Spryte was woken the following morning by Child gently prodding him in the ribs with his shoe.

“Whuzza?” the young man slurred.

“Up and at ‘em, Spryte.”

Even though Spryte’s vision was blurred by grogginess, he could still quite easily tell that it was kind of dark. The sky was light grey with touches of soft pink, and the sun was a deep orange ball just poking over the edge of the farthest horizon. Spryte sat up on his elbows. “What time is it?”

“Just after 4:30, I think. It’s hard to tell out here.” Child was holding something large and cumbersome in his wrinkled hands. He gestured with it. “Come on. On your feet, Plummer.”

“4:30 am?!” Spryte groaned, burying his face in his hands. “No! That’s the bad 4:30! Leave me alone.”

“You can get up now, Spryte, or I can dump a pitcher of ice water on your head,” said Child.

Spryte’s voice was muffled by his hands. “Very funny, old man. You don’t have a pitcher of ice water.”

When the ice cold water hit Spryte’s face a second later, he gasped and sat up. Child finished pouring the water and tossed the tin coffee cup he’d used to hold it back into his inventory. “I found a pond not too far from here. The morning dew makes the water particularly cold this time of day.”

Spryte felt like crying. “What do you want from me, Child?”

“I want you to stand up. We have work to do.”

Resenting every ounce of it, Spryte obeyed and got to his feet. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair was messed, and he had bags under his eyes that he could have used to hold his groceries. So, needless to say, when Child tossed the long, cumbersome object at him, Spryte’s clumsy fingers missed it by more than a foot.

“Pick it up,” Child instructed.

Spryte sighed and bent down to retrieve the fallen object. When he got it in his hands and straightened up again, he took a better look at it. It was a thick, sturdy tree branch, probably something Child had found out in the wilderness. Tied to one end of the branch with a short length of rope was a hefty boulder, about the size of two human fists.

“This is very nice. What is this, your new cane?” Spryte mumbled, his tone of voice indicating that he could not care less what it was.

“No. It’s your new hammer.”

Spryte looked up. “Say what?”

“If you wanna learn to use the Wisdom Tree’s hammer effectively, you’ve got to take it in baby steps. Starting with this.” He jerked his chin towards the makeshift weapon. “In the ancient days, Spryte, samurais used to train in the art of swordplay using wooden sticks. It wasn’t until they mastered the art of holding a weapon that they earned the right to actually carry one. So the same is gonna apply to you.”

“...this is a branch with a rock tied to it.”

“And from now until all this is over, you’re going to spend at least two hours a day practicing with it. One hour every morning, and one hour each night before we go to sleep. And when I feel that you’re ready, when I feel that you’re comfortable holding such a weapon in your own two hands, then I’ll give you your real hammer back.”

“But...this is a branch with a rock tied to it.”

Child ignored his protests. “Are you ready to start?”

“No,” Spryte said defiantly. He let the makeshift weapon fall to his side. “What’s the point of this, man?”

“The point, Spryte, is that right now there’s a maniac who’s probably got your girlfriend by the throat, and yesterday you almost died just because you heard his voice over a telephone speaker. You’ve only got one weapon to fight this guy with, and you can’t even swing it without hurting one of us. Now, I’m not a betting man, but to me, it sounds like the odds here aren’t stacked in your favor. If you’re happy being this helpless, then by all means, go back to sleep for another hour. We’ll just let Pixel try to overpower a man who’s probably two or three times her size with nothing but her bare hands. Then he’ll probably make you watch while he has his way with her before breaking every bone in both your bodies, because from the sounds of it he’s just the kind of sick person who’d do that. Would you be happy with that outcome?”

Spryte shook his head.

“So pick up the branch with the rock tied to it. Please.”

He did.

L O A D I N G . . .

