Wish upon the Stars (Original Superhero cultivation sci fi litrpg)

[Malcolm Tent]

We reached the next floor quickly, then the one above that, keeping to the unused passages. The trick was finding passages that connected to each other in the way we needed that weren't commonly traveled, and even then we almost ran into a few people. Murmur prevented us from being discovered, but when we reached the sixth floor, we ran into a big problem, and one I hadn't foreseen at all.


"Shit," I said as I stopped at the exit to our current batch of tunnels. "We have a problem."


Callie stepped up next to me, trying to spot what I was talking about. "What is it?" I think she assumed the door was busted or something, given where I was looking. Of course, that would have been far preferable to what I'd ACTUALLY found.


"The hallway ahead of us has…I don't know exactly how to describe it. Maybe a stealth canceller?"


I'd never seen any enchantment or device like this, so I was kind of stumped. It hadn't shown up on my scan because it was pretty deeply embedded, and it was sort of passive rather than active. Chelsea frowned at me. "How does it work?"


"You know how stealth functions, it's information warfare. You identify your traces and then erase them." I grimaced as I puzzled out how it functioned. "This thing uses a massive array of constantly shifting detection types to basically overwhelm any stealth skill. There are too many types of traces to identify and erase, and eventually the canceller trips you up and you get detected."


My sister looked worried. "But Murmur can handle it right? It's a domain. And Dantalion is perfect for that kind of battle."


"Yes," I agreed. "And I could break through eventually, but I'd have to exhaust the entire gamut of detection methods, which means casing this place for days if not weeks. We don't have the time. We can't go into that hallway in stealth."


Bethy's eyes lit up. "Does that mean…"


I grimaced. "It DOES. But you can't go overboard, ok? We're doing this to save time. You saw the people down in the city right? Is that enough information?"


"What are you talking about?" Abel asked nervously. "What does it mean?"


Reaching out for me and Callie, Bethy opened her Domain, sucking all of us inside. Rather than end up on the black grass, we actually manifested INSIDE the castle. Specifically, in a palatial bedroom covered in black drapery and sporting a colossal canopy bed. "It means it's time for a FASHION SHOW!" Bethy cheered triumphantly. "We need to blend in which means everyone gets a new outfit! You get a new outfit! You get a new outfit! You have wings and you look great anyway so you can keep that on, but probably lose the mask."


She'd pointed at my sister, Dayna, and Callie respectively. I just groaned. Bethy loved fashion. It was one of her favorite hobbies, and she'd talk about it for HOURS if we let her. Which we didn't, because none of us cared that much about clothes beyond initial costume design. Sometimes Benny or Chelsea would chat with her about it, it was her passion and we weren't assholes who deprived our friends of joy, but we strictly limited how much she brought it up, because otherwise she'd be dressing all of us in something new every day.


"We're in your hands, Bethy," I told her solemnly. "Only your fashion sense can save us."


She squealed with delight, literally bouncing up and down in excitement, and then blurred across the room to throw open a pair of huge doors. Inside was a massive closet full to bursting with racks and dressers all overflowing with different styles of clothing. Bethy arrive in front of one, opened it up, and then started digging around inside, throwing things over her shoulder to land in a big pile behind her back. "Too gaudy, too frilly, that one is possessed," she muttered under her breath as she sorted.


"Sorry what was that last one?" I called worriedly.


"Too frilly," she called back distractedly. "No talking, I'm trying to find something that will work. I can't just slap you all in tals and cufflinks and have you pass. Fashion is like a fingerprint. Every unique region has little flourishes and accentuations that make them stand out. Now, I obviously don't have anything from this region, BUT if I cobble together a few different pieces…" she snagged a bunch of articles of clothing, and to my surprise, started cutting them apart, using her nails as stitch rippers.


Once that was done, she waved an arm and it dissolved into bats at the elbow. The bats swept down and snagged a bunch of needles and thread and started zooming back and forth, sewing together pieces and clothing elements she'd shredded.


Finally, she finished, her arm reforming, and she turned to beam at me. "Shane! You're up first. Lose the mask and the armor."


I did, stashing both in my ring. I was wearing my usual silk boxers, so i wasn't worried about exposure, and once I'd stripped she blurred over, practically shoving me into a frilly button up shirt, then a coat, and then some pants and boots. She clipped several chains, a bunch of adornments, and few pieces of jewelry onto me, adjusted my lapels, and then stepped back, stroking her chin as she made a speculative hum.


Then she yanked off the jacket and marched back into the closet to root around. "So…I don't think I knew you could enter your own Domain," I said slowly. "How are you in here and out there at the same time, or do you not need to be present to hold the domain together."


"Not how it works," she said absently. "Domains are anchored in the dimensional fabric. I can enter my own Domain, though while I'm in here, the Domain itself is fixed in place. It becomes a bit like a spatially expanded space in a building. I wouldn't normally do it, but since we were in an abandoned secret passage, it seemed safe to come in."


I nodded, watching absently as she worked on the clothes. "I was wondering about something. You're really into fashion and you're a big fan of clothes and things like that. It doesn't seem like something that would come up on that creepy ship your dad lives on."


"You're be surprised," she said with a faint smile. "But my dad wasn't the one who got me interested in clothes. My mother was the one who taught me how to sew when I was a little girl. She would make me outfits to try on, and she was always making clothes for the maids in the castle." Her smile wilted. "She did that less and less as I grew up. I haven't seen her pick up a needle in a long time. But I still like it."


I remembered the story about her mother, and how her dad had come to get her when the woman gradually abandoned her. Meanads, I knew, had a lot of problems with wine. Bethy could make very powerful wine that could help people get stronger at an incredible rate, but she didn't like to use that ability.


Letting her get back into her sewing, I waited and then got into my new outfit. I felt naked without my mask, but Callie stepped up to study me appraisingly, and from her approving smile, she liked what she saw. She smoothed down my lapels. "Well, don't you look handsome. I think we make quite the pair." She reached down to pinch her ball gown with her fingers, then spun in a circle, spinning her cloak and dress. I caught a faint flicker of wings as she did, and smiled at her softly.


"Once again, not an appropriate time for mooning over each other," Chelsea said helpfully. At my raised eyebrow she shrugged. "Usually Benny is the one who yanks you two out of your own little world when you get all doe eyed, but he's not here, and I'd rather not accidentally step on a bear trap or something because you're distracted."


"I do NOT get distracted," I protested. "I am laser…" I paused and then glanced at my wife. "Sorry, I spaced, what were we talking about?"


Callie snickered and my sister rolled her eyes before being yanked off to try on a dress Bethy had just modified. Before long, we were all dressed up with nowhere to go. Except we had somewhere to go. To the vault. I wondered if the outfits would make it harder to break in, but that thought didn't seem efficient, so I pushed it down, nodding at Bethy to let us out.


She did, or at least she let a few of us out. Me, Callie, her, Abel. The rest stayed in the Domain, although they complained about it because Bethy hadn't seen fit to mention that they'd be staying behind before dressing them up in outfits they apparently didn't need.


We stepped out into the hallway casually, looking around to see if anyone was nearby. Since stealth was out of the question we were going with the "act like you belong there" defense. This fortress was huge, and there were tens of thousands of people in it. No way anyone we ran into would know everyone who was supposed to be here, and if they did…we'd handle that if it came up.


Setting off for the next passage, we kept up a brisk walk. The trick with looking unobtrusive is to walk fast enough to look busy but not fast enough to seem like you're hurrying. Hurrying is interesting, even if it isn't always suspicious.


Sadly, things rarely go according to plan, and as we walked quickly through the halls, a series of voices reached our ears. I briefly considered hiding or moving, but that would be suspicious, so we just shifted aside a bit as a large group of loud young men and women came bustling down the hall.


They were all dressed like we were, and a few of the guys were stumbling backwards ahead of the group of ten or twenty, doing or at least attempting dumb stunts to impress the girls who were mostly ignoring them. The whole crowd stank of wine so strongly I could smell it from down the hall. One of the stumblers, a short red haired guy with a patchy beard and bright green eyes, was trying to do a flip to impress a dark haired girl in purple when he accidentally slammed into me.


Naturally, being six foot four and pretty high in D-rank, I wasn't much affected, but the guy bounced off me awkwardly, slamming into the wall with a groan. He turned to look at me blearily. I half expected him to flip out and challenge me to a duel or something but he just beamed at me.


"Friends!" He cheered. "Meeting like this is naturally fate! Come, you must join us in celebrating Lady Hilary's birthday. We had a lovely cask of DeVost Red in the ballroom, but we seem to have misplaced the majority of it…" he giggled drunkenly. "In my belly!"


The girl in the purple sighed. "I'm sorry about Wendell. He's an obnoxious drunk. I don't mean to hold up your night. You're free to join us, of course, but feel no pressure."


I nodded gratefully, and I was about to move past her, when Callie's hand snapped out to catch my arm. "We don't have anywhere to be." My wife said cheerfully. "We'd love to help you celebrate your special day." I raised an eyebrow at her, but didn't disagree, she obviously had a reason for doing that.



As we fell into step with the group and started chatting, Callie's voice sounded in my head. "Don't react. We need to follow these people. I'm not sure which one it is, but one of them is a Priest of the Void." My blood went cold. I glanced casually at the people surrounding us, and I felt a knot form in my stomach. She was right, we couldn't ignore that. They might be involved in the attempted shallow in the caves. Even if this would waste our time we had to check. I sighed internally. Great. I hated parties.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

We were in trouble. Not immediately, because we were blending fine and these people were mostly very drunk, but in a more general sense. We NEEDED to get to the vault and get working. Someone was going to notice us here eventually, and when they did, we'd be pretty fucked.


That said, we also needed to find the priest here. That Shallow had been dangerous, but more importantly, I wasn't convinced one D-ranker could have arranged it. I wasn't sure what the process was for weakening the barriers into the void, but I was pretty sure it involved the same kind of misery farming that was done in the dungeon. No one here had access to the kind of numbers needed to stockpile that.


If there was a Void sympathizer helping them try to break through, it was probably someone in one of the higher zones, which meant that this priest probably had some kind of connection to them, or maybe to an organization they had founded.


Callie, for her part, had decided to make friends with the birthday girl. Lady Hilary (just call me Hilary) was surprisingly down to earth, and even more surprisingly sober. She was pretty decent company, and Callie dragged me into the conversation pretty quickly. I didn't mind talking to someone sober, considering the rest of the party was mostly clustered around Abel and Bethy, with Bethy being surrounded by an enthusiastic group of men and women who were vying for her attention, and Abel having gotten into some kind of competition with the others to see who could handle having their fist punched harder.


"I'm sorry about them," Hilary said wryly. "I tried to get them to hold back, but Wendell is a bit of a party animal. He really is a lot of fun though, so we put up with it."


One of the few guys who wasn't clustered around Bethy and Abel snorted. "He's a lush. If he didn't bring his own wine no one would put up with him." At her stern glare, he cleared his throat. "Not to question your taste in friends, milady. I'm sure he has his good points. I just don't drink much, so he's less entertaining to me."


"I'm surprised you aren't drinking with them," Callie chuckled. "It IS your party. Seems rude to party without the birthday girl."


She grimaced. "I wish I could." Her tone was miserable. "I have a banquet with my family tomorrow evening, and Wendell's libations are usually a bit stronger than average. No one is sure where he gets such potent wine, but he's certainly happy to share." She chuckled. "Duncan isn't wrong, he can be a bit much, but he's always generous and willing to lend an ear, and that's why he manages to make friends with everyone."


"He gets them drunk," Duncan said with a grimace. "Is that even called making friends?"


I saw Wendell infiltrate the crowd by Bethy, slipping through them smoothly. Everyone made way for the red haired man, like they just took for granted that he needed to get through. When he appeared next to my vampire friend, he held out a wine glass he'd pulled from…somewhere, and started pouring wine into it from an equally mysterious bottle.


Abel, punching the fists of a bunch of other guys, met my eyes as I glanced over at him. Noting the discomfort on Bethy's face (made all the more unsettling by how unflappable she was, I jerked my head towards her. He nodded, making excuses and slipping away towards the pair of them. He didn't bother being subtle, he just shoved people out of the way until he arrived. Wendell was trying to push the drink on her, his friendly smile a bit insistent as he leaned in closer.


Never one for subtlety, Abel just reached out and slapped the glass out of his hand. The shattering sound echoed through the hall, and everyone went silent, staring at my mentor as he loomed over the small redhead, who was flinching back, looking scared.


That was when I started smelling something off. Literally. I could scent dishonesty. Wendell had made a comment about how he didn't mean anything by it, and just wanted to help her relax, and I could SMELL that he was lying. I separated from the group, approaching the two of them, and smiled pleasantly. "Hey there guys, something the matter? We don't want to ruin the party, do we?"


Wendell shot me a relieved look. "No of course not. I was just offering the lady a drink. I think your friend here got a little jealous." If I wasn't so suspicious I'd have laughed. Abel viewing Bethy as a romantic prospect was about as likely as Benny dating my sister. There was absolutely no tension there. The fact that he was trying to deflect made my suspicion deepen though.


"She doesn't drink," I said cheerfully. "I'm sure he was just being protective. I don't usually drink either, but I'm willing to have a glass with you as an apology. Want to pour one for me?"


I was beginning to suspect something was wrong with Wendell, and more importantly with his wine. Between Leviathan and Callie's heretic fire, I wasn't scared of any D-rank influence, but if I took a sip I could confirm what was going on.


Sure enough, he brightened. "That sounds wonderful," another glass and bottle appeared, and he made a show of pouring generously, offering it to me with a flourish.


I took it from him, offering a smile, and then took a small sip. As I did, I activated Gluttony and Leviathan, though I flexed my will enough to keep the outward manifestations from popping up. No flaming hair and all that.


As the liquid poured down my throat, I felt a surge of…darkness. Like a voice was whispering in my ear. Leviathan flared, warding off the influence as Gluttony destroyed the physical liquid as it poured into me. Even so, I had to pull on Callie's power through the bond, flooding my system with heretic fire to stave off the chill of despairing ennui.


This stuff was…awful. Not the taste, though that wasn't great. But what it did. I'd had Dantalion running when I drank, confined to my own skin, and I was able to analyze the composition of the energy as Gluttony broke it down. I'd never considered that combination before, but it was something to note. What it told me was deeply disturbing.


The wine was infused with Void, the liquid form of that same despair and soulcrushing hopelessness that had made up the mist from before. But it was more than that. The Void was a priming agent, a sort of preparation for the energy in the wine.


Because that was Wendell's power. He infused the wine with some sort of hypnotic energy. It didn't impair the drinker, it just made them more trusting. Wendell became more likable, more interesting, you wanted to tell him things and be his friend.


Normally, this probably wasn't a particularly useful ability. It was VAGUELY soul related, but it was also very weak. It mostly just made him a better party host most likely. But with the Void taint in the wine, people's mental state became vulnerable and easy to manipulate. His power combined with the Void wine turned a weak, low level ability into an extremely dangerous social manipulation tool.


It was also the kind of power NOBODY would trust if they found out you had it. Some abilities, like Mad Scientists had been back home, had deservedly bad reputations. Being able to control people, even slightly, through tainting their drinks was the kind of thing that would get you branded as a dangerous element.


I saw a flash of satisfaction in Wendell's eyes as I drank, and I knew that at the very least, he didn't have the feedback to understand that it hadn't worked. But it confirmed what I'd already known. He knew what he was doing, and he enjoyed it. My expression stayed jovial, but my heart was cold. I'm not a bloodthirsty person. I don't decide to kill people easily or often, and when I do, it's usually in single combat.


This guy though, this guy I was going to kill. Trying to poison Bethy with Void wine so he could manipulate her mind? That was a death sentence. But I couldn't just attack him here. I had to play this smart. We still needed to enter the vault and retreat.


I smiled at Wendell. "I'm so sorry about my friend, here, let me clean up your glass for you." I reached down, having seen him do the same, and with a seemingly unintentional wobble, I bumped his shoulder. His finger jerked across a shard of glass and he hissed. My eyes went wide with horror, and I scrambled to "help" slipping the bloody shard into my ring.


He waved me off, looking momentarily annoyed before his mask of good humor returned. I apologized profusely, claiming Abel had already had a few drinks and saying that Callie and Bethy and I needed to take him home to rest. We made our excuses and left, and I saw Wendell staring after us with a troubled expression. In the end, he shrugged and seemed to let it go, and we managed to reach the next passage pretty quickly.


"What the hell was that?" Abel demanded. "You know how she is about wine, you just let him get away with-"


"Nothing," I said coldly. "I didn't let him get away with anything. He tried to do more than give her wine, and I absolutely am NOT letting it go. But now isn't the time. I have my own means of dealing with him, but I promise you, he WILL be dealt with. No one messes with my friends. I just didn't want to tip our hand early and get us surrounded and killed."


He glanced at Bethy, who looked a little subdued. When she was us looking, she perked up, pasting on a big smile. "It's fine, Shane, really! He was just trying to be nice, right?"


She'd clearly missed what I'd just said, so I repeated it, and informed them of what he was doing. Callie looked troubled. "So he's the priest I sensed?" She asked in confusion. "I don't know, I thought they felt stronger."


"Might not be him," I pointed out. "Maybe you sensed the Void energy in the wine. Someone had to have put it there, and I don't think Wendell has the chops. Regardless, we'll have to look into that later. Interrogating a bunch of drunk partiers under the guise of having a good time is one thing, but trying to pump an active Void infiltrator for information after he's got reason to pay attention is too risky."


Once we were out, I'd have Devlan look into his background, and I'd use Dantalion to retrace his steps outside the fortress if needed. I didn't believe he could have come into contact with NO ONE outside. This place was isolated, but not that isolated.


They all looked angry, and I understood, but I really did have it under control. Just to calm them down, I told them what I had planned, and they all stared at me in shock. "I…I didn't know you could DO that." Abel said in respectful awe.


I shrugged. "It's not a power I use much, but it works here. Like I said, it's handled. Just waiting for the right time."


With that revelation, everyone cheered up considerably. Since we were past the cancellers, I put us back under Murmur. I'd keep an eye out for them in the future, but for now we should be safe, and I felt better under stealth. After that, we moved on.


The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful, and when we finally reached the last passage, I called everyone to a halt, expanding Dantalion's range across the intervening space so I could get a read on the vault from inside the hidden passage. We'd only get one shot at this, and I was going to make it count. It was heist time.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

We had arrived. The Vault was right across the hall, and now we just needed to get into it. I'd carefully selected the team I'd brought for this, specifically because of their unique abilities and the details of the vault. First up, obviously, was Abel. I glanced at my mentor. "I need you to create a slipstream of spatial lubrication across this hall, then under the door blocking off the other side."


He nodded, humming contemplatively. "I'm assuming you want Bethy to carry us through in her Domain?"


"As mist, preferably," I agreed. I turned to the others. "Once we're in, Sable is going to take over." I glanced at her intently. "The first room of the Vault is a garden. It looks peaceful but it's covered in special formations designed to detect living beings. Because of the way it's set up though, plants are excluded. We need your root golems to get us across."


The rest of the plan would need to be explained on the fly. There were observations I needed to make in person, and I couldn't predict the outcome. Some of the defenses were randomized, and while I knew what had been a threat when I checked the Vault the first time, my staff could only simulate, not actually predict the future. While prediction WAS something I could achieve in limited circumstances, doing it hours ahead of time with so many variables was impossible for me.


Stepping closer to Bethy, we all let her pull us into her Domain. There was a brief flicker across the red moon, and she let us back out. Abel's spatial lubrication combined with Bethy's mist form let us smoothly bypass most of the external defenses. I'd had to double check a few things on arrival just to be sure, but that part of the plan had gone off without a hitch.


Inside the Vault, we emerged into a surprisingly peaceful garden. We were standing at one end, on a stone platform set into the ground, and a path of cobblestones extended through the place from the platform.


The path was a trap. It didn't actually prevent the formations from detecting you, and there were actually several dangerous trap enchantments laid out on the stones. The detection formations could identify members of the city lord's bloodline, or could be bypassed with a special token, neither of which we had. But that was why I'd brought Sable.


The red haired witch stepped forward confidently, reaching into a pouch, and withdrew a handful of seeds. Nicking her finger, she spread some blood on them and then tossed them casually off the platform and into the grass of the garden.


While the garden only detected living beings and not plants, there were other defenses in play. More active defenses that were a threat to the root golems. Our best bet here was quantity, sending a bunch of them through so that one or two might make it to the other side. Sure enough, the little root people took off for the other side of the room, and as they ran, they started getting picked off.


The garden was gorgeous. A huge, lush expanse of thick plantlife containing hundreds of flowers, trees, and various other interesting flora. I could even see what looked like animals made of plants, moss deer and moose with tree antlers. As the root people ran out among the plants, a large portion of them reacted.


Flowers grew teeth and devoured root people whole, tendrils from beneath the ground dragged them under kicking and screaming, and in some cases, floating spores or fluff landed on them gently, burrowing into the creatures and tearing them apart in explosions of blooming flowers or mushrooms. The whole thing was a horror show, and it made me glad I hadn't decided to brute force it. This was what happened when you DIDN'T trip the defenses. Imagining an actual coordinated response made my blood run cold.


After a bit of trial and error, we realized that there WAS a path through the garden, it just wasn't the stone one in the middle. I also suspected that the recognition formations did more than attack if triggered, I was pretty sure they suppressed the passive defenses too. Still, we managed to get one of them through, and once it got to the other side, I used Double Trouble to appear behind it, bypassing the entire room.


Once I was through, I turned to the large expanse of unwarded earth on the other side, then triggered Agares, and began shaping a long bridge to cover the room.


This was the biggest gap in the security setup. There were formations in place that required that any passersby walk across the ground. They jammed air passage to prevent anyone from just flying over. I'd bypassed them entirely with teleportation, but that was an uncommon ability to have, and the Vault itself was blocked off from teleportation coming in, so it was considered a low priority to defend against.


By using the unaltered ground on the other side of the formations, I could create a path that conformed to the defenses without actually subjecting my people to them. Within a few minutes, the bridge had formed, and my friends strolled casually across it to join me on the other side of the garden.


I grinned at Sable. "Nice one. That took more root puppets than expected. You feeling ok? You had to bleed a couple times for that."


She shrugged. "I'm a witch, and I use blood in a lot of work. I'm used to it." She shot Bethy a considering glance. "I am feeling a little faint though, Bethy, does that big castle have more than just that one bedroom?"


"Of course," the Vampire said perkily. "And all the beds are super soft. I found them on this really weird planet. They have mattress trees there. Also couch bushes, but those eat people. Poor Tracy is still afraid of paisley. Though to be fair, who wouldn't be, it's hideous."


It took me a second to remember that Tracy was one of her thralls. I hadn't seen them in ages, since they couldn't really keep up with our pace. Regardless, it was clear Sable wanted to take a nap, and Bethy seemed happy to oblige. Once she'd taken the witch into her Domain, we turned to the doorway to the next room.


"Alright Chels, you're up," I told my sister. "This is a special door that can only be opened by bloodline descendants of the city lord, OR by people with the token to get in here. It works on energy signature. This is good for us, because the energy signature we need is stored in the formations in this garden. The formation has to be able to recognize the proper signature to allow family members to pass."


My sister grinned. "Ooooh, I get it. You want me to use my diagram to share the power from the formations with the door lock."


She raised her hand, and a symbol appeared. Not the full yin yang diagram, but a segment of it. The dark section with the single white dot, looking like a comma. She extended her hand toward the garden, and the comme flew out and landed on the grass, luckily not setting off and alarms. Then she raised her other hand, manifesting a white comma with a black spot, and pressed it to the door.


The two segments glowed, and then the door glowed, and then there was a click and it swung open seamlessly. My sister grinned at us smugly. "See, when I work, there aren't any big loud crashes or ruined landscapes. I achieve everything with perfect balance and harmony. Violence is never the answer."


"Isn't one of your powers conceptual destruction?" Abel asked her mildly.


Chelsea smiled sweetly at him. "Isn't one of your powers shutting up before I hurt you? It would be a shame if, the next time we use the diagram, your powers conveniently fail when you're about to punch something scary."


"Have you learned nothing from Benny?" I asked him with a laugh. "Never piss off the support."


We stepped over the Vault threshold. This was the last room. "Alright, Dayna, you're up." I pointed up at the flying boxes randomly floating through the air. They seemed to be passing through some weird exchanging orbit that altered constantly. This had been part of why I'd needed to wait until now to reveal the plan. I had to use Dantalion to identify the right box. "Can you hit one of those boxes without actually damaging it?"


The archer frowned. "I…think so?" she said hesitantly. "I'd need to know which box, and I might need a minute to set up my shot. If we need contact without damage I need to hit it at the top of an arc. I'll need to make sure all the force is spent and that it hits in that moment before gravity starts reasserting control."


"Good, Chelsea, I want you to link that same power signature to her arrow," I instructed my sister. "Just give me a minute to find the right box." Callie glared at me, clearing her throat, and I rolled my eyes. "Alright, fine, do a few boxes while I look so you can practice."


Cheering happily, my wife dragged my sister and our archer off to set up. The interior of the main Vault chamber was BIG, but most of it was empty space. The floor made up a relatively small proportion of the room's area, but even that was about a square mile. CLosing my eyes, I took a deep breath. This was going to be deeply uncomfortable. I needed to use Callie's shadows to boost Dantalion again. Luckily, most of this room was empty space, and the Vault itself was an isolator of power, so the range would be MUCH smaller this time.


Reaching into the bond, I retraced the steps we'd taken before. I knew how to access her shadows without her help now, having done it with her once, and kneeling down to touch the dark was simple.


My mind expanded, and I grimaced as information flooded my brain. Luckily, it was MUCH less of it than last time, so I was able to handle it with just a few parallels to help manage the info dump.


I scanned the boxes, identifying which ones were the oldest. I figured starting there made the most sense, since the key was ancient and probably wasn't taken out that often. Once I found the oldest of them, I sifted through the information until I finally found the right box. "That one!" I called to the others as I reached up to point at a box.


I let Dantalion drop, turning to see Callie and Chelsea digging through a trio of metal boxes that had clearly been retrieved from the orbit above us. They were waiting for me though, and when I called out, they turned to see where I was pointing. Without much delay, Chelsea imbued Dayna with the right energy, and the archer drew and fired. The arrow arched gracefully through the air, reaching the apex of its arc and hanging suspended, the tip just barely brushing the box in question.


Despite all the impressive things I saw on the regular, watching the elven archer fire the shot so perfectly that the arrow essentially tapped the box in zero gravity, I was blown away. The delicacy and control needed for that were staggering. Whisper might shoot a little harder, but Dayna was obviously our strongest archer in terms of technique.


Once it was touched, the box smoothly drifted down and dropped onto the ground in front of Dayna, popping open as it landed to reveal the object inside.


Strolling forward, I leaned down to grab the key from its purple velvet cushion. The object was black metal with strange protrusions and sharp angles all over it. I didn't question it, this was the right item, I could tell from its history. I stashed it in my ring, then turned to the others, cracking my neck. "Good job everyone. Now that we have the key, gather up all the extra loot. This next part is going to be a little wild."

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Our total assets from this were substantial. Two hundred and seven C-rank chits, a series of random treasures we needed Zeke to identify (or I guess I could spend a day with them in Dantalion) and the key we'd come for. Once we packed everything up, I got to work setting up for my big plan.


When entering, I had been worried about leaving. Once anyone entered the vault, they were going to realize something was wrong, and when they did, they'd lock the place down and search top to bottom. This was naturally not a dealbreaker, we had our ways to retreat, and worst case, we could use wishes to get out, I still had some on hand just in case, and any of our people could wish for our exit. Hell I could use one of Nat's scrolls.


However, the earlier meeting with Wendell had provided me with an opportunity. Reaching into my ring, I pulled out the shard of glass with his blood on it.


I had a lot of abilities. Big, small, consequential and pointless. My mistwalking power hadn't been valuable in quite a while, for instance. I even had powers I'd never used before, and the one that was going to help me out of this particular jam was one of those. Namely, Blood Curse.


I'd gotten Blood Curse one or two rank ups ago, and while I had included it in one of my forms, I'd never had occasion to actually use the power itself. It let me use blood as a connection to attack people from a long distance, and was, to my knowledge, MOSTLY untraceable. Kneeling down, I began the process of the Blood Curse.


While Blood Curse was useful and powerful, it had a lot of conditions. It was meant to be a long range assassination technique, not a battle skill. To make that work, the most important thing was setup. Blood Curse itself was less of a skill and more of a ritual. My form could use it without prep because there was no distance between me and myself, essentially allowing me to skip that step because I was using it in EXTREME proximity.


Cutting myself, I slowly traced a series of patterns on the flood of the vault, then glanced over to Bethy and my sister. "Alright, so the plan is simple. We use blood curse to take out Wendell. He's a huge creep who is using Void taint to mind control people, so he's not exactly a loss, but more importantly, he's high profile and currently out with a LOT of important members of the fortress's younger generation."


Once Wendell died, everyone would freak out. The whole fortress would surge over to where the party was ongoing to investigate and check on the others, and we could walk right out the back door.


Bethy grinned viciously. "Good, I didn't like that guy at all. What do you want me to do?"


"I figured we'd use Chelsea's diagram to infuse your Domain into the Blood Curse, and then once it was connected, you could like…eat him." I trailed off at that last bit. "Was going to think of a nicer way to say that, but I guess it is what it is. You cool with a snack?"


I knew Bethy's Domain could consume, just like Lark's. I'd seen them use it like that. Plus it was blood based, which meant the curse should carry it flawlessly.


Bethy grinned, exposing her razor sharp fangs. "I have been feeling a bit peckish." I nodded to my sister, who close her eyes, and her diagram manifested above her. I felt the power of the Blood Curse sort of…well, for lack a better word bleed, into another powerful force, and Bethy's Domain flowed into the circle of sigils I'd drawn. When it had merged in, there was a low boom as the air inside was displaced and the blood making up the symbol caught fire, crimson flames licking the air.


Inside the circle, a small figure appeared, it went stiff and then started writhing, and the flames seemed to siphon red from the figure, the writhing becoming more and more extreme until it completely dissolved.


I felt the curse SNAP as the figure vanished, and assumed that meant Wendell was dead. The blood red flames exploded outward, funneling towards Bethy and pouring down her throat. She stumbled back, unable to stand as the excess points poured into her. Bethy's ability to consume stats wasn't WEAK, but she didn't do it the same way that Lark could. She actually bit people.


I turned to Sable to check if things were ok. As a legitimate witch and a group member who'd been here the whole time, she might be able to shed some light on the details. "Do you know what's going on with her? I was kind of counting on her help on the exit. I have contingencies, but is she going to be…ok?"


Sable grimaced. "Something about the synergy between the admittedly witchcraft adjacent blood curse and her Domain seems to have created a MASSIVELY improved consumption speed. Witchcraft is all about affecting the large with the small, using symbolism to create large scale changes with tiny catalysts. Considering how powerful her catalyst was…" She glanced at Bethy worriedly. "She might be out of it for a while."


My vampire friend looked all but comatose as her eyes flickered between bright red and deep crimson, stuttering like she was processing something. Abel caught her, looking concerned, and I had him hand her off to Dayna as I prepared for our exit.


We made our way through the garden on the bridge easily enough, and once we reached the other side, I covered us all in Murmur as we pushed through the door.


We were greeted by utter chaos. People running through the halls, screaming and shouting. Someone stopped as they ran by, glanced at the Vault, and ran over to slam their hand down on a carved lion's head on one of the pillars.


There was a deep grinding sound, and the floor lurched as the Vault began to presumably descend into the basement. I shrugged. Bit late now. Hell, that might actually help, since it would prevent them from discovering the thefts until the figured out who had killed Wendell. The only issue was…it was probably pretty obvious.


Vampirism was RARE, and there weren't a lot of beings that could kill a person in that fashion. We'd have to be careful not to let Bethy's existence get out while we were in Yettin, which meant binding contracts with any allies. Her strength was one of my trump cards, and was a big motivator, so I couldn't exactly keep it secret, we'd have to compartmentalize the information as best we could.


Heading for the access to our passage, I watched the locals run around like headless chickens, babbling and screaming. It didn't seem like most of them even cared who was dead, they just heard someone had been killed in a weird way and immediately decided they were "under attack".


"They KILLED Wendell!" I heard someone wail from down the hallway. "They're after our WINE!"


"Shut up Kyle," bellowed someone else. "Someone is dead, worry about wine another time, stop freaking out about fucking alcohol. FREAK OUT ABOUT THE FACT THAT WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" Everyone screamed, and the hubbub picked up. I pushed into the passage, covering us with Murmur so no one saw the entrance, then pushed it closed.


Turning to the others, I rolled my eyes. "Fucking babies. One person gets killed and the world is ending."


"Umm… Shane…" Callie said worriedly, withdrawing her fingers from the shadows. "You might want to see this. Actually, no, you probably shouldn't. Suffice to say I understand the panic. Wendell is basically a skeleton at this point. Note for the future, we should NOT combine those two abilities again."


Sable hummed consideringly. "I'm not sure about that. Thinking it over, witchcraft is mostly symbolic. It's worth mentioning that Wendell's power was wine based. Given Bethy's nature, it's possible that played a role in the increased consumption. Symbolically she was drinking the wine he tried to offer her earlier. Ritual is a big part of things like this."


I winced. "Right, so we need to do some testing with Blood Curse, especially when using it in combination with something like Bethy's Domain or Chelsea's diagram. It's fine, we were planning to kill him anyway, he was a scumbag. We just maybe went a bit overboard."


Putting that out of my mind, I led the others back down through the tunnels. We had to be very careful in the warded hallway, but we got through, making it back down to the basement access hatch without too much trouble. The distraction, despite a bit of over the top drama, had worked perfectly. By the time we arrived in the basement, Bethy was waking up, and we set her on a table to come to before we activated the lift.


She yawned blearily as she sat up, rubbing her eyes. "Oh wow guys, I just had the strangest dream. You were there, and you," she pointed at us all in succession. Then she continued cheerfully "we were in a castle made of candy canes with chocolate spider legs that was trying to shoot down the moon." She giggled. "Man, I always have the weirdest dreams after I eat bad guys. So, is it time to go?"


I sighed. "Yeah, looks like we're taking the lift." I grimaced up at the wooden platform. "I don't LOVE the idea of being lowered into a seemingly bottomless abyss that tries to eat people. But it's better than nothing. Let's load up."


