A black shadow dives into Assert, knocking her against a wagon and breaking an axle. Confused yells rise as merchants scramble to escape the toppling wagon, and the black haze turns solid into the dark Lumi, Hadke. He has taken advantage of the chaos procured by the rainstorm to finally strike. Hissing as the party approaches, he curls up, morphs into a little devilish porcupine, and levitates in the air, ready for the confrontation.

  “Do we have any of the potions that Starmetal used to fight Hadke and Nyri?” Cenvin whispers to Durand, who shakes his head.

  Wildshape! Teeth glaring, Lenny charges Hadke as a raging bull. Stampeding and trampling, Hadke forms a long, thin veil in the way of Lenny’s path. At the last second before impact, he dodges the bull by side stepping out of the way. Lenny roars in fury and quickly turns, charging back at his rival. Hadke flourishes gracefully as he reforms himself into the veil. It’s quite obvious that he’s playing bullfighting.

  A leap! Hurling like a flaming meteor, Lenny strains all his strength into this attack! Dear reader, we’re not playing around anymore, this stuff is getting good! With a deafening SMASH, Lenny stampedes out of the now-massive crater with Hadke nowhere in sight! Wait, look to the left! He easily dodged that! Lenny pouts and puffs, and charges in for another attack!

  A dodge! Hadke easily sways to the side, leaving Lenny to topple another wagon. Wheat and produce spill out from the wreckage. A merchant in the spectating crowds cries out in exasperation. Lenny quickly spins on his legs and repositions, bellowing heated breaths, thundering and snarling, and aims his horns right at Hadke’s bannerlike form.

  A charge! Whirling and seething, he stomps the muddy ground ferally in frustration as the black mantle evades yet another attack. Hadke, growing increasingly bored and worrying in this fight, transfigures into a solid black sphere that protrudes a plethora of needles towards Lenny, who in turn charges to meet the attack.

  A miss! Hadke, now levitating in his natural cat form, purrs excitedly as he weaves past Lenny as a thousand small orbs. Lenny, on the other hand, cries out in pain as he brays ferociously like a tortured animal. He pauses momentarily to give the crowds a gasp: his eyes are blinded. Lenny writhes into an uncontrolled frenzy, stamping over here and there.

  Cenvin and Durand try to enter the fighting, but they must stay away from Lenny’s wild, unstoppable patterns. They cry out as a person steps into the battleground, but go silent as that person is Assert.

  Hadke’s evil purring is cut off as a hundred thorns of fire and ice are materialized into his body. They simultaneously combust into freezing fireballs, and Hadke is nowhere to be found when the dust settles. Cenvin sighs in relief to step forward as Assert blocks him with a huge spike.

  “He’s still here!”

  And it is true, as Hadke reforms himself from a million particles that he split into to weave past Assert’s attack. With a massive heave from the ground up, Assert surrounds herself, Hadke, and the still-rampaging Lenny into a secluded dome of ice, blocking out the spectators.

  “No escape now, Lumi,” she declares as another volley of burning icicles materializes behind her, all trained on Hadke.

  Meanwhile, Lenny reverts to his honey badger self, holding his blood-drenched face in his paws.

  Hadke responds to Assert’s challenge by splitting it into five glimmering letters that spell: TRY ME.

  The needles fly loose of their invisible restraints and detonate upon the Lumi, who whizzes by the projectiles at the last second and forms a javelin. He dives at Assert but is forced to deter when she conjures up a blazing wall of ice. She pushes the wall forward into Hadke and detonates it, sending him crashing into the wall of the dome. He feebly struggles to get up on his fours. Assert steps forward and points a cluster of icicles at him.

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  “Get up, kitty. That was an appetizer. Ready for the main course?”

  “What’s going on?”

  Cenvin shouts as he leaps through his portal with Durand. He smiles sheepishly at Assert’s cold stare.

  “I believed we had made it clear that you can’t use your ability. It will harm you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Is he down?” Durand points to Hadke’s’ defeated figure.

