Scions of Shadow #003: Kaiju Beach

Chapter 1. Not of This World

There had been a lot for Rorn son of Rore to dislike about being summoned to this human world of “Virginia” against his will. Everything was too fragile and far too small for a nearly seven-foot tall minotaur like him. Their English was close enough to the Trade Tongue that he could understand most words, but the constant stream of small differences and nonsensical idioms kept making him look stupid. They put written words on everything and got upset when you were from a world where none of those glyphs existed. Their foul-smelling machines were everywhere and were constantly making unpleasant sounds.

This flying machine was easily the worst of the bunch. The buzzing sound of the glowing blue rings in its too-small wings set his teeth on edge. It reeked of lighting—since when did lightning even have a smell? The safety straps couldn’t fit over his broad, black-furred shoulders. A chair so small the protrusion that fit comfortably between his human teammate’s knees plunged into sensitive parts of his nethers. Oh, and it was hurtling through the sky at dangerous speed, a good hundred yards above the ground.

Minotaurs were tough, but even Rorn wouldn’t survive a fall like that without serious injury.

“I hate this stupid machine,” Rorn grumbled.

“But thopters are so cool! Gunner Industries reverse engineered entirely new physics from alien fighters to make them work!” Dakota Lyon had been Rory’s overly enthusiastic guide to this world since his unwilling arrival. She was dressed in her “superhero outfit” consisting of a bright green tunic, pointed green cap, four large belt pouches, and fake elf ears that were notably paler than her skin. Her compound bow and the special arrows the heroine Artemis had given her were tucked by her feet. Unfortunately, just because she was eager to explain everything didn’t mean the girl of fourteen summers was any good at it.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” Rorn snarled.

“Lyon! Read your briefing,” Pandora snapped. The black-skinned human was (at least nominally) the leader of the Scions of Shadow, the squad Rorn and Dakota had enlisted into. Despite being instructed otherwise by the “Justice Union” elders, she was always quick to assert authority. Pandora wore her clearly magical armor, complete with shiny plates covering much of her torso and bulky gauntlets and greaves that accommodating something she called repulsor and tractor beams. Lines of glowing pink energy flowed along the armor, making her very conspicuous. Like all three human members of his current squad, she was reading information about the current mission on her tiny magic tablet.

“I’m sorry, I’m just so excited. We’re going to fight a kaiju!” Dakota paused her bouncing. “Wait, Rorn, do you know what a kaiju is?”

“Sure. A giant monster way too big for us to fight.”

“You know the word ‘kaiju’, but the only version of ‘post’ you knew was ‘fence post,’ Son-of-Rore?” Pandora was glaring at the much larger Minotaur out of the corner of her eye.

Through clenched teeth, Rorn said, “My world had monsters. My people never had use for writing. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

A tiny, warm hand placed itself on Rorn’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll read the mission briefing for you.” Dakota held out the new tablet the Justice Union artificer Omnimind had made for her. It was apparently better than her old “phone” in ways beyond the larger, uncracked screen, although Rorn didn’t have a great handle on exactly how.

On said screen, there was an image of a quadrupedal, fish-like beast. Its back was covered in long spines and eyes. The photograph was taken from far enough away while the beast was breaching the surface of the ocean that it was unclear just how big it was. “This is the kaiju we’re fighting. They’ve dubbed it ‘Wavewatcher.’”

Rorn then noticed what looked like one of this world’s sail-less boats being pushed aside by a wave coming off the fish-beast’s leg. The thing would have to be nearly a thousand feet long. “How are we supposed to fight something that big.”

Dakota smiled. “That’s what the mission briefing is about.”

“You might want to re-read the big, bold line at the top of the document where it says ‘Mission objectives’.” Luna Hellsing—the fourth, and surliest, member of the Scions of Shadow—sounded tired. She often sounded tired when dealing with Dakota. The two girls were of similar age, but Luna had been fighting with the Justice Union for far longer. Her outfit included a very dark black half-cape, a skirt with more lacy petticoats that Rorn thought would be easy to fight in, skin-tight black leggings, and large stompy boots. Her skin was very pale, but her hair was as dark as Pandora’s.

“Here it is, Mission Objectives: Search and rescue in—wait, what?” Dakota pulled her hand tablet back to look at it more closely. “Are we not going to fight the kaiju?”

“Of course not.” Luna didn’t look up from her own tablet. “Leave that to the heavy hitters like Mighty Arzan, Brick, and Rainbow Mage. We’re going to help save the people who are losing homes to the waves this thing knocks up.”

“Rainbow Mage flew in from San Francisco?”

“Focus, Lyon,” Pandora snapped. She slid her phone into a pocket in her armor. “I can read and talk at the same time, I’ll catch Son-of-Rore up.”

Rorn grunted, unsure he’d actually understood what she’d said.

“This ‘Wavewatcher’ is blasting the nearby coast with massive waves, far outstripping what even a behemoth of its mass should produce. As you can imagine, this has devastated a bunch of coastal towns. This flying machine is going to pass over a small town in the East Shore on its way to bring weapons and supplies to the capes and military vessels in the fight, and we’re going to do what we can for those too isolated to get priority for proper help. Any questions, Son-of-Rore?”

Rorn forced himself to stop grinding his teeth. He was pretty sure no one had mentioned the state of East Shore before now, but the political divisions humans had loved so much had confused him even back home. “How exactly, are we supposed to help these people?”

“There’s plenty of rubble your brute strength will be useful for, Son-of-Rore. My machine control powers will help me find people trapped in the collapsed houses by the beach. Hellsing’s shadow powers will help extract them. She also has medical training.”

“And what about me?” Dakota asked. Any sign of disappointment over not getting to fight the kaiju had faded from her body language. “What do I do?”

For the first time in the weeks Rorn had known her, Pandora smiled. It was a vicious, cruel expression. “That is a very good question, Lyon.” Luna let out a small laugh.

Dakota deflated, with a small “What?”

Rorn understood the joke. Unlike Luna, with her shadow powers, or Pandora with her armor and whatever “technopathy” was, or even Rorn with his divinely-enhanced strength and toughness (atop his considerable muscles), Dakota had no powers. She was a perfectly ordinary human. And a young, not particularly athletic one at that.

He found himself standing on his hooves, horns scraping the ceiling of the subtly moving craft. He stepped forward, looming over the still-seated Pandora. She smiled up at him, baring her teeth like an animal.

“Dakota is an incredibly valuable member of this team. Apologize, right now, or I will throw you from this ship.”

“Bring it, cow.” Pandora made only a small, extremely subtle move, but Rorn noted it. She’d shifted the hand on the rest of not-too-small-for-her chair, pointing the palm of her gauntlet at his gut. If he made a move, she would counter with a repulsor beam.

The zreeth had called his bluff. Rorn fists started to tighten. If he let her get away with that…

A pair of tiny hands wrapped themselves around Rorn’s wrist. “Please.” Dakota’s voice was barely audible over the thopter’s infernal hum. “Please just let it go.” She wasn’t even looking at him, eyes cast down at her boots.

Rorn took a deep breath, and tried to roll the tension out of his shoulders. “You got lucky,” he sneered at Pandora.

Her expression hadn’t changed. “Any time, cow.”

The thopter shuddered with the force of Rorn’s stomp. “Stop calling me, cow, you–“

“If you could stop shaking the ship for a moment— ” Rorn knew the disembodied voice coming from above wasn’t actually a ghost, as much as it sounded like one. Just another so-called pee-ay “—we’re coming in over the main blockage on the road out of Saint Simon. This is where I was supposed to drop you off.”

“We’re ready,” Pandora replied, looking directly into Rorn’s eyes. She didn’t break eye contact to unbuckle the restraints that held her in the chair. Rorn heard Luna unbuckling as well, but kept his level gaze on Pandora.

The team of teen “capes” headed for the back of the thopter, near where they’d entered. A small warning light went off, yet another annoying otherworldly sound, this one accompanied by unpleasant flashing lights.

The rear wall of the ship began unfolding, letting in the sound of howling wind. “Wait,” Dakota asked, “aren’t they going to land?”

“You’re a proper, card-carrying super hero now, Lyon,” Pandora replied. Her cruel smile was nowhere to be seen, but its ghost lingered in her voice. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

Rorn snorted. “I got you, Dakota.” He swept the small human off her feet. Even only using one arm, her weight was nothing to him.

“Oh.” Dakota adjusted her sports goggles. “I see.”

Pandora made a small noise of displeasure before taking a large leap out of the back of the thopter. Rorn followed, and quickly plunged past her.

The thopter hadn’t come that low for the drop, forty feet, tops. The surrounding area was covered in short trees, broken up by fields submerged in water from the Wavewatcher’s attacks. Directly beneath them, however, was a road, smooth and dark through the countryside. There were several trees across the road, and behind them, several cars in the brightly colored metal that had stopped looking weird to the minotaur by now.

Pandora was using her beams, propelling herself through the air and slowing her fall. Dakota was screaming, the fingers not clutching her compound bow trying to find purchase on the fur in his chest.

