Heggy nodded. "Brand, right now, you and the others are far more at risk than I am. More importantly, I have combat experience. You don't."

However, rather than taking her outside like she wanted, Brand opened a window in the weird sky room they were in. The window gave her a view of the insanity playing out in the world of the living—not that there were very many living things left in it.

The view through the window was like a movie of a roller coaster, or a roller coaster of a movie. Brand's freaky six-eyed body raced through the skies of downtown Elpeck, weaving between skyscrapers and rushing down alleys, dodging laser storms of barreling this way and that.

Down below, a fungal monstrosity lumbered through the street, crushing cars and corpses beneath its misshapen feet.

"Brand," Yuth said, "down there!"

"What is it?" Brand asked.

"I'm starving!"

That was probably what the black ooze trickling from Yuth's snout-pores meant.

Heggy grimaced. "Is that severed head speaking in Nurse Costran's voice?"

"Yes," Brand said. "Yuth had a… um… accident."

"This kind of really isn't the best time for a snack," Brand said, speaking through his wyrm-body.

"Just chuck me down at the big guy down there," Yuth said.

"But—"

"—Please, just do it, I can't stand being like this."

Heggy nodded in solidarity. "Tell him, girl."

Not wanting to leave her while she was still vulnerable, Brand dove down after Yuth once he'd chucked what remained of her body at the shambler walking down the street. He used his pataphysics to guide Yuth's body onto the bus-sized behemoth.

Even though Heggy no longer felt the thoughts coming off the human-looking Brand standing beside her, the same could not be said of Dr. Nowston's wyrm-self. Experiencing all his thoughts and emotions was very disorienting, but, then again, what about being a ghost wasn't?

The shambler dropped to its many knees seconds after Yuth's severed head touched it. Mycelium grew out from the end of her neck and crawled underneath the creature's hide. The beast shuddered, flesh shoveling and wrinkling as Yuth's hyphae spread across what, until now, had been its body.

The creature fell to the street. Already, it was beginning to elongate. Yuth's head rose in fits and starts as flesh gathered together and rebecame her neck. Arms budded from the behemoth's sides while the shambler's legs retracted into its body.

From what Brand could tell, it looked like Nurse Costran would be nearly twice her previous size once she finished regrowing.

"This is so… weird…" Yuth said.

Good, Brand thought, she's alright.

Unfortunately, the flower-ship rapidly descending toward threatened to change that.

"Yuth," Brand said, "one of the flower-ships is coming!"

"Leave me," Yuth replied. "I'll manage!" As she said that, Nurse Costran accidentally slammed a car into a pet food shop, her tail and body flopping to the side.

Heggy winced. "Yikes, that's gotta sting…"

"But—"

"—I'm already bigger than you," Yuth said, "and I'm not even done yet! Brand, I can take it! Go!"

Brand rocketed up through the skyscraper corridor right as the approaching flower-ship fired. Its red death ray sliced through a building.

No, not just any building, Heggy realized; the Stockman building.

Broken window glass erupted from the building's frame as its steel beams melted and groaned. They gave up the ghost.

Heggy would miss the Stockman building. Her favorite hobby shop was located on its ground floor. She'd purchased some of her best to-scale miniatures from Bling-o Crafts.

Brand flew around in circles, dodging the laser beams, even as the Stockman building toppled around him.

"Pull up!" Heggy yelled.

Brand managed to snake his way around the collapsing building's corner just in time. The skyline fell away as he soared up.

And that was when Heggy saw them. It was their smoke trails that had caught her eye. In the backdrop of the fantastical battles playing out overhead, the smoke trails were little more than gusty claw marks on the sky. But she couldn't help follow them back to their source, up and up.

Eventually, the trails went out of Brand's range of vision.

"Brand, look up, would you?" she asked.

He did.

The smoke trails kept on going.

"Can you zoom in?" she asked.

Brand looked at her nervously. He patted his sponge-curled 'do with one hand. "Is something wrong?"

Heggy shook her hand. "Well, can you zoom in, or not?"

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

He nodded and then did so.

The image resolved into clearer detail, revealing scattered points of light peppering the upper atmosphere's heights. Smoke trails streamed behind them at angles so steep, they had to be vertical.

Heggy stomped her foot and growled. "I knew it! I knew it!"

Brand stared at her in confusion, and she returned his stare with a glower.

This was fucking serious. Tingles ran down her spine.

"Those, Dr. Nowston, are warheads. And there's only one type of ammunition that gets put in missiles that big or that high."

"What?" Brand asked. "What is it?"

"Nukes."

— — —

Karl didn't even bother to fight, he just fled, flying through the city streets while dodging the laser beams from the ship that was pursuing him. Damaged buildings collapsed behind him, forcing him to fortify the magic at his back to blunt the gale-force clouds of debris and broken architecture kicked up by the towers' falls. He turned yet another sharp corner, racing down one corridor of skyscrapers after another, only for this one to come to an abrupt end where the street opened up onto a broad boulevard that ran parallel to the bay. Half of the waterfront was on fire, and the half that wasn't was a jungle of fleshy stalks, crooked wood, and colorful bulbs.

"Dr. Derric," Karl asked, "can wyrms swim?".

"Ask Howle, not me," Jonan said, "I don't know." Suddenly, his eyes bugged wide. "Wait, what are you—"

Karl dove into the water.

Jonan freaked out for a while, only calming down when he realized he wasn't drowning.

