Eric obediently followed his mother down the winding marble steps, frowning when a massive abomination radiating a Bronze’s body and twisted cords of domination came racing up the steps, roaring and snarling as he lashed out with a club that would have torn through the front bank vault like tissue paper.

Contest of Quickness! You have bested your foe’s quickness by OVER 500 points!

Your foe FAILS to strike you in time!

Ice Fire!

You have successfully decapitated your foe!

A serene Eric allowed their entrance to be led by the bouncing head of ice leading the way down the steps, rolling into an oversized central vault that, instead of piles of gold, priceless contracts, and tons of contraband, was instead bare of anything save cages, captives, over a dozen monitors showing scenes of planetary devastation right from the most depressing scenes in every Nova Wars episode ever made, and his friend Caliban strapped to a gurney, covered in blood and gazing at Eric with an odd mixture off heartfelt relief... and dread.

Yet his wandering thoughts snapped to brilliant furious focus once more when he saw a face that instantly filled him with killing rage.

A sneering goblin covered in burns, presently soaking in a vat full of bubbling slime with countless screams in the background as the abomination puffed on a massive cigar. Though Greed’s sneer was instantly wiped of his face, replaced by furious disbelief, when he caught sight of who had just entered the chamber.

“YOU!”

Eric and his nemesis spoke simultaneously, Eric roaring his fury as his blade redoubled in its arclight brilliance.

He barely registered the painful cry of a voice that he almost thought the knew, all his focus locked on the abomination now daring to talk to his mother while Eric’s gaze locked with horror at scenes he could no longer pretend were from movies.

“So, you did it, Aurelia, congratu-fucking-lations,” Greed said with a mocking laugh. “Forced your baby boy to sear through his core and light up all his Bronze potential for, what, one final chance at ascension for yourself? As if that had a shot in hell of working?” Greed snorted and spat. “As if you were any better than Grandfather, desperately grasping at straws, eager to buy just a couple more centuries of life before your story finally comes to an end!”

Aurelia chuckled coldly even as Eric’s mind whirld with horror at what he saw. Dozens... no hundreds of massive triangular shaped dreadnoughts massing fleets over a dozen worlds.

The worlds of HIS people.

The worlds where his mother had promised to shelter the mothers of his unborn children!

Eric’s hands trembled upon the hilt of his blade. He forced his eyes to lock with a sneering Greed’s own.

“What are your ships intending, Greed?”

Greed smirked, savoring the moment as he gazed down at Eric before blowing a thick cloud of blue smoke writhing with silent screams of the damned and forgotten.

“Of all the questions you could ask. That’s the one you chose?” The goblin chuckled coldly. “What does it look like, boy?”

“It looks like you’re going to invade.”

Greed’s eyes lit up with impossible malicious glee. “Invade? HA! Don’t you WISH, foolish boy! We’re not going to invade... WE’RE GOING TO DESTROY!” Greed manically declared, seeming to glow with renewed strength, stepping free of his gloop-filled vat upon trembling legs as a pair of genuine demonic lemurs rushed to robe his desiccated flesh.

Yet as withered as Greed looked, his eyes were lit with wild glee. “Oh, I can see the terror in your eyes, boy. The sheer despair! How fucking sweet it is to see! You thought you could destroy our Soul-Forge starship foundry? Well we’re going to take this night to WIPE YOUR PEOPLE OFF THE MAP FOR ALL TIME! Because unlike your desperate mother, OUR PLAN WILL SUCCEED! Upon the burning corpses of all you cherish and love, LORD MALICE WILL FINALLY ASCEND!”

Eric’s heart was pounding in his chest, blood roaring in his ears. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the nightmare vision of entire armadas of massive space vessels approaching pristine fecund worlds before dropping tons of munitions that transformed clear blue skies and lush green forests into fields to mushroom clouds and storms of crimson flame.

Eric’s ears rang with screams he couldn’t hear.

Only sense.

