Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The king, the Core, the helm, the screams, none of this was supposed to happen, Olivia thought distantly, her heart death-chilled and her body frozen beneath Andrias’s shadow.

She flinched against Yunan’s armored chest as Marcy’s fading cries were echoed by the massive Core’s sun-screech, its six mechanical limbs dragging sparking furrows through polished stone flooring.

Then, just as abruptly, it stopped, leaving them in ringing silence.

Marcy’s body slumped in its bonds, and the Core’s comet-lit eyes faded into darkness.

It crashed to the ground, and did not move again.

Marcy- no, not Marcy, Marcy was gone, no better than dead if not drowning in a far worse fate- blinked open all thirteen eyes on its visor at Andrias’s introduction.

And gasped, hacking and coughing as if it had never before breathed through either lungs or gills before snarling, “Andrias, cut the lines!”

“But- My Lord-” “Now!”

The blaze of Andrias’s blade lit the dim room for an instant, nearly blinding Olivia’s light-sensitive eyes when he leapt atop the still body of the old Core and sheared through its root-tangle of cables in a shower of sparks.

The mechanical vessel shrieked like swords clashing, suddenly-flailing limbs dragging the king from atop it and launching him to the ground as if he was light as a mere frog.

The floor shuddered under Andrias’s bulk as the king landed on all fours, snarling, and flung his eyed crown away.

Warm, dry hands- human hands, she’d taken her eyes off the thing in Marcy’s body- ruthlessly dragged Olivia back by her dress, and she barely avoided cracking her head on the stairs when it shoved her away.

Familiar gauntlets swam in her vision, and Olivia gratefully took Yunan’s hand in her own and allowed the general to help her up. And over Yunan’s shoulder, she saw… the Core’s old body, three-taloned limbs frantically pushing it away from Andrias, who had righted himself and stood silhouetted before the venom-green light of its eyes.

… Green?

“Andrias!” The Core’s voice barked out, layered and raspy and entirely, poisonously wrong coming from the mouth of a child. “She is ours. If you kill her, your pathetic excuse of a kingship will end today.”

Ice bloomed in Olivia’s heart at the possessiveness in the Core’s voice. The greatest minds of Amphibia as one… Marcy was supposed to be- be absorbed by it, but then-

Olivia’s thoughts scattered like gnats as a sliding steel door at the base of the staircase slammed shut under the force of a Leviathan’s arms.

King Andrias panted for breath- the most exerted Olivia ever recalled him appearing, hair mussed and crown nowhere to be seen- and his restrained growl rumbled in her bones. “My Lord, what was that?”

Both Olivia and Yunan froze under the Core’s ice-dark look of consideration, but were soon quickly dismissed. “The host’s attachment to her own body was… lesser. She attempted to escape through the cables during the data transfer.”

Yunan’s voice was barely a whisper, pitched as silently as expected for a soldier experienced in stealth tactics- but not silent enough to Olivia’s court-trained eardrums. “That thing in there… Marcy?”

As if to answer her hushed question, a jarring, steel-shearing shriek crashed out from behind the reinforced doors. Doubtlessly, Marcy was still trying to escape; Olivia shuddered at the wound-fresh memory of the last time she saw Marcy’s face, the kind of wild terror only seen in the truly desperate.

Almost more alarming than the heavy cacophony beating at the doors, the crashing of steel beating upon steel lessened, and then stopped.

The… thing wearing Marcy’s face huffed. “What a tiresome tantrum. Andrias, keep all access points to this room sealed until further notice. As for you two…” Dispassionate orange eyes flickered, like ship-lanterns signaling to each other. “Congratulations, you’ve been promoted. Instead of executing you for treason, we have decided that you might be more useful alive.”

Andrias’s heavy hand, strong enough to break her spine with a squeeze, rested on Yunan’s and Olivia’s respective shoulders, deceptively casual.

She gulped. The Core made itself quite clear. Sooner or later, it would become evident that being granted life instead of the noose was not, in fact, a mercy.

--

Marcy slammed robotic claws into the steel blast-door, sparks shrieking away from every impact. But even the armor-segmented limbs left not a single dent in the barrier keeping her from Olivia, and Yunan, and her body, that was her body it had stolen as she’d fled the pain, electric and blinding.

Let me out!

Lashing limbs slowed, and then stilled, her last dejected swipe scraping down the door like fingernails on a prison wall. Because that’s what this was, wasn’t it? This body, this entire stupid castle, Andrias’s indulging affection.

In the forefront of whatever equivalent of a ‘brain’ she had, a new awareness pinged.

< Reserve power depleted. Initiating Sleep Mode. >

What? No, nononono!

Frantically, Marcy swiveled all her eyes to scan around the castle basement. Shattered holo-projector eyes on the wall, empty rejuvenation tank, wrecked remains of the throne-like upload station, and the tangle of wires, dangling from the ceiling where Andrias had shorn them away from this body.

Yes! The external power cables! And then-!

Marcy’s mechanical body froze in its skitter. Its limbs went slack, and she crashed to the floor, hard.

The reserve power was gone.

Marcy’s dismay flashed and sparked but did nothing, she could do nothing, she was paralyzed, blind, her anti-anxiety exercises were useless because she couldn’t even breathe-!

Like a curtain drawn across her very consciousness, a flat green panic too big for her body, too big for any body, slammed over her mind-

-And blazed away as the system reboot forced her back online.

Anxiety and the lingering spark-shocks of remembered pain lingered, but after the reboot it felt… muted, eased. Like she’d woken from a nightmare, disoriented and confused but feeling slightly less like the world was ending.

Did I just pass out?

The energy-saving background processing that ran even during ‘sleep mode’ informed her no, not really. More of a flush, purging the biomechanical central memory of the old primary minds’ remaining personal consciousnesses.

The- How did Marcy even know that?

Like fumbling to plug in a cord in the dark, Marcy felt something shift and whir inside the armored core.

Though still unable to move, Marcy still cringed at the sensation of code unfurling across her mind like feathering frost, and dismounted the external memory. The way it was formatted… She wasn’t meant to process it all at once, it was just her in here instead of dozens of minds!

But what she caught from it was enough.

The biomechanical central memory, containing only Marcy’s mind rather than the multitudes it was meant for, held nothing of the actual collective’s minds or memories or personalities. But the redundancies and applied data that remained in the Core’s traditional hard drives… those, she could read. The very fact that she knew this about the Core’s old body proved it.

Like I’m trying to read an advanced astrophysics textbook. The knowledge was there, but Marcy didn’t have a glossary of terms to refer back to, so only a part of it was understandable. And it was in a different language. And the authors had an entirely different viewpoint and understanding of the world. And the world was foreign to her.

Okay, maybe this would be… much harder than she thought. But parsing through all the applied mechanics and inherent data was possible!

And if that was possible, there had to be a way to fix this hidden in those files. And she had to fix this, because the Core was a way for Amphibia’s empire to never die and Earth was the next sacrifice to be slaughtered on the altar of conquest and that included her friends-

The overwhelming push of files and downloaded information and internalized knowledge faded, replaced by something comforting and familiar as it was sharp and stinging. Like green light reflecting off an endless array of mirrors, each ray connecting data point to raw information to synthesized understanding.

Marcy re-mounted the hard drive she’d disconnected from in her hasty reasonings. It seemed promising. Uploading and Downloading Abstract Neuroelectric Signals…

Chapter Text

The Core paid a visit to the basement approximately eighteen hours, forty-two minutes, and twelve seconds after it stole her body.

Its arrival heralded by the rolling stone door, the Core smirked its way out of the stair-shadows. “Hello there, Marcy. Our apologies for leaving you alone for so long.”

If not for her immobility Marcy would have shuddered at the underserved familiarity in the Core’s voice- her voice, her inflections, the faint lisp overlaid with an impossible thrum of voices that had no business emerging from her throat.

The nauseating roil of dysphoria was somehow even worse when looking at how the Core carried itself in her body, and the panic-flutter of ‘what happens when you can’t take your hormones because a supercomputer is possessing you?’ was a single, absurdly mundane anxiety swimming in a countless sea of them.

“But this isn’t a social call.” A faint whirring accompanied the Core’s steps, unnaturally stiff.

Marcy desperately diverted power to her limbs, something, anything to scrape away from the approaching being, because she was just as helpless as she’d been plugged into that chair, and all the Core brought with it was pain-

It passed right by her.

Even though the applied mechanics of how this body moved were useless in low-power mode, the sensory input was not; Marcy could still trace the movement of a tiny hand, coming up to rest on time-smoothed ivory.

The same data Marcy intuited that allowed her the knowledge of this body’s functions also informed her as to why the Core was touching the discarded crown. But she didn’t need to parse old files to know that.

After all, Andrias had only flung it from his head when he’d heard her screaming through it.

“We’re here to make an offer,” it said, its buzzing sincerity swarming through the crown’s connection, an array of fangs poised over Marcy’s head. “Join us willingly.”

Marcy pushed through lines of factory-reset coding and shoved the connection back at the Core with all her minimal processing power.

< ADMIN_WIT: Negative. [No no no, not again, please I don’t want to be alone, leave me alone, it hurt]. >

“Aw, c’mon now, we haven’t even given our pitch!” The Core’s voice climbed higher in a stark contrast to its previous ocean-swept formality, cheery as bubbling venom. “We mainly wanted a body capable of holding us, sure, but you’re more than welcome to join!” And again, whispery and soft and longing as distant waves. “You were always our first choice for a host. Don’t you want to be known? To know? If you do, then, well, you’ll never be alone again.”

It didn’t say what would happen if she refused. It didn’t have to.

She’d be alone, trapped deep in steel and stale stone, cut off from the wind forever.

But she also knew what the Core’s intentions were. Its goals. Its eagerness for conquest and ‘restoring’ Amphibia to its previous might, like gnawing on prey in anticipation of blood flooding between fangs.

… She knew what the Core’s intentions were, during this conversation.

If it wants to assimilate me so bad, why is it bothering with just trying to convince me?

Marcy felt further along the edges of the Core’s mental presence in the crown-link; as much as she wanted to curl up in the corner of her mind because this thing scared her, more than she thought she could be scared of anything, Marcy still braved it. The Core was going to hurt the people she loved, and she desperately refused to help it, whatever the cost.

And she felt, and listened to the wasp-harsh buzzing of the Core’s center, and realized.

The human brain was, in some aspects, the most efficient supercomputer in the world. Yet while the human body may be more efficient for the Core to reside in, the neuroplasticity and pattern recognition and working memory only running in the collective’s favor, the human brain was, in fact, too efficient. Since this chassis was far less energy-efficient, in terms of pure processing power, Marcy possessed far more bulk than the Core did, like this.

The reason the Core was talking in the first place was because… it couldn’t make her join. Not by force, not when she was stuck in this biomechanical vessel. Not with the upload station shattered like rotted logs.

< ADMIN_WIT: Request denied [I felt you as we passed each other and tangled in the upload cables]. > Marcy rarely got angry, not like Sasha or even Anne did- it simply wasn’t in her nature, as it wasn’t lightning’s nature to strike the same place with its wrath twice.

But fear for her friends and fear for herself and fear of Andrias and fear of the Core sharpened her glass-shattered helplessness like a whetstone, into claws that she raked across the collective’s connection, the crown-link snapping back in its face like a broken bowstring. < ADMIN_ WIT: The request conflicts with inherent base code, and cannot be accepted [How stupid do you think I am, stupid enough to help you kill Anne-and-Sasha, lights-in-the-dark, never letting you touch them. Go to hell]. >

But she had been stupid despite all that her mastery over wit had been her pride just as it was something pushed upon her since forever, and she’d been selfish, and it was her fault everything was so messed up, for her and for her friends. And Marcy loved her friends, a plain and star-bright fact that meant she would do anything to protect them in this mess she got them into.

She still wasn’t selfish or stupid enough to just let this… this unnatural thing, broken away from the wheel of life-death-rebirth, assimilate her, steal what was hers, what was storm-green and sparked like the shadow of a thunderstorm-

Eyes like embers sneered at Marcy, and the Core retracted its hand from the crown as if stung. “Hm, we suppose you aren’t stupid- and we don’t humor fools.” Those same eyes narrowed to moon-crescent slits, like lava glowing behind cracked obsidian. “But that also means you surely are intelligent enough to know what justice we might mete out against the traitors who tried to steal you. The stewardess and general, yes?”

Marcy’s vision constricted, both thermal and conventional, on the Core wearing Marcy’s own mischievous smirk, and she knew she’d been caught out.

The Core brushed a knuckle, dotted with the scars of childhood accidents, against the crown. “So, Marcy, here is your choice: save the two of them and join us- after all, you care for them, don’t you? Then so will we care for them- or continue this stubborn nonsense, and lose both them and your human friends.”

< ADMIN_WIT: Request denied [A choice made to save thy friends, a choice made to save thy friends, a choice made to save thy friends-]. Calculations for acceptable losses weighed [There are no winners in the end this time, Sasha-and-Anne and forgiveness and I’m sorry for everything, I’m sorry Lady Olivia, General Yunan…] >

“So be it. We’ll be sure to tell them who resigned them to their fates. We’re sure it will bring them such joy to know that the one they tried to ‘rescue’ shackled them instead.” The Core scoffed as it lifted away its hand, tossing its head in such an utterly humanlike gesture of derision that Marcy’s stomach would have lurched, if she had one. “Stealing you from us, when you could be part of the eternal lordship of the empire? Some rescue.”

The way it looked up at her unmoving form with something like pity… the Core truly, wholly believed that this was an honor. That it was offering her grand laurels rather than the death of all that she loved.

“Just don’t forget,” it said, sickeningly gentle and soft as a whispered threat. “Even though your human friends abandoned you, and you did the stewardess and general in turn, we will not. You are always the first choice, for us.”

The Core strode out of the basement, leaving Marcy with her grim thoughts.

And the Core’s old data backups.

Marcy grabbed the files in her binary-sharp teeth and yanked.

Core-specific castle framework interfacing. The music box’s mechanics and operation. Calamity-operated technologies and facilities. Armed Frobot units and their schematics, including the very code pathways that required the music box’s energy to run.

There had to be something here to fix this. Marcy just needed to find it.

--

The castle rumbled with each discharge from the ion cannon.

With each deployment of Frobot units.

With each knife-bright portal torn into the world’s weave.

Every time a portal was opened or the ion cannon was fired, the castle basement creaked, metal on metal, almost too low to hear but enough to set Marcy’s artificial approximation of nerves on end.

And with each snapped string, green flickered in the blank eyes of the Core’s old body.

Two weeks, one day, three hours, and fifty seconds of rumbling and cannonshot and Calamity energy weaponized, and then when the vibrating girders settled-

The world shattered into acid-bright lightning, and Marcy Wu moved.

She twitched a claw. The pulse of power, mind to false neurons to electricity to mechanical movement, felt different from the brief pain-flushed panic that gripped her weeks ago.

Marcy shoved away the memories needling into her like glass shards. Instead she flickered on the night vision built into this body, and lurched to her six feet. There was far less physical feeling than she was used to, but the sensory input was multilayered enough to serve their purpose.

All that time spent parsing and translating and internalizing the data was not for nothing. She knew what she had to do.

At least… sort of. Marcy knew how to access the Core-specific framework of the castle, how to weld her own wires back into the mainframe, but once she attached her processes to it, the idea of what to do next got… fuzzy.

Marcy ran her claws through the cables that used to attach this body to the framework, pulling further lengths of it out of the small compartment they lay coiled in. Upon a sudden thought, she grabbed the crown and crammed it behind the hatch. Better not leave it where anyone could get to it- if the Core’s voice touched her mind again, it would be far too soon.

As she carefully braided copper and alloy filaments from the shorn cable-trunk back into this body, mind filmed with the overlays of blueprints and alien engineering so advanced it should have made her head spin, Marcy considered her options.

