“Where the fuck is she?” Quinn yelled. “Every minute we fail to find her is another chance that someone else finds her and kills her! How is this so fucking difficult?”

  Zishang vomited on the floor, his intense drinking finally getting its revenge on the captain. He spewed red and purple. It smelled horrid, and had a scent of cheese, for some reason. He tried to stand, slipping on the puddle he made, stumbling and falling ft, coughing and wheezing, calling for Quinn to come and help.

  “Fucking gods. You are useless.” He dragged his cousin by the arm, hoisting him on his broad, caped shoulders. “You’d better be sober by the time we find her. I’ll take your weapon and shove it up your ass and out your mouth if you don’t focus.”

  “It’s my fault,” Zishang whispered. “I failed the princess. I let Runaya die. I am at terrible captain.”

  “Oh, woe is you,” Quinn hissed. “Cease your whining or I’ll throw you into the clouds, let a dragon eat you.”

  “Put me down. I’m fine now, brother.”

  Quinn lowered Zishang, then grabbed him by the ear. “You are not my brother,” he spat. “If you want to be, help me find where she is! Did you not see the fighting between that madman Stroke and King Godwin? Do you not hear them bickering like children through the Sentinels? Do you not feel the rumbling of Bianca’s hammer each time she makes a strike? We are running out of time, and you are no help. I should leave you here.”

  Zishang put a hand to Quinn’s face and shoved it away, then pointed a quaking finger through the curtains of smoking. He then vomited a second time, keeping the direction.

  Quinn wiped his wet, bck hair out of his narrow eyes, and saw a trail of bodies, still bleeding from their fresh wounds. He knew it could only be Mara or Fiasco.

  Captain Quinn spped his cousin and shook him. The strike from his long, thick arms awakened Captain Zishang’s attention. “I need you,” he told Zishang. “Help me get her back. Help me, and I promise I will do what you have always asked of me—I will seek help for my urges to kill. I will do it. You have my word.”

  “—and write letters to your mother,” Zishang coughed.

  “Fine!” he roared. “Just stand the fuck up and subdue her with me! We have to capture her, find a way to save her!”

  Zishang stood proudly, twirling his runed naginata to regain his focus. He held it in two hands, cracking his stiff neck. “We’ll do it for Bollo,” Zishang said clearly, no long slurring. “For him.”

  “That bald bastard would want us to save her.” Quinn spat in his hand, summoning a watery trident from the storm’s rain. “Any pce but her head, cousin—”

  “Brother,” Zishang corrected. “Call me brother, just this once. Please. I am your brother. Say it from your heart.”

  Quinn squeezed Zishang’s shoulder. “Brother,” he said. “You are the only one I would ever call that, you honourable cunt.”

  Zishang was more determined than ever to make someone proud. As the only child of his mother, he had always aimed to be someone’s brother, even if only a title. He wiped the purple vomit from his lips and marched by Quinn’s side, taking rge strides to match the marching of his brother’s long legs.

  “Don’t use that fucking fsh of your weapon again, it will ward her off. Use some other bullshit imbued in your cunt-bde.” Quinn got faster with each body he passed—their wounds got bloodier, each fresher than st, and the dust clouds began to have a tinge of red to their colour, a subtle sent of iron to them, and of course, the smell of pissy shit from the emptying bowels of the corpses.

  When the captains found Fiasco, she was closing her sughter of a small band of Van guards. They fought with spears, jabbing her tentacles, but ultimately fell to her spiked, fleshy appendages wiggling in the air like hundreds of frantic worms. Once she cut through them, she seized a family of five using the gifts of her red runes, crushing them into spheres of meat and bone.

  Quinn couldn’t believe his eyes. Fiasco, the gentle woman who only wanted the best for the commonfolk, had become even more monstrous than the creature he’d seen at the time of Stroke’s grand speech. Her gifts continued to fight the ritual, and in doing so, she’d become unrecognisable as human. She had five legs, seven arms, and a small, malformed, green-haired head growing on her shoulder. It had one eye, three mouths, screaming in agony, throbbing with a heartbeat from a heart growing inside their scalp. Her fingers were the length of rge daggers, her teeth uneven and jagged like shards of gss. Her once sweet green eyes were now bloodshot and red, and her skin was further marred with small tumours of purple. Her neck twisted like an owl, staring at the captains while her body kept forward.

