Without so much as moving his eyes or tilting his head, Pema began to perfectly spectate the fight detonating around him. He tracked its three - no, soon to be four combatants, pausing ever so briefly to scan their hindbrains and frontal cortexes for basic context. Character dynamics always made a good story more entertaining, after all.

  The jumpsuited man: Qiang Gao. Just enough of a peek into his memories to get a basic holistic feel: failed CCP military experiment. Scared Pidu runt. Images flashed: the thrill of the movement of an arm heralding a release of an impossible amount of force. The rubble of a skyscraper lifted off its foundations, the feel of its titanic weight like nothing more troubling than an overfull backpack. The inrush of Dark Water. The nightmares. The needles. Pema saw this and felt pity.

  The knight: Robert FitzRobert. English lancer turned bitter deserter. Centuries of sleep and travel. A man, his shape and smell and sound and smile more perfectly memorized than maybe any other human's in history. The ring of a mace on a helmet. The peal of applause, from the stands around the lists. The acrid, bile-sour guilt of knowingly abandoning the good thing in favor of the interesting thing. Pema saw this and felt sympathy.

  The warlord: Lakshmi Rai. The- No. No, can't look at this one. Not worth it.

  The corpse woman: Yelena ▇▇▇▇. Siberian woman with ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ and a ▇▇▇▇ but eventually returned. The beauty of ▇▇▇▇, the everlasting ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ and ▇▇▇▇▇▇ forever and ever. To bring it to all, to bestow ▇▇▇▇. More beautiful, more intricate than anything Pema ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇

  Yelena, hundreds of yards away, could feel him looking. She turned, stared at him through dozens of buildings, and smiled.

  Pema reeled, his attention diverting from her with the instinctive quickness of a hand from a hot stove. Mistake. To peer deeper would be a mistake.

  Troubled, he switched his attention to Qiang and Fitz, where they stood in the ruins of the office building. Qiang was ricocheting around, blurring and rebounding off of collapsing structures, blisteringly fast. He would dart toward the knight and strike him, then dart away, each blow curiously well-absorbed by Fitz’s armor. The knight’s Qi barely fluctuated as each hit landed and its force was assimilated. It was as if he wasn’t being hit at all.

  A closer look: the armor had its own Qi. No, each part of the armor, of the outfit itself: the pauldrons, the breastplate, the sword, the dirk, the helmet. They shimmered with their own unique Qi, as diverse and recognizable as people unto themselves. Curious. The breastplate’s field was the one absorbing the force, shunting it away automatically into the knight’s own reserves.

  He swung his sword, which burned with its own light as it traced its arc, and a forty-foot section of the collapsing building was cleaved in half, the concrete and rebar and fiberglass severed with a mason’s neatness, as if sliced by a gigantic, invisible blade. The blow was slow, well behind Qiang, who was busy flitting in and out, raining blows that didn’t land.

  The knight whipped around and flexed the gauntlet on his right hand. Qiang froze mid-air, seized by a huge, hand-shaped Qi field that burst into existence around him. Struggling to hold him, bleeding energy, the knight roared and threw his hand forward, sending Qiang hurtling through the wall, and then through two more buildings.

  Fitz raced after him, only to be caught in the street by Yelena, who had been stalking outside. She plucked him from the air as he flew past, pivoted, using his own momentum to send him slamming into the earth. She dropped onto him, one knee on his chest, and snaked one clawlike hand down to open his visor, trying to touch his face. The knight frowned, and his visor closed on its own, hard enough to sever the woman’s fingers at the joint.

  The air around them began to shimmer as the knight bled heat into his armor, which was now glowing orange, then red, then white. Smoke twirled into the air around the woman’s legs, where they cooked under her ratty dress. She smiled and settled in, straining to open his visor, the meat of her legs charring black. A crater was forming around them now, as she forced him down. A nearby septic pipe burst under the pressure, spewing foamy black tar into the air.

  Qiang returned, an orange blur, his hand connecting hard enough with Yelena that the resulting thunderclap would have been audible to Pema at this distance even without his mammoth sensory field. Her body exploded on impact, her dress shimmering away in the air. The shockwave of the impact blew out every remaining window in Pema’s near-five-thousand yard sensory radius.

  An instant later, the blade of the knight’s dirk sprouted through Qiang’s lower jaw, into his mouth. Blood foamed from the addled man’s lips as he tried to hiss something at Fitz, who grunted and heaved, tracing the dirk through the other man’s throat. Qiang’s head lolled to the side, only barely attached by a ropy string of sinew, but already tentacles of flesh were exploring out from the new hole, seeking to reattach to his head. He fell onto his back, the knight lurching forward with him.