Rorn hit the road hooves first, sending up a splash. He cushioned the fall as much as he could, even hitting one knee in the wet asphalt. He hadn’t noticed the small layer of water on the road until he’d hit it. Couldn’t have been more than half an inch.

As soon as he was on the ground, Luna slid from his shadow back into reality. One of her shadow powers. She let her boots splash through the shallow sheet of water flowing over the road, heading towards the civilians.

“Thanks,” Dakota whispered. “Y’know. For everything.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Rorn replied, dropping her gently to her feet. “You’re like the only thing in this stupid world I don’t hate.”

Luna had rushed ahead to where the tree had fallen across the road. Two lines of motor vehicles sat behind it.

“It’s too heavy,” the human man who appeared to be a self-appointed leader was saying. He had on one of their “ball caps” (a brown one with white writing on it), and was scruffy in the way human men got when they weren’t diligent about shaving. “It’s got, like, monster wave water in it.”

Luna nodded. Then she turned back to her minotaur team mate. “Rorn. This is Jasper. He doesn’t think you can move this tree.”

“Well fuck you,” Rorn snarled at the human. Jasper stumbled back. He was big for a human, but Rorn still had half a foot on him.

“Rorn,” one of his teammates—either Luna or Dakota—began, but the minotaur set to work.

He stomped hard on the tree with one heavy hoof. It cracked. Loudly. A few more stomps left the thing splintered through. He the grabbed one end and walked it off the road, rotating it around a pivot point under the water that was the side of the ditch. It actually was far heavier than it had looked.

What was left was smaller, and a few good kicks had it sinking into the ditch on the other side of the road.

Whirling back on Jasper, Rorn shouted, “Anything else you think I can’t do?”

“N-no,” the human said, backing up.

“I don’t think you can calm down enough to stop scaring people, Son-of-Rore.” Pandora was, for some unfathomable reason, standing on top of Jasper’s motor vehicle (which was a pickup truck, like an uglier, more rusted version of the one Dakota’s brother drove).

“Look, you—” Rorn thrust one finger towards Pandora.

Luna grabbed his hand, and he let her push it down. “Everyone just calm down. Lives are at stake here.”

“Well then.” Pandora didn’t let any of the smugness drop from her demeanor as she calmly stepped off Jasper’s truck. “No reason to delay, Son-of-Rore.” She splashed off the road into the woods.

Chapter 2. A Walk in the Woods

Luna Hellsing, also known as the young superhero Moonless, was a bit alarmed at the way the trees were moving. Between the overcast day and the screen of trees overhead, there were enough shadows for her to cobble together large shadow tendrils to swing from bough to bough. She well practiced in using her powers like this, but these trees had an alarming amount of give. Perhaps it had something to do with the kaiju’s presence.

And the Wavewatcher’s presence was extremely evident. The forest floor was saturated in more than an inch of seawater. Worse, it was conspicuously flowing west, which was both up hill and away from the ocean. If there were any of the wood’s normal insect buzzing or bird calls, they were completely drowned out by the bubbling babble of the water.

Rorn had set Dakota on one broad shoulder, and was soldiering through the water—and the mud beneath it, with a minimum of grumbling—and from what she could hear that might have been more about Pandora than the terrain. Pandora, on the other hand, seemed to be struggling a bit, to Luna’s surprise.

She’d seen Pandora fly, or at least approximate it, artfully combining tractor and repulsor beams to plummet from one anchor to the next. Sure, the older girl didn’t have as much fine control as Luna’s shadow tendrils afforded, but it had to be faster than what she was doing. Which was deliberately stomping along, splashing water and what remaining underbrush there was out of the way.

Letting the other two get a bit ahead, Luna dropped back to where Pandora was. “You can’t go any faster?” Luna hung from a shadow tendril, doing her best to compensate for the bouncing bough.

Pandora sneered at her, and without looking aimed her hand at the branch from which Luna hung. The violet light from the tractor bean was barely visible even in the dim forest, but the effect it had on the branch was obvious. The branch dipped and then broke, flying along the path of the tractor beam.

There wasn’t another branch close by, nor enough time to gain any momentum, so Luna slipped shadowside—the forest was barely dark enough for it. She emerged close enough to the ground that she didn’t create too big of a splash when she dropped to the forest floor.

Pandora’s arms were up in a guard position, the splintered remains of the branch floating around her greaves. “Any other stupid questions you’d like to ask, lightweight?” Pandora continued her stomping forward.

“Whatever.” Luna rolled her eyes. A quick glance confirmed Rorn and Dakota were getting further ahead. “You know you don’t have to be such a bitch to them, right?”

Pandora sneered without slowing down. “Do you want this team to fail or not, Hellsing?”

“There’s very little I look forward to more than never having to talk to you again. But you saw what the minotaur did to that tree. Provoke him into a fight, a real fight, and you’ll end up in the hospital and he’ll end up in the Spike.”

“Good to know you’re awful at evaluating fighters, Hellsing. I had assumed as much, but it’s always nice to have these things confirmed.”

“Seriously!” Luna snapped, struggling to keep her tone hushed. “He has no self-control. You’re asking for trouble.”

“How about you never tell me what to do again, Hellsing? Do you think your rattled brain can manage that?”

“At least stop picking fights in emergency thopters while I’m in them! We agreed, everything we could to cause the team to fail without jeopardizing innocent lives. My life counts.”

That time Pandora didn’t have any answer beyond another contemptuous sneer.

“Do you guys hear that?” Dakota asked, causing both Luna and Pandora to stop.

The water around their heels was gone.

It was faint, but the sound was there. “Is that the ocean?” Pandora raised an eyebrow.

Luna didn’t wait. She flung herself upward, protecting her face as best she could with her arms.

Even with the heavy clouds, the light above the canopy was enough to wipe away most of Luna’s shadow tendrils. But that didn’t matter when she saw it.

The wave.

It was massive, towering over the tree line. Towering above the height to which Luna threw herself. Branches, some with leaves still on them, rolled in its breaking tumult.

“Tidal wave!” Luna screeched as she fell back through the scratching branches.

“What?” Rorn was confused, but entirely too calm for the impeding danger.

Luna redirected and slowed her fall to land in front of Pandora. Mud splashed up on the armored heroine (bonus), who—for once—didn’t have a clapback. “Son-of-Rore! Grab Lyon and hold on tight to the nearest tree.”

Without saying anything, Pandora stepped forward and embraced Luna, readying to breath deep. The two turned to look in the direction of the now-roaring sound of surf.

As the waters tumbled closer, they took a deep breath as one, and slipped shadowside. Into silence.

Grandmother Night’s realm was the source of Luna’s power, and it had always felt simple and straightforward to her. It was hard for her to articulate what made the shifting, transparent clouds of violet mist passing through one another while drifting in all directions look different. But to her shadow-born eyes, it was all obvious and intuitive. There, above, was the line where the diffuse sunlight was blocked by the canopy, separating where it would be safe to slip back from where it wouldn’t. Completely opposite of the uneven but thinner surface spreading out below them where the light was completely blocked by the mud.

And the wave rose above them, a wall of darkness where disruption from slipping between planes posed no threat—the danger was what was on the other side. In the roiling water, it was nearly as dark as the mud.

Luna flinched as that darkness spilled through her, but it didn’t even push her. Changes in the mundane world couldn’t be felt in the weightlessness of shadowside.

It was past them so fast; and overwhelming. Roiling darkness rolling away from them with a force that would destroy buildings.

Pandora’s cold, wet, metal-clad arms were wrapped around her, holding firmly but not painfully. It was probably a smart move, because Luna was tempted to push free of her and let her shunt painfully back sunside—a maneuver Pandora’s grip made unfeasible.

The two gasped the moment they were back in the safe-to-breath air of sunside, shrouded in the still-mostly-intact trees.

Dakota was coughing up water. Rorn was clutching her tightly to his chest with one arm, and with the other holding a branch that was nearly splintered free of its tree. Scions of Shadow’s youngest member had her little compound bow in one white-knuckled hand. Artemis III’s special arrows were still peeking over her shoulder, which said a lot for the quiver they came with. The minotaur tossed his head, shaking water from his hanging ears.

Pandora caught Luna’s eye. “That wave is heading towards Saint Simon. Moonless.”

“On it.” Luna pulled a tendril of shadow out from the pocket of darkness under her cape. She again threw herself through the canopy, getting a good look at the retreating wave.

“It’s already gotten much smaller.” Luna landed gently next to Pandora. “The forest is blunting the worst of it.”

“Those houses on the beach need our help.” The two rival heroes nodded, and set off.

It was only then that Luna noticed that Pandora’s shadowside embrace had smeared her with much of the mud she’d splashed onto the armored heroine.

Chapter 3. The House Brought Down

Luna Hellsing had expected there to be more of a beach. The mission dossier had mentioned that most of these houses were vacation homes and/or those online timeshare things. She’d assume the buildings for that would at least have a nice view.

Here, not so much.

The shore was rocky and festering with sea grass. There wasn’t even a grand view of the ocean; bits of an island poked above the high tide for miles north and south. It smelled less like the sea and more like a sweaty bog. And in the distance, past the tiny island, obscured by the sea haze, Wavewatcher stood, thrashing here and there as bubbles of light burst along its skin. It was eerily quiet over the ocean.

