Chapter 47.2: Something Like a Plan

Through the tinted glass of the cylinder, Penny watched Minkus go. The leather-cased device on his back piped a thin stream of exhaust into the air as he beelined toward the Vigilman rising from the ground. Of course, that was also a beeline toward the golem that stood between them. Minkus’ steps became impossible to hear beside the footfalls of the massive machine, but he made no effort to veer away from it, instead ducking between a stone leg and swinging forearm as the thing turned to blindly face him. Penny winced, but the golem missed—or rather, Minkus missed the golem, evading the scissoring limbs and only missing a single step as he bounded out the other side toward the norn.

The golem didn’t pursue. In fact it didn’t even turn to face him again. There was no telling what it would do next, still clawing at the adhesive over its eyes, but it gave Penny another moment to exhale—to exhale and regret.

Minkus had been gearing up to race out and risk his tail again, and she’d had to go and open her big, stupid mouth in opposition to him?

Practically speaking, she wasn’t wrong about the insane difficulty of disabling that golem. Before it had broken through the wall, Penny too had thought there must have been a fairly conventional way to take down the machine. And when it had come through, she’d tried. The norn had tried. Whatever they threw at it, though, the golem just absorbed it. Even the bomb that Jinkke had praised Penny for hitting it with hadn’t actually worked as intended. Sure, it knocked the damned thing on its ass, but Penny’s plan had actually been to blow out a joint and cripple it, not just push it over for a minute. And now? Well, now it had a mind-warping beam to boot—a hell of a way for the three of them to try out their extremely prototype field generator. If they stayed long with this monster, they were dead. That was where all the facts pointed.

Still, Penny grabbed at her twisting gut, eyes locked on Minkus as he helped the norn to his feet on the other side of the room and urged him to cover. She might have been right, but she still wished she’d kept her damn mouth shut.

“What in the Eternal Alchemy was that?” Jinkke hissed, as though she were somehow privy to Penny’s very thoughts. Before Penny could even face her, the asura actually gripped her by the collar, yanking Penny down to eye level. “We came here to help him,” she snapped, “to keep him safe, to make up for—”

“Gods, I know. Alright? I know. It just came out. I’m not…” Penny pulled Jinkke’s hands away from her shirt and chose her words more carefully. “Look, I won’t leave him. OK? I wasn’t going to. I just— Well, this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m not leaving, not without Minkus. Happy?”

Jinkke inspected her, big eyes tight in concentration, then nodded, settling back into a less aggressive posture. Penny straightened, tugging at the stiff leather chest-piece again and looking once again toward the center of the room. It was hazy through the thick layers of cylindrical green glass, but she could make out the golem’s newly exposed eye. It scanned the surrounding area, seeming not to notice them, for now.

“Well,” Penny said, dropping back down beside Jinkke. “I think the glue’s run its course.”

“Its durability was admirable,” Jinkke said. “A good formula.”

“Yeah. OK,” Penny mumbled. The compliments from this one were getting weird, but there was no time for that now. “What do we do? If we’re not heading for the door, then what the hell are we doing?” 

Jinkke leaned out around her side of the cylinder. “Well, you are correct that it’s recovered itself. Both optical and locomotive functions seem to have been restored, neither of which is good news for us.” Holding her rifle down at the ground in one hand, Jinkke twiddled at her chin with the other. “The real threat is that agony weapon in its chest.”

“Yeah, but we’ve solved that one with the pack—at least for a while. If we want to get the little bitch behind all this and get your brother out of here, we need a way to take the golem out, not just keep it from taking us out.” Penny’s mind raced, with her heart rate close on its heels.

She pulled out a pistol round and started dancing it across her knuckles. It snapped her thoughts into alignment. Gods, of course. The place to start was always in taking an inventory of tools. She unsnapped the smaller pouch at her waist and reached inside to see what remained.

There were three smokers and one more run-of-the-mill explosive. Gods, how many of those had she actually used?

Keeping the little bomb in hand, she shrugged it off. It was fine. She’d just move on to the next one: the big toolbag around the back of her other hip. She knew there were still tricks in there.

