To understand how impressive Sans was in our short journey through the Ways of the Nevernever, you need to know a few things about what Ways are and what the Nevernever is.

First off, the Nevernever is the supernatural mirror dimension to all of reality. I don't mean all of Planet Earth, I mean everything, everywhere. If you know where to go looking, you could find Heaven, Hell, Valhalla, Elysium, and even cheap parking in Chicago, all buried somewhere in the Nevernever. Moreover, it's about as dangerous as walking around on Mars without a space suit if you don't know where you're going. Mars if it were covered in demons who all wanted to eat your face, and where gunpowder doesn't burn.

It doesn't help that while the Mortal Realms, including the Earth, are based on Physics, the rules that dictate how the Nevernever works are more like an ever-shifting system of beliefs. I meant it when I said there are places where gunpowder doesn't burn, or where water does. A lot of it doesn't change from day to day or even from decade to decade, but as a sort of mirror to reality, altering what you can find on Earth changes where you'll end up if you cross over to the Nevernever. Wizards can use a spell to open a Way into the Nevernever from just about anywhere; I call my version of the spell Aparturum. The thing is, the details of a given place can change dramatically even a short distance away either on Earth or in the Nevernever, so traveling without knowing a stable Way can get a little… complicated. And that's ignoring the dangers.

If I were to open a Way in the meat section of a supermarket in Chicago, I might end up in a regular meeting place of the denizens of the Nevernever, maybe even a more supernatural marketplace's "meat section." If I could avoid being eaten by any of the locals, I might be able to walk down the aisles until I came to another part of that supernatural marketplace. If I were to open a Way there, only a couple yards away by my reckoning, then I might find myself in a bazaar somewhere in Egypt. With only a couple of yards traveled by foot, I could literally step across the globe in a matter of moments.

The catch is, it's entirely possible that the supernatural marketplace I'd opened up a path into might be famous as a place to buy and sell fresh human meat. As a human myself, I would expect my journey to end long before I could open up that second Way into Egypt. For that reason, opening up Ways just anywhere, let alone diving into them headfirst, is generally considered a more complicated form of suicide.

Most Wizards, and even many of the Fae, tend to carefully sift through the Ways near the places they like to go, to see if there are any safe paths (for a given value of "safe") through the Nevernever to get where they're going. These paths are considered worth the weight of their maps in gold. Those maps can last until the mirror reality shifts to compensate for a change in how a place is seen or felt, and when that happens, those Ways cease to be. In Chicago, a natural nexus of the Mortal world, you could get just about anywhere if you knew a safe Way, but jumping through willy nilly was a method of absolute last resort.

Sans didn't give a shit about any of that.

In the back of my mind, I was reminded of my Soul Gaze with Sans, who stood firm against reality itself breaking down, and of all the power he had hidden away. I'd sort of known what he could do, magically speaking, since then, sort of guessed that I could have climbed physically through the paintings of his reality and found myself there, all at once, only a step away from that dust-choked hallway. Thousands of years spent stepping across the Mountain's threshold to the Nevernever, seeing how to cut corners in the most efficient way possible, looking for breaches however small in that Barrier, had made the ability to cross from one side of reality to the other effortless for the skeleton.

That was back down in the Underground, Beneath Mt. Ebott, where his Ways were subtle and perfect, if all completely hamstrung by the Barrier his people had been trapped behind. What he'd apparently gained from his travels was practice. Several millennia of it.

Up here in Chicago, Sans made the Ways his bitch.

I would say we stepped through a Way in the middle of the field museum, but that implies my feet ever touched the ground after we fell through.

Gravity clutched at my insides, and the only way we ever traveled was down. It didn't matter that we were flying through the air, flitting into and out of reality at a speed I could barely comprehend, because I was too busy feeling like the wizards in Harry Potter must have whenever they apparated, spun around and drawn ass-first through a sphincter in space between where they were and where they wanted to be. I may not have liked those books, but I was now glad I had something, anything to ground myself against while the world spun around me and the direction of down changed from instant to instant.