“That is a really big foundation.” Pandora observed.

The houses themselves were little more than rubble. Parts of them were surprisingly intact: a recognizable roof here, an undamaged dock there. None of it was where it was supposed to be to function as a house, but it was all still there. The foundations had held. Blocky squares of concrete stuck up from the water that had risen over whatever beach or yard had been here before.

“The Union wouldn’t have sent us here if there wasn’t a chance to save people. A collapsing house is one thing; one that holds you under water is something else entirely.”

Pandora gave Luna a side eye, not much liking the implications of that, but saying nothing. The two walked towards the closest and southern-most wreckage in relative silence. Rorn and Dakota trailed behind them, his hooves sloshing through the water. He was giving them distance, and Luna was happy to take it.

“The water is flowing up hill.” It wasn’t clear if Pandora was asking a question or not, but it was the closest Luna had come to hearing the armored cape rattled.

For her part, Luna just shrugged. “Kaiju cause weird shit to happen.” She’d seen worse.

As they neared the house, Pandora said, “There’s someone in there, Moonless.”

“You sure?”

“Their cell phone is still searching for signal. And I don’t make mistakes, Hellsing.”

It was not the time for whatever argument Pandora wanted to have. Techopathically detecting phones had been part of their plan. “Alight. I’ll go see what I can do.”

Luna walked around to the house’s shadow. Thankfully, on an overcast day like today, that would be enough. She took a deep breath and slipped shadowside. In Grandmother Night’s realm, it was obvious where the civilian was within the rubble. There was a pocket of surprisingly bright light that would be just big enough for her to slide back out of—if the light could be turned off.

She slid back to the human world. Pandora had already moved to the building’s shadow. “Status, Moonless?”

“There’s definitely someone down there. There’s enough space for me to join them in the pocket, but they’ve got their phone’s flashlight on, so I can’t slip back in. Can you connect us without a cell signal?”

“I could just turn off their light, Moonless.”

“Let’s not startle them more than we need to. They’re already having a rough day, and I don’t want to give anyone a heart attack.”

After a moment, Pandora gave a disgruntled, “Fair enough, Moonless.” She pulled her phone from within a slot in the thigh-plate of her armor. Without having to touch anything, the screen unlocked, and immediately loaded a window that said “Waiting to connect…”

After a few seconds, a very poorly illuminated woman’s face popped on. She was a plain woman in her early twenties, blood from an injury on her forehead messing up the right side of her face. She was wearing glasses, but the right lens was cracked. “H-hello?” she asked, sounding terrified.

Before Luna could say anything, Pandora spoke in a shockingly reassuring, calm tone. “Good morning. I’m Princess Aetherium, and this is Moonless. We’re with the Justice Union and we’re here to rescue you, ma’am.”

“H-how are you doing this?” the woman stammered. “I don’t have any bars. Or wifi.”

“My technopathy doesn’t require any of those things, ma’am. Please listen, we won’t be able to do this without your help. Understand?”

The woman let out a bit of a mad chuckle. “I’m a bit limited at the moment.”

“That’s okay, ma’am. We don’t need much. First: are you injured? Has any part of the building crushed any part of your body?”

“My leg. I’m pretty sure it’s broken. It hurt a lot. I passed out for a bit. But now, it kinda doesn’t feel that bad.” She swallowed. “That’s bad, right?”

“Legs can be fixed.” Moonless did her best to sound calm. They really needed this civilian not to panic. “We have the technology.”

The woman let out another mad chuckle. “I guess you guys do, huh?”

“Listen, ma’am,” Pandora cut in. “We need you to do two things to extract you. Firstly, you will need to turn out your light. Moonless’s power only lets her travel through shadows. Secondly, we’ll need you to hold your breath. Not right now, but when Moonless grabs you. The realm Moonless will take you through has bad air.”

“Bad air how?”

“It’ll be fine.” Luna gave her most reassuring smile. “I do it all the time. Just hold your breath.”

“Are you ready, ma’am?”

She took a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah. Get me out of here.”

“You need to turn out the light and blank the screen, ma’am. You’re brave. This is nothing for a scientist like you.”

Luna shot her unfortunate teammate a look. When had anyone said she was a scientist?

“Okay.” The video got a little discombobulated as she started touching the screen.

“How am I helping?” Rorn demanded. He’d drifted closer while the call was ongoing. Dakota was behind him, one hand resting on his elbow. Her eyes were glued one the ocean and the monster battle happening in the distance.

“Free up this boat, Son-of-Rore,” Pandora gestured at what looked like steel rowboat—not an ocean-going vessel—chained directly to the concrete foundation. If there had been a motor or oars, the wave had not left them behind.

“I’m going in,” Luna said, moving back into the narrow range of shadow behind the house. Pandora gave her a nod.

Slipping into the hole took a bit of doing. Luna didn’t align perfectly with the small void, and hadn’t quite managed to get her leg out of the rubble. She was rewarded with a stabbing pain in her calf as it was shunted into available space. She clenched her teeth against the pain. And the embarrassment of making such a rookie error. Hopefully she hadn’t kneed the other woman too badly.

“Eep!” the civilian squeaked as Luna dropped atop of her.

It was completely dark in the pocket of air, but Luna’s violet eyes could see the civilian woman’s face. The air was stale and smelled of equal parts seawater and blood.

“You ready?” Luna asked the civilian. In the close confines, they had no choice but to press against one another. “Deep breath. And you might want to close your eyes.”

The civilian took a breath, and Luna slipped them both shadowside. Which was where things started going wrong.

The woman started screaming and flailing. “MY LEG!!!”

She struggled against the young cape holding her. Pain and panic had driven all thoughts from her head. And there were only heartbeats before she would need to inhale to keep screaming.

Luna clung as tight as she could to the woman’s clothes and pushed the two of them toward the west wall of the building.

The woman, older and larger than the teen heroine, shoved and struggled, desperate to get away.

They weren’t going to make it.

Luna did the only thing she could. She shoved the woman towards the wall and let go.

With no anchor, the civilian was immediately shunted back sunside. There was a full twelve inches of mater she’d be displaced through, which would hurt. A lot. Hopefully less than a house falling on your leg though. I‘m sorry, she thought, but was too used to moving through shadowside’s toxic air to risk speaking to a woman no longer there.

Luna slipped back out in the mortal world just as the woman splashed out from the waters.

She was coherent enough to be shouting words, even if it was the same profanity over and over and over again. That was a good sign. Probably.

The red in the churning water around her legs wasn’t though. They were a long way from any replacement blood.

“I’ve got you,” Rorn said, scoping the civilian out of the water and into the keel of the rowboat at an ill-advised speed. He took one of her swinging hands in one of his massive ones. “I’ve got you, you’ll do fine.” The minotaur cracked a smile.

The civilian punched him in the face. And then screamed wordlessly, horrified eyes on her hand.

Rorn didn’t flinch from the blow, but his teeth made a horrific grinding sound. His muscles tensed as if he was about to do something everyone was going to regret.

Luna moved, but Pandora was quicker, her chrome and glowing violet armor sliding between him and the civilian. She shoved him back, the faint light of her repulsor beams illuminating him as the massive beast of a cape stumbled back.

“How bad is it, Hellsing?”

Luna glanced first at Rorn. He clenched his fists, but closed his eyes and started what looked like a deliberate breathing exorcise.

The immediate danger seemingly passed, Luna turned her attention to the woman’s leg, where blood was soaking through a pair of pajama pants. Even without touching it, she could tell it bent in places it shouldn’t, but it didn’t look like any bone was poking through. “I’ve seen worse. But, uh, this isn’t my first kaiju rescue.”

“Spare me the details, Hellsing.” Pandora stepped up and clamped an armored hand over the screaming woman’s mouth. Which did break through woman’s shock.

“You’re doing great, ma’am,” Pandora said with force, “but I think you should let me inject you with some morphine.”

The woman, breath coming in panicked bursts through gauntlet, gave a whimpered nod.

“…You have morphine?”

Chapter 4. Heroic Arguments

Luna Hellsing couldn’t believe they were still having this conversation twelve (thankfully empty) ruined houses later. “You can’t trick people into taking experimental drugs by lying to them about what they are!”

“Firstly, don’t call Omnimind’s invention experimental. She knows what she’s doing, Hellsing.” Pandora managed to sneer while wading through several inches of seawater. Wavewatcher remained an ominous shadow in the distance, seemingly unaffected by the occasional explosion still battering it. They were close enough that they should have heard distant sounds, but nothing came over the water.

The civilian, unconscious due to the super-science drug she’d been given, did seem to be doing better. Luna had done a little triage, at least bandaging and splinting the leg as best she could without disturbing the woman. She almost looked peaceful, passed out in the bottom of the boat Rorn was dragging by the portion of the chain still attached to its prow. He wasn’t talking, but his hunched shoulders indicated he was as exasperated at this argument as Luna felt.

“Secondly,” Pandora continued, “no one expects capes administering emergency care to adhere to the same medical ethics as doctors. Thirdly, Virginia has very robust Good Samaritan laws, so even if the police decide this, of all things, is what they want to pick a fight with the Union over, I have legal protection here.”

