several bundles of flailing tentacles charged at us, emerged from the fog in a visual snarl. The creatures they belonged to were systems of robust, flexible tentacle-limbs, bound together and capped on top by a single, hard-cased structure, shaped like an insect's abdomen. Headdresses of antennae crested up from the back of their heads, twitching this way and that.

"Run!" I screamed.

We turned and ran. The creatures ran after us, skittering across the lagoons, propelling themselves with their thick, muscular tentacles.

I could hear the water splash as they advanced.

In the distance, there was a deep groan, half foghorn, half-roar.

Several red, needle-like crystals shot through the fog and hit our two pursuers, impaling through the creatures' heads.

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"Holy fudge!" I yelped.

Each of the crystals had to be as long as my forearm!

Tentacles flailing, the creatures shrieked again as the crystals glowed bright, making a loud, tonal hum.

The creatures rushed us, and then exploded mid-pounce. The chunks of the protective carapaces on their heads flung through the air while the creatures' demolished tentacles scattered in the mud. Black ooze and clumps of electric green spores spurt out from the broken limbs.

I didn't know whether to be thankful or terrified.

Suddenly, it was like the Angel had reached down with His hand; all the fog was swept away.

A wyrm roared. Slender red crystals hurtled through the air.

We all gasped.

"This is a war zone," Ileene said.

"They're fighting zombies," I muttered.

The tentacle creatures were fighting against the fungal zombies &alon had made of their kind in a slew of scattered skirmishes. Bursts of particolored laser fire zapped over the lagoons. Electricity crackled on vicious, club-like weapons the creatures slammed into their infected targets.

&alon's zombies were easy to spot. The fungal growths cresting out of their heads and tentacles gave them away, as did the ulcers eating away at their head carapaces, and the spastic movements with which they tumbled across the mud.

The red needle-crystals were fired from weapons the creatures equipped to their tentacles like oversized bucklers. The bucklers were made of a vitreous, orange substance that glowed like a streetlamp on a dark, rainy night. Clusters of the red needle-crystals bristled at the shield's cores. The creatures held the things up like the shields they so resembled and then swung them to launch the crystals at the oncoming zombies, knocking them back or to the side. The zombies squealed in pain, tumbling down, flailing through the mud in a final indignity right before the crystals detonated, blasting their victims apart in a mess of goo and gore.

And just like on my world, when you fought &alon, she fought back. Groups of nimble defenders skittering across the mud or clambering up the mangroves, would fall apart as one or more of their number twitched and stumbled, the sign of &alon taking over their bodies. She didn't know how to use the crystal bucklers, beyond bashing them into anything that moved.

Crystals hummed on impact, glowing bright. Squadrons climbing hillsides fell apart. Victims exploded, blasting holes in the ground, even as &alon continued to claim more minds.

Even here, it was heartbreaking, watching her swipe away their will and turn them against their brethren.

"Over here!" Ileene said, kneeling by one of the giant mangroves.

We followed her, taking cover alongside her, behind the tree's towering roots.

It gave me a chance to survey our surroundings.

Marshes and lagoons scarred the battlefield, with newer, messier holes pockmarking the ground with each detonating needle. Mangroves stood here and there, bearing "leaves" as black as pitch. &alon had nearly outnumbered them; masses of her flesh swelled from the landscape like towering tumors.

The other structures rising up across the swamp were so unusual that, at first, I thought they were deformed mangroves, but, on closer inspection, I realized they were anything but.

They were buildings.

The tentacle creatures' architecture resembled abstract sculptures, or—as Ileene suggested—deep sea sponges. Despite their tall, vaguely rectangular profiles, their surface curved and flowed like something organic, bubbled up from the earth like lava in a lava lamp, wax congealed, struck through by holes through which I could see the sky. Bird-perch struts stuck out from their sides, forming monkey-bar paths the creatures clambered up and down with their infinitely dextrous tentacles.

Infected, chitin-clad six-limbed behemoths trundled across the battlefield. Sporestacks grew from their backs. But these weren't amalgam beasts. Groups of the tentacle creatures rode atop them, on saddles, using them as mobile towers to fire needle crystals at the masses of the infected skittering around the giants' feet.

"Are we going to die here?" Ileene whispered.

Roaring, several half-changed wyrms—all silver-eyed—swam up into the fog overhead. The tentacles and carapaces of their former bodies crowned the alien transformees' burgeoning wyrm-heads like the headdresses they so resembled.

The armies aimed energy beams and red needles up, trying to shoot the wyrms down, only for Vyx death rays to blast down from the corner of the sky. The beams' heat boiled away the fog, sending up great gushes of steam. The mud turned canyon-hard, cracking as it dried.

Tentacle creatures and zombies scattered every-which way as Vyx modules burst down out of the clouds, strafing their beams along the ground. The mechanical pixies I'd seen in Elpeck—the drones Treefather Day had spoken of—swarmed out from the flower-ships and meandered over the scene, surveying the land. Any uninfected survivors, structures, creatures, or relics got pulled up in their green tractor beams.

"ERADICATE! ERADICATE!"

"Shit," Suisei cursed.

AVUs whirled down through the clouds.

Something told me that they weren't just another part of… whatever this place was.

Chunks of "wood" splintered off and fell into the mud as the AVUs swirling metal swarms ripped through the mangroves.

"We have to make a run for it!" Suisei said. He ran out first.

It took me a moment to react, but then I did, grabbing Mr. Himichi's hand in one hand and Ileene's in the other.

We ran out from under the mangrove's roots.

Mr. Himichi picked up the pace, pulling free from my grip and dashing forward.

It was madness.

"Head to the building!" Suisei said.

I couldn't see where he was, but one building was closer to us than all the others, so I hoped that was what he meant.

Ileene yelled, crying in pain, trailing blood on the mud. She slipped and fell, landing at the edge of one of the deeper pools.

"Ileene!"

An infected, eel-like creature writhed out from the pool as I turned back and helped her up. It wrapped itself around her injured leg.

She screamed and flailed, desperate to kick it off. I pulled and pulled, but to no avail.

"Dr. Howle!" she screamed, eyes wide.

I saw something red glimmer in her eyes.

A reflection.

I turned to look.

A dead tentacle alien lay on the ground behind me, with its spike shield half-embedded in the mud.

Pulling on Ileene with all my might, I reached out with my other arm and grabbed the spike shield.

Its handle had the shape of a sewing needle's head.

I curled my fingers around it, and by some miracle, my fingertips passed over the trigger, which I pressed, but not before pointing the darn thing at the eel-monster.

A red crystal shot out, hitting the eel in the middle of its body. Fungal tendrils erupted from its flanks as the feelers on its head writhed. The explosion came a second later, splattering the two of us black ooze and kibbled flesh.

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