I think I puked stomach acid and water on a 40-foot-long flying seahorse-bear somewhere along the Way.

All in all, through the flashing lights, freezing and boiling temperatures, gravity shifts in all directions, and me nearly pissing myself, we finally fell through a thin cut in reality and were dropped unceremoniously onto a pile of grass.

Sans managed to land on his feet. I sprawled out face first into the ground, gasping for air.

"sorry about that," Sans muttered to me as he looked around. "i'm still not used to the shortcuts up here. i would have got us here sooner and smoother if we were underground."

I didn't answer him. I was still catching my breath and waiting for my heart to stop pounding.

'Apologies, my Host,' Lasciel's voice spoke up from somewhere to my left. 'Be at peace. It will slow the spread of damage to your soul.'

The world slowed down, just for a moment, then resumed at a normal pace as my heart returned to a more measured beat. The shock of the trip had passed, thanks in part to my Hellish companion. I looked at Sans, who was sweating a little around the bone of his forehead.

I guess if that's how he traveled, terrifying and amazing as it was, it was no wonder he was exhausted just getting around.

"Don't worry about it," I finally answered the skeleton. "Just don't let anybody else know you can do it. There are plenty of things out there that would gladly enslave you and force you to serve them because you can. Nobody can move through the Ways like that. It was fast, sure. Just… warn a guy, next time?"

Sans' eyelights blinked out for a moment, probably over the enslavement comment, but he shrugged it off and kept an eye out.

I finally looked around myself, and cussed like a sailor when I realized that I'd opened the cut on my eye for the thousandth time; it wasn't bleeding very much, considering how often I'd messed it up, but just for a moment, it hurt. The pain passed a second later, and I suspected a certain Fallen was responsible. Ignoring it, I verified that we'd landed in a graveyard.

Graceland Cemetery is famous. It's the largest and oldest graveyard in Chicago, and it's a tourism highlight. It has life-sized replicas of Greek temples and statues, Egyptian obelisks- I mean, there's even a freakin' pyramid. You may not take your wealth with you when you pass, but you can sure spend it leaving a monument before you go.

My grave is here, illegally open to the sky, on permanent standby awaiting my corpse. It was a gift from a Red Court vampire, given just before I'd kickstarted the war in order to save my girlfriend's life. I couldn't see it from here, but the message on my white marble headstone, etched in gold, was unforgettable:

HARRY DRESDEN

HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING

I came here from time to time, as a reminder of what I'd paid, and what I'd lost. What I would eventually pay. It's hard to feel proud or strong in a graveyard, and that goes double when you're standing over your eventual resting place. We aren't immortal. Hell, I'd spoken to the last in a long line of dead versions of me not an hour ago. I was fallible, and if things didn't go right, death was waiting for me, right alongside my gravestone.

If Quintus Cassius had his way, I suspect he was waiting to be my literal grim reaper.

I'm not immortal, but I'm not ready to go just yet, either.

Sans offered me a skeletal hand up, and I took it.

"tori isn't far from here," he told me, all business. "i can't promise she'll be able to put you back together, but she should be able to give you a hand."

"Lead on," I told him, the feelings of nausea fading, and we got moving.

Like I said, Graceland had statues and vanity headstones like you wouldn't believe. It was somewhere between ten o'clock and four in the afternoon, as I'd long since lost track of time, but I couldn't see where exactly the sun was through the various trees and while I was busy watching for threats among the gravestones. Even if I had, I wasn't quite sure which way North was, and wouldn't be until I saw some landmarks I could recognize.

So long as it wasn't night, you could normally find tourists, joggers and mourners in the cemetery, each paying their respects in their own way. With the state of emergency declared, there wasn't a soul in sight.

Graveyards are creepy at night. I could confirm that empty graveyards could be just as creepy during the day, especially when you knew something was hiding in them.

Despite my justified paranoia, we managed to find Toriel, Queen of the Monsters, without finding anyone, or anything, else.

