Wyrms and Rebel Vyx modules flocked toward us in a great convergence as we left the dark hydra in our wake. The hydra was banking in a wide curve around my world. If it kept going, it would soon encircle the planet.

Brand yelled. "Genneth, look out!"

I turned around. "Fricassee me!"

We had company; the bad kind. Half a dozen insane Vyx wyrm-mechs swam toward the rebel alliance, surrounded by swarms of Loyalist starfighters like so many locusts.

The Rebel ships dispersed, strafing death rays over the enemy squadrons. Pouring power into my flight, light swirling around me, I sniped through a narrow gap between the mechs and their attacks. I repurposed the coruscant veil as it spilled behind me, repelling my attackers with a flick of magic. Other mechs spewed out ion jets as they set off to pursue me, opening a break in their battle lines. Many dozens of wyrms raced on through the gap.

I turned around to meet my mechanical admirers. They reverberated with the electromagnetic currents of their communications.

"Protect Lady hUen-dE!"

"They're making a run on the Vengeance, stop them!"

I beat them back with vacuum slices from the Sword and a volley of gravitic whirlwinds. My thinking was, by forcing them to dodge the former, I could surprise them with the latter and crash them into one another. Unfortunately, the mechs were more than prepared.

Flibbertigibbet, I'd become complacent! I'd forgotten the Vyxit were adept at predicting wyrm magic and could hijack it to serve their ends, exactly as they did here.

Immediately, I pulled back, both physically and magically, but I wasn't able to pry my attacks' weaves from the mechs' control. The best I could do was pull up an anti-magic field and grow and shape it as fast as I could— which turned out to be not quick enough at all.

They sent my vacuum arcs across the Night, slicing many wyrms into halves or thirds, but it was the gravity whirlwinds that really did a number on us. The pulsing orbs rammed through the Rebels' battle lines like tornadoes on the prowl. Their force pulled in scores of allied starfighters toward half a dozen different convergence points, slamming the hapless modules. Explosions succeeded the implosions, spraying sparks, fire, and metal across the three-dimensional battlefield. Even some enemy fighters and mechs got damaged by the blowback, but that hardly made up for our losses.

I flicked my tail, lashing out with magic to twist myself around and stabilize my flight path. I'd barely recovered when light began to blossom on the hulls of the enemy capital ships.

Angel's breath, they were going to fire one of their giant death rays.

&alon lay flush against my back, grasping me with both arms, screaming in terror.

I couldn't blame her.

Even with her power at my disposal, I genuinely didn't know if that would be enough to block, negate, or deflect tens of laser beams of that strength and size.

I roared. "Run! To the Vengeance! It's our only chance!"

They wouldn't fire on their flagship, right? Right?

Unfortunately, getting there was easier said than done. Circumstances were forcing me to be more cautious. I focused on defense, devoting most of my concentration to extending kinetic and anti-magic wards all around us. I wielded forcefields like bucklers, bashing them into enemy fighters and their attacks, swatting at streams of fire and lightning like they were wayward snowballs. By giving our defenses my all, our wyrms could devote their power to zoom past enemy lines at the highest possible speeds.

But what could I do against the might of the entire Loyalist fleet?

Suddenly, a wave of wyrmsong more powerful than any I'd ever felt before rippled through my body. My back spines quivered.

"I hope you didn't forget about me!"

&alon squealed, very much in a good way. "Look, Daddy, it's Greggy! It's Greggy!"

I gazed in awe. "By the Godhead…"

Greg was big. Sure, I was upwards of a hundred feet long, but I was barely a bean sprout compared to Mr. Pfefferman. It took the Vyx modules a couple seconds to fly a fun circuit around his body's girth.

And he wasn't alone. Two other wyrms of mind-boggling proportions accompanied him. (One of which was, somehow, WeElMed's computer system?) Each one of them dwarfed the Vyx motherships in size. Only the great hydra surpassed them.

Not to mention—

"—Genneth!"

"Watterson!" I shouted.

The wyrm brigade had arrived.

"Let 'er rip, Slick!" Lt. Dueright bellowed.

"Yessir!"

The wyrms fired up their laser tanks.

With the three grand wyrms at their lead, the wyrm brigade struck the Loyalists like a hydra of our own. The big three didn't even need to use their powers to attack; their sheer size had them covered. Loyalist vessels pulled away, darting up and below, but many couldn't change their path in time. Those that couldn't met a fiery fate, blowing to smithereens as they crashed into the giant wyrms. Meanwhile, the giants were dueling kaiju, wrestling with their mechanical counterparts.

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"Dr. Howle!" Nina said, shouting in my mind.

I nodded.

I spun the Sword's weaves with my thoughts, aligning them to the magnetic doom I'd unleashed before.

Then I raised the weapon high and cast the spell.

The result was… magnificent. The enemy mechs and ships were atomized and cubed. Clouds of shorn debris orbited toward a central point in tightening streams as the Loyalist forces disintegrated like vampires in the sun. Magic pulsed out from the largest behemoths, pulling their fragmenting bodies back together.

It was just the delay the big three needed. With Greg at the helm, the three giant wyrms banded together and whipped out a truly massive span of forcefields that scattered the capital ships' awe-inspiring death rays. My magnetic wizardry drew the beams toward the forcefields, sculpting their paths. The power was so intense that even the human eye could see the outlines of the pataphysics' weaves contrasted against the bombardment.

Light and heat spilled off Azon's Blade as I quelled the spell.

Animé was right: the power of friendship really could work miracles, especially when your friends were hecking giants!

Vernon cheered within me, standing up on the veranda of his mountain lake cabin. "Let's go go go!" He pumped his arm and rolled his fists as he watched the battle play out.

