How was she able to find him so easily all the time, he wondered. She couldn’t see through walls too, right? No, he sheepishly realized a second later. She didn’t need to see through walls when she could just follow the racket he made with every step.

Having lived for many months now relying on his armor to walk, and having spent well over ninety percent of his time within the bare metal walls of his tucrenyx abode, Blake had long ago gotten used to the heavy bang that five hundred pounds of metal-encased person produced with every step, to the point that he didn’t even really notice the noise anymore. In fact, he had largely considered it more of a feature than a flaw; he felt that it gave him presence, the sound of his footfalls a constant reminder to his employees of who they served.

But now, that same ‘feature’ was now biting him in the ass. Arlette had once told him that she could hear where he was from more than twenty rooms and a storey away, and that was when he was just walking. Now running, he wouldn’t be surprised if Lady No-Limbs could track him from the next time zone.

Yet, what was he supposed to do about it? It wasn’t like he could just remove the metal soles from his boots. The rest of his leg armor wouldn’t be able to hold up, and his worthless feet wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure.

Well, if he couldn’t decrease the noise, what other options were there? Create more noise to drown it in a sea of sound?

Wait a minute...

It was as if the clouds parted and the answer he’d sought descended to the rapturous harmony of a holy chorus of angels. The best way to defeat bullshit comic book powers was with bullshit comic book logic! How many times would a supervillain be defeated, only for it to be revealed that it was never the real supervillain at all, but rather a robotic copy of them? Countless times—so many that some comic book villains were downright famous for it!

Yes, he thought as he dove into Hyper Mode, time slowing to a crawl. Why make yourself a target if you can make something else a target instead?

Of all the hundreds and thousands of different devices Blake had built with his powers, none were more familiar to him than that of his powered armor suit. He’d formed it over himself so often, in so many different situations, that the circuits and form were practically imprinted on his mind. It had become like driving, where he could leave huge parts of it to the non-conscious parts of his mind while focusing on other things, and it would still turn out fine.

That is to say, making a copy of his suit using metal and crystals from the nearby walls was child’s play to him. Adding a bit of extra metal on the inside to simulate the additional weight of his body was simple as well. Even making it walk and run naturally wasn’t a problem; given the state of his lower body, he’d had to rely on computer-assisted mobility functionality from the start. The only part that took even a little effort was programming Blakebot Alpha to navigate the fortress and avoid their pursuer as best it could.

His creation took off down the hallway, its metal feet banging along like the world’s loudest hammers on the world’s largest anvil. Meanwhile, he quickly melded into the nearest wall, making sure to move himself through the metal using his powers, at the cost of speed, instead of stepping. Then, he turned on his feeds of the many still-functional cameras spread throughout the building and waited, a devious grin spreading across his face.

He didn’t even have to wait five seconds before he heard the sound of the ceiling caving in down the hall near where his decoy was. She’d taken the bait. Now, all he had to do was flow down to the ground floor, making sure to stay inside the walls so he didn’t make any noise, and the trap would be set.

His grin widened, and he had to repress the urge to chuckle out loud. Arlette had really been on to something with the whole doppelganger tactic. He should have taken this page from her playbook long ago.

His Blakebot wouldn’t be able to stay ahead of her forever, but it didn’t need to as long as his trap was ready by the time she’d hunted it down. Still, just to make sure there were no surprises, Blake kept watch over his adversary as he followed gravity’s lead.

As he jumped from feed to feed, his disgruntlement growing as more and more of his abode came to look like a tornado had just passed through, he noticed something odd. Besides the floating woman, her front still stained with the greenish-brown of chili, he kept seeing something else, or several things perhaps, floating in midair. These indistinct shapes were moving quickly and often erratically, so he couldn’t make out what they were, but they caught his eye and his curiosity.

Pushing the live feeds to the side of his view, he took the recording of a recent feed and rewound it until he saw the shapes again. Slowing the playback even further, until he eventually was going frame by frame, Blake finally paused it on a frame that had a relatively clear picture. With that done, he studied the image with great curiosity. What exactly was he looking at?

The first thing to jump out at him was the thing’s odd shape. He had trouble wrapping his mind around it; it appeared warped, like a large sheet of paper that had been cut up and twisted into three dimensions. The second thing he noticed was the color: the same as the chili con carne still on the woman’s front and even in her hair. Coincidence? Surely not, but what did it mean? He wasn’t sure.

He went back to staring at the shape again, trying to puzzle it out. The object could be broken down into four parts. The largest one was the hardest to describe; its shape looked to him to be about halfway between a circle and crescent—or perhaps like a particularly obese ‘L’—with the edge of the inner side being far more squiggly and irregular than the more well-defined outer edge. Protruding from that outer edge were two long, thin rectangles and one equally thin but much shorter rectangle closer to the upper end of this ‘L’.

