“LEO!” Melody screamed.
The snake’s enormous head pulled backward, the muscles beneath its metallic scales tightening as the twin pincers spread on either side of its mouth. Leo scrambled across the pavement with the dagger still clenched in one hand, all of the strange calm he had carried since the pizza shop finally gone. He looked thirteen again, thirteen and terrified, sitting in the middle of a ruined street while several tons of armored snake prepared to cut him in half.
The creature struck before Melody could reach him. Leo threw himself sideways, and one of the curved blades punched into the pavement where his chest had been less than a second earlier. Asphalt cracked beneath the impact and sprayed across the intersection in black chunks, peppering Leo’s back as he rolled behind an abandoned sedan and disappeared from sight.
“Leo!”
“I’m okay!”
Relief loosened something in Melody’s chest, but she barely had time to feel it before the snake ripped its pincer free and turned toward her. Its black forked tongue slipped between rows of needle-like teeth, tasting the smoky air as more of its enormous body peeled itself from Broadway. What Melody had mistaken for a corpse had apparently been one gigantic coil, and now that the creature was moving she finally understood how badly she had underestimated it.
The armored cat had been huge.
This thing was a natural disaster with a digestive system.
Melody stepped backward while the snake tracked every movement of her feet with unsettling precision. Bullet holes pitted sections of its dark green scales, several armored plates were cracked, and black burns scarred one side of its neck where the military had obviously hit it with something powerful. The damage should have made Melody feel better. Instead, all it proved was that fighter jets had already unloaded on this thing and it was still perfectly capable of murdering her.
“Okay,” Melody murmured, taking another careful step backward. “We got off on the wrong foot.”
The snake hissed, releasing a gust of hot, chemical-smelling breath that rolled across Broadway and made her nose wrinkle.
“Or whatever you have instead of feet. Wrong scale?”
It lunged.
Melody jumped sideways. Her new body responded immediately, launching her farther than Edward’s ever could have managed, but apparently increased strength came with the unfortunate requirement of knowing how to control it. She cleared the first pincer and crashed shoulder-first into the side of a parked SUV. The door dented inward with a metallic crunch, and pain shot through her arm just as the snake’s second pincer sliced through the space she had occupied.
The blade continued into the SUV.
For a fraction of a second, nothing happened.
Then the entire front section of the vehicle slid away from the rest and crashed onto the street.
Melody stared at the perfectly clean cut.
“Oh, that is some absolute bullshit OP anime crap.”
The snake pulled its head back for another strike.
Melody ran.
There was no shame in running. At least that was what she told herself while sprinting north along Broadway with a gigantic murder snake chasing her. She wove between abandoned vehicles, vaulted a fallen traffic pole, and ducked beneath one of the creature’s sweeping pincers as it sliced through a streetlight behind her. Metal shrieked as the severed pole toppled across Broadway and crushed the roof of a yellow taxi.
Her heart hammered hard enough that she felt it in her throat, but physically she still felt strangely capable. Her legs kept responding no matter how hard she pushed them, her lungs barely burned despite the smoke, and bruises that should have slowed her seemed to fade almost as quickly as she collected them. Whatever she had absorbed from the winged cat had undeniably made her stronger.
Unfortunately, it had made her stronger in roughly the same way handing a toddler a chainsaw made the toddler more dangerous.
She still had no idea what she was doing.
The snake very clearly did.
Its enormous body suddenly swept across Broadway ahead of her. Melody saw the tail coming and jumped, but she reacted a fraction too late. The scaled mass clipped both legs while she was still rising and sent her spinning sideways through the air. She struck the plastic side of a bus shelter hard enough to shatter it, tumbled through a rain of safety glass, and skidded across the sidewalk until her back slammed into the concrete base of a building.
For several seconds Melody couldn’t move. The sky above her blurred between black smoke, blue-white mana, and orange firelight rising from Van Cortlandt Park. Something warm ran from her hairline down the side of her face, and when she touched it her fingers came away red.
“Ow.”
Her breath came out shaky as she looked back toward the street. “I have officially been humbled.”
Ten minutes ago she had been joking about being Batman.
Now Batman apparently had his back broken.
The pavement trembled beneath her, and Melody rolled onto one elbow to see the snake moving toward her again. It didn’t even seem tired, which annoyed her almost as much as the possibility of dying. She forced herself upright and ran just as the creature twisted with frightening speed and swung one pincer sideways. Melody ducked the blade itself, but the armored side of the snake’s head caught her across the waist.