Everyone hopped up on the platform, which thankfully didn't shift or groan ominously. High rank Ascendant materials were pretty damned sturdy. Mere age wasn't enough to wear out this rope. Not that I trusted that. I used Dantalion to thoroughly inspect both the rope and platform, and once that was done, I had Sable send a root clone over to the pulley system in the corner.


The lever was on a kind of winch, so you would pump the handle back and forth and it would ratchet you down. Even if you let go of the handle, the platform wouldn't fall, it would just sit there stably.


As it began to ratchet, another puppet kicked open the door, and within seconds, we were slipping past the floor of the basement, past the stone of the floating island, and slowly descending into the chasm below. It took what seemed like forever to reach the web bridge, and when we did, we dismounted quickly, careful to remain stable while getting the fuck off that thing as fast as possible.


With a quick thought from Sable, the platform rose back up into the island and the trapped door slammed back into place, blending seamlessly with the rock above us. Grinning, we took off into the cave system ahead.


I was absolutely thrilled to be out of there, and we made it through the caves pretty easily, emerging back out onto the hillside, only to be met by one of Devlan's people who helped hurry us through the check points. They even paid for us to take the nice path up, and we stopped for souvenirs and food on Devlan's coin.


When we finally reached the club, the smarmy butler wasn't even glaring at us as we made our way in to see his boss. I dropped the key onto his desk with a thump. Before he could react, I started grilling him about Wendell, seeing what he knew and what he could find out. He seemed nonplussed, but he answered hesitantly when he knew what to say, and promised to look into the rest of it.


Finally, he offered us free rooms in the club, and put us up for the night. We were all exhausted, so we agreed to head to bed and discuss our expansion when we woke up the next day. Aside from finding more allies though, we had some searching to do for the source of that Void taint. It was going to be a busy day.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

In the morning, I stockpiled my scrolls and then Callie, Abel, Bethy and I went down to the club proper for breakfast (the others were mostly sleeping in). When we arrived in the dining room, we found Devlan and Walden at the table, poring over a set of maps of the city. I raised an eyebrow, though I realized with my mask back in place no one could see it, so I sighed internally and verbalized my curiosity. "What's with the maps, we're leaving, right?"


I'd been confused about this for a while. I absolutely did not understand what Devlan wanted with this city. He was about to abandon the place for greener pastures, so why have me steal the key? He obviously wanted to use it, but what exactly was in this town that would be useful once we left?


Devlan looked up, amused. "Ah, you're wondering what the point is. That's fair. Let me ask you something. Why do you think the zones exist? What is the point of them, at least outside of the succession war?"


I considered. "I mean, back home we had tiered cities like this to stratify the renown. It kept super high rankers from siphoning off all the reputation and preventing growth."


"Less of an issue here," he said with a shrug. "We have higher rankers who give renown themselves, and as you know, that scales. No, the main reason for the stratified nature of this planet, outside of these few times, is simple. Logistics."


"I don't follow," I said in confusion. "Why would logistics be stratified?"


Devlan sighed. "It's complicated. As I'm sure you know, higher tier materials are always categorically better. HOWEVER, they're also categorically more difficult to utilize. In order for a society to function, it requires full engagement from all levels of the citizenry. More than that, there's prestige involved. While it's theoretically possible for an A-ranker to build a city in a day, do A-rankers have the time to run around and build D-rank cities?"


"Supply chain limitations," Callie cut in. "Construction of things like machines require tons of tiny moving parts. Chips, gears, screws. You can't have A-rankers constructing those, but D-rankers are perfect for it. Stagger your resources so everyone is using D-rank machines, and D-rankers can play an outsized role in the workforce. That's why the higher rank zones maintain a presence down here, you're their supply chain."


He nodded. "Just so. Beyond that, D-rank materials work for most things. A-rankers don't need A-rank showers, or soap, or beds. HAVING those things isn't the worst, but they aren't a requirement. Quality of life investments work just as well for high rankers, outside of some niche luxury products."


I was beginning to have a bit of a sneaking suspicion. This planet was a giant manufacturing hub, and the WCP, aside from wishes, was renowned as a colossal marketplace. "It's not just the locals. The branches do it too," I interjected. "The cities act as production facilities, and the local high rankers make deals with the branches. They get favors and information that can be cashed in during the succession war. Some of the branches already HAVE alliances set up, don't they? Does your organization?"


"The High Society is a bit…special," Devlan said with a chuckle. "We're a wholesaler. We don't act as a direct supply chain, but instead manage various material resources required to produce useful items. It means we have our fingers in a lot of pies, but aren't actually allied to anyone specific. That's why I've spent so many years attempting to secure this key. Do you know how this city was built?"


I shrugged. "It's a spoke on the wheel. There's lots of them, right?"


"There are," he admitted. "But that's only within a certain radius. There's a lot of wiggle room with city locations. Did you ever wonder why both this city and the nearby Kobold city are in THIS location? Why the first city lord built this absurd fortress town, and the even more absurd fortress inside it?"


My stomach dropped. Because I knew that there were other forces nearby. Hostile forces that had been extending their reach into this place. The Void was here for something too, and whatever he was building up to, I somehow doubted it was anything I wanted the Void having access to. "There's something under the city, isn't there?' I asked quietly. "Some kind of rare resource."


"Infinity crystal," he stated grandly. "A huge deposit of it. It's MOSTLY been mined clean, but moving it out of the city is prohibitively expensive and unsafe. Infinity crystal is delicate and extremely unstable. You can't put it inside anything that's been spatially expanded, and moving it in bulk is stupid and risky. There's a production complex under the city, but it's nowhere near efficient enough to put a dent in the mineral reserves they have stockpiled down there."


I thought about the platform under the island. Then I considered the chasm itself, and suction effect. Except maybe it wasn't suction. Maybe it was gravity. Or some kind of spatial warping. It was obvious infinity crystal was some kind of space mineral, but I didn't know what kind, so I looked to Abel.


My mentor noticed my gaze and inferred my question. "Infinity crystal is a spatial amplifier. It's what they use to make space rings. It's also commonly worked into foundations to allow for larger volumes of spatial expansion in buildings. It's considered one of the most stable spatial resources. Of course, it can and will blow you to shit if you mix it with other spatial energy, so it has to be handled carefully. But still, it's WAY less dangerous than a lot of the other materials you can get, and much more effective than freehanding it."


"The complex is at the bottom of that chasm, isn't it?" I asked. I was sure my suspicions were true now. More than that, they were worse than I'd expected. Space and the Void had an extremely intertwined relationship. My first experience with the Void had been back on Callus, when Abel had commissioned a Labyrinth under his brother's circus that was hanging halfway into the void. He'd used it as a clever method of limiting the cultivation rank of anyone who wanted to enter.


I didn't know what the Void children could DO with a massive stockpile of space warping crystals, but I was almost positive it wouldn't be good. Which is why I was pretty sure I liked where this was going. "You're planning to rob them?" I asked with interest.


"Of course," he said cheerfully. "It's just sitting down there untouched. The turnover on those space rings is slow. And while they're obviously a key resource, we have our own manufacturing lines, or at least close allies with them, that can massively increase the production capability. If I bring a substantial bounty of crystals with me, The High Society will value me IMMENSELY. Any request I put forward will be taken very seriously."


I glowered at him. "You set this up on purpose. According to our contract I could demand we leave right now, and you'd be forced to comply. But you knew that once you shared the plan I'd be roped into working with you to get the crystals and you wouldn't even need to pay for it."


"What a hurtful accusation," he said with faux sadness as he put a hand to his chest. "I truly believe this course of action will be the best possible outcome for all of us. Of course, I didn't approach you simply out of random assumption. I did a bit of digging on your group, and it came to my attention that you have a method of moving large groups of people in a spatially excluded manner. Now there are a few potential items or abilities this could be, but it SEEMS like one of you might have a true Domain."


That explained why he'd gone out of his way to contact us. In fact, I suspected Animal had been either directly pressured or subtly guided to reach out to us. At least assuming he hadn't known all this and approached us with this in mind.


Among the entire contingent of candidates and their retinues I was pretty sure that if Bethy wasn't the only one with a real Domain, she was probably close. Melding with a Domain seed was generally considered a dead end except in VERY specific circumstances. Barring unique cases like Bethy's where an active demigod personally adjusted things for her, no real genius would be willing to cut off their path to godhood so early.


"So you want us to move the crystals with Bethy's Domain," I said flatly. "And you think that getting us an in with your faction is enough to make that tenable? Kind of seems like we're paying you to do something we already have you locked into doing. What if I decide to send you ahead without using that key? Our deal was just for me to steal it, not let you use it. And you work for me now."


Sighing, Devlan leaned back, raising an eyebrow, steepling his fingers. "And what would you want in exchange for helping us? It's not like you could unload the crystals if you got some. Our connections are needed for usage. Not to mention that in order to take them to begin with, given the lack of spatial ring accessibility, we'll need to supply men to help move them, AND to combat the manpower in the production facility. They're designed to resist a Kobold invasion."


I had my own manpower…but he wasn't wrong. Those Kobolds had been a nightmare, and I'd fought ONE small warband. Sharing the chasm with a CITY of those monsters was like walking on the edge of a knife. Given the placement and purpose of the city though, I suspected there were some built in defenses to help. Whatever the case, if he thought we needed more people, then we probably did.


Still, I wasn't going to get fleeced on this. "Twenty percent," I said bluntly. "Converted to cash. I'm not unreasonable. I don't expect it paid up front, but I want a contract in place for installments."


"Do you have a Twilight Bank Box?" he asked after a delay. His easy agreement told me I probably could have gotten more, but I wasn't worried about it. He certainly wasn't HAPPY about the cost, so I hadn't done bad.


I glanced at Callie, who nodded. I raised an eyebrow, and got a quick mental message of 'later' before nodding to Devlan. "I do. We can hash out the details later, for now, I need to know more about the tactical situation and about our resources. I assume you'll be supplying more than just the few dozen people that are in the club?"


He snorted. "This is much too big a job for one branch. Luckily, the succession war has everyone mobile. No one will notice The High Society collecting D-rankers around Yettin, especially not with you and I talking alliance. They'll assume we're meant to fill out your forces."


"Which you WILL," I amended. "After we get the crystals." He didn't look convinced, so I shot Callie a message, and after a brief back and forth, I sighed. "In exchange, we'll amend our percentage to fifteen."


"Ten," he shot back immediately.


I shook my head. "I'm going to counter with fourteen, you'll say twelve, and we'll meet at thirteen. So thirteen, AND I want a bulk contract for ten years of service from all the incoming forces. Deal?"


He stared at me intently for a moment, then grinned. "Deal. I do love working with someone with a brain in their head." He drew out a stack of blank papers and a pen. "How about we hash out terms now. After that, we have a meeting. I got a lead on the investigation you asked me to launch." I settled in for some good old fashioned contracting, and then, we had a lead to chase down. I didn't want the Void dropping in on this clusterfuck, so we had to dig them out early.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

"So what exactly is this 'lead' you found for us?" I asked Devlan after we finished our negotiations. As soon as we were done he hurried us outside and we all piled into a car he had waiting. The back was spatially expanded, and after climbing in, I couldn't help but wonder if this car used an infinity crystal. I hadn't known they existed for so long, but who knew how many infinity crystal based buildings I'd been inside without even realizing.

Devlan smiled, withdrawing a bottle of wine from under his cloak, then popped the cork and poured himself a glass, taking a long sniff. "You mentioned looking for the external connection to someone named Wendell inside the fortress. Coincidentally, by the way, Wendell appears to have suffered a terrible and mysterious death recently. I don't suppose any of you had anything to do with that?"

"I heard someone say he was anemic," I said with a straight face. "Maybe he had an attack."

"An attack…of anemia." He said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I wasn't aware anemia attacks were a possibility."

I nodded solemnly. "Yeah, they're pretty rare. Very mysterious."

"Some people are saying that he may have come across…a Vampire." He said casually, his eyes searching my mask (which was pretty pointless, my expression was LITERALLY a block of wood).

I shrugged. "I heard Vampires don't exist. Seems like a convenient thing to blame your problems on."
"Vampires DEFINITELY exist," he snickered. "But yes, plenty of locals have made the same intuitive leap. Besides, I suspect we would all know if it was a Vampire. I've heard they're horribly unhygienic. Bad breath, greasy hair, and they never bathe."

"HEY, yes we do!" Bethy snapped angrily. Then she froze, her mouth slamming shut with a loud clack as her eyes widened in horror.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I sighed. "Godsdamn it Bethy."

"Yes, she's a Vampire," Callie said with an eye roll. "Now you know, don't tell anyone. Now can you PLEASE tell us what the damned lead is?"

"Right," he said with an embarrassed chuckle. "Apologies, got a bit distracted. The only connection Wendell had was a winery. Shadow Creek vintners in the midcity. He apparently had a special arrangement with the winery owner. Despite being so insular, supplies are of course a necessity inside the fortress. They have regular shipments inside, though they go through comprehensive searches and quality checks."

I froze. Winery. The Void taint had been embedded inside the wine Wendell had been offering people, and his power had been wine based. Plus, if the Void taint could be spread to help with his power, it could also be spread to help alter the disposition of the locals. Enough of that stuff getting out would make harvesting more Void taint simple.

My eyes met Callie's, and she nodded. We were on the same page, the winery was the perfect place for a Void infiltration to spread from. I nodded gratefully to Devlan. "Sounds like a good lead, thanks man." Having thanked him, I scanned our party for this little trip again.

Our core group this time was mostly the same. Bethy, Abel, Callie and I. But this time Belsara and Animal had come with us too. Having another candidate along was useful, and Belsara was much stronger than Nat. Animal, I was beginning to think was much more connected to Devlanthan had previously been apparent. In fact, I was sure of it. I remembered that he'd made a comment when we'd first met about "loving to talk to someone with a brain" that almost perfectly mirrored one Devlan had made earlier.

Beyond that, he was a dangerous person, and would probably be useful to have around. Bethy seemed to recognize him as a peer, which was…terrifying, really. The closest I'd seen to that was the way she treated Abel, and even that was more of a teasing little sister vibe than genuine acknowledgement.

"So, what did you get up to while we were committing grand larceny?" I asked him wryly. "Haven't seen you much since we arrived."

He shrugged. "Visiting old friends. While I was never permitted to move up to Yettin, lots of people I know have come here. Some were happy to see me, some not so much." He grinned, exposing teeth that were suddenly far too numerous and VERY sharp. "The ones who weren't welcoming needed some lessons in manners."

"What, they didn't accept your invitation to have them for dinner?" Abel said with a snicker.

"As mentioned, I don't eat humans," Animal pointed out patiently. "I just informed them that their abandonment hurt me. It only seemed reasonable to ensure they understood the pain they'd caused. Words hurt."

I snorted. "Do they hurt more than those scary ass teeth?"

"Sometimes," Bethy said brightly. "Daddy used to have a friend who could talk people to death. He would be like "FOOL" and the sound would like break their bones and stuff. I haven't seen him in a while though. Daddy said he was too loud so he stopped having him over."

I hummed with interest. "Noted," I said after a moment. "But since Animal doesn't strike me as the "words of death" type, I'm figuring he probably just kicked their asses in a more direct fashion."

"I did," he admitted with a shrug. "Regardless, aside from some genuine conversation, I refilled my coffers a bit. They were nice enough to compensate me for my emotional damages." We all laughed as the car finally came to a stop.

The drive hadn't taken as long as I'd expected, or at least it didn't feel long. It was highly possible I just got distracted chatting with my friends. Climbing out of the car, I carefully inspected the area, determined to internalize as much as I could. I even triggered Dantalion as I scanned the space around us.

We were on a hill, to my surprise. I hadn't seen any inside the city until now, but sure enough, a large emerald ridge was just sitting on a plot of land mid city. The winery itself was strangely homey, with a squat wooden construction, a red gabled roof, and trellises of wine grapes interspersed along the walls and throughout the yard in front of it.

"Well, this doesn't look like a den of evil," I pointed out. "Or does that make MORE likely to be one? Blending in and all?"

Ignoring me, the group headed up the hill, reaching the sturdy looking banded wood door surprisingly slowly. I was pretty sure the entry path was spatially expanded, because we'd walked further than it had looked like we were going to. When we finally arrived, I rapped lightly on the wood, and it opened after a moment to reveal a small, dark haired man with a monocle and a bushy mustache. "Yes? May I help you?" He asked, in a tone that made it clear he wanted to do literally ANYTHING but help us.

I glanced at Devlan. We weren't the ones who found this place and I had no clue what our plan for entry was.
"We're here to take the wine tour," Devlan said snidely. "Can you 'help' with that?"

While bushy stache had definitely been snarky to us, when he spotted Devlan, his spine straightened and he seemed to change into a different person. Gone was the derisive help opening the door for peasants. Now he seemed excited and eager to be of service. "Of COURSE, sir," he gushed. "Please, come in. Might I ask what vintage you're considering for your contract? We have tours for each of our departments. Red, white, rose, and even sparkling."

"Red," I answered quickly. The wine Wendell had offered had been red, so if there was Void taint here it was probably in that section of the winery.

At his acidic glance, Devlan sighed and repeated. "Red. We would like a tour of the red wine facilities. We'd also like to speak to your vintners. If I'm going to be stocking a vintage I like to know the quality of the people brewing it."

This seemed suspicious to me, but the monocle guy didn't even blink. From context, I gathered Devlan had brought us here as customers, looking to acquire large amounts of wine for The High Society club. I imagined lots of people in town knew Devlan, considering he was supposed to be one of the key players in town, and I was sure this visit would be a dream come true for most distributors.

Given The High Society's involvement in supply chains, it wasn't even out of character for them to acquire a large amount of wine. This was an objectively brilliant cover for an investigation, and I shot Devlan a nod of appreciation as the monocle guy (whose name was apparently Cranston) led us further into the building towards the wing where they made the reds.

The interior of the winery looked…kind of like a hunting lodge. Lots of wood furnishings, empty space, and weirdly, a bunch of animal heads mounted on the walls. Cranston led us to a small doorway at the top of a very cramped set of steps that groaned ominously under our weight, and we descended into the bowels of the earth.

I was pretty sure the stairs were DESIGNED to seem unsteady, because they were D-rank wood and I didn't see how they could have gotten so dilapidated without actually breaking. When we got to the bottom, we were standing in a huge room made of grey stone. Along the walls were dozens of wooden vats full of attractive, muscular men and women stomping on grapes.

"As you can see," Cranston said as he led us along the length of the room. "We choose only the healthiest, most aesthetically pleasing grape crushing employees. We refer to this position as "pediatric vintner support". Each of our employees has access to a full time foot spa and complimentary massages, as well as luxurious exfoliating foot scrubs free of charge."

"Wow," I muttered to my wife, careful to use Murmur to conceal the sound. "We found the evil in this place WAY faster than I expected."

She snorted, rolling her eyes, and then shushed me so we could liste. Cranston really like to hear himself talk and there was a lot of pointless information that needed to be filtered out of our brains, but midway through the explanation, I froze. Out of the corner of my eye, I'd sensed a flash of movement. I turned to look and as a small dark clad form vanishing down a hallway. Looking around to make sure we weren't being noticed, i grabbed Callie's hand and pulled her with me after the figure.

My fate sense was pushing me towards whatever I'd just seen. We caught up to the figure, concealed in dark clothes, around the nearest corner, following them into the depths of the winery. Finally, after turning down a long dark hallway, we came to an out of the way door that the figure had to punch in a long code to unlock.
With Murmur active, it was child's play to recreate the sequence and slip in undetected, following the figure into a chamber where a lone man sat at a table.

"Master," the figure rasped, bowing to the man. "We've received word that the Northrup boy was killed. The circumstances are…suspicious."

The man, an unobtrusive middle aged human male, glanced up from the documents he was reading. "A shame. That one had potential. After the collapse of the tree realm and the loss of Saeka I was considering grooming him as a replacement. He was weak, but pliable, and surprisingly effective. No matter. This outpost won't be necessary for much longer. The tunnels are coming along splendidly. How was our recent harvest?"

The figure withdrew a bottle from its cloak, stepping forward and pouring a glass. The man rolled his eyes. "For the last time, Skrok, this is a simulacrum. I can't ingest anything. I'm not really here. Deliver it to The Sommalier. And tell The Vintner to accelerate production. Once we break through in the tunnel we'll need to be mobile immediately. It's almost time to leave this cursed place." Without another word, the man dissolved into a cloud of smoke, which cleared almost immediately. Grimacing, i grabbed Callie and dragged her out of the room. That had been a lot of information, and we needed to discuss our next step. Things here were much worse than expected.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Our next step, as it turned out, required less discussion than expected. Namely, we needed to capture The Vintner and The Sommelier. But first, we needed to figure out who the hell those people WERE. The Vintner shouldn't be too tough, we were going to be introduced to all the winemakers, and I was guessing they would be among their number, but The Sommelier could be anyone. That was literally just someone who liked wine and knew a bunch about it, and we were at a fucking WINERY.


When we rejoined the group, the tour was still ongoing, and no one had noticed us slipping away under the influence of Murmur.


After a minute or two of walking, I took the opportunity to reappear from behind someone, drawing attention to myself by clearing my throat. "So, you said we could meet the winemakers?" I asked Cranston excitedly. He didn't seem to think of me as a person, but I didn't actually care what he thought about me, he couldn't ignore me with Devlan walking right beside us, and he could sneer as hard as he wanted if he'd answer my questions.


He shot me a withering glare. "The tour will proceed at the pace that I decide it should progress. If you wish to experience a faster paced tour, perhaps you can leave and come back when there is another guide available."


"Gosh, that's a good point," I said obtusely. "Hey Devlan, this guy thinks we should go away and come back later. That sound good to you?"


Devlan shrugged. "Coming back later sounds like a hassle. I figure we can just contact another winery. I hear Sudden Valley is decent., Plus they really need an influx of cash. They've been in a marketing war with some other no name winery. I bet they'd be super grateful for the investment after they used it to completely crush that other place."


Cranston went almost alarmingly pale. "I…wait, no, that's…" He started sputtering so hard I was worried he might hyperventilate.


Obviously, that had been a threat, and apparently a good one, judging by how alarmed he seemed. "Or," I continued with a cheerful smile. "We could always just go talk to those winemakers. That would probably be faster. I mean, we're already here. Do you think you could set that up for us, Cranston?"


He nodded so hard I was worried he might break his own neck. "Why, yes! Of course. I was mistaken earlier. The pace of the tour is naturally at the discretion of the customer."


Turning, he hurried along the length of the hall, guiding us through a large door as he frantically muttered into a scan ring. We took a couple of detours and roundabout turns that I suspected were designed to waste time, and finally arrived at a large hall full of silver tanks. S bunch of men and women in honest to gods lab coats were spread throughout the hall, checking guages and turning knobs.


When we entered, the one closest to the door turned to smile widely at us in greeting. He was a cheerful looking young man with curly brown hair and bushy eyebrows. "Cranston! Look what you've brought us! Guests are always welcome down here in the tombs. It gets so gloomy with only this sorry lot for company." He winked at us to let us know he was only teasing, and hurried forward to offer Devlan his hand.


Our local contact accepted the hand gracefully. "We were told you and the others down here could tell us more about the wine? I like to meet with the craftsmen who work on my products. You've no doubt heard of my organization, and our infrastructure and supply chains could be a huge boon to an operation like this, but I only act for mutual profit."


"Of course," the man preened. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Graham, and I'm the Chief Vintner here. My background is in hybridized grape development and fermentation processes, and I've published quite a few papers on both topics. I can't claim to be unrivaled on this planet, but within the D-rank zone, I daresay no one comes close to my expertise. Our entire team is made up of the best and brightest, and I personally vouch for every member of my group."


I glanced around. The people nearby seemed…distracted. The were trying their best to look busy, but they were clearly paying attention to us instead of their jobs…except one.


"Who is that?" I pointed out the sole exception. A tall, pale man with sunken eyes, he had his back to us and was actually ignoring the group, as opposed to just pretending like everyone else.


Graham furrowed his eyebrows. "That's…that's one of our technicians. His name is Horace. I'm afraid he isn't particularly social, or I'd introduce you. His field of expertise is also a bit obscure, so I doubt you'd be interested in hearing about what he does. We could talk to Lucy though, she's in charge of alcohol content in the vintages. Fascinating stuff."


I wasn't sure he knew what that word meant, because it definitely wasn't, but more importantly, the fact that he didn't want us to talk to Horace made me REALLY want to make it happen. I didn't bother bringing it up, I just broke off from the group, ignoring Graham's protests, and approached the tall man.


And he was VERY tall. Like, even by my standards. However, he was also so emaciated that his limbs looked like dry branches seconds from breaking off a dead tree. "Hey, Horace right?" I asked him as I approached.


He continued to twist knobs and adjust levers on the tank, ignoring me. When I got a bit closer, he finally paused, turning his dark, sunken eyes to stare at me coldly.


"I believe," he said in a surprisingly rich voice. "That you were instructed to leave me be. It is impolite to ignore the wishes of your host." His eyes raked over me. "I can't imagine what you might wish to speak to me about, but you may keep your greetings to yourself. I have no interest in discourse. Have a pleasant day."


As he spoke, I stared into his flat black eyes. There were dark and empty, ironically somehow more reptilian than the actual snake eyes of the house girl. As I started to feel a tug, like I was falling into the darkness, a surge of power poured through the bond, a blue black blaze of righteous fury washing away the sensation.


His eyes flickered. Not literally, but in the sense of someone noticing something, and then narrowed, his lips drawing back to expose rows of razor sharp teeth that I somehow hadn't noticed before. "Heretic!" He hissed with snakelike sibilance.


I was already moving, wings exploding out from my back as my staff appeared in my hands, whirling to meet the tendrils of shadow bursting from the ground at his feet. Blue black flame burned on my staff, the light of it banishing the dark, and he howled in outrage as he leapt up to cling to the ceiling.


Cursing, I spun the staff as he drew in a large amount of shadows and sent a wave of dark spikes at me. My spinning weapon created a shield of flame, intercepting the attacks, and Callie screamed in fury as she launched herself into the air at Horace.


Everyone else just kind of froze, unable to comprehend what was happening. "Murderers!" Howled the vintner. "Slayers of the vessel!"


The vessel. Was that the title of the house girl? Callie had called her a priestess, but it seemed like she didn't find that to be an accurate or inaccurate description. She had been a priestess, maybe, but she had also been a vessel. Or the vessel. Whatever the term was. She had called them a few things. The blade of the silent, the hand of the unheard. Vessels might just be another term for the sleeper agents the void cultivated in realspace.


Given the discussion about Wendell, the stuff that house girl had said about conversion was true too. They could make more of them later on, though under what circumstances I had no idea.


Callie crashed into the vintner before I had time to think much further, her black and blue flame clad hands wrapping around his throat as she tore him off the wall and smashed him screaming into the cement floor. Everyone was panicking, screaming for help and shouting at my wife to let him go.


Stomping a foot, I triggered Behemoth. The ground melted, rising up to wrap around the struggling vintner and fully restrain him. I channeled the heretic flame through the reinforced stone as it hardened, providing a layer of Void suppression, and his howls became angrier and more frantic.


"Bethy," I told my friend calmly. "Do me a favor and shut him up."


Her Domain flexed, and above her, a pair of colossal red eyes manifested, her natural gift for hypnosis being channeled through her Domain. It was similar to something I'd seen her do before, and to feeding through the Domain. I wasn't sure it would have worked without the heretic fire suppressing him, but it was and it did, and his form went slack, eyes glazing over as he stared up at the Domain gaze.


"Seal the room!" I snapped quickly. My people spread out, defending entry points as we herded all the strangers into the center of the space. "Sorry about that folks," I said with an apologetic smile. "Local constabulary, we're apprehending a dangerous fugitive."


They all looked skeptical, which was fair, it was bullshit, but I loved being able to use the word "constabulary".


I surveyed the people in the room. My logic was simple. We needed to seal this room. Either the Sommelier and we couldn't let them escape, or they WEREN'T and we couldn't let them find out. The Vintner might provide us some info, but he seemed pretty rabid, and I somehow doubted he was going to be cooperative. If we found the other one we would have more options. Playing them against each other for motivation, making an example, there were so many possibilities.


I strode over to kneel in front of the restrained vintner. Glancing at my wife, I nodded to him. "So, we have some questions for him. Any chance you have a way to help with that?" I wasn't sure about his position in terms of the Void. Was he possessed? Was he a traitor? Was he brainwashed from a young age?


She grimaced, shaking her head. "I can suppress the Void influence, but I don't think he's being actively controlled. I think some of them might be, and the ones who are I can probably free, but the true converts like this guy…I think my options are limited."


Looking back at Bethy, I called out to her. "Hey, can you make him tell us stuff?"


My vampire friend shook her head. "Not this guy. His brain is weird. Slippery. I'm having trouble holding on, and there's no way I can get a good enough hold to bully him into talking. Plus even if I could, that kind of thing is risky. If he decides not to bend it could break his brain, and then he'll just turn into a drooling mess."


Nodding to them, I closed my eyes, triggering Dantalion, and let the domain roll over the entire crowd. They were close together, so I didn't have to push it far. I just needed to watch and wait, and if the Sommelier was here I would find them.


Sadly, minutes went by, and though i gleaned a lot of random information from the nearby winemakers and the other tour participants we'd picked up along the way, there was nothing that would tell me for sure if any of them were with the Void. Which meant they probably weren't. I sighed, turning to Graham with a grimace as I opened my eyes. "Alright, let's have a chat about Horace and who he spends his time with." We needed to get this done soon, because I had a feeling whatever the plan was to attack the crystal depot was coming FAST. Time for some good old fashioned detective work.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Horace, as it turned out, was NOT a social creature. He didn't spend lots of time with many people, the main suspects this time only numbered a measly three. First, we had Charles, the janitor. Charles went out of his way to talk to Horace, always reaching out and trying to be friendly…but Charles talked to basically everyone. He was an extremely friendly person according to everyone on staff, and was widely beloved.


This didn't exactly clear him of suspicion. A lot of people tend to look for someone shady or out of place when searching for a spy, but often the opposite is true.


When looking for someone gathering information, friendly and outgoing people are a better pool of suspects than people who reek of suspicion. Information gathering is about listening, empathizing, and reaching out to those around you. If you want to find a spy, don't look for the creepy loner, look for the person who is always listening but never talking, the person who is always there to lend an ear and ask thought provoking questions about you.


Sadly, being nice wasn't conclusive, and it wasn't unique among our suspects, because coming in second was Sofia. Sofia was the receptionist for the shipping portion of the winery, and was apparently the object of Horace's (and several other people's) affections.


They didn't interact that much, because he didn't often get up the courage to talk to her, but she was always happy to chat with anyone and was genuinely kind to everyone on staff. She was another integral member of the winery who could go anywhere without suspicion, and would be a perfect choice for an infiltrator.


Finally, our third suspect was Barry. Barry was, as opposed to the other two, NOT a fan of Horace. He was a rival technician who was constantly at odds with our Void captive. He was actually pretty much a stereotypical bullying co-worker, but consequently the two of them interacted a LOT. All three of these people suited multiple criteria, not just proximity but wine knowledge and general capability.


The only problem was…"None of these people are in this room.," I pointed out in annoyance. "Which means we're going to have to go look for them, and while we expected that, from what I can tell they're all in different wings of this ridiculous oversized building."


Graham nodded. He'd been a huge help up to this point, once we explained why we'd captured Horace and exactly what we were doing. Obviously my crack about being "the constabulary" wasn't a valid explanation and we'd needed to actually tell them something about our purpose, but luckily, this was the heirworld. Locals KNEW the Wyndham name, and while there was a lot of political maneuvering between the various factions, everyone here knew that a Wyndham was their only ticket out, so the locals, barring betrayal to another Wyndham subfaction, generally didn't make trouble.


"Basically," he acknowledged. "Although I wouldn't describe the area where Sofia is located as a wing, more of a central hub."


"Yes," I said dryly. "That was my point. The terminology was unpleasant."


He coughed in embarrassment. "Sorry, I have a bit of a preference for exactness. It usually helps with my job."


"You need it," Bethy said breezily. "It smells like you used Valois as the core varietal for the hybridized grape strain here. Valois is way too acidic. The common thought process is that you want a balance of acid and sugar, but that's because too many people overferment. Sugar turns into alcohol during the fermentation process, so if you're not careful you end up with a super dry red with a high alcohol content, but if you lean into the acid your final product ends up without much body."


We all stared at her. She shrugged. "I'm part maenad, I know how to make wine. You guys know this."


"Fascinating as that insight into the winemaking process is," I said decisively. "We need to figure out how to get all three of those people together, preferably here, and preferably soon. That's the only way we can try to figure out the identity of the Sommelier, and HOPEFULLY flip them so we can prevent whatever tragedy that mystery backer is planning down at the crystal depot."


"We could throw a pizza party!" Bethy exclaimed brightly. "Everyone loves a pizza party. They'd all run down here at top speed."


Graham shook his head. "Wouldn't work, Sofia is allergic to tomatoes."


"How is that your main problem with that plan?" I asked in exasperation. "Nevermind, the point is we need something subtle." I paused, an idea occurring to me. "Or something very UNsubtle. Is there some kind of emergency alert you could trigger? One we could redirect so only they got it?"


He hummed contemplatively. "I mean, there's a subset of the tanks that have delton sensors on them. Delton gas is used in the process to reduce oxygen exposure, but it's not exactly safe in large concentrations. If there's a leak and it builds up, it's not only toxic but HIGHLY combustible. The first winery building was leveled in a delton explosion, so we're extremely fastidious about proactive detection."


"Can we set off the alarm without ACTUALLY blowing ourselves up?" Abel chimed in. "Because I feel like a giant explosion would put a crimp in our plans, what with the gruesome fiery deaths."


"I could most likely survive it," I shrugged. "But yeah, probably not optimal strategically."


Luckily, it didn't seem to be an issue. "No, we just need to alter the feedback data on one of the tanks. The actual delton levels won't be affected. The tricky part will be making sure only those three get notified. The delton alarms are threaded through the whole building, and when they go off standard procedure is to head to whichever wing the leak is detected from immediately to help with the suppression. There's a bunch of air purifiers that require life energy to function, and the employees use them to clear the gas pockets before the buildup reaches critical mass."