It was an ugly, lumpy amalgamation of shapes, and messy too. Strangely, the almost smear-like shapes kind of reminded him of his days as a young child when he used to fingerpaint and leave misshapen handprints on his mother’s pristine walls. Ahh, the good old days, back when he’d been much too young then to understand why his mother would become so upset whenever she discovered his ‘gifts’.

Hold on a second...

Blake looked at the image again, then set it aside next to the live feed, where in just a matter of seconds, the woman was making great progress in chasing down his doppelganger; Blakebot Alpha was slowed by its inability to ignore metal obstacles like he could. Bringing up a second feed, he slowed it down and watched how the floating thing twisted and folded. There, the way it creased, always in the same spots, never more than two folds.

He’d been looking at this all wrong. He wasn’t looking at an object, exactly; he was looking at the remnants of Sam’s meal splashed upon something invisible, revealing only a fraction of its surface. And, judging by what he saw, that object was a hand—a huge-ass invisible hand, floating in mid-air.

Now that he made the connection, he could see it all. The large, roughly oval area was part of a giant palm, while the rectangles were part of the inner sides of three of the fingers. It all made sense. If he’d had a bowl of chili splash in his face, his first instinct would have been to wipe it away with his hands. The woman had likely reacted the same way, except with her psychic hands since she lacked any real ones. Looking through the feed, he spotted the other floating shape he’d seen earlier. Yep, that was definitely the bottom of a palm and a thumb.

So... she didn’t have ‘true’ telekinesis, but rather huge unseeable grabbers. But, was that a distinction that mattered? Could he even take advantage of this discovery somehow? Hands or no hands, she could still peel his fortress apart like it was papier mache.

Perhaps, he decided. This revelation suggested possible limitations he had not before considered. It was possible that she could only hold or manipulate a few things at a time. If it was one hand per missing limb, then that meant two things at once maximum, or four if her legs had hands like a chimpanzee. Now that he thought about it, she’d announced her arrival by dropping four giant rocks onto his once beautiful fortress. Why stop at four? If she could only carry one heavy object per psychic hand, and she only had four hands, then suddenly this all made more sense.

Then there was the question of just how ‘physical’ these things were. Yes, they could interact with matter, but did they have to? Could they pass through solid objects? From what he’d seen, no, solid matter could block their path. That meant that things like, say, the pillars in the chamber he was retreating to could serve as temporary shields—unless she could maneuver her graspers around them and seize something she couldn’t see. But, once again, he’d seen no evidence that she could do that.

Perhaps there was more to work with than he’d first thought. If the hands were at least semi-physical, then it stood to reason that they might be able to block bullets. Yet, she had gone out of her way to create a shield earlier to protect herself, suggesting that she couldn’t block everything with just her projections. It also meant that every hand she sent out to crush something was a hand that couldn’t be shielding her.

Quickly, Blake reworked some of his attack plans for the upcoming second confrontation, several ideas bubbling up to the surface. For example, if he brought in some of his drones, he could have them do coordinated ramming attacks with five or more at once from five different angles, and at least one was likely to get through. Given their light weight, he doubted they could do a whole lot of damage, but even just making her hurt would knock her off balance and hopefully ruin her focus.

A few moments later, he wrapped up the alterations to his instructions, just as he felt the metal beneath him run out. He had arrived at his destination. Creating a fireman’s pole so he wouldn’t have to fall the several dozen feet to the floor—as a lobby of sorts, he’d tried to design it to instill a sense of power and awe; thus, the large size, extra-high ceiling, and pillars—he slid his way to the floor and looked around in satisfaction.

A wide array of his forces had gathered in this massive space. He saw original model skitters, still clanking along and still useful after all this time; newer generation battle skitters, larger, tougher, and stronger; Sam; a handful of experimental skitters that he’d been working on in his workshop, many of them still incomplete but all equipped with at least one working weapon; a small cloud of flitter drones, their combined fan output enough create a strong breeze within—wait a second. Back up.

Samanta cowered beside a nearby pillar, clutching Alpha to her chest with both of her little arms, a look of terror on her trembling face. What the hell was she doing here?! He already knew the answer: he’d told her to run to the lowest floor she could. Given that she didn’t have the clearance to access the basements or sub-basement, this was as low as she could go.

Blake cursed his luck, fate, and every god he could remember. Why?! Why did it have to be that the one time that she’d actually listened to him was the one time it would make things worse?! He couldn’t fight Lady Smash-em-up and protect Sam at the same time! It was dangerous enough for him to be here alone!

“Sam, run! Quickly!” he hollered. “Get outside!”

The girl didn’t need much encouragement. Turning toward the archway that led outside, inconveniently located all the way on the far side of the room, she ran as fast as her little legs could carry her.

It was too late.

Sam had made it only a couple of meters before the room shook from a heavy impact above. Another followed a split second later, the blow punching a hole through the ceiling not far from the exit archway.

Before he even consciously knew what he was doing, Blake took off after Samanta, his heavy boots slamming against the floor. A now-familiar figure dropped into view, her take-no-prisoners glare setting his hairs on edge. He pushed his armor to its limits, even disabling all safety toggles for every last ounce of speed and power he could get despite the possible loss of functionality past the immediate moment. Three steps later, he reached out, grabbed Sam by the shoulders, and dove to the side.