The impact lifted her completely from the ground.
Melody hit the hood of a car, bounced across the windshield, and crashed onto the roof. The metal collapsed beneath her back and cracks spread throughout the windows as air was violently forced from her lungs.
“Gaah!”
She lay there for a moment staring at the sky before managing another breath.
“You win. Snake one, me zero. Is there some rule saying I can concede?”
The snake circled back.
Melody rolled painfully from the crushed vehicle. “I guess not. You’re probably not a chess player.”
It lowered its enormous head.
“Maybe you like Chutes and Ladders?”
The snake attacked anyway.
“Message received!”
Melody threw herself between two wrecked vehicles just as the pincers snapped together behind her. The metallic clang reverberated between the surrounding buildings like two enormous swords colliding, and Melody landed badly on one knee. Before she could recover, the creature twisted its head again.
The tip of one pincer caught her upper arm.
There was so little resistance that at first all Melody felt was something warm passing across her skin, followed by a strange moment of numbness. Then blood sprayed across the white sleeve of her blouse and soaked into the black blazer.
Melody stumbled backward and stared.
A long cut ran from the outside of her shoulder nearly to her elbow. It was so clean that her brain needed a second to recognize it as an injury.
Then the pain arrived.
“Ah!”
She grabbed her arm and stumbled behind an overturned delivery truck. Blood immediately flooded between her fingers, warm and slick, although even as she pressed against the wound she could feel the bleeding beginning to slow unnaturally fast.
Her legs suddenly seemed considerably less reliable than they had a minute earlier. Adrenaline had been carrying her farther than she realized, and now that she had a moment of cover, her entire body seemed to remember how many times the snake had already thrown her into something.
Melody sank against the truck’s tire and forced herself to breathe quietly.
On the opposite side of the vehicle, scales dragged across asphalt with a low grinding sound. Cars creaked whenever the snake’s enormous body pressed against them, and somewhere close enough to make Melody hold her breath, its tongue flicked against the smoky air.
For the first time since the fight started, she wasn’t thinking about getting stronger, absorbing mana, or how ridiculously cool her earlier jump had probably looked.
She wanted to survive.
That was it.
She had gotten another life. She had been alive again for less than a day, and because Edward’s stupid gamer brain had seen a giant monster corpse and immediately thought loot, she had willingly followed a trail toward something that was now trying to turn Melody Rosethorn into several smaller Melody Rosethorns.
“This was stupid,” she whispered, resting the back of her head against the truck. Her eyes burned as she stared toward the smoke above. “So unbelievably stupid. I don’t want to die.”
The snake hissed nearby.
Melody looked down at her arm. The wound still hurt, but the bleeding had already stopped. Even more disturbing, the edges of the cut were beginning to pull together. Her body was healing again, slower than her ribs had apparently healed after absorbing the cat, but still fast enough that no normal human body should have been capable of it.
Whatever she had absorbed was keeping her alive.
It might even let her survive this.
That was probably something she should have investigated before challenging a monster large enough to crush a city bus.
The truck suddenly shook.
Melody froze.
The snake hit the opposite side again, and metal groaned as the entire vehicle shifted several inches toward her.
“Oh, come on.”
The truck began tipping.
Melody threw herself away just as several tons of vehicle rolled onto its side with a tremendous crash. She managed three steps before the snake caught her again.
This time the thick side of its neck hit her rather than one of the pincers, but that hardly mattered. Melody flew across Broadway and slammed into the side of a sedan hard enough to crush the passenger door inward.
Something cracked.
She dropped to the pavement.
For several seconds she genuinely couldn’t breathe.
Her vision pulsed black around the edges while the snake slowly turned toward her. Melody planted one hand against the street and tried forcing herself upright, but her legs failed before she even made it halfway.
“Crap...”
That was new.
She pushed herself onto trembling hands and knees, coughing as blood dripped from her chin and spotted the pavement beneath her. Her injured arm barely supported her weight.
The monster approached more slowly now.
Maybe it knew she was finished.
That thought made Melody angry.
She had died once already. She remembered being trapped inside that airplane with absolutely nothing she could do except brace herself and wait for the ground to arrive. Then somehow, impossibly, she had gotten another chance. She had stood outside Melody’s apartment only hours ago and promised a woman who might not even exist anymore that she would try to live this second life for both of them.
Dying the same morning because she went monster hunting with a thirteen-year-old felt like a spectacularly stupid way to honor that promise.
