The mantis Colored Shell leaped from the slab and fell atop the bounty hunter Senthrax Blackmath. Somewhere the tribe did the same to the Orc and the Amazon and the others. They might have been within the reach of a claw or in line of sight or far away. Colored Shell didn't notice or care after her forelegs closed around his body. She clasped him tight and he struck her four times for every one bite she took from his head. The first rasping cut from her mandibles caught the spikes of his helm and injured her. The second too.
The Toad rolled over in the lake of fire and croaked happily. He had been well fed and his things had found their way back to him. They always did. The Hammerer had his turn but no one was to receive more than a hundred blows. Then they came down. The thing in the bronze box thrashed and seemed to bounce off the heated walls like a rubber ball as it rattled the confines of its container. It howled with rage. Punishment had not chastised it. Confinement only magnified its anger.
Alice was alone in the field. Her hands and feet were again flesh. She interpreted this as punishment. Weakness returned to her for poor work. She pinched the bridge of her nose with her soft, stubby fingers and made peace with the loss. They were gifts from the Goddess and the deity had reclaimed what was hers.
Wait, where were the boys? At least a couple of them had perished at the hands of the Red Dwarves and later the thing in the jar. Probably more still had died after she was rendered insensate. Those idiots would get hurt without her.
(They had gotten hurt with her, said a voice in her mind that first assumed was the Goddess but sounded too much like herself)
She looked for a sign of their passing. There were no tracks. Only the gold grain and the perfect blue sky that met at a horizon so far away it implied the world was flat.
She chose a direction and set off.
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