We came up behind her while she kept a lookout toward a landmark I could recognize: my own grave. Her floppy ears twitched as we approached, and she turned just as Sans and I came to a stop. She was either still wearing her purple robe with white accents and a delta rune on the front, or she bought the outfit in bulk. Her stern, almost angry expression melted when she saw us, and she quickly swept us both into a hug.

"Oh, it is good to see you both safe!" she said, engulfing us in her mass. It wasn't that she was fat, just that she was huge. She wasn't taller than me like Asgore, but she was still pretty big. She had leaned down to add Sans to her grip, and I ended up bleeding on her purple robes a little bit.

She drew back and smiled at the both of us, and then her expression hardened again.

"I have kept the villains in my sight," she turned her gaze back toward my grave. "The Necromancer has been pacing, but has otherwise not left that spot."

"And the others?" I asked. "You said villains, plural. I don't see them. Or... anybody else," I said, looking around more carefully. "If we wait a bit, I know that a few friends of mine are on the way, and the military won't be long after."

She looked sidelong at me, then back. "Undyne and Asgore are guarding the mansion. Too many of us have been lost already, and we can't afford to leave our people vulnerable. No other Monsters are ready for this fight."

She motioned forward, then continued, "At least one large snake monster is hiding in your grave. Another two I have seen patrolling, and they have avoided this spot. I suspect they know where I am, and have been humoring me, watching them. None are near, but they are deceptively swift."

"Uh, when you say monsters…" I asked carefully, but she snorted; it was a strange, half-honking chuckle, and I wasn't sure which farm animal it sounded like.

"I suspect the snakes are constructs of magic. None are of our species," she assured me. "You shouldn't hold back against any but their leader, who still retains his SOUL, however broken it has become."

"yeah, alphys and i looked into it, and it turns out we're not covered under your laws of magic," Sans cut in, and I turned to see him… stretching? "i'm not going to say we're all pure joy and goodness, but we're not wired the same way you humans are. that's why i'm going to be killing liver spots while you two help out however you can. the original plan was for the two of you to wear him down and for me to take over, but that was before i realized you were injured."

Toriel looked away from my grave to stare down at Sans, then turned to scrutinize me more closely. I could see sympathy in her eyes as she saw the cuts on my face, the bruises I was covered in, and finally my hand. On seeing it, bloodied and bandaged but still holding my staff, her face morphed into shock and terror.

She hunched over, hands over her mouth, then gently reached toward me like a porcelain doll. "How…?" she asked quietly, and I felt an unnatural surge of euphoria spread like water dripping up my forearm.

'Apologies, my host,' Lasciel cut in, startling me. 'Your injury worsens. I will put more effort into reducing the side effects,' she insisted.

Sans must have caught something in my eyes when I'd heard the disembodied voice, because the bones around his eyes shifted in a shrewd way. If I hadn't Gazed him, I would have missed it, and I suspected he only caught whatever he saw because of his side of our Soul Gaze.

I ignored it all.

The strange feelings of joy vanished, along with most of the sensations in my right arm.

Toriel flinched, drawing back.

"How are you still standing...?" she asked, concerned.

"Pure stubborn will," I lied. Sans raised an eyebridge, but I smiled grandly and ignored him. "Speaking of, Sans here said you might be able to help with the whole, 'your soul is literally falling apart' problem I'm dealing with here. Be brutal: will I ever play the guitar again?"

"No," she said bluntly. "Were it not an ongoing effect caused by a magic rooted in your SOUL, you would be lucky to merely lose your arm at the shoulder. As it is…"

Sans cleared his nonexistent throat. "alphys might be able to help back at her lab. can you give him a band-aid for now? liver spots just realized we're here."

Toriel looked torn, looking between my hand and wherever Snakeboy was hiding near my grave. She took my staff from me and handed it to Sans, then engulfed my hand in her massive paws.

"Asgore warned me about your fear of fire," she told me. "For now, it will help us. Draw in your emotions, Wizard Dresden. Feel them all."

And then my world was fire.

I screamed in pain as my hindbrain exploded in terror, signals blaring to run or fight, preferably to run, but Toriel's grip was iron and my left hand was too weak to do anything with. I tried to pull away, feet digging in the dirt, and I only kept from punching or kicking her because I wanted to seize up.