Still, wanting to stand and actually being capable of standing were apparently two different things.
The snake raised its head.
Then a voice screamed from across Broadway.
“HEY!”
The creature stopped.
Melody’s eyes widened.
Leo stepped out from behind a wrecked car with the dagger held in both hands. His arms were shaking badly enough that Melody could see the blade trembling from across the street, and his legs weren’t doing much better. He was pale beneath the blood and grime covering his face, with fresh tears gathering in his swollen eyes, and everything about him screamed that he wanted to stay hidden.
He stepped farther into the street anyway.
“Leo...”
“HEY, YOU UGLY FREAK!”
The snake turned toward him.
Melody felt her stomach drop.
“Leo, shut up!”
He didn’t.
Leo swallowed hard and raised the dagger higher, trying desperately to keep his voice from breaking. “My name is Leo Jefferson! You killed my family! Pre... prepare to...”
His lips trembled.
The snake continued turning toward him.
Leo sucked in a ragged breath.
“Prepare to die!”
His voice cracked completely at the end.
Melody would have found the dramatic line almost funny under literally any other circumstances.
Right now it was terrifying.
The snake turned completely away from her.
Toward Leo.
“No.”
Melody pushed against the pavement.
Her arms trembled so badly she nearly collapsed again.
“Leo, run!”
He stood his ground.
“You killed my mom!”
The snake’s black tongue flicked between its teeth.
“You killed my dad!”
“Leo!”
His entire body shook now, but he held the dagger up anyway.
“And you killed Lilly!”
The final name tore out of him as a scream.
The snake faced him completely.
“COME ON!”
For a second Melody could only stare.
Leo wasn’t fearless.
That much was obvious.
His little sister had died in his arms. His parents were lying dead inside a destroyed car. Less than an hour ago, he had been begging a complete stranger to somehow make everything okay, and now he was standing in the middle of Broadway screaming at the monster responsible for all of it.
Not because he thought he could win.
Because Melody needed time.
Something inside her hardened.
“No.”
She planted one foot underneath herself and shoved upward. Her knees threatened to buckle, but she forced them straight as the snake started slithering toward Leo.
“Not him too.”
The creature accelerated.
Leo backed up one step.
Melody began running.
Her first stride was weak and unsteady. The second was better. By the third, whatever strange power lived inside her body seemed to understand exactly what she wanted. Her muscles tightened, her legs drove against the pavement, and pain disappeared beneath a surge of adrenaline.
“LEO!”
He looked past the monster.
He saw Melody coming.
For just a second, despite the terror still written across his face, Leo smiled.
It wasn’t a happy smile.
It was defiant.
He looked back at the creature and pulled the dagger over one shoulder.
“DIE!”
Leo threw it.
The weapon spun end over end through the smoky air, catching flashes of orange firelight as it crossed the street. Melody watched it soar above the monster’s body, and for one beautiful second she genuinely believed this terrified thirteen-year-old was about to pull off the impossible.
The fang struck the creature directly in the neck.
CLINK.
It bounced off.
The dagger spun away and clattered against the pavement.
Leo’s victorious expression disappeared.
“Oh.”
Despite everything, Melody almost laughed.
Of course.
The snake whipped its head toward him.
“MOVE!”
Leo dove as one enormous pincer swept through the space above him. At the same time, the dagger bounced once across Broadway and skidded directly into Melody’s path.
She ran harder.
The snake turned back toward her, apparently deciding the moving redhead was once again the more irritating target.
Melody lowered herself as she ran. The dagger was ten feet away, then five, then close enough that she threw herself forward.
Her fingers wrapped around the black handle.
Heat surged through her palm.
Melody gasped.
The veins running through the dagger ignited.
Dark red light pulsed beneath the strange black material, spreading from the handle and crawling into the fang itself. Flames twisted around the blade, but they weren’t normal fire. Their centers were almost completely black, outlined by a deep crimson glow that curled through the air like burning shadows.
Melody stared at it.
She knew that magic.
She had seen it before.
Lady Melody Rosethorn standing in the academy courtyard with darkness wrapped around her hands. Melody facing another mage while black fire twisted around her body. Students whispering about her affinity as though simply possessing dark magic made her dangerous.
Edward hadn’t finished the anime.
But he remembered this much.
“Mana.”
The snake charged.
Melody tightened her grip on the dagger, barely able to believe the words coming out of her mouth.