He continued speaking, filling us in on all the details. It was actually kind of interesting. Apparently the gas had a positive charge, and when the pockets expanded enough the charged molecules started bumping into each other and creating sparks. Enough of those and BOOM.


As he spoke, I approached the tank and controls, and deployed Dantalion, slowly comparing his words to what I was detecting in the machine. To my shock, I was able to actually SENSE the information. Dantalion could scan items for knowledge, but apparently active state information like data in machines could be directly interfaced with. It wasn't anything I'd ever tried before, and it required a bit of trial and error to connect, but once that was done, I was able to actively manipulate the data flow in the measurement device.


It was an interesting application of Dantalion, which had already been one of my most useful non combat forms. Sadly, I didn't interact with much machinery, so I wasn't sure how useful it would be. If I ever had to hack someone's scan ring it might come in handy.


Regardless, it only took about twenty minutes to figure out the notification process, curate the results, and then send them out to lure in our targets.


Once that was done, we all lay in wait. It didn't take long, they arrived in short order, but we didn't attack directly. Two of these people were probably totally innocent, so it wasn't really right to just jump them. Luckily, we had considered the problem and come to a quick and easy resolution. When they entered, we had Callie waiting there for them, and when she saw them, she hosed them all down with a wave of heretic fire.


While the heretic fire COULD be used for general offense when mixed with other things, it was mainly for cleansing and damaging the void and defending the soul. Not to mention Callie, as an angel, had a substantial amount of control of what her flames did.


Sure enough, they rolled over two of the targets, the two men, without incident, and only Sofia stopped and dropped to her knees with a low groan.


I triggered Behemoth, immediately capturing her and flooding the bonds with the flame. Her eyes widened, then darted from side to side, clearly looking for a way out. She spotted the rest of us, and her face crumpled. "Graham! What's going on? Help me! What is this? I didn't do anything!"


"Ah, yes," said Abel dryly. "Screaming that it wasn't you. The first action of any innocent person."


"That's not helpful," I told him with an eye roll. Sofia relaxed, and I felt compelled to add. "He's right, obviously. You're totally guilty. It's just tacky to point it out like that." I turned to my wife. "So? What's the verdict? She's not devolving into a gibbering mess and foaming at the mouth, can we flip her?"


Callie nodded. "Yeah, she doesn't seem to be a lifer. She probably just got recruited and is still in the process of conversion. The actual time necessary to achieve it varies. Like Wendell wasn't even close." At the mention of Wendell, Sofia's fearful expression cracked, collapsing to something harder and colder. Callie grinned. "Ah, there she is. Recognized the name? I'm guessing you flipped him?"


Sofia sighed. "It wasn't hard. He was a pig, and kind of a loser. His ability was pathetic outside the context of our operation. He was destined to be the designated wine guy for the rest of his life, and I told him so. Honestly, the worst part was putting up with his attempts at flirting. He was a slimeball."


"Oh, are we not doing the thing where you play dumb anymore?" I said brightly. "Fantastic. I was already sick of that. Tell us what you know about the attack on the crystal depot."


She blinked at me. "I mean…not much. I'm fucking HR. My job is to taste the wine and to recruit people for the cause. You don't tell your sales girl about your military distribution. I doubt I'd even know as much as I do if Horace didn't love to brag so much. You'd think being brainwashed by extradimensional hate aliens would diminish the need to show off. It does not."


"You know about the void and you're still working for them?" I asked dryly. "That doesn't seem counterintuitive to you?"


"What, afraid I'll ruin my bright future stranded in the slums of a ruthless prison world?" she sneered. "Not like I have much to lose. I'm stuck on my Solid Path. Can't get it to form. I'll NEVER hit C-rank as I am. Maybe I'll get brainwashed, but even so, I'll have a future. Or, y'know, I would have. Except I got caught. So…sucks to beme."


That was not ideal. It meant she had no information we could use. But I had a thought. "You put the Void taint in the wine, presumably to sway others, but to actually PRODUCE the Void taint you need concentrated misery. This doesn't seem like the place for that, which means you need to be GETTING it from somewhere. Do you have shipments?"


I could smell lies, but I realized that I hadn't ASKED her if she knew where the attack was being staged from. I asked what she knew about it. And she'd said not much. Which was an incredibly subjective answer. Sure enough, at my new line of questioning, she tensed. "I…yeah. Yeah I do. I pick up the Void liquid in a cave."


"You're going to take us there," I said triumphantly. "Tonight." I turned to Devlan, who was already nodding, turning away to try to contact his incoming forces. Now that we had a possible break point, we needed to move quickly. If we couldn't prevent the initial Void attack they'd screw up OUR attack, either by taking all the crystal of forcing them to beef up security. Sofia, meanwhile, looked terrified by the whole idea. Well, she's been right after all. Sucked to be her.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

With the two traitors taken care of, we turned Horace over to Devlan. Sofia, meanwhile, led us deep into the belly of the winery in preparation for her delivery. Which brought up a question that had been nagging at me. "So…how does this work?" I asked as we walked. She was in front, and we were all prepared to end her if she stepped out of line, so she was naturally being incredibly obedient as a captive.


"What? The accumulation?" She asked cheerfully. "They send it up from the bottom of the chasm and we add it to the wine."


"Not that part," I said with a shake of my head. "From the other side. There's no logical reason to spread the wine like that unless there's some way to gather the resulting misery. Wine from one winery isn't nearly pervasive enough to be a viable infiltration strategy, so you're not weakening the city for an attack, at least not ONLY that. Which means you must be gaining something. So there's got to be some reciprocity. How are you harvesting the resulting negative emotions the wine causes."


As we talked, she led us deep into the building, and finally, we turned into a large dark warehouse, and she gestured smugly into the room as we stepped through the door. "See for yourself."


I looked around…and my jaw dropped. "This is…a bottling facility?"


"A RECYCLING plant," she corrected. "We offer cash incentives and bulk discounts if purchasers recycle their bottles with us. We even pay on an individual basis. People all over the city scour their trash for our bottles, flocking to the winery to return them to us. Normally it would be a terrible business model, but the Void taint is habit forming, so people keep buying from us, and it offsets some of the cost."


I stared at her in horrified awe. "You…you enchanted the bottles? They're some kind of gathering artifact that siphons off the generated negativity from the surroundings? And by using the recycling as an excuse you essentially force the locals to collect the accumulated despair FOR you. That's…that's so evil. And really brilliant. But mostly evil."


"What is evil?" she shrugged. "To the Void, we're evil. We muck up their peaceful universe with our noise pollution. Anyway, you guessed it. Each of these bottles accumulates despair, which can be processed into Void taint. The taint is much more refined, but is actually LESS dense than the despair, so you can make about five bottles worth of Void taint for every full bottle of despair."


"And then you transport these down to the chasm, where whoever is down there processes them and sends up full bottles of Void taint, which you then spike into the wine," I said sourly, finishing her thought. "I'm guessing there's a lot of extra too. That's probably how they made that shallowing."


Callie frowned. "That's…that's not good." I raised an eyebrow at her, and she explained. "Creating Void taint is a natural mechanism most of the time. You essentially just increase the density of misery in a given area, then add in some reactive materials like the bone coins for it to infuse. But given the size of this city and the sophistication of the operation, they aren't passively gathering the stuff. They have someone who can HARVEST and REFINE it. There's a Filthsmith down there."


"Ok, so, I don't know what that is, but I feel almost certain it's a bad thing," I said glibly as I took in her tone. "Care to educate me?"


"Filthsmiths are special Ascendants who can process Void taint," she explained. "They're like…the opposite of purification specialists. Their whole powerset revolves around corruption. Kind of like Belial, but more Void specific. Utility wise, this is extremely annoying, but their combat power is pretty scary too. They can infuse Void taint into creatures to empower them."


Grimacing, I turned to Sofia. "When exactly is the next shipment due for delivery?" I'd told her we were going tonight, but if the next dropoff was soon, it would be easier to bullshit our way close enough to investigate without being discovered.


"Tonight," she admitted. "We have pretty fast turnover, given how much Void taint needs to be processed."


"What I want to know," said Abel solemnly. "Is who OWNS this place? Because there's no way this whole thing is going on without the owner being part of it. Slipping it by the employees is one thing, but whoever this building belongs to had to have been involved in setting this up in the first place."


Sofia shrugged. "Cameron Thistle. It used to belong to his uncle Carlisle, but the old boss had a mysterious accident before I started. You might be right, honestly, but I've never seen him myself."


"Because he's a member of the City Lord's family," Devlan said in a grim tone. "He married in ages ago. Last I heard, he was in charge of the mining depot."


"So the Void have been planning this for a while," I said grimly. Which meant they either knew the vanished gods were coming, or more likely, had always been looking for ways to deal with the six and had just launched their plans early to take advantage of the war. Swell.


Shaking, my head, I focused on the present issue. "Well, how do we get this stuff to the chasm. I assume there's some kind of tunnel or something?"


This whole city was built on a cave system, so the chances of the Void having a direct route to the pickup point were high. It was the only way I could think of for them to make consistent exchanges like that without it being WAY too obvious.


Strolling over to the back of the bottling warehouse, Sofia stopped in front of a shelf, reaching up, she yanked on a couple of seemingly loose fittings and hinges, getting a series of clicks as the snapped into place, then kicked the shelf. There was a low whoosh, and the metal shelving slid in and then down, flattening as it went, the shelves clicking into place as a flight of corrugated metal stairs.


"There's a couple of carts on tracks down there," she informed us helpfully. "I load them up with bottles and then ride along to the meeting place. They unload them, reload the full bottles of Void taint, and then I bring them back for Horace to infuse into the tanks."


I nodded. "Ok, then we can head down there to meet up with them."


"You COULD…" she said slyly. "But if you did, they might notice the carts are empty. So the safest way to do it would be to go about our business as usual, then follow them back down when they returned with the bottles. Right? Like you're planning to raid the place, so you need to do recon before your people arrive."


I sighed. "Are you trying to get us to do MANUAL LABOR for you? You're our PRISONER!"


"I prefer to think of myself as an aggressive guest," she chirped. "But until you actually attack them, I'll be in danger if I don't maintain the impression that I'm still serving the cause, so I obviously need to maintain my cover if you don't want to give away the game."


Squinting at her darkly, I ground out. "Do you, by any chance, get PAID for these deliveries?"


"Of course," she said with a serious tone. "Otherwise why would I work for them? You can't function in Yettin without money, and I'm very handsomely compensated. Of course, I could refuse that payment or avoid it somehow, but that would definitely tip them off that something was wrong. I would never miss a payday."


Devlan whistled in awe. "Damn, that's not bad. Blackmailing your captors into doing your work for you. Talk to me if you survive this, I might have a job for someone with your flexibility and cleverness." We all turned to glare at him, and he shrugged. "Game recognizes game. Being able to turn the tables on us in this citation is impressive. Plus she's right. Our forces won't be gathered for hours yet, and the more information we can get on their base the better we can do with our initial raid."


More than that, if we could take them out fast enough, we could identify and capitalize on whatever weakness they were planning to exploit in the depot. Hopefully less violently, considering they were the Void and were probably planning to kill a bunch of people, but still, it would make our job MUCH easier.


So, with a sight, we got to work. Abel and I started the process of lifting and transporting the crates. They weren't exactly heavy in the traditional sense, but they were still D-rank crates, so the weight of the Impact was still there. And there were a LOT of them. The carts were actually more like train cars, and we had to fill every single one. The crates were stacked to the ceiling and there were easily thousands of them across the several cars. Even with our whole group helping it took like an hour.


When we finally finished, we climbed onto one of the cars that hadn't been completely filled, and I triggered Murmur, covering us all and completely erasing all traces of our existence. I left Sofia visible, obviously, and once we were all set, she forced us to wait another two hours to justify her own bottle loading speed, something that enraged Abel and made Devlan laugh.


Finally, she tapped a button on the panel in the car we were in, and the cars all took off down the track at a decent clip. We spend maybe a half hour on the route, making multiple turns and doubling back several times, before we finally pulled to a stop in a big open cavern. Off the cavern was a web bridge, and to my surprise, an entire dock structure had been secured into the wall of the cliff, with a similar platform to the one in the fortress (albeit much higher quality and much more modern) hanging out over the abyss below.


As we dismounted, Sofia strode confidently up to the man in the bowler hat waiting for us. He had a round pale face (though it had a perpetual blush around the cheeks), a bushy mustache, and crafty look in his blue eyes. "Terrance," she said with a sigh. "Nice to see you, as always. You have my money?"


The man pouted, which was not a good look on him. "Sofia, must you be so cold? We're co-workers. I think you'd like me if you got to know me. I can advance you next shipment's pay if you'd like to use it to share a meal." He gave her a slimy smile that I suspected was meant to be ingratiating.


"Sadly, you'd have to pay me at least triple that to convince me to spend more than a few minutes in your presence, so there wouldn't be any left over for the food." Her tone was icy and poisonously sweet, like a cyanide popsicle.


His eyes flashed in anger, but he didn't let it show on his face, maintaining an indulgent smile. "Very well, perhaps next time. Boys!" He snapped, and about a dozen hunched, furry creatures with black, matted fur and flowing blue eyes loped off the platform towards the cars. They began unloading them, stacking the crates on the empty rock floor of the chamber before returning to pick up yet more crates from the platform and carry them back to replace the ones in the cars.


As they did so, I escorted my people over to the lift platform, this one the size of a large room, and we took up a position in the corner of the lift. When they finished loading the new bottles and stashed the old one in the platform with us, the round faced man smiled snidely at Sofia, and then returned to the lift, throwing a lever. The last thing I saw as we descended into the abyss was the woman counting her money. Maybe it didn't suck to be her after all.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

The lift lowered slowly. I didn't know why, maybe it was because of the attraction force from the infinity crystals, but clearly, they were wary about us descending too quick. Terrence the bowler hat guy was clearly unenthused with this pace, as he sat unhappily on the box nearest to the center, muttering to either himself or the…Void weres? Whatever the hunched furry things were.


"Cocky little bitch," he hissed as he kicked casually out at one of the monsters. "Thinks she's so special because she gets to come and go. Thinks she's too good for me. Once this job is over, we'll see what's left of her." He sneered at one of the closest monsters. "You thought you were special too, didn't you mutt? I wonder if she'll turn out like you did?"


I doubted she was still around. If Sofia had any common sense she'd have booked it out of Yettin first thing. I wasn't planning on chasing her, she'd helped us get this far, and honestly I had bigger problems. But I didn't like how creepy and vindictive Terrence was, so I decided to take him out when we raided whatever was down there. Callie, detecting my emotions through the bond, nodded solemnly. Some people just deserved to die.


We listened to him seethe and whine for another half hour before the lift began to slow. "Bethy, do you mind scouting ahead?" I asked her quietly, staring intently at the mist coating the bottom of the chasm. Outside the lift, the floor of the gap was completely concealed in fog, which meant Bethy could move perfectly undetected down there, in a state of absolute stealth even more flawless than her usual sneakiness.


I was positive this was a better idea than me going in person, mostly because I could sense extreme danger from that mist. The lift seemed isolated from it, but the closer we got the more my Danger Sense screamed at me not to touch that stuff. Luckily, Bethy's mist form was pretty impervious to most things, so she should be safe to go out there. Devlan seemed to know what it was and didn't object to her going, so I took that as a good sign too.


She nodded happily. "Um, duh! Exploring a secret treasure cave sounds like so much fun! I bet there's a temple down here. Treasure caves always have temples."


I recoiled. "Don't even SAY that! Temples are the worst. I've never had a good time in a temple. If there IS a temple down here, you come back and tell us and we'll leave. Don't get close to it, they're always really weird and dangerous." She pouted, but I repeated myself firmly. "Bethy. Seriously. This is important. It's not safe, promise if you find something like that you'll come back." I held up a hand, extending my little finger. "Pinky promise."


Gasping, Bethy flinched. "That's…so excessive." At my implacable, silence, she sighed and extended her hand, locking her pinky with mine. Then, as we finally came to a stop, she turned to mist and flowed out of the lift.


"Pinky promise?" Said Abel acidly. "Seriously?"


I snorted. "What do you know? Pinky promises are part of the honor of the modern age. Pinky promises, dibs, nose goes, and shotgun. These are the foundations of human trust. If you can't abide by the conventions of the honorable modern gentleman, you might as well be a beast scrambling around in the mud."


Callie sighed. "He and Benny take those kinds of things really seriously," she explained, entirely unnecessarily. "I'm still not totally sure it's not partly contract related recursion."


I rolled my eyes, but generously declined to comment on her spurious accusations. "Anyway. They're unloading the boxes, and that'll take a while. I'm hoping Bethy can get us a decent picture of what's going on out there. I can't really perceive anything outside the lift for some reason. It's like my Perception is getting lost in the mist. It just sinks in and dissolves. Even Murmur can't bypass is."


"That's infinity mist," Devlan informed me helpfully. "It's…hard to explain. Think of it like every drop of water is a VERY small pocket dimension. Like…an inch, maybe. They congregate together into that mist around infinity crystals, as a byproduct of their existence. Most Perception abilities don't work around them."


I cursed internally. I was familiar with the mechanism, it reminded me of the space isolation trick our friend Anna had used back during our army training in the empire. I knew spatial phenomena could cause problems with stealth and Perception, but I hadn't realized it would be an issue down here. "What about Bethy?" I asked worriedly. "She's mist right now, is she going to be swallowed up by the pocket dimensions?"


"She won't be affected," he assured me. "That's part of the reason I recruited you to help me move the crystals. She has a Domain, which is its own spatial anomaly, and a much higher level one. Her Domain is part of her, and will render her basically immune to the mist and any other side effects of the crystals."


I sighed in relief. "Alright, good. Once she gets back, she can take us further in. They have to have some way to resist the mist in there. Speaking of which, how are they moving through it so easily?" I gestured to the monsters unloading the crates.


"Void is the opposite of space," Callie said with a sigh. "Void energy has some strange interactions with spatial energy. I'm guessing that's what they want the infinity crystals for, so it makes sense the Void creatures would be resistant to whatever spatial erosion that mist can cause. I assume that's what it does?"


Paying closer attention, I could kind of feel it. The particles in the mist were…heavy, drawing in the space around them. That was the cause of the insane pressure in the chasm, this huge bank of infinity mist was dragging all the space above us down. It didn't seem to be affecting the actual stone around us though. I was guessing constant exposure over a long period of time had hardened the stone against to an insane degree.


In fact, I wondered if maybe this chasm hadn't been so deep to start. Maybe the mist had compressed the bottom slowly downward until it was too solid to go any deeper.


Whatever the case, this lift was warded against the mist somehow, so we could only stay and wait for Bethy. "How did you expect us to rob the depot with this shit around?" I asked Devlan. "Just relying on Bethy?"


"Mostly," he admitted. "But there's also some warded passages that allow people to move around down here. It took us DECADES to get any sort of information on the security arrangements, and that's basically all we know. We'll need your vampire friend to pull off this raid, but the mist is thicker than I thought, so we might be in luck. It SHOULD isolate our attack on their base so the depot won't notice it."


That was probably the only silver lining here. I'd been worrying about whether we could pull this off. Still, I was feeling better about this raid. Bethy was basically the perfect counter to this mist, and without her this place would be basically unassailable. There was no way there people had maintained any vigilance at the bottom of this giant ass chasm surrounded by crushing death mist.


We waited for the monsters to finish unloading the lift, with Terrence sitting around shouting insults and throwing things at them. Honestly I was feeling bad for the creatures, they looked kind of confused, and despite being Void monsters they didn't seem hostile. Knowing they might have been people before maybe made them more sympathetic, but still, the whole scene convinced me even more thoroughly that Terrence deserved to die.


When the crates were done, Terrence sneered at the monsters and chased them away from the entrance, then slipped on a ring. The ring was pitch black, and as he put it on, a black mist emerged from the band that flowed over his body. A very familiar black mist with a very unsettling feeling coming off it.


As he stepped into the infinity mist, the black mist from the ring clashed against it, creating a sound like water poured into a hot pan, but he remained otherwise unharmed as he strode into the depths of the fog.


Only minutes later, some mist slipped through the entrance of the lift, undisturbed by whatever force was keeping the infinity mist out of the lift. Within moments, it reformed into Bethy, who was hopping up and down yelping. "Ouch, ouch, ouch! Pins and needles, pins and needles EVERYWHERE! Gods WHY?"


"Bethy?" I asked worriedly. "Are you ok?"


She shook her whole body like a wet dog. "Ouch. I'm fine. It just stings. Like my whole body fell asleep when it was mist. Give me a second." She breathed through the pain, hissing in discomfort for another minute, and then finally sighed in relief. "Alright. It's gone. That SUCKED. This place is terrible. And there wasn't even a temple, just a dumb house in the middle of a cave."


"A house?" I asked with interest. "Is the area around it clear of mist?"


She nodded absently. "Yeah, there's a big open space surrounding it. The house is small, but pretty nice. I saw that jerk in the hat go in there a minute or two ago. I guess thats where the boss guy is."


"I'd assume so," I said with a grimace. "Look, I don't want to ask but…"


"You want me to carry you guys into the empty space?" She asked, her smile knowing. "I figured. I'm not too worried about it. The mist doesn't feel good, but it didn't damage me or anything, it just stings. Sit tight guys!" There was a flicker, and we were standing in a field of black grass outside a castle under a blood red sky.


We waited for only a few minutes before another flicker had us standing in a cave, positioned behind a large rock. Off to one side, I could see a wall of mist. On closer inspection, I realized the "wall" was more of a fabric, with thin tendrils of mist woven into a strange pattern.


"Formation," I said with dawning understanding. "They aren't stopping the mist, they're using it to stop itself, directing it into a formation that creates the warding effect. That's smart." I glanced around, worried someone might have noticed us. As soon as we appeared I'd applied Murmur, but it was highly possible someone noticed our appearance before I triggered it. Luckily, Bethy had set us down behind a rock that blocked us from view, so we were pretty safe from notice.


"Alright," I told my friends as we stepped out into the cave. "Time to poke around. Obviously stay close, but point out anything you notice. We're going to put together a comprehensive map of this place for our team when they arrive."


Everyone nodded, and we emerged from behind the rock, doing a circuit of the empty cavern, slowly closing in on the house. Sure enough, that had been a smart call. While they didn't maintain vigilance that I could see, they DID have passive traps set up. Murmur allowed us to bypass them, but I had to slow down, processing the information needed to detect each trap as we went closer.


Finally, we arrived outside the house, and I posted up next to the window, looking in to find an older man with a lionlike mane of grey hair and a neatly trimmed goatee sitting at a table, already working on a wine bottle he appeared to be siphoning black mist out of.


I let Murmur seep into the area, slowly learning more and more about the place, but when it became clear he wasn't going to do anything else, I stepped back and turned to my friends. "Ok, that should be everything. Lets get back up to the surface to meet with Devlan's people. I want to get this raid finished as soon as possible." After that…we had some crystals to steal.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

We arranged for the incoming backup to meet us at the club. I'd wanted to send them to the top of the lift, but without access to the winery, there wasn't an easy way to find that spot in the caves, and them entering the way we had might tip off the Filthsmith.


Honestly, it was way more people than we needed for the raid on the Void tainted base. But it definitely wasn't more than we needed for the depot…which made me wonder, had we missed some of the Filthsmith's assets? Did he have a secret army up his sleeve? Our scan had been thorough, but I hadn't detected anything that would let him contend with such a huge force. I was missing something.


The incoming D-rankers weren't as many as expected. Only a hundred had been called from the surrounding spoke cities, but they were all peak D-rank, and all with a Solid Path as far as I could tell.


"So, you're expecting us to…what?" Demanded a tall red haired man with wild spikes. "Attack a random Void outpost for no reason?"


Devlan sneered at him. "No, Clement, we expect you to follow orders. The boss sent you here to back us up, and as such, you're intended to actually ACT as backup. You'll do as instructed, and let us worry about the Void. We have experts on hand to take care of it."


That seemed to shut him up, to my amazement, and we all filed into Bethy's Domain, preparing to set off. Sure enough, Bethy was able to get down through the winery and into the caves without trouble, infiltrating as mist, and within about an hour we were back down in the cavern, stationed behind that same rock. Bethy only let a few of us out, since if we brought everyone it would be way too obvious someone was there, but with just a few I was able to use Murmur to protect us.


Once we'd scoped everything out, we started slowly releasing people, letting me cover them with Murmur little bits at a time. As we did, we gameplanned.


We made a rough outline of what we should do, and when everyone was out and prepared (I was BARELY able to hold on with five hundred people inside my domain), I proceeded with the first part of the plan. Wrath.


Specifically, I created a massive lake of burning ash infused with the heretic fire surrounding the house, using Chelsea's diagram to merge together the various powers closest to me to let me REALLY pour in the fire. Before our eyes, the ground began to dissolve, disintegrating into dust, and the air around it began to heat up as the heretic fire infused it alongside the destructive flames of Mephistopheles.


As we did this, I dropped Murmur, both out of necessity and because I didn't need it anymore. All five hundred of my people blitzed forward. The ring of ash surrounding the house was maybe one or two hundred feet, and they all knew about it in advance, so they were more than up to just jumping it.


The reason I'd used the attack, aside from environmental advantage, was because Murmur had finally picked up on some of the defenses I'd missed last time. Knowing they had to be there, I knew there were only so many places that I hadn't examined. Sure enough, I'd found that there were more of those Void monsters. Hundreds of them. All sleeping under the ground in stasis.


Wrath tore through their ranks, burning a majority of them alive. I winced at the necessity, since I had no idea if they could be saved from the Void, but I suspected they were a lost cause at this point, and we didn't exactly have the time to experiment.


It was a good thing I'd done that though, because it quickly became clear that underground wasn't the only place there were hiding. There was an inhuman screech from above us, and I looked up to see stalactites crumbling away, hunched hairy forms emerging from above, these ones with wings that they spread as they dropped down on us, gliding toward my advancing forces.


To my shock, several burning hands also erupted from the ash, and at least a dozen of the monsters ACTUALLY managed to climb out of the mire.


Callie grimaced from beside me. "My heretic fire isn't dense enough. It needs to be refined. Just like normal flame, there are levels of intensity. Mine is fine for ethereal stuff and basic Void spawn, but these things have been BAKED in Void taint. Seemingly for years. There's almost no human left, but there's also not…anything else. It's just like layers of Void."


I grimaced. Elder Voidspawn, swell. Sighing, I spun up my staff, ready to attack, and moved to head out to meet them.


This time though, I didn't merge my power with the others. I'd been noticing lately that my combat strategy had become almost exclusively group based. That was good, because it let me utilize my people to the largest extent, taking advantage of my biggest advantage as a candidate…but I was still an Ascendant. Not being able to actively contribute to combat was starting to bother me a lot.


Which was why I was about to debut something I'd been working on for quite a while. A new form specialized in single combat. Or rather, a new pseudo Domain.


I started with Sammael, obviously, added a dash of Mephistopheles, then Mornax and Agares, added some heretic fire, threw in Afterburner to make it spicy, and then, I started to SHAPE. Instead of just throwing it all into a blender, I decided to craft my narrative for this form as I went. A blink had me inside the library, and I cleared the table, grabbing a bunch of different volumes.


Writing out the details didn't take long, I'd been considering this for ages. Being able to do it so quickly was entirely a factor of the library and the staff, which I used to process all the information that I needed.


My eyes, opened, and my staff flashed as I took to the air, and I blurred through space, appearing behind a pair of monsters, grinning like a lunatic as they literally fell to pieces.


I swung my staff, flicking sizzling blood off the new addition at the end. A blade of amplified and condensed destructive fire, mixed with heretic flame and amplified by Afterburner. It was shaped from burning ash, sharpened to a razors edge, and blazing with the most deadly power I could bring to bear. Around me, dust armor was condensed in a suit of midnight armor, even bigger than my normal plate, elevating me to a legitimate seven feet, my now armored wings stretched behind me, every feather a weapon.


Mephisto's Waltz fired, and I vanished in bursts of black flame, tearing through the sky as I did. Mornax, through Sammael, extended its roots into the sky around me, giving me the defensive prowess of my Mountain Stance without needing to plant my feet, and Mephistopheles granted me explosive power even as it created an almost unblockable blade, converting my staff temporarily to a halberd.


A roar echoed through the chamber, a dozen of the monsters focusing on me and diving to attack. I didn't even blink. I brought my halberd to bear, defending flawlessly, batting them away as they rushed me. One or two got through, but they broke on my armor.


"Eighth circle of hell," I intoned devilishly. "Glory." I felt AMAZING. The power thundering through me was beyond what I could have imagined in a single combat ability. I'd lucked into that effect, by making Glory a body amplification ability through Mephistopheles and Sammael, but more than that, through iterating with the staff. Wisdom of Solomon hadn't just combined the abilities, it had combined them PERFECTLY.


Mornax didn't just strengthen my shell, it had infused my bones, amplifying the upper limits of what my body could handle, even as Sammael, Afterburner, and Mephistopheles POURED physical power into me to fill that reservoir.


Most of my abilities had tricks to them, unique twists, but Glory wasn't like that at all. It was just overwhelming physical domination. Raw strength exploding inside every cell like a miniature sun of black destructive fire. I roared in exultation, flickering across the battlefield, tearing through any monsters I found. The heretic fire made it SO simple, just a flick of my weapon would turn them to mincemeat.


I spun, raising my weapon, and stopped cold. Callie was hovering nearby, wings beating and a concerned look on her face. I grimaced, shaking my head a bit and forcing down that bit of recursion. I hadn't meant to do that. Using the Wisdom of Solomon to iterate a form I had already started assembling had overwhelmed me for a second. All that mythology filling up the design so quickly had kind of swept me away.


"Sorry," I chuckled as I let myself drift to the ground.


She shrugged. "You're good, had me worried for a second but you brought it back." She grinned wickedly. "Not to mention how BADASS that was, you tore through those things like a sledgehammer through wet paper." She gestured around us at the shredded remains of the monsters. "But we need you to fix that lake of fire so we can get to the base. We could jump it, but there's not enough room to land five hundred people."


I laughed, scratching my head with embarrassment as I turned and dismissed Wrath. I kept Glory active as I touched down and approached the house. Abel whistled as he caught up to us, covered in blood and grinning like a maniac. "Wow, that was bracing. We should do this more often. Bitchin' form by the way, Shane. I want to fight it."


"Maybe some other time," I said dryly. "Kind of busy right now. Mel, can you put a leash on him?"


The red masked fire mistress had been hanging back with Chelsea for their combo attack, but once we'd taken out most of the monsters, she'd quickly approached. She snorted helplessly. "Don't I wish. But sadly no. It's like owning a particularly absentminded cat. He does whatever he wants, but luckily he often forgets what that IS, so I can usually steer him. During combat though, he's laser focused, even if I wish he wasn't."


"What a hurtful thing to say!" He hasped in faux outrage. "I have NEVER been so…sorry this is boring me can I punch something yet?"


We all laughed. The sole exception, Callie, sighed as she stepped closer to the small house. She reached up to run her hand over the area ahead of us, and it ignited with blue black flame as it got close. She pulled it back with an annoyed hiss. "Nope. Because we can't get in. This place is surrounded with a sphere of hyperdense Void taint. I can burn it off, but it'll take ages. Classic Filthsmith." She turned to my sister with a vindictive grin. "You ready?"


Chelsea snorted. "I was born ready. Get everyone prepared. How many fire users do we have down here?"


"Plenty," my wife said gleefully. "As many as you can handle."


We put out the call, and a hundred or so people approached, grouping up near my sister. She raised her arms, manifesting her diagram, and I felt power being pulled out of me. I gave freely, pouring both heretic fire and Afterburner into the working.


Mel stepped forward, crafting a giant spike in the air above us from flame. Heretic fire, flames of purification, every possible flame poured into the spike, slightly strengthening it without actually robbing it of its inherent nature. Finally, Mel shifted the giant construct over the top of the house, aiming the point of the spike down at it on an angle.


My wife turned to Abel, beaming smugly as she gestured to the angled spike, a big flat area at the top clearly made for striking. "Now," she said vindictively as her eyes pierced the base, staring at the FIlthsmith through his defenses. "NOW, you can punch something."

 

[Malcolm Tent]

The sphere of pure Void corruption (or was that an oxymoron?) cracked like an egg under the spike as Abel's Ragam Blood Body hammered it in with a devastating punch. On contact, it split, and the spike dissolved, consumed along with the Void taint as both of them burned off. Inside, the Filthsmith stared in horror as we kicked the door in, rushing inside.


Stomping my foot, I triggered Agares, dissolving the floor and using the dust to form the same shackles I'd used earlier, infused with heretic fire.


Freezing, his eyes widened, and he jerked against the bonds several times before stopping, staring mutinously around at us. "What ARE you people?" He demanded. "This is…this is preposterous. All of our countermeasures, our defenses, you just…ignored them. What have you DONE? How DARE you?" His eyes finally focused on the bindings, and they widened even more. "What? You're…HERETIC! HERETICS IN THE CHASM!" His voice rose in pitch, becoming a screech of alarm, like he was trying to notify someone we were here.


Which…he didn't. Even if there had been anyone to listen, I had us under Murmur. Nothing he was saying was going anywhere.


I sighed, turning to Bethy. "Think you could do the thing?"


She shrugged, turning to stare at him. Behind her, her Domain expanded, taking the form of a pair of blood red eyes. The eyes bore down on the man, burning into his soul, and I was standing so close I could FEEL the pressure she was putting him under.


Shockingly though, he didn't buckle. He just sneered at us. "Pathetic parasite. My mind belongs to the great darkness beyond the stars. I have been subjected to sights and knowledge your feeble mind can't even begin to comprehend. Your paltry mind tricks cannot breach the sanctity of my enlightened brain."


I walked up to him, humming as I leaned down to look into his eyes. Then I hauled back and slapped him across the face with a blue black flaming hand. He squawked falling over backwards. Everyone stared at me, and I shrugged. "What? Sometimes stuff starts working when you hit it." Especially given the heretic fire. I hadn't slapped him that hard anyway.


"Anyone have lightning powers?" asked my mentor brightly. "We could try turning him off and back on again."


"Love the energy," I complimented him. "Not super ok with killing an unarmed captive, even temporarily, but great stuff. If you want to kill someone go off Terrence. He's on my list anyway." I paused, looking around. "Actually where IS Terrence?"


