Before Clyde touched the door, Soren called out behind him.
"Wait! Take this with you."
Clyde turned. Soren was holding out a small glass vial containing a colorless liquid, completely transparent, catching the amber light of the chamber in a way that made it look almost harmless.
Clyde took it carefully. His Hollow Eyes activated on instinct and the name appeared over the liquid immediately, clear as a label.
Sulfuric acid. What is sulfuric acid? And why is the vial warm?
"That is sulfuric acid," Soren said, adjusting his glasses. "Simply put, it can corrode and dissolve metal on contact."
Clyde looked at the tiny vial in his hand. "That strong?"
"Yes."
"What would happen if it touched a person?"
Soren looked at him over the top of his glasses. "You do not want to know the answer to that. Think of it like a blade. Wielded properly it becomes useful. Wielded incorrectly and it will cost you dearly."
Gulp.
A chill ran straight through Clyde's bones. He felt cold sweat drip from his chin and he quickly wiped it away with his sleeve.
"I trust you, Clyde," Soren said, with a calm and steady confidence that somehow made the whole thing feel more serious rather than less. "Stop that Howling before it hurts anyone else."
"I will."
Clck. The door shut behind him and he ran.
He found them crouched behind a bush at the edge of the lane, three shapes in the dim cobalt light. Aldric, Aurelian, Eira. He slipped in beside them as quietly as he could manage while running.
Aurelian turned his head immediately. "What took you so long?"
"Long story. I'll tell you later."
Aurelian looked like he wanted to push on that but decided against it and turned back toward the street.
Eira spoke without looking at either of them, her eyes fixed on something further down the lane. "Mechanical night is starting soon."
Aldric kept his voice low and measured. "When the lanterns go out, his form will be harder to hold. I will put a cage around him. The three of you strike the moment I have him contained."
"Yes sir!" All three of them said it at the same time, barely above a whisper.
Ding! Ding!
The bell mechanism triggered. One by one, the lanterns along the lane began to dim, the warm amber flames pulling back until they were gone entirely. The only light left was the cobalt bleed from the sky above, cold and sourceless, laying its blue quality across everything.
Down the lane, the student called Marcus had stopped walking.
He was twitching.
Small, wrong movements. His shoulders. His neck. The kind of movements a body makes when something inside it is no longer entirely in agreement with the shape it is supposed to hold.
CRACK.
Marcus's head snapped around. All the way around. Too far. The kind of rotation a human neck was never supposed to achieve.
He was looking directly at Clyde.
What?! How?! He noticed me?!
Clyde barely had time to form the thought.
WHOOSH.
Marcus was in front of him. Instantaneous. No movement between the two positions, just the lane and then a face filling his entire field of vision. No pupils. A grin stretched so wide across his face it looked like something had simply decided to keep going past the point where a mouth was supposed to stop.
Clyde stumbled back a step. Cold sweat broke across his skin all at once.
I can't move.
Something was wrapping around him. He looked down. Strings, thin and pale, winding themselves around his arms and legs and torso with the quiet efficiency of something that had done this before.
Strings?! When did these appear?!
The Howling wearing Marcus's face raised a knife. Slow. Deliberate. The grin didn't change.
He opened his mouth to scream.
No sound came out.
BOOM.
The air compressed. A cube of blue-tinted force snapped into existence around the Howling, walls of compressed Lunar Ichor slamming shut on every side. Aldric's Moon Cage, formed in an instant, the gravitational pressure inside it ramping up immediately, pushing the Howling down toward the ground.
The strings snapped as the Howling was forced to redirect its focus toward the cage crushing it.
Clyde gasped and stumbled back, breathing again, the chill of the cold sweat still soaking through his collar.
Aurelian already had his revolver out, arm extended, one eye closed.
BANG!
The bullet punched through the air.
But the cage cracked, and the Howling was gone before the shot arrived.
WHOOSH.
It was in front of Clyde again.
ME AGAIN?! WHY IS IT ALWAYS ME?!
"Clyde, DUCK!" Aurelian shouted.
Clyde dropped flat.
BANG!
The shot passed directly through the space his head had been.
"Tch." Aurelian lowered the revolver slightly. "Dodged it."
A moment of stillness.
Then the Howling appeared behind Eira. A knife raised. It came down.
SHLICK.
Blood sprayed. It hit Aurelian directly across the face, spattering warm and dark. He froze, eyes wide, the revolver dropping slightly in his grip, his expression going through several things at once, none of them good.
Then the blood turned black.
The Eira who had been stabbed dissolved, shadow breaking apart and sinking back into the ground. The real Eira stepped out from behind the bush twenty feet away, completely unharmed, arms folded.
