Seymour wracked his brain, struggling to come up with some action he could take to help Penny and Thornton escape. Unfortunately, formulating combat tactics on the fly wasn’t really his thing. But maybe he could do something about that. Seymour briefly scanned the description of the third new sigil power he’d recently received upon exorcizing his demons:

  He didn’t think that boosting Penny or Thornton’s attack speed would help at all in the moment, but he pondered using this power on one of them to increase one of his attributes. Penny seemed like the obvious choice. If the bonus he received was going to be based on her highest attribute, it would almost certainly make him smarter, which in turn might help him come up with a better idea.

  The mimic suddenly grew a fresh, ropy root-tendril on its back and used it to seize Penny by the ankle. Seymour made the snap decision to target her and activated Exploitation, which triggered a notification:

  Seymour gasped, surprised by the sudden sharpening of his senses. He’d been anticipating something else—a boost to his intellect or problem-solving capabilities—but he should have known that Penny’s greatest attribute would have to do with the way she perceived the world. After all, she could see the underlying sacred geometry in everything almost as clearly as he could – but without the help of a power like Infringement.

  But the added Perception didn’t do much to help him come up with a plan. If anything, he instantly felt overwhelmed by the situation in a way he hadn’t only a moment earlier. A Moderate Bonus to Perception evidently translated as a literal increase in the amount of raw stimuli Seymour could absorb at once – but processing all that information in an advantageous way would have required another bonus to some Mind-based attribute – Intellect of Thinking or something. He blinked his eyes shut, but it was no use. He couldn’t focus. He cursed himself for using an untested sigil power in such a pivotal moment; Exploitation had done more harm than good.

  Penny’s shrieks echoed extra-loud in his ears as the hedge mimic jerked her back, dragging her by the ankle toward its mouth filled with churning root-fangs. Thornton continued to crawl straight ahead, so fixated on escaping that he seemed to be completely oblivious of Penny’s predicament as he left her behind.

  And then Jerome did something Seymour hadn’t known was possible. He felt a gentle prick on the side of his throat and received a series of blood-written tooltips:

  Seymour knew that his own Body score was four. He also knew that Body was most accurately thought of as an amalgamation of several other physical attributes, like Strength, Dexterity, Fortitude, Quickness, and Balance. A number of sigil powers were known to directly reveal a person’s precise scores in these constituent stats, but neither he nor Penny had acquired one yet, so he was still in the dark as to the exact values he was working with.

  But from the ludicrous sensation he felt as his muscles began to bulge, he suspected that the Infusion of the three units of blood might have legit doubled or even tripled his unbuffed Strength. He could have more than handled someone like Gaspar Stuczi now. Maybe even big ass Magnus Malveau.

  At the same time, Jerome had selflessly emptied himself of the Malleable Plant Blood which had been enabling him to shapeshift into an adorable little cactus man. His body suddenly reverted to its prior, disturbingly phallic shape: a pair of bulbous spheres at its base below a tall, narrow protuberance, covered in inch-long spines. And as a result, his prehensile abilities were stripped away, as well, and he fell from Seymour’s shoulder, thudding into the snow at his feet.

  Thornton froze mid-crawl. Jerome had fallen into the snow only a short distance in front of him and it was the first he’d noticed Seymour’s arrival. He stared up at him with his eyes extra-wide.

  “How did you get here?” Before Seymour could respond, Thornton added, “is it really you?”

  In all the excitement, he had completely forgotten that he was still rocking the body of Nana Gring. Except now he had suddenly become a super-buff version of Thornton’s Nana. His Sincerest Flattery power had a duration of thirty minutes according to its description, but he had no guess right then as to how much longer it would last. Since entering the maze he’d completely lost track of time.

  This latest notification hit before Seymour could try to explain that he wasn’t actually Thorn’s Nana, and with it came the realization that Jerome had been acting tactically all along. He’d given Seymour the Infusion when he did because he recognized the opportunity to immediately replenish his supply of the malleable blood by siphoning from the plant-mimic that was chasing Penny and Thornton. Now Seymour not only had the body of Nana Gring, but it was buffed to hell and coursing with the Superior Regeneration effect.

  As an added benefit, Jerome had siphoned out damned near every last drop of the mimic’s vital fluids. Its color palette suddenly faded from shades of green and brown to a sickly gray and the tentacle dragging Penny into its mouth suddenly lacked the strength to restrain her. She kicked her foot loose and scrambled straight ahead, still on all-fours.

  Thornton reacted quickly, making his feet and putting himself between the monster and his Nana. He then used his Compost power to finish the thing off, turning its rapidly-withering corpse into another healing pod.

  “Nice work, Thorn.” Thornton looked up at him, confusion twisting his face, and Seymour winked.

  “Nana? How?”

  A black velvet bag materialized in the air beside Thornton’s head and floated there for a moment before plopping down into the snow. With everything else going on, he didn’t even notice it – but Seymour did.

  Cash Out. He grinned. Free money, baby.

  He’d seen this type of notification once before: back when he and Penny defeated the obsidian hornet that had ambushed them on the night she first became an Arcanum Collector. Back then he hadn’t actually been able to view it in real-time, though, because he’d been blinded, and only realized that Cash Out had even triggered when his sight later returned. The mechanism behind his power—the sudden materialization of a legit moneybag—impressed him as more than a little bit awesome.