The backup data she extracted all this knowledge from was just that- backup. Redundancies built into the Core’s vessel. She could reconnect to the network embedded into the castle’s mechanical frame, but all of the information she had was old- who knew how many modifications and tweaks and little programming changes had been made to it in the past millennia?

If she was lucky, it hadn’t changed much. Given the hardware modifications logged onto the Core body- that being, very few- ancient Amphibia wasn’t huge on any kind of real technological advancement race, anyway.

But the software modifications were a different story. Storage increased. CPU increased. Minds logged, memories categorized, assimilated, optimized, so many voices like the song of the storm, unified, more, more, we need more-

Marcy shook off the nerve-spooling thought with a stomp of one leg, the floor cracking beneath the force of it. She knew, intellectually, that this body was hardwired to hold a lot more mental bulk than just one human teenager’s, but it still didn’t change the echo-empty and profoundly lonely shadow of a feeling biting at her central memory every time she closed up a processing string and freed up more computing power.

She missed her friends more than ever, after so long with nothing but darkness and her own thoughts running through a body that didn’t belong to her. For all that Marcy’s actual body was wrong- too tall, too broad and too narrow, disproportionate in a way different from Anne and Sasha’s own awkward growth spurts- it was hers. It was human.

All the more reason to hope that the bright intuition painting data and raw memory together would guide her once she was connected.

Which should be just about… now.

Like a glass shatterpoint, spiderwebbing out from the point of connection Marcy made, the castle’s framework sprawled beneath her.

There was nothing truly visual about navigating the code-paths of the framework- more like being blindfolded, and running her fingers over a puzzle she knew by heart. And there was almost something else humming along her thoughts like plucked harpstrings, ribbon-green and faint as the distant roar of thunder.

One silk-filament of code twitched, almost as if in response to Marcy’s careful exploration.

She almost cut the connection entirely in her haste to flee, to tear herself away from the spark-fanged cables biting at her limbs and sharp blackthorn vine-minds squeezing her brain-

… Nothing happened.

Cautiously, Marcy surveilled the object of her fear, buffered by multiple layers of mundane castle functions and processes.

Like a spider, venomous chelicerae tucked away and legs resting on the main sub-networks, it lurked at the center of the framework’s web.

The Core.

But it hadn’t reacted to Marcy. Not even twitched.

Marcy waited, and watched. And realized.

Oh. It’s in a human body now, of course- even the Core has to sleep!

This was her chance! Marcy scrolled through the castle’s connected mechanics, searching for the ideal way to make her escape. Hmm… Backup power, blast doors, lighting, prison cells, surveillance cameras, hangar ports, flight stabilizers, ion cannon cooling system…

The spider twitched. It stretched its legs, feeling out the silken vibrations.

It woke up.

:YOU. HOW ARE YOU AWAKE!?:

Oh, shit!

Giddy panic thrilling through her like dry lightning, Marcy flipped every switch at once.

The world tilted around her, and the Core suddenly had much more to worry about than a rogue mind it hadn’t assimilated.

Chapter Text

On the tenth day, Olivia and Yunan stopped inspecting their cell for gaps- there would be none, of course there would- and resigned themselves to the realization that the opportunity to escape would have to come to them.

On the eleventh day, The Core paid a visit, dread fluttering in the wake of its footsteps like the cape it wore over narrow shoulders.

“Marcy?” Olivia called out between the bars, knowing her hope was fragile, and yet…

“Hmm, nope, good guess though!” The Core carelessly crushed that hope beneath its boot.

Yunan stirred, glaring at the Core from where she sat slumped against the wall, one arm over her knee. “So you’re here to gloat?”

Imprisonment had… not been kind to Yunan. To either of them. Oh, they’d known that the castle prison had seen quite a few visitors; back before they’d gone turncloak, Yunan and Olivia both had seen their fair share of newts brought back alive. A number of nobles, officers, and governmental faculty had fled the ascending imperial command, and Andrias had taken offense to that.

So he’d had them brought back, sometimes sending Yunan out on the solo missions that suited her better.

The prison cells those newts were brought to looked far different from the inside.

“Also no, but we love the idea!” The Core leaned casually against the stone wall facing their cell, conspiratorial smirk never leaving its dimpled face. “As fun as it is to watch you two sweat it out, we’re actually here to hold up our end of a deal.”

A deal? A deal with who, and for what?

“A deal?” Yunan echoed Olivia’s thought aloud, fingers flexing to unsheathe gauntlet-blades that she no longer had.

“A deal indeed! A while ago, we went and had a little chat with Marcy.” The Core crossed its arms across its chest, petulant and oddly defensive. “Even after we weighed the scales in her favor, she was uncooperative. But hey! What can a unified consciousness do?” it exclaimed, tilting its chin down and throwing its hands up in a summer-languid shrug. “If she wasn’t going to take it, she wasn’t going to take it. Which means she compared the options, and discarded your lives.”

“She what!?” Olivia couldn’t stop herself from gasping. Marcy wouldn’t- she was smart as a razored wire, certainly, but her reckless kindness had been what made her popular in the Night Guard, regardless of the writeups for disregarding orders to do what she thought would help the most people.

“I know how you types work. You’re lying,” Yunan growled as she got to her feet, marching across the cell to jab an offending finger at the Core. “Even against orders, she never left a man behind on a mission.”

She was never a soldier. Not yet, at least.

“Oooh, somebody’s upset that she ditched you. If we were you, we wouldn’t be, though- you only fished her out when you needed something from her.” Beetle-black antlers swayed as it shook its head mournfully. “We at least were guarding her. But you didn’t even let her finish healing in the tank. Have you no shame?”

Olivia’s heart dropped. She hadn’t finished…?

Surreptitiously, desperately, she pushed her face as close to the bars as she could, because sweet mother of newts, did they kill her? Was she even still breathing under that mechanically whirring suit?

She jumped when a hand found her own- Yunan, her face drawn- and squeezed. Olivia squeezed it back, grateful for the lifeline.

The Core was unnaturally still as it ignored their dawning fear in favor of hearing its own- Marcy’s, that was Marcy’s- voice.

“So really, we can’t even blame her for this. We understand why,” the Core mused aloud, wistful as a dream. “Ironic, that the budding ruthlessness she uses to reject us is part of the same potential that made her a candidate to become us.”

Olivia found her voice, seashell-sharp, with dignity veiling her emotions from herself and her expression from those around her, as any accomplished diplomat ought to do. Spine straightened, neck held high, voice even.

It was all she had left to prop herself up, a frost-fragile shield. “So. You are here to gloat, after all. If you’re here to carry out our executions, just say it.”

And if you take us out of this cell to do so… it’s an opportunity. From the calculating edge in Yunan’s eyes, she had the same thought.

The Core snorted. “Pfft, oh please, if we spent all our time on insignificant, short-lived worms like you, we’d get nothing else done. But you two will have our personal attention soon- we’ve even got just the project in mind you can help us test out.”

“... Project.” Oh, this cannot be good.

“Oh, yeah, your pieces are off the board now, which means you’re ours. There’s some tests we need sapient subjects for, so you’ll serve your empire instead of your Head Ranger.” The Core’s moon-sliver smirk had Olivia reflexively tasting the air for blood. “Marcy made her choice, and it wasn’t you. So look on the bright side! At least once your usefulness runs dry, you can die knowing nobody alive will miss you!”

It waved to them jauntily as it left with no fanfare to follow it but the lingering whispers of Olivia’s own dread.

“You… wouldn’t happen to know much about this thing’s… projects, would you?”

“Even if I did, my lady, I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that we don’t know.”

--

On the fifteenth day, Olivia and Yunan gained some cellmates.

Three newts hit the floor in a tangled skid, the cell door sliding shut before either Olivia or Yunan could slip through and even touch the frobot that tossed them in here. Damnit.

Still. Safety in numbers, and hopefully some additional intelligence-

“Ow! Branson, get off!”

“Yeah, well being my landing pad is the least you could do after getting us thrown in jail, Bartley!”

“Guys, you’re sitting on my tail…”

“Shut up, Blair!”

… Forget what she thought in regards to ‘intelligence’. “You three, just because you have presumably lost your stations does not mean you lost the respect you should hold for them.”

“Lady Olivia!” Blair was the first to rise to his feet, brushing off his robes and ignoring his brothers when they complained about being dumped. “We were just- hey, what are you doing here?”

Yunan slunk out of the cold shadows, everything about her scythe-sharp even without her weapons. “Whaddya mean? Surely that Core thing broadcasted our treasonous sentiments all over the damn castle.”

“General!” All three newts scrambled into a line and saluted.

Bartley spoke up first. “Ma’am! You were simply taken off the command registry for the bot units, but there were no other announcements made.” He nervously wrung at his hands, where stress-patchy shed skin still stuck. “And there… aren’t many people left we could ask. Most of the faculty and nobility that aren’t, um, MIA, were moved to the Newtopia on the ground unless they were actively in Research and Development.”

They might squabble like efts still, but they worked often enough with military corps such as the Night Guard to still hold a healthy respect for commanders. Good, Olivia could hopefully use that to leverage them into helping her and Yunan escape. “Which includes you?”

“... Which includes us,” Branson sighed, lowering his hand from its rigid salute. And then wheeled to turn on the newt next to him. “Or it did, until Bartley decided to go snoop where he shouldn’t poke his snout, and now we’re all gonna die! Or worse!”

“It’s definitely gonna be the ‘worse’, have you seen what Their Lordship gets up to in the biolabs? Freaky…” Blair muttered under his breath.

Yunan perked up, head tilted like a cockatrice tracking prey’s movement. “What does it get up to, then?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. Something to do with mold, weirdly. Or was it mushrooms…?” Bartley trailed off. “And it doesn’t matter anyway! It knows we’ve already seen that stuff, so how was I supposed to know that one unlabeled door in the basement was off limits!”

No way. Could it be the same place Olivia had failed to- “This door, did it have a circular pattern on it? With gear-like prongs.”

Helpfully, Yunan drew out the door’s pattern in the air, and Bartley’s eyes alit with recognition. “Yes! That’s exactly what it was! So what the heck was behind it that got us saddled with treason charges for just trying to take a look!?”

“Marcy…” Olivia whispered. “Marcy was behind the door.”

“Uh, the Night Captain? I thought she was, y’know…” Branson flicked his fingers above his head in an awkward imitation of branching black horns.

Yunan winced. “I mean, she was, but it’s a bit more complicated than that-”

The castle rumbled, the vibrations shivering through stone and grout and steel.

That was not the ion cannon.

“Well then un-complicate it!” Branson huffed. Paused, tilting his head to angle up to the vibrations they all heard. “... Something is wrong.”

Olivia and Yunan followed his line of sight.

The eye-lenses that recorded everything in this dungeon hall, and could play it back like a captured theater performance…

It was dead and blank. But unlike that time in the Core’s inner chambers, nothing had destroyed it-

Olivia leapt a full tailspan into the air when the hallway went black, the shriek of every cell door sliding open clawing at her eardrums.

And then gravity failed. “What the-?”

Blair looked up at her from where he crouched on the ground with his brothers, his cloak hood framing wild-eyed terror. “It’s the propulsors, the- the flight stabilizers, they must have- yipe!”

Flung to the side by the same rocking motion that sent the brothers flying, Olivia grabbed on to the nearest steady thing in the room- that being Yunan.

“Who cares what it is?!” the general snarled, her stressed hiss vibrating through her chest where Olivia was pressed flush to it. “The doors are open, let’s get out of here!”

She didn’t wait to see if the other newts were following them, or even to set Olivia down- she just bolted, just barely keeping her feet through the halls that were once so familiar to her.

They certainly weren’t now. The traditional blue-green-pink tapestry patterns of the royal family’s visages, scenes of the past, abstract tributes to the three facets of Amphibia’s natural balance- they were gone, stripped to reveal frescos of lava-sharp eyes and coral-curving fire lifting the castle into the sky.

It was also dark as death, with deactivated frobots the newts ran past slumped like corpses against the walls, intermittently washed in red from eerily silent alarm-flashes.

“There! That intersection, take a right!” Bartley cried out from behind them.

Olivia clung to Yunan as she skidded around the corner-

An array of lightning-split green points in the darkness, the sound of many-jointed steel limbs and sword-alloy claws striking stone tile, a huge armored mass hurtling towards them with the same frantic scrambling of the truly fear-blinded-

Huge and fast, like one of the raging typhoons that clawed the coast and tore the sky open, black water and black thunderclouds trapping the world between its talons-

Yunan backpedaled, barely yanking them both back into the intersecting hallway as Marcy streaked past them with a speed that belied such massive metal bulk.

Olivia pushed herself away from Yunan, and hit the ground running in pursuit of the unnatural construct that nearly flattened them. “Come on! We must follow her!”

To her credit, Yunan didn’t even blink, already at Olivia’s side as they ran as fast as their legs could take them.

“Hey! You’re going the wrong way!” Echoed behind them, but Olivia didn’t care. Marcy was there, she’d escaped too, they could all get out of here and this was her second chance to save the Captain and selfishly, in the ocean floor of her heart, Olivia wanted to ask if it was true, what the Core said? Did Marcy really-

“My lady!” Olivia’s silken shawl choked her as a fist grabbed it and yanked.

Sputtering, Olivia shoved away Yunan’s hand and whirled on her, seething. “Yunan! Marcy was right there, and I am not one of your army brethren to manhandle as you please…”

The roaring in her eardrums… wasn’t her own panic and steam-bubbling anger.

Olivia looked down.

Yawning blue rushed at her, blue like the wide river beneath them, blue like the glass-clear sky, blue like her feet planted far too close to the precarious edge of the hanger bay, wild-clawed wind tearing at her hair and dress.

“Hey guys, I told you to wait up- Blair, not the tail again!”

Olivia’s heart lurched when the brawling ball of newts tripped into her and her companion’s backs.

The castle had fallen a truly great height in the time that its flight capabilities had failed.

It was still a very long way to the freshwater beneath them.

Olivia’s world went white in a sheer veil of bubbles, and she knew no more.

Chapter Text

“Bweep?”

“No, Joe, we can’t fly, do you want us to get spotted when we’re this close?” Sasha grumbled, pushing away Joe Sparrow’s beak as he insistently nibbled at her hair. “We’re almost to the castle, anyway.”

As close as one could get to it when it was an airplane’s cruising height in the sky, anyway.

Speaking of… “Chuck, ETA?”

Chuck squinted up at the castle through the shadow-shading tree limbs, eyes flicking down occasionally to measure land as an accomplished farmer would measure tilled fields. He lifted up three fingers, one of them bent at the knuckle- impressive, given most Amphibians lacked the flexible precision of human hands.

“Two and a half leagues isn’t bad time.” Sasha remarked. “Think we’ll make a clean entrance in about, oh, two leagues?”

The other sole member of their covert team snorted. “Oh, certainly. I’m more worried about a clean exit- you’re always more likely to get caught on the way out, and I’m still not sure the sparrow can fly faster than a robot carrying all of us.”

“Four people isn’t that much of a weight to him, Grime.” And it would be four people. It had to be.

Marcy was still alive, still breathing- Sasha knew she was, sure as her own lungs drew breath like a seething volcano’s heart.

She glared up at the Newtopian castle, wishing with every bone in her body that Andrias could feel her intent to rend upon his royal person grievous bodily harm with malice aforethought, afterthought, and any other free time she’d had in the past two weeks.

Squinted.

Tilted her head.

“Yo… Grime, is the castle looking kinda wonky to you, or did that stupid helmet rattle something in my brain last time I got hit?”

“If you mean the castle falling out of the sky?” Grime responded mildly. “Then yes, it is.”

It was losing altitude. Its gray-stark walls blued by distance, Newtopia Castle’s fog-gentle float to the earth was deceptively slow; in reality Sasha knew it had to be plummeting with all the mercy of a meteor, the gigantic laser trebuchet at the castle spire tilted nearly a full forty-five degrees.

“Tulips.” Chuck’s spark-quick hand signals sketched out his suggestion.

