As Athena and Lacy helped me up, I pulled up the Status Sheet I’d managed to snag from the old man before he’d ended me so casually.

Name: Conrad (Training Room Immortal — Simulacrum)

Class: ??? (???)

Level: ???

Body:

- Strength: 2250

- Agility: 3125

- Endurance: 975

Mind:

- Intelligence: 750

- Perception: 1200

- Mastery: 2750

Spirit: N/A

“We are so fucked,” I said for the tenth time.

“What happened?” Athena asked, looking between Lacy and I. “I got shifted away and couldn’t see how you died.”

I looked at Lacy with an expression that said, ‘You wanna tell her or should I?’

She sighed. “It was the Immortal. That’s what I couldn’t tell you. When the alarm goes off, he rockets through the castle and kills everyone.”

“Immortal?” Athena repeated. Her eyes went wide suddenly. “Oh, like the name of the scenario? The Immortal Castle. I thought that was the name of the castle.”

“What Stage is he?” I asked. Kurian was across the training room, lounging in one of his chairs, his eyes locked on his tablet. “What Stage is he?” I called over.

“Immortal, obviously,” Kurian replied without looking up.

Athena furrowed her brow. “Is that what it’s called after Adept?”

My stomach flipped as I considered. “I…I don’t think so.”

“Wait, what?” Lacy asked. “I thought for sure he was a step above Adept.”

I shook my head. “I managed to scan him before he killed me. He has over ten thousand stat points. The Adept had about a thousand total. Even if the System becomes more generous each Stage, he might as well be two Stages above Adept with what I just saw.” I hesitated, feeling like I might have imagined it. But as the scene replayed in my head, I knew I was right. “He…he killed me with an air punch, Lace. Just the movement of his hand displaced the air so powerfully that he killed me. At max mass, too. And…and I think the first attack that sent me flying was the shockwave of his arrival. Like, he moved so fast that air hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit.”

“You’re fucking with us,” Athena said with a humorless chuckle. When neither Lacy or I laughed, her face dropped. “R-right?”

“HONK! I can’t confirm how you died,” Lex added. “But I can confirm that the jump from Adept to Immortal is a qualitative increase that transcends simple stat points. I’ve never heard of even an Adept prodigy beating a middling Immortal—let alone a Nascent like yourself.”

Kurian’s voice came softly from across the room.

“I have.”

We all whipped around to face him, but he was still staring down at his intergalactic soap opera or whatever it was he was always watching.

“You have what, Master Kure?” Athena asked.

He looked up, depositing his chair and tablet into thin air. As he approached, he waved his hand and showed us a projection of the vault from a side angle.

“I’ve seen a Peak Nascent beat an Immortal in single combat once. It’s only been done once, as far as I’m aware.”

I squinted in confusion, then realized what he was angling toward.

“Let me guess…” I said with a sigh. “That Nascent went on to become our favorite Aspect, didn’t he?”

Rather than answer me, he directed our attention to the projection hovering at eye level. The image changed in slow motion, revealing the Immortal’s arrival in freeze frames. Each step of the old man cracked the stone beneath his feet. For every ten steps, I saw myself moving less than an inch. When the projection finally reached the part where I was sent flying through the air, I was less than pleased to learn I was right; the shockwave of his arrival had launched me like a cannonball into the far wall. The killing blow was also exactly as I expected, his fist pushing the air so hard that it shot forward in a perfect circle toward my chest.

My frustration peaked as I saw just exactly how unbeatable this guy was.

“Why are you showing us this?” I demanded. “What the hell is this scenario, even? Getting my ass blasted to pieces before I can even react can’t be the most efficient way to reach Adept.”

Kurian turned his gaze upon me and I felt its weight. But I had a fire raging inside of me and I fought back with my own gaze. It was nothing to the Class Guide, but to me, the victory was symbolic. I knew Kurian could crush me with his eyes the way the Immortal had crushed me with air, but I had never shied away from picking unwinnable fights and if that meant dying to the Immortal a thousand times, I’d do it.

I just wanted it to mean something. Not a pointless death march that only served to break us down brick by brick.

What Kurian said next would have made me laugh if I wasn’t so fucking pissed at the futility of it all.

“Have you considered not triggering the alarm?”

