The Wyrms of &alon

"Nina," Suisei hissed, "once the Dominion knows what we can do, every one of their fighters will be out for our heads!" Suisei said.

He couldn't help but look over the battlefield in horror. There were so many things he could have done to help his allies, but he couldn't—not without spoiling the big surprise. He and Nina wouldn't be able to help the Vvz'zsh if they got themselves killed.

Still, Suisei was glad to see some of the Vvz'zsh using what little they'd been able to gain from the lessons he'd given them. Here and there, Vvz'zsh warriors clapped back at Puppets and cataphracts with bursts of kinetic force, giving them precious openings to strike. Leaping cataphracts were knocked to the ground; scissorblades got blasted out of puppets' hands.

"Dr. Horosha!" Nina yelled.

The light and sound building around the freeze rays swelled to a climax.

"Here it comes!" Suisei yelled. "Nina, with me!"

They ran forward together.

All the light and sound around the rays suddenly cut out as the artillery unleashed their fury.

Shimmering clouds barreled toward the Vvz'zsh army at a low angle. It was death incarnate, hurtling toward them in a riming pair of whirlwinds. Ammonia frost condensed in the weapon's path, drifting down and back in minute, blocky snowflakes. The beams fanned out as they advanced. Cataphracts leapt out of the weapons' paths, while the puppets jumped toward the Vvz'zsh, sacrificing themselves to block their enemies' escape.

Suisei didn't waste a second. He spread his arms and summoned a weave. Nina did the same.

They ran toward the incoming rays, wild energy against wild energy.

Inside, Suisei grinned.

Everything was going exactly as planned.

From what he'd seen, the D'zd only understood pataphysics as enchantment. To them, it was something you applied to a person, place, or thing—a song, sung into being—whose power was then ready to be called upon whenever it was needed. The idea of pataphysical power as an active force, one to be channeled and wielded from moment to moment—or even at the drop of a hat—was as alien to the D'zd as the D'zd were to human beings. It was like living your whole life thinking food only existed in the packaged, pre-processed form found on a supermarket's shelves, ignorant of the worlds of culinary invention that lurked between farm and stovetop. Sure, there was nothing wrong with living like that, but, you'd never get to eat truly good food that way, and it was Suisei's honor to teach that lesson to the T'dzd'ch Dominion.

It wasn't one they'd soon forget.

D'zd understood pataphysics through Chant. It was their way of communing with what they saw as the living essence of language itself. Obviously, they recognized that words could be twisted and corrupted until their original meaning and the intention behind it was beyond recognition. Ironically enough, it never occurred to them that the same could happen to their magic.

Suisei yelled. "Now!"

Somewhere behind the grainy spectrograms through which his D'zd body saw the world, Suisei sensed his lines of power and potential blossoming forth.

Nina's too.

Their combined power unfurled in a net that spread to meet the icy blasts. In between heartbeats his body didn't have, Suisei aligned his lines with the freeze rays'. His first guess was a mismatch, so he twisted the configuration.

That did it.

His weave linked with the magic behind the weapon like intermeshing fingers. They reached out to one another and connected. Grabbing the ice magic by its reins, Suisei lunged his torso forward and flung out his arms, and Nina did the same.

And then the clouds of ammonia frost turned around.

Chief Srrt'zt'krr's brzht-driver blasted light through zyr refracting horn. The signal swept through the spectrum, spreading up and out in a wide cone.

All the Vvz'zsh looked up at it. Those running away from the icy doom skidded to a stop, digging up dirt with their bident toes as they turned around, just in time to see the Dominion's troops eat the full force of their deadliest weapon.

Unsurprisingly, the puppets didn't react to the frost clouds rushing them, even as their robed masters fled in terror. The puppets just… stopped. The freeze ray moved past them, hurtling toward the city walls, crashing into them in a ghostly avalanche, spreading tides of algid air every which way.

The magic weapon had left a trail of hoarfrost in its wake. Hundreds of ice-dusted D'zd puppets—more than half of Dz'zrt'zt's defenders—had been frozen solid. A dozen or more cataphracts had been caught as well, along with a few puppeteers. The cataphracts' bodies lay on the ground at the end of the shallow depressions they'd dug into the dirt as their frozen forms had crashed mid-leap. Two particularly unlucky puppeteers had gotten their abdomens and hind legs frozen. Their pained writhings snapped their bodies off from their abdomens, leaving their foreparts and to skitter forward pitifully before bleeding out and turning still.

