Seeing Ileene in hideous pain, I drew on my powers and willed her to be healed. She stammered and blinked, her leg restored along with her jeans.

"Dr. H—"

—I grabbed her, pulled her up, and ran, while keeping a tight grip on the spike shield with my right hand. The handle was difficult to hold, and chafed against my skin. It obviously hadn't been made with human hands in mind.

I kept vigilant, looking around for the AVUs that were doubtless about to plow into us in a murderous rage.

An infected tentacle alien charged toward Ileene and I. I smacked my shield into its head, bashing it onto the ground. The blow embedded one of the crystals in its head. Ileene flinched at the blast, seconds later.

You could barely see any of the white on my coat anymore.

We kept running, making for the building. My loafers flicked mud, water, and ooze with every step.

"ERADICATE!"

There you are, I thought.

An AVU rushed us.

I spoke under my breath. "Oh no you don't!"

I aimed as best as I could and then pulled the trigger.

The crystal impaled the AVU, right through the dodecahedron. The metal swirling around it shuddered and slowed. The thing trembled mid-air, and then blew up like fireworks. The explosion showered us with glittering, pixelated flak that vanished seconds later.

"Hot dog!" I shouted.

The needler was now my favorite weapon.

"Genneth!" Mr. Himichi yelled.

I saw him waving his hands, standing at the base of a gentle ramp leading into the alien building. The entrance was circular and smooth, like a sewer drain, only with a hinge, and already open.

"This way!" he said.

We followed him, running up the ramp. The dark material yielded slightly beneath our footsteps, like a slow-motion sponge. The consistency of the ground solidified a little once we went inside.

The entrance opened onto an upward-inclined tunnel, dark, and colonic, with ribbing on its sides.

"There you are!" Suisei yelled, looking down on us from the platform up at the other end of the tunnel. His eyes widened as he saw the weapon in my hand.

Ileene went in front of me, joining Mr. Himichi. They climbed the tunnel in a crouched position, bracing their arms against the wall.

Unfortunately, I couldn't do the same while also keeping a grip on the needle shield.

"ERADICATE!"

Darn, another one!

Whipping my head to the side, looking out through the building's entrance, I saw two AVUs barreling toward me with a vengeance. Behind them, combat flooded across the land, aliens against aliens against fungus.

"There isn't—"

"—Toss it!" Suisei yelled.

"Ileene, Mr. Himichi," I said, "watch your heads!"

Pushing my foot against the tunnel floor's slick incline to brace myself, I chucked the needler up like a frisbee. It hurtled, whipping round and round, it zipped over Ileene and Mr. Himichi's heads, hit the side of the tunnel and bounced upward. Suisei lunged forward and grabbed it by the edge, before its crystal spikes took someone's eye out.

I clambered up the tunnel as quickly as I could, and soon emerged on the platform-like landing. The alien building's interior was dark, and drier than the swamplands. Surprisingly, it was comfortingly cool. I even felt a pleasant breeze and a breathy soughing, as if the whole structure was respiring around me. The climate control almost made up for my near-inability to see anything at all. I could just barely make out covered walkways and climbing spokes through the dull, red light that throbbed all across the atrium-like space. The light was strongest up against the walls, where it trickled out from wet, bulging ornamentations reminiscent of faceted eggs. There was also a softer, paler light coming up from down below, twinkling like many eyes.

"Look!" Ileene pointed.

Down below, in a depression in the middle of the chamber, there was a portal to the Vyx Network. Faint green, blue, and yellow lights glimmered softly all around it.

There was a crash and a tear, and a feeling of sickly heat.

"ERADICATE!"

Another AVU had come, this time by punching straight through the wall. Light and fog sank down through the hole. I flinched as wet clumps of building material fell on my face, and then gasped as I looked down and saw what was piled on the floor: a mound of corpses; dead tentacle creatures, overgrown with &alon.

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Ileene, Mr. Himichi, and I jumped down. The corpses crunched wetly beneath our feet.

"ERADICATE!"

I looked up at Suisei, who was still on the platform. "Shoot them, Suisei!" I yelled. "Pull the trigger!"

He did. The AVU shuddered from the impact. Suisei leapt down, joining us right as the AVU exploded in a rain of glittering pixels.

Wading through the sea of bodies, we clambered up to the portal in the middle of the floor and ducked inside it. Just like with the ecumenopolis, the portal spat us back out into the Network maze, only this time, I couldn't see any trace of the ruined hallways the AVUs had demolished.

It was working! We were getting further and further away from them.

Curiously, Suisei still had the spike shield. I guess that meant you could bring things out of Archives.

"Can you get us out of here yet?" Ileene asked.

I closed my eyes and tried. Nothing happened.

"Darn it!" I cursed.

A voice boomed: "ERADICATE!"

"Fudge!"

Here we go again!

We didn't waste any time. We all knew the drill by now. We ran like heck, found the next portal like heck, and jumped in like heck.

It was all heck, now.

