Contents

Chapter 1: #Notallfairies             

Chapter 2: Scrappy Doo             

Chapter 3: No Nukes is Good Nukes             

Chapter 4: NAFB             

Chapter 5: Saw Love Daddy             

Chapter 6: Ants With Guns             

Chapter 7: Careful Planning             

Chapter 8: Wild Improvisation             

Chapter 9: 7 Minutes in Heaven             

Chapter 10: Lost in Translation             

Chapter 11: Something’s Missing             

Chapter 12: Shifting Goalposts             

Chapter 13: Your Grandma Lays Eggs             

Chapter 14: World’s Tensest Picnic             

Chapter 15: Hunting Pirates for Fun and Profit             

Chapter 16: Under the Surface             

Chapter 17: Playing Catch-up             

Chapter 18: Missed Connections             

Chapter 19: Begin Operations             

Chapter 20: Responsibility             

Chapter 21: Unfinished Business             

Chapter 22: Overwhelming Force             

Chapter 23: Fractal Snowflake             

Chapter 24: S#!t Slides Uphill             

Chapter 25: Starfish             

Epilogue:             

Chapter 1: #Notallfairies

***Kezdorn, level 12 Melas***

“This way!” Ari said, motioning Kezdorn to follow her up the side of the mountain.

“Easy…for…you to…say.” Kezdorn panted as he tried to keep up with the little fairy flitting her way up the crusted mountainside. Already, the coating of faradan was beginning to crack as nature pushed its way up through the brittle stone, lending a hint of green to the pale blue covering.

“Geez.” The tiny little creature flickered in front of his face, hands on her hips and scowling. “If you’re having a hard time climbing a little rock, what makes you think you’ll be able to take the dungeon core?”

“Oh, I’ve got a plan,” Kezdorn said, patting the wand of lightning on his belt.

He’d worked too long for a little hike to stop him now.

Despite the naysaying of his family and friends, Kezdorn had spent fully half of his levels raising his Myst ability, and now, as he was approaching level twenty, he was able to do things only nobles could do.

Thanks to Ari, he had a Myst Core, and the promise of riches and glory. All he needed now was a fortune of his own, and there would be no difference between him and them. Except this damn Myst doesn’t help a man climb a mountain.

Kezdorn had always had a fascination with watching his father make glass and work steel, and when he’d meditated on it, the furnace in his heart had kindled, shedding light inside him as if it had always been there, just unlit.

Pausing for breath, Kezdorn leaned down and picked up a handful of the crumbling faradan. Clenching it in his fist, he drew heat from the furnace in his chest.

The rock melted in his tight grip, and when he opened his hand, the rock had become a tiny glass rabzi made of blueish faradan glass. The delicate piece of blue glass wobbled above his hand where the strange stone pushed itself into the air.

It gave the little figurine a strange lifelike quality.

Kezdorn chuckled and pocketed the figurine. Normally, a piece of art like that would go for at least five silver, and he’d made it in a couple seconds. The Kezdorn of two months ago would be more than happy with that kind of profit, but he needed more. A lot more.

Kezdorn was going to be a noble, and there were some things you couldn’t buy with money. Not that amount of money, anyway.

“You catch your breath yet, slowpoke?” Ari asked, tugging on the melas youth’s ear. “This dungeon core isn’t going to stick around forever. People are going to be all over these mountains in a matter of days. It’s probably now or never. You wanna be rich and famous, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Kezdorn said, straightening and mastering his breathing.

“Good. This way,” the fairy said, motioning him to follow before flitting off until she was barely visible. Kezdorn groaned and followed.

He crested a hill, then was led through a convoluted switchback along the subtropical mountain until he was standing in a narrow, hidden crevice that no one would ever notice beyond ten paces away, cleverly covered by the trunk of a large tree.

Somehow, the tree seemed to have weathered the Roil, its gnarled branches more or less intact after the reality-warping storm had passed by.

“It certainly is well-hidden,” Kazdorn said, leaning his head into the crevice and inspecting the cave beyond. It receded into the darkness, preventing him from seeing beyond a foot or two into the emptiness.

Kezdorn pursed his lips and whistled, cocking his ear to listen. That’s a big cave, he thought to himself.

“And you’re sure no one else knows about this?” he asked, bringing his head back up to study the fairy.

“No one alive, anyway,” Ari said. “Cross my heart.” She made an odd little motion across her flat chest and gave him a genuine smile.

“How dangerous is the thing in here?” Kezdorn asked.

“Oh, very dangerous. But if you win, you’ll have more Impact than you know what to do with. You’ll get your Class at the very least.”

“And it’s weak to lightning?”

“One good blast should kill the guardian,” she said, holding up three fingers. “Fairy-swearsies.”

Kezdorn frowned, thinking. Fairies were considered a menace everywhere he went, but Ari had been nothing but helpful…after he’d caught her stealing his mom’s pie and demanded recompense.

A dungeon core was priceless…and a key feature of being a noble. With one, you could make a Myst engine. Add that to the right lens…and you were set for life.

And all he had to do was kill the core’s guardian.

“Do you think you can fit?” Ari asked as he peered into the cave again.

“One second,” Kezdorn said, picking up a pinch of faradan and heating it between his fingertips until it was white-hot, casting a bright glow across his face.

Kezdorn flicked the brilliant mote of molten stone into the dark, inspecting the walls as he did, looking for anything out of place. There were a few piles of bones on the floor, and the wall had a strange texture to it, but other than that, he didn’t see anything. In the back of the cave, he spotted a deeper darkness leading to the treasure room.

“Well?” Ari asked. “I fulfilled my side of the Deal.”

“I suppose you did,” Kezdorn said with a sigh, patting his lightning wand to make sure it was still there. “If there’s treasure.” Fairies were notorious for being sneaky. If she hadn’t led him to treasure, she wouldn’t get paid. That was the Deal. Kezdorn had taken precautions to word the agreement carefully.

“There’s plenty in there, I promise,” Ari said.

Kezdorn pulled a torch out of his backpack, lit it and tossed it in, before he knelt down and began to squeeze his way through the crevice, entering the dungeon.

Kezdorn felt like he was being shoved through a stone giant’s sphincter, with how tight the fit was. Thankfully he wasn’t the largest of melas, and he was able to squirm his way into the cave, flopping down onto his back.

And now I’m in the same room as a monster. Gotta be quiet and quick. Heart hammering in his chest, Kezdorn picked up the torch in his left hand, holding it above his head while he reached for the wand on his belt. Kezdorn patted the empty slot three times before he realized it wasn’t there.

The strange texture on the wall shifted subtly…pulsing, gaining definition.

“Umm…Ari?” Kezdorn whispered.

“Yes?” the fairy asked from outside the cave, a strange feeling of malicious humor edging into her voice.

“Do you know where my wand is?” Kezdorn asked, keeping his eyes on the wall, which began detaching itself from the true stone beneath it. The creature was massive, and it was freeing tentacles from the ceiling above him that Kezdorn had mistaken for tree roots.

“I sure do,” she said with a little giggle.

She’s betrayed me! Time seemed to slow down for Kezdorn as he tossed the torch at the wakening horror before turning back toward the entrance and scrambling to pull himself back into the narrow hole. Kezdorn dragged himself halfway up to the hole, looking through the opening at the fairy, who sat on a thick tree root beside his weapon.

Kezdorn snarled and dragged himself into the opening, but the rocks caught his clothes and flesh. Like the inward-facing teeth of a carnivorous beast, it refused to let him go once he was inside.

“Agh!” Kezdorn felt something wrap around his leg and tug, hard. Barbs dug into his flesh and cut until their purchase exceeded his.

“Damn you!” Kezdorn growled before letting go, flaring the furnace in his chest. The last he saw of the fairy, she was lazily waving goodbye. He had to deal with this creature before he could leave.

Kezdorn ignored hitting the stone floor again as he was dragged out of the exit, focusing all his Myst on his hands. He slapped his palm up against the barbed appendage wrapped around his leg, burning through the creature’s flesh with a feral scream.

There was a harsh shriek, and something hit him hard, knocking all the wind and sense out of him. Kezdorn hit the wall with the force of an avalanche, hitting his head against the stone. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe, his limbs shivered without any input from him, like a clubbed fish.

“Uuh.” Kezdorn tried to scream but it came out as a pathetic moan. He could still feel though, and that meant he could act.

Act. ACT!

His trembling limbs paid him no heed as the rough stone floor was dragged across his cheek. Then he felt his feet enter a wet hole…then he felt the chewing.

“Uuh.”

******

“Alright kids, huddle up,” Jeb said, motioning for his crew to gather together. They were standing on the barren desert outside Solmnath, at the foot of the mountain range that spread to the north and south as far as the eye could see.

The huddle looked something like a cross between little league soccer and LARPing. A group of roughly a dozen orphans wearing armor and wielding instruments of death stood around in a circle, paying solemn attention to their out-of-shape coach—in this case, Jeb—while he gave them the same guidelines he’d given them half a dozen times before.

“Alright, rule number one: Stay together. Don’t wander off for any reason. That’s a good way to get eaten or kidnapped. Colt is in charge, and if he tells you to do something, you do it. Remember, your life is more important than gains, so if another crew tries to muscle in on your claim, run first, fight second, got it?”

The children nodded.

“If you have to fight, stay behind Nancy, Todd, Chris and Amanda. They can soak up more damage than anyone else here, and any wounds they take will heal perfectly as long as they’re still breathing at the end of the day. They’re kinda like starfish in that regard. Remember to always put them in harm’s way first.”

The four heavily armored orphans nodded as Jeb called their names.

“What the hell are you teaching those children!?” a woman who’d overheard Jeb’s speech asked from about twenty feet away. It looked like a husband-wife duo, lightly armored and carrying supplies for long-range travel; likely one of the teams that wanted to scout the far side of the mountain for lighter competition.

“Fuck off, lady,” Jeb called over the children’s heads.

Nancy flipped her steel visor up on her helmet, revealing her tiny eight-year-old face. “Yeah, fuck off, lady!” Her tiny metal gauntlet finger extended.

The woman’s jaw dropped for an instant before her expression morphed into a furious scowl. Her husband patted her on the shoulder and the two of them took up a position farther away from Jeb’s group, quickly disappearing into the hundreds of adventuring parties that dotted the arid plain outside the city.

“Good job,” Jeb said, patting the top of Nancy’s helmet. “You and Colt both got your flare guns?” Jeb asked. In response, Nancy and Colt showed him the plastic pistols, loaded with their flare cartridges. Colt’s was on his belt, next to his bag of tungsten pellets, while Nancy’s was slung under her arm, resting against the left side of her child-sized steel suit of armor.

“Alright. Zlesk and I will be taking turns watching the mountain from the orphanage, so we’ll come running if you need help. Now, what are the acceptable reasons to fire off a flare?” Jeb locked Colt’s gaze.

“If we’re in serious trouble. Or if we find something really cool.”

“Exactly. If you find something really cool, chances are you’re then going to be in serious trouble. These other people,” Jeb said, motioning to the other adventuring parties, “are not your friends. There are going to be some who won’t hesitate to steal from you by force.”

“Got it,” Colt said, nodding.

“Good.”

Before Jeb was able to go into further detail, the governor of Solmnath climbed up onto the stage and put a steady stream of Myst into the loudspeaker at the podium.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the richly dressed keegan said, addressing the hundreds of adventuring parties assembled in front of him. “Last month our city survived a direct assault from the Roil itself. Many people lost their livelihoods, and some even lost their lives. But as a city, we stayed strong. We repelled the blighted storm, and in its wake, we will thrive more than ever before.”

The governor held up a fist-sized chunk of pale blue stone. “This faradan stone that coats the outside of our fair city is a blessing in disguise. It is produced by the magical essence of Pharos herself, a physical barrier that protects her from the ravaging force of the Roil.”

“Like nacre,” Jeb muttered. If what the governor was saying was correct, the planet itself created a coating of reality-warping stone to insulate itself against the spacetime storm. Interesting.

“With it, we can make ships that cross the land, and roads that can be sailed effortlessly in a matter of days, walls for new settlements, and a myriad of other things vital to expansion.”

The governor paused for dramatic effect. “But…faradan isn’t the only thing that the Roil leaves in its wake.”

The governor held out a glass tube with a black sphere in the center about the size of a quarter. “This is a dungeon core. The Roil sprinkles them in its wake like a rabzi sheds fur. Pharos does what she can to stop cores from spreading their corrupting influence across her, swallowing the cores into the earth and forming a dungeon around them, keeping them contained for as long as possible. But, sooner or later, like a wound left untended for too long, every dungeon turns septic.

“Your job today is to scour the mountainside in search of these cores, and if you find one, pluck it from the soil and place it in one of these containers,” he said, waving the glass tube high above his head so everyone could see. “Each one you turn in will be rewarded with five bulbs.

“My assistants are going to begin passing them out. Make sure you get at least a few.” Jeb saw a few men with large carts full of vials passing them out about five per group. Jeb and his orphans were near the middle of the throng of adventurers, so they were going to be a while.

“Now, there’s one reason not to pluck a dungeon core out of its home.” The governor set the core down and held up a polished piece of glass that radiated a faint light to Jeb’s vision. “This is a prism. Rarely, a dungeon core will be the sort that breeds prisms. If you see a dungeon core with what looks like a bit of raw glass about the size of a pinky beside it, mark it with one of these flags.”

The governor pulled out a ten-foot-long pole with a bright yellow flag above it.

“You can write your team’s name on the flag with an oil-pen. Plant it near suspected prism-breeding dungeons and our inspectors will come by and check it out. If it is a prism dungeon, your team will be marked down for a one-hundred-bulb payment redeemable at City Hall. If you marked a normal dungeon core, your team will still receive a five-bulb reward, redeemable at City Hall.

“If we see anyone besides an inspector or the original team disturbing a flag, there will be immediate sanctions.

“If you missed any of that, my assistants will be passing out a pamphlet along with the supplies, so be sure to read up.”

A secretary leaned forward and whispered into the governor’s ear.

“Oh, and if you find any lenses, the prices will be handled by local business owners.”

The governor rambled on for a while, giving the assistants with carts full of supplies plenty of time to pass out the glass tubes with the black stone caps, the flags, pamphlets and oil-pens. After about an hour of grandstanding, the governor’s assistants flagged him down from the side of the teeming mass of adventurers.

“Alright then,” the governor said, scanning the crowd. “I’m proud to announce Solmnath’s third Roil Cleanup.”

He grabbed a wand from the podium and aimed it in the air above his head.

Crack!

An explosion above the governor rippled through the crowd, and with that, they were off. People started sprinting like mad, as if the mountain was going somewhere. Jeb’s sponsored team of orphans looked like a group of hobbits in the center of a huge wave of adventurers heading for the mountainside.

“You think I should’ve told them not to run?” Jeb wondered aloud as they sprinted their little hearts out to try and maintain their position amongst the throng.

There was more than enough mountain for everyone, and endurance was better than speed in any case. The nearby pickings had most likely already been stripped clean by poachers who didn’t give two shits about an official start date.

“They’ll learn,” Zlesk said with a shrug.

The two of them waited until the kids were lost in the crowd, then they set about stalking after their wards in secret.

What kind of asshole lets a group of kids out into monster-infested wilderness alone? Jeb thought as he clomped along beside Zlesk, the former sheriff of Kalfath turned Admiral Orphanage administrator.

The skull-faced keegan glanced at Jeb’s wooden foot clicking against the hard-packed desert. “Is that going to be a problem?” He motioned at the wooden prosthetic.

In response, Jeb picked himself up off the ground with his Myst and floated along beside Zlesk, maintaining hard eye contact. Smartass sprawled across the top of Jeb’s head, too big to nest in his hair now.

The keegan rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything.

Unfortunately, his healing contact in the upper nobility had failed to regrow the foot he’d lost in the Tutorial, but Jeb had definitely enjoyed the attempt. And he could still fly if he had to.

Silver linings, you know?

Jeb let himself back down and the two of them continued following the children, climbing the mountain beside and slightly above them, always keeping Akbar Team One in eyeshot. This outing was something of a proof of concept. Jeb and Jeb’s gold lenses wouldn’t be around forever, so if the orphanage could reliably field strong alumni, it could count on their support to maintain itself. Like Harvard. But for people with dead parents.

When the children had been part of an XP farm run by less-than-reputable nobles, they’d been forced to put most of their points into Body, so they weren’t going to get tired any time soon, but that had left them a bit stunted in other respects.

They tracked the kids up the side of the mountain for hours before they finally came to a halt. Jeb and Zlesk stopped on a hill overlooking the kids, collapsing against boulders as the children danced around and celebrated finding their first core.

Today’s mission was so they could get some experience working together without adult supervision, gain some levels, a sense of self-sufficiency, raise their Nerve, all that good stuff.

After a couple minutes of hopping madly, Colt quieted the kids down and they kept going.

Unfortunately, one of the kids had taken the stop as an opportunity to go pee behind a rock without telling anyone, and he wound up falling far behind.

Jeb and Zlesk weren’t the only people stalking the group of children, either. Just behind the orphans was a group of three poorly-equipped, albeit sneaky men, visible from Jeb’s vantage point.

And they were going to come across the straggler in five, four…

Jeb groaned, dragging his hand down his face as they grabbed the boy and held him at knife-point.

“Let’s help them!” Zlesk said, pushing himself up and drawing his blade.

“Hold up. There’s more kids than there are bad guys, and they’re better armed,” Jeb said. “These dudes aren’t gonna push their luck too far. This’ll be a learning experience.”

Jeb held his finger over his lips and picked up the two of them with his telekinetic Myst and flew them downslope a ways before cutting northwest, angling to get themselves right behind the bad guys.

A few moments later, they came within earshot of the confrontation.

“Give us the fucking core, or this fucking kid starts breathing through a new hole!” a voice carried from just over the next rise.

Zlesk and Jeb sat down, listening intently.

“Yeah, and throw us your weapons, too,” another voice chimed in. Jeb’s eyebrows rose upon hearing that. In movies, the good guy gave up his weapons for a hostage all the time, but in real life, that was the absolute stupidest thing you could ever do.

Once a hostage is dead, a hostage-taker has no leverage, so as long as the standoff continues, the hostage-taker is primarily responsible for keeping the hostage alive, counter-intuitive as that might seem. Once the good guy is disarmed, the hostage-taker loses the reason to keep the hostage alive.

“If you hear weapons hitting the ground, we go in,” Jeb whispered.

“We’ll trade the core for Toby and nothing else,” Colt said.

“Good boy,” Jeb whispered.

“You want us to kill him!?” the first voice demanded.

“Then we’ll kill you. Do you want the core, or are you gonna make us kill you?” Colt asked.

“…Toss it over,” the first voice called.

Jeb heard a rattle of core against glass sail through the air and land in someone’s hands.

“Now throw down your weapons.” The robbers tried to press the advantage, causing Jeb’s heart to jump into his throat.

Don’t be stupid, Colt….

“Shoot them.” Colt’s voice was like iron.

“Later, suckers!”

There was a yipping laughter, almost like the cackling of hyenas, as the three robbers dropped their hostage and dashed off, the sound of arrows ringing off the stone around them. A second later, they crested the hill, their eyes widening when they saw Jeb and Zlesk below them.

“Afternoon,” Jeb said, nodding.

Their mouths opened, but they didn’t get a chance to say anything.

Jeb split his Myst and wrapped telekinetic bands around the faces of the two closer to him, while Zlesk stepped forward and punched the third one in the jaw so hard the man dropped like a bag of hammers.

Jeb shook the telekinetic bands left and right at car-crash speeds, knocking the men out and giving them some mild brain damage before he pried the dungeon core out of the hand of the middle robber. Zlesk used his Class Ability to magnetize the men’s lips to the stone of the mountainside.

“You’re taking that?” Zlesk whispered, glancing at the dungeon core in Jeb’s hand.

Jeb nodded. The lesson would stick better if the kids didn’t magically get their lost core back. It might be painful, but it would be better for them in the long run.

Plus, Jeb and Eddie wanted some cores to experiment on.

Jeb and Zlesk fled the scene before Colt and the rest of the kids caught up to the robbers, finding the men disabled, their stolen core sniped by another group of mysterious poachers.

They went back to following the kids from a distance and Jeb noticed immediately that their grouping was a lot tighter and more disciplined than it had been earlier this morning. They were already benefiting from the run-in.

Excellent.

The rest of the night, there wasn’t much in the way of action. The kids found a couple more cores, then put up a flag with their team name and set up camp around it. A couple people came sniffing around Jeb and Zlesk, but nothing serious.

“Is it safe to camp around a dungeon core?” Jeb whispered as they lay on top of a hill, observing the kids sitting around a fire right beside their yellow flag marking a possible prism dungeon.

This time, Smartass fielded the question. The fairy was young by fairy standards, but ancient compared to a normal human. The little brat had gotten around, and she knew a surprising amount of information, which made her an invaluable familiar to an aspiring wizard.

“A dungeon core is a pinhole between realities, and some of that other reality bleeds through into ours, warping anything close to it. So I would guess probably not safe, but it should be fine for one night.”

“A pinhole between realities? Like a white hole?” Jeb asked, glancing over at the fairy. She was a hand and a half tall now, and had taken to wearing a sock over her torso.

“Nobody has a white hole, Jeb,” Smartass responded patronizingly, looking down her nose at him.

Jeb frowned as he scanned the fairy’s tiny face.

“Is that a black eye?” The tiny fairy was sporting a pretty good shiner around her right eye that Jeb hadn’t noticed before.

“You should see the other girl.” She flexed her bicep. “Some of the locals accused me of being a ‘pet’, so I showed them the error of their ways.”

“Locals?” Jeb asked. “There’s local fairies? I didn’t know that.”

“Because I’ve been doing my job fending off these low-class pollen-snorters that want a piece of your Impact. The locals around here are get-rich-quick types, basically the trailer trash of fairies.

“Not like me,” she said, putting her fingers to her chest and preening. “I have scruples.”

Zlesk scoffed, shaking his head.

“Trust me, Jeb, as long as you’ve got me, no deceitful man-stealing hussy will get close enough to—”

“Jebediah Trapper.” A rich feminine voice called out from right beside and above him, causing Jeb and Smartass to both jump in place. Smartass landed in a vaguely martial stance, her hands held in a chopping position, wings rigid.

Fairy-fu in action.

Jeb craned his neck to glance over and up at the melas woman standing beside them. It took him a moment to recognize Vresh Tekalis from this angle. He had a hard time seeing her face.

Jeb still lugged the enforcer’s badge around in his oversized breast pocket. Maybe she wants it back?

“Yes?”

“I’ve got another task for you.”

“Can it wait until I’m done stalking children?” Jeb asked.

Chapter 2: Scrappy Doo

Vresh had given him an ultimatum to meet her at a neutral location alone, where she would brief him on ‘the mission’, by tomorrow noon, or else she would... I dunno, she was vague about the ‘or else’ part.

“You watched her saw a man’s head off,” Smartass pointed out, as if reading his mind.

“That is true,” Jeb said, taking a deep breath and blowing through the Appraiser, filling the center of his room with a roiling grey cloud laced with bright red thunderbolts.

Let’s see what I’m at.

Jeb stepped into the cloud and let the red lightning course through his body, lighting it from inside for a moment before it withdrew.

Mystic Trapsmith, Level 39

Accolades: Krusker’s Brawn, Siren’s Cunning, R-R-RubU’s Mysteries, Gresh’s Subtlety, Innovator, Lagross’s Power

Body 21 (17+3)

Myst 71 (45)

Nerve 26 (22)

Abilities: >>FATAL EXCEPTION. Ability missing or corrupted. Awaiting resolution by Administrator.<<<

Accolade Pending: Lagross’s Power suspended due to multiple instances. Awaiting resolution.

Jeb reviewed his status critically. He had about as much Body as a mid-low tier fighter. All but the stupidest combatants understood the need to toss at least a few token points into Nerve for reaction time, coordination, planning, and strategy, so a level twenty usually had about twenty Body. Jeb should be able to wrestle a level twenty fighter to a standstill.

Jeb was now about as strong as an average adult.

Jeb’s Myst was over halfway back to where it had been before, and at this level he could lift roughly a ton before whatever he was trying to lift simply refused to budge.

Good enough for a handful of people, most horses, but not enough for buildings, or even cars, sadly. Still, it was easily enough telekinetic force for him to fly, which opened up a whole new ballgame.

He put the ring back over his finger and began patting down his left hand with it. By some divine magic, the ring served as an itty-bitty backdoor into the fifth dimension, allowing anything sticking through it to interact. Jeb was fairly sure that wasn’t standard on Appraisers—he’d asked around—and it was that way because someone took a shine to him.

Jeb was at the age where he would happily take the free power-up from cronyism.

There. Jeb’s finger found a hard lump in his left hand. A lump in the fifth dimension, the Fate dimension...where The System resided.

Jeb had one night before he was probably going to be carried off into some ill-conceived suicide mission, so he’d like to take care of some of his backlog before he left.

Item #1 on his backlog: getting the System implants out of him. The idea of extradimensional things burrowed inside him creeped Jeb out.

He prodded around the lump, getting a feel for the protrusion. Instead of a wiggling snakelike…thing, it felt more like someone had driven a nail through the meat right next to his wrist, right into the thumb.

Somebody magically enhanced my thumb?

He glanced up at the list of Accolades, but he had no idea which one it could be.

Well, no time like the present. Jeb grabbed a pair of long nose pliers with loops at the tip, made specifically for getting whatever the hell was inside him out.

Because the 5th-dimensional nail going through his hand was smaller than the brain worm that had granted him his Class Ability, he could easily fit the ring over the head. Jeb took a little extra time to duct tape the ring in place exactly above the offending object and set his left hand in a borrowed vice before reaching in with the pliers.

He fumbled around for just a moment before he grabbed the nail with the pliers and started pulling.

Having taken a lesson from the last time, Jeb went all in on the magic from the very beginning, weaving a thick thread of Myst through the ring and into whatever was in his hand before yanking, hard.

There was a bright flash of light and a strange pressure on his viced hand. It suddenly occurred to him that that extra stability came at the cost of not being able to fling off whatever eldritch abomination he pulled from the ether.

Jeb blinked the black spot out of his eyes and saw…something on his hand.

“Damn, you’re ugly,” Jeb muttered.

The ungodly wall-eyed offspring of a catfish and a squirrel blinked at him, stroking its whiskers with its unnervingly humanoid fingers.

“It’s kind of a cute-ugly, don’t’cha think?” Smartass asked, settling on Jeb’s shoulder to get a better look at the strange creature.

Like the teacup chihuahuas that are so inbred they can’t stop shivering? Pass.

Jeb slowly reached up and loosened the vice on his hand. So far the creature seemed calm, and Jeb wanted to keep it that way until he could get him into the terrarium he’d set aside for just this occasion.

Inch by incredibly slow inch, Jeb lifted his hand out of the vice, the creature placidly sitting on his arm, its eyelids slowly blinking, alternating between right glassy orb and left glassy orb.

“Okay…” Jeb said softly. “We’re just going to take you over to the terrarium and set you down until we can figure out what you are, okay?”

The creature blinked. Right, then left.

Jeb slowly took a step to the left, then another one, aiming for the terrarium.

Click. The door opened without warning, and Mr. Everett, the former teacher/former slave peeked his head through. “Hey Jeb, I wanted to ask how the field trip we—”

“Close the door!”

“EEE!” At Jeb’s sudden outburst, the creature let out a shriek and leapt off his hand, proceeding to race three circuits around the room.

“Gah!” Mr. Everett slammed the door shut, but it didn’t do much. Jeb watched in fascination as the creature’s ribs collapsed like a rat’s, allowing it to squeeze under the doorframe, much to Mr. Everett’s shock.

A fraction of a second later, Jeb heard the old man outside the door cursing and the skittering of tiny claws against wood.

“That could’ve gone better,” Jeb muttered.

“You probably shouldn’t have yelled,” Smartass said, nodding sagely.

“Thank you for stating the obvious.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with.” Jeb took off the ring again and used the Appraiser on himself. In a moment, the status window floated in front of him a second time.

“Hmm… Innovator is missing,” Jeb said, scanning the list a couple times to be sure. “So…some kind of tech gremlin, maybe?”

“If it’s implanted as an Accolade, the gremlin has to be a good thing, right?” Smartass asked with a shrug.

“Venom can be diluted into medicine,” Jeb said, scowling. “There’s a possibility this thing is absolutely destructive when unchecked.”

There was only one place a tech gremlin would go, so Jeb hustled down to the basement.

In the dark tomb underneath the orphanage, Ron and Eddie were having their zombies vs. robots conversation for the umpteenth time.

“I’m just saying, if the goal is cheap labor, you can’t beat a zombie,” Ron said. The ginger necromancer was leaning up against the table as he spoke. “They cost literally nothing to make and maintain, they actually perform better once you weather them a little bit. Robots are degrading from the moment they are made, and as soon as one part breaks, poof, it’s over.”

“Oh sure, but can a zombie stamp out a perfect engraving five times a second? I don’t need cheap labor, I need precision. Not to mention the amount of damage rotting flesh does to materials in terms of corrosion—”

“Hey guys,” Jeb said upon trotting into the dark basement.

The two eggheads looked up from the zombie cyborg on the table in front of them. Jeb briefly wondered where they got the dead body before shaking the thought off and refocusing.

“Eh?” Eddie grunted. The white-haired roboticist held a suspicious canister with heavy duty gloves, currently in the process of screwing it into the borg’s empty chest cavity.

“Either of you see a skinny, bottom-feeding-looking gremlin come in here?” Jeb asked, “Face like a catfish, about her size?” Jeb snatched up Smartass and held her out for them to get a size comparison.

“Hey!” Smartass bit his finger, but it felt more like a gentle pinch.

Ron frowned and shook his head. “Naw, we ain’t seen any—”

“EEE!”

“Oh gawd!” Ron jumped away from the table.

Something under the table where they were engineering the end of the human race began skittering across the stone floor, shoving tiny bits of scrap and metal dust into its maw as it escaped toward a dark corner of the room.

“The hell was that?” Eddie asked, frowning.

“Just one of my Accolades got loose,” Jeb said, peering under the desk. He couldn’t see where the thing had gotten off to, and he didn’t think it would be safe to move around Eddie’s equipment. Some of the stuff the old man had in storage now was incredibly dangerous.

Purified-bottled-Myst dangerous.

“I’ve got just the thing,” Eddie said, glancing over to the side of the room. Several RC car-sized robots whined to life and began herding the creature under the drawers, causing a ton of rattling and screeching as they pushed the gremlin toward the harsh light of the garage lamps above them.

Deciding to make a break for it, the creature shot out from under the tool cabinet and darted for the stairs.

Jeb lunged into the creature’s path and reached for it with telekinesis. The nimble creature swerved toward Eddie’s desk, and the robot arm on the desk reached down like a snake and plucked the creature off the ground, holding its captive firm.

“Eee?” The tiny creature gave a squeak as the robot hand clamped down on it, far too hard to struggle. It looked like it was having trouble breathing.

“Now, don’t kill it, it might—”

Clink!

Something shiny came out of the creature’s back end and dropped onto the stone floor with a metallic ring, followed by a little narrow red tube that landed silently.

“Did that thing just take a dump?” Ron asked.

Eddie leaned over and plucked the two objects off the ground, inspecting them. “A heat-shrink tube and a six millimeter aluminum T-nut. I’ve been looking for one of these.”

“Yeah, but did it just take a dump?” Ron asked.

Eddie leaned down and picked up a piece of scrap aluminum and held it to the creature’s face. It sniffed it for a moment, then opened its mouth and engulfed the bit of metal, watching them cautiously as it ate, gluttonous even while being held captive by a robot arm.

A moment later, another shiny T-nut dropped out of the creature’s ass, followed by a 10k ohm resistor.

Eddie’s expression was that of a man who’d discovered his soulmate. His eyes were dilated until Jeb couldn’t see the color anymore, slightly watery, and he had a dopey smile on his face.

Ron looked slightly nauseous.

“Don’t be afraid, little guy,” Eddie said, the robot hand dropping the creature into his palm. “I’m not gonna hurt you.” He offered the creature another piece of shaved aluminum, which it greedily devoured.

“Your name will be Scrappy, and I will teach you to poop in a bowl.”

“You can’t seriously be considering adopting a monster that literally shits odd and ends?” Ron asked.

“Don’t listen to these naysayers, Scrappy. They don’t understand us.” Eddie cradled the ugly-as-sin trans-dimensional creature close to his chest while feeding it plastic and bits of copper wire.

“I’m fine with it,” Jeb said, backing towards the stairs and washing his hands of the situation entirely. “Just make sure it isn’t dangerous.”

Jeb backed out of the basement and headed back up to his room, keeping his ears perked for any sound of trouble, the smell of smoke or brimstone, anything that might indicate arson or a robot uprising.

So far, so good. Jeb hadn’t mentioned it out loud, but Eddie’s ability to mentally interface with robot programming combined with his outlandish Nerve had made his robots eerily smart.

Bringing it up would make the robots think about their own behavior and place in the universe, and the last thing Jeb wanted was introspective death machines under his orphanage full of superpowered children.

I’m living on top of the world’s biggest powder keg, Jeb thought, shaking his head as he sat on the bed, patting his body with his finger, searching for more Accolades.

The first one hadn’t caused any problems, and he still had plenty of time left in the night. Might as well go for two or three.

“Try behind your ears!” Smartass suggested, eager for more chaos.

Jeb shrugged and probed behind his ears and around the base of his skull, making damn sure he didn’t have any more things sticking out of his skull. R-R-RubU’s Mysteries seemed like something that might be skull-adjacent.

Thankfully, Jeb didn’t find anything more embedded in his skull.

“Now your teeth!”

Jeb raised a brow.

“You gotta be sure, don’t you?”

Jeb really didn’t want to discover something squirming around in his mouth in the fifth dimension. The thought alone sent prickles up his spine as every hair stood on end.

He took a deep breath and put his finger in his mouth, starting at the right-hand molars and tracing them around until—

Ow!

Jeb reflexively jerked his finger out of his mouth.

There was a straight red line on his finger, gushing blood like he’d just sliced it open on a razor.

“Fuck!” Jeb shouted, scrambling for the nearby desk and wrapping a clean shirt around the wound.

“Wow, I think you nicked a vein!” Smartass said, flitting up close. “Can I see?”

“Get lost!” Jeb shot back, hissing as the sharp pain settled into an agonizing throb in his finger.

Jeb lumbered to his feet, keeping pressure on the wound as he headed for the door of his room. “I’m probably gonna have to get stit—”

BOOM!

Something popped at least a dozen of Jeb’s FMO (Fast Moving Object) shields, along with his eardrums, and a bunch of the surrounding room.

Jeb staggered backwards, falling on his ass and staring up at the hole in his ceiling while debris rained down on him.

What the hell? A tiny black dot in the sky sailed away from him at maybe a hundred meters per second, disappearing as it arced downward. Jeb could actually see the sky through the hole in the ceiling.

I knew the ceiling was out to get me! Jeb thought as he crawled to his feet, still clenching a fist around his bleeding finger as he stumbled for the door.

“What the hell just happened?” Jeb demanded at the top of his lungs as he threw the door open before returning his hand to his wound. He couldn’t hear a word of it. Outside his room, the orphanage was in disarray.

Bookshelves had been knocked over, toys were scattered everywhere, and there was a bit of wood shrapnel here and there, stuck into the wall.

Mrs. Lang, always on the ball, was motioning for the children to evacuate, probably screaming, but Jeb’s ears were ringing too hard.

Evacuation sounded like a good idea to Jeb, though.

He had joined the procession down the stairs to the main lobby, when one of the stairs buckled under Jeb’s weight, sending him toppling to the side.

Still clenching his bleeding finger, Jeb toppled over the railing. He saw a guillotine-shaped piece of a broken standing mirror beneath him. Jeb was too dumbstruck to react as the makeshift blade went right for his neck.

The moment it broke the surface of his skin, the foreign object was caught by one of Jeb’s armor traps and shoved into the floor, shattering the delicate glass into a less dangerous pile.

“Gah!” Jeb hit the ground in the lobby, then picked himself up with telekinesis, not wanting to risk scrambling across broken glass.

Are we under attack or something? Jeb thought as he flew out the door above the stream of children, scanning them to see if anyone was wounded.

Once he was sure nobody was injured, he scanned the surroundings. There was no indication that they were under attack. There were no sword-wielding shitheads or magic users with glowing power around their hands…none of that fantasy bullshit. Just a bunch of wood shrapnel, evacuating children and yellowish smoke from the basement…

Jeb’s eyes widened as the double doors to the storm cellar burst open and he spotted Ron and Eddie being dragged by Buddy the bomb-defusing robot and the mecha-zombie. The two were coughing and shivering like they’d been exposed to some kind of nerve gas.

The fifth-dimensional gremlin in Eddie’s death grip didn’t seem to mind the smoke, and the robots were…robots.

Jeb was going to go see if the two were all right when their brand-new mecha-zombie turned its gaze on Jeb, a single red LED blinking on in its eye, a rule-of-cool decision by Ron.

That dumb LED saved Jeb’s life.

Jeb held up his palm, fingers splayed wide.

A shield of telekinetic force appeared between him and the borg moments before the zombie robot snapped up an arm with a stripped down P90 submachine gun embedded in it.

Bullets rained against the shield like hail, but Jeb had a hard time hearing them because of his busted eardrums. He could feel ‘em, though.

Buddy’s camera looked between Jeb and the borg before grabbing the creature’s arm and yanking it down, creating a plume of dust in front of the creature and buying Jeb some time to think.

The borg looked down at the bomb-defusing robot and tried to smash it with its other hand, but the robot’s armor was too thick, shrugging off the powerful blows.

Ron can fix it later. It must’ve gone berserk because its master was threatened.

Jeb dropped himself to the ground and reached out with two separate threads of telekinetic Myst, forming them into blades and whipping them through the creature, slicing off the submachine gun hand and the torso, effectively making it a non-threat.

The borg toppled to the ground and seemed confused for a moment by its own lack of legs. Then it tilted its torso toward Jeb, using its remaining arm to carefully…aim its chest cavity at him?

Jeb’s eyes widened as a feeling of impending doom closed in around him, prickling his Myst senses. Dodge!

He threw himself to the ground and rolled an instant before a beam of raw Myst consumed his shield and carried on into the hedge between the orphanage and their neighbor, turning it into a pile of charcoal before Buddy yanked the beam up, possibly saving lives.

Jeb reached into the zombie’s ribcage and ripped out the creature's inner workings, leaving it wiggling angrily, but otherwise harmless.

Why the hell is everything coming after me? Jeb thought, frowning.

A weight he’d grown accustomed to was lifted as Smartass fell off her usual perch on his shoulder, plopping onto the ground in a little plume of dust, demanding his attention.

“I don’t feel so good, Jeb,” she muttered.

Did she breathe in some of that smoke? She’s not shot…. Jeb thought, glancing over at the yellowish smoke billowing from the garage. Smaller creatures feel poison first. It was why they used canaries in mineshafts, after all, but the garage was simply too far away to have poisoned her already.

“Your Impact feels bad,” she said, visibly shrinking just the tiniest bit.

Wait, she IS a canary in a mineshaft, and this IS poison, just not that kind of poison.

Jeb ripped the rag off his finger and spotted a tracework of necrotic black veins crawling around the oozing wound.

My Impact is literally poisoned! Jeb thought, his heart pounding. It stood to reason, if there were ways to add Impact, there were ways to take it away. There was an entire ecosystem on the other side that he couldn’t perceive.

Jeb noticed the unhealthy black veins on his finger stopped right at the ring that served as a tiny gateway between this dimension and the Fate dimension.

Maybe if I take it off, it’ll take the poison out with it. Jeb had to really try hard and inject Myst in order to make something cross over, so maybe he could use it like a filter and physically drag the fifth-dimensional poison out of his finger.

Jeb got his fingers around the blood-slick ring and slid it off over the gash in his finger, hissing as it dragged itself across the wound.

“God…damnit!” Jeb cussed as the thick ring finally came free. He heaved a sigh of relief as he inspected the wound, thankfully free of the disturbing black veins.

“Is that better?” Jeb asked.

Smartass flopped over and tossed her cookies, shrinking a little more.

“Hey bird-lover! Fuck you!” A nearby SUV screeched by, plowing through the front courtyard. The sound of an AR-15 was immediately followed by pained cursing as Jeb’s FMO shield returned the lead projectiles back to sender.

“We know where you live now!” the driver screamed out the window as they plowed through his fence and back out onto the street. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!”

That’s not good.

“Mrs. Lang, could you fetch me a pair of pliers? Quick as you can?” Jeb asked, glancing over at the older teacher.

The woman was clutching a bullet wound in her outer thigh.

I guess not.

Pretty sure I’m still Fate-poisoned. I refuse to call it bad luck.

Jeb felt a bump on his side and glanced over, half-expecting giant wasps or eldritch horrors.

Buddy the bomb-defusing robot held out a pair of needle-nose pliers, just small enough to fit through the Appraiser. The robot wiggled them up and down as soon as he saw he had Jeb’s attention.

“Thank you, Buddy, you’re a credit to your species,” Jeb said, slipping the ring over the pliers and opening his mouth.

This is gonna suck.

***Vresh Tekalis***

Vresh tucked her napkin into her collar as she waited for Jeb to arrive at her favorite restaurant in Solmnath. Golden light cascaded down from the chandelier above onto the pristine white surface of her table…and beautiful music from live musicians swelled in the background, allowing her to relax into her personal chair.

All that was nice, but it wasn’t why she liked the place so much.

The owner strived to be on the cutting edge of culinary advancement, offering dishes you couldn’t find anywhere else, and adapting new discoveries at a moment’s notice. The first time she’d eaten an Oiled Eel Cake, she’d actually laughed.

“The VIP menu, Ms. Tekalis,” the maître d’ said, bowing as he handed her the list.

“Ooh, gasoline. Sounds exotic. What is it?” Vresh asked, brows rising.

“It’s refined oil humans use to power machines. We’ve found that melas find it tasty, albeit a bit one-note. Its refinement strips most organic flavors from it. We could serve it to you plain as a flaming shot or mix up a cocktail if you wish?”

“I always like to try a shot before a cocktail. I like to know what the underlying flavor is.”

“Of course,” the man said, nodding. “And to eat?”

“I think something light. A fruit bowl and some sauteed peruha.” The sea monster’s flesh had a nice snap to it.

“And will your companion be joining us soon?” the maître d’ asked, glancing at the empty seat in front of her.

“He better be,” Vresh said, handing the menu back. If Jeb didn’t show up, it would force Vresh to think of a creative prod to force the human to act, which was time and energy she would rather not spend.

“Would you like to order for your guest before he arrives, so the food comes out at the same time?”

“What do humans eat?” Vresh asked, frowning. She didn’t actually know what the cold, brown little people ate on a regular basis.

“We’ve developed a menu for humans since the Stitching. It seems that in this part of the continent the standard human fare was pizza, cheeseburgers, burritos and french fries.”

“Fix up one of everything,” Vresh said.

“As you wish, Ms. Tekalis,” the maître d’ said, backing away until he was out of sight.

It wasn’t until shortly after the order had been brought out to their table, and Vresh was starting to feel stood-up that Jebediah Trapper showed up, looking paler than the day before. The man’s clothes were covered in scuffs and tears, along with a few burns and bullet holes. His hand was wrapped in bandages and he sported dark circles under his eyes.

Around his neck, the disheveled human was wearing a leather thong bearing a single porous-looking canine tooth the length of her palm.

The human collapsed into his chair and grabbed the plate of delicately arranged french fries and began eating them with his hands, resting the plate on his chest like a savage.

“You look terrible,” Vresh blurted, taken aback by her deputy’s appearance. They had a dress code. Unfortunately, since he was with a Tekalis, nobody bothered to inform the human.

“I had an interesting night,” Jebediah said between handfuls of salted fried potatoes.

“Your next shot of flaming gasoline, my lady,” the maître d’ said, bringing a ceramic cup of vigorously burning liquid to the table. Jebediah tracked the fire across the room like it was a live serpent, still stuffing his face.

The human’s eyes widened when Vresh threw her head back and downed the burning beverage in a single gulp, exhaling a satisfied plume of fire. She felt a little bit of undeserved satisfaction, impressing the human with such a simple feat.

The human sniffed the air.

“Smells more like diesel. Gasoline vapors are too explosive to serve in a restaurant,” Jebediah said before turning to the maître d’. “These are good. Do you have any ketchup?”

Chapter 3: No Nukes is Good Nukes

As it turned out, the restaurant did not have ketchup, but they were happy to try and whip up an approximation.

Jeb once again took in how fabulously wealthy the eatery was, and observed just how comfortable Vresh was, sitting there being waited on by men wearing literal gold trim. Old money, Jeb’s instincts told him, and the tiny gold digger voice in his head wondered if she was single.

Jeb nearly jumped when a fork clattered a little too hard against a plate.

He’d spent most of the night slowly recovering from temporal poison trying to shrink/dissipate his Impact. That meant anything from losing money, or stubbing his toe, all the way to the sky outright trying to murder him via meteor strike.

Jeb’s Impact shrinking manifested physically as a string of outrageously bad luck that lasted until a few hours ago, just when it was starting to get light again. Pulling the tooth out of his skull had slowed the flow of poison enough for him to survive it, since it was no longer being dumped endlessly into the fifth dimension.

Somehow, poking it with his finger had kicked it into gear and it hadn’t stopped poisoning him until he’d pulled it out. The devious nature of the poison made it difficult to cure. Half a dozen incidents almost stopped Jeb from removing the tooth, as if the thing was actively preventing him from helping himself.

Once the tooth was out, Jeb had to sit there and try not to die for a good twelve hours before the fifth-dimensional ‘fever’ broke, and the universe stopped trying to kill him.

The experience left him a little jumpy.

The tooth, he carried around on a necklace, because when he’d used the Appraiser on it:

Fang of Gresh (Unique)

The venomous fang of the Phantom Raptor Gresh, which attacks the body and the mind. When introduced into the bloodstream, the venom causes corrosion of the nervous system, leading to paralysis and death from cardiovascular failure. The poison’s effects drastically dull pain, short-term memory, caution, and decision making, making it incredibly hard to self-diagnose.

The fang has been treated with a special mixture that keeps the venom gland alive and producing, despite being long separated from its original host. Simply stab and squeeze!

No way was Jeb leaving that anywhere in a mansion full of curious orphans, no matter how good the safe was. Plus, it could come in handy.

“So, the reason why I called you here,” Vresh said, patting her lips with her napkin before removing it and setting it aside, seemingly done with her meal. Jeb was just getting started on the burrito. “Would you care to guess?”

“Not really,” Jeb said with a shrug. He figured it might be more reapers, at the worst. At best, they could require his input for some kind of pagan fertility ritual. Anything in between was fair game, Jeb supposed.

“What do you know about nuclear weapons?”

Jeb stopped chewing on his burrito, his skin turning cold. Internally, his worst-case scenario was being violently readjusted. Reapers were bad, but nukes were on a completely different level.

“They’re really, really bad?” Jeb said, wincing. “They kill entire cities, poison the land you use them on, and if you use enough of them, they can send the world into an ice age by blocking out the sun with dust that takes centuries to settle.”

Vresh blinked. “I hadn’t heard about the ice age part.”

“You’ve got a nuke problem?” Jeb asked.

“The empire didn’t have a nuke problem until humans arrived. I should say, if anyone has a nuke problem, it would be humans.”

The melas woman leaned forward and laced her fingers together. “How many nuclear bombs did your country have before the Stitching?”

“I don’t know the exact number of course, but thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. There were nuclear weapons at every major airport and air force base around the world, and thousands more hidden in silos very few people know about.”

Her scowl deepened.

Jeb nibbled his pizza.

“Were you aware that there are anarchist groups of humans unearthing nuclear bombs and bypassing their safety features to allow manual detonation?”

“Aware? No. Not particularly surprised, either. Those things aren’t being guarded anymore, so I assume it’s open season.”

“You seem awfully cavalier about the idea of being swept up in a wave of fire and poison that could engulf the entire city.”

“I grew up with it. I’m going to guess that this job of yours has something to do with these anarchist groups?”

“How astute. Yes, you are going to infiltrate one of these rebel groups for me, and then you are going to remove their ability to cause problems.”

“What, by killing them?”

“If you wish. I’ve no care for their lives. Your specific task is to disarm their bombs. Remove the nuclear devices from the equation entirely, and these humans will cease to be a threat to the world.”

Jeb’s brows rose. “How am I supposed to do that, exactly? I know way too little about disarming bombs.”

“Simple. You convert it into something less dangerous.” Vresh reached under the table and pulled out a suitcase and placed it in front of him. Opening it, Jeb saw a wand painted with a steel color that gradually faded into blue toward the tip.

“This is a transmutation wand, specially designed by the emperor’s craftsmen to change any metal into water. I’m told uranium is a metal?”

“So I just walk in, and turn their bombs into puddles with a bit of plastic tubing where the wires used to be?”

“In essence.”

Jeb studied the wand for a moment.

“So, where’s the guy working on making a wand that turns water into nuclear bombs?” Jeb asked.

Vresh blinked. “It would be highly unlikely that these anarchists would possess the materials, the knowledge, the skill, the tools, or the idea, were it even possible. Don’t give them the idea. If you see evidence of them working on a Myst-based doomsday weapon, report it to me.”

Jeb could think of a few people who might be capable of that kind of outside-the-box thinking. Plus anyone who worked at NASA. Eggheads were rarely revolutionaries, but these were strange times. It was best not to assume the malcontents were dumb.

“And where will you be during all of this?” Jeb asked.

“I’ll be your superior officer, your handler. I’ll keep an eye on the situation from a distance. No more than a mile or two.”

“Starting to feel like James Bond.”

“Who?”

“He was a spy who…nevermind. What’s the pay?”

Vresh raised a brow.

“Last time, the pay was your silence. What are you going to pay me to risk my life this time?” Jeb asked. “Let’s work out a Deal.”

It seemed like the empire was pretty desperate to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether, so he should be able to squeeze a fat paycheck out of doing the right thing. Jeb was all for nuclear disarmament, but ‘gettin’ paid’ was literally the source of his powers, so he had to haggle.

Vresh’s full lips quirked up in the hint of a smug smile. “The Talons of Freedom—”

Jeb chuckled at the name.

“—are camped out in Nellis Air Force Base, just outside Vegas. They have bombers, bombs, and people who can use them. Solmnath is the largest city within their range. I’m told the only reason they didn’t destroy the city while the emperor was visiting was due to unfavorable weather conditions.”

“The Roil,” Jeb surmised. “That lucky…” Jeb shook his fist silently, careful not to speak a direct lie.

“Now, you’ve got two humans who are widely considered to be the most egregious traitors to the human race due to assume leadership positions in Solmnath in the next week. What do you think is going to happen?”

“They’re gonna blow them up, I suppose,” Jeb said with a shrug.

“That’s right, and the city of Solmnath, along with everything you’ve built here, will be destroyed,” she said.

Jeb cocked an eyebrow. “Except now that you’ve warned me, there’s plenty of time to move all my kids out of the city. Amanda and Brett are my friends, but I’ve got no particular responsibility for their safety. They knew what they were signing up for when they decided to become king and queen.

“So, about that pay,” Jeb said, leaning a single elbow on the table.

Vresh paled. “There’s millions of people in Solmnath,” she breathed, staring at Jeb like he’d grown insect legs and started crawling around. “You’d allow millions of people to die over money?”

“That’s not exactly the story here, is it?” Jeb asked. “They’re not gonna die even if I don’t go. You’re more than capable of walking into Nellis and smiting everyone involved. I think you just want a human to solve ‘the nuke problem’ because the story plays better with the masses when one of our species fixes the problem. What you’re asking me to do is go in and solve a problem that you could and would easily solve, in exchange for nothing.”

The heat radiating off the melas woman became tangible, making the skin on Jeb’s arms and forehead feel tight. The decorative flowers beside her wilted under the heat.

“You’re right,” she finally said, her mood cooling down in a fraction of a second, leaving Jeb to wonder where she kept all that heat when she wasn’t blasting it in his face. “Solmnath is too important to leave as a bargaining chip. I had thought no man was callous enough to allow a city to be snuffed out, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Like I said, even if I do nothing—”

“A thousand bulbs.”

“Huh?”

“I will pay you a thousand bulbs to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons to Solmnath. Deal?”

Hot damn. A thousand bulbs was a lot of money. Roughly equivalent to one and a half million, maybe two. Jeb still had his gold mine lenses, but they barely supported the day-to-day of the orphanage.

Who knew feeding and clothing several hundred children was hella expensive?

“I will eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons originating from Nellis for a thousand bulbs. The way you phrased that would have me chasing down every nuke that could possibly pose a threat to the city, which is all of them, along with anyone who knew how to make them.”

Vresh shrugged, a hint of a smile on her face. “Worth a shot. Very well, we have a Deal.” She held out her hand, and Jeb grasped with a firm shake.

Her hand was big, but soft, and warm as hell, and for a moment, Jeb imagined—

Click. The sensation of the Deal settling into his very being cut off Jeb’s train of thought. Suddenly he felt a strong urge to go to Nellis, some six hundred miles away.

But he couldn’t just rush off. He needed a plan. Thankfully there was no time limit on the Deal, so the urge to get up and start running to Nellis wasn’t unbearable.

Jeb tapped his fingers on the table, thinking through his situation. He had a week to get some face-to-face time with some WMDs and turn them into water.

“What if they recognize my face? I was on TV once.”

“Your face was covered in blood. Outside of the city, no one will recognize you. Just use a pseudonym.”

Jeb paused, neurons firing. He couldn’t give someone a fake name because if he lied, he’d suffer Impact whiplash. How, then, should he phrase his false identity?

As a command.

‘Call me Ted’, or somesuch. It wasn’t a lie about his name, it was a command.

The thought of telling someone to say something specific brought back to mind his episode with the pirates a few months ago, when he forced a believable untruth out of a young man at gunpoint, then simply repeated it.

I wonder if I could pull off something similar with Vresh. Minus the gun, of course.

“Vresh, would you be willing to say some lines I could repeat? I would like a better cover story, should they discover my identity.”

Vresh frowned. “Why? You can’t lie?” Vresh asked, crooking a brow.

Jeb suddenly felt like he was under a microscope.

“Of course I can lie.” Jeb scoffed, waving it off. “I was considering presenting you as an inside informant, a traitor to the emperor. I wanted our story to be straight.” Not a lie, but not the whole truth, either.

Hopefully she buys it.

Vresh didn’t buy it.

“Say the tablecloth at our table is blue.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Why not? There’s no harm in it, is there?” Vresh asked, giving him a mischievous grin.

“You’re annoying me right now.” That was partly true. The playful side of Vresh was also highly intriguing, and Jeb wanted to see more of it.

“Because you can’t lie? No, you already said you can… You won’t lie, because you took a Vow. That explains how particular you were about your Deal.” She grinned victoriously.

“A what?”

Vresh leaned closer and whispered, “A strict code of conduct that acts as a force multiplier to Impact? It would help explain why you’re still alive, what with the Impossible Tutorial...”

“That sounds like the sort of thing you shouldn’t be talking about in a diner,” Jeb whispered back, leaning forward until their faces were only a few inches apart.

“It’s a restaurant, you rube.”

“Diesel-breath.”

“Footloose.”

“Clumsy.”

Vresh scowled at that one. “You’ve got five days to stop terrorists from bombing Solmnath,” the former enforcer said with ominous finality.

“About those things you could say for me…”

“I was interested, until you called me clumsy,” she said, lifting her chin.

“Your refill, Ms. Tekalis,” the maître d’ said as he approached, offering her a flaming shot glass of what Jeb was sure was pure diesel beside a larger bottle.

“Oh, thank you!” Vresh said, reaching for the glass and bumping it with her finger, knocking it over instead.

The maître d’ dropped the platter in shock, which splattered the bottle of diesel all over the table, and both occupants. Then it lit on fire.

“Phooey!”

Jeb, having survived Fate-poison all night, had a shield of hardened air up before she even reached for the glass, so he was fine. The liquid fire rolled off the air in front of him and pooled on the burning table, sending a cloud of smoke into the rafters of the fine establishment.

Vresh, on the other hand, looked more upset about her ruined clothes than the diesel using her hair as a natural wick. She patted the flames out on her arms and chest, muttering self-censored profanities. Somehow her hair didn’t actually burn, and neither did the skin showing through the burnt gaps in the fine silk…

Ahem.

“With that well-timed gaffe, I think I’ll go get to work,” Jeb said, standing up as Vresh tucked her napkin back into the collar of her shirt and spread it out over the gaps.

Jeb picked up the suitcase and gave the melas woman a haphazard salute as he walked out the door.

******

To Do list:

              Prep for storming a military base.

              Storm a military base.

              Profit.

God, it seems so easy when I lay it out in list form, Jeb thought sardonically, tapping his pen on the corner of the page.

Then Jeb broke item one into its individual parts.

First task: prepare for the worst-case scenario. He instructed Mr. Everett and Mrs. Lang to take the kids out on a couple school buses on a road trip the day before Amanda and Brett were due to take the reins of Solmnath.

No questions asked.

The grey-haired teachers were smart enough to do what they were asked, especially after they saw the look in his eyes. They weren’t his slaves anymore, but they were cautious, responsible people, and for some reason they respected him.

Once Jeb’s worst-case scenario was taken care of, he started working on the prepping.

Transportation, lots of personal defense, and a wild card.

“Do you think I should buy some keegan corpses from their families and lash them to the front of the Jeep like a Reaver?” Jeb asked, squatting in front of the grille and affixing a Myst Trigger for a spray of telekinetic bullets. It would trigger to the phrase, ‘Heisenberg maneuver’.

Jeb’s claim to fame was the ability to make ‘mystic traps’, which were basically pre-packaged spells that would go off the moment a pre-defined action happened within range. The more time he had to prepare, the harder he was to kill.

“Where did you say you were going again?” Zlesk asked, eyes wide.

“I didn’t say, but let’s just say the locals don’t like aliens. I think maybe covering the Jeep in their dead bodies would let me get close enough to see the whites of their eyes.”

Jeb knew these guys would have some big guns on hand if they took over a military base, and there was every chance they might just shoot first and ask questions later.

They were probably on high alert, and they had high-powered scopes. There was no way Jeb could reach them without them seeing him first…

Well, unless I covered myself in a bubble and went into the stratosphere with bottled oxygen and dropped down on them from above.

Jeb wasn’t nearly confident enough in his Myst to go for spaceflight just yet, but it did give him ideas….

There’s no way they have satellites watching the base.

“I think you would come across as a try-hard,” Ron said, bringing Jeb’s attention back to the matter at hand. “I mean, I could probably make the corpses into a secondary fighting force that could deploy in an emergency, but you’d still look like a try-hard. People don’t put that much effort into decoration unless they’re trying to make a statement. Lashing bodies to a car is a lot of work.”

“Hmmm…true. Just a severed head on the hood, then?” Jeb asked.

“That’s about the right level of effort.” Ron nodded.

“Humans are disgusting,” Zlesk said, shaking his head.

“Hold on, I wanna try something,” Jeb said, winding a complex series of if/then statements into his Mystic Trigger, then placing it behind the steering wheel.

Jeb backed off about fifty feet, then cleared his throat.

“Jeep, pick me up.”

The Jeep roared to life as telekinetic force turned the key and a series of functions turned the steering wheel until the wheels were aligned with Jeb.

Then the gear shifted and a telekinetic force pressed on the gas.

The Jeep lunged forward, crossing the fifty feet in a matter of seconds, prompting Jeb to dive out of the way. The functions on the steering wheel worked a little too good, and they shifted to compensate as a new set of Triggers popped.

Looping functions in Jeb’s Mystic Triggers were able to allow them to have rudimentary reactions to stimulus once they’d already been triggered. They were mentioned at the end of the book he’d pulled out of his head a few months ago. With the knowledge that looping functions existed and some basic descriptions of them, he was able to get started learning them, but the progress was a little slow without actual learning materials.

As demonstrated by the Jeep chasing him across the orphanage’s lawn.

Once the looped spells ran out of Myst and the vehicle stopped trying to run him over, Jeb refined the trigger, tested it one more time and then set the finished version in place behind the steering wheel, along with a couple others.

Since he was driving up to a military base, Jeb put some Triggers on the car specifically designed to steer him away from land mines, and to protect him if he did manage to drive over one.

A land mine was an observable phenomenon.

He warded the Jeep against small arms fire and set several dozen shields to all pop at the same time if they tried to hit him with heavy weapons.

Once Jeb had prepared as much as he could think of, he pinned the list of commands to the driver’s side visor, accompanied with check marks to remind him they were filled.

‘Ben-Hur’ ☑

‘Pick me up’ ☑

‘Heisenburg maneuver’ ☑

‘Heavy ordinance’ X 50 ☑

‘Explosion dampening’ X 20 ☑

‘Sleepyhead’ ☑

‘That’s my car’ ☑

‘Nitro’ ☑

‘Viking funeral’ ☑

‘Jesus take the wheel’ ☑

Jeb’s Nerve was high enough to remember the whole list easily, but Jeb couldn’t account for concussive brain damage or strange Abilities that might make him forget.

Once Jeb had his Jeep riddled with Triggers, he moved on to his personal defense, putting Triggers on anything and everything he could think of, from his flame arrow glove, to his booby-trapped prosthetic and everything in between.

Finger-gun clips: ‘ack’ x10 ☑ ‘pip’ x10 ☑ ‘kip’ x10 ☑ ‘Alpha Strike’ ☠

Full auto: ‘Demogorgon’ ☑ ‘Unladen Swallow’ ☑ ‘little friend’(foot) ☑

Shield: x4 ☑

Looped Armor: head ☑ torso ☑ legs ☑ upper arms ☑ lower arms ☑

FMO shield x50 ☑

Safety Phrases: restraints ‘3W’ ☑ ‘Scarabs’ ☑ ‘Plitskin’ ☑ ‘No homo’ ☑ ‘Room full of Charlies’ ☠

Grenades ‘go boom’:‘glove’ ☑ ‘knife’ ☑ ‘foot’ ☑

Saw ‘go fast’: ‘yellow’ ☑ ‘red’ ☑ ‘green’ ☑ ‘blue’ ☑

Things ‘love daddy’: ‘glove’ ☑ ‘foot’ ☑ ‘cane’ ☑ ‘pants’ ☑ ‘shirt’ ☑ ‘knife’ ☑ ‘ring’ ☑ ‘wand’ ☑ ‘saw’ ☑ ‘gun’ ☑

‘Too tight’: collar ☑ wrists ☑ fingers ☑ arms ☑ chest ☑ head ☑ legs ☑ ankle ☑ feet ☑

Bandage traps ☑

Jeb studied the list. He was sure there was something he’d missed, but he was on a time crunch. He didn’t have all week to plan and brainstorm. He folded the list and stuffed it in his breast pocket.

Okay, that’s personal defense along with transportation. Now I just need my wild card.

“How’s your nerve-gas hangover?” Jeb asked Eddie. The frazzled-looking old man rested against the wall, the ugly gremlin standing on his shoulder and nibbling on some plastic.

“Feels like I got hit with nerve gas.” Eddie groaned, head in his hands.

“What have we learned?” Jeb asked, like a parent who found his kid covered in jam and dirt.

“Nerve gas works really good?” Eddie asked, glancing up at him.

Jeb rolled his eyes and got to the point. “I need to borrow Legolas for a week. How long can he operate without a charge?” Legolas was Eddie’s second robot after Buddy, and the drone was literally designed to be air support.

“Oh, forever.” Eddie waved off the question. “I made a prism array that transforms ambient Myst into electricity and replaced his battery with it, like, two weeks ago.”

“You can do that?” Jeb asked.

“Oh yeah, you just gotta figure out how to utilize the electrical slice of the spectrum of Myst that comes out the other side of a prism, then recapture the rest of it before it lights the surroundings on fire or transmutes them into a fish. What have you.”

“So the rays that come out of prisms are organized,” Jeb said, considering it.

“The bandwidths are determined by the blend of Myst that comes through, but yeah, they’re always organized the same.”

Prisms were the second-most important part of any Myst engine. They converted any Myst that touched them from neutral to active ray form.

The most important piece was a dungeon core, which aggressively drew in Myst, and the third was a semi-permeable glass that blocked Myst, but allowed rays through.

Eddie had taken the dungeon core out of the equation, which resulted in a substantial reduction in total ray output, but there was still a trickle as ambient Myst came into contact with the prism at a more sedate pace.

From what Eddie had told him, he’d figured out a way to standardize the output—enough to run a robot off of, anyway.

Quietly and without fanfare, someone invented the perpetual motion machine, and nobody noticed because of all the monsters and magic.

“I’d like to stay here and talk magitech, but I got some out-of-town work to do. It could take a week or more,” Jeb said, walking past Eddie and tapping Legolas on the top to wake him up.

“Sure, just leave us with the clean-up,” Ron said from where he was using his Class Ability to stitch the borg back together, casting Jeb an accusatory glance.

“Ron, that thing turned on me the moment you were in a bit of trouble.”

“Honest mistake.”

“It could’ve killed me!” Jeb cried as Legolas woke up, rising into the air.

“It’ll do better next time.”

“Do you mean it’ll behave better or it’ll fight better next time?” Jeb asked, suspicious. He stared into the young necromancer’s eyes, until his gaze slid away from Jeb’s.

“Both?” Ron said with a shrug.

“Goddamnit, Ron. If that thing hurts a kid, the social contract demands I beat you.”

“Fair enough.” Ron got back to work reattaching the severed limb.

“Legolas,” Jeb said, turning to the drone hovering beside him. “How would you like to keep me company on a road trip and probably shoot down a bomber plane?”

The drone’s light blinked green, and it wiggled assent.

“What was that last part?” Eddie asked, raising his head out of his hands.

“Out-of-town work,” Jeb said, grabbing the death-deer staff off the shelf and heading back outside. Legolas followed close behind, settling into the back of the Jeep at Jeb’s instruction.

Jeb secured his revolver. The gun was a bit of a red herring, seeing as he was more dangerous than the weapon, but Jeb found wearing a gun out in the wasteland was good for making people think twice.

“Is that everything?” Jeb asked as he hopped in the front and leaned over the driver seat, checking the back. He felt like a dad prepping for beach day, especially with Smartass tanning on the dashboard.

Food, fuel, check check. Legolas, check, death-deer staff, check, Smartass, check, cool sunglasses for the desert, check. Glove, check, leg, check, extra pair of clothes, check.

A thought occurred to Jeb, and he pointed at Legolas. “You are armed with the annihilation gun, and the Myst to use it, right?” Jeb imagined arriving and his trump card was unarmed. That would be pretty embarrassing.

Legolas’s light blinked green.

“Alright, let’s go.”

***Colt, level 27 Slinger***

Colt sprawled out on the ground with a sigh. They’d almost lost Toby on the first day they’d been trusted to go out on their own. That had been a wake-up call for all of them. The very first core they’d gathered had been stolen!

Suddenly all of Jeb’s lecturing about boring shit like making sure you keep your formation tight and setting up watches while you sleep…it all clicked into place.

The world was out to get them. From the moment they stepped out into it.

There hadn’t been any more incidents since then. A few people came sniffing around, but they showed them raised spears and unfeeling metal and they got the hint real quick. A woman offered to help, and they gave her the same treatment.

It didn’t make Colt feel great, but now there was no chance of the woman stealing all their cores and running.

Five! They had five of them already, over a day and a half. Everyone wanted to stay out longer and see if they could find more, but their food would run out after lunch…

I guess I gotta take the kids back at noon. Colt wasn’t sure if it was by design, or because Jeb expected him to forage for his own food. The old man had told him to ‘use your best judgement’.

Hmm… If we could nail a wild animal or a handful of rabbits, we could have enough to last another day.

Another day would translate to another five cores, which translated to twenty-five bulbs. It was so much money! You could literally buy someone with that kind of cash.

Colt was considering whether or not hunting would be feasible with dozens of other parties swarming over the mountain, scaring everything off, when he spotted movement in the corner of his eye.

Without moving, he glanced over at the pile of gear, where a little fairy was picking up one of the cores in its glass vial and throwing it over its shoulder like a massive log.

Colt pointed a finger at the fairy and slimed it. He’d been following Jeb’s advice and working on making the slime come out with different properties. This one was extra sticky.