The rage threatened to explode out of me and it was only Lacy’s calming hand on my arm that kept me at bay.

“Come on, Dirk,” she said softly. “That was a really good first try. Let’s try a different angle, hm?”

The softness of her touch mingled with her quiet suggestion to calm me enough to think rationally. She was right, it was a good first attempt. With a bit of trial-and-error and a lot of luck, we could absolutely grab the crown and escape without having to face the Immortal.

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I nodded and let her guide me back to the starting point. Kurian watched impassively, returning to his chair as Athena came over.

“You good, old man?” she asked with a teasing smile.

I returned it, masking the anger still simmering beneath the surface.

“Always. Let’s get it.”

We bumped fists and Lacy patted me one more time on the shoulder before taking her spot up on the platform. A minute later, the scenario timer was counting down in my vision.

***

Three more attempts. Three more brutal defeats.

Actually getting to the vault was trivial at this stage. Hell, even getting inside the vault wasn’t our problem. It was once we were in that was giving us fits. Either the Adept was too much for us and we both died or it managed to flee and hit the alarm. We tried closing the vault door behind us to buy time, but I never managed to kill the guard fast enough; the alarm always raised at a certain point, whether from a corpse being found or a change in shifts, I couldn’t say.

This time, we decided to try something different. Change up the variables, so to speak.

Instead of infiltrating through the second-story window, Athena and I scaled the exterior of the castle all the way to the roof. I wasn’t hopeful that it would lead to anything fruitful and chances were the Immortal’s enhanced Perception would hear us coming ages before we made it inside. But we needed to change things up, and frankly, I was sick of dying inside that vault to a gust of wind. Let the fucker take me out on the roof if anything.

No alarm was raised as we climbed over the roof crenelations and we breathed a sigh of relief. Dying to the Immortal on our feet was one thing—plummeting hundreds of feet to the ground below was another.

There was an unlocked trapdoor in the roof and I went first down the ladder. It led into a dark room that was dingy, the air still and sleepy, like there hadn’t been any human traffic in weeks. There was a single door leading out of the room and I sent my Fate energy questing forward. There was no sign of any guards so I cracked the door open. Its hinges creaked, a horrible sound that echoed out. Athena and I both cringed and I quickly swapped energy to reduce the friction on the rusted metal.

I swung it open gently, switching back to Fate energy as we waited for that damned alarm to ripple throughout the castle. After a few tense moments, we both sighed and I sent the energy forward again. There was a set of dark spiral stairs and we tiptoed our way down.

At the bottom of the stairs was another door and I first checked past it with my Fate energy to confirm if it led to an occupied room. There were no guards, but the tendrils of Fate touched objects that felt strange to my senses. There were documents on a desk that I could tell were not in English, yet I understood the contents anyway.

“Body tempering formula,” I whispered.

“What?” Lacy asked in my ear.

At my side, Athena was looking at me with narrowed eyes.

“Nothing,” I muttered, focusing my attention on that specific document.

Body Tempering Formula — Human Adjacent Species — Grade ???

Three Caldorian eyes (aged 7 years)

Pineal gland (or equivalent) of a Jree, Caskian, or Kiln adjacent specimen

Nine pinches of Julman bone powder (femur preferable)

…

And on and on the document went. All in all, there were over a dozen ingredients—most that made no sense to me. Past that, there was a specific set of instructions on the order and method of combining the ingredients to concoct what I could only assume was a potion. But even more interesting, was the final page, which appeared to be how to ingest the potion for some result.

Body Tempering Ritual

Prerequisites:

1. Combined System stat total in either Body or Mind exceeding 150

2. System-recognized species is human or human adjacent

3. All cores have reached High or Peak Tier as classified by System

4. Level 50 or higher

Application:

While maintaining a System-recognized meditative state, imbibe the potion orally. (Note: submersion is possible but unnecessary and wasteful. Avoid contact with eyes.) As potion is digested, notice its passage through your stomach into your bloodstream. Guide the potion to each extremity with meticulous control and attention to detail. As the potion passes to your fingers and toes, express it past the limits of your skin, expunging the mortal impurities. Repeat this process seven times or until the potion is fully expended within your system.