My sister raised her hand. "If you're talking about the guy with the bowler hat that was me. Sorry. I knocked him into the lake of fire. He never came back up."


"Sucks for you," I told Abel mercilessly. "Looks like Chelsea beat you to it."


He shrugged. "Not really my scene anyway. I was mostly joking about killing this one. Senseless death is such a waste. I like my deaths to make sense. Stick me in a ring and only let one of us leave. That's the good shit."


"You're a deeply disturbing person," I informed him cheerfully. "You should seek professional help."


He hummed with interest. "Like a booking agent? That might be useful, actually."


"Call of the VOID!" screamed the Filthsmith. "I'll TALK! Just please stop BANTERING at each other! I can't take it anymore! You're so annoying!"


I flinched. "Whoa," I said in a hurt tone. "That's pretty hostile. I mean, honestly if that's your attitude I don't know if I even WANT your information anymore. I bet it's not even that important anyway."


"Shane," Callie said in a reprimanding tone. "Don't be petty. Of course you want his information."


The Filthsmith, still annoyed, blinked rapidly, his eyes fogging for a second before they cleared. Behind Bethy, the red eyes of her Domain flickered slightly in a low,soothing pattern. My wife turned to him, smiling kindly. "Mr. Smith, please. Finish your thought. I'm so sorry my husband interrupted you."


He blinked again, eyes flickered. "Of course. I…yes. I can forgive the impetuousness. How kind of you. My…thought. I was…telling you the truth about this place?"


This was a new technique Bethy had been working on with Crell before we'd split with the C-rankers. We'd known her hypnosis wasn't likely to work at all times, so the Legendary Doubt Master had been teaching our vampire a few new ways to apply those abilities.


She smiled happily at the captive. "Of course, you want to tell us everything," she said, her voice layered with soothing, enticing vibration. "How else will we know how amazing your masters are. You have to educate us on their greatness. Heretics and blasphemers like us could never understand their shining glory. But if you guide us down the right path, you could bring them even greater benefits."


"Yes," he drawled blankly. "Philistines. To show you the truth of their undying perfection would be the greatest act of merit." He smiled dopily. "You'll be so in awe of their genius. The construction of the Void Ladder will be our grea-" he didn't even finish the word. The second he uttered the phrase 'Void Ladder', he tipped back his head, cutting off the rest of his sentence with a high pitched scream as darkness erupted from his mouth, eyes, nose, and ears.


Torrents of dark energy poured from him, and Callie stepped forward, waving a hand to conjure her heretic fire to counter it, burning the stuff away as it came. It took a surprisingly long time. When it finished, she stared down at the body, looking…disturbed.


"You ok?" I asked her gently. "That was sudden, I know, but-"


"It's not that," she said worriedly. "It was the last thing he said. I know what a Void Ladder is. And if they're building one on this planet…this is bad, Shane. This is REALLY bad." Her voice was shaky, her eyes alight with panic as she tried to form coherent words for what she knew. I put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it as I pushed my love and support through the bond. She closed her eyes, exhaling heavily, and smiled as she opened them. "Thanks hon', I really needed that."


"Any time," I beamed. "Now, how about you tell me what the hell is going on?"


Callie's disturbed look returned. "A Void Ladder is kind of the opposite of a shallow. It's a method to pull a piece of realspace into the Void. Normally it's done to places with spatial isolation like the dungeon, but the formations around the heirworld are probably enough to count."


I frowned. "I mean, why would they bother though? The Void wants to wipe out realspace to quit their territory. Why would they bring the heirworld into the Void on purpose. Isn't that just dumping a bunch of trash in their own yard?"


"It's the candidates," my wife said, her eyes widening. "Wishmaster candidates are almost impossible to get ahold of. You move around constantly, most of you have guardians, and the Void's presence in realspace is minimal. Catching one or two is maybe possible, but the strongest will most likely be protected. Godworlds are in the Void, but they're not actually OF the Void. The god in question has complete dominion, so anything inside is basically untouchable. Void invasions of godworlds rarely accomplish anything, because worst case the god can just send anyone they want to out of the Void before the local forces accomplish anything."


"Which makes this a perfect opportunity to attack us en masse," I finished with a grimace. "The heirworld is cut off from support. If it gets dragged into the Void, every candidate is at the mercy of the Void forces. There's a lot of powerful people here, but the Void is endless. Once we're over there, they can bury us in bodies."


She nodded solemnly. "We need to get in touch with your grandparents. They can alert the elders up in the station. But we can't leave now. The infinity crystals are a key component in the construction of the Void Ladder. I don't believe for a second this was the only operation targeting them. The Void always uses redundancies. I wouldn't be surprised if there were traitors embedded in the depot protection detail just in case."


"We can't contact them from down here either," I said with a grimace. "The mist makes any sort of communication impossible. Even if I used a wish, the cost would be mindboggling because of the interference, there's no way any of us have the juice to grant that wish."


Which meant we had to do this on our own and worry about reporting in later. When this had just been a slight chance of mild void subversion, I could justify keeping the WCP leadership out of it. We didn't know who had been turned, and contacting the station could be dangerous for us. But now…this was going to be a fucking nightmare. We needed help.


Not to mention I knew this wouldn't END the succession war. This was the most important tradition the Wish Curse Palace had, there was no way it would be delayed. The succession war could be moved up, but never postponed. Not even the god war had been enough reason for that.


I turned to look out the window at the boiling must being held at bay by twisting strands. "Alright. We hit the depot first, snag the crystals and keep them away from the Void. Once we finish that we get our asses topside and contact my grandparents, then head for the C-rank area. My cousin Felicity should be there, along with some of our other forces, and the backup will be helpful."


What I REALLY wanted was to speedrun to the inner zone where my parents were waiting, but I knew that I'd have to do tasks as I went to accrue points. Points were how I could recruit more locals, and I wasn't naive enough to believe that a Void invasion would make my crazy family members stop squabbling and band together. I needed to prepare for this possible calamity AND win this damned war. Fantastic.


Luckily, five hundred people couldn't fit in this fucking house, so most of them were still outside cleaning up. I was also erasing the traces of this conversation with Murmur, so no one had overheard. I turned to Devlan, the one local who HAD been involved. "So…you freaking out yet?"


He shrugged. "I don't LOVE the sound of what's going on, but I've dealt with worse. It's just the threat of death or captivity. For a chance to get off this godsforsaken rock I'd risk much more."


"Good to hear," I laughed. "Animal, I want you in charge of the locals. I trust you, and I noticed them giving you some intimidated looks. Can you keep them in line?" The redhead Clement was kind of a dick, and I didn't trust him to stay on task during this raid. The last thing we needed was some showboat going rogue. Well. Another showboat. When I went rogue it was charming and practical.


We headed outside, lining up in the formations we could cobble together before Bethy took everyone into her Domain. I had her leave Callie and I outside when she did though, just to check in. "You doing ok?" I asked her before we set off. "No pins and needles?"


She beamed at me, shaking herself all over like she was doing some weird dance. "Nope, all loosey goosey. I'm totally good to go."


Nodding, we had her bring us inside, and then we were off. She didn't share her view through the moon, which she'd explained earlier was because the visual feedback of being a mist in a weird collection of particle sized pocket dimension was jarring and uncomfortable, and that trying to display it would hurt.


As we waited, I reached down to grab my wife's hand, squeezing it tightly. This whole thing made me even more aware of how much we needed to hurry up her progression. I was going to start looking into acquiring the elixirs for D-rank, because the extra hundred thousand points was bound to help. We both needed to be stronger as soon as possible to be ready for what was coming.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

We emerged from Bethy's Domain in yet another cave. Not shocking, since we were at the bottom of a giant hole in the ground. This cave, however, was MUCH different. For one, it was bigger, lined with lights and apparatuses for mining and sorting. For another, the floor of the cave had several struts set into it, with a sort of subfloor set beneath a metal primary floor to separate the mist from the workers.


The primary floor was a series of metal platforms and walkways, beneath which we could see the mist from the open walls and tunnels surging, clearly being compressed somehow so as to keep it away from the people moving busily about the cavern.


We popped up in a back corner, behind a shed or something that was out of the main sightline of most of the rest of the room. I had us covered with Murmur almost immediately, and we started mapping out the area and deciding what our next move was going to be. It was clearly going to be an ordeal.


The first thing I noticed was how fucking DENSE the population of this cavern was. I could see dozens if not hundreds of people, and they weren't lying in wait or anything, they were legitimately just going about their days.


To me, that said that there were even MORE people around who weren't out and about, and it told me a lot about the defenses near here.


I'd been thinking about it since we left that house, and the Filthsmith had screamed to try to notify someone. Our theory that there was a redundancy was firmly supported by that fact, so whatever attack we were about to initiate was going to have to deal with the Void as well as the local forces.


"Damn, they're pretty dense in here," Abel said as we crouched behind the shed. Despite being covered by Murmur, the less I had to conceal the easier it was, so we tried to stay out of easy line of sight.


I turned to Devlan. "This is your show, you and your people did all the research on this place. So what are we looking at in terms of defenses?"


He'd actually filled me in on some of this before, but the entire premise at that point had been that we would attack later, and having to act immediately really threw off my understanding of the situation.


"Based on the timing, we should be looking at the third, sixth, and ninth guard divisions, two hundred fifty each, and first division, which is one hundred peak D-rankers. The latter are stationed here permanently, but the rest of the divisions are cycled out on the regular to ensure everyone is in a good mental state. Beyond that we're looking at a hundred mining engineers, and another three hundred miners, but it's doubtful they'll actually bother fighting."


Animal nodded. "The mines down here emit that mist constantly as they're worked. It's NOT good for the body, and every person who volunteers to mine down here is either desperate, suicidal, or a colossal amount of trouble. Debtors, prisoners, the terminally ill, none of them are the kind who will bestir themselves for the defense of their tormenters."


I grimaced. "That's…unpleasant. Any chance we can help them? Maybe purify the influence of the mist?"


"Unlikely," Devlan said with a shrug. "The damage caused by that mist is gradual, and it can be resisted for a while, but it's EXTREMELY hard to resolve. It can be considered something similar to being shredded by a million Domains. Only a very small amount, but it adds up, and most recovery methods don't work."


"This infinity crystal is nasty stuff," I grimaced. "Whatever. The depot is here, and the mining has been going on for ages. They can only move a small amount of it, so the rest must be stockpiled down here in the chasm. I assume you know WHERE it's stockpiled?"


Devlan pointed across the cavern at a large metal door set directly into the rock. "In there. Don't underestimate that vault either, being at the bottom of this chasm for so long, the mist has slowly condensed the stone to an unimaginably hard level. This whole chamber is substantially more durable than you'd expect."


I cursed internally. I'd been hoping the last chamber would be indicative of the strength of the stone. The diversion formations the Filthsmith had used had cleared the mist and I'd been able to turn the stone to dust pretty easily. After thinking about it though, I was pretty sure the reasoning for that lay in the Filthsmith himself. His Void taint was the opposite of the mist from the infinity crystals and would naturally degrade the things around it. That whole house had been warded by a sphere of that much for ages, and it probably corroded the stone, reversing the condensation.


Which gave me an idea. I turned to Callie. "Your Void Priestess powers can manifest through shadows, right? And the shadows you use should erode the infinity mist. Can you transport us inside the vault through the shadows? Bethy can carry everyone in her Domain, so you'll just be transporting her and maybe me if you need it."


She hummed contemplatively. "I mean…I think so? It'll take a lot of effort, the mist in here is really jamming me up, but if its just one or two people it should be doable. But I don't think I'll be able to get us out again. Once Bethy has her Domain full of crystals I don't think she'll be able to easily move everyone again. We'll probably need to be taken in one at a time, which will take a while."


I hadn't considered that. The mist caused discomfort and stiffness in Bethy even through her own mist form, so it would naturally have some effects on her Domain. I knew that we could still GO in the Domain, otherwise Devlan wouldn't have brought us down here, since he'd essentially be dying in exchange for the crystals, which didn't seem like his style.


Devlan sighed. "Alright, so we're going back in. Be careful entering. The first division actually lives IN the vault. They have special armor that can resist the erosion. It's prohibitively expensive to make, so they don't have much of it. If we'd breached from outside, we'd have had to deal with them rushing out to attack and joining the others. Doing it this way has advantages and disadvantages."


He nodded to us, then vanished along with Animal, Bethy pulling them both in. She turned to me. "How about you, boss-man? You going away or you going to follow us into the dark?"


"It'll be lighter on Callie if I'm in the Domain. She can pull on my strength through the bond if she needs me." Pushing my mask up, I gave my wife a quick kiss and then vanished. To my surprise, Bethy dropped me in the castle this time, in one of the spare rooms with a view out the window to the moon.


Not that it helped much, the moon went black as Bethy was swallowed into the dark with Callie. Through the bond, I felt the sensation of Callie forcing her way through the shadows with her Void access. It was staggeringly difficult. I felt like she was trying to dead lift a five hundred pound bull as a mortal with nothing but her toes. Not only was it difficult and a strain, it was hard to get a solid grip.


I had to push my power into her to help, and we finally popped through, ending up inside the vault. Quickly, I was pulled out, and Bethy pointed worriedly around us at the gathered mist. "Um, Shane, this stuff is EVERYWHERE," she looked panicked. "How do we fight them if we can't go into the mist? They have special armor, but we don't."


Frowning, I examined the area around us. I hadn't considered how much of this stuff must have accumulated in here. I figured we'd need to deal with it while we moved stuff, but the erosion took time. FIghting though, that was a different story. We were currently perched on top of a storage container, and the mist surged and roiled along the ground.


"You're going to start raiding. Let our people out on top of these things, I'll handle the erosion. I have an idea. You focus on clearing out all the crystals, and once we finish the fight you can start admitting people into your Domain one by one." I paused, considering what we'd need to do. "Can you put the crystals in the field outside and have us in the castle?"


"Sure, that's easy," she chirped. "But are you sure you've got this? I saw some of these guys coming in. They're big and that armor is scary."


I grinned humorlessly beneath my mask. "Of course. We're going to do it the same way the Filthsmith was. We're going to use the Void." I turned to my wife, who was leaning against the top of the container, panting and wheezing. "I'm going to need to tap into your Path for this honey. Leviathan and my own resistance should keep it from being too much, but I need you ready with the heretic fire if I need to be pulled out of it."


"Got it," she said tiredly. "I know what you have in mind. It's risky, but it's the only option I can see."


Nodding, I indicated that Bethy release the others onto nearby containers. Once she did, we waved her off to go gather the crystals, and I triggered the rank up effect on my staff, elevating Belial to C-rank. Then, reaching through the bond, I sank my claws into the power of Callie's Path of the Abyssal Priestess.


It was…weird. The energy in that Skill felt off, now that I knew what to look for, and I understood it was because the Skill itself ran on the Void. Or at least had it mixed in. So I pulled on that, mixing it into Belial as I did. Belial was the prince of corruption, literally created to corrode and consume, so the Void had no issue meshing with the essence of that form.


Then I pushed it outward, using the C-ranker skill to corrupt every one of our people. Belial could let me wield even other humans as a weapon, and with the Void influence infused into, there was a lot of risk of causing permanent damage…usually.


Before any long term harm could set in, I pushed all my people off their containers, dropping them into the mist. Almost immediately the Void taint started to boil off against the spatial energy, draining away the corruption even as it flowed into them. We didn't have long, but at C-rank I was able to move a sizable chunk of power with the form, so we could last long enough to do the job.


With my senses extended through so many people, I was having trouble processing, and I had to trigger Piece of Mind a few times to offset the overload, but once that was done, I was able to deploy my forces perfectly.


All across the vault, my people fell on unsuspecting armored forms in groups, outnumbered five to one and acting against a superior force deployed by one overarching mind, the first division barely stood a chance. They did better than expected, honestly, but since I knew several troop formations, I was able to deploy them liberally, overwhelming the armored figures and restraining them.


Bethy showed back up soon after to start collecting people, and I dismissed the energy as they climbed back up on the containers, all now empty. I sighed with relief as I did, ready to be DONE with this shit so I could call up for backup.


Unfortunately, before I could, I felt something massive smash into the walls nearby. Or rather, into the huge metal door, which shook like a leaf, stone dust drifting down from above. A roar sounded out behind it, and I cursed, readying for another fight. Before I could even figure out what was happening, there was a mighty screech, and the door was ripped off the hinges in a way I hadn't thought was even possible.


My eyes snapped to the form looming in the gap, a semi familiar draconic silhouette MUCH bigger than any individual person. Except this one was leaking dark energy that popped and crackled on the mist as they came in contact. "Oh, good," my wife said tiredly. "Void kobolds. That seems fun."

 

[Malcolm Tent]

"The kobolds," I said grimly. "Because of COURSE their backup plan was the kobolds. How did I not see that coming?" I grimaced at Bethy and my wife. "I don't suppose either of you is secretly holding back a ton of power you previously neglected to mention? Because I'll be honest, I don't love my chances against that asshole head on."


Callie shook her head in exhaustion. "I'm tapped. Getting us in here took a lot out of me."


Sadly, Bethy wasn't doing any better. "My Domain is crazy unstable right now. I can admit one person at a time, but I don't have the juice to keep up a battle while I do it."


Chelsea couldn't help either. Her diagram was useful and strong, but the more people we involved here the more difficult this would be. I didn't have the strength to use Belial on five hundred people again, not without the staff boosting it. I COULD, however, use it on two. "Animal. Abel. Looks like this next part is going to be on us."


The others needed to stick close to Bethy and Callie in case they needed help with the getaway. My wife needed to rest up because even with that door gone, the shadows were our best exit if we didn't want to be ambushed on the way out, and Bethy needed to focus on our escape plan. Animal and Abel were the absolute minimum force I could see managing to actually win this fight.


Oddly, I had the distinct feeling that we didn't need anyone else, and bringing any more would limit our capabilities too. My fatewalker abilities didn't pop up too often, at least not so noticeably, and when they did, I tried to listen.


Animal, to my surprise, looked genuinely excited to fight. The taciturn man was usually pretty laid back and apathetic, so seeing him get amped was an experience. More of an experience was watching him transform into…something. From one breath the next, Animal became a beast. Not one that could be easily defined, because it had parts from so many creatures mixed in.


The head was shaped like a bear, with a bat's squashed muzzle and a snake tongue, the eyes were hawkish and the shape of the body was closer to an ape than anything else, but there were slight deviations in some of the limbs that seemed to come from minimal contributions from other creatures. It was such an asymmetrical and off kilter being that I had trouble actually picking out all the individual aspects, because there were SO discordant that they didn't seem to fit with anything besides the current shape, ironically taking the beast all the way back around from patchwork to looking like a cohesive whole.


Bethy's eyes lit up. "It's so CUTE! I want one! Shane! I want one! Can I wish for one of those? Hey, you, what's that called? Did you come up with a name yet? It looks so weird but so cute. We should call it something that fits. Like…a Chinchilla."


"Bethy, Chinchilla's are already an animal," Callie reminded her with a chuckle. "Seems like it might get confusing."


The vampire snorted. "Whatever, they don't do anything but make coats. They can change it."


Considering her father had MURDERED every living creature in the universe that wasn't related to him so he could be the only vampire, I felt the need to nip that plan in bud. "How about you just come up with something else," I suggested. "I'm sure whoever came up with the name Chinchilla wasn't half as creative as you. You can definitely do better. Why rip off some lame guy who no one even remembers."


That got me an impressed look from my wife, and a solemn nod from Bethy. "You're right," she said in a somber tone. "I'm better than that." Then her face melted into its usual cheerful grin. "Thanks Shane, but you should really go fight that dragon thing before it kills us all."


I laughed at that, turning to Abel and Animal. Flexing my will I triggered Belial. My first form would have trouble offsetting the mist still, but with just two people I didn't need the rank boost from my staff. Once I had them connected to me though, I could actually maneuver them like weapons. Since they were so strong already, I mostly just left them free rein, but I did steer them slightly as I pushed off, wings spread and with Glory active, heading for the void dragon construct.


Without much prompting, they split off, circling around to hit the monster from either side. Abel went for a wing while Animal exploded into a ball of snarling fur in the eye socket of the monster.


One of the only downsides to this weird mass manifestation method that I could see was that damage was shared among the kobolds. My own staff flashed as I dove forward, dragging a line across the side of the neck, and I saw several weaker kobolds die as my attack tore a long gash in the dark shimmering scales.


The kobold forces were behind the dragon, in the main room of the vault, and a ring of kobold warriors were engaged with the other units, protecting their lizard wizard and his core group of batteries. As they started to die though, the guardian kobolds were closing ranks, folding the odd less important guardian into the formation to power the dragon.


That would have been a much bigger problem, except that I had heretic fire infused Belial avatars attacking them. While this helped offset the mist, it ALSO slowly corroded the construct with heretic fire based poison, and as I watched, blue black cracks began creeping out from the injuries we were all leaving as we made them. I saw some of the kobolds start to cough blood and smoke as the heretic fire fed back into their working through the mechanism of Belial's corruption, and I grinned at how well my plan was working.


Which of course is when three of the kobold warriors broke off to attack. They were scary looking bastards, huge draconic monsters with black scales and the glowing blue eyes of Void tainted creatures. Their skin had split from expanding muscles, with blue light leaking out between the tears, and their fangs were too long and sharp for their mouths, forcing their jaws apart into a permanent snarl.


The monstrous kobolds broke away from the encirclement, punching right through the local defenders, and headed right for us, breaking off to attack us one each.


Snarling in annoyance, I triggered Beelzebub, splitting off a dozen clones. My clones couldn't maintain more than one form each, and they all had to use Belial to offset the mist (Sammael didn't count) so none of them were able to use Glory. Still they were all extremely powerful with the amplification of Sammael and able to perfectly communicate through my own Belial connection, so using them to form a formation to counter one of the kobolds was doable.


My main goal was to make sure they didn't distract us so thoroughly the dragon construct would have a chance to tear me apart. Unfortunately this took up the attention of all my clones. Or rather, the single parallel of Piece of Mind I was able to make to control them. I was juggling too many things right now and my soul was exhausted from constant use, so I couldn't spare the soul weight for the constantly compounding parallels.


Since I'd gotten my Chronicle, I'd rarely done anything that required quite so much soul strain as this whole mess. I'd been using forms left and right, amplifying and then spreading Belial, creating a new domain, I just couldn't keep this up long term. Luckily we were almost home free, but this was hardly the best time to be hitting my limits.


More than that, it seemed like Glory was a bigger strain than my other domains. I wondered if the fact that it was so antithetical to the jack of all trades, versatile support image I'd been cultivating that it was having a negative effect on the domain. I'd never asked anyone if recursion could erode skills, but it could boost them, so it only made sense. If that was the case, the problem should solve itself after a few demonstrations of the power, but until then I'd be pretty screwed.


I should have created a single combat form earlier, but I'd been so wrapped up in my support and amplification capabilities that it just hadn't seemed important. I was paying for that now.


With a roar, the dragon construct snapped toward me, massive teeth shearing the air. I triggered Double Trouble, amused at the confusion when it bit down on "me" and got only air. I considered using it again to flank the lizard wizard, but I was almost positive the others would fall on me like rain and tear me apart, and even if I tanked all the attacks I'd catch the attention of the local defensive units.


Instead, I glanced down, smirking as I had an idea. I used Agares, focusing all my attention on the grating beneath the kobold wizard's feet.


Metal came from the earth, and there wasn't a ton of the stuff there. Not to mention it was already under MASSIVE stress from resisting the constant erosion of the mist. It wasn't too hard to push it over the edge JUST enough to dissolve into dust, and the wizard shrieked as he dropped about two feet, his legs plunging into the mist. The collapse of the grating rippled out, dropping more and more kobolds into the mist, and the dragon construct flinched, its dark scales rippling.


The kobolds were screaming, the Void taint on them burning off in the infinity mist, but they couldn't get OUT of the mist because the encirclement was keeping them confined to that one area.


Raising my spear, I forced a huge surge of heretic fire into it, then whirled it once and slammed it down on the construct, spearing right through it and slamming into the ground. The huge torrent of heretic fire disrupted the cohesion of the dragon, already floundering with the unstable Void taint that was able to get through after the mist burned it off, and it exploded, shredding the whole energy body into fragments of burning Void that floated down from the sky like black flaming snow.


The backlash stun locked the kobolds, sending them screaming to the ground clutching their heads. The distraction caused the kobold warriors holding off the locals to lose their footing on the gap in the grating and tumble back into the mist themselves, and the guard units surged forward, spears and swords and various other weapons turning the misty hole in the grate into a sea of blood.


"All done, time to go!" Bethy chirped as she skipped forward across the mist, casually disembowling the kobold fighting Abel.


Callie swept up behind me, grabbing me as Bethy pulled Abel and then Animal into her Domain, and then grabbed our vampire friend as she jerked us back into the shadows, pulling us through the Void laden darkness even as the rest of the locals came surging in.


We emerged behind the shed, out of breath and reeling, and I dropped everything but Murmur, keeping our traces concealed as Bethy prepared and pulled us into her Domain with the others to carry us safely out through the mist. Once we were inside, I collapsed onto the bed in the room she dropped us in, letting every single one of my forms go as I clutched my aching head.


Callie flopped down next to me, letting out a relieved groan. "Man. This was SUCH a dumb idea," she said with a laugh. "Why did we agree to this again?"


"Money," I told her solemnly. "And influence. So the same reason anyone agrees to a dumb plan." That got a giggle out of my wife, and I couldn't help but dissolve into laughter myself. We lay there for about ten minutes, cackling over something that wasn't really funny. This HAD sucked. But at least it hadn't sucked alone.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

"You better be ready to leave this shithole of a city," I growled at Devlan as we emerged into The High Society. "Because I am absolutely done with this place." We had accomplished…well, something, admittedly. The HUGE number of infinity crystals that Bethy had temporarily unloaded into the vault downstairs to prepare for our journey to the C-rank zone were integral to the construction of the Void Ladder.


But ultimately, there were other crystals, other possible items that could be used. We'd set the Void back a ways, but this was one small town in the weakest zone, and we'd lost any leads on anyone further up the chain.


The Filthsmith wasn't in contact with anyone else aside from his Void contacts. He'd known about the ladder and we'd inferred the existence of the backup, but now that we'd ruined the plan here, we officially had no real task to accomplish left in the D-rank zone. At least, not unless we GOT a new task for the competition.


I was pretty sure, however, that the tasks were regional. Rather than specifically watching us, they had them set up to trigger when we reached certain areas. That was why some of them had only tagged people near town when we participated in the siege.


It also explained why we hadn't gotten any since we arrived here, and meant that we needed to move our asses for TWO reasons, hence my extreme passion for getting the fuck out of here.


Sadly, we had nothing to wait around for in terms of support either. While we'd delayed the construction of the Void Ladder, it HAD apparently begun. My grandparents had informed me that the space surrounding the planet had already become too unstable for passage. If we didn't stop the construction we would all be fucked, but we needed to accrue our backup the way the competition intended, so moving on to the next stage immediately was our best course of action.


"We can and should," he agreed. "We're heading for Drakkholm in the C-rank zone, but it's hardly the next city on the spoke. It's one of the central cities in that zone, similar to the biggest cities here, and there are a few smaller towns on the way. We have a stop or two to get you in touch with some local factions I think might be swayed by my opinion, but we really should leave as soon as possible."


"Which direction is it?" I asked suspiciously. I was PRETTY sure the answer would be the one I wanted. I suspected they put my backup along the same spoke I was currently traveling down, but I needed a heading just in case, to make sure it matched up with my intended direction.


He pointed, and I sighed with relief. "Got it. So we need to get going then, right?"


"Yes, but not right away," he cautioned. "Since your young miss had to empty her Domain to recombobulate herself, our forces won't be able to reconvene inside while she has the crystals, at least not quickly. Therefore, I've taken the liberty of sending them out of the city piecemeal as we've been speaking. Well, before that, obviously, they didn't all leave town during this two minute conversation."


"Understandable, are they all gone then?" I asked with excitement. I felt so stifled here. Not just because of the time pressure, but because I was in a fucking WAR for control of my ancestral faction and I was already running behind.


He reached down to touch his scan ring, eyes flickering a bit, then nodded. "Looks like we're all good to go. We just need to-" The ground shook, cutting him off.


I sighed loudly. "See, I'd like to assume that has nothing to do with us, but my vast life experience tells me that whatever that is just fucked us over in a colossal way. Care to check again to see what that was about?"


He was already messaging, and I didn't love the shade of green his face was turning. "The city lord fortress has armed the defenses." He said in stupefaction. "We're…we're trapped."


My eyes narrowed at him. "I'm sorry. They armed the defenses? The defenses that require a key to arm? The key that I STOLE to get you involved in this plan in the first place?" My voice was rising as I spoke, my hands clenched into tight fists. "Are THOSE the defenses you're talking about?"


Scrambling across the room, he dug in his desk, pulling out the black metal token, checking it, and then grabbing some books and flipping through them. "Yes! But they shouldn't be able to do that! The key is a NECESSITY! That was the point of stealing it before the heist, to prevent THIS!"


Callie, who had been sitting in quietly, still recovering from her ordeal earlier, raised her hand. "I'm sorry, I hate to pile on, but am I to understand that you sent ALL of our people out of the city before these defenses became active? And that we are now trapped, alone, inside of a hostile fortress town strewn with powerful automated defense mechanisms that have now been activated and set to murder us?"


I pointed at her. "That! That's a good point! We're so FUCKED right now!"


"Not ALL of them," he assured me in a panic. "Obviously I was planning to have our personal retainers tag along. Animal is here, as well as several members of your inner circle who wouldn't leave."


"Oh, ok," I said brightly. "So we're not trapped in a death city alone, we're trapped here with MY SISTER AND ALL MY FRIENDS!"


"STOP YELLING AT ME THAT ISN'T HELPING!" he shrieked desperately. "I'm thinking!"


I actually did stop, because he'd been so put together and composed up to this point that seeing him dissolve into a screaming incoherent mess was actually kind of jarring. I modulated my tone. "Alright, Devlan," I said slowly. "This is not ideal. I know you get that. So, is there anything we can DO to get out of here. Because I can't imagine you're any more excited about being stuck in here than us. There has to be a way out of-" I froze, my brain stalling. "A way out. Can you get us to the winery? The tunnel was made completely outside the city lord's authority, and there's a straight shot to the chasm in there!"


He went still. "I…I think I can," he scrambled through the desk, pulling out maps, poring over them. "Yes. I can. But it won't be easy. We have to take a series of tunnels and they go through a LOT of faction bases. We're going to piss a lot of people off."


We emerged from the room to find several people nearby. As he'd said, Benny, Jessie, Abel, Bethy, Belsara, Chelsea, Animal, and his butler whose name I could not remember for the life of me were all there, waiting for us to emerge. I stopped to explain the whole thing to them, and everyone except the butler and Animal turned to glare at Devlan.


"I don't know what happened!" He repeated pleadingly. "This shouldn't be possible!"


"I mean, they probably just made a copy," Bethy said with a casual shrug. "What kind of idiot only keeps one copy of their most important key?"


Putting a hand on her shoulder, I gave her an encouraging smile. "That's right Bethy, and let's not get bogged down in who is or isn't a complete moron for not thinking of that. But we have a plan to escape." Honestly, I was pretty sure that Devlan hadn't considered a copy possible, and we were probably being uncharitable. This WAS the succession war, which meant they had probably teamed up with one of my relatives to wish for a new one, but still, I was really annoyed he hadn't considered that.


I wasn't the only to think of that, Belsara raised her hand. "A wish could probably have done it. Do we know if any of our other family members have shown up in town lately?"


"Doesn't matter. Whoever it is can scour the city for us once we're gone," I said firmly. "We just need to get gone. Sadly, we're going to have to move FAST if we want to get out of here quickly. Devlan says they have some of those stealth detectors in a few of the bases we're heading through. So we don't do this sneaky, this is gonna be a bull rush."


I turned to Abel. "That means you, man. You up for that? Your spatial lubrication is basically universal super speed, and it's our best shot at moving out quickly. But we're probably going to be tanking attacks left and right, can you keep up our exit through that?"


"Easily," he snorted. "Who do you think I am?"


"We've got another problem though," I added as I considered a new angle. "If the key came from a copy, and they locked down the city, chances are good that another candidate is behind the lockdown. They probably assume WE used wishes to rob the depot, or at least to transport the crystals. Which means there's also a non zero chance there will be counter wishes set up for our exit. How do we tell?"


Belsara perked up. "Actually there's a pretty easy way. Wishes become more expensive based on difficulty. If we use the stockpile you have from Natalie, we can test them as counters to possible obstacles. If they suddenly become too expensive to use, then we know there's a DIRECT counter arranged in that specific way. That's why despite preemptive wishing being feasible most of us save scrolls for the last minute."


"But this IS the last minute for them," I said, catching on. "Which gives us the initiative. In order to catch us they probably used all their wishes ensuring we couldn't escape. And if they didn't, we'll be able to tell from our OWN wishes and use those to ensure we DO. Even if we're wrong about the candidate involvement this will make it so much easier to get out of here. Also Devlan is paying for it out of his share of the crystals." I glared at him as he opened his mouth. "Come on, it's barely a blip, and we're only getting ten percent anyway. I doubt the total value will even make it to eleven percent."


I reached into my ring, pulling out all of Nats scrolls. We had about thirty of them left at this point. "And since these aren't mine, Belsara and I can BOTH help you refine the wishes." I carried the scroll stack over to a table and dumped them on the wood, pushing all the books around them to the side. "In fact, everyone can help. Now get your asses over here, we've got some wishes to make."


We started with gaming everything out, trying to identify which wishes were most likely to discover resistance. Wishing we could make it out of the city undetected, for instance, required WAY too many stats, so that one was blocked. Same with wishing a clear path to the gate. Wishing a clear path to our next destination worked, but wishing we'd pass it undisturbed didn't. It took us about ten tries before we got a variation of that we could live with.


Luckily the wishes told us the prices before use, otherwise we wouldn't have had close to enough. In the end it took all thirty to ensure our safe passage to the tunnel. I suspected the other candidate (who the inflated prices had basically confirmed was in play) had used wishes to divine our route somehow and arranged resistance, otherwise I had no clue how they'd prepared for us so thoroughly.


