Livisk burst up and out of windows that had been part of the side of the building once upon a time. Honestly, it was the perfect place for them to run an ambush. They could put people into the building and have them running under us, and then it would be easy enough for them to burst out all around us.

Which is exactly what happened.

"Everybody get down," I shouted.

Only it was hard to hear anything over the din of combat and the sizzle of plasma blasts going off all around us. The ominous hum from all of those weapons charging up at the same time turned into an almost deafening roar. It was also the kind of sound that would've had my balls retreating up into my body.

In the olden days, at least. I'd seen enough ground combat at this point that it wasn't even in the top ten of bullshit I'd seen.

Okay, maybe it was in the top ten, but not in the top five.

I immediately ducked down. I didn't wait to see if anybody around me did the same. I figured most everybody in my immediate vicinity had combat training. Hopefully that little bit would be enough to save their lives.

I dropped to the ground and plasma blasts sizzled through the air all around me.

"Son of a bitch," I yelled as I felt something sizzling right over my head.

None of the fancy stuff that had happened to me since I arrived here on Livisqa would be worth a hill of beans if one of those plasma blasts happened to get in a good hit. If I lost my lungs the same as the livisk outlaw Varis had taken out earlier then I'd be just as dead as she'd been.

More and more blasts sizzled through the air. People let out cries of pain, cries of terror. I heard at least a couple of what I now recognized as death rattles.

Usually I heard those because I was the one inflicting them on someone else, but these sounded like they were coming from humans. Humans who were dropping all around me.

Some of them were giving as good as they got, but not all of them.

"Damn it! We've come so far. We were so close," I yelled.

"Focus."

I felt a pulsing heat in my mind. I looked over to see Varis looking at me. She nodded. She was the one who'd just shouted that to be heard over the battle all around us.

"Focus," she said putting her fingers to her eyes and then back to me.

I licked my lips. I nodded.

"Right, focus. It isn't going to do anyone a damn bit of good if I lose it to fucking panic."

"Exactly," she said.

I blinked. For a moment I thought she was using the link to read my mind, but then I realized that I'd said all of that out loud.

Crap. Maybe this whole combat situation was making me more addled than I realized.

"We need to get in the fight," she said.

I nodded. "Get into the fight."

"Your blade," she said.

"My blade," I said. Then I blinked. My blade. Right. My blade.

I grabbed my plasma pistol and my blade. I guess I was going to get a little more experience dual wielding these things.

I raised my plasma blaster and pointed it at a livisk who was almost right in front of me. They were wrapped in the rags I'd come to recognize as the uniform of people who'd come down here to the Undercity and were trying to make things work when they hadn't been able to do that up above. I squeezed the trigger on my plasma blaster, but there was a slight tremor to my hand as I did it.

The blast went wide. I let out a couple of curses. I raised my blaster again and I fired again.

This time it took them in the shoulder. Which definitely wasn't the kind of marksmanship I was used to. I kept up with my shooting. Shooting was fun. I especially kept up with it in the year in between my present circumstances and the battle that happened on the Allamaraine.

"What the fuck?" I said, smacking the plasma pistol a couple of times like it was the pistol's fault I'd just missed. Which I knew wasn't the case.

I raised it again. I fired on a livisk who was running after one of the crew from the Early Warning 72. The blast went wide again. It went right in between them, actually, which wasn't the kind of accuracy I was used to.

For a horrified moment I thought I was actually going to hit my crew member, but thankfully that didn't come to pass. The shot also went wide enough that it didn't hit the livisk I was aiming for either.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Son of a bitch!"

I still felt that calming presence from Varis but it didn't help. That tremor was still there. Like my body didn't want to do what I was telling it to do.

I didn't think it was because I was having a bad reaction to combat, either. I'd been in plenty of combat before and kept it together, damn it.

"What's wrong?" Varis asked, turning to stare at me.

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head and trying to chase away the confusion and the cobwebs that threatened there.

"If I might, William," a voice said in the back of my head.

I blinked and looked around, wondering where that voice had come from.

"What was that?" I said.

"It's me, William," Arvie said, "Talking to you through the connection."

I blinked and tried to make sense of what was going on. I was in a fight. There were plasma blasts all around. Their bright light was overwhelming.

I didn't know why this was happening. This had never happened before. I wasn't a coward. I'd been in plenty of worse situations than this before.

"I think this is part of the trouble of you overdoing it with the neural link too early," Arvie said. "We're trying to... "

"I think this is part of the trouble of you overdoing it with the neural link," Arvie said. "This is a delayed reaction brought on by suddenly finding yourself in a high-stress scenario, or a situation where there is far more input than your mind is used to handling while still getting used to the after effects of the neural link."

"Then turn it off," I said.