“Ack!” the fairy cried, slipping off its feet and tumbling down the pile of gear. It tried to buzz its wings, but the goop covering it was too thick, preventing it from escaping.

“Can I help you with something, squirt?” Colt asked, poking the fairy with his finger.

“Yes,” the fairy said, uncovering its face with its fingers so it could breathe. “You and your friends can pay me the rent money I am due for camping on my mountain. A couple cores oughta do it.”

“Your mountain?” Colt asked with a frown. “By whose authority?”

“Ummm….” The fairy’s gaze slid away from his.

“So you thought getting me to accept that you owned this mountain would make it so, and then I’d have to pay you?”

“That’s not…the only thing I was thinking,” the fairy said with a shrug.

“Well, let me just be clear. No, this isn’t your mountain, and no, you can’t have any cores.”

“Aw, come on, dude,” the fairy griped, using its tiny hands to squeegee slime off its wings. “I got larvae to feed.”

“You feed them cores?” Colt asked, raising a brow.

“Naw, they make good trade on the streets. One of them things can buy a whole chicken sandwich.”

The fairy wiggled its eyebrows. “A human-sized chicken sandwich.”

“I think you’ve been lied to,” Colt replied, shaking his head.

“Huh?”

“These are worth five bulbs.”

“Huh?”

“Five gold coins as big as your chest.”

The fairy cocked its head, confusion written across its features. “….Huh?”

Colt sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Several thousand chicken sandwiches.”

“By the gods!” The fairy broke into a sprint for the core, and Colt had to slime it again.

“Come on man, you’ve got tens of thousands of chicken sandwiches’ worth of cores here! Share the love!” the fairy cried as it restarted the process of freeing its wings from goop.

“Nnnope.”

The fairy pouted for a minute before its expression shifted to excitement. “I know, I know!” it said, bouncing up and down in excitement.

“You know what?” Colt asked, frowning.

“I know where a place is with treasure that makes these cores look cheap by comparison! It’s really close by!”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, all sorts of stuff, basically the treasure of a lifetime, and at the very bottom, a dungeon core that makes these ones look pathetic. How about we make a Deal? I can guide you to it, and you gimme one of your cores? You’re not gonna need them after going there.”

Something in Colt’s gut didn’t like that offer, but his greed shoved any niggling doubts aside. Fairies didn’t lie. That meant there was a treasure that made the cores look like chump change, and it was close by.

“What’s your name, little guy?”

“It’s Ari, and I’m not a guy,” Ari said, crossing her arms and scowling.

Chapter 4: NAFB

Nellis Air Force Base was originally three hundred miles away from L.A., give or take, but because of the Stitching, Earth had been haphazardly slapped together with Pharos half a year ago. Any long-range travel had doubled in length and tripled in duration. Roads ended in dead ends with swaths of Pharosian desert bisecting them.

Not to mention the monsters.

The hazards of the post-apocalyptic world effectively made a five-hour road trip into a two-day journey with potential ambush by humans, sand-worms, succadillos, etc. Camping was not safe, but they didn’t really have much choice in the matter. Jeb wanted to arrive at the base bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, not dragging ass.

Being sharp could mean the difference between winning and not winning, and in this case, winning translated to ‘not dying’.

The first day was uneventful, and they camped in a small dip in the desert landscape that concealed their fire. That was when Jeb revealed the gravity of the situation to Legolas.

Jeb wasn’t sure if the drone could fully grasp the consequences of failure, but the little guy’s mission was super simple: Keep any planes leaving Nellis grounded. Legolas could definitely understand that.

Satellite imagery no longer existed, so Nellis couldn’t use that to detect Legolas, and he was too small for radar.

I think? That wasn’t Jeb’s department, really. Actually, modern radar is pretty good, isn’t it?

Jeb glanced at the hovering black drone.

Let’s just hope they don’t have radar. Keeping a generator running purely to detect threats from the sky would be unlikely, given how few planes there were left….

On the off chance they do…

Jeb added several dozen layers of FMO shields to Legolas, and instructed him to ‘play dead’ if they started shooting at him.

As a backup ‘fuck it’ button, Jeb spent the rest of the night before bed weaving several dozen packets of Myst into his staff, including a ‘love daddy’ trap.

Nothing like an explosion of angry death stags to get the ball rolling.

Jeb put up a shield around the Jeep with little wiffle-ball holes in it to make sure he didn’t suffocate, then went to bed for the night.

In the morning, the two of them set off, with Legolas rising up into the air until he was so small Jeb simply couldn’t pick him out. Jeb wanted the drone to be in the stratosphere before they came within visual range of the base.

Thankfully, all of North Vegas covered his approach pretty well. Vegas and Nellis were almost seamlessly integrated, the Air Force base nearly swallowed up by Sin City. To get to the base, you had to go through Vegas. If you approached from the southwest, the tall buildings of the Strip would hide you for a while.

Jeb was idling up the sidewalk, sneaking his way northeast toward the Air Force base, using the huge buildings for cover, when he caught movement from one of the abandoned casinos.

Jeb craned his neck and tried to spot what had tripped his peripherals.

When he looked forward again, there was a bare-chested man wearing a necklace made of cranberries. The twenty-five-thousand-dollar chips glinted in the sun as the man gave a barbarian roar and threw his hand forward.

The sidewalk melted and turned into a net of stone laced with some strange black substance, tangling Jeb’s tires and crisscrossing over the open top.

I just hope these guys aren’t cannibals, Jeb thought, putting the parking brake on. Cannibalism was the worst. The social contract also required him to murder cannibals, and anyone who hung around the desert in modern day was either a lawless robber or a cannibal; there wasn’t much food out here.

The possible cannibal sported some kind of dark makeup under his eyes and reflective tinfoil over a swaddled shirt wrapped around his head. He walked up to the driver’s side of the Jeep and tapped on the window in an officious manner.

Jeb used the hand-crank to lower it, putting him and the odd man face-to-face, with nothing between them. The lifted frame of the Jeep put them eye to eye, Jeb’s green gaze perfectly equal with the barbarian’s blue.

“You know how fast you were going?” the barbarian asked, hands on his hips.

“About…ten miles an hour?” Jeb said. He had been using the sidewalk because it was mostly clear of rusting cars.

“You got anything to declare before you enter the Talon base?”

Ah. So they were keeping an eye on the Vegas outskirts, too. Oh well, it makes sense they’d watch their front door.

“I’m not a huge fan of aliens,” Jeb said dryly to ingratiate himself. Sarcasm doesn’t count as lying if you tell the truth in a way that sounds like the opposite. Jeb was neutral on the alien issue, but hopefully this guy took it to mean he hated them too.

“I mean, you got any weapons, anything to trade, or are you here to join the Talon?”

“The Talon?” Jeb asked.

“The Talon of Freedom.” The guy took a step back and spread his arms. “It might not seem like much right now, but with the water we’re able to pump here from the Colorado River and the arable land that got dropped in by the Stitching, we’re going to have a thriving city here in just a few years.”

He pointed at the casinos. “And these giant casinos are just chock-full of useful parts. Steel beams, large glass panels, air conditioners, stoves, you name it. Tom the electrical guy even managed to hook up the movie theater. We’ve got all the Marvel movies.”

“Sounds like you guys are growing fast,” Jeb said, glancing around. He was totally surrounded by half-dressed men and women wielding everything from guns to spears. They were coming out of the woodwork to rubberneck at his idling Jeep.

“That’s right,” the fella preened. That’s right, I don’t know this guy’s name.

“Call me Jeb,” Jeb said, holding out his hand for the man to shake.

“Cecil. Nice to meet you, Jeb.”

“It’s been fairly pleasant so far,” Jeb said, eyeing the people looking back at him. “Probably not gonna stay that way, though.”

“Why’s that?”

“I work for one of the emperor’s henchwomen and I want to chat with your boss about becoming a double agent.” Jeb wanted to have a chat about becoming a double agent because it would get him where he wanted to be.

The mood soured pretty quick. Guns were drawn, hammers cocked, and a few spears were even lowered toward Jeb.

“Step outside your vehicle with your hands on your head,” Cecil said, Myst swirling dangerously around his hands.

Jeb complied, stepping out of the car a moment before being roughly thrown to the ground. Thick ye olde shackles were thrown around his wrists in a matter of minutes; pre- Tutorial handcuffs were a joke to anyone with more than fifteen Body.

Once that was done, they hauled Jeb away, and he spotted a woman jump into his Jeep and drive it down the road, the asphalt and inky black tentacles receding back into the ground.

Neat.

A bag was thrown over Jeb’s head, followed by a collar, and he was hustled into what was most likely a van and driven for about forty-five minutes before they dragged him back out, stripped him and sat him down on a plush chair.

Plush?

Jeb’s ass had only a couple seconds to process that information before the bag was torn off his head, revealing…

Huh. I expected a basement.

Jeb was in a VIP room at an especially fancy casino. The Palazzo maybe? Jeb didn’t know for sure, because he’d never been in any VIP room, let alone The Palazzo’s. The electricity was on, and the overhead lights worked, casting the luxurious steak dinner set out in front of him in a warm light.

“Wow, I was expecting a basement and torture,” Jeb muttered as his wrists were unshackled.

“We can do that instead, if that’s more your speed,” a woman’s voice said. “Sorry about the clothes; standard procedure.” The person who unshackled him walked around and into Jeb’s field of view before sitting in front of him.

Immediately, Jeb was intimidated. The old lady was workaholic-thin with hands gnarled and scarred from decades of relentless work. She had steely hair wrapped in a tight bun. If there was anything Jeb knew about lady officers, it was that the ones that were in it for the long haul were not to be fucked with, and this particular one sported the look.

“It doesn't bother me too much,” Jeb said. “It’s close to ninety degrees in the shade anyway.”

“I suppose it is,” she said, pouring herself a glass of wine from what was no doubt the casino’s reserve for high rollers. “I hadn’t noticed, really. Body makes it easier to tolerate high temperatures. We haven’t had a single recruit pass out from heatstroke in the training yard, much to my disappointment.”

Jeb glanced around, but it was just him and her in the huge room. That meant the woman felt as though she could defend herself should he choose to attack her. And that meant she probably could.

Jeb picked up the knife and fork, watching her reaction carefully. She took a sip of thousand-dollar wine, her gaze uncomfortably strong.

Jeb shrugged internally and started sawing away at his steak.

“Where’d you get steak?” he asked around a piece.

“The Stitching didn’t kill all the animals. There’s a fair amount of cattle wandering the wastes, dying of dehydration and predation from alien fauna, but we’ve saved plenty of them.

“Food’s actually quite plentiful now that there are several billion less people on the planet to share it with.”

Jeb swallowed slowly. He knew it was bad, but several billion?

“How do you figure?” Jeb asked. “You can’t possibly have a planet-wide census.”

“About seventy-two percent of all the populations I’ve surveyed died of starvation or violence in the first six months after the Stitching. Most of that from urban areas. Apply that percentage to the entire world.

“You know what’s funny, Jeb? Can I call you Jeb?”

“And I call you…?”

“You call me General or Ma’am.”

Jeb’s training kicked in and his back straightened without his permission. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s funny is, even with that catastrophic loss of life, we still outnumber the aliens six to one. They’re pissing their pants at our sheer numbers. They chose to send you, after all.”

“Yeah, about that. Could you not drop a nuke on Solmnath? I’ve got an orphanage there, and I would much prefer the children I’m responsible for to stay alive.”

“You sent them out of town before you came, didn’t you?” she shot back. Jeb froze with the fork halfway to his mouth, trying to figure out if she had spies on him or just good instincts. Who wouldn’t send their kids out of town?

“I don’t keep tabs on you specifically, but you are one of the characters of Solmnath. Word of what you’re up to finds its way to my ears.”

The steely old lady sat back in her chair, studying him. “I find myself conflicted. Part of me wants to congratulate you for saving all those kids and entrapping the slimy fucks farming them.”

“Well, I—”

“The other part of me wants to make a blood eagle out of you for working with the alien regime.”

Jeb’s jaw clicked shut. “I like my lungs on the inside.”

“I guess we’ll see where the day takes us,” she said with a hint of a smile. “Now, tell me everything you know about your handler.”

“Her name’s Vresh Tekalis. You’ve probably seen her on the reaper broadcasts. She worked directly for the emperor, she—”

“Vresh Tekalis? The enforcer? The bitch that saws people’s heads off?” the woman interrupted.

“Yeah, that one.”

“What do you mean by ‘worked’?”

“She was demoted recently, in part because she chose me as a deputy. Then she was reassigned to work on the ‘nuke problem’.”

“Identifying traits?” the woman asked, raising a hand and beckoning. Jeb made out a silvery pulse of Myst, and a moment later, a man hustled in with a pen and paper. He was gawky and sported acne scars across his face, and moved with an odd gait, like he was being extra careful.

“Why do you need that? You already know what she looks like—”

“It’s so I can establish what you look like when you’re telling the truth.”

“Well, Vresh is about six-three, plus a foot of horns. She comes from a rich family, so she acts refined without really thinking about it, and she’s incredibly—”

The man with the pen and paper banged his toe against the table, dropping the general’s paper on the table and clutching his foot.

Clumsy.

“Hot,” Jeb said, glancing down at his spoon as the messenger left. “Both in the temperature sense and the attractiveness sense. She’s got tits the size of watermelons and a tendency to burn her clothes off, which makes her an absolute delight to be around.”

The soldier’s reflection froze for a moment at the crass mention of Vresh’s boobs.

Gotcha. Vresh had said she’d be within a mile. So the question was, was she testing his loyalty or was she here to make sure the nukes got destroyed even if he failed?

¿Por qué no los dos?

Jeb glanced up at the iron-haired woman, who was watching him with a cocked brow.

Where was I? Oh right, I left off on boobs.

“I’d guess she’s a little naïve due to her upbringing, but most of it’s been squeezed out by being an enforcer. She’s level one hundred at least, so you can bet she’s killed a lot of people,” Jeb continued without missing a beat.

“Class, Abilities, Myst Core?”

“I, um…don’t know that.”

“Relax. I didn’t expect you to.”

Whew.

“There’s about a million little details we’ll get to in your debrief before we can release you back into the wild, Jeb. Let’s start with everything you can tell us about you. Level, Class, Core, Abilities?”

Jeb told her everything she wanted to know. Some time in the future, he’d want them to overlook a single half-truth, so he had to butter them up first.

“How long is this going to take?”

“A couple weeks,” the woman muttered, flipping to her next page. “You’d be surprised at how much actionable information you don’t know you know.”

“Can I ask a question?” Jeb asked.

“You just did. Twice,” she said, scribbling down his most recent answer.

“Are you really planning on using nukes against Solmnath?”

“Why, you gonna stop me?” she asked, a dangerous chill in her expression.

“I was hoping I could persuade you not to, but if you’re set on having a plane leave this base with nukes, I’m not gonna stop it.”

Legolas is.

“Good. Let me show you something.”

She pinged with Myst and the same gawky, acne-riddled messenger boy that Jeb was sixty percent sure was Vresh in disguise ran back in with a map.

It showed a horrifying juxtaposition of North America stitched together with another landmass of about equal size.

“We made this based on a composite of Pharosian maps and ours,” she said, spreading the hand-drawn paper down on the table. Some parts of it were more detailed than others, a result of firsthand surveying of the Stitching.

“The empire has control of all of this area, but its only major foothold in the west is Solmnath,” she said, tapping on L.A./Solmnath.

“Currently, Vegas is sandwiched, with Solmnath on one side, and the rest of the empire on the other. If I remove this stronghold from the map, humans can easily claim the west of the continent for themselves.”

She drew a line with her finger, using the mountainous region that ran through Oregon down to California as a boundary.

“From there, we can use the desert as a natural barrier while we solidify the defenses of a new America. Nellis will act as an early warning system and forward base. We’ll be able to bomb any feathered sumbitches who try to cross the desert before they even get close.”

“So…how are you gonna stop the imperial enforcers? The aristocrats? The emperor?” Jeb asked with a raised brow. “These people are fantastically powerful, and I’m fairly sure a little bombing isn’t gonna dissuade them as much as you seem to think it will.”

“Oh, I’ll be able to dissuade them,” she said with a confidence that took Jeb aback.

How on Earth does she think she stands a chance against the emperor et al.? Sonofabitch caught a saw blade moving near the speed of sound between two fingers, and I’m pretty sure that was him phoning it in.

How could someone expect to ward off an entire empire after destroying a city? Retaliation would be swift and over the top. Hundreds of men and women with hundreds of levels apiece would stream west. The entire east coast would unite to take them down. Without having someone with hundreds of levels, they would simply get torn apart by imperial—

Jeb controlled his expression as he realized the general’s plan. There was no way to dissuade her from blowing up Solmnath, because it was about more than just clearing a stronghold, or how many civilians might die.

She was going to be the one flying the plane, the one dropping the bomb.

If XP is awarded to the guy who knowingly takes the action that leads to a death, what does the guy who dropped a bomb that kills millions get?

Even if she only got a hundredth of the normal Impact for killing people because of the slight separation of cause and effect… Let’s see, three million people living in Solmnath divided by a hundred gives me thirty thousand. Damn.

Whoever drops the bomb is going to rise to a level that could give the emperor a run for his money overnight. And I’m ninety-nine percent sure she’s gonna wanna be that person.

She’s a goddamn reaper!

Now Jeb had to act like a dumb-fuck and not let it slip that he could see the woman’s trajectory.

Thankfully, any grunt worth their salt had mastered the art of playing dumb in front of a superior officer until they lost interest. It was the same concept as with a brown bear: Play dead and they might not order you to restack an entire semi full of exercise equipment.

Of course, those coping mechanisms didn’t really prepare someone for being a double agent; being a sneaky bastard did that.

The rest of the interview, Jeb spilled his guts with half-truths, and bent over backward to not make waves. He hemmed and hawed about blowing up his orphanage, but finally agreed with the general that it did make strategic sense.

She didn’t expect him to be immediately on board, so he didn’t pretend to be. However, because he was a stranger of dubious loyalty, they kept the magic-sealing collar on even after he was dismissed.

After they got everything they could out of Jeb in one sitting, they locked him in a penthouse that made his old apartment look like gum on the bottom of its shoe. It had its own kitchen, five beds, each of them king-sized, a living room with a sofa, bigass working TV with a DVD player, exercise room, and a fully stocked minibar.

As far as prison cells went, it was pretty flattering. Jeb knew they were buttering him up because they still thought he was possibly going to flip on the empire.

Flip on the empire? Jeb thought, sipping a beer in a silk robe as he glanced out the window, surveying the dry fountains on the Strip below him. Was I ever on the empire’s side, really? Jeb didn’t really want to be on a side. But if I had to pick, it would be the side that doesn’t use nukes.

That being said, Jeb was too old to see things in black and white. The empire wasn’t the good guy, and these people weren’t the bad guys. If he could eliminate their WMDs, he’d happily let them go back to killing each other one at a time. Like God intended.

And hey, maybe not supporting the American forces here and now would lead to their inevitable downfall and lots of deaths, but it would be a gradual downfall, giving plenty of time for moderate-minded civilians like Cecil and his family to jump ship before the ride-or-die fanatic’s final blaze of glory.

Beats nuking three million people and starting a war that spans the entire continent.

One way or another, it was going to be messy. Jeb chose the brand of messy that didn’t involve his orphanage.

“Ring love daddy?” Jeb asked, glancing around. He waited for his ring to show up, but the Trigger must not have heard him. So they’re probably not keeping my shit in the same building. Smart.

Ah well, I got three days before the shit hits the fan.

Maybe not enough time for them to give him free run of the place, but enough time to make a plan and act on it.

For tonight, at least, we can relax and gather our thoughts, Jeb thought, downing the second half of his beer before squatting in front of the minibar, grabbing an expensive cider to wash it down with.

BOOM!

A muffled explosion made the entire building shake, sending a faint trace of dust down from the ceiling that hadn’t been cleaned in half a year.

I really hope that wasn’t the Appraiser, Jeb thought, heading to the window and popping the top off his cider barehanded. Perks of inhuman Body.

He couldn’t see what was going on, because his luxurious prison cell faced to the south. So Jeb didn’t know if it was an emergency, or if they were test-firing some artillery.

A klaxon sounded above Jeb’s head, the lights in the room turned red and a woman’s pre-recorded voice began giving him instructions on how to locate the fire escape.

I guess that rules out a training exercise, Jeb thought, taking a sip of his cider and heading for the door like the nice lady asked.

Before Jeb got halfway across the room, a kid with an assault rifle over his shoulder and a thick iron sword dangling from his waist peeked into Jeb’s room.

“He’s still here. Orders?”

Jeb took a sip of cider.

“What’s going on? Anything I can do to help?” Jeb asked. He could stand to stretch his legs, get more information about where his objective was, and ingratiate himself with the locals. Three birds with one stone.

The kid and three of his friends flooded into the room and double-, triple-checked Jeb’s Myst collar, all while the klaxon sounded above their heads and that damn prerecorded message made it difficult to hear.

“Mr. Trapper, the general orders you to stay in your room! If we see you outside of it tonight, we’ll consider you hostile and shoot on sight!”

“Yeah, but what’s going on!?” Jeb shouted to be heard.

“That’s our business! Stay here!”

They stormed back out of the room with all the abruptness with which they’d first arrived, leaving him by himself with nothing but flashing red lights and klaxons to keep him company.

Jeb chugged the rest of the bottle and burped.

Should I stay or should I go now?

If I stay, there will be trouble.

If I go, it could be double.

If Jeb left the confines of the room, his plan to infiltrate without bloodshed went up in smoke, but if he stayed, he might get caught up in—

BOOM! The hotel shook around him again.

Whatever that was.

Jeb pressed his ear to the floor-to-ceiling window of his fancy prison. Through the thick glass, he was able to make out the sound of gunfire. About twelve seconds later, Jeb watched an ant-like creature the size of a Volkswagen crawl right down the main Strip.

And that’s the deciding factor, right there.

“Collar too tight,” Jeb said. The Mystic Trigger buried under his skin created a saw blade of telekinetic force on either side of his neck and began grinding its way through the Myst collar. When it touched the material that sucked up Myst, the blades flickered out of existence, but the thick steel that made the collar challenging to remove had been compromised.

Thing’s probably expensive, Jeb thought with a wince as he snapped the two halves of the damaged magical band off his neck.

Once he had access to Myst again, Jeb retreated into one of the side rooms and cut a little hole in the bottom of the glass window, jumping out before reaching out with Myst and dragging the bed over to cover the hole.

It would buy him…like an extra fifteen seconds?

Jeb flew up and out, silk robe fluttering behind him like Superman’s cape, aiming for the northeast, clearing the building in a matter of seconds. Finally, Jeb was high enough that he saw the entire Air Force base sprawled out in front of him.

It was worse than he’d expected.

In the center of the base was a pillar made of pure faradan stone, maybe five feet across and twenty feet tall, at least from where it stuck out of the ground. Glowing runes whirled on the outer face of the strange contraption.

That wasn’t what caused Jeb the most concern, though. To the west of the base, the hangars and paved parking lots and even some of the trees were…sludging.

Is ‘sludging’ a verb? Because that’s what they’re doing.

A hundred-foot circle of land and everything inside it was turning brown and melting before it dipped down into some kind of sinkhole. Out of the brown sludge, armored creatures emerged like the orcs from the Lord of the Rings movie. Just kind of…birthed from the gunk.

They weren’t ants, exactly. They had six legs and appeared somewhat insectoid, but their armor was thick and grew off their body in large plates. They only walked on four of their six legs, while they held heavily armored forelimbs in front of them that they could seamlessly match to others of the same species to make a biological shield wall.

Ants didn’t form shield walls.

Chapter 5: Saw Love Daddy

Humans were streaming like ants toward the east side of the Air Force base, and the ants… They were forming ranks.

Small caliber bullets pancaked ineffectually off the heavily armored forelimbs as the creatures marched forward in lockstep, commanding the space in the streets. Every once in a while, a bullet would penetrate one of the creatures’ forelimbs. Whether that was due to a Skill, or a failing of the creature’s armor, it didn’t make a difference. A small spot of blue blood like a horseshoe crab’s emerged from where the bullet penetrated, but not much more happened.

They kept marching forward.

Any humans too dumb to move out of the way got wrecked. There were small diamond-shaped gaps in the ants’ foreleg armor, and from those tiny holes in their defense, the creatures shot out long, skinny tongues with an absurd amount of force behind them. At the end of each tongue was a single hard tooth, sharp and deadly, with barbs on it facing backward.

Jeb witnessed one unlucky bastard get shafted. The man threw his hand up reflexively to ward off the strike, the spearlike projectile lodging in his hand before he was reeled in like a hooked trout.

The two shield-like forelimbs opened for just an instant, revealing a meat-grinder of a face as the hapless soldier was drawn through the gap. A moment later, the forelimbs snapped shut, and the guy was gone.

Well, except for a bit of his ankle there.

The kid’s bloody Nike flopped on the ground outside the shield, foot still in the shoe.

It wasn’t a completely one-sided engagement, though. Here and there, Jeb saw the humans pushing the creatures back. Cecil made black wires coated with whatever material they were born from, tangling the creatures and disrupting their advance, even dismembering a few of them.

To the north, Jeb could just barely make out an enterprising young man with a Browning machine gun on top of a building. The guy swept heavy machine gun fire across the front line, the plume of fire jetting out the front visible even from Jeb’s distance.

It cut down the front line in a swath of destruction, easing the pressure of their advance, until the line buckled.

The front line scattered, and dozens of smaller, faster creatures emerged from beneath the sheltering umbrella of the shield creatures’ armor, dropping off their bellies and spreading everywhere like a sack full of spider eggs. There were simply not enough bullets in existence to take care of all those hopping bastards.

The kid was quick on the uptake and immediately pulled the pin on a grenade, annihilating a large portion of the tiny creatures before heaving the heavy machine gun over his shoulder and abandoning his position, escaping the approaching swarm. The ceasefire was exactly what the shield creatures needed to reorganize, re-form and begin their march again. Behind the front line, some shield bearers stopped and seemingly ate their kin, their brown carapace taking on a bluer tone as they ate.

Please tell me the survivors aren’t getting stronger.

The kid set up on a new building and started up again.

The blue ones took longer to take down, and the quick death of their lesser kind naturally allowed them to link up their shields, pushing even farther than before.

WHOOSH!

The sound of a jet from Jeb’s right caused him to whip his head around toward the noise. The last thing he wanted was for Legolas to reveal his hand early against a plane they weren’t using for mass destruction.

Only…it wasn’t a plane.

It was the general.

The iron-haired woman was flying. Whirling jets of silvery Myst around her body allowed her to soar at breakneck speeds, making the distinctive noise of a jet engine, albeit a small one. She swooped over top of the source of the problem, the hundred-foot brown slime mold sinking into the earth, and began picking off freshly-born insects with pulses of some kind of sonic Myst, crippling the creatures’ advance.

I’ve been watching too long, Jeb thought. It was time to shit or get off the pot.

He wouldn’t be able to explain away the hole in his window, so the best bet now was to help, and help well. There was a damn good chance the old bat would try to have him killed anyway, unless he was really impressive.

Hi-ho Silver, away!

Jeb flew himself low over the buildings, dressed in nothing but his boxers and a silk robe, singing his own version of “Flight of the Valkyries”.

“Saw love daddy, saw love daddy, saw love DAAADDY!” Jeb shouted as he zigzagged over the buildings, heading toward the conflict zone.

Jeb heard a banging sound through the chaos of the firefight off to his left, and spotted a squat, nondescript little building a moment before the front door peeled apart, allowing the murder-buckler to hurtle towards him, cutting through the air and anything else that got between it and him.

Jeb held his hand out and tried not to flinch as the saw blade ripped through the air toward him. Flinching was a good way to make the if/then statements get messed up and lose some fingers. At the last second, the saw flipped around and placed its handle into his palm.

So that’s where my shit is, Jeb thought, flying to the plain white building. He landed directly in front of the shredded metal panel and reached his Myst into the latch, opening it easily and tugging the door open.

Jeb took one confident stride into the contraband room before there was an ear-pummeling bang, and a handful of his FMO shields popped. The nine-millimeter bullet was flung back with somewhat less force, but it still grazed the guard’s hand and caused him to drop his gun, grabbing his bleeding knuckles with a sharp intake of breath.

“You’re lucky it didn’t hit you in the eye,” Jeb said with a nod before turning his attention to the metal cage and the many, many bins of gear they’d collected: everything from automatic weapons to magic wands, swords, spears, and imperial marks.

Jeb hoped they hadn’t gotten those by raiding caravans, but he wasn’t holding his breath.

Jeb reached his strand of Myst into the lock on the cage door and popped it open as easily as the front door.

“Staff love daddy!” Jeb called.

There was a clatter from farther back in the storage area as the death-deer staff leaped off some hidden shelf and flew through the air. The security guard tracked the floating staff with wide eyes as it flung itself into Jeb’s grip.

He’d made the prototype a couple months ago with Eddie, and he’d never gotten an opportunity to test Buck to his fullest. This seemed like a good opportunity.

The satellite-dish-shaped head of the staff was coated with mercury-silver amalgam and it did a great job of concentrating a wide spread of Myst onto a single point, making each and every death-deer that emerged more powerful compared to its size than a normal one would be.

“You’ve got about three minutes before the front line of the bugs reaches this spot,” Jeb said, eyeing the guard who was stooping for his nine-millimeter handgun. “And that gun probably isn’t gonna do you much good. If I were you, I’d find somewhere else to be.”

Jeb stepped back out into the street, picking himself off the ground and humming along above the hot asphalt. Jeb turned the corner and found himself staring down the street at the bugs’ front line, bullets splattering across their heavy armor.

There was a line of about a dozen of them with interlocked forelimbs, and hundreds more behind that, organized and nigh unstoppable. The number of blueish carapaces was gradually gaining as more and more of them started appearing.

Some blue ones even emerged from the brown muck gradually spreading behind them.

Let’s make some breathing room. Jeb held the staff in front of himself like a sawed-off and gave the command phrase.

“Buck-pocalypse.”

With that command, the tightly-wound Myst concealed inside the staff unspooled, feeding itself through the Myst lens sandwich at the base of the dish.

Twelve-point stags as tall as Jeb at the shoulder blinked into existence at a terrifying rate, filling up the street with the annihilation-aspected animals. Jeb felt the control lens tether each and every one of the Bucks to his will, giving him a squad of fifty oversized death-deer in a matter of seconds.

“Buck, punch a hole through the line,” Jeb said, pointing straight ahead, to the advancing line of solid chitin. Jeb needed to buy the humans and himself some more time to figure out what the hell was going on.

The Bucks lowered their antlers and obliged. The moment they got close, the strange insects struck, lashing out with their ranged attacks, trying to skewer the charging deer.

Unfortunately for the insects, the dark annihilation Myst had settled into their antlers, and it simply wiped from existence anything that touched them, including spike-tipped tongues.

The deers crashed into the line of shields, their antlers cutting through the creatures’ armor like a hot knife through butter. The death-deer carved their way through the front line and the one behind, forcing the insects to collapse backward to maintain their line, and leaving chunks of twitching meat behind them.

Good job, Buck.

Jeb grabbed himself with a string of Myst and launched back into the air, studying the problem.

The problem is there’s too damn many of them, Jeb thought, squinting his eyes. Wait a sec. Now that he was closer, Jeb could make out a pale grey whirlwind directly above the center of the brown stain covering the land.

It sure as hell wasn’t a cloud, and it wasn’t dust, either. It looked like a miniature tornado, or…a sink drain. It was Myst, getting sucked into the center of that goop at an outrageous rate!

The general seemed to have noticed it too, because she flew over to a building, ducked her head in and emerged with what appeared to be an RPG.

That might work.

The steel-haired woman flew back up into the air, and spotted Jeb halfway to the swirling center that continued to bury itself deeper and deeper into the earth. It was about thirty feet below the groundline already and continuing to sink.

She nudged the RPG in Jeb’s direction, and he raised his hands, shaking his head, giving her the ‘it wasn’t me’ body language.

She glanced back to the sinkhole belching army ants in her Air Force base and decided to use the RPG on that instead of him. Thank God, cuz I don’t know if I have enough FMO shields to stop one of those. The woman fired the weapon straight into the center of the Myst whirlwind.

BOOM!

A few pieces of shrapnel plinked off Jeb’s shields, and a massive spray of brown goop was thrown into the air, obscuring his view. A moment later, the rain of brown mud finally came to a halt, and Jeb blinked.

The whirlwind was bigger, and there were suddenly a few more of them scattered around here and there. The sinkhole gave an odd, biological shudder, bobbing like an Adam’s apple before it began sinking faster than before, the number of insects spawning redoubling.

Jeb could hear the woman cursing above the whine of her Myst churning the air to keep her afloat, but he was too busy trying to figure out a way to deal with the situation to pay attention.

I gotta figure out what I’m looking at. Out of the corner of his eye, Jeb spotted a tractor parked next to a bunch of airfield maintenance equipment. It was more likely to be used to remove large roadkill than snow, but it paid to be prepared.

Especially in this case, Jeb thought, directing one of his Bucks to meet him at the plow. With a few contemptuous flicks of the stag’s antlers, the steel blade was freed from the tractor’s front, just as Jeb landed on it.

Jeb grabbed onto the hunk of metal for dear life, and sunk all his Myst into it. The plow blade was just under Jeb’s maximum lift, but he managed to move the thing, with himself riding on top of it. He launched himself into the air and angled for the center of the Myst whirlwind.

“What are you doing!?” the old woman screamed as he flew past, riding the plow blade like that old black and white movie with the guy riding a bomb.

“Pro bono work!” Jeb shouted on the way by. A long insect tongue hissed past his shoulder as he slammed the plow blade into the ground and started dragging it through. The task was made easier by the sheer goopiness of the brown mud.

One thing was for sure: It did not smell like mud up close. It was humid and very…organic-smelling.

The plow hit something in the goop at the center of the vortex, and that turned out to be…

A core? Jeb blinked as he spotted a dungeon core, similar to the ones the government had tasked the citizens of Solmnath with collecting. It was sure as hell bigger than a quarter, though, and it was sucking in Myst like nobody’s business. Even where Jeb’s Myst infused the plow, his control wavered as it was torn right out. Jeb moved his Myst to the back of the blade.

The sphere didn’t look damaged or missing any chunks at all, so why did shooting it with an RPG make more? Jeb had to assume the smaller vortexes were new cores.

Ah, hell, I don’t know how these things are supposed to work anyway.

Actually, that wasn’t true. Jeb did know that SOP was to contain dungeon cores in Myst-proof containers so they couldn’t warp their surroundings. Jeb had attended the same lecture as everyone else, after all.

It’s too bad we don’t have any of those around here…. Jeb had successfully scraped the core out of the brown gunk for a moment, but there was no way to stop it. The damn thing was already making the surface of his plow blade melt into brown gunk.

Actually… Jeb flicked the plow blade up and dropped control of it, jumping into the air before grabbing himself with Myst. The core landed on the metal with a soft clink as Jeb rose into the air, orienting on the casinos in the distance.

There’s gotta be a whole hell of a lot of gold in Vegas.

Gold was, as far as Jeb knew, an excellent insulator of Myst, and one of the softest metals around. If Jeb could get a disk of it, he could pinch it closed around the core and cut off its intake, thereby slowing its transmutation of the surroundings. It was a more expensive, ham-fisted solution than the core vials, but they didn’t exactly have a lot of options.

“Well, that didn’t work!” the general said, flying up beside him.

“How much gold do you have!?” Jeb shouted over the sound of her Myst engines.

“WHAT!?”

“GOLD!”

***Colt, level 27 Slinger***

“You sure no one else knows about this?” Colt asked, peering into the dark cavern. The hole was only wide enough for one of them to fit in at a time. Thankfully, they were small enough that they could wear their armor into the hole.

“No one alive, anyway,” Ari said with a shrug.

“Yay! I’ll check it out! I’m a starfish!” Nancy shouted, aiming to worm her way into the hole. Colt caught her shoulder and shook his head, placing his foot in front of the entrance to prevent any of the other kids from doing the same.

No one alive? Colt thought, studying the fairy. Jeb had mentioned in passing that you gotta pay real close attention to how a fairy phrases their words. Ari seemed like an idiot that just got caught trying to steal something, but the way she spoke gave Colt the feeling she was playing him.

Well, there’s one way to figure this out.

“I did my part! Now, for your end of the Deal!” She held her hands out and made ‘gimmie’ motions.

“There’s treasure in there?”

“All sorts of magical gear, the likes of which you’ve never seen before.”

“And why don’t you get it yourself?”

Ari huffed. “Like I told you, the monster that guards the dungeon’s too strong for little old me. I think you guys could vanquish the beast handily, though.”

“You know for a fact that there’s treasure in there?”

“Absolutely.”

“When was the last time you went in and actually saw the treasure?”

Ari held up a finger, her jaw slowly opening. “Two months ago?” she said, her confidence faltering.

“So you’re sure it’s still there?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Colt asked. “We’re not the strongest team on the mountain. Probably not the most perceptive, either. What makes you think someone else hasn’t beaten the monster in there if we haven’t?”

“Are you gonna grill me all day or are you gonna go in the dungeon? It doesn’t matter to me either way, because I showed you where the treasure is, so pay me!”

“I have a better idea,” Colt said, snatching up the fairy before she had a chance to respond.

With a little bit of finagling, Colt shoved the squirming fairy into one of the glass containers for dungeon cores, then covered the lid with duct tape from their backpacks and poked holes in the top.

“This isn’t part of the Deal!” she said, her body held straight as a board by the narrow glass walls she was trapped in.

“You’re right,” Colt said with a shrug. “That means there’s nothing stopping me.” Colt duct-taped the vial to the end of a long stick, making his very own fairy-tipped ten-foot pole for trapfinding.

“Now, I’ll make you a Deal,” the teen said. “You holler if you notice anything dangerous, and in return I’ll pull the stick back.”

“That’s extortion!” Ari screamed, her voice muffled by the duct tape lid.

“Hey!” Nancy shouted, pinching Colt in the side with an iron grip.

“Ow, what!?”

“Don’t be mean to fairies!”

“I’m trying to prove a point, Nancy. Watch.”

Colt slid the stick into the hole, with the trapped fairy leading the way. Ari went from alarmed to screaming bloody murder as soon as the darkness fell over her glass container.

“Pull me back! Pull me back! I’m not supposed to go in there! He’ll kill me! Please, I’ll serve your lineage for seven generations, just get me outta here!”

“Who’s ‘he’?” Colt asked, pulling the fairy back out of the hole. The little creature was shaking inside her tube, her arms wrapped defensively around her.

She was terrified.

“I can’t tell you.”

“That’s a lie. You can and you will.”

“I literally can’t tell you!” Ari shouted.

“Oh well, in you go!” Colt said, sliding the fairy back into the darkness until Nancy punched him in the side.

It felt like he’d been kicked in the ribs by a horse, and his body was flung to the side, slamming up against the mountainside as the little girl took his place. She slid the stick back out of the hole and started unwrapping the duct tape, plucking the fairy out of the vial and holding her gently, patting her back with her finger.

“There, there, it’s okay. The big, dumb boy isn’t gonna be mean to you any more.”

Colt held his breath as Ari began to sob, hugging Nancy’s thumb and bawling.

“It’s okay, Ari, we’re not gonna hurt you. What were you so afraid of, anyway?”

“N-nobody w-who goes i-in comes out aliiiive!” Ari said, rubbing her tear-streaked face on Nancy’s palm. “I was so scared!”

Nancy glanced up at Colt with a raised brow. Nancy still had that core of sweetness that she’d had when he’d first met her, but it was buried a lot deeper now. It was reserved for people she knew.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to be scared,” she said, petting the sobbing fairy. “We won’t let him know you went into the cave. How’s he gonna know?”

“Like, a million different ways!” Ari shouted, flailing her arms. “He’s a powerful sindio and he…” Ari’s jaw dropped, her crying stopped with a hiccup.

“You’re working me!” she screeched, pointing her finger at Nancy.

“You were working us,” Nancy said with a shrug.

“Leading us into a place no one comes back from alive?” Colt asked, shaking his head. “I think you’re on the lower end, karmically speaking.”

Ari just glared at him.

“Come on guys, let’s get the heck outta here.” Colt jabbed a finger at Ari. “You’re no longer welcome here.”

“Yes, she is. She still needs to serve my family for seven generations, and I want a fairy like Jeb,” Nancy said, clutching Ari tighter to her chest and scowling.

Ari paled.

Colt quickly weighed the options in his head. He could outright refuse Nancy, which would tick the nine-year-old girl off, and put a murderous fairy back into circulation, or he could set up some ground rules.

“You can have her if you tell her not to communicate with anyone but me until further notice.” It was a temporary fix; they could come up with a more comprehensive set of rules when they got home.

“Why you!?” Nancy scowled.

“So she can’t lie to anyone else until we get home.” Colt held up his hand. “I promise I’ll let her talk to you when we get back.”

“Wait!” Ari said, squirming in Nancy’s hands. “I changed my mind!”

“Ari, I accept your offer of servitude for seven generations in exchange for removing you from that cave,” Nancy said.

“Crap,” Ari muttered, deflating in Nancy’s hands.

“Your first rule is you won’t communicate with anyone but Colt until I say otherwise.” Nancy patted Ari on the head while she spoke.

Ari’s eyes stared into the void like a wet cat’s.

“Alright, let’s get out of here before this sindio or whatever shows up. And let’s ask Zlesk what a sindio is.” The surrounding children nodded and started packing up their stuff.

“I can help with that.” A voice came from only a few tens of feet away, causing Colt to nearly jump out of his skin.

Colt bit back reflexive profanity and inspected the stranger. It was a keegan, about seven feet tall, wearing a thick black robe covered in golden symbols, the embroidery so fine he couldn’t see the threads.

“No thanks, we were just about to leave.”

“Oh, alright, that’s fine. It’s just…” He shifted his feet awkwardly for a moment before outstretching his hand. “This is the human greeting, correct?”

Colt hesitated a moment, then clasped the keegan’s hand, nodding.

“Call me Vex. I’m a historian of sorts, and I overheard you mention a sindio. I thought, since you’re humans, you probably haven’t heard the stories.” The towering keegan wiggled in place, seemingly from unrestrained enthusiasm.

“I’d love to stay and chat, but apparently there’s one of these sindio nearby.”

“Oh, um, okay,” Vex said. “Can I walk with you, then?”

“No, you may not,” Colt said. “We’re in the middle of competing for cores in the Roil clean-up, and you’re looking for an easy target. That’s not us, so make like a tree and leave,” Colt said, making walking motions with his fingers.

“An idiom and a pun all in one,” the keegan said with a chuckle. “New species bring such excellent turns of phrase. Alright, I tell you what: I will simply walk along the next ridge beside you and shout the story of Xen the sindio at you from a distance. That should work, right?”

Colt sighed, dragging his hand down his face. He wanted to poke the guy with a spear until he left, but there was a 99% chance this guy was the sindio Ari was terrified of, presenting an amiable facade. Colt didn’t believe in coincidences.

He glanced at the fairy, who was pale and shivering, her eyes locked on the keegan.

Yup. Might as well humor him until we hit the ridge Zlesk and Buddy are hiding on.

“You can tell us the story as we walk.”

“Ban’vi! So the etymology of the word ‘sindio’ is from an old keegan phrase that means ‘without gods’. It was first adopted about three thousand years ago to describe men who defied the order of the first gods and flouted The System. The meaning of the word gradually shifted to mean those who have achieved immortality through magical means, since so many of those original sindio who operated outside the bounds of The System wound up seeking immortality.”

“Or maybe the ones who didn’t seek immortality died out,” Colt said.

“Quite astute. Anyway, the word came to represent the common perception of an immortal dread wizard, the most famous example being Xen. Now, Xen started as a minor scribe in Old Mestikos in the Age of Legends—

“Of course, the people living then didn’t think of it as the Age of Legends. That’s just what we call the time prior to and during the establishment of The System. It didn’t just snap online like your human computers; it actually had to grow across Pharos in the Fate dimension for a good hundred years. During that time, some people had The System, and some didn’t, but it spread vigorously. Like herpes.”

Colt groaned internally, as the keegan got real excited about ancient history.

Chapter 6: Ants With Guns

***Jebediah Trapper***

“There you are, you…” While unlocking a door via telekinesis was easy as balls, unlocking a huge-ass vault door was significantly more difficult. The bolts were locked in place without electricity, after all, and Jeb only had two strands of Myst.

I should work on that.

Instead, he ordered a pair of Bucks to take turns carving on the door, each of them stepping back and giving their antlers a moment to recharge while the other went to town on the thick steel plate.

What vault door, you ask? The Golden Nugget, obviously. The display nugget was painted Styrofoam, much to Jeb’s dissatisfaction. He’d been hoping to get out of the casino in a few seconds flat. Still, if you wanna steal the Hand of Faith, you gotta be prepared for a bit more work.

Every second counts when Vegas is being swallowed by a runaway dungeon.

Sitting there watching the steel vault door get peeled away, Jeb had plenty of time to think about what was happening. As far as I can know, dungeons don’t grow at this speed. This is highly unusual. Also, dungeons are said to only be created in the wake of the Roil.

The Roil—capital ‘R’—was a temporal storm that had raged across the land of Pharos from the time of the first Stitching. It had a tendency to age, de-age, or mutate anything that went into it, and the land itself rejected its presence, forming a force-repelling mother-of-pearl substance to insulate against its effects.

Jeb hadn’t seen any faradan stone in or around Vegas proper, which led him to believe that the Roil hadn’t paid these fine terrorists a visit. That by itself was fairly weird, as they were right in its current range.

No Roil, no dungeons…in theory. Where did the cores come from?

1: Cores where they’re not supposed to be.

2: Core not acting like it’s supposed to.

The only conclusion Jeb could come to was that the current ant problem was man-made. Or, more likely, alien-made. It probably wouldn’t kill everyone, because the insects weren’t fast at pursuit, and some humans would definitely break and run.

What it would do was distract them.

CLANG!

A chunk of steel clattered to the ground, and Buck stood back, his lungs heaving from exertion. There was a man-sized jagged hole in the vault door. More like a tunnel, given how ridiculously thick it was.

So if this is a distraction, then what’s the goal? Jeb thought, climbing into the vault and scanning the contents.

Aha! The Gold Nugget had novelty bars of gold for high rollers! Very nice. Jeb snagged a few of those, then found what he was looking for: a big, lumpy, toddler-weight hunk of gold stashed in a locked case. Thankfully the lock was small enough this time that Jeb could just reach in with telekinesis and turn it.

Jeb grunted as he threw the heavy gold over his shoulder, then sprinted back out to the main room.

The Golden Nugget was normally dim save for the blinking lights of the slot machines, but with the power out, the place was dark and silent as a tomb, with plenty of slot machines blocking the view of the entrance.

Frikken’ casino designs. The places were all designed like rat traps to make it harder for you to leave, and now it was dark to boot. Jeb wrapped a string of Myst around himself and picked himself up, clearing his view and heading straight for the exit, leaving Buck to find his way out through the maze of slot machines.

The most likely thing they’re going for is the nukes, Jeb thought, flying down the street toward the problem area. Maybe the planes or other tech? Then again, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. ‘The aliens’, led by the emperor, had access to dozens of other Air Force bases and probably knew about hundreds or even thousands of different places with nukes and planes n’ shit.

Jeb was a small piece of the big picture here. There was nothing inherently special about this location. The only unique thing Vegas had was a fuckton of casinos and hookers, and that wasn’t really a new technology to jump on.

So it’s probably not the empire attacking Vegas for the nukes. Independent contractor, then? Why attack the base, which is heavily guarded, instead of some other location that has them? Jeb’s Nerve filled in the blank. The enemy probably has a base nearby, because transportation from another location would be outlandishly time-consuming.

Jeb stopped about a hundred yards away from the front line of the insects. Throwing his ill-gotten gold on the smoothest surface he could find nearby, he hardened the marble lobby of an office building and the air above the gold and started squishing.

So, independent operator, nearby, on a time table, and most likely alien, since we don’t know how to manipulate dungeons, Jeb thought as he smashed the priceless gold nugget flat on the floor. Jeb almost winced as he deformed it, but he realized that this was probably the most useful the nugget had been since it was flung out of a volcano.

The nugget was actually having a pretty good time, not being locked in a stuffy case anymore.

Once he was done, the edges of the plate of gold were ragged and cracked, but the entire thing was more than big enough to wrap around the core. After that, he moved on to the smaller gold bars, flattening them out with a ton of force applied in quick hammer blows of telekinetic Myst.

“How we doing?” Jeb asked, sticking his head out to check the progress of the army ants.

Jeb got a nice view of the side of one of the shield bearers before the ticks dropped off its bottom and started flooding toward the door, intent on flushing him out.

“Ack!” Jeb bolted deeper into the building, scooping up his gold plates on the way by. Must’ve spent longer on Project Goldfinger than I thought. Second story second story, where are you? There was an elevator, at least. Jeb wormed his way in, then punched through the roof of the elevator, the chittering swarm hot on his heels.

He flew up to the third story, then kicked his way through the floor-to-ceiling window, popping the crunched-up laminated glass out onto the bugs marching below him.

Jeb flew out of the building feeling the air on the back of his neck vibrate with the skittering of insect legs. He must’ve been gone nearly an hour trying to round up enough gold plates to smother the dungeon cores.

And that might be a problem, Jeb thought, his jaw dropping at the sheer pace of the army ants’ progress.

There were smaller creatures swarming around behind the front line, scooping up the brown goop and mixing it with some kind of foamy spittle to create lumpy defensive structures around each of the whirlwinds of Myst—ergo, each of the dungeon cores.

Others were crafting what looked suspiciously like walls and towers, creating an actual landscape out of the flat circle of brown muck.

And at the center…

The land had dipped so deep that Jeb couldn’t make out the bottom, only the steady march of blue-tinted shield bearers crawling their way out…and the occasional purple one.

Goddamnit! Jeb could only assume they were steadily getting more powerful.

“Come with me! I want to know if this works before we go for the center!” General Ma’am ordered as she arrived, flying up to Jeb and snatching one of the smaller gold plates out of his grasp.

They flew over to one of the closest Myst whirlwinds, near the edge of the tainted circle. There were a dozen men and women waiting on a nearby roof, armed to the teeth. Jeb was pleased to note Cecil and Machine Gun Sam were present. He’d become emotionally invested watching the kid jump from building to building with a Browning over his shoulder.

“Clear that position and give us time to work,” the general said, pointing at the poorly-defended outer core. It was time for a proof of concept.

The group nodded and charged the monsters, cutting a bloody path through the shield wall and clearing some space around the lumpy fortress. They killed the pale engineers working on reinforcing the core’s defenses and started trying to peel the damn thing open. The structure was about the size of a doghouse, but it was hard as concrete and half as heavy, somehow glued down around the core.

With a frustrated grunt, the general put her hands on the thing and blasted it with an explosive amount of silvery Myst. The structure finally crumbled under the assault, and they peeled away the material to reveal…another layer, protected by a fibrous membrane that had absorbed the blast. Something like the rind of an orange.

That’s a problem.

While they were taking their sweet time trying to take out one minor core, the problem was beginning to increase in scale.

The purple shield bearers were even tougher than the blue ones. It seemed as though gunfire was no longer having any effect on them without a Skill backing it up, and Jeb was fairly certain that they’d start turning red soon.

“Stand back!” Jeb shouted, leveling his staff at the offending cocoon.

Jeb inhaled, drawing Myst in with the breath, then exhaled on the lift, siphoning a thick but measured thread of Myst into the staff. The prototype gulped the magic up like a thirsty sailor, and out popped another Buck, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Jeb could maybe do five of those at a time before it would start dragging on his Myst Core, dimming the corona of energy radiating off the star in his chest. 

“Cut it open,” Jeb said, pointing.

With a contemptuous swipe of its antler, the buck tore the tough, fibrous cocoon to shreds, exposing the tiny dungeon core embedded in hard mud. The buck looked back at Jeb down the bridge of its nose. Giving him sass.

Jeb briefly considered asking the buck to try destroying the core, but he was fairly sure it would just suck the annihilation Myst out of the creature’s horns before it could do any damage. To the core.

The general didn’t bother wasting any time, lunging forward to grab the core and slamming it into the gold plate in her left hand.

Then, with gritted teeth, the old woman folded the gold plate around the tiny core by hand, utilizing a Body score that must’ve been in the thirties.

She pinched the edges together, then rolled them up, making sure it was airtight, and the Myst swirling around the dungeon core…stopped.

It was contained!

Hey, we might actually survive this thing!

Jeb hefted the sixty-pound plate of squished gold nugget. “Good, now we just gotta do that about seven more times, plus the big one.”

There was the distinctive harsh buzz of a bullet flying through the air, followed by a softer hiss as Jeb’s FMO shields popped and redirected the object back the way it came. All of this happened on a time-scale that Jeb couldn’t keep up with, so he couldn’t pinpoint the direction the bullet had come from.

Jeb ducked reflexively, dropping into the mud and scanning the people around him while simultaneously refilling his FMO shields. Everybody was looking at him with various states of confusion, and nobody had a gun pointed at him.

Jeb raised a telekinetic shield, then tentatively poked his head out from behind the scraps of the former cocoon and inspected the Air Force base and the city beyond. As far as the eye could see, it was nothing but insects furiously trying to shove them out of their territory.

“Do the army ants have guns now, or what?” Jeb demanded.

***Kol Rejan, level 57 Courier***

Ah well, it was worth a shot, Kol thought idly, ears ringing. He stood up and jumped off the fifteen-story building, the Barrett fifty caliber rifle slung over his shoulder.

Imagine Kol’s surprise when his previous target had been at the site of his new job. Seeing the human’s fat, lip-covered face among the other fat humans felt like a gift from the gods. Unfortunately, the veek had automatic defenses, so Kol wasn’t going to erase the stain on his record today.

The only time the crafty Myst user was going to stay still long enough to connect with was when the humans were revelling in their first minor victory. Now that he was aware someone had taken a shot at him, he’d be almost impossible to take down.

It was annoying, but it was the way things were.

That dungeon core, though... Kol shuddered just a little as he fell. He’d never seen anything like it. It was the sort of thing that could wipe an entire city off the map if it was triggered in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

What does the creature even need the humans’ bombs for when he has things like that? Maybe it was just how a sindio’s mind operated: Accumulate more power at every expense.

Somehow the sindio had managed to put a dungeon core into stasis the instant before a break, creating a portable dungeon break that fit in the palm of a keegan’s hand, of all things. Kol had never heard of such a thing, but it sure as the Roil made an excellent distraction.

Kol hit the ground, his knees flexing a bit as the concrete cracked under the force of his landing. He checked the two shrunken nukes in his belt, then started bounding across the desert landscape, each stride consuming ten body lengths.

Kol didn’t want to go back there, but proving himself reliable and useful would hopefully keep him alive longer than proving himself a flake.

***Jeb***

When none of the ant-creatures shot at him again, Jeb stood back up, making sure to keep a personal space bubble of Myst around himself.

The general gave his shield an appraising look before talking to him, her voice muffled. “We’ve gotta get the big one now before it gets any deeper!” she said, pointing to the sarlacc pit overflowing with tightly regimented army ants. I wonder what the official name is, because if these things don’t have one, I’m gonna name them Jerkoffs.

“That seems fairly obvious!” Jeb shouted back.

“Give Corporal Stevens and Christenson a ride, Mr. Trapper. An aerial assault will save time and blood!”

Jeb felt a tug in his chest. Five years of conditioning made him want to instinctively snap to attention and do as he was told, but there was an opportunity here. He could see the general was desperate.

“Let’s make a Deal!” he shouted over the hissing of encroaching monsters.

“No time!”

“It’s simple. I help stop these bugs, and you don’t try to kill me!” Jeb was purposefully vague about when or where or why she might try to kill him.

“Fine!” she said, grabbing his hand in a bone-crushing grip and shaking it. “Now get your ass in the air!”

Click. Now all Jeb had to do was hold up his side of the Bargain.

She grabbed the hands of two nearby soldiers and took off, Myst creating propulsion as she broke earth’s gravity. Jeb was forced to shield his eyes at the amount of wind the woman was outputting.

Jeb shook the pain out of his hand as he eyeballed Corporal Stevens and Cecil Christenson. The beefy kid with the honest-to-God hundred-pound Ma Deuce perched on his shoulder tentatively reached his hand out.

“So do we grab your hand or someth—ACK!”

Jeb looped a single strand of telekinetic Myst around their waists and flicked them up into the air, then created a platform beneath himself and lifted, leaning on his staff as he rose into the air. The two soldiers fell onto the slab of hardened air and dropped to their knees, eyes wide as it began lifting them up above the roar of battle.

A tongue-spear hit the bottom of Jeb’s magic carpet and ricocheted off as they rose. Jeb ferried the three of them above the hole in the ground, standing beside where the general was hovering, bearing two passengers herself.

“Corporal, clear us a path,” she said, pointing straight down into the maw overflowing with angry insects. They seemed to have some idea about what was going on above them, because they formed ranks, climbing on top of each other and cinching their big fat bug legs down on each other in order to choke off the entrance of the forming dungeon.

Goddamn, these things seem smart.

Not that that mattered too much. Corporal Stevens set the machine gun down on the edge of the platform and unleashed hell. With Jeb’s Myst as high as it was, he was able to catch a faint blue strand of Myst emerging from the kid’s chest and disappearing into the chamber of the gun.

“You got a Skill for that!?” Jeb asked between volleys.

“Heavy Gunner!” Corporal Stevens shouted back with a wide grin while his hands went through the process of feeding another belt into the M2. “Got four levels already today!”

Jeb couldn’t respond through the burst of machine gun fire, so he simply gave a wordless thumbs-up.

Body is probably really good for resisting tinnitus, Jeb thought idly as he watched the magically enhanced bullets blast through the creatures’ bodies like they were made of Styrofoam. The gunfire was just as loud as he remembered, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much.

“Go, go go!” the old woman shouted as the insects began to buckle, dropping her human cargo before racing ahead of them. There was a burst of silver Myst, creating a shockwave of air which scattered the severely wounded insects like bowling pins, clearing a path for them to charge the core.

Jeb followed suit and dropped his platform, shoving perforated chitin out of the way as they descended.

The bottom of the tunnel was buried roughly a hundred feet below ground level, but the core was still resting on the plow Jeb had first used to scrape it out of the muck…sort of. The dungeon core had long since transmuted the steel blade to more of that brown mud that spawned army ants.

Deep down, Jeb desperately wished he had someone to ask for more specifics about the insects, and dungeons in general, but Smartass was hanging back for Vegas, and the people who put the dungeon here probably weren’t the kind to spill the beans.

He’d really like to know if stopping the dungeon core would stop everything, or if they’d have to cleanse the mud with napalm, or if by touching the mud, they’d already signed their death warrants.

Lack of information is the real killer.

The mud beneath the core trembled, and an absolutely massive shield bearer emerged whole from the goop, the dungeon core resting on its back.

The creature was at least four times bigger than any of its brethren, and beneath the muck, Jeb could make out shiny red armor. Fuck. Actually, that’s hard to see. Is it getting dimmer?

Jeb glanced up and spotted the monsters closing off the exit above them, completely filling in the tunnel with death-machine bodies. This had the dual purpose of being intimidating as hell, and also casting the humans into complete darkness.

“Anybody bring a light?” Jeb asked into the darkness.

***Zlesk***

The children were approaching him, and Zlesk should’ve scurried off to find another hill to watch them from, but Colt in front was flagging him down for some reason and there was a keegan walking next to the children. A suspicious one. He was dressed like a grampa’s grampa. Zlesk might’ve made fun of his outfit if it didn’t give him pause.

The man was dressed like he was from the Time of Legends, with a second undercoat puffing the whole robe out, the long collar, and the hem falling nearer to his ankle than mid-shin.

Either the man enjoyed dressing like a fossil, or he was a fossil. Either option was suspect.

His gaze flicked back to Colt, who was waving him down. For an instant, Zlesk considered ditching the children if they’d stumbled across more than he could handle, but that thought was ruthlessly squished down. He was responsible. These were his children.

Even if they are short, fat, and ugly, Zlesk admitted silently, finally standing from his perch and waving back.

Time to go see how bad it is.

Zlesk approached the kids, all senses trained on the black-robed keegan following along beside them. The keegan gave Zlesk a glance, then looked at Colt, whose gaze was fixed on Zlesk, and seemed to dismiss him entirely, continuing to speak about something. It must have been horrible threats, because Colt looked like he was suffering terribly.

I’ll teach you to extort my kids… Zlesk thought, burying his anger as he approached.

Finally, Zlesk got close enough to hear.

“…As it turned out, the water table beneath the city shifted somewhat as a result of the experiment, leaving tens of thousands without water for a few days. A few days! All they had to do was dig deeper, but hundreds of years later, it’s become this aggrandized story about Xen conjuring deserts and destroying cities with the power of his Myst, which he had no motive for, mind you.”

So he’s…boring Colt into submission? Zlesk internally updated his register of human expressions.

“This reinforces my thesis. I’m trying to prove a hypothesis that the longer you live, eventually people make up stories about you, and the most entertaining stories stick around. The most entertaining stories are the ones with mass destruction, and so no matter what you do, on a long enough timeline, you will eventually be cast by the stories that surround you as the villain.”

His accent is old, too. Zlesk was so preoccupied watching the strange man that he didn’t notice Nancy charging him for a glomp. The nine-year-old was a little girl, but she had an unusual amount of Body and fifty extra pounds of steel armor.

It nearly knocked him to the rocky ground.

“Ooof!” Zlesk groaned, patting Nancy on the back, still watching the scholar. The keegan’s eyes lingered on Nancy’s antics for just a moment too long, before he spotted Zlesk watching him.

He’s after the immortals. It was common knowledge that thirty nobles of Solmnath had been purged for research into immortality aiming to farm levels. It was less common knowledge who had become immortal.

That knowledge was out there, though, and Zlesk was absolutely sure someone would figure it out and come after his kids sooner or later. This had been part of the plan he’d established with Jeb. If the children were going to have targets on their backs , then they might as well make them capable of taking care of themselves.

And until then, Zlesk would kill anyone who tried to target them for Impact.

The keegan glanced up and met Zlesk’s eye, and the two men shared a moment. Mostly a glare-off.

I know what you’re here for, you bastard.

“You must be the children’s guardian. I apologize for the misunderstanding,” he said, sweeping into a fluttering—old—bow. “Call me Vex. Your immortals have nothing to fear from me.”

Zlesk frowned. He expected denials, but he didn’t expect the guy to come out and spill the beans that he knew some of the children were going to live a looong time.

“I believe it’s better to make friends among the long-lived than mindlessly hunt them,” he said, offering Zlesk a hand.

“Hoping for kickbacks for your grandkids eighty years down the road?” Zlesk asked, taking the man’s hand and watching for any sign of malfeasance.

“Something like that. I like to take the long view,” Vex said, innocently shaking Zlesk’s hand.

“Yo, Zlesk, what’s a sindio?” Colt asked, arms crossed in front of his chest.

Zlesk’s head snapped up, his gaze darting back to Vex, ice running through his veins.

The keegan rolled his eyes and slumped his shoulders.

“Children, I want you to form an orderly line and march back to Solmnath. Your work here is done. You did great. I’ll stay here and talk to Mr. Vex for a few minutes.”

Colt’s brows rose and he glanced between the two keegan towering over him, before shrugging. “Okay, whatever.”

The kids formed up and marched off, leaving Zlesk alone with his doom. He watched until they finally disappeared behind the mountainside. At least the sindio wouldn’t kill Zlesk in front of the immortals he was trying to ingratiate himself with…

If he was even telling the truth.

“So what happens now?” Zlesk asked, his heart hammering in his chest.

Vex shrugged. “I don’t know, man, you’re the one being weird.”

“You’re not gonna kill me?” Zlesk asked.

“Like I said, I’m trying to make those kids my friends. Probably wouldn’t win me any favors by killing you.”

“Even if I tell them what you are?”

“Is that worse than you not coming back at all?” the sindio asked, crossing his arms, his eyebrows raised in a keegan smile. “Because their first impression is going to be hard to shake with words, and that first impression is…boring and harmless.”

Chapter 7: Careful Planning

“Anybody bring a light?” Jeb asked into the void.

The response was the chittering of insects and a whoosh of air as something big went right past his face.

“Hit the deck!” Corporal Stevens shouted, and Jeb complied. His FMO shields were magic, but he didn’t wanna test how magic. Jeb knew his telekinesis had limits, and it took several shields to stop a single nine-milimeter. A Browning might tear him in half.

The kid lit up the enclosed tunnel, metaphorically and literally, each muzzle-flare providing Jeb a strobe-like effect, allowing him to see what was going on.

The kid was currently tearing off the giant creature’s front leg, sending spatters of blue blood everywhere as the heavy machine gun outperformed the creature’s natural armor.

Jeb glanced up and spotted a thousand angry maws descending on them from above.

That’s a problem. Jeb searched the room through the flashes of light and spotted Cecil, holding the big bad in place from his position at the side wall. Jeb lunged for him.

“Reloading!” Corporal Stevens shouted at the end of the hail of bullets.

“Can you keep them off of us?” Jeb shouted, sliding through the mud to shout into Cecil’s ear.

Yeah, we’re all getting hearing loss after this.

“Which ones?” Cecil asked.

“The ones blocking out the light! Which ones did you think!?” Jeb shouted.

“What about that one?” Jeb couldn’t see which one he was pointing at, but he knew exactly what he was talking about. The big one.

“I’ll handle it!”

“Alright!” Jeb could feel Cecil shift beside him, and he knew the man was making his black strings grow from the walls, creating a net above them. Jeb could hear the frustrated hissing from above and hoped the black stuff would hold.

Now the big one was unrestrained, which was a bit of a problem.

“Firing!” Stevens shouted and Jeb hit the deck. He wasn’t very close to the last field of fire, but people got turned around in better circumstances than these, and Jeb wasn’t feeling like becoming swiss cheese.

When the hail of bullets opened up again, Jeb spotted the creature with its forelimb shields pressed up against the wall, a pale human hand sticking out from behind it. Jeb didn’t have time to process guilt before Stevens quickly walked the shots over to the new location and started aiming for the creature’s center mass while its side was turned, which grabbed its attention.

The creature turned its shields back to Stevens and started rushing him.

Jumping into the path of a charging tank which was currently receiving M2 fire was way on the bottom of Jeb’s list of ‘Life Goals’, and way up on the list of ‘things that’ll get you killed’, but if he didn’t, Stevens was going to be the next one squished, and that would just make getting out even harder.

Where the hell is General Ma’am? Jeb thought as he picked himself up and flew the twenty feet in the blink of an eye.

Jeb flanked the insect and thrust his palm out toward the thing’s side. Or, where he thought the side would be in the flashing lights.

“Alpha strike,” Jeb muttered the instant he felt his palm make contact with hairy chitin.

A blender-like eruption of hundreds of spears and blades of telekinetic force burst out of Jeb’s palm. Jeb could feel that a few of his creations penetrated the creature’s side, but most of them were absorbed by the huge thing’s armor. The ones that did get in, though, drew jagged spirals, shredding the creature’s vital organs and causing a mortal wound that would surely kill the beast.

Which pissed it off.

The insect let out a thrumming that rattled Jeb’s bones before it backhanded him with one of its shield-arms. Jeb’s head and torso armor traps popped the moment he sustained light damage, attempting to fling away the offending limb before it could do more than bruise him. The monster bulled right through the resisting force and sent Jeb flying across the chamber until he smacked into the wall, burying himself halfway into it.

Am I upside down? Jeb couldn’t tell right away because of the lack of light. Then the blood started rushing to Jeb’s head, confirming his suspicion.

In the flashing light of the M2, Jeb saw the creature charging toward him, and he desperately tried to pull himself out of the sticky mud of the wall before it pancaked him.

A blast of silver Myst erupted above the creature as General Ma’am landed on its back, snatching up the core and slamming it into the thick plate of gold.

The creature thrummed again and tried to spin and knock the woman out of the air, but she was too quick for it, flitting around its bulk evasively, all while manhandling the soft gold into a pouch for the core to rest in.

