This Chairman wasn’t even nearly as clever as the old one. Sure, he had buckets of Power and a horrible little monster helping him, but he’d never really worked for it, he’d never had to struggle and figure it out on his own. It had been given to him by the invisible octopus riding on his shoulders with its tentacles stuck in his eyes and ears. Faye simply could not abide that.
That critter was the Pathfinder everybody had been talking about, but they couldn’t see what it really was. They had been expecting a giant, indestructible beast because that was what it had grown into last time. This thing was just a tiny little part of a great big whole spread all over the place. There was what was in our world, but the great big dangerous rest of it was still in another world, right next to this one, where it couldn’t help. The little part had to figure out how to open the door to let it in, and it had been letting humans do all the hard work for it, gathering up all the magical folks into one easy bucket to dump into its mouth hole.
Now that its plans were all messed up, all those little bits were on the move. The rest of the folks didn’t realize it yet, but a war had just started. There were going to be battles now in every single part of the world the skinless men were hiding in, but Faye couldn’t worry about that right now. She had to stop this big part of the monster from getting away.
The new Chairman Traveled away just as Toru swung his big club. The club whistled through the air where the Chairman had been and a big lion statue got turned into gravel instead. Even though Faye’s head map was filled with thousands and thousands of moving people she easily picked out the spot where the new Chairman moved to. He thought he was quick, jumping seven times in just over eight seconds, but she was right behind him.
She intercepted him on the roof of the castle.
He saw her the same time she saw him. The invisible monster that was steering him opened its parrot beak and hissed at her. The new Chairman’s mouth opened in surprise. He could see magic as clear as she could, and she knew he’d never seen anything close to her before. “What are you?”
“I’m the Spellbound. The Power picked me. So now your time has come.”
He raised his hands and a sickening wave of destruction came at her.
Even as the energy surged through the air faster than a bullet, Faye was processing the information. It was the same type of magic as the Black Monk’s. She quickly changed her link, folding and refolding it until it connected to a new section of the Power. The destroying magic washed harmlessly past her as the roof began to disintegrate. He changed tactics, and the air around her began shedding energy, trying to freeze her solid and make the water in her body turn to ice to rip her cells apart. Faye merely switched to Whisper’s magic and heated everything back up.
They went back and forth, he’d try to hit her with magic, but she’d change things and hit him right back. He tried to electrocute her, but she thought of George Bolander’s magic and deflected it. Lightning bolts shot into the sky. A current of fire formed between them, which rapidly spun into a tornado, and when they let go of it, the fire crawled down the castle wall and drifted across the panicking crowd. He tried to command her, like a Mouth, but she just laughed at him while their fire tornado crashed into the high-rise next door and the whole thing exploded.
Demons sprang into existence beside her. She slugged one in the face and it exploded, took control of the other one, and ordered it to go eat the Chairman. He blasted it into chunks of black ink, which Faye then gathered up with her mind, hardened the droplets into bullets, and launched them into the Chairman’s flesh. He hardened his body and absorbed the impacts, started to Heal himself, but then Faye appeared before him and drove the stolen sword through his heart. He used Mover magic to knock her away, and he grimaced and yanked the sword free. It hit the roof with a clatter, and she immediately focused on it, made it spring into the air, and impaled it into his leg.
He roared, gathering the energy from the air, focusing it for a mighty destructive release, but Faye snagged it from him and shoved it aside. The Boomer magic was diverted and another of the high-rise building’s lower floors was hit instead. The explosion rocked the entire city. The forty-story building fell, slowly thundering its way down into the escaping masses. Instead of soaking up that freed magic like it was used to, the Pathfinder was shocked as Faye took it all instead.
Faye was fueled by death and Power.
In all of its millions of years chasing the Power, the Enemy had never met anything quite like her.
Hopelessly damaged, the roof collapsed. He tried to Travel away, but she was much faster at that, so she reached the part of space he was trying to smoosh together and smacked his hand away.
“How—”
The roof came apart around them. The Chairman simply turned himself into a Brute to take the fall. Faye went back to what came natural and Traveled off to the side.
They fell inside the mansion. Mr. Sullivan and Toru were there, on the ground floor, completely surrounded by Iron Guard. The two of them were moving from room to room, shooting, bludgeoning, stabbing, kicking, smashing their way through enemy after enemy, leaving a pile of broken bodies behind them.
The Chairman landed with a crash in the middle of a group of Iron Guard, scattering them.
Faye landed perched, on the balcony railing high above on the third floor.
The Chairman got to his feet and spoke to her, only she quickly realized it wasn’t the Chairman speaking at all, but rather the monster which had been hiding inside of the imposter for so very long.
“You may beat me here, but the spores have settled across the entirety of your world. All you have done here today is speed up the inevitable harvest. I am everywhere.”
Faye felt a sudden alarm. Her pulse quickened. Her head map was spinning. It was as if the Power itself was trying to warn Faye of something.
She opened her head map, couldn’t find the problem, then used up more Power, and more, burning the energy of some of the hundreds who had just been killed around her. It was further than she’d ever dared push before, but she fueled it with a battleship worth of dead connections. Her head map expanded outward until it seemed to cover the whole world. The information was too much, it screeched against the wall of her sanity, but Faye could see everything, every connection to the Power, natural and unnatural.
The unnatural was easy to spot. The monster was not lying. It really was everywhere. It had been planning for this moment since long before Faye was born, even before Sivaram had shown the Power how it could defend itself, and now that it had been exposed, it was making its move. There were thousands of infiltrators spread across the world, and all it would take would be one bunch of them consuming enough magic in one place to anchor the big Enemy to this world forever.
There were patches of death in the world as the skinless men began their harvest. Faye watched her head map with horror as the blackness began to spread.
“I am everywhere.”
“Well so am I!” Faye shouted back. She picked a location, threw caution to the wind, and stepped through reality.
UBF Traveler
“We’re going down!” Barns shouted. “We’ve lost half our major systems.”
“Keep us in one piece, Mr. Barns,” Captain Southunder responded.
There was a terrible clatter, a tearing of metal, and another one of the small demons came crawling up out of the instrumentation. “Gremlin!” the teleradar operator shouted.