The feeling shifted, all at once, like a burn salve's icy touch fading down to something manageable. I was comfortable then, in her gentle grip, and her fur was soft and her timid smile warm, inviting, the fire more that of a hearth than an explosion in a dusty building. If you've ever put aloe vera on a burn, it was kind of like that in reverse.

'Time grows short, my host,' Lasciel warned me. 'I am prepared to recover control of your warring emotions as the Monster Queen's spell fades.'

"If you are injured in the coming fight, reapply your bandages." Toriel looked over her shoulder at a sound in the distance. "I have infused them with healing magic. Prepare yourselves. We have guests."

The sensations all fell away, and the numbness from before fell across my entire body, albeit less absolute. Everything was distant, and my mind was empty of excess.

So there were no distractions from Quintus Cassius' entrance into my view, and I have to say, he had gone downhill since I'd beaten him senseless with a baseball bat.

The first thing I noticed was that he was the size of a troll on steroids, and the second was that his club, something I realized had been meticulously carved from a tree trunk to emulate a Louisville Slugger, was almost as tall as Sans. Even from here, I could see that his movements were still a bit stiff despite his size upgrade, and his sagging face and massive arms were still covered in liver spots.

"Dresden," a voice deeper than I'd remembered rasped. "You're finally here. I was worried your invitation to visit got lost in the mail."

Snakes, dozens or hundreds of them, slithered into view a fair distance away. Close enough to threaten us, not close enough to strike.

"Sorry, who are you again?" I scratched my head with my gloved left hand, but kept my right ready to swing my staff around to cast with. "I've been dealing with so many of you villains lately, I done plumb forg-"

"Don't play stupid, you ignorant gnat," Cassius growled. He lifted the tree trunk like it weighed a tenth as much as actually did, and turned it sideways to reveal the Slugger logos burned into the wood. Like I said, it was a replica somebody had spent far too much time on. "You know exactly who I am, and what you did to me. It'll feel nice to repay you the favor again. And again. And again, for as long as we meet in battle. My only regret is that you won't remember the pain, but don't worry… I have all the time in the world to teach it to you, all over again."

"Oh, come ooooon," I droned, flicking my eyes around to try to find his snakes in the grass. Unprompted, Lasciel's shadow caused several bushes to glow, and the outlines of several long figures to turn red against the grass. I resisted the urge to thank her, or demand she quit helping me. "What, you're just going to skip the part where you reveal your plans and tell me I'll rue the day? This is basic supervillain stuff we're missing out on."

The massive figure laughed maniacally, his arms held back as he shuddered with mirth. I mean, he actually started cackling like a madman. I caught something red and crazed in his eyes as he pointed his bat at me again, and it was about then that I realized something had pushed old Snakeboy over the edge.

"Oh, for all I've come to hate about you, you're really a funny guy when you put your mind to it, aren't you?" He put the end of his bat on the ground and leaned over it like a cane. "I always wondered why you never realized, and it took me so long to learn for myself. Why is he so weak? Why does he keep losing? And then I carved you open, mulched your bones, and searched your remains, and what do I find?" He smiled. His teeth were huge, and many of them had shattered at some point; I supposed he might have grit them too hard with his new strength. "Nothing. You never took up Lasciel's coin." His face turned ugly in an instant. "All the strength of an angel that you could have turned to your own needs, and you threw it away!"

Sans glanced at me, but I shook my head again, just barely. Not now.

Sans focused his attention back on Cassius.

"So you want to know my grand plan?" He rasped in a faux-sweet voice. "It's really rather simple. The others are going to fight over the power they've been gathering, and I'm going to torture you until you take me to Lasciel's coin, in bloody payment for the coin of Saluriel that you took from me. I'm going to take you out of this city, and I'm going to take... my... time. You're going to beg me to kill you, just like Shiro did."

I flinched.

It was a lie, but it hurt all the same. Shiro was a Knight of the Cross who had been tortured to death in my place. He had been strong, his faith unwavering, even in death.

I took my staff in both hands, completely focused on destroying this bastard.