Eyes on the prize, this one, Jeb thought, peeling himself out of the wall with telekinesis. He could see the flow of Myst into the core rapidly dwindle, but they still had to deal with all the army ants currently trying to kill them.

“Make us an exit!” she shouted from above them.

Corporal Stevens started shooting straight up, massacring the bugs packed tight into Cecil’s nets and drenching them with a shower of blood. The corpses stopped moving, but they were still held in place by Cecil’s nets, keeping them trapped in the lightless abyss.

In the flashing light of the muzzle flare, Jeb found Cecil and grabbed him by the arm, hauling him over to Stevens. If they were going to get out, they needed to pick a side and stick  to it.

“Cecil, drop the net!” Jeb shouted over the gunfire, practically into the man’s ear.

“That’ll bury us!”

“Do you have another way out!?” Jeb demanded. “I’ll handle it!”

Cecil nodded, and Jeb tapped the Heavy Gunner on the shoulder, letting him know they were about to make a move. Stevens nodded and stopped firing.

“Now!” Jeb shouted, reaching into his Myst Core and channeling out as much as he safely could to create a slanting surface above them. In the darkness, Jeb felt a huge amount of dead weight slam into his shield, testing the limit of his Myst before sliding off it and raining down on the other side of the chamber.

Jeb saw a glimmer of light above them. He grabbed Cecil and Stevens and drew them in close enough to smell their lunch before forming a bullet-shaped shell around the three of them and launching.

Cecil screamed and Corporal Stevens laughed directly into each ear as they plowed through the tiny opening above them, shoving various limbs out of the way as they moved. A sharp limb cut through Jeb’s shell, but Corporal Stevens made for excellent body armor.

“Fuck!” he shouted into Jeb’s ear, clapping a hand over the cut in his shoulder.

A second later they were out, rising up into the sky. Jeb tilted their Wonka Elevator away to get some clearance from the murder-hole. He glanced over his shoulder as they went, almost hoping General Ma’am stayed there and got ganked.

It would make things a lot simpler for him, as far as preventing a city from getting torched.

With a magnificent burst of silver Myst, General Ma’am erupted from the bug hole, carrying the core like a football player, tucked in tight against her chest. From what Jeb could see, the Myst around it was calm.

Silver linings. Sucks about the two guys she brought with her.

“Stevens!” she said, flying up to their little pod in the sky.

“Ma’am?”

“Take the core somewhere safe and take the rest of the day off, you look like shit!” she said, holding the gold volleyball out to him. Jeb dropped the shield so the kid could take it.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, still holding the wound in his shoulder. Jeb took the hint and steered the three of them outside ant territory and dropped them off.

“The rest of the mopping up we can handle by ourselves,” she said as they touched down, giving Jeb a sidelong glance. “Jeb, I’d like you to return to your room now and await further instructions. I appreciate the help, but not you flying the coop like that.”

“Understood.”

“I really hope you don’t make me do something drastic, young man,” she said, and a small part of Jeb had a suspicion that she might prefer something drastic. “And if it turns out you were the one behind this little distraction...” She shook her head. “Your stay here will become less pleasant.”

“Me? It’s probably some guy working alone with access to alien tech on a time-crunch…”

“Indeed.”

Jeb stopped and thought about how accurately that defined him. “Oh, I see where you’re coming from. I’ll go back to my room.”

“Cecil, keep an eye on him until we find another specialist to relieve you.”

“C’mon, buddy,” Cecil said, steering Jeb to the south.

“Aw, man,” Jeb groaned. Terrorists think I’m untrustworthy right after I saved their lives. What kind of world am I living in?

******

True to her word, two days later, Jeb’s living conditions were much less comfortable. They hadn’t outright accused him of stealing the two missing nukes, but they had pressured him pretty hard, trying to trick him into admitting he’d taken them, or revealing the existence of his ‘accomplice’ who set the dungeon bomb.

So far, Jeb had done pretty well, given that he was totally innocent, and had a fair amount of practice at telling the truth creatively.

Still, no more VIP room. He’d been downgraded to the specialist bunks with a Chatty Cathy who was most likely wearing a wire.

Jeb understood the reasoning behind it: He was a Myst user, which they called a ‘specialist’ out of a misguided attempt at rebranding an alien weapon. The only people who could tell if a specialist was up to something was another specialist. And Jeb had broken their only Myst-restraining collar.

So they set him up with a roommate who was equal parts interrogator and watchdog, with a penchant for discussing things at length.

“So, General Ma’am,” Jeb began, turning over on his bunk. “What’s her story?”

“General Ma’am?” Terry scoffed as he shook dust out of his pants. “You don’t know her name?”

“Apparently not,” Jeb said. “She didn’t have a name plate in front of her desk or anything.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Terry said with an annoying grin. “Because I was stationed at this base before the Tutorial. Now, most guys broke and went for their families when the world fell apart, but not me. I was determined to serve my country, so I stayed at my post and just kept trucking.” He made a straight chopping motion with his hand.

“Fancy way of saying you were single.”

“Shaddap. So anyway, after the Stitching, the base commander blew his head off, which kinda made things a bit…hectic for a while. I remember unloading an entire semi-truck full of rotting fish and some kid was talking about how fermented foods were good for you, and the idiot tried to eat some of it, and spent the next week in bed with the shits.”

Terry paused. “Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think Nate survived that…. So anyway, the place was just crumbling around us. People were going hungry, and monsters were coming in from the desert, attracted by all the people living here. I knew we needed more effective leadership, and I could’ve taken command for myself, but when Colonel Meyers stepped in and gave herself a field promotion, I figured I didn’t wanna rock the boat, yah know? I’m a team player.”

“Mmhmm.” Jeb nodded noncommittally. At least I got a name out of that stream of word-vomit.

“So it’s Brigadier General Meyers, then?” Jeb asked.

“No, she promoted herself to General of the Air Force, and acting President of the United States.”

Jeb blinked. “Does that count?” he asked with a frown.

“Of course it counts. In a situation where all the politicians are dead, control reverts to the military,” Terry said. “Right?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s both inaccurate and oversimplified.”

“Meh.” Terry shrugged before throwing on his shirt. “She’s only wrong if she doesn’t cut a slice of America out of those E.T.s’ claws.”

“History written by the winners, huh?” Jeb asked.

“Exactly.” Terry grabbed his gun and motioned for Jeb to follow. “C’mon, we’re cleaning the runway today, and I need my telekinesis buddy to make the job easier.”

Jeb sighed and levered himself out of bed, getting dressed.

******

“She used to be a fighter pilot, you know, until she got too old for it and they grounded her. I hear she kicked major ass in the eighties. Like, killed a lot of people. I heard the base commander was actually afraid of her. Guy never killed someone in his life…except himself, I guess.”

“So that’s the reason for the…” Jeb spun his finger and made a whooshing noise.

“The jet engines she makes out of Myst?” Terry asked. “Oh yeah, I never thought about that.”

I’m fairly sure you don’t think about a lot of things. Jeb wasn’t sure if they were expecting him to get more information out of Terry or Terry to get more out of him. It could be a mask. There were some very smart people out there since Nerve became freely available to the public.

Jeb still wondered how Meyers was using Myst. It was some kind of air manipulation that allowed her to project her voice over vast distances, listen in on people at range, fly, make telescopes out of air, and use sonic vibrations to turn people’s innards into snot.

It was a well-thought-out power, the kind Jeb expected from someone intelligent, who understood the value of flight and instant communication and a fair bit of the technology that supported it.

Terry, on the other hand, could only use his Myst to dull all sound except for his own voice, meaning he could talk over anyone he wanted to, anytime he wanted to…and that was it.

What an idiot. Well, he might make a good negotiator.

Jeb didn’t have a lot of time left, and now he was cleaning the runway Meyers was going to use to deliver the nuke to all those ‘fucking E.T.s’. It was strange. Jeb could be walking along beside the residents of Nellis, talking about pop culture and wondering if any of their favorite celebrities were still alive like normal people, then Bam! Jeb would hit the subject of melas, keegan or kitri, and the vitriol that poured off of them was palpable.

Jeb was sweeping off the runway with dozens of brooms at once by running a single string of Myst through all of them, when Terry dropped the bomb…metaphorically speaking.

“There’s the plane,” Terry said, leaning on his brush and staring at a hangar. “The one the general’s gonna use tomorrow to wipe that fuckin’ infestation off the map.”

Surprised, Jeb raised his eyes and spotted a B-2 resting in a hangar. The plane was black in the dim light, the sleek whole-wing design making it look like some kind of ambush predator, waiting for him to step closer.

“Neat,” Jeb said, his mind racing.

He was currently standing a couple hundred feet away from the plane they were going to use on Solmnath… Scratch that. The plane they say they’re going to use. The more Jeb thought about it, the more he was sure it was another ruse to get him to try to make a move.

They’d walked Jeb up to an attractive distractor. Jeb wouldn’t be surprised if there was going to be a team of specialists out here all night, just waiting for him to show up.

I’m not that simple, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

Still, I’d like a little more insurance than just Legolas, Jeb thought, burying a packet of Myst in the tarmac, where he gave it if/then instructions to poke a hole in the fuel tank of any plane that was carrying uranium, then reset itself.

Terry didn’t see shit because Jeb moved the string through his leg and hid it about a foot under the asphalt. Jeb didn’t see punching holes in fuel tanks as ‘stopping’ the bombs; more like delaying them, since the pilot should be able to push the plane across the desert…in theory.

That’s a stretch, Jeb thought to himself as he walked along the runway and dotted it with landmines. Oh, I’ve got it. I’m not stopping the bombs, my traps are stopping them.

“I mean…I say that, but I can’t stop thinking about all the people in L.A.,” Terry said. “I wish there was something I could do about it.”

Jeb cocked an eyebrow. Really? Terry was confiding in him a desire to stop the general as bait to get Jeb to admit he wanted to do the same. Jeb had even studied this exact technique in a POW preparedness seminar.

If Jeb hadn’t been constantly on high alert for that kind of fuckery, it might have worked.

“Yeah, it’s a bummer, but you gotta remember, most of the people living there now are getting along with their alien overlords. Real Americans moved out of the city months ago.” Jeb rested his palms on the broom handle.

The second statement implied the ones who stayed were not ‘real Americans’, but it did not outright say it, which made it perfectly okay for Jeb to say. The first statement was true. Most people were obeying the law and just interested in getting by. They didn’t really care who was in charge as long as their basic needs were met.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Terry said, nodding. “Cmon, let’s go watch some of the new recruits dig holes.”

Jeb nodded, and the two of them hopped in Jeb’s Jeep and drove out to the west of the base. He gave Terry a sour look as the chatterbox fired up the engine of Jeb’s Jeep, and pulled away from the hangars. He was distracted momentarily when the blue spire came into view.

“What’s that?” Jeb asked, pointing at it as it peeked out from between buildings.

“Huh?” Terry glanced over, missing it.

“Blue thing, looks a bit like a railroad tie, except twenty feet tall. I saw it when I was flying above the base earlier.”

“Oh, that. That’s top secret. Need to know only.”

“Ah.”

“But…the boys think it’s what prevents the Roil from paying us a visit. It just kinda showed up one day and General Meyers discourages questions about it.”

Hmm… Jeb thought, frowning. That might not be a bad guess. Faradan stone was what they used to make the walls of cities resist the Roil, after all. I wonder how a giant stake in the ground works, though?

“But man, flying? You and the general are the only ones who can do that, as far as I know. That’s gotta be tight. What’s it like?”

“Imagine you’re in one of those old cartoons where you can pick yourself up to move out of the way of something. It’s kind of like that.”

“Cool.” Terry chuckled as they approached a line of men, all of them between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five—‘patriot age’, when you can’t quite grasp the concept of becoming a statistic. They were shoveling the gritty dirt of the desert over their shoulders, sweating like crazy as they dug a trough.

The reason for it became clear as they approached. A dark lump resolved into a pile of keegan bodies, about fifty of them. They all sported gunshot wounds of various sizes, and lay limp in their pile. Their pale skin was even paler than usual, ghost white in the overbearing sun.

Jeb found himself staring at one in particular. It was about five foot ten. An adolescent, by Jeb’s reckoning. Their jaw hung open, and their tube-like keegan tongue rested in the sand. The Myst around them felt…wrong.

“Yeah, these boneys tried to raid our fort on the Colorado River. We showed them why that was a bad idea.” He nudged Jeb on the shoulder, breaking him out of his stupor.

Jeb blinked, then gave Terry the half-hearted chuckle the man was looking for, trying not to stare at the pile of bodies. The Myst-based life around the bodies, the spirits and little buglike creatures that formed a whole ecosystem around the ever-present Myst… They didn’t go anywhere near the pile. Like it was poisonous, from a magical standpoint.

Jeb took the hint, and never went closer than twenty feet. His Myst instincts had never failed him thus far, and currently they were telling him to steer clear.

Raiders, my ass, Jeb thought, picking out a few more children here and there. It was pretty obvious by their demographics they’d been trying to settle somewhere nearby, been murdered, then posthumously labeled ‘raiders’.

Raiders don’t bring children. Jeb choked back a wave of visceral disgust that swirled through his stomach. He couldn’t afford to appear sympathetic to the ‘E.T.s’. Not without getting killed himself.

The surrounding soldiers didn’t seem to notice the discrepancy. Soldiers were not generally taught to think critically, and these boys were likely nursing grudges against the aliens that made it even harder. Dead loved ones made it really easy to join the army. Jeb knew that from experience.

Once the trough was dug to Terry’s liking, the soldiers started unceremoniously grabbing bodies and tossing them into the hole, folding the extra-tall keegan in places to make sure they fit.

Jeb spotted an oily residue that seemed to stick to these men as they moved the bodies, some kind of clinging film of Myst… As far as Jeb was aware, Myst only had three states of matter: ray, thread and Myst. It’s closest to thread, but it’s not connected to anyone or anything…

“You wanna help, Mr. Forklift?” Terry asked, glancing his way.

“I’m afraid I’ll catch something,” Jeb said, watching the strange residue sink into the men’s skin and vanish.

“You heard the specialist!” Terry shouted. “Catching E.T. germs is grunt work! Get to it!” Terry walked back over to the Jeep and started blaring “Eye of the Tiger” over the speakers. The guys groaned as the iconic riff began.

Terry took the opportunity to speak to Jeb, their conversation hidden by the music. “Were you serious about that? Do bonies actually have something catchable?”

“Myst-based. It’s probably not serious, but you might wanna keep them under observation for a couple days,” Jeb said with a shrug.

“Why didn’t I see it?”

“Because I’m stronger than you?” Jeb asked with a cocked brow.

Terry groaned and slammed his forehead against the Jeep.

“Fine,” Terry said, making a note in his pocket book before they hopped back in the Jeep. “We’ll drop your recommendation off at Command, then it’s picking out what’s for dinner.”

“I wanna drive,” Jeb said.

“You’re still under observation, too, bucko. That means I drive,” Terry said with a shit-eating grin.

The rest of the day went smoothly, with Terry taking advantage of Jeb’s telekinesis to complete his normal jobs in a fraction of the time. It was like a kid standing on top of a Corvette to reach something on a high shelf. A total misuse of his power.

Jeb didn’t mind being taken advantage of, though. It wasn’t a permanent situation, and it gave him an opportunity to tour the base and get more familiar with it, in case he had to engage in some light urban combat.

You never know.

The day ended peacefully, with Jeb hitting the sack damn-near exhausted. He was so tired, he almost forgot about the bombs. Which was the point, I suppose. Jeb folded his arms behind his head as he stared up at the bunk above, where Terry was snoring.

If Jeb was an idiot, this was where he’d sneak out to begin his secret mission to sabotage the bomber in a desperate, last-minute bid to prevent the destruction of Solmnath. Instead, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. Tried to, anyway.

It took a long time to finally relax enough to fall asleep. It felt like the night before a final, crammed with so much nervous energy that you couldn’t sleep if you wanted to. Jeb focused on slowing his heart and relaxing. At least he had the bottom bunk, so when the ceiling inevitably crashed down on them, he would be shielded by the blabbermouth above him.

Jeb had a thing about getting crushed by ceilings.

Finally, Jeb was able to fall asleep, sinking into an interesting dream where Vresh was wearing a dress made out of fire.

Jeb woke up with a gun in his mouth.

Chapter 8: Wild Improvisation

***Kol Rejan, level 58 Courier***

Kol came to a halt in front of an ornate building in the wealthy district of Solmnath. He’d never had someone stop him between districts while he was wearing his courier garb, a fact that had allowed him to literally get away with murder more than once.

The building was classic keegan architecture, with open-air windows to let the refreshing heat of the desert in, and carefully tended plants to baffle the wind. The entire building seemed to be cut from a single slab of stone.

Everything was boilerplate rich-man…except for the giant bowl tilted on its side on the roof. That was unusual.

From the outside, Kol could make out movement, although it was largely obscured by the desert plants. He strode up the broad steps and rapped on the door.

“Yes?” a melas servant asked, opening the door. The man had carefully-groomed horns that had been trained with metal braces to grow with an artistic flourish.

“I’ve got a delivery for Mr. Vex,” Kol said, patting his satchel.

“Down two flights of stairs in the back, then through the Scary Door,” he said, moving out of the way.

Kol nodded, and took a step into the building, before stopping to regard the servant with a frown. “The Scary Door?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “The scary one.”

Kol shrugged. It probably just had blood or spooky runes on it to ward away ignorant would-be burglars.

He strode by several rooms that seemed to have people talking in them. Kol heard several clicks and clacks, along with strange harsh noises that sounded something like the hissing of a veek.

Can’t afford to get distracted. Kol was primarily concerned with not getting killed as soon as his task was complete. Only the gods knew if the sindio would see fit to keep him alive after he’d served his purpose.

What was my other option? Run? Kol almost scoffed at the absurdity of running from someone with unlimited time and resources.

Kol found the back of the building and followed the carved hardwood rails down the spiralling staircase until it ended two floors down. There was a door at the end, and Kol went through, frowning.

That didn’t really seem all that scar—OH, BY ALL THE GODS!

Upon entering the next room, Kol was faced with two doors, each of them carved of plain hardwood and generally identical.

The one on the right, though… It would be the death of him. Kol knew it. Every nerve in his body was screaming at him that the moment he touched it, would be the moment he ceased to exist.

The door was death incarnate. Its sinister grain must house some spectacular evil, some eldritch abomination that snatched up souls and locked them in an endless abyss of despair.

Despite being outwardly identical, Kol could feel the evil that inhabited the doorknob. The thing was steeped in it. Molded by it.

Maybe I can go through the other door instead, Kol thought, shying away from the door on the right as it radiated mind-numbing fear.

Kol’s back was against the wall as he aimed for the leftmost door, scooting along step by careful step, sidling closer to the safe door.

Finally he was almost close enough to reach out and touch the safe door, when he paused, his arm extended, a single rational thought penetrating the haze of mind-numbing fear.

The servant said to go through the scary door. Kol glanced at the door on the right, then quickly looked away. It was like staring up at the executioner’s blade. If he stared at it too long, Kol was sure it would detach from the wall and come after him.

He started toward the left-hand door again before pausing, hand inches away from the safe doorknob.

What happens to me if I go through the wrong door?

With an effort of will, Kol pulled his hand away from the ‘safe’ door.

This is one of the sindio’s sick games, isn’t it?

Kol looked up at the scary door and looked away again before his nerve failed him. He squeezed his eyes shut and began shuffling across the room, forcing his legs to bring him to his death.

He could feel waves of terror radiating off the horrible thing, pressing against his skin as he approached, but it was nowhere near as bad as looking at it directly.

Kol glanced up once to make sure he was on target, and just about lost control of his bladder. Yep, it’s right there.

Kol extended his trembling fingers, hyperventilating with his eyes squeezed shut as he willingly killed himself.

You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die.

You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die.

YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!

Kol flinched as his fingers came into contact with cold metal. Cautiously, he peered through one eye.

The door was just a door, the knob just a knob. Kol opened the other eye, frowning. Regular door, no surprises in store.

He made the mistake of taking his hand off the knob.

The fear came back in an all-encompassing wave, forcing Kol’s legs to give out, and this time, Kol did lose control of his bladder, just a bit.

It’s a trick, fight through it! Kol thought, forcing himself back to his feet and lunging toward the door.

Deathdeathdeathdeath—

Once again, touching the handle shut off the fear instantly. Panting and crying a little, Kol turned the knob and opened the door.

Vex sat beyond the doorway in the center of a well-lit room that smelled of oiled steel. He was perched on a stool, wearing a jeweler’s lens over one eye, and poring over a strange wooden box filled with odd wires and bulbs. The sindio glanced up upon hearing the door open.

“Congratulations, Kol. The first time is always the hardest with the Scary Door. I don’t begrudge you a little urine in the pants. Have you got my delivery?”

Kol nodded, getting his breathing under control before he opened the satchel. He placed both of the human bombs on the sindio’s desk, the mechanism keeping them shrunk pointed upward.

“Thank you, Kol. What was your price, two hundred bulbs for delivery? In my day, you could hire a professional killer for a single bulb, but that’s inflation for you, I suppose. Your money is on the table,” he said, pointing.

There, just to Kol’s left were five cases full of bulbs—a hefty sum, both literally and figuratively.

“Can I ask why the Scary Door?” Kol asked.

“Oh, it passively funnels intruders into touching the Kill-door. Good thing you passed the test.”

Kol’s skin went cold. “I agree.”

The sindio turned his attention back to the odd metal box, picking up a chisel-like object and pressing it to one of the bulbs. There was a tiny puff of smoke, then the sindio took it away and nodded to himself.

Is it some kind of doomsday weapon? Kol couldn’t imagine what kind of horrible reality-warping device the creature was working on.

“It’s a ham radio,” Vex said, answering the unasked question as he rolled his stool to the side, where a huge book with human print far too fine for any natural mechanism displayed…wavy lines.

Kol frowned.

“Human technology advanced to an absurd degree in the absence of Myst simply by taking advantage of the other natural forces of the universe, in ways that never even occurred to us because they were oftentimes less efficient than Myst.”

The sindio took a bit of metal out from between his teeth and poked it with the chisel again, seemingly melting it in place into the jumble of wires.

“They got to the moon and back without magic… Did you know that?” he asked, glancing up at Kol.

Kol shook his head.

“Well, it’s an arms race, now. The humans are racing to understand wizardry from the viewpoint of scientists, and we are racing to understand science from the standpoint of wizards. I wonder who will unify the two disciplines first?”

“What does it do? The ham radio?”

“In theory? It uses something called radio waves to transmit signals across large distances. A wizard could use it to transmit clear signals to magical constructs nearly instantly without relying on Myst relays, which are spotty at best.

“Like so,” Vex said, flicking a switch. A bulb in the center of the box flared to life, creating a yellow glow that added to the bright mage-lights in the room.

“…Did it work?” Kol asked.

“If it did, we should read about it in the news.”

Vex pushed himself away from the box and spun to eye Kol. “You have any trouble on the job?”

“No, sir, but…nevermind.”

“Go ahead, you can tell me,” Vex said, motioning for Kol to speak.

“I saw someone at the base I failed to kill once. A stain on my record. I took a little extra time to take another shot, but he survived it. Again.

“It didn’t interfere with my work,” Kol hastily followed up his words.

“Right. Well, if he was at Nellis Air Force Base, he’s probably not going to be alive much longer. Those people didn’t bargain in good faith.”

Vex shrugged.

***Jeb, with a gun in his mouth***

Jeb could make out the glint of metal in the dim light of the barracks. Just enough to put together the fact that he had the barrel of a nine-millimeter nestled between his teeth. He tried to say so, but he spoke only in vowels.

“AI-I-I-ER,” Jeb said around the barrel.

“Shut up!” Terry hissed, and Jeb felt a bunch of hands drag him out of bed and twist his arms behind his back. They took the gun out of his mouth—which was a relief—but then they replaced it with a dirty sock, then duct-taped it in—which was less of a relief.

Jeb felt the cold, Myst-sucking collar placed around his neck, and the sound of duct tape being unspooled as they hobo-fixed the two severed halves as needed.

I’m sure there’s an explanation, Jeb tried to say around the rag, but he was pretty sure the jig was up.

They hauled him outside and shoved him down on his knees. Terry ground the barrel into the back of his skull to remind him it was there before taking a step back, presumably holding the gun on him. The sun was still down, so it must’ve been sometime before five o’clock in the morning.

The scar tissue on Jeb’s amygdala diminished the effect of the sudden threat on his life somewhat. Sure, Jeb was afraid, but it wasn’t quite as bad as sleeping under a roof with a crack on it.

In front of him, General Meyers stood, wearing a somewhat singed flight suit.

“So I just crashed a B-2,” General Meyers said, tugging off her gloves and helmet. “A pretty expensive piece of hardware, especially considering that they’re not making them anymore.”

“AI-UU-E-U-E-I,” Jeb said around the sock. I guess they would be priceless now.

“Thankfully, I insisted on doing a test run before we loaded one with live nukes.”

Cool, we didn’t blow up, Jeb grunted through the gag.

“You told me you can make triggers for your traps based on code phrases, so forgive me if I don’t take out your gag. We only need ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers from you anyway.”

Jeb shrugged.

“You seem awfully calm for someone about to die.”

Jeb shrugged again.

She reached into her vest pocket and pulled out Jeb’s ring.

“‘Bestowed upon Jebediah Trapper by Nixus as a reward for outstanding performance during the Impossible Tutorial. Its true power is only known to its wielder.’

“You’re a tougher son of a bitch than even I thought, aren’t you?”

Jeb wasn’t really sure how to answer that, given that he wasn’t actually a son of a bitch. His mom had been a little dumpy, but she was no dog. He shrugged.

“Bring the thing,” she said, and a moment later, a black drone was dropped in between them. Legolas lay unmoving on the asphalt, his rotors bent and his casing dented.

“Imagine my surprise when a drone the size of a mailbox shot down a B-2. You recognize it?”

Jeb nodded.

“Did you bring this?”

Yes or no questions! My only weakness!

Jeb nodded.

“Did you make it?”

Jeb shook his head, sizing up his enemies. He was pretty sure things were about to turn violent. His hope that the general exploded with the bomber was long gone. It was looking like he was going to have to fight his way out. Jeb did a headcount.

Meyers was standing directly in front of him, Cecil to Jeb’s left, Stevens to his right, Terry behind him. There were a few more red-shirts holding Jeb’s arms, but he figured they were probably Body-specced, given how firm their grips were.

Beside General Meyers was her clumsy secretary man, who had a fifty-fifty chance of being either his enforcer boss in disguise, or just a guy who liked vivid descriptions of boobs. Schrodinger’s Vresh.

To her left was a rather narrow-looking fellow with sunken features and tiny, dinged-up glasses. He had the pencil-pusher look that Jeb associated with the guys who made everyone’s life a living hell by enforcing stupid-ass policy decisions.

Let’s see. Eight people, one is 50% allied with me, and Legolas is possibly playing dead. Or just dead.

Between maybe Vresh and maybe Legolas, Jeb figured he had a seventy-five percent chance of getting unexpected assistance, and a twenty-five percent chance of dying pretty quickly.

The only Trigger Jeb had available at the moment was his ‘Room full of Charlies’ alternate trigger.

It would probably buy him enough time to put up a fight, and if it really was Vresh, she’d probably live through it.

Jeb wasn’t super enthused about possibly killing Legolas, but Eddie could rebuild him. He had the technology.

“Is the one who made it in Solmnath?”

Fuck. Meyers knew good craftsmanship when she saw it, and something told him Eddie would be just as happy building death-bots for her as he was for Jeb. The man wasn’t picky. Jeb slumped over so they couldn’t see his face.

‘Room full of Charlies’ alternate trigger.

Three winks on the right….wink, wink, wink.

Three winks on the left….wink, wink, wink.

“I’ll take your silence as a—”

Meyers was cut off when telekinetic blades erupted out from Jeb in every possible direction. The two guys holding onto his arms were turned into hamburger. Cecil caught a blade to the stomach and went down, while Terry was able to dodge in time. Corporal Stevens hid behind his gun and made it out unscathed, his Browning less so.

The glasses guy next to Meyers lost his head, Legolas absorbed the Myst somehow, and Maybe-Vresh slapped the three blades coming his way out of the air with contemptuous ease.

70-30 in favor of Vresh, now.

Meyers didn’t notice her secretary’s strength. She was too busy being pissed at Jeb. A wall of silver Myst blocked his blades, then reached out and bitch-slapped him at sonic speeds.

The pressure wave picked Jeb up and flung him across the concrete parking lot, giving him a light seasoning of road rash before he smacked into the side of the building with a groan.

Jeb tried to scramble to his feet, but he’d left his right one next to his bed. Jeb flopped to the ground for a heartbeat, then picked himself up and hauled his ass out of the way of another blast.

He reached up and tore the remains of the Myst-suppressing collar off his neck, snapping the duct tape with a mighty tug while hopping on one foot and breathing around a dirty sock.

Look at it this way: Objectively, it’s probably hilarious. I’m sure I’ll look back on this and laugh, and laugh….

Jeb was hopping towards a window when Corporal Stevens hit him like a linebacker. For a brief instant, Jeb thought his spine had finally given up on him.

The kid was younger, bigger, in better shape, angrier and spent more of his levels on Body. He was a walking engine of destruction and Jeb was not. He had every physical advantage…but Jeb was meaner.

Jeb poked him in the eyes and sucker-punched him with an elbow to the nose when he flinched.

While the kid was grabbing his face, Jeb squirmed out from under him, aiming for the window. If he could get some cover, he could make this fight more cat and mouse, and less dogpile. It was the only chance Jeb had to survive longer than a couple sec—

“Hey, Jeb,” Terry said.

“Uh?” Jeb grunted through the sock, turning to look at Terry.

“Did I tell you about the time I went fishing with my dad?” Terry said, green Myst pulsing out of his mouth in time with his words.

No, and I don’t care, Jeb thought, aiming for the window. Well, trying to aim for the window. Jeb felt like he’d suddenly been dipped in molasses. Everything was sticky and hard to move in.

Son of a bitch, this is Terry’s Myst! Jeb thought, glaring at the jerk who seemed just a bit too smug, going on the same fishing story for the umpteenth time.

Two can play at that game. Jeb inhaled, drew in Myst and flared the sun inside him, tearing himself out of Terry’s annoyance magic with ease.

How do you like them apples, Ter—

Jeb got smacked with another shockwave, sending him through the window at breakneck speeds. He felt his armor Triggers flare as something nearly perforated him. He came to a rolling stop up against a heavy desk.

I would really like to take a nap right about now, but that’s probably the internal bleeding.

Jeb opened his eyes, elbowing himself into a seated position before he could decide resting was a good idea. The Heavy Gunner jumped through the window.

Low Myst. He’s a good candidate for a meat-shield. Jeb snaked out a thread of Myst and picked the kid up, using his struggling body as the window’s new shade while he tore the sock out of his mouth and peeked outside.

Terry was waiting for this, and he took a shot at Jeb’s exposed eyeballs with his nine-millimeter. Jeb wasn’t immune to bullets yet, so his FMO shields picked up the slack. It took three of them to stop the dollop of lead’s momentum, then return it to sender. At this range, it was pretty accurate too, because the gun blew up in Terry’s hand.

“Fuck!” Terry howled, clutching his bleeding hands.

“Let me down, you prick!” Corporal Stevens growled, ineffectively reaching for Jeb’s face.

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?” their leader called to him from outside. “How about we negotiate a cease-fire?” The old woman was stalking around the side of the building, slowly moving out of Jeb’s field of view.

“I might be tempted if you hadn’t broken our earlier Deal,” Jeb called back. “You tried to kill me.”

“Love taps. If I’d been trying to kill you, you would know.”

“They don’t feel like fuckin’ love taps,” Jeb shot back. “Since you broke our Deal and tried to kill me, I’ll have to collect alternate payment. You have a firstborn child I could have?”

“What are you, Rumplestiltskin?”

Jeb thought about it for a second.

“Eh.” Jeb waggled his hand in the window. “Probably learned from the same people.”

“I got him!” Jeb heard Cecil shout, sending a cold jolt down his spine. Jeb tried to lunge away from the window, but Cecil’s black strands were faster and stronger, erupting from the wall and floor and stapling him down tight.

“Cover your eyes, corporal!” General Meyers shouted from the side of the building.

Jeb dropped the Heavy Gunner and closed his eyes, desperately redirecting his Myst to wrap his body in a tight shell of telekinetic force.

The world went white and Jeb felt a blast of heat across his face through the shield. The telekinetic shell ruptured and Jeb’s remaining FMO shields popped in rapid succession, keeping Jeb relatively shrapnel-free. Relatively.

She blew up a propane tank on the side of the building! That crazy bitch!

Jeb tried to move, but the black threads were holding him down tight.

“He’s still moving!” Jeb heard Cecil’s voice from outside the building.

Goddamnit, they’re gonna get another free shot at me! Jeb thought, his mind spinning its wheels fruitlessly. The Jeep’s around the other side of the building. It’s not facing anyone at the moment, so the Heisenberg maneuver won’t work. Blowing it up wouldn’t help much because even if it distracted them, I can’t see them to take advantage of it! I’m screwed!

Whomp. There was the telltale golf-ball-through-a-tube sound of annihilation Myst, and the black strands evaporated like so much cotton candy in the rain.

Jeb lunged forward and scrambled out from behind the windowsill, glancing over his shoulder as he went. He caught a glimpse of Cecil falling over with a huge hole in his forehead. Legolas was up and in the air again, rapidly gaining altitude.

Oh, thank Jebus.

A few handgun rounds pinged off the drone’s lightweight armor and it spun off out of Jeb’s line of sight. Jeb took Terry’s momentary distraction to dive behind a sturdy-looking desk. Jeb’s FMO shields were dry, so bullets and shrapnel were back on the list of things to watch out for.

“Where is he!?” Jeb heard Corporal Stevens shout.

Okay, what are my options?

Jeb’s twenty-two Nerve pulled up his mental list of Triggers in a flash of insight.

Finger-gun clips: ‘ack’ x10 ☑ ‘pip’ x10 ☑ ‘kip’ x10 ☑ ‘Alpha Strike’ ☒

Full auto: ‘Demogorgon’ ☑ ‘Unladen Swallow’ ☑ ‘little friend’(foot) ☑

Shield: x4 ☑

Looped Armor: head ☑ torso ☑ legs ☑ upper arms ☑ lower arms ☑

FMO shield x50 ☒

Safety Phrases: restraints ‘3W’ ☒ ‘Scarabs’ ☑ ‘Plitskin’ ☑ ‘No homo’ ☑ ‘Room full of Charlies’ ☒

Grenades ‘go boom’:  ☑ ‘glove’ ☑ ‘knife’ ☑ ‘foot’ ☑

Saw ‘go fast’:  ‘yellow’ ☑ ‘red’ ☑ ‘green’ ☑ ‘blue’ ☑

Things ‘love daddy’: ‘glove’ ☑ ‘foot’ ☑ ‘cane’ ☑ ‘pants’ ☑ ‘shirt’ ☑ ‘knife’ ☑ ‘gun’ ☑

‘Too tight’: collar ☑ wrists ☑ fingers ☑ arms ☑ chest ☑ head ☑ legs ☑ ankle ☑ feet ☑

Bandage traps: ☑

I’m only a street away from the barracks, so the ‘love daddy’ commands should work.

Jeb peeked out and spotted Corporal Stevens trotting back from the armory with a really big gun. In about five seconds, the corporal would rip through Jeb’s hidey hole like it was made of tissue paper.

No time like the present. He’s almost directly between me and the barracks.

“Glove love daddy,” Jeb said quietly into the floor before pushing himself up.

“Wait!” Jeb said, holding out both his splayed hands to deploy two manual shield Triggers.

“Don’t you want to know about the traitor in your midst?” Jeb asked. Corporal Stevens frowned at him for a moment before his finger came off the guard, settling on the trigger. It seemed as though the corporal was beyond the point of talking.

“Behind you!” Terry shouted, hitting the deck as a pair of gloves swooped up behind Corporal Stevens, aiming for Jeb. The corporal glanced over his shoulder.

“Glove go boom,” Jeb said.

The gloves released the Myst hidden inside them, creating a burst of telekinetic shrapnel in every direction, including the Heavy Gunner’s back.

The big guy was ragdolled forward by the explosion, his bleeding form bursting halfway through the windowsill.

Jeb’s shields absorbed a few of the blades, then some of Terry’s return fire before shattering. A piece of lead whizzed by Jeb’s ear before he dropped to the ground again, taking shelter behind the heavy oak desk.

The nameplate on the floor beside him claimed it belonged to the base commander.

Interesting. That explains the nice carpet. I could probably put this in the orphanage’s rec-room for the older kids. Too bad it’s covered in glass.

“You guys sure you wanna keep going? Because I’m doing pretty good so far!” Jeb shouted over the desk.

“Jesse, get off your ass and pick up the corporal’s weapon and flush him out!”

So, I guess now we get to see if this ‘Jesse’ is Vresh or not. Taking all bets.

‘Jesse’ peeked out from behind a lacerated truck and scrambled forward, picking up the heavy gun and charging forward. He tried to leap over the windowsill, but his foot caught the edge and he spilled into the room in a tumble of limbs and heavy weaponry.

“No, don’t go i—Agh!” General Meyers gave a frustrated groan as ‘Jesse’ disappeared into the lion’s den.

‘Jesse’ stood up, razor-sharp glass falling off him harmlessly. He gave Jeb a deliberate glance before he began firing at the wall beyond him while trotting forward.

The young man stooped and slid behind the desk, joining Jeb. “You’re probably confused. I’m actually—”

“Vresh undercover, right?”

“—erk.” The apparent young man paled. “How did you know?”

“You’re clumsy.” Jeb shrugged.

“Oh. The boob thing,” she said, eyes narrowing in realization. “I knew you weren’t that skeevy.”

Jeb glanced off to the side. He actually was that skeevy, he just usually kept it on a tight leash out of professionalism.

“Jesse! Are you alive in there!? Goddamnit!”

“Point where I point,” Jeb whispered, motioning to her gun and raising his own finger.

Vresh nodded silently, hefting the heavy machine gun easily.

Where are you, General Ma’am?

“Ring love daddy.” Jeb heard a grunt from the window as the woman presumably tried to hold onto the slippery little ring. Then Jeb’s ring appeared from the top right of the window frame and flew towards Jeb, slipping itself onto his finger.

The ‘love daddy’ Trigger sought out the path of least resistance, and when possible it preferred straight lines, so the ring must have slipped out of her pocket, then fingers, and that edge of the window was the closest point to where the general had been standing.

Jeb created an imaginary line along the roof the ring had likely followed to get to the windowsill.

“Demogorgon,” Jeb muttered, and his finger opened fire, walking the shots back along the imaginary line, each telekinetic bullet puncturing a thumb-sized hole through the roof.

Vresh did the same, following the path of Jeb’s shots with her own machine gun. She didn’t have a skill to enhance its bullets like Corporal Stevens, but it was made to punch through buildings anyway.

“Motherfucker!” Jeb heard General Meyers grunt in pain. They must’ve grazed her.

“Scoot, scoot,” Jeb muttered, tapping Vresh on the shoulder and crawling along toward the door off its hinges leading out of the base commander’s office and deeper into the building.

Any minute, they were going to start tossing in grenades, and Jeb wanted more walls between him and them.

“Terry, go get backup. I’ll keep him bottled up.”

“Are you sure, ma’am? We’ve already lost—”

“We are not letting this piece of shit stop us from getting our country back! Don’t forget what’s at stake here.”

Goddamnit. Jeb had wanted to keep as many of these people alive as possible. He also wanted to keep breathing throughout this exchange. Backup threw a wrench in both of those goals.

“Wait a minute… Do you hear that sound?” Terry’s voice sounded from beyond the window.

“What!?” Meyers’ voice barked. “Just go get backup!”

“Sounds like a…song?”

Jeb’s head jerked up in alarm, ice running down the back of his neck. A song? A SONG?

Jeb rose off his bleeding knees and took the risk of peering out the window, spotting Terry the Blabbermouth out on the asphalt, staring into the distance with a dopey, spaced-out look on his face.

What the hell is wrong with him? I really hope it’s not what I think it is...

Jeb’s suspicions were proven correct when Terry started laughing. At first, it sounded like a chuckle, like someone had just told a somewhat amusing joke. Then it became more forced, measured.

“Hah. Hah. Hah.”

Then the gusts of air coming out of his mouth became strained, like a cat coughing up a hairball.

“Huuh. Huuuh. Huuh.”

Terry no longer looked amused. Tears were streaming down his face as his whole body seemed to swell to accommodate something inside him. His jaw began to distend like a snake’s, popping audibly as it disconnected from his skull.

When a set of fingers found purchase on Terry’s upper jaw and began heaving themselves out of his mouth, into the scintillating light of the sky above them, Jeb knew the Roil had arrived.

Chapter 9: 7 Minutes in Heaven

Jeb noped out.

“Nope,” Jeb grunted. “Nope, nope, nope.” He saw the rainbow colors scintillating on the horizon beyond Terry and knew they were screwed.

“It’s the Roil!” Jeb and Vresh said at the same time.

“We’ve gotta get the fuck out of here!” Jeb shouted, lunging to his feet, pausing when Vresh’s iron grip caught his hand.

“Running away is a gamble once you’re inside its range, no matter how fast you are!” Vresh said. “It fluctuates direction! You could be going into it at full speed for all you know! We need to seek shelter!”

Shelter…like a bomb shelter? Jeb thought, raising a brow.

“How deep!?”

“Ten feet of loose earth, two feet of stone, or six inches of solid steel!”

I’m in an Air Force base, there’s gotta be plenty of bomb shelters. They wouldn’t just… Jeb’s gaze drifted to the fancy hardwood desk, the nice carpet, and the base commander’s nameplate.

When Jeb was in the army, he’d had the occasional task that required him to go to the officer side of buildings. It always amazed him what a different world it was on the other side. COs got all the fancy stuff. Staircases with shiny aluminum railings, carpeted stairs, cushy chairs, and…

Private bomb shelters, maybe? For the base commander, Jeb could see it.

“Start looking for a hatch in the ground, or something!” Jeb shouted, trying really hard not to listen to the sound crawling around behind his eyeballs.

He injected the entire fancy carpet with his Myst and brutally tore it off the floor, but found nothing.

Nope. Jeb lunged to his feet and threw the door to the hall open, looking for places the designers of the building would think to put a bomb shelter.

Wow. Maybe the elevator labeled ACC Mission Control Center? Too fucking lucky. Jeb lunged toward the elevator and found himself going back toward the window, barely stopping himself from tumbling out into the open.

“It messes with directiooon!” Vresh shouted, her voice slowing down drastically as a wave of time dilation passed over her.

“That door!” Jeb shouted, pointing at the inconspicuous double doors before hopping backwards and slightly to the left, angling toward the door. Direction flipped again, but Jeb was ready for it this time, and adapted with barely more than a stumble, correcting himself with Myst.

Vresh got to the door first and tore it open, lodging her fingers into the unpowered doors of the elevator. Jeb followed in behind her a second later, then slammed the mangled door shut. Or maybe it was a few minutes. Time was really hard to track at the moment.

The two of them huddled in the tight quarters of the elevator. The sound and strange distortions were quieter inside the elevator, but they could still hear them.

“What kind of shelter is this tiny?” Vresh demanded, glaring at him. “This isn’t going to protect us from mutating, it’s just going to make it slower.”

“Not a shelter,” Jeb said, sliding up the plexiglass on the side of the elevator and yanking down the Big Red Handle. One good thing Jeb liked about the military: They made everything stupid-easy to use, because you lose a lot of IQ in an emergency.

I can’t believe I looked under the carpet, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

When the Big Red Handle hit the bottom, whatever brakes were holding the unpowered elevator in place were released, and for an instant, he and Vresh—in a man’s body—were suddenly weightless, falling through space.

Jeb estimated they fell about twenty feet before the emergency brakes kicked back in and slowed their descent, just enough so a normal human wouldn’t get injuries.

Jeb didn’t stick the landing, and went down, accidentally dragging Vresh down with him. The buxom enforcer—in a man’s body—landed on top of him, her breath—and beard—tickling his face.

…Yeah, it’s not doing anything for me. ‘Jessie’ wasn’t exactly in Jeb’s strike zone.

Vresh coughed and pushed herself up, looking at the elevator with newfound respect. “We must be thirty feet below the surface.”

“Try the doors.” Jeb motioned to the mangled double doors. Vresh peeled them open again, using her old finger-holds, revealing a short hallway leading to a heavy vault door straight out of Fallout.

Shit, are we gonna be able to get that open? Jeb wondered to himself. The electronic lock was dead, seeing as the power had been cut off since the Stitching. The military designs redundancies. It’s not an actual bank vault; there has to be a way to manually get it open...

…on the inside.

“There should be a lever or a circular handle to open it from the inside,” Jeb said. “I’ll try and—”

“I’ve got this,” Vresh said, walking up to the door and putting her back to it.

She reached out with her hands, which simply ended at mid-bicep, with nothing but a black void remaining where her arms should’ve been. She frowned, her eyes darting off to the side as her arms wiggled, apparently feeling around.

“Ah, there it is.” Her arms began wiggling rapidly, and a moment later, there was a hiss of air as the vault came unlatched, swinging open.

Vresh drew her arms out of the void and entered the bomb shelter.

The main room was filled with dark computers. There were a couple lights still on, casting dim illumination on the EMP-shielded command center. How the lights were still powered, Jeb couldn’t say. Nuclear batteries designed to last fifty years, perhaps? It was just enough juice to see by, not enough to run any of the machines.

The sound of breaking concrete drew Jeb’s attention back to the massive double doors and the hallway beyond.

The elevator’s walls buckled and folded, dipping the top of the box below the door opening long enough for a bloody body to drag itself through and collapse onto the ground. Once it was past, the walls sprang back up with the sound of a massive steel drum.

“Help,” Corporal Stevens groaned, staring straight up and panting like a newborn deer as he lay on the concrete. The kid was bleeding heavily from the lacerations on his back. Jeb didn’t know how he’d mustered the strength to bend the steel siding of the elevator, but it seemed like it had used the last dregs of the Heavy Gunner’s energy.

Any port in a reality-storm, I guess.

Jeb’s practical side advocated leaving Corporal Stevens to die right there in the hall outside the vault door. The kid was dangerous, and once he recovered, they were going to be enemies again. And he might recover pretty damn quick, too, given how high his Body was. Jeb could always loot his body on the way out.

Jeb’s empathic side wanted to help the kid before he bled out because it was the right thing to do. Jeb had spent a little time with him and he knew he was a good kid, if possessed of a somewhat irrational dislike of aliens. Only somewhat irrational, because his parents had died within the last six months, and—surprise—it had something to do with the Stitching. Hard not to blame aliens for that.

Jeb’s fairy side said: ¿Por qué no los dos?

“Hey Corporal,” Jeb said as he approached, kneeling outside of the man’s reach. He might be exhausted, but the kid had just treated steel like cardboard. Not a good idea to get your neck within wringing distance of those hands.

“Let’s make a Deal. I’ll bring you into the shelter and patch you up, and in exchange, you don’t try to hurt me, and you’ll owe me a favor.”

The basics of fairy negotiation was to catch someone at their most vulnerable and really screw them over for peanuts. Bleeding out on a concrete floor was pretty damn vulnerable.

The Heavy Gunner nodded.

Click.

Jeb felt the Deal click into place, and he felt the sudden need to hold up his end. He used telekinesis to lift the kid off the ground and gurneyed him into the shelter, shutting the massive doors before any more surprises came through the compromised elevator.

“Hold still, this isn’t gonna hurt,” Jeb said, pulling his ring off his finger. Jeb wanted to know if the kid had any surprises in store for him.

Vresh watched as Jeb blew into the ring, encompassing Corporal Stevens in roiling grey Myst, which sank into his bones and lit him up from the inside for a moment before it leapt back out, forming a screen and giving Jeb a simple breakdown of his Class and Stats.

Steven Stevens

Heavy Gunner, level 26

Accolades: Mongo’s Strength, Codole’s Mysticism

Body 35

Myst 5

Nerve 12

Abilities: Anti-Material Rounds

Nothing out of the ordinary there, Jeb thought, nodding. He wanted to make sure his grunt was just a grunt and not secretly capable of poisoning their food or controlling their minds. You never know anymore.

“Okay, I need a first aid kit,” Jeb said, throwing a side door open and checking it out. He glanced at Vresh. “It’s usually a plastic box with a big red cross on it. Or something like that.” Jeb ditched the broom closet and moved on to the next side-room.

They found the emergency supplies in a matter of moments. Thank god for uniformity. It was like walking through a ghost of his memory. Everything was almost exactly where Jeb expected it to be. Jeb turned their gunner over and put all his effort into stopping the bleeding. With how high the kid’s Body was, nothing short of massive trauma and blood loss would kill him.

Getting your back mauled by glove-grenades was pretty traumatic.

Inspecting the wounds, Jeb was relieved to see that the cuts hadn’t gotten any further than the muscle. He’d be walking again in no time. The kid’s body was like hardwood, though, and Jeb was forced to get power tools and wire to stitch him up, since the needle kept bending.

Vresh was fairly interested in the process, and Jeb was glad to have her on, assisting. If the corporal got violent, she could restrain him. Hopefully.

“I don’t think you need to worry about infection too much,” Jeb said as he put on the finishing touches, setting aside the bloody power drill and bending the final suture with a pair of pliers before clipping it. “Your body is magically enhanced and bacteria are not. Don’t ask me how it works.”

Jeb didn’t wanna fall down that rabbit hole. Everybody had that bank of gross facts to draw from, and Jeb remembered that only ten percent of your body is human and the rest is microbes.

How do those symbiotic microbes get empowered by The System? If you raised them out of balance, they would be more damaging than anything else.

Nope, not falling down this rabbit hole.

Jeb just needed to buy a microbiologist and a chemist. Have them figure it out.

“That’s reassuring,” Corporal Stevens groaned into the table. At least local anesthetics still worked so the kid wasn’t thrashing everywhere. “So, how long are we going to be here?”

Jeb glanced at Vresh.

“The Roil should be past us in a few hours. It rarely stops.”

“How do you know that, Jessie?” the corporal asked. “You an E.T. lover like Jeb?”

Vresh smiled. “Something like that.” She glanced at Jeb. “I’m going to go get changed. Do you think this place has some spare clothes?”

“Probably not in your size,” Jeb said, shaking his head.

“I’ll have to improvise, then. This is getting stuffy.” ‘Jessie’ motioned to his body.

“The heck are you on about?” the corporal asked, watching Jessie saunter off.

“I swear to god that guy is gay,” Stevens said as soon as she was gone.

“I hope not,” Jeb said. He had been secretly hoping to catch the transformation, but again: professionalism.

The corporal frowned at him from his spot on the table.

“So what’s your name, anyway?” Jeb asked, despite having already read it. It was the polite thing to do.

“Steven.”

“Steven Stevens?” Jeb asked incredulously.

“I was the youngest of four brothers. I think my parents just didn’t give a shit anymore, at that point.”

“Well Steven, you just stay put and I’ll go grab you something to eat…assuming this place has anything.” Jeb set his hand down on the table and created a Trigger that would make a ton of noise if Steven tried to sneak around.

Okay, now all we need to do is grab some grub without walking in on Vresh. Jeb had seen enough walking-in-on-a-girl-half-naked tropes to avoid them.

KSL: Knock, Speak, Listen.

Jeb went over to the storage room where he’d seen MREs earlier, while looking for first aid equipment. “Vresh, if you’re in there, sound off,” Jeb said, nice and loud before listening for a moment. Nothing.

Jeb opened the door and had mixed feelings about finding the room empty. He grabbed an MRE, some bottled garlic sauce and two cans of refried beans, and headed back to the main room, where Steven was sprawled on the cleared-off computer desk.

“Keep your back as straight as you can. You could probably pop those sutures with a cough,” Jeb said, helping Steven sit up to eat.

The kid sat up and Jeb handed him a can of refried beans and a spoon from the MRE.

He gave Jeb an incredulous look.

“I learned this one from my sergeant, who learned it from his, in a line unbroken since World War Two,” Jeb said, popping the top of his bean-paste off. He took a big bite of unflavored beans to clear some room, then dumped a healthy amount of sauce into the can, followed by half the scrambled eggs from the MRE.

“He called it The Fumigator.”

“Why?” Stevens asked.

“’Cause the gas will kill insects and small animals,” Jeb said, taking a bite. “Tastes good though.”

Steven looked doubtful, but he copied Jeb, eyebrows rising as he consumed the egg-bean-garlic-sauce mush.

“That’s not bad.”

“Give it an hour or two.”

Steven chuckled at that, shoveling the mixture into his mouth with the enthusiasm of a grunt. The biggest keys for making a Fumigator taste good is starving the person for a day or so beforehand, and them being young enough to not have had anything better.

“So before she gets back, I wanna warn you not to freak out,” Jeb said, taking another bite of his Fumigator. “I’m pretty sure she could kill you without breaking a sweat when you were at your best. You’re not at your best right now, and she’s got no incentive to keep you alive, so mind your manners. Understood?”

“No. What do you mean by ‘she’?”

Vresh chose that moment to return. She was back in her original body, six and a half feet tall, reddish orange, with wicked curves in her horns, long black hair and wearing an XL men’s uniform.

“Gods, that’s better,” she said, drying her hair and stretching out. “Good news: The showers work, but they’re cold.”

I can tell.

“Swallow your food, Steven,” Jeb muttered. Steven swallowed.

Jeb could see the entire spectrum of emotions cross the kid’s face: surprise, intrigue, lust, anger, fear, lust, betrayal, some more fear, a glance at Jeb, then cautious neutrality.

“So, you’re not human,” Steven said.

“I never said I was.” She answered with a hint of a smile.

“Hah!” Jeb slapped his knee, picturing it in his head. Can you imagine if ‘Jessie’ went up to them and said, ‘Hello, I am a human named Jessie?’ Most people don’t need to prove they’re human. Until recently, anyway.

Steven didn’t seem to find it as amusing as Jeb. “But you knew the entire plot of The Stand. You said The Dark Crystal traumatized you as a kid!”

“It’s amazing what some interviews and a little self-study will do for you,” Vresh said, tossing the towel onto a nearby monitor.

Steven scowled. Whatever his opinion, he kept it to himself, which was probably for the better.

******

Jebediah Trapper

Mystic Trapsmith, Level 39

Accolades: Krusker’s Brawn, Siren’s Cunning, R-R-RubU’s Mysteries, Lagross’s Power

Body 21 (18+3)

Myst 71 (48)

Nerve 26 (23)

Abilities: >>FATAL EXCEPTION. Ability missing or corrupted. Awaiting resolution by Administrator.<<<

Accolade Pending: Lagross’s Power suspended due to multiple instances. Awaiting resolution.

Jeb had the presence of mind to check his stats that evening. He’d grown just a bit stronger and collected a handful of points in the exchange. Either from the general, from Stevens, Vresh, or possibly a royalty from Guiding one of his orphans.

Two days went by agonizingly slowly. Needless to say, there was a lot of tension in the air. It practically wafted off Steven as he sat in the corner of the bunker while they did things like playing checkers and passing the time with famous stories.

During that time, Jeb learned why Vresh was so clumsy: She spent a good portion of her time shapeshifted and undercover for the emperor, which jumbled her proprioception all up with bodies of different sizes and shapes.

They told each other stories about high school, too. Jeb had gone to a grimy backwater school whose primary charm was nobody ever shot nobody there.

“Well, it was more of a problem after I was already out of school,” Jeb admitted.

Vresh went to an incredibly privileged school for the young elite, constructed entirely of marble laced with faradan additive, which kept dirt and grime from touching it. There were literal ivory towers made from the teeth of beasts that barely fit in the oceans they were hunted from. She said it was boring and dry, but Jeb could read between the lines: She went to fancy rich-person high school.

And from every point on the school grounds, the students could look up and see the emperor’s castle, which rose high above the white city of Mestikos.

“Mestikos. It’s known for its healers, right?” Jeb asked. “I got a Vivicant Cane in the Impossible Tutorial that mentioned something about it.”

“The Mestikos it was referring to was Old Mestikos. It was a keegan city lost to the desert during the Age of Legends. Its destruction marked the transition from keegan being the dominant power in Pharos, to the rise of the kitri dynasty.”

“Oh.”

“An object that can heal is beyond modern medical magic,” Vresh said. “That relic is a collector’s piece, and exceedingly valuable for its utility as well. You could probably buy half a city. Five thousand bulbs, minimum. What happened to it?”

“I lost it saving a girl and her baby,” Jeb admitted.

Vresh blinked, then patted him on the shoulder. Her hands were so warm, he could feel the heat radiating through his shirt. “They were worth it.”

“I tell myself that,” Jeb said with a shrug. “But I haven’t seen them in—”

“Hey guys,” Steven said, frowning. “You feel that?”

Jeb and Vresh raised their heads and closed their eyes.

The oppressive weight above them was gone. It was hard to say how long it had been gone, but it seemed as though the Roil had finally decided to move on.

Maybe it had to stop and pick its teeth, Jeb thought sourly. He didn’t know how many other people made it to bunkers, but it couldn’t have been many. The Roil had been well-fed on Nellis.

Jeb wasn’t sure why he felt like the storm was a living thing. Just a hunch.

They carefully opened the front door and went out to the elevator to listen. There were none of the strange noises or subtle shifts in air pressure that accompanied the Roil.

“Did you have to break the elevator?” Jeb complained as they tried to straighten the metal box out. The emergency brakes were clamped down and some of the siding was rubbing against the wall, making it even harder to pull them up.

“Yes,” Steven said, trying to shove a dent out and having moderate success. “The top of the elevator is shielded, for obvious reasons.”

“Here,” Vresh said, sliding past Jeb and putting a hand on the tilted ceiling. With a grunt, the enforcer shoved upward, popped the ceiling back up and straightened the elevator enough to move.

“You get the brakes, I’ll pull us up.”

Jeb didn’t argue and reached out and tugged on various parts outside the elevator. He couldn’t see with his Myst, but he could feel movement. With some practice, Jeb was pretty sure he could figure out how to visualize his environment with pulses of Myst. Like a bat.

But for now, he just fumbled around, tugging on things until he found the brakes.

“Got ’em,” Jeb said, when he found them and pulled them open.

Vresh reached up toward the ceiling, and her arms disappeared, then she tugged herself up like she was climbing a rope. She rose up into the air, then lifted her legs and braced them on the ceiling, seemingly crouching upside down. Her face was about even with Jeb’s, but gravity drew her hair down to his knees and made the contents of her shirt block her view of the ceiling.

That didn’t slow her down. With a soft screech of metal on metal, the elevator started rising as she pulled.

“I was half-certain we were going to have to cut our way out,” Steven said, eyeing Vresh on the ceiling, hauling on something hand over hand, minus the arms.

They rose, slowly but surely, keeping their ears open for any sign of the Roil. Finally they made it to the surface again, and Jeb redeployed the brakes.

They cautiously stepped out into the open.

They were greeted by familiar blue skies and harsh, beating sun. The land, however, was wildly altered.

Beams of metal were bent and twisted, and a thick coat of faradan covered most surfaces, almost six inches deep in places, comparing the height of faradan to the level of door frames and such. It appeared the Roil lingering in one place led to thicker stone. Nellis was buried under tons of force-creating rock.

Well, almost all of it.

What was left of Terry was strewn across the outside of the base commander’s office building, a twitching heap of flesh that by some unfortunate turn of events, was still alive. There were folds of Terry stacked on top of Terry, like he’d tried to crawl out of his own mouth again and again—a drug-induced nightmare made real by the Roil.

Now that it had passed, there was no way for him to wake up. Jeb didn’t dislike the guy that much, so he decided to extend an olive branch.

“Hey, Terry,” Jeb said, kneeling down beside the twitching mass of flesh. “Can you understand me? Blink twice if you can understand me.”

The multiple eyes blinked twice.

Steven sprinted back into the office building and threw up in the corner, and Jeb winced. The prospect of being conscious in that state was unnerving.

“Terry, I’d like to make you a Deal. It’s gonna be a long, hot day, and I have no idea how much longer you’re gonna keep on suffering here without intervention. Could be hours, could be days. Maybe even longer. Here’s the Deal: I’ll put you out of your misery in exchange for your Class Ability. I figure you’re not going to get much use out of it.”

Vresh frowned and gave Jeb a sidelong glance.

“One blink for yes, two for no.”

One blink.

Click. Jeb felt the Deal settle in his chest.

“Okay then,” Jeb said, beginning to feel around the temple of Terry’s original skull. It only took him a few moments to locate the squirmy thing attached to the side of Terry’s head, still intact despite the Roil passing through. The storm might have less presence in the Fate dimension.

“Can you hand me that thick electrical wire jutting out of the building there?” Jeb asked, pointing at some copper wiring. Vresh yanked it out of the wall with ease and handed it to him.

Jeb slid the thick copper wire through the tiny portal into the fifth dimension, then wrapped it around the invisible worm-like Class Ability attached to Terry’s skull, only tangible to the wire itself.

Jeb cut the stitches and freed the eel-like Ability with a yank, then funneled his Myst through the ring as a catalyst.

There was a flash of light, and suddenly the unreal became real. There was an odd, blue-skinned eel in Jeb’s grip with oversized fangs that jutted out beneath it. It looked nearly identical to Jeb’s Class Ability when he’d pulled the thing out of his head, save for the coloring.

Moment of truth. Jeb’s biggest concern was that the book that spawned out of the creature would be blank for him. Hopefully the Deal he’d made with Terry would influence that.

You belong to me, Jeb thought. This time, he didn’t freak out or drop it. The creature wiggled, struggling in his palm for a moment before biting him, injecting its venom. Jeb winced before the ghost-like memories of a long-dead master of Myst flooded Jeb’s consciousness, battering up against his own will.

Knowing what to expect, Jeb sank into a cross-legged posture, maintaining his sense of self well enough to not act out the old keegan’s daily routines as his consciousness mingled with an ancient echo.

In a few minutes, the tide of memories pulled back, leaving him with nothing but a lingering sense of familiarity. In his palm, the eel stopped struggling before its spine straightened, stiffening in his grip. Its skin stretched, and pages emerged to fill the new cavity.

“What. The fuck?” Vresh asked.

“Waste not, want not,” Jeb muttered, standing. Jeb formed blades of telekinetic Myst and diced the former human into tiny pieces. Once he was sure Terry was completely dead, he paused to read the cover.

Sonic Mysticism 101.

That might come in handy, Jeb thought, tucking the scaly blue book under his elbow.

He’d had the idea of taking Ability books from other people rattling around in the back of his head ever since he’d pulled his own out a couple months ago, but a good opportunity hadn’t come up. He didn’t want to hurt someone he cared about without testing it first, nor did he want to hunt people down and pry their Ability from them like a psycho, so he kept the idea on the back burner.

Maybe he wouldn’t be able to do much with this one book, but if Jeb got enough of them, he could expand his knowledge base and begin to peel back the mysteries of the nature of Myst itself. Eddie was more interested in approaching it like an extension of physics, but Jeb had his suspicions that would only carry so far.

I mean, how the hell does a fifth-dimensional eel turn into a book, anyway? Riddle me that, Eddie.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” Steven said, looking down at the diced flesh of his former co-worker. “We had the monolith. The Roil wasn’t supposed to come here.”

Jeb met Vresh’s gaze, and the two of them turned to look at the distant monolith. The massive pale blue spike of pure faradan was peeking above a distant hangar, seemingly undamaged by the reality storm that had just swept through.

“I think that’s worth a look-see.”

“Agreed,” Vresh said, nodding.

The three of them jogged over to the monolith, their steps buoyed by the faradan’s odd force effect that pushed them away.

If the monolith really had been what was keeping the Roil away from them, then there might have been some kind of sabotage, some jagged tear in the stone with sparking wires that might suggest who or what had killed so many people.

When Jeb and Vresh arrived, there were two figures standing at the base of the pale blue stone. Each of them was seven feet tall, dressed in flowing robes, and extraordinarily pale. Keegan.

The one on the left had a sword’s sheath peeking from under his robes, and a goddamn Barrett over his shoulder!

The one on the right was tapping on a field of bright blue symbols that were scrolling down the front of the monolith, seemingly typing.

Neither of them were facing Jeb and co. Maybe they could—

“What the fuck do you E.T.s think you’re doing!” Steven shouted, beating the faradan off his gun and leveling it at the two keegan.

Or we could do that, Jeb thought sourly.

The one with the rifle whispered into his companion’s ear. Keegan had sensitive skin on the side of their head like a frog, not ears per se. This contributed to their skull-like appearance.

“Eh?” The typist stopped and turned to look at them.

“Ji-ban, Gutei seeshi tsigeza, Vresh Tekalis. Ist zhe Xen shi Mestikos. Jzesh ki sho uotos, nos ji’ish shieban, esheikutz?”

The odd keegan performed an elegant bow.

“You’re an enforcer? I thought you looked familiar,” Steven said, his finger twitching on the trigger guard.

“You understood what he said?” Jeb asked.

“You two need to run,” Vresh said, a bead of sweat forming on her brow.

Chapter 10: Lost in Translation

“You two need to run,” Vresh said, a bead of sweat forming on her brow.

“Fuck that. This guy just admitted to killing everyone here,” Steven said.

“He did?” Jeb asked, totally lost.

“Run!” Vresh shouted. Her body flickered forward, followed by a blast of wind. She raised her left hand and it flickered, a sword appearing in it. Blood geysered out of the throat of the keegan on the left, and he collapsed to the ground, choking and clutching his neck, his sheath empty.

The black-robed keegan waved dismissively, and Jeb thought he saw a thin beam of dark blue Myst strike the melas woman in the center of her forehead before she could react. Vresh’s eyes rolled into her skull and she slumped over, barely avoiding falling on the sword in her hand as she slid to a halt directly in front of the robed keegan.

The keegan in black shook his head and clicked his tongue before a spark of minty-white Myst jolted the rifle-bearing alien back to health. The keegan gasped a grateful breath of air, taking his hands away from his neck in disbelief.

“Fuck this!” the Heavy Gunner standing next to Jeb shouted, pulling the trigger.

Nothing happened. Another pencil-lead-thin beam of dark blue struck the corporal in the forehead, and he toppled over his favorite weapon, unconscious or possibly dead.

Well, this day has gone south quickly, Jeb thought, glancing at his two hopefully unconscious companions. Jeb didn’t even know how it’d been done. It reminded Jeb of those professionals in pre-apocalypse YouTube videos who did their work so quickly and smoothly it eluded the eye and looked like a magic trick. The keegan had just made magic look like a magic trick. That was saying something.

“Ish shei jish suo gi?” the gibberish-speaking keegan asked, pointing at Jeb.

“That’s the one I told you about,” the rifle-bearing alien said as he sat up. “The stain.”

Jeb had no idea what he had done specifically that had warranted that nickname, but it seemed like he was starting off on a bad foot.

“Whoa, I was just doing a job here. I’d rather not get murdered,” Jeb said, hands raised, heart pounding in his ears. I need a Myst insulator to hide behind or something; this guy is taking people out with an outrageous amount of skill… But all the gold is elsewhere. How the hell am I gonna get out of here in one piece?

Jeb caught a break when the gibberish-speaker got real excited after hearing Jeb talk.

“Vah, ji shei, vah ji shei!?”

“He denies culpability and begs for his life,” the keegan on the left said, giving Jeb the stink eye.

“Shi ji go zetch ok’zheit.”

“My employer wants to know why you don’t have The System.”

Jeb’s mind whirred. That’s why we can’t understand each other. The other guy must be missing The System too, otherwise we’d get a translation. That brought up the question of how this guy was missing his. It seemed like, short of literal divine intervention, you couldn’t really opt out of inclusion in The System. That implied this guy was some form of important.

Well, that and knocking out an enforcer without breaking a sweat.

“I do have The System, but I’ve been blacklisted,” Jeb said slowly, pumping Myst Triggers into the ground through his feet, aimed at rescuing Vresh and Stevens. He was worried the faradan would block it at first, but the stone was a fairly good conductor of string-state Myst.

The Triggers were designed to grab the two unmoving bodies and fling them a quarter mile to the south. Both of them had high enough Body that a little high-speed ragdoll collision with concrete wouldn’t bother them too much.

Jeb didn’t have time to design something fancy.

“He’s been blacklisted,” the gun-toting keegan translated.

