Nosedive had been hoping for a cracking or popping sound when he tackled the sorcerer. Asteroth was built like an exceptionally tall toothpick, and went down easily, but other than being deeply offended, he seemed otherwise no worse for wear.

If anything, it managed to make him more cross. 

“How dare you?”

Though the old man lay prone, Nosedive felt something like a hand grasp at the collar of his armor, and yank him away with such force his feet left the ground. He dangled, and thought for a moment it must have been one of the monsters, but when he reached up to wrench himself free, there was nothing there for him to struggle against. He was just in the air, held up by nothing.

“Look, I don’t know what you think is going on here, but I assure you that you started it,”  Nosedive yelled over the rushing wind.

Asteroth got back to his feet without visible pain or struggle, and appeared to pull another handful of fire from the air. “It makes no difference to me if you are cooked before you join the rest of your brethren. It’s all the same.”

With no options left, Nosedive grasped for his blaster, pointed it squarely at the sorcerer’s head, and hoped for the best. The shot traveled so neatly into Asteroth’s left temple that it was almost a shame Mallory was not present to witness it. She would have been whatever passed in her emotional library for proud. With any other person, such force from such a large projectile would have crushed the delicate bones of the face and turned them into shrapnel lodged in the brain.

These rules did not apply to Asteroth, apparently, and instead the puck ricocheted off somewhere into a wall. Whatever invisible hand had picked Nosedive up like a misbehaving pet dropped him, and the fireball that was supposed to fry him instead went far over his head, turning already struggling scaffolding into slag. Nosedive landed on hands and knees on the ground.

Asteroth glowered down at him, yellow eyes wild, “You will pay for every single slight, every annoyance, every delay!” He shook a bony finger, in a move that he probably thought looked menacing. He took a step forward, threw his arms wide, “If it takes the afternoon or ten thousand years you will understand exactly what you owe.”

As Asteroth closed the distance between them, Nosedive slowly got to his feet, expecting to have to evade another fireball, or something worse. But as he did, something glinted in the light, reflecting the brilliant dance of the howling pillar behind him, or perhaps it shone with a light of its own. A purple glass pendent, on a simple gold chain, dangling on Asteroth’s neck. The one that Canard had shown to both himself and Duke, days before.

“You don’t have any power that you didn’t steal, do you?”  Nosedive smirked.

“Excuse me?” the old man said, pausing in his melodrama.

“All this light-show and smoke and mirrors and you’re not any more a magician than I am, you just have more toys.” 

“I have the knowledge of the seven most powerful wizards ever to walk the realms, and more lifetimes than your pitiful little species could ever aspire to!” Asteroth snarled, looming over him now.

“Have any of them ever done more than spit sparks?” Nosedive challenged. 

Asteroth clapped his the sides of Nosedive’s head in an iron grip between his hands, fingers digging into the skin of his face. Nosedive could feel his cheeks beginning to warm, and he realized the wizard intended to set his head aflame in retribution.

But the sorcerer had helpfully bent over, and the glinting pendent now dangled perfectly in Nosedive’s line of sight. He grasped at it, trying to snap the chain. He wrenched free, putting his entire weight into the motion, falling backwards to the ground. The pendant came with him, neatly balled in a fist.

This did not have the immediate effect that he was hoping for. Asteroth did not vanish or cower in fear. Rather the sorcerer stood over him a great, growing fireball in his hands, his face tormented with rage, preparing to reduce Nosedive to a pile of charcoal and the ground around him to a smooth mirror of glass.

“IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO ME!” Asteroth shouted over the wind, and laughed the insane laugh of the demented, when a line of steel erupted from his chest. Red bloomed out from the wound, and the stunned wizard looked down, and then turned slightly to peer over his shoulder. Nosedive’s first impulse was that Duke had somehow joined the fray, but as Asteroth’s body moved, it was only Emily standing there.

Emily tried desperately to twist the blade. As the puck had failed before, impaling did little more than annoy Asteroth further. It was an improvement that it had penetrated him at all, but whether or not it pierced his heart, or even if he had a heart to pierce, was immaterial. He did not die. The fireball he was summoning in his hands spluttered, and dropped to his feet as a broken ball of embers.

It appeared that the same invisible hand that had grasped Nosedive before now took hold of Emily, ripped her from Asteroth’s backside, and threw her into one of the crumbling cinder block walls. 

Nosedive wondered if the wizard had always been so resilient. Red dripped from both ends of his wound, but Asteroth seemed to be taking it rather well. Whatever else he was, he was not going to be stopped by something so trivial as a piece of steel through his chest. The little elfin Prince, Borg, had told them Asteroth was immortal, but they had never actually tried outright killing him before.

Duke had said the pendent was just glass. Maybe that was true.

Nosedive dropped the pendent to the ground beside him where he lay, and brought down the butt of his blaster on it, as hard as he could.

It did not shatter dramatically, to his disappointment, but it did crack, a spiderweb pattern appearing across it, breaking in its setting.

The rushing cascade of wind continued beside him. Asteroth was still reaching for Emily, and instead of moving under her own power, it appeared the invisible hand was picking her limp body up, to throw again. Up above, the sky was still an expanding, spinning nightmare of red stars in a black deeper than any night.

Emily fell the few feet back to the ground as a rag doll, and the wizard turned to look down at Nosedive, and then at the sword slashed through him. Asteroth’s yellow eyes went wide with terror, and he stumbled towards Nosedive, hands clutching out uselessly to the cracked pendent on the ground. The same spiderweb crack drew itself across his chest, as he moved, his torso coming apart at the seam as if he himself had been brittle glass, and he fell forward. He landed on Nosedive in three distinct pieces, that then turned to a thousand when his palms hit the ground, and a thousand more, and then the shards that had made his body simply boiled away into a white smoke. It stung in Nosedive’s eyes and he coughed, waving it away. 