“That’s not the point!” Luna clenched her teeth. “If you want to be a member of the Justice Union, you have to hold yourself to higher moral standards. Otherwise you end up a well-intentioned villain.”

“Stop being stupid, Hellsing. I just have to hold myself to the same standard Omnimind holds herself. Unless you think she’s a villain, Hellsing.”

Luna ran her hands through her hair. She wanted to crack a joke like, When I snap and start killing people, I‘m going to start with you, but she’d known Artemis’s son before he’d snapped. “Thank Darkness this the last house.” The twelve behind them had exactly one trapped cat, and no pockets of darkness large enough for a civilian to be stuck in. Even compared to those, though, this one had been hit hard. Its roof lay submerged in the water flowing inland, the ruined housefront mixed with most of a deck splintered over the boxy cinder block foundation.

“There’s a digital watch in there.” Pandora squared her shoulders at the house.

“Like, a smart watch?”

“No, if it was smart watch, I would have said so, Hellsing. This a cheap toy, like idiots wore before cell phones.”

Luna blinked. “Your technopathy works on stuff like that?”

“Yes, Hellsing. Now stop underestimating me and go in and find whoever that is.”

Luna rolled her eyes but sloshed over to the house’s shadow as best she could. She hoped that this was just a spare that someone had left behind, but one didn’t get into being a cape to abandon people to uncertain fates on that sort of hope.

With a deep breath, she slipped shadowside and turned her gaze inward, to the protrusion of shadows behind her. The overlapping hazes of umbral energy left very little impression of differences, once one got inside the still-standing foundations.

There was absolutely nothing large enough for her to slip back into. Perhaps not unsurprising for the inside of a collapsed building.

Luna slipped back to the mortal world and then used a shadow tendril to toss herself up onto the roof.

“Well?” Pandora asked, almost sounding nervous.

“No places I could slip in, but there was maybe a pocket near the surface here. I’m going to see if I can wiggle a tendril in and feel about.” She did her best to step lightly as she walked across the top of the structure.

“You can feel with those things?” Pandora sounded extremely repulsed.

Luna rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Did you not read my file? I’m sure my parents gave you one before our disastrous lunch at the mall.”

“No. Why would I? The last thing I want is to spend more time thinking about you, Hellsing.”

It was almost refreshing after Dakota, who had literally been stalking Luna on and off for months before being admitted to the Union. The open and unbridled contempt was much easier to deal with.

From atop the rubble, Luna pulled the shadows from under her wet half-cape and wriggled them down into the rubble, probing here and there, searching for ways deeper in. The tactile feedback she got from these extensions of herself was much more limited than touching things with her hands, but they could be pressed impossibly thin, and split to probe multiple different crevices. Which was fortunate, as there were lots of little crevices to get around.

She found a warm, soft, smooth bit of human skin right at the moment the screaming started. “Ah! Rats! Get off me you creepy little bastards!”

Luna leapt back, off the rubble entirely. No sense in adding her weight to that crushing the woman. She released the shadows she’d pulled into a tendril

“Ma’am,” she tried call.

“Get off! You ain’t gonna eat me, ya little flea-bitten shit-eaters.”

“Ma’am.” Luna was not getting through to her.

“Come any closer and I’ll bite you myself!”

“Ma’am!” Pandora pounded a fist onto the exposed bit of the frame that covered the top of the still standing foundation. “The Justice Union is here to help!”

That the woman shut up for. Briefly. “Well hurry up then. The rats are back, and they’re fixing to finish what they started.”

“What they started?”

“Not important, Hellsing.” Pandora’s head was turning back and forth as she weighed her options. “This was why we brought that sand-brained minotaur.”

“What did you call me?” Rorn almost bellowed. Luna rubbed her temples.

“Sand-brained, Son-of-Rore.” Pandora stepped up into his face. “And now that I’ve got your attention, don’t touch that rubble.”

“Look, you stupid zreeth—”

“Do you want to kill that woman, Son-of-Rore?”

Rorn’s face twitched. “What in the hells are you talking about?”

“If you push that rubble the wrong way, you can push it onto that woman and crush her, Son-of-Rore. You’re more than strong enough for that to be fatal.”

The minotaur’s nostrils flared, but he loomed a bit less over his nominal leader. “So Luna can just…” he waved a hand in her direction.

“There’s not enough space.” Luna shook her head.

Pandora raised an eyebrow at her, before turning back to the house. After a moment, she clicked her tongue. “I hate this plan.”

“What plan?”

“Pay attention, Hellsing.” Pandora stood and stretched as much as aetherium armor allowed. “I need to get a lot of air, to be able to tractor something as heavy as this roof up. Since I can’t tractor to moving water, I’m going to have to boost off Son-of-Rore to get the height I need. Once the roof is lifted, the minotaur will try to hold it to buy you enough time to slide in and grab the woman.”

“How is that different than me lifting it?” Rorn snarled.

“Because my tractor beam will lift the whole roof as a single piece, Son-of-Rore.”

“What does that even mean?”

Luna held up a hand in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “Trust me, Rorn. I know the complicated mystical details, and she’s definitely right about this being safer. For the civilian, anyway. We’re not the ones at risk of getting crushed if the building material breaks when you’re moving it.” The short of it was that the tractor would lift all parts of the object at once, so it wasn’t going to snap or pivot around a tragic point, but she doubted Rorn would grasp the concept quickly.

“Hello?” the woman’s voice came from inside the rubble.

Rorn’s fuming gaze move between his teammates before settling on Luna. “You trust her?”

“When it comes to saving people?” Luna raised an eyebrow at Pandora, who rolled her eyes back. “Sure. I’m a little surprised she has this much faith in my ability.” She had actually done something similar last year with Mighty Arzan, although the circumstances there had been a tad more dire.

“I told you I hated this plan.” Pandora contemptuously flicked an invisible piece of dirt off her shoulder. “Anyway, it gets worse. After you pull the civilian out, you’re going to need to catch me, because, again, I can’t repulsor the water to stop my fall. And I will be falling fast, Hellsing.”

“You… trust me to pull that off?” Luna couldn’t help but consider what it would be like to, well, not try very hard and let Pandora smash into the water-covered beach. It was less than a foot deep, but it would probably cushion the fall enough to not be lethal, right?

No. That way lay villainy. Even assholes deserved to be saved. Damn it.

“What shadow are you going to aim to land in?”

“Excuse you, Hellsing?”

“I’m not going to catch your fat ass with shadow tendrils, not if you’re moving really fast. So what shadows are we going to slip through so we can kill the momentum?”

“Tch.” Pandora glanced around angrily, before dropping off the side of the building and picking up a large rectangular piece of house. She hefted up to one shoulder, which was actually somewhat impressive. Pandora had to be stronger than she looked. According to her file, her armor didn’t provide anything like enhanced strength. She angled the wood towards the cloud-shrouded sun. “Will this do, Hellsing?”

Even Rorn let out an impressed-sounding, “Huh.”

Luna tilted her head considering. It actually just might. “I hate this plan.”

“I know, Hellsing. Ready?”

The smaller girl rolled her shoulders and then nodded.

“Son-of-Rore, give me a boost.”

The minotaur sneered, but crouched to hold a hand. They’d actually practiced this exact move (barring the shading detritus) in last weekend’s drill.

Pandora stepped onto that hand, leaping up as Rorn tossed her. He lit up with the faint violet light of the repulsor beam before Pandora was even past him. He staggered, struggling to hold himself upright as she accelerated upward.

Their nominal leader shrank into the distance above them, giving Luna time to swallow. She hadn’t realized Pandora’s beam had the range to pull off this maneuver. This was even more stupidly dangerous than she’d initially thought.

The armored heroine’s flight jerked downward the moment the tractor beam hit the top of the ruins, but the house frame didn’t respond nearly as fast. It drifted slowly upward, its much greater mass pulling Pandora more than she pulled back. Rorn’s massive hands were already on the roof supporting it.

But a small gap was all Luna needed. She threw herself into it, pulling herself along with shadow tendrils. She shot straight towards where she’d felt the woman, bits of wet debris from the too-close roof splattering against her.

A terrible cracking sound came from the wreckage above her.

“Jesus!” the civilian swore, kicking up.

Scraping against the wet splinters all around her, Luna managed to nab an ankle, pulling them both shadowside.

There wasn’t a heartbeat to spare. In the blink of an eye it took to slide between worlds, the open space around them was gone. Their near-deadly collapse had made no sound.

“Ow! Let me go!” the civilian screamed, kicking at the hand holding her in the realm—in all the bickering, they’d forgotten to tell her to hold her breath!

Luna slid them back to reality, shunting them both up through to the top of the house.

The pain lasted a heartbeat, but was a sharp, full body thing. The old woman was screaming profanities, but Luna grit her teeth and looked up.

Pandora’s path was off the house, her free hand held out to a stumbling Rorn. The repulsor beam had done almost nothing to slow her plummet. The chunk of wreckage on her shoulder was still angled perfectly to keep her in shadow.