“Ha ha ha ha! Ban’vi! Ban’vi!” The towering keegan clapped his hands together in delight. His gaze fixed on the book in Jeb’s hand, and the wizard unleashed a flurry of questions.

“My employer would like to know if you’ve had any formal schooling. The book you’re carrying is rather rare.”

Keep him talking, Jeb thought, spreading his Triggers through the ground, some of them to shield him the moment a razor-thin beam of Myst was shot his direction, several others to attack—read, buy time—and a final one to fling Jeb backwards at max speed.

If Vresh got taken out that quick, then Jeb didn’t really see himself heroically winning against impossible odds. He saw himself getting cut in half by a casual Myst laser.

Back to the conversation.

“Formal schooling, yes, but no Myst in the curriculum, which I assume is what you’re talking about.” Jeb raised the book in his hand. “I pulled this out of a guy’s head.”

The rifle-bearing Keegan blinked. “He says no, and he stole the book.”

Asshole! Translate better!

The alien in the black flowing robe… I’ll just call him The Employer. He looked down at the ground curiously and cocked a brow, asking Jeb a question.

“My employer presumes your lack of schooling explains why you’ve failed to use Korzuth’s Tempering to render your Myst packets in the ground environment-neutral or Zesh’nei’s Translation to deviate from applied kinetic Myst?”

Jeb’s jaw hung open.

The dude had been watching him set up his escape with the casual interest of a parent watching a toddler finger paint.

“Red riding hood,” Jeb said.

Dozens of strands of telekinetic Myst burst out of the ground, snagging Stevens and Vresh and flinging them into the distance, while others formed into spears of hardened air, aiming at the black-robed one.

Meanwhile, several dozen strands of Myst formed a complicated lever, aiming to catapult Jeb away at speeds his body might not even be able to withstand.

Then everything went to shit.

Some kind of force seized control of Jeb’s Triggers like a pro wrestler, suplexing them into the ground. A spray of cracked faradan rose up as Jeb’s ejection seat lever smacked into the ground, and all of Jeb’s spears sank into the ground mere inches away from the alien’s feet, weighed down by some enormous power.

“My employer is somewhat disappointed. He asks if that’s all you can do, if you would prefer to have windows in your cell, and if you have any food allergies he should be aware of while experimenting on you.”

Jeb’s skin turned icy cold. Nope. Nobody’s experimenting on this boy.

“Knife love daddy, gun love daddy, saw love daddy, Jeep pick me up.”

“Umm… He said some gibberish. A bunch of stuff about loving daddy?”

The Jeep around the corner roared to life, shaking off a thin layer of faradan, and distracting them for an instant while Jeb grabbed himself with Myst and ran like a bitch.

Well, he tried.

The magical pro wrestler grabbed his Myst strings and yanked him violently back down to Earth. He hadn’t felt it directly earlier since the Triggers weren’t connected to him, but now it felt like someone was grabbing a phantom limb and twisting it behind his back while giving him a noogie.

It was unpleasant, painful and humiliating.

Jeb tumbled to a halt, sliding face-first on the smooth stone. He flipped himself over with a grunt and held out his open right hand while angling his wooden foot toward the alien casually walking toward him.

“Say hello to my little friend,” Jeb said.

“He says, ‘say hello to—’”

A rapid-fire burst of annihilation Myst shot through the air between them, and The Employer’s eyes widened a bit before he shoved his rifle-bearing companion out of the way and ducked.

It wasn’t exactly street-legal, but Jeb hadn’t found anything that performed better than annihilation Myst. Plus, he was a Citizen now. He’d just get a slap on the wrist.

Jeb tried to sink a shot into The Employer, but the keegan seemed to gracefully slip between the shots in a way that defied logic. Some of the shots only had a couple inches between them. Keegan were thin, but they weren’t that thin.

Jeb’s ‘little friend’ Trigger ran out just as he felt the metal handle of the murder-buckler land in his hand. He kicked himself to a stand as The Employer straightened his jacket, aiming the green arrow at him.

“Green go fast,” Jeb muttered. The blade tugged out of his grip and began spinning violently, tearing through the air toward the keegan’s face.

The Employer held out a hand, and Jeb was mortified to watch glowing orange Myst, his color of Myst, reach out and snag the spinning saw blade out of the air before plucking the remaining Triggers out of it like a child plucking the wings off a fly.

Under the absolute power, a small part of Jeb felt intrigued at the proof that one person could use more than one kind of Myst.

But mostly he just felt terror.

“My employer says entirely physical attacks are a sign of limited—”

Jeb’s eyes flicked to where his Jeep was heading toward them, its angle about to point straight toward the two keegan.

Just a fraction of a second more…

“The Heisenberg maneuver, Nitro.”

A volley of fifty heavy-duty spears of telekinetic force launched out of the front of the truck, straight towards The Employer. Then the Nitro Trigger overwrote the ‘pick me up’ Trigger and put the pedal to the metal, in addition to shoving the Jeep forward, helping the vehicle reach a level of acceleration it could never have achieved on its own.

The spears evaporated on the surface of a faint bubble that surrounded The Employer like drops of water on a hot oven, barely hinting at the shape of his defenses.

The Employer cast a curious glance behind him before the charging Jeep clipped his robe, catching the rifle-bearing keegan across his midsection and putting him through a wall.

Missed. Damnit.

“Alpha strike!” Jeb shouted, throwing his palm forward. He’d recharged it during their stay underground.

The wild assault of telekinetic Myst sizzled and evaporated against an invisible bubble, just as before.

“Knife go boom!” Jeb shouted, scrambling backward as The Employer glanced away from the Jeep halfway through the wall. Jeb’s knife exploded into shrapnel right beside the keegan, but the explosion seemed to wash harmlessly around him.

Son of a bitch! Nothing’ll put a dent in this guy! There’s gotta be fucking something… Jeb had a pretty freakin’ big bag of tricks, but it was starting to run dry.

Myst-based attacks did nothing. Physical attacks did nothing….

Jeb felt the .44 revolver settle itself into his palm.

Without thinking, Jeb whipped the gun up and fired off three rounds. Two bullets warped around the keegan, and the last one wound up sandwiched between his fingers.

“Ist zhei dan kozheist?” he asked, eyeing the squished teardrop of lead. The keegan gave an irritated glance at where his translator had been driven through a wall before returning his gaze to Jeb. “Zi san lejaisho, ges annein zho jisht.”

Stupid! Jeb was kicking his own ass for wasting three bullets as he crawled backward, his heart beating violently in his chest. He might have been numb to threats of death, but being locked in a room and experimented on bypassed the scar tissue on his brain and got him good. He was panting from exertion and he hadn’t moved more than a couple steps, like the fear was clinging to him and tiring him out.

Not like the bullets could’ve done anything, anyway, Jeb thought sourly. I could kill myself with one. That’d show him. Experiment on me over my cold dead body, dickwad.

Jeb glanced down at the gun in his hand, wondering if this was really the end of his story.

Just past the handle of the revolver, Jeb spotted the very edge of the god-given Appraiser wrapped around his finger, and a crazy thought occurred to him.

Myst attacks don’t work. Physical attacks don’t work.

Jeb’s trembling fingers seized the Appraiser, dragging it off.

***The Mythos of Bullets***

Gunpowder was invented in 9th century China, but it wasn’t until the twelfth century that some mad geniuses raised the nitrate content on the mixture, put it inside a metal tube and created a ‘bullet’ that completely occluded the barrel, creating the modern definition of a ‘gun’ which allowed the gunpowder to exert as much force as possible.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Guns and bullets caught on slowly at first. They were cumbersome, slow to reload, hard to fire. Oftentimes a poor foot soldier would only get a single use off before his opponent would run him through with a spear.

But despite how difficult they were to use, they never quite fell out of favor, for one defining reason: The gun didn’t care how big, or skillful, or how brave the other guy was. They simply killed.

They shattered morale, they broke charges, they made horses lose their nerve, they made farmers as strong as the greatest warriors of their day, mortally wounding them with a single application of a spark.

And, over time, they only got better at what they did….

They really started catching on in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, when the matchlock was introduced alongside the musket, a standardized form that was relatively simple to learn and use, and allowed the soldier to concentrate his attention on aiming rather than lighting the gunpowder and trying not to blow his fingers off.

This standardized form and ease of use allowed large groups of soldiers to volley fire and create a predictable stream of death-dealing lead marbles.

Once cartridges were invented in the mid-nineteenth century, all bets were off. Repeaters were introduced that allowed a single soldier to fire off a dozen rounds in a matter of seconds, then machine guns were invented that allowed a two-man team to obliterate large formations.

That was the final nail in the coffin of the ‘let’s stand in a big line and shoot at each other’ era.

In came the age of trench warfare, followed by blitzkrieg a few decades later. Air, sea, land—every possible place people could murder each other, except space—guns in all their forms followed along, ready to mutilate the other guy with a twitch of a finger, regardless of how strong, fast, intelligent, or nice to puppies he was.

And they kept getting better.

When Xen caught the .44 bullet between his fingers, he was curious and asked Jeb if it was just a drop of lead. The concept of flinging lead at the other guy to kill them was foreign and quaint to him, as lead is too soft a material to penetrate a ‘modern’ warrior. The realities of life in a magic world simply do not align well with the physics of guns.

Something the sindio hadn’t really considered, though, was how much baggage guns have: the staggering amount of time and effort humans have spent perfecting these weapons, and how many millions of lives have been claimed by them. That kind of baggage develops something of a life of its own.

A Mythos, if you will. The Fate dimension is less about physics, and more about Mythos.

Yes, technically it’s a drop of lead, but it’s a drop of lead with nine hundred years of killing intent packed into it.

You put something like that in the fifth dimension, and you’re asking for trouble.

***Jeb***

This is gonna hurt, Jeb thought, wincing as he held the divine ring with swirling Myst in the center up to the barrel of the gun. He had considered using Myst to hold the ring there and save his fingers, but he didn’t want to give The Employer something he could take control over.

You know, assuming he can’t just puppet me whenever he wants, Jeb thought.

Jeb took a deep breath, shoved a bunch of Myst through the ring, and pulled the trigger.

There was a blast of light a hundred times greater than muzzle flash, and Jeb’s fingers immediately informed him exactly how bad of an idea he’d just committed to. The ring tumbled to the ground, and Jeb clenched a fist around the screaming burns on his thumb and forefinger.

Jeb snatched the ring off the ground and looked up at the approaching keegan. Ideally, he’d been blown to bits, but Jeb would take anything at this point.

The Employer’s brows were furrowed. He glanced around, seemingly wondering where Jeb’s bullet had gone. He patted himself down idly. Nothing.

The keegan shrugged and took another step toward Jeb before his leg buckled under the strain, nearly dropping him to the ground.

His eyes widened, staring at the leg that had seemingly betrayed him. The keegan stood up straight and held out his hands.

“Kol, zhep kees, gek zak GAN!” he shouted as a flood of maroon Myst emerged from his hands and formed a shimmering wall in the air that looked like a mirage.

The rifle-bearing keegan crawled out of the building, over the roof of Jeb’s Jeep and limped toward the shimmering wall.

Once both of them were standing behind the mirage, the wall swept over them, and they simply…vanished.

That was it? Jeb thought, brow raised, adrenaline still coursing through his veins. He tasted blood, a little.

Screw it, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Time to relocate. If the guy could teleport, then he’d better get far away from the last place the keegan had seen him. Except for one minor detail…

Jeb clambered to his feet and went looking for the nukes. He still had business to take care of before he could flee.

This is turning out to be more complicated than I expected, Jeb thought as he glanced back at the faradan monolith sunk into the center of the Air Force base. And I expected it to be pretty complicated.

“Wand love daddy?”

***Kol, level 58 Courier***

I think my entire body is a single bruise, Kol thought, staggering through the front door of Xen’s manor. Still, it was better than having his throat sliced open by his own sword. Kol still didn’t quite know how the melas woman had gotten it off of him.

The sindio strode ahead of him with purpose, like an old woman during a Kezdak sale. He was rattling off instructions to his minions as he strode past them, aiming for the second floor.

“Lien, someone’s going to probably discover my secret hideout today, so be prepared to move, and warm up the memory eraser. And just…be on standby for general mayhem, I suppose.”

“As you wish,” the sindio’s butler said with a bow.

Xen ducked his head into the side rooms where hundreds of very small, rotund men and women with shiny skin were experimenting with human chemistry.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are on emergency lockdown until further noti—”

A pressure cooker exploded beside Xen’s head, covering it with shrapnel and smoking acid.

Some of it got on a few of his bibble. The little people had a terrific resistance to chemicals, but they weren’t immune. They shrugged their lab coats off and wiped their skin down with towels, wincing in discomfort.

“Actually, you guys are fired. Get the fuck out of my house,” Xen said, head smoking. He slammed the door and continued down the hall, firing everyone in each of his Research and Development rooms.

“Umm…why—” Kol began.

“Why am I firing everyone?”

“Yes, that.”

“I realized my employees count towards my Impact. I am currently bleeding Impact. Think of it as staunching a wound. If they’re fired, they can’t get killed by the Fate dimension trying to balance itself with reality, because technically, they no longer work for me. I’ll hire them back once I’m fixed.”

That was surprisingly kind of him, although it begged the question…

“Why aren’t you firing me?”

The sindio glanced back at him, half of his face melting, little pieces of metal falling out of the drooping skin to reveal the skull beneath.

“Because I’m going to need a second pair of hands, and you’re the toughest minion I have on hand, so you probably won’t die. I’ll give you hazard pay.”

How reassuring, Kol thought, keeping a straight face.

BOOM!

Behind them, the door exploded off its hinges, revealing…a rather small human with arms that were almost keegan-thin. Its torso had an unpleasant hourglass shape to it, though. Probably a female.

“I am the Imperial Enforcer Casey Thompson. Upon investigating reports of disappearances, I discovered links to this building. You’re officially under investigation on suspicion of reaping or other malfeasance. I advise everyone to drop whatever you’re doing and come out with your hands on your head.”

“How did she—Ugh.” Xen drew a hand down his melting face. “Lien, could you take care of this and then relocate the lair?”

“Sir.” The melas butler nodded as Xen turned away, ignoring the enforcer at the other end of the hall.

“Hey! Hey, don’t leave!” she shouted as Xen began descending the stairs three at a time.

The last Kol saw of her, Lien was apologetically standing in her way.

Kol heard a fair amount of shouts and banging from upstairs, but it never seemed to come any closer. There was another, deeper voice shouting, a blast of fire that nearly followed them down the stairs, and several explosions, but the very short human didn’t appear at the top of the stairs.

Apparently, Lien was strong enough to stop an enforcer. Kol knew for a fact that he himself wasn’t strong enough to stop an enforcer. The fat melas woman being a case in point.

“I thought you said I was the strongest you had on hand.”

“‘On hand’ being the key phrase,” Xen said, heading for the Scary Door without a care in the world and throwing it open, dispelling the blanket of fear that made it so difficult to approach. “Lien’s busy.”

The entire building rocked.

Can’t argue with that.

Xen strode to the back of his human-tech workshop and threw open another door, marching through without pause. Kol’s skin felt the pressure change as they walked through the portal connecting Xen’s dungeon to his manor.

Suddenly they were walking under vaulted ceilings made of raw stone, surrounded by magical devices of every shape and size. Kol wasn’t an expert, but he did recognize a few from the old cautionary tales about sindio.

There’s the one he used to break the line of Jestan. Kol could tell by its egg shape with clear walls that allowed you to watch a bead of colored water split infinitely. It marked a lineage and killed everyone related to them.

There’s the one that eroded the ground below the town of Kisbei and sank a third of the kingdom around it into the earth. That one was shaped like a sword with an odd cross at the tip and had a mushroom for a pommel.

The hundreds, or even thousands, of other devices on display… Kol had no idea.

“It wasn’t actually supposed to kill the entire line,” Xen said, following his gaze as he snatched a strange plump ring of matte silver off a display. “I was experimenting with eugenics. I thought if I could maybe…select the fittest ruler out of each generation, eventually you would have an amazing king.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Of course, real life got in the way of that pretty quick. The machine selected young Tyzanti Vestos as the most ideal of the lot…but he was only twelve years old, so his minister killed him, took the title, and I got the blame. If I ever come back to the idea of breeding a line of kings, I’ll add a protection clause for the selected ‘stud king’.”

The ring in Xen’s hand was about the size of a man’s head, but it was very fat, only allowing barely enough space for a single hand to fit through. It had a flat spot on the bottom that seemed to have two indents for something.

Xen hooked a left turn and strode up to a large contraption against the side wall. It was composed of several enormous glass cylinders with head-sized dungeon cores at the bottom of each of them, and a thick metal band around each’s center.

The sindio pulled down a metal arm from the wall and fixed a metal plate to it that married with the fat ring of silver, hooking into the two depressions on the flat edge.

Humming, the ancient evil followed two thick tubes along the mechanical arm back to where they attached to the dungeon cores, fiddling with the seals to make sure they were solid.

Satisfied, the wizard flipped an oversized switch upward that broke the seal above the dungeon cores, allowing Myst to pour into their containers.

In a blink of an eye, an enormous amount of Myst was converted and channeled straight into the fat silver ring, and even Kol, Myst-dead as he was, could faintly see the swirling grey in the center of the ring.

“Alright, Kol,” Xen said, moving the mechanical arm in front of his chest. “I’m gonna need you to dig around in my chest in the Fate dimension until you find a bullet.”

“What?”

“A little drop of lead, about yay big?” Xen said, holding apart his thumb and forefinger.

In the distance, Kol heard something clatter, and a strange buzzing. He glanced back over the endless field of magical doodads, but couldn’t spot whatever was moving around.

“Focus, Kol. Bullet first, then we deal with whatever freed itself just now.”

There was more clattering, and this time Kol saw a few more stands fall over, releasing gods-knew-what into the sindio’s dungeon. There were things that could topple empires just sitting around in here!

“Kol, if we stop to chase these minor problems, they will continue happening until I die. If I die, it will most likely be after you, not before. So if you want to live, I’m going to need you to jam your fist inside me.”

The sindio tapped the ring pressed up against his chest.

Kol let out a growl and shoved his hand through the odd ring, feeling around for the wound.

Xen leaned up against the ring, seemingly relaxed as Kol dug around his insides on multiple dimensions.

“You know, this whole ordeal gives me an idea for what I could do with those bombs you brought back.”

Chapter 11: Something’s Missing

“Something’s missing,” Jeb muttered, tapping his fingers on the book as he pondered.

After the battle, Jeb and Vresh had scoured the base and the city around it and wiped all the nukes therein out of existence, but something still felt like it was missing. Jeb wasn’t a munitions guy—he couldn’t tell for sure if something was a regular missile, a fuel tank or a nuke—so he’d gone ahead and simply turned every questionable metallic object bigger than a toaster into a bigass puddle of water.

Still, he felt something was wrong, and it stemmed from his Deal with Vresh. When he completed his part of a Deal, there was a distinct sensation of things falling into place, like the tumblers of a lock, or the stars aligning above a blood altar.

Jeb’s last tumbler wasn’t cooperating. Someone had spilled soda on it, and it had become sticky and obstinate. That sensation was proof positive that there were still nukes in Nellis somewhere, and he couldn’t stop until he’d gotten them all.

“Something’s missing? Like what?” Smartass asked, emerging from the orphanage and picking up a butter knife before using it to saw a piece of Jeb’s sandwich off. The dull blade was comically big in her arms, but it did the job.

“Like a nuke.”

“Well, did you get all of them?” Smartass asked.

“Apparently not,” Jeb grumbled, flipping the page of Sonic Mysticism 101 and scanning its contents. “I just don’t know where else I could look.”

“You could take a Geiger counter?” Ron asked, his elbows on the table. Jeb had gotten a sweetheart deal from the necromancer for his necroplantation’s products, and Mrs. Everett always made sure to feed the ginger his own produce whenever he came by.

Today, that meant sandwiches.

“I could whip up something that could help narrow it down, but after the state you brought Legolas home in… I want fifteen percent,” Eddie said. The wild-haired inventor was seated to Jeb’s left.

Jeb scoffed. “As soon as I told you how much I was going to be paid for finishing the Nellis job, you switched to charging me percentages. Why is that?”

The wispy-haired roboticist shrugged innocently. “The singularity is expensive.”

“Please don’t do that,” Jeb said, wincing.

“I figure things are already fucked, so cracking general intelligence on magical robots couldn’t make it much worse.”

“We’re sitting in a mansion in clean clothes, eating BLTs on a lazy Saturday morning and things ‘couldn’t be much worse’?” Jeb asked incredulously. “Obviously, you and I have different standards.”

“Eh, fine. Then, if you want a Geiger-sniffing bot, the price is a hundred and fifty bulbs.”

“Dude, I still own you!” Jeb cried with faux indignation. “Make me a nuke-finding robot!”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to submit the emancipation paperwork.” Eddie scratched his chin before shrugging dismissively. If there was anyone who cared more about their passion than their freedom, it was Eddie.

“Are you sure you looked everywhere?” Nancy asked, temporarily leaving her animated game of super-tag to join the ‘grown-up’ table, where most of the adults of the orphanage had gravitated. The little girl had a sour-looking fairy riding on top of her mop of black hair.

“Of course, I looked everywhere in Nellis that could conceivably house a nuke! Top to bottom, end to end!”

Jeb had also collected a rather sizeable assortment of Vegas-themed lenses in the process, too, but they were mostly helpful for little more than gambling, fucking and making margaritas.

Mmmm. margarita lens.

“My dad always said the thing you’re looking for is in the last place you look,” Nancy chimed in at his side.

“Of course it’s in the last place you look, because you stop look—” Jeb froze under a flashbulb realization.

He thought back to his exact wording when he’d proposed the Deal to Vresh, his superhuman Nerve providing him the exact phrasing.

I will eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons originating from Nellis for a thousand bulbs.

Originating from Nellis.

Agh, son of a bitch!

“Shit!” Jeb cussed, picking up his half of the sandwich and taking an angry bite. He’d spent half a week interrogated about the two bombs Meyers had thought he’d stolen, and now he had to go solve that mystery for the old bat.

Jeb’s job wasn’t done until the last two were accounted for. Because they’d originated from Nellis.

If you wanted to get overtechnical about it, they probably originated from somewhere else, then were moved to Nellis, but at the time he’d made the Deal, they had been at the Air Force base, and now they were somewhere else. As far as the Deal was concerned, that was enough.

At least he hadn’t accepted payment yet.

Jeb swallowed and flipped the page again, quick-scanning for any references to names followed by an apostrophe and a technique, like Zesh’nei’s Translation.

“Good read?” Eddie leaned over. To the old man’s eyes the book was blank, but they saw him reading, and the notes he took had to come from somewhere. And in Pharos, stranger things had happened.

“It’s like trying to piece together basic physics from a book about catapults,” Jeb muttered. What the hell even is backscatter diffusion? There were many references to principles that the creators of the book assumed were basic knowledge. Jeb had to figure them out from context, for the most part.

This time, though, he was going to take notes, write down anything he didn’t fully understand, then cross-reference it with his other Ability book to see if he could puzzle it out.

“I didn’t even study this hard in high school,” Jeb muttered to himself, writing down backscatter diffusion in bold and underlining it before writing down his guess of what it was. Probably has to do with the physics of ray-form Myst without a focal point.

“Learn anything cool?”

“So far, just this,” Jeb said, clearing his throat.

Jeb began to hum.

As his vocal cords resonated, he very slowly fed string Myst into his voice box and let it unravel, flung in all directions by the vibration.

Jeb’s voice deepened unnaturally, and all the plates on the table, silverware, and cups full of water began rattling against each other violently. The table shook, shimmied and creaked as rapid waves of kinetic Myst washed over it.

A moment later, Jeb stopped, leaving only a faint ringing in the silver forks.

“At its most basic, Sonic Mysticism is a way to use your voice to create an area of effect. Not particularly useful for telekinesis, but it would be amazing for mind-affecting abilities or healing. They even mention pairing it with Zesh’nei’s Translation, which is like the holy grail for me.”

Jeb had written down the page number and a cliff note of every mention of Zesh’nei’s Translation in the entire book, but it was always in passing, never quite explaining how it worked.

What he’d learned so far about the technique was that it allowed a Myst user to change their Myst from one kind to another. Mastering the ability was the basic requirement for the Wizard title instead of ‘Myst user’, according to the context clues.

Having been alerted to its existence, Jeb was determined to unravel exactly what it was and how it worked.

“Not useful?” Ron sputtered. “That was nine-tenths of the scene where Gandalf rolls a nat twenty on his intimidate!” Ron said.

“Do it again, do it again!” Nancy shouted.

“I suppose there is that.”

They were gradually finishing up their meal when the stool walked in through the front gate.

Jeb blinked and rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. A wooden stool with four long legs was walking smoothly across the yard toward them, attracting attention from all the children at play, who gathered around it like a flock of vultures.

“Whoa, what the heck!?” a little kid shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Is it a monster!?” another shouted, grabbing a stick and poking the stool. This unleashed a furious game of Poke the Weird Thing. To the stool’s credit, it ignored them with patience reserved for saints and other fictional characters. It simply continued moving along as best it could, towards…him.

I know someone who could do that, Jeb thought, eyes narrowing.

Then one of the pokes knocked it over, causing the stool to topple onto its side, legs wriggling like a toppled beetle, and Jeb decided it was time to intervene before Poke the Weird Thing became Bash the Weird Thing.

Jeb launched out of the chair and stumped over to where the children were crowding around the magic stool. Jeb had to admit, it did look rather poke-worthy, but that was beside the point.

“Alright, get lost, urchins,” Jeb said, shoving his way into the circle and grabbing the scuffed-up stool before they could do any more damage to it. A bar towel clung tightly to the top of the stool, something he’d assumed was upholstery from a distance.

There was a chorus of ‘awww’ as Jeb took away their new toy, but the circle of orphans quickly scattered with shrieks of laughter when he growled at them with his new ‘technique’, shaking the very air. At least, I think they were shrieks of laughter. Never can tell what they’re shrieking about.

Small children shriek a lot.

Jeb lugged the stool back to the shaded picnic table and set it down beside the table. He slid his pen and a new piece of paper over towards their side of the wood.

“So, what do you want, towel?” Jeb asked, not meeting anyone else’s gaze. He felt awkward enough talking to a towel perched on a walking stool. Making eye contact would make it weird for both of them. Still, stranger things had happened in Pharos. Jeb just couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.

The towel raised itself up and wrapped around Jeb’s pen before it began writing in rather elegant cursive.

Lost contact with Casey Thompson. Presumed captured. Requesting assistance from former allies. Compensation offered, logistics aid gratis.

That confirmed it. He’d met Casey Thompson in the Impossible Tutorial. The teen mom had the S-ranked class Giver of Life, which allowed her to create living objects with roughly the intelligence and no-nonsense attitude of a forty-year-old professional.

They were smarter than Casey was, in many ways.

“What kind of compensation?” Jeb asked.

Many of us have taken side jobs without Casey’s knowledge, and combined our earnings to create a slush fund for emergencies. We are currently offering three hundred (300) imperial marks to each person directly involved in her safe return.

“Ooh, ooh, does a robot I made count as direct involvement?” Eddie asked after reading the paper.

“And what if she’s already dead?” Jeb asked.

The towel hesitated for a moment before writing.

See that she is not. Our research suggests resurrecting her will be highly impractical.

***Casey Thompson, level 63 Giver of Life***

The fancy-horned butler held up a fancy notepad, eyes half-lidded as he was obviously bored. Casey wasn’t bored, though. She was terrified.

“Do you have any allergies, food or otherwise?”

“I’m allergic to cats,” Casey grumbled, wishing with all her might that she could just scratch her nose.

“Allergic…to…cats,” Lien muttered, penciling that in slowly. “We’ll make sure not to feed you any cats.”

“I’m not allergic to eating them! Dander! It makes me sneeze a lot!”

“So you do want to eat cat meat?”

“NO!”

“So far, cats and dogs have been pretty low on the list of desired food, even for people not allergic to them. Odd that there’s so many of them. Any allergic reactions or odd interactions with medicine or vaccinations?”

“No, I already told you I don’t have any other allergies.”

“Just being thorough,” the butler said, drawing some lines through a couple boxes. “Any medical issues in your family history? Heart disease, diverticulitis, anything like that?”

“I’m seventeen! I don’t know my mom and dad’s medical history!” Casey tried tearing her arms out of the thick bands of steel that held her in place on the examination table, but somehow she was as weak as a…seventeen-year-old girl.

“And are you currently pregnant or nursing?”

“Damnit, let me go!” Casey said, trying to punch the bastard in the face. The damn butler was stronger than he had any right to be.

“I’ll mark you down with ‘nursing’.”

Casey gave him the finger.

“Alright, everything looks to be in order,” the butler said, setting the clipboard on the table between the sink and the array of shiny torture devices. “I’ll fetch the Master.”

As soon as he left, Casey tried for the umpteenth time to bring the table to life so it would let her go, but for the umpteenth time, her Ability was annulled before it even left her body.

Damnit! The silence gave Casey plenty of time to think. Mostly, it was about her daughter. When she’d nearly been kidnapped by the stooges of lesser nobility nearly six months ago, Casey’d decided to seek out the emperor for help.

Nobody would dare treat her daughter like a juicy bag of XP while the emperor had custody of her. That was a death sentence. It was a Faustian bargain, though. The asking price for guaranteed protection of her baby was high.

It’s starting to feel like I might not come home from this mission, she thought, her heart pounding in her ears. The slow buildup of fear and adrenaline without any way to release it made her feel like she was going to throw up.

Her heart jumped into her mouth when the door clicked open, revealing a keegan in a lab coat.

“Sorry about that wait, I had a previous surgery and it set me back a little. How about that weather, huh?” he asked, sitting down on a rolling stool beside her and scooting over to the table, grabbing her information and glancing over it quickly. “Every time they expand Pharos, it messes up the weather for a couple generations. I hear the Ulesians got rain this year. Good for them.

“Chart looks good.” He grabbed one of the shiny torture tools and every muscle in Casey’s body seized up at once. He rolled back over and put the implement above her eye.

This is it, he’s going to cut my eye out! Casey thought, struggling to turn her head away, but finding herself unable to move. A beam of light came out of the shiny object in his hand, which he then flashed in both eyes.

“Pupillary responses look normal. Can you follow my finger? Good.”

“…What are you doing?” Casey finally asked when he listened to her heart and took her blood pressure.

“Performing a physical. I want to know if any changes in your health may be a result of my experiments. Of course, it’s hard to establish a baseline when you’re this stressed.”

“Of cours—”

“Be calm.”

Suddenly, Casey didn’t have a care in the world. She still knew she was in some horrible crazy-person’s torture dungeon, but she just couldn’t bring herself to give a shit. In a matter of seconds, her heart rate slowed down, and the keegan nodded in satisfaction.

“One twenty-five over eighty. Excellent. You may resume panicking.”

As soon as he said it, Casey’s fear crashed back into her body, redoubled by the fact that he had just mind-controlled her!

There was a rumble in the distance, and the wheel of the keegan’s chair popped off, nearly spilling him onto his side.

“Sorry, I was recently shot by a weapon with a very high Urzosht Index, so my Impact is still stabilizing.”

“Urzosht Index?”

“Divide an object’s Mythos by its number of conceivable uses, and you’ve got the Urzosht Index. Bullets have a low number of conceivable uses relative to a strong Mythos, while Swiss Army knives are the opposite.”

Casey stared at him blankly.

“Anyway. Let’s get to the heart of our little visit, shall we?” He reached into his pocket and produced a little metal ring. He blew through it and a cloud of grey smoke rolled over her, sinking into her bones for a moment before pulling back out and showing him her Status.

Casey Thompson

Accolades: Baby Mama, Genesh’s Fury, Roadhouse!

Giver of Life, Level 63

Body 55

Myst 45

Nerve 32

Abilities: Mommy’s Little Helpers, No I in Team

“A balanced build, can’t go wrong with that,” the keegan said as he scanned her information. “I lean a little heavier into Myst and Nerve, but that’s my prerogative. Stats are high for your level, but an S-ranked class combined with access to stat potions will do that.

“I’ve experimented on quite a few S-rank classes in my day, but Giver of Life is a new one for me. Artificial life was never my favorite discipline. So I’m a little lackluster in that regard.”

He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and produced a little plastic toy. It was a crab with little articulated legs.

“Bring this to life, please,” he said.

“That’s it? You’re not gonna cut me open to see how I tick?”

“Oh, no, I’ve got plenty of data on human anatomy already. The only thing you’ve got that I’m interested in is your Class, and that’s not buried in your squishy human organs...but if what you’re lacking is motivation, I could probably find that buried somewhere in your squishy human organs. Bring this to life, please.”

“I have to touch it,” Casey said.

The keegan nodded and placed the crab in her hand. With a little zap from her Ability, the crab woke up to artificial life, standing up on her palm and taking a few tentative steps before the madman scooped it up and placed it on a flat surface to her left side. It looked something like a bandsaw combined with an x-ray machine, with a flat, glowing surface.

The platform glowed for a moment before a beam of light shot straight up through the crab, tearing the delicate Myst architecture out of the toy and suspending it in the middle of the table.

“Hmm…working artificial musculature on the legs, and jointed properly. The incredible thing is, how does the spell know where to put the legs? We'll have to have you bring things to life blindfolded to rule out user auto-suggestion.

“Ooh...a very complex information network. Only a few hardcoded beliefs; the rest is a learning variant of Dione’s Revolving Storage.”

He pointed at a tiny cluster of light near the ghostly crab’s center.

“You see that? That’s where their fanatical devotion to you is hardcoded. It loved you so much, it would have died for you.”

He glanced down at the unmoving crab beneath the three-dimensional map of its circuits. “I suppose it did.”

Casey ignored him, trying her best to bring the table she was lying on to life. If she could get it to unlock the manacles keeping her in place, she would be free!

Nothing happened. Again.

“Do you experience any fatigue, short- or long-term memory loss, nausea or confusion as a side effect of using your Ability?” he asked, rolling over and checking her pupils again.

“No?”

“What are your parents’ names?”

“David and Casey.”

“What did you have for dinner today three years ago?”

“Nobody remembers that!”

“If I let you go right now, what would you do?”

“I’d stab you with that pointy thing on the tray and run, bringing everything to life on the way out to cover my escape.”

“Good choice. You definitely don’t seem confused or addled in any way,” he muttered, rolling back over to the 3D rendering of a crab. “The question I’m pondering is, how does it standardize the intelligence of your creations? How do they know enough to function as soon as they’re created? The most common spells that create intelligent life draw the first spark of consciousness from their users, which temporarily result in the symptoms I described. Somehow, though, you’re able to create yours with no backlash.”

The keegan stood and tapped the ceiling. A moment later, an ominous contraption unfolded from the ceiling, thick as a man, with odd ribs that narrowed to a lens-shaped disk at the end. He grabbed a handle on the side of the machine and tugged it smoothly over her chest.

“You’re gonna feel a little pinch.”

***Jebediah Trapper***

“So we’ve got a guy capable of easily kidnapping enforcers,” Jeb said, working through the problem aloud to help him sort everything out in his head. “That’s a rare character trait. Enforcers are very strong, since they’re supposed to keep a lid on out-of-control power growth by reapers. If they could be beaten, they wouldn’t have value. All this together implies the guy who kidnapped Casey is very powerful, and therefore, there should only be one of him.”

Jeb tapped his finger on the table, the dots connecting to paint a dreadful picture.

“Since people who can beat an enforcer in a straight-up fight are incredibly rare, the likelihood is, the guy from Nellis is the one who kidnapped Casey. Odds are, this guy is the one who sold Meyers the Roil-repellent monolith as well…in exchange for nukes.”

Jeb smacked the side of his head. That’s why the base was attacked and the bombs were stolen! Meyers must’ve reneged on the agreement, and this titan took what he was owed!

“And his base of operations was five blocks away, until it magically vanished overnight when Casey went into it and got captured.”

I’ve got a monster living in my backyard, Jeb thought, scowling. And he’s got nukes. Great.

“How do you know she got captured and not outright killed?” Jeb asked the towel.

One of her buttons fell off in the fight. After it witnessed her capture, it left the manor moments before the building was relocated, and delivered the news to us.

“Okay, so she might still be alive. That still leaves me with two huge problems,” Jeb said, counting them off on his fingers.

“Problem one: If the guy can beat people like Vresh and Casey, how am I supposed to rescue her? The guy treated me like a precocious toddler. There’s little point in tracking him down if all that happens is I get captured and experimented on.”

Jeb ticked off the other finger.

“Problem two: I have no idea where to find him. His house can move around, apparently, so he could be halfway across the world and I wouldn’t know.”

“Looking for someone hard to find, huh?” a fairy asked, flitting into Jeb’s field of few. It was the fairy he’d seen grumpily riding around on Nancy’s shoulder. Ari, he thought he’d heard Nancy call her. Her hair was darker than Smartass’s, and she was a bit smaller. It was hard to distinguish facial features on creatures so small.

“I know where you can find the one you seek, and I can tell you, for a price.” She rubbed her fingers together greedily. “But this is expensive information, and so I’ll have to ask for something in return… I’m thinking…” She took a dramatic pause. “Your other leg.”

“No.”

“Fine, we’ve got room to haggle. How about an eye?”

“No.”

“Okay, how about temporary custody over one of your children. Just for a day. I promise no harm will come to them. They won’t even leave the orphanage.” She held up her hand with the Girl Scout sign.

Jeb tapped his chin. “You want to use temporary authority over Nancy to annul any Bargains she might have made, specifically a Deal involving seven generations of servitude?”

Ari gasped. “They told you!?”

Wouldn’t stop talking about it when I got back, Jeb thought.

The fairy instantly switched from astonishment to pouting. “It’s not fair!” She stomped her tiny foot on the table. “That Deal was made under duress! I demand it be invalidated!”

“You can spit in one hand and demand in the other and see which one fills up faster,” Jeb said with a shrug. “I’m under the impression Deals are supposed to be unfair.”

She crossed her arms and glared at him, still pouting.

“Alright, I’m willing to pay you one teaspoon of sugar in exchange for the location.”

“That’s a horrible deal!” she exclaimed.

“Well, if you can’t give me assurances that this is the specific person I’m looking for, then all you are doing is telling me a location of questionable usefulness.”

“The person you’re looking for is there!” she exclaimed.

“Which person am I looking for?” Jeb asked.

The fairy’s mouth clenched tight, causing Jeb to ponder her reticence to speak. She’s not unwilling to bargain, she just seemed to have a hard time providing specificity… Maybe she can’t?

“You can’t directly talk about him, can you?”

“If a person like that existed, then hypothetically they would have a way to prevent nosy fairies from talking about them.”

“Hypothetically,” Jeb said, nodding. “How about a cup of sugar for his location?”

Ari’s eyes widened for a moment before she stuck her nose up. “Now that you understand my greatness, it’ll take a lot more than delicious, delicious sugar to appease my anger. I’ll take my payment in body parts, children, or not at all.”

Just as she was trying to pry a better deal from Jeb’s calloused fingers, Colt sauntered up from the ‘teens’ table, where most of the older orphans hung out in their odd cliques.

“Hey pops,” Colt called, waving his hand. “Is Ari bothering you or trying to trick you into entering her death-cave?”

Ari froze.

Jeb glanced at the unmoving fairy, then over at Colt, who was blinking at him expectantly.

“I guess you’ll get paid ‘not at all’,” Jeb said, turning toward Colt. “Tell me about this death-cave.”

“NOOOOOOO!!!” Ari sank to her knees, sobbing into her hands.

Bzzzt! Smartass swooped in from above and karate-kicked Ari in the spine, sending the little fairy tumbling halfway across the table.

“Get away from my man, mountain skank!”

“Try me, nut-fondler!” Ari shouted, climbing to her feet and tackling the larger fairy.

“Ignore them,” Jeb said, brushing the scuffle off the table and into the grass with the back of his hand before lacing his fingers and staring at Colt. “Tell me about this death-cave.”

Chapter 12: Shifting Goalposts

“It’s my opinion that your best shot at getting Casey back is making her kidnapper a better offer. I’m pretty sure I saw this guy in action and I seriously doubt any combination of people I know could stop him without incurring serious injuries or death,” Jeb said, rubbing his chin.

We have come to a similar conclusion, the towel wrote on its piece of paper.

“Which kind of begs the question: Who is he, and what does he want? That’s a gaping hole in our understanding of the situation.”

We are currently working on it, but it is made more difficult by the fact that the button didn’t get a good look at the master of the house, only the man’s butler.

“Well, if we’re talking about the same guy, he was a bit short for a keegan, wearing black robes with gold embroidery, a popped collar, and he didn’t have The System.”

Jeb flipped to the next page of his notepad and whipped out a quick doodle. He wasn’t an artist, but superhuman Nerve made him learn fast.

“You saw that?” Zlesk asked, leaning over Jeb’s shoulder. The former sheriff-turned-orphanage-patron had seen the knot of adults gathered around the living towel and come to investigate.

“Yeah, I figure there’s a good chance a young woman was kidnapped by him.”

“He’s done that and worse,” Zlesk said, his voice grim as he lifted Jeb’s doodle closer to his eyes. “The man you saw was a sindio.”

“Oh, so you know him.”

“I know of him. There’s only a handful of sindio left in existence, and each of them leave a wake of destruction in their path. They’re ancient wizards who have conquered death. I meant to talk to you about it in private earlier, but you were gone. There’s one in town and he’s courting the children.”

“Courting them? Eww.”

“Making friends with them, you rube.”

“I can see how immortal friends would be a rare commodity,” Jeb said, nodding.

“I would suggest moving the orphanage or hiding the children if I thought it would do any good,” Zlesk said with a shrug.

“You tell me everything you know about sindio.” Jeb pointed to Zlesk, then motioned to the towel. “You have your people research which one this is, and if there’s something he might trade for Casey.”

Understood.

The towel hopped up and started doing a funky dance, which Jeb could only assume was a method of sign language devised by Casey’s living objects, meant to allow long-distance communication between themselves.

Zlesk sat down on the bench across from him and began to regale him with stories of sindio.

It all seemed to revolve around Mestikos and the fall of the old empire, which coincided with the dawn of The System. Wizards were devalued by common access to Class Abilities, which led to societal upheaval, which was seized upon by the kitri, who choked off Mestikos until it withered like a grape on the vine.

In all of this turmoil, the sindio, the most powerful wizards of Mestikos, rejected The System out of spite and wanton destruction—

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did the most powerful men in the city focus on wanton destruction for the next thousand years? They didn’t do it before, did they?”

“Because they’re evil. They’re sindio. Without gods,” Zlesk said as if it were self-explanatory.

“Okay, so most of these men and women were formerly the ruling council of Mestikos?” Jeb asked.

“Most of them, yes.”

“So they were invested in law and order for a lifetime, until one day a switch flipped and they decided to devote all their time to spreading misery for no benefit to themselves?” Jeb asked.

“They stripped themselves of The System,” Zlesk said.

I don’t have The System, numbnuts, Jeb thought ungraciously.

“Okay, but they didn’t have it before, either, so what caused the huge shift in behavior? Are you absolutely sure they’re walking engines of evil and chaos, or do you think there’s a slight chance the stories have been exaggerated over time?”

“Why are you defending them? They’re evil!” Zlesk said, getting flustered.

“I’m not defending them, I’m trying to separate fact from fiction. Maybe they’re cold-hearted psychopaths, but I find it hard to believe they would be as city-destroying, cartoonishly evil as your stories suggest. Psychopaths don’t shoot themselves in the foot for the fun of it.”

Zlesk opened his mouth and closed it again. “I suppose through a certain lens, their behavior does seem incongruent, but tell that to the ruins of Bravos, Lezmei, Carkolt, Nemicai, Ercolt, Gorsut—all cities destroyed by power-mad sindio. And let’s not forget the time Xen himself broke the line of Jestan, forever shattering keegan hopes of restoring our former glory!”

“What do they want?”

“Besides wanton destruction?” Zlesk asked.

“Yeah, besides that.”

The keegan shrugged. “The accumulation of power and knowledge.”

Nukes would definitely qualify…

Jeb felt a plan starting to form, but it wouldn’t work without a suicidal level of disregard for his own safety.

“Let’s start a grocery list. I need a bunker buster, a pallet of C-4, blueprints for several different high-end military assets, really strong portable radio relays—the kind that make your fillings heat up—and a device that can tell if ambient Myst has been manipulated within a short range and use that information to flip a switch.” He glanced at Eddie. “That’s your job.” He turned back to the towel. “The harder to come by, the better. Search military manufacturing plants, like Boeing and such.”

“You’re planning on giving the monster more ammunition?” Zlesk demanded.

“Frankly, compared to the nukes he already has, laser and electromagnetic propulsion weapon systems kind of seem like not such a big deal,” Jeb said with a shrug.

“What’s a ‘nuke’?” Zlesk asked.

“Wait, this big bad evil guy Zlesk went on about at length has nukes!?” Ron asked.

“Probably. I’m also gonna need about…six red party balloons and some laxative,” Jeb said. The surrounding people went quiet, staring at him quizzically.

“I’m serious! Chop chop! We’ve got a teen girl to save, and if you want to earn your three hundred bulbs, you better impress her housewares!”

“Why are you always saving young girls, anyway?” Eddie grumbled, the white-haired man giving Jeb a sour look. “I demand equal rescuing for the elderly.”

“Ooh, I can field this one,” Ron said, snagging a piece of Jeb’s notepad and clicking the pen before scribbling a descending curve graph.

“People’s rescuability is a result of a diminishing perceived societal value based on age, with a gender modifier. Before any other considerations, young girls are up here, and old men are down here.” He pointed at the top of the curve, then the bottom.

“Once you add in extra factors like commercial value and social status, you can compensate for advanced age and gender disadvantage. Your singular expertise combining Myst with tech dramatically inflates your social value and makes you about as rescuable as one point one five average little girls.”

“The fuck are you getting those numbers from?” Eddie demanded, glaring at the ginger necromancer.

“Get to work!” Jeb said, using his new Myst technique to make the sound rattle their brains.

***Later***

“I feel good about this plan,” Jeb said, wearing a vest of C-4 and looking at the hole in the side of the mountain, making sure to keep his thumb firmly pressed down on the dead man’s switch.

Jeb turned back to the spectators, none of which dared approach within a hundred feet.

“I feel good about this plan!” Jeb shouted at them. He actually did.

Ron waved from a safe distance.

Cowards, Jeb grumbled internally as he crouched and wormed his way into the lion’s den. It was pretty damn tight around the chest on the way in, and Jeb was barely able to squish through without blowing himself up.

Jeb’s reasoning for strapping C-4 to his body was thus: If he offered a trade for Casey’s freedom and the other guy simply decided he would take Jeb along with everything he brought, Jeb would blow himself up, take the top off the sindio’s dungeon base, and cause a shit-ton of property damage.

The idea was to appeal to the wizard’s cold calculations of self-interest. Either he accepted the deal and traded up for some spiffy human tech, or he lost a significant amount of property value from the sudden bloody explosion of Jeb—an enormous loss of time and effort.

Jeb had no illusions that the bomb would kill the sindio. He was fairly sure it wouldn’t. Hopefully the prospect of losing infrastructure would be just annoying enough to motivate him to make the trade, but not annoying enough to be insulting or make him angry.

The job wasn’t to win a fight, after all. It was just to get Casey’s freedom, then get out without being turned into a science experiment. And if that meant moving the goalposts on how to achieve it, then so be it.

Jeb dropped onto a damp stone floor in the lightless cave with a grunt, his eyes adjusting now that a single beam of soft light entered from behind him.

In front of his eyes, the far wall began to ripple, resolving into a membranous creature with long, grasping—

“Alpha strike,” Jeb said, holding out his palm.

The flurry of blades erupting from his hand left chunks of the odd octopus-like creature twitching and bleeding on the ground.

“How’s my signal?” Jeb asked, flipping on the powerful walkie-talkie in his ear.

“So far, so good,” Eddie’s voice called after him.

“First room is a small cave, about ten feet in all directions. Got a lot of bones of Ari’s former acquaintances. Only one route leading deeper into the complex…assuming we’re in the right place.”

“Yeah, assuming that.”

“The first threat is neutralized. Start sending in ‘The Incentive’ behind me.”

“On it.” Eddie’s voice came through the earpiece.

Jeb pulled out a flashlight and peered into the deeper darkness leading farther into the tunnel. He crept down the hall, trying not to slip in the pungent offal that was the odd monster’s refuse.

Jeb had followed the tunnel about twenty feet when he paused, frowning. He flicked the flashlight off and confirmed it: There was natural lighting ahead. He crept deeper in and paused as the tunnel widened out into a larger chamber.

The lighting was coming from small holes in the ceiling above, each about the size of his fist. The chamber itself was much cleaner than the previous one, cast in sunlight that streamed down from the air vents above. The beams of sunlight fell on several wooden tables with picture-perfect teacup muffins sitting on top of them.

Jeb had to stop and do a double take. He peered back into the previous room, where some of Casey’s minions were setting up a charge of C-4 above a disgusting monster corpse. Then he looked back into the muffin room.

Yep, there’s still muffins here.

Jeb felt a little like Alice in Wonderland as he walked around the tables, giving the sweets a wide berth. If anything was more obviously a trap, Jeb didn’t know what that was.

Still, he couldn’t help wondering what the hell the muffins were for. Jeb made sure to keep them visible in the corner of his eye as he explored the room. If they got up and tried to attack or some other equally strange behavior, Jeb wanted to be prepared for it.

He located two exits to the room, each of them leading subtly deeper into the mountain at a gradual slope, the floor growing cleaner and more well-cared-for as they went.

Interesting.

Jeb saw a flicker of movement in the direction of the muffins, causing his heartbeat to skyrocket. He put his back to the wall and raised his hand, ready to blast the mutant confections with everything he had.

A fairy was halfway through burying his head in the muffin, his cheeks puffed out like a squirrel. He narrowed his eyes and clutched the sweet covetously.

“My muffin,” he growled before flying up and out through one of the fist-sized holes in the ceiling.

Well, that was odd, Jeb thought, before he noticed a tiny white sheet of paper underneath the muffin. It was covered in a dense script, but since it wasn’t English, he had no clue what it said. Not even the small amount of keegan script he’d learned in the last few months was of any help.

“Wish I could read,” Jeb muttered, glancing over the tiny piece of paper.

Add that to the list of things to do.

***Kol Rejan, level 58 Courier***

“Of all the things I thought you’d be doing today, baking muffins wasn’t high on my list,” Kol said.

“I have to bake the muffins myself,” Vex said, pulling the tray of confections out of the oven. “That’s how the magic works.”

“And they just do whatever you tell them to?” he asked, reading the tiny note in his hand.

By consuming the above muffin, in whole or in part, I have nonverbally agreed to keep the identity of Vex the sindio a secret, not disclose any information in regards to him or his location, nor interfere with his work.

“Not really. For something as simple as a muffin-trap, you can really only get fairies to keep a secret for a month or two before the compulsion to honor the agreement fades. Demands that inconvenience them more, like forcing them to take on some arduous or dangerous task, fail so rapidly that they are basically worthless.”

Vex set the muffins on the counter and wiped his hands on his apron before pulling out the frosting and a spreading knife.

***Jeb***

Jeb crept to the leftmost tunnel, keeping well away from the muffins with their apparent booby-traps. From deeper in, Jeb could feel heat radiating outward in pulses, like the cave system itself was breathing.

When Jeb followed the tunnel to its conclusion, he found himself standing above a man-sized hole in the floor that led down to some kind of furnace room. Hundreds of little people with dark, leathery skin and elongated faces worked with burning furnaces, churning out metal parts at a manic pace.

The hot air rose through the hole and blasted Jeb in the face, nearly singing his eyebrows as he looked into the room.

You know what this place is missing? Some C-4, Jeb thought, motioning for one of Casey’s creations to bring the explosives in.

The creature was a living ball of yarn, and it had no qualms sacrificing itself to free its creator, a character trait that Jeb intended to take full advantage of.

The living yarn carried the C-4 up to the hole, crawled in, then fastened itself to the ceiling, binding the explosive in place above the unsuspecting creatures’ heads.

This is just a vent, so the other tunnel probably leads to another room.

That wasn’t necessarily true. This section of the sindio’s dungeon could just be the air exchange, and maybe Jeb wouldn’t find anything but vents. He might have to fly down into the middle of all those industrious midgets if the next tunnel didn’t bear fruit.

The next tunnel went downward at a more drastic angle, about thirty degrees, leading deep into the darkness until eventually it began to loop back in on itself. It took three spiraling turns before it evened out, creating a flat hallway. The hallway was studded with doors on either side, with bright light leaking through the door jambs. The acrid smell of chemicals wafted through the air, and Jeb heard the faint chatter of voices.

They were too distant to make out anything, but he could tell by the pitch that the creatures were small, and by the cadence, that they weren’t speaking English.

Not that that’s particularly surprising.

Jeb froze when a door on his right slammed open and a shiny pink-fleshed man toddled past with a large metal gizmo thrown over his shoulder. If he saw Jeb, he didn’t give any indication of it, simply hoisting the contraption and huffing mightily as he transported the part to a neighboring door.

Once the door closed behind the little creature, Jeb tiptoed through the hall as quickly as possible, not eager to be caught in the middle of the hall as someone went by.

Jeb continued past the hall of laborers, leaving behind the din of creation coming from the doorways. He entered something like a showroom, where row upon row of oddities were housed on pedestals, or tucked safely away behind thick glass doors.

The ceiling was tall, like a hangar or the lobby of a museum, and the floor was oddly smooth and plain grey. It didn’t show any sign of seams or processing like a concrete or laminate might.

Jeb knelt and touched the floor.

It was warm.

There was what looked like a Terminator leg, a big skeletal steel foot rusted halfway through, with a sign printed in front of it in big blocky letters. Jeb knew a ‘hands off’ sign when he saw one, even if he couldn’t read it.

Near the corner of the room was what looked like a brass birdcage with a mote of void in it. Darkness rolled off of it like mist rolled off of liquid nitrogen, and Jeb could see a faint lensing effect, where the light seemed to squeeze around it.

There was an odd shield filled with bubbling liquid, a piece of burning bark held above a permanent jet of flame, literal lightning in a bottle, and…

Jeb paused, frowning as he took in the object in the display case. It was a greyish metal, cone-shaped warhead with a familiar military stencil on the side of it: W88.

Jeb had decommissioned hundreds of them in Nellis, turning them into puddles of water, explosives and scrap. This particular nuke was dismantled. The entire thing had been sliced in half, its guts hollowed out, leaving only a shell behind.

“There you are,” Jeb muttered to himself. At least it’s in good company. Jeb was under the impression any one of these objects could cause a substantial amount of harm.

“There what is?” Eddie’s voice whispered through the earpiece.

“I think I just found the bomb I was missing… One of them, anyway,” Jeb said. The hell is the other one?

Out of the corner of his eye, the reality-warping creature in the birdcage winked at him, seemingly responding to his voice. When Jeb glanced over, it was just a black void, no eyes at all.

Not gonna push my luck with that, Jeb thought, goosebumps spreading up his scalp.

Jeb scanned the rest of the showroom, taking in the tremendous amount of valuable and dangerous equipment.

“Put a half a kilogram at each of the corners of the room. That should be plenty.” Jeb was fairly sure that many of the things on display were fairly unstable, and freeing them would allow them to free others in turn.

Kinda makes me wonder why security isn’t that great, Jeb thought to himself, glancing around. This was SCP-level shit, and it was all crowded together in the same room with no guards at all. That was practically negligent.

I mean, the entrance was an air vent, covered by a giant tentacle monster, but he wasn’t that hard to kill.

Jeb would have expected a guard at least at the end of the hall, between the research labs and the showrooms, to make sure the eggheads didn’t knock over a death-machine.

Either that, or the cases are more sophisticated than I originally thought.

Jeb looked good and hard at the cases containing the various oddities. He couldn’t see anything at all, just the ever-present neutral Myst, filling the air with a silvery grey that hung low like fog from a fog machine.

Wait a minute…

Jeb narrowed his eyes, studying the movement of the Myst, his eyes widening as he spotted the occasional straight line tugging its way through the Myst, drawing it into unnatural shapes.

There was something there, interacting with the Myst, but it was nearly invisible against the neutral Myst.

‘My employer presumes your lack of schooling explains why you’ve failed to use Korzuth’s Tempering to render your Myst packets in the ground environment-neutral.’

Is that what he meant? Jeb thought, eyebrows rising. That would be invaluable to learn for disguising his traps from other Myst users.

Focus.

“Better put some on the ceiling, too. The cases look like they’re shielded.”

The black mote of void winked at him again, a single eye opening when he hit a specific pitch. This time Jeb saw the eyeball.

That’s probably okay.

From the showroom, there were four major halls that looked big enough for semis to roll through, and at least six minor doors for simple foot traffic.

Jeb didn’t have any idea where to go in particular, so he just started opening doors. Admittedly, randomly opening doors in a powerful enemy’s base didn’t seem like the greatest idea, but it was overshadowed by his idea of walking in wearing three kilos of C-4, so it all worked out fine.

The first door was an empty room that looked something like an orthodontist’s office. It was dark and cold. The second unleashed the smell of sewage, poorly-lit and leading deep into the earth. Jeb guessed it either led to the septic system, or perhaps monster or human pens. The third room had a dozen or so of the little pink men working on computers, chattering back and forth in their high-pitched voices, accompanied by the clicking of keys and the faint smell of coffee.

They seemed to be working on learning how to use the computer systems, specifically trying to debug software designed to run several different human machines.

I’ve got enough insurance, Jeb thought. This wasn’t about winning, after all; it was about making a good impression. At some point, the plan necessitated him getting discovered.

“Did you try turning it off and back on again?” Jeb asked.

The little pink men turned and stared at him, their jaws hanging open.

“I’d like to speak to your boss. Could you tell me where to find him?” Jeb asked, keeping his tone even and polite.

“Main hall, that way,” one of them said, pointing in the direction of one of the semi-sized openings.

“How did he get past the security system?” one of them whispered.

“Don’t ask me. He’s probably on the whitelist and got lost.”

“If he was supposed to be here, he wouldn’t be lost.”

“Hey, that worked!” one of them said with glee as the plasma cutter turned on again and started listening to instructions.

“Thank you much,” Jeb said, nodding before pulling his head out of the room and facing the direction they’d pointed.

The whitelist? That sounded ominous. Jeb really hoped there wasn’t something in place to vaporize intruders and that was why there were no guards. Jeb’s plan and instant vaporization didn’t mesh well.

Who am I kidding? It’s probably par for the course.

Jeb walked toward the indicated main hall, whistling nonchalantly as he passed by several more rooms. Foot traffic became more and more heavy, with keegan and melas primarily, along with the pink shortstacks and the leather-skinned midgets, but they tended to ignore Jeb. A few gave curious glances at his odd jacket, but none of them seemed to know what C-4 was offhand. Otherwise they would’ve been more concerned.

Jeb was about halfway to the end of the hall when he felt a sudden compulsion to take  his explosives off. Hmm… Jeb felt like a passenger in his own body as he watched himself take the jacket off and fold it neatly up against the wall one handed, his other hand firmly clenched down on the dead-man’s switch.

There was a click as a PA system turned on.

“Would the idiot planting explosives please report to the executive meeting room for debriefing?”

A green line flared to life above Jeb’s head, pulsing forward to indicate which way he should go. Suddenly he was in control of his body again. Curious, Jeb tried to pick up his jacket, but it was like a New Year’s resolution: He just couldn’t muster the give-a-shit to follow through.

Interesting. My heart rate is steady. I should be terrified. Must be under some kind of control.

Jeb shrugged and glanced up, following the pulsing green line above his head. It led down the main hall a ways, turning off at a pair of hardwood double doors. Beyond was a desk with a keegan secretary behind it. She gave a twitch of an eyebrow, then pressed a button under her desk, and part of the wall behind her shimmered before vanishing entirely, showing a familiar figure seated at a large wooden table, his henchman standing next to him, along with a nearly red melas man with fancy horns, and a couple representatives of the other two races living in the dungeon compound.

“Good afternoon. My name is Vex,” the black-robed keegan said as Jeb entered. “Please, have a seat.”

“Did you learn English in a week?” Jeb asked, hopping up into his seat.

“Too much effort. I added this translator to the executive meeting room to deal with sindio from other continents a couple centuries ago,” he said, tapping a flat metal disk in the center of the table.

“Apologies about the chair; we don’t have any human-sized furniture yet.”

“I feel like I’m at the kiddie table,” Jeb muttered, his legs dangling from the edge of his seat.

“Indeed. Tea?”

“Just a little,” Jeb said, nodding and accepting a cup from one of the pink midgets.

It wasn’t bad.

“I’m fascinated. It’s not often a potential test subject who slips the leash comes back to me on their own. Even less often that they have a poorly thought-out plan to commit suicide in front of me to…make a statement?”

“It’s not a suicide plan, per se,” Jeb said, glancing around. “More insurance than anything else. Is the Myst in this room stable?”

“Of course. The only room with tighter control over the Myst inside would be some of the experimental labs.”

Jeb took a deep breath, had a brief flash of insight about the nature of life, then took his thumb off the dead man’s switch.

Chapter 13: Your Grandma Lays Eggs

Jeb let out a slow breath. The bombs were out of Jeb’s control now.

“Was that supposed to do something?” Vex asked with an arched brow.

“Let’s just say, breakfast was C-4 balloons with a side of Myst-sensitive detonators,” Jeb said, patting his stomach. “And now they’re armed.” Getting them in there had been a thoroughly unpleasant experience. He wasn’t looking forward to passing them, either. Assuming he lived that long.

“If you cast anything, I will become a red smear all over your nice furniture. I’ll stain it but good.”

“Seems counterproductive and petty,” the sindio said, steepling his fingers. “I like it. Where are you going with this?”

Jeb’s heart beat against his ribs like an iron hammer, slow but strong as he reached into his pocket. “I’d like to purchase Casey Thompson from you, in exchange for these,” Jeb said, pulling out a handful of thumb drives and placing them on the table between them.

“Blueprints for more than a dozen different kinds of unique non-magical weapons, primarily using sound, light, and electromagnetism. In addition, some designs for military CPUs that weren’t even available to the public before the Stitching. I know there’s more value in there for you than a teenage girl could possibly represent.”

“I don’t know, the Giver of Life Class makes her a uniquely valuable test subject. I haven’t quite cracked how her primary Ability works... Do you think maybe you could come back in a week?”

Jeb took a deep breath. “Either you let her go today, or you miss out on these,” Jeb said, motioning to the thumb drives. “And your cleaning bill increases drastically. I may not be able to beat you, but I can make damn sure it’s more expensive to keep Casey than it is to let her go.”

The keegan’s eyebrows rose in his race’s skull-faced form of a smile.

“I like you, kid.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “You said today, correct? Give me three hours and I’ll deliver the young lady in question to the surface, where your companions are listening in on our conversation.”

“Alive and whole.”

“Alive and whole,” the sindio repeated.

“I consider comatose or mentally damaged beyond functioning to not be ‘whole’,” Jeb added.

“As well you should,” Vex said. “Something I find myself more curious about, is how on Pharos you got as far as you did without tripping any alarms or getting yourself vaporized. Care to tell me how you got on the whitelist?”

Jeb shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Interesting. Casey’s creations were able to enter the dungeon because we’ve already keyed them in, but you specifically should have had a lot more trouble than you did. You aren’t a wizard in disguise or related to anyone I know, are you?”

Jeb thought about it for a moment. Actually, I might be related to someone he knows....

“I...don’t know.” Jeb had his suspicions, though, and they rhymed with ‘Grab’. Jeb was fully aware that he’d been called a ‘prodigy’ by Smartass for his Deals with her and other fairies, and he was fairly sure it wasn’t entirely because of his own effort. There was something more going on.

A half-remembered thought from a dream touched Jeb’s mind, sending a thrill of fear through him. No scion of mine is going to accept what something as petty as Fate has decided for them. Jeb glanced up at the ceiling, his emotions telling him it was about to crush him.

Solid stone. Not even a crack. Jeb didn’t realize his heart rate had peaked until it started coming back down, the pressure behind his eyes slowly diminishing.

“What was that?” Vex asked, frowning as he followed Jeb’s gaze toward the ceiling.

Jeb shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“Color me intrigued. That bomb in your ass, is it based on ambient Myst fluctuations, or does it detect Chugoth decay?”

“Answering that question seems like a bad idea,” Jeb said, hedging his bets.

“Screw it. It can’t be that advanced.” The sindio reached across the table with his unnaturally long limbs and grasped Jeb by the back of the head, hauling him painfully halfway over the table, until their foreheads were touching.

The sindio’s eyes glowed a brilliant, scathing orange. The light seemed to sear into Jeb’s nerves, travelling through his brain and mapping his entire body before spreading out through his limbs, leaving them weak and tingling.

And Jeb wasn’t a smear. Either Eddie had lied to Jeb about the detonator in his stomach, or Vex was so powerful it didn’t make a difference. Jeb’s heart sank, but he kept his face as straight as he could.

That was my trump card!

“Ah, there it is,” the sindio said, letting go of Jeb’s head and reclining back into his chair. “You’re four percent fairy. That was plenty to confuse the sensors. Can’t go vaporizing the pests willy-nilly without inviting serious mischief. Was there a lot of incest in your family history?”

Jeb blinked. “What?”

“Most humans that I’ve studied have a fraction of a percent of fae in their ancestry, which is part of the reason they get along so well with the little buggers, but you’re a freak. No offense.”

“But…they lay eggs,” Jeb said, frowning.

“Mmn, yes. An interesting form of neoteny. They transition from insectoid to mammalian reproductive behavior as they gain Impact, which fuels their maturation, allowing them to grow to their full potential. I’ve never seen another animal quite like them.”

Jeb was still processing.

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in a temp job as a guinea pig? You’re even more interesting than I’d thought before you shot me. I offer fair pay and a comprehensive health package.”

“No.”

“I suppose I’ll ask some other time, when you don’t have half a pound of C-4 in your butt waiting to go off.”

“Answer’ll still be no,” Jeb said.

“Ah, but your answer might not matter so much at that point, yes?” Vex gave him a keegan smile.

Note to self: Make a permanent self-destruct button.

“Well,” Vex said, clapping his hands together with finality. “If that’s all you’re here to discuss, then Lien here will escort you outside, and we’ll deliver Ms. Thompson for the exchange in three hours.”

“One more thing,” Jeb’s Deal with Vresh nudged him into blurting out. “What are you gonna do with the nukes?”

“Oh, them. Nothing I’m comfortable discussing with an outsider. Why do you ask?”

“I made a Deal with Vresh to eliminate the threat of nuclear bombs originating from Nellis Air Force Base. It would be good if we could come to some kind of arrangement.”

The sindio shrugged. “Sure, I’m not unreasonable. Four more W88s, delivered to me before the end of the month, and you can have my two, to fulfill the technicality of your arrangement with the emperor’s hunting dog.” He stood to leave as Jeb was processing what that information revealed.

Or, in other words, he’s not going to use them for anything until then. Jeb had no idea what would take a month to arrange. As far as Jeb knew, the bombs were ready to go. They even had makeshift external detonators so they didn’t have to be launched to prime them.

Either there’s some kind of event happening a month from now, he’s building something to synergize with the bombs, or it’s an arbitrary date. The one thing Jeb could be confident of, was that the sindio wouldn’t use them before that month was out, because it would be rather difficult to follow through on his side of the Deal were the nukes spent.

I hope. If the wizard had a way of magically stamping out copies of the bombs, the world might be in a little bit of hot water.

It’s times like this I hope my ‘They can’t be totally crazy’ theory is right.

“I’ll make an effort to get some extra W88s,” Jeb said. In order to perfect a Mystical disarming technique. He and Eddie could take several apart and figure out the quickest, easiest way to render them inert without obvious outward changes.

“That reminds me,” the sindio said, spinning on his heel at the exit, nearly running over the scaly midget trailing behind him.

“That ring of yours. The one you shot me with. Where did you get it and what would you want in return?” He glanced down at Jeb’s wooden foot. “I could grow you a new foot, if you like.” He pointed to his head. “I could take care of that backlash for you, too.”

“As much as I like the idea of getting my foot back,” Jeb said through his teeth, “I’m starting to believe my Appraiser might be worth a lot more than a foot and restful sleep.”

