For a moment, Benjamin wondered how it was he recognized the man. Surely in a new body he shouldn’t be able to just see such things, and yet, there he was the man from his nightmares standing before him.

He was younger, though, and as Benjamin tried not to stare, he realized that the man had a number of subtle differences. His hair was wavier, he was a little shorted, and most of all, the gray that had been in his ugly little goatee had vanished.

It's a new body, but somehow sculpted to look a bit like the old one, he realized. He wasn’t sure how that worked, of course. Was it some natural property of the phylactery or the reincarnation process? Had he chosen one of his own relatives to be a host and stolen their body?

Flesh sculpting. The word came to mind unbidden from somewhere deep in the Prince’s memories. Benjamin vowed to examine that later, but for now, he ignored it. Instead, he focused on the terrifying man before him while he tried to maintain as blank a gaze as possible.

The one thing he didn’t do was try to access the man’s system to see if his credentials were unchanged. That would have to wait for a moment of distraction, just in case. Should Benjamin find himself locked out at this range, he’d be annihilated by whatever counter it was that Lord Jarris chose to bring to bear.

And If I’m going down, I want to take all you motherfuckers with me, Benjamin thought to himself.

None of that certainty made it to his face, though. Instead, he watched as the Summoner Lord regarded them coldly from where he stood with his inner circle before making his way over to the flickering Rhakshasa.

“So you have returned after all, my pet,” he said with a cold smile as he regarded the two men she held in tow. “I take it that this one is of some importance, then? This is not the time to return to me unless you have something or someone that will aid us with this mess. The resistance is proving to be fiercer than anticipated.”

“Of course, my master,” she purred, slowly taking on the shape of some other woman he didn’t recognize. It was probably Lord Jarris’s waifu, he realized. Instead of being a sexy fox girl, though, he seemed to prefer a prim and proper noblewoman. “He is one of the leaders in all of this, and of course, if he wasn’t important, he wouldn’t have been able to steal this from his friends, would I?”

As she spoke, Ethan took off the necklace he’d been wearing and handed it to the Summoner Lord. “The Prince’s Phylactery,” Jarris smiled. “And in good condition, too. Prince Agardian is a younger son, it’s true, and a bit of a dilettante, but the Emperor will be very pleased, no doubt.”

Benjamin felt the dismissive words raise his hackles unexpectedly as some small part of him took offense to a slight directed to someone else. It was a strange sensation. But he ignored it and continued to stare blankly straight ahead, waiting for instructions. After half a minute of inspecting the jeweled amulet, Lord Jarris placed it into an inner pocket of his own robes for safekeeping and then turned to Benjamin.

“Now, who might you be?” Lord Jarris asked.

“Benjamin Newsome,” Benjamin said simply, knowing the information would do the man no good. He either knew it, or he didn’t.

“And what is your role in this little uprising,” Lord Jarris asked as another explosion, not so far away, rocked them slightly. They were on a low hilltop, giving them a commanding view of the nearby battlefield now that the grass had all been burned away, but as dark as it was, all that Benjamin could really see were flashes of different colors of light and the silhouettes of men fighting and dying together.

“I was both the instigator and the leader,” Benjamin answered, trying to give the truthful, uncreative response he’d come to expect

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” the man said as he started to poke at Benjamin’s system. “Ah yes, so many things that should not be here. I shall have to study you in detail later before the Emperor lets his pets devour your soul at their leisure. Compared to my dear Rahkshasa, they can be very cruel, indeed.”

There was no question, there, so Benjamin said nothing. Instead, he didn’t react at all. Instead he watched as a some kind of flaming eagle brought down a griffon in the distance.

“Tell me, Benjamin,” Lord Jarris said, “The natives are restless in the north. Did you do that? Are you allied with them somehow?”

“I did,” Benjamin said. “They are attacking you all along your front line even now as a distraction.”

“A distraction?” the Summoner Lord asked. “From what?”

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“From the main force of our army that is coming behind you even now,” Benjamin said.

That was the moment he was waiting for, and he took some joy in the way that man’s eyes widened sharply. Up until this moment, he’d shown as much emotion as a glass of ice water. Now, though, there was just the hint of fear, and as far as Benjamin was concerned, that was blood in the water.

Even as Lord Jarris turned, Benjamin seized that moment of distraction and accessed the Summoner Lord’s soul with the man’s stolen seal. It was the most pivotal moment of the whole operation. If the man had changed it, or if he’d noticed, then…

Benjamin didn’t finish that thought, though. Instead, as soon as he saw access granted flash across his invisible interface, he activated the complex program he’d spent the last few weeks building. Then he watched as it unfolded before him like an origami flower made of glowing glyphs and inscrutable runes.

It was a gorgeous sight, but no one but him could see it, just as no one could see the data tables filling up as he started to siphon the credentials of every man Lord Jarris had given orders to in the last 48 hours from his temporary log files. Many of those names and soulIDs were linked to other subordinate mages, and as soon as Benjamin’s program figured that out, new tables were created, and those systems were accessed as well.