Luna flung herself towards her hated teammate, flailing out with the longest shadow tendril she could conjure. It caught Pandora and pulled them together.

The two capes hit each other at the same time they hit the water, but they’d slid shadowside before they hit the rocky beach below.

They plunged deep, deep into the umbral reflection of the ground below. Pandora’s armored hands clung tightly to Luna, but she at least wasn’t struggling.

Luna reached up, pushing towards the shadow of the damaged building. Her lungs started to burn as she held her breath against the poisoned air. Pandora didn’t make it, gasping in a lungful before they reached.. .the surface.

They slid back to reality just above the water of the beach, collapsing with a splash. Luna had to pull her armored teammate’s head up, so she could at least start coughing clean, breathable air. A cold metal hand clasped Luna’s shoulder as Pandora struggled to gasp and cough at the same time. Breathing heavily, Luna adjusted her weight on the wet, uneven ground, shifting to more firmly supporting her sputtering teammate.

The woman they’d dug free was still shouting profanities.

When Pandora recovered enough to support her own weight, she thanked her teammate by shoving her hard. Luna stumbled and splashed into the slow-moving sea water. “Cutting it fucking close, Hellsing.”

“You’re welcome,” Luna snarled back.

Pandora sneered, but Rorn’s voice drew their focus. “Where’s Dakota?”

Chapter 5. Plot Twist

Dakota Lyon was officially registered as Fletching in the Justice Union database (even if wasn’t really very accurate to say she was known by her cape name yet). Artemis—the Artemis—had even given her some trick arrows and everything. (Actually, she was the third extraordinary-but-still-human woman to use the name of the Greek goddess, so maybe not THE the Artemis.) She was starting to feel like she might actually be a pretty poor super hero, though. She’d wandered away from her team in the middle of a search and rescue operation.

Sure, she was barely helping with that mission. But that didn’t mean it was okay to wander up away from the beach like this. Her teammates were—at least theoretically—counting on her to warn them if Wavewatcher was going to blast them with another wave. But, according to her (shiny new super-tech) phone, the news was still talking about the third wave that had so recently failed to reach downtown Saint Simon.

Pandora had given her busywork to keep her out of trouble while they did the real superheroing. Which was an improvement on open mockery, maybe, but still didn’t feel great. Worse, the view of the kaiju—a real, terror-to-multiple-communities kaiju—was worse from the beach that it was from the news thopter daring to get much closer to the thing. Dakota had thought being literally present at a kaiju attack would be more exciting than watching one on the news, but here she was.

And that was before the bickering started. It was… odd to see her personal hero Luna “Moonless” Hellsing like that. She’d followed her more than perhaps she should have over the past seven-ish months that they’d been going to the same school, and she’d never been so angry or petty. Or even just so wrong. Omnimind wouldn’t have given Pandora the not-technically-morphine if it wasn’t safe. Impossibly safe, even. Super scientists like her didn’t make mistakes like that (at least not the heroes).

But Luna was so determined that Pandora had to be wrong she just… wouldn’t stop yelling about it. Dakota had heard that people got like that sometimes, but the home-schooled child had only seen it on TV, and it had always seemed so fake there.

So, instead of sticking around in the dangerous area, like the real hero her Justice Union ID card said she was, Dakota had wandered back into the trees, where the sea water flowing uphill wasn’t as unpleasantly deep, and the pointless arguments weren’t so loud.

She sighed. Was this what cape work was actually like? The other mission she’d gone on hadn’t been like this.

The snapping of a twig jolted Dakota from her melancholy. She swung her head around, and gasped when she saw what made the sound.

A fish man was standing stock still, bug-eyed gaze fixed on her. The creature was covered in the blue-ish scales of a fish, and it had the wide-mouthed, gilled head of one as well, but its frame was otherwise mostly humanoid, about Dakota’s height, but thinner—if not as thin as Moonless.

“Are you part of Wavewatcher?” Dakota asked. She spoke softly, more to herself than the creature. The kaiju that had hit Tranquility City last Halloween had fragmented out little pieces of itself, and it hadn’t been the only kaiju to do so. There was something in the dead fish eyes of the creature that did look a bit like the eyes that ran the length of Wavewatcher.

Once it was clear that it was spotted, the fish-man turned and started rushing towards the beach. It staggered forward, limping awkwardly along the land with its wide, webbed feet.

It was heading right for Luna and the others! And the ocean where the big part of the kaiju was.

“Oh no you don’t,” Dakota said, reaching back to her trick arrows. It took two tries for her to grab the sticky arrow and put it to her little compound bow. She held the arming button in the nock, as she tried to aim. The trick arrows—and especially the sticky arrows—were much heavier than the ones she’d used to go hunting with her dad. And the fish-kaiju-spawn-thing was trying to run, so she’d need to lead it.

She let the arrow lose, and it was immediately clear she’d overcompensated. The arrow flew over the thing before hitting a tree and plorping out its load of sticky yellow adhesive all across the trunk.

Dakota shouted a bad word—that was the only sticky arrow she’d packed.

But then something amazing happened. The fish-spawn-monster-thing tripped over the underbrush. It staggered, arms spinning before catching itself on the trunk of a tree. Specifically, the trunk covered in sticky yellow goo.

It made a whining sound and tried to pull away from the tree, but its hand remained firmly rooted in the glue.

“That counts!” Dakota said. “I caught a kaiju-spawn. I caught a kaiju-spawn! Wait, now what do I do?” Somehow, this scenario didn’t have a standard Justice Union protocol for her to follow, at least not one she could remember. You’d have thought someone would have caught a kaiju spawn before. They were still fixing up the waterfront area after the spawn had swarmed it last year.

“I’ve got to call Luna’s parents! They’ll know what to do.” And it would be great for them to see what she’d done. And maybe, this would prove to be the key to actually stopping Wavewatcher before the behemoth decided to come up on land and do real damage.

Because they were probably going to need to see the spawn, Dakota used the video call feature of the phone. It was some sort of propriety protocol, not one of the big apps that most phones used.

The Professors Hellsing answered quickly, crowded close enough together for both be visible, Dr. Quincy Hellsing standing behind his wife. The two looked frazzled. They were still wearing the plaid shirts that were sort of their trademarks, but the hats were gone, and Dr. Quincy had unhooked his whip from his belt. “Is our daughter okay?” Dr. Charlotte asked without any greeting.

“Oh, uh, I think so. This isn’t about her: I caught a kaiju-spawn, and I wasn’t sure what to do, but I was pretty sure you’d want to see it.”

The adults both raised their right eyebrow. “Are you sure?” “As hard as we’ve been hitting it, we should have seen some before now.”

“Maybe it was in the waves. But, here, look.” Dakota turned the phone’s camera towards the trapped fish monster.

Neither the creature nor the professors responded the way the young girl was expecting. It pointed one webbed hand at the screen and suddenly started babbling. Which the professors answered! It wasn’t even remotely English, but they were immediately talking to the creature.

It sounded scared. Horrified even.

Wasn’t that a good thing? Weren’t monsters supposed to be afraid of capes?

“Dakota.” The girl turned the phone back to look at the professors. “That’s not a kaiju spawn, it’s a deep one. They’re a sort of a…” Her husband completed the thought. “…an oppressed minority in the Atlantian Empire.”

“Wait, like Atlantis? The people who sunk those ships all those years ago? With the mermaids?” She glanced back at the humanoid fish, and couldn’t help but feel a little cheated that she was getting to see an Atlantian and it wasn’t a proper mermaid (which she then immediately started feeling guilty about—that was no way for a cape to feel!).

“Atlantis has done a lot of things.” “The important part is that Akat here says they’ve been held prisoner with a few more of their kind in a cabin in the woods near here.”

“Wait. Does that mean it has nothing to do with the kaiju?”

“They, Dakota. Akat is a person, not a beast.” “They’re asking for help freeing the others.”

“Oh.” She glanced in the direction of the beach, but she couldn’t really make it out through the trees. “Does that mean we should abandon the fight against Wavewatcher?”

“You aren’t fighting the kaiju, you’re doing search and rescue in the area that’s been damaged.” “And these deep ones sound like they need a rescue quite badly.” “Reach out to Luna. She’s been neglecting practicing her Atlantian, but she should have retained enough of the basics to find the cabin.” “We really need to get back to seeing if we can find out anything about the kaiju.”

There was something in Dr. Charlotte’s voice that gave Dakota a little pause. “Is the fight not going well?”

“Let us worry about that.” “Focus on saving the people you can.”

Dakota didn’t like that answer at all.

…

Rorn was the first to make it to where Dakota was watching over the still-trapped deep one (who was named Akat, she guessed). He rushed in, moving with an adroit speed incongruous with his extreme size. “Are you ok?” He barely even spared a glance to towards the monster she’d trapped.

“I’m fine. I caught a monster, like a real hero!” She pointed at Akat. “Although I guess technically, he’s a victim? Where’s Luna?”

“She’s coming.” Rorn side-eyed the Atlantian. “Slowly.” Then he turned towards Akat and said a few words. They weren’t in a language Dakota recognized, but he sounded frustrated.