Several more rounds of various ammunitions rested in the pocket at its fore, things that would certainly come in handy before long. In the main pouch on that side, she’d stuffed away a few more interesting bombs that she rifled through next, pulling them out to take visual record again. There was a gas bomb—not at all helpful unless the golem had magitechnical asthma—a couple more strict explosives, one glue bomb, and a pair of firestarters. Gods, she thought with a start of realization, if a single flame licked that hip pack in this confrontation, she’d go up in a combustive mess of fire, glue, gas, and blood. What the hell was wrong with her?

She raked a hand through the main pouch one more time and came up with something she’d almost forgotten about: her killswitch. She shoved a hand back in again and found the second, holding them both up before her. Fully charged and only a switch-flip away from engaged, she bounced them in her hands and glanced up again in the general direction of the golem.

“I think I have something,” she said to Jinkke in a low voice. The asura raised an eyebrow, silently demanding explanation, and Penny held out the pair of steel, magnet-backed cylinders. “Doesn’t matter how thick its armor or how crazy its magic is if we kill its power system.” Despite her anxiety, she grinned maniacally.

Jinkke looked at the killswitches and then at Penny. “That’s some type of human joke, yes?”

“No. It’ll work. You never deigned to use it, but these things pack one hell of a punch.”

“Through half-stone armor and insulation?” Jinkke scoffed. “That is highly unlikely. Assuming it had enough charge to impact the energy circuits, you would have to get close enough to somehow insert one beneath the plating.”

Penny grimaced. She had a point there.

Then it hit her like thunder. She raised a finger. “What about—”

Meeting her gaze Jinkke finished the thought. “The power cycle.” She played with her chin in thought again. “That would theoretically offer a few seconds of safe access, but it requires the unequivocal risk of the golem using that agony weapon at something or someone.”

Penny raked fingers through her hair and cursed at the ceiling. She didn’t want to say what came to her tongue, and she damn well knew Jinkke wouldn’t want to hear it. What else were they going to do, though?

“Well,” she said through tight lips, “we did—”

“Yes we did,” Jinkke agreed before she could finish. The asura wagged her head in a similar resignation. “We made the shield project for a reason.”

Penny knew both of them were thinking of Minkus in that moment. There would be no taking the pack off his stubborn back, which meant he really would be their tester.

“There’s not really a choice,” Penny began.

But before she could fumble through something adjacent to encouragement, there was a loud crash and the ear-straining screech of metal on stone. “Target lost,” said the mechanized voice of the golem. “Reacquiring.”

Both Penny and Jinkke’s eyes went wide, and they shot around to see the construct, now facing the other way. It had found Minkus and the norn and launched one of its fists through the half-shattered containment cylinder they’d previously been moving behind. The glass was now completely blown out, and as they watched, the steelwork cap that had been atop it swung feebly from fat cables before ripping loose and slamming to the ground, throwing up a thin spray of glass bits and dust. Minkus and Fjornsson were nowhere to be seen, and the golem’s hand, like an enormous, rocky spider, was already righting itself for magnetic reattachment.

Still feeling her eyes opened as wide as those of the asura beside her, Penny jammed the killswitches into her empty hip pouch. “Power system, then?”

Jinkke nodded, scrambling to slide a round into her rifle.

Penny grimaced, digging in her toolbag for something more immediately useful. “Great. I’ll get to Minkus, fill him in, and—” She drew out one of the smokers and bounced it in her hand. Her heart was about to beat out of her chest, so she kept talking. “Yeah, this’ll work. I’ll get us started, and then we’ll try to piss that thing off and blow its core. I mean, what could go wrong?” 

“What do I do?” Jinkke asked, masking neither her fear nor her indignation at having no assignment.

“Stay here, watch our backs for any surprises, and line up a shot on that thing just in case.”

“In case of what?” Jinkke said.

Penny shrugged. “Well, if I can’t distract it from your brother and Fjornsson, we’ll probably all need you to save our hides.”

“But…”

If Penny waited another second, she knew she’d never move, so she lunged out into the open. Jinkke’s words disappeared behind her, overtaken by the sounds of servos, gears, power generators, and steel plating grinding against the stone floor and debris. Through a sudden lightheadedness, she refocused her attention on the golem dead ahead. With a whir of sound, its forearm flew across the room and slammed back into place.

Gods, she’d lost her mind, hadn’t she: running headlong at a weaponized golem? If they didn’t deal with this technological monstrosity, though, Minkus would never leave, they’d never get to Kikka, and they’d most certainly die horrible deaths in this gods-forsaken place.