With everything done, we all headed out to the entryway, Abel raising his hands to build a giant spatial sphere around us, something like a hamster ball. With that finished, we all prepared for the run of our lives, and then, with an explosion of sound and fury, we set off, blasting through the front of the club and out onto the open road.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

We hit the street like a wrecking ball of death, spinning over the ground inside the sphere so fast the outside blurred. The club was actually partially surrounded when we came out, but we shot right between a pair of groups, bounced off the wall behind them, and shot off down the road before anyone nearby could even process what had happened, our path cleared perfectly by the wish as we headed for our first destination.


"Alright, the entrance to the first cave system we need is down two streets and over to the left. It's a Beer Hall called Dreklarskal." Devlan said as we rolled. "The owner is a man named Sven Krang, and he and his people have reinforced the whole place. Pretty heavily. We have a straight shot in, but once we break through, we're going to get attacked."


I nodded. "Abel, red ball mode." I commanded solemnly.


"We're not calling it that," he said waspishly. "But yeah, fine." He narrowed his eyes and the surface of the sphere shifted, converting from clear spatial lubrication to the infinite blood sea.


We came around a corner at Devlan's instruction. Hitting the front of the building at speed and smashing right through a weak spot in the defenses we'd arranged through a wish. The facade of the building exploded, and a dozen men surged to their feet. "ATTACK!" Howled the tallest one, a blond bearded man with an axe. Whether he was announcing that there WAS an attack or telling THEM to attack I had no idea, but as soon as he spoke, an assault began.


Slashes from weapons, blasts of energy, constructs, more that a dozen types of unique attacks rained down on the blood sphere, and we just punched right into them. There was a sort of low grinding as the energy was pulled into the rotation and shot out behind us, ejected into the crowd like dirt behind a digging dog.


Sadly, we couldn't shed ALL of it, and the sphere flickered somewhat under the impact, even though we felt nothing inside. Abel grunted, then leaned forward, gritting his teeth as he PUSHED us onward.


The Beer Hall around us filled with screams as attacks were reflected and tossed in random directions, and Devlan screamed. "That way! Take us that way!" He pointed towards a trap door set at an angle between the floor and wall and we shot toward it, covered by the backlash of our attackers own power shredding the building.


If this had been a normal sphere, we wouldn't have fit through the door. We were about ten feet across, and the trapped door was five, but this wasn't a NORMAL sphere. This was spatial lubrication, and Abel could make it do almost anything. Given the motivation he could shove an army through a keyhole with this power, so stretching the sphere a bit to get us through even as we smashed in the door, then spun down the steps and off towards the back of the basement.


In the back corner, there was a large bookcase that Devlan indicated we should demolish, and once we got through it we were in a large tunnel, making our way east at Devlan's instructions. "Alright, up here we're going to bust out into the Nightshadow Collective. It's basically a cult. They're going to try to tie us up with shadow ropes. It's kind of their thing."


We knew, from the wish session, but his warning was both appreciated and understandable. We were all just kind of sitting here doing the hurry up and wait thing, and it wasn't shocking that he wanted to participate somehow.


Nodding, Abel took us through a shadowy black space around a corner and out into what appeared to be some kind of labyrinth. We hit the wall at speed and ramped right up it, showing it was much sturdier than some of the other stuff we'd crashed into. We bounced along the top of the labyrinth a bunch, getting some air each time, and finally hit a pair of big stairs that sent us careening up into what looked like a really somber church.


The pews were full of robed figures in dark cloth (I had no idea why evil cultists seemed to LOVE dark robes, but it was a big thing in my experience). As we crashed through the doors at the back of the church, heading for the entrance, they all rose, and contrary to the earlier encounter, they didn't make a SOUND.


As one, the creepy figures raised their hands to the sky, and a wave of darkness exploded from between the pews, warping into chains and ropes. It wasn't Void shit, just dark power like Callie used to use. It hit the sphere and got sucked in, but rather than getting spit out by the rotation, it started to WRAP. We got further and further, dragging the shadows, but the closer we got to the door the more the resistance built, like we were dragging on a rubber band about to snap back.


Abel groaned, pushing us forward, upping the rotation, and I was alarmed to see a dribble of blood flow from his nose. We didn't have a wish ready for this leg of the trip…because we didn't need one. We'd known about these guys, and we had a natural counter. We got closer and closer to the door, the spin resisting enough to drag us onward…and then Callie flicked her fingers and a wave of shadow rose from the floor, coalescing into a giant pair of scissors.


With a snap, they closed, severing the darkness and sending us ROCKETING out into the street at a speed surpassing anything we'd enjoyed so far. Abel leaned us sideways, turning us sharply to prevent us from just smashing through the building across the road, and we took off down a major thoroughfare at top speed, rolling right over cars and sliding between groups of people. Without the wishes for this particular section of road, Abel had to be very careful, but we'd needed to use several defusing traps that had been waiting here.


Behind us, I watched a patch of frozen over tar melt back to a sticky mess made to trap us, a series of spikes jammed before they could hit the sphere, there was a platform set top spring us backwards that locked up before we went over it. Sadly, we hadn't got ALL the possible obstacles, as thorough as we'd been."FUCK!" Shouted Callie as she looked behind us. "Abel, what are the chances this thing is resistant to rotational counterforce?"


The physics of how this nonsense bubble worked were beyond me, but I knew it DID interact with the world around us by necessity, otherwise it couldn't bounce, punch through things or rotate. Energy attacks seemed to blood off, but I did think counterrotation might be a gap in the defensive capabilities. Which I wasn't worried about until I looked behind us myself…and saw the giant fucking BOULDER crashing down the road on our tail.


He flicked a glance behind us, then started cursing up a storm. "No, it is NOT resistant to that!" He spat. "If that thing hits us it'll start grinding down our momentum until we stop and then it'll pop this sphere like a soap bubble. Or did you not notice the fucking mist."


Mist WAS seeping out of the stone sphere from random spots, and it took me a second to process what I was looking at. Infinity mist. "I thought we stole all of those!"


"We stole most of them!" Devlan corrected. "No ALL. They're a major resource. Of course they have some on hand. Though how they knew to do THIS with them I have no idea." I had one. It was probably some bullshit wish divination. Secrets were weighted, but they might have gained enough info from setting up the traps to finagle an idea about what means we'd be using to escape.


Bethy glared back at them. "These guys are dicks!" She spat, more acidically than I' almost ever heard her talk. "We should find them and tear out their spines, then beat their still twitching bodies to death with them!"


"Love that," I said mildly. "Love the energy, but MAYBE not the best use of time during an escape. Spine beatings will definitely go on the agenda though. For now we need to figure out how to not get crushed to death by that insane space warping boulder. Don't suppose anyone has any ideas?"


Because we were on a straightaway path to our next cave entrance, and we couldn't turn here. "What about the ground?" Callie asked intently. "There are caves under us, we're heading for one, but could you like…drop out the ground into a different cave system? Maybe make a ramp?"


I blinked. That might work. Nodding, I reached for Agares, triggering my staff's elevation effect to take the form to C-rank. Reaching for the ground beneath us, I felt around for caves. I did find some, not all of them moving straight. "Abel! Speed up! I need a buffer!" I called to my mentor. I found a perfect cave system to use for this, then reached for the ground and SMASHED my will into it as I dissolved it into dust behind us.


There was a crash and a rumble as the boulder dipped below street level and slammed into the wall of the tunnel I'd chosen as it turned off. I'd wanted to curve it, but I couldn't manage that kind of delicacy fast enough to catch it.


We heard but didn't feel the rumbles inside the bubble, but it DID stop the boulder. We hit the next building, a cafeteria style eatery that we smashed through pretty easily, heading back under the city without much suspense.


The rest of the trip was pretty boring, aside from being in a giant spinning death ball as we fled from pursuers. We headed off most of the traps with wishes, and the remaining ones we were able to disarm with our own unique abilities. By the time we came up across from the winery, we'd basically confirmed we were free and clear, and we dismissed the sphere as we bolted into the building.


"Alright, everybody down to the tunnels!" I yelled as we bolted through the halls. "We need to hit the chasm, has anyone reached out to the others to tell them where to meet us? If nothing else they need to get away from Yettin and out of range of the long guns on the walls outside."


"Not an issue," Devlan assured me. "I told them to clear out far. And I just messaged them to head to the chasm entrance out further from the city to meet us. It's out of range and then we can just go around to get further inland. There are paths around Yettin that avoid the defenses, obviously. Part of the reason it's such a nightmare to handle is how condensed the defensive perimeter is."


We hit the bottling plant and entered the tunnels, then it was a straight shot to the chasm. We ignored the lift and took the bridge right across, and Devlan was able to find us a heading pretty quickly given his familiarity with the area from his research over the years.


When we finally emerged from the caves to meet up with the others, we were all emotionally and mentally exhausted. In the distance, we could see Yettin, swarming with activity. I didn't think they actually KNEW we were gone yet. We'd come out of this alive. Barely. I glowered at the locked down fortress town. "Remind me to find out who the candidate was working with the city lord's fortress. Because I OWE them an ass kicking. Now, everyone back into the caves. I'm going to reshape us a camp so we can sleep for the night, and being surrounded by stone will give us the best defensive options." Then we'd set off for the C-rank zone to meet up with our people. I couldn't wait to be away from this awful city.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

The next morning saw us all moving out of our temporary shelter. I stashed another eight scrolls as usual, then followed behind Devlan as he led us out and around the zone of protection that was Yettin. I was a little worried they might notice us and flood out to attack, and even with him stating unequivocally that it wouldn't happen, I wasn't willing to take the chance. I covered us all with Murmur as we walked, keeping us completely cloaked until we were out of sight and into the forest beyond the city, heading into the C-rank zone.


"So, our next stop is going to be Freldorf," Devlan said as we made our way along a relatively unobstructed path. Being an army meant we were pretty intimidating to anything that might have got in our way, and I was pretty sure even most of the other factions would avoid us.


Animal, to my surprise, recoiled at the statement. "Oh, please tell me we aren't visiting the Swamp Ghouls. They're so terrible."


"They're unpleasant," Devlan admitted. "But they're STRONG. And most of the candidates won't be trying to win them over. Most of the locals don't bother with them unless they have to, and I can't think of anyone who would suggest an alliance to a candidate."


"Um, question," I said, raising my hand. "What is a Swamp Ghoul? Ghouls are undead right? Are we going to ally with monsters?"


Devlan shook his head. "They're not actual ghouls. Though there ARE ghouls with a racial trait. Swamp Ghouls is an organizational name though. They're…slightly cannibalistic. But only if you attack them. They're Murk Elves."


Dayna, who had been walking nearby, visibly flinched. "MURK Elves? You want us to ally with MURK Elves? Murk Elves are not SLIGHTLY cannibalistic. Murk Elves are chaotic evil nightmare creatures who devour their enemies ALIVE. My species has been hunted basically to extinction and we aren't as poorly regarded as Murk Elves."


"That's an exaggeration," Devlan protested weakly. "This tribe has diverged heavily from their ancestral traditions.They rarely even eat enemies, it's a ceremonial thing they do once a year, and they'd be willing to drop it if you push."


The Heaven Murder Elf looked skeptical. "If that's true…they might be worth recruiting. Murk Elves are notoriously difficult to fight. They're basically immune to pain and their blood is poison. Not even the same poison. They eat poisonous plants and animals as they grow to cultivate different strains. Their nobility are distinct for their nearly irresistibly toxic blood."


"Freldorf is in a swamp," Devlan informed us helpfully. "The whole area is highly toxic. Lots of poisonous plants. And they use their blood to cultivate even more. Side note, don't eat or touch anything in Freldorf unless you have some kind of purification power."


Dayna snorted. "That won't matter. Murk Elves don't work with weaklings. You have to survive being poisoned by their leader to cement an alliance. I don't care how far they diverged from tradition, that one is inviolate."


"How do you know so much about them?" Asked Bethy with interest. "Do you just know all the elves?"


The elf girl shrugged. "Basically. Especially the rare variants. Star Elves, Moment Elves, I even met a Grave Elf once." She shuddered. "I sincerely hope to never repeat the experience. They are DEEPLY unsettling. I've never met a Murk Elf, mostly because no one sane goes anywhere near them. They're almost always rabidly hostile to outsiders. How did a tribe of them even end up on this planet?"


He shrugged. "Who knows. I've heard a few guesses, the most realistic of which being that they were given sanctuary from the Wishmaster for services rendered. The D-rank zone isn't the only place they live. There's an A-rank Monarch who lives in the central city. She's considered one of the most dangerous beings on this planet, and is so toxic that LOOKING at her unimpeded can kill you. She usually wears a veil."


"I wasn't aware there WERE any A-rank Murk Elves," Dayna said in astonishment. "They don't generally fare well in the outside world. There were rumors of a few swamp worlds with enclaves, but much like my own people they've been heavily depleted."


Dayna's people, the Heaven Murder Elves, had an almost unnatural natural gift for combat. They were extremely famous as retainers and mercenaries, but were often killed on sight because they were as dangerous as enemies as they were as allies. Bethy had been the one to recognize Dayna for who she was, and had beaten the elf girl in combat and swayed her to her side.


I was PRETTY sure there was more to that than we'd seen, and that Dayna's acceptance of her place as Bethy's thrall had something to do with Lark offering her protection vicariously. But whatever the case, Dayna traveled with us openly and no one had bothered her, even despite her being a reformed cultist of Verdyn.


Chelsea, to my surprise, looked actively excited, and so did Daysia. "I can purify any poison we come up against, so don't worry about that, and Shane has his own abilities in that direction."


"And I really want to study some of these plants you mentioned," Daysia gushed. "I could learn so much from them." The dryad had been distinctly down since the dungeon, but after getting through that and reuniting with her parents, her outlook had shifted. More than that, since we arrived here she'd been making fast friends with Celine, Alyssa, and Jessie. They'd even worked together back at the tree grove.


We continued our walk, discussing details and strategy, until we finally came to a stop at the edge of a new terrain. A very muddy, sludgy, WET terrain. I grimaced. "This, I take it, would be the swamp you mentioned? I don't suppose these isolationist poison elves like at the EDGE of this swamp?"


"Nope, dead center," Devlan said with a shrug. "But we need to pass through to get where we're going anyway, which is why I planned this meeting. Two birds, one stone."


As I stepped over the dividing line in the grass though, I was immediately notified that things weren't going to be that easy. Even as we walked away from the solid ground and onto the squishier and more insubstantial grass that made up the uneven terrain of the swamp, a familiar scroll unfurled in my vision.


"Announcement: The next task begins! Capture the frog king! Deep inside the toxic depths of the Venomvein swamp lives the deadly and terrifying Poison Dart Frog King. An uncatchable menace with a brilliant mind, beware the frog king's fury, for to trespass on his domain is to court your own destruction. Hint: Depths in this case is literal, you're heading down, not forward."


I stared at the purple flaming letters on the newly unfurled scroll with a sigh. "Really? The SECOND we step into a new territory. Also I'm pretty sure I'm the only person here that can even do this part? How the hell are any of the other candidates supposed to try it?"


"Maybe it's great-grandpa helping you," Chelsea said brightly. "Suggesting a task where you have an advantage!"


I raised an eyebrow at her. "And why would the rest of the council allow that?"


"They probably assume you'll die," Abel said nonchalantly. "Lot of cautionary warnings there. Those weren't so prevalent before. Feels like a setup."


"Oh it's almost definitely a foreshadowing thing," I agreed. "But why are they doing ANY of this. The whole planet is under lockdown. I can't imagine anyone cares that much about any of this when the whole line of descent of the Wish Curse Palace might get sucked into the Void."


Belsara giggled. "Oh that doesn't matter. Aiden is still the Wishmaster. He's running this show, and you saw his attitude about it. If we all die he'll just shrug and say we weren't worthy. Besides that, NOTHING can interrupt the succession war. Not unless Aiden forced it through with majority elder support, which he absolutely doesn't have even if he was inclined to try that. We're locked into this, no matter what happens."


Callie looked annoyed. "My heretic flame can't purify physical poison, and Chelsea's flame of purification can't coat her whole body. Your mom took years to create that combat state, and she just doesn't have the skill for it yet." She turned to frown at Abel. "Can't you go in? Your infinite blood sea should isolate your from the poison, right?"


"Yup, but it'll also isolate me from everything else," he sighed. "In a swamp like that, visibility will be ass. Your hubby has his ridiculous sensory form, but with my Ragam Blood Body active I'll be heavily cut off from any sort of energy or physical sensation. Perception isn't my strong suit on my best day, but I'd be useless under that muck."


I briefly considered trying Belial to utilize his power under the swamp, but in the end, I decided against it. I wasn't some fragile support backliner who needed to be coddled. Spending two hours coming up with an intricate plan to perfectly protect myself might mean someone else would get to the king. I didn't believe for a moment that I was the ONLY candidate who was capable of going down there.


Several of them probably had wishes that enabled their subordinates to go. I'd actually considered that, but I'd also have to preempt any wish based traps or tricks, and honestly after using up all of Nat's stockpile on our city escape I was running low.


Taking a deep breath, I triggered Zagan. It would be more useful for a physical detox than Leviathan, which was aimed more at soul defense. With a quick salute to my friends, I dove forward into the marshy water. From the second we'd entered the swamp, the ground had started to become more complex and sparse. We could still walk, but there were gaps where you could enter the underwater biome beneath the floating tangle of weeds and roots the ground consisted of.


Sure enough, as soon as I submerged, I felt a toxic miasma of filth try to surge into me. Zagan, being what it was, roared inside me like a furnace kicking on, boiling off the corruptive energies of the poison as it tried to erode my life force.


With my safety taken care of for now, I also triggered Dantalion, spreading my Perception around me through the marsh like a sphere.


I found…swamp. I sighed. I wasn't completely screwed, of course. Dantalion included Eye of Revelation which was comprised partly of Seek Hidden. Seek Hidden let me find traces of hidden or missing things, and I could do the same with the frog king. I just had to dig into the data cooking in the swamp until I found a trace.


As I searched, I also considered a few things. I was pretty sure Malachai WAS involved in setting this task. Ignoring the danger, it was exactly what we needed right now. Namely, the super venomous frog king would be an excellent gift to open negotiations with the Murk Elves. I wasn't sure how he'd convinced them to issue it or how the issuing even worked, but I wasn't going to waste the chance to put us in a good position.


Suddenly, my head jerked up. I'd found something. A trace, a hint of the frog king's presence from a long time ago…and one that led off into the swamp.


With a cry of delight, I spread my wings, flapping them hard to create a pair of paddles the drove me forward through the swamp water like a motor. As I shot off through the sludge, I could feel other forms closing in from the edges of my perception. I grimaced. I'd been right, I wasn't the only one who could get down here.


Triggering Murmur, I cloaked myself, vanishing into the dark murk seamlessly as I plunged deeper into the swamp, heading both forward AND down. The frog king was holding court deep below the surface, and I was aiming for a little regicide. Game on.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

The inside of the swamp was DARK. That might have seemed obvious, but it was actually kind of oppressive when I got deep enough. Towards the top, some light had gotten through the muck. Not much, but with my Perception I could still see it. Down here though, once I'd dove a few hundred feet, there was NOTHING. It was so dark that it felt like I had my eyes closed.


Only my Dantalion senses made it feasible to function down here. Song of the Soil among others was designed to function through solid earth, so a bit of thick water wasn't much. I could hold my breath for hours at this point, but I didn't even need to do that, because Zagan was cleansing the area around me after a bit of fine tuning, purifying the muck and boiling off the water in such a way that I had a small bubble of fresh air forming a cushion as I dove.


I could have actually lit the area directly around me, but I was erasing the light with Murmur. It wouldn't penetrate the muck, but it was just a risk for no reason. What was the point of seeing for two inches away from my face.


Around me, I could sense people combing the swamp. Some further up, some even deeper than I. They crisscrossed the area, searching for the beast, and some of them felt pretty fucking strong.


As if the thought had summoned her, a figure darted through the muck, stopping about twenty feet in front of me. I couldn't see her, obviously, but my senses told me she was there, and more concerningly, she seemed to be able to sense ME too. I stopped, staring forward. I considered how to interact, but since she could sense me despite Murmur, she had to have some means of field detection, which meant I could just…talk.


"Who are you?" I asked bluntly. "Assuming you can hear me right now, which I have to guess you can and aren't just sitting inconveniently in my way by coincidence."


"Anis," she said in a high, clear voice. She was tall. Like way taller than most people. Six foot two maybe, and thin but muscular. "The spirits tell me of your presence. You cannot hide from the dead."


I sighed. "Ah, that explains it." Murmur was an amazing tool, but it worked based on my own Perception. There were senses that were uncommonly found that normal stealth just…missed. Methods of detection that ran parallel to the sensory input of most people that had to be cultivated to be countered. Necromantic sight, a method using ghosts to perceive the world, was one of those. I'd never run into anyone that could use it, and I'd never really bothered learning it myself, so I couldn't conceal my traces from it with my domain. "What exactly do you want?"


"The spirits speak of knowledge gained through demonic trickery," she said hazily. "You have truth to speak. Reveal your path, trickster, or face the lamentations of the dead."


"You know lamentations means like…complaints, right? There's a severity difference, sure, but you're basically threatening to whine at me if I don't let you cheat off my test. Which, obviously, I'm not doing." I rolled my eyes. "So why don't you move, before I move you, because I am not even remotely scared of you or your spooky ghost friends."


Despite saying that, I DID trigger Glory. My staff extended into a condensed blade of destructive black flame as strength flooded my body. I would absolutely throw down if needed, though I'd prefer to save my effort for the frog king.


"Your infernal might is great," she said coldly. "But I did not seek this conflict without assurance."


I would have asked what she meant by that, but the multiple OTHER fucking people swarming around me right now made it pretty clear. None of them, as far as I could tell, were Wyndhams. My family tended to work through cat's paws. These were the powerful subordinates they brought, and they were…inconvenient.


Four more people were surrounding me. One was a girl with long silver hair and silver eyes, her skin chalk white and her mouth sewn shut. I was able to pick up her racial trait through Dantalion, and I was impressed. I'd never met a Banesidhe before. Another was a small, round man with a bald head ringed by a shock of bright blue hair. His skin was dark and he had a thick mustache.


The last two were twins, slim blonde girls who looked a bit younger than me, their unblinking eyes each one blue and one green, but on opposite sides.


Raising my staff, I was preparing for a fight…when my Danger Sense EXPLODED. Focusing on the blue haired man, I triggered Double Trouble without hesitation. My Danger Sense had been trilling lightly since entering the swamp, but it hadn't gone off hard until that moment. It wasn't from the five subordinates either. It had happened after they surrounded me.


Behind me, in the collapsing pocket of air left by my vanished form, a small bright green form exploded from the muck, its lurid purple tongue shattering the mud as it was launched right at where my head had been moments ago.


Since the head, much like the rest of that figure, was an illusion, it punched right through, the tongue tearing the swamp as it lashed into the arm of Anis the ghost girl.


She screamed, jerking back, and I saw the wound turn black and begin to rapidly corrode. She didn't even hesitate, just reached up and, with a groan of effort, TORE her own arm directly off her body and chucked it into the swamp.


The green thing was floating where my illusion had been, its large red eyes scanning the muck, and it seemed to be able to see perfectly. Which was to be expected really, the frog king WAS the lord of this swamp. "Humans," spat the frog, in a surprisingly urbane and cultured accent. "You trespass."


That was shocking. Beasts RARELY spoke. At least not human language. Some of them could turn INTO humans, but the ones who didn't had evolved into more dangerous or powerful forms of their animal self specifically because they saw no value in becoming a person. Because of this, true form animals above D-rank didn't really LEARN human speech. The fact that this one had was…interesting.


In fact, thinking back, the announcement hadn't said to KILL the frog king. I'd assumed that on reflex. It said capture.


Looking at it now, capture might not even be necessary. I could just ASK him to come with me, at least for a while. My plan to turn him over to the Murk Elves was obviously off, given their habits and his own sapience, but I could still get the points.


Sadly, my ingenious plan to actually TALK about things for once was derailed by the blue haired man in front of me screaming. "INFERNAL BEAST, DIE!" And unleashing a column of swirling ice energy right at the frog king. I sighed, triggering Double Trouble again and appearing behind the ghost girl, who was too distracted trying to patch up her lost arm to notice me.


That decision proved to be a good one, because the ice beam did NOT stop the frog king. In fact, it didn't even touch him. He blurred upward, then his powerful but tiny back legs (he was only the size of a child's fist) pushed off the muck in a way I couldn't process and he exploded toward the blue haired man. He hit the man and bounced off, the force of the kick knocking him flying as he ricocheted towards the twins.


I, naturally, got the fuck out of dodge. I could find him again later to talk if possible, or I could just miss the points, but I couldn't UNdie if he killed me. My wings struck the muck powerfully, sending me exploding straight upward at a tremendous speed. My staff thrust out ahead of me, slicing the mud to provide me with less resistance as the power of Glory propelled me upward.


My Danger Sense screamed in my head, and I flapped harder, exploding out of the mud and into the sky before triggering my Waltz, vanishing in a flash of black fire. Looking back at the spot I'd vacated, I saw a small green form burst from the swamp like a cannonball, shooting toward the spot I'd just been. "Foul interloper!" Howled the tiny frog with surprising volume. "Taste my vengeance!"


I wasn't there anymore, so I obviously did NOT taste his vengeance, and I immediately triggered my Waltz repeatedly to keep it that way. The incredibly bouncy frog bounded off the top of a tree past where I'd been, then leapt from tree to tree in a blur, desperately trying to smash into me.


That might not have seemed like a problem, considering his small size, but where he impacted the trees, the bark turned black and started to decay. On trees that grew in a POISON SWAMP. I couldn't imagine being touched by that thing would do much for me, even if my Zagan powers would probably eventually take care of it.


Not to mention I wasn't really set up for this fight. Small bouncy animal wasn't really my usual opponent. I fought people or occasionally big things.


Landing on the tree closest to me, I frowned as I looked around. I'd lost track of him. Dantalion was useful here, but he wasn't…there! My head snapped around as I caught a blur of motion heading toward my. My staff spun, readying to deflect despite REALLY not wanting to touch this thing…but it didn't happen.


From the air above me, a familiar and wonderful trill of rage echoed, and a blazing green form exploded from the sky wreathed in life giving, purifying fire. Archimedes, claws outstretched in a ferocious avian swoop, flickered down towards the frog, on a collision course with the poisoned animal.


When they met, an explosion of dark energy and erupted as the life nova flames purified the corrosive frog venom, the beast bouncing off Archie's talons as he pushed himself away, trying desperately to escape.


But my buddy was not to be denied. With another trill, he exploded in a flurry of green fire, using my Waltz himself as he teleported after the fleeing frog king. Archie appeared low, herding the frog up to keep him from entering the muck to escape, and the frog howled with outrage as he was forced higher and higher, cutting off his retreat. Being able to teleport short distances combined with being a fucking BIRD in the air gave Archie an overwhelming advantage.


Eventually, the frog king was cornered, and Archie wrapped his wicked sharp claws around the small animal from above, immobilizing him. From his talons, dark energy spat and flickered as he consistently detoxified his own feet to counter the frog's venom.


He trilled happily, smugly gliding towards me with his prize, then beginning a lazy circle around me. "Unhand me pigeon!" Shrieked the frog king. "How dare you! I am a monarch, respect my dignity! Bow before my glory! Ow don't squeeze so tight that hurts!"


We headed back to the edge of the swamp, where I met up with the others. My eyes almost bugged out of my head when we landed outside the swamp, and I was notified through the scroll announcement that the trial was over. More than that, it privately informed me of my point gain, and I was absolutely blown away to see that my points total had reached SEVENTY FIVE after this, substantially climbing from just one task.


Archie landed on a branch, one leg extended, holding the frog king out in the air with a single claw to keep him from trying to escape. I laughed as my friends stared at me in shock. "So, turns out, Archie is REALLY good at frog hunting." Everyone burst out laughing, and I beamed as I looked around. That had been an excellent way to dip our toes back into the competition after all the Void shit. Now, all we had to do was deal with the frog king. Time for a conversation.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

The frog king was NOT happy to be captured. Which, you know, objectively reasonable. Who likes getting kidnapped. Admittedly, the frog was more verbose about it than I suspect most creatures are. But after we explained we weren't planning to kill him or eat him he calmed down. Archie looked a little disappointed, but I drew the line at eating sentient creatures that are actively begging for mercy. Or like…demanding it acerbically.


"Humans," he announces grandly. "I will allow you to remain in my august presence as we journey to meet with the point ears."


Bethy stared at him indecisively for a moment, then turned to regard me imperiously. "This one," she said, her tone like the edict of an immortal empress. "Is not cute. We can get rid of it. We should find something better. Something fuzzy."


On that cheery note we continued onward. We had a meeting with the Murk Elves to attend, though I was told we weren't really on a deadline, it was just generally agreed the faster we moved the better. With the frog king coming along with us, we moved faster than I'd thought. I'd have expected the candidates and their subordinates to follow us, but apparently either the loss or whatever the frog king had done to them had scared them off, so we made surprisingly good time.


Arriving at the Murk Elf village though, I was pretty thrown by how…normal it looked. The town was very neat, well kept and cleanly constructed houses surrounded by cute little fences with tiny gardens laid out in the surrounding yards.


Of course, that peaceful and idyllic impression was somewhat disturbed by my Danger Sense screaming bloody murder when I came within a hundred feet of one of those gardens. Every single plant in every single yard was maximum levels of toxic, to the point that I was worried the wind would shift and some of our people would fall over dead.


Sitting outside the village were what looked like a welcome wagon of friendly, approachable elves. They were tall and pale, with moss green hair and eyes and happy smiles. They wore light, breezy clothes and had cheerful and upbeat demeanors.


But there was more beyond that. If I hadn't been looking for the signs I'd have missed them. The incredibly sharp nails, the serrated teeth that vaguely showed behind their tightly closed lips.


I triggered Zagan as I strolled forward to meet them. "Greetings friends," said the leader, a tall, spindly male elf with sharp cheekbones and a small scar on his jaw. "Welcome to our humble home." He offered his hand to me as I approached. "Be welcome in our place of life."


He looked like the picture of elfin hospitality, and anyone outside the situation might have really believed his act. I, however, took his hand and immediately felt a surge of power billow through me as Zagan purified the poison he was emitting. And it wasn't even his full effort. Murk Elves synthesized poison in their blood stream. I was catching contact poison off like…hand sweat.


The elf raised an eyebrow with interest, his moss green eyes the only part of his face not smiling. "Well now, how interesting, it's been so long since we had guests who could keep up."


"Monico," Devlan sighed from behind me (several hundred feet behind me, in fact). "I brought him here to meet with you about an alliance. There's no need for hostility. He's well aware of the rite of fortitude and is happy to drink with you."


Monico's eyes snapped up suspiciously. "He may be aware of the rite of fortitude, but you were not. At least not before your arrival here. Who speaks to you of such things?"


"I do," Dayna said, stepping forward with a cold stare. "Or do the Murk Elves no longer recognize their brethren of the vanishing tribes?" I hadn't been aware there was a name for it, or that they had that kind of interaction. Based on Monico's face though, he recognized Dayna and her comment hit him hard.


"A heaven murder elf," he said grimly. "What a misfortune to be visited upon my humble village. We honor the old ways, traveler, you are recognized, though not welcome."


She shrugged. "I'm not exactly thrilled to be lunching with you either. All I ask is that you hear him out. Consider the offer, and I'll consider any duties you have to me as host completed in full, and we can ignore each other as we'd both prefer."


"You keep…interesting company," Monaco said to me with a steely grin, squeezing down harder on my hand. "But I suppose it says quite a bit about your capabilities as a leader. Very well. We dispense with the games. Will you undertake the rite of fortitude? Will you drink the most potent venom of the Swamp Ghouls and seek survival within the jaws of death itself?"


As he spoke, the air around us grew heavy. Something shifted slightly in the atmosphere, shadows lengthening and cold win flitting over us. Behind him, I saw the eyes of the Murk Elves glow a dim, ominous green. I nodded firmly. "I will."


He stared at me for a moment, eyes boring into me like icepicks. "Very well," he said again. "Fetch the table and the grail!"


Behind him, all the Murk Elves gasped and whispered, one of them taking off into the village and running to the biggest house before coming back with a pair of objects, one small wooden table and one beaten brass cup carved with exquisite symbols.


Callie, contacting me through the bond so I could hear, leaned over to Dayna. "So…what's that?"


"It's a Gloomblood Grail," the archer said with a sigh. "They're rare and difficult to find, but it'll make this more dangerous. The grail retains the venomous essence of previous rites performed with it. It's not enough to decide things on its own, but it will make this much harder. I didn't expect them to have one."


Monico gestured for me to sit at the table, on one of a pair of mushrooms that grew from the ground at a gesture, and I did so, as he set the grail in front of us, he poured a measure of water he was handed into the grail, then pricked a finger and dripped it into the cup. The runes glowed, and the water inside shifted from clear to a lurid purple, beginning to glow.


"The rite of fortitude is quite simple," he told me with a pleasant, sharklike smile. He wasn't bothering to hide his rows of razor sharp teeth this time. "The adapted version requires a single drink and then survival, but the original uses the grail. The grail converts life energy into toxicity. As we each pick it up and sip, passing it back and forth, the damage to our life force from the poison will funnel into the grail, reinforcing the toxin."


He chuckled at my silence, apparently taking it as some kind of fear response. "Fear not, we have an antidote on hand if needed. We aren't fools. While your family might be in contention with one another at the moment, we are not well loved. Killing you while you're under hopsitality and have offered no violence to us would cause no end of problems."


I didn't speak, but nodded, focusing on the grail as I triggered my mask to open up like when I ate. Seeing Monico had no intention of doing anything, I sighed internally, reached for the cup, and took a sip. Sure enough, there was a roar of energy inside me as the poison in the cup clashed with the power of Zagan enhanced by Sammael. Rather than actually damage me though, it was just burned off, and there was a flicker of green fire in the purple liquid as it bubbled and hissed.


Setting it down, I pushed the grail towards the other side of the table. Smirking Monico picked up the cup and took a long sip. As he did, his brow furrowed and his eye twitched, the smile falling off his face. He looked at me sharply, but I remained silent as he pushed the cup back my way.


Without any hesitation, I picked the cup up and took a sip. This time, the reaction was bigger. The runes on the cup had flared when Monico drank, and the feedback from my own power was there too. I'd expected it to purify the poison somewhat, and it had…which was the problem. Monaco's bloodline poison was cultivated carefully. It was MEANT to be toxic. Purifying it didn't turn it into something safe, it just removed impurities that made it LESS poisonous.