  But he couldn’t let his bad-ass money-making powers distract him right then. Further down the hedge corridor, the corrupted corpse of Handsome Gentry had another pod erupt, this time spraying out an acid mist which quickly melted what was left of the barrier Thornton had left in its path, dissolving it into the floor. The Surrogate Nursery then floated slowly toward the three of them even as Penny commanded her familiar to flap forward and soak up the remaining acid mist. The book had now absorbed two of the three effects it would require to craft Penny another scroll.

  The combat reset for a moment, with the mimic defeated and Thorn’s barrier having been destroyed. The pregnant monster floated forward with Gentry’s head lolling around, root-worms festering out of his eye-sockets and a thick bundle wriggling out of his mouth like the demented tongue of an Old God. A pod suddenly bulged on his shoulder and burst, birthing another topiary creature, this one much smaller than those which had come before, something like a small dog.

  It hit the ground on all-fours but rather than rushing into melee range the way previous topiary critters had done, this one turned in place and pointed its backside at them. The thing was almost perfectly round and would have been easy to mistake for a simple shrub right up until the moment when long, black quills emerged from its back. As the Surrogate Nursery floated past, this newborn topiary porcupine launched a volley of quills. A yellow-green mist trailed each of the sharp, wooden missiles.

  Penny’s book flapped up to intercept the attack but while it could strip away whatever venomous magic was attached to the quills it could do nothing to slow them as they passed clean through its ghostly pages.

  It all happened fast but not so fast that Penny didn’t have a chance to scream for everyone to look out! Seymour suddenly snatched both her and Thornton in a big Nana bear hug and spun them about. The quills embedded into his back painfully and he let out a grunt that somehow sounded manlier than any noise he had ever made prior in his entire life, he realized – despite the fact he was temporarily inhabiting the body of an old woman.

  He released the others from his bear hug and turned about to face the Surrogate Nursery, which continued to float in their direction. Sincerest Flattery had not only morphed his body into Nana Gring’s, but it had also altered his clothing to become the forest-green gown she’d been wearing when he had met her in the shop—which had only been earlier that same day, even though it now felt like forever ago—and now it was stained with spots of blood where the quills had stuck into his back. The sleeves had also split all the way up to his shoulders in order to accommodate Nana Gring’s newly-bulging biceps.

  “Nana?” Thornton asked for at least the third time, but a little bit softer now.

  There was no denying the pain, but Seymour knew he could take the damage better than the others. The quills were already dropping to the snow, his massive regeneration closing the wounds and forcing them out. He stared at Handsome Gentry’s hideous face, defiant but still unsure of how he could even attempt to fight the bizarre monstrosity – despite the muscle-bulging power coursing through his body at that moment. He suspected he could tear the Surrogate Nursery apart with his bare hands – but there had to be a better way.

  Kissy kiss, Jerome emoted at Seymour’s feet. He had resumed his tiny humanoid form and stood there reaching up with his stubby little arms.

  Never releasing the Pod Person from his gaze, Seymour stooped just slightly and offered his hand for Jerome to climb aboard. The cactus man accepted the invitation, but instead of continuing to climb up to his previous perch upon Seymour’s shoulder, this time he stayed in his palm.

  And as he lifted Jerome he realized the cactus was changing shape again. First he engulfed Seymour’s entire right hand, and then he abandoned his humanoid form and began to stretch into a cylinder. A moment later Seymour found himself holding a leathery handle attached to a long, green club.

  “Nice,” he said, weighing the weapon in his grip. Spines nearly as thick as railroad spikes knifed out from the barrel of the cactus club. “Ooh, nicer still.”

  The fight that ensued then was Seymour’s come-to-violence moment, same as Penny had experienced when she beat the obsidian hornet to death that night back in the jungle.

  He swaggered toward the Surrogate Nursery, casually twirling his cactus-club. In his mind’s eye, he looked like one of the droogs from A Clockwork Orange. But in Penny and Thornton’s eyes, he looked like a roided-out Nana Gring. Reality might have been more bizarre than his imagination, this time.

  As he neared range, pods began to bulge all over the fiend’s torso, threatening to burst. Through the stretched and semi-translucent skin he recognized one of the mimic creatures about to be born, but it wouldn’t get the chance. He swung Jerome in a blur and the pod nearly evaporated; the mimic right along with it.

  A wild laugh tittered out of him.

  A topiary creature of some sort would have been next to be born but he aborted it with a second, swift cactus-blur, all the while cackling. This went on for another thirty seconds of bullet-time—cactus-time—with Seymour playing whack-a-mole, splattering the pods of topiary monster fetuses and busting them up into slimy kindling. The now-inert sticks and branches began to pile up at the bottom of the floating Surrogate Nursery’s robes like he was building a pyre to burn a witch.

  When the time came to end the fight, Seymour took up his club and swung it viciously through Handsome Gentry’s head. The decapitation was so sudden that the creature’s body remained hovering in the air for a moment, the bulging pod-sacs inflating and deflating in a struggle that reminded Seymour of a fish out of water. Then whatever force had been animating the hideous thing escaped, and the body plummeted straight down to the floor, robes pooling around it, the way a skyscraper collapses in upon itself during demolition.

  Who put the robe on this goddamned thing? Seymour found himself wondering. Another high-pitched, squealing titter chirped out of him. He realized his laugh was alien to his own ears – it was actually Nana Gring’s laugh, after all. Then it struck him that he had just beaten the shit out of a monster while looking and sounding like someone’s sweet old buff-ass granny.

  When Seymour turned back to the others, he found them both with their jaws gaping.

  “What?” He grinned a grin that no Nana should ever grin.