The giant wyrms' surprise attack left the Loyalist front scrambled.

"The path to the Vengeance is free and clear!" Watterson yelled.

I shot forward, drawing from the &alon's power to punch through debris clouds. In seconds, I'd caught up with the first wave of wyrms to get behind enemy lines.

&alon screamed. "Daddy Genneth! Behind you!"

I looked back.

"No…" If I had a jaw, it would have dropped.

A shiver sashayed down my body.

"The shadows are comin' back!" &alon screamed.

Two steps forward, one step back.

The shadow-wyrms I'd banished with the Sword's powers were percolating back into our side of reality. The spatial folds I'd made with the Sword's help spilled their banished contents back into the Night. Rifts opened in the chaotic black, edged in prismatic fire. They burned across the battlefield, swallowing up all that passed close to them.

"&alon, I don't understand!"

"It doesn't work forever! It doesn't work forever!" She beat her hands on my spines. "Run Daddy, run!"

"Dad, what's going on?" Jules asked.

I looked at the Sword. Even the warmth pulsing through it had a cold, bitter edge.

I'd judged things prematurely. Even with all their might, &alon and the Sword couldn't stop the Darkness, they could only delay it.

"Daddy Genneth," &alon cried, "the more you make it go away, the faster it comes back!"

Fudge.

"We're getting c-crazy readings!" Twiginix yelled. "It's—"

"The Sword only banishes the Darkness temporarily!"

"FUCK!" Tal screamed.

"Then it's a good thing you don't have any time to lose!" Alahumadwod said.

I couldn't have said it better, myself!

Commands zipped across the battlefield. Everyone was scrambling, but the Rebels had the upper hand. Their modules assembled into their attack formations, as did the wyrms and &alon's monsters.

I followed suit, hyperphantasizing an HUD for myself as we neared hUen-dE's flagship. Indicator lines and icons of all sorts popped into view, in a visual display of the data Twiggy had given me. I updated it in real time with whatever I could make out from the chaotic messages flying every which way. It took some effort on my part, but the result was more than worth it. I ended up with a highly detailed composite that clearly indicated the locations of the Vengeance's landing bays, its major Vyxit population centers, and the coat of defensive laser turrets speckled across its outer hull. Last but not least, I could make out where the all-important main power junction was.

I sang the information to the other wyrms.

Karl, Brand, Yuth, Kurt, and all the other surviving transformees of West Elpeck Medical Center flew up alongside me like a wake of swans. The faces I saw riding on their backs moved me to tears.

Storn.

Heggy.

Jonan.

Geoffrey.

Names and names and names.

"You guys…" I said, song breaking, "what are you—"

"—Just like there's no way you're going to let your children die, Genneth," Brand said, "there's no way we're letting you do this without us!"

"You were there for us," Merritt said. "It's only right for us to return the favor."

Storn nodded. "And, unlike you, that's a promise we're not going to forget."

There was nothing I could say to dissuade them, and even if there was, I didn't have the temerity to try. I was overcome. I didn't just see my friends and colleagues, I saw the absence of those we'd all lost, and those who were living on borrowed time.

Any wyrms struck by the darkness or its beasts were afflicted by its taint. Even now, I could only watch helplessly as the Darkness consumed them from within.

Who was I to tell them how they ought to spend what precious time they had left? Who was anyone?

I briefly considered whether it was worth trying to use &alon and the Sword's powers to wipe away the darkness spreading through their bodies, but I realized there wasn't any point to that. If it was possible to cure the corruption that way, &alon would have done so long ago.

The Vengeance loomed before us, larger than the Moon.

We had perhaps a minute at most before our attack commenced.

Three Rebel capital ships were moving into position behind us, electromagnetic signals shuttling back and forth between them and their fleets.

To my pleasant surprise, one of the Rebel capital ships shot a broad spectrum transmission at us wyrms.

Data on the Rebel's battle-plan streamed into my mind. In brief, the plan was to use the capital ships to break through the Vengeance's shields, and then mount a full frontal assault to neutralize, the flagship's shields, its defensive batteries of laser cannons, and the squadrons of modules and aegises hUen-dE would no doubt deploy to stop us. Meanwhile, a select group centered around yours truly would make for the main power junction, flying close along the hull to where the rebel Vyx on board had exposed the junction to the vacuum of space.

Fortunately, Geoffrey Athelmarch, Count of Seasweep had a better idea. It was hard to miss him; he rode on Karl's back like a warrior of an epic, clad in his crusader's armor, cape streaming behind him and halberd in his hand.

"Genneth can use the Holy Sword to cut through the shields," he said.

"&alon, do you have enough power to do that?" I asked.

"I dunno!"

But then the answer came to me, and I almost slapped myself in the snout.

It was right in front of me. And behind me—and above, and below, and to either side.

My fellow wyrms.

I bent my neck this way and that. "Everyone—all wyrms, that is—lend me your power!"

True, we might not have shared the same backgrounds or traveled down similar paths, but, no matter who we'd been or what world we'd come from, we'd all endured the horror of our world's end, and the loss of our lives and liberties—of our freedom to choose who we'd be.

It was ironic. For all the limitless power we had inside our minds as wyrms, until now, that which mattered most—justice—had always been out of reach.

But now, we had a chance. We were taking our first step down the road to making things right.

I quickly sang the explanation for how to do it, just as I'd done with the wyrm brigade. Heck, Brigadier-General Watterson and her troops sang the information themselves, spreading the knowledge even more quickly than I could have on my own.

"Lasers incoming!" Heggy yelled.

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