Something unseeable slammed down right where they’d just stood, shaking the ground and just missing them as they rolled behind a nearby pillar and out of sight.

Then, all hell broke loose. An eardrum-shattering cacophony erupted as dozens of weapons fired from all across the chamber. Unable to see what was happening, Blake let his pre-planned orders take effect, turning his focus to the child huddled against his armor, hugging Alpha tightly to her chest with fearful desperation.

This wasn’t going to work out. He could fight the intruder or keep Sam safe, but he couldn’t do both. In the end, the decision ended up being an easy one. He’d put a lot of time and effort into creating this place and building his robots, but he could always rebuild those.

Sam was a different story. He had not rescued her, spared her, protected her, housed her, fed her, tutored her, and so many other things just to have her die here. He had yet to make her understand, to get the tearful apology that she owed him and would one day bestow unto him when she finally fully realized the terrible truth of her past deeds. And until that day came, he would not let her die. Never. He would not allow it. And if that meant fleeing and temporarily leaving this place to the enemy, then so be it.

“Pinch your nose and hold your breath!” he shouted.

Ordinarily, the unearthly din of weapons fire, invisible hands smashing about, and huge robots stomping around all echoing across a fully metallic chamber would make any aural communication nigh impossible, but Scyria’s strange meaning translation managed to convey his words well enough that the girl complied.

Without taking the time to explain further—time he likely didn’t have—Blake pulled her and her robot companion as close to him as he could and used his powers on the metal below them all. Samanta flinched as they sank into the floor, but thankfully did not resist beyond that.

It was a good thing, too, as something—an invisible hand, no doubt—struck the pillar they hid behind, creating several large cracks that ran through it like lightning. One breath later, most of the pillar exploded into rubble, showering the area with shrapnel as large as a man’s head.

But, it was too late. They had sunk so low by that point that they remained hidden behind the low stump that remained, and then they were fully within the floor and sinking lower by the second.

There was not much beneath the ground floor that would work for their situation. The basements, which could be found beneath perhaps half of the fortress by area, had no way out but back up to the ground floor, so they wouldn’t work as an escape route. Same for the sub-basement far, far below where the dungeon and his crystal vault stood.

They would work only as temporary hiding places; any hope he had of using them, the sub-basement especially, as a sort of panic room—Blake made a mental note to build a real panic room in his next fortress—was undermined by the existence of the elevator shafts. Dozens and dozens of yards of solid tucrenyx and earth between them and her meant nothing when she could just bust through the lifts and float right down unmolested.

But, there was one place below his fortress that had everything he needed: the sewers. Several sewer tunnels ran beneath the structure, including one beneath this very chamber. There were no easy weak points here, only foot after foot of solid, uninterrupted tucrenyx all the way down. After Sofie and Pari tried to enter the fortress through the sewers way back when, Blake had paid much more attention to how the fortress sat atop them. He’d increased the thickness of the metal between the sewer and the floors above, reworked all of the waste lines to empty at the south end of the fortress as far downstream as possible, added sensors to detect any attempted infiltration, and more. Once they were through, he and Sam would have a good twenty feet of metal between them and her.

There was a big difference in thickness between this and the walls above. At twenty feet, she wouldn’t be able to bust through with brute force blows—or it would take her long enough to do it that they’d be long gone, at least. The complete lack of windows, doors, or anything else for her hands to grab onto for leverage would help as well.

Yes, this would work. Blake wasn’t exactly happy about having to abandon his home, but he could stomach a temporary defeat for a permanent victory. More than halfway down now, the sounds of the battle were becoming harder to make out, but he could tell from his feeds that chaos still reigned.

Lady McSmash had broken holes all across the ceiling and was popping down through them just long enough to throw a chili-covered fist at a robot before zipping back up and out of view like an inverted form of Whack-a-Mole. The floor was covered in the rubble of shattered pillars and assorted robot parts. Most of Blake’s flitters, his flying drones, were down for the count, as well as about half of his skitters. Some were entirely destroyed, while many of his larger robots were still half functional but with crushed weaponry or legs limiting their effectiveness. Several had somehow gotten flipped upside down and were having trouble righting themselves in the uneven, debris-littered environment.

Still, his units were putting up a good fight, more than good enough to keep her busy for a good while longer—and, if he was seeing it right, she had not gotten through this so far unscathed. He was pretty sure he saw significantly more blood on her now than even after he’d detonated her shield. Their sacrifice was tolerable for this outcome.

Just a moment later, Blake, Sam, and Alpha hit the roof of the sewer tunnel and all resistance dropped away. They fell the last dozen or so feet, Blake wincing as the impact of landing sent stabs of pain running from his hips up his spine. Meanwhile, Sam let out a little ‘oof’ as she landed somewhat awkwardly, Alpha slipping out of her arms and tumbling into the nearby stream of water and sewage. It scrabbled out a moment later, letting out a high-pitched, indignant whine at such horrid treatment.