  Fitz dug his hands into Qiang’s neck, severed the strands where he could, and began to heave, his foot planted on the man’s chest for leverage. Strand by strand, Qiang’s neck weakened, until only a pencil-thin strip of Qi-hardened spinal cord held it attached to his body. The bone shimmered oddly in the light.

  Qiang drew his own legs into his chest and started to scream, a sound created not by his now-ruined vocal cords, but by a wave of sonic energy radiating out from his grimacing mouth. Then, summoning an explosion of power at a scale Pema had truly never seen before, drove his feet into the knight’s chest. Even with the breastplate absorbing the vast majority of the force, the knight was sent rocketing into the sky, his torso detaching at the arms, leaving them, gauntlets and all, still attached to Qiang’s head.

  Qiang’s dangling head chuckled wordlessly, as his body reached up and affixed it on his shoulders like a wayward hat. Already nearly whole again, he tensed to launch up into the sky after his quarry, before jerking his gaze back down, surprised.

  There, sprouting from a chunk of body still embedded in the asphalt, Yelena’s arm snaked up and out, grasping Qiang’s hand. Her head, still re-growing, lolled, a nascent eyeball rolling in its shuddering socket to peer up at him.

  The flesh on Qiang’s hand where she touched him was quickly blackening, the skin and muscle sloughing off faster than it could regrow. Bemused, Qiang tilted his head at the sight, stared uncomprehending at what was happening. Purulent yellow-black trails of decay began tracing their way through his veins, spiderwebbing up his arm.

  Only now beginning to understand that he was being hurt, Qiang tried to jerk away. Yelena’s arm held him fast. She was growing legs, now, knees whose stubs she balanced on to raise herself from the earth.

  Qiang’s fierce grin wilted into an almost childish display of actual terror, and he began to whimper. He pulled again, strained to get free, but his Qi wouldn’t respond. Pema watched in distant fascination as all the energy Qiang tried to summon from his own stores slipped, unbidden, into Yelena’s, only accelerating her own regrowth.

  Qiang’s arm was a corpse’s, now, a long-dead mummy’s blackened limb, and the rot was clawing its way up his torso, toward his head. The rot was too fast, too overwhelming; he couldn’t heal. He wasn’t getting better. Qiang moaned again, tears beginning to squeeze from the corners of his eyes, his efforts to leave the woman’s iron grip growing more and more futile.

  “There will be nothing more to fear,” Yelena whispered to him through a fresh pair of lips. Her dress was back, had grown out from her body. Pema looked closer at it, saw that it was made of a textile composed, somehow, of her own skin, that it responded to her Vital Qi the same way her damaged muscle and bone had. “You have been mistreated, boy. Let me deliver you to your rest. Let me-”

  With a rumble that shook every inch of earth in Pema’s sensory field, and probably more outside of it, Rai arrived. She lighted on the ground five meters away from the two like a dropped anvil and stood straight, pausing to brush debris from the pantleg of her suit.

  Yelena tilted her head to greet the interloper. “There will be time enough for you too, pretender. Patience, for-”

  With a roll of her shoulders, Rai extended her Qi field to its utmost, and Pema, as detached from his body as he currently was, still felt his jaw drop.

  The largest field he’d ever seen, one wielded by a now long-dead Thai Demigod, had been the size of a large truck, maybe a bus. Even the most powerful Qi users rarely had a field much more sizable than a puffy coat. The Knight’s had extended to the size of a walk-in closet, a small room, maybe, and both Qiang’s and Yelena’s only reached a few inches from the edges of their skin.

  Blooming in a fraction of a second, her Qi field detonated, its expansion shattering anything more fragile than drywall for a hundred yards around. It grew in radius: five, seven, ten, fifteen feet. Twenty.

  Soon she was surrounded, her leviathan Qi big enough to swallow a small house whole. Qiang and Yelena were caught within it before they had enough time to register what was happening.

  Pema felt his vision of her Field’s contents abruptly severed, as he knew it would be. A Qi user had total dominion over the matter and energy within their Field, and she wasn’t letting him see inside. Qiang and Yelena were now subject to nothing other than Rai’s furious will.

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  The two were lifted from their feet as Rai stood, staring at them, hands in her pockets. She smiled passively as they were ripped apart by forces frustratingly invisible to Pema. The rot-blackened man and the corpse-white woman were shredded as if pulled in all directions by a thousand different arms, their muscle and skin and bone dissimilating and powdering at the sheer force of it. Qiang was holding himself together, his skeleton buttressed by something Pema couldn’t make out: maybe an internal field of Qi, somehow shielded from Rai’s influence somehow? His bones looked odd: green and purple and shimmering with an oil-slick sheen. The man’s flesh disappeared almost instantly under the onslaught, but, somehow, impossibly, his skeleton remained, contorted and screaming but intact.