It had been a long and restless night for Pixel, who barely managed to get three hours of sleep. Whenever she’d been tantalizingly close to drifting off into a peaceful slumber, her thoughts would zero in on the knife that was currently sitting safely within her inventory, and the very thought of it would jar her awake again. No matter what she’d tried, Pixel couldn’t get her mind off of it. Even when she did fall asleep, her dreams were dominated by images of blades slashing in the dark.

Now, it was morning. Frustrated at her lack of rest, Pixel sat up, blowing the bangs away from her eyes. She made a mental note to get those annoying bangs cut if she ever got back to Coinopolis in one piece (a mental note that she promptly forgot a minute or so later when her mind wandered to other things).

The lingering presence of the knife in her inventory made Pixel afraid to step out of her cell. There were no nearby sounds of guards, but she still didn’t fully trust the silence. She knew that any one of those awful creatures could be lurking just around the corner, and she didn’t want to take that risk. Instead, she just sat there, with her back against the hard stone wall, her mind going a million miles a minute. The knife...the knife...all she could think about was the knife. It was starting to drive her insane.

Pixel’s imagination was set afire with dozens of different theories on how she could use the pilfered weapon to her advantage...and each theory ended up with her lying dead in the castle, slain by the veritable army of ghoulish minions in Gonnad’s employ. Even if she could slip the knife between her captor’s ribs and make a break for it, the castle doors were always guarded. Which meant that no matter what happened, Pixel would have to end up confronting at least two guards. Maybe more.

Finally, when the very thought of thinking made her head hurt, Pixel resorted to removing the knife from the inventory, laying it across her outstretched palms, and staring at it.

She almost laughed in spite of herself; she felt like Falcor. Spryte’s Androidimal companion had always taken to staring at objects he deemed lovely, in some instances for hours at a time. The familiar memory of Falcor made Pixel smile for the first time in a long time. Come to think of it, she couldn’t even remember the last conversation she’d had with that wonderful robotic bird...

Dust seeped into Pixel’s nose, making her sneeze so suddenly that she dropped the knife. It hit the floor with a clatter that seemed positively deafening to her. She hastily picked it up before it could cause any more of a ruckus. Had someone heard? Had her pathetic excuse for a garbage-constructed knife actually fooled anyone downstairs, or were the minions all snickering at her, waiting for her to try something just so they could easily stop her and take the stolen weapon away?

That was when the cold, hard truth hit her: every single one of Gonnad’s minions (that she knew of, anyway) was wearing one of these knives at his belt. Which meant that all of these unpleasant creatures were probably rather proficient when it came to wielding a knife in combat. Pixel, on the other hand, had never been in a fight in her life. There had been that one time at school, when Janey Anderson had pushed her in the mud and stolen her lunch money. But that was third grade. Aside from hitting one of her kidnappers with a frying pan, Pixel had pretty much zero experience in the art of hurting people. So even if it came down to her and her knife versus one of the castle guards...she had no idea what to do except flail the weapon madly through the air and hope for the best.

This, she decided instantly, was something that needed to be rectified. Now.

Standing up from her uncomfortable position, Pixel grasped the knife carefully by the hilt, holding it as if she were going to stab someone. Her fingers were sweaty and shaky. She fumbled and dropped the knife again.

“Pick it up, Pixel Durango,” she commanded herself. “It’s just a knife, for god’s sake. You’ve cut bread with worse than this.”

Not one to disobey a direct order from herself, Pixel obeyed.

L O A D I N G . . .

“Okay,” said Child, smiling. “First things first: you have to learn how to hold your weapon properly. Your hands are way too close together. This is a hammer, not a baseball bat. Spread them apart.”

“Like this?” asked Spryte, separating his hands by a few inches.

“Better. Now, your feet are also too close together; you have no balance. If you swing that thing now, its weight and your momentum are going to make you fall flat on your face. Spread your feet more.”

“There’s a lot more spreading involved in this than I thought,” Spryte muttered. He obeyed, and immediately felt more comfortable.

“Now give it a swing.”

