I moved one hand to tap on Allow.

  My deteriorating mana bar fshed red and in seconds filled itself right to the top, then continued a slow pulsing, dull red to glowing ice white and back.

  When I brought up Rain and slid the bar to add more power to it, the indicator on my mana bar didn’t move at all.

  This wasn’t the moment to question how.

  I maxed out my Rain completely, as high as it would go, and turned it loose.

  My mana bar didn’t change.

  The clouds above us, on the other hand, churned and spread outwards and released a virtual torrent of water with a copper sparkle.

  “That might have gotten the whole town,” Logan said, looking around thoughtfully as mosslings on all sides colpsed where they stood. “Probably washed spores out of the air and destroyed them, too. Bet if any of them got into the wind instead of being inhaled here in town, there are only a few, and there are potions out there now to deal with the unlucky.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said dismissively, the rain having no visible effect on her aside from making her hair stick to her skin. “I have plenty more and your healer freak friend can’t keep that Rain up forever.”

  “Oh, you’d be amazed at how long that might be.”

  Green light flickered, ghostly and unstable, but strengthening slowly.

  Into... a geodesic dome, countless triangles of gss, arching over us. It was rge enough to contain not only the showdown itself, but every one of the colpsing mosslings surrounding it. The gss turned red, filtering out most of the sunlight and letting in only a thin bloody glow. With the thin green lines still defining and outlining it but casting no actual light, it was an eerie effect.

  Now what?

  It made no difference to my rain, anyway, which kept falling steadily.

  Logan gnced up. “Damn, bro. That one’s got hel potential.”

  “Mosses,” Serru said tightly, “sometimes release spores when they die. And pnts grow poorly with little light. Everyone you have infected with this new strain is inside, since you brought them all together. I doubt anything is escaping Nathan’s Rain, but let’s make sure.”

  “And just how long do you expect to be able to maintain this? Against me?” The Moss Queen did her best to sound amused rather than annoyed.

  “Long enough,” Terenei said ftly. “We have Elixirs and Refreshes and I can see an alchemist shop inside the dome. Let’s see if I can hold it long enough for Nathan and Logan to make sure you aren’t a threat anymore. I’m game to try. And I have absolutely nothing to lose.”

  I gnced back. Someone had set up one of the little sensory tents, presumably because trying to paint while being rained on would be impossible. Terenei was sitting at the mouth of it, with Zanshe kneeling across from him, her hands cupped over his around the edges of his sketchbook.

  Heket’s mecha was right beside them, hovering protectively. I didn’t see Myu, so presumably she was also inside.

  And, of course, Serru and Aryennos were still fnking me, right in front of the Moss Queen in person.

  Airborne moss infection was probably worse than anything they’d ever imagined, but that didn’t mean my found family were going to just sit in a corner and whimper.

  The Moss Queen crossed her arms, surveying all of us with the expression of a teacher confronting students who were being disappointingly unruly.

  “Well. I suppose, you’ve managed to disarm my moss, unmake my mosslings, and prevent further infection. Temporarily.”

  “Temporary is good enough for now,” I said. “As long as there’s a heartbeat there’s still a chance, and sometimes even if there isn’t one.”

  She reached up to her throat and unfastened her green cloak.

  All in one gesture, she swung it around and flicked it in the air, like spreading a sheet on a bed.

  In the thin steady rain, it was hard to even see the seeds that flew off it, scattering across the sodden intersection that struggled to cope with the puddles forming on its absolutely ft hard surface.

  The Moss Queen raised both hands palm-up, grinning. “Uproot one pnt, another will grow. Pnts will split mountains and choke rivers, given time, and they need less of that when I’m encouraging them. The ck of sunlight is only inconvenient. Thank you for the water. Seeds do need that.”

  The seeds sprouted, sending out tiny white tendril roots that drove downwards with unnatural force into the street, which should have resisted any such invasion. Green shoots oriented themselves upwards, swelling and expanding. Presumably they were feeding off her energy in pce of the sun’s.

  “I knew that was going too well,” Logan growled, and seized hold of one of the pnts. I saw jotun muscle tighten with strain as he wrestled it out of the ground. The roots kept right on growing while suspended in the air, sending out new arms that thickened rapidly.

  Serru snatched the gatherer’s staff from her bag, but it failed to gain any purchase against the hard ground; her small and very sharp knife did better, but it still took more strokes with each pnt to sever the stems. Logan followed her cue and pulled out a jotun-sized compact hatchet; I had one that was sized for other species, and fumbled it out of my bag. It worked less well on the tough living greenery than it did splitting dead wood, but it was better than nothing.