A number of things happened at once as those systems were penetrated and taken hostage. Some of the mages that were affected might have even noticed what it was he was doing if, at the same moment, all this was happening, a Nether Behemoth hadn’t started to manifest somewhere behind Benjamin, a quarter mile to the south.

If Jarris had felt the specter of fear at the news that he was about to be ambushed, then it was terror that gripped him when that gigantic monstrosity faded into existence and roared to the sky. In the realms beyond worlds, the Behemoth was an apex predator, and every one of them was a nightmare. This one was a ten-story tall mass of writhing tentacles, and every one of them ended with a giant serpent’s head or the undulating mouth of a worm.

It was a hydra as the world had never known, and one step at a time, it lumbered toward them. “It was a trap!” Lord Jarris screamed, suddenly realizing what had happened, at least in part. “You led them right to us!”

“I couldn’t have my master!” Miku pleaded, able to lie to the man for perhaps the first time in her life since she was no longer under his control. “It took eight rifts to reach here. We passed through three cordons. It's not possible.”

“It’s not possible for them to summon a nether behemoth either!” he yelled, growing increasingly unhinged as the battle began to turn against them on all sides.

Benjamin might have reacted similarly in the man’s situation, but he wasn’t in it, so instead, he simply stood there awaiting some kind of command. Not only was a frightening new enemy coming to bear, but as soon the Fae were gaining ground too, and for the first time, Benjamin could see the light reflecting off of a phalanx of clay men with hard-baked exteriors marching toward them. Each spell flung at them crushed several, but their numbers were limitless, and they continued to march out of the darkness like an earthen wave.

“Bring that thing down!” Lord Jarris ordered, commanding his archers and his mages to turn and focus on the Behemoth approaching them from behind, even if that loss of support collapsed his front line. It was clear that he feared the demons far more than the Fae.

“And you! Benjamin! Tell me how to defeat that thing! How did you even summon it?” The man was on the edge of panic now. Benjamin didn’t blame him, but it was still nice to see that the icy, patient monster that had haunted his nightmares for so long could feel fear.

The lines were collapsing in every direction now. And though this tiny little engagement was only a speck on the massive front line that went for miles in both directions, Benjamin was confident that even now, his spell was racing up and down in both directions as it sought to vacuum up every piece of data it could from every system that he manage to steal the password from.

Since he’d started at the top of the pyramid, or close to it, he expected that a single program would be enough to get almost everyone in one shot. It was possible he might miss a few high officers that Lord Jarris hadn’t seen in days, but truthfully, Benjamin wasn’t concerned about the Rhulvinarians this time. He cared only for the humans who could still be saved. Live or die, he’d already won. He was quite sure of it.

So, when he answered Lord Jarris, it was with a satisfaction that was so powerful that he couldn’t entirely suppress the smile that was aching to curl across his lips. “There is nothing anyone can do now,” Benjamin said. “Even without me, the army I raised is impossible to stop.”

“What?” Lord Jarris bellowed, torn between looking into Benjamin’s eyes to ascertain the truth of that statement and looking past him to the monstrous giant that was getting noticeably closer with every step. “How could you hope to summon such a creature? The Behemoth… the Elder Serpents… The Moray Dragons… those are sole domain of the royal family! Even I… ”

As he spoke, each of the monstrosities sprang to life somewhere on the chaotic battlefield, like a prophecy killing and maiming where they went. The forces of the Rhulvin were bombarding the Nether Behemoth with everything they had, and the light was lit up like a fireworks show filled with green explosions and red fire, but they were barely slowing it down.

“I worked with the traitors in your midst…” Benjamin said, pretending that he was trying and failing to fight the terrible mind control that he was shackled by. “They showed me how to unlock your systems… they taught us the way to summon forbidden creatures and… and…”

As if right on queue, the first foot of a four-foot centaur arrow suddenly blossomed in Benjamin’s chest, spraying the ground between him and Lord Jarris with blood. Benjamin looked down in surprise and then collapsed to the ground.

“No! Tell me!” Lord Jarris said, kicking Benjamin ineffectually in the chest as if that could bring him back to life. “I command you to tell me who was behind this!”

“Master!” Miku hissed. “This battle is lost. We must be away, or we shall surely be lost with it!”

There was pensive silence for a moment, and then suddenly, there was the sound of a rift opening. “We have the Prince’s soul at least, as well as whatever it was you learned from your interrogations,” the Summoner Lord grumbled. “That shall have to be enough.”

Lord Jarris ordered a general retreat even as he stepped through the portal, but the violence and madness that was drawing ever closer didn’t cease until the rift closed behind Ethan and Miku. Then, the silence was deafening as the battle instantly ended as if it had never existed in the first place.