The streets of Creektin were abandoned like a city awaiting a natural disaster. In a sense, the disaster had already arrived, the mimics already posing a significant threat to the average joe and displacing people by the thousands.

  Nothing tried to stop us as we ran towards the evac zone, not a single mimic.

  If there was a final boss of bad feelings, he was nestled in my gut, twisting it into knots so tight I was about to puke. I felt faint, and my breath was coming short.

  “Why the evac zone?” Addy muttered. “Why there?”

  I had an idea. It wasn’t a certainty. It was also a little bit arrogant. If it was true then that meant the Ur-mimic was just a little bit more spiteful than I’d thought possible.

  “It’s where everyone I care about is.” Except for Becca, who’s missing. “It wants to pin me, pin us, in one place.”

  So it can do something else elsewhere.

  I didn’t voice that thought. Addy might have taken it seriously and turned around. In going to the evac zone, we were playing into its hands.

  “We’re playing into its hands,” Addy said as she slowed her sprint to a jog. “This is a bad idea.”

  My heartbeat stopped for a moment.

  “Addy, you can’t be serious.”

  She came to a full stop outside a gas station smelling of spilled petrol and motor oil.

  “The trail splits here,” she said, ignoring me. “One vampire goes right, the Ur-mimic goes left… away from the evac zone. This is another distraction. It’s—”

  “It’s where my freaking family is, Addy!” I said firmly. I couldn’t believe that she was just going to avoid that issue. “I’ve got friends there too, I know half the town. I’m not going to just leave them. None of them can deal with an elder vampire. The two of us can deal with one, maybe, but Medusahead isn’t built for combat. I need your help Addy.”

  “I…” She swallowed heavily, painfully, hiding her face behind her hands as she curled up into a giant weretanuki ball. “I want to save your family. I-I want… I can’t make that decision. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”

  Because too much was at stake. What were a couple hundred lives against the mere possibility of another permanent mimic nest in the great lakes? More permanent footholds meant more Custodians assigned to guard them, which meant less elsewhere, which in turn risked the creation of more permanent nests.

  Logically, reasonably, by every objective measure it was the safe option to abandon the evac zone and hunt down the Ur-mimic while we were still hot on its trails.

  But to me, it was impossible. You might as well have asked me to catch a star in the palm of my many hands.

  “You can,” I pleaded. “You just have to take one step, and then another. There’s no guarantee the mimics are ready to break out. If we work together, we can smash the last of their forces and clean up the nest after.”

  “They’ve had plenty of time,” Addy whined. “It’s all falling apart. It always does, just like Capua.”

  I dug her head out of her limp self-embrace and forced her to look up at me, to see my fury, my desperation. “If you won’t do it for me, then what will you do it for? What do I have to give you? Coins? Promises? Sex? What is it that you want?”

  She stared me in the eyes for a while. When she next spoke it was in a hoarse, quiet voice, brittle like broken glass.

  “I just don’t want to fail again. To have people look at me and think ‘she’s the one who barely wasn’t good enough.’”

  I closed my eyes. Clem was right all along. She wanted to win so bad that failure had turned into a fate worse than death. I could relate.

  “Then go after the Ur-mimic,” I said in a grim tone. “If you can make sure this is the last of its tricks, that it can’t ruin any more lives, I’ll happily spend some of my own to slow the vampire down.”

  “But you don’t have any extra lives.”

  “I, uh, do too.”

  [Extra lives: 0]

  Shut up, dangit!

  Nervously, I looked to the side. “What I’m saying is you can go, if you feel that you need to. I won’t be mad. I’ll figure something out so we can hold the line with Medusahead, even if only for a little bit.”

  She regarded me with a look I couldn’t entirely decipher.

  “Thank you.”

  And then she was off, and I was alone once more.

  +++

  The first sign that something was wrong was the forest of roadsigns completely blocking the road up ahead. It reminded me awfully much of the siege of Clem’s house, except instead of a thin line this was a briar of sharpened stakes. They were stacked so close together that the bendiest of cats would have had difficulty swerving around it.

  That was their first mistake.

