“If you want to take out a convoy, all you have to do is target the first and last vehicle,” Ted yelled.

  I ducked as a pelting rain of leaper spikes bounced off of the armor all around. “Gee, that’s awfully reassuring considering we’re in the FIRST FREAKING VEHICLE!”

  It was barely sturdy enough to be called armor, what with its wooden planks and sheets of corrugated metal someone had probably stolen from a fence, then nailed together into an impromptu bunker on the back of the pickup. The firing holes looked like an enthusiastic welder had just gone to town on the material with a buzz saw. The inside smelled of choked breath, sweat, and gunpowder, and as if that was not enough, every shot echoed like freaking thunder.

  “This is insane!” I yelled.

  “If it was, I wouldn’t be sitting here driving,” Ted yelled back from the driver’s seat. “Your were-friend opened this path; we’re here to pave it with lead.”

  I grumbled. Dang him and his stupid logical arguments. I wanted to cry in protest. But I was private Rubens, magical girl, not-a-child-soldier, and damn well the best spotter for a hundred miles. Nobody else could do it, not as good as me. And I also happened to be the only one immune to the effects of leaper poison.

  The self-telepathy potion hadn’t run out yet, but I was definitely going to crash like a brick dropped from a Boeing (or alternatively, just like a Boeing) once it did.

  We were three people in the back; a nervous-looking dude by the name of Alex, a graybearded old fisherman confusingly called Hunter, and me, little ol’ spider Sam.

  The moment we had left to scout ahead, we were beset by mimics of all types and sizes. The mimics were entirely happy to force people to stay in one place, and didn’t like it at all when those people tried to fight their way out. They appeared especially aggressive towards organized groups. If thousands of camouflaged mimics waging guerilla warfare wasn’t a terrifying prospect then I didn’t know what was.

  I poked my head up out of a hatch that used to be a toilet seat, then ducked immediately as a scattered spread of needles skimmed off the top.

  “Can’t we go any faster?” I yelled, “We’re not outrunning the leapers, we’re just gathering a train of them behind us!”

  “That’s the point of reconnaissance in force, Pinky,” Ted said.

  “Y-yeah, Pinky, get me some targets to light up,” said Alex.

  “No rush,” Hunter said with an even, almost quiet voice. “Poke out when you know it’s safe, Pinky.”

  “My name is not… grah!” I made a point of popping all the way out and blasting at two of the leapers on the rooftops to our left before retreating back into my cave, like a trapdoor spider.

  … wait, that was actually a fun way to think about this. But was it fun enough?

  [Channeling emotion: Joy]

  [Spell charged: 78%]

  Heck yeah, it was, wohoo! Spider Sam, on the hunt!

  “Two on the left, plus two further down,” I said. “I saw another three on the right. Our back is clear; the 1.5 and 3kg models aren’t fast enough to keep up.”

  “Good, means they won’t have much of a chance when we go back to get the convoy,” Ted said, checking his tablet. “We’re halfway there.”

  I ordered some more ammo and poked back out to take the odd potshot. Judging by a few glimpses as we rushed by, Creektin was not having a good time. Houses had their windows smashed, garbage cans were knocked over, spilling their contents onto lawns, roads, and driveways. The odd body only made the sight more depressing.

  “We’re about to be ambushed,” I said, staring intently at an upcoming, abandoned-looking police car with a foot-sized hole punched through the driver side.

  “How the hells do you know that?”

  “The leapers are their scouts, so if you find one tracking you you’ll—”

  There was a thump, a swear, and then the pickup began swerving uneasily.

  “Fucking — did we just hit a stinger?”

  We did, in fact, just not one made of metal. I looked back to see two lines of tire traps stand up on long needle-like legs. They each bundled themselves together, forming something like a nest of needles around a pitch-black core. It was a pink sea-urchin, except with its bladed tentacle limbs bundled together it was as wide as a car was long.

  They spun in place, before accelerating right towards us.

  “Oh shit — Bandits, six o’clock, two of ‘em,” I called a second before Hunter and Alex opened fire through the back viewslots. They didn’t hit much, as our ride was swerving and drifting dangerously, likely due to popped tires.

  Bursts and single shots hit the nest of whipcords, but the fire was ineffective. I aimed and shot with my Toothpick. Even though the whipcord limbs did melt and bend away where I hit, there were so many of them that it didn’t seem to matter. A shot from my Goop Gun hit the spinning whirr of stuff before it was flung clean off.