Blake couldn’t help but snort. It felt like the little machine was getting more lifelike every day, and of course, of all things, it was turning into a cat. At least this one wouldn’t shed all over the house, he supposed.

Now that he had a moment of relative safety, Blake dove into Hyper Mode. His thoughts whirred as, in a fraction of a second, he wrote a quick script to display a small map of the sewers in the upper right corner of his vision, along with a red line tracing the most direct path from their position to the closest exit. There was no easy way to get their exact position under all this metal and earth, so he would have to manually update their progress as they went, but that was good enough for his needs today.

Scooping up Sam, he tried to place her on his back but found that the suit made his chest too wide for the girl to go piggyback. Though she was rather big for it, he moved her onto his shoulders instead and took off down the tunnel, following the directions given by his homebrewed GPS. Alpha could follow on its own just fine; its legs might be short and stubby, but it could really move them if it needed to.

With a fairly straight tunnel and no crazy woman trying to kill him, they made swift progress. In what felt like no time at all, they’d already passed where Blake believed the fortress’s outer wall to be. From here, the ground above would quickly transition to primarily earth with some stone, with the only tucrenyx left being the relatively thin six inches or so that made up the tunnel itself.

Theoretically, it would be much easier for Smashy von Crush-crush to dig her way down here, but she would have to find him first. Even the ringing clangs and clongs of his feet pounding on the tucrenyx walkway would be impossible to hear from above ground.

They passed two side tunnels and took a left at the third, the first turn in their fairly simple directions. From there, they sped down this slightly smaller tunnel until it ended in a ‘T’ intersection, where he went left. The passageway here took a long, slow, but steady bend to the right until it forked into two more tunnels. Right this time, his guidance said. This tunnel was less straight than the rest. First, he slid around a sharp left bend, his feet slipping from the water that seemed to cover every spot of ground here. Then came an equally sharp right turn shortly after.

It was here, rounding this second bend, that he almost ran face-first into a stone wall. As it was, Blake barely managed to skid to a stop before he would have slammed into the unexpected obstruction. He looked around, befuddled. The sewer tunnel came to an abrupt end right here, a wall of stone sealing off the space from side to side and top to bottom.

The stone was largely a dark tan with streaks of light gray mixed in. Its surface was smooth like a stone from the ocean, with little of the usual craggly roughness of the rock found in the area. The only hole in the wall was a thin gap in the bottom center to let the sewer water continue to flow unimpeded, but even that had several ‘bars’ of stone sealing it off.

What was going on? His map showed this passageway continuing for some length before joining up with the final sewer line that would lead to the exit. It couldn’t be a cave-in, as it was clearly man-made, so what was it doing here? Had somebody—Leo, perhaps, or whoever was in charge of the city’s sanitation?—ordered this put in recently? Why hadn’t the map been updated? Or had it been updated on paper but never in his systems? That last possibility was more likely than he wanted to admit. Even years in, getting all his employees to use computer systems over paper as much as possible was a challenge.

Well, whatever the reason, the blockage seemed too thick for him to bust through without major effort and time he didn’t have—best to just find another route. His system blinked for a moment before the red line changed, now heading back and taking the other side of the fork. Well, at least it didn’t look to be too significant of a detour.

At least, that was what he’d told himself until he followed the second tunnel and found himself standing before a second stone obstruction nearly identical to the first—it even had the same bottom grate to let the liquids through. Shit! Why was he in the dark about these? How many more had been put in here without his knowledge and consent? When he made it through this, Blake was going to have a long talk with those responsible, from Leo on down!

Or, had that been the point? At this point, Blake found it hard to keep his trademark paranoia in check, as unhelpful as it was right now. Was this some sort of sabotage? Part of a plot to bring him down? Was there a rat in his government placed high enough to manage this sort of thing?

He’d have all the time he needed to solve his mystery later. Right now, what mattered was getting out. Ignoring Samanta’s confused and worried questions, Blake reversed course and headed back toward the T intersection.

This third route had him taking the rightward path, which mirrored the slow bend of its twin. That meant he’d be able to keep his momentum up along the outside wall through the whole turn. Or, at least, that’s what he’d thought until he sped through the intersection, did a double-take, and came to a screeching halt.

The other passage, the first turn in his directions, the one they’d taken from the central tunnel into which they’d fallen, was now sealed off with stone—the same stone as the other two blockages. This one was new, however. Right? He wasn’t going crazy, was he? He hadn’t gotten all mixed up and lost?

No, he was right where he thought he was, and this was definitely new. There was no bottom channel on this one, meaning that the sewer water was now pooling up on this side as the stone blocked its flow. Judging by the small and shallow puddle at his feet and the rate at which it was rising, this obstruction was maybe two minutes old—three, max.