Spryte hesitated for a moment, then inhaled sharply through his teeth and made a pathetic little movement with the makeshift hammer that looked less like a swing and more like the shiver one inevitably endures when they urinate. The others, who were watching nearby, had to resist the urge to burst out laughing. Packman failed resisting that urge.

“Doctor, your laughter isn’t helping anyone right now,” Child said with a glower. “Don’t pay any attention to them, Spryte, just try it again.”

“Uggh!” Spryte gave a mighty grunt and attempted another swing. It didn’t quite work out. Spryte’s entire body spun around 360 degrees. Twice. The hammer nearly flew out of his hand and he stumbled forward to avoid losing his grip on it. This time, Packman’s failed attempt to resist the urge to laugh was twice as loud and obnoxious as before, making Spryte’s blood boil. A few seconds later the wood-and-rock hammer went flying straight at Packman’s head, knocking him right over. It was Spryte’s first time using the tool successfully.

“Well...you hit your target,” Child said with a shrug. “Very good. Let’s keep going.”

First things first, Pixel told herself. Learn to hold the damn knife properly.

She rubbed her sweaty palms against her jeans and took hold of the knife’s hilt. Her fingers rose and fell a few times as she struggled to get a comfortable grip on the small but efficient weapon. She didn’t know much about using knives as weapons, but she was fairly certain that there was a right way and a wrong way to hold one when doing so.

And she had a sinking feeling that she was currently doing it the wrong way.

The knife was held out in front of her, blade straight up, like a torch. She waved it back and forth haphazardly a few times before frowning and lowering his arm. “Okay, that is not working,” Pixel scoffed. “I look like I’m directing traffic.”

She tried a different approach, holding it with her arm cocked at a 90-degree angle in front of her, the blade pointed outwards. Pixel gritted her teeth and took a wild stab forward. But –given the awkward way her arm was positioned –the force of the swing made her fall forward and she relinquished her grip on the knife so that she could hold out her hands and brace herself against the nearest wall.

“Yeah, that’ll come in handy if all these monsters only attack me from my right side.”

Understandably frustrated, Pixel retrieved her fallen weapon. Keeping her thumb at the top of the hilt, she tried just holding the knife casually at her side and then –WHOOSH! She brought it up in a wide arc, slicing the air in front of her with enough speed for her to clearly hear the sound of air being cut. This felt remarkably more natural and comfortable. Pixel grinned.

Excited, she tried again, just in case that first time turned out to be a fluke. It wasn’t. The knife attacked the air with just as much enthusiasm. She did it again and again, until the movement felt almost like second nature. Every time, the knife’s edge cut sweeping, glorious arcs through the empty space in front of her. Pixel’s grin grew wider. She brought the knife close to her face as if seeing it for the first time.

Pixel knew how to hold her weapon. Pixel knew how to swing her weapon. Now all that was left to do was...

“Practice, practice, practice,” Child announced, squinting as the sunlight caught his old eyes. “You’re never going to get good at it just by swinging the thing around for a while. Like I said, two hours every day.” The old man braved the harsh glare of the wild sun to chance a glance skyward. “We’ve been at it for an hour now, so you can stop there. We’ll pick up where we left off tonight.”

Spryte weighed the homemade hammer gingerly in his hands. “You really think I can get the hang of this by the time we reach the castle?”

“I’ve got faith in you, Spryte.”

Adding the weapon to his inventory, Spryte joined the others and together they moved on through the ever-deepening Wilds.

Both Child and Spryte stayed true to their intentions: for the next week, Spryte spent one hour each morning and one hour every night swinging the fake hammer back and forth. Child taught him not only how to strike overhand and underhand, but how to thrust with the butt of the hammer, how to parry blows, how to attack two or more enemies at once, how to use his feet, and any other skill the old man felt would be essential in combat.

At one point, early on in the training process, Child had fished through his inventory and emerged holding the lid of one of the cooking pots they’d been using to make their fireside meals. Upon the face of this metal lid, Child used a red marker to draw an X.