The fish person stood up taller and blinked. It replied with what sounded like a question.

Rorn did a double take. “Atlantica?” He sounded mad.

“Yeah. Akat here is from Atlantis. Do you speak Atlantian?”

“No. I know a couple of phrases in Mer, but I’ve never heard of Atlantica.”

“Huh. Oh, is it’s like how your world’s Trade Tongue is basically English. Atlantian must be the same for Mer.”

Rorn’s face contorted in furious confusion. “How?”

At that moment, Luna dropped down from above them. Her face was determined, which made her look even prettier than usual. She shot off a few words in Atlantian (her accent notably thicker than her parents’) before turning on Dakota. “Why are they still trapped?”

“Uh, I didn’t, um, I was waiting for you guys?” She rummaged around in her belt pouches, looking for the solvent. “Is Pandora joining us?”

“No, she’s managing the human civilians.” Luna turned back to Akat, and spoke some more in stop-and-go Atlantian.

The deep one and Luna went back and forth a few times while Dakota found the solvent tube and moved around to where Akat’s wrist was trapped in the yellow goo. She squeezed out a big glob of what looked like cyan toothpaste. It started melting into the goo. Dakota hadn’t done this before, but the instructions said it took a few minutes.

“I’m not really following this, Luna. My Mer—” Rorn winced before correcting himself. “My ‘Atlantian’ is extremely rudimentary.”

“He doesn’t want to go back and show us where the cabin is. He wants to run away.”

“Can he give us directions?”

Luna gave her a quick side glance. “Not really. Even if there wasn’t a language barrier, it’s a cabin in the middle of the woods. A bit short of landmarks.”

Rorn grunted. Then he leaned over and grasped the wrist trapped in goo. Dakota and Akat both instinctively leaned away from the giant’s unexpected motion. Luna moved to put a hand on him, but was too slow. A good yank pulled Akat free, leaving only a few tendrils from the still-dissolving adhesive. Rorn leaned close to Akat’s face and said three words in Atlantian.

The fish person swallowed, and then gave a nod. He pointed and said something that was almost certainly “This way,” before moving up hill.

“What’d he say?” Dakota whispered to Luna. Why was she whispering?

“Fear not.” Luna pulled out her phone. “I’ll let Pandora know where we’re going.”

Dakota did a double take a Luna’s next words. “Hey, bitch. We’re going to save some fish people, so mind the human civilians.”

Pandora’s voice was incensed enough that Dakota could hear her clearly. “You do not get talk to me like—” Luna hung up on her. Luna actually hung up on their team leader.

“Come on.” Luna nodded after the fish man and minotaur who were pushing their way uphill through the muck that was the forest floor.

“But, but.” Dakota hurried to catch up with her favorite hero. “Isn’t Pandora going to be mad?”

Luna’s phone started audibly vibrating, but Luna didn’t move to answer it. “Who cares? I don’t like the way she talks to you.”

Dakota’s eyes grew enormous. “You do care about me!” She threw herself at Luna, trapping her in a tight embrace.

Luna struggled, pushing gently at the younger, damper girl. “No hugging. Please no hugging.”

“Oh, right.” Dakota gave her one more squeeze before letting go. Luna’s phone started buzzing again. “Are you going to answer that?”

Luna sneered. “If it’s a real emergency, Pandora will call you. Now come on. I think we might need to fight some demons.”

“Demons?”

Chapter 6. Into the Dark

Rorn son of Rore was about as far from an expert on magic as it was possible to get, but even he found it suspicious the way the water grew deeper the more they followed the Mer (or Atlantian or whatever Akat was). On the beach, it had been a thin rippling layer only a few inches deep. Over the march through the woods the waters had gotten deeper, first covering his knees, and now rising up to his waist. It was becoming a real pain to wade through the cold water and the grasping mud beneath it. Minotaurs were not built for mud. Carrying Dakota on his shoulder made it harder, but she’d be swimming by now without him. At least he was moving with the current.

“Why is this water getting deeper?” he grumbled.

“It’s weird,” Luna replied. “If the kaiju was just pushing all the water away, you’d expect it to stay the same depth up to the point it reached the end of its power and then start churning, and flowing back. This is… it’s all still flowing away from the coast.” She was swinging herself from bough to bough with her shadow tendrils, occasionally slipping into the shadow world and back to cover larger gaps. Despite the looming danger both ahead and behind, the shadow witch was admirably calm.

“Did you have stuff like this in your world?” Dakota asked.

“I don’t know. Dad always tried to avoid the places where wizards were prone to showing off.” He snorted. “They’re bad places for powerful creatures like us to be.”

“Oh. I see….” Dakota didn’t sound like she really understood.

Akat reemerged from the waters and shot off a long string of Mer that Rorn failed to catch any of. They were pointing one webbed hand in the direction of the flowing water.

“He says the house is here?” Luna translated.

“Well, let’s go see what the fuss is.” Rorn pushed forward, moving a particularly persistent bit of undergrowth aside, and stopped. “Okay. That’s odd.”

The water burbled, like it was hitting a wall or rock in a stream. But it wasn’t stopping. There was some movement to the sides, but a thin sheet was flowing forward, and up an invisible dome, forming a sort of odd, rippling bubble. Inside there was a distorted view of what might be a wooden structure within. It was small, at least by the standards of Virginia.

“It looks kinda like the pictures of Alexander’s library during the Stormwinds’ attack,” Dakota said.

“What?”

To Rorn’s shock, Luna agreed. “Yeah… There’s definitely some sort of spell barrier keeping the kaiju’s power out.”

“You’ve seen this before?” Rorn had always considered himself worldly. It was starting to get frustrating just how much more these two young girls seemed to have seen.

“Just in pictures.” Dakota cringed back slightly on his shoulder.

“Not this close. That was… a busy day for me and my parents.” Luna took a deep breath. “I guess we go in.”

“Y-you sure?” Dakota asked.

“We came here to protect people, right?” Rorn shrugged and was rewarded with a nervous hand suddenly clinging to his horn.

“Keep an eye out for the demons!” Dakota squeaked as he stepped forward. Luna hung back, suspended from tendrils of shadow.

Rorn stopped just before the rippling wall of water. He reached out, pushing a hand through the barrier. There was an odd, not-exactly-warm sensation on the other side, but he could turn and wiggle his fingers freely. He pulled his hand back out, and didn’t encounter any meaningful resistance.

“Seems safe enough.”

At Luna and Dakota’s nods, the minotaur plunged forward through the rippling curtain of water. There was a warm tingling as they passed through the invisible barrier, but nothing that compared to suddenly not having to push through the chest-high water outside.

He glanced back and forth, feeling different, but it took a moment for him to figure out why. “Huh,” Rorn patted the fur of his muscular chest. “I’m dry?”

“Wow.” Dakota patted her green tunic. “Me too.”

They met gazes, as much as it was possible given their positions. The air felt dry in the bubble as well, more like the desert, and much less like a rainy day. The two shared a shrug. He lowered Dakota the great distance from his shoulder to the (also dry) forest floor.

Luna popped out of the water next to them and let out a relieved sigh. “Darkness, it feels good to have dry socks.”

“Feet,” the hoofed minotaur snorted.

Now that the shed was more clearly in view without the rippling water, it looked no less out of place. Its walls and roof were made of real wood, roughly cut—unlike any of the other buildings Rorn had seen in this world. However, the door was a grand, paneled affair, large enough that he wouldn’t have to duck to get through. It even had a latch that wouldn’t have out of place in the human cities of his home world, rather than the too-small noobs this world preferred. Well, the clearly branded padlock holding it closed would have seemed out of place.

“That must be how the fish-man escaped.” Dakota gestured at the corner of the building where there were some animal scratches marring the wood. “I might be able to squeeze through it, but…”

“That’s fine.” Rorn cracked his neck. “You’d need a much heavier door to stop a minotaur.”

“Wait,” Luna began, but his hoof slammed hard into the center of the paneling, backed up by his more-than-mortal muscles. The door, frame and all, flew into the shed’s interior with a noisy crash.

Inside, the shed appeared empty: four barren walls and shadowy rafters. No immediate sign of demons, or the friends that that Akat had claimed were in danger.

“I guess you didn’t want the element of surprise,” Luna grumbled.

“Sorry. My kind isn’t suited for stealth,” Rorn smiled back.

He walked into the ill-lit building, eyes probing every corner. There wasn’t much. Four wooden walls, a smooth wooden floor, a basic wooden ceiling. Only the various bits of frame required to hold the walls and ceilings together, and the animal damage in the one corner prevented it from being completely featureless.

“There’s nothing here?”

Luna slipped out of the shadows right in front of him. “There’s an underground passage here.” She announced. She raised a hand and conjured several shadow tendrils, larger than she’d managed outside, but barely visible in the unlit cabin.

The wriggling mass of shadows flowed over the floor in front of Luna’s outstretched hand. A rectangle formed where they slipped into cracks Rorn had been unable to see. Luna’s face contorted in concentration for a moment before she raised her other hand, extending a shadow tendril up to the cabin’s ceiling. She grunted as she pulled on the shadows extending above and below her.