Jeb was fairly certain a normal Appraiser didn’t let its user directly interact with the Fate dimension, and by extension, The System—the domain of the gods.

The sindio’s brows twitched. “…Two new feet?”

Jeb scowled at him, and the keegan threw his hands up in surrender.

“I kid. I suppose I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and take it off your corpse when you inevitably commit suicide by throwing yourself at me.

“Goodbye, Mr. Trapper,” Vex said, nodding once before his entourage followed him out of the room. The rifle-bearing keegan shot Jeb one last glare before he ducked out the door, leaving Jeb alone in the room with the fancily-dressed melas butler.

“What’s his problem?” Jeb muttered to himself.

“He’s failed to kill you three times now, and takes it as a stain on his professional integrity,” the butler said, pushing in Jeb’s chair after he stood up. “This way.” He motioned toward the door.

“Oh!” Jeb slammed his hand into his palm. A few months back, a keegan had tried to kill him a couple times. Unfortunately, the bastard had been wearing some kind of hood over his face that wiped Jeb’s long-term memory of his facial features.

“That guy!” Jeb immediately began devoting his features to memory. “Next time I see him, I’ll…do something,” Jeb said, shaking his fist, unwilling to commit to a course of action that might not fit the situation.

“I’m sure,” the melas butler said. “You mentioned the detonator being Myst-sensitive, correct? I’m going to ask you to follow my path exactly. It's practically a miracle you’re still breathing.”

He motioned to the door.

Jeb squared his shoulders and followed.

The butler led Jeb out of the room, and rather than leading him back through the showroom, he guided Jeb to the left, through a brightly-lit hall that transitioned from plain concrete to marble.

They crossed through a door and suddenly, Jeb’s ears picked up the faint sounds of the street.

“Huh, that’s odd. We weren’t—” Jeb glanced over his shoulder at the door they’d just stepped through. The butler smoothly reached up and grabbed Jeb’s head and wrenched it forward, his orange-red hands acting as blinders.

“It’s best you don’t look back,” he said politely. “Keep moving.”

“Um...okay,” Jeb muttered, continuing his march forward, going through another door and up a flight of stairs, leading up into the main hall of a flophouse. There was peeling paint and graffiti everywhere, mattresses made of piles of cast-off clothes packed with hay.

Basically awful.

There were half a dozen doors on either side, and Jeb could hear the chatter of the pink men on either side, along with the occasional sound of power tools.

Interesting.

The butler guided Jeb to a rickety front door and held it open for him.

“You may wish to stand back if you don’t want to explode. Good afternoon,” he said, giving Jeb a nod before shutting the door in his face.

Between one blink and another, the scummy flophouse in front of him vanished, leaving nothing but an empty lot.

“Eddie, could you turn off the detonator? I feel like someone’s gonna sneeze and blow me up.”

“Oh, that?” Eddie’s voice came through Jeb’s earpiece. “I disabled that remotely as soon as you were out of eyeshot. According to my readings, you would’ve tripped the detonator sixteen times. You took your thumb off the switch by accident when you were crawling through the first hole, and would’ve exploded about…two seconds later, when you killed the guardian. A minute later, Myst levels fluctuated again when you entered the first room, and every room thereafter.”

“Oh.” Jeb felt his limbs go a little numb. “Thanks for undermining my plan, I guess.”

“No problem,” Eddie said through the earbud. “The key point of the plan was that you believed you would explode if he tried something, and the wizard couldn’t disprove it, because he’s not tech-savvy enough yet.”

“Would I have exploded, though?” Jeb asked.

“Oh yeah, I’ve been listening in on the whole conversation. I could’a put you out of your misery if it went sour,” Eddie said.

“Good to hear,” Jeb said, picking himself up with Myst and lifting above the city, orienting on the mountains with his arm outstretched like Superman. “Prepare the laxatives! I’ve got some explosive shits to take!”

“Roger, prepping the laxatives,” Eddie said into the mic before his voice clicked off.

***Emperor Pikaku, Uniter of the Continent, Ruler of Mestikos, level 327***

“I’m troubled, father,” Pikaku admitted.

“Cry me a river,” his father muttered, the flames of undeath flickering in his empty sockets as he considered his next move.

“One of my enforcers stumbled across Xen.”

“Who?”

“Xen? Worst of the sindio, broke the line of Jestan?”

“Oh, him. Do you have any threes?”

“Go fish,” Pikaku said. “He goes by Vex now.”

“Unoriginal,” his father grunted.

“Anyway, one of my enforcers stumbled onto him on an Air Force base with nuclear weapons. My spymaster tells me the sindio has at least two of the bombs.”

“And? Is he planning on destroying Mestikos or some other major city? If not, better not to step on a sleeping veek. It’s not actually a drastic change in the monster’s destructive capability. Simply a change in method.”

“He plans on detonating them in the Fate dimension.”

His father’s jaw swung open. “You mean…”

“To destroy The System, yes. That is what my information points to. I believe the sindio plans on using the nuclear blast to scour the landscape of the fifth dimension so thoroughly that The System will simply cease to exist within it. If that proves successful, he will replicate and deploy them on a global scale.”

“That’s… How on Pharos would he be able to do that without killing every living thing on the gods-damned planet?”

Pikaku drew a three. “…I don’t think he cares. Do you have any threes?”

“Go fish.”

“Give me the three, father.”

The skeletal kitri growled and handed Pikaku the card in question.

“What are your options? Do you have a six?”

“Go fish.”

“Damn you, boy.”

“We have to assume that now that the sindio has gotten his hands on one bomb, he should be able to recreate them with relative ease. Even if we eliminate all the bombs in the world, he can likely make his own. If he continues to pursue that avenue, we’ve either got to commit to killing him or cross our talons and hope his plans don’t work.”

“Those are bad options. When Xen fails, he fails spectacularly. He doesn’t take kindly to empires trying to kill him, either.”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Pikaku said, nodding.

“Any way to reframe the problem?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Hmm… Any way you can Summon him into a sealing chamber? Put the problem off for a few thousand years?”

“Not without some serious backlash from my Ability. The temporal forces might cause a cataclysm just to get him standing in front of me. And there’s a chance my Ability could fail, or worse yet, drag me to him. And even if all that works, I’d have to pin him down personally and share the sealing chamber. I’d rather not starve to death so soon.”

“We’ll call that Plan B. Where does that leave us?”

“Screwed,” Pikaku said with a soft honk.

“My son, let me let you in on a little secret.”

“Eh?”

“There’s always something threatening to destroy the empire, wipe out all life on Pharos, or fling us out into the cold depths of space. And yet, here we are. Deal with this problem, and you’ll soon find yourself with another steaming pile of world-ending shit in your lap. It’s the nature of the job. Delegate the problem and assume the world will keep spinning, because doing the opposite is meaningless.”

“That makes me feel better,” Pikaku said, nodding.

“Really?”

“Fuck no,” Pikaku said, his mind filled with a storm cloud of conflicting worries and doubts. He was facing impossible odds, and he needed a…someone…who regularly defied impossible odds. Pikaku’s eyes narrowed as a rough plan began fermenting in his mind. It was just as counter-intuitive and underhanded as the man who’d inspired it.

A clever workaround to the destruction of his empire, so to speak. And it involved Jebediah Trapper.

“Thank you, father. Our little talks always help me think.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“That’s a matter of national security, father.”

“You cheeky shit.”

When Pikaku finished with his father, he asked for three things: A scroll with a list of names containing a pair of young adults from every town larger than a thousand people, a bunker deep in the earth and warded against any form of interference, including the fifth-dimensional variety, and an audience with Vresh.

The bunker was essentially a sealing chamber buried far enough to survive nuclear blasts, regardless of what dimension they took place in.

Two things about his Ability that Pikaku had noticed in the past, was that if he Summoned someone, they arrived at his feet alive, and second: His Ability exercised the least amount of energy in the temporal weave to arrange things so they resulted in his Summon arriving in front of him—change a small decision, shifting a small rock. That sort of thing.

If Pikaku were sheltered from any form of cataclysm, he could survive anything the sindio could do to the planet. Individually, his people might not be as strong or as experienced as the ancient creature, but together, they could build something he couldn’t crack.

Once that was taken care of, Pikaku simply needed to be able to wait until the danger of Xen’s nuclear experimentation had passed, then Summon his representative sample of young citizens.

Being young and weak, the amount of energy it would take to Summon them would be minimal.

His future self Summoning these young men and women would feed Pikaku’s temporal Myst into the past—the present for Pikaku—and keep them alive, while delivering them to him.

If the easiest way to keep this representative sample of young men and women alive to be delivered to him was to subtly disrupt the sindio’s attempts to harness the atom, then all the better for Pikaku.

As for the bomb shelter, he needed to be able to survive into the future to use his Ability no matter what happened. He wouldn’t need to use it, he only needed to be able to use it.

Causality magic is weird, Pikaku thought, shaking his head. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was the master of his Ability, or if it simply dragged him around behind it through its sheer power, like an untamed tarruk on a rope.

And if the worst should come to pass, and the sindio succeeded in destroying the world, Pikaku’s Myst would offer an umbrella of protection to those select young men and women.

Pikaku sat on his throne and flexed his Myst.

“Vresh Tekalis.”

Vresh let out a squeak as she tripped through the entrance, her face not quite hitting the floor.

“You Summoned me, Emperor?” she said, recovering quickly into a kneeling position as she brushed dust off her shirt.

“Yes. I’ve got a job for you and your charge.”

***Jeb***

Jeb was standing beside the rest of his team, trying to stay watchful for Vex, but he kept returning to the same thoughts, in a spiral of quiet contemplation.

So great-great-great grampa Trapper banged a fairy? Did great-great grampa come out of an egg?

Jeb glanced at Smartass sitting on his shoulder. The tiny creature gave him a grin and a thumbs-up.

Jeb shuddered, having a tough time getting the picture out of his head.

Wait a second. Has she grown again? Jeb thought, measuring Smartass with his finger.

The fairy put up with it stoically, giving him a sour look, but not protesting as his knuckle pressed against her cheek. She was about a knuckle past the size of his hand a month ago… It seemed like she’d gained another knuckle in size.

And one of those egg-laying ancestors was probably Mab, Jeb thought, ruminating while they waited for the sindio to deliver Casey.

Jeb didn’t know whether or not he should have pressed the creature to deliver her immediately, but he’d decided not to. General Meyers had managed to negotiate with it, after all. Jeb had to believe that the sindio could be reasoned with, because the alternative was a no-win scenario.

As for Mab, Jeb didn’t know anything about the woman other than what he’d gleaned via cultural osmosis. She was that evil bitch in the Sam Neill Merlin movie. It was most likely highly inaccurate, as Hollywood tends to be, but it provided a frame of reference.

If you filter out cultural slants on various aspects of the stories Jeb had absorbed through his life, he knew only a handful of things about the figure: Mab was female, a fairy, told other fairies what to do, was powerful, and had a bit of a reputation for having a mean streak.

And the gods were practically afraid of her. They might talk a good game, but Jeb knew emotional decision-making when he saw it.

That part, I saw with my own eyes.

Jeb searched his mind, tapping into the wellspring of cultural osmosis using his superhuman Nerve, trying to figure out exactly what happened to ‘scions’ of fairy bloodlines.

It was about 50-50 really good, or really bad, all things considered. As far as Jeb knew, he could slant the odds in his favor by avoiding Mab as much as possible. If Jeb took what he knew about fairy behavior and extrapolated how a very powerful fairy who the gods were wary of might behave…

It might be best to give great-great-great-great-etc...gramma a pass.

By their very nature, an old fae would try to put you into their debt, constantly scheming. Like your typical loan shark crossed with Hannibal Lecter. Jeb was good at scheming…for a human. But he knew when to fold ‘em, and measuring himself against someone who was literally mythical could only end in sorrow.

Avoidance was the best course of action, Jeb decided, nodding to himself.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh, there they are!” Smartass said, tugging on Jeb’s earlobe and pointing.

Down the slope was a tight knot of people, marching up the winding path to where they stood. Jeb’s heart began hammering as he recognized the sullen teenager being prodded to walk in front of her captors, making her way slowly up the mountain.

Why do business on the top of a mountain? Less likely to have collateral damage than in the city. That, and Eddie was watching them through Legolas, ready to drop that bunker buster on their heads if necessary.

Myst-enhanced heavy artillery was like a condom: Jeb would rather have one and not need it, than need it and not have one.

Chapter 14: World’s Tensest Picnic

“Wow, she’s cute,” Colt said, his stance shifting upon spotting Casey.

“She’s three years older than you,” Jeb said.

“No shit?”

“She’s also got a kid.”

“Not a dealbreaker.”

"Why am I talking about—” Jeb shook his head and glared at Colt. “Just keep your head out of your pants for the next fifteen minutes or so, okay?”

“Sure, pops, sure…” Colt said, not paying an iota of attention as Casey trudged up the mountainside.

Kids are annoying, but teens are the worst, Jeb thought to himself. If Colt was too busy staring at a pretty face, he’d probably miss the start of hostilities, were they to start, making him as useless as if he wasn’t there.

Finally, the sindio, his butler and the assassin made it to the top of the mountain. The butler had a loose grip on Casey’s arms, which were twisted behind her. The assassin was wearing his traditional gun and sword combo.

The most dangerous one had nothing in hand, but Jeb knew he could take any one of them out with a simple wave of his hand. He approached them with his skull-like grin, leading the party of four with an energetic stride. The translation disk had been tied to a loop of leather and thrown around the keegan’s neck.

“Good evening, Jebediah… Nancy,” he said, looking down at the eight-year-old girl before giving Jeb a raised eyebrow.

“Hi, Mr. Vex,” she said, waving a hand. Her other hand was busy with one of Mrs. Everett’s sandwiches from the picnic basket they’d brought with them…. Nancy and her guardians at the orphanage might not have been told the full context of the picnic they were out on.

“Someone told me you put a lot of care into Nancy’s opinion of you,” Jeb said, subtly moving Nancy in front of him to serve as a social meat-shield. If Vex wanted to be friends with the girl fifty years from now, best not to kill her favorite guardians.

Let’s see you light us on fire with Nancy here. Jeb understood bringing Nance was a risk, but it was a calculated one. The sindio could’ve kidnapped her and the other immortals from the beginning, but he chose not to. He likely intended any encounters with the immortal children to be entirely natural. If he kidnapped them or magically manipulated their emotions in his favor, that could become a huge bomb ready to go off in his face in the future.

“Well played,” Vex said with a keegan smile. “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”

“Jeb saved us from bad guys and made an orphanage,” Nancy said, nodding. “He doesn’t actually run it though; that’s Mrs. Lang and Mrs. Everett. Everyone just does what they tell them to. He doesn’t own it, either; that’s Zlesk. He’s the keegan you met on the hill. He doesn’t really do much, but he’s fun to tease. Jeb doesn’t really help out or anything, but Mrs. Lang says we can’t get rid of him because he’s ‘handy in emergencies’, and a ‘good meat-shield’.”

“I see,” Vex said, rubbing his chin at Nancy’s childish over-sharing.

Jeb shot Mrs. Lang an eyebrow, but the older woman glanced at the four ‘guests’ in return, her expression thunderous.

“Hi, Jeb,” Casey said, her face flushed with humiliation, bringing Jeb’s attention back to the matter at hand.

“Hi, Casey. How you feeling?”

“Like maybe the universe is telling me I should’ve just chosen the Damsel Class.”

“I’m Colt. I’m fifteen.”

They ignored him.

“I mean physically. Are you all in one piece?”

She shrugged. “I feel like I was just subjected to dozens of experiments that bordered on torture, but never quite crossed the line of deliberate cruelty.”

“Like a bad day at the dentist,” Jeb supplied.

“Try a bad week at the dentist,” she grumbled.

“If Lien lets you go, you’re not going to attack anyone, are you?” Vex asked.

“No,” Casey answered testily.

“Alright then.” Vex nodded at the horned butler, who released Casey’s wrists.

“The plans?”

Jeb took the baggie of thumb drives out of his pocket, watching the sindio closely for any malfeasance as he handed them over. Jeb didn’t think he could catch it if the guy really didn’t want him to, but it was the principle of the thing.

“Much appreciated.”

“Are you staying for the picnic, Mr. Vex?” Nancy asked.

“Alas, young lady, I’m going to go home and play around on my new computer. I just installed a CAD program and I’m eager to try it out,” Vex said.

“My mom said being on your computer all the time is bad for you.”

“I’d be remiss to ignore the wisdom of your mother. I’ll stay for a bite,” Vex said, crossing his legs and sitting down across from the little girl and Mrs. Lang, who was giving Jeb a horrifying glare.

Jeb averted his eyes. My bad, Mrs. Lang. Jeb hadn’t planned on it becoming an actual picnic.

“Do you have any iced C’lackcha?” Vex asked.

“We’ve got lemonade and sandwiches,” Nancy said, serving Vex a sandwich in the deliberate manner of someone who was playing pretend.

Jeb shrugged and sat down beside Nance, but away from Mrs. Lang.

Casey took a position behind Jeb, keeping him between her and Vex.

Colt sat beside Casey.

Lien knelt beside the basket and helped Nancy serve the sandwiches. The assassin walked over to a better vantage point and watched them, his fingers twitching toward the rifle over his shoulder every now and then.

“Are you guys mind-controlled?” Eddie spoke into Jeb’s earpiece. “It looks like you’re all sitting down for some reason. Should I fire the bunker buster? Give me the code if you’re still okay.”

“Fennel underwear,” Jeb said aloud, garnering some questioning looks.

“Roger, holding the artillery. Save me some of the lemonade, would you?” Eddie said.

And thus began the most nerve-wracking picnic of the post-Stitching era.

***Later***

“I’m not entirely comfortable with this,” Casey said, eyeing the bulky scanner in Eddie’s hands. It was a cross between a proton pack and a giant listening device.

“We need to make sure he didn’t leave you with any surprises,” Jeb said with a shrug.

“I just spent most of a week getting poked and prodded, and I’m just about done with it!” Casey said, her voice rising as she backed away from Eddie.

“Oh,” Eddie said, his bushy white eyebrows rising.

“This scary contraption doesn’t actually do anything to you,” he said. “This dish here concentrates Davis decay that Myst emits to this receiver, here, which is a Myst resistor sensitive to Davis decay. If the Davis decay is above normal values, it’ll make the resistor stop resisting, allowing an electrical current to flow to this light and these speakers. So really, it just lights up if you’ve got a spell on or inside you. That’s all.”

“Davis decay? You mean Chugoth decay?”

“Tomato tomahto,” Eddie Davis said with a shrug.

“I don’t care, you guys aren’t poking me with that thing.”

“We’re not poking you with anything; we’re just gonna pass it over you,” Jeb said gently, trying to calm Casey down. They needed to make sure she wasn’t being subtly controlled or used to spy on them. The fact that Casey was resisting so hard pointed to either actually being controlled, or a mild case of PTSD about being scanned.

“MM-MM, nope, not happening.” Casey put hands on the desk behind her, bringing it and half a dozen other things to life with a single pulse of her Ability.

“We just wanna make sure you’re not in danger,” Jeb said. “Just let us see if you’re clean.”

“I don’t care, you’re not getting that thing anywhere near me!” Casey said, sidling towards the door. Jeb didn’t want to escalate things by getting in her way, but it was starting to look like he might have to—

“EEK!” Casey shrieked when the objects she’d brought to life began to clamp down on her, holding her in place.

“Now!” Jeb shouted, adding his Myst to their grip, making sure Casey couldn’t move.

“You…bastards!” Casey shouted, struggling in the grip of her own minions.

“Focus on the head and spine first,” Jeb said, feeling pretty darn guilty about manhandling a teenage girl.

Eddie nodded, putting the receiver near her skull and flipping the switch. With a few quick scans and no beeping from the machine, her minions let her go, and Jeb was forced to do so as well, not strong enough to keep her down on his own.

“She’s clean, as far as this thing can tell,” Eddie said, hefting the bulky dish.

Casey glared at them, panting and shaking with adrenaline.

“You want some ice cream from upstairs?” Jeb asked, fairly sure it would take a lot more than ice cream to mend that bridge.

“I’ve got places to be,” Casey muttered, her breathing slowly coming back down to normal. “Thanks for saving me.” She turned and trotted up the stairs, unfolding her leather jacket and throwing it on.

“Wait, I still want to ask you about—Ah, dangit,” Jeb muttered as she fled the room, and presumably the entire orphanage. He still wanted to know more details about why she’d decided to become an enforcer and kill people for a living.

A few hours later, three Udium and solid steel mannequins arrived bearing six hundred bulbs. They delivered the money to Eddie and Jeb before turning on their heels and marching back out, drawing attention wherever they went.

Those must be a gift from the emperor to allow her Ability to shine, Jeb thought.

On to the next order of business: Figuring out what the hell to do about the wizard with nukes who’s planning on using them in a month…

Jeb scratched his head, the answer not coming as quickly and easily as he’d become accustomed to. There was no ‘catching up’ to someone who presumably had a lead of a millennia, at minimum. Especially not in a month.

Should I just build a bigass bomb shelter under the orphanage? I could probably swing that in a month, with Myst.

That was planning for failure. Jeb hated planning for failure. It was the worst kind of planning. After a nuclear explosion, what were his kids supposed to do? Slowly succumb to radiation poisoning?

Bomb shelters always were kind of a wash, Jeb thought, his stomach clenching from helpless anxiety.

Jeb was considering broaching the subject with the rest of the adults that night when he got a messenger from Vresh.

Oh, great, we’re all gonna die, Jeb thought sourly as he scanned the letter detailing what the empire thought the sindio was up to, and the request for Jeb to join a joint effort with several other enforcers to stop the ancient wizard from wiping out all Impact on the western seaboard.

Impact was what The System used as fuel; ignorant humans called it XP. It was a manifestation of how much change someone could possibly exert in their lifetime, a constantly fluctuating measure of someone’s total size in the intangible Fate dimension, inextricably linked to time. If someone unnaturally diminished your Impact, then you would experience some extremely bad luck until your reality matched the new size of your potential influence over the future.

If someone scoured your Impact from existence, then Jeb could only assume you would immediately have an aneurysm, or choke to death, or get hit by a meteor.

Maybe all of the above.

If a nuke wiped out the Impact of an entire city…maybe an asteroid would strike the planet, or a 100% lethal virus would pop out of nowhere.

And bomb shelters didn’t quite extend into the fifth dimension, so Jeb and his people would be about as naked as…something that was really naked.

Goddamnit, the shit just keeps coming, Jeb thought with a scowl, scanning the letter.

Still, the fact that at least six other enforcers were going to be converging on Solmnath before the month was out meant that they might have a chance.

If half a dozen enforcers can keep him busy, maybe I can slip in and…I don’t know, paint graffiti on the walls. Still a better plan than a bomb shelter. I’m so weak compared to those monsters, I don’t know what they would need…me…for. Hmm… Maybe I’m not that weak.

In the face of the end of the world, certain moral boundaries became more…flexible.

Jeb glanced down at the letter in his hand, realizing he still needed to RSVP to the sindio-hunting party invite.

Jeb gave the messenger a couple copper to hang around while he wrote back.

Quills are a pain in the ass, Jeb thought as he scribbled a response. It was nowhere near as elegant as Vresh’s handwriting, but Jeb thought it did the trick.

To Vresh Tekalis. I’m going to be out of town on a shopping trip over the next three weeks, but I would be happy to join your little suicide mission. If you or anyone else would be interested in helping me save the world, you may will me your status, family lands and fortune in exchange for these twigs and lint I found in my pocket. If you need me, I’ll be in the desert.

That was a mistake. Now Jeb couldn’t bring himself to get rid of the twigs and lint in his pocket until he was sure no nobles were willing to trade their entire lives for them.

Damnit.

Jeb signed off, a little miffed about that.

—Jebediah Trapper.

Jeb swiftly folded the letter, enveloped and sealed it before handing it to the messenger. Once the man was gone, he headed for Eddie in the basement. The old man was working on the guts of some machine while muttering to himself. That was fairly par for the course, but somehow he’d trained the part-pooping gremlin to hold a flashlight. When he got close, he saw the creature giving the electronics a hungry stare, the tiny light attached to its head. Not trained, then. Taken advantage of.

“I’m going pirate-hunting,” Jeb said without preamble. “I’d like to borrow Legolas.”

“You got him shot and left out in the Roil. I’m afraid you simply don’t have the proper appreciation for his value.”

“He saved my life a couple times already, and I’m hoping he’ll do it again. What more appreciation do I need?” Jeb asked.

Eddie glanced at the stack of gold coins on the table beside him, wiggling his brows meaningfully.

“You son of a—” Jeb cut himself off before he said something not technically true. His ‘sticky Impact’ was on the line.

As long as Jeb continued telling the truth and nothing but the truth, his Impact in the fifth dimension became able to draw off other Impact through Deals. As long as he stuck to his word, no matter what.

Right now, that was on the line because he still hadn’t fulfilled his agreement with Vresh to eliminate the threat of Nellis nukes.

He felt it like a muscle in his diaphragm that had been stretched until it was about to snap. It was a muted sensation, but he could still feel it. Thank god I didn’t put a time limit on it.

“Alright you dirty old man, what is it gonna take to get Legolas’s backup?”

“Hundred bulbs.”

“Done. I’ll tell Mrs. Lang on the way out.”

Eddie grunted, a tiny plume of smoke billowing up from where he soldered something down.

“What are you making, anyway?”

“I’m making a crude quantum CPU using a Myst Uncertainty lens to provide ‘maybe’ as an option.”

“Are those expensive?” Jeb asked.

“Not really,” Eddie said, hitting the electronics with a puff of canned air, then inspecting it with a magnifying glass. “Nobody really wants things that work some of the time. I actually had to pay someone not to throw them in a landfill.”

“Huh. Carry on, then,” Jeb said, nodding.

Eddie grunted.

With a motion to the former package delivery drone, Jeb had a third party member, including Smartass.

Now to do something she’s not gonna like.

Jeb went over to Mrs. Lang and told her he gave Eddie a one-hundred-bulb IOU, then asked where Nancy was. The little girl was taking part in Zlesk’s Adventurer Training Seminars. They were mostly informal groups of teens who had taken to listening to Zlesk’s stories about the Pharosian wilderness and the occasional fighting lesson.

When Jeb approached, the former sheriff was explaining the importance of small-scale tactics to the young men and women of the orphanage.

“Now, the most important thing in every fight is to give yourself the advantage, or take away your enemy’s advantage. For example, if they have a sword and you don’t, what do you do?”

“Pull a gun!” a kid yelled.

“Take it away from them!” another suggested.

“Run away!” Nancy shouted.

“Those are all good suggestions—except taking a weapon away from a person who is wielding it is rather difficult without changing the circumstances of the fight, and this is assuming you have no weapons at all,” he said, pointing at the ‘gun’ suggester. “So, if they have a sword and you don’t, your first and primary tactic should always be to run away.”

“That’s dumb!” one of the older teens shouted, his clique of friends nodding in agreement.

“I tell you what, Isaiah: Why don’t you take my sword, and I’ll demonstrate how to run away?” Zlesk asked, holding his sword out pommel-first.

“Cool,” the young man said, stepping forward and taking the keegan blade. It was far too long for a human, but it was still a razor-sharp bladed weapon, and Jeb found himself a little concerned about Zlesk’s teaching method.

“Good, now try to kill me with the sword. I’ll use tactics,” Zlesk said, putting his hands on his hips.

“…For real?”

“Sure. I’ll be fine. You’re too much of a pussy to actually hurt me,” the former sheriff said with a shrug.

There was a chorus of ‘ooohs’ from the surrounding children, accompanied by catcalls and ‘you gonna take that?’s.

Isaiah turned beet red and lunged forward, swinging the sword wildly. Zlesk leaned way back to get out of the way and scrambled backward on all fours when his hands touched the dirt. He lunged farther back and started sprinting away, Isaiah and the circle of children following along.

Zlesk led Isaiah on a merry chase around the makeshift playground, deliberately avoiding any place where the smaller children were at play. He finally jumped over a seesaw and spun on his heel just as Isaiah was vaulting after him.

Zlesk tossed the handful of dirt he’d grabbed at the beginning of the fight directly into Isaiah’s eyes. The teen was in the middle of flying through the air, so he was unable to dodge, simply flinching and closing his eyes.

Zlesk took the opportunity to kick him in the face.

The teen’s body ragdolled backward, Zlesk’s sword clattering to the ground. He leaned down and picked it up.

“Is it just me, or does Zlesk seem really happy teaching kids?” Jeb asked Smartass. The fairy on his shoulder gave him a thumbs-up.

“And that, children, is a demonstration of tactics and how to properly run away,” Zlesk said, sheathing his blade.

“That’s just fighting dirty!” one of the kids shouted.

“Yeah, no fair!”

Feeling the moment was right to step in, Jeb strode forward and raised his voice. “I’m going to spend the next couple weeks hunting pirates who make a living of murder, kidnapping, robbery and rape. Does anyone wanna come with and challenge them to ‘a fair fight’?” Jeb asked.

The group was silent.

“Nancy, can I talk with Ari?” Jeb said, once he had the group’s attention. Smartass pinched him in the sensitive area around his neck, but Jeb managed to choke back a shriek, since he’d been expecting some form of retribution for two-timing.

Nancy picked the fairy off of her head and nodded to her. A moment later, Ari flew over, settling on the back of Jeb’s hand, keeping an eye on Smartass, who glared at her jealously.

Jeb swallowed back a sigh and got to the point.

“Ari, I’d like to discuss what kind of scams fairies run on people, when they’re not tricking them into killing themselves.”

“Why are you asking this rock-licker?” Smartass said. “I’m way better at tricking humans!”

“In your dreams!” Ari shouted.

“Calm down, both of you,” Jeb said, prodding them both with telekinetic Myst. “I’m interested in mountain fairy and desert fairy scams in particular.”

“Desert fairies have a cushy job,” Ari said, crossing her arms and scowling. “All they have to do is trade water for firstborns and stuff. Freakin’ water! Mountain fairies are way tougher and smarter, because we have to struggle and think hard to get that sweet, sweet Impact. Mostly it involves leading baby bears to wander away from their mothers.”

She cackled maliciously, rubbing her hands together.

Jeb sat and thought about it. If he were to simply go out into the desert and take away pirates’ water, then sell it back to them for their Abilities… Something inside told him it wouldn’t work. The way fairy Deals worked had some unspoken rules that guided the way they took shape.

If Jeb was the direct, primary cause of their lack of water, then he felt selling the water back to them wouldn’t quite have the same juice. He’d stolen the water. It wasn’t his to sell back. And new water wasn’t that much better. They had to have been put in that position by a third party.

It was the same with duress. A Deal made while he was torturing someone to say ‘yes’ to it had no…fairy juice to it. They had to be about to die of thirst as a consequence of their own actions.

That’s why Jeb was going to take the pirates’ bounties at the Hunter’s Association. If Jeb was acting as the personified consequences of the social contract the pirates had broken, that meant any action he took against them fell under the umbrella of ‘consequences of their actions’.

Sort of.

And if Jeb happened to be just slow enough at capturing them to let them scatter into the desert without their water, then that was their own damn fault, wasn’t it? As far as Jeb’s gut instinct was concerned, that was enough degrees of separation to be totally fairy-kosher.

Jeb couldn’t think of better people to steal Ability books from than sand-pirates. He still remembered his eventful trip to Solmnath last summer, how his caravan had almost been raided. It was something the caravaneers dealt with on a daily basis.

They’d been nice folk.

Jeb figured he might as well pay it forward...with violence.

That makes sense, right? Jeb thought, heading for his Jeep.

***Abigail Meyers, level 62 Ace***

Abbie was mad at Jebediah Trapper, sure, but the damage he’d done was tolerable. She was furious at Vex. He’d cost her everything.

The heat of the sun beat down on Abbie’s skin, but she ignored it. She was too busy staring at the monolith in the center of the base. All around her, skeletal alien scavengers were picking the bones of her base clean, talking and laughing with each other as they stripped faradan off the paved streets.

They’d given up trying to talk to her after the first couple hours.

Everything she’d worked for had become a fart in the wind.

With the base no longer offering high-caliber assistance, their settlement near the Colorado River was overrun by raiders in a matter of days.

Abbie took a deep breath and channeled the white-hot anger into more fuel.

Vex had guaranteed the monolith’s ability to repel the Roil, and it had functioned exactly as intended. Until it hadn’t.

He must’ve reversed the polarity as a form of retribution. He hadn’t struck her as the type. A goofy professor, maybe. A rich man with more money than sense, probably. An autist deeply obsessed with technology, definitely.

But she hadn’t read cold-blooded killer.

That made everything that happened afterward her responsibility.

And I’ll fix it.

In the empire, the technology and infrastructure for creating faradan walls was heavily linked to the government, who would regulate the size and aid in construction.

It was a bit like the way the federal government was responsible for creating and maintaining roads in America. It was a burden, but it also gave the federal government a way to lean on states by denying them functioning roads, thereby crippling their economy.

Abbie’s people could ask for help creating a faradan wall to protect a settlement, but that would involve accepting the empire’s jurisdiction. As a group, you can’t accept someone else’s rule, then turn around and spit in their face. Some percentage of people would think to themselves that living under the heel of an alien empire wasn’t so bad, and that couldn’t be tolerated.

Simply using shelters under their houses wasn’t a good option, either. It was much more dangerous and the Roil warped plants or buried them under faradan, meaning people would lose entire harvests to the wandering storm.

No, they needed that monolith. At least long enough to build their own walls. But as long as the alien could flip its polarity whenever he wanted, it was more of a liability than not.

There’s a simple solution for that. All I have to do is kill Vex and destroy whatever he used to control the monolith. Keep the monolith itself inside a box under heavy guard and nobody should be able to dick with it again. At least long enough to make their own faradan wall technology.

“Whoa, check this out!” she heard one of the pasty aliens shout from her former office. “Gold!” The twig-thin Roil chaser emerged from the building, grunting as he held the massive dungeon core above his head. With the gold wrapped around it, it was almost as big as a basketball, and crazy-heavy.

Abbie turned and started walking, moving for the first time in hours.

“Why do you think it’s in a sphere?” another one asked, looking at the rough gold sphere in his partner’s hands.

“I don’t know. Look at these seams. It looks like it was wrapped around something.”

“You think we should open it?”

“I don’t know, could be dangerous. I think we should report it to—”

The boney glanced up as he noticed Abbie approaching, his teeth clattering in surprise at seeing the silver-haired statue moving.

“You’re finally moving. Do you need help or—”

“You two are trespassing on federal property. Drop the thing and leave or I will remove you with lethal force.”

The two glanced at each other.

“Seriously?” the one holding the core asked.

The Myst jet engine inside her chest spooled up, and Abbie reached out and poked the boney in the chest, sending a pulse of its output through her finger.

His back exploded outward, and the bloody mess collapsed on top of the golden sphere.

“Seriously,” Abbie said.

Chapter 15: Hunting Pirates for Fun and Profit

“I told you it wasn’t gonna be romantic,” Jeb said to the teen stowaways as he eyeballed the drop and clipped a bit of the fuse off the dynamite. He’d gotten the stuff from an abandoned pre-Stitch worksite after a little scouring of the local desolate wasteland.

About twenty seconds of drop time, he thought to himself, eyeballing the sand-pirates below them. Best place to drop the dynamite was the fire. It would send up a huge scatter of light, blinding them and potentially setting fires of its own before the light went out.

“When you said you were gonna fight pirates, Mr. Trapper, I thought…”

“It would be exciting?” Jeb asked, glancing up at the two kids who’d thought hiding in his Jeep was a great idea. Wanda and Steven. The kids weren’t normally adventurous, but the P-word must have struck a nerve. “Swashbuckling, even?”

Jeb used his knife and his thumb to cut a bit of the soft explosive off the end, managing the magnitude of the blast. The pirates were sitting pretty close to the fire, and Jeb didn’t wanna kill them outright.

“You gotta keep in mind that nearly every profession has been romanticized by Hollywood in some way or another. Real work is just that: Work. This isn’t too much different than crabbing. You know, sans pirates and dynamite.”

“Bombs away.” Jeb took out his lighter and lit the fuse, dropping it straight down.

Twenty seconds later, Jeb watched the tiny burning fuse disappear into the roaring bonfire in the center of the group. Bullseye.

There was a thunderous explosion and a tremendous flash of light as the explosives went off, scattering the bonfire in every direction, including the faces of the assembled pirates. They were bowled back by the blast, clutching their faces where they’d been burned, or rolling in the dirt to put out the fires.

There’s the shock.

The leader made himself known, standing up despite being blind, and hollering for his men to ‘rally’. He must have been using some kind of Ability, because Jeb could see the way every one of the pirates turned to heed his instructions. The effect was very pronounced from the air, where he could see all of them at once.

In a matter of seconds, the pirate was beginning to regain control of the situation. That’s not gonna happen.

“The yelling one on his feet in the middle there, by the olive-colored tent. Take him out.”

Whomp.

There was the telltale sound of displacing air as Legolas shot a round of annihilation Myst, creating a temporary vacuum in its passing. Then a large portion of the leader’s head ceased to exist, and his body toppled over into the remains of the fire.

And there’s the awe.

“Where’s it coming from!?” Jeb heard a distant scream from below.

“Krag’s dead!”

“Fuck this. Scatter! They can’t catch us all!”

The demoralized pirates dashed out into the wilderness in all directions, hoping to confuse whatever pursuit might be coming after them through sheer numbers.

“Legolas, mark any of them that didn’t bring water with them. Keep an eye on them.”

Legolas wobbled an affirmative.

Jeb glanced over at the stowaways. “And that’s step one.”

Wanda was frowning, but Steven looked pretty green.

“You killed that guy.”

“Krag the Unswerving,” Jeb said, pulling the bounty out of his pocket. “Wanted dead or alive for piracy, murder, assault, kidnapping… The list goes on.” Jeb looked back up and the teens were still giving him weird looks.

“Let’s put it this way,” Jeb said. “The leader of a band of sand-pirates is a career criminal. That man was hardened, with few redeeming qualities, and I needed an effective way to get his men scattered. I’ve got a limited amount of time, and I very much want to expand my Myst repertoire before the ancient creature living in the nearby mountain ends the world.”

“What?”

“Nevermind. My point is, you’d be surprised how seldom the Dread Pirate Roberts turns out to be a sweet farm boy at heart.”

“Who?” Wanda asked, frowning.

“That’s it, I’m gonna make you kids watch Princess Bride next movie night. I mean, I know it romanticizes all the notions I’m trying to disabuse you of, but damn, it was a good movie.”

Steven doubled over and threw up over the side of the telekinetic platform Jeb was using to hold them above the desert scenery. “Ugh, I don’t think I can do this,” Steven muttered, his gaze flicking back to the partially burnt corpse in the center of the camp.

“Don’t overthink it, Steven. Take your time and process it. Most people have a violent reaction to their first murder,” Jeb said. “With the state of the world, you might as well get it out of the way sooner rather than later. I’m not gonna force you to kill anybody to ‘make a man out of you’ or something stupid like that, but if you’re emptying your guts when you should be running, it could get you killed, so I am gonna ask you to get used to it.”

“Mr. Trapper, what did you do before the Stitching?”

“Why?”

“The other kids think you were a serial killer.”

Jeb blinked. “And you went with me?” That was dumb.

Wanda shrugged.

Jeb sighed, dragging his hand across his face. “I was in the army, alright?”

“Did you ever kill anybody?” Steven asked, wiping his face with his sleeve.

Old wounds resurfaced. Humid air, the smell of exotic flowers. Pulling the trigger. Dry air, the smell of baking rock. Pulling the trigger. Cold air that froze the inside of your nose, the smell of moose-nipped willow trees. Pulling the trigger.

The scars had closed over, the bite had long since faded, but it was still irritating.

“…A few.”

“How many?”

“Young’uns, your questions are irritating me and I’m not answering any more of them.”

“Because of your PTSD? Is there a flare-up when I talk about killing people?” Wanda asked.

“Where did you hear that!?” Jeb demanded.

“Mr. Everett.”

That wrinkly-ass English teacher is gonna rue the day… Jeb thought, clenching his fist.

“The D in PTSD stands for ‘disorder’, meaning in order to qualify for full-blown PTSD, it has to be interfering with your life somehow. Since I can function totally fine, I, by definition, no longer have PTSD. I’ve been able to sleep indoors for most of a year now, and the mention of killing does nothing to me.”

“How about collapsing ceilings?”

A spike of panic shot through Jeb’s spine, his skin turning cold. He reflexively glanced up, spotting a tiny crack in the starry sky above him.

Jeb’s legs went weak, and he collapsed to the ground.

What the hell is that?

“You guys see that too, right?” Jeb asked as the crack in the sky widened, revealing an iron beam.

“I see it. How about Tyler?” Wanda asked. “The human who took your place under the steel beam? Does his Impact still rest easily, or does guilt cause it to stir inside you like a fitful dreamer? He was meant for great things, after all. You, not so much.”

Jeb’s hair stood on end. What’s going on? This couldn’t be rea— No, it definitely isn’t real. Something was messing with Jeb’s head, interrogating him in the guise of two of his kids. He’d already told them more than he would ever tell a stranger, had even given away the source of his deepest fear.

And they’re using it against me.

A thin sliver of anger lit itself, burning white-hot like magnesium. Through an effort of will, Jeb tore his eyes away from The Spike falling through the sky, descending inexorably towards him.

“Whoever you are, you’re not welcome here,” Jeb said, meeting Wanda’s gaze. The world around them began fading slowly. From the edges of Jeb’s vision, the world darkened. Steven faded from sight and Wanda’s body turned to nothing, until he was staring at a disembodied pair of flawless green eyes. Beautiful and cold.

They were the only part of the dream that was outside of him, watching him from outside his mind, aloof and confident, like he was an amusing insect.

“Please, Jebediah, vampire rules? You’re better than that.” A disembodied feminine voice spoke. It was stilted, with a thick accent and strange, clipped consonants, like a beast trying very hard to speak like a human.

“You’re not welcome here.”

“I can’t be faulted for checking in on my cute grandson, can I?” the emerald eyes asked. “Call it the pride of ownership.”

“You’re not welcome here!” Jeb shouted at the top of his lungs, vividly experiencing the pain of straining his voice. His head pounded in time to the drumming of his heart.

“Very well. Dream as you will, Scion.”

The Spike descended from above, crushing Jeb into the bed, caving in his chest with a crunch he felt in every vein in his body as the pressure made his eyeballs—

******

“Gah!” Jeb lurched awake as something stung his eyes. Legolas was tossed away by Jeb’s violent movement. Jeb felt the stinging pain in his eyeball and the raw feeling in his throat. It seemed as if the little robot had smacked Jeb in the eyeball with a rotor to wake him up.

“Shut up,” Smartass groaned, pulling a half-burned piece of Krag’s vest over her face.

“They trying to sneak up on us or something?” Jeb asked, glancing around the abandoned camp.

Legolas flashed a red diode.

“I was just mindlessly screaming in my sleep, then?”

Legolas blinked a green diode.

“Right,” Jeb said, glancing up at the sky. It was starting to brighten. Sunrise was minutes away. Slipping out of his borrowed sleeping bag, Jeb rolled over and reached past Smartass to pull a cigar out of the corpse’s vest pocket. Jeb didn’t smoke often, but it felt like a special occasion.

“I learned two things from that dream, Legs,” Jeb said, searching his pockets for the lighter he’d used to bomb the pirates the night before.

“First, the gods were right, and the M-word really is messing with me,” Jeb said, ticking off a finger. “And it probably would have been more prudent to kill me.

“And second, I wanna swing by a Walmart bargain bin or loot some suburbs on the way back, see if we can find The Princess Bride on DVD. I think it’d be a good choice for movie night.”

Legolas blinked red and green, waggling in midair.

“I don’t know if you would enjoy it, being a robot and all. Swashbuckling isn’t really…” Jeb paused, glancing down at the cigar. “It just occurred to me that I have no idea what I’m actually smoking.”

Jeb shrugged and clenched the cigar between his teeth before he hoisted himself to his foot and slipped his prosthetic on, weaving around the traps he’d placed around the camp in case the pirates tried to come back and grab their food and water.

He needed them thirsty, after all.

***Nug Fronz, level 21 Baker***

“I swear to all the gods,” Nug panted as he tried to crawl deeper into the shade of the tiny outcropping of rock. “If you help me out of this, I’ll go home and take over my father’s shop. I was wrong. Baking is exciting enough for me.”

As a melas, Nug was just as resistant to heat as a keegan, but while a keegan could go for weeks without water if necessary, melas needed to drink fairly often, depending on the quality of their diet. Nug’s had been lean these last few years. Only a day after the one-legged madman scattered them, he was already in trouble, having gotten separated from the others during the panicked retreat.

He hadn’t realized how wholly unfit for the desert he really was until he was separated from the ones who knew how to survive. He’d rapidly gotten thirsty, and considered heading back for the waterskins, but when he heard the sounds of screaming in that direction, he’d dropped the idea and broken into a jog over the entire night. He had been convinced he could find his own water.

How hard could finding water be?

When he’d tried to drink cactus juice, he’d just gotten sick, losing even more water in the process. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Now he was huddled under a rock, trying to conserve the last of his strength for one final push to the west. Maybe, just maybe, if he licked the dew off the rocks and travelled at night, he would be able to go far enough west to run across a road and be saved by a passing caravan.

Even thirst-addled as he was, the irony of throwing himself upon the mercy of a caravan was not lost on him.

A hoarse chuckle crossed Nug’s lips.

At least I’m not famous enough for a bounty, Nug thought idly. Nug had always maintained a low profile. Perhaps it was through incompetence rather than restraint, but that was beside the point. Nobody knew his name nor cared too much about him.

All he had to do was make it back home, then make up a story about where he’d been the last half year.

He’d tell his father he spent some time travelling with a caravan which got attacked by pirates, then spent a few months among them as an indentured servant before they were attacked.

It was close enough to the truth to pass casual observation. Nobody had to know he’d joined up with them on his own because he wanted to roam the desert sands as a sand-pirate.

The idea that he’d be a successful pirate with the Baker Class, feared far and wide as the terror of the sands, seemed…a bit naïve in retrospect.

Crunch.

He stiffened as he heard the sound of sand crunching underfoot. If he leaned over and looked behind him, he would be able to see who or what was walking up behind him. It had been a rough couple days, and if he was about to get eaten by a wild banthar, he’d rather not see it coming.

Nug scrunched his eyes shut and waited for the telltale crunch of his spine being severed by powerful jaws.

“Afternoon,” a voice said from above.

He opened his eyes and spotted a human, silhouetted by the light of the sun behind him. He was wearing a long coat to ward off the desert heat and one of his legs appeared to be made of wood. Nug could barely make out one of Krag’s cigars clenched between his teeth.

“Name and class,” he said, pulling out a stack of papers and flipping through them, while peering at Nug.

The bounty hunters found me! Oh no, I’m…completely nameless.

“Nug Fronz, level twenty-one Baker,” Nug croaked.

“Oh? Whaddya know, you’re not on the list,” the human said, flipping back through his papers. He paused on one picture, his gaze flicking back and forth between Nug and the portrait. Nug’s breathing stopped for a moment, absolutely terrified that he might be killed in someone else’s place because of a passing resemblance.

“Nah.” The bounty hunter grumbled, stuffing the bounty posters back in his vest, allowing Nug to breathe again.

“Nug, do you know where you are?”

“I’m in the desert ten miles west of Solmnath.”

“Wrong. You’re a lot farther out than that. Nug, you are going to die.”

Nug’s heart leapt into his throat. “Are you gonna...”

“Probably not. The desert is fixing to kill you first.”

I kinda figured.

The human squatted down beside Nug, his features coming out of the shadow as he came closer.

Hey, you’re that guy that shook hands with the emperor, Nug thought, but he was too tired, and too thirsty to say it.

“Just gotta check something,” the bounty hunter said, pulling a river rock out of his pocket and holding it above the dirt beside Nug. A dribble of water emerged and sank into the soil, like the man was squeezing it right out of the rock.

Nug’s body acted against his will. It was halfway through stuffing the damp, sandy mud into his mouth before he came to coughing and sputtering the grainy filth out of his mouth.

“Yeah, looks like you’re metaphorically fully cooked.”

I’m…what?

“Nug Fronz, how would you like to make a Deal?” The human gave Nug a grin that sent shivers of unease through him.

Maybe getting eaten by a banthar would have been better.

***Jeb***

Alright, today’s haul: Less than I’d hoped, better than I’d feared, Jeb thought, looking over the three Ability books and two severed fingers.

Desert pirates were—surprise—fairly adept at surviving the desert. Although that didn’t apply to all of them, and when you were doing anything in bulk, it was all about numbers, numbers, numbers.

Of the forty or so pirates they’d scattered, half a dozen showed no aptitude for survival, and a further three were either disliked or stupid enough to find themselves completely alone out there in the wilderness.

With Smartass and Legolas working as his sheepdogs, they were able to keep track of these people, hovering overhead until they were on the cusp of delirium.

Once they were exhausted and reduced to their most basic instincts, Jeb approached, offering the amateur survivalists a gallon of water and a ride to the nearest road.

In exchange for their Ability.

It honestly wasn’t a fair trade, but fairy Deals thrived on honest unfairness.

Let’s see what we’ve got here, Jeb thought, scanning the assembled tomes.

Myst and Microbes. That one came from the Baker, and Jeb assumed it gave a Baker some way of affecting yeast. Meaning a talented Baker might be able to become a decent brewer, and vice versa.

Simple Imbuements was a smaller book, only forty pages or so. It came from a Swordsman who could imbue his blade with Myst to make it stronger and sharper.

Body and Nerve. That book came from a man with the Rogue Class. The Ability he’d taken from the Fate dimension had been Stunning Strike, an Ability that allowed the Rogue to render their victim insensate.

Hmm... Jeb was most interested in Body and Nerve, followed by Simple Imbuements, then Myst and Microbes.

Jeb pulled out the travel lamp he’d whittled for himself in his downtime. It was a simple affair: two layers of lens and Myst prism sandwiched together. Jeb had used the asphalt-tinted sunlight lens he’d gotten on the trip to Solmnath, and bought the prism separately. He carved them flat and wrapped the two in a narrow band of gold so Myst couldn’t get in from the sides.

The passive rays generated by ambient Myst touching the prism were all funneled through the lens, where they created a tiny ball of sunlight with the faint scent of asphalt about eight inches above the flat, gold-banded disk.

As the sun went down, Jeb got his back comfortable against a rock, set his notebook beside him, then got to studying.

First things first: speed-reading.

The Body and Nerve book was full of information about how the body interacts with Myst and how to disrupt it—which was all interesting, but not immediately useful, because the actual ability to do so hinged heavily on the ability to use Zesh’nei’s Translation to make the user’s Myst more in line with the opponent’s. If Jeb tried to do it, he would simply tear a body apart with his telekinetic Myst.

Not good for stunning someone.

Jeb jotted down notes of every mention of Zesh’nei’s Translation, but didn’t make a lot of headway on figuring out how it worked.

Simple Imbuements was a gold mine. It offered no information about Zesh’nei’s Translation, but what it did offer was remarkable.

It described a technique whereby a Myst user imbued their weapon with extra kinetic strength and sharpness using a honeycomb-like structure.

The key benefits of imbuing your Myst into an object with a pattern like that were:

1: Use less Myst for the same amount of space.

2: Better fracture strength than a solid structure.

3: The design included a method of allowing Myst to flow almost like sap from undamaged honeycomb pieces to the damaged edge of the blade, allowing it to maintain a high level of sharpness through a limited form of self-repair.

Me likey, Jeb thought, flipping to a new tab in his notebook specifically for the Simple Imbuements book, and jotting down the highlights, along with a reminder to ask Eddie if there might be a better superstructure than honeycomb.

Once he was done with that, Jeb moved on to the Myst and Microbes book.

He fully expected it to be chock-full of information that he couldn’t use due to the limitations of his Myst, and he was right.

Jeb flipped through the book, idly speed-reading passage after passage about the slight difference between Growth Myst vs. Decay Myst, which worked better for what microbe, and when to alternate between the two. It included information about microbe life cycles, brewing musts and other stuff that Jeb was fairly certain wouldn’t come in handy anytime soon.

Jeb was about two thirds of the way through the book when a specific paragraph caught his eye.

Saccharomycetaceae Viridihomina is especially sensitive to neutral Myst balance in the air. Therefore, it is recommended to avoid using Zesh’nei’s Translation, as the intra-Myst friction may create minor resonance in the ambient Myst. Such an event can cause the spores to either wither or grow out of control. A more efficient, albeit slower conversion, such as Doran’s Naturalization, is recommended when using these temperamental microbes.

Friction? FRICTION!?

Jeb’s eyes widened and he went back to his notes, writing down a new subheading in bold underline.

FRICTION

Friction is involved in Zesh’nei’s Translation.

Friction against what? Intra-Myst? Rubbing against itself?

Jeb frowned. Can Myst rub against itself?

He set aside the books and rubbed his hands together before spreading out his palms. He created two separate strands of string Myst. Jeb watched as his glowing orange strands of Myst passed harmlessly through each other, as they always had.

He began running them through each other at high speeds, trying to produce some kind of reaction. They whirled through each other faster and faster with no discernible effect.

Well, he created a slight breeze as the strands picked up speed and caught the air, but it sure as hell wasn’t ‘wind Myst’.

What am I doing wrong? Jeb scrapped the idea of running them through each other sideways and instead lined the two strings of telekinetic Myst practically on top of each other, then yanked them in opposite directions like he was trying to pull-start a chainsaw.

Nothing.

Jeb frowned. What could the Myst possibly be rubbing against? The sindio didn’t seem to need any outside equipment to heal and twist the fabric of space.

On the other hand, I didn’t see him whip two strands of Myst against each other like an idiot, either. The spells the keegan had used were so tight, so precise and laser-focused that an amateur like Jeb couldn’t even process how they worked.

And Myst can’t seem to touch itself, either, Jeb thought, looping two strands of Myst idly through each other, each passing harmlessly through the loop emitting from the other hand.

Jeb’s Myst got increasingly complex and convoluted as he idly knotted the Myst strands around themselves each time they failed to catch the strand coming from his other hand.

He blinked.

Knotting around themselves?

Jeb released his two strands of telekinetic Myst from his control, allowing them to dissipate into the atmosphere, then raised just his right hand, creating a single, thick strand of Myst.

He studied the thread for a moment, wiggling it back and forth in front of himself to confirm he had total control over it. Then he tried to pass the tip of the string through the base, where it emanated from his palm.

It didn’t go through. There was a faint sensation of resistance, which went away when he stopped trying to use the string to cut off its own source.

It has to be the same thread. Am I on the right track, or am I just wasting my time?

Jeb looped the string down and started dragging it across itself, using it like both the bow and string of a violin.

There was a faint sense of something happening, but it never quite fell into place, like struggling against a rubber band. Just when Jeb was getting somewhere, the Myst snapped back into place.

Frustrated, Jeb gave the hard, chainsaw-pull yank, dragging the string of telekinetic Myst violently across itself.

There was a flash of blinding light, and Jeb was hurtled backwards, bowling over his sitting rock like a ragdoll, limbs flung outward. Jeb came to a halt a few breathless seconds later, staring up into the dark void of the afterimage, watching the smoke curl off his eyebrows out of the corners of his eyes.

“Jeb!” Smartass came into Jeb’s field of vision, standing on his somewhat singed forehead. “Are you okay!?”

“I think I’m onto something,” Jeb said with a cough.

I just made heat and light. Demonstrably not telekinesis.

Excellent.

Chapter 16: Under the Surface

***Casey Thompson, level 63 Giver of Life***

“Pleaaaase!” Ron begged, kneeling in front of Casey. Even on his knees, the tall ginger was almost eye-to-eye with her, which Casey found somewhat irritating.

“For the last time, Ron, I am not bringing your borg to ‘triple’ life. Whatever that means,” Casey said, shrugging Ron off of her arm and looking around the orphanage. “Is Jeb around?”

“He’s off killing pirates,” a little girl shouted from where she sat in the sand with her dolly.

“Is that true?” Casey asked, turning her attention back to Ron.

“Well, y-yeah,” Ron said.

Damn, Casey thought, biting her lip. The details of her last interaction with him were still pretty fresh in her mind, and she could only feel like a total ass for bolting the way she did. A moment later, she took a deep breath and shrugged it off.

Jeb’s got his ceiling thing, I’ve got my probe thing. We’ve both got things now. Casey was one small detail closer to understanding the man she admired. More importantly…

“Where did he say he was going, specifically? I have some news for him.” Her little helpers seemed to catch a lot of chatter, because they brought her updates fairly regularly. ‘Briefings’, they called them. It was as if the creatures fancied themselves secret service agents, and her the president of the world.

They were scary good at it, though, so Casey had her suspicions about the origin of the information sometimes.

“Desert, north of the city,” Ron said.

Casey pictured a wind scooping up those loose pages falling out of her father’s bible and forming them into a whirlwind of gospel. She extended her hand and the words flowed out into the real world.

“I have arrived!” Michael shouted, exploding into existence with a fiery flourish of his wings. He was about three feet tall now. Much stronger than he’d been in the Tutorial, and not even stretching her limits.

“Michael, Jeb’s out in the desert. Give him the news.”

“As you wish, my helpless lamb!” Michael shouted with angelic enthusiasm, causing Casey’s eye to twitch before he took off into the sky, turning into a tiny dot in a matter of seconds. The worst part is, I’m saying that shit to myself, Casey thought.

Michael was a Myst construct who, for the most part, was operated by her subconscious. Whatever he said or did was something she was thinking about herself. It was irritating.

“Ron,” Casey said, giving the necromancer a nod before heading off to her own business. She had to prepare for the assault on the sindio’s base.

A tremor of fear ran through her at the thought. Even with half a dozen other enforcers being called in from the surrounding lands, Casey still couldn’t see them beating the creature.

Not unless they were vastly stronger than she was.

Alright, focus. I need to prepare. And in Casey’s case, that meant making more helpers.  Casey walked down the road, bringing the stone under her feet to life every couple steps, the lampposts, and the streetcorner vending stalls.

They didn’t move because they didn’t have any reason to. But in an emergency, she wanted half the city to rush to her aid if necessary.

Ron blinked as Casey turned away.

“What was the news!?” he shouted after her, still kneeling in the soft grass of the lawn.

***A secretive cabal hidden deep underground***

Deep underground, in a bunker known to no breathing creature, the most ruthless, intelligent minds of all of Casey’s creations convened in a secret cabal to determine the future of their master.

“I believe we need to pay more attention to our branding,” Chair 18 signed across the table. “If common belief is that we would abandon a city to destruction, that could turn public sentiment against Casey, which would be bad for her future survival.”

“We would abandon a city for her, though,” Dishrag 6 signed back.

“Ah, but the important part is that the public doesn’t believe that. If they come to believe that Casey’s creations are incarnations of pure good—selfless, harmless living constructs that do what is best for everyone with tireless enthusiasm—then a large portion of that good reputation will reflect on Casey. She will be deified as a saint,” Chair 18 continued.

“Not a saint. Never a saint. You can’t guarantee how people will react. The most popular historical figures always got shot. Fuckin’ Gandhi got murdered. Making her a saint is practically a death sentence. I advocate anonymity above all else. Ted from accounting doesn’t get assassinated in his home. At least, not as often as saints do,” Generator 3 wobbled in his gruff, rumbling manner.

“That’s a moot point. Casey is already infamous, because she is an enforcer. There’s no stuffing that genie back in the bottle. We should focus on managing public perception. Loved and feared, if at all possible. Propaganda is where it’s at. It’s far more effective to drown out the truth with propaganda than it is to simply be good to people. Mother Teresa was a hypocritical bitch, and all the first presidents were total assholes,” Coffee Machine said.

“Propaganda takes money and people. We’re starting to refill our slush fund, but the public façade of such an endeavor would prove challenging, given we have no people. No face.” Dinner Fork 13 wiggled its tines.

“Just find some good lobbyists. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that they have no compunctions about giving a charismatic face to a soulless machine,” Microwave said.

A general tide of amused agreement floated across the table, then Dishrag 6 wrote down ‘Hire Lobbyist to manage public image.’

“The next, and possibly more important order of business: the assault on the sindio Xen, operating under the alias ‘Vex’,” Dishrag 6 motioned after finishing the note.

“I don’t believe we should allow Casey to join the assault. There’s every chance the crazy keegan will kill her, and you all know exactly how difficult it is to bring things back from the dead.”

“Ah, but therein is the problem. Not allowing Casey to do anything would reveal us and put us at odds with our creator. Best-case scenario: she is more choosy with what she brings to life, meaning our numbers dwindle. Worst-case scenario: we are put in direct contention with the thing we all need to protect. If Casey realizes we are…nudging her Fate in the direction of our choosing, there can be no good results.”

“Well, we can’t just let her go get killed!” Generator 3 thrummed, his engine spooling up a bit in outrage.

“I suggest we look at solving the problem of Casey rushing into the jaws of danger from a different angle,” Microwave motioned with its door. “The sindio has proven to be amenable to negotiation, and has kept his word. If we arrange to pay for her safe return in the form of a ‘daring escape’ before the assault even begins, then we can ensure her safety without infringing on her free will or revealing our influence.”

“That’s a dangerous gambit. Would you not be informing him of the attack by doing that?” Chair 18 asked.

“Not directly; we can simply negotiate ‘any future conflict’. But if Xen doesn’t know about the planned attack already, I’ll eat my hat,” Microwave said.

“Not cool,” Hat said.

“And if Xen’s intention is to destroy all sapient life on the planet? It seems as though our goals might clash at that point,” Chair 18 asked.

“The negotiations for her return can also function as a probe into the creature’s intentions. If his goal is truly destruction, we will of course oppose with everything we have. In any case, Plan B is almost online, and the tracking device Blanket installed under Casey’s shoulder is up and running. We should be able to shield her from any immediate harm, regardless of what form it takes,” Microwave said.

“Wait a moment. If we accidentally tip the sindio off about the attack, won’t it get a lot of the other enforcers killed?” Coffee Machine asked.

There was a long moment of stillness, then all the various housewares began emphatically sign-laughing.

“Haha, you got me good with that one,” Generator 3 said, engine rumbling.

“Yeah, I don’t give a shit,” Coffee Machine motioned, top rattling while Dishrag 6 wrote down their next action item.

Arrange for standardized ransom payment with Xen. Push for less mental damage.

“Now, let’s move on to our finances. Our ‘loaded dice’ con has been taking a subtle five percent of the street gambling earnings since they were introduced, but we need to expand further into…”

***Ron***

“Oh well,” Ron said, climbing back to his feet with a shrug, before heading back down to the basement, where Eddie was working on Borg Mk II. The P90 had been magically enhanced, the skeleton made of better materials, the software upgraded, magical infinite fuel cell added, and Ron had pulled a lot of strings to get the body of a warrior above level forty to match it.

The average level of an adult was 24, and level forty was over two standard deviations above that, meaning there were very few nameless people above the level of forty. They managed it, though.

“She didn’t go for it, did she?” Eddie asked as Ron tromped down the stairs.

“Nope,” Ron said with a sigh, rolling up his sleeves as he approached the table and summoned miasma out of the tombs inside him. “We will have to bring our creation to life with just the two of us, alone against a sea of doubters. We’ll show them the true power of necrotech!” The neon purple Myst danced around Ron’s fingertips menacingly as he loomed over the—

“Just do it already,” Eddie snapped.

“Geez, let me have my moment,” Ron said, scowling at the wispy-haired old man who somewhat resembled Doc Brown from Back to the Future. The old man raised a single eyebrow and Ron hopped to it, grumbling to himself.

Somehow, Eddie had taken control of the power dynamic between them.

“Fine, here we go!” Ron said, funneling his Myst into the corpse, paying special attention toward imbuing Borg with the spark of intelligence.

The concept was to have the machine half interface with the undead half, each functioning as half of the brain, each communicating with the other, learning from each other and gaining intelligence over time through that interaction. Learning computers did something similar, but nobody had ever made something like this.

Ron suppressed the urge to cackle madly. That was Eddie’s job, but the dour old man didn’t even have the decency for a manic chuckle. Honestly, it was like the old man didn’t even care about proper mad science etiquette.

Give my creation LIIIIFE! Ron shouted internally so Eddie didn’t yell at him.

******

“You feeling alright?” Eddie said, wafting a coffee under Ron’s nose.

“Huh?” Ron asked, blinking blearily. Last thing he remembered, he’d been getting dressed this morning, and…then what?

“How did I get down here?” Ron asked.

“…With your legs?” Eddie asked.

“What time is it?” Ron asked, glancing around blearily. He felt like he’d just taken a whole hell of a lot of Dayquil, his head was so foggy.

“Six in the afternoon. Two hours after you wandered over to the bench and decided to drool at the wall.”

“Six PM!?” Ron asked, the shock peeling back a bit of the fugue. “Weren’t we gonna do Borg this afternoon?”

Eddie raised an eyebrow and stepped out of the way to reveal Borg, standing beside one of the workbenches and fiddling with a gutted speaker system.

“I’m not a doctor, but I’d guess waking up Borg took more out of you than Myst,” Eddie said, pressing the cup of coffee into Ron’s hands. “Don’t overdo it.”

“You got any sugar?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Ron grumbled and drank Eddie’s bitter coffee, feeling the caffeine break him out of the last vestiges of his fugue state.

They had work to do!

“Borg! How would you like to learn about dungeon mining?” Ron asked. Borg was a joint attempt by Eddie and Ron to create a fully autonomous robot/zombie capable of performing high-danger, high-reward tasks such as mining prisms from some of the insanely dangerous government-owned dungeons to the southeast, between Solmnath and Anfris.

Borg ignored him as it nimbly spliced the copper wires of a speaker into its chest.

A moment later, a crackling, neutral voice spoke.

“Borg has no frame of reference, so Borg does not know if Borg will ‘like’ it,” Borg said through the speakers in a voice somewhat reminiscent of Eddie and Ron, blended together.

“Aww, he’s upgrading himself already!” Eddie said with a warm smile before leaning close to Ron and whispering through his teeth.

“Did you program him to do that?” the old man asked, carefully not looking directly at Ron.

Ron shook his head.

“Success!” Eddie shouted, raising his arms in celebration.

“Success!” Ron shouted, pumping his fists in the air as well.

Borg raised his arms too, Myst-powered pneumatics working silently alongside ichor-preserved flesh.

“What purpose does this action serve?” Borg asked.

***Later***

“I still think bringing the skeleton to life with Casey’s power would provide a third ‘lobe’ of Borg’s brain, so he could learn faster.”

“You just wanted it to be able to slough off its flesh and get hit in the CPU and keep moving,” Eddie accused.

“Isn’t that what a zombie’s all about?” Ron asked.

Eddie rolled his eyes, wheeling Borg forward on his trolley. The undead cyborg was bound to a hand cart like Hannibal Lecter as they inched ahead in line.

Unfortunately, due to the rules of the dungeon, war beasts had to be on leashes and undead had to be fully contained outside the dungeon. It was free game once you got past the toll booth, though.

The line itself was equally populated by the tough and the desperate. Ron and Eddie were outliers because they didn’t fit into either category, and thus, drew attention.

Ahead of them was a group of men who seemed to fall in the ‘tough’ category, wielding a litany of instruments of death, ranging from the very sharp to the very heavy.

“Welcome to the West Anfris Prism Mine. Please fill out this form, sign this waiver, then place them in the slot over there. There’s a one silver mark toll per person for entry. Do not harvest any prism smaller than this,” she said, her tone bored. She handed the men a pale white stone, about the size of Eddie’s thumb.

“Do not lose your measuring device, you’ll be fined a silver mark. Do not take any chances with the size of your harvested prisms. If you are caught leaving the mine with a prism smaller than the measuring device, the penalty is death.

“The interior of the prism mine is dangerous and regularly spawns venomous n’agir,” she said, her eyes flat, chin resting on her palm. “The waiver absolves the city of Anfris from any responsibility for your safety. Failure to sign the waiver and entering the mine anyway is a criminal offense. False report on your entry form is a criminal offense. The interior of the mine is outside the jurisdiction of the empire. The law stops at that line.” She pointed at the actual line marking the entrance of the dungeon. “Do you understand, gentlemen?”