  “What the heck is that?”

  [Would you like to buy information on the mimic subtype? Price: 10 Soulcoins]

  I blinked at the popup. “Why the hell does that also cost money!?”

  [People died for this information. Elysium must be maintained. A just reward for work must be given. An equal exchange.]

  That was… fair, I suppose. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to grumble as I forked over those points.

  [Xenotype: Deceptores rosei. Subtype: 75kg Tangler mimic. First spotted in New York in 2021, phenotype confirmed appearing all across the northwestern hemisphere. A wiry and flexible body protects a core no larger than a volleyball, with jagged blades attached throughout. May transform into a tumbleweed-like ball that can move at highway speeds. May grow roots to form one of many mimic structures (Expand List).

  Preferred objects of mimicry: Poles, wires, gutters, frames, pine trees, road spikes (new).

  Top speed: 57 mph (Certainty: 97%)

  Point value: 30 Silver Soulcoins

  Weakness: Lightweight, unarmored core]

  I suppose that makes things simple.

  “Shoot the core!” I yelled.

  “The what?”

  “The black thing in the middle!”

  As I was yelling, a row of impacts hit our improvised metal and wood bunker. I looked up. One of the urchins had flung its tentacles forward, jagged edges digging into the bunker at the back. From the inside, it looked like a megalodon was trying to take a bite out of us.

  Then, like pulling a ripcord, the teeth all sawed backwards. In one moment we were in our sweaty little bunker, in the next there was a diagonal cut that ended with a solid third of our cover missing.

  I saw the leapers moments before they fired. The three that had been following us on our right let loose nearly in sync. I was the one furthest up, but even as I felt spines impact the front of my vest I knew that if something didn’t happen right here, right now, then everything was proper fucked.

  The bazooka fell into my hands as I poked out the top of the bunker. The barrel was heavy, swerving uncomfortably in my potion-backlash-addled hands. There were leapers all around. My extra eyes meant I could see them better than anyone else, but that just created more fear than I knew what to do with. More than four eyes total also meant more sensory overload than I could handle.

  [Spell charged: 97%]

  No joy in this, too much danger, too much fear. Just gotta wing it.

  A row of leaper spines hit the side of our truck. I flinched as I pulled the trigger. With an irreverent thump, the high explosive round fired, and I knew immediately that I’d aimed too low. The rocket propelled grenade bounced off of the asphalt, whizzing into some poor guy’s car before exploding violently, sending glass and metal shrapnel everywhere. The giant tumbleweeds didn’t like that, losing ground as they swerved around it. We weren’t supposed to lose them; they needed to die, here and now.

  “Drive faster, dammit,” Hunter yelled, slamming the back of the driver’s cabin. “They’re turning us into ground meat back here.”

  “Missed,” I grunted, “Sorry. I screwed up.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Y-you did that on purpose,” Alex muttered.

  “Happens.” Ted swore. “Truck’s swerving something fierce; might not make it to the evac zone even without mimics on our ass.”

  I grimaced. Shooting the big ones was my one job. I fluffed it up big time, and I only had one more shot with me. I bought more the moment I’d recognized the threat, but those were two minutes out, and we didn’t have two minutes.

  Moe was reloading, but he was faster at reloading small weapons, and I didn’t have [Arms & Arms Proficiency] to tell me in which exact order I needed to put the warhead in so I didn’t blow myself up, because that was a risk, because it was a friggin’ rocket launcher and I just had to pretend like I knew what to do with it. Stupid, stupid, stupid—

  “Breathe, kiddo,” Hunter said, trying to sound reassuring. “Was only a near miss. You blew some holes in their cover.”

  I squinted. He was right. One of the balls had a patch where spines and tentacles didn’t cover the core. For about a split second, you could see the black warbling core through one of them, but then it was gone, and the things rotated faster and faster.

  “You can’t possibly think that you’ll hit that from over here,” I said.

  Hunter just smiled. “In my day they called me Trickshot. Watch this.”

  He leaned forward against the rear hatch, relaxing the same way Foggy did whenever she was pretending like she wasn’t about to pounce her toy mouse. The old hunter must’ve been in a trance; he didn’t notice the leapers lining up another shot at him, nor when Alex and I chased them off with two careful bursts of rifle fire.

  In a moment of unusual calm on the road, he took the shot. Immediately, the rightmost ball lost all cohesion, collapsing in on itself like a bundle of yarn.