  Heket reached past us with a long metal arm to seize a pnt and rip it up by the roots. She hurled that one at the Moss Queen with one hand while switching tools with the other.

  I hadn’t realized she had tools that amounted to a pair of long slightly-curved bdes. A couple of odd little fixtures might have allowed them to be hinged together into a scissor-like cutter, but separately, they worked like a pair of machetes or sickles, sweeping through the pnts low on their stalks.

  That was harder for them to recover from. The root systems tried to send up new shoots, but they were smaller and slower; the tops struggled to generate new roots, like the cuttings my mother was always putting in water, but they were more straggly, longer but thinner.

  There were a lot of pnts.

  And the Moss Queen simply watched, grinning, her hands still raised.

  Aryennos yelped, and I spun towards him.

  One of the pnts wrapped a leafy tendril around his arm, and he cwed at it with his other hand, breathing fast and hard and face tight with strain; as I watched, leaf after leaf fttened itself against the skin of his arm.

  “There are thorns on the bottom of these leaves! And they’re sticky! And... and my arm’s going numb?”

  “Hold on.” I sshed one other pnt out of the way so I could reach him and take a closer look at the problem.

  The veins of the leaves attached to his arm were darkening.

  I used both hands around the short handle of the hatchet, bringing the bde down on the vine a short distance from Aryennos’ arm.

  The liquid that dribbled out was worryingly red mixed with mucousy strings of greenish gunk, all diluted instantly by the rain.

  Aryennos staggered, his vine-wrapped arm limp dead weight at his side and his eyes gssy.

  “Don’t let them touch you!” I shouted at the others, wrapping an arm around Aryennos to keep him on his feet. I couldn’t just leave him, even in the middle of all this.

  “Sure, nothing to it,” Logan shot back.

  All too true: more vines were moving in our direction. I stomped a hoof down on one, took my hatchet to another, but one coming from the other way snaked itself around Aryennos’ leg and began to climb.

  Diagnosis told me he was suffering from a combination of ongoing traumatic blood loss and phytotoxins with multiple effects, anaesthetic and sedative-hypnotic and... anticoagunt?

  Why wasn’t the Rain removing that from his body?

  Quite possibly, it was, and it was being constantly replenished.

  Which meant that trying to cure the toxins or the blood loss wouldn’t help until the source was removed, but how the hell was I supposed to do that? Attempts at peeling the leaves off his skin completely failed, even though that vine was no longer connected to anything; it might just as well have been epoxied in pce edge to edge. I might have some hope of removing the stalk between the leaves, isoting them, but where was the toxin reservoir?

  The Rain was fading again. My mana bar was still pulsing white and red. I called up another maxed-out Rain. We really did not need the extra complications of moss infection right now!

  I heard Zanshe cry out, heard her tell Terenei to move back and close the tent.

  “Ideas?” I shouted at Logan, and noticed only betedly that he was with Zanshe—dumping the contents of a potion on her arm, in fact. The leafy vine on it withered and shrank, but more were closing in on them. Serru, hatchet in one hand and knife in the other, did her best to buy time while Zanshe recovered her bance and tested her injured arm.

  “Open to any! I only have a few weedkillers!”

  “Nature will always win,” the Moss Queen said smugly.

  “There’s nothing natural about this!”

  I didn’t need another Diagnosis to know that Aryennos was dying, and this time, I didn’t have a way to intervene. The progression from first contact to this was terrifyingly rapid.

  Vines wrapped around Terenei’s tent and contracted. Even the heavy-duty ones meant for the Highnds had limits, and the little ones sacrificed a lot of durability for speed and convenience. It wasn’t going to be much protection for long.

  Heket spun in pce, her mecha’s four legs solidly pnted, and attacked the growth on the tent. Vines crept up the mecha’s legs, up towards the core, and she had to pause to tear at them before they could jam the precisely-calibrated mechanisms that kept the whole thing working.

  There had to be a solution! A way to keep us from all dying. A way to make sure there was a world to wake up to that wasn’t a dystopian hellscape. What was the point of all the encouragement, the gifts of house and bag and guitar, the message to Serru, even the Purification potion, if whoever was behind the scenes was okay with everything ending like this? Was she really so strong they couldn’t stop her and Logan had been wrong about which side was doomed to lose?

  A vine wrapped itself around Serru’s leg. She severed it and went back to her attack on one that was twining around the tent, but that leg rapidly lost any ability to hold her weight.

