"I’d want to accompany you in particular, then - feeling sufficiently rested?”

"Yeah. You good to keep moving, then?"

“Yes.”

He presents his hand.

He'll take it.

And so he can resume being dagger shaped!

(It transpires that daggers cannot quite hum happily to themselves, but they can certainly manage a close equivalent.)

And he'll move out.

They're able to handle the remaining groups, but the center - 

The center contains a lot of them, shifting and rustling and layered over each other - 

Well, he says.

Time for the grand finale? Unless there’s some clever way to bypass them.

"We miiiiight be able to get them to follow us to a choke point but I'm not sure if I'd put better odds on that or on 'dart for the portal stone.'"

I vote for ‘dart for the portal stone’. They don’t seem - sufficiently finite - for choke points to work.

'Yeah. I'd be worried about exhaustion there, too.' He peers out. 'You sense anything? From what I've heard they usually - stand out a lot.'

Well, does he sense anything?

There's definitely something off, rough where the surroundings are smooth, and also darker in a way. It's not quite towards the center of this space, but it's close, and currently obscured by a glass wave.

He considers if he should try verbalizing the involved location, decides against it, and instead transmits a direct sensory impression.

There.

He nods, and starts inching forwards, trying to get as much distance as possible before he's noticed.

It's made significantly harder by the fact that whoever designed this dunj didn't seem to have a concept of 'floors.' There's only usually a walkable surface, and that's mostly when room was needed for a scene. It was less of a hindrance earlier, when Cooper could take his time or even just sit down and scoot, but now it's quite the problem.

Jamie cannot help substantially in this task while he is a dagger, and asking to be anything else seems unwise, right now. He tries to think encouraging thoughts.

He makes it pretty far - 

Then steps on a monster.

He stabs that one, then takes off running. It turns out most of the glass waves can be vaulted, assuming you're the sort of person who tried and was good at most high school sports, and kept up with quite a few of them afterwards.

It’s pretty impressive.

Jamie cooperates with monster stabbing, and continues thinking encouraging thoughts, although they’re presently tilted towards ‘oh god we might actually make it’ instead of ‘we can do it, we’re going to be fine -‘.

He gets swiped when he's close, roles with it, favors his side a bit but still manages a lunge -

The portal stone is jarringly out of place, could and rough-hewn and grey, but it's not too hard to knock down, and it shatters on impact.

And both Cooper and Jamie are in the woods, close enough to a road to hear the rumble of cars.

Daggers can’t really giggle hysterically. He makes a sold attempt, anyways.

We’re not dead! We aren’t even slightly dead. We’re - fuck, we actually did it - can I go back to being humanoid so we can have celebratory hugs -

He'll help with that - 

Before sort of awkwardly collapsing.

"I'll pass on the hugs. Think my ribs are bruised."

“- sorry, didn’t realize that hit did anything substantial, I’m still unfamiliar with - sorry. Anything I can do to help?”

"It's cool. I could use someone to lean on walking back maybe? Luckily my car's near."

“Can do,” he says, helping him up and positioning himself so that he’s conveniently lean-able.

He'll lean, and direct Jamie to help him hobble over to his truck. "Thanks for the help," he says. "Here and in there."

“- ‘thank you’, he says, as if I could’ve wanted to do anything else - you’re welcome.”