  Yelena, however, was torn completely asunder. Yet, Pema could barely make out, she kept returning. The instant her last patch of skin was ripped apart, another nascent core of cells regrew seemingly out of nothing, began developing like an embryo under time-lapse, only to be ripped apart again.

  Rai began to frown. Nearly ten seconds of this, and neither was dead: her combatants reduced to a shrieking, impervious skeleton and a stubbornly re-appearing batch of cells.

  Pema’s gut roiled. How. How were they doing this? His need to know lit a flame in his gut, and he began to creep closer to the action. He’d only made it a few yards when a dagger flashed from the sky and plunged into Rai’s chest.

  The woman staggered back, and her overhuge Qi popped like a bubble. Fitz dropped from the sky in a blur and snagged the dirk’s handle. Yanking it from Rai’s chest, he punched down with it again, missing her by a hair after she detonated an explosion at her feet, sending her cannonballing wildly away.

  “Bloody massive Shroud you’ve got there,” he called to her, as she picked herself back from the rubble pile created where she’d crash-landed. Fitz was breathing heavily, sweating, his fingers still bubbling where they re-grew. He chuckled and looked back at the two behind him: the shrieking skeleton was lurching to its knees now, fresh viscera already unspooling behind its ribcage, skin growing to catch it. Yelena was a half-formed idea of a woman, her dress back again, hiding behind it a rapidly growing body, already lurching to its seven-foot height. Fitz barked another exhausted laugh. “I had no idea. No idea, truly, just how able the Consecrated of this age had become. Well met, ha-HA, VERY well met.”

  “That knife,” Rai said, inspecting the tear in her suit’s breast, the skin beneath still healing. “It ignored my Field. How?”

  “It’s a dirk, not a knife, and it was a gift from a dear friend,” Fitz said.

  “That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “It’s not sporting to demand a handicap from a worthy foe.”

  “Kill you-” Qiang hissed, the bottom half of his face still nothing more than a tongue encased in swirling, incandescent teeth and bone. His eyes, fully regrown, swam with tears. “Too strong. Hurts too bad. Can’t- You gotta die.”

  “I can fulfill that wish, little one,” Yelena said, inspecting her new set of hands. “Let me start with you. Let me deliver you from your agonies.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut UP! You are being creepy on purpose.”

  Pema felt an incursion into his sensory field: a small squadron of armored police, supplemented by National Guard corpsmen. They’d arrive at their location soon.

  He briefly toyed with the idea of sitting back and continuing to watch, desperately curious as to how these four titans would continue to interact, but his thoughts drifted suddenly to Gloria. He did a quick check: she was in his sensory range, half a kilometer away now, huddling under and overpass with a mass of panicked civilians. The image banished his enthusiasm for the spectacle. If the fight continued, people would die.

  Besides, he knew how it was going to end anyway.

  “It seems you’re all at an impasse,” Pema called out, stepping into view. All but Yelena whipped their heads around to see him. Rai looked vaguely displeased.

  “A-ha! You must be the source of the strange firmament I’m feeling around here,” Fitz called, his sword held up in salute. “An overlarge Shroud, stripped of all its usefulness in service of stretching it out. I’ve seen the technique before, though I can’t say I understand the point. There was a Consecrated I met once, in, what was it, Constantinople, who did something similar-”

  “Aleppo, actually,” Pema corrected, after a quick peek into Fitz’s memories.

  “I- yes. How did…” Fitz, his face hidden behind the visor but visible to Pema nonetheless, cracked a bemused grin. “Now that’s a funny trick.”

  “Too many new people,” Qiang hissed, his vocal cords still too ruined for normal speech.

  “None of you is going to be able to kill the other,” Pema continued. “Not based on what I can see.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” Fitz said. He leaned on his sword. He wasn’t trying to show it, but he was winded. Beneath his armor, his torso was still reconstructing itself, and he only had the use of a single lung.

  “Qiang, that’s the given name of our friend over here, the one who just kicked you into the lower thermosphere, he’s too dense for any of you to be able to permanently damage.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Not an insult, my boy, a physical reality. Your Qi, it increases exponentially in density the closer it gets to your center. Normally that core of yours lives just behind your heart, but it can expand to cover your skeleton, can shield it or your vital organs from damage.” Pema turned to Fitz, aware that he, specifically, had been wondering about this. “It’s how he’s able to hit so hard without the blowback breaking him apart.”

