‘One.’ Your fist reaches up, pushing away the wyrm’s massive form and snapping its neck with a flick of the wrist. Your hand then grasps the top of its head between its ears and crushes it brains as you use the force of it to pull yourself out from beneath the wyrm, tossing yourself over the beast and hurling yourself toward Keri, who remains unseen behind the swarm of wyrms slashing and gnashing at her. Your heart beats audibly in your ear. ‘Two,’ you think to yourself.

At some point, you appear to have reclaimed your sword. The where and when of it doesn’t really matter as you cleave your way into the nearest wyrm, its skull splitting open in a satisfying but somehow distant, wet, and crunchy sound. Its body slumps down, and you ride it to the next wyrm, which turns its foaming jowls toward you just in time for you to reach out and tear its lower jaw off, sliding your sizzling blade through its brain and pulling it down through its spine. Your heart beats again, the sound of it pounding like a large drum. ‘Three.’

A wyrm bites your empty hand, trying to keep you from reaching her sisters. You turn your helmeted head toward the beast, the black and green tendrils of dark light associated with full glow emanating from the inside of the blast visor, and the wyrm’s eyes go wide as, instead of trying to pull your arm out, you plant your feet and drive it farther in, blowing out the back of the beast’s neck just below its nape. You clench your fist and launch a plasma bolt at the surprised wyrm behind it. At this range, one would be enough. Your world shakes as the sound of another heartbeat echoes in your ear. ‘Four.’

You swing your hand around, firing two more bolts as you go and using your other arm to skewer a wyrm only a hair’s breadth away from your face. The wyrm’s momentum carries it through the motion, slamming its now-dead body into you and knocking you back several steps before you manage to toss it away beside you just in time to be tackled by the white, heavily furred figure of a particularly large wyrm. You grab its head with both hands and twist it viciously, throwing its limp carcass into two of the others. The remaining three wyrms are huddled together facing inward and snapping at something. That must be Keri. You dispose of the two wyrms buried beneath their fallen comrades with a bolt each to the brain as you jump toward the final trio. You plunge your sword into one of the wyrms, and the last two finally turn toward you. You extend an arm to fire a bolt, but your launcher’s overheated. It wasn’t designed to fire so quickly and frequently.

An explosion can be felt in your head as your heart beats again. ‘Five.’ You’re cutting it close, but you have to reach Keri. The nearer of the two wyrms launches itself toward you, its claw slamming directly into your collar, disengaging your helmet and sending you several paces to the side. You managed to right yourself before sliding to a halt. Your helmet’s damage is just sufficient enough that your display has gone black, so you remove it before launching yourself toward the wyrm, throwing your helmet with enough force to slow you down significantly and to crush half of the wyrm’s skull, allowing you to redirect toward the last wyrm, which has started to rear its claws, preparing to swing down. You don’t hesitate as you prepare one last burst of compressed energy behind you, projecting you at a speed nearing that of the sound of your own battle cry as your hair flies about in the wind of your own motion, the dark light of the full glow turning your hair a deep green with tendrils of dark green light emanating from your eyes and hair, even your eyebrows and lashes, almost seeming to absorb the light around rather than emitting it.

Your fist comes into contact with the wyrm, and you flick your wrist down, bringing the sword down and cleaving the wyrm clean in two straight down to its shoulder blades, its spinal cord cut cleanly in two, and its brains draining into the newly formed space between hemispheres. You suppress a gag at the sight as you sheathe the blade, looking to Keri, who is uncurling from the fetal position, your helmet crushed and tossed to the side along with several pieces of her armor. She’s bleeding in several places, but she seems to have sustained no permanent or even overly severe damage. Her mouth moves slowly, her arm seeming to be at a near halt despite its current path toward you. Piecing the expressions together, you realize she’s asking if you’re alright. You blink, the motion taking what feels like an eternity. You look around and see that some of the wyrms are still falling to the ground with a pace like syrup.

You’re forgetting something in the elation of saving Keri. You just know it. At that moment, you recall the words of the Valkyrie who had trained you most closely. “Never stay in full glow more than six heartbeats,” she had said. “The stress of the exertion and friction on your body could take a serious toll on you. It has a nasty habit of killing most Valkyries who don’t spend much time in full glow regularly. I would recommend avoiding full glow entirely, since a lot of us don’t have the discipline to spend only a few moments in a state of such speed and power. If you must, though, Zhilo’di, don’t stay in it too long. You’re powerful, but I’ve only ever known the Matriarch to be that powerful.”

You think to yourself how odd it is that you remember that now, but your thoughts are coming to a halt. You look one more time at Keri, who has started to kick her way into a run toward you, and you smile, the sensation of such love that you hadn’t known for cycles overwhelming you. Using the last power of which you can be certain, you reach out to Keri’s mind and send as much information that she may need as you can. The stress that would take on your brain ceases to bear relevance as the world booms about you a sixth time, and your hair returns to normal, the glow in your eyes fading forever with a single accompanying thought borne upon your lips. “Goodbye.” The world goes cold, and your vision turns black, only the long-past sound of your mother’s voice in your ears, a faint and gentle smile on your lips for eternity.