“I can use magic.”
The creature lunged.
Melody swung.
The fang struck one of its armored scales.
This time it didn’t bounce.
Dark fire erupted along the edge.
The dagger cut straight through the scale and into the flesh underneath, opening a deep glowing line along the creature’s neck. Dark blood spilled from the wound and splattered onto Broadway with a faint hiss.
The snake recoiled violently.
Melody stared at the blade.
Then at the wound.
Leo stared too from several yards away.
“You hurt it!”
“I hurt it!” Melody repeated in disbelief.
The snake roared.
Her brief excitement vanished.
“Unfortunately, I think I also made it angrier.”
The creature’s massive body began twisting around them. One coil slid across Broadway behind Melody, blocking the direction she had come from, while another section shifted between Leo and the opposite sidewalk. Cars rocked as the body pressed against them, and suddenly the wide New York street felt considerably smaller.
They were running out of room.
Melody looked toward Leo. He tried moving around the creature, but one sweep of its body forced him back.
She looked at the dagger.
The dark flame was still burning.
Then she looked at the snake.
There was no escaping it now.
Not without leaving Leo behind.
Melody tightened both hands around the weapon.
“Okay.”
Leo stared at her from across the street. “Okay what?”
“I have a really bad idea.”
“That doesn’t sound good!”
“It isn’t!”
The snake lowered its head while Melody bent forward and planted her feet against the damaged pavement. Everything hurt. Her blazer was torn, blood covered one sleeve, her hair was full of dust and broken glass, and she had absolutely no idea what the dagger could actually do now that it was glowing or what her newly discovered dark magic was capable of.
She didn’t even know whether she could survive another direct hit.
But she knew one thing.
Leo had stood in front of this monster while terrified because she needed help.
She wasn’t going to reward that by letting him die.
The snake lunged.
Melody ran directly toward it.
“MELODY!” Leo screamed.
“I KNOW!”
The creature’s pincers opened.
Melody sprinted straight toward the space between them.
There was no elaborate plan waiting in Edward’s head, no special technique he remembered Melody using in the anime, and no helpful supernatural voice telling her how to activate whatever ability she had apparently unlocked.
She was going to put the dagger into the snake as hard as possible.
If that worked, wonderful.
If it didn’t, at least she wouldn’t die running away.
The dagger suddenly pulled forward in her hands.
Melody nearly lost her footing.
A strange pressure gathered around the blade as the black flames streaming behind it flattened backward like they were caught in an enormous wind. Except Melody couldn’t feel any wind against her face. Instead, for the briefest moment, something translucent seemed to unfold behind the weapon.
Wings.
Melody’s eyes widened.
They looked like the metallic wings of the cat monster.
“What the...?”
The pressure intensified.
The dagger pulled harder, dragging Melody’s hands forward with it.
Then the force released.
A violent gust exploded behind her.
WHOOSH!
Melody became a projectile.
Her feet left Broadway so suddenly that her stomach seemed to remain on the pavement behind her. Smoke, wrecked vehicles, and burning trees blurred into streaks on either side as the blast hurled her toward the snake faster than anything her body could have produced on its own.
“What the fuuuuuck!”
The monster’s neck filled her vision.
Melody shoved both hands behind the dagger and aimed the fang forward.
Dark fire erupted around her arms.
She hit.
The blade punched through the scales.
For the smallest fraction of a second there was resistance, just enough for Melody to feel the impact slam through her shoulders.
Then the dark mana flared.
After that, the only comparison Edward’s brain could produce was what it might feel like to actually be a bullet fired from a gun.
Melody tore straight through the snake’s neck.
The world became heat, muscle, bone, blood, and darkness.
Her scream disappeared beneath the creature’s roar as hot liquid exploded across her face. The snake’s blood soaked through her blazer, hair, arms, skirt, and legs, and almost immediately her skin began to burn.
Acid.
“Oh God!”
The pain was unbelievable.
Wherever the blood touched exposed skin, it felt like someone had poured boiling chemicals directly onto her. Her cheek burned, her neck burned, and her hands felt as though the skin was being peeled away layer by layer.
Still, the force behind the dagger continued dragging her forward.
She couldn’t stop.
Something hard cracked around her.
Bone.
Then daylight appeared.
Melody exploded from the opposite side of the snake’s neck in a spray of dark blood, shattered scales, and black-red mana.