  “Ah,” Fitz said, nodding.

  “You, on the other hand, have too many defenses for anyone here to really penetrate. With your shield handling all kinetic force for you, and your gauntlet gathering so much energy ambiently, and your greaves-”

  “Hey, silence, silence!” Fitz called out. “I’d rather you not spoil the tricks of my whole armory to the competition, if you don’t mind.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if I did.” He shrugged, and turned to glance sideways at Yelena, afraid to look her directly in the eye. She was fully re-formed, now, staring a hole through his head. “Yelena, the tall woman, her reserves of Vital Qi, and her mastery over it, make her functionally unkillable.”

  “Vital Qi?” Rai asked. Pema shot her a look, gestured at the freshly-healed hole in Rai’s torso, and she nodded. “Right. Of course.”

  “To kill her permanently would take a good deal more effort than any one of us alone could manage. And Rai, none of you are going to be able to kill her, because-”

  “Too much for one person, but what about two?” Rai cut him off.

  “What are you suggesting?” Pema asked.

  “Help me kill the boy.” Rai jabbed a finger at Qiang, who snarled. “Help me kill and absorb him, and I can end this.”

  “I call foul play,” Fitz added. “This is collusion. Unseemly and boring.”

  Pema frowned, considering this. He stood and pondered it for over two seconds, which, for him, involved about as much processing as five-minutes’ deep thought for a normal person.

  “Come on,” Rai urged. “Of everyone concerned, I’m far and away the best candidate to wield this power. I’m the only one here who’s not completely omnicidal.”

  “I’ve never heard that term before,” Fitz said. “But I assure you, my motivations are righteous. Far more than this woman’s, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t know me,” Rai spat.

  “I’m a gifted judge of character.”

  “I also only wish to help,” Yelena said. “My cause is the most humanitarian of all. My only wish is to shepherd the scared and afflicted of this plane to their universal reward beyond.”

  “Oh shit,” Fitz said, half-laughing. “Ominous.”

  “Pema, she and the boy are psychotic, and the knight is five centuries out of touch with the world and what it needs right now.” Rai clasped her hands together, her posture perfect, her gaze levelled and steely as she pitched. “Let me do this. Let me end this all, here, before the bloodshed worsens.”

  At this, the approaching police force began to filter into a rough half-perimeter. A man with a megaphone began shouting demands, insisting the four of them put their hands on their heads and lie down. Qiang began to laugh, deep in his chest, as he turned to survey the growing mass of prey.

  Pema clucked as he came to his conclusion. He pictured himself joining Rai, tag-teaming Qiang, pinning him down, helping the warlord to unravel the layers of impossibly durable Qi protecting his heart until they could put him down for good. He imagined having to dance around interference from the other two, coming into close contact with Yelena’s awful touch and even worse gaze, of running the risk of being turned into another trinket festooning the knight’s outfit, forever.

  He weighed that against the possibility of getting to watch more, of letting this chaotic dance of a series of events spiral out.

  If he said yes to Rai, here, he knew exactly how it would all end. The future would return to a largely predictable tableau of mostly mundane events.

  If he said no, then anything could happen. Any impossibility could occur. He truly had no idea where things would go from there, but he knew that, more than anything, he wanted to watch.

  Internally, he apologized to Gloria, and to the people like her, as he gave his answer.

  Seconds later, the National Guard was opening fire, a mix of high-caliber ammunition and gas bombs. As the bullets pinged harmlessly off of their Qi, or in Yelena’s case, shot neat tunnels through her body, the five Demigods regarded each other.

  Pema watched their bodies tense, their eyes narrow, brains churn as they thought about what he said. Each eyed the Demis next to them, aware that any move they made would be immediately followed by a blindside from their neighbor.

  The Demigods, one by one, stepped back into the gas and debris, and retreated.

  Soon Pema was alone, his Sensory field collapsing back to its usual, effortless 40 meters. He felt a jolt of excitement at the events to come; it had been so long since he hadn’t known what was going to occur next.

  Then he glanced around at the ruin of Minneapolis’s uptown, and remembered the sheer weight of the pain and fear he’d been feeling in the hundreds within his range just moments ago. He thought of Gloria again, surprised at this relative stranger’s stubborn occupancy of a corner of his mind, and felt a pang of guilt.

  He ignored the line of armored cops bearing down on his location, disregarded their shouted commands to get on his knees, and hurried off in the direction of the overpass he assumed Gloria would still be hiding beneath.