As I finished reading the entire document through the Fate energy, I snapped back to reality. Lacy was frantically calling for a status update as Athena shook my arm gently. When she saw my eyes shift back into focus, she let out a sigh of relief.

“He’s back, Lacy,” she said quietly.

“Dirk? You okay?”

“Yeah, one sec. I’m trying to memorize something.”

Closing my eyes, I ran through the entire ingredient, prerequisite, and application portions of the formula. There was no way this was real, right? And yet, I felt like we had stumbled upon something here. Why would there be a completely fabricated potion formula sitting this far out of the way of Kurian’s scenario? There were two possibilities that I could see.

One, this scenario was taken brick-by-brick from a real castle that at one point had been occupied by real guards. If that was the case, then why not real documents also?

The second possibility—and the one that intrigued me the most—was the Kurian had planted this formula here intentionally. Which meant it was either intended as a sort of bonus reward for exploring…or he had been pushing us toward this document the whole time.

I must have been zoning out longer than I had thought, because Lacy was insistent in my ear again.

“Can you tell us what the hell is going on?” she asked. “You’re killing us here.”

“I found something interesting on the table when I was scouting the room with my Fate energy,” I whispered back. “Looks like a formula to upgrade our human bodies or something.”

Athena looked at me with a mixture of confusion and disbelief. Lacy’s voice sounded just as skeptical as the girl looked.

“It’s probably just a prop for the scenario, Dirk…”

“Yeah…you could be right.” I paused. “But what if it’s not?”

Neither of them said anything for a moment and I shrugged.

“Let’s keep going, I wanna take a closer look anyway.”

I lubed up the door hinges with my Friction energy and we slid into the room. It was a spacious office with the desk I had been examining dead center. The formula was sitting there right out in the open and Athena jogged over to take a look.

I’d already memorized it, so I continued scanning the room visually and with my Fate sight. One wall was lined with shelves containing all sorts of interesting artifacts and books and I wondered if everything up there was a treasure trove of information like the document on the desk. I resisted the temptation to dig in and continued surveying the room.

There were two more doors in the room. One was straight ahead and the other was to my right. It was difficult to tell which one would take us downstairs, but I ignored them for now, continuing my Fate scan of the room.

As I trailed the energy over the surroundings, it snagged on something that shouldn’t have been there. Behind a painting depicting a younger woman, there was something metallic where there should have been stone wall.

I snapped my fingers quietly to get Athena’s attention and pointed at the painting. She followed with a curious expression and took the painting when I levered it off the wall. Sure enough, sitting behind the painting was a safe embedded in the stone. Athena gasped and then we shared a smile. In our ears, Lacy sounded giddy.

“Holy crap! We never explored up here. There’s no way there’s something in there, right?”

“Remember the scenario description?” I replied. “It said take the Immortal’s treasure. It didn’t specify which treasure.”

Athena was wide eyed while I had a shit-eating grin on my face. I couldn’t be certain, but it felt like we were about to beat Kurian’s scenario!

Sending my Fate energy forward, I found it blocked by the material of the safe.

“Shit, it’s shielded,” I muttered. “We’ll have to break it open.”

“Can you?” Athena asked.

I shrugged. “Not sure. Bring its mass low enough and I should. Let’s just hope it’s not resistant to all energies.”

As I switched energies, I fed the Mass energy into the safe door. There was a bit of resistance, but I managed to still alter its composition enough to bring its mass down noticeably. Bumping my own mass up, I grabbed the handle and torqued it hard. The entire thing gave way, ripping a fist-sized hole in the safe door.

Peering through the hole, I gasped as I saw the prize. A small potion vial were the only contents of the safe. It was clear glass, with a blue liquid visibly shifting inside like it was alive. I could feel that it wasn’t just any old liquid, but was brimming with power.

“What is it?” Athena asked, craning on her tippy toes to see through the hole.

“I think it’s the Body Tempering Potion!”

A voice sounded from behind us, causing us to spin in a panic.

“I thought I felt foreign energies in my office.”

Standing at the far door was the Immortal. His posture was relaxed, his hands clasped behind his back. But the fire in his eyes was alight.

“And you are quite right. That is a Body Tempering Potion. Unfortunately for you, I am here now.”

Neither of us saw the blow that killed us.