Those thoughts carried her the distance as she lit the fuse, and just a few steps away from the mammoth machine, she changed course, veering left and dropping the smoker to bounce across the stonework toward the construct. She heard the hiss of expelling vapor as she fled from it toward the northern end of the lab, where she’d fought the two guards and the murellows. Every test cylinder in sight was toppled, so she rounded a pile of stone and steel wreckage and dropped to the floor in a slide, coming to a halt as much behind a fallen cylinder cap as she could.

She’d give it just a second, peeking over jagged lines of broken glass still set in the fallen cylinder’s base. The golem remained within the quickly thickening cloud, though she could see its shape darkening as it came through in her direction, arms flagging as if to dissipate the smoke. Gods, it looked like this first, half-cocked stage of her janky plan was working. 

Penny waited another moment, letting the golem draw closer and the cloud grow denser before slinking quietly to the other side of the fallen containment chamber. She grabbed another smoker, snapped the pouch back shut, and lit the fuse.

The golem’s arm swept out of the cloud, drawing a trail of swirling, white smoke behind it as the machine worked its way free of the gas still streaming from the first bomb. That was Penny’s cue. She lit the bomb, threw it just far enough to double the size of the cloud in her own direction, and cracked off a shot at the ceiling to draw the golem’s attention toward her. “Hey, asshat!” She didn’t actually need to yell at it—that was just fun.

There was a sound of whirring, like she’d heard before. A light flashed from the cloud, and a huge steel hand shot out at her, pulling wisps of smoke behind it.

Penny spat a curse and dove aside. The fist flew wide, slamming into the side of the entry landing a ways behind her, and Penny pushed herself up from a jagged pile of rubble, stifling a pained groan.

There was another whirring from inside the smoke cloud, matched by a similar sound starting up in the mechanical hand lying lifeless on the floor. Knowing she only had a moment, Penny felt around for the first fist-sized slab of rubble she could get a hand on and tossed it back toward the western row of test cylinders. Watching the golem’s hand right itself on the ground, she grabbed another stone and did the same, intentionally throwing just a bit farther than the first one. Then another, and another. With any luck, she’d get the thing to—

That whirring hit a peak pitch, and the huge hand shot back into the cloud. Latches snapped and locked somewhere in the pale fog and then immediately undid themselves again. Penny saw another flash of explosive light, and the same blunt fist shot out again, this time aimed even farther from her, right where she’d tossed that line of stone. She shook her head. Golems were apparently creepy and stupid.

Penny tossed another piece of slag for good measure before slipping away in the other direction, keeping eyes on the smoke cloud as she slunk back around the fallen cylinders nearest the eastern wall. The fog created by her first smoker was starting to dissipate now, and the second wouldn’t be far behind it. The golem, clearly following her ploy, wasn’t visible through the murk, so Penny knew she wouldn’t be visible either, at least for a moment. Passing once more between the crushed cylinders and the eastern wall, Penny patted the killswitches at her hip and slipped off in search of Minkus.

She’d only made a few steps when a gunshot rang out from the other side of the smoke cloud, back in Jinkke’s direction. “Oh, gods,” Penny muttered. “Please no.”

Her prayer, had it been anything like one, was not answered. Instead, she heard Jinkke yelp in surprise and crack off another shot. There was a clatter of rubble and claws, and then yet another gunshot went off. As if synchronized with Penny’s worries, the golem’s pounding footsteps stopped moving northward for a second, then completely changed direction in pursuit of the new sounds.

“Shit.” Penny bit off the curse, barely keeping her voice down. What the hell was Smalls doing?

For a few seconds, she stared frustratedly into the smoker’s mist, until an audible movement of rubble and glass along the southern wall stole her attention. She froze as haphazard, heavy footsteps slapped through the fog and toward the golem, Jinkke, and whatever else was back there with her. It was Fjornsson, she knew. She could just make out the thick, norn silhouette through the cloud wafting farther outward into the room.

That was something. She had no idea why Minkus had let the big idiot run off like that, but at least Jinkke had backup coming. If any of her plan were going to work, Penny still had to find—

A sharp yelp of surprise burst from the relative silence in the test-cylinder slag a few yards away from her, and Minkus came charging into the open, spinning and flailing his arms in some kind of disjointed dance.