More fire drained into the grail as my form burned off the much stronger poison, but this time, Zagan had trouble with the toxin. I had to sit for a second and process before it was cleansed, and when I put the grail down, I felt a slight strain on my soul.


This time, Monaco's expression when he drank was strained, and I groaned at my next sip. Back and forth we passed the grail, the poison becoming denser and denser. My Zagan form couldn't keep up, every sip burned poison, but it was so slow after so many rounds I was still burning the poison from the sip before, and it was starting to snowball. I groaned internally, but forced myself to ignore the pain as I drank.


Despite the small size of the grail, they'd poured a whole pitcher of water into it, so I assumed it was spatially expanded. Even so, we quickly approached the end of the concoction, and I found it harder and harder to endure.


Monico wasn't doing much better. His pale skin was mottled blue and green. Not like a supernatural alteration, but like he was nauseous and suffocating at the same time. Apparently even his own resistance to his blood had been far outstripped by the toxicity of what was currently in that cup.


I slammed the cup down, panting, teeth gritted, and pushed it slowly to the other side, my hands shaking. My throat burned, my eyes watered, my lungs cramped. Pain beyond imagining was wracking my body, and I could imagine LOTS of pain. But I didn't give up.


Monaco glared at me in defiance, wrapping his long fingers around the grail and slowly raising it to his mouth. His hand shook so hard the purple liquid sloshed over the edge, hissing and burning away the table where the drops landed. He raised it slowly to his lips, eyes boring into mine…and then fell over.


Another Murk Elf, a tall willowy girl with curly moss green hair, took my hand and raised it above my head. "Victor!" She called in an exuberant voice.


"Yeah, thanks," I gritted out. "Can you give me the antidote now? I am in…indescribable pain."


She nodded, then reached down to the grail, tapping a series of runes. The bubbling purple liquid seethed, boiling over, and purple smoke rose from it, floating off into the breeze and leaving just a green glowing liquid. Smiling, she handed me the cup, and I nodded gratefully, taking a long sip. I felt pure relief wash through me, revitalizing my body like rain in the desert.


It blended with the power of my Zagan fire, enhancing it as I gloried in the sheer gratitude that I wasn't suffering anymore. I was so wrapped up in it that I missed them dumping a bit of it into Monico's mouth, but I noticed them leaving with the still full cup as the elf leader groaned, sitting up slowly and rubbing his head. He shot me an amused look. "That was supremely unpleasant. Well done."


I laughed, standing shakily and walking over to offer him a hand, pulling him to his feet. "What can I say, I don't do anything the easy way." He joined me in my laughter and clapped a hand on my shoulder, leading me further into the village to discuss the alliance. I had to admit, that could have gone much worse.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

The rest of our trip to the C-rank zone was surprisingly mellow. After we affirmed our alliance with the Murk Elves, several of them joined up with us. We also stopped at multiple villages, towns, and even a city or two along our slightly serpentine path, and now we were arriving at the first C-rank city on the spoke we were following, Devayre.


Our forces had grown as we traveled, now up to a full seven hundred and fifty. As we approached Devayre though, I had a strong feeling that we needed to stop there, regardless of our plan. My fatewalker abilities were hit or miss, but didn't usually steer me wrong when they did pop up, which told me that something in that city was important to us.


As we approached, I recognized a familiar figure. A tall red haired woman with golden eyes, decked out in pure golden armor with onyx inlays and wielding a colossal mace over one shoulder. She noticed me looking and smiled easily, waving cheerfully as my army marched down the stone path we'd been on for the last twenty miles or so. As we came closer, she snapped off a lazy salute. "Ellisara of Estelos at your service sir. Head of your personal guard in C-rank."


I glanced to her side, noticing another familiar figure, an incredibly pale girl in a black dress. I grinned at her. "Hey cousin, you look like you're doing well. Making friends I see? Aren't you glad I fixed you up?"


Felicity snorted. "Not really. I was harder to annoy when I was a blank slate. This one never shuts up."


Ellisara gasped, putting a hand to her chest. "Why I never. Lissy, I thought we were best friends? I was going to introduce you to my brother. You two would get along swimmingly, you're both huge buzzkills."


My cousin rolled her eyes. "I've met your brother, remember? He didn't make a good impression."


I snorted. "You two manage to gather any of the others, or have you been too busy taking your two woman comedy show on the road?"


Ellisara snorted. "We've got about thirty of them in there. We're doing surprisingly well here, a few of the factions have tried to poach us, but between me and Liss, we've bounced anyone who got too shirty. Some of those C-rankers you sent in here are impressive. That archer Argaunt is a dour bastard, but he can shoot like a cannon, and he's kind of cute."


"Argaunt is here!" Dayna popped up next to me, excited. "That's fantastic. He should have the other C-rankers from Verdyn's faction with him. And we can use them to find the others. Tracking is one of our specialties."


"That's how we found the ones we've got," Ellisara nodded. "Those pods weren't designed to stick together. You're lucky you had the vampire to cart your people in, or you'd have been swarming the D-rank zone trying to track down the rest of your people for days. Or wasting scrolls to do it. Regardless, I'm glad you found us first. I promised my master I'd watch your backs."


I nodded gratefully, happy to have such a powerful guard. Ellisara was my mother's personal disciple, and a subordinate of my grandfather. Her Solid Path was in my mom's Stellar Flame Fist. Its ultimate transformation, the Sunsmasher Body, was a terrifying fighting state my mom had pioneered herself, and she was legendary for the whole set of techniques, earning her the epithet "Star Queen".


I'd seen Ellisara fight before, and she was scary. Speaking of that fight. "I don't suppose your brother is here?" I asked her. We'd originally met Ellisara and her brother back during the conclave held by the six gods (in absentia). Her brother Malkyr was an Earl with the Empire, and had a Job called Cinder Centurion, which enabled him to mold weapons out of living fire. I could think of a few uses for that power given Chelsea's ability.


Sadly, she shook her head. "Not this time. I didn't want him coming anyway. That was why I decided to follow him to the conclave and beat him. Dad isn't so confident in his abilities anymore, and he was less likely to send him here. I had a bit of an inkling it might get moved up. My brother is no slouch, but he's not ready for this kind of environment. He's too…soft."


"Awfully prescient of you," I said wryly. "Because to the surprise of absolutely no one, something has gone horribly wrong."


We filled them in on everything as we walked back to the city. Devlan, to my surprise, caught up to us despite the obvious reunion and interrupted. "I just heard from the The High Society," he told me breathlessly. "They sent one of the local branch heads to collect the crystals here. You'll be paid an estimate in advance, but he wants to meet with you immediately."


I grimaced. "We're supposed to be going to get our people. We have thirty C-rankers in town waiting around for us, can't this wait?"


"Sorry, no," he said bluntly. "When one of the bosses calls, we go. Trellan Saint is one of the strongest C-rankers in the zone, and a direct blood relative of our current A-rank society head. He's fairly easygoing most of the time from what I hear, but with this much money involved, no one would be relaxed. He said now and he means now."


Ellie's gold eyes flashed menacingly, but I held up a hand. "No, that's reasonable. We dragged our asses getting here, making recruitment stops left and right. I'm not surprised they sent someone to meet us, and delaying any longer would be bad manners." I squinted at Devlan. "That said, we WILL be going in armed and ready. So if he decides to start things off with a show of force, he's going to have a bad time. I'm assuming my people can show up within minutes if needed, and Ellie and Felicity are more than up to holding down the fort while we wait for backup."


"If I was planning to double cross you, which I'm both not and can't, I'd have jumped you en route," he pointed out bluntly. "My people might not outnumber you, but there are enough of us to be seriously inconvenient in an ambush. Besides, no matter what happens, Bethany has the crystals and to get them out of her Domain we'd need her held. I don't think even killing her would manage it, not that any of us are stupid enough to try."


Both good points, though I thought the latter was a bit more of a factor. Still, he'd helped us out a lot, and despite how much help WE'D been, I was also his meal ticket, so I wasn't too worried about this being a trap. That said, better safe than sorry.


We entered the city with surprisingly little resistance. Devayre was as open and inviting as Yettin was closed. Forget walls, there weren't even gates. Just a lot of archways ringing the city that anyone could enter or leave through. We followed Ellie and Felicity down a few back streets, heading for the spot where this Trellan person was supposed to be meeting us. He'd given an address, but Devlan wasn't familiar with the city, and while the girls weren't local, they'd been here for a while as we'd made our way to the zone, so they knew the way.


To my surprise, we did NOT end up at a bar, or a club, or any sort of food preparation establishment. In fact, we didn't end up at an establishment at all. We came to a stop at the end of a deserted back alley, in front of a pair of nearly horizontal angled doors in the cobbled street. Benny turned to Devlan. "You know what I love about this situation? How much of a trap it doesn't feel like. When I think of traps, I think of any situation but one where a shady ally leads me and a mostly inferior group of my friends into a literal hole in the ground at short notice carrying a lot of expensive treasure."


"He's not wrong," I told Devlan flatly. "Your contract is the only reason I'm even considering this. Next time tell your boss to pick somewhere less sketchy. If Ellie and Felicity weren't here I'd dump your crystals on the street and leave you to cart them down one by one if needed."


He shrugged helplessly. "Noted, but this isn't exactly one of our strongholds. I'm sure he just needed a quiet meeting place and this was what was available."


I rolled my eyes, letting everyone go ahead, but to my surprise, I was stopped by Benny before I could follow. I turned to him with confusion. "Hey man, what's up? You've been quiet lately. That's the first thing I've heard you say since we got to the zone I think. Anything I can help with?"


"Yes, actually," he said with a grin. "I need to borrow something. Or rather, I need you to get it for me. I've been working on a new invention to integrate, and I need you to spot me some materials. Namely, I want one of those infinity crystals. Just one bar of the stuff, I don't think I can work with much anyway, but I just know if I can integrate it into one of the powerful devices I'm making, I'll be able to boost my strength by a ton."


I vaguely remembered getting him some pieces of gear with souls in them, an axe and something else, but I had no idea what they did or any of the specifics. Still, I'd been a bit worried about my best friend. He'd done a TON of training, but since he'd come back from his trip with Sebastian he'd been sort of distant. Some of that was obviously me being stupidly busy managing hundreds of people, but I also suspected he didn't really know how to talk to me while we were here.


Him coming to ask for help was a sign of trust and a relief to me. So of course I gave him shit about it. "Man you know how much they're going to charge me to get one of those? I'll probably have to eat one or two percent. That's well outside my contract. You're like I kind of like you sometimes."


"If only that feeling were mutual," he grinned, his eyes sparkling with a gratitude neither of us wanted him to articulate. "I tolerate you at best, and that's only on your good days."


I laughed, clapping him on the shoulder, and we turned and headed in. Nothing else needed to be said. He knew I'd do my best to get him one of those crystals, and I knew he'd use it to become as strong as possible to help me accomplish my goals. Benny and I might have been a bit distant lately, but he was still my best friend.


We stepped onto the stairs, heading down to where Callie and Celine were waiting for us, and when I explained to my wife where we'd been she rolled her eyes. To my surprise though, I saw Benny glance at us thoughtfully and then at Celine, and his face became pensive. I made a mental note to bring that up later, because I was pretty sure I knew what he was thinking.


When we got down into the weird cellar building, we passed all our people clustered in a big sort of warehouse room. Devlan was waiting, and he ushered us into a small wooden chamber where a slim blonde man with a well trimmed mustache sat at a rickety wooden table. Trellan noticed us as we entered and looked up, smiling widely. "Ah, the guests of the hour, please, do come in, we have so much to discuss." Somehow, I didn't think he just meant the crystals. Now I just had to figure out if that was good or bad.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Trellan Saint was not an intimidating person. Not just visually (I'd long since learned not to judge books by covers), his whole demeanor was very casual and amused. Like he was in on a private joke the rest of us hadn't caught onto yet. I didn't like him. Like…immediate antipathy. But that wasn't really relevant to the situation. So I sat down across from him and just bluntly said what was on my mind. "What do you want?"


He hummed with interest. "What a fascinating question. Because really, wants are so complex. They tend to vary moment to moment. If you ask what I want now, perhaps a nice filet, what I want in my life? Power and control. In a more general sense, the short term if you will, I'd say survival is high on my list. Specifically, not plummeting into the Void and being torn apart by a never ending army of nightmare creatures."


"Yeah, I think that one is pretty popular," I said wryly. "Am I to take it that you've chosen to involve yourself with my group in hopes of PREVENTING that outcome? Because that seems remarkably forward thinking of you. I get the vibe everyone else is just going to ignore it and hope it goes away."


He snorted. "They're idiots, but they aren't complete dunces. They're not being as passive as you might think. But yes, they'll prioritize the succession war. At least until the very last moment, at which point they'll all join forces to try to dispose of the problem."


"But what if it's too late?" I asked in frustration. "What if they waited too long and we're all going to die by that point?"


"Then we die," he shrugged. "I'm not a Wyndham, kid, I'm just telling you what I see. This competition is worth more to your family than almost anything. This isn't just a chance at authority, it's a chance at GROWTH. You know the Wishmaster position is temporary, holding office until you're close to S-rank, but did you know that there is NO Wishmaster who hasn't at least reached A?"


That seemed obvious…until I thought about it. "I mean, the sheer volume of renown would be huge, but past D-rank you can't rank up with just stats. So there's some way to help the Wishmaster with Path stuff? Or is just a consequence of only picking the best for the position?"


"Could be either," he said with a shrug. "The point is that this is a guaranteed ticket to A-rank, possibly on the road to S. Some of these people will NEVER reach that level. They'll die of old age in a few thousand years, pointless and ignored. The WCP might be this huge monolithic object to the universe at large, but the fact is that most candidates live unremarkable lives, essentially becoming reality warping vending machines until they hit a wall."


Which was grim. But also kind of shed some light on the rabid desperation some of my family seemed to exhibit. My path to where I was hadn't been typical. Not even for a candidate, the sheer number of advantages I had in terms of Paths and my non stat advancement was staggering, and it was easy to forget others didn't have it.


Looking at my life, my friends, my family, so many of them were on the road to power, to longevity and health. How much would I be willing to risk if that wasn't the case? If Callie didn't have the talent to hit C-rank, or even D-rank, no matter how much help I provided. If Benny was stuck beyond that threshold, destined to die after what, to me, would be an eyeblink.


A lot. I'd do a lot. Risk almost anything. Maybe that was too much credit to be giving my relatives, but I was sure at least some of them had the same thought. Some of them had loved ones they wanted to bring with them to the top. Hell, how many of these subordinates were best friends like Benny was to me? Were wives or surrogate family? It was easy to look at the rest of them like the universe did, spoiled powerful children scrabbling for relevance. But how much of myself was reflected in the drive these people had, and how much was I ignoring out of my own hubris?


"So, you want to help, why do that instead of buy into their bullshit, like so many others are clearly doing?" Because the other candidates WERE still recruiting successfully. The Void incidents weren't necessarily common knowledge, but I was sure some of the locals knew. Trellan himself was an example.


"Because my faction interacts more with the outside world than most," he chuckled. "The Heirworld is a product of the Wish Curse Palace. If the candidates and branch heads are going ahead on a combination of arrogance and desperation, the locals are doing so out of a misplaced idealism built off lionizing the overlords that created this broken science experiment of a planet. It's easy to see what the WCP is capable of as a whole and attribute that competence to the individual. Not to mention we have our own desperation stoked by the possibility of escape."


I snorted in amusement. "So basically, you have no faith in my family and want to hedge your bets by working with someone you think will at least slightly prioritize the bigger picture instead of sticking their head in the sand until we get sucked into a howling vortex of eternal blackness?" I stared at him for a moment, waiting for a response, and when he nodded ruefully…I held out my hand. "Sounds good to me. Welcome to the team. I hope you realize I'm going to rake you over the coals in these contract negotiations."


He barked out a laugh, taking my offered hand. "Wouldn't have it any other way. So, tell me, what is it you're looking for?"


I considered my goals, my needs, and what I had available. And I sighed. I was getting a big chunk of cash for the sale of the crystals, which would be useful for my comfort here, considering the overwhelmingly consumerist atmosphere…but that had been more Yettin than it was the planet as a whole. While I was sure that money would help, it wasn't what we needed most. Aside from the one infinity crystal I was planning to request, I also had other needs.


"Elixirs," I told him with a sigh. "Enough for…" I trailed off. "At least four. More if possible. A full set for each of us."


He nodded, humming consideringly as he pulled out my contract and studied it. "Fifteen percent of the bulk sales, we're paying up front so we go off market price. There's no real flat pricing for elixirs, it's going to vary based on your prioritized stats, but I could probably swing…seven sets? Assuming you aren't going to ask for something like a hundred thousand Fantasy or something. Some of the rare stats are at a premium."


Seven was decent. Me and Callie, Benny, Jessie, Abel, Bethy, and Chelsea. I honestly felt terrible that I couldn't help out people like Celine, Daysia, Dayna, and Alyssa. But aside from Benny (who I refused to leave behind), everyone else was vital to our success.


I tossed out my demand for a few infinity crystals too (I decided to ask for three of them, if Benny didn't use them I was sure someone else would) and we haggled over details for a while. I DID end up getting seven sets, but I had to compromise on the crystals, lowering my demand to two to push it over the edge, because the stat distributions I wanted were worth a bit more than I could afford with my share. Once I dropped one though, I was OVER limit, and I ended up getting a hundred C-rank chits in change on top of the contract fee, which definitely didn't hurt my mood given how low my funds were.


Once we had the terms settled, we moved onto the next part of things. I had already signed Devlan and his people in exchange for that percentage stake, and this was Trellan wanting to commit more of his forces to our efforts at stopping the void, so we were clearly in territory that required new terms.


"So, what do you have to offer, exactly," I asked him bluntly. "I assume you DO have an offer or you wouldn't have approached me."


He smiled broadly, then snapped his fingers, withdrawing a folder that he tossed on the desk. "In fact, I do. Once we got a handle on what happened in Yettin, we decided to investigate our other holdings, looking for any signs of possible attempts to gather the materials for the Void Ladder. We identified several possible trouble spots, and dispatched our people to deal with them. Even if we don't end up allying with you, we don't want the planet destroyed, and the materials are a good business opportunity.


"We ALSO identified at least one potential area of concern in this city. We noted your presence here as a faction and it was decided that I should be dispatched to aid in the removal of this particular inconvenience," he gestured to the folder, which I picked up and read over.


Rather than another theft, this particular operation appeared to be a brainwashing operation. Based out of an old orphanage, the Void was apparently running some kind of kidnapping ring. Orphans and former employees of the building would go out and grab people and bring them back for conversion. Some of them came out, some of them didn't.


I called Callie in, passing her the folder to check over the details. She grimaced. "This is…this is just sloppy. They're grabbing anyone with a weak mind and quick converting them, then killing anyone who doesn't take. This is antithetical to the normal Void approach. Whoever this is either doesn't care what the Void Children think or is desperate. I'm guessing the latter, given that this kind of broad spectrum numbers game conversion is something nobody would bother with unless they were firmly dedicated to the Void's interest."


"Fair enough," I said with a grimace. "So, we obviously don't want to raid this place directly. I'm assuming you're suggesting infiltration? If we can identify the distribution channels they use to ship these converts out, we can uncover a huge swathe of operations all over the planet."


He beamed at me. "Exactly what I was thinking. Great minds and all that. But yes, I'm absolutely planning to use these fools to uncover the main bulk of their forces. Playing defense is unlikely to get us rid of this threat before things devolve beyond the point of salvation. We're doing our best to put out fires, but signs aren't visible for us until it's nearly too late."


"Very well, so what resources are you promising for this infiltration?" I asked, getting to the heart of the matter. "I assume you aren't expecting me to go alone, or this wouldn't be a cooperation at all."


"Of course not," he beamed. "In fact, we've already begun our process. Not only will we not expect you to do the bulk of the work, we already have an agent inside waiting to help you infiltrate. Her name is Tilda, and she'll be helping you establish yourself as a potential convert, as well as allowing you to bypass the worst of the conversion process."


He outlined our strategy there, or rather, the one he intended to use, asking me for advice and letting me help streamline the process. Finally, we came to an agreement and signed a contract. Ten years of service in exchange for aid in infiltrating the orphanage. Once we signed everything over, I let out a sigh of relief. "Now, with that out of the way, how about we get our hands on those elixirs early." I wanted to stack the deck as much as possible before this mission. Just in case.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

"Hey, where do you think the brainwashing facility is?" I asked my wife sardonically as we stared up the hill at the incredibly creepy dilapidated wooden building. Above us, clouds loomed large, shadowing the whole area, and there were even sparks of lightning dancing between them.


Of course, this wasn't some kind of regional phenomena. Even the Void wasn't sloppy enough to leave random stormclouds floating over JUST their base. No, there was a storm in the city. It hadn't started raining yet, but apparently the storms here tended to be boiling hot, something to do with the fire cage around the planet, so we were hoping to get inside before it started. At our ranks, we wouldn't be in any real danger, but it would be uncomfortable, so we'd hurried to meet Tilda at…well, the creepiest abandoned building in the world.


Callie rolled her eyes, giggling at my nonsense. "Yeah, I admit it's not exactly subtle. But there are creepy buildings everywhere."


"Yeah, and they're probably mostly just abandoned and perfectly fine," I admitted with a laugh.


She snorted. "What? No. Almost all creepy abandoned buildings end up haunted. You know what kind of recursion urban legends gather?"


"Huh, noted," I said with a smile. Sadly, the time for amusement was brief. "You ready for this? We'll probably be separated. Your Void Path gives you more options during this than I have, but I'm still not thrilled you're coming along."


"Well tough," she said ruthlessly. "I get that sometimes you need to run off and do random nonsense without me, but this is Void business. I'm more important to this op than you. You're lucky I let YOU come along. Now stop whining before I send you home and do this myself." She was smirking at me smugly as she made that threat, and I couldn't help but grin back.


Sighing, I shook my head. "Yes dear. Now, where is Tilda, she's supposed to bring us in. It'd be too suspicious to show up ourselves."


"I'm right here," said a voice in my ear. I yelped, almost jumping out of my skin as I spun around to find a small dark haired girl with green eyes behind me. Her hair was long and curly, black ringlets down to her back with a large bow on top of her head, and she wore a frilly black and white dress that reminded me of a maid.


"What the hell?" I asked, panting. "How did you do that?" I hadn't had Murmur up, obviously, but with Sammael and my own Perception I should be pretty hard to sneak up on.


She blinked at me innocently. "Do what, sir?" Her voice was incredibly faint, to the point where if I hadn't had such high Perception I might not have heard her. In fact, she had shockingly little presence in general. Shifting my eyes away from her made it difficult to remember she was even there.


"You know," Callie said in a fascinated tone. "I was wondering how they had a spy in the Void conversion building, but now I get it. Shane, we're bringing this one with us when we leave. She'd be so useful in so many situations."


"Thank you ma'am," Tilda said meekly. "But I can't be missing for too long. They overlook my small absences more than most, but if I'm gone too long they get suspicious. Are you ready to be taken in?"


I nodded. I'd taken off my mask and armor, and was wearing a set of normal civilian clothes that fit the area. A pair of tight pants and a long sleeved shirt with a thing neck tie. Before I could speak, Tilda lashed out with a spinning kick, the chunky heel of her platform boot smashing into my temple and sending starbursts of pain through my head as I dropped like a rock.


My vision went black, and when I came to, Callie and I were lying in a dark, wet, stone room. "Ow," I groaned as I sat up, gingerly feeling my skull.


"Shane!" my wife said in relief. "You're alright! She hit you way too hard."


"Yeah no kidding," I winced, touching what felt like a fucking dent in my head. "What was that about?"


Callie pulled me forward, studying my face and eyes for any signs of lingering damage. She was apparently satisfied with what she found because she released me. "She was selling it. She had me help carry you. Apparently I'm small enough that she felt comfortable claiming to have subdued me without harm, but she didn't think beating you would be believable."


I sighed. We were Ascendants, and we could easily throw small cars even on a planet like this. But people could be stupid about things, so maybe Tilda was right. Regardless, we were in now, and I looked around, studying the nearby area to get a lay of the land.


"So…where are we?" I asked Callie as I tried to spot any sign of…anything. This whole room was completely empty.


"Holding cell," she sighed. "There was another person in here, but they got taken away a few minutes ago. I don't know what they did to them, but every minute or so-" An earsplitting scream tore the air, and the single lightbulb in the swinging lamp above us flickered menacingly as it happened. "That happens."


I frowned at the sound. "What are the chances that was a sound made by someone who is REALLY excited that they just got a new pair of shoes?"


The light flickered again, and there was another scream. "Oh god! They're torturing me!"


"Well that just seems performative," I said uneasily. At my wife's glare I held up my hands. "KIdding, sorry. I joke when I'm uncomfortable, you know this. Obviously we have to save whoever that is. But for now, we have to focus on finding out who this place has already converted. Dantalion should be able to dig up information even if they don't have some kind of database, but I need access to the main…office? Lair? I don't know, wherever the head of this operation makes decisions."


Closing her eyes, Callie dipped a hand into a nearby shadow. "There are a lot of people here. Seems like they do this in order. They'll come get you and take you to the torture room, then electrocute you for a while to soften you up. You'll be left to recover in a room full of Void taint, and it'll seep into your wounds and help you heal even as it alters you."


I grimaced. "I want you to use Bael to hide when they come," I said after a moment's thought. "We can pretend you slipped out. When they take me away to work on me you slip out and do recon. You can come get me later."


Her eyes flared, her sclera drowning in black as she glared at me. "I'm sorry," she said in a dangerously soft voice. "Are you implying I should sneak away and hide while my husband gets TORTURED?" Her voice was a venomous purr, and cold enough to freeze a lake. "Because I'm sure the man I married wouldn't be stupid enough to try to talk me into doing THAT, so I must be confused."


"I am suggesting," I said gently. "That you trust I can handle myself, like I trust you to take care of this while I'm restrained. Don't forget, I was trained to handle pain by a religious order founded by a goddess of torment. I'm more afraid of eating spicy food than whatever these amateurs think they can do to me with the electrical grid in this busted ass house."


Her stare didn't abate, her blue eyes like chips of ice as they drilled into me, but I didn't relent. After a minute or two, her shoulders slumped. "I…I don't know if I can handle it," she whispered. "When you were on Rackham I was distracted with training, and we only talked like once a day. I don't know if I can sit down the hall from you and feel you suffer while I search this creepy old building like nothing is going on."


I leaned forward, pulling her into my arms and holding her against me. "It'll be fine, hon', I promise. If shit gets too real I'll escape. Between your Void powers and Double Trouble, nobody holds me anywhere I don't want to be. I promise if anything comes up that I can't handle, I'm gone."


Sighing, she leaned against me. "I came here to help you, to make sure you wouldn't be alone when you were in here, and now you're asking me to just abandon you."


I chuckled, tilting her chin to give her a quick kiss. "Callie, I haven't been alone since the day I met you. Not being in the room doesn't change that even a little bit." I let her feel through the bond how much I meant that, and I enjoyed the slight blush as she looked away from my intense gaze.


"Lame," she muttered as she stood up, pulling away from me. "But I love you too, you big idiot. Don't you get hurt too bad. I will drop this fucking hellhole into the Void myself and blow the whole thing up for good measure if you die."


"I wouldn't have it any other way," I laughed. "Now hurry up. Just because I'm willing to undergo torture doesn't mean I'm psyched about it. Plus I think they're coming."


She shot me a wink and then vanished, concealed behind Bael. Murmur required the use of multiple different forms, so I wasn't sure how well Callie could handle it. I beamed, then slumped over back onto the floor, pretending to be asleep as I waited for the interrogators.


I was planning to ask some questions of my own during this whole ordeal too. I could smell truth, and people were often chatty when they felt like they had power over you.


Within a few minutes, the door creaked open, and a large man with a half shaved head and a metal jaw came in. "Oi, morons," he spat at the two men behind him as I 'woke up'. "Wheres the girl? You said there were two."


The two figures, both wearing thick robes, bowed low. "We do not know, sir," they said in unison. "She was here, but now is gone. We beseech your mercy."


Snorting, the man backhanded one of the figures, sending it flying into the wall so hard it dented the stone. Blood dripped from the prone form as it fell to the ground. "There you go," the big man said with a sneer. "There's your mercy. How bout you, you want any mercy from me, freak?"


"No sir," said the still standing figure. "She will be found." Then he turned and scuttled off.


Metal mouth turned to regard me coldly. "Oh, looks like our guest is awake. How bout' you, boy? You see where the bitch went?"


"Yeah, he's standing right in front of me," I rasped like my head was still foggy.


He grinned at me. "Hey, that's pretty funny. You're a funny guy." His smile vanished and his boot blurred up to smash into my teeth, slamming my head back into the ground. "I hate funny guys. You got any more jokes for me funny guy?"


It didn't hurt. I had Mornax active, so he was basically kicking rock, I just let me head fall back on impact. Still, I made sure to bite my lip enough to show a little blood when I smiled. "Oh, I wouldn't want to show off in front of an expert. That little baby kick was the funniest joke I've heard in years."


He snarled, then kicked me again, and this time I slumped like I was unconscious. As he was forced to pick me up and carry me out of the room to wherever he was planning to torture me, I smirked to myself over his shoulder. This guy was an idiot, I was betting I could learn a ton from him as long as I made him mad enough. I reminded myself to tell Callie I told her so. This was a GREAT plan.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

I "woke up" strapped to a wooden chair. Metal bands crisscrossed the device, wires sticking out of them at odd angles, all leading to a machine plugged into the wall. Atop the machine was a tub of blue liquid in which floated some sort of misshapen octopus creature, it's single blue eye glowing much like the void mantii. Or maybe not like them. It was hard to say, with the color of the liquid, maybe it was glowing white and just tinted.


Metal mouth stood in front of me, sneering as he twirled a barbed metal chain dexterously between his fingers. "Ah, you're awake," he said snidely. "Not much good at takin' a beating are you boy? Shame, that. I'm not supposed to kill you lot during this part, but sometimes my hand slips."


"Well, it's attached to an idiot, so I think we can cut it some slack," I rasped. His eyes blazed and his hand flicked, the jagged chain slicing through the air to land on my now bare abs. I considered letting it actually leave a mark, if only to keep him focused on me, but I decided that just tanking it would frustrate him more than enough to keep him trying. I could tell this asshole took a lot of pride in his work, terrible as it was.


So…I let it hit me and just bounce off. No cuts, no blood. Mornax took the strike without any trouble, and I just sat and smiled at the man.


His eyebrows furrowed, staring down at the chain in confusion. "What the hell?" He muttered to himself. "What did you just do?" His question was a demand, an assumption of authority and obedience, and I just rolled my eyes in response.


"I sat there and let you hit me, shame you suck at it. Maybe switch hands? Or do you have some friends you could call? Statistically SOMEONE here has to be good at this." I smiled innocently at him, my voice sugary and clearly mocking. His eyes flashed again, and so did the chain. Once, twice, a third time. His hand blurred as he lashed out at every part of my body with that tearing length of metal, to no avail.


I yawned. "Man, if I'd known you were this pathetic I'd have just stayed unconscious. I think I'll go back to bed, do me a solid, turn out the light when you're done? You can keep up the beating, it's kind of lulling me to sleep. Like white noise."


"I'll kill you!" He snarled, lunging forward.


I didn't even twitch. "Yeah you mentioned you do that. Somehow on accident? I doubt you could manage much actual damage on purpose, not sure how you pulled off any mistake murders. Or am I an exception for you? Maybe your usual victims are starving or elderly. Suffering from some kind of wasting disease?"


"I am an ARTIST," he hissed. "An instrument of the Void. Their hand in this sickened world. Bodies are my canvas and blood is my paint. I deal in fear and corruption, twisting the hearts of any who come before me!"


Glancing up and down his body, I shrugged, annoyed at the chafing of the metal bands. It didn't hurt, obviously, it was just annoying. "I don't see it. I doubt the Void would trust trash like you with anything important. This place is obviously some sort of hideaway for the incompetent. They just stick people like you here to keep you from embarrassing the real operation. 'Hey, remember that torturer who can't torture? Put him in that old orphanage, that should keep him out of the way'. I bet they laughed at you even harder than I am."


"SILENCE!" He howled, swinging the chain so fast and hard it started biting chunks of the chair. My skin remained unscathed. The chair was D-rank, surprisingly, as was the chain. I assumed this asshole wasn't worth wasting a C-rank weapon on. Presumably there WERE C-rankers among the staff here somewhere, or maybe not. Tilda probably would have warned us. This was a small city, and I doubted even in this zone C-rankers were so common as to be ubiquitous.


I snorted at his feeble flailing. "What a sad little man. Did I touch a nerve? They don't trust you? Don't respect you?"


That was a guess, but not a tough one. I'd triggered Dantalion, and I was officially plumbing him for information as I pushed, reading his vitals, finding his sore spots. In the end though, I didn't even need that. This guy wasn't tough to figure out. He was a bully. He literally beat helpless people for a living. Nobody who didn't need validation would take pleasure in something this pathetic.


"They trust me above all others!" He snarled madly, eyes glinting as he leaned into my face. "Dominic is only in charge of this branch because I'm more valuable where I am! I'm irreplaceable!"


I had no clue who Dominic was, but that seemed like a good start. "Oh, sure. I always have my most important people do the grunt work. They have you shovel the walk too? Take out the trash? Maybe you really are important, everyone needs a janitor. I hope you're better at cleaning toilets than you are at beating people, at least."


He let out a wordless scream of impotent rage, the chain bitting even deeper into the chair. I winced. It wasn't cutting me, but it didn't exactly feel pleasant. Nothing I couldn't handle.


"Besides, it's not like they'd have let you work on anyone useful," I said venomously. "They probably just let you slap around the rejects to keep you happy. Has anyone you've tortured even actually been converted? You mentioned accidentally killing them, does that happen alot?"


His eyes lit up with triumph. "Fool! You prove your ignorance. Some of our most promising converts have been turned at my hands. Lyle of Erebor, Strand Delvor, Chrand Vintrek, powerful and stealthy agents embedded in the deepest layers of this pathetic plane-" He didn't even finish talking before he was embedded in the wall.