“You’re right, we- this is an unexpected factor, but we can take advantage of this,” Sasha said decisively. “The box might be in a different location if it’s not powering the castle, but that means the castle isn’t powered. Which means all its security is dead.”

At least, it probably was. Sasha didn’t like relying on ‘maybe’s and ‘probably’s. Trusting those was like jaywalking across the interstate- flirting with the razor edge of fate, and likely to get someone killed-

Something rumbled in the distance, faint and splintering. Subtle vibrations, like the trees were shivering their roots like rattlesnakes, warning them of what was to come.

“Wait.” Sasha held up a fist, tension wired in her neck as she glanced back. With Chuck and Grime frozen beside her, she strained her senses towards the oak-groaning shiver-sounds echoing right ahead of them; her hearing was sharper than a frog’s or toad’s, after all. “Do you hear that?”

Silently they both shook their heads- and then Grime looked past her, single functioning eye wide, and Sasha remembered that while she had better hearing than them, the Amphibians had far better vision in the shadows than she did.

Sasha whirled back around to face the thing that crashed through the trees, trunks swaying and snapping as it ripped past the treeline as if it were tearing a theater curtain away.

Really was too much to hope it was just a wild animal, huh? Sasha thought wryly. Spun her swords out of their sheaths, already scanning for the usual structural weak points the frobots had; she and her companions would need to hit them hard, and fast, because this ‘bot was one mother of a big one.

It froze, multitude of eyes roving and round body rocking back on six legs, as if it were just as shocked to see them as they were shocked to see it.

“Chuck, with me! Attack pattern A-T!” Sasha called, launching to her left in a tuck-and-roll that took her behind one of the six segmented legs.

Chuck mirrored her, already clinging to one tree-sized leg and whipping out his laser-cutter stolen off a cloak-bot. They may not have the ropes or cables that this formation usually necessitated, but Chuck could improvise damn near anything into a workable interpretation of planned attack patterns. Once they had the thing’s legs out of the equation, it’d be simple work for the mountain-crushing weight of Barrel’s Warhammer to destroy its core.

Okay, so maybe Star Wars had been one of Marcy’s movies that Sasha actually remembered most of. She’d never admitted she liked it in the past, instead deflecting it as nerd shit- stupid, just one more way you fucked up with her- but watching as the giant walkers were tripped over their legs with just some cables was pretty cool.

And shockingly applicable to her current situation as a resistance commander fighting against an alien salamander king’s robot army.

Keyword being usually.

“Hide is too tough! Hurk-!” Chuck’s shout cut off in a wheeze as the robot lifted its- unmarked, hardly even scorched, what the hell was this thing made of- leg away and shook, whipping Chuck about like a cat with a wasp-stung paw.

The crack of his back hitting a tree shattered Grime’s stillness. “Sasha! Forget the legs, go for the head!”

“I’ll cover you!” And Sasha lunged, blades poised like a heron’s scissoring beak.

Sparks sprayed where her swords scraped against the trunk of one of its legs, and what the hell?

Red armor and pink Calamity-powered runes blurred out of the corner of her eye, and Sasha whirled around just in time to see the robot slam Grime into the dirt, pinning him like a raptor’s talons.

Storm’s-eye green shifted to focus on her.

Heaved away, as the robot reared up on two legs as if repelled by her seething presence, disconcertingly fluid and yet unsteady as a tadpole with fresh legs.

Unsteady, only two legs on the ground, this is my chance-!

This time, Sasha managed to make a chip in one of the thing’s legs, sword-point jammed into the seams of one of the annelidan armor-rings.

She grinned, baring fangs she did not have in a long-ingrained habit to imitate toad threat displays, when the robot lifted its lightly-damaged leg up and away from her. She had it on the back foot, literally.

… Oh crud, it’s on the back foot!

Sasha scrambled out of the way, but far too slow because this thing was huge and it fell fast, about to squish her into a pillbug pancake-

The robot tilted, swaying away from Sasha’s backpedal so that the main bulk of it… didn’t squish her?

The earth shook, impact-scattered dust blinding Sasha.

Whatever! Chuck was down for the count, Grime was definitely unconscious after slamming into the ground that hard, Sasha had to cut down this weird experimental super-bot while she still could, her hands heating and her breath fogging with a strength she drew from a dry, pink-shaded well-

The world went gray as something long and metal-plated- the other arms, they were right above her- collided right across her gut, heavy as a stone pillar. And just as immovable.

Sasha wheezed for air that would not come. Shit, knocked the air out of me, still gotta move, get this thing off me while the body is down!

She squirmed, clawed glove digging shallow furrows in the dirt as she hauled herself out from under the cable-leg-

Which coiled, pinning her other arm to her side and lifting her up as it rose to its feet once more.

Sasha raked steelpoint talons across the limb imprisoning her, snarling-

And froze, staring into the thirteen wells of radioactive green that were close enough to touch, almost all-consuming in their pull, like static that made all the hairs on Sasha’s arms stand up. Exactly like the weird feeling Sasha got when music box-powered tech was nearby, but way, way stronger.

Uncaring of the dust still in her eyes, Sasha glared right back at it with a scowl dug deep as a canyon.

The thing was just as freaky close up. Utterly still, it exuded a mist-pricking hum where its cable wrapped around Sasha; it put the hairs on the back of her neck up, a wordless static-song of power that belonged off the edge of the world and called to something in Sasha, deeper than blood and bone and breath of fire, like the velcro-pulling sensation from the Strength Temple in reverse.

… Why isn’t it doing anything? Sasha saw how hard it could whip around those limbs- by all rights it should be trying to squish her.

Unless Andrias wants us alive. Chill sluiced down Sasha’s spine at the thought.

As if hearing her thoughts, the robot hummed, the sound ringing in Sasha’s ears like struck crystal.

And she cringed violently, her single free hand flying up to cover an ear because ow, ow, ow, it was painful, like the screech-chime of glass scraping quartz.

Sasha’s world swooped when the robot flinched away from her in turn, and she was left shaking her head to clear the high-pitched vibrations echoing in her skull.

When she stopped, she glimpsed something else held in one of the robot’s talons, and the first thing she realized was that she recognized that thing.

Andrias’s crown? What the hell- Oh, no way, get that away from me-!

Sasha writhed in the iron grip trapping her, hand braced on the trunk of it to push herself free with all her strength because she had no idea what it was planning to do, but whatever it was it couldn’t be good.

Cool ivory pressed against her palm when she tried to shove the crown away, and Sasha’s frantic train of thought scattered like embers in a plains-wind.

And then it set the plains alight, a sudden explosion of heat that buffeted her with a storm of emotions and slash-scatter memories and the motion-shapes of thoughts not her own.

< ADMIN_WIT: Ally found [Sasha Sasha Sasha it’s me, I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to hurt anyone]. > A dozen firework-flashes of memory exploded behind her eyes- memories of Sasha herself, and Anne. And they were familiar scenes, from the point of view of… < ADMIN_WIT: Connection established [It’s me, it’s Marcy, I love you I missed you, it’s me, I’m sorry]. >

Sasha grit her teeth against the sudden swell of emotion-intent-words slamming into her with all the mercy of a runaway freight train.

Ow. Headache.

Hell, it felt like Sasha got thrown out of her entire body just from the sheer attempt to process.

“What-” Sasha panted, almost choking in shock at the faint wisps of smoke escaping her lips that definitely wasn’t normal, but somehow it was far from her greatest concern. “-The hell was that?”

< ADMIN_WIT: Extending apologies [Endless interfaces, motion-shapes filtered and translated to words still cracked through with shadows of not-words, sorry Sasha]. Designation: Wit. >

That voice. Wit, like one of the temples, like the gems, like the inaudible hum that vibrated along Sasha’s jaw and pricked her ears when she got close to things powered by the music box. “Marcy?”

< ADMIN_WIT: Confirmed [Sasha! Sasha Sasha Sasha, fluted fire and sunbeam-sharp blade in the night, sword-and-scales, yes!] > The voice bypassed Sasha’s ears entirely, dropping into intent and words like blocks of iron deposited into the seething lava of her mind.

Then the cables imprisoning her tightened, and Sasha’s gut lurched as they drew her dangerously close-

Face smushed against the robot’s steel hull, right between the unblinking eyes, Sasha pressed her palm against a glass-glowing eye and fruitlessly pushed. “Marcy! I get it, but put me down! Breathing! Air!” This is weird, this is weird, this is way too damn weird!

Gently, the robot- Marcy- set Sasha on her unsteady feet next to Grime.

Crud, Grime!

The bumpy, dry texture of Grime’s wrist was river-cool- but not too cold. His pulse beat steadily as a war-drum. He was fine.

… Gonna have a nasty headache when he wakes up, though.

As she made her way over to assess Chuck, Sasha was obliquely aware of the robotic behemoth behind her, tons of alloy and computer-wires tiptoeing across the grass on claws long as swords.

It was exactly like how Marcy would lurk in Sasha’s shadow with her hood up when she was having a particularly bad sensory day. And buried under the weird green static, that was Marcy’s voice.

The moment her ungloved hand touched Chuck where he was still slumped against the tree, he stirred. “Tulips… growing?”

Yikes. “Alright Chuck, how many fingers am I holding up?” Thank god for the concussion check they made us learn when another cheerleader flubbed a landing and cracked her head on the bleachers.

He squinted back at her in obvious pain. And then his eyes widened, his finger jabbing to point behind her.

“Chuck, I’m holding up a four, not one, so we really need to get you back to Felicia-” Sasha fumbled her words when she saw him groping for a weapon that had been tossed to the treeline, because how the hell did she forget-

Sasha backed up, hands held in an uncharacteristic gesture of surrender that clashed with the smoke-seething edge of command in her voice. “Chuck, stand down. This is an ally.”

Incredulously, Chuck pointed to where Grime still lay unconscious.

“... That was a misunderstanding,” she said weakly. “Look, this is- you remember Marcy, right? This is her.”

Chuck glanced at her, then at Marcy, and then back to Sasha. Held up three fingers. “How many fingers, Commander?”

“How many- ugh, I don’t have a head injury!” Sasha crossed her arms, blowing out her frustration in an exhale that felt like it should be hot enough to ripple the air. “Look, just- take this.”

Chuck had the good reflexes to grab on to the crown that she shoved his way, at least. Might not have a concussion after all.

He went still, eyes staring at Marcy as if there were wires tying him to her.

Sasha was concerned she’d have to pull him away from the crown, but Chuck shook himself off and retreated from it. “Marcy. How did it even happen? Tulips?”

“I intend to find out,” Sasha muttered darkly. Because seriously, what kind of sci-fi magic shit had they gotten involved with this time? “Keep an eye on Grime, get him awake if you can.”

She didn’t like the idea of leaving Grime’s triage to only Chuck, but he would agree. Intel first, because the unknown was where a knife was most likely to stab at you from. “Okay, Marcy, so we can just… talk to the crown? I have to be touching it?”

In response, Marcy lowered herself to the ground with a rumbling thud that vibrated straight up Sasha’s feet into her spine. One claw nudged the crown forward.

Sasha sat down across from her, back leaning against the tree she’d just woken up Chuck from. Dragged the crown closer, one hand gripping the closest prong. “Hit me with it. How does this thing work?”

< ADMIN_WIT: Neuroelectric transmissions. The most effective communication system with non-Core entities. > And beneath all that, there was the same gray-static hum of emotion, a layer of raw feelings and ghost-whispers smudging artificial lines of words. < A new Administrator was installed in the Core [Not my body but still me]. Previous Administrator was uploaded to a new vessel [Help me, lonely, claws spraying sparks as they scraped against steel doors, disconnect and dissociation]. >

“A… A new vessel?” Wait. Oh no. Please let me be wrong. “Is- if this thing was occupied before you were in it-” Sasha reached out beyond the crown-link, beyond flesh and blood, to that odd compass-pull that tugged her spirit towards the castle. She always thought it was the drive to rescue Marcy, but now… “Marcy, where’s your actual body?”

< ADMIN_WIT: Stolen. ADMIN_CORE attempted to integrate a new mind [It almost absorbed me, it was terrifying, Sasha] into the collective. ADMIN_CORE is now contained in a fully biological vessel [If you see something wearing my body, it’s not me, it’s the Core, it’s dangerous it’ll hurt you don’t go near it]- >

“Whoah, ease up there Marbles,” Sasha cut her off, massaging at her temples. Hell, it was like hearing and reading two entirely different conversations at once. “You’re kind of giving me a headache.”

Half of the mechanical creature’s eyes closed contemplatively, while the rest either stayed fixated on Sasha or flicking around to glance at the other members of the team.

< ADMIN_WIT: Toggling Full Command Visibility off [Where the heck is the other setting, I know it’s in here somewhere…]. Toggling Single-Mind Communication Overlay on. > The multi-layered mental sandblast of Marcy’s telepathic projections softened into static, and then faded entirely. < Is this better? >

Sasha couldn’t contain the pink-fogged sigh of relief as she slumped against the tree trunk behind her. Because strange as it was echoing directly in her brain like her own thoughts, what Sasha heard was undoubtedly Marcy’s voice- weird little inflections unique to her and all. “Much better.”

She eyed where the first pair of thick cable-legs tucked themselves under Marcy’s bulk like a particularly disturbing cat would. “Seriously though, I know I said I believed you about being… uh, you, but how did this even happen?” And is it something we can fix?

Sasha’s world went dark, orange sulfur-smoke fear bleeding into her peripheral vision and brimstone-razor heat burned a brand from where her arm rested casually on the coral crown, up her arm, into her skull-

< Olivia and Yunan, they rescued me, and then Andrias ambushed us, and the Core [The Core the Core the Core, searing-freezing-burning, flesh-blood-bone and code-wires-steel, channeled lightning on bare skin, body seizing and nerves screaming, voice screaming-] possessed my body [Knew it was coming, could see it lowering down, run away can’t escape trapped, slow as death as the descent of a blade as a beetle-dark helmet refusing to be dislodged as she thrashed about her head in desperation-], and I took its own body to keep it from taking my mind too [The howling shriek the storm the death-of-mind the fear the terror the pain, pain, pain-] >

‘-Pain’ vanished in a light steam-hiss of returning vision, and the first thing Sasha saw again was a hooked steel claw dragging away the crown from her grip, surrounded by half a dozen undulating cables anxiously fluttering their talons in concern, because Marcy was tactile by nature but knew not to touch Sasha when she got like this, when her gut roiled between breath-stealing anger and the slippery grasping at the fear that escaped its prison-

Sasha scrambled to her feet and just managed to find a steadying grip on a tree branch before she vomited like a blackout-drunk partygoer.

What the fuck.

There was no response. Because right, Marcy couldn’t answer, she’d been trapped in this mechanical body trying to escape binary crawling up her nerves like lava, like long needle-teeth sinking into her brain when the assimilation started and by the three stars it was trying to eat her-

Sasha nearly choked when she started dry heaving again.

This time, she didn’t flinch when spear-sharp talons gently pulled her hair back.

Sasha flung out a searching hand, grabbing onto the closest steel crescent-hook. Simply stood there for a full minute, letting the post-pukefest shakes ride themselves out.

Chuck tapped at her leg- when the hell had he gotten there?- signing, ‘Medical assistance?’

Feeling wretched indeed, but not actually harmed, Sasha slowly raised her free hand in a thumbs-up. “Yeah, I’m fine, just… gimme a minute.”

Or maybe thirty. That wasn’t just the words and faint impressions she’d gotten through the crown beforehand, it was like Sasha was there, memories intense and fresh as spilled blood.

Was that what happened to Marcy after we escaped?

… What had they left her to?

Sasha straightened. Grabbed her canteen from her belt and took a swig, spitting out the gross aftertaste. Grabbed the crown and dragged it to the other side of Marcy’s body, dropping into a deliberately coiled sit, ready to spring up at anything that might ambush them from above or below.