  A conflagration of flame blasted them apart as my bazooka carved a path through their ranks, instantly adding a hundred soulcoins to my coffers. The rest of the mimicked roadsigns quivered, but held formation. If a square of pikes was effective against cavalry, it was effective against me as well.

  “F A S T L A N E.”

  The lines parted, mimics flung to the side seconds before I zoomed past. Medusahead’s snake-hair drones whirred overhead, clearing the path and speeding me along.

  Do they ever run out of charge?

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The wall to my right opened up, bricks flying away like shrapnel as a huntsman crashed right through it.

  Crap—

  It was heading straight towards me, crabby, tree-trunk-like limb poised to crush my face.

  I blasted it with my shotgun, the oversized solid slug severing the whole limb.

  The huntsman stumbled. Three more shots to center mass and it stopped moving.

  [Soulcoins: 139->169]

  No time, gotta split.

  I created a body double and sent it ahead and to the side of me, hopefully letting it catch any ambushes up ahead. A second line of pointy-looking fence pieces and garden chairs were pushed to the side. They earned another high explosive bazooka shot as thanks, but this one was much less effective than the last, only netting me five or six mimic kills.

  I hope Addy knows what she’s doing.

  A string of gunshots rang out in the distance. The evac zone was close.

  The third ring of mimics — a freaking third! — was less organized. They were already in the process of assaulting the outer defenses of the evac zone. They didn’t have the numbers to pay attention to their fronts and backs simultaneously.

  “Friendlies!” I yelled as I ran around a corner only for a couple of rifle shots to crack uncomfortably close to my head. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”

  There was a barricade up ahead, what looked like a couple volunteers manning it with whatever guns they could scrounge up. In front of them were rows and rows of abandoned cars, most pushed onto the sidewalk to give them a partially open field of fire.

  “Don’t run in our line of fire you moron!” someone yelled and hah, I suppose I did kinda do that.

  I hid behind the wreckage of a toppled semi truck smelling of hot metal and burnt rubber and spotted a leaper. It was in between me and the people manning the barricade, which meant it was in cover from their perspective, but not from mine.

  Four blasts from two Toothpicks at the same time exploded its backside. In between catching my breath and trying not to catch any stray rounds, I preened myself on both my accuracy and swiftness.

  Akimbo unlocked! Stats gud.

  The gunfire died down as the mimics started giving this place a wide berth, probably because I was here. I waved the people on the barricade down carefully advancing on their position.

  “Hello! Hey, hi, hello. It’s me, Sam. Remember me?”

  They didn’t look like they did. I certainly didn’t recognize them, which, y’know, fair. I hadn’t exactly been making friends while I was lying unconscious in a medical tent.

  One mid-thirties woman with a buzz cut looked at the small video-drone hovering above me, then at my arms, then at me. “So you’re the… superhero-person?”

  Their guns — an assortment of pistols, shotguns, and the odd trashy AR-15 — weren’t exactly pointed at me, but they also weren’t not pointed at me. There was a general rule everyone was taught when wielding guns that you only ever pointed it at something you want dead. The fact that they were holding them at more than a 45 degree angle told me that they weren’t so sure about the four-armed, four-eyed girl with a bazooka.

  I shot them a salute. “Custodians of earth, here to save the day!”

  “I think I saw her in the background of one of the weregirl’s videos,” one guy muttered and oh my god, did they get all their information from freaking Tiktok shorts?

  “Sam. My name is Sam. S. A. M.”

  “Sam. Is that short for something?” she asked.

  “Yes. System Assisted Magician. Now can I go past or, are you going to be the reason everyone behind you gets chomped by mimics?”

  At least she didn’t continue that inane line of questioning. I was ushered through, which is to say she offered an arm. I sized up the barricade and jumped it in one go. My smile felt forced.

  Ugh, that was probably not good publicity. Whatever. Save lives now, reputations later.

  “Did a convoy of a couple vehicles come through here a few minutes ago?” I asked her.

  “Kids and old people. Someone with a disability card. Imagine, making it this far while being blind. Must’ve been one hell of a badass.”

  This smile felt more genuine. “Yeah, she is.”

  “They’re probably going through the teleporter right now,” she called as I jogged away. “Everyone who stayed volunteered to give these damn pinkies a blue eye.”