As for the other half of the T'dzd'ch forces, they were in disarray. In their panic to flee the oncoming freeze rays, they'd scattered their numbers to the fringes on either side of the battlefield, leaving the path to the front gate wide open and undefended.

The Sun's warmth quickly melted the thin layers of ammonia frost the rays had coated along their path. In seconds, the frozen D'zd fell apart. It was watching clumps of twigs get washed down into the gutter. The deformed corpses broke into pieces as they hit the wet ground, and if the impacts made a sound, Suisei couldn't hear it.

The Vvz'zsh raised their swords and cheered while Dz'zrt'zt's defenders looked on in shock. T'dzd'ch puppeteers stared at the bodies of their dead, both slave and not.

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Living bells rang in radio atop Dz'zrt'zt's highest steeples, rippling out light. The shrieking alarms had the D'zd defenders on the ramparts running amok.

Bzrt'zrt raised zyr swords high and bellowed. "Forward!"

And the Vvz'zsh answered zyr call.

War-beasts filtered to the left and right, hounding the stunned cataphracts. They had the enemy on the run, and they intended to keep it that way. The brzhts' Chant-imbued harnesses flared in bright, roaring flashes of light. The blinding, deafening flux left nearby D'zd staggering about like drunken ants. Not even the puppets could escape incapacitation.

Nina turned to Suisei. "What now?" she asked.

"Now?" Suisei flicked an arm. "You can do whatever the hell you want. We've just kicked the hornets' nest." He glanced at the city walls. "The fun has only just begun."

Dz'zrt'zt opened its gates. Cataphracts poured out, accompanied by scores of puppets and the robed Chanters who led them.

The armies rushed at one another and engaged

Suisei ran, and Nina followed.

"Do you think they noticed us?" she asked.

A third of the Dominion's new forces broke off from the main group. Their puppets and cataphracts leapt, hurtling over the heads of the Vvz'zsh and their war-beasts.

And every last one of them was heading straight for Suisei and Nina.

Suisei pointed. "Exhibit A."

Interestingly, he noticed the freeze rays had begun to power up for their next attack.

"It seems the T'dzd'ch think they can wield their weapons with impunity as long as they manage to take us out."

Suisei loved it when his opponents made stupid mistakes. There was nothing quite so satisfying as disabusing one's enemy of their fatal errors.

Nina skidded to a stop and turned.

"What is it?" Suisei asked.

Nina pointed at something that had been launched over the city wall. "What's that?"

It looked vaguely like a faceted cannonball.

A second later, there was another, and another, and another.

Lovely. A bombardment.

Suisei nodded. "That would be Exhibit B."

Krr'kt'zz bellowed. "Grenades!"

Panic spread through the Vvz'zshs' ranks. Their warriors used pataphysical bursts to knock their attackers back and open a window to disengage and scatter.

Suisei shook his head.

They never learn, do they?

Nina staggered back. She craned her flower up, watching the grenades arc through the air.

"What should I do?" Nina asked.

"Stay alive, and have a good time," Suisei said, before setting off in a run.

The T'dzd'ch's bombs exploded as they hit the ground, turning it molten. There was little, if any fire; just heat, pressure, and all the devastation that came with it. Massive clouds of gas and steam spread, liquifying everything they passed over. Any D'zd caught in the blasts died instantly and horribly, their bodies bursting open from within as their bodily fluids came to a boil.

Suisei dodged the impacts deftly, blasting weaves against the ground to catapult himself through the air and out of the blast radius, only to repurpose his propulsion mid-air, use it to knock incoming bombs back the way they came with a sweep of his arm.

He hit the ground running, skittering forward with quadrupedal sturdiness while the deflected bombs hurtled backward. Most of them hit the city walls, or the stretch of ground immediately in front of them, but either way, the Dominion troops up on the ramparts still burst open like seed pods from the explosions' heat.

Liquid ammonia droplets rained onto the battlefield as the rising steam cooled. Grains of frozen hydrocarbons fell like sand and hail.

Suisei looked up at the freeze rays atop the walls.

He needed to be closer.

T'dzd'ch cataphracts leapt up, rushing at him, swords ready to cleave. With a stomp of a foreleg, Suisei threw his arms up, raising earthen walls.

