Senegal turned and kicked my attacker away from me.

Nice work.

While Senegal used the lock on the end of the length of chain to strike the man in the jaw, I tried to stand.

Senegal may be a creep, but he knows what he’s doing in a fight.

Stupidly, I’d opened my eyes as I stood, instead of trusting to my power to keep a sense of the immediate situation.

Whoops. Probably not a good idea right now.

Motion sickness hit me like a sack of bricks, and I nearly fell over.

Yeah.

Charlotte caught me to keep me from tipping over, only narrowly avoiding stabbing herself on my good knife.

Good job.

I kept my eyes closed as I fought back, pulling out of Charlotte’s grip to strike at the Merchant, cutting him across the forehead.

From the outside, it’s going to look like Taylor is being a badass while fighting blindly, but the truth is she’s just “looking” in a very different way.

He growled something I couldn’t make out and charged me.  Knowing I wouldn’t be able to beat him in any contest of strength, I threw myself to one side, landing hard on the ground and nearly tripping Senegal.

Whoops, careful.

I brought my knees to my chest, and then I kicked outward to strike him in the calf with both heels.

Niice.

I wasn’t thinking straight.  I should have predicted that he’d fall on top of me.

…ah, shit.

His shoulder hit my chest, his body weight heavy on top of me.  His knife hand was trapped under his body, near my waist.  I was more fortunate, with my right arm free, and I pulled the knife’s point across his ribs, aiming for a shallow cut that hurt more than it injured.

Phew.

He screamed and dropped his weapon, and I scrabbled to slide it back towards Charlotte, Brooks and Lisa.

With panic and disorientation nearly overwhelming me, I had to resist the urge to use my power to call a swarm together.

It’s been a while since that was an issue last, but it’s still very much a thing that can happen. I’m still not backing down on my 1.1 prediction that at some point, likely a moment of intense rage or despair, she will fail to control her power.

Using this many bugs, to get a sense of what was going on?  It wouldn’t attract undue attention.

Yeah, this is fine.

I let bugs gather on the ceiling of the mall, drawing them down through the large crack where part of the roof had caved in, as a just-in-case.

Good call.

I closed my eyes, trying to blink and fix the distorted focus, and it only helped a little.  I looked to my left for help, saw Minor and Jaw with their hands full, their movements too hard for my eyes to follow.  To my right?  Lisa was slumped over, and Brooks held her. 

Welp.

Merchants were closing in on them.  Senegal stood in front of me, and though his gun was gone, he was using the length of chain that he’d taken from one of the Merchants to drive our opponents back and buy us breathing room.

Nice!

It wasn’t enough.  Three capable fighters weren’t able to protect seven people in total.

Might have to bring in some bugs after all. Or run.

I used my power, and wrenched my eyes closed.  It helped more than anything, as the tactility of my swarm sense gave me a concrete, solid sense of the things around us.

Excellent.

Many of the Merchants had lice on their skin, in their clothes and on their hair.  A small handful of flies buzzed around the area.  With a bit of direction to guide those flies to where I needed them, I had a solid sense of my surroundings and what the enemy combatants were doing.

In this state, she’s more in tune with her bug sense than with her vision, it seems. That’s probably not a coincidence.

He caught me across the cheekbone with his elbow, and pain shot through my entire skull, bringing me halfway back to reality.

I mean, she’s remembering so far, but for Hana it started to fade rather quickly after time resumed, even if her psychic link with her weapon (at least I presume that’s the reason) allowed her to remember the most important bits.

Someone grabbed me, her chest soft against my back, her grip around my shoulders painfully tight.  Charlotte?  Or Lisa?

I don’t think Lisa would do this unless she were physically trying to restrict Taylor from fighting back. I guess it’s either a scared Charlotte, or a female merchant getting in from behind.

The shift from what I had seen to relative normalcy was so drastic that I could barely grasp what I was sensing.

Yeeah, got a lot to process right now.

I opened my mouth to say something and then closed it.  I couldn’t unfocus or take in the scene as a whole, as the entirety of my attention was geared for seeing…

Seeing the unseeable?

what had I been looking at?  It escaped me as I tried to remember.

Ah, there we go.

It reminds me a lot of someone’s power. I wonder if more powers are similar to things about the beings?

I shook my head, striving and failing to see past the countless minute details or the shape of things: the way the Merchant’s facial features seemed to spread out as he advanced towards me, the contraction of his body as he bent down, the nicks and brown of rust on the knife he picked up, the one I’d dropped.  I still held my good knife.