Millions of desperate souls shrieking in panic as their halcyon life turned to a fiery hell, forced to witness their loved ones wrapped in sheets of pitiless flame, children screaming underneath rubble, before all breath was stolen when the air itself ignited as the destruction of one city became a second and then a third.

Entire nations slowly turned to pools of hellfire as the armada slowly crawled across entire worlds. The jewels of Aurelia’s realms, about to be obliterated in hellfire for all time.

“Mother, help us!” Eric’s horror was magnified to a fever pitch, only in that moment recalling the horror Aurelia had pushed away for too short a time.

Recalling so well his half-sister’s terrified, despairing eyes, the eyes of a woman he had so hoped to befriend only a month before, just before their signal was cut off.

Because this wasn’t the first handful of planets Greed had struck.

The same bastard who, even now, was laughing from the safety of a monitor a world away.

“NO!” Eric screamed, clenching the hilt of his sword so TIGHTLY as despair turned to towering fury.

“Yes!” Greed chortled, nothing but malice in his gaze. “Oh yes, you obnoxious loathsome poxsome little brat! I’m going to slaughter all your people, fool, every last one! I will swim in their blood and when Lord Malice ascends, it is I who will take his place! It is I who will lead our people to greatness! It is I, Greed Bane, who will make it our people’s mission to PURGE Terra of all humans and elves the instant your world leaves protected status, and I will do it with every armada you see before you, fool! Every star ship will be under my command!”

Eric’s eyes were wild, blazing with a heat far beyond mere fury as he sensed Rica’s desperate cry, a world away.

Even now, his girlfriend was embracing every bit of her Primal Hunter’s gifts to outrun the rain of hellfire obliterating the city that was to be her sanctuary, her guardians and keepers already splayed upon the ground, eyes wide and vacant with death, choking on perilous fumes that Rica’s monstrous vitality and perks Eric never knew she had claimed the only things keeping her alive.

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A futile desperate run through broken city streets.

For the armada was a full hundred ships as peaceful blue skies turned red with flame and black with ash.

And their bombardment had just begun.

“Mother! Rica’s in trouble! We have to stop it! We have to stop it!”

Yet surprisingly, to Eric’s complete and utter horror, his mother’s eyes were cold, her lips pressed in a bitter thin line.

“I can do nothing, Eric. For it appears that our foes have indeed outmaneuvered me at every turn, this time around.”

Eric’s eyes widened with surprised dismay as Greed cackled in the background. “Oh, you admit it. The bitch finally admits that a master of fate FINALLY got the best of her! Malice will be most pleased. I’ll be sure to tell him, right before he EATS OUT YOUR HEART, You winter bitch, before leaving for lands of glory you will never know!”

Eric’s eyes widened with dismay, his sense of Rica’s growing panic reaching a fever pitch.

“MOTHER!”

His mother’s gaze locked with his own. Faster than causality normally allowed, Aurelia was before him, irises of ice and flame boring into his own.

“Only YOU Can stop this Eric.” She flashed a bitter smile. “Because all my cards this round, every single one, I PUT ON YOU!”

Eric hissed, lurching back. “Mother... no. Elonia. She was always—”

“A feint,” his mother said as casually as a killer blasting out the brains of his victim. “A ruse. A patsy. As every other girl before her has been for the last seven generations.”

She turned to give a suddenly scowling Greed the most innocent of smiles.

“So the damned fool Greed covers for would have no idea of the final gambit before it was time for us to finally play our hand.”

Eric took a wheezing gasp of panicked air, gazing desperately at the monitors so casually displaying nightmares. “What do I do, Mother! All I have is this sword! What do I...”

He gasped and shuddered when her hand caressed his skull.

And suddenly his world blazed with brilliant blue fire.

“GAZE AT THE MONITORS!”

A shuddering Eric did just that.

“Do you see, Eric Silver, my lastborn son?”

Eric opened his mouth to scream against the absurdity. Of course he saw! And there was no time! His targets were a thousand lightyears away! They needed to...”

Eric shuddered, heart racing with wild fury and desperate hope.