  “Fiasco, can you hear me darling?” Quinn said desperately. “If you’re in there, listen to my words. I’ll save you. We will leave this city and go to Arcyril. I promise you that.”

  “Can we even save her?” Zishang said. “How much can a soul handle before they can’t be brought back?”

  “I don’t want to think about that.”

  Fiasco turned to face them. A tentacle wrapped around one the corpse of a child, smacking off the back off their scalp with a whack. Something blue, purple, and slimy popped out from the wound, and Fiasco sucked it out whole, chewing on it, tossing the little boy aside like a broken pything. She sauntered closer, heads twitching, and for a moment it appeared that her many arms were trying to scare away the two captains, to ward them away from her monstrous self. Tears came from her bulbous eyes, running down her cheeks.

  “I’ll follow your lead, brother,” Zishang said. “If she gets hold of you with her gifts… I can try to repel the magic with my weapon. It should work, but be careful.”

  “Careful is not an option for us,” he said. “I will die if it means saving her. We must restrain her.”

  The Sentinel above turned from red to green, gaining the focus of even the monster. “Kill her,” King Godwin said. “Captains, look at her—there is no way to get to the tear of the angel inside of her.”

  “No!” Quinn shouted. “I won’t listen to your orders, you Van cunt! I’ve taken orders from you for far too long.”

  “Captain Zishang,” Godwin said firmly. “I leave the decision to you. Just know that if you fail to restrain her, countless more will die due to your selfishness.”

  “Don’t listen to him, brother,” Quinn begged. “Don’t.”

  That word again, brother. Zishang loved hearing it. He wanted to hear it more, in a calmer pce, in a conversation between them that was gentle and funny.

  “May the gods favour you,” Godwin said. “Good luck.” The fmes turned back to red, and the streets became eerily silent, only the sound of rain thudding against the ground and rooftops could be heard. The dragons were silent too, as if they were watched, and for a second, Zishang was happy to fight alongside Quinn, even if the circumstances made him want to vomit harder.

  Fiasco screeched. Dozens of her meaty tentacles grew out from her flesh and came for them like arrows.

  Quinn spat into the puddles at the feet, raises his empty hand. He summoned a wall of water, freezing it. The appendages met the wall, shattering it to small pieces of ice. As if the two captains were connected by brain, Quinn knelt onto one knee, allowed his brother to leap over his wide shoulders with his naginata twirling in his hand. He danced with the tentacles, cutting them only once, turning the flesh to a brittle marble before smashing them.

  No fshes, Zishang thought. She will run if I use my naginata to make fshes again… I’ve never experimented with the potential of the weapon, so I’ll stick with what I know—as long as I get a cut to whatever she throws at us, I can alter the material to something hard and easy to break.

  The change from flesh to marble ran down closer to Fiasco. She ripped into her own meat, biting them off the base before it got too close and turned her main body to the same material.

  “Be careful with that!” Quinn yelled. “You’ll hurt her!” He pushed past Zishang, spitting in the sky at every opportunity. He barraged his wife with spears of ice, pinning the wiggling worms of flesh to the ground below. She stumbled forward, then ran, lunging for Quinn as he charged. The captain speared her down, attempting to keep her still as her cws cut open his back.

  “Brother!” he yelled. “I’ve got her!”

  Captain Quinn did not have her, not one bit. She impaled him in the thigh, shattering his bone, biting into his shoulder, nearly tearing off his arm. Zishang panicked, aiming the naginata at the monster—a pale-blue, spiralling beam of magic formed at the tip and hosed down Fiasco. She blocked it with her second, smaller head, allowing it to melt down to the neck. She tossed Quinn aside, seeing him in so much pain, her bloodshot eyes twitching, swapping from red to green in quick flickers.