Karl had swum before, as a human, and had been expecting the experience as a wyrm to be similar.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

Not only was the water porridge-thick against his speed, he didn't need to close his eyes to keep it from stinging. The sea pressed down on him in every direction the deeper he went.

"This is insane…" Jonan muttered.

Bever and Geoffrey nodded mutely in agreement. The two spirits rode on Karl's back, seated behind Dr. Derric.

To Karl's surprise, even underwater, he could still see and hear wyrmsong. The rippling soundwaves were thinner than what he was used to, which made sense. The water was probably filtering out a good portion of them. Still, a layer of the song managed to make its way down to him.

It left Karl wondering whether there might be more to wyrmsong than just the sound, but he discarded that thought the instant he made sense of the messages.

They were screams of terror, and not all of them from voices he knew.

"What are those!?"

"Angel's mercy, what's happening now!?"

"Look up! Look up!"

"What's going on?" Karl asked.

"You're asking us?" Bever said.

A good point.

Karl dove deeper. He swam by undulating his body to deal with the water, and let his flight magic take care of the rest.

One of the death rays shot through the water column, illuminating the depths with an aching red light that cast a menagerie of shadows.

Jonan gasped.

The fungus was growing in an underwater forest, eating the Bay's silty bed alive as &alon's trunks, vines, and stems marched across the deep. Monstrous fungus-life swam and crawled through the fantastical underseascape. The death ray boiled them with its heat and light. Chunks of fungal trees and overhanging cliffs fractured and vanished as the beam struck.

Karl kept his distance from the fungus, not wanting to trap himself there by letting his body feed on it.

"Kid," Jonan said, "I've got some bad news for you."

Karl craned his head and neck to see Jonan looking up.

The flower-ship had flown underwater. Its silver hull gleamed, radiating softly into the depths.

And its weapons were charging.

"Go up!" Jonan yelled. "Go up!"

Karl dove down and then—before Jonan could complain—coiled on a bare patch of silt and sprang up, launching himself in a powered leap that sent him hurtling toward the surface. He whipped his magic hard, speeding himself even faster as he broke through the water and burst into the air.

The skyscraper skyline and the Bay-girding hills fell away as he soared. A backward glance showed the flower-ship still in pursuit, its death ray burgeoning bright, ready to fire.

But then the ship suddenly veered off course.

"Good God," Bever yelled. "What is that? Look up!"

Karl did.

The sky…

Objects were falling from high above, trailing smoke in their wake. Karl started to sing a question to the other wyrms, only to shut his eyes as a luminance a flared from the direction of the horizon, more potent than the sacred Sun. The flash lasted only for a moment, and when Karl cautiously opened his first pair of eyes, he could only stare in shock.

A half-dozen city blocks had just been swallowed in a roaring fireball of unimaginable size. The explosion swelled toward the sky, turning nearby wyrms into ash and silhouettes. Rings of wind and debris tore through the surroundings, scattering window glass like dust.

The flower ships barreled away from the explosion as fast as they could.

"What's going on?" Karl shouted. "What's going on?!"

Then a voice spoke, like an answer to a prayer: "Everybody, this is Dr. Marteneiss speaking."

Jonan looked up in confusion. "Heggy?"

"Some of you may have noticed the smoking thingamabobs rapidly plummeting toward the ground," Heggy said. "Those are nuclear warheads, y'hear? So, unless you wanna find out first-hand whether or not wyrms can survive a first-hand encounter with a thermonuclear explosion, you better listen good to what I'm about to say."

The… thermonuclear explosion was the most incredible thing Karl had ever seen.

"Beast and Queen," Geoffrey muttered, "am I understanding her correctly? This is some kind of weapon?"

"Yes, unfortunately," Jonan said.

Heggy continued: "Trenton nukes are designed to explode once they get close enough to the ground. They've got barometers in them; those measure the air pressure, which increases the closer the bombs are to the ground. Once the pressure is high enough, the nukes detonate. That's the trigger."

"That being the case," Dr. Nowston said, chiming in, "we need to use our powers to keep the air pressure around the nukes artificially low, or they will explode!"

Karl spotted the doctor-wyrm flying along one of the red tracks that wound through the city. He must have been traveling along it to spread his message.

"Here are the pressure specifications you'll need," Heggy said.

All of a sudden, a piece of information flickered on in Karl's mind. The information was a limit, and the knowledge that the missile would explode if and when the forces pressing down on it exceeded that limit.

Jonan groaned. "Again, I'm really starting to miss Letty now."

Karl watched Dr. Rathpalla, Dr. Nowston, Kurt, and many other wyrms shoot up past the buildings' spires. A big wyrm—larger than any of them—snaked its way out between the skyscrapers on either side of a street that let out onto the Bay.

"Karl," the wyrm said, "don't just float there!"

It was Nurse Costran!

"Well, well, well," Jonan said, "she got better real fast!"

"What do I do?" Karl asked. "There are so many!"

"You heard what Dr. Nowston said," Bever said, "you have to use your powers to fool these baro-meters into believing that they're at a higher altitude than they really are!"

"I don't know what that means!" Karl cried.

"You think I do?" Bever said, cape fluttering behind him.

Jonan furrowed his brow. "Well, air pressure is—"

"—Karl…" Geoffrey pressed his hand onto Karl's scales. Karl could feel the contact. It gave him strength. "Watch how the others weave their magic," Geoffrey said, "and then do the same."

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