Blake took off down the rightward path, his legs churning with a redoubled urgency. Somebody else was down here. That somebody was hunting them. And, they’d taken chimirin. A team of expert stone Observers would need a few hours at the minimum to create a mass of stone that big, and yet it had formed in just the few minutes after he’d made it to that intersection? That was the only explanation, no matter how much he didn’t like it.

Memories he very much didn’t want to remember resurfaced at the thought. Visions of his life-or-death battle with that bastard Yarec flashed through his mind, reminding him of just how deadly a stone Observer on this suicide drug could be—and that fight had happened above ground! Here, he was surrounded by stone, encircled on every axis by the enemy! Even with all the experience, knowledge, and resources he’d gained since that early, terrifying confrontation, Blake knew he didn’t stand a chance here.

The thought of Yarec returning from the grave to exact his revenge sent shivers down his spine, but he dismissed it immediately. That fucker was dead. He’d checked.

It didn’t matter anyway. Sure, Yarec had been an accomplished Observer to achieve his status in the old Otharia—a high-tier stone Observer, at least—but the real star of that show hadn’t been the man but the drug. Swapping him out for another stone Observer wouldn’t make a difference; same chimirin, same result—and that result spelled bad news for him and Sam, no matter how he looked at it.

There was, of course, the ticking time bomb that came with god-like power. If Blake could just manage to run out the clock... but how? He had nowhere to hide, and this new adversary knew where he was—or at least, where he’d been. He couldn’t even hide in the walls, as they were too thin to conceal his whole body. If this second enemy wanted to take this to the next level, they could do so any time they wanted.

It figured... he’d done so much, sacrificed so many, just to escape death by crushing metal, only to end up facing death by crushing from different building material for his troubles.

Well, there was nowhere left to go but forward. And so, Blake went. Except, things were different now, he found as he moved through tunnel after tunnel. No longer content to hide their existence, his mysterious foe was now blocking off options at every junction, forcing him to take one path and one path only. They weren’t being hunted, he realized now; they were being herded, funneled through an underground maze of their enemy’s design.

Every so often, over the pounding of his heart and the clangs of his boots echoing through the tunnels, he thought he could hear metal tearing as rock obstructions formed ahead, the sound of their unseen stalker doing their thing.

Why were they doing this? If their roles and powers were swapped, Blake would have just turned his adversary into pulp via a hundred tons of stone crashing down upon their head. Why wait, especially given the limited time they had? Was this some sort of sick game? Did they need to get their jollies by terrorizing him before they ended things? Or, was the reason they had yet to render him and Sam into paste that they didn’t want to kill him at all?

Maybe that was it. Maybe they were forcing him toward some desired location, some trap they’d set up in advance to capture him without killing him. The presence of those first walls, the ones with the drainage slots in them, suggested that this had all been planned in advance. There was no reason to make them with holes at the bottom except to prevent backups and floods that would draw unwanted attention before the attack took place.

The prospect of being captured didn’t appeal to Blake much more than being crushed to death. But what could he even do about it? What were his options down here?

Hiding would have been highly difficult even without Sam here; her presence made it nigh impossible. He could try to force his way up to the surface, perhaps, but it would be difficult and take a lot of time. Without his usual resources available, he’d have to work with just the metal and crystals around him.

Metal wasn’t an issue, since he could just strip the floor of as much as he needed, but there were almost no cantacrenyx crystals around to power anything he made. Digging up posed its own risks, like bringing everything down on their heads. And, of course, their enemy lurked somewhere within the earth as well.

That left turning back and trying to bust through one of the obstructions. Given some ingenuity, most of the crystals in his suit, and whatever he could pull out of Alpha, he could probably make something strong enough to hammer the obstruction to—

“Lord Virgin, are you there? You’re still listening in on me, right?”

Blake nearly tripped over himself and fell into the sewage, only able to come to a halt by fusing his boots to the floor. Sam cried out as she nearly flew off his shoulders, her arms desperately wrapping around his helmet and cutting off his vision for a moment. What in the hell was—

“It sure sounds like you’re having the time of your life up there. It’s not polite to exclude a lady, you know.”

Oh, right. Chitra. He’d totally forgotten about the video and audio feeds that some subroutine in his fortress server was monitoring for activity and how he’d set it up to pipe live audio directly into his helmet if she said anything suspicious. Calling him by name damn well qualified as suspicious. And how had her English gotten so good?

No, never mind that. He had to keep running. Bringing up the live feed of the cell, he stuck it next to the minimap so he could glance at it while he ran. Within the grey box, Chitra leaned casually against a side wall, the cables fastened to her limbs long and limp upon the floor.

Blake didn’t have time for another distraction. Whatever she thought she was doing, now wasn’t the time. He sent out a directive and a moment later watched as the four cables retracted with great speed, yanking the woman off her feet and slamming her back-first against the far wall, her limbs spread eagle as each cable went taut.

Chitra grinned, seemingly not just unbothered by the sudden use of force but delighted by it.