A chunk of floor lifted up and Luna swung it to the side. It was nearly the size of the door, but much thicker.

“Those thing are stronger than they look.” Rorn’s eyes were glued to the displaced floor panel and the inky black basement below.

Luna twisted, pulling herself higher by the tendril attached to the ceiling. She rolled her shoulder as if it had been strained by the lifting. “They’ve got some weirdness that makes you way better suited in a fight, even before we factor in your resilience. So. After you.”

“It’s so dark,” Dakota said. Her compound bow was in her hand, but she hadn’t nocked an arrow. She was also standing very close to her much larger teammate.

“Yeah.” Rorn gave the open passage a mistrustful look. “You have one of those el-eee-dee arrows?”

After a moment, Luna asked, “Dakota?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. The light-up arrows. I can… Hang on.” She fumbled a bit at the arrows in the holder on her back. It took her a few tries to find the one she wanted. The lights that sat just behind the blunted head lit up after she nocked the arrow.

“From shadowside, I could see that this is a single passage, maybe a hundred feet long, that way. At the end there’s a brightly lit chamber. I’m guessing that’s where the rest of the deep ones are being held.”

Dakota loosed her arrow into the chamber in the direction Luna had indicated. It bounced off the floor once before coming to rest.

The tunnel’s walls were uneven, carved directly into the earth. Roots from the various trees dangled messily into the tunnel at irregular intervals, casting sweeping shadows from the el-eee-dee arrow. It was a perfect place for an ambush.

“Cover me.” Rorn nodded at Luna who nodded back.

“Dakota, hang back and make sure nothing sneaks up on us.”

“Y-you’re leaving me alone?”

“I trust you,” Rorn said, leaping down into the tunnel before either teammate could say more.

He hit the earth floor without anything jumping out at him. He could stand without scraping his horns on the ceiling, but only barely. In addition to the blue-white light of the el-ee-dee arrow, there was a faint red light down the tunnel, dim and obscured by roots.

“Well, well, big boy,” a feminine voice purred from off to his left. “What do you like?”

Rorn dropped into a fighting stance, but the speaker made no move to close. She was short, easily a foot shorter than Dakota, and green—she looked a lot like a goblin. She was wearing a slinky red dress, bright red lip paint, and had triangular ears that were wider than her face.

“Tempta?” Luna’s voice came from somewhere behind Rorn. “Be careful. She’s a kind of demon that feeds on desire, and she’ll take on the form you find most appealing.

“She will what?” Rorn asked, sure he’d misheard.

His gaze snapped back to this Tempta. She moved, but only to stop leaning on the wall. Her eyes were on her own bare limbs, which were sprouting a layer of black fur. “Oh,” she crooned. “Someone likes ’em hairy.”

Rorn blinked. She’d started to swell in height as well, not much but she was at least a few inches taller, and noticeably more muscled.

Abandoning all caution, Rorn threw all his weight into punch that buried his arm deep in the earthen wall behind where the goblin had been standing. At that speed, Tempta barely had time for her eyes to widen before she’d disintegrated into a puff of red smoke.

“What happened?” Luna’s voice asked.

“I also like ’em big and strong enough to kick my ass, so I had to take her out quickly.”

A slow clapping drew Rorn’s eyes deeper in the tunnel just in time for the glowing arrow to wink out. He got only a brief glimpse of the creature stepping on it, but it appeared like another goblin; likely male and fully dressed in a vest, trousers and a flat-cap.

“Well done, well done, Rorn, son of Rore,” the goblin said, voice deeper than Rorn would have expected of such a small creature. “But now let’s talk about what you really want. Going home. Seeing dear mommy and daddy again.”

“You can send me home?” Rorn asked, slowly moving towards the goblin, and keeping his ears perked. This was almost certainly a setup for an ambush.

“He’s lying,” Luna whispered.

“Of course, of course,” the goblin spoke over her. “Do as I say, and soon enough you’ll being chewing your cud with your dear dad and those cousins in familiar mountain pastures once more.”

“And mom will be there?” Rorn asked.

“Yes, yes. Mommy, too. Things aren’t so bad that a little goblin magic can’t fix it. You know that’s what you want.”

Rorn couldn’t see much with the goblin’s foot on the glowing arrowhead, but he could tell he was getting close now. Only two or three times his own height.

“So goblin magic can raise the dead?”

“Uh.” The shadows shifted as the goblin took a half step back.

“My dead mother. You can bring her back?”

“Yes? Yes, of course I have the power to—”

“You are a terrible liar,” Rorn growled.

“Now!” the goblin lifted his foot off el-ee-dee and flooded the tunnel with light.

It illuminated Rorn’s back. He’d turned in time to catch the third goblin that had been sneaking up behind him. It had one of those sports-clubs from that ball game Dakota’s brother liked to watch so much. One of Rorn’s massive hands wrapped around both of the goblin’s, crushing them to its sports-club. The goblin swallowed as it met the much, much bigger minotaur’s gaze.

He didn’t give the creature time. Rorn swung the creature around, slinging it at the one that had been standing on the light.

The bad liar had produced a fighting staff from somewhere, but it made for a poor tool to block his companion’s body hurtling towards him. The two collapsed in a struggling tangle.

Luna popped out of the shadows behind them, shadow tendrils before her and enveloping the struggling pair in entangling darkness.

“I don’t need your help,” Rorn snarled, and rushed the gap after the would-be sneak. They were still struggling to get themselves free of each other. Hands on the ceiling to brace, Rorn raised a hoof and slammed it down into the two of them. The resulting puff of foul-smelling smoke turned the whole cavern illuminated by the el-eee-dee arrow a murky shade of red.

The billowing smoke made lights that danced aggressively in Rorn’s peripheral vision. He twitched his ears, but the tunnel was silent.

“That might be all of them,” Luna said. She was holding a black handkerchief to her nose, but her eyes were moving around the darkness as much as Rorn’s were. “Summoned demons often come in threes.”

“Best make sure.” The two moved around the tunnel looking for more signs of demons, but found none.

They returned to collect Dakota before venturing to the end of the stinking tunnel. Rorn held a few roots out of Dakota’s way, and the young heroine looked wide eye into every corner. At least this time she remembered she had a weapon and walked the whole way with an arrow nocked.

At the end of the tunnel lurked a giant metal vault door. It sat in the middle of a wall, clearly not part of the natural earthwork that had led them here. Luna moved to inspect a panel with four rows of three buttons in the center of the door. The small indicator on top of that panel was the source of the red light Rorn had seen earlier. “There’s no key hole,” Luna observed.

“What?” Rorn put his hands on the cold steel of the door. “There’s got to be a way to open it.”

“It’s a demi-electric passcode. I’m not sure if Pandora’s technopathy would get through this.”

“Uh guys.” Both of Dakota’s teammates turned to look at her. “Uh. Is that drywall?”

After a moment’s pause, Luna and Rorn moved to look where Dakota was pointing. The wall besides the door did look a bit like the strange gray material Dakota’s brother had around his house. “It couldn’t be,” Luna said. “Who would do something like that?”

Rorn put a hand on the wall and gave it a push. His palm went through the wall easily, cracks spreading rapidly around the hole.

Sound and light poured through the hole, along with frightened voices speaking Mer (or, rather, Atlantian).

Glancing through the hole, squinting against the bright light, Rorn counted five more of the fish-like humanoids Luna had referred to as deep ones. They were all drawn back away from the wall as much as their shackles allowed.

The wall was so flimsy Rorn was able to walk through it with almost no effort. He glanced aside at the massive steel door, extending six inches on either side of the thin wall it was embedded in. There was nothing to do but shake his head.

“Think you can break those chains?” Luna asked with a smile.

Chapter 7. Loose Ends

Rorn son of Rore and Luna made quick work of freeing the fish-like deep ones. They’d recognized Luna, but her command of their tongue limited the amount they could actually communicate. It was clear, though, that none of them wanted to be here, not waiting for the rest to be freed before running off.

“Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, make sure they come with us to the Justice Union headquarters so we can figure out what’s wrong?” Lower, Dakota added, “and that they aren’t, y’know, some sort criminals being held here?”

“They’re not criminals,” Luna said, opening the last lock with a mass of writhing shadows. “At least, they’re not being punished by the Atlantian government. They’d have access to a much more secure locking mechanism and a very different sort of metal for that gate. And frankly, the only way we’re getting them to the Union is if we’re willing to hold them like the sadists who put them here, and I’m not.”

“Besides,” Rorn added, “we’ve still got humans to help. That kaiju hasn’t gone anywhere.”

The deep ones were shouting thanks as they fled. Rorn watched to make sure no demons ambushed them in the tunnel, which turned out to be an unnecessary caution.

“Did we at least get their names?” Dakota asked as the last limped down the tunnel as fast as their withered legs would carry them. “I’d kinda like to know the names of who the first couple of people I saved was.”

“Deep ones won’t share their names unless… no. No, I didn’t get their names.”

“Let’s get going,” Rorn rumbled. “We don’t want to leave Pandora alone too long. She might hurt someone.”

A delayed chuckle burst from Luna’s lips. “Yeah. She does have a history of throwing good people into the ocean.”