"Aurelian," she said flatly. "We have worked together for years."
Aurelian wiped the black shadow-blood from his face slowly. "Shadow Clone substitution. Right. I forgot you could do that."
"Every time."
"In my defense it's very convincing."
"That is the point."
Clyde was not paying attention to any of this. His grip on the vial had tightened until his knuckles went pale.
The Howling's ability is accelerating. Every time it moves, its wave speeds up. An acid accelerates corrosion the same way. If I time it correctly—
"Principal Aldric," Clyde said, keeping his voice low and steady. "I have an idea. I need you to suppress it long enough for me to act."
Aldric looked at him once. Then nodded.
Aurelian and Eira immediately moved, pushing toward the Howling from opposite sides, keeping it busy, keeping it reactive, forcing it to split its attention between two fast-moving threats rather than settling on one.
WHOOSH. BANG. CRACK. The sounds of the skirmish filling the lane, the Howling moving too fast to pin down, Aurelian's shots finding air instead of target, Eira's shadow clones bursting apart each time the Howling struck them.
Aldric reached into his coat.
He produced a knife and cut his own palm.
Clyde watched with wide eyes. What is he doing?
A card appeared in Aldric's other hand. Green, dark green, a symbol pressed into its surface of a tree, its branches spreading wide and its thorns visible even at this size, fine and precise.
Aldric pressed his bleeding palm flat against the card and spoke clearly.
"You are the symbol of life. Beautiful and deadly. With my ichor sigil I resonate with you. I offer you my blood, God of Briar. Please aid us in this moment."
WHOOOM.
A dark green light erupted from the card, violent and sudden, flooding the lane in its color for one brilliant second.
"Impaling Grasp."
He threw the card.
CRASH. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
The ground under the Howling split apart. Vines erupted upward, thick and dark, wrapping around the Howling's legs and arms and torso in overlapping coils that tightened as they grew, each one forcing the one beneath it harder against the Howling's body. The Howling opened its mouth to scream.
CRACK.
Thorns punched through the vines and through the Howling's body simultaneously, pinning it where it stood. Its mouth sealed shut under the pressure. Fully immobilized. Completely unable to accelerate into its next position.
"CLYDE! NOW!" Aldric bellowed.
Aurelian turned at the same instant and hurled the flintlock toward Clyde in a single clean throw.
CLANG.
Clyde caught it with one hand.
With the other hand, he threw the vial.
It arced through the air, tumbling once, and struck the Howling's chest.
CRASH. HISSSSS.
Glass exploding on impact, the liquid spraying across the Howling's skin and the vines holding it in place, the hiss of the acid beginning its work immediately, not slowly but fast, the corrosion eating through the surface on contact with the aggressive efficiency of something that did not negotiate with what it was dissolving.
The Howling's skin began to melt.
It tried to move. The acid only reached more of it.
Clyde raised the flintlock. His Hollow Eyes were already active, the frequency layers of the world showing him the Howling's interior, the irregular pulse of its heart visible through the dissolving surface.
He found it.
Aimed.
BANG!
The shot landed clean.
CRACK.
The Astral Card inside the Howling's heart shattered. The sound of it rang out bright and metallic, the specific snap of a sigil breaking apart under terminal force, and then the Howling dissolved, the remaining structure of it breaking down in stages as the organizing principle holding it together ceased to exist.
Silence came back to the lane.
Clyde lowered the flintlock and breathed out slowly.
THUD. He let the weapon drop to his side.
Aurelian was beside him in seconds. "How did you do that? And what was in that vial?"
"Acid," Clyde said. He was still catching his breath. "Sulfuric acid. The Howling's ability was acceleration, it moves by speeding itself up. Acid accelerates corrosion by the same logic. I figured if I could get it on the Howling's surface while it was immobilized, the acid would move faster than the Howling could."
Aurelian stared at him. "And how did you know the ability was acceleration?"
"Every time it used the ability I could see its frequency wave through my Hollow Eyes. The wave sped up each time it moved. Once I saw the pattern it was obvious."
Aurelian looked at him for a long second.
Then he burst out laughing, loud and genuine, the tension of the last several minutes releasing all at once in the sound of it.
"As expected from our genius Clyde!" He clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make him take a half step sideways.
Eira's mouth moved. Barely. The smallest possible suggestion of a smile.
Aldric looked at the dissolving remains in the lane with the expression of someone confirming that the result matches the desired outcome and finding it satisfactory.
Clyde said nothing.
But the corner of his mouth moved.
A small smile formed, quiet and genuine, the kind that arrives not because of a joke but because something difficult is over and everyone around you is still standing.