Cassius began laughing again, except this time the red outlines of the snakes had started slowly moving towards us. I broke my focus on the big guy, and I reminded myself that Sans was going to have to land the killing blow. I almost warned him and Toriel about the snakes, but she had clearly turned a little to face one while his hand pointed toward another.

The red outline seemed to turn a dark blue, and the snakes Sans had pointed at stopped moving.

I glanced behind us, but my Lasciel-o-vision didn't pick up on any more threats.

It was around then that Sans, without warning, decided it was a good a time as any to start the fight.

And he sure as hell started the fight.

The snakes he'd been pointing at crunched up and turned to ectoplasmic sludge, which was the only warning Cassius got before Sans' off hand shot out toward the thug. Cassius was slammed into the ground, and a small forest of bleached-white bones shot up from the ground through his insides even as he tried to shove himself back into a standing position; they were streaked with blood. Waves of bones rose from around him in the grass, each five or six feet high, and pushed through his prone form, tearing at him physically and magically as they passed. Sans lifted, and Cassius was thrown into the air, where the bovine skulls I'd seen in our Soul Gaze flashed into existence, their mouths glowing white, and then I saw from the outside what it looks like to be shot with laser beams. Four beams of light as thick as tree trunks tore into him, then four more as the skulls twisted over and under the bewildered hulk, then the skulls morphed together into two massive, twisted forms.

Two final beams tore into Cassius, both bright enough to blind me for a moment, and then I heard a thud as the man crashed back to the ground.

The sound of Sans breathing heavily was loud in the moment of silence that followed.

Quintus Cassius, bloodied and torn, had never dropped his baseball bat. He shoved it into the ground and forced himself into a kneeling position. He roared at us, his teeth bleeding, as he tried to get to his feet.

"Forzare!" I yelled, swinging my staff, and a massive fist of force took Cassius under the chin, smashing more of his teeth and flipping him backward and away from us.

"good luck with the snakes," Sans huffed, and then he walked forward to face off against the mutated snake summoner.

A wall of fire bloomed from Toriel's side of the fight, cutting off my response. I'd missed my timing to joke back, so I focused on whittling down the number of slithering threats in the area. There were dozens more than Lasciel had pointed out, and every new one flashed red in my vision. My shield charm would have been useless, the snakes capable of just slithering around it, and we would have been overtaken if I tried to take them out one by one. I wasn't going to fight them one by one, however; I'm not called one of the top 40 strongest wizards in the world because I'm subtle.

"Smagt!" I called out, releasing a burst of raw wind and force. The snakes were too low to the ground for it to hit all of them effectively, and the spell tore up more grass than reptiles. I needed more power, and it didn't help that it felt like my spells were weakening as they passed through my dominant, cursed hand.

I stepped back, toward Toriel and her waves of fire and heat, and I drew on the spike of fear I felt at the proximity through my numbed emotions. The snakes were closing on the three of us, even as another blast of energy and light sounded off from Sans' direction. The ground was shaking, a result of Cassius' massive size and club being put to use.

I needed to change the game, and to do that, I needed to concentrate.

I'm good with wind, force, and fi- and fire. But I knew exactly one spell's worth of Earth magic, too, one Ebenezor had insisted I'd learn. I'd never used it before in battle, and not just because it takes a long time to set up; Earth magic is not my forte.

"Toriel, buy me thirty seconds!" I called out, then did my absolute best not to scream as a tornado of flames twisted around me, nearly burning off my eyebrows, to burn away the snakes that were nearest to me. It swept back and forth, and I stared directly at it as I forced energy into myself, out of my emotions and the heat in the air.

It kept bleeding away, out through my right hand, but after twelve agonizing seconds, I'd managed to prepare the spell faster than I ever had in my life, or ever would again.

"Geodus!" I called to the Earth, and the Earth broke.

A fissure, far larger than I'd intended, split the cemetary between the three of us and my side of the battlefield. Countless charging snakes, too slow to change direction, fell into it. Gravestones and coffins collapsed into the now-open space, crushing a number of the beasts, and the intended effect of giving us breathing room was accomplished, more than I'd hoped for. Toriel's fire tornado also fell into the rift, and a lot of the snakes were cooked when they couldn't flee from it.