“So, you do hear me! Wonderful! I sure hope you are watching as well. I would hate for you to miss the show. It’s been fun, these little games of ours, but I’m afraid it’s time now for me to take my leave. You’ve been a truly excellent host, I must say, but all good things must come to an end eventually. I’m sure you understand.”

What in the world was the Ubran talking about? Had she suddenly lost it? Take her leave? The woman could barely move with all that Sofie had done to her, not to mention the manacles and prison cell and all the rest!

Unless... was all of this—the fortress destruction, the flying torso, this chilling game of underground cat and mouse—just part of an operation to free the Batranala? But no, that didn’t quite add up.

Chitra’s location was known to a select few—the existence of the deep underground prison and its adjacent crystal vault was a closely guarded secret, after all—so unless somebody in the small handful of people involved was a rat, people on the outside wouldn’t even know where in the fortress to look for her. And if they somehow did, all they would have needed to do was use their chimirin-boosted stone Observer to make a passage right down to her cell and take her out before Blake even knew what was going on.

“Before I head out, I wanted to thank you for making this all possible. If you’d sent anybody else to go round up your wayward waif, I would never have gotten days of exposure to her geasa. Without that, I would never have been able to craft the methods to subvert or even destroy her commands. I have enjoyed playing pretend these last few days—especially the times when you ‘made’ me cough up ‘blood’. To think a parlor trick was all it took to cloud your judgment. You trust in yourselves far too much, but I digress.”

Wait, what?

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three. Oh! That one felt especially violent.”

“And... Four.”

“Done. Four geasa snapped like rotted twine. You cannot see this, of course, but you’ll see the proof of it in a moment. Does envy fill you, oh Lord Virgin? After everything she’s put you through, don’t you wish you could be free of that nugget of fear in the back of your mind? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid crawlers just don’t have soulforce strong enough to manage it. My condolences.”

Oh. Oh, no. Oh, nonononononono. She couldn’t be. She just couldn’t! It wasn’t possible!

But even as he thought that, he could zoom in and see the royal purple scales forming on her skin, the teeth in her mile-wide grin sharpening like tiny daggers, the pupils of her eyes transforming from round to a predatory slit. The woman’s entire body seemed to bulk up, not only her muscles swelling bigger and bigger like time-lapse footage of watermelons and her frame widening and growing inch after inch. Stepping forward as if she were not restrained at all, Chitra brought her arms forward and seized the shackles on her wrists, one and then the other, breaking them apart like they were made of cheap plastic. The ones on her ankles followed a moment later.

“One last thing, before my mouth becomes unable to pronounce this silly speak of yours,” the creature said, her voice now a low baritone and getting deeper by the second. “I bet you have wondered just how we people carve out homes from within the very mountains themselves. As one final token of appreciation for just how easy you made all of this, I, Maylanth, will now provide you with a demonstration!”

She laughed, the sound deep and almost diabolical even when coming through the tinny speakers within his helmet. As if a switch had been flipped, her changes accelerated drastically, her body shifting from the humanoid he had always known to a familiar quadrupedal form. Her skin was now entirely covered in scales, their color almost regal as they flickered in the low light of the prison. Wings sprouted along her back, twitching and trembling as they expanded and thickened. Though she had turned around to face the back wall of the cell, he could see her face lengthening into a long snout. A massive tail, thick with cords of muscle and topped by a series of nasty-looking spikes running from the body all to the way to the tip, sprouted from her rear, lashing back and forth with seeming anticipation.

By now, the dragon—and that was what she was, no matter how much Blake wanted to deny it—was taking up nearly every square foot of her cell. With a swift kick of her feet, the bars that made up the enclosure’s entrance snapped off, freeing her to expand beyond the confines of the chamber she’d called home for the last few days.

Then, she swelled even more, not because she was still growing—and she was very much still growing—but because, he realized after a second, she was taking a very deep breath. The reason for that became clear a moment later as she exhaled, a thick plume of noxious flame pouring forth into the back wall. The flame looked strange and wrong to Blake; not only was the color—a sickening mix of orange, vomit-green, and light brown—all wrong, but the flames did not seem to entirely flow as fire was supposed to.

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Immediately, the wall of solid tucrenyx began to melt, swiftly receding deeper and deeper out of his video feed’s view. Blake blinked. No flame, not even one as hot as what he’d seen dragons manage, could do away with that much metal that fast, and in that way. It only began to make sense a moment later, when Chitra—no, he supposed it was ‘Maylanth’ now— turned her breath on the walls to her sides, opening the area up for more rapid growth.

With a closer view at a better angle, he realized that he wasn’t really looking at flame breath at all. Sure, flame was a component of it—the orange color he could see, and maybe a contributor to the brown as well—and influenced the flow, but it was secondary to the main element: some sort of gaseous acid that spewed out of her mouth like the toxic smog of a thousand factories running at maximum output.

This cloud ate away at the metal at an astounding rate, turning what was a thick, strong, and proud wall into a long, smooth, and widening tunnel. It eroded the rock behind the tucrenyx even faster, and before he knew it, the now-immense but still-growing dragon was stepping out of the cell through an exit of her own making and receding from view.