“Dom, you’re a big fella,” Child said afterwards. “Mind holding this lid up an inch or so over your head?”

“Sure!” said Dom excitedly, eager to help.

Child turned to his student. “Now, Spryte, I want you to try this: Dom is going to sneak up behind you and make a noise. When he does, I want you to spin around 180 degrees and hit the X I drew on that lid with your hammer.”

Spryte’s face paled. “What if I hit Dom?”

This hadn’t occurred to Dom until now, and the bouncer suddenly looked rather terrified. “Yeah, what if he hits Dom?!”

“If you pay attention to everything you learn while training and never lose concentration for an instant,” Child explained, “you won’t have to worry about hitting Dom at all.”

“Yeah, but...what if he hits Dom?!?!” Dom asked again, much louder this time.

Packman –whose head was healing quite nicely –leaned in and whispered to Nester, “Twelve bits says he hits Dom.”

“You’re in debt up to your ass,” Nester reminded him. “You sure you wanna be gambling right now?” Then, after a pregnant pause: “Twenty.”

“Deal.”

“Ready?” Child asked “Let’s try it in three...two...”

“I can’t watch this,” Nester decided, covering his eyes with his hands. Packman followed suit a fraction of a second later.

“Neither can I,” muttered Falcor, shutting off the power to his photoreceptors.

“...One!”

There followed a series of accumulatively unpleasant noises. Nester dared to peek out from between a few of his fingers. “What happened?”

He saw Child shaking his head dismissively. Spryte was wincing, hammer still in hand. Dom was lying on his back in the grass, a nasty welt growing astoundingly fast on his forehead.

“I hit Dom,” Spryte groaned.

Dom stared wide-eyed at the clouds that filled his vision. “I can hear colours!” he whispered hoarsely.

Now that she had a good idea of how to properly and comfortably wield her new knife, Pixel just had to keep working at it. Over the course of a week, she spent the majority of her time sequestered up in her cell, emerging only for bathroom breaks. The rest of the hours were spent fine-tuning her chopping, slashing, stabbing, slicing, and dicing. On several occasions, Pixel had to hide the knife in her inventory whenever she heard a guard entering the room to bring her food or to intimidate her (or, sometimes, both).

At one point, Gonnad himself came back into the cell to sneer down at her and inform her that her precious Spryte Plummer would soon be within his grasp. Pixel tried her best to convey a look of what she hoped was utter helplessness. It seemed to work, because Gonnad smirked with satisfaction and stomped from the room, his tail slithering behind him.

As soon as his back was turned, Pixel had a mad fantasy of just retrieving the knife and throwing it into Gonnad’s neck. This delusion quickly made the young woman aware of how inexperienced she was when it came to using the knife as a ranged weapon. Praying that no guards would hear, she decided to test just how inexperienced she was.

Using the lipstick in her purse, Pixel drew a miniscule, barely-discernible X on the wall at the far end of the room. Then, positioning herself opposite the marked wall, she took the knife in her hand. Her eyes squinted in deep concentration. She kept focused on the target, blocking out everything else around her. And after emitting a gasp of breath, she hurled the knife with all of her strength.

PING!

It hit the opposite wall hard (quite far from her lipstick target, unfortunately), and bounced back like a tennis ball. The hilt hit her in the forehead hard enough to knock her right over.

Slowly, a little dizzy from the impact, Pixel picked herself back up, thankful that she hadn’t been hit by the other end. Not willing to give up so easily, she tried another toss.

PING!

This time she had enough sense to cover her face with her arms when the knife came bouncing back at her. This was starting to try Pixel’s patience. “Grrr! Come on, you stupid thing!”

PING!

Had she not ducked and covered, this bounce would have probably driven the knife point-first through her face. Pixel was just gathering her wits for a fourth toss when she heard the unmistakable sound of a guard working the knob on her cell door. She hastily concealed the knife.