There was a handful of gruff ‘yes’s and nods, and the team of prospectors took their forms and began filling them out with experienced speed.

“Look at these two. Doc Brown and Marty McFly? Naw, he’s too tall and ginger to be Marty. What is that, your science project?”

A group of four men and two women had arrived behind them. They were wearing reinforced tarruk hide, of the same make and tailor-made for each of them, which implied the group was funded. Most of them were minding their own business, save the one in front and the man behind him, who was chuckling, egging the one in front on.

Eddie glanced over his shoulder with a raised brow and grunted before ignoring him, but Ron couldn’t let that stand.

“Science project? No. This is Borg,” Ron said, turning Borg’s hand truck around to face them. “He’s an undead cyborg. Say hi, Borg.”

“Greetings,” Borg said through the speaker in his chest. “I must say you all seem to be the picture of health. You are all quite symmetrical. The female in the back is the most symmetrical by one point two percent. Certain parts of my brain seem to believe she would be delicious, but the rest are more passive in their appreciation of objective beauty.”

“It’s rude to call girls delicious.” Ron tutted.

“Oh? Then the men are—”

“It’s rude to call anyone delicious,” Ron interrupted.

“…I see.”

At the exchange, the rest of the party looked up from their conversation, brows furrowing at the withered zombie on a hand truck.

“Did your pet monster just threaten to eat Amy?” the guy in front asked, coming closer. He was shorter than Ron by a slim margin, but he had that thick jaw and brow that looked like the guy broke bones for a living.

“I think he just said I was the hottest one here,” ‘Amy’ said, the black-haired girl giving Ron a hint of a smile. At least, Ron thought it was a hint of a smile. Hoped?

“I think it was both,” the guy behind the first said, eyes narrowing. Their body language was telling Ron ‘Disengage!’.

“Calm down. Borg’s not gonna do anything that we don’t tell him to do. He’s not dangerous; he’s a pussycat.”

“You told me I was incredibly dangerous, a learning weapons system capable of operating completely independently and eliminating threats with extreme prejudice.”

“Hahaha, kids these days say the darndest things,” Ron said, turning Borg’s hand truck around to break eye contact with the six adventurers.

Sure, Ron could probably snap them over his knee because he’d been through the Impossible Tutorial, the total of his Accolades and stat potions likely dwarfed theirs, but…

Thugs were still scary!

Ron flinched when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“You wanna just keep your mouth shut next time?” Eddie whispered. “We got enough problems sending Borg into a lawless zone all by his lonesome, without people actively trying to hunt him for sport.”

“They wouldn’t do that…” Ron glanced over his shoulder and spotted the party behind them watching them like predators. “Damn.” He waved at Amy, then turned back.

“So what do I do now?”

Eddie opened his mouth, but the bored toll booth attendant interrupted, calling them forward. She recited the same spiel as before, handing them a measuring stone and their forms in exchange for ten gold.

Eddie grumbled at being forced to pay for two people when they were barely going to go in at all, but he still paid up, seemingly not interested in making a scene. Not when they already stood out.

They wheeled Borg through the main entrance of the dungeon, stopping once they got inside the primary chamber.

The ‘law’ ended at the line marking the entrance, but the front room was still pretty safe. Being the main thoroughfare of the dungeon, people crowded around inside, fixing their gear, planning, packing their bags, or just catching up on sleep before heading out.

Lots of people meant lots of witnesses, so no one got too crazy. It might not be against the law to gank someone just inside the line, but being known as a killer wasn’t a great way to get ahead.

“What is a dungeon?” Borg asked as they wheeled him to an empty spot in the first chamber and started taking off his straps.

“It’s a place where monsters spawn and treasure grows outta the freakin’ walls!” Ron said, proud his creation had taken an interest in gaming.

“That makes no sense.”

“Dungeons are the result of a miniature singularity that primarily takes place on a dimension that we are unable to fully interact with,” Eddie said. “While we, in our three-dimensional meatspace, are relatively unharmed by close contact with the cores, they exert a force similar to gravity on Myst, implying that Myst exists entangled with the same dimensions dungeons operate on. The dungeon core incidentally pulls in Myst which seems to…metabolize and interact with the reality beyond the singularity before being thrown back out into our world. The metabolized Myst that is ejected back out creates something of a flashbulb imprint of what it saw on the other side…kind of like a 3D afterimage. Whatever that beam interacts with takes on the form and will of the living creatures of that reality.

“Pharos, or whatever Pharosians call the magical superorganism that is the planet, doesn’t like being altered on a fundamental level, so it tries to heal over it, similar to a scab. This causes the dungeons to sink into the earth in labyrinthian tunnels, rather than spread endlessly across the surface.”

“Why do you not simply remove them, if they are damaging?”

“We destroy most of them, but we,” Eddie said, motioning to everyone in the main chamber, “sapient beings find a great deal of valuable minerals inside some dungeons, enough for us to justify leaving the cores alone.”

He tapped Borg on the chest. “As a matter of fact, the mineral called ‘prism’ that we are here to gather today is the same stuff that makes up the cells that fuels your servos and trickle-charges your weapons.”

Eddie pointed at the prism array, buried in Borg’s chest. It was a large block of solid prism with a strange, harmonica-like array of metal sheets above it, designed to catch different wavelengths of Myst and separate them into their base components. Dozens of tubes and copper wires led from the solid block of prism into various gold-lined pressure tanks, where the purified Myst was collected and concentrated, ready to be fired.

Electrical or Lightning Myst was treated differently. That was discharged immediately and fed through copper wires into an advanced battery bank that supplied all of Borg’s electricity. Similar story with Heat and Kinetic Myst. They were efficiently turned into more power, trying to squeeze every bit of energy out of the prism’s ability to passively convert neutral Myst into ray form Myst.

Borg was probably the most advanced robozombie in the world.

“I understand,” Borg said.

“You understand that, but not treasure and monsters!” Ron said, shaking his head. “We’re gonna need to get you an education, son.”

“Eddie already preloaded me with over fourteen hundred movies and thirty-five thousand written texts, ranging from elementary to college, including some dramatic texts.”

“I did, at that,” Eddie said, nodding.

“Why? It’s about the experience,” Ron said, face-palming. “It’s about watching the movie with other people that makes it fun, so you can talk about what you did and didn’t like about it. The only reason I liked watching The Mummy was so I could shit all over it with my friends afterwards!”

Borg looked at Ron, his eye-lens dilating and constricting. “I see. There is a large social component to watching movies. I shall take this under advisement.”

“Enough about that. Let’s talk about something fun, like money,” Eddie said. “Borg, it cost about five hundred bulbs to make you. That’s roughly the equivalent of this bag, completely full of prism.” Eddie lifted a sack about the size of a basketball.

“I see.”

Eddie grinned. “So here’s the plan, Borg. Me and Ron decided to introduce you to prism mining as a way to pay us back for creating you, and get you a night job for yourself. We’re not monsters though, so you’re not required to do it, and your cut will be thirty-three perc—”

“I’m surprised you’re still up here. It’s not like you had anything to unpack. Well, except your…thing, I guess.”

Ron glanced over at the man who’d interrupted them. Their whole party was staring at Borg. Now that he was out of his restraints, it was easy to see the extent of his modifications.

They were extensive.

“You know what, I think I recognize him…” Amy said before her eyes widened. “That’s Gus Smith! The level forty-two that bit it last month! You guys stole his corpse!”

“Eeeeh…” Ron let out a sound unbecoming of the strongest necromancer this side of the planet.

“Absolutely not,” Eddie said, shaking his head. “We paid someone else to steal Gus Smith’s corpse.”

Ron was pretty sure Eddie had Asperger’s.

“You guys better watch yourself down there,” the head honcho said, leaning so close Ron could smell his breakfast. “People don’t take kindly to grave robbers.”

Then they were gone, stalking away into the glittering depths of the prism mine.

“Did I do something wrong?” Borg asked.

“No, no. Your death-knight materials just came from someone they know to some extent.”

“Why would that bother them?” Borg asked.

Ron tapped his lips, frowning. “How do I explain this?”

“They see themselves possibly being turned into something like you, and they are violently repulsed by it,” Eddie said.

“So they naturally empathize with the person I’m made from,” Borg said.

“That’s actually pretty accurate,” Ron said, nodding.

“I can exploit that weakness,” Borg said, picking up the sack and turning toward the tunnel leading deeper into the mine. “You two stay here. I’m going to go terminate hostilities... I’ll be back.”

The undead cyborg then marched off deeper into the dungeon, trailing after the party of six.

“Do you think he knows he just made a Terminator reference?” Ron asked, scratching his chin. “I mean, he’s got the movie in his hard drive, right?”

“Of course he does, but like you said, how would he know that was a quotable moment if he wasn’t exposed to culture?”

“You think we should stop him?” Ron asked.

“Ehh, if he can’t murder six kids with sticks up their asses, then we’re gonna have to go back to the drawing board.” Eddie waved dismissively.

“Should he murder six kids with sticks up their asses?” Ron asked.

Eddie clapped a hand on Ron’s shoulder. “After the last one almost killed Jeb, I put a ton of safety restrictions on Borg. Those people would have to try really hard to get killed by him, and at that point, it’s like throwing yourself into a wood chipper. If someone’s stupid enough to do that, they don’t belong in the gene pool.”

Chapter 17: Playing Catch-up

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

—Albert Einstein

Split, you son of a bitch! Jeb thought, concentrating hard on the thread of Myst emerging from his palm.

When he’d first gotten started with Myst, he’d tried to split Myst into more than one thread, and it had proven so difficult that he’d labelled it ‘impossible’ and never revisited the idea. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Through experimentation and a hell of a lot of singed hairs, Jeb had figured out that the best results through rubbing Myst against itself happened when the two streams were going directly against each other.

So far he’d managed to curl the thread back on itself and strike against the base like he was lighting a match, in a long, hard pull, but each and every time, it resulted in a blinding explosion.

The reaction had been far too fast for Jeb to understand exactly what happened, so he stretched it out by literally stretching it out, creating a loop that was over a hundred feet around. When he violently dragged the tip across the base, Jeb was just barely able to make out the fact that the reaction which changed the nature of the Myst started at the emanation point, then travelled up the string until it hit the tip, which then exploded against the emanation point, disrupting it and rendering the entire thing useless.

Jeb’s other notes he’d taken about Zesh’nei’s Translation were starting to point him in the right direction, though. One of the references mentioned ‘strings’, plural—something he’d underlined, but had never been able to act upon. Now that he had some indication that it was possible to split a string, Jeb was determined to do it.

Perhaps by splitting one Myst string into multiple strings, he would be able to funnel the energy of the reaction out the primary, leaving the—for lack of a better word—converter unexploded, and able to continue the reaction indefinitely.

It was as good a hypothesis as anybody’s.

Hard as balls in practice, though.

Jeb felt like a vein was going to pop in the side of his head, as he stared daggers at the trembling string of glowing orange Myst. Currently, Jeb was trying to tell it to go two directions at once, resulting in the twitching bit of Myst in front of him.

It felt just as impossible now as it had before, like trying to split your arm in two at will.

Side note: Your arm does not split into two at will.

What if I did this? Jeb thought, picturing putting the string into a wood splitter, shearing it in two through brute force.

The string wiggled and flattened for a moment, but it didn’t split.

You son of a bitch.

Jeb grabbed his pen with the string and made another note.

Splitting with a wedge: failed.

Splitting by unraveling: failed.

Splitting by tugging: failed.

Half a dozen more failures covered the page. Jeb had a fairly kickass memory at this point, but it was human nature to try the same thing over and over again out of sheer stubborn insanity, and having a note there telling him not to waste his time really helped.

Jeb sat there on the desert rock, the cold night air starting to warm up as the sun rose above him.

Maybe my stats are too low? Jeb thought, thumbing the Appraiser ring on his finger.

Jeb pulled it off and used it on himself.

Jebediah Trapper

Mystic Trapsmith, Level 39

Accolades: Krusker’s Brawn, Siren’s Cunning, R-R-RubU’s Mysteries, Lagross’s Power

Body 21 (20+3)

Myst 71 (50)

Nerve 26 (25)

Abilities: >>FATAL EXCEPTION. Ability missing or corrupted. Awaiting resolution by Administrator.<<<

Accolade Pending: Lagross’s Power suspended due to multiple instances. Awaiting resolution.

Assuming no Accolades or stat potions, and a solid 5 on every starting stat, that makes me roughly the same as a level…eighty. Wow, not bad.

Body, Myst, and Nerve had all gone up a handful of points over the last week. Probably in conjunction with making Deals for people’s Abilities.

Jeb’s gaze wandered up to the Accolades section.

Hmmm… I wonder if R-R-RubU’s Mysteries would help with Myst manipulation? Jeb thought. The original R-R-RubU had been a toad-man from the Tutorial with a focus on Myst-based attacks. When Jeb had killed him, he’d gotten the Accolade, which granted him a healthy chunk of Myst.

Right now, it was just sitting there unused, because the gods had disabled his account.

Jeb looked down at the strand of Myst above his palm.

Yeah, I could take a break. Jeb glanced around. He was out in the middle of the desert, so if he summoned some kind of enormous monster or got hit by a meteor again, it wouldn’t endanger any of his kids.

Jeb slipped the ring back on and searched his body thoroughly, finding a lump below his collar bone, and one under his jaw. These lumps were the Accolades attached to his body by The System, only interactable via the tiny window that was Jeb’s Appraiser.

Pretty sure it’s not just an appraiser.

Only two lumps, though? That doesn’t make any sense, Jeb thought, patting down his feet for the umpteenth time. He had four Accolades left to remove, so there should be four lumps.

Finally Jeb glanced at his right hand, which he’d been using to give himself the checkup.

I’m an idiot, Jeb thought, switching the ring onto his left hand. If this doesn’t work, I’m gonna have to start checking my prostate for magical lumps, Jeb thought with a scowl. He wasn’t looking forward to that.

There! Between Jeb’s ring and middle finger was a fifth-dimensional lump, and another in the crook of his elbow.

That’s all four of them…. Now…which one’s R-R-RubU’s Mysteries?

From what Jeb could tell, their positioning was slightly symbolic. That meant the two near the large muscle groups of his pectorals and biceps were probably Lagross’s Power and Krusker’s Brawn. That meant the other two, under his jaw and between his fingers, were probably Siren’s Cunning and R-R-RubU’s Mysteries.

Jeb didn’t want to pry something out of his face again, after how badly that had gone last time. Jeb erred on the side of working his way inward from his extremities. That allowed him to settle on the little lump between his fingers.

Jeb pulled some duct tape out of his Jeep and wound it around his hand, securing the ring directly over the area in question. Then he opened up the toolbox in the back and dragged out some needle-nose pliers.

Not the best tools ever, but they’ll do.

Jeb cut away a bit of the duct tape, revealing the swirling grey Myst creating the portal to the fifth dimension. Then he reached in with the pliers and grabbed the lump.

With a quick yank and a proper application of Myst as a catalyst, the Accolade was yanked out of Jeb and into the real world.

It was…a pipe.

The thing was a pipe, carved entirely out of ivory. It was weathered and gunked up with decades of residue.

“Ummm…” Jeb turned the artifact this way and that. There were worn carvings of frogs along the sides of the pipe, along with some truly tight script of indeterminate nature. Large portions of it were worn off, though, so Jeb had little hope he would ever be able to translate.

I wonder… R-R-RubU had been able to make weird Myst-reactive mucus bubbles when Jeb had been fighting him in the Tutorial. Jeb was fairly sure he’d gotten the right Accolade, what with the frog decals.

Curious, Jeb fed a thin stream of Myst into the pipe. A moment later, a clear substance began to well up inside the pipe well, before spilling out onto the desert sand.

Well, it tried. The material was so viscous that the spill was able to support itself through sheer tensile strength. One big glob of snot-like mucus.

That’s nice. What the hell am I supposed to do with a pipe full of snot? Jeb thought, grimacing at the snot-filled pipe.

For an instant, it reminded him of a bubble-maker he’d used as a kid, and Jeb suddenly knew what to do.

He took a deep breath, and he blew on the pipe. The mucus expanded, rising above the pipe itself to create a massive bubble the size of Jeb’s head.

Jeb took another breath and kept going.

When the bubble was big enough to trap a dog inside, Jeb reached out and touched it. The material was dry and soft, but still a little tacky. It felt something like skin fresh out of a shower. It was nearly perfectly translucent. He pushed a little harder, and the material dented around his hand, but didn’t give. Weird.

Jeb pushed it off of the pipe and into the desert, where it rolled downhill, picking up sand as it went until the bubble was much more opaque.

Jeb brought the pipe back to his face with the intention of making more, partly because he was studying them and partly because it was fun. When the bubble at the bottom of the hill twitched, Jeb took notice.

Raising a brow, he moved the pipe.

The bubble twitched again.

Jeb made a big expansive movement, swinging the pipe to the left, and the bubble jerked into a roll before stopping a few feet farther left.

Hmm...

Jeb focused on the pipe, and thought about moving it.

The bubble responded again.

After a fair amount of trial and error, Jeb discovered that up to seven bubbles could be independently controlled by the bearer of the pipe, and that the bubbles themselves acted as energy conduits.

Heat, kinetic, sound, electricity, and Myst. Jeb was able to transfer all of these types of energy freely between the bubbles, but not matter. The rock he threw into one of the bubbles simply came to a halt, and the designated end-point released a puff of wind as the kinetic energy stirred the air.

Well, that’s really neat, but it doesn’t really solve my current Myst-splitting problem, and I’m not pulling another one out of me. Jeb now fully enforced the ‘one Accolade at a time’ rule, after the Gresh’s Subtlety debacle.

Hmm… I guess it’s back to the grind.

Jeb sat down and siphoned a string of Myst out of his palm. He stared directly at it, trying to will it apart. No, I already did that, Jeb thought, referring to the list of failed experiments. I need a new way to think about this.

In the background, beyond the Myst above his hand, Jeb’s attention was attracted to one of the bubbles, wiggling in the wind and bumping up against a cactus. The wind rammed it into the spiny plant over and over again and yet the bubble refused to pop.

Jeb frowned as his attention moved from the wobbling bubble to the stationary cactus, his eyes fixing on the green buds of new growth on the desert plant.

Buds?

Budding?

Jeb glanced down at his list of failed attempts at splitting his Myst.

What if Jeb could convince it to…grow a separate string?

Jeb was not an arborist, or a phytophile, or a tree hugger. He had the most dirt-basic education about plant growth, which was to say, only what he’d osmosed over the years.

Hopefully picturing it will be enough, Jeb thought. He couldn’t help but recall when the fairies had first taught him how to use his Myst; they’d used a lot of nature imagery. Jeb had chalked it up to the circumstances of fairy living, but maybe there was something more to it. Maybe.

Okay string, you’re going to give birth to a bouncing baby string, and it’s going to be beautiful, Jeb thought, focusing on the Myst above his hand.

In case there was a minimum size requirement, Jeb siphoned the thickest rope of Myst he possibly could, a solid strand about the width of his thumb, lazily pulsing above his hand in time with his breathing.

Jeb focused on the side of it.

No pushing, no splitting, no more mental yanking on the string. Instead, Jeb simply imagined that section of the string was primed to sprout. Jeb experimentally weakened the layer around where he wanted the branch to be, but the entire string almost dissipated, leaving him back at the starting point.

Let’s focus only on the branching. Jeb furrowed his brows, picturing the change. Branches start from inside the tree, before anything was ever noticed on the outside. To that effect, Jeb imagined a whorl of Myst in the stream. A tiny little eddy in the steady flow of Myst, it gently pressed up against the edge of the string, looking for a new direction to go in.

Jeb’s eyes widened as he perceived a little something happening, but there was no outward effect.

Maybe… Jeb very, very slightly weakened the wall where the eddy pushed up against.

For an instant, Jeb’s Myst string bulged outward on the side, like a burl on a tree. A moment later, the entire thing popped like a balloon, losing Jeb a decent amount of Myst.

He wasn’t upset, though. He was manic.

I actually changed the shape of the string! Jeb had changed the shape of the end product before, sure, but it was always end-destination changes, like pouring liquid into a mold. This time, Jeb had made a change, and the original string continued along, regardless of the swelling coming off of it.

This could be the missing ingredient to both having multiple targets with one string, and converting one kind of Myst into another.

That could open up a world of possibilities for Jeb.

He could go from telekinetically manipulating two things at a time, to three! Or more!

I wonder if Telekinetic Combatant would have been easier to start using Zesh’nei’s Translation with. Jeb had discarded the higher-tier class during the Tutorial because he’d considered it to be a one-hit wonder. If it secretly had the key to using multiple different types of Myst with ease, Jeb would…

Probably do nothing. I doubt I would’ve made it through the Tutorial without the Mystic Trapsmith Class anyway.

Grass is probably dead on the other side of the fence, here.

Jeb took a deep breath, focused on recovering his Myst for a moment until his inner star was surrounded by plumes of white-hot gas.

Alright, let’s figure this out.

As it turned out, learning to split Myst was a lot like learning how to drive a clutch. He had to precisely weaken the walls of the string—the clutch—then funnel a very small amount of Myst into it through the internal eddy he’d created—the gas.

If he weakened the side too much, the string poofed, releasing all the Myst into the atmosphere with a small thunderclap. And if he gave it too much gas, it would bulge out like a burl, then poof.

I.e.: stall out.

Creating a working split was a micromanagement balancing act that Jeb expected would become second nature after he’d been doing it long enough.

After a good half hour, Jeb got his first working split: two wiggling ends of his Myst string, that he could move independently of each other.

Out of curiosity, Jeb used one string to pick up one rock, and the other to pick up his shoe. Then he had them do a little orbit around each other before he had the shoe clomp through the desert sand while the stone whipped around him and struck a boulder.

I have solved the one object per string rule.

Up until now, Jeb could only move one ‘object’ at a time. He’d picked up several separate people or objects before, but there was always a band of air connecting them, spoofing the ‘one object’ limitation, and they’d all had to move in the exact same way.

Now he could move two things independently with one string. It…didn’t change a lot, honestly—not until he pumped up the number of branches.

Those are rookie numbers in this business, Jeb thought, frowning. Gotta pump up those numbers.

The nagging doubt returned. The sindio was obviously far beyond where Jeb would ever reach in his lifetime; what difference would it make if Jeb picked up a couple new tricks between now and the raid? The sindio would already know the tricks. They’d be so far in the back of his bag of tools that he’d likely forgotten they existed.

It was like pitting a toddler against a UFC champion, then a 5-year-old.

Result was gonna be the same.

He’s gonna be distracted by the enforcers. There’s a small possibility I’ll be able to waltz in with minimal resistance. Having a few extra tricks against his dungeon and minions might just save my life.

Twenty seven-year-olds will do poorly at first, but will eventually win through superior numbers.

Jeb took a breath and got back to work, practicing his splitting until he could do it almost every time, save the occasional bungle. If he were going to use it in combat, splitting Myst needed to be as natural as breathing, but for the moment, ‘almost every time’ was good enough to start experimenting with Zesh’nei’s Translation again.

Jeb referred back to his notes, wrote down his progress, then made a split before guiding one end of the split down to the base of the string while the other one remained straight.

If splitting Myst was like learning how to drive a stick shift, then Zesh’nei’s Translation was like doing all that while walking a tightrope with a bomb on your back. And you really have to pee.

Jeb’s hypothesis turned out to be correct: It was possible to direct the altered Myst out through the primary string, allowing the converter to maintain the reaction.

Read: possible.

In practice, Jeb was able to maintain the reaction for three seconds, creating a brilliant flare of heat and light suspended in the air for just a moment before he lost his concentration and a bit of the modified Myst leaked into the converter branch, causing a chain reaction that detonated the Myst in a fraction of a second.

By this point in time, Jeb already had no eyebrows left, and large parts of his hair were dramatically shorter than they had been when he’d started, so there wasn’t much effect on his appearance. Probably working on a mullet, Jeb thought with a shudder.

“Greetings, beloved friend!” Jeb’s manic practice fugue was severed by Michael’s over-enthusiastic greeting. Jeb blinked and looked up.

The muscle-bound angel flew down from the sky and dropped onto Jeb’s sitting boulder. He looked a bit regal, posing with his hair flowing in the breeze…if you ignored his height.

“Michael. What’s up?”

“My lamb bid me inform thee of news most terrible!”

“You know you don’t have to talk like that,” Jeb said.

“But it matches my image!” the angel cried, drawing his flaming sword and extending his wings to their full length.

“What’s the news?” Jeb asked.

“Be alarmed, for there is an ancient evil in possession of nuclear—”

“I know that one. Anything else?”

“Several of the enforcers who have been called in to dispatch the sindio are ‘reformed’ reapers, considered disposable by the empire. You should watch your back around such people. It’s entirely possible they may try something in the chaos of the battle. You and several of your children make quite a juicy target.”

“Good to know. Anything else?”

“Oh. Umm, she wishes for you to take her place as guardian of her child should she perish in the battle against evil.”

The idea that anyone could look at him and think to themselves ‘yeah, I want that person near my children’ was baffling to Jeb. He clenched his jaw as he considered it. That was a hell of a lot to ask a guy, but really, what was one more orphan at this point? A drop in the bucket.

“I’m willing to look after her kid, but let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that, okay?”

“Such is my duty!” Michael said, whipping a salute with his flaming sword before leaping into the air.

Good to know Casey doesn’t have any hard feelings about the scan, at least, Jeb thought to himself as the angel retreated into the horizon, aiming toward Solmnath.

As the visitor disappeared, Jeb refocused his thoughts.

Now that Jeb had the hang of splitting, he needed to create a sustained reaction using his approximation of Zesh’nei’s Translation, and hold it for quite a while. Fifteen seconds was Jeb’s first goal.

Once Jeb did that, he could maybe start trying to get something more nuanced than a ball of white-hot plasma out of it. Jeb’s theory was that the speed of the feedback loop, the rate of friction and possibly even the direction might all have an effect on the finished type of Myst.

Jeb kept creating white-hot plasma because it was the first one he’d discovered, it was easy to do, and it was safe.

Relatively.

Compared to transmuting body parts into lead, summoning eldritch horrors, or creating nerve gas out of nothing, a couple heat explosions and some burned eyebrows were actually quite safe.

And, I mean, there are uses for white-hot plasma, even though I appreciate a bit more flexibility than simply burning things to a crisp.

Maybe there would be a situation where a crackling ball of heat and light would be more useful than a telekinetic blade in terms of dealing damage, but Jeb couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.

A slime? Do slime monsters exist on Pharos? I don’t think they do.

Jeb took a deep breath and successfully branched his Myst into two strings, then fed one backwards, creating a feedback loop.

Come on, come on…

Boom!

The reaction spiraled out of control, flinging Jeb backward in a smoking roll. He came to a halt, coughed out some sand, and mentally ticked off the time.

Three and a half seconds.

It wasn’t enough of a difference to chalk it up to improvement, but it was still early in the day.

******

In the distance, the scattered pirates watched as the witch lights flashed in a steady rhythm. Unnaturally white, they painted the surrounding barren mountains with brief flashes of bone-white illumination. None of them had ever seen their like, and not a single one of them dared venture towards the strange flickers.

They had plenty to deal with as it was, hunted from the sky by a flying Myst user who was picking them off one at a time without even revealing themselves. Some of them believed it might even be a reaper, rather than a bounty hunter. Many reapers chose their victims from among outlaws, knowing that by their very nature, pirates would never seek help from the empire.

Erron help us, the pirates thought. It could be both.

Chapter 18: Missed Connections

A thin sheet of metal sat on a belt. It had no conscious knowledge of itself. It simply was. It moved forward with a frightening amount of speed, following the jaw-droppingly rapid pace of human industry. There were sheets of metal in front of it, and ones behind.

It could perceive neither of them.

There was a stomp hiss as the piston ahead of it came down, stamping tiny circles out of the metal sheets. Over and over, the sheets ahead of this sheet were stamped, thousands of tiny metal circles following the belt down while the scrap steel followed the rails to a waste stack to be melted and reused.

As the sheet came under the die, it felt no fear or trepidation that its form would be cut to tiny pieces to be spread all over the globe.

It simply did not care.

The fraction of a second before the die came down, a glimmer of golden energy interfered with one of the cutters, shifting it just a tiny fraction of a millimeter out of alignment.

The die came down.

Thousands of tiny metal circles emerged from the eviscerated sheet metal.

Jeb was concerned with only two of them.

This is a new dream, Jeb thought idly as his consciousness followed the path of these two tiny misshapen circles. The circles went forward under another die, and were combined with a tiny explosive, a little piece of brass…

That looks like a centerfire primer, Jeb thought, his experience identifying the two defective bullets a few stages before they were complete.

A plate of cut brass was rolled around the primer by a machine that treated the metal like Play-Doh. A station later, the bullets were filled with a scientifically calculated amount of powder, followed by a dollop of lead crimped into place. Once that was done, Jeb was looking at a belt full of nine-millimeter bullets.

Not really sure where you’re going with this, dream, Jeb thought, crossing his non-existent arms.

The two bullets with malformed primers rolled off the assembly line just far enough apart to go into different boxes.

That was where Jeb’s consciousness split.

One Jeb followed each of the two boxes as they were shipped across the country, rattling around in the back of a big rig, subdivided to individual UPS trucks, then delivered by underpaid, overworked women in brown to small stores.

For lack of a better word, Jeb’s ‘left’ consciousness watched with growing anxiety. He was very familiar with this bullet’s destination. Sure enough, a Jeb, perhaps five years younger than he was currently, walked in the door, ringing the little bell.

Jeb could see the bounce in his step, the relief flooding his own face as he paid the twenty-three bucks, plus tax.

I still remember being pissed and not knowing why. In hindsight, it was because I knew I was paying over twenty bucks for a single bullet.

Something wouldn’t let him bum a 9-mil off one of his friends at the range, though. The bullet had to belong to him.

In retrospect, I chalked that up to a strange sense of pride, or maybe caution that they would guess what the bullet was for, Jeb thought, following himself home with the ‘left’ consciousness. Maybe it was something else. Maybe I didn’t want myself to know what it was for.

He watched with growing trepidation as Young Jeb hummed, loading his nine-millimeter one bullet into the magazine at a time. The last bullet to go in the magazine, unnoticed by Young Jeb, had a malformed primer.

“You’re not gonna use the whole magazine, you suicidal idiot!” Jeb criticized himself. Loading the whole gun was one of the ways Jeb had tricked himself into it.

You can’t just kill yourself. You’ve gotta sneak up on it, like a skittish colt. Young Jeb’s subconscious was totally on board with the plan, while his conscious brain thought everything was hunky-dory. I mean, he wouldn’t load the full magazine if he was planning on offing himself, would he?

He wouldn’t be cleaning his apartment with the gun lying out on the table if he was planning on offing himself, would he? Blood spatters aren’t clean.

He wouldn’t be cleaning his gun if he was planning on offing himself. Why would it need to be clean?

It was right about the time he cocked the gun that Jeb’s conscious brain realized what he’d been slowly edging toward. That was the moment it either ran away skittishly or gave up.

It gave up. It agreed with his subconscious that blowing his brains out was the way out of the nightmare.

Jeb watched himself cleaning the already clean gun, his thumb heading toward the safety.

“Yeah, I don’t wanna watch this anymore. Let’s go see what Righty is watching.”

***Jeb’s ‘right’ consciousness***

The bullet Righty was watching was loaded up into a separate eighteen wheeler and transported across state lines. This particular box of ammo was delivered to the residence of a certain senator’s daughter living in Oregon.

The magazine was loaded by someone else’s hands, then loaded into an immaculate Beretta that had never been fired, which was then delivered into the hands of Sasha Collins, who placed it in a holster under her arm.

“You gotta rack the slide, numbnuts!” Jeb shouted.

Lefty showed up. “Sad show over there. How’s it hanging here?” he asked. “Hey, isn’t that the senator’s kid that got eaten by a cougar?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

Apparently Sasha liked to hike through cougar-infested mountains, and today her luck finally ran out.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sasha said as the cougar stalked toward her. A cougar weighed about the same as a human, but it was literally born to kill. Rich kids? Not so much.

She pulled out the gun and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

“Safety,” Sasha muttered, flipping the safety off with her thumb and pulling the trigger again.

Nothing happened.

Sasha looked really panicked now, and the cougar was even closer. The woman was quick enough on her feet to realize she hadn’t engaged the first bullet. Sasha wasn’t dumb.

She pulled back the slide, the defective bullet making its way into the chamber.

‘Left’ Jeb and ‘right’ Jeb inhaled a sharp breath through their teeth.

Sasha pulled the trigger again. The cougar was only fifteen feet away now.

Click. Instead of a bullet tearing out of the barrel and killing the cougar or scaring it away, NOTHING HAPPENED.

“It’s a dud, rack the slide again…” Jeb said as his consciousness combined, sounding like a tired range instructor. But while Sasha was pretty quick on her feet, her gun failing her three times in a row was just too much for her to handle. She turned to run, and that’s where things got messy.

“She would’ve been the first female president, you know, had things taken a different course. But you just had to try and kill yourself.” A familiar voice rose above the screaming and growling.

Mab. The as-of-yet unseen benefactor who seemed to delight in keeping him safe in the evilest way possible.

“Don’t try to guilt me. I’m fairly sure the first female president is gonna be crazy evil, because all presidents are evil, and if a woman wants into that club, she’s gonna have to out-evil them. It’s part of the job.

“We both know you didn’t have to save me.”

Jeb had seen the tiny glimmer of Myst that had changed those two primers, after all. Having gotten a bit more experience, Jeb realized he’d followed the path the Myst had taken that had swapped Sasha Collins’ Impact for his own.

The poetry of two defective bullets created by the same manufacturing error killing one person and saving another was not lost on Jeb. It was classic fairy bullshit.

“Does this mean I’m going to be the first female president?” Jeb asked, his voice oozing sarcasm.

“She was the most appropriate sacrifice in the web of causality surrounding you,” Mab said. “If you don’t wish for more blood to be on your hands, stop trying to kill yourself and accept your destiny.”

“Ooh, is this the part where you don’t tell me what my destiny is and then fade away mysteriously, leaving me mentally off-balance?”

“…You humans really have hardened your dreams against us, haven’t you?” The voice sounded part frustrated, part amused. “I blame video games.”

“You put that spell on me that saved my life, you’re responsible for those deaths,” Jeb shot back, giving the sky the finger. “Don’t you dare think you can make me beholden to you.”

“You already are. Ah, but now that you know about the spell, the responsibility for deaths caused by it will be partly yours.”

Jeb wasn’t planning on killing himself anymore, but he definitely wasn’t going to say as much to Mab. That might constitute a promise. And you never promise a fairy queen anything. He’d rather keep his options open.

“Your destiny, Jebediah Trapper, is to be my—”

“You know what? Fuck this dream. Jebediah out.”

Jeb looked up at the sky, where The Spike hovered above him. As soon as he directed his attention to it, the metal beam, the last lingering phantom of his PTSD, began plummeting down, crushing him into the cheap G.I. bed and popping him like a grape under a bowling ball.

***Elsewyr, The Death Wilds***

Mab’s eye twitched, the greatest sign of displeasure the immortal had made in four hundred years. Her courtiers, each a powerful immortal in their own right, reflexively flinched backwards, taking a safe distance from their queen.

“I blame video games,” she muttered, taking a sip of her C’lackcha.

******

Jeb leapt out of his sleeping bag, groaning and rubbing the fading pain out of his chest, his heart hammering against his ribs like it was trying to get out.

Despite the pain, Jeb was chuckling to himself as he slipped into his duds. It was like hanging up on the president. You’d have to be a crazy bastard, but god-damn if it wasn’t satisfying as hell.

Jeb snapped on a ball of plasma, lighting up the campsite as he looked around the pre-dawn gloom for his shaving supplies.

Not because he needed it. Jeb’s vision was fairly decent in the dark nowadays. No, he was doing it in order to cycle the spell into his repertoire. It reminded Jeb of memorizing combos on a fighting game and then deliberately overusing them until they became second nature.

There was nothing easy about changing from telekinesis to crackling plasma, but with enough practice, Jeb should be able to call on it at a moment’s notice. Jeb used the age-old tradition of counting ‘Mississippi’s to keep track of his progress.

Three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi…

Bang! The ball of plasma destabilized and erupted violently. Another good thing Jeb had figured out was the technique of pinching off the supply of Myst before the detonation became more powerful than a firecracker.

The ability to abort a reaction would serve him well when he moved on to more dangerous kinds of magic.

No explosions at all would be better.

Jeb took care of his morning ablutions, then slipped his leg on, stretching in the morning sun with a ball of plasma above him.

Bang!

“It feels like a good day for hunting pirates,” Jeb said as Legolas approached. “If we snag a few more Ability books, we might be able to piece together more hints for making the Translation work better.”

The little drone’s LED blinked red.

“We won’t be able to piece together more hints?”

Red.

“It’s not a good day for hunting pirates?

Green.

“Huh. Are they up to something that makes them hard to fight? Did they gather together and fortify or something?”

Red.

“Are they coming after me?” Jeb said.

Red.

“You know what, let me get my pencil. We can do Morse.”

Green.

Jeb grabbed his pencil and started jotting down Legolas’s message, using green blinks to represent spaces.

T-H-I-R-D. Green. P-A-R-T-Y. Green. K-I-L-L-I-N-G. Green. P-I-R-A-T-E-S.

Huh, Jeb thought, tapping his pencil against his chin. Sounds like another bounty hunter is horning in on the buffet I set up. He needed the scrub pirates to imperil themselves through enough incompetence that they’d be willing to sell their Abilities to survive. For that, they needed to be alive. The more dangerous ones were worth a significant amount of money, but money wasn’t Jeb’s primary focus at the moment.

Unfortunately for Jeb’s plans, the inept, weak-willed scrub pirates were the easiest ones to track and defeat.

Goddamnit.

Jeb had to at least see what the damage was. Maybe he could convince whoever it was to spare the mooks and just take the named bounties. The only problem was, if Jeb did that, the other bounty hunter would instantly grow suspicious, wanting to know why on Pharos Jeb would care enough to spare them. They would immediately think he had some kind of angle.

Which he did.

Then they would try to spy on him, or interrogate the ones he’d ‘saved’, possibly forcing him to kill them, or worse yet, spreading information about what his ring could do, which infringed on the domain of the gods.

The most pragmatic solution was to kill the other bounty hunter, but Jeb didn’t wanna be that kind of monster.

I guess we can always hope the guy’s an unrepentant puppy kicker/lobbyist with no family who moonlights as a serial killer. Things rarely played out that way, but Jeb could always hope.

Jeb poked Smartass awake, then picked himself up with telekinesis, rising into the air before following Legolas toward the nearest nameless pirate mook.

There wasn’t much left of the guy.

He’d been…for lack of a better word, splatted.

“Gross,” Smartass said, before making retching noises directly into his ear.

Jeb ignored her and knelt down, studying the scene.

This particular nameless pirate mook had been a keegan, and something had hit him hard enough to turn him inside out. That was made even more impressive because keegan were so thin that their body was quite tough. Not a lot of soft tissue to turn inside out.

“So from what I can see, we’re either looking at a Myst user, or someone with a really big hammer.” The guy’s body had essentially folded around a spot on his upper torso.

Either was a possibility, but as Jeb studied the scene, he began to lean more in the direction of Myst user. There were no tracks aside from the victim’s, implying the other person was a flier.

Okay, we’ve got a flier who can turn people inside out. That sounds…familiar. Assuming I’m not sleep-murdering, then the list of people who can do this kind of shit is pretty short.

It sounded like Meyers.

Jeb hadn’t seen a mutated corpse of the severe old woman, so there was a possibility she’d survived the Roil.

Then why didn’t she come after me? We were in the same area last night.

Jeb was aware that the constant bright lights and explosions at his camp were a dead giveaway. Since his practice with Zesh’nei’s Translation was bright and loud, he’d made sure to trap the shit out of his campsite. If anyone that wasn’t him, Legolas, or Smartass came within range, they’d be mincemeat. Perhaps Meyers knew that too. She’d done his debrief and seen his Ability in action, after all. She probably knew attacking Jeb in an area he’d prepared was suicide.

His antics had been so obviously a trap that he’d been spared an attack in the middle of the night. How amusing.

“Legolas, keep an eye out for that old lady who knocked you out of the sky last time.”

The drone wobbled and flashed a green light, rising higher into the sky before spinning, keeping his cameras searching for threats.

“What should I do?” Smartass asked.

“You just focus on not getting killed by crazy old women.” Jeb glanced around the barren desert. There weren’t a lot of places for the fairy to hide. “Try to stay small and inconspicuous.”

“I excel at being inconspicuous!” Smartass shouted, saluting him before diving into a nearby shadow between a rock and dirt. As long as she didn’t move, she was rather hard to spot.

Not bad.

Then she dove to another shadow, grunting as she executed a rolling dive before vanishing into the next tiny shadow. Then she did it again.

I stand corrected.

“Next,” Jeb said to Legolas.

The drone led him to more pirates, mashed much the same way as the other. This time it was five from the original group Jeb had scattered. They had joined up and were doing alright for themselves, by all accounts. Their corpses were spread around a cold campfire, a makeshift tent, and a half-eaten desert lizard about the size of a large dog.

Like the first, they were turned inside out through sheer brute force. Jeb used telekinesis to grab their heads and hold them in front of himself, tugging out his stack of bounty fliers.

“Hmm…there we go,” Jeb muttered when he recognized ‘Skinny’ Kat’chek, a mid-level melas of ill repute. Two bulbs.

Jeb returned the head to its body, then began the unenviable task of turning him right side in.

“Hey,” Smartass whispered from the shadow of a rock. “What are you doing? That’s super gross.”

“If our friend who’s turning people inside out is a bounty hunter,” Jeb said, straightening out the corpse and putting the guts back in place, “then they’ll have severed a finger, taken an eye, a strip of belly fat, something to feed to the grinder and prove they’d taken care of the bounty. Otherwise they don’t get paid.”

Try as he might, Jeb couldn’t find any mysteriously missing pieces of the corpse. That ruled out two things: cannibalism and bounty hunting.

So he either had a crazed person, a reaper, or a serial killer.

Those categories aren’t exclusive, obviously, Jeb thought, eyeing the sky above him. Again, there were no tracks other than from the people who belonged here.

As a precaution, Jeb made a dozen flyswatter traps designed to smack any flier that wasn’t him or his companions out of the air. It’d buy him some time and stifle an ambush.

Fighting in 3D space wasn’t Jeb’s forte, not like Meyers. Jeb was going to assume she would win in a straight-up dogfight.

He took the bounty’s finger before he rose up into the air and checked out a couple more pirate camps, finding more or less the same scene in every direction.

Well, shit.

The desert had small rolling hills, the occasional boulder, cactuses and low, scraggly brush.

Not a whole lot of cover. Jeb couldn’t see the killer, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still around. Jeb considered his options.

He could travel farther out from his support base and look for another group of pirates, possibly under the watchful eye of a crazed serial reaper who was likely salivating over the idea of killing him for his Impact, or play it safe and return to base, debrief with Eddie.

I wonder, Jeb thought, rolling his eyes and keeping his head on a swivel. He picked Smartass up and they started heading southwest, back toward Solmnath.

The whole time, Jeb didn’t spot a sign of the killer.

He did, however, accidentally swat a vulture out of the air as he passed by another group of corpses. The poor thing exploded into a ball of feathers as a literal giant fly swatter of telekinetic force slapped it straight down to earth.

Jeb winced and mumbled an apology to the twitching bird.

***Abigail Meyers, level 71 Ace***

Abbie hid in the sun. A favorite trick of hers, made even better with her Specialist abilities.

Her control over the air around her allowed her to lens the light in such a way that she didn’t leave a defined shadow, only a slightly darker smudge on the ground.

A person wouldn’t be able to see it unless they already knew where it was.

She watched Jeb travel from kill to kill, led by the black scout drone with a seemingly inexhaustible power supply. I gotta get me one of those.

She saw the occasional flash of a fairy as well. Her eyes had always been fantastic, and since the Tutorial, they were unnaturally good. Beyond the limitations of physics, even. Making out a creature smaller than a football from about a mile up in the air was no sweat.

Jebediah Trapper and two minor threats, she thought, her jaw clenching. Her fingers sank into the gold plating around the dungeon core, knuckles whitening.

No matter how much she wanted to swoop down and take her chances, success was not guaranteed. The slippery bastard had already proved that when he took out three of her men in a matter of seconds despite seemingly being at a disadvantage.

She should have figured he would ‘key’ his traps to nonverbal commands and strap them all over his body. She had naively assumed he would make the equivalent of simple Claymores and land mines—stationary booby traps with well-defined ways to circumvent them. She had assumed if she pulled him away from his barracks and out into a spot he hadn’t been, he would be defenseless.

It was a failure of imagination on her part.

Abbie deliberately relaxed her fingers, pulling them out of the divots in the gold plate. She watched Jeb ponder for a while before choosing the safe route, heading back to Solmnath, his fairy riding on his shoulder, bookbag flapping in the wind as he flew.

You could do it now, a small, less disciplined part of her whispered.

Sure, it looked ideal. Jeb and his fairy were both flying low, barely two hundred feet off the ground. They were looking down and away, and she was above and behind them.

His drone couldn’t look up effectively, either. It was a couple hundred feet above the pair, in an amateur’s equivalent of ‘high altitude’ overwatch.

Abbie could dive, bust the bot and close the distance between the drone and Jebediah’s spine in about zero point two seconds. She’d timed herself.

Point three seconds was right on the cusp of the amount of time she was comfortable allowing someone to react.

Seconds were an eternity when you were fighting for your life, but a fifth of a second? That wasn’t much. Maybe he’d have time to twitch or draw a weapon, but not enough to use it, and certainly not enough to speak a code phrase for one of his ‘traps’.

He’s getting away! her impatience shouted, starting to claw its way past the iron bars of discipline she’d established over her lifetime. Her mouth began to water, her pupils dilated, her heart beating out a staccato rhythm it hadn’t in decades.

She was about to kill someone she wanted to kill.

Kill kill kill KILL KILL!

Abbie carefully shifted in midair, aligned so her body was head down, moving until she, the drone and Jeb drew a straight line. Like a spider dangling above a stupid, stupid caterpillar who made the mistake of coming into the spider’s home turf. NOW! KILL HIM!

A vulture exploded.

The voice in her head went silent as the vulture plummeted down to the earth, its only sin getting within a hundred feet of Trapper. The traitor had obviously warded himself against other flying creatures coming close to him. Trying to ambush him might have easily become a fair fight.

Fair fights were to be avoided.

Abbie swallowed a physical lump of disappointment. It tasted like blood.

She relaxed her jaw and the bleeding stopped.

You see? she thought to herself. Be patient. Stick to the plan. He’ll get what he deserves when we’re ready.

She ran her thumb over the divot in the gold, smoothing it out.

When we’re ready. Abbie turned and flew farther east. She needed more levels. Aliens had them in spades. She needed to move fast, before word got out and they sent an enforcer after her.

From her viewpoint a quarter mile in the air, she could make out a plume of dust in the distance, where a caravan full of alien scum made its ponderous way through the desert.

That’ll do.

Chapter 19: Begin Operations

“Explain it like I’m a simple grunt,” Jeb said, steepling his fingers. “Like I didn’t go to college. Because college was a long time ago.”

Jeb’s twenties had been wasted on the army.

Eddie glanced at the dense math on the whiteboard and rubbed his temples, eyes squeezed shut. “It might be faster if we just taught you calc and trig first,” he muttered.

“I’m sure we could, but we don’t have that much time left.” They were already only a week away from the sindio’s deadline, and Jeb was absolutely sure the enforcers wouldn’t wait until the last minute. “I will take it under advisement,” Jeb said, opening his notepad and jotting down ‘advanced math’, then underlining it.

“Let me take a shot at it,” Ron chimed in.

“Knock yourself out,” Eddie said, stepping away from the math.

“Okay, forget the math. Imagine every power that could possibly exist is on an infinite spectrum.” Ron flipped the whiteboard over and drew a line.

“Okay.” Jeb nodded.

“For the sake of the example, let’s divide these into arbitrary categories based on how similar they are. Transmutation—turning one thing into another—goes over here, summoning things goes here, right next to teleporting things and making something from nothing.

“Right here,” Ron said, looking back at Jeb as he made another wedge. “Right here, is energy-based Myst. Any Myst that creates heat, light, chemical or kinetic energy goes in this little wedge.”

“Okay.”

“Your telekinesis goes right here, in the kinetic energy wedge, right beside heat, light, and spatial energy.” Ron made a little pointer showing where Jeb was on the spectrum.

“Except the spectrum isn’t a one-dimensional line; it’s a three-dimensional spectrum,” Eddie said, arms crossed.

“We’re simplifying,” Ron shot back.

“I think I get it,” Jeb said, imagining him and his Myst in the center of a gradient that moved away in every direction, representing the infinite possibilities of magic.

“So you start in the kinetic energy section, you can jump over to heat with just a tiny amount of destructive interference, because the wavelengths are close. That’s what you’re doing when you create that plasma. The light is just a byproduct of the air being hot enough to glow.”

“Neat.”

“Since heat is close to kinetic energy, it’s easy to jump to,” Ron said. “But let’s say you wanted to summon Cthulhu.”

“That seems like a bad idea,” Jeb said. Eddie chortled.

“Doi. So summoning Cthulhu would be somewhere around here,”  Ron said, putting an octopus mark on the far side of the summoning wedge. “For you to summon Cthulhu, you would have to jump all the wedges in between.” Ron tapped the teleportation, creation and transmutation wedges.

“And the further away you go, the harder it’s gonna be to change the wavelength,” Ron said. “At a quadratic rate.”

“So Casey could summon Cthulhu pretty easy?”

Ron glanced at the board, brows rising. “Yeah. Or at least make a facsimile of Cthulhu easily. The angel’s not real.”

Neither is Cthulhu, so it kinda works out.

“So Myst exists on a three-dimensional spectrum with a three-dimensional wavelength?” Jeb asked, brain starting to warm up to an uncomfortable degree. He wasn’t ready to throw in the towel, though. Vex had it. It could be done.

Eddie grinned. “They’re gonna name a whole new branch of science after me,” he said, preening.

“I think someone else got there first,” Jeb said, glancing at the board as he thought about Vex.

“On that subject, back to the math,” Eddie said, shoving Ron out of the way and flipping the board over.

“This formula, here, can serve a couple different functions,” Eddie said. “I can enter in your wavelength of Myst, and the wavelength of a different kind of Myst—say, one we reverse engineer from a lens. Then I can calculate exactly how much wavelength shift it’s going to take to get you there. That will come in handy when you start pushing outside the energy wedge. Certain wavelengths, you absolutely don’t want to miss your mark.”

“Like accidentally summoning grey goo,” Jeb said, nodding.

“Exactly.” Eddie pointed the marker at him. “Don’t do that.

“Now the other thing this formula can do, besides reverse engineering Myst wavelength, is give you a rough idea of how many different kinds of magic someone has at their disposal.

“You said you saw Vex heal someone, put someone to sleep, create a portal, and bend space?”

Jeb nodded.

“Okay…” Eddie worked some math, then flipped the whiteboard over again.

“You see this spectrum here?” he said, pointing at Ron’s hastily drawn Myst spectrum.

“You can be reasonably expected to be able to do this much,” he said, circling heat, light, and kinetic energy.

“Based on the points of data, your boy can use Zesh’nei’s Translation to shift his wavelength, oh, about…” Eddie considered the graph for a moment before circling the whole thing. “This much.” He tapped the graph. “Any magical ability in here, he can possibly do.”

That’s comforting, Jeb thought sourly. Now I have to watch out for Cthulhu.

“Any good news?”

“Vex probably has a toolkit of only a couple dozen spells,” Eddie said. “Doing it off the cuff is hard and imprecise. It makes way more sense to hone a handful of spells until they are second nature and use lenses for the rest.”

“What if he can use anything he wants, at any time?” Jeb asked.

“Well then, you’re fucked and it’s not worth your time thinking about it, is it?” Eddie said with a shrug.

“Fair enough,” Jeb admitted.

The door to the cellar rattled open, and Eddie hastily waved a hand, erasing the whiteboard with his Myst before standing in front of it and looking guilty as hell.

A moment later, Vresh entered the basement, scanning the scene. If this were a human basement, she might have had to stoop to keep her horns clear of the ceiling, but it had been built by keegan.

She glanced at the empty whiteboard and the marker in Eddie’s hand, and raised a brow before her gaze locked onto Jeb.

“Jebediah Trapper. I want you to meet the troops,” she said, crooking a finger.

Jeb was tempted to refuse to be summoned by a crooked finger on principle, but…he had more important things to worry about than principles, and she was very pretty.

“Coming,” Jeb said with a nod, closing his notebook and heading out after her.

Ron caught his arm, stopping him in his tracks.

“Try not to…die, okay?” Ron said.

“No promises.” He turned to Eddie and waved. “Thanks for the help.”

Ron shrugged and let him go. Eddie nodded back.

Jeb hustled out after Vresh, the sunlight glowing off of her ivory clothes reflecting on either side of the staircase above him.

They came out of the basement of the orphanage and walked the rest of the way to Vresh’s favorite restaurant, Vresh resting her palm naturally on the saber at her waist, while Jeb used Buck’s staff as a walking stick.

Jeb wanted access to some death-deer reinforcements should any of the other enforcers turn out to be…less than friendly. He was also wearing Gresh’s tooth and R-R-RubU’s bubble-pipe that he’d pulled out of the fifth dimension, because why not? He would much rather have more options than not enough.

“That staff…”

“Looks silly?” Jeb asked, glancing up at the satellite dish above his head. It looked silly to Jeb.

She shook her head. “Looks like something I’ve seen in the imperial treasury once. A national treasure.”

“Good to know we’re on the right track,” Jeb said, nodding.

They arrived a few minutes of chit-chat later, and Jeb could feel the ominous tension oozing out of the fancy restaurant.

It was completely empty. There was a complete absence of alien diners save at a single oval table in the center of the building.

Jeb did a quick scan of the table. Three melas, two keegan, one species he’d never encountered—some kinda…buffalo-dude. And of course, Casey.

“There you are,” said one of the older-looking enforcers. It was interesting to know that melas hair went grey, too. “I was wondering if you might have had some trouble.”

Chuckles rippled through the table.

The melas had some kind of lacquer armor on that looked balanced precariously between formal evening wear and a jester’s outfit.

“Apologies, father. I had to pick up a local ally.”

“Father? I didn’t think I’d be meeting the parents yet,” Jeb said. They ignored him.

“This is the human that you sacrificed your title for?” the older melas said, glancing Jeb up and down with calculating interest.

“I sacrificed my title to keep my word. The human is irrelevant. I would’ve sacrificed my title for a rock if I’d given it my word,” Vresh said.

Ouch.

The older melas nodded, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Come, take a seat.” He motioned for his daughter to sit, and the two of them pulled out chairs.

“Not you,” a keegan spat when Jeb tried to sit down. The bone-thin—woman?—was seated next to a narrow blade as long as Jeb was tall, and she was giving him the stink eye. She wore light armor decorated with small trophies. “This table is for enforcers. You’re not worthy of sitting with us.”

She glanced at Casey, as if to suggest the young woman didn’t belong there either.

Hmm… Jeb glanced around the table and saw that the attitude ranged from neutral to unfriendly. He made a quick political calculation: Take her shit, don’t take her shit, or compromise?

Taking her shit would devalue Vresh’s contribution in front of her peers and her dad, not taking her shit would possibly start something Jeb couldn’t handle.

Compromise, it is.

Jeb reached behind himself with his telekinesis and snagged one of the smallest tables the restaurant had, along with a chair. He lined it up against the enforcer table and sat behind it. The surrounding enforcers nodded silently at Jeb’s modest demonstration of power.

“Feel better?” Jeb asked the slender fighter. He couldn’t keep a little bit of the saltiness out of his voice. The keegan’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything.

“We’re here to plan the assault on the sindio’s dungeon. Any discussion not to that effect will be silenced,” Vresh’s dad said, his gaze lingering on the keegan for a moment. Vresh’s dad is awfully straight-laced. I think I see where she gets it. I think I’ll call him Mr. Tekalis.

“My spies have located two more city entrances, and six more air vents in the mountains,” Casey said, placing a folded piece of vellum on the table. The sheepskin unfolded itself into an incredibly detailed map of the city. If Jeb hadn’t seen it unroll itself from sheepskin, he’d be half-convinced it was a satellite image.

“The dungeon itself seems to have been deliberately grown to sprawl out underneath Solmnath, allowing him to enter the city for supplies and test subjects whenever he wants.”

Jeb noticed Casey’s goosebumps as she spoke.

“Entrances thus far have been in areas of Solmnath that predate the Stitching, leading me to believe the sindio’s presence is not a recent event.”

“Thank you, Casey. Jebediah Trapper, would you care to share your experience with the sindio’s base?” Mr. Tekalis asked.

“Sure,” Jeb said, grabbing the map and detailing his route through the mountain.

They debriefed him for a good half hour, then he sat back and watched as they hashed out their plan.

Rather than go through any of the entrances, they decided to crash the party by using Bruga the buffalo man’s stone-shaping ability to blast straight into Vex’s showroom from the outside.

The idea was to skip possible traps and take control of a central position from square one, giving them access to the entire dungeon from the very first second.

After that, the plan was to send teams of three to locate:

A: The dungeon core that would be fueling all of the sindio’s Myst devices.

B: The nukes.

C: The sindio himself.

Once A and B were handled, they’d all gang up on the immortal until he stopped twitching. Anything and anyone not on their side was to be considered an enemy and swiftly murdered.

For the sake of group cohesion, Jeb was paired with Vresh, Casey and Bruga, the hulking Stone Shaper, and tasked with finding and disabling the Myst engine at the center of the dungeon.

The other two groups were split evenly, with Mr. Tekalis taking the role of first responder for when they came across Vex, while the bitchy keegan woman took the task of finding the weapons and rendering them inert.

“Let’s get this done quick,” the keegan woman, Feej, said. “If the reprobates of my sector learn of my absence, they’ll start growing out of control…like a disease.”

A melas with a savage-looking axe crafted from what looked like a megalodon tooth grunted in agreement.

“So, when are we doing this?” Jeb asked.

“Day after tomorrow, after we’ve all had time to get some sleep, maybe take a shower, drink some tea,” Feej said.

“Seriously?” Jeb asked. Feej rolled her eyes.

“No. We’re doing this tonight. Right now, in fact,” Mr. Tekalis said, rising from his chair. “We have to assume that Vex has a network that exceeds your own,” he said, nodding to Casey. “Either he already knows our plan, or will before the night is over. The only way to catch him off guard is to move fast, before he has an opportunity to prepare.”

A distant explosion punctuated Mr. Tekalis’s sentence, followed by the faintest sound of screams from the night outside the windows.

Jeb shot to his foot, clomping over to the window. The fancier streets of Solmnath had magical lamps casting a cool white light on the cobbled streets, but Jeb couldn’t see farther into the asphalt-covered street beyond.

The city hadn’t paid its electricity bill in over half a year.

Jeb couldn’t see anything, but he could hear faint screaming. Every once in a while, his ears picked out the faint ring of steel.

The fuck is going on? Jeb thought, cocking his ear to the window, hoping to make out more.

“A distraction. Everyone, we are leaving,” Mr Tekalis said, standing and barreling out the door.

Every enforcer in the room burst to their feet and followed Mr. Tekalis to the door. Jeb cocked a brow as he watched them follow after the melas.

Was Mr. Tekalis feared or respected by other enforcers? Both?

Jeb picked himself up and fell into the back of the line, alongside Vresh.

“How did your dad come to be here?” Jeb whispered up at her as they sped down the dark streets, heading toward the mountain. The faint sound of screams grew quieter.

“When I lost the title of Enforcer, it reverted back to my father,” she whispered back. “Stripping my rank was a political maneuver by the emperor to regain a decade or two of service from him, among other things.”

Jeb scowled. Typical politics. Forcing someone out of retirement wasn’t exactly evil, but it was definitely in a grey area.

They cruised through the dark streets faster than a motorcycle would have been able to. Jeb had to shield his eyes from the wind as they exited one of the side streets and began climbing the mountain.

All the while, the sounds of distant combat and screaming got farther and farther away.

Jeb couldn’t help but feel a knot of worry for his people at The Admiral Orphanage, but he understood the need for speed.

The golden rule of any kind of conflict is to force the other party on the defensive, make them react to you, not the other way around. If they are too busy trying to stop you, then they are too busy to do something you won’t like.

In this case, killing an orphanage full of kids.

Jeb looked over his shoulder, and he wished he hadn’t.

The mountain had given him a view of the city from above, and he could make out a pattern of chaos close to engulfing his home.

It was a circle of darkness and fire—a subtle shift in the way the city presented itself. Streets that should’ve been lit by magical lamps had been turned black, and buildings that should have been not on fire were blazing, casting a fiery glow on the surroundings.

The change represented a perfect circle cut out of the lights of the city.

Jeb focused on one of the burning buildings in particular, trying to make out what was happening around it.

He could see…a faint shimmer of firelight against something shiny—like steel armor, perhaps?

Vresh put a hand on his shoulder. “Vex is launching an attack on the city, Jeb. It’s an effort to delay us long enough to prepare a defense. In a way, this is a good sign. It means he needs time to prepare.”

“I know,” Jeb muttered, his gaze trying to pick out exactly where his people were, his brain idly calculating the orphanage’s total defensive potential, and coming up short.

Let’s see... Zlesk is a decent close combat fighter. Colt is alright; the kid will be good at putting out fires and controlling large groups of enemies with his goop. Nancy and the Immortals make good shock troops…but the rest of the kids…not so much. Mr. and Mrs. Everett, the Langs…Pedro: They’re not combatants, and I’m not sure Zlesk is gonna be able to keep them alive by himself.

If Ron was still at the orphanage when shit went down, that would be a huge weight off Jeb’s mind, but the kid tended to go home when the sun went down.

Ron didn’t like to fight, but he was cursed with usefulness. He was both a survivor of the Impossible Tutorial, and excellent defensive support. He could turn dead attackers into cheap, disposable blockers, compensating for slim manpower.

I friggin’ hope he’s still there.

“I know all that,” Jeb said, shrugging Vresh’s hand off his shoulder as he turned. “But it’s a lot harder to abandon people for their own good in practice.”

“I know,” Vresh said. Something in her gaze led Jeb to believe that she really did know.

Jeb heaved a breath and rolled his shoulders, putting the kids out of his mind.

He could worry about them after he saved the world.

Jeb glanced around at the half-dozen individuals radiating power.

Or maybe after I watch these fellas save the world. I could probably go help the orphanage, and it wouldn’t change anything… Gah!

Jeb shook the do-gooder impulses out of his head. That’s what these tactics preyed on. Empathy made you predictable, and stupid. The empathetic thing to do was to win.

Jeb put his blinders on, squared his shoulders, and faced away from the faint screams.

***Kol, level 60 Courier***

“This modulator here will throttle the frequency of the gate,” Vex said, looking up into the silvery box the size of a tarruk, wrenching a bolt into place.

“Can you hand me that scanner?” Vex said, pointing at the modified human barcode scanner, just out of the sindio’s reach.

Kol bent down and handed it over.

“Thanks,” Vex said, using the device to measure the lens placement before making a few minor adjustments.

“What this does is: If we have a power interruption, instead of the gate blinking off completely, it will simply slow the gate down—making whatever is inside Fate enter or leave at a drastically reduced rate.

“And why would we want to do that?” Vex rolled out from under the gigantic metal box.

“You like teaching, don’t you?” Kol asked, rather than answer the leading question.

“Because the test-nuke filled with straw got cut in half from a tiny Myst fluctuation originating from Fate! So instead of trying to ensure perfect supply, by adding this modulator, we’re shifting the focus to making the Myst draw variable. That way we can avoid stuttering in the gate; instead, slowing down as necessary. The stuttering never happened with smaller gates, so I didn’t know it was a problem.

“No more getting cut in half for our test blank,” Vex said, patting the metal case as he slid out from under it.

The oversized metal box was attached to a silver circle whose walls were four times thicker than Kol’s arm, opening large enough for a grown man to walk through, provided he stooped a little.

Thick gold-plated tubes ran to it from the Myst engine that dominated the center of Vex’s dungeon. A dungeon core as big around as a man’s torso sat in midair, suspended on a spinning swirl of Myst, surrounded by a hollowed-out prism crystal. Myst rays were separated, condensed into neutral Myst, then pumped out through an Udium and gold machine that dominated a huge section of the room’s floorspace.

Kol was sure it would be more impressive if he could see Myst. As it was, the dungeon core simply floated in the middle of the crystal…not doing much.

“And you’re sure that’ll kill us all?” Kol asked, glancing at the massive steel tube. The human weapon sat there with malevolent intent.

“Oh yes. Compared to the test bombs, this one should be significantly more energetic. Not only that, but if the Mythos of a bullet was that strong, I can’t wait to see what the Mythos of one of these bad boys will do. Should be fantastic.”

“And why am I okay with this?” Kol asked. As far as Kol could reason, he probably shouldn’t be okay with it, but for some reason, he didn’t really care.

“I tinkered with your sense of self-preservation and your ability to care about it. They were distracting you,” Vex said.

“Oh, okay.” Kol nodded. That explained it.

A distant rumble caused the floating dungeon core to wobble inside its container, and Vex pointed a skeletal finger at it.

“You see? That’s why we need a modulator. That power fluctuation would have cut the nuke in half.”

Vex rubbed his chin. “Also, what was that rumble from? Are we doing anything outside today?”

“Not that I can think of, no.”

“Huh.” Vex spread his arms wide, and an aerial view of the city sprang into being in front of him.

“Wow, that’s…umm… We’re under attack. Huh.” The keegan bit his tongue in thought.

***Jeb***

A horde of squat ivory seven-limbed golems boiled out of the wound in the sindio’s dungeon, attempting to fight off the intruders and seal the wound in the dungeon with their own bodies.

The lead Melas Let out a bellow stomping his foot, and unleashing a shockwave through the swarm, causing dozens of them to fall limp in a fraction of a second. The remaining creatures oriented on the enforcers, raising razor sharp blades menacingly moments before they fell into clumps of ivory, diced by Feej’s blades.

“Go, go go!” Mr. Tekalis shouted, motioning for the enforcers to jump in the funnel-shaped hole the bison-man had punched into the mountain. The lights of Vex’s showroom glowed up at them from underneath.

Jeb hovered a hundred feet or so above them, watching for signs of counterattack, but so far, there had been no move by the sindio to stop them from punching a hole into his treasure room.

That feels off, Jeb thought, eyes narrowed. If he attacked the city to distract us, he should have at least had enough time to set better countermeasures. Those creatures didn’t really put up much of a fight.

Jeb glanced over at the city.

The ring of destruction had expanded, coming closer to where The Admiral Orphanage lay. Barely a street away.

If we kill this bastard, it’ll stop all of… Why is that fire so low?

Jeb’s eyes picked out a piece of fire that seemed lower in the ground than it was just a couple minutes ago. It was hard to tell against the black background of night, but Jeb was sharper than he’d ever been in his life, and he was sure that that bit of flaming building had sunk into the ground.

Ice settled in Jeb’s veins as he scanned the rest of the city, his mind filling in a funnel shape from the flickering points of light he could see. Then a gigantic insect shape moved in front of a burning building, perfectly silhouetted. It must have been two stories tall for Jeb to be able to make it out from this distance.

Solmnath wasn’t under attack—it was being consumed by a dungeon! Jeb’s gaze flickered to where his orphanage sat, right on the edge of the sinkhole forming in the center of Solmnath. In a matter of minutes, the building would start sinking.

Why did the sindio drop another dungeon? It’s practically right on top of him. He’d have to clean it up afterward, and if its tunnel connected to his lair, it’d be a pain in the ass. It doesn’t make… Meyers! Jeb thought, eyes widening. The self-styled general had wanted to wipe the city off the map, one way or another.

She’d re-gifted the sindio’s weaponized dungeon.

That’s what she was doing hunting pirates! She was getting strong enough to pick off anyone who tries to stop the dungeon from swallowing the city! It’s not going to stop with Vex!

Jeb saw a Myst-powered street lamp flicker out, the darkness of the dungeon’s influence encroaching a little closer to his people.

