“Eeeek! What is it?” squealed Uhuna as Yo swept her from the path of a boulder-sized fist.

“That is to being the indescribable Yurt,” the pure thought being answered, skipping aside from a grasping arm ridged with razor-sharp shale edges. “Is to be monster created by uncute nuclear explosion and peasant hut.”

Trickshot distracted the behemoth with a screamer arrow, which it grabbed and ate. “Yeah, this guy just upped an’ vanished from the Safe just before that Hellraisers business,” the irritating archer remembered. “What, I can’t read briefing stuff sometimes?”

Hatman reached to his waist to find his Donar helmet. Nothing less was going to make a dent on the Yurt. “How did he get here, though? And what has he got to do with the crater? Or the rainbow flashes?”

CrazySugarFreakBoy! dodged aside so the Yurt’s blow landed instead into the rapidly-expanding Manga Shoggoth. The Yurt flicked the elder being goo off him like a dog shedding water.

“That’s the Yurt?” Uhuna gasped. “But you’ve beaten him before, right?”

“The first time NTU-150 came up with a device to suck his gamma radiation out of him,” CSFB! told her. “Another time the Librarian and Al B. pumped him with intelligence to take him down.”

“And guess who ain’t here now to geek the thing into submission,” Trickshot complained.

“We’re here,” Hatman said determinedly. “We do the job.” He stepped up and smashed a fist into the massive creature, hitting so hard that tiny cracks appeared across six inches of the Yurt’s surface.

“Uh oh,” Trickshot breathed.

Hatman staggered back, gathering his wits for another blow when the Yurt hammered him down with the force of a collapsing building. Razor-shale ridges ripped across the capped crusader, gashing him deeply.

“Back off, rocky!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! warned the monster, spraying a confusing array of combat candy around the Yurt.

The gamma-spawned monstrosity hammered the ground, sending fragments of shrapnel spraying into CSFB! and Trickshot.

“Getteth them to safety,” Hatman called rising. “I hath got him!”

“The Yurt is a remarkable construction,” the Shoggoth admired. “But he does seem somewhat agitated.”

• Take this moment as a good time to retreat
• Keep going at the Yurt. Hatty’s got his Donar helmet on, after all.