In the absence of being able to actually make up for leaving her behind, simply find the problem and kill it until it dies.

Sasha gestured to Chuck, silently inviting him to join the impromptu war meeting.

Pointedly, he looked at the crown, then the puddle of what remained of her lunch, and then back at her. Jabbed a thumb in Grime’s direction before backing off to try and wake him up.

… Fair enough.

Sasha sighed, feeling the light-buzzing sensation of Marcy in the back of her mind through the crown’s connection. “Marcy, it’s okay, I get that… wasn’t supposed to happen?”

< I- no, sorry. I made the filters stronger so it shouldn’t happen again, but still… >

“Look, it’s fine, I swear.” Well, I’m not fine after seeing that, so how bad was it to have lived it? “Really, I’m more worried about you. Because was that what happened to make you like- like this? What even was that thing?”

< … A collection of Amphibia’s greatest minds, uploaded into a unified consciousness. The Core of the empire’s conquest, > Marcy recited, the words feeling… rote. Quoted as a memorized script, with a fog-flicker of artificiality behind them. < A lot of them are Andrias’s ‘glorious conqueror’ ancestors. Fourteen thousand years worth of them. >

“But then… Why all this?” Sasha gestured to Marcy, and her situation, in entirety.

< It wanted a new vessel. A biological one that could actually contain it. I ended up in here because it couldn’t grab me in time. > Sasha couldn’t tell if the pang of fear and helplessness was hers, or Marcy’s echoes through the crown. < It wanted to merge me to it, the same way it had all the other minds in the collective. Kept saying all kinds of- just awful stuff, and it was watching me the entire time I was asleep in the tank- > Walls slammed down, cutting off Marcy’s bleeding emotions and leaving only knifelike silence. < … I don’t want to talk about them anymore. Please [Please don’t make me, tired of being made to do things, coercion and possession and running scared]. >

“Okay, that’s- you don’t have to.” Awkward, feeling as if her body was displaced a few inches to the left of where it really was, Sasha pressed her ungloved hand against one of the metal legs curled in front of her. “I’m sorry for pushing so fast,” she said, the guilt-tasting apology rolling off her tongue on instinct, as it always had in her head when she thought about her girls after the Resistance formed.

< ? [Apologizing? To me to us to anyone?] >

Sasha’s heart wrenched up rebelliously into her throat, and she pushed it back down, like swallowing magma. “We’ll go up and get you back your body, get the box, and kick those bastards so hard they’ll be feeling it for another thousand years.”

She stood and stretched, hooking the crown over her foot and kicking it up to catch in her arms. “Hey Chuck! If Grime is up for it, the mission’s still on!”

Marcy’s legs stirred, climbing the air like vines.

Slam.

Throwing herself back toward Marcy’s eyes, away from the overlapping metal trunks blocking her path, Sasha barked out, “Marcy, what the hell, dude? What gives!”

< You can’t go up there! >

“What? Why? Your body is there, that thing still has it!”

Lightning flashed behind Sasha’s eyes, red-black-red-black-red, like blood on dark armor and caliginous threats whispered with Marcy’s own voice in a sunless castle basement. < Yes, and it will kill you! >

Sasha snorted. “Oh please, as if I’d let it.”

< That won’t matter! The Core is on high alert after I escaped, it will catch you if you fly up to the castle, and the things it does to people who personally angered it… >

“So what, we just leave you up there possessed by that monster?”

Inwardly, Sasha knew Marcy was right. With a team as small as theirs, at their level of power, ambushing the castle had to remain just that- an ambush. With the knocks to the head Grime and Chuck sustained, and what Marcy knew about the dangers in Newtopia far more intimately than them…

< Just… please. I want my body back more than anyone, but it’s not worth your lives. > A long claw tapped at the side of Marcy’s hull. < There’s more up here than just Creatures and Caverns campaigns, Sasha. There’s war philosophies and battle tactics stored in here that have been tried and tested over millennia. We’ll make things right without getting any of us killed. >

Part of Sasha still wanted to take that logic and rip flaws into it with talon-sharp words, mend them with her own intent so that her loved ones would stay close and never stray, would allow her to protect them when they faltered because in the years previous she had been derelict of that duty in the worst of ways-

That part of her died swiftly as a candle in a blizzard, not even a smoke-wisp left trailing from the extinguished flame. No more manipulation, even if it felt like it’s for a good reason.

Sasha Heronslayer is a sword to wield, and a shield to bear. Not a person who leads by fear. The mantra glowed and sharpened in her mind like a tempering blade. An adaptation of a very old toad guardian’s tenet, one she’d seen translated several times over in the really old stuff gathering dust in the Plantar’s death trap of an archive.

Barrel Farlowe was far from the first to quote that philosophy, and even farther from the first toad to follow it. But he had been the last one to for a very, very long time.

Until now, at least.

“... Okay, I understand. You… definitely know our chances better than me.”

Marcy’s relief dropped on Sasha like a ball of cold mud. Her cable-trunk legs dragged away, the front two limbs curled loosely in front of her in a fashion so similar to how Marcy held wrist-crooked human arms that it gave Sasha the weirdest case of double-vision she’d had so far looking at her friend.

An acidic hum, faint as the sulfur from a volcano, vibrated at the base of Sasha’s skull.

She whipped her head around to see Grime leaning on an activated Barrel’s Warhammer, stoically ignoring Chuck’s attempts to wave him down.

He squinted critically, his one good eye narrowing. “Sasha, what the heck happened while I was out?”

“I, um. I can explain?” Sasha said sheepishly.

< What could possibly explain this? >

“... You know what, sure, fine,” Grime sighed, clearly knowing better than to get into it with a possible concussion. “Start with the giant robot that is not trying to kill us, now.”

“Right, um, about that ‘robot’...”

Chapter Text

Sasha stared at Marcy, sizing up how her friend compared to the dilapidated Plantar home.

“I, uh, don’t think you can fit in this way.”

< You don’t say? > echoed sarcastically from the crown- which was very awkward to hold on to and walk with, by the way.

“Listen, I’ve been under a lot of pressure, cut me some slack!” Sasha huffed. “We’ll see if the cargo entrances will work. Chuck, Grime, go ahead and head down the fireplace- Joe already knows the way to the upper roost. Get the relevant frogs in the auditorium for the mission report.”

A paired salute, and they vanished into the house.

Sasha jabbed a thumb behind her, where the forest thickened and the hills rose like waves. “Right, uh, the bigger entrance is this way. Let’s go.”

As they walked, Sasha felt Marcy’s silence through the crown she'd awkwardly looped her shoulder through like a wall of fog. She appreciated the deliberate partition after the red-black kaleidoscope of Marcy’s memories of possession, but without a voice to speak with or much identifiably organic body language, reading Marcy was… awkward.

“Sooo,” Sasha started, her quiet voice almost lost beneath the thuds and occasional rubble-crunches of Marcy placing her claws in precise, tiny increments. “Um, I guess… you might want to know what’s been going on down here while you were… asleep?”

< I knew things were bad from what I caught from the Core but not… this bad. > Marcy’s mental voice whispered like wind through a graveyard.

“We got everyone out, though. Or under, really,” Sasha reassured. “The Plantars have this crazy cave system under their house, it has like, a thousand years worth of frogs’ junk down there. And, it’s big enough to fit the whole town!”

< And you’re not just hiding out, are you? > Marcy finished, gleeful as light glinting off raised swords.

“Nope! You’re looking at the commander of the Wartwood Resistance!” Sasha’s voice glowed summer-warm with veiled pride. “We’re the most organized Andrias asskicking force on the continent besides the Eastlord’s and Westlord’s toads, so…”

Sasha halted, squinting at the cargo entrance they’d arrived at, giving her best estimate for its dimensions compared to Marcy’s size. “So we probably should have made bigger doors, hm.”

Marcy pried up the camouflage-plated wooden flap, another leg slithering underneath to shine a green-beamed flashlight from the uncovered lens where three claws met. < It'll be a tight squeeze, but I should be able to fit. > Three eyes swiveled in Sasha’s direction. < Maybe you should go first in case, thought. >

“No arguments there,” Sasha agreed, stepping into the artificial light that felt harsh after nearly a year of running off torches and shroom-lights. “C’mon, it’s not far.”

And it wasn’t, thankfully, even though the rumbles and scraps of dirt against metal as Marcy pulled her way through were unpleasant.

Simple mushroom light greeted Sasha at the end of the tunnel, warming the shells of snoozing snails in their stalls. Bessie’s head poked out of her shell, eyestalks swerving unerringly to Sasha as she chirped.

Sasha stepped aside to give Bessie her requested scritches, glancing back to make sure Marcy managed to pry herself out of the tunnel. “You good there, Marbles?”

Marcy’s claws dug into the floor outside the tunnel as if it were butter-soft and not a path packed down by hundreds of boots, dragging herself into the barn with a heavy thud.

She gathered her legs beneath her, thirteen eyes swiveling in dizzyingly opposite directions to take in Sasha, the snail stalls, the unsorted cargo alcove, and the high, ripple-stone ceiling marked by climbing fingers of moss.

< Oh, wow, this is big. It’s just the barn? >

“Yeah, the courtyard is way bigger, but the door from here to there is too small, sorry.” Sasha lifted her fingers away from the snail-shell to scrub a hand across the back of her neck, much to Bessie’s disappointment. “We can… knock down a wall or something later, so you can get through.”

< How big is the courtyard? Can it really fit the entire town? > Numbers and measurements and load-bearing calculations rose like bubbles through the connection, scrambled by such alien formulas that even if Sasha was more than a B-minus math student, she’d have no clue what it all meant.

“Oh man, it’s actually pretty cool, like, it goes so high up you can’t see the ceiling from the lowest parts.” Soaring roofs faded by darkness, stone-shaped aqueducts molded into the walls carrying water to the storage pools and aquaponic gardens, alcoves of frogs living their lives and fighting for them, steel ringing and moral-boosting Music Nights echoing in the town square and turning a cave into a cathedral…

< Ooh, I can see it! > The frog-made rivers, the training grounds, the pluck of Grime’s harpstrings and clash of weapons, all of it skimmed against Sasha’s brain like wool static. < Wow, the Plantars were really holding out on us. There’s some labs from old Plantars, right? Lemme at ‘em! > The sensation of gleefully grabbing fingers accompanied Marcy’s words. < I figured out how to synthesize hormones that would work for humans when I was in Newtopia, I bet I could here too! >

She started transitioning for real here? Of course, the answer was yes. With the freedom afforded to Marcy in Amphibia, not just away from her impending cross-country move but from family and societal expectations… Sasha couldn’t blame her.

“Y’know what, nobody else wants to mess with those, so they’re all yours if you can convince someone to bring it down to… you.” She frowned. “Wait. How did you know that?”

< Wait, didn’t you- oh. Oh! Hold on. > A wire-rattling sensation, like dry rice sifted in a bowl. < Okay, so, best way to explain this is that the way you’re hearing me talk right now is just an overlay, it filters out a lot of other connection stuff. But that other stuff is still happening, so… >

“So it’s not just words. Right, brain-to-brain connection, of course,” Sasha muttered. “So you, what, lifted that from my brain? You better not be digging around for dirt on old middle school crushes or anything, Marbles.”

< Of course I wouldn’t! And it’s more of a brain-to-crown-to-brain connection, by the way, so it means stuff gets lost in the transfer unless you purposefully decide to convey it, or if the memory is strong enough. > Marcy rocked back on four legs, lifting the front two up to nervously tap talons together. < I wouldn’t pry anyway. That would be rude, and I- I would never take things from your mind that weren’t given to me. That’s what the… y’know. What it does. >

That’s what the- oh. The Core. She said it wanted to assimilate her, so- “That’s… that’s good, thanks.” And then, an idea crawled across her mind, sharp as a smirk. “Hey, so, if you picked up my visuals of the resistance base earlier, does that mean it goes both ways?”

< I mean, yes, that’s what I was getting at, you don’t need to even speak out loud when we’re talking- ACK! > Marcy recoiled, eyes blinking sporadically. < Did you just… transmit the sensation of getting whacked with a pillow at me? >

“Yes! So it did work!” Sasha pumped a fist. If one of them could send straight memories, it made sense they could send physical feelings too. It was, admittedly, kinda cool. “Okay, do me!”

< I… I don’t know, the process is a bit different from this end. It’s less sharing and more… downloading working knowledge. >

Sasha shuddered at orange-echoed memories that weren’t even her. Reached out to place a hand on one of Marcy’s legs. “Hey, I’m- I wouldn’t force you to. But… I know you won’t do anything gross on purpose.”

< But how do you know? >

Sasha… knew a thing or two about not trusting herself to not hurt her friends. But Marcy wasn’t like her. They still had to address the music-box-shaped elephant in the room, and Sasha fully intended to grill her friend like a meatball for what that was about, but Marcy…

There was no true toxicity in her heart. Nothing like Sasha, who left everyone she touched bleeding.

But she didn’t say any of that. Instead, she reassured with, “Because I can feel your sarcasm through the crown, so I could definitely tell if you’re lying. And you’re not, so! It doesn’t seem any more malicious than giving me the answers to the math test.” She gingerly pressed her palm right beneath the green sliver of an eye on the crown, trying to convey that this was no manipulation, she promised. “And it’s not like I need the answers anyway. So if you’re uncomfortable with it, you don’t have to.”

< … Not that wrong of an analogy, honestly. > A buffeting sensation that felt more like a computer fan flipping on than a sigh. < But… Thank you. >

Sasha propped herself against the stall fence in a casual lean that belied her thoughts of resistance logistics and communication methods that slotted into her long-term priorities like new beads on an abacus. Right. Business.

“Although, uh, speaking of how the crown works- is there any other way besides it that you can talk with?” Sasha hefted the headpiece in question. “It’s not exactly meant for people who aren’t evil-salamander-sized, and I don’t want either of us to get stuck without a way to talk for when we head out to infiltrate the castle.”

< Aside from just scratching out letters in the dirt? Nope. > Ruefully, Marcy dug her claws into the dirt, over and over like a cat worrying at a blanket. < I think I can try picking at it, though? A lot of the data I integrated from the backup memory had to do with how this body works, and that includes the crown, so maybe I can make it less bulky? >

“In that case… ugh.” Sasha chewed on her lip, the pull between her duties as commander and staying with her friend leaving her feeling guilt-frayed. “Listen, I have to go report to everyone in the resistance, get them started thinking of a new game plan, assess how it changes missions in the next week…” She trailed off. “I, uh, don’t know when I’ll be back. But I will be.”

< Sure. I’ll work on stripping the crown down while you fill everyone in. > The tone was even, but Sasha could feel Marcy’s words reaching out, looking for a hand to hold. < See you soon? And maybe see if Maddie wants to say hi? >

Sasha passed the crown to Marcy’s awaiting claws, and felt something ripple in the back of her skull, like storm-winds tugging at trees. And then, a conspicuous emptiness where Marcy’s link once was, an unpopped lava-bubble in a sea of molten stone.

Sasha patted one of Marcy’s talons. “Yeah, I won’t leave you.” Not again, not ever again.

Chapter Text

“So! Any questions?”

Sasha looked over the half-full auditorium, Grime by her side. He’d already had to elbow her to get her back on track once or twice, and she didn’t begrudge him for it because she was distracted.

Wally cupped his hands around his snout. “Is this robot body-snatching a human thing?”

“Oh for-” Sasha threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender to the universe at large. “Y’know what, sure, things are already so weird. Yeah, maybe it is a human thing.”

“I knew it,” Wally’s vindicated whisper echoed in the otherwise-silent auditorium.

Which was… strange. Usually mission reports or conferring with the other rebellion heads were marked by an underlying layer of calls or enthusiastic jeers when an Imperial base took a hit. “Alright you guys, what aren’t you telling me?”