In his place, a short, tan man with dark hair and eyes stood glaring. "Franklin, for once in your worthless life, will you SHUT THE FUCK UP?" Hissed the angry man. "He's pumping you for information you lackwit." He turned to stare down at me coldly. "Who are you?" He demanded. "Why are you here?"


"I'm from the eastern branch," I said somberly. "Ted sent me." He stared at me implacably. "Ted? From human resources? He wanted me to check to make sure this place is up to code."


His hand blurred, and stars exploded across my vision as my head rocked back. I blinked away the pain, scowling at the hand that I could now see was threaded through a pair of knuckledusters. C-rank knuckledusters. I winced. He'd hit the same spot Tilda had. I didn't think that was an accident. I must have still had a bruise.


"Rude," I said as I tried to shake the ringing from my ears. "And you didn't even introduce yourself. Not that you need to. I'm guessing you must be Dominic."


He turned to glare at Franklin, who was still embedded in the wall. "Absolute nitwit," he spat. "I'll see you banished to the Void for this. See how much damage you can do stuck in some gods cursed temple on a floating rock in the outer darkness."


"See, that's just poor leadership," I lamented. "No wonder he hates you. Slapping him around, mocking him, making threats. Can we say hostile work environment. This is exactly what HR was worried about." He snarled at me, and his hand blurred again. This time though, I was ready. I flexed my connection to my staff, using its upgrade ability to push Mornax to C-rank. This backhand didn't make my head ring, instead, it deflected off my skull, smashing a hole in the wall beside me. "Definitely not up to code." I observed cheerfully.


He stared at me in shock, clearly unaware of how I'd done that. Still. I was pretty sure this little distraction was about as over as it would get. Dominic had completely halted the reverse interrogation, and his knuckleduster COULD hurt me once this temporary boost faded.


So I switched to a new plan. Make him irrationally angry and force him to take a swing. "I wonder if once I get out of here and tear your little operation apart, Frankie there will be in charge? Maybe he'll make YOU go to some out of the way temple. Man clearly needs an upgrade, bet he'll take those cool knuckles from you. I was wrong to mock him earlier. You're WAY more pathetic. He was just using shitty equipment, you can't even do the job rocking overleved gear."


Dominic's eyes flashed. Literally, they lit up blue like the Void creatures. From his hand, black mist began to billow, coating the C-ranked knuckles. Not just coating them, actually, seeping INTO them. I watched with discomfort as the objects became somehow…denser. Heavier and more dangerous. My Danger Sense was SCREAMING at me not to touch them.


With a roar, he hauled back and rocketed a punch toward my head…where it passed right through the illusionary image of me and SHATTERED the wooden chair into kindling. His eyes widened as he pitched forward, having exerted way too much force on something that wasn't there. It left his back wide open for the lunging stab I used to drive the black razor edge of Glory's spear into his unprotected back.


He screamed, stumbling away from me, hand going to his damaged back as he spun to stare at me in confusion. Not that it helped. I was already on him, staff whirling, spearhead cutting away at him as the heretic flame blazed on it.


The inner bend of his elbows, Double Trouble again, his achilles tendons, the back of his knees. I neatly severed ligaments until he couldn't stand, then flicked my fingers, Agares calling stone from the floor to imprison him the same way I had with the Filthsmith. He bucked and writhed as he stared down at the shackles in disbelief. "Heretics? Here? HOW? Release me! Release me now!"


I snorted, walking over to pry Frankie from the wall, dropping him onto a clear spot of floor and creating another set of shackles. These were more of a pillory than cuffs. They held him immobile and stuck to the ground at an awkward angle, and he didn't stir as I did it.


Walking over to the side of the room, I grabbed another chair. Then I looked at the machine for a second…and I shoved it in my ring. I wasn't sure if that would kill the octopus…but I also didn't care. I could give this thing to Benny to play with. I didn't know what it did, but it didn't hurt to grab new toys. Dominic was screaming nonsense, and it was annoying, so I flicked my fingers and his jaw was locked open by a bit gag.


Which was how my wife found me about twenty minutes later. She strolled in carrying a big box of papers under one arm, and smiled at me wryly. "I just can't leave you alone for a minute, can I?"


I shrugged. "What can I say? I'm a sore winner."


Her smile dropped as she took in my disheveled state. "Are you alright? Did they hurt you?" Her eyes flared, not pure black like when the Void was Ascendant, but the blue rings of fire on the black backdrop that let me know the heretic angel was feeling righteously protective.


"Nothing much," I laughed. "They were pretty pathetic at their jobs. Now, what did you find for us here?" I gestured to the box, and she dumped the papers out onto the stone floor. With a smirk, I focused Dantalion on the pages, indexing and slowly gathering information. This was probably going to take a while…but we had all the time in the world now. Nothing like a quiet night in with the wife.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

I stared down at the papers, having finished using my Dantalion abilities to mine information from them a while ago, and all I could think was. "There are SO many spies here," I blinked in horror at the list. "Like, holy shit. No one should ever trust anyone ever again. They're EVERYWHERE. And they've been doing this for years. Like…half of the people on these lists are in positions of power now. And like…actively reporting back. This is a fucking sleeper cell RING."


Callie grimaced as she leaned over to study the list. "Yeah…that's not optimal."


"The only upside is it's been, what? Like twenty years since they infiltrated this place? So while there's been some infiltration, it's mostly localized. None of them have made it up to the B-rank zone." Which I'd assumed. Hell, most of the people in question weren't even C-rank. That was why the two idiots we'd restrained weren't past D. The branch of Void lackeys running around in the C-rank zone hadn't made nearly as much progress infiltrating as the ones in the lower zone.


I was glad that The High Society was taking care of that shit, because the thought of trying to dig up the much more deeply rooted turncoats back in the outer ring sounded like an exercise in pure frustration.


Frankie and Dominic were nearby, restrained and watching. At first, they'd been furious. Dominic still was. But Frankie had slowly slipped from his fury into fear. The metal mouthed man was a coward, which wasn't surprising. The restraints I used had prevented them speaking, a cylinder of rock holding their mouths open like a bit in a way that was almost definitely uncomfortable, but with so much information and such a lack of context, I needed answers, so it was time to do some questioning.


I let Frankie's mouth close, removing the bit keeping him silent. "So. You realize your options here are limited." My tone was not kind. "Here's my offer. Tell me what I want to know, and I'll kill you."


"I don't want to die," he said shakily. "I won't tell you nothin' if you don't let me go."


"See, that's where you're wrong," I told him in a flat voice. "You DO want to die. In fact, you want it more than anything. The Void aren't kind to those who fail them. You're weak, pathetic, and easily controlled. You've clearly kept your mind through all this, unpleasant as it is, but if you survive the purge we're going to conduct on the Void tainted, you won't be useful anymore. I've SEEN what the Void does to weak and expendable people. Death is a much better offer."


I wasn't going to let Franklin live. Not because of what he'd done to me, but because of what I knew he'd done to others. Because he tormented innocent people and enjoyed it. I wouldn't leave him walking around to hurt anyone else when he had the chance. I glanced at Callie, and saw nothing but support in my wife's unnatural blue eyes.


Franklin stared at me. I saw him go through several emotions, his face as plain as day to read. Anger. Hate. Fear. Desperation. And finally…acceptance. Not dignified acceptance, more like he just…broke. But he did accept it, his shoulders slumping as the light died in his eyes. "What do you want to know?" He asked woodenly.


Dominic's eyes flared in outrage, and he snarled and spat, but the bit keeping his jaws open prevented him speaking, so all he could do was let out muffled grunts and shouts of fury. I ignored him. I was planning to kill him too, but I doubted he'd be useful for the favor. Some people were so ungrateful.


"I don't know what I don't know," I told Franklin with a shrug. "Just start talking. I'm sure I didn't get it all from the paperwork, you'd have to be idiots to write everything down. More than that, YOU'DE have to be an idiot not to have kept some form of insurance. You don't strike me as the type to go on faith. Dominic here is a true believer, I think, but you're just a bully who thinks the Void gives him the right to do whatever he wants." He opened his mouth to protest, and I raised an eyebrow at him. "To clarify, I can smell lies. So don't bother with protesting. Or trying to bullshit me."


His mouth snapped shut, then his shoulders slumped. "I keep a list," he admitted. "The papers are the ones who report in, but some of them just fall off the grid. They're not all dead. Some just sort of…move on. I get in touch, and they do me favors to ignore them."


I raised an eyebrow at that. "You built a secondary network? That's more impressive than I'd have pegged you for. Also, how did they escape? The Void doesn't seem that easy to shake off."


"It's not," Callie confirmed. "But twenty years isn't that long, in the grand scheme of things. You can resist. We've seen that. Hell, sometimes even long term. It doesn't always manifest the same way. The Void affects everyone, but it affects them differently. Otherwise there would be no need to cultivate their forces like they do. They'd just flood the whole universe with Void taint and have everyone kill each other. The efficiency varies."


Well, that was good to know at least. I was vague on the rules for how the Void worked, honestly, I had so little information and all of it was circumstantial. The Void forces seemed so scattered and varied that it was hard to find common elements. That was probably a consequence of them being so large and diverse, and all of that focused here into a relatively small space for this would be invasion. Or whatever the opposite of an invasion was. An exvasion?


"Keep going," I told Franklin. "You were telling us about your secret network."


He couched, looking a bit sheepish. "I wouldn't go that far. I have a few people who owe me, and I collect. Nothing as cohesive as a network. You're right though, not all the information you need is in the paperwork. We keep records of our own, but we're just a small branch in this zone."


"You all seem to compartmentalize quite a bit," I said mildly. "What's the deal with that? Seems a bit more intentional than I'd expect from Void Children."


He laughed bitterly. "Some of them. The Void Children are all different. Some are focused and driven, some don't give a damn about us mortals. Most of our interactions is with the Vessels though. Vessels act as the voice of their Void Child in the world. Vessels of lower rank Void Children aren' much, but the higher rank Vessels are OLD and scary. They all do things differently, so there's not a lot of…watcha call it? Consistency."


I grimaced. We'd heard of Vessels. Because of where we were when that happened and how weak the replacements had seemed, I'd assumed that Vessels were mid level threats. But thinking about it, the knowledge that there were different levels of Vessel for different levels of Void Child made a lot of sense.


It was ALSO very ominous for multiple reasons. With the most recent task out of the way, I had officially overstayed my welcome here. I needed to continue on and get to the B-rank zone to meet up with Crell and the others, then on to where my parents were waiting.


We grilled him for a while longer. Whatever information pipeline Callie had to the Void wasn't perfect. She knew a lot, but it was general knowledge. The specifics of intervessel relationships and Void politics were beyond her reach, and we managed to get a few leads. We also learned some fairly disturbing facts.


Becoming a Vessel provided a LARGE boost to power, and could be done at any time. It was also less outwardly corrosive. Vessels were agents that needed to function in the real world, so they weren't mentally dissolved the way some lesser minions were. All of this meant that literally ANYONE could be a Vessel, because no one on this planet wasn't a fan of power, and as we'd seen at the winery, people were willing to do stupid things when they felt trapped.


Once we learned everything we could, I took a deep breath and ended the lives of Franklin and Dominic. Killing cold like that still bothered me, in ways mid battle butchery never would, but aside from the fact that they deserved it, I also wasn't lying about their probable eventual fate if we let them live.


Callie stepped up next to me, putting a hand on my shoulder. "I know it's not your favorite part of the job," she told me softly. "But if it helps, the fact that you still have trouble with things like that makes me so proud. Recursion can eat away at who we are so easily, but you're still you where it matters. Still the man I married. That's why I want you to win this so badly. Because I truly think you're going to do amazing things as Wishmaster."


I pulled her against me, burying my face in her hair and just inhaling as I put my thoughts in order. This whole place was a lot. Being in Dantalion for so long inside of what was essentially a torture and brainwashing camp. I'd learned so many things that I wished I'd never known. Not just useful things, but horrible, pointless cruelties that I'd have rather never been aware of.


Once they were dead, we moved on to checking on all the prisoners. Callie had freed them when she was getting the paperwork, but they were all too many different shades of broken to go anywhere on their own. Even after she used the heretic flame to cleanse them of the Void taint, the things they'd been through here were unspeakable. I made a call, and Jessie showed up along with the cleanup crew, ready to help as many of them as possible.


With that done and all our information passed on to Trellan, I moved on to meet back up with Felicity and Ellisara, as well as the rest of their C-rankers. They'd met up with a few more of our people, C-rankers from the dungeon like Veldran as well as a few from the Church my mom had dispatched to help us. Once we had that all done, we headed out, specifically, for the capital city on this spoke in the C-rank zone.


I was in such a hurry I didn't even have time to wait for my elixirs. I just told Trellan to have them gathered in the capital to meet us. We needed those elixirs pretty badly, given they were a substantial step towards me hitting C-rank and Callie being able to integrate her Path and racial trait properly, but we didn't have any time to lose. Especially given we were likely to hit more tasks on the way as we passed through new territories. A quick wish with one of Nat's scrolls to let all of our C-rankers know where to meet us and we left immediately, setting off back into the forests before the sun had even set for the day.


There was some debate about camping in the wilderness, but it was decided that we had no real need to worry about that kind of thing, especially with Agares handy to help me construct fortifications.


As we headed deeper into the C-rank zone, I couldn't help but worry. My stomach had this gnawing pit in it. We'd gotten through this little incident too cleanly, too simply. I didn't trust when things went my way like this. There would be consequences for this quick stop later, and I dreaded to find out what they might be. Until I did though, I could only prepare as best I knew how. That was all I could ever do. Take every day one step at a time.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Our trip to Draycia, the spoke city where Devlan's uncle was in charge, was surprisingly mundane, if not exactly peaceful. We ran across another trial, a sort of maze that I got through with minimal effort. Sadly, this particular trial wasn't all or nothing, so while points were awarded, I didn't get many of them. Fifteen at the maze, and another ten from brief participation in a hunt for a pack of wild boars. It wasn't really even a trial, more of a spontaneous event, but the combination brought me to a hundred points even, which I suspected wasn't bad for so early in the competition.


I also stockpiled another eighty scrolls of my own during the ten day journey, bringing me up to a hundred and four, not counting the seven I kept as an emergency stash. I wanted to use them for stats, honesty, possibly hit C-rank faster, but it was clear that I should worry more about the Void and the other candidates than raw stat growth at the moment, so I just sat on them.


It was surprising to me that the journey down the spoke seemed to be getting longer as we traveled further north. Given the zones started huge and thinned out, I was expecting it to be the opposite. But as we traveled, the journey became harder. Not just because of the terrain and wildlife, but because we had so many soldiers to deal with now. Bethy had unloaded the infinity crystal, but we decided it was still best to keep our forces out and about, if only to get them used to working and traveling together.


Still, by the time we reached Draycia, we'd settled into a nice rhythm despite the reduced speed, and I was feeling a lot more mellow, despite no real change having happened in our situation from a tactical standpoint.


As we approached the city, Ellisara and Felicity flanked Callie and I on either side. My mother's apprentice and my cousin had appointed themselves our personal guards, and had become our constant shadows. Argaunt was not far behind, traveling with the archers but keeping an eye out. Ellisara and he informed me there were my "near and far guards" When they caught sight of the city though, the red haired woman let out a groan of annoyance as we all came to a stop on a hill overlooking the place.


"That is…deeply unfortunate," she sighed as she stared down at it. "Why would anyone possibly design a town like that?"


I chuckled. I could see why she was concerned. Draycia was…odd. The whole place was built of small mismatched buildings scattered in a huge circle. There were no walls, not even the insecure archways of the last city, and no rhyme or reason to the layout. The whole thing looked like some almighty creator being shook up some buildings in a giant cup and dumped them out onto a plate. "You're not worried you might not be able to keep me safe, are you?" I teased. "I thought you were a professional?"


Ellisara was brisk, good natured, and extremely blunt. She was also arrogant and exceedingly vain. I'd discovered quickly that she considered her ability to defend my person a foregone conclusion, and any question of her capability was met with exasperation and annoyance. It didn't make her ANGRY, per se, more derisive, but she didn't enjoy the implication that she might not be up to guard duty.


"Just because I CAN do something doesn't mean I relish HAVING to do it," she responded acidly. "That is a security nightmare, and despite my phenomenal skills and prodigal levels of competence at any task to which I set my mind, I don't love having to do unnecessary work."


"So NOT incompetent," I snickered. "Just lazy. Good to know."


Callie rolled her eyes. "Don't taunt our security, darling. It's gauche. Also, there ARE things between failure and success. I'd prefer Ellie doesn't have a reason to decide to let you get lightly stabbed for mouthing off."


"I would NEVER," the redhead gasped in faux outrage. "I couldn't look my master in the eye if I allowed anything more severe than some extreme blunt force." She winked at my wife, who laughed, and I rolled my own eyes at their joke at my expense. Not that I minded it that much. Teasing Ellie was amusing to me, the redhead was close with my mom, and she seemed so much more comfortable with Chelsea and I than any of the other C-rankers. It was almost like having another sister, albeit a cocky one that was much stronger than me.


I'd taken to the golden armored fighter faster than I'd expected, forming a bond for not just her demeanor and relationship to my mom, but her easy charm and how much she reminded me of a certain fist fighting battle maniac.


Ironically, those same similarities made her and Abel almost completely incompatible with each other, her ego and greeted strength (not to mention her fist based ability) causing her to treat my mentor like a bratty kid rather than the genuine threat he probably was, even to her. Abel was staying back from us at the moment for that exact reason, hanging with Mel and my sister back where they were walking with the angels.


Despite the lack of walls though, there WERE guards in Draycia, and once we came within a mile or so, they appeared to greet us, melting from the trees surrounding the circle that contained the city. "Halt," snapped one of the strangely dressed men. They were all wearing green suits of rough leather and golden deer masks, their eyes burning a strange golden brown. "Who approaches Draycia?"


Devlan, who was trailing behind us, moved forward to meet them. "We're here to see Tyrus," he said as he came into view. "Tell him his nephew is visiting. He should be expecting us."


He reached into a pocket and drew out a single chit, which he flicked to one of the deer masked men. The green clad guard caught it, rolling it between his fingers, then nodded, and the whole group faded back into the trees.


"Well…that seemed needlessly ominous," I pointed out with amusement. "Why did they even bother with all that?"


"Because it's how they make their money," Devlan said sourly. "That was a C-ranked chit. It's common knowledge that when the Stagkin appear, you're supposed to tip them well. Otherwise…well, they don't touch anyone in the city, but there are trees just like this on all sides. You don't want to be alone in the forest with the Stagkin if they feel you've slighted them."


I blinked at that. "They have powers or something? Some kind of forest based racial trait?"


"No clue," he shrugged. "My Uncle has some kind of deal with them. They look out for his interests, but he doesn't know where they came from. They've been here longer than the city. They don't eat, don't sleep that anyone has seen. They're only visible when they want to be, and no one knows where they go when they aren't in front of you. Sensory powers don't seem to work on them either. Even the highest Perception just sees them as part of the forest."


I turned to call over my shoulder for Daysia and Alyssa. When they showed up, we described the Stagkin, hoping our resident forest experts might have some idea what the creepy things were.


Daysia frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not sure. They don't sound familiar, but they wouldn't be. We don't have many forest races back home, not humanoid ones. Celine would be the better choice. They sound like some kind of fae. But I doubt she'd know them either. Not based on just that. Even odds the masks are unique to this region, and they're probably specifically designed to conceal what they are."


Alyssa nodded. "Most likely. Is this going to be a problem?"


I glanced at Devlan, who shook his head. "I paid, so no. We're good. We can head in to meet with my Uncle. He should have your elixirs ready too." I beamed. Not only would I be getting a hundred thousand points of free stats (for some value of the word free) I was ALSO going to be getting a bunch of stat income from the renown I'd been accruing since arriving. I doubted it would get me to C-rank or anything, but I was hopeful I'd be a lot closer after this.


Callie looked more nervous than excited, and I took her hand in mine, giving it a firm squeeze,. I knew she worried about the process of merging her ability and racial trait. The Void would have an even firmer hold on her after she did.


I was worried myself, especially with the new factor of the Heretic God, who we still knew nothing about. Not that I expected that to continue. I was pretty sure if the Heretic God still existed, Callie would be hearing from him soon. Namely, when she finally formed her Chronicle. My dad had shown me that Chronicle formation allowed for certain types of interaction that might be impossible under other circumstances. I couldn't imagine the Heretic God would miss that chance.


Which added another layer of worry about Callie's advancement. Assuming she was likely to form her Chronicle before or at C-rank, which I did. As my wife and my bond partner, Callie had direct access to my library, and to my own Chronicle. It was a unique advantage in that kind of advancement. In fact, I planned to help her out with her Chronicle condensation myself, which somewhat lessened my worry.


We made our way into the city without much fanfare. I'd expected the size of our group to be a problem, but the haphazard distribution of the buildings, while seemingly random and pointless, DID leave lots of room for us to move around. We were nearing a thousand people at this point, give or take a hundred or two, but we moved through the city with neither difficulty nor any real fanfare. I'd half expected to get stares or suspicion moving such a big force into an occupied town, but this WAS the C-rank zone, and only a hundred of my people were C-rank (even after the stragglers had joined up with us on the road in).


To my surprise, we didn't head into some big pavilion or bar or club. Devlan led us through the streets until we ended up in front of a small shop. The Stake and Candle. He gestured for us to follow him in, leaving most of the group outside. Ellie, Felicity, Callie, Abel, and Bethy were the only ones who came with me as I entered.


Inside, an unassuming man with intense green eyes and a well trimmed beard sat behind the counter his gaze flicking up to us. His brown hair was neatly combed, and he watched us out of a well worn pair of glasses. Those intense eyes focused on Devlan, and he nodded to our guide.


This was Tyrus MacCall. Devlan had made it clear that Tyrus would be necessary for the next part of this trip. While entry into the C-rank and D-rank zones was largely unmonitored due to size and general disinterest, the ENTIRE B-rank zone and onward was secured. You couldn't enter those territories without help from an established force. Tyrus would need to provide us with a guide and passage.


Specifically, we would be heading underground, through a very dangerous labyrinth of caves, to go underneath the massive ring of terrifying mountains that sealed off the B-rank zone from the lower world. Before that though, I had other things on my mind, which Tyrus seemed to assume. His mild face spread in a slow smile as he saw me glance down at the counter where several space rings sat. "Ah, welcome friends," he said with a grin. "I've been expecting you. Please, let me offer you some…refreshments." I grinned back. It was finally time to take that next step closer to C-rank.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Our first order of business after meeting with Tyrus was find a place to stay where we could FINALLY start working on our elixirs and reap the benefits of the frankly ludicrous things we'd been accomplishing since we got here. Aside from being watched by a bunch of S-rankers, we'd ALSO made enemies of the Void en masse, so I was expecting a pretty decent bump to my stats beyond the elixirs, even if we were still low enough priority that I didn't think it would be on the level of some of my recent boosts.


My seven rings were dispersed to their new owners, with Jessie, Benny, Callie, and I retiring to the domed chamber underneath Tyrus's store to take our elixirs in peace and sort out the oncoming stat boost.


I went first. We'd given The High Society a list of everyone's preferred stats, and I'd made sure Creation and Fantasy were on my list though, not the highest priority. Fantasy was an expensive stat, and one that was tougher to make elixirs for, as well as less in demand. I got twenty five thousand Fantasy, and the same in Creation, then ten thousand each in Focus, Vitality, and Perception, and twenty thousand in Might.


Given my current base of stats, a hundred thousand wasn't enough to shake me or cause much pain, nor was the additional forty six thousand spread across Might, Focus, and Vitality from other sources. Twenty five thousand in Vitality (Zagan, Leviathan, and my other life based forms must be making an impression), ten thousand in Focus, and eleven thousand in Might, to cap off my already huge gains from the elixirs, had me at around nine hundred and five thousand points, a mere five digits from C-rank, and so close I could taste it.


And that wasn't nearly as much as Callie had gained from all this. My wife was a singular entity now, a Heretic Angel who struck fear into the Void. I didn't know who exactly had been talking about her, but SOMEONE was aware of her new capabilities, because she netted a solid two hundred and fifty thousand total points with the elixirs included, a full hundred thousand more than I had, and I'd been making waves.


Fifty thousand of that was Might, and fifty thousand Fantasy, but she'd gained that on her own, and had mainly used the elixirs to smooth our gaps in the rest of her stats where they'd fallen behind. None of them were at less than a hundred thousand now, and though that was still half what her two main stats were at give or take, her total was still up to a whopping eight hundred and thirty five thousand or so, well on her way to joining me at C-rank.


Benny, sadly, had gained much less outside the elixir boost. And even that had been hard fought, given his stat total was only two hundred thousand to start. Nearly a third his total in incoming stats, with another maybe twenty two thousand or so put him at three hundred and twenty five thousand, which was decent for where he was in his journey.


He'd only hit D-rank very recently, and hadn't had a chance to make much of an impression, but with the infinity crystal and that D-ranked soul to work with from the fight back at the siege, I was expecting him to come out swinging, and he had a lot of low stats that would rise on their own as his reputation got larger, since the lowest stats couldn't drag that far behind when a powerful warrior rose through the ranks. A rising tide lifts all boats, and all that. Even BEING at D-rank gave people a certain impression of power that would slowly even out the worst of it over time.


Jessie, of course, saw some of the most dramatic improvement for that exact reason. Not as much as Callie, obviously, but a solid two hundred and twenty thousand points, albeit almost all of it going into Vitality. Between the fifty thousand Might from a combination of her bond to Randall and the elixirs, and the hundred and thirty thousand Vitality, it was clear that even with her new nature, our healer's reputation was heavily skewed towards her most useful talent.


The other forty thousand was a flat ten thousand apiece in each of her other stats, which had fallen SO far behind the others that some of them weren't even in the five digit range. With over three hundred thousand Vitality (that wasn't even mentioning the modifier), having less than ten thousand Focus would have been absurd, so I wasn't shocked she was starting to see her other stats creep up.


Sitting at slightly over four hundred and fifty thousand, she was almost halfway through D-rank, and her absurd hyperspecialization was almost completely to blame. With a triple stat modifier from her racial trait, she had a higher effective Vitality than I had TOTAL stats, and with a slightly higher Impact than others her rank, it made her probably one of the most powerful D-rank healers in the universe at this point.


With that taken care of, we rejoined the others, who mostly didn't bother elaborating on their own stat choices, not that we asked. While Jessie, Benny, Callie and I had come up together and were always happy to share with each other, most Ascendants played their stats a bit closer to the chest.


While Paths and Chronicles tended to blur the lines enough that raw stat values couldn't represent real strength, having an in depth assessment of your opponents stats could tell you almost everything about them, both as a person and as an entity of renown. That kind of information was deeply personal, and unless you were VERY close to someone, it was considered good manners not to bring it up unless the situation called for it in some urgent manner.


Having taken our elixirs and set everything up in town we needed, Tyrus immediately dispatched Devlan as our guide to bring us to meet his people at the labyrinth that would take us into the B-rank zone.


"So…" I said as I turned to regard the mountains to the north of us. We were traveling with Devlan, all of our people making good time through the forest after leaving Draycia. "Why is the labyrinth necessary? I'd have figured someone would have built an elevator or something, or tried to climb the mountains. They're tall, and those cliffs look sheer, but we ARE Ascendants, I'm sure someone has what it takes."


Devlan laughed bitterly. "It's been tried. But those cliffs aren't SHEER, they're GLASS. They're not completely smooth all the way down, but the rough spots are razor sharp. B-ranked obsidian, the whole ring. Raised by an absurdly powerful A-ranker centuries ago. Scaling the black cliffs is a fools errand, and everyone who tries it dies. And that's not even bringing up the birds that nest up at the top."


"Are these birds…friendly?" Benny asked hopefully. "Maybe the cute kind that sing pretty songs as they help princesses get dressed in the morning?"


"That depends," Devlan said innocently. "Do you enjoy hellish screeches of victory from fifty foot monstrosities as they rip the bones out of still living human beings? Cliff Ravens are abominations of nature. Their feathers and talons are MADE of the obsidian from those cliffs, which they EAT when bored. They can fire the feathers at you like projectiles, and they're so light they almost can't be tracked. They're NOMINALLY C-ranked creatures, but being effectively naturally armored in B-rank material makes them a much bigger threat than anyone below B-rank has any business dealing with."


I shuddered at the description. Especially considering tasks were generally based on location, and I had a sneaking suspicion trying to CLIMB those cliffs would spawn one we wouldn't want to be involved in. Of course, we were bound to wind up with a trial in the labyrinth anyway, but if it meant avoiding angry glass covered hate birds, I'd take my chances.


The mountains grew as we approached, sheer walls of black shining glass that had been tough to distinguish at a distance, but became clearer as we approached. If I'd been nearer to these when I had my earlier thought, I wouldn't have needed to ask. Whoever had erected this ring of impenetrable black glass had clearly wanted to dissuade anyone from easily crossing it. "Stay out," it seemed to say. "Some things are not meant for the likes of you."


Of course, I ignored that bullshit. I was a Wyndham, and even if I had been the kind of person to take things like that to heart, this planet belonged to my family. There was nowhere in the Heirworld I was scared to go. Or at least, that's what I tried to tell myself.


The truth was that with so much Void interference on the planet, I was plenty scared to heed the call to adventure. Despite being fairly sure the forbidding cliffs had nothing to do with the Void at all, the whole aesthetic just reminded me too much of the dark powers the Void had at their beck and call. A monolith of cold darkness, shadow and death frozen into solid form and carved into a jagged warning to all those who looked upon it.


"That's super dumb looking," Bethy said casually, as she stared up at the cliff face we were approaching. "It's so…dull. They need to add some colors. Maybe some pretty wildflowers growing in the cracks along the cliff. Ooooh, or maybe a mural! I think a butterfly would look super cute."


Devlan stared at her in horrified fascination. "A butterfly?" He asked numbly. "Forgetting HOW you would even paint a mural in glass on the side of a giant cliff populated by furious murder birds, why a butterfly? And even if you COULD do it, I wouldn't. The Wallmaker is notoriously petty, hence him building a giant glass wall to seal off the inner two rings. There's no wall around the A-rank zone, of course…there doesn't need to be."


That sounded ominous to me, but Bethy just shrugged. "Whatever. His fault for making it so ugly. If he gets mad about it I'll just have Sebastian beat him up. He sounds mean. I guess I could just wait and do it myself, but that would take ages, and I have better stuff to do."


Considering the old man was Lark's personal butler and one of his most effective lieutenants, making him probably one of the most dangerous A-rankers alive, I thought that idea was much more intimidating than Devlan seemed to give it credit for. Benny, for his part, looked torn between horror and eagerness, and since he had spent the most time with the terrifying old man, I took that as a pretty firm sign.


Deciding to spare Devlan the confusion of trying to argue with Bethy (who was honestly right in this case, the cliff WAS morbid and boring) I gestured ahead of us. "So, how do we access this labyrinth? I don't see an entrance."


That seemed to snap him out of his confusion, bringing his focus back to the matter at hand. "The entrances are concealed," he said, clearly happy to be back on familiar footing. "We had a problem back in the day with people sneaking in. The labyrinth is HUGE and dangerous, if you don't know the proper paths through or aren't strong enough dying is a certainty. We lost a lot of C-rankers trying to cross when they had no idea how. Eventually the local powers sealed off the labyrinth entrances except for a few hidden paths down, just to be safe."


We strode forward, access cracked and hard ground peppered with chunks of broken obsidian, not B-rank like the cliffs, but C-rank, probably tiny damaged pieces that had degraded and snapped off. Still, I saw Benny kneel down and start scooping as much of them up as he could find.


He had to stop and catch up to us eventually, but he rejoined the group just in time for us to stop in front of a HUGE monolith of black glass a few hundred feet from the base of the cliff. Devlan stepped forward, knocking a pattern on the side, and there was a grinding rumble as a section of it slid down, revealing a long set of rough glass stairs descending into the earth. I sighed. Back underground, I supposed. I was beginning to hate caves.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

The staircase down into the labyrinth was cramped and uncomfortable. The top steps were rough and had good traction, but they were incredibly short and small, making each step feel awkward and overly dramatic even when I was just walking normally. The stairwell was also narrow, so we had to descend one by one. It was deeply uncomfortable.


By the time we reached the bottom and emerged onto the ledge that overlooked the labyrinth, I was agitated and twitchy, ready to fight someone just from the sheer frustration. Despite that, the sight of the black glass labyrinth laid out below us like a sprawling tapestry of interlocking lines was breathtaking enough that I felt compelled to stop and take it all in, studying the dizzying and confusing trajectories as best I could.


Devlan stopped next to me, whistling softly. "That never gets less impressive," he said in an awestruck tone. "Something about the jagged lines and the way the light bounces off it all. It's mesmerizing."


He wasn't wrong. The maze was filled with white flame torches, and the light refracted off the obsidian in strange and dizzying patterns, leaping to and fro to confuse the eyes and the mind.


"I assume there's some reason we can't just fly over it?" I asked, though by this point I knew better than to hope for such an easy solution. Nothing was ever that simple, especially not when obstacles like this were involved.


He pointed at the vaulted cavern ceiling above us, shrouded in shadow though it was. "Bats," he said simply. "They have sonic attacks. The screams bounce off the glass. Just…don't. Bat tides kill hundreds of people down here every year. And those are people specially selected to be allowed to be here."


"Of course they do," I said with a sigh.


Bethy appeared next to me, excited. "Wait, no! I can help! I can disguise myself as bats and live among them, slowly gain their trust and then convince them to let you pass. I just need ten years and a hundred thousand still living mice. Unless they're fruit bats. I can't talk to fruit bats, they're obtuse."


"What kind of bats aren't obtuse?" asked Benny cautiously. I smirked, knowing the answer before he even finished asking the question.


Bethy shot him a pitying look. "Vampire bats. Duh."


"Why is it that every time you open your mouth, I feel either very drunk or very stupid?" asked Benny mildly.


I grinned at him. "Well to be fair, you're always at least one of those things. Luckily you don't drink." He flipped me off, and everyone else laughed. He spun on Celine, who was standing behind him, shooting her a look of absolute betrayal as a giggle slipped out at my comment. By the time he spotted her, her face was smooth as glass and her expression was blankly innocent, which only made the rest of us laugh harder.


Devlan shook his head. "I have no idea how you people manage to remain a viable combat force and still act like bickering children during peacetime. Don't get me wrong, I kind of envy it, it must be relaxing not to worry about anything, but don't you worry what people will think of you if they hear…this?"