Yes, in the grand scheme of things, the gestures did nothing, but where was the fun in that?

The cataphracts' swords snapped in half as they slammed into the walls. The fractured scissorblades flew this way and that.

In the momentary pause, Suisei watched Nina redirect some of the Dominion's bombs with her pataphysics. Some exploded midair, raining grit and ammonia down on the D'zd. One burst in the middle of advancing puppet troopers, instantly killing dozens.

It made Suisei proud to see some of the Vvz'zsh soldiers use their new psychokinetic abilities to knock the bombs back. Though, for every success, there were just as many failures: deflected bombs mortally injuring Vvz'zsh soldiers because they exploded too close; redirected bombs landing behind some of the Vvz'zsh's warbeasts.

He aimed at every one of them.

Two brzhts popped like miniature volcanoes as the pressure of their boiling body fluids turned them into living bombs.

Suisei saw a stream of cataphracts headed toward Nina. She was still redirecting the latest volley of sundew bombs.

"Oh no you don't," he muttered.

Twisting his arm, he turned the mass of air around the cataphracts deathly cold. The cataphracts' motions slowed as their bulging bodies cracked and froze.

"Zz'zz," Krr'kt'zz yelled, "behind you!"

Suisei turned.

Every damn cataphract in sight was running right toward him! His first thought was to jump, but that must have crossed the cataphracts' minds too, because several of them preemptively drew from the Chant in their swords and leapt.

Shit.

It wasn't that he couldn't take them out; he could, it was just a little more draining than what he was comfortable with, all things considered.

"Krr'kt'zz!" he yelled. "I'm going to use the sundew. Clear me a path!"

Krr'kt'zz yelled. "Vvz'zsh, to me!"

Warriors and war-beasts rushed toward Suisei and the chieftain. Several of the cataphracts broke off their attack and zoomed at the oncoming Vvz'zsh, beheading hounds and D'zd alike.

Worse, a third wave of bombs fresh out from the city was about to reach the apex of their flight.

How many of the damn things had they been hoarding?

Regardless, this was going to be pretty close.

Suisei reached to his utility belt and grabbed the soft, fibrous skin holding the drams of sundew Srrt'zt'krr had entrusted to him.

An unexpected wave of force struck the T'dzd'ch flank, scattering cataphracts and puppets. Curving upward off the ground, it rose to meet the falling bombs like an uppercut punch, and sent them flying.

Nina ran into view, as if pulled in along her pataphysics' coattails. "You asked for help?" she asked.

"Perfect timing!" Suisei said. "I need crowd control, stat!"

"You heard zym!" Bzrt'zrt bellowed.

Clan Tzrk'vv'k's warriors followed up from the rear.

Both armies coalesced around Suisei, Nina, and Krr'kt'zz like ants around honey. Suisei set up a forcefield around himself while he carefully unstoppered the skin of sundew and levitated the translucent, luminous fluid out of its container.

Nina shoved puppets out of the way with her powers, and followed up by mimicking Suisei's dirt snake trick. It wasn't quite as intimidating as his had been, but he was damn impressed that Mrs. Broliguez had even pulled it off.

In another life, she could have made for one hell of a mage.

The grainy earth crested in two stone walls, forming a D'zd-free corridor in front of Suisei's path. Nina raised the walls higher and higher, stopping any T'dzd'ch that tried to leap over. The three chieftains and their greatest warriors had circled around Nina, fending off the Dominion's attackers while the little miracle maker did her thing.

Suisei glanced up at the two freeze rays. They were nearly ready to send out their next shots.

Perfect.

With a simple wave of his hands, Suisei spread the levitating propellant into two clusters of tiny droplets. In the blink of an eye, he stretched the droplets into miniature needles and swathed them in two layers of pataphysics: one, in a sphere, to propel them through the air; the second, two tethers that combined a remote detonator and a detonation into a single, handy package.

Suisei sent energy racing through the sphere. The clusters rocketed toward the two freeze rays. The tethers' tails spooled out as the clusters flew.

Wait for it.

Several cataphracts leapt over the stone corridor. The edges of their blades glinted in the sun.

Wait for it…

The cataphracts dove toward Suisei, who leapt up and away in a powered jump.

Now!

Suisei let his power flow through the lassos right as the droplets passed by the freeze rays.

"Checkmate," he muttered.