One of Gonnad’s creatures poked his head into the room, his eyes narrow slits of unfriendliness. “Did I just hear three suspicious noises in here, you hideous thing?!” he queried.

“Absolutely not,” Pixel answered, a little too quickly. “I mean...that is, you might have heard noises. I was...talking to myself. But there was nothing suspicious about it.”

“Talking to yourself? About what?”

“Mostly table tennis. It’s my favourite sport. You might have heard me say ‘ping pong’ two or three times.”

“I think I heard you say ‘ping’ once or twice,” the guard grunted. “But it sounded like you were saying it pretty melodiously.”

“I was. I was singing. I sing when I talk about table tennis. I find it very exciting. Can I have some privacy now, please?”

The guard considered this for a moment before nodding his beaked head. “Fine. But no more singing! You have a terrible voice.”

“Okay.”

The monster left, shutting the door and muttering something along the lines of, “horrid, hideous thing, comes into our castle and starts wailing like a banshee, the Master ought to cut its filthy little tongue out...”

Pixel waited for the creature to move out of earshot before trying to figure out a way to work on her throwing accuracy without alerting half the castle staff to what she was doing. Thankfully, the guard hadn’t noticed the tiny lipstick mark on the mall (that would have surely raised even more questions). If only she had some way to muffle the noise!

She thought and thought until her head hurt, and the haze wafting through the window from the lava below was starting to make the room uncomfortably hot. Lucky for her, she was wearing a couple of layers. Pixel pulled off the soft baby blue sweater that she’d been trudging around in since her meeting at Burger Time with Spryte. She felt instantly cooler, and the pink tank top she wore underneath kept her from feeling too exposed or indecent.

Pixel tossed the hot sweater aside, and suddenly remembered just how much Spryte used to love that sweater. The first time he’d seen her in it was their fifth date, when Pixel invited Spryte over to her apartment to watch a DVD. Spryte had stupidly selected a gory slasher flick, in the hopes that Pixel would get scared and curl up into Spryte’s arms for comfort. Little did Spryte know that Pixel was an avid fan of gory slasher films (hence the reason she had one in her home to begin with), and she was unaffected by the R-rated horror of The Tronville Chainsaw Massacre. Instead, it had been Spryte who ended up curled in the fetal position on the couch, burying his face in the crook of Pixel’s arm whenever things on screen got a little too intense or blood-soaked for his liking. It was during these cowardly dives for cover that Spryte first discovered the wondrousness of Pixel’s blue sweater.

“Mmm! Wow, honey, this sweater is really soft!” he’d said.

“Thanks!” she’d replied, genuinely pleased.

Pixel looked up, her mind racing back to the present. She reached out and grabbed hold of that soft blue sweater and held it out in front of her, examining it from every angle. Then she made her way over to the wall. Just as she’d hoped, the bricks making up the wall of her cell hadn’t been laid in any perfectly straight lines or anything, and one misshapen chunk of brick was protruding out just enough to make a very handy hook. She hung her sweater onto the corner of this brick, waiting to see if it would fall. It didn’t.

Then, taking up her lipstick again, Pixel drew another red X. This time it was much bigger, and it was spread across the entirety of the back of the sweater. When this task was done, Pixel set her purse down beneath it all.

The excited young woman retreated back to the far side of the room and removed the knife from its hiding spot in her inventory. She gave it a few practice swings, and then planted one foot forward and chucked it across the cell.

The knife hit the sweater hilt-first and bounced harmlessly onto the purse beneath it. Neither of those two actions made a sound that could possibly be heard by anyone outside the room. Slowly, the corners of Pixel’s mouth curled up into a gleeful smile.

“Again!” Child barked.

They were standing at the very edge of a low valley. To the west stretched a long, barren plateau of beige rock. Dawn had come, and Spryte was once again training his little heart out, under the watchful eye of his mentor. Spryte swung once to the right, once to the left, and once to the right again, planting his foot on each swing. The moves came clumsily at first, but time and practice were starting to pay off.