Behind all the shock and panic, a part of Blake’s mind noted how odd it was that Maylanth was tunneling out sideways rather than upward. After all, wasn’t the point of this for her to escape? Then, at last, he connected the direction of the tunnel to the layout of that area and let out an involuntary gasp.

She was going for his crystal vault! His precious crystals, including the pair of massive incredibly powerful stones, sat there, waiting to be plundered! His experimental bunker device, too!

Suddenly he understood what she’d meant when she’d said that he’d made things “easy” for her. Getting caught and thrown down into his underground prison had been her goal all along. Was this coordinated attack a part of that plan? She’d been forced to admit collusion with the terrorist forces, but could anything she’d said be taken for the truth now that she’d shown that Sofie’s command had never had a hold on her? He didn’t know.

What Blake did know is that he’d been played harder than a fiddle at a twenty-four-hour hoe down. He was so screwed.

It would be only a matter of moments before Maylanth made it to his vault. What could Blake do about it? Nothing, he realized with great anger. He had been distracted, chased, and isolated—Sam’s presence notwithstanding. He had no resources and was stuck in an environment that tilted heavily against him. He didn’t even know the true number of foes he faced right now.

He was impotent again, just like he’d been when he’d first found himself here. So much of what he’d done over the last few years, he’d done in large part to never feel that powerlessness ever again. Yet, after all of that, here he was anyway, cornered and out of options. Except for running. That, he could still do for now. That, and watch a dragon steal all his best stuff, which was something he very much did not feel like watching.

With great disgust, Blake turned off the video feed. He needed to focus on traversing the tunnels right now, not on the pillaging of his vault. He would deal with that later, when this was all over and he had a chance to prepare himself.

A small hand smacked against his helmet.

“What are you just standing here for?!” Sam complained from atop his shoulders. “Let me down if you’re not going to do anything!”

Huh, he’d stopped moving sometime during Maylanth’s little show without realizing it. How long had he been standing here? Where even were they right now? He checked his makeshift GPS, the dot of his position showing him somewhere northeast of the fortress but still nowhere near outside the city.

Without taking the time to respond, Blake got back to running. Still, try as he might, he couldn’t quite take his mind off of what he’d just seen and heard. He felt so utterly idiotic, now that events had so rudely pulled back the curtain on his many ignorant assumptions.

The biggest assumption: only elves could shapeshift. This seemed like an almost farcical conclusion to him now, but it had been so widely accepted as the obvious state of things by everybody around him that he’d never once questioned it. No other form of Scyrian ‘magic’ that he knew of was exclusive to a single species.

If there was any explanation, then, it would be that shapeshifting took so much time and effort to learn that the other races wouldn’t be able to master it within their shorter lifespans, leaving elves the only ones capable of it by default. Dragons had all the time in the world, though. The only thing stopping them would be themselves...

Which led to another related and underlying assumption now proven wrong: dragons would never try to take humanoid form because they viewed such a thing as entirely beneath them. From everything Blake had gleaned during his stay with Bazz, it wasn’t just that ‘crawlers’ were viewed as vastly inferior existences, but the humanoid form was inherently demeaning to a dragon because they, by definition, could not fly. If he had been asked that morning if a dragon would ever willingly take human form, he would have laughed out loud—all while, willingly or not, one had been lurking beneath his feet the whole time.

And, because of these two presumptions—which everyone else believed as well, in his defense—Blake was about to have his important project smashed and his greatest crystals absconded with. He needed those, especially the biggest, if he wanted to ever build a tunnel back to Earth.

Ugh, just the thought left him bitter and paranoid. What other unquestioned assumptions of his were there, hiding in plain sight and waiting for the perfect time to ruin his day? What simple fact was going to turn out to be completely false right when it mattered most? What—

A mighty roar sent tremors running through the ground, followed soon after by another coming from higher up, likely softened by distance—Maylanth’s triumphant victory cries, he assumed. Damned dragons... couldn’t even let him lose quietly. Had to make a big deal about it.

Suddenly, alarms started blaring in his ears. Giant, bright red letters spelling out “URGENT! DRAGON DETECTED!” started blinking in front of his eyes, blocking his vision.

“Oh, now you work properly,” he grumbled, disabling the system.

“What’s that sound? It’s giving me a headache,” Sam complained.

“That was a dragon roaring, Sam.”

She bapped his helmet with her fist. “I know what a dragon sounds like, idiot. I was there too, remember?” Oh, right. “I’m talking about the other sound.”

Other sound? The alarm in his helmet? He was pretty sure nobody could hear the sounds in his helmet, or she would have said something about it over the years. And surely, she couldn’t mean the banging of his suit against the ground that came with every heavy step, as cacophonous and headache-inducing as it was, especially amplified by the tunnel. He slowed to a halt for just a quick moment to listen better.