"Can't say as I do," I shrugged. "At least not unless it directly affects my personality through recursion. But if the worst recursion I get is being dumb and immature with my friends, I can live with that. It could be way worse. I could gather recursion that made me into a sadist, or a torturer, or someone who eats steak well done. You know,a real monster. Now, where exactly is this guide? You're supposed to be leading us to the person who will take us across, right?"


I hadn't gotten a trial notification yet, so it probably wouldn't pop up until we hit the labyrinth, but I'd been warned about going down there without the right guide.


"Why, I've been here for ten minutes," said the urbane voice of the goatee'd man standing to my left. I froze. We all froze. Turning slowly to regard the man who none of us had noticed standing with us until just now. The last time someone had managed to slip by me so easily had been when Tilda did it back at the orphanage. I still didn't have Murmur going, but it wasn't an easy thing to do.


Then again, this guy was C-rank, so maybe he could just ignore my detection completely. Murmur DID work on higher ranked opponents, but only when it had time to take effect. The salt and pepper haired man with the goatee smiled. "Huh, I expected someone to jump or scream in shock. I like these ones, Devlan. They've got spine."


Devlan just sighed. "Yes, that at least they have in spades. How are you Jack?"


"I spend most of my time in an underground cave where everything is trying to kill me," Jack said brightly. "So by any conventional metric, I'm still quite mad. Though I suppose there aren't very many convention C-rankers, so that in itself is a flawed conceptual model. What is sanity, anyway?"


"Probably not this," Devlan admitted casually. "But we were the ones who came down to meet you, so I suppose the madness is universal."


I rolled my eyes. "This is fascinating," I said with a long sigh. "But I need to know what the hell we're doing. We need to get going soon." I pointed down at the labyrinth, or more specifically, and the multiple entrances within my eyeline. "The question is, where do we enter from. You're the guide, so you have the path we need."


He nodded amiably. "That I do. But while the walls don't move, the obstacles do. Paths shift and need to be reworked. Traversing the labyrinth is as much art as science, you know? That's why we don't all just carry a map. Wouldn't do any good.


"If you want to know which entrance we should take, the answer gets a bit complicated." He pointed down the cliff to a wall of glass, a convex curve with irregularly spaced doorways leading to seemingly random paths. "There's a fast way, a safe way, an interesting way, and the way that we should actually take."


I raised my eyebrow at that. "Why wouldn't we take the safe way? Or the fast way? What makes the last one special?"


"Fast is fast, but dangerous, safe is safe, but slow," he explained with a shrug. "We're looking for a good balance of the two. It's fairly interesting as well, but I feel that might not be as big a priority for you in these circumstances, begging your pardon, my lord."


"Lord, is it?" I asked with amusement. "You from the Empire, Jack?"


He laughed. "I'm not from anywhere, my lord. Least nowhere save these caves right here. But you're a Wyndham, and there are still those of us who remember what this planet is here for. I suspect you've had some dealings with such as I."


"So, this balanced path," I said, trying to refocus on the trip. "Is it vulnerable to the bats? I heard if there's a bat tide the whole place turns into some kind or megaphone or something."


"The real danger in a bat tide isn't the sound itself," he cautioned. "It's unpleasant, but survivable, save for in a few VERY specific places. The real danger is that the sound drives all the OTHER animals in the labyrinth mad. People too in most cases. The screeching has a hallucinogenic property. But the bats should be sleeping for a few weeks yet. They're big bastards, and it takes a lot of energy to rouse them. During the tides they scoop up vulnerable creatures and swallow them like snakes, then spend a few months digesting. Last one was two weeks ago."


My eyes widened with alarm, and I spun on my heel, pointing a finger at Bethy, whose face was lit up with delight, "No." I told her mercilessly. "I know what you're thinking, and you cannot try to turn into a snake bat and learn to swallow stuff whole."


"But it's the perfect combination!" she all but squealed. "I won't have to feed so much, and I'd have so much time for activities!"


I decided not to bother with pointing out the various logistical challenges of ingesting a whole cow or whatever (I didn't think Bethy was the type to want to eat a person unless they annoyed her first) and just told her no again, ignoring her pout as I turned back to Jack. "Well, you told me the path we need. I trust you to guide us, otherwise I wouldn't be here. Lead on."


Nodding, he turned and walked across the cliff face, taking a sharp turn at the edge. It briefly looked like he might fall, but he turned out to have stepped into a divot that led into a cleverly concealed staircase carved into the glass. Seeing him standing on what seemed to me to be thin air and walk at a strange angle only to vanish below the cliff edge was odd, but I followed him over, carefully mimicking his steps.


Before long, we were on the ground, and I could see a variety of dangerous looking spikes littering the ground at the base of the cliff. It was taller than it seemed from up top, likely because of the deceptive size of the labyrinth throwing off perspective, and I could tell that no one dropping all that way onto B-ranked glass spikes was going to have a nice time.


In the dark around the edges of the maze, I caught the occasional gleam of light off the eyes of…something. I ignored it, because I was pretty sure they were ambush predators waiting for someone to be injured on the rocks, and we were about a thousand men strong.


Following Jack along the curve of the outer wall, we came to a small archway, and I stopped to wait for the others to catch up. As I did, I finally got the scroll in my vision I'd been waiting for, telling me about the trial I'd been waiting for.


"Announcement: The Mad Maze begins! Candidates will enter the labyrinth, struggling to leave in safety as the various traps and guardians attempt to waylay them. Points will be gained for each living candidate remaining in the maze when the candidate exits. Hint: you only get points for a living candidate who you have actually met or seen from a distance. Secondhand accounts and guesswork don't count."


I froze, taking in the information. "That is…surpisingly humane." I said slowly. "It seems like they're actively trying to keep us alive this time."


Callie nodded. "Sounds like they're taking the threat of the Void seriously. Trying to minimize casualties. Of course, this is going to make it MUCH harder to actually accrue points. I guess we could somehow try to detect a bunch of them and make a run for it, but the implication is that we need to find a way to sandbag a bunch of candidates on our way out."


I nodded absently. She was right. I had plenty of environmental tricks, but Agares was going to be useless in this maze. Even with the staff boosting it to C-rank, this whole maze was made of B-rank glass. I had a better chance of juggling the sun than managing to turn any of that shit to dust. I'd have to work smarter, not harder. But luckily, I had some ideas about that. I grinned, checking my ring for something I'd picked up earlier.


Back on our exit from Yettin, we'd taken tunnels out of the city. I'd used Agares liberally to great effect, and more importantly, I'd made a not to actually KEEP some of that condensed stone on me, in case I needed it in the future. I turned to my wife after confirming I had quite a bit of it. "So, honey, how many shadows can you actively sense in this maze? Given all the crazy lights?" I was hoping it was still a decent amount. Because I had a wonderful, crazy plan.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

I had a LOT of rock in my ring, and after melting it down enough to thin and having Callie reach into the shadows…I dropped it all. There was a whump of displaced air as the light in the cave flickered wildly. Not enough to wake the bats, and not enough to be extinguished, but it was definitely dimmed in our nearby proximity as condensed D-rank stone coated the walls and floor of the maze within about a mile of me.


Sadly, while I DID have enough prescience to stockpile some rock, I wasn't actually able to see the future in any reliable sense, so I didn't have nearly enough of the stuff. Still, it would help smooth over the beginning of the journey, especially given several of the entrances led into the area I'd just covered.


I turned around, amused to find everyone in my retinue had made their way into the maze already…and was now covered in melted stone. My wife, being the person who dispersed it, had avoided being coated, but everyone else looked like they'd just come in out of an indoor rainstorm at a dirt factory. "I did a plan," I told them all solemnly. "It's genius in it's elegant simplicity."


"I don't think LITERAL mudslinging is a revolutionary idea," Benny said waspishly as he wiped his face clean."


Snorting, I triggered Agares, and then Murmur. I was fairly shocked to find that because of Song of the Soil being part of my Dantalion form, which was part of Murmur, the two overlapping abilities seemed to…synergize. It wasn't a new Domain, though I could probably make one if I tried, more just an exceptionally useful mix of tricks. Still, within moments, I was blown away to realize my Murmur domain had EXPANDED to fit the field of mud I'd created, using the liquified stone as a carrier for my senses and doubling down on my stealth and detection capabilities.


The boost made anyone detecting us nearly impossible, but more than that, it made anyone getting PAST my detection just as unlikely. Which meant…"Shit, we need to sit and wait." I said with a grimace. My stealth became more viable with time, and with this kind of boost, I was pretty much positive we could wrap up anyone who came in. We'd essentially be sneak attacking them with a thousand people from ambush.


We'd have to move eventually, but given we were at the entrance of the maze, someone would need to come through here at some point.


So…we waited. It was annoying, and felt counterintuitive, but it was the right call. And sure enough, within about an hour, a party of people came through. We'd retreated to the center of the mud area, so I could get as much warning as possible with which to position my people, so I saw them coming from almost LITERALLY a mile off.


Two hundred. A relatively small force. But I wasn't taking them lightly, because I recognized one of them. The copper titan. I still didn't know his name, but I'd seen him fight, and he was definitely someone's ringer. I had Abel on standby ready to take him down, assuming the surprise wasn't enough to drop him.


As he made his way deeper in with his people, I finally spotted what I assumed was his candidate. A small blonde girl with pudgy cheeks and sky blue eyes, her hair pulled up into a pair of braids that hung over her shoulders. She looked cheerful and excited, and I wouldn't have even known who she was if not for the purple electricity dancing in her eyes.


Apparently when you got the notifications about a task, it triggered the same visible energy surge as granting wishes. That was good to know. Nat and Belsara hadn't been around to see my eyes the last few times, and vice versa, so I had been unaware until now.


"Cryton, you don't need to be such a worry wart," she chirped happily. "We have our whole army with us. Plus you're guarding me personally."


The copper titan, currently copper but not titanic, scowled. "Can you not take things so lightly? This is DANGEROUS Alys. The rules of the game have changed. They're trying to keep us alive. It's not right. I don't trust it."


She snorted, blowing a raspberry. "That's just dumb, my family is being nice, that's a good thing."


"It is NOT a good thing," he snapped heatedly. "It's a SCARY thing. The Wyndham family are cold blooded serpents, to a man. You're the only decent human being in that den of vipers. The fact that they suddenly grew a conscience and are trying to keep all of you hale and healthy SHOULD concern you."


Alys pouted. "That's so mean. I know they can be a little standoffish, but they're still my family. I think its nice that they're giving us a way to get through this without alienating our family members. We'll all be serving in the WCP together in the future. It only makes sense not to take things too far."


I was feeling legitimately bad for planning to attack her at this point. She seemed so…nice. I wished more of my family thought like she did. Of course, given they were raised away from the branch clans, it wasn't surprising other Wyndhams thought like me. But seeing one was…kind of heartwarming. The only thing that made me feel a bit better was that I wouldn't need to hurt her. This was a fairly peaceful trial, like he'd said. We just had to pin her down and then move on.


Heart heavy, I raised my hand, pointing out positions for my people and getting them ready to waylay the incoming force with the most overwhelming advantage possible. The more we overpowered them, the less actual force we would need to exert and the less injured they'd need to get. The formations we'd learned in the Empire were definitely going to be a help in that regard too.


To my shock though, as they were walking into our trap, Alys froze, her head snapping up like a dog who caught a scent. "We're…not alone," she said slowly. "In fact, I THINK we might be surrounded."


With a sigh, I let the traces of us fade into being, halting my obfuscation of our forces. Keeping it up at that point would have been MORE dangerous. If they didn't know our numbers, they might be more likely to try to break out of the encirclement, and random attacks could accidentally kill someone even if they weren't aiming for that.


Cryton's eyes flared with incandescent rage as he started to grow, but Alys's hand shot out to grip his shoulder. "Wait! If you get too big you might breach the bats' airspace." She smiled wanly at me. "Hello cousin. You're Shane, right? I recognize the mask. It's super creepy by the way."


"Thanks, I try," I chuckled, stepping forward and raising my hands to show I wasn't a threat. That was nonsense, obviously, I could pincushion the whole army with a thought, or at least the D-rankers. But there was no reason to be too aggressive. "So, are we actually cousins, or is that just a general use term of endearment? I know my dad has about ten half siblings I've never met."


"Second cousins, I think," she shrugged. "It gets hard to keep track. Family is family, so most of us just say cousin to keep it simple. "So, I don't suppose you'd be open to negotiations?"


I cocked my head. "I mean…what kind? I waited an hour here to catch you guys, so I don't think I can just let you go. But I'm not unreasonable, if you think there's something you can pay me with that's worth potentially losing out on a local helper, I'm willing to listen. Though I'm surprised you're so reasonable, your buddy there seemed pretty dead set on coming for me when we first met."


"Oh, don't take it personally," she chirped. "He was just playing politics. You know that the branch heads put a bounty on you, right?"


"I wasn't aware it was anything that formal," I admitted with a laugh. "But I knew they put the word out. I suppose I can't exactly blame him for coming after me for benefits when I'm doing the same to you. Go ahead and make your offer, though like I said, I'm not sure how much we have to talk about. I can't just let you go."


She hummed consideringly. "Alright…how about a head start? Or the opposite of that, I guess. I'll trade you twenty scrolls for two hours. We stay put for two hours, and then after that time ends we're free to advance into the maze. Gives you decent odds of beating us out, and you'll get the points as long as you do, even if we make it out later. Plus it'll be a friendly start to our future dealings. I think the branch heads are finally starting to see the value in teamwork, so we might have a chance to work together in the future!"


Callie turned to me with a dazed look. "And I thought YOU were optimistic for a Wyndham. I almost want to keep her."


"Don't YOU start," I told her waspishly. "You already brought Tilda home. If you start picking up strays like Bethy does we won't have anywhere to keep them all." I glanced back at Alys. "Sorry, ignore that, my wife and I like to banter. I think your idea has merit. I DO like your attitude. And it would save us some trouble and possible injury."


Cryton snarled at me. "CERTAIN injury. You're lucky I'm hobbled in this damned cave, or I'd crush the lot of you."


"Can I punch him in the throat?" Abel asked acidly. "He seems like he could use a throat punch."


"No," I told him bluntly. "And shut up if you don't have anything nice to say. I'd tell him to do the same if I thought he'd listen."


Alys nodded approvingly. "I like that. Cryton, shut up if you don't have anything nice to say."


Cryton glared at me like I'd just taught his toddler how to swear, and I wondered briefly how they knew each other. A lot of candidates probably came with foster siblings or childhood friends. These two seemed close.


I withdrew a contract, sketching out some terms, and to my surprise, Alys tossed it back with a few addenda. I returned it with alterations, and we spent about ten minutes going back and forth before we finalized the terms. Of course, we used a wish to seal it, and she paid me for leaving them in peace with two hours lead time.


The wishes themselves weren't counted as part of the deal, mostly because appropriately valuing a scroll was basically impossible. She handed them over before we left, and we headed off into the maze.


I was happy to meet Alys, and looked forward to getting to know my newfound cousin in better circumstances, but we needed to go. However, this little encounter and the wait to prepare for it had given me a new idea. Given the synergy between Murmur and Agares in these conditions, maybe I could extend that particular window of usefulness.


Focusing on the mud, as well as on Murmur itself, I stepped forward, and with a grunt of effort, the liquid stone began to writhe and roil, slowly moving forward along with me. Inside the Murmur domain, the liquid stone was concealed, and the spread of the stuff allowed me to expand the domain beyond its normal limits. The soul strain of moving the whole thing was no joke, but speed seemed to affect the difficulty. So with that understanding, I just began moving as slowly as possible.


Jack, who had been watching in morbid fascination during the negotiations, seemed to regain his senses as we started moving, and he quickly took charge of our path, leading me towards the exit as well as he knew how. At this rate, it would only take a week or two to get out. Lovely.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

We ran across another candidate not too far into the maze. Or rather, two candidates working together. Rather than be in the dark about these though, I was pleased to note that Belsara seemed to know them. I was LESS pleased that she tried exhaustively to convince me to stab them in the throat from stealth.


"Rega and Pallux are MONSTERS," she told me bluntly. "I've met them several times, and every single one they tried to kill or capture me. They control their subordinates through fear and constant competition, pitting their people against each other to keep them under their thumb, and their guard captain, Strelk, is a sadist who torments his own people for his own amusement."


"Where did you meet them, exactly?" I asked after she finished talking. "It seems like some of these candidates are more…immersed in branch politics than others. We were all raised away from the family, how do they know so much?"


She sighed. "What you need to remember is that while this war was moved up, it's still been DECADES since the last one, at minimum. Every Wyndham born since that event is involved in the current succession war. Lots of them hit D-rank years ago. Once your guardian is no longer active, you're technically not bound by the rules of non interference. A lot of the older D-rankers, or hell, anyone who has been in D-rank more than a few years, made their way back to check in with the branches and start vetting their factions."


I was curious why we hadn't done that. Was it a timing thing? We ranked up FAST, even for a candidate party. My library and natural talent let me accomplish things at E-rank most people didn't manage until years later. It was possible we'd just done it so fast there was no time for a check in with the family.


Then again…it might not be that simple either. Grandpa's branch was a mess, my Uncle was an asshole, and other branch heads hated me. Maybe dad had foreseen some of this nonsense and had Zeke steer me away from trying to involve myself too heavily with the family until I had the authority to keep myself safe. Hell, maybe he didn't want to change the way I saw the world. I knew he actually loved mom's heroic spirit, it was part of why he'd left me in the Congolmerate to begin with. The Unity had an idealized perception of the universe compared to most factions.


Still, dicks or not, I didn't like the idea of actively attempting murder on unsuspecting people, especially relatives. I shook my head. We'd been following them in stealth for maybe ten minutes, waiting to find a decent environment for an ambush or encirclement. Currently we were in a long glass hallway, and that didn't really suit for either. "No. When we get a shot, we take it, and we take them down hard, but no killing. Not from ambush. We restrain them and leave them here to rot. That'll have to be enough."


We stalked behind them silently, waiting and watching, until we came to an open room. My mud field had preceded us (and keeping them from noticing it was shockingly easy, considering it was an extension of my will, Murmur was able to erase it easily, and it got easier and easier the longer the substance spent in my domain. This really was an amazing combination.


Spreading out, we surrounded the pair of candidates and their minions. Three hundred of them, surprisingly. I was pretty sure we'd done better with local recruitment than the majority of factions we'd seen so far. Since we outnumbered them three to one, I decided to show up directly to discuss things at the start. It had worked pretty well with Alys.


To my surprise though, when we appeared they didn't seem bothered. Not like they were expecting us, mind, they just appeared to be completely at ease.


I had no clue WHY that would be a thing, but to my complete shock, my attempt at discussion was interrupted…by a growl. From BETHY. I froze, turning to stare at my friend, who was looking at the tall man in the black armor behind the two candidates, her eyes blazing an unearthly red, her lips peeled back in an ENRAGED snarl. "Harpy!" She hissed, her voice guttural and animalistic.


My sister, standing behind her, went pale with fright. "Shit," she spat, stepping forward to grab Bethy. "That's BAD."


I frowned at them both. "Bethy? Are you alright?" Bethy got bloodthirsty and amused, she got cold sometimes when she was doing something she needed to do but didn't like, I'd even seen her lose control. But THIS I had never seen. This was…HATE.


"No, she's not," Chelsea answered grimly. "We need to put these assholes down and leave, now. Bethy can't be around a harpy. Maenads and Harpies are OLD enemies. The reflexive drive to fight them is one of the few things Bethy inherited from her mom. Something about stealing wine grapes, I don't really know. She doesn't talk about it. But we need to-"


She yelped as she was cut off by a fucking SONIC BOOM as Bethy crossed the distance to the armored figure too fast for even MY eyes to track, her fangs snapping and claws flashing toward's the big man's throat.


To my utter shock, he didn't tank the hit. He just sort of…leaned back. Her nails passed a micron in front of his gorget, the wind creating a scraping gouge as her fingers cut through it. The man's arms snapped out and forward, metallic feathers sprouting from beneath then as his hands flickered forward, creating a shower of metal shards that Bethy effortlessly flowed between like a dancer.


Despite the ease of avoidance though, dodging gave him time to retreat, and I was barely able to follow the motion as he launched himself into the air, sweeping upwards and then unleashing another shower of razor feathers, this time at US.


Abel snorted, tracing a circle in the air above us, and the feathers fell into the spatial lubrication, swept into a circular motion that appeared to be gathering speed with every rotation. He flicked his fingers again, and they launched back out the same way they'd come, moving three times as fast. His eyes, barely visible behind a strange black birdlike helm, glowed an unsettling orange as they flicked to his boss and then back to Bethy, refocusing on his own fight.


Rega and Pallux seemed MUCH less calm now, their eyes narrowed under their platinum blonde hair. Each of them had one blue and one green eye, on opposite sides of their face. And their haircuts were incredibly similar, with Pallux's being a bit shorter from what I could tell, though not enough that you couldn't easily mistake him for his sister. "Drewnokk, what the hell are you doing?" Snapped Rega. "Put her down!"


I smirked. This wasn't ideal, but it was better for us than them. Presumably, they had been leaning on this Drewnokk guy, who, admittedly, was fucking TERRIFYING to be capable of competing with Bethy. But with him out of the picture, they didn't have anyone strong enough to protect them.


Between what Belsara said about the captain (Drewnookk I assumed) and their general demeanor, I was willing to kick their asses even if I still wasn't ok with unilateral execution of family members.


Glory blazed to life as I flickered forward, my staff appearing and lashing out in the same motion, the razor edge of the black flame spear driving right toward Pallux's face. He was the closest, and I held back enough that he wouldn't have trouble dodging, but to my surprise, he just screamed and stumbled back, tripping over his own feet. I just stopped, standing over him dumbly. "Are you serious?" I demanded. "Come on, man, have some self respect. You're a Wyndham."


I was so disgusted I didn't even bother with anything fancy. I just smashed the butt of the staff into his skull, knocking him out cold.


Despite being apparently a generally terrible person according to Belsara, Rega is NOT a terrible sister. Her eyes narrow in rage as she backs off from her brother. "Drewnokk, enough with her, get down here and tear a strip off this armored bastard!"


Cursing, I triggered Mornax immediately, planting my staff to tank the impact I knew was coming…and it was a good thing I did. In a movement too fast for me to track, the armored harpy man vanished, appearing in front of me with wings and claws flashing. His fingers were hooked with curved talons I hadn't noticed under his gauntlets, and there was a screech as they carved divots in my armor.


My C-rank plate didn't GIVE, exactly, but it certainly strained as he gouged out some of the metal. I was EXTREMELY glad to be wearing full plate, because if his talons did that shit to my plate, I didn't even want to THINK about what they would do to my flesh, Mornax or not. I was durable, but not C-rank metal durable.


I didn't need to find out though, because there was an incandescent scream of rage and Bethy fell on him like a fucking rabid animal. Her claws raked his armor, longer and sharper than I'd ever seen, and to my shock, something ELSE had changed too. Flowing blood red patterns had begun to wind their way along her skin, starting around her eyes, the sclera of which had been drowned in crimson. Not blood red. Something deeper and darker. More like…wine.


Drewnokk retreated, snarling and lashing out with a rain of feather blades. Before he could follow up though, a gleaming armored form smashed into him at speed, a lance concentrating the force into one spot as the unstoppable avalanche of power that was Gabe on horseback hit him at full force, sending him skidding across the floor to smash headlong into the black glass of the nearest wall.


Like Bethy, Gabe was in a state I'd never seen before. Raw, overwhelming fury. His normally amiable face was peeled back in a rictus of explosive fury. "Don't TOUCH her!"


That was sweet, if misplaced normally, because Bethy was way stronger than him, but I could see what was making him angry. Bethy didn't LOOK like Bethy. Not even vampire Bethy. This was a completely different version of my friend. Dropping Mornax and Glory, I triggered Zagan, then stepped between her and Drewnokk. Callie, aware of all this through the bond, surrounded us with a shadowy ward, and she sent Abel and my sister to help out against Drewnokk as our people dealt with the others.


The two candidates each had a hundred of their own C-rankers, meaning that despite our vastly superior numbers they had twice the high level combatants. Luckily, we had BETTER ones, and Ellisara, Felicity, and Argaunt were carving through their people with enough urgency that they didn't have time to spare thinking about the D-rank fighters.


Especially since the two candidates had been essentially left alone, and now that I checked, I couldn't see them anywhere. Rega seemed to have grabbed her brother and dragged him off who knows where. I didn't have time to worry about it.


I put my hands on Bethy's shoulders and she snarled at me, her teeth actually snapping towards my face. I didn't move, it wouldn't have done any good. "Are you done?" I asked my friend kindly. She stared at me, and I flooded her body with Zagan's purifying flames of life. As I did, the red patterns on her skin began to slowly fade away, like they were being bleached off in the sun.


Her eyes, formerly wine red across the entirety of the orb, faded back to the normal red irises, and her pupils returned. She stared at me in terror, horrified that she'd just attacked me. I pulled her into a tight hug, not letting up on the life fire, and she just sat there and cried. There was a flicker in the dark and Callie appeared beside us, wrapping her arms around Bethy from the other side and joining me in comforting our friend.


I didn't know who to blame for this bullshit, the elders, the twins, or myself. Regardless of anything though, if I saw Rega and Pallux again, I wasn't going to be gentle with them. I had some frustration to work out.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

We stopped for the night after traveling for another few hours. We didn't run into any new candidates, thankfully, and I was able to condense the mile wide liquid rock swamp into a complete building for us to use as a base of operations. A Piece of Mind parallel to control Mumur, combined with my EXTREME familiarity with the stone in question meant the whole lodge was impossible to spot even when I was unconscious, so I was free to catch some rest with everyone else.


Before that though, I decided to cook dinner for the whole camp. I felt the need to connect with my people a bit more. Our force had expanded massively, and it was getting hard to keep track of everyone. Without a personal stake, I was worried my new faction members would lose motivation.


But cooking for a thousand people was…a lot. Like a staggering amount of food and effort. I needed something easy and quick but also heavy and filling.


I turned, in the end, to the tried and true method of using food to reach out to a friend. Which is to say, I decided to make something to cheer up our wilting vampiress, who had been withdrawn and nervous since the incident earlier.


"Hey Bethy," I called her over to where I stood in front of a huge metal pot. "I need your help with this."


She shrugged, standing up to walk over to me blankly. "I don't really know how to cook. You'd do a better job than me." She stared down at the pot, seeming to lose herself in the dark recesses of the cooking implement. But I was having none of that.


"Well, sure," I said casually. "But I'm making fondue. That's just melted cheese. I'm sure you have some…thoughts, on what kind of cheese I should use, right?"


Her eyes snapped up to me, narrowing in suspicion. "Cheese?" She said slowly. "I know a lot about cheese."


"I know, that's why I asked," I chuckled. "Of course, if you don't want to help, I could always make soup or something. You're a big fan of soup, aren't you Bethy? I think I have the stuff for…lentil garlic."


She flinched back, hissing dramatically. Chelsea, who had approached when she saw me drag Bethy over here, cleared her throat. "Um, hi, yeah, fondue is fine, but what's with the hissing? Is the vampire garlic thing real? I've never seen Bethy pass up food because it had garlic in it, at least not that I noticed."


"What?" Bethy asked in confusion. "No, I just really hate lentils." She pouted at me. "Hey. you're distracting me. I'm trying to be sad here."


Chelsea giggled at that. "Yeah, stop. Gabe has been all broody since the end of the fight. I think he needs a hug." She glanced at me. "After you help Shane pick out some cheeses for this fondue. I'm actually starving, and I want something to eat bad. What do we have to dip in it?"


I backed away as Bethy started digging in her ring for various wheels of cheese and plopping them down on a table she'd pulled from nowhere, loudly announcing the various types of dairy product we had on offer. I kept an ear out, but I was willing to let Chelsea handle that while I went and sought out another friend in need.


Gabe was sitting in the back corner, looking unhappy. Drewnokk had lost to our crew, and Ellia dn the others had driven off their C-rankers pretty easily. Once the twins vanished, no one had bothered to stick around to try to fight for nothing, and they'd scattered.


Our Adamant friend had immediately come to find us and check on Bethy, and on seeing her in tears over what had happened had pretty much shut down. His eyes looked haunted and blank, like he was lost in a fog, and I sat down next to him with a sigh. "Well, that fucking sucked, huh? This succession war isn't exactly a party. You regretting coming along?"


He snorted. "I don't do regrets," he said with a bitter chuckle. "At least, not for helping friends. I just…I feel like I'm falling behind. My drive to advance has been waning. Not that I don't want to keep up, but an Adamant is supposed to forge ahead, and you're all leaving me in the dust." He shot a glance at Bethy and Chelsea where the two of them were working on cheese picking. "I guess I just…I've been so comfortable here. Just one of the crowd. It's hard to stand out when there are so many amazing people around, but that's not always bad. Fitting in was…nice."


I raised an eyebrow at his soft expression. "I'm very specifically NOT going to ask which of them you're looking at right now, because if it's my sister I'd have to kick your ass, and if it's NOT my sister I might STILL have to kick your ass." I was more convinced it was both, actually, but that was a mess I wanted absolutely no part of, and would leave to Chelsea. They were all adults, and their love lives weren't my business.


"You think you could take me?" He grinned, his eyes lighting up with the challenge. "Think I might still be a bit too much for you. Never mess with cavalry. You should get a horse, it would pair well with that spear thing you've been doing lately."


I snorted. "I don't trust any mode of transportation that can make it's own decisions. You might be able to cheat with your magic star horse, but I'd probably end up with some sarcastic asshole horse that would dump me off its back all the time. Sucks Archie is still pretty small. Riding a phoenix into battle would be badass."


"That WOULD be cool," he said thoughtfully. "I wonder if I could figure out a way to adapt my charger into something that flies. Not a bird, but like…maybe a pegasus?"


I grinned at him. "Man, Bethy is a bad influence on you, huh? Or a really good one. Why don't you go ask her about it, since she's the most likely person here to figure out how to swing something like that." My vampire friend regularly altered a fundamental transformation she'd been born with on a casual whim, turning into things like cats and squirrels just because she felt like it. I might be a Path genius, but Bethy was a natural prodigy at altering Skills like that on the fly.


Gabe seemed to brighten slightly, standing up and clapping me on the shoulder. "Thanks, Shane. You're a good guy."


"It's cool man, you just need to get out of your head." I nodded to him, smiling as he headed off to talk to my sister and Bethy. Yawning, I stood up and stretched. I glanced around, noting that everyone was sort of grouping up. All except one person. Benny was off by himself at a table he'd brought in, working on…something. Celine, Jessie, Mel, Abel, and Daysia were over with Holly and Serah, talking about some plant thing or other, but my best friend was all by himself using a series of complicated tools to alter the axe he'd gotten from the siege.


I approached, interested to see what he was doing, and found myself entranced by the process. The axe lay on the table, a dark stained wooden thing with what looked suspiciously like manacles sticking out of the ends. They were open and ignored, with Benny only using the central area of the table. Surrounding the axe were a variety of beakers, test tubes, and flasks, all connected together and bubbling away atop multicolored flames.


One of the flasks I recognized as the kind Zeke used to hold souls, and that one was sitting inside of a circle of oddly numerical symbols. Above it floated…something. A vague shape that seemed halfway stuck between fog and solid, losing its form by the moment as Benny adjusted knobs, feeding materials from the different flasks into the connecting tubes. The liquids dripped down through the soul, and I saw it lose some of its cohesion even further as one of the droplets took on an odd shine.


Rather than hit the flask though, the droplets landed on a wide funnel that interrupted the distance between them, draining down into another tube that led over to the axe. At the end of it, a bright flame glowed, like a butane torch, and Benny was using one hand to slowly engrave things on the axe blades while the other adjusted the various knobs expertly, slightly changing the consistency and color of the flame as he carved.


I whistled. "Damn, is this your new inventing process? I knew your ability would change how it worked, but that's kind of involved."


"It is," he admitted, not even bothering to look up. "But the use of souls makes it both more and less restrictive. It's more…open ended, weirdly, but that also means I can impose my will and control it better. Downside is that souls have tendencies, and they have trouble synchronizing with items that aren't attuned to them."


That was interesting. I knew souls weren't people. They didn't have a consciousness or sentience, exactly. The souls that Benny, Zeke, and people like my dad used weren't trapped human beings suffering for eternity, they were just fragments of vital force that had been imprinted with the characteristics of the people they used to be. The ability for a soul to retain true consciousness was exclusive to mirror soul bodies, which was the reason they could be reformed after shattering.


He was staring hard at the axe head through a pair of odd goggles, but eventually grimaced and turned off the flame. He started packing everything up, taking the goggles off with a sigh. "This is starting to make my head hurt. I'll come back to it later."


"I noticed you haven't upgraded any of your gear recently," I said sympathetically. "I'm guessing this new style of creating has higher requirements?"


He nodded. "It does. Takes ages to get anything done. But I should never need to replace any of this stuff. Soul based artifacts will grow alongside me, and they have a much higher potential limit." He patted the axe fondly. "This beast is going to be the basis of a powerful new ability that will stick with me for the rest of my life."


Putting the axe away in his ring, he packed up the table, then stood and stretched. "Speaking of creating stuff, weren't you supposed to be cooking dinner?"


I didn't see the need to dignify that with a response. Flipping him off, I rolled my eyes, turned and headed back over to Bethy and Chelsea, who were currently arguing over the groaning table full of a dizzying area of cheeses. "No, we can't use ALL of them," my sister said indignantly. "More isn't always better."


"It's CHEESE," Bethy said with a mutinous pout. "More IS always better. Gabe tell her!"


"None of you get a vote," I said ruthlessly as I stopped next to the precariously stacked tower. "And this is WAY too much cheese. You can pick like…three kinds. This is fondue, not alchemy."


Bethy literally stomped her foot in outrage, but I couldn't help but smile. Goofing off with the others put that classic Bethy sparkle back in her eye. She glared at me murderously for a moment, then looked away with a snort. "Fine. Smoked Gouda is my favorite. And Colby Jack is good. And Pepper Jack."


She pointed them each out, and there were indeed several wheels of each. I tossed them casually into the pot, then lit the fire, making sure to keep the heat low. As the smell of cheese wafted out into the building, everyone else started flocking to the cooking pot and I grinned happily. This had been a pretty good plan.