“Again!”

Spryte obeyed, completing the three-swing combo another time. Then another time. And another, and another, and fourteen others, until his arms felt like they were going to fall off. The stick-and-rock hammer clenched in his sweaty fists seemed to weigh more than it usually did.

“Reverse!” Child called, ignoring Spryte’s obvious desire to stop and rest. Spryte spun around on his heel, facing the opposite direction.

“Duck! Swing! Jump!”

Spryte executed all three moves flawlessly.

“Okay!” Child said, beaming. “From the top!”

“Again,” Pixel demanded of herself.

The word bounced around the empty grey room for a moment, and then she swung. The knife cut to the left, then to the right, then to the left again. What began as a shaky start was quickly easing into a much more comfortable routine. Pixel almost felt as if the knife were a part of her already.

“Again!”

Her teeth bared in concentration, Pixel completed her combo another dozen times. Her arms and legs were starting to ache, and her stomach was rumbling with hunger. The guards had yet to bring her a meal that day, and the lack of food was starting to make her woozy. But she forced herself to ignore all of it, to pretend nothing else mattered –or even existed –save for herself, and her weapon.

“Turn!” She spun on her heel. “Swing! Dodge! Spin! Swing!” She practiced darting around in a circle, avoiding the imaginary counter-attack of one of Gonnad’s knife-wielding monsters. By the time she was done, beads of sweat were coursing down her forehead and bare arms. But she couldn’t stop smiling.

“Okay. From the top.”

The valley Spryte and his friends were travelling through happened to be chock full of strange little creatures made out of what appeared to be blobs of light blue slime. The slime-blobs stared up at the rescue party with soulless eyes as they closed in to attack. Child decided this was the perfect situation to test Spryte’s accuracy and agility.

With the fake hammer by his side, Spryte dove into the fray, swinging and spinning with all of his might. The slime-blobs didn’t know what hit them. One hit from the hammer sent them squishing into thousands of miniscule drops, spattering across the valley floor before evaporating into oblivion and dropping 4 bits as a parting gift. Spryte dispatched twenty slime-blobs in this manner, and –though he did not realize it at the time –he hadn’t even broken a sweat. He was overjoyed with himself for having learned so quickly. Child was overjoyed with himself for having taught him so well. And Packman was overjoyed with himself because he now had another 80 bits to add to his growing collection.

At night, when the castle grew dark, Pixel would emerge from her cell and sneak through the corridors. She went nowhere in particular, focusing instead on just learning to avoid every single guard she came across. She learned where all of the torches in the castle were positioned, and how she could hide in the shadows of their light while the guards passed by, oblivious to her presence. Had they spotted her, they would have simply told her to go back to her room; but Pixel played through every scenario as if it were life or death. Every footstep down the hall was had the potential to lead to a fatal encounter. So she took no chances.

Pixel ducked behind barrels, she disappeared into dark corners, she crawled beneath tables, she ran full-tilt down a narrow hall that bridged two wings of the castle together. She opened and shut doors so silently that no one knew she’d been there. She explored as much of the ancient structure as she could before returning back to her cell. For all the guards knew, she’d been in there the entire time.

Even though his head was still considerably tender, Dom bravely volunteered to continue holding up the pot lid with the big red X. Spryte stood with his back to the bouncer, cautious, focusing as hard as he could. When Child gave the word, he spun around.

The hammer struck nothing but air, whooshing a few feet in front of Dom’s outstretched hand.

Child encouraged Spryte to stop holding back, to trust both himself and the hammer to find the target. Spryte tried again and again. Each time, Dom winced and turned his head, afraid of what he might see. Luckily, the hammer didn’t bludgeon any part of his body. But the pot lid remained untouched.

Pixel flicked her wrist in an almost nonchalant way and sent the knife sailing across the room. It hit the very bottom of the sweater, barely reaching it at all, before plummeting back down onto the purse. She retrieved it and tried again. This time, she overcompensated for her last mistake and ending up throwing it too high.