Discontented croaks and puffed up vocal sacs rippled across the bench, until Stumpy sighed and rose to his feet, far more gingerly than usual. “Our supply mission went well, but those damn bandits moved camps, they’re far too close for comfort now. So when we ran into them…”

“They stole the food. Damn it!” Sasha snarled, the geyser’s puff of smoke that erupted between clenched teeth almost shocking her out of her rage. Almost. “What are we looking at in terms of what we have left?”

“I was about to go check the restaurant pantry as well as the communal stores, but we’ll have to be prepared for some lean times.” Stumpy shrugged, resigned. “At least until we can head out for more grub, Commander.”

“... Okay, go take a look and report the food store levels to me, we’ll need to do some number crunching.” Sasha slid the bearing of command over herself the same way she closed the Helmet of Authority’s visor. “Croaker, Grime, you two are with me. We’ll need to shuffle some plans and assignments, see if we can get more hunting parties out.”

Grime’s voice snapped out, the rumble of an earthquake paired to Sasha’s volcano-sprayed smoke. “The rest of you, move out! Get some rest, we’re all going to have longer days ahead of us.”

They filed out, some whispering to themselves, some nodding to her as they left; Ivy waved at Sasha and pointed two of her four fingers to the stone ceiling- a V for victory, because Ivy hadn’t stopped pestering Sasha about what it meant when the gesture blazed from the screen when Sasha allowed her to watch some downloaded anime on her phone.

Sasha sighed, but didn’t let her shoulders slump. Instead she pushed aside the curtain to the backroom, throwing her fur cloak on a chair as a cushion. “Okay then, Croaker? Your suggestions first. How are we going to feed hundreds of frogs for the next week?”

--

Sasha didn’t so much walk to bed as she was carried.

That was to say, literally carried, the steel toes of her boots nearly dragging on the floor from her position on Grime’s back.

“Grimeeeee,” she whined, not even making a token effort to pry herself away- she was just that exhausted. “Seriously, we haven’t even decided on how we’re solving the food problem.”

“And we’ll decide it either tomorrow, or when you’re not in danger of leaving your face-print smudged in ink on the map, again.”

“That was once, you warty old bastard. Once!” she lamented, turning so her cheek was squished against the top of his head. “I can take care of myself.”

“Oh, certainly. Killing a heron proved that,” Grime said lightly. “However, you’re still lacking in some old soldier’s lessons. That being, sleep when you can and where you can, provided it’s not at the war table or in a warrior-wasp’s nest.”

“... Has someone fallen asleep in one of those? Aren’t they super venomous?” Sasha wouldn’t even be surprised, really. Every once in a while she still managed to be shocked by tales of casualties that started with a toad saying ‘Here, hold my Bog Grog and watch this!’ and ended without a body to bury.

“You know, if someone did, they never made it out alive. Probably why it’s part of the saying.” Sasha’s foot clipped against rock as Grime rounded the corner into the cave Sasha claimed as her room. “Now, sleep. And don’t expect this again! I am not a snail.”

“Pssh, ‘course, can’t have the frogs thinking you’ve gone soft.” Sasha shoved herself off his back, only wobbling slightly when her feet hit the dirt floor of her room.

Wait. Her room. “Shoot, Grime- I appreciate the lift, but I gotta go.”

Grime frowned. “If you think you can be so foolish as to pull another all-nighter-”

“It’s not that!” Sasha cut across him, snagging her lumpy pillow and rolling up her blanket. “I promised Marcy I’d be back as soon as I could. I can’t leave her alone!”

She couldn’t leave Marcy in more than just the usual way. The other girl had subliminally let slip just how empty and unmoored she felt through the crown-connection, like fragile new clouds. The Core was a hivemind, of course that body was constructed with the harmony of multiple brains in mind.

Sasha was aware the concept of talking to her best friend in such a body, through such a connection, rusted the iron-grated walls Sasha erected around herself and the place she kept her emotional vulnerability and her shame and any number of unpleasant feelings that she swallowed behind bared teeth.

Not much was stronger than the tug of need-and-needed that connected her to her friends, though. Especially since it’d been so long since she’d been needed, instead of actively mucking things up with them. “Look, Grime, I’ll sleep, you have my word, just not here.”

Grime scrutinized her. Sighed. “Just be sure to actually sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Thanks Grime!” Sasha called over her shoulder as she yanked aside the curtain that served as a ‘door’. Paused, leaning against the arc of stone to regain her balance and look at him. “And you better get some rest too, old man. You didn’t have a concussion but Marcy did knock you around a bit on accident.”

“She did not! I was simply keeping attention off of you and Chuck.” Grime huffed, arms crossed.

“Sure, sure. See you later, Grimesy. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“After we first moved into this undertown? If I see another bedbug infestation, it will be far too soon. What such large subterranean specimens were doing down here is still beyond me.”

Sasha shook her head ruefully. “Yeah, I think we cleared those out, it’s more of a… hyperbole in Amphibia, I guess.”

One last wave, and she was gone.

--

Dim shroom-glows and the bone-scraping sound of chiseling greeted Sasha as she stepped inside the barn-tunnel. “Marcy, how can you even see in this? Need me to raise the light level?”

Claws flexed and froze in their work, one talon still holding the delicate spool of wires spilling out from beneath the crown’s cracked shell.

Another limb eagerly wove at Sasha, who tried for a casual walk to where Marcy rested, but ended up with a hasty jog instead. “Sorry I got here so late, there were some… complications, during the mission report.”

A faint static-whir, as green pupils moved in eerie synchrony to glance at the bedding bundle in Sasha’s arms, a third robotic limb pointing to her with a tilt.

Understanding the question, Sasha spread her quilt on the well-worn ground next to Marcy. “It’s been a while since we’ve had a sleepover, yeah?”

Marcy’s eyes brightened like storm-glows in a cloud-shadowed sky- something Sasha’s subconscious hindbrain couldn’t decide was an invitation or a threat- and wove half her limbs into a tangled cradle around where Sasha dropped her pillow and quilt.

Huffing in amusement, Sasha dropped to sit and get as comfortable as someone could on a bed of dirt; not that she hadn’t slept in about a dozen rougher places before, of course. Frowned, thoughts tugging her lips down into a distinctly worried observation.

Marcy was always clingy. Especially during sleepovers at Sasha’s house, when she and Anne would jump down from the bed to join their friend on the floor-cot. But now…

“Hey, um… are you okay?” Sasha asked, and immediately winced. Stupid question, given everything.

Marcy paused her work on the crown. Gingerly, she spooled the thin wires back into the crack in its surface, nudging it over to Sasha.

< I’m fine, just… thinking. >

Sasha had always been able to taste lies like smoke on the wind. Before, it served as a warning of a seething argument between her parents, and then as a smog to choke others on. Now… “Are you sure? If it’s- if I said something earlier-”

Marcy’s voice cracked through Sasha’s brain like lightning. < No! No, it’s not you, it’s… > Static shivers and wisping winds, curling away. < It’s… me. It’s my fault. All the townsfolk, you, Anne- none of this would have happened to you if I hadn’t decided to use that stupid box. >

“Oh.” Sasha swallowed awkwardly. “Right.” That.

< Yeah. That. I’m so, so sorry. > Simple words, threaded with blood spraying like sparks from a plasma-sword, clashing words and clashing blades and clashing friends, holding love so close that your claws pierce it through-

Sasha was familiar with the feeling, the drive. She’d left her friends bleeding by trying to drag them closer by sword-sharp words in her pursuit of it.

And Marcy had already been hurt so badly, so far beyond anything on Earth or anything Sasha had ever felt; that projection from the crown was one of the most viscerally painful things Sasha could comprehend, and that was just a memory-echo rather than the real thing.

“It’s- okay, it wasn’t actually fine, but none of the shit I’ve ever done was fine. Heck, I can understand the reason… really well.” Sasha Waybright had long been known to hold grudges until the stars died, and she’d kill those same stars herself if she had to, no matter how hard it felt to change. “Of course I forgive you.”

She’d forgiven Marcy a long time ago. Nothing could ever justify what happened to her, and… Sasha understood far too well, the fear of her friends leaving her.

The searing sunbeam of her new and unfiltered honesty reflected back at Sasha like an array of mirrors; though perhaps only due to the nature of their communication, Marcy had instantly taken and accepted Sasha’s words as sincere.

It felt… nice. Sasha wasn’t lying in the first place, and she wasn’t spinning manipulations off her tongue, so still being believed for the unembellished truth was satisfying, a warm ember in her chest flaring with every wavered breeze.

< You… really mean that. > Marcy’s claw hovered closer, almost near enough to sketch a deliberate cut in the air above the scar tracing Sasha’s face.. < Even after everything that happened? >

Sasha snorted, leaning back against the tangle of cables thick around as her torso, strong enough to crush her ribcage to chalk-powder. “I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t.”

And she was trying not to be. She was trying, but it still seemed like everything she touched came away bleeding, including her friendships. She’d already let Marcy languish for weeks as a prisoner of King Andrias of all people while she was so focused on Wartwood and the bandits and even thoughts of Earth, and if that wasn’t an excruciatingly painful culmination of all the times she’d ignored Marcy’s interests and worries in favor of Anne or her own wants, she didn’t know what was.

(Maybe trying to be better could only get her so far. Maybe she was just like this, heart-rotted from too many betrayals and too many abuses.)

Marcy’s eyes shuttered into condemning, vertical slits as the eye-covers slid partially closed.

Slow, right in Sasha’s field of vision, one of Marcy’s claws wove closer. She grit her teeth, waiting for her friend’s judgment-

Startled, when Marcy’s limb nudged into her shoulder like an affectionate cat. < Hey, sad thoughts. Quit that. Where’s the confident Sasha I remember? >

“She grew a conscience, for one,” Sasha snorted.

< That doesn’t mean you should keep cutting yourself up over it. > Old middle school textbook passages flitted across, about bloodletting in medieval times, and how utterly detrimental it was.

Okay, I get the picture. “Then you definitely shouldn’t.”

< I mean, I… I would get it if you’re still mad at me, though. I am too. > A noncommittal hum whirred from somewhere inside Marcy’s body, traveling down her limbs and vibrating against Sasha’s back like a tuning fork. < We both messed up people pretty badly with our choices, huh? >

Sasha knotted one hand in the quilt in worry, the kind of absently needle-chilled thoughts that chased her after the sun went down. The snails snored gently in little chirruping purrs; the sounds of Wartwood Resistance’s outskirts during the night-cycle, punctuated by the gentle wind-whispers of a mind touching Sasha’s own.

Mouth dry, Sasha stroked a thumb beneath the crown’s green eye. “Earlier, you said none of this would have happened to me or Anne or Wartwood if not for the box, but… what about you?” She hunched her shoulders as Marcy turned to face her with a slow, iron creak- Sasha didn’t want her friend to see her welling tears, salt-bitter with failure and years of regret. “You- I couldn’t save you. Didn’t. I took too long and was too stuck in the delusion that everything would be okay in the meantime and you paid for it.”

Was still paying for it. Whatever the hell the Core was doing while it possessed Marcy’s body couldn’t be good, and her- the sword, right through her chest, a death-wound if Sasha had ever seen one.

Worry tore at Sasha’s heart in a shallow imitation of Andrias’s plasma blade burning through flesh-blood-bone what if they were too late and Marcy’s body wasn’t even alive for them to return her to-

Her wandering fingers caught on a wire, yanking out more of the disturbingly nervelike cords. “Ah- shit, sorry, I- here, you were working on this before I interrupted you.”

Sasha tried to pass the crown over, but it was shoved right back into her lap with the half-sensed impression of wait-important-telling-you.

The connection was smoke-hazed and muffled, but Sasha still caught feather-sharp pulses of < Dumb at first. > and < Andrias was our real enemy, not you not me not Anne. > and < At least you came for me. > and < Still dumb because of course I forgive you, there’s nothing to forgive. >

No hesitation. Marcy hadn’t even needed to think about it before she said it.

It felt like a second chance.

“... Thank you.” And if Sasha’s voice was watery and thick, Marcy refrained from commenting, only drawing entangled limbs closer.

It was strange for Sasha to see cold metal plates next to her instead of a human, to hear soft fan-whirring from inside a steel shell instead of the warm puffs of sleeping breaths.

The little whirrs from Marcy’s mechanical vessel rose and fell like waves, and Sasha slipped off between them mere moments after her head hit the pillow.

Chapter Text

Note to self, Sasha thought, arm tingling from where she’d slept on it and stomach sore with what had to be a fantastic bruise that formed overnight. Don’t sleep on the floor again. The blanket does nothing.

Creak.

The subtle groan of moving metal had Sasha’s fingers jolting to the dagger-sheath sewn onto soft leather boots, closing around the hilt and flipping the blade up before she even opened her eyes-

Thirteen panels of startled green eyes as tall as she was stared back at her, framed by five claw-tipped limbs thrown up in a surrender that was almost comical given the sheer size difference.

Sasha blinked away sleep and faded dream-shadows from her eyes, sheepishly sliding the knife back where it belonged. “Uh, sorry, Marbles. I’m… kind of a light sleeper these days.”

Anyone would be, really. You only encounter a Cloakbot out in the wilds once before your reflexes demonstrate that it’s not actually paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Doesn’t change that your first instinct is to hurt people, accident or not.

Three of Marcy’s central eyes blinked incredulously as she lowered her raised limbs… only to slither them into a layered weave around Sasha and her pillow-and-blanket floor-nest. The air whistled as swordlike claws extended, poised outward like the world’s most aggressively metallic thornbush.

Like a defensive wall.

Oh. “It’s fine though! There’s not really any chance we were followed down here- it’s just… habit,” Sasha finished lamely.

Unblinking green eyes wide as the horizon continued to stare at Sasha, almost as if looking past skin and blood and bone to a light that breathed when she did.

Almost reluctantly, segmented legs retreated to curl harmlessly beneath Marcy’s spherical bulk. Except for one, offering Sasha something looped between two claws that bore a familiar embedded green eye-shape.

“No way, you finished working on it already?” Sasha took the modified crown from Marcy carefully, feeling at the connection like sparks on damp tinder.

Not that it looked much like a crown at all, anymore. A loop of braided leather and insulated fabric, with threads of exposed wires peeking out from the knots where they connected to the glass-green disk that used to glare down from the crown’s center.

Experimentally, Sasha poked at the seam where the green panel fused to the leather backing- did Marcy somehow weld it there? “Definitely way easier to use than the crown. Although… where’d you get some of the stuff to make it?”

Wordlessly, Marcy pointed to the tattered corpse of what used to be a snail saddle.

“... Eh, I’m sure they won’t miss it,” Sasha waved off, shrugging the sash over her shoulder. Nice and light, like a sword-belt.

Marcy rolled into her corner of Sasha’s mind like a fog-bank. < Morning! You slept like a rock last night [Inaudible breaths where there used to be embarrassing snores, warmth curled against black iron plates guarding against the waking world, protecting-and-protected, a fire dimmed to resting embers]. >

Sasha winced at the yarn-tangled thought-shape Marcy dropped into her brain; she grappled with the staticky ball of her friend’s projected thoughts and images of Sasha herself in a way that felt distinctly like fumbling a wet bar of soap in the shower.

And then dropping it on the tile when looking at herself through another’s memories and feeling what another thought about her became a bit too much.

She knuckled at her impending headache, muttering, “Ow. Thing still packs a bit of a punch.” Tilted her head consideringly as the pressure faded. “Not as… intense as last time, though. Think I’m finally getting the hang of the uh, undercurrent, I guess.”

< But it works? >

“Yup. Even smoother than it used to be.” Probably from the full contact, rather than just resting a hand on a crown-spike.

Little plasma-spinning chirps echoed from within Marcy’s alloyed hull, and the pressure of night-chilled steel flung Sasha away from the tether between them that still echoed with breezes of satisfied glee.

Marcy’s limbs slithered like cold snake-coils, wrapping around Sasha and pressing her close beneath a vivid green eye. Which... tracked, in the weirdest way possible. Marcy had always been a full-body hugger.