Penny spun, drawing a gun from her hip before recognizing him. “Oh, good. It’s you,” she sighed. Then looking again, she scowled. “What in Torment are you doing?”

White wisps of smoke curled off his body and off the projector pack as he twisted and reached overhead, spinning around at odd angles. He seemed to bend and buckle beneath the weight of the pack, which didn’t make a lick of sense until Penny noticed something else there: another asura. Penny blinked wide eyes. Gods, there was another asura riding Minkus like he was some kind of bucking dolyak. It clawed at him and screamed nonsense as Minkus vaguely approached in her direction. “Elevate the levels, for buckling down counterpoints, you imbecilic jelly-twits!”

Gods. Penny groaned. It was that agony-crazed asura again. All the psychotic test subjects were dangerous, but this one was also irritating.

“Never capitulate,” he spat. “Always surrender!”

Minkus swung hands at the squawking monster, spinning to break free of his hold, and Penny quickly checked back over her shoulder. She still couldn’t clearly see the golem through the dissipating fog, but she could hear its plodding steps chasing something. Assuming that something was Crusader Fjornsson, she moved for Minkus.

“Get the hell off him!” Penny barked, scrabbling to get grip on any part of the psychotic hop-on with her free hand. Together, the two stacked, flailing asura reached almost to Penny’s chin, and the demented one was wet with some combination of slick, viscous fluids that Penny didn’t want to think about.

“Penny,” Minkus pleaded, “the pack. He’ll damage the pack!”

“Yeah, I got that,” she said, stuffing her pistol back into her holster and rejoining the fray with both hands.

Minkus spun, moving the attacking asura away from her grasp and then back again. Penny clutched hard at clothing and pulled, ripping the asura free of Minkus’ back and swinging him wide in the other direction—or that’s what she’d intended to do. She moved the screaming lunatic maybe a foot before being yanked back by the combined weight of both asura still tethered together by the pack, and the three of them toppled, falling hard to the debris-riddled floor.

Penny and Minkus continued wrestling to break free of their attacker. He snatched up a glass shard and started slicing at them. But before the threat of that could really settle in, there was another shot fired across the lab, and Penny heard Minkus gasp. “Wait, where’s Jinkke?”

“The norn has her,” Penny said. Gods help her, she actually felt a similar anxiety for his sister, but right then, she had a problem to solve, and she thought she knew how, if only she could get some leverage.

Penny pressed a heel to Minkus’ side and pushed him away at the same time she got a firmer grasp around the waist of his attacker. Sprawled out across the floor, she worked to stretch Minkus, the pack, and the rabid asura apart—as careful of the prototype as possible. The asura released one hand to reach out and claw at her instead of Minkus, and she snapped on the opportunity, slamming a fist down on the one hand still clutching the pack.

Even before she made contact, the asura drew back both hands, changing focus and slashing wildly at her instead. Thankfully, he’d dropped the glass. “Inopportune resistance manifolds. Engage revolutions!” he screamed, sprinkling her with spit.

“Shut up,” Penny barked back, wiping her face. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She rolled, pulling the furious asura over her and onto his back on the other side, away from Minkus and the pack. She faintly heard something clatter away from her in the movement, but her focus was on the asura.

Penny smashed an elbow into his nose, almost certainly breaking it, but it didn’t slow the asura’s thrashing. She got herself atop him and threw a hand to her right hip, grasping for her— Oh, gods.

Straining to hold down the scrabbling, little monster, under her body weight, Penny turned her head to where she’d heard the clatter, and instantly regretted it. It of course was her gun, several feet out of reach, lying uselessly on the stonework. “Gods damn it,” she snapped, glaring back down at her captive. The pistol at her other hip was loaded only with her engineered trick shots, and at this range, many of those would do as much harm to her as to the nutty asura.

She’d never been great in a fist fight, but she was out of options, so Penny started swinging for all she was worth, and the asura took it. He kept pushing to free himself, all the while barking nonsense. “Breakers tripping. Tripping, tripping— pop!”

“Just. Go. Down!” Penny spat in rhythm to her punches. Already she was tired, her untrained arms burning as she swung wildly, but she kept her focus on the asura’s eerily dilated yellow eyes. Yellow eyes?