  [Assisted in killing: 75kg Tangler Mimic - 15 Soulcoins]

  I stared, gaping in awe for a moment before Moe poked my thigh. The second shot was loaded. This time, I waited until it was close enough to launch another whip-like attack with one of its cords, close enough that even with the truck swerving I couldn’t miss.

  Thwump!

  The shot hit its shell, detonating and sending bits of mimicked teeth and black goop flying everywhere. The whole thing fell together in a pile of pink vines. The explosion probably did the same thing to its core as it had to my eardrums, which was to say: The core popped like a balloon.

  Hunter was yelling something at me. I only understood it as ‘get down’ when he roughly yanked me off of my feet. Right, bazookas needed a proper stance to fire, and that left me vulnerable. Good thinking, old man.

  Then I noticed that he was pointing at Alex and the giant quill stuck in his neck and wow, talk about bad luck. Judging by the angle it had snuck in right through the left viewport and embedded itself smack-dab in his trachea. Probably why he had stopped accusing me of crap over the past minute or so.

  Wait, no, he was poisoned — envenomated to be precise — and shit, he was already going slack-jawed. Blue-ringed octopus poison was only nonlethal on baseline humans who got immediate life-supporting treatment, as I discovered while reading up during my paralysis.

  Clem wasn’t here to mix another auto-telepathy potion, and the universal antidote cost three hundred soulcoins. I was sitting at…

  [Soulcoins: 97]

  … not enough. And no matter how I fudged the numbers, waiting until I did have enough was not going to work. The more critical Alex’s condition became, the less options I could see. He was going to die, his lungs failing and his heart too, and there was nothing anyone could do about it, because wherever we were going, it was not towards a hospital. Creektin was too small to have one.

  But what if… I brought the hospital to Creektin?

  “System, make me a list of what I need to keep someone affected by a lethal dose of leaper toxin alive.”

  [Respiratory machine — Price: 5 Soulcoins]

  [Oxygen supply and monitoring system — Price: 5 Soulcoins]

  [External cardiac monitor plus defibrillator — Price: 5 Soulcoins]

  [IV lines plus three days of fluid supplies — Price: 4 Soulcoins]

  Nineteen coins, and not a single magical or sci-fi level piece of equipment among them. It was all stuff humanity already had available. Even then, saving a life was a hundred times more expensive than taking one. But it was doable.

  “Buy it.”

  The rest of the leapers were shooed off, or killed by a combination of Ted’s driving and Hunter’s accurate fire. I made coins via kills and assists, but only enough to buy more silvered ammo for everyone present. Within a minute our pickup ambled past a few very surprised lookouts standing behind a wall of cars and assorted clutter, passing the checkpoint without too much fuss.

  The moment we rolled to a stop Ted grabbed my shoulder.

  “Samantha. The poison. Can you do something about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Handle it.”

  He said it as if it was something I could just do. Which, given I could teleport literally everything in, he might as well think I could. Great. His explicit command and implicit trust only served to make me more stressed about something I was going to do anyways.

  I leapt off the back, Ted yelling for a doctor while I kept four eyes peeled for the nearest functional electric socket. People had built a sort of safe haven in the middle of the tiny park that lay right in front of the town hall. Roads were cut off with whatever was at hand: furniture, wrecked cars, office supplies. I found some unused sockets near a diesel generator that was powering bits and bobs in a makeshift medical tent.

  The tent was filled with people who mostly had cuts and stab wounds. I grabbed the middle aged woman who was pacing around with needles and notes as if she knew what she was doing.

  “I have a patient, male, thirty to forty, unknown bloodtype, who’s been hit by leaper poison.”

  She made a face like I’d just made her drink a cup of unsweetened lemon juice. “I’m sorry, dear. I can’t do anything ‘bout that, just how I couldn’t do anything ‘bout the previous ones.”

  Four packs of equipment rained down around me, clattering and clonking to the floor, complete with instruction manuals and all. “What about now?”

  She stared at the machines for a split second before swearing and starting to hook them up. “I’m a dentist, not a licensed toxologist.”

  “And I failed my way through two years of medical school, so who’s more qualified?”

  “Touché.”

  To her credit, she remained professionally silent about my extra arms and eyes.