After a few tedious attempts and no luck, a frustrated Pixel chucked the knife with all her might. She was genuinely surprised when it came pretty darn close to hitting the big red lipstick X, and then bounced off the sweater with enough force to come back at her. Reaching out with her off-hand, Pixel caught the knife in mid-air.

It was still a miss, but it was a good miss.

As the valley deepened, the blue slime-blobs kept multiplying. Eventually, the group came across one that was slightly bigger than the rest. Rather than being blue, this one gave off a silver sheen so bright that it couldn’t have been anything other than sentient liquid metal (the very thought of which blew Nester’s mind to such a degree that he demanded to take a picture of the monster on his cell phone before allowing Spryte to kill it).

It took three blows this time to fell the silver blob...the same three blows in the efficient combo Child had been teaching him all week. One swing to the right, one swing to the left, one swing to the right. After the trio of consecutive pummels, the metal blob finally succumbed to the weapon and splattered, littering the ground with 40 bits.

Spryte turned his head to revel in the victory with his companions...only to discover that a veritable horde of other metal slime-blobs were advancing on them at an alarming rate. Grinning, Spryte sprang into action alongside his friends.

One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.

One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.

Pixel moved from one end of her cell to the other, practicing her combo of knife swings. After having spent so much time in their presence, Pixel knew exactly how tall each different species of minion was, and she swung her blade accordingly as if she were aiming for the neck.

The shelled beak-monster. Slice.

The big-eyed, sloped forehead monster. Slice.

The skeletal, glowing-eyed monster. Slice.

Gonnad. Slice, slice, slice.

She wound her way across the cell with such fluidity that it almost became a kind of dance; a waltz with a flurry of invisible partners who would have the pleasure of dancing with her for all of three seconds before their imaginary jugulars were slashed, at which point they would drop to make way for the next unfortunate soul to join Pixel Durango on the dance floor.

Child issued his command, and Spryte spun.

The hammer almost brushed the side of the pot lid. Almost, but not quite. He didn’t wait for an order to get back into position and try again. He swung and missed...

The knife almost hit the center of the sweater. Almost, but not quite. Pixel didn’t waste any time getting back into position and trying again. She threw and missed...

One-two-three, one-two-three. One by one, the metal slime-blobs were obliterated, leaving only money behind to remind the world that they’d been there at all. One of them tried to engorge Nester’s leg, but Spryte sent it careening into the side of the valley with a well-aimed attack.

Everything felt like it was moving in slow motion. The slimes would advance, and Spryte would beat them back with his hammer.

One-two-three, one-two three...

Swing!

A beaked monster fell dead in Pixel’s mind, but she didn’t linger to savor the victory. She moved around in a circle and encountered her next bit of opposition.

Swing!

Another creature fell.

Swing! Swing!

The two big-eyed minions who had been sneaking up behind her had their throats slashed...

Dom held his hand out, and actually watched instead of flinching. The command came from Child, but Spryte only half-heard it. His body partially tucked into a crouch, the Androidimal fighter lifted one foot off the ground and spun around. The rock-and-stick hammer he wielded cut a huge arc through the hazy air.

The end of the rock collided with the red X in the middle of the lid, resulting in a tremendous CLUNG.

There was enough force behind the impact to push Dom backwards several steps.

With a noise that was unimaginably pleasant, Spryte’s experience points rolled all the way up to 63,000.

Pixel was coming to the end of her dance. She finished stabbing the throat of an imaginary guard, ducked and dispatched two more, and touched down on the ground in a squat. She allowed herself half a second to keep her balance before popping back up into the air, whereupon she turned 180 degrees and sent her knife across the room.

The center of the red lipstick X was penetrated by the smooth blade, which stuck itself into the wall and vibrated on the spot there for a few seconds, resulting in a quiet THUNK.

Pixel spent the next several minutes ruminating on just how unimaginably pleasant that little sound was.