The next thing I knew, everything was wind. Wind buffeted my body, making my coattails flail behind me. Wind ripped through my eyes, shoving its fingers into my cheeks.

We were falling!

I spread my limbs.

I'd never gone skydiving before, but that was the only apt comparison that came to my mind. We fell from a great height, down toward an expansive brown plain. Stark, gray mountains bordered the plain. Pale blue crystals grew in place of vegetation; other crystals jaunted across the plains. In places, stalagmite forests clustered, like dragons' teeth.

Dragons…

I muttered into the wind, not that I could hear myself talk. I could hardly hear myself think over the sound of the sky.

"Sword stab me…"

The sky was filled with dragons. Four-eyed, crystal dragons, covered in patches of rugged gray flesh.

And the sky was filled with wyrms.

It was a war of dragons against dragons. Transformee dragons slithered through the skies, still flapping their refracting wings. Claws clashed with claws, wings banked, tails lashed; jaws snarled, bit, and tore. Fungus-shattered crystal lumbered across the land, another world, being remade in &alon's image.

More dragons took flight from down below, emerging from openings in the grand pyramids that rose from the land.

Suisei, Mr. Himichi, and Ileene fell along with me. Talking to each other was pointless; our words drowned in the wind.

Ileene raised a trembling hand and pointed toward the sky.

Fighting the wind, I looked up.

The Vyx fleet…

Ships plummeted toward the ground. Wyrms, dragons, and modules corkscrewed around one another, striking with lasers and fungal plumes. I saw an infected dragon—its head a hideous outgrowth of fungal organs—fold back its wings and pounce onto a Vyx module. It bashed at the module's energy shields with a strike of its claws, and kept slashing, even as its fingers broke off its hands and tumbled away.

Sonic booms burst as wyrms rocketed across the sky, leaving vacuums in their wake strong enough to rip off dragons' wings.

I fell, as helpless as a feather in a hurricane—and not just because of the wind.

I was lost in the tumult of events I could scarcely imagine. My mind reeled at the thought of being able to understand it.

I felt like I never would.

A module's death ray cut across the sky. Its sound and heat and furious light overwrote the wild wind. It swept close, and closer still, indescribably hot.

And then it consumed me. The only pain I felt was in my face as I hit an unexpected floor.

Mr. Himichi, Ileene, and Suisei groaned in unison.

I pushed up off the ground and looked up. We were back in the maze again, in front of yet another portal.

"What was that?" Ileene whispered.

Suisei muttered. "I don't know."

Then I noticed the walls. "Look! The walls!" In my excitement, I crawled forward on my hands and knees before rising to my feet.

The hallway's walls underwent a subtle change of color from one end to the other. To my right were the last vestiges of the brown red striations-and-squares pattern from the section of the Network we'd entered upon leaving the Treefather's archive. But to my left, the wall was blue-green, like mica mixed with malachite.

"This is what the walls looked like where we first entered!" I said. I started off in a run. "C'mon let's go!"

We made it a hallway and a half when things took a turn for the worse.

"ERADICATE! ERADICATE!"

Two AVUs came barreling toward us, shattering wall after wall.

Suisei raised the needler and fired. The crystal it launched hit one of the AVUs. The dodecahedron collapsed to the floor along with its veil of swirling metal. It exploded a moment later.

"Run!" Suisei said. "I'll follow!"

I grabbed Mr. Himichi and Ileene and ran.

Suisei shot the second AVU right as it charged at him.

I looked back.

Suisei turned around and ran toward us, even as the dodecahedron crashed to the floor and skidded and skipped. Then, with a crunch, the maze shook and a rift opened up in the middle of the hallway, right in front of a wall portal. Suisei and the portal went one way; Ileene, Mr. Himichi and I went the other way.

The AVU tumbled into the widening gap and disappeared into the darkness below.

Suisei set off in a run, limbs pumping, ready to jump the gap. But he smacked into an invisible barrier. It knocked him back.

"Genneth!"

In a panic, I tried to use my powers to teleport Suisei to my side, but nothing happened.

The gap widened at a terrific pace. In seconds, it was like we were standing on opposite sides of a street.

"The severance," Mr. Himichi muttered, "it must finally be complete."

As Suisei's section of the maze continued to recede, I got a view of how the maze had changed. Mr. Himichi, Ileene, and I stood on an island of maze in a sea of endless void beneath a churning, storm-like sky. The tower of light was nowhere to be seen. Other than a few isolated maze-islands, the void was emptiness personified, and even the islands were drifting away from us. In moments, they'd be gone.

"ERADICATE! ERADICATE!"

For a second, I froze, feeling nothing but dread. But then I realized the cries were coming from the other side of the rift.

An AVU turned onto the hall and hurtled toward Suisei.

He glanced at the nearby portal. "Find me!" he yelled. "I'll be waiting!"

He fired the needler's last crystal at the AVU. The shot hit, and the AVU fell and burst, but more emerged from the walls, the green-blue glass rippling like a lagoon.

Then Suisei cast the weapon aside and jumped into the portal.

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