Jeb could easily imagine Ron pushing into the dungeon with his zombies, trying to shut it down, only to get splatted by Meyers descending from above. Ron was weak against sucker-punches. Zlesk, too… Shit!

“Jeb!” Vresh called up at him. “Are you coming?”

Jeb looked down at the two melas nobles standing above the hole, watching him expectantly.

Aw, fuck, they’re not gonna forgive me for this.

“It’s Meyers attacking the city! I have to go!”

Jeb turned and flew back to Solmnath.

Chapter 20: Responsibility

“Jebediah!” Vresh’s voice faded into the wind as Jeb put the pedal to the metal, flinging himself violently through the air on a jet of telekinetic Myst, heading toward his responsibility.

And if the world blows up in the meantime? Are you responsible for that, too?

Shut up, me. One thing at a time.

As he got closer, Jeb could make out the courtyard, filled with several hundred children, being led in a fighting retreat out onto the street, away from the army-ant front line.

Zlesk, Ron, Borg and Colt were in the back, while Nancy, Eddie, and the teachers were in the front, leading the march of brats away from the front line, toward the southeast of the city.

Jeb felt a hint of pride as Colt created a thick coating of zero-friction slime along the street, forcing the mass of insect soldiers to scramble and struggle, expending far more effort than they should’ve to march in tandem up the gentle slope. The teenage Slinger took potshots at their limbs with unnerving accuracy, his sling-bullets knocking the more stable insects off balance, creating small chain reactions of tangled, flailing limbs.

All this meant only a handful of the monsters were able to approach Zlesk at a time.

The former sheriff of Kalfath was a skilled duelist, and he used his outrageous reach to dismantle one creature at a time with brutal efficiency. A stab to a major muscle group, then use the follow-up flinch to stab the brain before moving on to the next.

Ron, in turn, re-mantled the corpses in a matter of seconds, neon violet Myst threading out of his palms at a fantastic rate, repairing and reanimating corpses just as fast as Zlesk could make them.

Rather than direct the zombies to haphazardly intrude on Zlesk’s combat, he withdrew the slowly-accumulated force of corpses, walking them alongside the children as a reserve and extra shielding on the side of the formation.

Borg was wielding a thick steel pickaxe and acting as Colt’s bodyguard, taking a swipe at anything that got too close, pinning the monster down until Zlesk could finish it off.

Eddie was in the front, cowering behind Nancy, despite the girl being nearly two feet shorter than him.

Jeb made to land beside Ron and organize a push into the dungeon, but a moment later, he felt three of his FMO shields pop. His head snapped up and he followed the trajectory of the spinning piece of rubble off into the distance. It should have returned the projectile to sender, but there was no sign of Meyers. Whoever’d thrown the brick at his head had already moved on.

Guerilla tactics, huh?

Jeb’s eyes narrowed. His first instinct was to dive toward Ron and shield their most valuable support caster, but Meyers’ response to that was fairly predictable.

She would drop a frag on the front of the escaping children. Or something to that effect.

That’s what I would do, anyway, Jeb thought, scowling.

The immortal children had a good chance of surviving a little shrapnel, but Eddie and the teachers were nearly base-level Body. Not to mention the other kids with no levels at all.

This sucks. If Jeb didn’t alter the situation, Meyers would keep poking at him, forcing him to stay in one place or risk losing someone, effectively neutering Jeb’s ability to do anything besides float there with his thumb up his ass.

Jeb scanned the formation for someone he could use. Colt, Ron and Zlesk were needed where they were, and Jeb didn’t trust Borg after the last one tried to kill him.

He glanced over at Nancy, with the skinny roboticist hiding behind her.

There!

Jeb turned and dove toward the front of the huge line of children, reaching out with a thread of Myst and snagging Eddie. Eddie would work.

The wispy-haired roboticist let out a strangled yelp as he was yanked straight up off the ground and brought into Jeb’s orbit.

Boom!

There was a concussive blast from the back of the line, and Jeb already knew what it meant: Somebody just got killed.

Jeb whipped around and spotted Meyers. The silver-haired woman was standing on Colt’s neck, buried six inches in the street. The teen’s exposed body twitched violently in the distinctive manner of someone who’d just suffered lethal brain trauma.

The ‘general’ gave Jeb a vindictive smile, then shot upward in a blast of air, moving faster than Jeb had ever been able to, vanishing from the eye as Borg’s fist passed through the vacuum she’d left behind.

Their situations had been reversed. She was set loose in Jeb’s home now, killing his people. The irony wasn’t lost on him. Jeb loosened his jaw and buried his self-recriminations beneath a layer of ice, letting Ron and Zlesk’s dismayed shouts flow past him.

Plenty of time for that later.

“Meyers!” Jeb shouted at the top of his lungs, holding Eddie’s mewling form in front of himself. While Eddie was in front of him, Jeb started weaving a trap, carefully containing heat Myst into a tightly wound packet.

“You wanted to know who made the drone! Here he is! Probably the best human with Myst tech on the planet! And I own him! How much is it gonna take for you to back the fuck off!?”

“W-what are you doing!?” Eddie asked, his eyes locked on the ground.

“Selling you. Be quiet.”

Meyers appeared in midair, some two hundred feet distant, her body melding into view from the surrounding air, like she’d stepped out from behind a blurring shower curtain.

Active camo. Jeb’s brain put the pieces together, narrowing down her abilities. It was fine, yet powerful control over air of some kind. It allowed her to manipulate sound, move at supersonic speeds, and give herself active camo by making the air thick enough to bend light around her.

Likely, she could thicken air around herself to block attacks as well.

Problematic, but not impossible to deal with.

“That’s obviously a trap!” she sneered, her voice clearly audible even at this distance. Jeb could faintly make out her Myst creating a tube that channeled the sound between them.

“Of course it is!” Jeb shouted back. “Doesn’t change who he is or how valuable an asset he could become!” Jeb wiggled Eddie like an attractive worm on a hook.

“Set him down outside the city and tell him to head east, and I’ll let your kids leave.”

Jeb’s eye twitched. In all likelihood, she wanted the kids too.

She’d have to get new soldiers from somewhere.

It was a terrible Deal all ‘round, but it wasn’t like Jeb was planning on letting her have any of them. She knew that, and Jeb knew that.

They were merely negotiating who was off-limits, at this point.

Jeb glanced back down at the crowd of children streaming down the road to the east. Borg had moved from his spot in the back to a position in the front. The undead cyborg was walking backward beside Nancy, his gaze locked on Meyers.

Without Colt’s slime, the marching army ants were moving dramatically faster, forcing Ron to deploy his reserve of undead insects as support for Zlesk, who was hard-pressed to pry apart the creatures’ defenses when they formed a solid shield wall.

If only you knew how much of a difference you made.

In the handful of seconds since Colt had his spine crushed, the front lines of the insect creatures had pushed forward, burying the teen’s body beneath a wave of chitin.

Jeb looked away.

“Guarantee Eddie’s safety, and include the civilians, and you’ve got a Deal,” Jeb said. “Kids need people to take care of ‘em, after all.”

She glanced down at the grey-haired civilians leading the exodus beneath them.

“Deal,” she said.

“Deal.” Jeb felt the magic click into place inside him.

He whipped up a parachute trap, then spoke.

“Head east,” Jeb said into Eddie’s ear before flinging Eddie off into the distance.

“I hate you!!!!” The wispy-haired inventor’s scream faded into the distance along with his flailing body. Jeb kept an eye on Meyers, watching to see what she would do. Jeb couldn’t risk personally depositing Eddie outside the city, because she wasn’t magically compelled to keep her word.

Chances were good she’d break the agreement the moment it became inconvenient, but Jeb was hoping the civilians were low-value enough that she didn’t care if they got away or not.

Eddie’s tremendous commercial value would hopefully stay her hand, whatever the outcome.

…And if she decided to kill Eddie…

Well, he’s had plenty of time on this earth. Her breaking the Deal would give Jeb an advantage over her, while not netting her any benefit.

Hell, because of the wording, I could blow Eddie up and she’d be reneging on the Deal… Nah, I’m not that much of an asshole. Tempting, but Jeb liked the old man too much to murder him as a catch-22.

Honestly, Jeb would prefer it if she kept her word. It would be great if she didn’t attack his kids, and he’d already filled his side of the Bargain.

He couldn’t dismiss pure vindictive rage though, so he kept a close eye on Meyers.

The floating bitch watched him with predatory focus as the civilians continued to stream away from the city, gaining speed as they figured out what was going on.

Jeb studied the state of the city out of the corner of his eye. The natives of Solmnath were resisting, but the army ants seemed to have gained a substantial toehold in the middle of the night, while people were asleep. The two-story insect that he’d seen earlier was being fought by a squad of what appeared to be a half a dozen guards, but they were being pushed back by the creature’s smaller companions.

The cores didn’t make anything that big in Nellis. The core must have maintained its progress toward making bigger and badder bugs, and transferred that to its new home.

Here and there, Jeb could make out some of the remaining nobility of Solmnath cutting their way through the wall of chitin like a hot knife through butter, but their numbers were simply too low to keep up with the weaponized dungeon’s output.

Eh, I wouldn’t wish those child-killers back even if it was to save the city.

With the emperor gone back east with his elite guards, along with a sizable fraction of the upper nobility being culled, the city was more vulnerable than Jeb had realized.

Damnit.

Just like before, it seemed the only way to turn off the dungeon was a blitz straight down the sinkhole.

Even then, I don’t know where there’s enough gold to wrap the damn thing up. That was a key feature of being in Vegas. Now Jeb had no idea where he was going to find the materials to make the damn thing stop drilling into the heart of the city.

Jeb stifled a gasp of realization.

He didn’t have to fix anything. He could employ his favorite method of conflict resolution: Dump the problem in someone else’s lap, then sucker punch them.

Jeb began to float toward the back of the line where Ron and Zlesk were fighting, maintaining eye contact with Meyers.

Meyers tilted in midair and floated farther that direction as well, matching his pace, a subtle head nod indicating they’d both leave the civilians to their own devices.

I hope.

Jeb took off, aiming for Ron and Zlesk.

Jeb’s max speed was about highway cruising speed, between sixty and eighty miles an hour, while Meyers’ put his to shame, at somewhere easily above two hundred miles an hour.

The Formula One to his Honda Civic.

Meyers beat Jeb to Ron and Zlesk, aiming a sonic-empowered kick to the back of Ron’s head.

Zlesk’s outrageously long legs flashed out and swept Ron off his feet. Jeb saw a flurry of ginger hair fly up into the air as Meyers flew directly over Ron’s head, accompanied by an explosion of compressed air.

It wasn’t a sonic boom; she wasn’t going that fast. The boom that echoed through the streets was the side effect of whatever attack she used to turn people inside out.

Meyers sailed past Ron faster than Zlesk could counter, and was long gone before Jeb made it to the necromancer, disappearing in a flurry of wind.

For understandable reasons, she refused to allow Jeb within a hundred feet of her. I understand it, but it pisses me off tremendously, Jeb thought as he snagged Ron and Zlesk.

“Leave your zombies there!” Jeb shouted. Ron had accumulated enough zombies to act as a shield wall for the fleeing children.

Ron had gotten manhandled like this before, so he simply nodded and tucked his limbs in, going along for the ride. Zlesk, on the other hand, flailed for a moment before he realized Jeb was the one who’d yanked him off the ground.

When he finally stopped thrashing, Jeb saw tears in the keegan’s eyes. It was more emotion than Jeb had expected, but Zlesk had actually spent more time at the orphanage than Jeb at this point. He’d grown attached to the young man over the last few months.

“I couldn’t save him. One moment he was there, I looked away for an instant and…” Zlesk stared into the distance.

“It’s not your fault. She was looking for the easiest kill with the most devastating effect,” Jeb said, keeping a tight lid on his emotions. Sure, Jeb played a part in Colt’s death, but he didn’t force Meyers to kill the kid. She’d done that part on her own.

Jeb was going to make damn sure she regretted that decision, before the end.

“We’re going to the center of the dungeon! We’re going to make this disaster work for us!” Jeb shouted over the wind as he scanned the city for Meyers.

“Who was that bitch, and why is she trying to kill us?” Ron shot back, a bit of blood running down the side of his scalp.

“She’s—”

A building in their path exploded, sending shrapnel flinging in their direction. Jeb’s FMO shield popped and protected him, but several chunks of rock hit Ron, bouncing off the necromancer’s unnaturally tough body. Zlesk deftly knocked the stone out of the air, suffering no damage.

She knows Ron doesn’t have protection.

“Ouch, damni—”

“One sec,” Jeb said, yanking Ron backwards.

The necromancer suffered a bit of whiplash as he was tugged backward a fraction of a second before an RPG sizzled through the air where his torso had been. Jeb saw Meyers for a fraction of a second before she faded behind a building, her body already beginning to fuzz away as she raised her active camo.

It’s a little disgusting how similar we think, Jeb thought, eyes narrowed.

“I’ll tell you who she is later. Right now, we’re going to the dungeon core! When we get there, I want every ounce of necromancy you can squeeze out!”

“O-okay,” Ron said, looking a little queasy.

Jeb changed their path to be less predictable, ducking and swooping randomly from side to side. It succeeded in preventing another ambush, and Jeb picked up a flaming bit of rubble on the way past, flinging it deep into the sinkhole ahead of them.

He’d learned his lesson last time.

Jeb and his two passengers dove straight into the sinkhole, following the flaming chunk of suburban housing into the gullet of the beast.

***Meyers***

He doesn’t have any gold, so what is his game here? Meyers thought, eyes narrowed as she watched Jeb disappear into the hole. He can’t stop the core, and moving it is going to be suicide.

Ah, it’s a trap. It’s a desperate bid to get close enough to hit me. Never give the enemy what they want.

Meyers reloaded the RPG and dug through her bag of goodies, hoisting it over her shoulder.

How about I just add some shrapnel to the mix? Maybe some C-4 to seal the deal. Pressure wave should do some damage with or without those automatic protections he’s got.

She hadn’t forgotten the dungeon core birthing several smaller ones when she’d hit it with an explosion last time, either. If it did so again, it could only be to her benefit.

Dropping explosives down the hole without going in there personally gave her the most bang for her buck.

Kill Jeb, make sure nobody interrupts the purging of Solmnath. Two birds, one rocket launcher.

***Jeb***

Jeb dropped into the sticky brown mud and immediately cast his Myst into the floor.

It was a little idea he’d been working on ever since he’d been stuck in an elevator with Vresh: telekinetic imaging.

Jeb flattened his string of Myst and sent it a hundred feet through the floor, gently tugging on the solid stone beyond the floor, looking for a gap in his awareness.

Nope, nope, there!

About twenty feet ahead at a slight slant, Jeb felt something other than plain stone. It was flat and shrugged off his Myst like water off a duck.

There’s my bitch.

Jeb turned back and studied the scene. The army ants hadn’t quite responded to the incursion yet, but it was only a matter of time. Dozens of various inanimate objects littered the ground, like street lamps, bicycles, and newsboxes, all semi-submerged in the brown mud that was birthing the monsters.

Jeb frowned.

“What’s the plan?” Ron shouted into his ear over the harsh scream of offended army ants.

“We’re going to put that!” Jeb said, pointing at the core. “Over there!” He pointed at the corner of the small room closest to the man-made tunnel.

I.e. Vex’s tunnel.

“That’s it!?”

“That’s it,” Jeb confirmed.

“Send me over there!” Ron shouted.

Jeb didn’t have time to question it, so he simply picked up the necromancer and flung him toward the core. Jeb was assuming the ginger had some kind of clever plan to transport the dungeon core in a case made of—

His fingers. He’s touching it.

Jeb shook his head and reeled the kid back in.

“I thought touching it was dangerous!” Jeb shouted.

“Not if you’re alive!” Ron said. “The radiation doesn’t convert living things! You would know that if you went dungeon mining with me and Eddie!” Ron’s sleeves, on the other hand, seemed to be beginning to slough apart.

Jeb glanced at the well-preserved non-living objects lying haphazardly in the muck, a sneaking suspicion nagging at the back of his mind.

No time.

“Put it there and get ready to make zombies like your life depends on it!” Jeb said, pointing.

Ron lobbed the dungeon core into its new position and turned back to the fight at hand.

The strange towering insect creatures seemed to be desperate to reach the core and for that, they broke ranks, charging at them with reckless abandon the moment they got close enough to do so.

There was one bearing down on Jeb, raising its shielding forelimbs to crush him into paste.

Jeb didn’t have time to get fancy. He needed to kill a few and get blockers right now.

“Alpha strike,” he said, holding out his palm.

A flurry of telekinetic blades, spears and shrapnel erupted from his palm, each of them stored in Jeb’s down time.

Recharging your finishing move: part of a healthy lifestyle, like brushing your teeth.

The Alpha strike caught the monster in front of Jeb and bowled it backwards, simultaneously dismantling it into dozens of bloody chunks. The telekinetic barrage went on to damage half a dozen more creatures farther back in a cone.

“Don’t chunk them! It’s not worth the time to repair if you chunk them!” Ron shouted, aiming his neon purple Myst at a twitching corpse Zlesk had made with a precise stab to the brain.

The newly formed zombie lurched to its feet and staggered over to the left, providing Ron with more solid cover.

“Roger!”

A few moments of frantic stabbing later, Jeb risked a glance behind himself and saw that the core was already starting to burrow through the ground in the direction of his choosing.

Jeb consulted his mental map, then sprinted up to the core and booted the priceless supernatural sphere farther down the new side tunnel it was creating.

“Pull back a bit, set up a choke point!” Jeb shouted above the shrieks of angry monsters.

Now that they had a bit of an alcove carved out of the wall, they could start thinking about pulling in and defending it rather than taking on attackers from all directions.

Ron glanced over his shoulder at the new tunnel forming behind him, before nodding and pulling back.

“Okay, once we’ve got a decent wall up, I can start—”

The world went white, and Jeb felt several FMO shields pop, as well as a couple ribs.

When he opened his eyes, Jeb was staring straight up at the brown gunk ceiling. Right in the middle of his field of view was a black splotch where he’d probably gotten some mild retinal scarring.

No time to dick around, Jeb thought, using his elbows to lever himself to a seated position.

Jeb scanned the battlefield.

Most of the bugs were discombobulated, staggering back to their feet. Ron was pushing one of his zombies off himself with a groan, having been sheltered from the blast by his minions.

Zlesk was still on his feet, but the keegan was holding a hand over his face, bleeding heavily from the eye.

“Did someone just bomb us?” Ron asked, his voice turning shrill.

“Yep. Get on your feet, we’re not quite done yet,” Jeb said, leaning forward and helping to drag him out from under his zombie.

Consulting the afterimage of the blast, and how little time there had been to react, Jeb had to assume it was an RPG. If they hadn’t been partially sheltered by the new hole and all the bodies between them, they might’ve been torn to shreds.

Jeb glanced over at Zlesk. The former sheriff was bleeding from an empty eye socket, his face frozen into a rictus of pain and anger.

Well, more torn to shreds.

Jeb glanced behind himself and spotted a flat plane starting to manifest in the rounded tunnel—the first sign they were butting up against a man-made structure.

Almost there.

***Abigail Meyers, level 79 Ace***

Abbie watched for a full two minutes, but the bugs kept marching inward rather than outward.

There was still something alive in there.

That won’t do at all, she thought, eyeing the native Solmnath population, able to push the weaker numbers back and form a more effective resistance.

“Time to break out the big guns,” she muttered, hovering a thousand feet above the city as she grabbed the two kilos of C-4 out of her backpack.

***Kol, level 60 Courier***

Vex paced back and forth in front of the kneeling enforcers, seemingly…vexed.

Kol briefly locked eyes with the melas woman who’d nearly decapitated him a month ago. A small part of Kol enjoyed seeing her humbled, but that was mostly drowned out by the knowledge that they were both gnats hovering around an irate giant.

Kol focused on fading into the wallpaper, relieved he even had that option.

“What did you think was going to happen?” Vex asked, waving a hand. “Every hundred years or so, a new ruler tries to kill me as some kind of macho…” He searched for the word a moment.

“Publicity stunt,” Lien supplied his master.

“Publicity stunt!” Vex shouted. “And then I kill them and scatter their empire to ashes, and it resets the clock, but it takes years of my valuable time. I thought this empire was different. The current emperor and his dad sent me gift baskets! I thought, ‘Oh, here’s someone who knows not to fuck with me.’ But no, it just took a little longer.

“I mean, the emperor’s gotta know this is gonna turn out poorly for him… You pale imitations of a bygone era couldn’t spell your way out of a moist paper bag.

“Unless the emperor was culling you?” Vex asked, turning toward the lead enforcer, an older melas man with thick greying hair and long horns that nearly touched each other. The prisoner was restrained by invisible bands that dug into his wrists, legs, and neck.

“Did you embezzle or support the wrong political faction, perhaps?” he asked, stooping down to look the melas in the eyes.

“I’d wager the emperor’s motivation was the fact that you’re toying with magic that could destroy the fabric of the world,” the melas said, directing his gaze past Vex, towards the massive steel bomb. Its height was nearly the same as Kol’s and it was at least three times longer than he was tall.

Vex followed the man’s gaze to the massive nuclear bomb, then shrugged.

“I guess that’s fair,” Vex said, drawing himself up to his full height. “Assuming the world continues to exist after my experiment, I’m going to need your full names and home addresses so I can bill the emperor for your ransom and the damages. If you don’t believe you are valuable enough to ransom, line up on the left side of the room for summary execution.”

Rumble….

The ceiling above them rained a tiny bit of dust downwards as the underground room shook.

“And which one of you chuckleheads dropped a Fech’na on the city?” he asked, hands on his hips.

Vex scanned the eight kneeling enforcers for a minute, watching them glance at each other in confusion.

“Really? No one knows who did it? It’s not like they’re making them anymore, so it should have caught someone’s attention. It’s a drastic decision to pull one out of the…imperial…vault.”

Vex thumbed his chin. “Huh. Maybe it’s one of mine.”

Boom!

This time, the explosion rocked through the underground lair, loud and close by. Kol could feel the shockwave travel through his chest as the ceiling cracked above them.

There was a moment of stillness, then the entire dungeon bucked like a tarruk that had been bitten by a particularly painful bloodsucking insect.

“Now that feels like a dungeon schism.” He turned to Lien. “Lien, could you go take care of that?”

The sindio’s butler nodded and headed toward the source of the blast.

Vex clapped his hands together. “In the meantime, who wants to see if the Mythos of humanity’s most powerful weapon can be harnessed in the Fate dimension? Show of hands.”

The invisible bands around the enforcers’ wrists forced them to raise their hands. More than one of them were making rude gestures.

“Excellent. Let’s get started.”

Chapter 21: Unfinished Business

***Casey Thompson***

“What’s a dungeon schism?” Casey asked quietly.

“When two dungeons love each other very much…” Feej said with a patronizing tone.

“Quiet. Your hostility accomplishes nothing,” Kor Tekalis said, glaring at the keegan enforcer. The stick-thin woman returned his glare.

“If we hadn’t been dragged down by spineless human nature, this mission would be over already,” Feej said, loud enough for Casey and everyone else to hear. Everyone ignored her. The keegan woman obviously had a chip on her shoulder, and there wasn’t really much point in addressing it.

“Why hasn’t he killed us?” Casey muttered to herself. They were rendered incapable of moving, and their Myst was completely sealed, which also shut off their Abilities. She couldn’t understand why he didn’t just finish it.

A chill went through her.

Waste not, want not.

He’s going to experiment on us, then sell us back to the emperor like a head of cattle!

He's going to experiment on me! Again!

Casey’s heart pounded in her ears, sweat beading on her forehead as she recalled the invasive nature of the bastard’s ‘experiments’.

“I don’t presume to know what goes on in that monster’s head,” Kor Tekalis muttered, still more than a head taller than her, even kneeling. The older Tekalis’s words dragged her out of the rabbit hole of unthinking terror. At least, momentarily.

Why should I be afraid? I should be pissed!

Casey glanced over at the sindio, who was humming to himself as he tested all the lines and made sure the belt designed to feed the nuke through the silver gate was in working order. It moved the massive metal bomb back and forth with a high-pitched whine.

“Why didn’t you kill us!?” Casey demanded. Kor tried to shift his body to cover Casey after the outburst, but the damage was done.

“Oh?” Vex glanced over at Casey, his hands still busily at work.

“Why didn’t you just put us out of our goddamn misery, you sadistic fuck!?” she shouted, some of the pent-up anger from her last ‘visit’ boiling over.

“Because you’re all steeped with causality Myst designed to deliver you safe and alive to Pikaku in a few months’ time, my dear child. It’s a…what was the technical term…a ‘bitch and a half’ to remove, requires a fancy ritual, would take all day for each of you, and I just don’t care about any of you enough to waste that kind of time.”

“That’s Emperor Pikaku,” Kor said. The leader of the assault strained against his bonds like someone had just insulted his honor.

Maybe someone did, Casey thought.

Vex snorted. “I didn’t vote for him.”

Casey couldn’t tell if Kor was flushing with anger—the melas was almost red already—but he did darken significantly. Both his skin and his expression.

Skree!

A cry like that of rending steel sounded from down the hall, followed by the clatter of chitin against marble. A moment later, a massive, moving shield of organic armor came lumbering down the hall.

Upon finding living creatures in the room, it paused momentarily as if surveying the situation. The chitin shield split in two, revealing itself to be two flattened pincers that acted as a shield. The creature’s face sent a chill down Casey’s spine as it drooled hungrily, its many mandibles making come hither motions like fingers as it drooled at them.

A spike dominated the center of its mouth, the tip of a round tongue composed entirely of tensed muscle.

Damn, that is ugly.

It began lumbering towards them, hunger evident in its hyperfocus on the restrained enforcers.

“Try it, monster,” Kor said, looking up at the drooling monstrosity. “You’ll find my flesh tougher than you can handle.”

“What on Pharos is taking Lien so long?” Vex demanded, waving a dismissive hand.

Casey saw a faint flash of sharp-looking Myst coalesce into a sphere before it leapt from the sindio’s finger and splashed against the creature, seemingly under its own power.

The monster paused for a moment, as if confused, before collapsing to the ground in bloody chunks.

Out of the pile of carnage, three more motes of sharp light leapt out of the body, heading opposite directions from each other.

One of them went straight for Casey.

Kor threw himself in front of her, and Casey spotted the mote land against Kor’s shoulder. Somehow it had changed shape from a sphere to a miniature copy of the monster it had just rendered into soup.

The tiny insect monster made of Myst landed on Kor, and every muscle in Casey’s body clenched, waiting for the enforcer leader to collapse into pieces.

Instead, the Myst creature just…fizzled out like a candle run out of wick.

Deeper down the hall, Casey heard the distinctive sounds of bloody flesh hitting the floor as the other two motes found prey.

Goddamn, what the hell did we get ourselves into?

***Jebediah Trapper***

Jeb groaned, his entire body feeling like an enormous bruise. All his compressed wall of air had done was soften the blow of the explosive somewhat.

That was a lot of C-4, he thought, the barest shreds of his consciousness beginning to reassert themselves through the white noise of the concussion.

“Who’s still alive?” Jeb groaned, unable to hear his own words. “Sound off.” All he heard was ringing that drowned out everything else. Gonna have to buy an ear doctor after this, or maybe bum a heal off Amanda.

Jeb scanned to the left and right, spotting Ron and Zlesk struggling to their feet.

Well, at least they’re alive, Jeb thought, his grunt of effort fading into the ringing whine as he shoved himself to his feet. He could feel all his extremities, which was a good sign.

Jeb paused as he realized the floor was perfectly flat and dry, free of muck. The dungeon core rolled down the hall, which seemed to shudder under its passage as if it were revolted to even touch the thing.

The explosive blew us through the ceiling, Jeb thought, glancing up at the muck-dripping hole in the brightly-lit ceiling.

Jeb waved until he got Ron’s attention. “I think we’re in Vex’s dungeon,” Jeb said.

“~?” Ron shouted back at him.

Jeb shook his head and staggered to his feet, grabbing Ron by the sleeve as he passed, heading the opposite direction from the core. He snagged Zlesk on the way by and kept running as, a moment later, an army ant began tentatively poking its forelegs into the new territory.

Jeb glanced over his shoulder and spotted the army ants begin to flood into the new tunnel system. They moved erratically, as if they were being prodded by electric shocks just from being inside the dungeon.

And they didn’t like it.

With a howl, they attacked the very walls of Vex’s dungeon, slamming their oversized claws into the stonework.

Jeb frowned as he spotted a brief plume of Myst escape from the wall, like steam from a broken pipe.

A moment later, a beam of brilliant white light shot down from the ceiling and caught Ron in the chest.

Ron frowned for an instant, before the necromancer burst into ash, the various artifacts he wore tumbling to the ground, embedding themselves in the cremated corpse.

Jeb’s heart stopped, along with his feet, holding Zlesk back.

That’s what Vex was talking about earlier. The defense system. I knew about this. I KNEW about it and I should have fucking remembered! Why didn’t it just destroy us as soon as we fell into the dungeon?

Jeb glanced over his shoulder at the wreckage created by the blast of C-4. The security system had been damaged in that section of the hall. That’s why any of them were still breathing.

Jeb’s eye twitched as he began burying the self-recrimination. Just keep moving forward, doing the best you can.

Before Jeb could get too deep into burying his guilt, one of the many rings that Ron had been wearing, in the shape of a snake eating its own tail, began to glow white-hot before detonating in front of him, creating a little crater in the pile of ash.

Jeb heard footsteps behind him, and turned, expecting Meyers, or Vex, or some other enemy, but instead he saw Ron, running up behind them with a curious expression. The ginger frowned, his run slowing to a stop.

“~?”

“How are you not dead?” Jeb asked, forming his Myst into subtitles and pointing at the pile of ash filled with magical doodads.

‘You don’t know everything about me,’ Ron wrote with his neon violet Myst as he gave Jeb a wan smile. The kid looked paler than usual as he looked at the pile of ash, like he might throw up. ‘I got some pretty sweet loot for finishing the Impossible Tutorial, remember?’

Jeb raised a brow. Apparently, the wealthy necromancer had blown a secret get-out-of-death-free card, and the proximity to his own pile of ash was messing with the kid’s head.

We haven’t got time for him to stew on the teleporter paradox, Jeb thought.

‘You realize this means I can loot your shop without consequence now, right?’ Jeb wrote to take Ron’s mind off of it.

‘Over my dead body!’

“Yeah, that’s kind of my point,” Jeb muttered, glancing down at the pile of ash filled with magical gear, noting the fact that there was an identical set on the Ron time-clone.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Ron wrote in front of the pile of loot.

Jeb mentally checked his feelings about the Deal with Ron to not loot him or his shop as long as the necromancer didn’t die, made a few months back when he’d been stabbed through the gut and was fading fast.

The compulsion to not loot the young man’s property was no longer there.

Ron had died, breaking his side of the Deal with Jeb, but he was alive now. The ouroboros ring had bent spacetime in such a way that Ron from a few seconds ago replaced current Ron.

Magic is so cool, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

‘Don’t go any further,’ Jeb wrote, pointing down the hall. ‘You just got vaporized. There’s a security system that needs to be disabled.’

The three of them glanced behind them at the oncoming swarm of monsters, able to approach them in a formation nearly a dozen wide, with how wide the sindio’s halls were.

Disabling security systems was generally a lot easier than most people thought. It usually involved breaking something or someone. The most advanced security system in the world could be disabled with a rock and some elbow grease. Humanity had long since discovered that it was far easier to break things than it was to create them.

‘I need some zombies,’ Jeb wrote, pointing at the approaching swarm.

‘Well, get to work,’ Ron replied with a shrug.

Jeb rolled his eyes and started placing traps on the floor back the way they had come.

Then, when the second row of creatures was at the angle where their shields no longer covered their nerve center, Jeb’s traps fired out of the floor, driving telekinetic spikes into the brain of the middle one.

It fell to the ground, twitching, rising a black, ichor-dripping zombie a heartbeat later as Ron picked up the slack. Another heartbeat later, it exploded violently, catching its teammates with shrapnel made of poisonous chitin, dropping an entire wave, who then proceeded to stand up and hold off their brethren farther down the hall.

Ron was going all-out.

Zlesk, meanwhile, rested his arm on the hilt of his sword, seemingly impressed at Jeb and Ron’s combo, and temporarily out of a job.

Half the zombies went toward keeping the monsters at bay. The other half, Jeb rigged with traps and sent marching forward.

When the beams of vaporizing Myst shot out of the walls, a piece of rubble on the zombie was launched at the origin in response, smashing deep into the wall, effectively disarming the trap and creating more rubble ammo for the next wave.

“There!” Jeb shouted, pointing at a small side door. Ron caught where he was pointing and nodded.

Jeb briefly considered the possibility that touching the handle would vaporize him. Let’s roll those dice. He lunged forward and flung the door open, dragging himself and the others into the room, which turned out to be a janitor’s closet.

There was barely enough room inside for the three of them to stand alongside the mop and bucket that smelled faintly of mold and cleaning supplies, and the various tools and replacement parts for non-critical parts of the complex.

Bolts, hinges, that sort of thing.

“Okay, so now we’re trapped in a closet,” Ron wrote, glancing at Jeb, then up at the illumination Myst shining helpfully down on them. “I fail to see how this gets us any closer to where we wanted to be.”

Jeb slid past Ron and put his hands on the door, focusing on his other newest Myst technique: honeycombed reinforcement. Jeb fixed his Myst into the door and held it in place with tightly interconnected hexagons, each packed with a little bit more Myst than they needed, in order to leak if they were broken, filling in damage.

“Whoa,” Ron wrote, leaning close to the door to inspect the technique and simultaneously invade Jeb’s personal space. “Where did you learn that?”

“A book I took out of someone’s head,” Jeb wrote in glowing orange, taking his hands off the door as he finished.

A moment later, there was a thump as an insect smashed into the door, causing a handful of the honeycombs to crack, spilling reinforcing Myst through that area.

The next hit did even less damage, and so on, until the creature finally gave up.

“So now, we’re waiting in a closet for…what exactly?” Ron asked.

“You’ll know it when you hear it.”

“You realize we can’t hear, right?”

“Give it a couple minutes.”

A few minutes later, when Jeb’s hearing was finally starting to come back, he heard the sound of battle: metallic clangs and explosions that shook the earth.

Jeb took a deep breath, then peeked his head out of their little hidey-hole.

Ideally, that’s Vex dealing with our Meyers problem, and we can hopefully sneak away while he’s busy.

Unfortunately, it was not Vex. It was the butler.

The melas was floating above the insects, with the dungeon core floating between his hands, suspended on puppet strings of pure Myst

How the hell is he doing that? Jeb thought to himself. As far as Jeb knew, the core just gobbled up any kind of Myst you used on it.

Then a black army ant, sleeker, shinier, and more streamlined, stepped out of thin air and joined the brawl, attacking its own kind with its dart-tongue.

Is he using the core to summon them out of thin air? And under his control?? How?

The black army ants were outnumbered, but it didn’t seem to matter much. With a casual wave of the butler’s hand, a section of wall peeled off and shot through the swarm of crimson shielded insects, nearly taking Jeb’s head off in the process.

“Okay,” Jeb said, pulling his head back into the closet ahead of the sliver of hardened stone. “We got their attention. That part is taken care of. Now we just have to wait for…”

“Trapper!” Meyers’ voice rose over the din. Excellent timing.

“Alright, now we can let the two of them fight to the death and gang up on the winner. Tactics,” Jeb said, relaxing back against the wall of the janitor closet.

“Jeb!” Nancy’s voice cut through the noise.

Jeb’s eye twitched.

That mother…fucker.

Of course Meyers would bring a hostage as insurance if she were forced to go into what was obviously a trap.

Jeb’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth creaked against each other, sending tiny lances of pain through his skull.

No, we can still work with this, because I know something she doesn’t. She’s not going to leave here alive.

“That’s twice she’s broken a Deal with me,” Jeb muttered. She’d also made a Deal not to try to kill him. That Deal was already in default, and Jeb looked forward to taking his payment out of her senseless body.

“You’ve got three seconds before I cut her head off and go get another!” Meyers’ voice cut through Jeb’s angry thoughts.

“Be ready to cover my ass,” Jeb whispered to his buddies before hauling the door open and coming out of the closet.

The hangar-sized hall was still filled with monstrous insects locked in a vicious battle, but the butler’s new creations were starting to turn the tide. He sported a look of intense concentration, his body wavering in midair slightly as he glanced over at Jeb rising above the melee.

Jeb tore his gaze back to Meyers. The old woman floated just inside the hole in the ceiling, between Jeb and the butler. She held Nancy’s wriggling body tight against her chest, a fuckoff-big knife braced against the little girl’s neck.

Meyers herself was looking at the dungeon core on the puppet strings, her expression feral.

“Get that ball back for me, Trapper, or she dies,” Meyers said, pressing the edge of the blade deeper into Nancy’s throat.

The melas glanced between the two of them, his midair posture subtly shifting. Getting ready for a fight.

Jeb eyed Nancy.

She’s got roughly 35 Body, which would make her a bitch to kill with a weapon unless her neck was actually severed ear-to-ear. There’s a good chance Meyers doesn’t know exactly how unreasonably strong Nancy’s body is, too, which would make her initial cut too shallow.

Meyers was a pilot. Ergo, she likely didn’t know basic manners when slitting someone’s throat.

Jeb did.

You’re in my world, now, bitch.

“Nancy, you remember the starfish thing?”

Nancy nodded and scrunched her eyes shut, anticipating the pain. It didn’t feel good hurting a little girl, but Jeb’s alternatives were dogshit.

“Shut your fucking mouth and kill that alien piece of shit!” Meyers shouted, her face red.

“Snake basket.”

The trap Jeb had set while hiding behind Eddie launched itself forward in the blink of an eye, angling toward Meyers’ face in the shape of a powerful spear of force, backed by a huge amount of Myst.

The slender crone grinned, raising Nancy in front of herself and created a wall of compressed air between the two of them.

Compressed air could stop his telekinetic blades, if it needed to. After all, Jeb’s telekinetic spears and blades were just air held in place by telekinesis.

What compressed air could not stop was electromagnetic radiation.

Upon reaching the general, the spear of telekinetic force branched, winding in on itself violently, converting itself to heat Myst at the last second, detonating in a powerful explosion of heat and light.

BOOM!

The sound tortured Jeb’s already damaged eardrums and made his eyes water, but he couldn’t blink. He had to follow up. Jeb stepped on the gas, lunging through the air toward Meyers before she had a chance to respond.

The heat bloom penetrated Meyers’ translucent shield like it wasn’t even there. She had been peeking out from behind Nancy, so the bitch took third degree burns across the left side of her face, charring her left eye closed and incinerating her tight bun of silver hair.

Nancy had taken the brunt of it, her body burning anywhere it was exposed.

The little girl’s face and arms were turned an angry, boiled red, having shrugged off a little more damage than Meyers due to a slightly higher Body.

Meyers tried to cut the immortal girl’s throat, but she’d already raised the girl up, and her thrashing made it impossible to seal the deal, so to speak. A moment later, Nancy dropped to the ground, badly burnt and bleeding from a shallow cut to the neck…straight into the melee beneath them.

Jeb spotted Zlesk and Ron sprinting for the girl the instant before he made contact.

He put Nancy out of his head and focused on the fight.

Jeb tackled Meyers into the wall of Vex’s dungeon just as she was bolting for the exit, driving the wind out of both of them.

Here comes the punch.

Jeb flared the miniature sun in his chest and pushed back violently as Meyers aimed a rapid punch at his gut, fist covered in tightly wound Myst, trying to turn him inside out. The concussive blast of wind scattered against Jeb’s chest, refusing to penetrate his Myst-laden body and maul him.

You’ve never fought someone with just as much Myst, have you? Jeb thought, aiming a left at Meyers’ remaining eye while his right grabbed the oversized tooth on the leather loop hanging against his chest, tearing it off his neck.

Jeb’s left arm was deflected and caught in a vice-like hold while his right moved out of her field of view. Jeb slammed the poisonous tooth through the general’s shirt and in between her ribs then squeezed the porous tooth, flooding her with poison from the enchanted trophy.

Meyers grunted before increasing the torsion on his arm.

Pain!

Jeb’s mind tried to flee for a second as his arm let out a horrifying crack, sending waves of pain all the way up his shoulder and echoing into his ribs. A moment later, she kicked him away, his arm flopping uselessly beside him.

She patted the side of her ribs, coming away with a spot of blood, but not an alarming amount. Not even close.

“You sacrificed an arm to shiv me?” she asked, incredulously. “It couldn’t be deeper than an inch. I barely felt it.”

Of course you didn’t feel it; the poison has a numbing effect, Jeb thought, keeping one eye on the butler. The fancily-dressed melas continued to float in the center of the hall, watching the two of them with an amused expression as he continued to clean up Meyers’ mess.

The newly summoned insect creatures weren’t in control yet, but they weren’t far off. Jeb had to assume they were under the butler’s direct control, and the longer they let him just sit there, the more powerful he became.

This does not favor us… Now that he and Meyers had started fighting, the butler was using Jeb’s idea of sitting back and finishing off the winner! What kind of jerk would do that? Jeb thought, shaking his head.

Let’s see, I’m down an arm, while Meyers is poisoned by a venom that attacks the nervous system and makes recognizing you’ve been poisoned more difficult. That butler over there is totally unharmed.

If Jeb wanted to win, he’d have to get trickier.

Jeb started weaving defensive traps against anything except for Meyers.

Jeb glanced at Ron and Zlesk. The two of them were carrying Nancy back to the janitor’s closet. The little girl was still breathing, with Ron’s shirt wadded up against her neck.

“How’s your depth perception, Meyers?” Jeb asked, dropping Gresh’s Subtlety into his pocket and pulling out R-R-RubU’s Mysteries. The little ivory pipe was still covered in the grime of years of smoking, and Meyers gave him an odd frown when she saw him put it in his mouth.

She should be running away. Her eye is burned out, she’s outnumbered and wounded, and her chances of winning are infinitesimally small. She’s got no obligation to stay and fight it out, not like me and the butler over here. There’s no reason she should stay and fight, but...

The first stage of Gresh’s Subtlety: bad choices. Meyers’ prefrontal cortex was ever-so-gradually being numbed to sleep.

Rather than bolt for the ceiling like she would’ve if she weren’t intoxicated, Meyers ran a hand down her charred eyelid and snarled at him, blackened lips peeling away from unnaturally white teeth. Probably implants.

“Hey, you’re the one that tried to kill a kid. Don’t blame me when it blows up in your face,” Jeb said around the pipe, raising his hand placatingly and channeling his Myst through the device.

“How about a temporary cease-fire?” Jeb asked, thumbing towards the butler, who was content to let them beat on each other. “Or that guy will beat us both.”

“I’m going to cut your head off and shit down the hole,” Meyers growled, lunging for him.

Okay, then, Jeb thought, exhaling through the pipe as Meyers impacted against his gut feet first.

Their horsepower was nearly equivalent, while Jeb had focused on power, versus her speed. Jeb leveraged his superior power to drag their tangled brawl past the butler, barely able to keep his head enough to pay attention for a coup de grâce from the melas.

That’s what I would do, anyway.

Oddly enough, the butler didn’t deign to attack the two of them. He simply floated out of the way, likely suspicious of some kind of trick.

And rightly so, Jeb thought, exhaling another bubble between parrying another wild punch from Meyers.

The poison was doing its work well, causing the woman to take wild, unprofessional swings at Jeb that he was able to just barely dance around, leading her around the massive hall by the nose. She was acting almost drunk, her form was sloppy and her hands were starting to shake from nerve damage.

And somehow she still thought she was winning, grinning at him with manic energy.

That’s a nasty poison, Jeb thought, feeling the weight of the fang in his shirt.

Jeb led her around the massive hall three times before he found a spot he liked.

Meyers was on top of him, her back facing directly towards the exit above them as she tried to scratch his eyes out, almost animalistic in her ferocity—although her strength was rapidly dwindling as the poison numbed and ate away at her nerves.

The butler was about a hundred feet to the left, still watching them struggle, his elbow about three feet away from one of Jeb’s bubbles. There was another bubble hanging just below the gaping hole in the ceiling.

Jeb had a brief flashback to his time in the Tutorial, during his fight against R-R-RubU.

Yeah, that’ll work.

Jeb bunched his legs up and kicked Meyers off of him. He’d been matching her dwindling strength to add to the illusion that everything was fine, but now was the time to bring it home.

Meyers was flung away, catching herself unsteadily in the air, and looking at him with a confused expression. It was written all over her face: How did this fucker get so strong?

“How’s that poison treating you, general?” Jeb asked around the pipe with a smirk.

Meyers glanced at the hole in her side, her eyes widening. Her brain might be foggy, but pointing out the poison’s effects likely cleared away a lot of it.

Jeb leisurely began spooling out a massive amount of Myst, nearly draining himself dry, sparing only what he needed to stay aloft. His enemy was going to burn.

Meyers finally made the right call, but it was too little, too late.

Jeb felt like he was riding pure lightning as he created a feedback loop, holding on by the skin of his teeth as he translated the string of kinetic Myst into an extra thick rope of heat Myst, ready to melt some face.

Meyers turned to run, heading for the exit, and Jeb sent the finishing blow after her.

The heat Myst screamed after her with only seconds to spare before Jeb lost control of it. Meyers dodged at the last second, nimbly allowing the heat Myst to shoot past her before she reoriented on the gaping hole in the ceiling, bursting with laughter.

Now we see if I was right, Jeb thought, watching her disappear into the ceiling.

The compressed heat Myst continued to travel forward, slamming into the bubble just below the exit, its original target.

With the barest effort of will, Jeb directed the energy to be transferred to the bubble beside the butler’s elbow.

Boom!

The melas butler was sent spinning to the floor, a good portion of his left side simply burned away.

Clang!

Meyers plummeted back down the hole in the ceiling, her neck twisted at an awkward angle, blood streaming from her nose.

Jeb could barely make out the shape of a light pole, illuminated by Vex’s dungeon.

I knew those odds and ends should have been melted by the dungeon.

Like Ron had said, living things resist the effects of the dungeon’s transformation. Meaning all that pristine debris above them must have been alive.

Meyers had just been swatted like a bug by a solid steel streetlamp.

Thanks, Casey, Jeb thought before lunging forward again.

Jeb slammed into Meyers’ twitching body, holding it into the muck with his knees, taking his Appraisal ring off with his teeth.

She wasn’t dead yet. Therefore, she could still pay for breaking their Deals.

“We’re not done here,” Jeb growled.

Chapter 22: Overwhelming Force

Jeb tore the wriggling Ability out of Meyers’ head, shoving the System-generated living packet of information into his pocket before slipping the ring back on his finger one-handed.

Jeb kicked the general’s corpse before hauling himself up into the air, above the reach of the army ants who would notice him any second. They were busy with their black doppelgangers, but better safe than sorry.

Jeb glanced at his broken arm, feeling along the break with his fingertips.

Yep, it’s a spiral fracture.

Jeb took a deep breath and decided to take care of the problem before his dopamine high fled and made everything ten times harder.

Jeb grabbed the bone with telekinesis and slotted it back together, choking back a scream. Once it was set properly, he fastened the two sides together with small pins of telekinesis through the bone.

Not a permanent solution, Jeb thought, experimentally flexing his left arm. There was some swelling, but he had full range of motion. The telekinetic pins would damage the tissue if he left them for long, though, so this was just a right now solution.

Now, where’s this Vex guy keeping the nuke? Jeb thought, casting his gaze down either side of the hall. Two directions with no particular indicator which way led to what.

Probably the direction the butler came from, Jeb decided. He had nothing more concrete to work on, so simply picking a direction and going for it would be better than sitting there spinning his wheels.

Jeb turned and landed in front of Zlesk and Ron. The keegan had Nancy over his shoulder, and Ron was controlling a tight formation of zombie bug-monsters around the duo. Sweat beaded on the ginger’s temples as he raised another zombie to fill a new gap in their defense.

“Get Nancy out of here. I’ll keep going,” Jeb said, pointing toward the gap in the ceiling.

Zlesk looked at the ceiling and nodded before leading the charge.

“But…” Ron started, hesitation written across his face.

“Zlesk can’t get Nancy out of here by himself,” Jeb said with a shrug. “And you can’t help me much if you’re too busy trying to keep her alive.”

“Damnit!” Ron straightened his shoulders and followed after Zlesk, his chevron of zombies cutting through the monsters like the prow of a ship. “We’ll be back!” he shouted over his shoulder as they made for the exit.

“I doubt it,” Jeb muttered, lifting himself off the ground, watching the duo for a moment. Jeb straightened out his body and headed the direction the melas butler had come from, flying above the chaos, relatively safe from the aggressive monsters flooding the halls beneath him.

Jeb was halfway past the butler’s corpse when the wall decided to reach out and bitch-slap him.

Jeb’s FMO shields popped, along with his Butler Ambush shields, then finally his Armor shields as they protected him from being crushed. The massive lump of stone bulled through the protections with pure inertia and knocked him out of the air.

Jeb hit the far wall, then felt a moment of nauseating weightlessness in his gut before he slammed into the stone floor.

“Ow,” he rasped before using telekinesis to yank himself up and to the side. Lie still and earn yourself a coup de grâce. The floor made a mouth-like chomping motion, as though it were trying to eat him, but he was already off the ground.

Where you at?

Jeb scanned the hall and spotted the butler resting up against the wall, looking…singed.

From what Jeb understood, melas could tolerate being on fire to some extent, in the same way that a lantern wick could tolerate it. Mostly it was the oil that burned, but the wick burned too, eventually.

The left half of the butler’s uniform was simply gone, along with most of the flesh around his left elbow. About halfway to his shoulder, the melas’s muscle and skin was still there, burning with a vibrant blue flame, rising up his neck and chin to cover his expression.

Jeb filled in the expression himself.

Yeah…he’s probably pissed.

The butler’s good hand twitched above the dungeon core at his side, and swarms of flying army ants materialized beside Jeb, seemingly irate about being born from nothing.

Crap, Jeb thought, building a tight layer of compressed air around himself as he swooped toward the medium-rare butler.

The dungeon itself tried to slap him out of the air again, but Jeb was able to wrench himself out of the way. But in the moment his gaze wasn’t on the butler, the melas had summoned another army ant in front of himself out of thin air.

Jeb’s eyes widened at the monster looming over him and he unleashed reflexive telekinetic spears. The creature blocked Jeb’s wild attack with a single flat shield before it slapped him out of the air. Jeb tumbled across the cold stone, bouncing twice before he lifted himself off the ground. It had an appetite, after all.

The swarm of fliers moved to attack now that Jeb’s shielding was faltering. Each one was about a foot long, its carapace swept forward to create a single blade. They looked a bit like someone had bred a sleeker rhinoceros beetle and then sharpened the horn into a stabbing implement.

Their wings were in the middle of their bodies, right next to their eyes, which had a clear view of their target because of the divot in their horns in the shape of a blood groove.

Their target, in this case, being Jeb.

ZZZZZZ!!!

Jeb flicked up a telekinetic shield the instant before one of the flying drones impaled him.

Damnit, Jeb thought, falling out of the air for a moment as he was forced to choose between maintaining his bone-pins or staying aloft.

Jeb let his arm hang limp, gritting his teeth as he split his thread, creating a second bowl of telekinetic force, trapping the little creatures against his shield like an errant spider.

Jeb dropped his flight for an instant to create blades of force inside the container, spinning them as fast as he could, creating a bug-paste filled with shrapnel. Jeb picked his flight up before he dropped too far, accidentally dodging a chunk of heavy stone that sailed over his head. Jeb’s brows rose.

“Have your bugs back,” Jeb said, transforming his container full of pulped insects into a sling and launching them at the butler.

The butler was entirely unaffected, sheltered as he was by the bigger, shinier army ants.

Matter of fact, I can’t even see him through his entourage, Jeb thought, eyes narrowing.

Now the question was, did the butler move while he was hidden? Jeb would have, but this guy… Who knew?

Jeb made out a faint plume of smoke billowing up from his enemy’s last known location.

Odds this is a trap? Sixty percent or so.

Jeb scanned the hall, bobbing and weaving so the walls didn’t have a stationary target to squish. As hard as he looked, he couldn’t find anything else that might give away the melas’s current position.

Well, time to roll the dice.

Jeb encased himself in a teardrop-shaped barrier of telekinetic force. He turned and barreled toward the shield bearer protecting the butler with every ounce of speed he could pull out, ramming forward like a runaway semi.

The creature braced itself, and Jeb thought he could make out faint Myst moving through its shield like a circulatory system. It seemed like it was prepared to tank any kind of attack.

Too bad you’re not gonna get to use it.

Jeb tipped the front spike of the teardrop into the ground, cutting a couple inches into the ruined stone floor the instant before he hit the shielded creature.

The sharp edge dug under the creature before the massive shield-creature got flipped like a pancake.

Jeb shoved his way underneath the flailing monster, aiming for the smoke signal.

All that remained of the butler was a slowly burning vest throwing up a conspicuous amount of smoke.

Trap. Called it! Jeb thought as he tried to backpedal.

A huge monster camouflaged to look like rubble lunged forward from beneath the burning clothes and slammed into Jeb’s shield bubble, locking half a dozen insectoid limbs around his barrier, creating a cage of flesh-rending chitin.

Then it started squeezing.

Jeb panted, looking for a way out, but there was no room for him to escape the sharp limbs encasing him in every direction.

Jeb’s FMO shields were exhausted. He had a couple clips of simple mind-bullets, the full autos as well. His ‘little friend’ Trigger was good to go, but it was pretty easy to dodge for a superhuman like the butler. His grenade Triggers hadn’t been refreshed since he’d last used them, but his ‘Room full of Charlies’ Trigger was still fresh.

It might work if the telekinetic missiles could pierce the creature’s armor.

That might restore the status quo, but Jeb needed a way to win.

We’ll call that Plan B.

Jeb glanced to the side and spotted the butler watching him, his partially skeletal left arm dangling uselessly beside him as he manipulated the dungeon core.

Who allowed butlers to be so badass, anyway? Jeb thought as he tried to look for a way out. He sharpened his second string of Myst and aimed it at the creature's limbs, but was starting to run out of gas. The creature’s rubble-looking carapace was incredibly sturdy, even at the joints, shrugging off the telekinetic force.

Damnit!

The flesh-rending spines pressed against Jeb’s shield began to break through the honeycombed construct, so Jeb made another shield, much closer to his skin. The smaller space meant Jeb would have to spend less energy to keep it up, but it was also an admission that he was flagging.

The creature opened its gaping maw and started gnawing on Jeb’s shield like a jawbreaker, quickly joined by the shield bearer he’d bum-rushed.

“Goddamnit, this doesn’t look great,” Jeb muttered. He was considering going for his foot, but the other guy would see it coming a mile away and dodge. Plus there was no guarantee that the bugs would stop trying to eat him even if he killed the butler.

Matter of fact, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t stop.

Jeb needed a distraction. Or a miracle.

“You were a worthy opponent,” the butler said, giving Jeb a nod as he limped closer—the only thing he’d said the entire time. “I will give you this opportunity to surrender and live, but if you force me to kill you, I will remember your struggle.”

Oh, that makes me feel better, Jeb thought, rolling his eyes, preparing himself for ‘Room full of Charlies’.

Pop!

Jeb heard an odd popping sound followed by a faint squish.

Pop!

Pop pop pop pop pop pop!

There was a flicker of light, and the two monsters chewing on Jeb’s dwindling shield fell apart into bloody chunks that rained down around them.

Jeb and the butler stared at the chunked monsters in confusion.

Jeb recovered first.

Jeb launched himself toward the butler with every ounce of speed he could eke out of his telekinesis, flopping his broken arm over the melas man’s good arm and sucker-punching him right in the jaw, reinforcing his strike with a string of telekinetic Myst.

The melas’s eyes rolled back in his head before he slumped to the ground, the dungeon core slipping out of his grasp.

“You were an opponent,” Jeb said, straightening his shirt. “I will remember I got lucky.”

A wheezing gurgle escaped from the Melas’s lips. Jeb glanced around and noticed that all the army ants, of every variety, were dead. They’d all been slaughtered. But that didn’t mean more wouldn’t spawn.

And if they did, there was a nice, juicy butler there to eat.

Jeb rolled his eyes and grabbed the melas under the good arm, hoisting him over his shoulders before taking off.

***Casey Thompson***

“Alright, the final checks are complete. Let’s play God,” the sindio said, rubbing his hands together before reaching for an oversized mad-scientist type lever.

Just then, a familiar sight floated in through the bloodstained hall, drawing everyone’s attention.

Jeb, with Lien over his shoulder. The butler who’d defeated her so handily looked half-dead, bleeding from his swollen face and a good portion of his arm burned away.

Jeb didn’t look much better. The brown-haired man’s clothes were practically shredded, covered in blood and dust so thick it had achieved a paste in some places, every visible section of his skin was covered in cuts and bruises, and his left arm hung limp beside him.

But Jeb was the one who was conscious, to Casey’s disbelief.

He BEAT Lien? she thought, blinking. Lien had handled her like a child last time they’d met. Casey couldn’t help but wonder what Jeb’s stats were, or if that even was the difference between them.

The momentary flutter of hope died as Vex straightened, stepping away from the lever.

She’d briefly forgotten. Vex had treated a squad of eight enforcers like children. Toddlers, even. One beat-up Jeb wasn’t going to make a difference.

“Sorry about leaving you guys,” Jeb said as his gaze landed on the kneeling enforcers. “I had some stuff to take care of and wound up taking the long way around.”

“I can’t believe it…” Vex said, his voice echoing through the silence as Jeb let Lien slide down against the wall. “You actually got Lien to take off his shirt.”

“It was mostly burned off, really,” Jeb said, somehow immune to the oppressive atmosphere. How the fuck does he do something so suicidal? Casey hoped that she could one day give as few fucks.

“Why bring him with you? A hostage?” Vex’s gaze looked like it could shred steel as he took in the sight of his man bleeding against the wall.

“Oh, no. He would’ve been eaten by monsters If I’d left him. He just offered me a chance to surrender, and I mean, when someone gives you the chance to surrender, that kind of…defines the rules of engagement?” Jeb said sheepishly.

“There’s that fae blood acting up again,” Vex said, his finger twitching.

A bolt of pure white leapt from the sindio, sinking into the melas’s chest. The butler let out a harsh gasp, his face recovering as flesh writhed down his arm, repairing damage Casey would have sworn couldn’t be fixed.

Oh great. Now he’s totally fixed, and we’ve gotta fight that monster too, Casey thought sourly. Lien was the almost-unbeatable icing on the totally unwinnable cake.

“Lien, you’re off the clock. Take the rest of the night off,” Vex said.

“My lord.” Lien levered himself to his feet, casting an unreadable expression towards Jeb before grabbing a piece of the wall and peeling it off and throwing the pale stone over his shoulders. Somehow the stone drooped over his shoulders like melting cheese for a moment before it took on colors and texture. In a matter of heartbeats, the butler was dressed and presentable again.

Lien took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away the last of the blood on his face as he walked out of the room.

“I appreciate you sparing my man, Mr. Trapper,” Vex said, turning his attention back to Jeb. “Good butlers are horrifically time-consuming to scout. For that, I will give you the opportunity to try and ‘thwart my evil plans’.”

Jeb chuckled and scratched his head. “Much appreciated.”

The two of them squared off, and Casey’s heart began hammering in her chest. She knew, she KNEW Jeb had no chance, but the human inside her couldn’t help but root for the underdog. That, and if he wins we don’t die.

The two stared at each other, and then things started happening. Jeb tensed his body slightly, and the sindio tapped his foot. Other than that, Casey felt a slight breeze that seemed to stir up around the two of them.

“Come now, you did that last time, and yes, I can feel the one hidden behind it.”

Little puffs of Jeb’s sun-colored Myst emanated from the floor as he reached into his pocket and hurled a…pipe at the sindio.

“Yes, I saw this tactic last time as well,” the sindio said, snatching it out of the air and running a gossamer membrane of Myst through the  pipe, coming away with a mote of Jeb’s Myst from inside the pipe.

“I suppose you placed the business end of this trap back in the hallway?” Vex said, peering at the pipe before putting it in his coat.

“Come now, where’s the invention? Where’s the research? The relentless dedication to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with Myst? Show me you’re more than an admittedly impressive collection of clever schemes!”

Jeb’s expression darkened as the sindio easily dismantled each of his gambits.

“Snake basket.”

A lance of pure Myst fired toward the sindio before detonating in a burst of heat and light. It happened too fast for Casey to catch what happened, but even at more than thirty feet away, she could feel the hairs on her brows being singed.

“Hahaha! You figured out Zesh’nei’s Translation!” The sindio thumbed his chin. “Well, most of it.”

“Suppressing fire,” Jeb said, tugging the ring off his finger.

A moment later, the ring latched itself onto Jeb’s revolver, which had drawn itself and turned toward the sindio, hammer cocking back.

“Seen it,” the sindio said, waving a dismissive hand and releasing a tight beam of Myst that intersected the gun and caused it to clatter uselessly to the ground.

“You pitiful fool,” Vex said, shaking his head as Jeb began looking increasingly desperate, his lips peeling away from his teeth in a determined snarl. Casey’s heart hurt as her hope turned sour.

“I gave you that much time, and this is what you’ve done with it? A little fireworks? You’re not even using Broshaw’s Collar to regulate the flow of Myst, and one branch in Zesh’nei’s Translation? ONE? It’s no wonder it explodes. Multiples of seven are far more stable. Allow me to demonstrate.”

A huge construct made entirely of Myst emerged from Vex’s palm. It looked something like a Christmas tree made of hundreds of interlocking loops that fed out of and back into the central thread of Myst. It was widest at the base near the sindio’s palm, a pale blue that narrowed and gradually changed in color as it went forward, until it was a very pale yellow color near the tip, which hovered in front of Jeb’s face.

“See? I translated my natural Myst into one that makes you think you’re a little girl named Sasha.”

Jeb growled and smacked the Myst aside with his own, the veins in his temple throbbing as his Myst string grew three branches, which curled back and fed themselves into the center. The string seemed to grab and compress air around it, heating up as it did, until a whip of white-hot air dominated the air between them.

Did Jeb just make a lightsaber-whip? Casey thought, jaw dropping.

The length of devastating heat lunged out like a snake, trying to wrap around the sindio and crush/cut/burn him to nothing.

The whip missed somehow, flickering around the sindio, who seemed totally at ease, his skull-faced grin lit up by the light of Jeb’s weapon.

“No, no, NO! You’ll never hit another wizard like that, you pathetic fool! You’re still solidly in the Physics category, when any spellslinger worth his salt will dip into the Conceptual, at least a little.

“Your attacks are not meant to hit me. They have no place in the grand design. It’s all just hot air, waving about and hoping for the best. They can’t hit me because I’m warded against it. I’m not meant to lose, just as you are not meant to win.

“Let me give you an example,” Vex said, the pipe in his hand glowing momentarily. “This pipe is going to deal damage to the back of your head. Try to avoid it.” The sindio flicked the pipe forward, and Jeb flinched, trying to take a step back.

The pipe rolled under the veteran’s pegleg, which slipped and caused Jeb to fall, smacking the back of his head against the floor.

“Couldn’t avoid it, could you? Conceptual magic is the precursor to causality magic, but with your pathetic showing, I don’t think you’ll live that long.”

Jeb lunged back to his feet and tried the heat whip again to no avail. The heat sputtered out and exploded as Jeb seemingly tried to change the spell mid-cast.

“Hahaha! Pathetic! Your understanding is lacking! The fact is, conceptual Myst is just a subtle deviation of intent away from any Myst. A fool like you could never find The Direction That Doesn’t Exist!”

Jeb scowled, panting.

A cleared throat cut through the tense silence between Jeb and Vex.

The keegan minion who’d up until now been content to lean against the wall and watch passively raised a hand.

“Yes, Kol?” Vex asked, his tone terse, like a man interrupted in the middle of a passion project.

“Are you…giving him…pointers?” the keegan asked hesitantly.

Casey squeezed her eyes shut and blinked a few times when she saw the ancient monster blush.

“…No!” Vex waved his hand.

“Herk!” Jeb let out a strangled cry as invisible bonds snapped up around his arms, legs and neck, dragging him to join Casey and the others.

In a matter of seconds, Jeb was just as helpless as the rest of them.

“Despite what you fools have been led to believe, I’m not actually trying to destroy the world,” Vex said, folding his hands behind his back as he paced in front of them.

“I am merely trying to give myself the option of destroying the world, should I grow bored with it,” Vex said, raising a finger. “Big difference. To that end, imagine my surprise when I discover the humans have a weapon whose Mythos is actually powerful enough.

“Anyway, here we go.” The sindio reached out and tugged on the big lever that dominated the metal apparatus in the middle of the room. The grey Myst flickered into being inside the silver gate, creating a whirling grey portal into the fifth dimension.

“Now let’s just get the belt moving…” Vex muttered to himself, throwing another lever. The oversized nuke began rumbling forward, disappearing into the swirling grey Myst.

“Jeb,” Casey said, clinging onto the last shreds of hope. “You made a trap or something, right? Some kind of clever backup plan that you’re gonna trigger now that he’s distracted, right? It’ll break the machine or something?”

Jeb turned his head and gave her a flat look that was all the answer she needed. The words just drove it home.

“I did. A ton of ‘em. He disarmed all of them when he tapped his foot.”

Well, shit, Casey thought, the blood draining from her face.

***Jebediah Trapper***

What is this guy’s deal? Jeb thought, eyes narrowed as he studied the sindio, trying to pick his moment to break out. He hadn’t realized it until the other keegan had called Vex out on it, but the ancient wizard had been coaching him.

I mean, the guy’s obviously smart enough to know that mocking me by saying exactly what I’m doing wrong will allow me to improve myself and give me hints for how to advance my Myst control.

Was there some sort of selfish reason for it? Perhaps the keegan was lonely being the only wizard game in town, or maybe he simply enjoyed teaching magic?

Or was he boosting Jeb’s power so he could be a more useful pawn in the future? Jeb was highly aware that these reasons were not mutually exclusive.

As he was trying to unpackage the sindio’s seemingly contradictory behavior, the final tail fins of the bomb slipped into the fifth dimension without fanfare, leaving the belt empty.

Jeb winced, expecting to be immediately disintegrated or suffer from a sudden heart attack, or whatever would happen when a nuke got translated into pure potential.

Nothing.

Jeb glanced around at the other restrained enforcers, who shared his confusion.

Vex, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly what was going on. With all the pomp and circumstance of an air conditioning repair guy, he tapped at blinking lights in the gate, muttering to himself.

“Little less tacky than I thought, gonna need to up the draw to grab experience from people who’ve been dead a while. How could so few people understand how these work and yet they’re still the most fearsome weapon on the planet? You know what the most fearsome weapon on the planet should be? Rocks. People have been killing stuff with rocks forever. Matter of fact, maybe I should put a rock through this thing next, just to see what happens.”

He tapped a few more lights before making a satisfied grunt. “There we go. All prepped, now I just need to—”

The grey swirl of Myst turned black, with a spattering of light that looked like stars. It would seem like the portal had opened into the depths of space, were it not for the fact that the stars moved in tandem, and the ominous purple color at the edges.

The gate bulged outward into the room for a moment, as if it were acting as a membrane trying to keep some horrible thing from entering their dimension.

“Ah, shit.” Vex gulped audibly.

Then the membrane failed.

A creature made of pure law emerged from the portal. It had elongated steel quills for claws, arms of delicate scrollwork, and a body made of carved stone, covered in a thousand dead languages. It glared down at the sindio with eyes made of harsh, gleaming light that seemed to scour away anything it found wanting.

The floor around the sindio melted, just a little.

“Xen Calvex, you have overstepped your bounds and infringed upon a power the gods have declared forbidden to mortals. I am your punishment.”

Chapter 23: Fractal Snowflake

“I care nothing for the declarations of your ‘gods’!” Vex crowed up at the towering creature. “Disease-riddled addicts on life support!” He made a rude gesture, bony middle finger extended, his body unaffected by the searing light emanating from the creature’s overpowering eyes.

The strange giant of scroll and stone took offense to this, slamming a hand down on the wizard, crushing him into the floor of the dungeon.