Sasha loved her friend dearly. But this was weird, this was still way too weird; she might not feel unsafe around steel-echo hums and sword-claws and the sheer size of Marcy’s borrowed body, but the happy squint of eyes as tall as Sasha and unyielding armored segments were entirely different yet unnervingly similar to the brightness of Marcy’s dimpled grin and the grounding warmth of her hand tucked in Sasha’s.

A warmth that she felt lighting up the nerves behind her skull and down her spine like the soft glow of burnt tree-roots.

“Are you… trying to hug me with your body and your brain?”

< Not trying to, but… > Marcy’s limbs released Sasha into a stumble that left her braced on Marcy’s side, spear-tipped claws tapping and flexing contemplatively as the mind-warmth faded.

The impression of soft, warm fingers interlacing with hers, like when Sasha and Anne would hold Marcy’s hand inside her hoodie pocket, bloomed in Sasha’s mind, a sepia-faded memory worn smooth by affection and revisitation.

It wasn’t quite true human contact, but it was very close, and it was something both Sasha and Marcy had been lacking for far too long.

< I wish we could do this for real. > Marcy’s mental voice was small, shivering like spring leaves in the wind.

Me too, Sasha almost said. “And we can, once we kick Andrias and his weird robot boss’s asses.”

And they would.

< You’re proud of them. > Notes of fear-chilled trepidation seeped through the glowing updraft. < Are you sure they can do it? The Core- Andrias is- they’re both… The Core is the unification of Ancient Amphibia’s greatest minds, including its tacticians and generals. Please, please be careful… >

“Pssh, those guys don’t stand a chance,” Sasha waved off, bravado kicked up between them like billowing ash clouds. “Turns out the recreational mobbing was great practice for these frogs. They’re more bloodthirsty than some toad clanheads I’ve met!”

Not that Sasha had actually met many clanheads, even when the bulk of the toads gathered at the North Tower for the meeting. Just Bufo, Aldo, and a few heads from smaller clans. And then there was clan-heir Beatrix, but she was a category of her own. Shame she and her boys had packed up their forces to be a thorn in Andrias’s northeast side, largely ignoring other rebellion forces except to pass on intel.

< Speaking of that, how has the rebellion been operating? I’m surprised Andrias hasn’t found you yet- And oh! I saw some repurposed Frobot parts down here that I used for the crown, have you managed to crack their network? >

“Oh, man, okay, so! The resistance started… honestly because the townies were actually really vicious taking out the bots that followed us to Wartwood, and then Loggle told us something very interesting about the Plantar’s fireplace…”

--

Marcy let Sasha’s arm-sweeping and regaling narration roll over her like soft magma, matching adventures and missions and incidents to familiar froggy faces that she wished she’d had time to get to know better.

Marcy had interjected once, about projected bot patrols and their pathing algorithms. Sasha had looked up, a dragon-sharp glint in her eyes, proud as a poised blade.

And then she’d asked Marcy to elaborate. Asked Marcy to tell Sasha what she thought she should do.

The experience was novel, swaying beneath Marcy’s feet like a storm-thrown ship, especially after so long of a history as the one to seek compromise and acquiescence to keep the inevitable relationship friction away.

But it was nice, to listen and be listened to as Sasha brought up the food shortage, and then being able to do something about it and be listened to about… any problem, really.

Marcy had eagerly crunched the numbers like they were fragile chalkstone between her talons, even pointing out ways to maintain a surplus with a few specific crossbred mushroom species that could be transplanted to the main resistance tunnels basin, where the mycelium could weave even into tough limestone and thrive on the lower PH of the water.

From there she’d gotten… rather distracted once she started talking about the mushrooms, though.

But Sasha was actually paying attention still, making an effort even when Marcy’s wind-wandering words strayed far from topics that would actually help Wartwood, and closer to talking just for the sake of it.

And when Marcy stopped, waiting for the dismissal, it… didn’t happen. Each heavy pause prompted a needle-prickling sensation of encouragement from Sasha, a heron tilting its head and flaring its crest feathers in curiosity.

It stung, nettle-soft and imperceptible, that only now was Sasha listening to her infodumps, but the sting was easily overtaken by the interest-piqued sparks of acknowledgement from Sasha. Who was being genuine, wasn’t humoring a beloved friend who was nonetheless perceived as a bit scatterbrained.

Marcy’s tangent on Amphibian mycology flashed over the sash-connection like cloud-hidden glows, lightning sparking between the shadows of a thunderstorm that was human minds. Cloud to ground, lime-bright positive charge to negative charge, Marcy’s swirling storm-green tradewinds to Sasha-

Breeze-borne mycology trivia scattered like feathers in the wind, and Sasha jolted violently where she sat, her bewilderment blowing back to Marcy like hot ash.

Instantly, Marcy froze the green-creep of information. < Sasha? >

“Yeah! Yeah, fine.” Sasha gave her a thumbs-up with the hand that wasn’t massaging the bridge of her nose. “Just… didn’t realize there were so many hallucinogenic mushrooms growing here, which… you… never told me about.”

“... How do I know that?” Sasha muttered, barely audible underneath the increasing whirr of Marcy’s cooling fans.

I did that, I uploaded data directly into her brain it was an accident I didn’t mean to, uploads hurt, did I hurt her-

“Marcy!” The rap of gloved knuckles against the glass panel of one of Marcy’s eyes rang her back into reality like a tuning fork. “Chill! You’re fine, girlfriend, just- uh, right, you can’t breath- Okay, listen. Just… follow mine.”

A deep breath, long and slow enough that Marcy could practically feel the flow of oxygen, from lungs to blood to brain to the ribbon-weave connection between her and Sasha.

She attempted to copy it, because it was something to focus on, and Sasha was breathing deep and even so she was fine, she hadn’t been hurt. Marcy vented back a machine-hot puff of air. Repeated it, with every cycle of Sasha’s breaths, until the strain of emergency protocol code with no target finally unfurled.

< … Where did you learn to do that? >

“Oh, uh… Felicia had me learn this stuff, actually. I’m not a field medic, but I am a front-liner, so when we go to defend and evacuate any villages under attack, it’s a lot easier to haul civilians out of the line of fire when they’re not about to shake apart.” Sasha lifted a hand off Marcy’s segmented limb to scrub at the back of her neck. “Especially for the tadpoles. Trying to get back to the base without being tracked is hard when there’s kids freaked out enough to start crying.”

Civilians. It sounded almost strange, coming from the mouth of someone who used to treat math tests as life’s most arduous hurdle, but she was right. Marcy hadn’t exactly been a civilian for a long time either- as gilt as the title of Chief Ranger was, she’d still had to earn it, in part.

She wondered if the toads had a similar path, from squire to ranger to officer, or if Sasha had just kicked enough toad ass to elbow her way into the rank of lieutenant.

… Given what Marcy knew of both Sasha and toads, the latter was more likely.

She was still sharp as the spark before a wildfire, still a defender, but… softer, now, with a strong pink-weave of care between bristling obsidian spines.

And she loved Sasha for it, always had, even if it was a bit embarrassing to feel like cold-cracked glass, because she didn’t want to be treated like glass, just treated like someone who was loved and held with tenderness. But Sasha had always been the kind of person to fight her friends’ problems, rather than insulate them from it- for better or worse.

< Well, uh, it worked, so… thanks. > Marcy’s words pulsed with storm-sparks of concern, forking out and seeking all the unique, flame-licked edges of Sasha’s mind that made her Sasha. < Are you sure you’re okay after a download? It’s- I don’t know about downloads, but uploads are- > Screaming dragged out of her throat by wires of code, nails digging bloodied half-moons into hands cuffed to a chair- < …Painful. >

“Dude, don’t worry about it.” Sasha waved her off, swaying deceptively from still-recovering balance. “Although, uh, next time we do that, let’s do it on purpose instead so I can brace myself. Feels like someone spun me around on the tire swing too many times.”

Wait. < Next time? >

Sasha shrugged, shoulders tense. “Well, yeah. You know your stuff, and- sometimes I could use some… help when it comes to solving resistance problems,” she admitted, words catching in her throat as if they were made of jagged glass.

… Sasha never admitted weakness out loud, and Marcy found it hard to believe she would even after her change of heart. How long has she been burning both ends of her candle?

< Of course. I’ve always got Wartwood’s back- and yours. > Marcy curled one limb inward to tap a talon against her hull. < And I know a lot about Imperial Amphibia’s structure and tactics now. We could definitely blast it right back in their faces! >

“Oh hell yeah.” Sasha grinned, intent radiating like the rays of a desert-sharp sun; victory balanced at the tip of a blade, lives snatched from the jaws of the enemy, razor-feather wings mantled over those who she guarded. “I think it’s about time we took the fight to Andrias.”

Mentally, Marcy brushed out the bladed feathers of Sasha’s protective thoughts around her, just a little bit- as warm and protected and safe as it made her feel, her mind needed room to stretch. < Exactly. It might take a while, but I doubt they changed the default conquest and occupation protocol with the frobots, so outsmarting them will be an easy place to start. >

“Nice! With you and me, we’ll have the castle back on the ground and Andrias running with his tail between his legs before we get Anne back!” The smoke-sweet excitement of Sasha’s voice faded. “... If she comes back.” She swallowed, hard, and sat down. “Hey, is there- are there other ways to open a portal, or- or see across?”

< No, there isn’t. Just the music box. > Marcy pulled her limbs in closer, bunching Sasha’s discarded quilt around her hips. < … I miss her. >

“... It’s not the same without her. And I- I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to- the castle, and Toad Tower…” Sasha’s words dried up like a desert spring, sand-flashes of crumbling stone and the sting of steel against her face scraping across Marcy through their connection.

That feeling, like a line of fire across skin Marcy didn’t have anymore… That scar on Sasha’s face had to come from somewhere, thick and raised in the way that wounds that poorly healed from infection were.

< Anne just said that you fought. And that it was… bad. > Carefully, like examining delicate mothwings, Marcy brushed the cold curve of her claw against Sasha’s scarred cheek; she wanted so badly to hug Sasha with warm hands and a warm heart instead of smooth steel, but her friend still didn’t pull away from her touch.

“Well that’s an understatement. It was… not my proudest moment.” Sasha looked away ruefully, leaning back to pull her knees up in front of her. “Almost got Anne and the frogs killed.”

Marcy knew some of it, at least- even she wasn’t oblivious enough to miss the knife-flung insults and bared teeth hidden behind polite smiles at their dinner party.

But… that ‘almost’ hung like a dangling body over the abyss, its sweat-slick fingers deliberately letting go of that near-death, falling- < Sasha, did you- on purpose? >

Sasha shrugged weakly. “The least I could do was let go, I guess.”

The least you could-!

Sasha jerked back against segmented limbs as Marcy shoved her entire body right in front of her face, as if she could take Sasha into her armored hull and hold her, show her how loved she was as a protector, someone who held Marcy’s mind so fondly, so of course Marcy should do the same-

The green lightning-crack of what are you doing? froze Marcy in place, more motionless than any breathing being could hope to be.

“Marcy, what the hell? That’s what you’re mad about?” Sasha snapped defensively, bracing her hands against the steel behind her and getting right back up in Marcy’s face despite the laughable size difference, teeth bared like a toad’s threat display.

< Yes! Because you could have died! >

“Well, maybe I thought I was going to!”

< That’s exactly the problem! > Marcy punctuated her mental message with the slam of longsword-claws digging into dirt hard enough to splinter steel.

“You don’t get to judge me on this, Marcy.” Sasha glared up at her, voice wobbling as she blinked through unshed tears and the sheer weight of her projected emotions made Marcy wish she could cry, too. “Not you.”

< Maybe I don’t get to judge you! I’m not judging you! > Marcy’s thoughts rushed around her with all the untameable force of a storm. < Nothing is worth you dying. > Spiraling and lashing like the arms of a hurricane, thoughts scattering away from intensity that belied words and could only be projected and shown to someone else. < Can’t give up, don’t give up again [You’re too loved to be given up on, even if it’s you giving up on yourself, you can’t, not Sasha-friend-and-sword-heart-of-the-mountain!] >

Sasha gasped, shuddering when projected feelings roared back through the crown-connection like a wind tunnel to buffet her. Sighed shakily, slumping away from her snake-arced defensive posturing. “... It was really close. But I- I don’t feel that way anymore, trust me.”

Oh. < …I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled, > Marcy said quietly, trailed by the deliberate sensation of wiping away the wetness creased around Sasha’s eyes with fingers she didn’t have.

Sasha said nothing at first; she leaned forward, eyes downcast, to rest her head against the green glass of Marcy’s open eye with a soft thump. “I shouldn’t have either.” A low, breathy chuckle. “Don’t worry about it happening again. I’ve got too much to do, remember?”

Then, ticked off like a rote list, loud and clear as Sasha’s spoken voice, ‘Kick Andrias’s ass, keep the Resistance safe, find a way to Earth because I never got to tell Anne how I feel, get Marcy her body back, I need to keep her safe, and then-’

Wait. < Tell Anne what? > Marcy’s shaky curiosity rose up, despite feeling like a wrung-out towel.

“Hm?” Sasha turned her head to the side to press an emotion-flushed cheek to cool metal. “What’re you talking about?”

< You said you needed to tell Anne something- > Marcy cut off her message, considering how the flow of projected words through the overlay settings felt. Turned the thought over carefully, recalling how Sasha sounded to her. < … You didn’t even open your mouth, did you. >

“Well, no, I-” Sasha pulled away, stray strands of staticky hair clinging to Marcy’s eye. “Did you- are you pulling that from my brain?”

The smoke-slip of anxiety around Sasha’s thoughts made Marcy mentally recoil. < Of course not! You were practically yelling in my ear, I didn’t know it wasn’t on purpose. > She paused, testing the obsidian-sharp cracks that were the edges of Sasha’s mind. < I couldn’t even if I wanted to, I think. Looks like you just projected it on purpose without knowing. >

“That’s good, at least.” Sasha gusted out a sigh, slumping against the curl of Marcy’s limbs; relaxed, and open, so they were okay, they had their understanding back.

< Why, embarrassed about something? > Marcy teased.

‘Absolutely not!’ Sasha shot back, her mental relay deliberate and somehow exactly like her. ‘And yes, that one was on purpose. Could come in handy if someone eavesdrops, I guess.’

< And you figure out just when you get embarrassed about something. > Marcy pushed the light glass-flutter of amusement beside her words- gentle, friendly pokes. < Hmm, very suspicious, Commander. >

“Oh, piss off,” Sasha grumbled half-heartedly, shoulders riding up in a slouch that made her look uncharacteristically shy, especially without the bulk of boiled leather armor and thick fur. “I just- y’know, if she ever comes back, I…” Words faded, while scatter-slash impressions and thoughts lit up like cracks of lava.

The rock of a raft on the waves, the spray of sweet saltwater against her face, an ice-channeled riptide that she’d fought to tame but now wanted nothing more than to dive in and let the currents claim her-

< Oh, > Marcy realized, unknotting the blue-stained tangle into coherent ideas. < You love her. >

Sasha’s expression shuttered with shame and longing both, fingers digging into the discarded pillow from their sleepover. Her mouth worked, wordless, and she squeezed her eyes shut. “... I didn’t mean to send any of that,” she said lowly.

< No, um, I- don’t worry about it. > Marcy tapped her claws on the ground in an anxious staccato.

She acknowledged some thoughts from her previous years never went away, and never would go away, even if she never dared to voice them until now. But she understood.

Anne was so very easy to love, after all.

And so was Sasha, if only she’d let herself be; who held Marcy’s gaze with dawning comprehension, even as Marcy tried very hard not to get lost in the tiny points of blue looking up at her, brighter and hotter than a summer sky.

< Me too. > Marcy rocked her round body subtly, back and forth like the foam-tipped waves of Sasha’s Anne-thoughts. < Since we were in middle school, really. > And it had only grown like twisting sweet-vines since then, a constant curl of affection and longing by her heart.