Taylor seems to have ended up in a state of hyperawareness following a timeless moment of being aware of something most people have no idea exists… if anything her awareness has gone down.

But it also appears to be working against her right now – she can’t see the forest for the trees, and the forest is currently attacking her with a knife.

Destination.  Agreement.  Trajectory.  Agreement.

Interesting. Seems they’re planning to move somewhere. Could it be towards one of the humans in the Wormverse, or maybe they have other plans?

They would meet again at the same place.  At a set time, they would cease to expand their revolution and contract once again, until they drew together to arrive at their meeting place.

Ah.

This all sounds like a sort of dance.

-the Merchant caught me off guard, as I reeled from the image of what I’d just seen.

Aand we’re out. Or maybe in. Who knows where we just were – Taylor’s consciousness may well have exited the universe.

She’s not going to remember any of it, is she?

The pair moved in sync, spiraling around one another in what I realized was a double helix.

Hm, interesting.

So… might their presence have something to do with the super juice around here?

Each revolution brought them further and further apart.  Innumerable motes drifted from their bodies as they moved, leaving thick trails of shed tissues or energies painting the void of empty space in the wake of their spiraling dance, as though they were made of a vast quantity of sand and they were flying against a gale force headwind.

That sounds familiar. Karahindiba appeared to disintegrate as it “fell” down to Hana, too. Are both of these beings “dying” in the same sense Hana observed that Karahindiba was, whether or not what happened with Karahindiba was genuinely its death?

When they were too far away to see one another, they communicated, and each message was enormous and violent in scope, expressed with the energy of a star going supernova.

Oh boy.

I’m guessing it’s not going to be comprehensible for Taylor. Even if they do communicate via sound and language, which I find unlikely, I highly doubt these beings speak English to each other.

Then again, if they actually want Taylor to understand them, they might have their ways to make her comprehend the incomprehensible.

One ‘word’, one idea, for each message.

Interesting. It implies a sense of… rawness to it. Like they communicate their ideas directly as ideas, rather than via the mimema, the imperfect reflection of the ideas, that is words.

The primary difference between these things and the tesseract was that these beings I was looking at were alive, and they weren’t simple models I was viewing on a computer screen.

3D living beings do tend to be a bit more complex than a simple model of a cube.

They were living entities, lifeforms.  There wasn’t anything I could relate to any biology I knew or understood, nothing even remotely recognizable, but they were undoubtedly alive.

It’s very interesting how Taylor and Hana were both able to tell this with such ease, despite these lifeforms being unrecognizable and incomprehensible. And then Hana was suddenly really certain that Karahindiba was dying.

I wonder if Taylor is seeing this because someone is about to get powers. That would be kind of strange, though, considering that time appeared to stop for everyone around Hana – that, or it all happened in an instant perceptible only through her mind. Either way, this implies that whatever the reason is for Taylor to see this right now, it probably has something to do with her specifically.

They were enigmas of organs that were also limbs and also the exteriors of the creatures, each simultaneously some aspect of the entity as it flowed through empty space.

I really do think Wildbow chose an excellent way to portray these beings. Why have Lovecraftian horrors be incomprehensible only by size and number of tentacles, when you can make them multidimensional? I really like it.

Also, another thing that’s interesting about this situation versus Hana’s experience – Taylor specifically narrated that she’s somewhere else now. She hasn’t described that somewhere else, she’s too understandably busy with the multidimensional beings, but she is somewhere else. Hana, on the other hand, seemed to stay in the same place – possibly minus the other people, she never looked back to check – just with time stopped.

It didn’t help that the things were the size of small planets, and the scope of my perceptions was so small.

I did say “only” by size (and number of tentacles). I’m fully aware that that is another way these beings are incomprehensible.

It helped even less that parts of them seemed to move in and out of the other dimensions or realities where the mirror images were.

Yeeah, it seems what you’re seeing isn’t even the full extent of them.

Some distant part of me realized I’d seen something similar to that folding and unfolding once, in a much simpler form.  A tesseract, a fourth dimensional analogue to the cube.

Alright, so it wasn’t by much but I did catch on before Taylor spelled it out. 😛

I feel like “in a much simpler form” is to imply that either this is a much more complex fourth-dimensional shape, or it’s a shape of a much higher dimensionality than a measly four.

The difference was that while the cube had six flat faces, each ‘side’ of the tesseract had six cubes, each connected to the others another at each corner.

True.

To perceptions attuned to three dimensions, it seemed to constantly shift, each side folding or reshaping so that they could all simultaneously be perfect cubes, and each ‘side’ was simultaneously the center cube from which all the others extended outward.

This is a pretty good description.