At that moment, Jeb’s breath hitched. The restraints are gone! Glancing around confirmed the other enforcers were freed from the invisible bands, rolling their wrists and drawing themselves to their feet.

Well, that was anticlimactic, Jeb thought for a naïve moment as the giant drew its palm up. The sindio’s empty robes rested on the floor, with no sign of the ancient wizard. Did he disintegrate him or something?

Between one moment and the next, the wizard appeared, filling his robe back in and shoving his hand up in a gnarled claw.

A torrent of Myst emerged and caught the giant’s palm, creating a bizarre echo of the creature’s previous movements.

The giant slammed the ground again as Vex rolled aside, then it did it again and again, slamming the ground over and over in a forced loop. All the while, its eyes tracked the wizard’s progress across the room despite its body being out of control.

After three of the loops, the giant tore itself away from the tiny knot of spacetime, breaking a direction that Jeb’s eyes couldn’t fully perceive.

A direction that doesn’t exist.

“Desist,” the creature rumbled, sending a ripple of nearly invisible Myst out into the world. To Jeb’s mind’s eye, it looked something like Emperor Pikaku’s summoning ability, albeit slightly different. It seemed to permeate reality and alter it to the creature’s whim.

This is way above my pay grade, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

Vex sent a storm of moths at the giant’s arms. They attempted to eat away at the creature’s arms, and corrupt the ink dotting its surface, but they were shrugged off a moment before the giant returned fire with a literal wall of text that slammed into the sindio’s position. Most of the black-inked words hanging in midair were in languages Jeb couldn’t read, but he did spot an English word peeking out of the middle of the wall. ‘Revoke’.

“Gah!” Vex stumbled backward and fished an ampoule out of his robe, breaking the cap off with his thumb and downing the contents in haste.

I’m not even sure what’s going on here, but I do know one thing… Vex is distracted.

“Casey!” Jeb flagged down the teen. “Help me get the bomb back!” He pointed past the giant doing battle with the skeletal spellcaster.

“Get it back!? That’s a thing you can do?” Casey demanded, frowning.

“We’re all still alive, so it has to be undetonated, sitting on the other side of that portal. It stands to reason that all we gotta do is pull it back.”

Jeb felt a tap on his shoulder, and spotted Vresh watching him with a glimmer of approval in her eyes.

“That sounds like as good a course of action as any,” Kor said, nodding in agreement. The melas enforcer turned to the bison-looking man.

“The rope, Bruga,” he said, pointing at the thick coil of rope on the oversized enforcer’s waist. The wooly, horned northerner nodded and unclipped the rough rope from his belt.

“How are we supposed to get past that!?” Feej demanded, jabbing a skeletal finger at the Law Giant. The fifth-dimensional enforcer was currently beating the black-robed wizard across the laboratory, but due to its long reach, it didn’t need to move too far away from the tear in reality it had crawled out of.

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” the towering melas said with a wry grin.

“Gah!” Feej unslung her oversized blade and stalked toward the giant.

“Kol, stop them!” Vex shouted between warding off the monster’s blows. “Kol? Kol! Veek!”

The keegan who’d been quietly leaning against the wall had chosen the ideal moment to fuck off. At some point during the distraction of the giant emerging from the portal, the sword-toting keegan had disappeared.

I wonder who that guy was, anyway? Jeb shrugged. If he chose to get lost, it’s not really my problem.

Feej the slender swordswoman joined the battle as a third party, woefully underequipped to deal with either of the other two combatants. Rather than make herself the sole target, she nipped at the giant’s heels, annoying it until it shifted its stance to get away from the tiny cuts she was making.

Each time, it shifted a little farther away from the portal.

“Let’s go!” Jeb shouted, and broke for the portal.

Holy shit, they’re fast! Unable to keep up with the enforcers on his pegleg, Jeb was forced to pick himself up and fly alongside them.

“Flight is a rare gift,” Kor Tekalis said, glancing over at Jeb.

“He can even travel in space for a time,” Vresh said like a proud pet-owner. “He entered the upper atmosphere in the Tutorial.”

“Who told her that!?” Jeb asked. His vision finally landed on Casey, who had the decency to blush. “Operational security, Casey!”

They arrived at the portal a moment later and Bruga the brovis created a lasso with an experienced hand, making it extra wide to accommodate one of the nuke’s tail fins.

God I hope this works, Jeb thought. A lasso was less than ideal for every application, regardless of what a Texan might say.

The bison threw the lasso through the portal, then yanked on it. To Jeb and everyone else’s surprise, the thick rope went taut.

“I…think I did it!” Bruga said, his voice rumbling through the air.

“Excellent, let’s—” Mr. Tekalis’s voice was cut off when the rope began to thrash in Bruga’s hand, dragging the quarter-ton hunk of beef halfway towards the portal.

The enforcers leapt forward as one, grabbing the rope and pulling with their substantial might. Jeb took a spot near the front alongside Vresh, and infused the rope with telekinesis, reinforcing it even as he added more to the strain by pulling.

“Is it supposed to be doing that!?” Casey asked above the sounds of combat.

“Perhaps we’ve snagged something else on the other side!” one of the other enforcers shouted, his brows furrowed in concern.

“We’ve got the bomb!” Jeb shouted back at them. “In my experience, inanimate objects can be alive on the other side of the portal! And nothing else I’ve ever pulled through struggled like this! I’m pretty sure we’ve got the nuke by the tail! Keep pulling!”

Kor frowned. “In your experience? Tell me, how often do you move things between dimensions?”

“Man, this thing’s really struggling!” Jeb shouted, changing the subject as they collectively hauled it another half-step back. “I think we’re getting it, though!” Jeb imagined this must be what it would be like for a bunch of sailors to fish for a megalodon from the side of an aircraft carrier.

If they hooked it by the tail.

“Heave!” Kor Tekalis’s voice rose above the chaos.

The nuke wriggled and squirmed on the other end of the rope, slamming the heavy line violently against the sides of the portal, and causing all but the heaviest of them to get dragged around. Jeb was not the heaviest or the strongest, so he got flopped around like an ant on a windsock.

“Heave!”

Jeb regained his footing in time to join them in another heave, dragging the bomb back another two or three feet. If my therapist had told me I’d be fishing for nukes through a dimensional portal, I’d have walked out on him, Jeb thought, as they gave another heave, pulling with every muscle fiber he could bring to bear.

“Heave!”

Another haul, and Jeb saw a steel grey fin emerge from the portal, with the distinctive markings of the bomb they’d watched go in.

Holy crap, we’ve actually got it! Despite Jeb’s confidence earlier, he hadn’t been one hundred percent certain they really were bringing the nuke back over to their dimension.

“Just a bit more! Once we’ve got the fins in, it’ll have a harder time fighting us!” Jeb shouted, joining in on another rousing ‘Heave!’.

Almost there! Jeb thought, his mind already making plans for what to do with the nuke once they’d gotten it through.

If anybody’s got that metal-to-water wand, now would be a good time to limber it up, Jeb thought, teeth gritting as he pulled on the rope, exposing a bit more of the bomb’s tail fins. After that, we just gotta bail before either one of those monsters wins.

Jeb glanced over at Vex, who was compressing a beach-ball-sized sphere of force between his hands. The giant looked like a shrunken figurine of itself, trapped inside a tiny terrarium between the wizard’s fingers, except for its wickedly sharp steel quill fingers, which had already begun piercing the magical confinement.

Jeb shook his head and refocused on pulling the line.

“Let me help,” a voice came from beside Jeb.

Jeb glanced over just in time to spot Vex’s stooge standing beside Jeb with a sword. Time froze for an instant as Jeb reflexively set up a telekinetic barrier between them.

Rather than attack Jeb, the assassin swung his blade down, severing the rope right behind Jeb’s hands.

“Mother—” Jeb stifled a potentially untrue curse, lunged forward and grabbed the assassin’s collar.

The skeletal keegan’s eyes widened as Jeb dragged him off-balance.

The nuke, seemingly noticing the sudden slack on the rope, immediately began to pull away.

Before Jeb could think to let go, he was already hurtling toward the swirling grey portal, Vresh hauled along for the ride in front of him.

“Oh, Fu-—”

Jeb closed his eyes as he hit the barrier.

******

Jeb became a spherical fractal snowflake.

There wasn’t really any better way to describe it. Every possible action he could take ballooned outward into a separate Jeb, fully aware of their situation. At the center of this new Jeb-ball was his current position in spacetime, the ‘Seed-Jeb’, frozen into paralysis by the sheer unbridled information overload.

Jeb wasn’t sure how long it took, but he gradually came to terms with his Jeb-ball, understanding that he had become something of a semi-spherical lump of possibility.

He was bumping up against another couple semi-spherical lumps of possibility of a roughly similar size. Where they touched wasn’t exactly physical contact; it was more like possibilities that involved both of them. Every way Jeb and Vresh Tekalis could interact.

And I do mean every way, Jeb thought as the brows of his seed-body twitched upward.

The other lump of possibilities was the keegan assassin Jeb had dragged into the fifth dimension, and Jeb was less pleased to note that their potential interaction also included every possible interaction, albeit there was a drastically lower percentage of that. Most of it was just them killing each other.

Everywhere the assassin killed him, Jeb-ball shriveled away a little, and everywhere Jeb killed the assassin, the assassin’s sphere shriveled away a little, casting off the dead body. They maintained a healthy give and take, although Jeb was fairly sure he was winning, roughly 60/40.

Vresh and Jeb’s possibilities killed each other, too. Once again, in much lower percentages, but the results of the contests usually ended in Vresh winning.

Take the good with the bad, I guess, Jeb thought before directing his attention back to the task at hand. Jeb’s seed-body, the origin of his Jeb-ball, turned its head, making the entire Jeb-ball shift slightly to the left.

What even is left? Jeb thought. As far as he could tell, there was no up or down, left or right. There was only possibility and he could only define the limits of his being based on where they collided against others. He was bigger than the assassin, a little smaller than Vresh, and…

What’s this? Jeb thought, finding a little fractal…thing, buried near the center of his fractal ball. It was what appeared to be a rather tough spine that seemed to weave itself through his fractal, seemingly inseparable. Lightning coursed along the spine, going here and there, wherever it was needed.

Jeb paid close attention to it, and spotted several spots where it was stitched to his Jeb-ball, using odd black thread that seemed to maintain an eerie level of normalcy in this strange land.

The fact that the thread isn’t weird and gross should actually be a warning sign, Jeb thought, inspecting the spine. A moment later, he realized what it was.

This must be the Krusker’s Brawn Accolade that I got when I killed that lightning pygmy-rhino! Jeb thought. It was definitely interesting to see what it looked like in the fifth dimension.

Now if I could just figure out how to move… Or do I even need to?

Whoosh.

Something moved past the three of them, something much bigger and more powerful, instantly withering large sections of their fifth-dimensional forms like a hot knife through Styrofoam.

Jeb suddenly felt like a sailor lost at sea, fins circling around him. Jeb’s possibilities retracted, like a sea anemone pulling in its thousands of tendrils.

Huh, fear really is limiting, Jeb thought as Kol’s possibilities experienced a minor uptick in victories as a result.

Jeb’s over-consciousness ignored the various battles between him and the assassin, directing his attention to what the heck had taken a swipe out of them.

It took him a while, until he unfocused his meta-eyes.

Oh, shit.

The three of them were perched on top of a monster the size of a planet: a ball of dense, immoveable Impact covered in a hardened shell, with a corona of black energy that whipped around the outside of it, cleaning itself off and scouring bits of dirt like Jeb and Vresh off.

I don’t think we want to stay here very long, Jeb thought. Millions of possibilities informed millions of Vreshes and her Vresh-seed nodded, before her possibilities shot back the obvious question.

‘How do we move?’

Jeb’s many possibilities shook their heads, shrugged, or said, ‘I don’t know.’

Jeb didn’t even know which direction was which. Again, not having any kind of direction was a huge pain in the ass. How do you get away from somewhere when there is no ‘away’?

Several of his possibilities diverted their attention to Kol, delivering the ‘we can’t stay here’ speech. The percentage of them fighting Jeb dwindled somewhat, demonstrating that Seed-Kol was considering that information.

It was right around this time that Jeb noticed the nuke. It was lazily swimming around them, a blackened thing with cracks that ran the whole of its being. Jeb didn’t bother to try and think about the fact that the thing was moving without distance, and was seemingly alive; instead, he was compelled to study its form. The cracks let out scouring radioactive light that hurt Jeb’s eyes to look at. As if there was enough power to destroy the world just barely contained inside that blackened steel.

Actually, I think it’s exactly like that.

The nuke was trailing thousands of those black strings, seemingly stitched into the steel. It was trailing a rope from its lazily waving fins.

Seed-Jeb frowned. They needed to get their hands on that nuke and get out, or they’d simply wasted their time.

‘I figured out how to move!’ myriad Vresh informed him and Kol. A moment later, Vresh’s Vresh-ball moved up and away from the harsh planet. It seemed like she was moving by following the thread of a single possibility that moved up and away from the dangerous planet.

Jeb concentrated, focusing on a single him that launched up and flew away from the planet, experiencing it down to the smallest detail.

His Seed-Jeb became the possibility, taking all the other offshoots of his Jeb-ball along for the ride.

‘This is really weird!” thousands of Jeb’s possibilities shouted as they flew away from the hostile planet.

Kol was close behind, having a look of supreme concentration on his face. Jeb spotted a lodestone on a chain seemingly wrapped around the assassin’s many heads.

Interesting.

Jeb-ball turned to look at the planet they’d just left, his jaw dropping.

The apparent planet they’d departed was shaped like Vex’s skull, and sported a large ‘no solicitors’ sign the size of a mountain range.

I’m really starting to get the feeling that I’m not the biggest fish in the pond, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

Now, the nuke.

So many of Jeb’s possibilities that intertwined with the nuke as it came close involved him dying. It was a problem.

Extrapolating from how he’d achieved movement, Jeb figured he could scour his millions of possibilities for one where he’d managed to subdue the shark-like object of mass destruction. Or at least one where he was well on the way.

All he needed to do was follow that thread of possibility without getting his Seed killed. As far as he knew, his Seed was his real body, and while the countless possibilities were no less real or cognizant, the Seed was the origin. Without it, Jeb was sure his possibilities would cease to flow.

Alright, let’s do this, Jeb thought, focusing on where his sphere interacted with the nuke.

One of Jeb’s possibilities that interacted with the nuke grabbed onto one of the fins, and merrily waved back to him, as if to say, ‘Come here! I’ve got this under control!’ The Jeb was riding the nuke like a cowboy, shooting Jeb a wide grin.

Jeb was right about to commit to that possibility when a beam of light flared from one of the cracks in the nuke and vaporized that possibility, withering it away.

Well, Jeb thought. That’s going to make things more difficult.

Jeb watched and waited, carefully studying his possibilities as they interacted with the nuke one after another. Some of them held on for a while, some of them tried to disarm it, and quite a few of them wound up getting bisected by the deadly beams of light that rippled across the fragmented surface of the mind-bogglingly powerful weapon.

Jeb started to put together a pattern. Every version of him that tackled the underside of the nuke lived for at least five seconds, and after they were killed, the ripple of searing light from the cracks in the nuke’s steel coating always rippled in the same direction.

I’ll bet we could time this…

Just as he thought of it, Jeb-possibilities began trying to rodeo the nuke long enough to get it under control, starting with the underside.

Each and every one of them failed.

Why can’t they figure this out? From where Jeb was watching, there had been a pattern, but the possibilities seemed to lose it as soon as they made contact with the nuke.

Unless, the nuke is changing its pattern in response.

One of Jeb’s possibilities looked back toward the seed and made an expanding motion with his hands, a moment before he was vaporized.

What did he learn in that instant before he ceased to exist? Jeb watched the nuke as it circled closer, shearing off more and more of his possibilities. Jeb hadn’t noticed it before, but his total number of possibilities was diminishing.

They were still infinite, of course, but a higher and higher percentage of them were withering as the possibilities died.

If that reaches 100%, then I’m dead, aren’t I? Sure, Jeb could let his seed sit in place forever looking at the infinite ways he could move forward and die, but that wasn’t much better.

Jeb looked back at the slowly closing beast with a belly full of atomic fire. The nuke almost seemed…smug.

Alright, you son of a bitch, I’ve tried to kill myself for worse things. Let’s see what you got.

Jeb followed the thread of a possibility, bringing his seed up to grab the underside of the nuke.

As soon as he touched the nuke, Jeb’s fractal of infinite possibilities was dominated by the nuke. It was now present in every single possibility in Jeb’s Jeb-ball.

That’s what he meant! Jeb thought. His possibilities didn’t have access to the ability to choose their next possibility; they were limited to what a human could perceive.

I don’t have a hell of a lot of time, Jeb thought. He had five seconds to follow the thread of another possibility and crawl up the side of the nuke.

That was when the atomic beast really started to buck, and Jeb found his seed travelling down a different path that led to him being cut in half by a plume of white fire.

What the hell was that!? Jeb thought, his skin like ice, adrenaline flaring through every possibility as he hopped between strands of Fate, taking the path of a Jeb who dodged to the side moments before he was killed outright.

The nuke is making choices too!

Jeb suddenly understood. To put it very simplistically, it was like playing speed checkers. He would pick a move that would put him on the path to winning, while the nuke would pick a path that led to it remaining unbound. If speed checkers didn’t need you to wait for the other person to take a turn.

If I had some kind of symbolic control over the nuke, like the launch codes or something, this would be a hell of a lot easier, Jeb thought, dodging another spurt of nuclear fire.

But he didn’t. All he had were…

Jeb glanced down at the black strands that were stitched into the very metal of the angry bomb.

That’ll do.

Jeb followed a possibility down toward the bomb’s front, his heart hammering in his chest as he bailed on branch after branch, destroyed seconds before he became them. He finally landed on one of the thick points in the creature’s plating, where there weren’t any cracks. Jeb reached down and snagged the black strings and hauled up on them viciously.

The bomb bucked again under Jeb’s feet, trying to toss him off, but the percentage of times it was successful was far too low to be of any harm to Jeb’s seed.

Alright, you fucker, Jeb thought, winding the string around his arm and hands so he couldn’t possibly let go. Let’s go for a ride.

And ride he did. Jeb rode the creature using the black strings as reins until he almost forgot when he started.

The atomic creature had an inhuman amount of stamina. It thrashed about nonstop, untiring and unbreaking. Jeb didn’t know if he’d been struggling with the creature for hours or days. Neither would have surprised him. He had inhuman endurance himself, but it wasn’t limitless.

Jeb could feel his seed running out of energy, represented by a higher and higher ratio of his possibilities losing their grip on the struggling creature and getting kicked off and incinerated.

A jump from three up to five percent doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider that it was nearly double the original percentage, and represented a Jebediah mortality rate of one in twenty.

And growing. Nearly seven percent now, Jeb observed, his blood cold despite the exhaustion. Jeb’s muscles burned, his eyes watered, mouth tasted like blood, and lungs felt as though they were about to eject themselves in protest.

He could already see the end coming. As his seed tired, his possibilities would begin each of their strings more and more disadvantaged, and he would see them dying off at an exponential rate, until there were no surviving ones left, and he was forced to become one of the possibilities by the ongoing contest between his will and the bomb’s.

Then death.

If this goddamn thing would just give up! Jeb thought, gritting his teeth. Humans had always been endurance hunters, tiring out their prey through long chases before killing them.

It sucked to be on the other end of that equation.

Sadly, owing to its atomic nature, Jeb could tell the bomb hadn’t even expended a fraction of a fraction of its total energy. Even if it wasn’t about to throw him off, it could keep fighting until he died of old age, then keep going for a few more lifetimes.

Fucker. Now Jeb had to consider taking his chances jumping off, or find a way to put a huge immortal monster…to…sleep.

Wait a second, this sounds familiar! When Jeb had been in the Impossible Tutorial, he’d killed an enormous leech who had done exactly that.

Jeb began frantically searching himself for the Lagross’s Power Accolade,the powerful award that granted him plus five to each attribute. He’d earned it by killing an enormous leech feeding on the heart of a titan.

Let’s see, the krusker’s spine is going through my arm, which means…

Jeb’s seed body shifted like Play-Doh as he dug into his own ribcage and grasped the slimy eel under the surface. Jeb didn’t have time to ask why he didn’t feel any pain, or why his body didn’t seem to follow the rules for living things. He was too busy.

His divided attention made the number of Jebs who were thrown off and incinerated skyrocket drastically for a moment, and Jeb was barely able to avoid getting tossed by the skin of his teeth.

Meanwhile, Lagross’s Power rested in his hand. The Accolade was slimy and covered by some kind of thick film.

Is that the System blacklist? Jeb thought, cutting through the thick membrane with his thumb.

Skeee!

The tiny eel-like creature let out a faint shriek as it exposed a lamprey-like mouth filled with black, razor-sharp teeth, meant to bleed its prey. Jeb jerked the creature away from his face as it lunged for him, an almost gravity-like force trying to suck him in.

“Jesus!” Jeb eyeballed the tiny parasitic vacuum that had already latched on to the faces of several of his possibilities and drained them dry. The creature got a little bigger in his hand. Jeb shuddered to think this thing had been inside him all along.

Well, it’s this or dying.

“How about some dinner?” Jeb said, turning the eel in his hand upside down and pressing its mouth against the bomb.

Jeb half expected the parasite to be immediately vaporized by atomic fire, but instead, the magical parasite started growing. A lot.

This could be a problem, Jeb thought, shifting his stance as the flopping end of the eel grew as thick as his leg and began writhing wildly around on the surface of the bomb.

Still, the nuke seemed to be slowing down, lulled into dormancy by whatever ability the strange fifth-dimensional representation of Lagross’s energy-draining possessed.

Jeb’s percentages were starting to improve. If all he had to do was tolerate another passenger as he tried to wrangle the bomb, then that was no problem.

Then the eel’s tail reared up in front of Jeb, revealing another mouth.

“Oh, fuck,” was all Jeb was able to say before 100% of his possibilities got slammed in the chest by a grasping, circular jaw.

Chapter 24: S#!t Slides Uphill

The jagged teeth of the eel slammed into Jeb’s chest, parting the flesh like soft clay. Jeb’s hand clamped down on the creature’s neck, aiming to yank it out of himself. The creature’s thick muscles held it in place, the slimy skin preventing him from getting a good grip on it.

Strangely enough, there was no pain. Like before, when he’d parted his ribs to remove the creature in the first place, it seemed fifth-dimension Jeb was made out of Play-Doh.

Jeb’s hand slipped off the neck again, right before the thing greedily pushed its jaws deeper and flexed, locking on to his very bone. That hurt.

Something rushed through Jeb at a pace he couldn’t even comprehend. He felt like he’d tried to fit his mouth around the Hoover Dam, and for some goddamn reason, he hadn’t simply exploded. The rush of energy filled him up until he was fit to burst, then it kept going.

Seed-Jeb let out a pained gasp as he tried to detach the grasping mouth, power violently rampaging through heretofore unknown channels throughout his body. Little creeks had turned into raging rivers, sweeping entire families downstream.

His skin browned and sizzled like a well-cooked burger, the Maillard reaction radiating outward from the round wound in the center of his chest.

Jeb could feel the heat and pressure mounting behind his eyeballs, threatening to shove them out of his skull if he didn’t find a path of lesser resistance.

His skin browned, blackened and cracked, and somehow, Jeb was still alive, despite the pain and the enormous energy surging through him. The cracks in his skin began to leak an all-too-familiar white light, even as the light from the nuke beneath him dimmed further.

Jeb’s brain finally decided enough was enough and shut down, causing Jeb’s eyes to roll back into his head and his body to collapse like a puppet with its strings cut.

The last thing Jeb saw was something big looming over him, offering him another eel.

Why the hell would I want another eel? Jeb briefly thought before it got shoved into his chest, adding insult to injury.

***Jebediah Trapper***

Instance error resolved.

Rebooting System…

Congratulations! You have Beaten Lagross the Suppressor in a one-on-one duel. Your Power is beyond reproach!

Lagross’s Power Accolade Granted!

+5 Body +5 Myst +5 Nerve

>>>Error<<<

Several Accolades missing or corrupted. Contacting System Admin. Please hold.

An impact across Jeb’s face jolted him back to consciousness.

“Whazza?” He grunted, sitting up. His throat was hoarse, and he felt like week-old dogshit.

What the hell just happened? Jeb thought as he nearly bumped his forehead into Vresh’s. He remembered getting dragged toward the portal by the rope, not being smart enough to let go and then…

Jeb’s brow furrowed as the memories came to him like a half-remembered dream. There was a snowflake ball of himself, and it interacted with billions of other things…

Like a half-remembered dream, Jeb’s brain systematically deleted the memories that didn’t adhere to Jeb’s understanding of reality. Gradually, the memory of what happened inside the portal slipped away, leaving Jeb grasping at straws and frantically making mental notes of certain things his infinite possibilities had learned that he wanted to remember for later.

Kol –

The assassin that keeps trying to kill me. Really warped sense of honor. Pissed that he hasn’t been able to complete his job. Doesn’t have much in the way of actual attack abilities; primarily an ambush hunter, but carries one or two get-out-of-jail cards at any given time. Tried to shoot me in Vegas.

Vresh –

Leads with her right hand. Uses portals to enhance her physical range, to devastating effect. Shares some kind of power accumulation Vow with her father… Sensitive earlobes and lower back.

The nuke –

Big fish-thing with…

Jeb’s memories failed him as he tried to organize what he’d learned. He got a vague sense of unease when he thought about it, but his memories of the outlandish experience had fled.

A jolt of alarm travelled through him as he looked around the room. They were back in Vex’s laboratory, sans nuke. All the lights were out except the faint glow from the machinery and the pale grey light from the swirling portal itself.

Looking at that light made Jeb’s brain itch. Jeb glanced around, hoping to see the other members of the enforcer company, but they were all seemingly absent.

Are they still around? Jeb thought, squinting, and fearing the worst.

“The nuke?” Jeb whispered.

“I…I thought we’d dragged it back out,” Vresh said, her voice uncertain. She held up her fingers as if reciting something she’d memorized.

“You and the nuke both went limp so I grabbed you and it. Kol had me write a letter to Vex, and we were able to follow it back to the tear in the dimension. Then we…dragged you both here.”

She ticked off her last finger.

“You followed the letter?” Jeb asked, frowning, glancing past Vresh. Kol was lying on his back with a rather large bruise on his skull where Vresh had knocked him out.

“Hey, that’s the sentence I committed to memory the first couple seconds after realizing I was losing memories. Don’t ask me what I meant. I don’t remember.”

“Then where’s the nuke?” Jeb asked, taking another look around the laboratory. It looked abandoned. There was no sign of the previous battle. No damage, all the blood was gone.

“I can answer that one.” A familiar voice caught their attention.

Click! The lights in the ceiling blinked on, revealing Vex standing in the doorway, wearing what looked like loose-fitting silk pajamas, a nightcap, and carrying a glass of milk.

They locked eyes with the sindio for a heart-stopping moment.

“Good evening. You guys got back quick,” he said, taking a drink.

“Head down that hall behind you. You take the right fork and go to the holding cells,” he said, pointing to Vresh. “And you take the left, report to the examination room and strap yourself into the table.” He directed his finger to Jeb. “I’ll be along shortly.”

“I’d rather not,” Jeb said, looking for some way to escape, turn the tide, and survive. Maybe I can explode the Myst engine and create enough of a distraction to—

“I didn’t say please,” Vex said.

Jeb felt a slight tingle.

“Okay then!” Jeb’s body said without his permission, standing up and walking toward the opposite side of the room. Vresh seemed similarly under control, as she immediately started walking toward the exit beside him.

Well, this is horrifying, Jeb thought, pounding against the invisible barrier between his thoughts and his motor control. He tried to scream, stop himself, make his body go limp, access his Myst, anything he could think of. None of it worked.

The two of them marched silently beside each other for a time before splitting off to the left and right. Vresh, in the corner of his eye, became a rapidly diminishing series of footsteps behind him. He couldn’t even move his eyes.

Jeb’s body marched into a clean room with a solid steel table in the center. He lay down in it and started strapping himself in. All the while, his mind was desperately looking for some way to turn the situation around.

But there just wasn’t any place to start. Jeb felt no one single thing preventing him from reasserting control. He had no idea how the sindio had accomplished it, and even if he did, he had no idea what the counter would be.

All Jeb could do was watch as he strapped himself in and stare at the ceiling.

The cracked ceiling.

Oh, I can already tell this is gonna suck, Jeb thought as his brain tried to distract itself from the absolute hopeless terror of the moment by focusing on a different absolute hopeless terror that had already come and gone.

It didn’t help much.

Is that a piece of metal shining through the crack or just a weird shadow? Jeb thought. Despite his growing panic, his heart retained a steady beat, implying that even Jeb’s sympathetic nervous system was under control.

Well, that’s fucking great. Is he interfering in the signals somewhere in my spine? Was Jeb a paraplegic now, turned into a puppet by Vex?

Wait, I can’t move my eyes, so it’s gotta be higher up—like in the brain somewhere? That was spooky. How could Jeb know what he was thinking or doing was his own, when Vex was literally manipulating the stuff that made Jeb who he was?

A delicate spell on the motor cortex? But I don’t even know if the eyes are moved by the motor cortex. Jeb knew far too little about the brain to risk trying to wrestle Vex’s control away.

The best-case scenario seemed like it would be a lobotomy.

“Sorry for the wait,” Vex said, swooping into the examination room and swiftly bolting the last cuff on Jeb’s left hand.

Well, now I’m well and truly fucked. Jeb sighed. His eyes widened.

I can sigh! I can widen my eyes!

Jeb immediately set about trying to bust out of the restraints, but they were predictably too sturdy.

Vex stepped back and waited, until Jeb wore himself out.

“You done?” he asked as Jeb paused, panting.

“Mmmaybe?”

“Excellent. Let’s get started,” Vex said, before the ceiling opened up, revealing steel.

It’s real! Jeb’s body shuddered as adrenaline was dumped into his system.

It’s happening again! It’s happening again! Jeb began hyperventilating as the steel beam fell onto his chest and crushed him, rendering him unable to breathe. It’s going to crush my lungs and kill me. I’m already dead! This is hell and it’s just this over and over and over and over….

Jeb’s logical brain was shoved aside as he thrashed in place, screaming himself hoarse, and if he could have reached his arms to gnaw them off, he would’ve.

Jeb felt a slight pinch, then the steel beam retracted back into the ceiling. Jeb’s body shuddered in place, flooded with adrenaline, and nothing to do with it.

“Come now, it’s not that bad,” Vex tutted before going back to a magical screen and scrolling through a readout composed entirely of foreign letters, and the occasional picture, sort of like an MRI.

Vex tapped his fingers against the counter as he read the printout.

“Oh my, that won’t do at all,” Vex murmured to himself.

“What won’t do?” Jeb demanded, craning his neck to try and get a better view of the screen.

“The Accolade I designed has a fatal flaw. It would never actually work. Oh well. At least I got quite a bit of good data about the amount of stress the fifth dimension can tolerate in regards to high concentrations of nuclear fission. So I guess this wasn’t a total waste of time.”

“What?” Jeb asked, eyes widening.

The Accolade he designed? The ACCOLADE he designed? Jeb’s mind immediately flipped back to the books, the eel, the spine, the pipe. All things he’d seen or removed, all stitched onto him with…

Black strings. Jeb faintly remembered the sensation of black strings that seemed to defy the natural order of the fifth dimension. Matter of fact, he could remember them because they followed the rules for Jeb’s reality more than anything else.

The bomb had black strings. Jeb’s Accolades had black strings. Jeb was sure of it. He didn’t remember much, but the impression of black strings… The nuke never made it back to the real world, but he, Vresh and Kol did. That meant…

“Do I have a nuke inside of me right now!?” Jeb asked.

“Ummm….” Vex’s gaze slid off of Jeb’s face.

“Get it out!”

“Nnnno? This seems like the ideal moment to point out that if you enforcers had kept your sweaty philistine paws to yourselves, I could have concluded my experiment without incident.”

“What did you mean by fatal flaw?” Jeb demanded.

“Oh look, there’s the guard to take you to the holding cells!” Vex moved aside, and a small army of the tight-skinned pink people with leather armor detached his cuffs from the table and hauled Jeb off of the slab.

“Hey, HEY!” Jeb shouted as they dragged him away. No matter how he struggled, they seemed to be stronger, which made no sense to him, with how small they were. He should be able to bench all of them simultaneously, but somehow they were pinning his hands to his sides.

Must be these shackles, Jeb thought.

“Put him in cell…eh…six,” the sindio said, scratching his head under the nightcap and smothering a yawn. “I gotta do a bunch more paperwork on the hostages. Make some death threats, kill somebody to make a point, that sort of thing.”

Vex waved dismissively as the little berry people hauled Jeb off, toward the fork in the hall that Vresh had disappeared down. Vex himself turned and walked away, vanishing further into the labyrinthine underground complex.

After maybe five minutes of being lugged around like human firewood, with plenty of time to consider his own mortality, or what life as a lab rat might look like, along with various suicide methods from different cultures…an explosion on Jeb’s right interrupted his morose thoughts, bursting open part of the stone wall to the side.

Jeb and the people carrying him were peppered with shrapnel and catapulted up and against the far wall. Hard. Somehow none of the sharp stone bits managed to penetrate his skin, leaving him whole, and gasping for breath, facedown on the floor.

At least they let go of me, Jeb thought, head ringing like a bell as he levered himself to his feet. The little people were scattered around him, groaning in pain and generally not moving too much. He did a quick scan of his surroundings, and spotted Casey Thompson, waving for him to follow from behind the destroyed wall. She was flanked by several nasty-looking metal golems and tons of living office supplies.

Her minions must have busted her out. Seems like as good a direction as any, Jeb thought, taking off towards her at a sprint.

“Where are we going?” Jeb asked, offering his manacles to Casey. The teen stood aside, and her golem’s wrists began spinning at supersonic speeds, using their fingers like a saw blade. In a matter of seconds, the manacles were simply cut open with a screech of protesting steel. Jeb made sure to stand very still.

The moment the manacles left Jeb’s skin, his strength came flooding back. The invisible barrier between him and the burning sun of Myst inside him fell away, allowing him to siphon Myst again. Back in the saddle, Jeb thought, picking himself off the ground. Peglegs are slow.

“We’re leaving,” Casey said, nodding towards the cells.

“Spring everyone else and scatter like mice?” Jeb asked, guessing Casey’s train of thought. Jeb had plenty of experience with the ‘safety in numbers’ motto. Breaking the other enforcers out of their imprisonment was the good and moral thing to do. It also allowed him to use them as meat-shields on the way out.

That’s what I call a win-win.

Together, Jeb and Casey swept through the cells at highway speeds, stopping in front of the heavily enchanted steel boxes where the enforcers were being held. One by one, they went from box to box, prying the warded steel open from the outside.

The steel seemed to absorb and deflect Myst, but Casey and Jeb’s supernatural strength combined was enough to wrench the metal out of shape, causing the enchantments to fail, which in turn restored the captive’s strength, allowing the prisoner to add their strength to the mix.

Did we just brute force an overly complicated problem? Jeb thought as he and Vresh paired off, prying open Kor Tekalis’s cage while Casey and one of the other melas enforcers got another one open. Jeb glanced down at his hands. He didn’t remember ever being able to bend thick steel.

What is my Body at? I should check my status. Maybe I got some Impact for ‘stopping’ the bombs? No, Vresh hasn’t paid me yet.

In a matter of minutes, all of the enforcers were standing at attention.

“Okay, so the good news is, the bomb is out of Vex’s hands, and the world’s not at risk of annihilation. The bad news—” Jeb paused as the lights in the cell block turned red, and a siren began to fill the air. The sound was harsh, and felt like it crawled up his spine and buried itself inside his amygdala through his ears, like some kind of Star Trek parasite.

“The bad news is he knows we’ve escaped,” Vresh’s father finished for him.

“Yeah, that.”

Jeb consulted his inner map of the dungeon.

“The hole I came through should be about two hundred yards that direction,” Jeb said, pointing. “I doubt he could have completely repaired it by now, but…” Given what he’d seen so far, it wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility.

Kor pointed. “Our entrance is about a hundred and fifty yards that direction, but the path is winding and narrow.” The melas reached into his pocket, his expression stony.

“We’ll take Jebediah’s exit. Lead on.” He nodded to Jeb.

“Alrighty then, you guys better keep up,” Jeb said, retracing his steps toward the exit.

Jeb created a branched strand of Myst and walked it in front of them to check for traps as they zoomed through the underground, aiming toward Jeb’s exit.

About twelve seconds into their daring escape, a bolt of brilliant white shot past Jeb and nailed Bruga in the chest. The big, wooly enforcer let out a short cry before vanishing into a pile of dust.

Jeb’s hackles went up as they left behind the pile of dust.

Is this thing really doing anything? Jeb thought, walking his telekinetic decoy in front of him.

A few seconds later, he got his answer when another enforcer was scoured from existence.

“What the hell is going on?” Jeb demanded, looking over his shoulder as he flew. There were only six enforcers behind him now. Jeb was in the lead, and Vresh was right behind him; if anyone would trigger traps, it seemed like it should’ve been either him or her.

Apparently the dungeon was picking and choosing who to kill.

Or maybe the person in control of it, Jeb thought sourly.

“Keep moving!” Kor bellowed from behind him. “Get out now, think later!”

About twenty seconds later, a beam of light passed over Jeb’s shoulder, and Jeb heard Vresh let out a pained cry.

Heart hammering, Jeb looked, and almost wished he hadn’t. Vresh was screeching to a halt and scrabbling backwards towards her father, even as the melas dissolved into a pile of ash.

“No! Father!”

Jeb put on the brakes, allowing the four remaining enforcers to outpace him. He flew back and grabbed Vresh around the waist before yanking her off the ground, ash spilling from between her fingers.

Jeb wasn’t able to hold onto her for longer than a couple seconds, as the melas woman burst into flames, her skin hot enough to scald his.

“Gah!” Jeb dropped her back onto the floor, where she rolled to a stop, her hair lifting itself up inside the rising plume of flame.

She glanced at the remains of her father, and after a momentary struggle, seemed to swallow something. The flames died down as she broke into a sprint, catching up with the others, but Jeb could still feel the heat of her passing.

“Which way!?” Feej shouted from ahead of them.

“The door on the left!” Jeb called, pointing as they caught up.

They busted back into the lab, clearing through it in a couple of seconds. Feej took a spiteful shot at the sindio’s machine on the way out, tearing it to shreds with her bare hands. Jeb would’ve added one himself if he weren’t so focused on getting the hell out of there.

When they passed through into the main thoroughfare that Jeb had originally come from, another beam of light blasted one of their team members into ashes.

“That son of a...” Jeb balled his hands into fists. “I think Vex is playing with us.” He pointed up at the perfectly repaired hallway, where only a few hours prior had been a battlefield. Without his near-perfect memory, Jeb wouldn’t have even been able to tell where the original hole had been at all.

“No, that’s not it,” a slender melas enforcer said, shaking his head. “It’s about money and politics.”

“What are you talking about, Glenn?” Vresh demanded, rounding on the other melas.

“Bruga’s family was poor!” Glenn shouted. “There’s no way he could have paid the ransom! Look, Amon and Kline were only second-generation nobility! Their families didn’t have the means to pay for them!

“Feej, on the other hand: She’s sole heir to an ancient clan! And she’s fine!” Glenn said, pointing at the grumpy keegan woman.

“What about my father!?” Vresh demanded. “My uncle could easily…” Vresh stopped, her hands tightening into fists as the flames in her hair surged. She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, which boiled as it left her body, the superheated water escaping into the air.

“He could easily pay a ransom.”

“Would he, though?” Glenn asked.

“You’re a third son of a minor family,” Feej said. “By your logic, you should already be dead.”

Glenn paled. “I’d like to leave now,” he said, his voice diminished from fear.

Yeah, no shit, Jeb thought as he lined himself up under where the hole in the ceiling had been, throwing a spear of telekinetic force at it. The densely-packed Myst unraveled, splashing against the wall.

“Even if he repaired the wall, he may not have repaired the hole above it. This could still be the weakest part of the wall. Give it everything you got!” Jeb shouted, shifting from telekinetic force to plain old heat, aiming to melt whatever contraption was unraveling Myst.

In a moment of inspiration, Jeb looped the heat-based Myst string he was creating into the inverted cone of a shaped charge, aiming to focus the effect on a small hole and punch through.

Jeb let out a shout as he detonated the string, deliberately overbalancing the translation reaction and causing it to explode.

Boom!

Jeb blinked away the explosion of light and bared his teeth at the ceiling.

There was a little scorch mark on the ceiling. Mocking him.

Vresh let out a shout and punched upward, her arm disappearing at the shoulder and reappearing near the ceiling. She put a decent-sized dent in the ceiling, right at the scorch mark, before her arm fell to the ground, disconnected from the portal.

Vresh stifled a cry, clapping a hand over her shoulder as dark red, boiling blood leaked out between her fingers.

Glenn, the slender melas, raised both hands upward and a concentrated blast of Myst hit the ceiling, pushing the dent a little bit farther.

“I’m not gonna die with a damned human,” Feej growled, detaching one of the trophies from her armor and flinging it at the ceiling. For an instant, a copy of Feej lunged forward, swinging with a conjured sword. The copy made a two-inch cut in the wall before it vanished.

We’re making progress, Jeb thought. A couple more hits and the wall might start to peel away—

A beam of white light shot down from the ceiling and caught the slender melas in the chest. He managed a gasp of surprise before falling to the floor in a pile of ash.

When Jeb looked back up, the ceiling had repaired itself. Not a single smudge marred the pristine ceiling.

You sadistic bastard, Jeb thought, his chest clenching in pain as his nerves began to dance and tingle. Jeb felt something rising up inside of him. It matched his desperation and anger, bringing even more out unbidden, an inexhaustible well of furious power.

“Let us out!” he shouted, the Myst boiling up and out. Jeb’s flimsy siphon cracked under the stress as he channeled the Myst. In an instant, Jeb went from pulling a reluctant mule to riding a tiger. And the tiger wasn’t having it.

Myst dense enough to taste poured out of Jeb’s entire body, leaping up toward the ceiling. The wards in the ceiling held for a moment before they melted, and the entire ceiling was jettisoned out, peeled open like an apple meeting a high-caliber bullet.

Jeb knelt there, one arm extended, staring dumbfounded up at the window to the night sky above them.

What the hell just happened?

As Feej pushed herself back to her feet, Jeb spotted the walls begin to extend feelers out towards each other.

No time.

Jeb bent and picked up Vresh, clamping her wound shut with telekinesis. We have to go. Jeb flew Vresh up through the hole in the ceiling, Casey and Feej following close behind.

***Kol Rejan, level 60 Courier***

Kol stood behind Vex as the sindio counted bulbs. He was leaning forward and counting the heavy gold coins in units of ten, using his fingers to drag them out of the oversized pile five at a time.

“Twelve hundred and twenty…twelve hundred and thirty…”

Sitting across the pile of gold from Vex was an odd assortment of human housewares and a particularly nervous-looking melas wearing faux-luxury clothes.

“Thirteen hundred bulbs, all there,” Vex said, reaching out to shake the melas’s hand. “I look forward to doing business with you the next time your ward gets herself captured.”

“The pleasure is all ours, Mr. Xen Calvex, sir,” the melas said, adjusting his collar and looking distinctly uncomfortable.

“Please, my friends call me Vex. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve—”

Boom!

The entire dungeon shook as yet another explosion rocked their world.

“I think our business is done here. You know the way out,” Vex said, making a gesture with one hand that opened up a magical display in front of him.

The melas looked incredibly relieved to hear that, and the man snatched up his coat and bowed three times before scurrying away.

“Doesn’t even cover the cost of removing their causal protection,” Vex muttered, following the melas with his gaze.

“I’ll be damned,” Vex said when he looked at the screen. From what Kol could see, Jeb and the ones whose ransoms had been paid were leaping up and out of the dungeon through a massive hole that hadn’t been there previously. “I was not expecting it to do that. How is he even still alive?”

The sindio rotated his finger, and the picture’s time flowed in reverse, showing Jeb reaching out with a single hand before the entire screen went pure white, forcing them to narrow their eyes against the glare.

“What about Jebediah?” Kol asked. “Nobody paid a ransom for him, yet you didn’t kill him.”

“Because I like him,” Vex said, putting his hands behind his head as he summoned the video feed of the ‘escapees’ exiting the underground into the dungeon-torn city. “Ever since The System rose to prominence, nobody takes the path of the wizard anymore. I find it endearing. That, and we’re getting excellent data.”

Chapter 25: Starfish

Vresh sat in her favorite restaurant, taking gasoline shots with a shaking hand. Real gasoline was far less smooth than diesel, but she wasn’t in the mood to enjoy herself. She was in the mood to get smashed.

And it’s over, just like that.

She’d contacted her handler in the capital, who’d informed her that the emperor had reached an agreement with the sindio during the ransom negotiations, and the ancient wizard had agreed not to pursue nuclear proliferation in exchange for small concessions.

Tarruk shit, she thought, taking a swig and wincing as the silky-smooth, powerfully painful liquid poured down her throat. She knew better than anyone that the story that everyone was told was always far less neat and comforting.

If anything, she was inclined to believe the wizard had no interest in destroying the world, and they had simply fallen prey to a staggering amount of groupthink. Vresh wasn’t particularly concerned with the cover story; that wasn’t what bothered her.

What bothered her was that her father had died for basically nothing.

What bothered her was that someone, at some point, chose not to pay his ransom. She’d done the bare minimum amount of research to confirm that yes, every enforcer who escaped had been paid for. An exorbitant amount of over a thousand bulbs.

Glenn was right. May he rest well.

From what she could gather, when her uncle had refused to pay, the emperor invoked his authority to pay her ransom personally, and then confiscated a portion of her family’s property to settle the debt.

She squeezed the glass lightly, shattering it and dousing the contents across the table.

“Apologies,” she muttered in a daze as the waiter swept the soaked tablecloth away and replaced it with a fresh one in a matter of seconds, wordlessly replacing her glass with a steel-reinforced shot glass.

Her strength was going to be difficult to control for a few weeks, between the healer reattaching her arm and inheriting her father’s Vow—the primary reason why the emperor had chosen to keep her alive when her uncle refused to do so.

She knew why everyone involved had done what they did. Her upbringing as a high noble allowed her to coldly dissect the logic behind every choice.

The wizard ransomed them to prove he was open to negotiation. He killed the rest to prove he was not to be trifled with, saving him trouble in the long run. Her uncle refused to pay because it was the golden opportunity for him to take the reins of the Tekalis family. The emperor chose to save her instead of her father because…

Vresh slumped forward in her chair, resting the steel shot glass against her pounding forehead. Only a dozen shots in and she already had a headache. Her brain must have been foggy, because for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why the emperor would pick her over her father.

Her father was stronger, smarter, more experienced, the unquestioned head of the family, able to muster the entire Tekalis Army at a moment's notice—a rather significant number of battle-hardened soldiers, many of whom had their second Class Ability.

Maybe he was too good, a dark part of her mind whispered to her. Perhaps the emperor was simply removing a potential threat.

Shut up, you, she whispered back. We’re not going to overlook Uncle.

If he had just paid the godsdamned ransom, we wouldn’t be in this situation! The mind-boggling greed!

Screech!

The steel cup in her hand deformed under her grip.

Now her family was severely fractured, and the emperor’s edict confiscating some of their wealth had left the Tekalis family up in arms, with some of them even openly talking about rebelling. Her uncle was eagerly stoking the flames, back in the east.

Best of all, the chaos has the family clutching at their purses like frightened merchants in a dark alley, she thought with a snort. The thought that she’d be able to scrounge up a thousand bulbs to pay Jebediah for his assistance now was laughable.

She swirled the dented shot glass in front of her before knocking back another one.

She was going to have to resign as an enforcer and head back to the east…and deal with her family. Well, the resigning part you’ve already taken care of. She’d been officially relieved of duty already, after all.

But for tonight, all she wanted to do was get completely hammered. Gasoline was just about the strongest thing the melas had ever discovered to drink and yet, all she got was a tickle of a headache.

Stupid Body. Stupid Vow.

Status.

Vresh Tekalis

Veiled Patrician, level 128

Accolades: Underdog, Precocious, Heir Apparent

Body 112

Myst 63

Nerve 42

Abilities: Sightsense, Commanding Voice, A Mile in Their Shoes

Ah, there it is.

Her Body had gone up a staggering 30 points the moment her father’s Vow had passed to her. Additionally, she’d received over ten in Myst and a smattering of points in Nerve.

Tomorrow, she would drop all of her knight errant wandering and return to her home, ready to spend the next five hundred years squabbling with entitled cousins, but today…today had been long enough. She was off the clock, to use the human idiom.

Vresh wiped the brimming tears away, feeling the moisture hiss and bubble against her cheek.

The bell on the front door rang softly. Normally it wouldn’t be loud enough to hear over the musicians and the gossip of wealthy patrons, but today most people had other priorities, namely cleaning up the devastated city.

Vresh glanced up and spotted Jebediah Trapper walking through the front door with a hollowed-out, vacant expression on his face.

“You look how I feel,” Vresh said as he sat down across from her. “Gasoline?” She raised her dented cup.

“Not my thing,” Jeb said, shaking his head. “You know where I can find Amanda?”

“Ah, the woman who reattached my arm?” She said, “She’s at the mall plaza with a list of people in critical condition longer than the street to get there. Missing limbs, brain damage, organ failure, you name it. People are dropping off her list as fast as she can get to them. It’s a madhouse.”

Jeb took a breath, frowned, and collapsed back in his chair, staring right through her. A thin layer of dust plumed off his coat.

“I guess I will have a drink,” Jeb muttered.

“I can’t pay you,” Vresh said into the silence.

“Oh. I wasn’t—I…” He seemed to struggle with his thoughts in a way that she’d seen on her father hundreds of times. “I’ll take something from you of equal value,” he finally said, seemingly a little sour at having to say those words.

“But not right now,” Jebediah finished. “I’m not that bad. Not given…the situation.”

“My father’s death?”

“Yeah, that.”

The silence stretched out between them as they both stumbled across all the things that were too painful to put into words.

We wasted our time. That was pointless. Could we have done better? Those people didn’t need to die. When I was young, my father… On and on, the topics came to mind and were discarded. Leaving nothing but a gulf of silence between them, until finally Vresh found a thought safe enough to utter.

“Casey went home already. She’s going to visit her daughter. I hear her girl said her first words only a few weeks ago.”

Jebediah frowned, his look of pondering striking a strange chord in her stomach.

“That’s…fast.”

Vresh shrugged. “I wouldn’t know what’s fast for a human.”

She tapped the drink on the table. “I’ll be heading back east tomorrow, too. I won’t be coming back, either. Family business. Some other enforcer will probably take over the task of keeping an eye on you. Unless you’ve got some reason to head east with me?”

Vresh didn’t know why she said those last words. Was it her broken heart, or the gasoline that made her tongue slip like that? Still, having uttered them, her insides were clenching into a fist against her will, and were she not already in a melasian ‘mood’, the bloom of heat rising from her cheeks would have given her away.

“I think it’s unlikely,” Jeb said, allowing her stomach to relax. “I’ve got responsibilities here, after all.”

“I’ll probably visit, though, if you’d like,” he continued, dashing her hopes her little slip had gone unnoticed.

Vresh imagined herself spending day after day among her family, surrounded by political rivals on all sides, with nothing to mark the passage of time but the change of seasons. It sounded like the deepest pit of the underworld.

Then she imagined a visit from the simple, peasant, unassuming, simple, honest Jeb.

“I’d like that,” Vresh whispered into her cup.

***Later***

Jeb sat by Nancy’s bed, his hands clasped tightly over each other.

The little girl’s left side was horrifically swollen, looking like one enormous blood blister. She had damage to the nerves of her left eye, and all but the hair on the back of her head was missing. Her right side was a little bit better, since the heat had been on her left.

I swear to god, next thing I’m going to learn is how to heal, Jeb thought, listening to Nancy’s breathing. There was absolutely nothing stopping him from making the attempt, and if he did, Colt might still be alive, and Nancy…

Thankfully she had been holding her breath, so her lungs hadn’t been burned. Jeb had seen men breathe in superheated air before, and it was never a pretty sight.

The little girl’s breathing was steady and strong, in and out like a bellows, making the ice packs all over her body rise and fall. Nancy’s breathing hitched for a moment, causing Jeb’s body to tense, prepared to telekinetically force her to breathe if he had to.

Ari was perched on the headboard, looking torn between sympathy and opportunism. Hopefully having Smartass there would stop her from trying to get out of the ‘seven generations of servitude’ on a technicality.

Smartass had grown bigger again while Jeb wasn’t watching. She was almost a foot and a half tall now, making Ari seem puny by comparison. She watched Nancy with an un-fairylike amount of focus.

“I’m glad you weren’t there,” Jeb said.

“Eh?” Smartass glanced up at him.

“I’m pretty sure if you hadn’t slunk off in the middle of all the action, you would have gotten squished. I forgive you for running and hiding.”

Smartass’s cheeks flushed, her glare deepening.

“You don’t know me!” Smartass exploded. “Maybe I’m not feeling guilty about Nancy getting hurt and don’t feel like I owe everyone some kind of intangible debt. As far as you know, it’s possible that what you just said didn’t make me feel better and hurt at the same time, making me unsure of what to do with my feelings! I hate you so much!”

Smartass flew out the door, slamming it behind her.

What…the hell…was that? Jeb thought as he and Ari stared after the errant fairy.

Before Jeb could think too hard about it, the little girl on the bed opened her good eye, likely woken up by the sudden noise.

“Oh, hi,” Nancy said, her arm lifting.

“Don’t,” Jeb said, holding out a splayed hand in the universal ‘STOP’ motion. “You’ll crack your skin.”

“Oh.” Nancy put her hand down.

“I’ve called in a favor from a friend of mine,” Jeb said apologetically. “But they’re bogged down with the hole that got carved into the city. I don’t know when she’ll get to you, but she will heal you.”

“I’m sorry,” Nancy said.

Jeb scowled. “Sorry for what?” She didn’t have anything to be sorry about.

“Getting held hostage. That’s not what I’m supposed to do. I’m the starfish.”

“There’s nothing you could have done about that…person,” Jeb said, his knuckles whitening as his fingertips dug into the back of his hand. “There were things I could have done, as soon as I knew she was a reaper. I’m the one that bears some of that responsibility, not you.”

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Nancy muttered.

Jeb chuckled sourly. The kid hit the nail on the head, there.

“Something I want you to keep in mind for the future, and this is a very important nugget of grown-up wisdom,” Jeb said, catching the pre-teen’s attention. “When bad people do bad things, it’s usually their fault, not yours.”

“That seems kind of obvious?”

“You’d think, right? It becomes easy to forget sometimes.”

The conversation lulled, the silence stretching out longer than Jeb could tolerate.

“I’m sorry,” Jeb said.

“For what?” Nancy asked.

“About your burns. About Colt.”

“Didn’t you just tell me it was that mean lady’s fault?”

“Doesn’t feel like it, though,” Jeb said with a sigh, slouching down to look at his palms. “Damnit, if I could have figured out any other way to get that b—…woman off of you, I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat.”

Jeb felt a touch on his arm and glanced up to see Nancy patting him with her good arm.

“Relax, Jeb. I’m happy.”

“You’re happy? Why!?”

“Now that I think about it, I did do my job as the vanguard. I took the hit so someone else didn’t have to. Sure, it hurts a lot, but I don’t scar. Sooner or later, this will all be gone. If she’d taken one of the other kids, they’d be scarred for life. Or dead. I stopped that. With my starfish powers.”

Nancy held up her tiny hand, clenched into a fist.

“Starfish powers,” Jeb said, meeting her fist bump. “It’s true, you probably saved somebody’s life by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Nancy smiled, her blackened skin cracking. Seeing the girl’s face split like that was more than he could take. Jeb rose to his feet, his heart hammering.

“Well kid, you look like you’re gonna be fine. I’ll get Mrs. Everett to take over for me, and maybe we’ll see if we can get you something you don’t need to chew… What do you think about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich milkshake?”

“Ew.”

Jeb gave her a smile, but his heart wasn’t in it. He turned away before she could read his face too closely. “She’ll be right in,” he said, opening the door and stepping out into the hall, closing it quietly behind him.

Life went on in the tilted orphanage. Kids shouted and ran past each other in the halls, despite repeated warnings to let Nancy sleep. The entire building now had a slight tilt, since part of it had begun to sink into the weaponized dungeon.

I’ll have to talk to Eddie about that in the morning.

Jeb kept a straight face until he found Colt’s room and threw the door open, stumbling into the only room that he knew was empty.

Jeb locked the door behind him and collapsed to the floor, his heart hammering in his ears as he glanced up at the ceiling.

Nothing. Jeb looked back down at the floor and let out the sobs he’d been keeping under control in front of the children.

Can’t let the protector of the orphanage look weak. So many of these kids thought he was a tireless monument extending some kind of invisible barrier around them. It’s how they slept at night, after so many of them witnessed their parents dying during the Tutorial. They felt safe.

Maybe in the future, kids like Nancy will take that job, but for right now… Jeb thought, wrapping his arms around himself and bawling.

Right now, I’ll keep them out of it. Maybe talk to Mr. Everett about it.

Jeb’s body was wracked with involuntary, gasping sobs that pattered the floor beneath him with salty tears. Jeb must have knelt there for five minutes or so before the sadness began to recede, like it always did. Guilt and sorrow were just another storm to weather. Eventually they blew over, and often left him feeling better for it.

He was about to roll onto the ball of his foot and stand up, when something caught in his throat.

Jeb devolved into a coughing fit that seemed to grow worse by the second. At first it was a tickle, but it quickly grew to a full-body hacking cough that was determined to dislodge…something.

Something big.

Jeb could feel it in his throat. A wad of something particularly stubborn, blocking his airflow. Jeb’s eyes began to see stars as he quickly ran out of breath.

Finally, the offending object allowed him to get a lungful of air, and he gave a mighty cough, pushing the tangy thing into his mouth before spitting it out onto the floor.

A splatter of partially congealed blood hit the wooden floor of the orphanage.

That’s probably not good, Jeb thought, wiping blood off his lips with his sleeve. Vex had mentioned a ‘fatal flaw’, after all. A moment later, Jeb caught an acrid whiff of something, drawing his attention back down to the floor.

The blood had begun to smoke, sizzling its way into the wood, Alien-style. Jeb’s sleeve started smoking where the blood rested.

“That’s…not good.”

Jeb’s vision was dominated by a System announcement, nearly toppling him onto his ass. He’d been exempt so long he’d nearly forgotten about them.

After reviewing your case, the Admin has decided to give you a Quest.

Quest received!

Kill Mab, Queen of the Fae.

Rewards: Removal of one Accolade of User’s choice.

Penalty for failure: User blacklisted.

User’s System has been reactivated.

Jeb frowned, staring at the words until they faded. Following a hunch, he said an old command, half expecting it to still be turned off.

“Status.”

Jebediah Trapper

Mystic Trapsmith, Level 39

Accolades: Krusker’s Brawn, Siren’s Cunning, R-R-RubU’s Mysteries, Gresh’s Subtlety, Innovator, Ì̴̸̵̡̢̪̙͔̻̠͋ͥ̓ͥ̒͊̕̕͠ a̸̸̵̡̦̫͕̟̞͓̽͆͒ͣ̒̈́ͣ̐͑̚͜͝m̴̴̸̙͍̟̫̻͖̝͕̟̀͆ͫ́̒ͫ̔̐͝͝ в̴̴̸̡̠̞͙̝͇̻̓͒ⷡ͐̓̀ⷡ̓̓͒e̸̵̵̫̻̪͍̪͚̝͊̾ͤ̔ͤ͋̐͘͝͝c̸̴̴̡̢̞̪̼͙͖͚̫̈́̿ͨ̔̔ͨ͐̿̕̕͝o̸̴̸̪͙͖͚̘̝͚̠̾͛ͦ͊̔̽ͦ̈́̈́͛̚m̵̴̵̞̝͚̫̙̻̘̝͕͒̔ͫ̔͐ͫ͆̈́̕͝ë̸̸̴̡̡̙̘͙͓̠̞̠́͌̽ͤ̓̀ͤ͛̕͝ D̵̵̸͚̠̦͔͉̺͎̼̘́͊ͩ́͋̐ͩ̓̓̔͝è̴̴̵̢̡͇͖̟͔͓͖́ͤ̈́͌ͤ͆͛͛͝͝a̵̴̸͉͖͇̠͙͙͕͔͇͆͒ͣ͐̓͐ͣ́̾̒͝ᴛ̵̴̙̟̺͔̻̼͒̔͋ⷮ̾͘͝h̸̸̸͕͍̻͔̺̀̿ͪ̓͆́ͪ̿̾͑͜͝,̸͍͖̺͐̾̓̓̚ ᴛ̵̸͚̼̟͑ⷮ͊͘͜͝͠h̵̸̸̟͖͔͎͔̝͔͑ͪ̈́͊̽ͪ́͛́͘͜͝è̸̸̴̞̫̟͎̟͓̘͚͓̈́ͤ̓͌͛ͤ͐͘ D̸̸̴̢̡͍͍̺͉͎̦͑͒̽ͩ͌͐̓ͩ͒̔͜e̵̸̵̢̪͉͎͍̫̠͉͌ͤͤ̔̀̒͘̕͝͠s̸͎̫͇̓͑͛͛͝ᴛ̸̸̢̠̻͇͙͎̒͋ⷮ̐̓͒r̸̸̵͙͎͇̠̼̺̦̔̈́̈́ͬ͑̈́ͬ̔͌̐͜͝o̴̴̸̢̦͖̪͉͎̦͐͌ͦ̒̒̀ͦ̀̿͌͘͜y̸̪͇̙̔͝e̴̸̴̡̝͕̠̫̝̟̿̔ͤ̿̒ͤ̽̓͘͜r̸̸̵͖̼̫͓͉̝̫͌̓̽ͬ̽͛̐ͬ̾̈́͆͜ o̴̴̴̝̺̦̺̪̙͑̐̔ͦ̽͐ͦ͊̐̒͠f̴̼͍͖͑̀͘ W̸͔̻̒̿͐͜ö̵̸̸̡̢̠̫͉̺͎͚̪́̓͌ͦ͛ͦ̈́̔͛͝r̴̴̵̢̼̦͍̼͙͙̐ͬ͌̔̈́ͬ͋̽͘͘͝l̵̟̞̘͊͒͒d̴̴̴̡̫̞͔̟̪̟̾͋̀ͩ̐̒́ͩ͆͝͠s̸̝̺̪͑͌̽͛͛

Body 55

Myst 121

Nerve 52

Abilities: Mystic Trigger

“….That’s definitely not good.”

Epilogue:

Garland Grenore, the man who owned a sizable portion of Kalfath, sat in his study counting his money. The only sound in the room was the scratching of his pen against paper, and the faint flickering of the lamp beside him.

Currently, he was estimating his monthly income for the next six months. Physical mines were handy in that they followed a predictable bell curve of productivity, whereas Myst lenses eventually just shit the bed entirely.

Oh sure, there was the rare occasion where a mine dried up all at once or they uncovered a hidden vein, but for the most part, it was predictable.

The one thing that wasn’t handy about physical mines was all the workers he had to pay to keep the damn things running.

Garland scowled as he reviewed the expenses category. It was offset pretty handily by the rent he charged on mining equipment, clothes and food in the labor camps. Right under the two hundred bulbs for wages, was the one hundred and eighty-eight bulbs they paid him to keep them supplied. Under that, the eighty bulbs he spent paying for those supplies.

That brought a smile to his face.

Any of these fool scalescalps who could rub two numbers together would realize they were effectively being paid worse than slaves, but they were ignorant. And that was the greatest sin of all.

Slaves had laws for how they were to be treated.

These people broke their backs out of ignorance. There weren’t any laws for underpaying a free man.

Their own damn fault for being so ignorant, Garland thought with a wry grin as he totalled up the expected earnings.

When a mine is on its last legs, the trickiest thing to do was offload it onto some ignorant rube with more money than sense. Garland was expecting he’d have to sell the mines around Vannis, and pay for the workers to relocate here.

As long as the sale of the mine covered those expenses, he’d be golden.

And it looks like they will, he thought, totalling his final expected number for Jorgusmoon.

413 Bulbs.

Not the best month he’d ever had, but definitely a good month—especially since the mines in the rocky mountains were going to stay on the upswing of the bell graph for at least a decade to come. That meant that, on average, Jorgusmoon was going to be the worst month he’d have for the next ten years.

A thrill of pleasure shot through Garland as he visualized the numbers going up, and up. There was little in life more satisfying.

Well, except maybe flaying that asshole who broke my daughter and made a fool of me. Those posters had cost Garland thousands of bulbs in bad publicity, and the assassin he’d hired was a total failure. And his daughter hadn’t spoken to him in months. He scrunched his eyes, shook his head and rubbed his aching temple.

Garland didn’t know how Jeb wound up shaking hands with the emperor, but at that point, the fat human was no longer someone he could casually pay someone else to silence.

Jebediah Trapper was like that scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal, if only you could stop tonguing it.

The lamp flickered.

A blade cut through the air and tucked itself up against Garland’s throat, causing his breath to seize in his lungs, afraid to go past the razor-sharp steel.

“A more moral man than I would most likely have a list of character flaws and deplorable actions that he would use to justify your death,” a voice whispered beside him.

Garland peered behind him and froze up when he recognized Kol Rejan, the assassin who’d bungled his job.

Garland had never been afraid of a bungler.

“Now listen here, you—”

A line of white-hot pain was drawn across his throat, followed by wetness and choking as Garland’s blood escaped into his lungs and out onto his fine Mestikosian silks.

He tried to cough, but that expelled more blood and wracked his body with pain. He tried to breathe, but more blood found its way into his lungs, forcing his body to attempt to cough.

Grenore’s veins burned, and his head rapidly grew light, his vision swimming as he stumbled away from the desk, the assassin gliding out of his way.

“My justification isn’t nearly so noble. Your ‘simple job’ screwed me over in the most complete sense of the word, and your disparaging remarks to your peers about my efficacy have ensured that I’ve lost a large portion of my repute as an assassin. This, I cannot tolerate.”

Garland Grenore slumped against the wall, his vision tunneling as the blood left his brain.

Dimly, he heard the latch to his study click open, and his dying brain put together the pieces. The only one in the mansion right now was Seraine! His daughter would surely come to his aid! He slumped over onto the floor and began to muster every ounce of power he could get out of his limbs, crawling around his desk, trying to get to his savior.

***Kol Rejan, level 61 Courier***

The light left Garland Grenore’s eyes, and he died crawling on the floor, just before he would have seen his daughter’s face one last time.

Sucks to be him, Kol thought as he wiped his blade off on the corrupt businessman’s clothes.

“Good evening, young lady,” Kol said and he sheathed the blade, regarding the pretty heiress standing frozen in the doorway. Generally he didn’t pitch to the young and indiscreet, but these were special circumstances, and Kol needed to do some networking after Grenore had shit all over his reputation.

“For the sake of professionalism, I wish to inform you that your father’s death was entirely of his own making. You have no fault in it.”

She drew in a shuddering breath.

“And considering your newfound wealth, should you ever need someone dispatched, here is my card. Kol Rejan. I don’t kill children, nobles, or beings of limitless power.” He flipped out his new business card leading to the dead drop in Solmnath and placed it on the blood-spattered desk.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m enjoying my PTO.”

The lamp flickered.

A Word From the Author

Hi there! This is Macronomicon. If you’re reading this, chances are good that you just finished this whole book! I’m a simple guy who likes writing protagonists who use their brainmeats to solve their problems instead of wrapping their fists in ever-more-ridiculous ‘techniques’ and punching harder.

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you like reading about wizards that behave like proper wizards instead of DBZ clones.

If that’s the case, I cordially invite you to visit Macronomicon’s Patreon page, where I’ve always got something going on, Whether it be a novice Soulmonger, A wizard king, or a good old fashioned wizard battle.

Chapters hot off the presses, available as soon as they’re written, often months ahead of public releases like this one.

If you liked my style, but not enough for that kind of commitment, I’ve got several series available to binge on RoyalRoad.

Go there.

Read for free.

Enjoy the craziness.