Overcharging the spell had also felt like it split my brain, and I fell to the ground with a broken cry.

I twisted, fighting through the pain, trying to rejoin the fight. I managed to turn on my side to see how Toriel was doing.

I shouldn't have bothered. Dozens of balls of fire were shooting from her paws, unerringly striking at things I couldn't even see, and then each fireball bounced from one target to another, all of them hitting at least two targets apiece. Whenever they started really closing in, she threw out waves of fire, scorching the grass. At least three trees around her were also on fire. Even so, she was glancing my way, looking a little startled.

I flopped over to see how Sans was doing.

Cassius was fast, up and swinging his club around so quickly I briefly wondered how it wasn't breaking the sound barrier. He swung it down, took it in both hands and swung it to the side, then kicked out with his oversized foot, practically ignoring the nightmare-hellscape of jagged bones he was standing in as they tore through his massive legs whenever he moved. He drew back his hand and cast it forward, calling spectral and physical snakes to dive forward en masse towards not only Sans, but also Toriel and me, then roared in anger when the lot of them were suddenly slammed into the ground and crushed, the attack wasted.

I tried to get up even as I watched.

Sans was faster. He moved faster than my eyes could follow, his manipulations of gravity turned on himself to pull him to the sides, into the air, out of the way, and the damned skeleton had one of his hands in his pocket the whole time! With the other, he shoved Cassius back again, then pulled, dragging his legs out from under him. The battlefield shook, dropping me back to the ground as another forest of bones rose up through Cassius' massive form, but now that I was looking more closely, despite all the blood, it only appeared to be doing superficial damage.

Even so, it was a lot of superficial damage. If Sans could keep it up, Cassius would die the death of a thousand cuts before too much longer. From here, it was only a question of who would fall first: Cassius, who couldn't land a single hit on the skeleton, or Sans, who couldn't seem to just kill the bastard.

I caught Sans' quick glance as I managed to force myself to my feet. His bony face was sweating, a reminder that he'd entered this fight tired.

Hell's bells, if this was him tired, I didn't want to see him fresh.

Something massive burst out of the ground between the three of us, what could only vaguely be called a snake. It was huge, and came up out of the ground a good ten feet with plenty more left hidden from whence it came. It was some amalgam of corpses and body parts, ripped from the graveyard and sewn together with rope and sinew, the mouth formed with hundreds of teeth both human and otherwise. The massive fangs looked like they'd once been elephant tusks, ripped from the jaw of a live elephant and honed into something much sharper.

Sans vanished completely, probably into a Way, and Toriel took great strides to widen the distance as the zombie snake smashed face-first into the ground where she had been standing a moment before.

I, not having much else in the way of choices, rolled myself the short distance into the fissure in the earth I'd made. The lip of the pit was smashed and dust and rocks tumbled in after me.

I couldn't get my shield up in time, but the rocks only hurt like a bitch. They hadn't broken anything.

A moment's panic had me shove myself up, ignoring the pain, as what few small snakes the now-defunct fire tornado hadn't killed rushed over to greet me. With my back to the wall, crumbled as it was, I threw up my left arm as best as I could and drew in any power I could get.

"Riflettum!"

And my magic failed me.

The snakes moved quickly, biting me anywhere they could reach. My duster saved me from the worst of it around my arms and sides as I beat them off with my staff, but my legs were bitten into again and again. Everything was numb, and I felt for a moment that I was going to die.

The world slowed down to a crawl.

'It need not end this way, my host,' Lasciel whispered in my ear. 'You need only ask, and no matter what distance and protections keep it hidden and safe, my Coin will come to you.'

"How about you just hold time still like this a little longer?" I grunted back, my mouth not moving, the now-accurate swing of my staff poised to shove half of the snakes off me. The movements it was making were glacially slow to my perception, but with the pain a distant, hazy feeling, I could win this fight. "I'm not going to take up your coin when you can cover me just fine like this."

