Tommy came through the long grass with agility that seemed borrowed from the wrong body. Lanky limbs carried him low and loose, sharp claws dragging near the dirt while peeling fingertips flexed at his sides, yet the torso above them was dense, thick, and raw with saturated orangish-red skin. From his ribcage rose two massive skeletal hands of aged ivory bone, their elongated fingers interlocked over his sternum in a mockery of restraint, while a slightly oversized head watched from above them with glossy vascular eyes, hollow cheeks, and wide cracked lips stained red.
Stone answered his advance by breaking through the dirt in staggered rows, tall enough to sever sightlines and close enough to leave narrow hunting lanes between them. Tommy moved through those lanes by choice, letting Roy see him in pieces, raw shoulder, ivory ribs, glossy eyes, cracked mouth, each glimpse arranged so the approach felt less hidden than offered.
Tommy's slinking advance turned into a rush so suddenly that FDR had to shift his mechanical mass toward Roy before the defense had fully formed. Claws rose as if Tommy meant to tear Roy's head from his shoulders, only for the attack to fold upward at the last instant, his long body vaulting over Roy with a horrible, boneless precision before he struck the ground behind the group and drove straight for the Convention of the Patriots.
"Warrex, Eisenhower, Grant," JFK barked, the order cutting in before Roy could turn alarm into speech. "Go after him. Now. I will be right there."
Before Warrex could get JFK's name out, the order cut across him. "Go. Now."
Portals opened along Tommy's path as he tore toward the Convention, and Jefferson answered from inside the sovereign border the moment each dimensional tear appeared. Through those openings came artillery shells and runic fire from Garfield and Jefferson, tearing up dirt, shattering stone cover, and striking again and again at the places Tommy had already left behind.
"When I heard her name, I had hoped to witness the Sixth Witch in action," Lynder said from the border, with disappointment weighing more than fear in his voice. "A relative of the Immortal Family is bound to be greater than the legends claim." But Tommy was the threat crossing the field, and Lynder's attention finally bent toward him. "I will aid them. If possible, I would appreciate a boost."
Blackened ground split under FDR's runic circle, giving rise to a hollow tube of mana tall enough for Lynder to understand the offer without needing it explained. "Get in."
Inside the glowing tube, protective runes wrapped thick around Lynder while FDR set both hands against the spellwork, planted his stance, and threw him across the battlefield.
High above the battlefield, the magical cylinder carried Lynder in a hard arc toward Tommy's path, then broke apart near the glowing border and dropped him between the charging monster and the Convention.
"A nation's borders must be maintained," Lynder declared as false shadows spilled from his void ring. "As an immigrant to this beautiful Convention, I will lay down my life to protect it."
Tommy's cracked lips pulled back until too much gum showed beneath them. "You are ruining my game," he complained.
From a body built like a skinned nightmare came the petulant whine of a spoiled boy, and Lynder lost the half-second Tommy had been trying to steal.
Stone pillars broke from the ground around them, thick enough to hide Tommy while leaving narrow gaps for him to use. He slipped behind the new barriers and waited there until Lynder searched the wrong spaces, then offered one glossy eye through the gap and caught him looking.
The moment Tommy lunged, Lynder had the guard waiting, a compact pocket of false void opening in the monster's path. Tommy hit it face-first, and the barrier imploded around the impact, hammering his skull into the packed dirt.
Pain barely registered in Tommy. He came off the dirt in the same motion that should have stunned him, circling Lynder until a shallow, fast slash cut through cloth and buried itself in the elf's shoulder. Defensive runes were already writing themselves into the air as Lynder retreated, building barriers around the wound before the claws finished pulling free.
More pillars rose, and Tommy used them the same way, offering a flash of glossy eyes before slipping into the narrow lanes between stone. This time, an unseen barrier caught him mid-charge and threw him back, forcing him to recover outside Lynder's reach before he came around for the elf's back.
Tommy anticipated the anticipation. The rear assault became a lie halfway through the air, his lanky body folding wrong as he reversed into the opening Lynder had created by turning to meet him.
Eisenhower's magical highway delivered Warrex into the gap before Tommy's strike landed. His axe crashed into Tommy's arm and failed to bite through the dense muscle beneath the raw skin, but the impact still drove the monster backward until his heels scraped the Convention's glowing boundary.
Eisenhower stepped off the asphalt with his eyes on the narrow space between Tommy's heels and the border. "Damn. So close. You almost got him into the Convention."
"That was your goal?" Lynder asked, one hand pressed hard against his bleeding shoulder.
"Of course it was," Warrex said, never taking his eyes off Tommy. "If he crosses into sovereign territory, the rules hit him. That levels the field."