“Like she did to you when you fought Warlord D’jaxx?”

That drove the mirth from Luna’s face. “Yes, Dakota. Thanks for explaining the joke.”

The three walked to the tunnel entrance, but only Dakota trusted the wooden stairs up into the cabin enough to use them. Rorn vaulted it, and Luna pulled herself up with shadows tendrils.

Luna’s magic tablet buzzed, and she got a concerned look on her face when she looked at it. “My parents tried to call me?”

“Maybe they defeated the kaiju?” Dakota pointed out the door of the shed.

It took Rorn a moment to realize what she was talking about. Outside was a normal-looking forest, except for all the water. Then it hit him: now the water was moving normally. The odd flowing bubble was gone.

He walked out of the door for a closer look. The water was flowing down, away from them and back towards the coast, much more rapidly than it had been moving uphill. There was still a circle around the building that was dry, but water tumbled around it like a rock in a stream as it flowed back towards the sea, and not like—whatever it was that caused water to bubble over a building like that.

“Let me just…” Luna said, before the magic tablet made a pinging sound.

“Luna!” The voice of both of the young heroine’s parents came from the tablet. “Are you alright? What’s going on?”

“We found Akat’s friends in a weird, I don’t know, lair, I guess. They’d been captured and imprisoned by some mages. “

“How long ago did you set them free?”

Luna glanced at her team mates. “A couple of minutes, why?”

“Because a couple of minutes ago, there was a sudden spike of sidereal flux, and the kaiju turned and just left.”

Her other parent added, “We managed triangulate the spike’s origin, and it’s very close to your last known location. Did you break any spells?”

Once again, the gathered trio glanced at one another. “I think we just poofed a few goblins guarding the place,” Luna said. “I didn’t sense anything.”

“Look, Rainbow Mage is heading your way. Coordinate with them; that site might have been what was drawing the kaiju in the first place.”

“Can we speak to the deep ones?”

“Heh.” Luna smiled nervously. “About that…”

…

It wasn’t until the next day that they finally got the whole story straightened out.

The “debriefing” took place in a sort of courthouse the local human authorities had turned into a base of operations. Rorn arrived with Luna and Dakota (the explanations of why Pandora had gone elsewhere hadn’t make sense to him, but he wasn’t keen to investigate). Luna’s parents were there, in their wide brimmed hats and flannels, whips hanging from their hips. The creature that they called Rainbow Mage was also there, and they looked no less absurd the second time Rorn saw them.

They looked like a gold-skinned elf, although Dakota had assured Rorn that the appearance was superficial. Supposedly they were a human born to human parents before transforming into what they were now by some mechanism Rorn hadn’t followed. Their hair was long, snowy white, and tied back into a messy ponytail. They didn’t stand too much taller than the teenage girls, shorter than both of Luna’s parents. What really made them look absurd, though, was the outfit. There was an excessively large fur coat that hung to their knees, dyed such that it went through the progression of colors of the rainbow: red at their shoulders and violet about their knees. Under that they wore a loose-fitting, high collared shirt that hung like an unbelted tunic over slacks the exact same shade of purple. On their chest hung a large circular medallion that shone like metal, but also followed the rainbow pattern of colors, this time in concentric rings to its center. The medallion had two elaborate arrows raised from the center as if they would be able to spin around its face.

Rorn knew mages were odd creatures, but the only thing near this colorful he’d seen since coming to this world were the moving picture cartoons Dakota had tried to interest him in.

“Alright,” Rainbow Mage said, “I’m drained, and I have a plane to catch, so we’re going to do this quickly.” They spoke swiftly and with mild annoyance.

“Did you find any of the deep ones?” Dakota asked.

“If you have questions, please hold them until after I leave. I have to take a civilian flight back to San Francisco, and things are already going weirder than usual in my absence. Also, yes. One.”

“Where are they now?” Dakota continued. “I don’t see them.”

“Again, no questions. Now, bear in mind that much of this is conjecture and educated guesses, but what appears to have happened is that some human wizard needed to collect deep one blood for some spell they were working on, and were able to use unusual magic to call them up directly from the ocean floor. That is calling as in the type of magical summoning, not like a phone. I do not have the time to deal with that confusion.

“One of the deep ones they captured appears to be the subject of some prophesy. The one I spoke to was able to identify the Wavewatcher kaiju as related to it, but was unaware of useful details. Now, theoretically, this shouldn’t be a land-dweller’s problem, being an Atlantian prophesy, but as we saw today, prophesies are never easy.”

“What’s the prophesy about?” Rorn asked.

“Again, no questions. The wizard who was holding the deep ones laid down some impressive spellwork to keep their lair hidden while they collected blood over months, but eventually, the prophesy beast was able to get a vague idea of where the foretold one was being held, and set about trying to get them back into the water. Once it realized the creature was free, it lost interest and disappeared into the depths.

“For now, things will largely be stable. The deep ones are all back in the ocean, and hopefully they can be Azeas’s problem.”

“Who’s Azeas?”

“An Atlantian we’ve worked with in the past,” the female Dr. Hellsing said.

“If we get into who’s who in Atlantis I will miss my flight. So, again, no questions.

Luna ignored the bizarrely dressed human. “I didn’t think it was possible to summon anything out of Atlantis. Is something wrong with Neptune’s Barrier?”

“Again, no questions. Also, no. I wasted some of my—at this point extremely limited—reserves verifying that. So this wizard, in addition to being unlucky enough to have come close enough to foiling a prophesy that a kaiju got involved, seems to break the rules of what we know summoning magic can do.”

There was an awkward silence following that statement. “Why is everyone looking at me?” Rorn demanded.

“Because, based on what we know about summoning magic, you being called to this world is also impossible,” the male Dr. Hellsing said.

“Wait, are you saying that whoever this wizard is, they’re the one who brought me here?” Rorn asked, sitting up straighter. It was the closest thing to a lead on getting home he’d heard in his time on this so-called Earth.

“I hope that’s the case,” Rainbow Mage replied. “One person running around re-writing the rules of summon magic is already too many.

“Do you have time to scan him before your flight?”

Rainbow Mage turned their talisman to look at the arrows. “Only because I can do so quickly. Rorn son of Rore, give me your hand.”

Rorn glanced at Dakota, who in turn glanced at Luna. The pale-skinned girl glanced back at the two of them. “It’s probably your best chance of getting home. She’s probably the best wizard on the earth right now.”

The minotaur sighed, and reached out to take the mage’s hand. Like all humans, theirs (hers?) was tiny in comparison to his own..

Rainbow Mage closed their (her?) eyes and a halo of light formed around their joined hands. It rippled, each color of the rainbow flying by in succession one after the other.

When the lights faded, Rainbow Mage sighed. “Well. That’s frustrating.”

“What?” Rorn demanded, pulling his hand back.

“As we feared, you were physically called to this world. Not a spirit summoned into a vessel created by the summoning like those demons you fought. But your self and your soul physically transported through realities from yours to ours.”

“I thought we figured that out already?” Rorn asked.

“Yes, but you’re a—” Rainbow Mage cocked their head. “In the interest of time, I’m going to use the word ‘demigod’, even though there’s no such thing.”

“I am a demigod, though. A blessed descendant of Minos and Taura.”

Rainbow Mage scowled. “You are extremely lucky I am pressed for time, or you would be getting a lecture right now.”

“Are we not getting a lecture?” Luna asked.

“Fair point. Here’s the short version: the kind of creature you are should be absolutely immune to calling. Not, ‘it’s very difficult,’ like summoning a living human without killing them. Not ‘requires finding a way to circumvent powerful magics,’ like calling someone from Atlantis. Not even ‘theoretically impossible,’ like gods existing. Proven impossible, like adding two and two and getting three.”

“Gods exist,” Rorn grumbled. “I’ve met several.”

“Theology and/or etymology aside,” Luna’s mother interjected, “what does this mean for Rorn?”

Rainbow Mage glanced at the human cape. “There’s a few implications. The most immediately relevant is that not only do we have no way of sending you home, we have no framework with which we could even begin to research such magic. Secondly, as more of your body is remade by the food you partake of, the harder any such theoretical magic will get. And finally, you won’t get whatever afterlife you’re expecting. When your soul leaves your body on this world, it will go through the stages that any other soul—human or otherwise—would here.”

“But we’re not going to let him die!” Dakota said, squeezing Rorn’s other hand.

Rainbow Mage raised an eyebrow at her. It was the most they’d emoted in the entire conversation. “You are adorable. I see why the let you join the Union.”

“Really?”

“Again, no questions. If I’m going to make my flight, I should have left ten minutes ago.”

“Wait, what happens next?” Rorn demanded.

“My husband and I will coordinate with Azeas,” said Luna’s mother. “We’ll see if we can’t find more information about this prophesy, and the wizard who nearly foiled it.”

“Meanwhile,” Luna’s father continued, “keep trying to help people. In the two and half weeks you’ve been a member of the Justice Union, you two have managed to stumble into two separate plots that require Cape action. Keep looking, and we’ll find out this nemesis of yours.”

“After you drive me to the civilian airport, of course.”