The distant bustle of New Wartwood waking up echoed in the hall, and the snails stirred in their pens.

“... You should tell her,” Sasha said finally; a fresh ache, like the view of a friend’s turned back. “If- when. When she gets back.”

Missed chances, the silhouette of someone’s retreating form, an outstretched hand that Marcy wasn’t sure was hers or Sasha’s- < Only if you do, too. We… might not get the chance, later. >

“Whoa, hey, you wouldn’t be doubting your esteemed Commander, would you?” Sasha jabbed an elbow into Marcy’s limb, hiding a quiet hiss when she inevitably faced the consequences of ramming her arm into solid steel.

The confidence was fragile as summer ice, but… genuine, still, like a hand surreptitiously offered for Marcy to hold. < Oh, far be it from me to doubt your prowess, Commander, but I think the townsfolk know even big, freaky mammals like us need to sleep. >

Which Sasha hadn’t been, even if she’d never told Marcy. The dried cracks and furrows like sluggish mudflow in her brain were too easy to see.

“Oh, so that’s what this sleepover is about? Enforcing a bedtime? What happened to ‘Never ever go to sleep’?” Sasha snorted. “You were the one up all night making that sash thing.”

< I don’t actually need to sleep, > Marcy pointed out. < Turning off all the external sensory systems to dedicate more power to higher mechanics is the closest thing. >

“... Right, computer brain,” Sasha muttered.

Marcy elected not to correct her that the central memory that contained her consciousness was biomechanical, grown from an insectoid species from another world that interfaced themselves with their own ships to navigate during spaceflight. She was already having a hard time not thinking about how disturbing the concept was.

Sasha waved, beckoning at Marcy’s wandering attention. “Say, I don’t actually have an official rank for it or anything yet, but you’re one of the smartest people I know. What do you say about being the resistance’s official advisor?”

There was no thought or calculation required. < Yes! >

It’s the least I can do to at least start making it up to you and Anne and Amphibia after I was too selfish to stop running away and too blind to see Andrias for who he was.

The Core had literally been living beneath her room (don’t think about it don’t think about it don't think about it-), how had she not noticed?

“Glad to have you on board then, partner.” Sasha jauntily offered both her hand and a crooked smile, grabbing onto one of Marcy’s long claws and shaking it. “Welcome to the team, Head Advisor Wu.”

Chapter Text

Despite the long day stretching behind her, and the equally long one on the horizon, Sasha stared up at the night-darkened ceiling of the snail-barn tunnel. The faint whirring of Marcy’s internal mechanisms were quieter than thought as she maintained the ‘sleep mode’, as she called it- her attention and mind turned inward, to process and calculate and know things better and better with every night Sasha spent with her.

And it was a good thing Marcy wasn’t paying attention to the outside, with that the wired sash left draped over one of the six limbs entangled in a nest around Sasha’s sleep-spot.

Because Sasha did not want her sniffing out the thoughts that whirled in her brain like cinders.

“Get Marcy her body back, keep her safe-” and then what, Waybright? Kiss her? Good fucking lord.

All too conscious of the dim-glowing eyes that sightlessly lit her temporary sleeping nest in a wash of green light, Sasha repressed her dramatic groan and rolled away from Marcy.

The realization had cracked through her like lightning in a night-dark storm, and now she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Sasha liked Marcy. Wanted to stay as close to her as she’d be allowed, body and mind and soul, because there were fleeting crushes and there was whatever the hell this was.

And what this was- Sasha liked the sound of Marcy’s voice, with or without the faint layered hum of the telepathic overlay, liked the sky-fresh confidence she had in herself and her strategies and her friends. The way she sent smiles through the connection that felt sunny and sly and dimpled even without her actual body; which Sasha wanted to hold close and listen to her heartbeat, twine her fingers through dark hair-

Marcy had always been pretty, in Sasha’s eyes- both her friends were. The observation was irrelevant to the fact that Sasha wanted Marcy, drawn to love her for who she was, a lodestone to Sasha’s iron spear-point.

Sasha belatedly realized she’d stopped thinking of Marcy in a ‘she’s cute and I’m not blind’ way a long time ago, and hurled straight down the endless canyon of ‘I am crushing on my best friend so hard it could turn boulders to powder’.

… Marcy had enough to worry about. And so did Sasha. Focus, Waybright. Heronslayer. Don’t burden her when you’ve got other things to focus on, people to lead and frogs to feed.

Which, speaking of, perhaps she could run through some ideas with her new advisor…

--

Brian reached into the overstuffed cart with the hand not resting his poleaxe on his shoulder, cheerfully stuffing the unearthed raw chocopede into his mouth.

Dessert for breakfast, especially stolen dessert for breakfast, never truly got old.

The sad truth was that those resistance frogs just didn’t have the numbers- and Brian would know, given numbers were his ex-career. Didn’t have the numbers to feed themselves, didn’t have the numbers to guard supply runs, definitely didn’t have the numbers to survive Andrias’s strange metal drone army.

The Marauders didn’t have the numbers either, technically, so they just borrowed the labor of others. And if they managed to catch a few rebels to ship off to the Crown so they could be left alone, well, that was just business.

Wheels groaned and creaked, and Brian nearly ran face-first into the back of the cart. “Hey! What’s the holdup!”

“Shh!” The twiggy newt at the driver’s seat hissed back at him. “Did you hear that?”

Brian indulged his fellow marauder with a moment of silence, before snorting. “No, those dang machines are super loud, and those annoying frogs don’t know about these backroads. Now get a move on!”

“No, I swear, I heard something in the bushes!” the newt insisted.

The gaggle of frogs and toads accompanying the cart cackled, heckling at their fellow Marauder’s paranoia.

Derisively, Brian picked the remaining chocopede chitin from between his teeth. “Sure you do. Did you sneak something you shouldn’t have from the mushroom haul?”

Yellow slits glared at Brian from around the cart’s corner, and the newt’s mouth opened in preparation of what was no doubt an annoyingly long tirade-

And shrieked, blood spraying in an arc where his fingers were severed by the dagger that flew out of nowhere.

Axe out, feet braced, sharp teeth pulled in a snarl. Dessert and the blood of my enemies, oh, this is a great day!

Snap.

Dismayed, Brian could only watch as their panicked beetle broke free from the cart, leather snapping as it barreled away from the smell of blood and the pained wails of the driver.

They weren’t aiming for the driver’s fingers- they were aiming for the reins!

This wasn’t a catch and release trap. This was a permanent one, like the fancy Newtopia razor-wire snares that put an end to the more aggressive sea-snakes haunting their harbors.

The whisper of wind through fur, unnaturally light footsteps-

It was by pure dumb luck that Brian managed to put up his poleaxe in a hasty block, nearly buckling under the brutal weight of his attacker’s downswing.

As soon as Brian caught sight of his attacker, and didn’t need to look down from his towering height to meet their eyes, he realized.

Pale skin, flush with hot blood and the exhilaration of battle, blunt teeth bared in a threat that would strike doubt in the heart of any toad regardless of the lack of fangs, dark-plumed fur bristling like the hackles of the hybeena it used to belong to.

A warmblooded wolven terror that was unnaturally tall, unnaturally strong, unnaturally tireless, and just plain unnatural all around in a way that reminded Brian of tales of toad-eating monsters that would devour little tadpoles that didn’t finish their turnips.

Oh no. The resistance’s human is here?

“Get them!” Brian shouted between one huff of strained breath and the next. The human was here? Fine! There were only two other frogs with her. “We outnumber them!”

He pushed back at the human, lashing out with the butt of his poleaxe.

The smack of the oak shaft hitting leather gloves cracked across his eardrums, because the human had caught the blow that could crack giant beetle chitin like brittle glass-

Trailing black fur whipped over Brian’s vision as the human slipped under his guard, heron-clawed fingers raking across his eye.

Red lines of fire burned even hotter than the indignant shame of being bested by a child who didn’t even need to use a weapon. “Augh! What did I tell you stupid interns, I said to get her-”

The forest air screamed, crackling with the sun-echo shriek of no Amphibian or beast Brian had ever heard.

Pulled by instinct stronger than thought, he turned on his heel to run from the sword-screeching roar, cowardice be damned. If the other marauders were still alive after this, they’d find their way back to camp if they were competent enough.

“Marcy, grab him!”

A faint grasswhistle-whisper of blades cutting through humid air-

His head cracked against the ground, ribs groaning and lungs heaving for breath against the claw-cage of steel pressing him down. Claws that attached to a hinged grasp, to a segmented metal tree-trunk of a limb, to the spirit-torn glow of thirteen huge eyes.

What, Brian barely managed to question, the hell is that.

Instead of an answer to his half-mad plea, Brian was greeted by the human’s face looming above him, her head tilted like a bird considering if he was worth the trouble of eating or not.

He wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t eat him.

“Listen here, you honorless, annoying little shit. You and your gross little gang playacting as bandits can do whatever the hell you want to Andrias’s people, but leave us alone.” Brian couldn’t help his instinctive flinch when her rose-sharp sword stabbed into the ground bare inches from his exposed neck, the threat clear.

Pink, for strength and wars won and bringing calamitous defeat down on one’s enemies with all the mercy of a warhammer.

Given the reputation the strange human beasts had gained for being practically unkillable, the resistance’s human carrying the invoked warrior’s hue into battle with her made way too much sense, now that Brian actually had the displeasure of encountering her.

“You got lucky today, because you get to go back to your little buddies, and tell them that if I catch them stealing from us again, I will kill them until they die.” The metal monster’s claws pressed Brian deeper into the dirt, but the human’s glare was somehow far more intimidating than the… thing with eyes green as death. “Capisce?”

“What’s a cap eesh?” Brian blurted out, tongue taking over while his thoughts ran in panicked little circles.

“What a- Marcy, stop laughing- What a ‘capisce’ is doesn’t matter, what matters is you should be thanking whatever cairn-spirits are unlucky enough to be watching over your pathetic excuses for battles, because you get to leave with a working eye and all your limbs attached.” The human’s sword whipped out of the dirt, vanishing into its sheath. “You’re welcome.”

The metal monster’s talons slowly lifted off of Brian, dangerously sharp clawpoints trailing dirt into the still-weeping wounds lashed across his face, though he dared not move.

The moment he was clear, though, Brian bolted, nearly tripping over a limp marauder- and when had they even fallen, in the brief fire-flash of an ambush? Still. Better them than him!

The resistance might not have the numbers still, but Brian’s math was clearly out of practice. The many-eyed monster was a new and unexpected factor, however…

I wonder if Barry would want to know anything about this- he lived near a town with a human, after all…

Chapter Text

Reclaiming their stolen food supplies was a roaring success; of course, Marcy did have a near-perfect streak of completed missions from her time as Head Ranger, and the pride in continuing that reputation nestled in her central memory like sun-warmed stones.

Not everything was quite so quick and easy, though. She knew this- had known this since she was still a squire, and the plague that struck down the village she and her mentor were assigned could not be fought like cultists or pirates or even restless political agents.

Andrias’s robots could be struck down like cultists and pirates, though. And as ungainly as her massive borrowed body could be, Marcy was very good at striking down Andrias’s robots.

The Suriname-series Frobot pinned beneath Marcy roiled, straining against the four limbs pressed onto its back as the nodes carrying full mini-bot units creaked open.

Oh no you don’t!

Marcy clamped the talons of her remaining two legs into the dirt, whipping one of her limbs away from the bucking Suriname, four scythe-sharp claws ratcheting closed-

The drilling point of her clenched claws punched straight through the exposed cables of the Frobot’s arched neck-hinges, driving all the way into the plate-protected sensory system.

The Suriname slumped beneath Marcy, deactivated.

‘Marcy! We got another big one by the town hall! I’m still stuck over here with the Judge units!’ Sasha’s sword-slashed words reeled through Marcy’s mind like the call of a war-pipe. ‘It’s where the kids were hidden!’

Already moving, Marcy scuttled across the battlefield, uncaring of any delicacy as fences and half-broken walls crunched and splintered beneath her talons. Children, tadpoles and efts even younger than Sprig crammed into the only stone building in the town, hiding from the uncaring robotic soldiers that raided on the orders of the king.

This particular town was fairly sizable, and prided itself on its stone-scrabble independence shoved up against the southern mountains; they refused to let the Crown roll over and tear up their entire lives for more manufacturing plants.

It was a refusal that they very nearly paid for with their lives at the hands of the king.

Who was supposed to be protecting them!

How dare he! Marcy’s rage flared as soon as she spotted the first Frobot firing holes into crumbling stone walls hiding terrified Amphibians, her storm-shredding roar demanding the attention of her foes.

The first robot to reach her crunched like a cockroach beneath her claws. The rest soon followed.

One of the walls supporting the town hall tilted dangerously inward, and Marcy lunged to tear it out rather than allow it to crush the occupants, claws digging into stone rotted by time and laser fire both.

Marcy wanted to cry when the panicked shrieks of tadpoles and the adult frogs too old or sickly to fight filtered through her sensory systems. Andrias was doing this to his own people. He was hurting them, in a way that Marcy couldn’t imagine hurting people.

She took an oath to protect the realm and its citizens, back when she’d graduated to a full ranger after her mentor decided she was ready to move on from squiring. No matter the state of the kingdom or the actions of its people. And she’d taken it seriously.

The rangers of the Night Guard weren’t meant for bright glory on the battlefield, sunlight gleaming off armor and swords. They worked in the open, sure, but their title was a truthful one; they guarded against the night, and all that lurked in it- threats that nested in stony dens and the hearts of malicious Amphibians both, plagues and disasters that could not be fought with swords and spears.

No matter the state of the kingdom. No matter the actions of the people. But the sentiment of the king had never been called into question. He’d ruled justly, she’d thought. Arranging townships and highborn houses alike as if they were Flipwart pieces, perfectly balanced across the board in a peaceful standstill.

It was far too easy to see the flaws cracked deep as a sunless sea trench, once she’d jumped into the waters with everyone else, falling away from a career in the Guard that, looking back, was suspiciously isolated to the capital and the surrounding territories.

She’d thought she could use her position to look for Sasha and Anne, but Andrias (and the Core, always the Core, eyes everywhere-) had always kept her close with the promise of the eyes and eardrums of royal informants out in the country looking for news of a human. She hadn’t seen just how bad things were even before he decided to bust out the laser guns and robot units that trampled everyone underfoot, frogs and toads and newts alike.

Dejection and anger writhed within her, echoing like thunder in the canyon connecting her to Sasha. < Peacekeeper for a thousand years. Liar! >

He’d lied to everyone, and she’d known it, because that’s how he told her he kept all the squabbling council members and haughty nobles happy and actually working together instead of constantly straining to kick out the social ladders from beneath their peers’ feet.

She thought she’d been special, when he divulged one of the secrets to managing his court. A confidante, a like-minded heir. A few cotton-fluff lies to keep everyone happy and together was good.

But she hadn’t known the extent of that millennium-old labyrinth of deceptions and hidden traps, filled with blood-dark betrayals that didn’t even spare the people he cared about, especially her.

(What was worse was that Marcy still loved him, just as much as she feared him and was so, so angry at him.

Almost as angry as she was with herself.)

Marcy turned away from the cowering froglets hidden behind frail relatives who stood their ground nonetheless; she knew she looked scary, sure, but it still hurt a bit.

She tuned out the sounds of the frogs sheltered in the town hall, the crash of collapsing buildings, the crackle of laser fire and the screams of casualties-

‘Oh, shit!’ slammed into Marcy’s mind like a car-sized hammer to her chest.

The faint sound of something furry and human-sized hurtling through the air was familiar to Marcy by now, though usually under her friend’s own power.

Faster than instinct, guided by smoke-scoured thoughts from Sasha’s connection, Marcy pinpointed where her friend was, her trajectory, where she would land-

Sasha crashed into Marcy’s outstretched claws, breath wheezing out of her lungs even as Marcy took care to rock back with the inertia.