She sighed, right by my ear, just as my staff hit the closest of the snakes, twisting to strike the next one. 'If I keep this up without the power of my Coin, it will melt your brain long before the poison of these snakes kills you.'

"What happened to my magic?" I changed the subject, quickly thinking on whatever else might save me from this mess.

'The curse from the museum even now takes its toll,' she informed me. 'As you've felt, it saps your strength even as it destroys your soul, a slow, insidious death.'

She appeared before me, sitting on the head of a snake that was rearing back to bite me again. She pointed down at the bandages on my numb right hand.

'If you still insist on doing things the hard way, I'm certain there's magic enough in her gift to burn these snakes away.' She smiled winsomely at me. 'Of course, that requires you to actually use fire again. It would be no effort for me to distance your emotional response to the flames, as I've worked to do in the past.'

"What's the catch?" I demanded, and time was already starting to speed up again; I'd finished striking half the snakes, the rest still focusing on bruising me through my duster with their ineffective bites.

Her smile widened. 'No catch, not really.' She moved closer and leaned in, right next to my face. Her breath was hot on my ear as she whispered, 'You just have to say thank you.'

The numbness in my right hand was replaced by the feelings of warmth and comfort Toriel had infused into my bandages. Rather than re-apply them to stave off the wounds I'd taken, I drew the energy in to cast a spell I'd been avoiding for quite some time.

"FUEGO!" I shouted, and flames burst out from me like an explosion, engulfing the pit and turning the snakes to ash. I gasped as time returned to normal speeds, my head swimming and limbs aching, and I freaked out for a moment when I couldn't move, fearing that the snakes' venom had paralyzed me. When I saw my staff swinging around, I blinked trying to process it.

Had… had I just given myself third degree burns over my entire body?

No, I couldn't have, my duster would have protected my back and I couldn't feel it, either.

Like the million other times I'd done it today, I put the problem aside as best I could and soldiered on. I planted my staff next to me and pushed myself up against the wall. I was fighting a total lack of equilibrium, and it didn't help that I couldn't feel where I was putting my feet. I managed to stand, finally, and looked around to see that Lasciel was sitting on nothing in the air wearing a fine white dress, filing away at her nails.

She raised an eyebrow at me with a smirk.

'Well?' she asked. 'I'm waiting.'

I didn't get it at first, but then I thought over the deal we'd made.

"Thank you, Lasciel," I told her, doing my best to bury any emotional attachment to the words.

She smiled at me again, then waved her hand and disappeared.

The sensations in my body returned, allowing me to move again.

It was just in time to feel the pit shake as something huge crashed into the ground.

While I'd torn the Earth asunder in a sort of line, completely unlike the circular hold I'd been going for, the ledges were about five feet higher than I'd intended for them to be. I hadn't meant to do much, just to leave a divot the snakes would be slowed down by. If it weren't for the huge zombie snake's attack on the side of the pit, I might have been stuck.

I carefully climbed back up the short distance to near ground level. Ground zero, I amended, taking in the destruction the fight had caused as I lay half-out of the pit. Toriel's areas were no longer on fire, but that was because there was little left that could still burn; the three trees' leaves were ash, and the trunks were blackened. Sans' bone killing fields had torn up the ground and splattered it in more blood than I would have thought Cassius' oversized form could hold. My own contributions had left a scar on the land, carving through several of the artistic legacies of the dead. All around, there were blasted holes, places something had burst out of the ground.

The ground shook as the zombie snake did precisely that, then shot forward to bite at one of the burned trees. Toriel jumped back from behind it as the snake ripped the tree in half, the charcoal-wood exploding into pieces. She threw fire at the abomination, and it dodged and dropped underground once more. More fire followed it down into the hole, for all the good it did.

"Level with me," I told the Fallen, resigned to needing her help no matter how much I hated it. "What would it take to blast that thing to pieces?"

Lasciel appeared, laying down outside the pit in a yellow sundress, holding the Word of Kemmler. She idly turned one of its pages. 'You're thinking like a caveman,' she admonished me, not looking up from the book. 'Would it not be easier to draw away the Necromantic energies from the Serpent?'