  Alex was hauled in just as we finished setting up the parts that would do the breathing for him. His pulse was weak; we didn’t get the defibrillator set up in time. After all the crap I’d gone through today, with arms aching from cuts, bruises, and handling doubled gravity from a potion recoil effect, I had to massage his heart until it was done. The average person couldn’t do it for more than four minutes, and compression quality sharply declined after half of that. But I was on fire, a mix of stats and adrenaline allowing me to continue chugging along.

  There was also the joyful catharsis of being out of a dangerous situation, plus the fact that every pump was seconds I was buying for him to live. Even if he had done nothing but insult me. And joy meant unparalleled [Arms & Arms Proficiency], which meant I kept on pumpin’.

  Remember the beat: Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.

  Wow, this is exhausting. But it’s better than being shot at. What other songs are there that are roughly 100-120bpm? Poker face? Seven nation army?

  Doo, doo do-do do doo, dooooooo…

  I think I’m going insane. How much longer do I have to do this? I just want to shower, lie down, have a quick nap—

  No. Private Samantha ain’t no quitter, neither is paramedic Samantha.

  Failed paramedic.

  If only I had more arms.

  “-dear. Hey, dear, you hear me?”

  “Wuh?”

  I asked, turning exactly the wrong way to look at the dentist with my face, but exactly the right way to have my two neck-eyes blink at them. She was pointing at the patient, who had all kinds of things hooked up to his chest. Right, the medical gear… stuff.

  It was done.

  Instead of leaning back, I fully flopped down onto the grass and just enjoyed the feeling of a job well done.

  Man, that was great. I could get addicted to succeeding once in a while. I hope Clem and Akira made it to the evac zone. There was a third Custodian somewhere in this barrier too. Hopefully they can help with… everything.

  I’m tired. Everything hurts.

  This would’ve been a lot easier if I could just afford a few magical antidote potions. But nooo, someone had to go and gouge the prices.

  Three hundred. Whoever dared to be this greedy during an emergency situation deserved a flogging. Just… what for? Magical money was still money, but even then was that it? Who could be so evil? Did Mochi accidentally make a health insurance company’s CEO a Custodian or what?

  The question itched at the back of my mind something fierce. So, I did some research.

  Clem had mentioned that a specific type of Angel’s Trumpet was necessary to create the potion at quantity. No artificial substitute was available. A quick search revealed that Brugmansia Sanguinea was classified as extinct in the wild, and that over the past decades protected stock declined due to an as-of-yet undocumented pest poisoning the plants, leaving tiny incisions around the roots…

  Wait. Tiny pests disrupting the one plant crucial to a drug that counters any and all poisons? Unseen, despite this phenomenon being first documented in 2016, way past the start of the era of affordable phones with cameras?

  Mimics. It had to be. Rather, it made too much sense for it to be anything else. They were here on earth before this invasion for some time, as Addy had said and proven since she was hunting one when we first met. They were the perfect creatures for sneaky supply-chain attacks, and even though they didn’t manage to destroy humanity’s entire stock of Brugmansia Sanguinea, they did reduce the available amount significantly.

  Which now meant universal antidotes were unaffordable.

  Faith in humanity: restored.

  Faith in mimics being little shits: reaffirmed.

  It was the end of a day, or so I hoped, so maybe not everything was bad. I was alive. I did a bunch of magical girl stuff today. I managed to get just shy of level ten. Honestly, the fact that I hadn’t level upped in the last fight was a bit of an insult to my effort, but hey, it was fine. Tomorrow was another day, and after that another, and another, all until seven days were over, every quest was failed, and Foggy was consigned to kitty-cat afterlife.

  I really need to find Addy soon. But how?

  There was one way. The doggy whistle. I took it out of my pack, and blew it twice. A couple dogs started barking in the distance, but beyond that nothing happened. I tried again. The dogs barked louder.

  Dangit. I’ll try again later and hope she picks it up. Until then, gotta do some prep.

  I’m a magical girl using magical guns for friendship and magic~, do do doo.

  I hummed to myself as I stocked up ammo for my three weapons, focusing on every purchase to milk just that little bit of joy out of them, and recharge my spell. As I was waiting for the delivery to arrive, a pair of shadows settled over me, a man and a woman, well-dressed, her carrying a tablet and pen, him wringing his hands nervously.

  It was mayor Mendoza. And from the way he was dripping sweat all over me, things were probably not looking great.

  “Custodian Adelaide? We would like to discuss the, er, evacuation plans.”

  "Do, do, do, do, Stayin' aliiiiive!"