Within mere seconds, the wall of grass and vines mere meters away from my mere friends’ mere car had risen to five times my height. Like a tidal wave of dark, shadowed green, they looked ready to collapse upon us, swallow us whole.

  Reed wasn’t stopping the car for anything, though—we had to get to the villagers, whose cries I could hear faintly through the din of this whole high-speed chase.

  With a sucking whoosh, the vines caught fire. They were hit by one regular-sized Fire Spell and several tiny ones—the former from Heidschi, the latter from Bayce and her magic-diluting wand. Immediately the flames ate holes straight ahead of us. Vine-tentacles jolted apart, breaking the wall. But they didn’t fall completely.

  They were still on the attack. And with our car hurtling forward, they were practically on top of us!

  Which was where I came in. Standing on top of the front passenger’s seat, I took my Pyrite Machete firmly in hand and remembered what had happened last night…

  Just before bed, Reed had taken out a spare chunk of wood. It hadn’t yet been carved into an animal shape. Perhaps it never would be. It perished for a good cause, chopped in half by a swipe of my machete.

  So chopping a wood block was effortless. Chopping a single one of these vines apart should be, what, ten times as hard? What’s ten times effortless? Half an effort?

  It was so hard to calculate. Each “vine” was actually a tangle, an amalgamation of like a thousand overgrown blades of grass and thorny flytrap tendrils. In fact, now that I was this close up, I could see just a fraction of those layers, all criss-crossing, hugging themselves close. Far harder than a petrified tree.

  But this vine up ahead was injured—fire magic had bitten through its outer layers before burning out. Turning my blade, I swung where the wound was.

  It chopped the thing in half. I groaned with effort. The top went flying, and I felt like a baseball player.

  Instead of relaxing, I spun on my heel and sliced just half a meter above Reed’s head. Another vine was on the attack, and this one was the cleverest yet. How’d it know to attack the driver?

  I heard sounds of struggle behind me, too—Bayce and Heidschi were no doubt fighting others off. Good. That let me focus on mine.

  All this happened within milliseconds. A lot can change in a flash.

  I cleaved this second vine about the way I had the first, but my machete didn’t go straight through. I pulled it out, stabbed instead.

  Horrible idea! It jammed inside. Shocked, my mind flew to the next battle idea and I let go—only to remember that I was, after all, in a moving car.

  That vine was disappearing into the distance, already several meters behind me.

  Oh.

  Thanks, Reed!

  “Meow!” I cheered.

  “Meow,” Heidschi said, sounding a bit wilted.

  “You shouldn’t waste Spells or javelins on this,” Chora told the back row. I turned to watch, wobbling on the seat constantly. “Heidschi, you come up front and start buffing. Let me use wind techniques from you and Reed’s side—then we’ll be conserving more and we’ll have our angles covered.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Bayce added. “I’ve got Fire covered, my wand’s active.”

  Heidschi was climbing over the headrests already. “Okay,” they said. “I’ll enhance physical and magical power. If you need a different kind of boost, just say the word.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  To give them space to switch seats, I Morphed back to cat form for just a second. After that, I squeezed my fists a couple times…missing that darn pyrite throwaway sword. It was nice while it lasted.

  Maybe raw claws and the odd Air Cutter could do just as well?

  I gasped as another vine rushed into view. Ugh! My concentration, I lost it back there!

  Gritting my teeth, I hoped that sheer force could knock this one aside.

  A drumbeat began in the middle seat beside me. It was making me stronger, pumping my blood, but it’d only just started. This first attack would be all me…sadly.

  But I tried anyway, summoning all my cliches about super-strong martial artists. A knuckle bashed into the vine, splitting surface layers of plant fibers, scattering a tinge of purple aura.

  Buying us time.

  The vine recoiled, then sped by, becoming just another part of the background.

  We were going ever deeper into the bowl, and our weird angle was un-weirdening more and more. Still, the minefield of vines was relentless. Chora flung bursts of wind both to help the car dodge (when this was even possible) and to punt vines aside. I swatted, scratched, punched, and, when it seemed unavoidable, cast an Air Cutter to send pieces of vine flying. And like stars, Fire Spells scattered themselves across enemies, softening them up before I got them.