  Logan spat a curse and charged directly at the Moss Queen; vines snatched at him, but he was suddenly a bck felid with improbable speed and dexterity, and at least jotun strength given the way he was swinging that hatchet that was now more like an axe in his hands.

  Vines snapped into the air, writhing, and he twisted away from them, between them. Maybe he could make it through, maybe he could take her down with the oldest and simplest of attacks, and end this right now.

  The Moss Queen’s green cloak, on the ground at her feet, erupted into a virtual wall of dense growth, tendrils holding hands to give them strength to climb. A thick rope of them curled around towards him, seeking him. There were few leaves on it, but it coiled around him and threw him back, the leaves it did have tearing loose with him as they attempted to adhere to his sleek fur.

  His weight knocked Serru to the ground beside Zanshe, who was on her knees with gzed eyes, her struggles weakening and mostly reflexive. The vines closed in as he and Serru scrambled to get out of that vulnerable position.

  What would work? We had no effective defences or effective physical weapons. My magic could hold off a moss infection but not much more. If I switched out of my centaur form, we immediately lost even that. Logan’s skills were impressive but not good for this. Every advantage was on the side of a complete psychopath who believed she was a deity and the world had to be purified. It wasn’t water or fire or ice or raining jaguars, but it wouldn’t be significantly better.

  Something touched one of my hind legs and I felt pressure.

  I lowered Aryennos to the ground, knowing he was already past feeling it and past anything I could do but I still couldn’t make myself just drop him, and hacked at the vine before it could get a grip. Another tickled one of my legs, and I even felt a tug on my equine tail.

  There had to be something!

  The mecha was slowing down, overwhelmed by the vines, and I heard a sickening crunch as the pressure cracked the gss. The capsule hatch groaned as it was forced open a narrow crack, and a small bck-and-white body leapt out, running for cover with fur all on end.

  What did we have? Nothing in our gear would help, no potions, no tools. This world didn’t hand out magic swords. Logan had crafting skills and had never been able to challenge her. I had skills that were all about healing people, but I couldn’t fix things faster than she was breaking them.

  No, I had more than healing skills.

  I couldn’t make potions at the moment. If Logan had been unable to use enhanced felid abilities to reach her, my ordinary felid self never would.

  My gatherer skills were rgely useless, and so was my aquian form. Growing the pnts faster was unlikely to tear control away from her. Could I force them into a ter stage of growth? Make them age themselves to death? That seemed like a possibility.

  My search-and-rescue skills would let me put my friends in stasis so they’d stop deteriorating, and then I could put them in an impenetrable cocoon, but that would end as soon as she took me out. That would take longer if I bumped my stamina but it would still happen.

  Hoping fervently that it would be worth it, I switched to my aquian form and brought up my dispy, ying a hand in the shallow water puddling across the intersection and telling it to push the pnts into their next stage of growth.

  They stopped spreading, and instead twined around each other more than they had, supporting themselves as they raced through the production of tiny buds that swelled and opened into flowers.

  In the early morning sunlight, without the red gss dome, the flowers were a pale greenish-yellow with veins of livid red through them, and they smelled of copper and iron and salt.

  “Pretty, aren’t they?” the Moss Queen said, completely unconcerned.

  Another push would make them go to seed. That should be sterile, but it might not be with her abilities involved. I wasn’t sure I could go past that even under ideal conditions and kill pnts. Did alchemy ever require that?

  The stems were more woody now, and very few were still moving and expanding, but it was too te. Heket’s mecha wasn’t moving at all, just inert metal wrapped in green. The tent had colpsed and the gss dome above us was gone. I already knew about Aryennos, but Zanshe wasn’t moving anymore. Logan was back in his jotun form, hacking at the vines that had seized Serru, and she was still fighting them, but she looked dazed, and there was less purpose and determination behind it, less and less strength.

  “You’re sick,” I shouted at the Moss Queen. “You’re right up there with the worst men who ever devastated home in the name of greed and patriarchal values.”

  She just shrugged. “Your opinion does not matter. Logan’s been ripping vines off but he’s feeling it, and I don’t think he’s going to be standing up with them pinning him down. I told them to go easy on you so you could watch, but there’s one around one of your legs and they’re running out of alternative warm breathing targets. I don’t think it will be much longer. You could still beg for mercy. I still might let you go to the Axis if you promise to leave this world.”

  “No. Even if you were telling the truth, I wouldn’t.”

  Even if I’d failed completely, and I couldn’t even hold out hope that my friends were going to wake up in a world they’d want to be in. What was coming was a world where even death was no longer an escape.