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The katana gleamed a fluorescent neon as energies buzzed around the tip. The power coursed through Winnipeg's veins as she poured her everything into the attack, Fargo stripped away, Regina-Saskatoon stripped away, the roots and the petals and the world stripped away until everything became a white-hot blear in her mind.

"BOURRASQUE..."

The roots perhaps sensed her power and battered the barrier to strike at her, to disrupt her concentration, and perhaps that accounted for the dull rhythmic thump in the back of her skull. But they could not stop her. As the final word formed, nothing could stop her.

"DENOUEMENT!"

The barrier burst and she unleashed her finisher. Winnipeg burst into a hundred whispery copies of herself, each composed of wind but taking her form, with sinew, muscle, structure, pulse. A squall of ferocious gale shredded through the roots as the one hundred Winnipeg clones fanned out in a circular pattern, each dragging her katana through plant matter and virulent ooze. Each Winnipeg sliced, shredded, cut with her same finesse and technique, her same skill and prowess, each imbued with a dollop of her soul and the howl of zephyr.

Roots peeled back and dropped in every direction as the blades whipped through them. They spouted viscous white pus into the lurid landscape and squealed as they thrashed and gnashed their worthless thorny limbs and dropped into orange oblivion below. Winnipeg and her facsimiles of self spread between them toward the ends of the arena, each leaving a swath of destruction in her wake until they butted against an unseen wall and bounced back in dissipating puffs of smoke and wind.

As fast as the attack had taken to charge, it ended. The clones ran out the end of their microcosmic souls, extinguished the little life with which Winnipeg had nourished them. Their sparks fizzled one by one until the wind died completely and the real Winnipeg drifted backward among the gaudy backdrop.

All energy had left her. The muscles in her fingers could not even muster the strength to retain her katana, and the blade drifted from her hand as she fell. She had no breath left; her eyes threatened to close completely. She could not even feel her own heartbeat, even as all sound and sense folded in on itself and left only herself to feel.

The debris and dead roots, some still twitching, drifted alongside her. Like the wreckage of some phantasmic god in an alternate reality—no, not like; it was. Not a single root had been spared. Only the archon itself remained, a monolithic obelisk of pinions and avian elements that presided over the wasted land.

(Chapter 11)