It was the first she’d noticed it. Recessed unusually deep in the pale, gray face, this jerk’s eyes were bright yellow, just like that ass Skixx. Obviously it wasn’t him, but that didn’t stop the hot chill from shooting up Penny’s spine and fueling her swings. Her form shifted; she drew in her wilder side swings, tucking her arms in beside her and focusing piston blows into the asura’s face with abandon.

“Penny, stop!” Minkus yelled, closer beside her than she’d remembered.

“He won’t go down,” she heard herself say.

Minkus jumped between them as she bent back to throw another blow, and she froze.

“I see that.” Minkus said, sliding back from the two combatants and glancing between them. He had that worried frown on his face.

Suddenly aware of her own panting, Penny caught her breath, still atop her opponent and struggling to keep him pinned between her knees. One of his arms slipped out, Penny threw hands down to contain it.

“Well, then,” she snapped, pointing at the gun lying on the floor. “Grab that for me, and we can finish this.”

Her friend’s frown deepened, and he shook his head. “No. We— This isn’t an animal Penny, and it’s not— well, it’s not his fault that he’s—”

“What do we do, then?” Penny couldn’t believe they were arguing about this now. The trapped asura snapped his jaws at her, and she slapped him. “We can’t just leave this thing here to get up and come at us again, and your sister and the norn are waiting for us.

“Gods, Minkus. We have a plan. I came over here to tell you we have a plan.”

It looked like Minkus was ignoring her. He stared down and tugged at his ear, pained thought dressing his face. Then something visibly clicked. His eyes lit up, and he looked surprisingly like his sister in one of her flashes of inspiration. “The field,” he said, pointing a thumb at the projector on his back. 

“What about it?” Penny said, struggling again against a free arm flailing at her.

Minkus’ bright eyes nearly lit up the gloomy room. “What if the field could heal him?”

“Heal him?” Penny balked. She’d finally gotten a solid grip on the asura’s wrist and pinned it hard to the ground. She glanced again at his golden eyes and stifled a sneer. “Biggie,” she said, fumbling with the conflicting arguments suddenly pelting her brain, “No one ever said it could do that! Gods, who knows how long he’s been like this. You’d just as likely… kill him.” Penny heard her own words and shrugged. “OK. Fine.”

There was the crack of another gunshot across the lab, and then another. The two of them met eyes. “Fire that thing up, Biggie. I’ll hold him down.”

Minkus nodded, taking another step back to put Penny and their captive outside range of the Seer-essence field. As they’d designed it, the field would only be dangerous to living things while forming. Penny didn’t actually know what it would do to someone caught in that process, but once the field was completed, it was safely permeable. Minkus, it seemed, had remembered this; clear of her and the asura, he was going to generate the field and then walk it back over them.

Penny leaned her weight slightly off the trapped asura. She knew a completed field was safely permeable—they’d tested it—but that didn’t mean she wanted to test it again if she didn’t have to.

Minkus nodded, too focused even to smile. He closed his eyes in what looked like some kind of prayer and then opened them again, focusing hard on the asura beneath Penny. “SP-1,” he ordered, “defense field.”

The field projector whirred into activity. It’s emitter popped up from the top of the leather case and flashed to life, throwing an arched line of liquid energy to the ground behind Minkus and snapping it forward in two quarter-domes that met directly in front of him, sealing the opalescent hemisphere shut with a crisp snap. With the Seer essence loaded into the system instead of the lyssal isolate they’d experimented with, the flowing dome of energy was a deep, living blue. If Penny hadn’t been terrified for her life, she might have considered it beautiful.

Minkus met her eyes across the magical veil and took two quick steps toward her and the asura subject. Penny spat a curse and jumped back from her captive just before the dome reached them. A sun-bright line of energy burst to life as it touched the asura and swept across him with Minkus’ movement. He writhed and screamed as it passed across his body, and for just a moment, Penny saw Minkus’ resolve give way. Horror flashed past his eyes as he finally considered alternate outcomes to his merciful experiment.

The expression faded, though, as both of them looked down at their attacker lying still inside the bubble of magic. His chest rose and fell. He was alive and sleeping—not screaming, not ranting, not laughing like a lunatic, but sleeping.

“Gods,” Penny gasped, rising to a knee and leaning forward. “Did it work?”

Minkus stepped back from the asura again, gave the instruction, and powered down the field. It drew back in a pair of dancing, light ribbons that met behind him and flicked out of existence.

