Wonderful Insane World

The first thing that tore Maggie from the mental vertigo was pain. A burning sting at her shoulder, where a puppet's claws had ripped through her leather tunic. The shock spun her on her heels, the halberd nearly slipping from her grasp.

She panted, fingers clenched around the smooth wooden shaft. It was a foreign mass, inert. Without the familiar flow of her stigma, the great curved blade was nothing but a burden of wood and steel. The whispers seized the chance, slipping into the breach.

"Useless. You're nothing but a broken doll. You're not even awakened anymore."

Maggie clenched her teeth. She closed her eyes for a heartbeat—not to pray, but to remember. She searched in her muscle memory, in the phantom echo her power had left behind. The perfect balance. The pivot point. The weight becoming an extension of her body.

She remembered.

Her body moved before her mind had finished forming the thought. The halberd suddenly felt less heavy. It wasn't the fluid grace of her stigma, but a copy, a shadow of movement etched into her flesh by thousands of repetitions. The blade swept low and horizontal, cleaving clean through the legs of the puppet that had struck her. The motion was brutal, less elegant, but lethally efficient.

"A dance," she muttered in a hoarse breath, finding again the rhythm of her old chant. "Just a dance."

She didn't have instinctive understanding anymore, but she had memory. Every rotation, every lunge, every parry was a gesture learned, repeated, engraved in a life where her body had been an open book to every weapon. Now the book was closed, but its pages still lived within her.

She plunged into the melee, her weapon a whirling blade of death. She no longer thought—she recited the fight. Her body was the scribe, drawing lines of blood and steel into the air. The halberd hissed, blocked, cut. She was no longer a magical pillar; she was a physical bastion, a rock that remembered how to be invincible.

But the price was cruel. Every movement demanded immense effort. Her breath was fire in her chest. Sweat and blood poured down her forehead, sometimes blinding her remaining eye. The whispers cackled, feeding on her exhaustion.

"Look at Tonar. He's going to die. You're too far away. You can't do a thing."

And indeed, she saw Tonar being lifted, strangled by shadow. Panic surged through her, threatening to shatter her focus. The halberd's shaft almost slipped from her damp palm.

"No."

The denial was a spark of pure will. She remembered another fight, another weapon, another life. A circular defensive maneuver, designed to shield an ally at one's side. It wasn't meant for a halberd, but her body adapted the memory. She slammed the butt of the weapon into the ground and pivoted, using the long shaft as a lever to fling a puppet aside toward Zirel, who finished it with a dagger thrust.

Then came the dull thud of Elisa's spear against the Masque's chest. The creature staggered back—an instant of reprieve for all. Maggie seized it to shout, dredging up a fragment of her chant—not to channel magic, but to rally the surviving soldiers.

"The mask!" she bellowed, her voice hoarse and broken, but heavy with command. "Don't look at it! Look at your brothers! Hold the line!"

Her own exhortation gave her strength. She was no longer the mage of protective chants. She was the warrior with an aching arm who remembered every strike. She saw roots burst from the ground, and her mind—deprived of her core's essence but sharpened by experience—anticipated their paths. She struck the soil with her blade's point, breaking the roots before they could coil around a soldier.

When the earth trembled and jaws of roots yawned open everywhere, Maggie did not feel fear. She felt rage. A cold, determined rage. She hurled herself forward, placing her body and her halberd between the roots and Elisa, who was on her knees, her psychic shield shattered.

The blade came down, slicing through a root as thick as an arm. The shock reverberated through her battered bones. Another root coiled around the shaft, trying to rip the weapon from her hands. She recalled a staff disarming technique: a sharp twist, a kick in the opposite direction. The root cracked and recoiled.

She was gasping, each breath a knife. Her muscles screamed, betrayed by the absence of the magic flow that had once sustained them. But she held. She fought with the shadow of her former power, a scrap of warrior where once an artist had stood.

The Wooden Mask turned its milky gaze upon her, as though it finally perceived the strange dissonance: a woman without a natural gift, yet whose body was a library of mastered violence.

A filament of shadow, thicker and more vicious than the others, shot toward her mind.

Maggie lifted the halberd, not to parry, but to strike the ground before her, mimicking a gesture she had seen Tonar use. The purely physical shock jolted her body and disrupted the whisper's assault.

She raised her head, her single eye blazing with fierce defiance.

"See?" she spat, addressing the Mask as much as herself. "I don't need a stigma. All I need is this."

And she charged—not with the blind fury of a barbarian, but with the relentless precision of an expert replaying, step by step, the deadliest of her memories.

The charge was anything but reckless. It was a deliberate path, a wire stretched over the void. Each step was a tearing away, each heartbeat a thunderclap that threatened to snuff her out. But Maggie did not slow. The halberd thrummed in her grip, memory of a sacred tool now reduced to a simple extension of her flesh.

The Wooden Mask did not move. Its roots, usually so quick to lash, remained still. As if the creature were observing her, intrigued. A cold curiosity, almost human, radiated from its immobility.

Then suddenly, the whispers shifted in tone. They no longer sought to undermine her will—they became mocking, cutting.

"Your memory deceives you. Every gesture you mimic is a corpse. And corpses don't dance."

Laughter grated inside her skull. Maggie clenched her jaw and leapt.

Her blade hissed diagonally, aimed at the creature's gnarled collarbone. The Mask twisted at the last instant: the halberd only scored its surface, releasing a black gush that spurted like burning sap. The corrosive heat splashed onto her bare arm, blistering her flesh at once.

She bit her lip, ignored the pain. Pivoting on her stance, she swept another blow, horizontal, aimed at its legs. This time, a root burst from the soil to take the impact head-on. The vibration jolted through her whole skeleton, nearly breaking her wrists.

The Mask countered. With a hand of shadow, it unleashed a cone of black filaments—not to pierce, but to envelop. Maggie stepped back, but one filament brushed her temple.

And suddenly, she was no longer on this battlefield.