  “For now, yes, but he will inevitably get back up. We can’t kill these immortal aberrations.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Perhaps a few minutes. I blew him up quite hard.”

  Gritting bestially, Hadke stands up once again and splits into two halves. The first half further splits into tiny bullets, which pelts towards the party. The other half becomes a volley of arrows, raining down from above while the bullets surge from the front.

  “Watch out!”

  Assert forms a wall to counter the bullets, but she isn’t fast enough to block the arrows. A few strikes her in the shoulder and torso and she grunts, falls, and moves no more.

  Cenvin exchanges a look with Durand as they draw their respective weapons.

  “Our turn,” he says excitedly. Durand nods in agreement and adds one more thing.

  “Don’t use your ability.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. Now SIT DOWN, KITTY!”

  Starting the fight, Cenvin draws his crossbow and launches a bolt at Hadke before putting it away. Naturally, the bolt was never intended to deal damage, but to keep Hadke distracted. Durand comes next as he charges headfirst into melee combat, spinning his shortswords expertly to cut up Hadke like a chef and his ingredients. In seconds, Hadke is pierced, sliced, and diced.

  The dark Lumi grins as his body easily melds back together. His paws grow into two knifelike limbs and stab at Durand precisely where his heart is. The attacks landed, but Durand moved just back enough so that the knives didn’t bury deep.

  Cenvin draws the Shimmerim and flicks at Hadke from a distance. The weapon tears through time and space to land a solid stab into Hadke. He pretends to writhe in pain, but mockingly recovers and taunts the duo.

  Durand takes a step back, throws one of his shortswords into the air, and casts Conjure Barrage. The shortsword is instantaneously cloned into a hundred exact copies of itself and all are launched at Hadke, who is forced to turn into a sponge to evade all of the blades. However, he does flash red as one of them hits: he couldn’t account for the 100th shortsword.

  Hadke retaliates by morphing into a hundred daggers from himself, effectively recreating the spell. The adventurers grunt as they’re unable to dodge everything and as Hadke extracts himself from the bloodied wounds of the adventurers, Durand falls to the floor, weakened, with very low health.

  “Bastard…” snarls Cenvin.

  The Shimmerim flies through a portal and impales Hadke from behind, through Cenvin’s portal. As he uses his ability his body grows numb; he stumbles, struggling to stand.

  Hadke, on the other hand, rapidly oscillates between black and red as he reels from the near-fatal attack. He collapses just like Durand. Who is still conscious?

  “Finish… him,” he whispers to Cenvin.

  Assert finally rises and kicks Hadke furiously.

  Lenny shuffles over and casts Cure Wounds for Durand. Rejuvenated, he rushes over to Hadke and joins her in kicking the hell out of the Lumi.

  They stop as Cenvin collapses into the mud, comatose once again.

  “There he goes again,” Durand sighs. “Can you lower the dome now? We should get out of here and be on our way. Everyone outside is ready, but no one can fix the axle.”

  Lenny rubs his eyes and raises his hands, “I can do it. I have Mending.”

  With a wave of her hand, the dome around the party collapses and evaporates. Lenny hurries to the axle and mends it while Cedric hurries the party and Assert away for an emergency meeting. Using this brief unsupervised moment, Hadke quickly melts himself and slips away into the swamp by swimming in a thin stream of water.

  He reforms once he’s well out of eyeshot of the caravan. He licks his wounds on his body and tickles a spot on his arm with his tail. Just when he finally has a chance to relax, a missile of pure light slams into him, resulting in a tangled struggle of black-and-white luminescence. The battle heats as each opponent transforms into swords, spears, shields, morningstars, and darts in a single second—a life-or-death brawl between Hadke and Nyri.

  The sun had set. From the murky waters of the Sealine Swamp, Nyri emerges from the muddled depths. She’s now bigger and wiser as she wearily trudges through the waters, finally collapsing on top of a boulder. There, she falls into a healing sleep.