“He looks peaceful,” Minkus observed, approaching from the other side.

Penny shook her head, brushing wild locks of hair out of her eyes. Minkus looked amazed, and she couldn’t blame him. For the first time since they’d started on this stupid, suicidal mission, Penny wondered if maybe—just maybe—there was some good they could do besides knocking Kikka’s teeth in.

Before she could say anything more, though, the sudden silence was broken by a deep-throated cry on the other side of the dissipating cloud: the norn.

Penny spun, staring through the thinning haze as a rapid sequence of steel clangs rang out on the heels of the shout. The smokescreen had dissipated enough that she could see the general shapes beyond it now, and the scene, cloudy though it still was, came clear to her: the norn had reengaged the golem. He’d either stepped between it and Jinkke or drawn its attention away from her. It was hard to tell spatial relationships between the silhouettes. She could see some other figure moving through the faded haze, though, and it looked like Jinkke struggled with her rifle. Just great—there was another monster still creeping around in here.

“OK, Minkus,” Penny barked. “Your sister and I came up with—”

A gun went off behind her, and several things happened in the same moment. Penny spun, adrenaline surging as she grabbed the only gun at her hip. Minkus jumped away from the sleeping asura, also spinning to face the sound. The slightest blue shimmer snapped to life across the surface of her friend’s skin and armor; she could actually see that magical barrier this time. Both of them laid shocked eyes on a porcelain doll of an asura, adorable despite her sharp lines and ice-cold eyes: Kikka.

Penny sneered, something that seemed to rise up from the knot cinching down again in her belly. This complicated things, a lot. And yet, the thought of shooting the little bitch here and now brought a dark grin to her face instead. “Alright. I guess we’re doing this after all.”

Only yards away Kikka glared at her down the short length of her own pistol barrel. Her twin braids hung straight as pastel stone down the sides of her face, and she had some kind of rifle strapped to her back. She held that hot, steely smugness in her expression, looking at— no, Penny realized, Kikka wasn’t looking at her. It also didn’t seem she was looking at Minkus.

Holding her aim where it was, Penny cast a quick glance to her periphery, where Minkus had silently dropped to a knee beside the unconscious asura.

“No,” he whimpered, turning slowly from the test subject to Kikka. “Why?”

Penny blinked, dropping her gaze from Minkus to the asura at his feet. His steady breathing had stopped. Blood trickled out of a fresh hole just above his left eye.

“Why?” Minkus repeated, his voice trembling. “He may have— We might have cured him.”

Kikka shifted the barrel of the weapon to Minkus, glowering at him. “Are you even more mind-numbingly infantile than you look? The notion that there’s a remedy to the effects of my weapons changes absolutely everything, but that does not mean I want that imbecile roaming about evincing it to everyone. I’m sure we can posthumously gather valuable data for further study.” Grimacing jealously, she waggled the gun at Minkus’ pack. “Of much more value is that device you accomplished it with. Take it off and slide it this way, you sentimental oaf!”

Minkus’ eyes flashed from Kikka to Penny.

“Don’t do it, Biggie,” she hissed, keeping her eyes on the evil, little doll. “That golem isn’t going to pull his punches because this goblin stole your backpack.” Penny continued with a smirk, “Besides, she can’t drop us both before we get a hit in on her.”

Kikka’s smug grin returned.

“You heard her,” came another voice, scratchy and raw, just left of them. “Relinquish the device. Now!” Both Penny and Minkus looked to where another asura stood, dressed in the dirty and tattered remains of an Inquest uniform. He was caked in the dust of fallen stonework, cemented to him in what Penny could only guess was his own dark blood. He aimed an energy rifle at Minkus’ back.

“Gods, you again?” Penny huffed, recognizing him. “I thought those damned little things ate you.”

The guard glowered, brushing dirt and blood from his cheek with a shoulder. “Relinquish the device.”

The clang of steel continued in the distance behind them, two shots were fired, and there was a rabid, chittering roar from whatever was still alive over there.

An explosion silenced the other sounds.

“Shit,” Penny spat, thinking far too slowly despite all efforts to do otherwise. How the hell were they getting out of this?

She glanced at Minkus and realized something. He was still shimmering. In that magical, shield-y way, Minkus was shimmering.