She flew across Broadway and hit the pavement shoulder-first before tumbling into a roll. Her hip struck next, then her back, then something she couldn’t even identify before the dagger vanished from her grip somewhere along the way.
Melody finally stopped face-down against the street.
For several seconds she couldn’t move.
Her clothing smoked around her.
Acidic blood had eaten holes through parts of the Crownwell blazer, exposing angry red burns underneath, and one side of her face felt like she had pressed it directly against a hot stove.
She groaned into the pavement.
“Ah, God. That sucked.”
Something enormous crashed behind her.
The pavement shook.
Melody forced herself to roll enough to look back.
The snake’s head had fallen.
Its pincers scraped deep lines through Broadway as the severed neck collapsed sideways, and the gigantic body began convulsing violently behind it. Coils slammed against abandoned vehicles and sent one car rolling onto its roof. Another was pushed halfway onto the sidewalk as the tail swept across the intersection.
For one horrible moment Melody thought the thing had somehow survived.
Its mouth opened.
The tongue flicked weakly.
The tail struck the street one more time.
Then the movements began slowing.
One final convulsion traveled through the enormous body.
The golden eyes became empty.
The snake collapsed completely.
Melody remained exactly where she was, staring at it.
She did not trust it.
They had already made that mistake once.
“Leo,” she gasped.
“I’m here!”
His voice came from somewhere beyond the enormous corpse, hurried and frightened but wonderfully alive.
Melody closed her eyes for half a second in relief.
“Is it moving?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Leo was quiet long enough that Melody opened one eye.
“I’m pretty sure it’s dead.”
“Awesome.”
Melody attempted to push herself upright.
Her arm immediately collapsed beneath her.
Pain rolled throughout her body. Between the fight, the burns, the blood loss, and whatever insane magical cannonball trick the dagger had just performed, Melody finally felt completely exhausted.
Then light appeared beneath the snake’s scales.
Melody stopped moving.
Blue-white mana shimmered through the corpse.
This time there was no mistaking it. Light spread through the entire creature until its enormous body was outlined across Broadway like glowing veins beneath translucent armor.
Leo backed away.
“Melody?”
She looked up.
A grin slowly formed despite the pain.
“Oh. So it wasn’t a fluke.”
The first strand of light peeled away from the snake’s corpse, followed almost immediately by another. Hundreds more rose from between the scales, curling together above Broadway in luminous streams before abruptly changing direction.
Toward Melody.
She stared at them.
“Nice. Level-up time.”
The first wave struck her.
Warmth spread through her burned hand.
The pain immediately dulled.
Then the rest of the snake erupted into light.
Mana billowed across Broadway in an enormous flood. It flowed around wrecked vehicles, over broken asphalt, and through drifting columns of smoke before surrounding Melody from every direction. Her crimson hair lifted around her face as the wind generated by the energy sent ash, broken leaves, scraps of paper, and bits of trash spinning through the intersection.
Melody gasped as the energy entered her.
The cat had been a rush, strange and overwhelming but almost pleasant once the shock passed.
This was different.
This was too much.
Mana poured through her skin and flooded everything inside her. The acidic burns across her face and arms cooled. Bruises along her back faded. Her injured shoulder stopped throbbing, and even the exhaustion that had left her barely able to move began washing away beneath a growing pressure inside her chest.
But the mana kept coming.
Melody’s body arched against the pavement.
The warmth became pressure.
The pressure became uncomfortable.
Then painful.
She suddenly understood something she hadn’t even considered before.
There could be too much.
Whatever existed inside Melody that had accepted the cat’s energy was filling again, except the cat had been comparatively tiny.
The snake was overflowing it.
Her vision began turning white around the edges.
“Melody!”
Leo ran toward her, but his voice sounded strangely distant, as though he were calling from the opposite end of a tunnel.
Melody tried to answer.
Her mouth refused to cooperate.
More light poured into her.
The pressure inside her continued growing until she couldn’t tell whether she was being healed or torn apart from the inside.
The last thing she saw clearly was Leo standing only a few yards away, staring at her in panic while the final streams of mana peeled away from the enormous snake and disappeared into her body.
Her knees gave out when she tried to move.
Leo reached her just in time to catch one shoulder, but there was no chance a thirteen-year-old boy could support her weight. The two of them stumbled toward the pavement together, Leo struggling to keep her head from hitting the ground.
Above them, the broken sky glowed blue and violet between towers of black smoke while mana continued falling over New York like impossible snow.
Then Melody’s eyes closed, and everything went dark.