“I see them.”

His mother smiled. “Yes, you do.”

“In live time! Even as they unleash fiery hell, I FEEL the screams of our people. It is in sync! We are all in sync!”

His mother’s eyes twinkled with wild, fiery mirth. “Correct.”

“So it is an arcane connection. THEY ARE RIGHT HERE!”

Eric gazed at the nightmare image of not one but a dozen armadas over a dozen worlds, knowing all too well that what he was thinking would be his death.

He knew damn well just how fearsome a starship truly was.

He had used an entire Planetary Perk point, one boosted by countless hundreds of thousands of grateful souls... to make one for his daughter’s future graduation to Bronze.

His mother gently clapped his shoulder. “Correct, Eric. They are right here. AND THEY ARE SLAUGHTERING OUR PEOPLE! So what should we do?”

Eric’s ears rang with the screams of countless millions. His eyes lit up with a blade now alive with the transcendent ideals of Fire, Ice, Dominion and WRATH. All at once.

Choosing his perk.

KNOWINGLY warping his body and soul... TWISTING his infinite potential for a cause far greater than a single spoiled boy’s dreams.

A cause that would give him the POWER of a Gold before he ever touched level one hundred.

Eric laughed with madness, regret, and howling fury, now not just lighting the candle at both ends of his fragile soul but EMBRACING A NUCLEAR FIRE!

As his sword shuddered with a pristine configuration that wasn’t just the higher order components of a single profound concept, but four such concepts fused into one.

His body spasmed as every cell within him screamed with a blaze that would never end.

Not until there was nothing left but the echo of his fury ringing against the cosmos.

The countdown was set.

His final hour had begun.

“WE KILL THEM ALL!” Eric screamed, racing toward the bank of monitors as Greed looked on in growing dismay while Eric screamed with all the insights of the Electromana spectrum BLAZING inside his skull as he FORCED the arcane connection to zoom in on the closest battleship.

There!

A single portal.

A command center within.

A gate open.

And Eric JUMPED!

Leaving nothing but the howling storm freezing the bank vault behind him, Lord Grim’s gentle blood ward all that kept a dazed, still bound Morlekai from freezing to ice, along with Alice and Morlekai, Drake and Louie, and countless dozens of young necromantic disciples who, somehow, with Grim’s surprisingly peaceful surrender, hadn’t registered on their enemies after their lord and master had so quietly gone inside the massive bank vault of a cage. Sheltering so many souls with his aura. Eric’s closest friends, who he hadn’t even registered for a heartbeat.

Yet they had certainly registered him.

A pale-faced, frightened looking Alice was shaking like a leaf, holding her husband, the solemn-faced Louie trading a look with his closest friend.

“That was our Boyscout!”

“Yeah, babe. It was.”

“What happened to him?”

Louie shook his head, kissing his wife’s brow. “I wish I knew, babe. I wish I knew.”

Morlekai shivered, turning to his master. “Lord Grim. Eric... who is he really?”

The ancient lich smiled. “He is the lastborn scion of the Winter Queen.”

“Who was glowing like a nuclear reactor meltdown.”

Drake chuckled ruefully. “Yeah, they both were, boss. They both were.”

The vampire frowned, before shaking his head with a sigh. “Contenders like that are far beyond our ken.”

Surprisingly, Lord Grim shook his head. “They aren’t walking the path of a Contender, grandson.”

Morlekai frowned. “Then what—”

“They’re walking the path of ultimate ascension.”

“What does that even mean?”

The lich sighed. “That means we’d best head to the gate a certain well-inclined familiar has just informed me was placed at the entrance of a hidden tunnel her master had once used before. Come, Gather Prince Caliban and the other elves and lets head to the warded farm and jump through without delay.”

Alice’s eyes widened. “Grandfather, what are you saying?”

The ancient Moor dressed as an 18th century gentleman gave a regretful shake of his head. “It means that a pair of brilliant stars are about to ignite, and they will light this world ablaze.”