"I don't think that's going to do anything," Arvie said.

His probe was suddenly there in front of me, blasting away at the outlaws all around us. Everywhere he fired, he hit one of them, and they went down with smoking holes in their bodies. The world seemed to slow down for a moment like it did when I was in the middle of combat as a battle pair, but then it sped up again.

Which had the whole world spinning around me. Like even the battle pair reaction times weren't working correctly now.

Unfortunately, all his firing still wasn't enough to take out all of them. More of them were pouring out through the windows below us with every passing moment.

There was an old quote from Earth attributed to one of the dictators from the 20th. I couldn't remember which one, but he probably wore a weird mustache. That seemed to be a thing with dictators from the mid-20th.

Anyway, he'd said that quantity had a quality all its own, and that was definitely the case here. They kept streaming out and firing, and more and more of my people were surrendering.

Not all of them. I watched as Jeraj appeared with his sword out, slicing into a group of them and causing all of them to be bisected in an instant. Which was really messy when they eventually fell forward to the ground.

"Disgusting," I muttered.

"What's wrong?" Varis asked, suddenly appearing next to me.

"I don't know," I said. "I can't fire. It's like there's something messed up with my brain."

Varis frowned, and she looked up to the probe.

"Is this your doing, Arvie?" she asked.

"Technically, it's William's doing," he said. "He's the one who decided to go ahead with an ill-advised attempt to control multiple fighter craft."

"You're the one who put this thing in me," I said. "I knew this was a bad idea."

That wasn't entirely fair. I knew it wasn't entirely fair. Arvie was the one who'd been suggesting it, sure, but I was the one who went along with it. I was the one who tried to stretch myself past the breaking point.

"I don't think this is the time for recriminations, William," Arvie said.

"You're right," I said, flopping over and squeezing off a shot at a crowd of outlaws. There were only outlaws standing in that bunched up crowd, and so I figured it was safe enough to fire. If my shot ended up going wide, then at the very least it would only hit another one of them and not hit one of my people.

Maybe.

I put my sword back on my belt. None of the livisk were coming close enough to us to make it useful anyway.

"Why is this happening all of a sudden?" I said.

"Like I said, it's likely the increased input that is causing the problem," Arvie said. "You already overwhelmed your mind when you were moving at machine speed earlier switching between multiple fighter craft. This is your mind lagging out."

"Lagging out," I said. "That doesn't seem like something that's good with a human brain."

"Generally, it's not," Arvie said. "You should recover, but for the moment, you need to rest."

"How am I supposed to rest in the middle of a battle?"

And then something terrible happened. Suddenly, one of the outlaws was standing behind Varis. They put their plasma pistol up against the back of her head. I had a moment of terror where I thought they were going to shoot her. That her brains would be splattered all over this building in front of me.

That might've happened if these were imperials who were trying to take us out, but the outlaw standing there merely stood there grinning down at us. It was a cruel grin. The kind of grin that said he knew he had the advantage.

"Surrender now and there won't be any more bloodshed," he said.

I looked at Varis. She nodded, and then she swept around and slammed her fist into the outlaw's stomach. She brought up her own plasma blaster and fired it into his midsection until there was no midsection left and he'd been bisected, with his top and bottom landing in a smoking heap.

She brought her pistol around and tracked it at all the other outlaws who were suddenly surrounding us, but it looked like they'd decided to take the whole battle pair thing seriously. They were all around us in a circle, pointing their own weapons at us.

Beyond them, I could see people from the Early Warning 72 lying in smoking heaps. Others were being gathered together with their hands behind their heads in surrender. Basically, this had all turned to shit, and I couldn't help but blame myself for pushing myself too far. For going so long with everything going my way that I assumed everything was always going to go my way.

Varis turned and looked at me.

"We could go down in a blaze of glory," she said, and I was terrified to realize she was telling the truth. She was totally thinking about doing just that.

"I don't think it would be much of a blaze of glory for me," I said.

"Oh?" she said, arching an eyebrow.

"If you surrender, I promise we will take you to the Spider in one piece," one of the outlaws said.

"I'd really rather go out with a fight," I said with a shrug, "And clearly, the delayed lag from this neural link bullshit is keeping me from doing that right now."

She nodded as though that flimsy excuse I came up with in the moment made all the sense in the world.

"You speak truth, Bill," she said, reaching down and grabbing my arm, pulling me up. I realized I could still move the basic functions of my body just fine. That had lulled me into a false sense of security. It led me to believe I was just fine when clearly, I wasn't.

"Come," she said. "We'll surrender, and we'll see about dying in that blaze of glory later when you're feeling better."

"Sounds like a lovely plan," I said as I looked at the outlaws all around us with their weapons glowing.

Oath-breaking bastard sons of bitches.

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