< Sasha! Are you okay? >

‘... Ow. Ribs. Cracked, I think,’ Sasha managed to project, still too winded to speak aloud. ‘Judge-bots got a size upgrade. With a way bigger hammer.’

Crash. Crunch.

As if summoned by Sasha’s silent imprecations, the Frobot in question stomped straight through a half-standing house, iron gavel bearing scars that had to have come from Sasha’s blades.

The feeling of a hammer striking her had been entirely literal, apparently.

The hinges of Marcy’s claws creaked as Sasha shoved them apart, grunting, “Hell. We have to get the civilians out of here.”

< Load-bearing wall is gone, but the building is stable for now, > Marcy shot back, already half-submerged in the flickering green fog of what she’d come to think of as increasing her RAM capacity, her eyes only half-above the stream of projections and executable actions like an alligator above the waterline. < You can get them out faster. >

Sasha’s brief questioning coiled around Marcy’s mind like unspooled silk, and wove into acceptance as wire-bright flickers from Marcy pointed out her cracked ribs, the panicking froglets about to be trapped, the strength of the literally-alien alloy of Marcy’s hull against a simple iron hammer.

Even with the added benefit of a telepathic connection, Marcy thought as she spread her talons wide in preparation of the Judge Frobot’s advance, it still said much that Sasha trusted her so wordlessly, even when it went against her own battle-wrought instincts, and that Marcy trusted her in return.

Tearing great gouges into the earth with her claws, Marcy turned herself to the Frobot-

She saw the hammer swinging at her side too late.

The world went error-green as Marcy’s hull rang like a struck bell, vibrating all the way down to her rigging and her unpowered crystalline battery and her biomechanical center.

The earth shook beneath her as she hit the ground, hard, though she barely felt it past the sensation remarkably like that of brain-jello shaking in a metal bowl.

Note to self, account for improvements made to Frobot series since the rebellion’s start, Marcy thought sluggishly, attention catching on a spiderwebbing of cracks up her outermost visual sensor. The heck is R&D even putting into specialized units, these days? If our intel on their specs is this outdated, that’ll be a problem later-

Something behind her hissed like a lit fuse.

The Judge in front of her froze. So did Marcy, her sensors spiking and flaring with the impossible, because if the atmospheric pressure really had increased that much and the temperature spiked so high, they would all be molten slag-pancakes, did something get knocked out of alignment when she took a hammer to the head-?

Just as quickly as it swallowed the world, the pulse-weight feeling of pressurized magma vanished.

“Hey, asshole!”

Pink trailing after her like a comet’s tail, Sasha lanced across Marcy’s visuals like a sunbeam, tightly-gripped swords flared out to her sides like heron’s wings.

Keening fire spat and crackled and lashed out with denial and bared teeth and ‘Don’t touch her!’.

Marcy blinked away flashing sensory system error messages, but it was already over, the Frobot toppling over with hands fruitlessly reaching for the hole torn into its torso- no, melted into it.

Panting, Sasha whirled away from the Judgebot’s wreckage, light fading from her eyes and magenta smoke puffing from between her teeth like dragon’s breaths.

Like Anne, back in the castle. But weaker. More like a distant heat-shimmer of power than the all-consuming blue surge that forced even gravity itself to kneel.

It felt familiar, in a way that was impossible to explain with clinical backup memory drives stored in her current vessel. A force that broke and built worlds under the touch of salamanders’ webbed hands; power that, when left unrefined, wove into reality like the world’s living veins.

Calamity exists on all planes, in all states. It was how the box channeled it to part time and space like a superstring-stitched curtain.

And then the Calamity was gone, like a wildfire leaving nothing but cool ash behind. “Marcy!” Sasha sheathed her swords hurriedly, almost skidding on the seared dirt path as she ran to where Marcy sat. “Are you okay?”

< Yeah, it didn’t even hurt. Just… took me by surprise. > Marcy blinked her eyes, one at a time. < But what the heck was that? >

“The heck was- oh.” Sasha tore her eyes away from Marcy to gaze sightlessly at the Frobot’s remains drooling half-melted iron onto the dirt road. “Did I do that?”

< I think you did… > Anne was connected to the stones still, somehow, so could Sasha…?

“I- I just got real mad, I guess. I felt like someone hit my head with a crowbar, and then I saw you go down…”

Oh.

Marcy gathered five of her legs beneath her, using the remaining one to press Sasha in close, a silent thank you for the concern she felt licking at the edges of the crown-link, and then nudged her to the crumbling town hall.

< Hey, I’m fine, but some of the people here might not be. > Marcy’s self-assuredness traveled between them, solid as the footholds of the Newtopian city walls that she knew so well.

‘... Okay, if you’re sure. I- you know yourself better than I do,’ Sasha whispered back, the words still shimmering like an outstretched hand reaching out to try and hold Marcy despite the vast physical differences.

Woven through the same wavelength, Marcy took the feeling of a hand in her own.

Stalwart as interlocking shields, responsibility and command snapped into place around Sasha. “Right. You’re right. If Croaker’s squad did their jobs, then that was the last ‘bot in this raid. Once you’re sure you’re okay, can you take the civilians here to Felicia’s cart? She can start taking names and pairing them back with their surviving family.”

< And what about you? > Marcy squeezed the words through their connection like breaths straining against aching bones. < Even after going glowy, I know your ribs are still cracked. >

“Search and rescue first, Marce.” Grim experience ringed Sasha like a halo. “I can wait, but some of them might not be able to.”

Even after they parted to attend to their own tasks, the feeling of Sasha’s hand in Marcy’s memory of one never left.

Chapter Text

With a tortured groan, a panel of wrecked roofing dislodged and fell, punctuating the eerie silence of a desolated township.

Cleanup was never anyone’s favorite after-battle duty. Especially not Marcy’s.

All too often, the destruction felt like a failure. If she’d been faster, or smarter, or come up with a better strategy…

Surviving family, indeed. Marcy was all too aware that some of the younger kids that had been hiding away from the battle wouldn’t have any of those left.

Ideally, some would be taken in by more distant relatives, or kindly neighbors. More likely they’d shelter under the endless tons of stone protecting New Wartwood from the outside world, because the vast majority of the township decided to join the resistance cause, once they’d been offered the chance.

They were fighters, that was for sure- heck, it was the reason this raid had been so brutal in the first place, their refusal to roll over and show their bellies to Andrias goading him to aim the literal big guns at them.

Like the lanky newt keeping a polite distance from her legs, pointing out well-hidden shelters for Marcy to pry open with her mechanical strength in search of survivors.

“One of your Wartwood fellows claimed you’re the same kind of creature as their commander,” the newt said, casual and conversational and far less sly in their attempts to fish for intel than they thought. “Though you look nothing like her. This true?”

Marcy paused for only a moment before she continued to heft snail-sized boulders away from the deep-dug entrance to one of the shelters. She couldn’t exactly speak, and she could write out some Newtopian script to communicate, but she’d learned the hard way months ago that not everyone in Amphibia used the same written dialect.

Sasha’s questioning smoke-sweep brushed against Marcy, and she blew it aside with a spring-sweet hum of acknowledgement. She didn’t need her friend there as a medium, not yet.

Instead she raised one of her unoccupied hind limbs towards the middle-aged newt, pinching her talons closed and flicking out one of her claws.

“The name of the Mother did you learn Night Guard handsigns?” they managed, taken aback.

Were they that unique? Marcy set aside the last of the rubble, freeing up her claws to sign out, “Non-hostiles, zero. Next objective location.” Thoughtfully, she tapped a talonpoint beneath her eyes, considering. How to tell them…

The newt’s eyes widened as Marcy first pointed to herself, raised her middle claw in an approximation of the sign for ‘one’ in tandem with her own personal sign, and clenched her claws closed in the Night Guard’s salute. “Head Ranger Marcy Wu.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. Word down the berry-vine was that we had a new captain that wasn’t a newt, but you’re definitely not what I expected when they said ‘Not a newt’.” Their amused chortle did nothing to brush away Marcy’s questioning blinks, because while she hadn’t exactly been hiding, she had been concentrated on work in the city itself. Not many people would have seen her from outside of it.

Flattened claws like she was pressing them against a wall, waving side to side. “I don’t understand.”

“Ah, of course you wouldn’t, I left years ago.” Jauntily, the graying newt saluted back at her, a mirror image despite the vastly different proportions. “Ranger Cato, at your service- retired, now, of course.”

Hope rose in Marcy’s core like dissolving dew in morning. Foregoing the handsigns, she reached in front of the ex-ranger to scribble out a message that she now knew they could read.

“You helped protect this town, even if it’s not your job anymore. Thank you.” Though it doubtlessly looked goofy, Marcy punctuated her vehement message with a salute both she and Cato knew well. Excellent work, Ranger.

“Don’t thank me yet, Cap,” they snorted- but not before returning the gesture with a languid salute of their own. “Not a ranger anymore. Raising arms against the king is treason, don’t you know?”

Angry claws left gouges in the dirt. “It’s not treason if Andrias went against his oaths first.”

Cato stared at the earth-scarred words. Shook their head, shrugging casually. “Well, can’t argue with that, especially if even the Night Captain denounces the king.”

It felt like fire racing up her spine to acknowledge it in so many words, because the betrayal that spurred her to cast aside his name still hurt to acknowledge rather than lash it down to the shadowed storm-depths of her soul; she had loved him, and she wasn’t sure if she still did or not, even after everything.

“So long as he keeps hurting our own people, I do.” Marcy insistently tapped the packed-earth path between them, parting the dirt into shallower lines. “One shelter left, and then I can take you to Sasha to talk about long-term options for your people.”

Cato's snout downturned in a sober look. “It's not up to me what people decide to go with, but I’d at least like to vet these options, yes.”

Hmm. Marcy curled her attention around Sasha like the faintest breeze tugging on loose sleeves, her question unspoken but clear.

Flits of the scene before Sasha’s eyes reeled to Marcy; the scent of the air now that the ash had cleared, frogs and newts speaking with reunited family at Felicia’s cart, the lightened weight across Sasha’s shoulders- good, she’d taken off her armor so her ribs weren’t compressed.

“Sasha is almost done, she’ll be here soon,” Marcy wrote.

“Soon, alright then- Now, follow me, this last one is kind of hidden on the edge…”

One slapdash shelter later, emptied of the pair of frogs that had been trapped within, Sasha lit a muted flare across their connection to let Marcy know she’d arrived.

Not that Marcy really needed that, at this point. Sasha was a constant presence in her mind, like she’d melted out her own perch into Marcy’s central memory just as surely as Marcy tucked herself into the little air-pocket reserved for her with Sasha. Each wordless pulse of [I’m here] and [You-where-here-friend] was like brushing fingers together, a silent relay of their presences.

“So, Marcy tells me you’re one of the guys in charge. There’s a lot of civilians to deal with, so what’re your questions?”

“Not necessarily in charge, but I do have some goodwill with my neighbors due to my old job.” Cato glanced at Marcy, one brow-ridge raised, before returning their attention to the commander. “The Head Ranger here says you might be able to expand the horizons for our displaced friends.”

‘They're calling you by your old title?’

< Ex-Night Guard, way before I joined. Definitely not a fan of Andrias these days, to say the least. >

‘I see. Good news for us, at least.’ Sasha blithely waved her hand in the direction of the remaining survivors, as if she hadn’t been simultaneously holding a silent conversation Cato wasn’t privy to. “So, for those who don’t already plan to relocate elsewhere or go their own way, we have places for them to bed down at the Resistance.”

“And the price of this shelter?” Cato prodded. Smart newt, to know that everything came with some kind of price with half the world burning.

“Everyone gets a bed, safety from the ‘bots, food, water, basic amenities,” Sasha ticked each boon off on clawed fingers. “And while everyone has to pull their weight, there’s plenty of roles noncombatants can fulfill. We don’t force anyone to fight who can’t.”

Smart. And it was definitely not something Sasha learned from her time with the toads, who believed you either died a coward or with a weapon in your hands.

“And I know a lot of people will take that offer. A stable roof over your head is an attractive prospect these days, no matter the work.” Cato frowned. “There is, however, the matter of tadpoles and efts with no family left or townsfolk able to take them.”

“We’ll take them,” Sasha said firmly, unable to keep the nettle-bitter hiss out of her tone- it was a bruise-soft subject for her. “Wouldn’t even be the first time. Got tadpoles from Wartwood, a few efts from fleeing Newtopians under our roof, even some clanless toadlets nobody would claim.”

Most of whom stuck to the Heronslayer like little warty burrs. Sasha didn’t have a clan, but she had a lethally-earned title, and an army, and had claimed Barrel’s Warhammer, all at fifteen. The toad kids looking up to her was a forgone conclusion, after living with the resistance long enough.

Sasha might not voice it, but Marcy could feel she was fond of them too, even if she showed it by tossing them headfirst into haybales when they tried to see if a couple nine-year-olds could get the drop on her.

Cato first met Marcy’s thirteen eyes, then Sasha’s eyebag-lined ones. Looked sightlessly across the burnt wreckage of what used to be a bustling town, the surviving house-frames standing like blackened rib cages. “... I’d prefer to keep our people together, but if it comes down to a matter of safety, then it might be best for you to take some of them.” They raised a bowstring-calloused finger. “But, only if I go with them.”

Faint relief from Sasha was tugged along behind the breeze of Marcy’s twisting excitement. Even if they'd been retired for a while, Cato was another Ranger. She knew how Night Guards were trained- their help would be a hell of an asset to the resistance.

“You kidding? Of course you can come along.” Sasha stepped aside, gesturing past her to where the resistance and the townsfolk clustered. “Specialists are what we need now, and from what Marcy told me, the Night Guard definitely fits that. Besides, it’ll probably be good for the new kids to have a familiar face around.”

A last salute to Marcy, a respectful head-dip to Sasha, and Cato was gone, vanishing in the lingering smoke to join the rest of their town.

Once they were out of sight, the war-mantles of Wartwood’s Commander and Head Advisor were shrugged away, leaving only Sasha and Marcy, the pair of human girls who weren’t expected to maintain the authority of rebellion leaders.

Sasha casually rested her hand on her sword pommel, using the other to fruitlessly comb ash out of heat-brittle hair- or at least attempt to. “Ugh, battle-grunge is way worse this time around, I swear,” she complained, wiping away bangs that stuck to her flushed face with sweat.

And she still looked unfairly pretty, even when ash-smudged and sweat-stained with the frayed strap of her undershirt falling off her shoulder and a bandage tied around her bicep that bled red and a crooked grin just for Marcy, who she allowed the vulnerability of seeing her as anything other than the battle-wrought soldier.

‘?’ glowed at Sasha’s end of their connection- less of a thought, and more of a feeling.

Marcy half-frantically swiped through all the settings, slathering even more crown-telepathy overlays on top of what she had enabled beforehand. Nope, nope, nope, no weird crush-thoughts about her friend that she’d thought she repressed in middle school while said friend’s brain was basically in Marcy’s pocket.

Although those flushed feelings had never been so strong in middle school; seeing Sasha’s newly-lit kindness with Wartwood and with Marcy continue to burn steadily, in contrasting tandem with vicious and blood-bitten protectiveness…

She didn’t know if Sasha felt the same, and even if she did, Marcy wouldn’t want to tell her while she was stuck like this.

< Sorry, just a lot of thoughts to juggle at once. This is the biggest populated area they’ve hit besides Newtopia itself. >

Sasha frowned, recognition rising slow as swamp-floods. “Shit, you’re right. They’re escalating. Fast.”

And they were already on the defensive. Any more pressure, and they would either all succumb to the invisible siege, their supply routes cut like arteries, or they’d be captured.

Marcy knew which one was worse.

We have to go on the offensive soon.

They couldn’t avoid the Core for much longer, no matter the risk. But they also needed to prepare. And hopefully survive the balancing act.