  How Reed could concentrate with so much going on was beyond me.

  Then again, when you fight or drive in a rhythm long enough, with a team behind you, you do get tunnel vision. You don’t realize there’s anything before you but the goal. Which was why my heart spiraled out of my chest when our jeep rocketed into deep forest. A deep forest I’d absolutely seen coming, and yet hadn’t seen-seen coming.

  Leaves shuddered against the cracked windshield, entered my hair, smacked me in the face.

  This was the forest, but not as I knew it. Here the only trees had massive stems instead of bark, and huge billowing spherical masses of leaves. The mottled shade they left on the ground was eerie—or maybe that feeling was just my premonition of the eerie things to come.

  Harsh but intermittent shadows, plus a radiant sun, meant that rolling through these sandy woods had a kind of strobe effect on the poor eyes of these friendly humans. Not mine, though! If only I could drive.

  Ah, at least Reed had strapped on her own aviator goggles at some point within the past five minutes. Those might absorb some sun.

  What we couldn’t block out were the sounds of melee. But as awful and explosive as they were, reaching them was our goal. We wouldn’t want to.

  I was sure that at this point, everyone could hear the fighting. It was in these woods, unmistakably, and I knew now that earlier, the dandelion trees had contained and dampened the sound.

  Whatever that battle was, it involved magic attacks of astounding size and caliber, and I prayed that we weren’t pulling up on the tail-end of a loss for Outlast.

  Right now, however, we were still minutes away from a cool or tragic magic battle—and I was screaming as the “puff” of a dandelion tree collapsed upon us.

  No, it wasn’t a collapse. This redwood-sized dandelion was bending at unimaginable speed, like a flail. The skull-crushing version of what those fairies I’d encountered at Cornutopia carried around.

  The car crashed with a loud metal haaank, a final cough of the engine, and a dull thump in the sand. My heart sank.

  …Wait, why wasn’t I bleeding everywhere?

  Oh, okay, Reed just stopped the car.

  Suddenly everything and everyone seemed frozen. Except the battle ahead.

  Beside and below me, Reed was panting. Her hands slipped from the wheel to her chest. All our hearts had to be racing—watching her made me think of mine, and I deepened my breath, feeling cautious.

  The dandelion had made landfall just ahead of us.

  Reed whispered the first-ever curse I’d heard out of her mouth. “We could’ve died.”

  “We would not have died,” Chora said, laying a hand on her back.

  Reed didn’t respond to that. “Out of fuel,” she said.

  Turning, I saw Bayce and Chora digging in that back seat hatch, fidgeting with the Spells in the trunk. Those Giga Fires, the clusters of magic as big as coolers, were what kept our car rolling.

  They continued to fidget.

  “What’s wrong? Talk to me!” Reed said.

  “I’ll have to be our makeshift engine,” Chora said.

  Heidschi cried, “We can run!”

  “We’re too fragile!”

  But our fragility wasn’t the problem. As they struggled to settle on our next move, I was our lookout. The dandelion tree ahead of us, the one that’d almost bashed the hood of our car apart, was moving, a colossus slowly rising to its feet. But that wasn’t the problem either!

  The whole forest was beginning to move. I should’ve expected nothing less.

  When we got moving again, we’d be running a gauntlet. Every single tree in our path would come falling like a hammer, and where one failed, another would pick up the slack.

  It was impossible! At best, it’d sap all our strength. We didn’t have forever to recover. Scratch that—recovery was not even an option. We just needed to circumvent this obstacle. and it was gonna take some pretty wacky thinking to do that.

  I bent down and tapped Bayce on the shoulder. She turned. “DONT PANIC. GRAB EVERYONE. TIGHT”

  “What, what the…oh.” Bayce gave me a wink, then whispered, “I trust you.”

  I dashed out of the car, switching to cat form—feeling speedier. The dandelion rose for a giant swing. Exactly what I was counting on.