  Quinn saw her hesitation and spat into his palm. With a watery trident in his grip, he reluctantly thrusted it into her chest, driving it upward into her throat. He knew she wouldn’t die, knowing that such beasts from rituals could only die from a destroyed brain. The tentacles wrapped around his arms as he stood, constricting his long arms and turning them purple.

  His hands broke first, then his elbows, but Quinn stayed on his feet. He angled her towards Zishang, who leapt onto her back, shoving the spear between her shoulder bdes. He quickly dug deep into the wound with his fingers, trying to find the tear of the angel.

  “I can’t find it!” Zishang shouted. “I can’t find her heart! There is too much of everything!”

  “Keep searching!” Quinn screamed. “I can hold her!”

  Fiasco screamed and tensed her body, a bony spike shot out from the wound and stabbed Zishang in his right lung. It came out his back, curving around his shoulder and locking him on it. He spat blood, releasing his grip on the naginata and falling limp, his eyes fluttering and twitching.

  “No!” Quinn shouted. “Zishang, brother! Wake up! Wake up!”

  The tentacles travelled further up his arms, now at the shoulders. It consumed Quinn, wrapping around his neck, then face, the tips entering his throat and slithering downwards, suffocating him.

  The Sentinels released a loud sound, then released a beam of fire into the Fiasco. It struck her hard, and she released Quinn, skidding across the ground. She rolled, the bony spike that contained Zishang snapping.

  The beam from the Sentinel suddenly stopped, then began, then stopped. It was clear to Quinn that it was Godwin who gave them aid through the fmes, and Stroke who was forcing it to stop. He jumped Zishang and broke the curved tip of the bony spike, pulling his brother off it. “Wake up.” He spped Zishang repeatedly. “Get up, brother!”

  Zishang sucked in a breath. Quinn spat into his palm, forming a dome of ice around them. He heard Fiasco attacking from every angle, desperate to get in. “We have to find King Godwin,” Quinn said. “He can heal you.”

  Zishang touched his wound with two fingers, wincing at the viscous blood between his fingertips. “No,” Zishang said weakly. “We will lose Fiasco if we seek out the king. We can restrain her. We have time.”

  “You will die!” Quinn yelled. “I’m not losing the both of you!”

  “I have time,” Zishang smirked. “Release me. I need to get my weapon. I have time to do the right thing.”

  The icy dome shattered, bsting Fiasco away. Zishang ran for his naginata, twirling to the rain. He turned the raindrops to nuggets of solid iron, using the runes of his weapon to make them circle his body. When Fiasco came for him, he joined the iron to the shape of a spear with a blunt tip. Upon seeing Quinn summoning a trident of ice and rushing to aid him, he struck his own brother with the spear, knocking him down.

  Fiasco shoved her cws into Zishang’s stomach. He smiled through the pain.

  “BROTHER!” Quinn yelled. “What are you doing?”

  “The right thing…” he said. “Saving your wife.”

  Zishang’s hand fell limp, dipping the naginata into a puddle. While Fiasco feasted on him, he turned the surrounding water to molten bck steel. With the st of his strength, he tapped the tip of his weapon against his own knuckles. His hand slowly turned to solid godsteel, and he wrapped his arm around the back of Fiasco’s head. He kept hold of the spear, guiding the red-hot liquid to the monster’s body. He sealed her tentacles in the bck steel, wrapping one leg around her waist, awkwardly pcing his second at the back of her calf.

  He dropped the spear, content with what he’d done. He trapped the monster in an inescapable prison of his own body. I didn’t know the bde could make godsteel, Zishang thought. Maybe It’s my proof that my soul is pure.

  “Find a God Arm and bring it to her,” Zishang said. “This is the right thing… forgive me for all I’ve done.”

  Quinn said not a word. He struck the bck steel, trying to climb over it to get to Zishang. When he got to him, it was too te.

  Captain Zishang’s face was now pure godsteel, a smile on his lips. Fiasco struggled against the metal, screeching, but his hold on her was solid and true.

  Zishang had restrained Fiasco, doing it the only way he could think of, giving his life for what he knew was the right decision.