  “I’ll have you know, I only joined because someone didn’t listen when I said we should go, and I wasn’t going to leave her behind.” the guy muttered.

  “Aww, that’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me. Tell you what, if we both survive this I’ll…”

  I missed the end of that conversation and was glad for it. Not that I was against battlefield romance, but it sounded like the quips of a couple staring their doom in the face. Thinking about how many situations like these were playing out all across the evac zone… yeah, not everyone was going to make it. That was depressing. I didn’t have a spell that used depression as fuel.

  Moving on, my first stop was the teleporter. The chalk-and-rocks diagram was still set up right at the center of the old marketplace. The mayor was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t know whether to be angry that he jumped ship, or whether to feel glad that he was no longer obstructing important business.

  I caught Lily with my portable terrarium — the one I used before Hobbes outgrew it. She was moving towards the center of the circle together with Tanya, who was having a hard time holding Foggy in all her fuzzy glory. Mom and Dad were right behind. Dad was limping, a quick-and-dirty tourniquet bound around his leg.

  Yeah, no way I was going to allow any of them to stay.

  I waved at them. Lily almost waved back, but then remembered the heavy and important burden she was carrying. Foggy meowed at Tanya with indignation.

  “Sam, I got your pet tarantula, I call dibs on feed—”

  A flash, and then she was gone. I dashed over to Mom, ignoring the exclamations from Medusahead’s mooks.

  “Sammy, you’re back. Did your… super-heroing go well?”

  “Uh-huh, yeah, totally.” I gave her a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “You know Sam, I’ve always dreamed of going on the kind of adventure you—”

  A flash and she was gone too.

  “D-did you just push your mom through the teleporteraAAA—” Tanya asked before I picked her up and yeeted her right through the portal.

  “There,” I said, turning to Dad. “Just one left.”

  “Well, that was rude,” he quipped.

  “I’m not taking any chances.”

  “You should’ve let her finish talking at least. I think Mom will forgive you if you come back in one piece,” he said with a warm smile. For a moment, his mask of confidence fell and he looked sick with worry. He grabbed me in a big, crushing hug. “Promise that you’ll do just that.”

  “I’ll come back just so I can beat you in Smash,” I said.

  “You’ll never.”

  “I have stats now. I’m literally superhuman.”

  “Cheater.”

  When we parted, it was with wet eyes and a grin on our lips. I made a big show of putting a laser pointer attachment onto my Toothpicks and Pricklers. Dad made a face of mock-shock before giving me a pat on the shoulder. Then he walked past me and with a flash of light, I was the only Rubens left in town.

  “Your family is nice,” Medusahead said in a monotone voice from where she was standing next to me. She’d waited politely for me to finish with my parents. For that, my estimation of her went up a few points.

  “Addy said the same thing.”

  “I think it bears repeating.” She paused, looking up at the sky. “Did you know Adelaide has blocked all my direct messages for two years now? Adelaide, my team leader.”

  “You could try talking to her, face to face,” I suggested because yep, that worked out so well for me.

  “I tried. She keeps running away. I cannot keep up — no flight, not enough Body. I am a bit jealous about how quickly you got hold of her. I should not have given you that quest. Apologies.” She sighed, weariness dripping through her robotic frame. “She is chasing after that mimic of hers again, is she not?”

  “I didn’t stop her.” I cringed when Medusahead looked back at me. Yeah, she had some less than savory opinions about that. “If it’s any consolation, there shouldn’t be any deathworms nearby?”

  “I am aware, newbie. Follow me. We have a situation on our hands."

  “Do we ever not?” I asked, to which she just laughed like a robot.

  I followed her into her command-tent, which was awfully empty except for her second-in-command and a table strewn with a map of the immediate area. It wasn’t for her benefit — she probably already bought the minimap upgrade for her system interface — but for anyone who wasn’t a Custodian. I could make out a couple quickly printed plastic chips representing the mimic force attacking the evac zone, and roughly half as many chips representing volunteer squads. Hopefully. If those were all individual people then, well… yikes. Not a lot of people left.

  One of Medusahead's snake drones turned to me, inspecting me with its red lens, before turning back to the map.

  “Do you want the details of the situation, or can I skip right to talking about how fucked we are?”