All that was left was the broken glass on the ground beside him.

There may have been a lone echo that followed, some great sound of indignation that mixed with the howl of the wind, and then that was gone too.

There was a screaming sound to his right, and a second scream in answer that was not an echo, and a large crash. The monster. He had forgotten about the monster. 

He snatched the pendant off the ground, suspecting it would be important, and got to his feet.  Winterwing was entirely out of breath, bruised and torn and sitting hunched over, with what appeared to be a giant mass of limbs tumbling behind him.

“The heck happened here?”  Nosedive frowned as he approached, his sprint faltering.

“I think, I think I made something worse,” Winterwing said from the ground. His shirt was ruined, and a crimson red.

“Whoa, you still have all your organs?” Nosedive asked.

“What, your fancy machine can’t put those back in?” Winterwing said through gritted teeth.

“I dunno man, I live by the philosophy of trying not to find out.”

The rolling, partially liquid mass of beast was struggling with itself, disinterested in either of them, a tangle of confused limbs and heads and eyes tearing at each other.

Nosedive made a face. “Well, that’s weird.”

“How do you suppose we get rid of it?” Winterwing asked.

Nosedive’s understanding of magic systems were paper, or code, or some other form of entertainment. Those were things that needed rules for participation, and were very strictly not real. He had absolutely no idea how real magic actually worked, only that he could be pretty sure that it did because it kept causing him problems. It seemed a reasonable assumption that if he had removed the source of the chaos, as well as the caster, that would help alleviate some of the annoyance.

Nosedive looked back through the ruined walls to the horizon beyond. He was sure now that the dark was receding, and that the cyan of a brilliant day was coming in to replace it. The column of light in the center of the building seemed to waver at the corner of his vision, as if the light were passing through water. It broke and shifted, its steady stream upward spluttering and falling back on itself. He made the unfounded guess that was a good sign.

He still could find no sign of the rest of the team, and with all the other immediate problems solved, this began gnawing at him, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do to about it.

“I don’t know,” Nosedive admitted at last. “There’s a vault, under Drake One. Where Tanya keeps important things. I think something in there could help, maybe, but,” he trailed off.

“But we probably shouldn’t leave,” Winterwing finished for him.

“Yeah, I gotta say, this one has not been very convenient.”

The blob of limbs and teeth and eyes writhed around on the ground. One of the heads took a snap at them, but fell so short neither of them flinched back. Winterwing did not stand up, still holding his torn flesh together with a hand, looking like nothing so much as an old drake on the verge of heart failure.

The blob gave up on them, and instead haltingly rolled for the pillar of sputtering light, occasionally doubling back on itself as a limb changed its mind, was torn off, and then reformed back into the mass.

They watched it, unsure if they should stop it, or even if they really could. It met the light, its bulbous, miserable body crawling inward. The column increased its spluttering for a moment, until the blob disappeared. Nosedive kept a hand on his blaster, knowing that would do little to help, but after several moments of standing and waiting for something even worse to emerge, nothing did.

Winterwing stood but remained hunched over, one hand gripping his chest. He took his cue from Nosedive and held the blaster in the other. Neither of them would have wanted to hear the comparison, but it appeared that he shared Wildwing’s determination to the point of self destruction. It could have possibly even been considered heroic, in the moment, had the image not been ruined by molted feathers sticking to the blood.

“So, ‘The Dark Zone’,” Winterwing prompted, a slight nod to the sky above them. “It’s not a great name.”

“Yeah, but it seems pretty straightforward, right, like you have a pretty good idea what’s there, looks pretty dark to me,” Nosedive looked above into the shrinking black hole in the sky. “Or maybe that’s Tanya’s Dimensional Limbo, I don’t know.”

“Okay, ‘Dark Zone’ is better.”

The fountain of light continued to bend and splutter with increasing chaotic grace, first one way or another. None of the thousands of red eyes above chose to drop down on them, and the edge of the dark hole continued to seep inward, the last failing wave of a black ocean circling a drain. They stood at a meager attention but beheld no arrivals.

Before them, the fountain of light split as it died, and rather than a cohesive tangle of beams, it turned into three, then four, then five separate pillars that danced and interplayed.

The sky turned blue again. The swirl of black above finally closed into a point, and the column of lights failed, tumbling down as the last flow of water over a dry river. They ceased mingling together, now clearly five separate entities, and Nosedive’s brow knit together in doubt.

“There’s no way it’s that easy,” he said aloud.

The warping bricks and beams of the factory around them began to remember gravity, and fell back to the earth a handful at a time. The light shrank, pulling back down to the earth, lost its burbling and resembled nothing so much as elongated, impossibly tall bodies, that shrank further, and further, into correct proportion, lost their brilliance, and then collapsed entirely into five unmoving teammates, arranged on the ground.

Dumbfounded, Nosedive holstered his blaster, carefully approaching the bodies, still working to press anxiety back down into his stomach. He thought perhaps it was Mallory that gasped for air first, the long noisy breath of someone who had been under water for far too long, and the others followed suit.

Nosedive finally let relief come flooding back in, and he ran to them. He gave Duke the loudest slap on that back he could manage and declared, perhaps not as steadily as he would have liked: “This whole time you guys were just standing around?!”

They gave him murmurs of confusion, but they did all respond. They sat up carefully, groaning . Duke repaid his slap with an irritated swat to the leg. It appeared, at least, that the very worst had been avoided.

He looked over his shoulder at movement in his peripheral vision. Winterwing had dropped the firearm, and was moving haltingly towards to limp form of Emily, who had not moved from where Asteroth had thrown her.