"That's grossly unfair!" Tommy whined, his cracked mouth pulling wide around the complaint. "Two-on-one? You cowards! That's it, I'm done with the sneaky stuff!"
Tommy abandoned the game by going through the person least prepared to stop him. He shot past Warrex, slipped in behind Grant, and drove his claws into the Presidroid's flank hard enough to tear through outer armor and bite into the machinery beneath. The blow sent Grant tumbling backward over the glowing boundary and into the Convention.
"Sorry, Roy," Lynder said over the comms, quiet enough that the apology seemed meant for one person despite the open channel. "I have to break my promise. I will try not to let Tormenta take me too deep this time."
The highway flared under Eisenhower as he shouted Grant's name and pulled himself back toward the Convention, but Tommy let the retreating Presidroid go, turning the full weight of his next lunge toward Lynder's throat.
The change began in Lynder's eyes, black overtaking them until no color remained, while beads of void slid from his skin and collapsed the instant they struck the air around him. Tommy's grin failed first, and then his feet dug backward into the grass as he tried to get away.
Whatever restraint Lynder had kept in place broke loose as a dense sphere of true void formed in his hand. He chained the spell forward in overlapping points, each one hidden inside the next, until the line reached Tommy and the first touch collapsed through every link at once.
With the first word, Lynder's voice held a calm that made the spell sound worse than rage. "Concraze." The magic layered deeper. "Castration: Absence."
True void opened inside Tommy's torso and began layering through itself, hundreds of absences folding into thousands before the monster's body could even finish reacting. Each collapse triggered the next, ripping through his chest in a chain of impacts that boomed across the floor hard enough to make the nearby stone pillars tremble.
Smoke swallowed what remained of Tommy's chest, and the ruined shape inside it held still long enough to promise death before a raw red hand punched through the thinning haze and drove deep into Lynder's side.
Blood rose into Lynder's mouth as the hand stayed buried in his side, and the black in his eyes tightened around something closer to admiration than fear. "Incredible. Very unwise." Breath dragged through his teeth as his fingers found the shape of the spell again. "Concraze."
The second chain came weaker, but Lynder forced it anyway, dragging void out of the surrounding air until even the shadows on his skin began to thin. One collapse became another, then another, each repetition costing more than the last, and by the time the final point tore open against Tommy's body, the darkness had drained from Lynder's eyes and left him sinking to his knees, whispering through blood to keep his mind in place.
Across Tommy's upper body, whole sections of flesh and bone had been carved out by the collapses, leaving gaps where his chest should have been. Raw tissue bubbled along the edges anyway, knitting muscle back over exposed bone while the monster's cracked smile struggled to return with the rest of him.
"We retreat inside the Convention," Warrex said, watching new tissue crawl across the ruin Lynder had torn open. "We cannot fight him out here."
"No need to tell me," Eisenhower replied as the highway came back under his feet.
What passed for a rescue came at maximum speed, Eisenhower catching Lynder by the collar as he passed, hooking his other arm around Warrex, and dragging them both backward through the Convention's glowing border.
Just outside the boundary, with his prey finally beyond reach, Tommy paced along the glowing perimeter while his chest kept knitting itself closed. A wide, cracked smile split his face as he threw his voice through the barrier, turning the standoff into a performance.
"This thing is beautiful," Tommy cheered, admiring the floating scrolls and sovereign pillars from the wrong side of the barrier. "The failure told me it was nice in there. Good food. A good final meal."
Disgust tightened around Warrex's voice as he pressed one hand against Lynder's bleeding side. "So you killed him."
"Of course I did." Tommy gave a loose little shrug, as if the answer had barely deserved breath. "We do not need failures. If he could not take down something as pathetic as this toy box of light, why let him keep breathing?"
Mockery entered Eisenhower's voice only after he sharpened it for Tommy's pride. "You think it is pathetic. Then test it. Come in."
All Eisenhower got back was Tommy's head thrown toward the cavern ceiling and a bright, ugly laugh from the wrong side of the border.
Under the cover of Tommy's laughter, the bait fell out of Eisenhower's voice and a private emergency ping cut across the network. Roy. Tommy is at the Convention. We need backup now.
The emergency ping reached Roy in C3, and his attention snapped to the Presidroid holding the line beside him. "Stay safe," Roy ordered. "FDR and I are falling back to stop that freak."
As Roy turned and broke toward the Convention, Truman remained with the burned corridors at his back. "I will not be far behind."
Beyond the burned corridors, bodies gathered into a spreading mass, and Truman faced them with Roy's retreating footsteps already fading behind him.
With the horde advancing into range, Truman settled his stance and let the quiet sit in his voice. "My turn. Forgotten Scripts: The Buck."