"Not to argue a fine point, but I have no idea how to do that and can't learn fast enough for it to matter," I growled back. "What can I do to help her now?"

Lasciel reached out to put a gentle hand on my face, and I only couldn't pull away because if I did, I would have fallen back in the pit. 'Silly mortal man, it is not beyond-'

Whatever she was planning to say was interrupted by Sans and Cassius falling sideways, parallel to the ground, right past me. The Serpent burst forth again, and Sans instantly altered course for Cassius to smash into it at terminal velocity, slamming both of them into the ground in a dark blue haze. Toriel reached outward, and threw fire not only at the pair of them, but also into all the holes the Serpent had made so far. Fire erupted inside the beast, coming up from below, as Sans landed next to her. Both his hands shot forward, and the air filled with dozens of thinner, sleeker bovine skulls. They glowed, then fired one after another, each disappearing after delivering its Monstrous payload and even more flashing to life as they pounded Cassius and his Serpent into the ground, the light carrying enough force and energy to feel it from where I was hiding.

The last of the beams fired as Toriel finished preparing some sort of finisher of her own, and she held out her hands and bathed the fallen pair in a torrent of melting flames.

I dropped into the pit as the heat washed over me, followed by excess jets of fire.

Some other, final explosion lit up the afternoon sky, and then the graveyard was quiet.

I waited a few moments, just in case, then poked my head up again to see what, if anything, was left.

The Serpent had been destroyed completely. Cassius, his body half melted and a number of his bones open to the air, was trying to push himself up one final time. Sans was half collapsed against Toriel, who was the only one here who didn't look totally exhausted, the tears on her dress notwithstanding.

Cassius shuddered, then spoke.

His voice was deep, so deep I couldn't understand what he said, but whatever spell he cast fell on me like a suffocating miasma of death and decay.

He collapsed on the ground, dead.

A Death Curse. He'd somehow managed to pull one off, even as broken as he was.

Whatever curse he'd cast on us, it didn't stop me from climbing out of the pit and stumbling over to the others, giving the Serpent and Cassius a wide berth.

"Hey," I told them, glancing around at the total destruction of the nearby cemetery.

"hey," Sans said back, the bones of his eyes seeming to droop. He looked like he was about to pass out on his feet.

I guess I sort of felt the same way.

Toriel looked between the two of us and sighed, deeply.

"Our fight with the Necromancers is not yet over," she reminded us. "Not by far."

"Yeah, but we'll get 'em," I said back, leaning lightly on my staff. "We always do."

"do we?" Sans asked. "doesn't always feel like it. doesn't feel like victory."

I looked down at the remains of the Snakeboy and his snake. I thought back to the room, where they'd sacrificed dozens or hundreds of Monsters to turn him into the mad thing he'd become. "No, it doesn't," I sighed, blinking heavily. "Still gotta try to stop them, because failure's a lot worse."

Sans shook his head a bit, swaying on his feet.

Of the two of us, I like to think he collapsed first.

My magic had failed me, and whatever healing spell Toriel had used on me was far past spent. I just wanted to rest.

There would be time for that when I was dead.

A small part of my brain told me I might not have to wait all that long for that.

I didn't pass out when I hit the ground, as I'd done so often over the past few days. I was still vaguely aware when Toriel flipped me over so I wouldn't suffocate against the dirt, and I felt some faint tingles when she used whatever magic she had left to treat me and Sans. Everything was foggy, distant, but I was still sort of in and out.

I don't know exactly how long it took for anybody else to arrive, what with how busy I was dying on the ground, but I noted that for all it was, this kind of death was really, really boring. Even the pain seemed too distant to matter. Somebody lifted me onto a stretcher, and there was a short argument I managed to overhear about how a hospital wouldn't help me.

I was loaded into the back of a minivan, of all things.

It wasn't until we'd been driving for a while, me blearily watching the swaying of the ceiling as the van puttered along, that I finally closed my eyes. I was sure it would only be for a short nap.