Immediately, he knew what his passenger was talking about. Now that he wasn’t lost in his own little world of self-condemnation, the sound came through loud and clear. It was quite low pitched, yet somehow sounded almost like a whine even though it was nearly a rumble. Something about the sound felt familiar yet disquieting, though he couldn’t say why. He could feel it on the tip of his tongue, recognition just out of reach.

What was it about this sound that set him on edge? Was it the low frequency? No, though unexplained low rumbles were never a good sign. Was it the way the pitch seemed to be rising ever so slowly, just fast enough for him to be only mostly sure he wasn’t imagining it? No, not that either. Maybe it was the way the sound seemed to bypass his eardrums to vibrate inside his skull...

Blake gasped in horror, the pieces suddenly falling into place. He’d heard this sort of ‘sound’ hundreds of times now, just never so low that its nature hadn’t immediately become clear. This was not a sound of the vibrating air variety. This was something altogether different. He wasn’t hearing this with his ears, he was hearing it with his mind and soul. This was the ‘sound’ cantacrenyx crystals made as they became overloaded with energy, just before they exploded and unleashed a torrent of mostly kinetic energy in all directions.

The problem was that the whine he was used to sensing was usually extremely high-pitched, almost at the edge of a human’s hearing range. That was because the crystals he usually set off were small; with one notable exception back near the start of his time on this world, the largest were the size of a thumb. The larger the crystal being primed to explode, the lower the whine began before rising as it grew more and more saturated until eventually reaching that telltale high note.

Blake quickly brought up the security feeds of his crystal vault. There was only one crystal in existence that would start its whine so low that it almost resembled an earthquake. Sure enough, what he found on the feeds confirmed it. Every crystal, big or small, had been connected by tucrenyx channels into his super giant crystal, with only a single small channel out to complete the circuit—his classic overload self-destruct configuration.

As massive as his biggest stone was, the combined mass and energy of all the others in the vault still overtook what it could handle. It was only a matter of time before it went off, and when it did it would wipe all of Wroetin and more off the map in one massive blast. He, Sam, and everybody else in a multi-mile radius would be pulverized into smithereens by the kinetic energy. He wasn’t listening to just a rumble. He was listening to the countdown to his annihilation.

Blake’s already sky-high heart rate was now spiking through the roof, his body trembling uncontrollably. Blood pounded in his ears and his vision seemed to pulse with every beat. The walls felt like they were closing in. He couldn’t breathe, with air coming only in fits and gasps.

The countdown tone’s pitch continued to slowly rise.

Small hands grabbed at the bottom of his helmet, trying to pull it off. Desperate for air, he let it melt away and took a series of huge, deep breaths. Sam stood in front of him, hands on his shoulders, shaking him as much as a prepubescent girl could shake a large armored man who weighed ten times as much as she did. How had he ended up sitting on the ground with his back up against the wall?

“What are you doing?!” the girl hollered. “We need to get out of here.”

Blake avoided the child’s gaze, staring off into the gloom with empty eyes. “Doesn’t matter,” he told her, his voice as hollow as his spirit. “It’s too late for us now.”

“What are you talking about?!”

“That sound. It’s a bomb, and when it goes off, we’re all going to die. Even if I run as fast as I possibly can, there’s no way to escape before it blows. It’s game over. We got outplayed.”

“So you’re just going to sit here?”

“What’s the point? I’d just die more tired,” he replied through heaving breaths. His heart still pounded with terror, his mind still cried out at the concept of oblivion, yet he knew it was all for nothing. “This is the end. A pointless death in a fucking sewer. What a fucking life.”

SMACK!

Her face contorted in indignant anger, Samanta reared back and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. From the way that the entire side of his face buzzed, she’d likely added some electricity to her palm as well. The blow stunned Blake for a moment, enough that when that faded, he found himself staring at the girl’s furious visage with mind and sight momentarily unmuddled by fear.

“What’s wrong with you?!” she yelled. “Aren’t you supposed to be Lord Ferros? Aren’t you the man who slew the Church in front of all of our eyes and declared yourself king? Aren’t you the wicked tyrant who rules this land with an iron fist?! What are you doing?! Get up!”

“None of that matters anymore, Sam.”

SMACK!

“When I stabbed you, you could have just lay there on the ground and waited for death, but you didn’t! When those assassins almost killed you with the poison knife, you could have run away, but you stayed! When Miss Gabby came and attacked you and sliced everything apart, you could have surrendered, but you refused to give up! You fought with everything you had, no matter how bad it seemed! Now, after all that, you’re going to just sit here without even trying?! Get up!”

She kicked his armor, disdain and contempt oozing from every pore. Still, he didn’t move.

“Get up, you bastard! Weren’t you going to show me just how wrong I was?! Weren’t you going to make me grasp the weight of what I did to you?! Weren’t you going to make me see the magnitude of my actions and understand so deeply that I would not just apologize for everything but thank you?!”

She screamed at him with a rage and intensity that he’d not known her capable of, her face a furious red and getting redder with each shouted word while tears of bitterness formed in her eyes.

“Or was all of that just damned lies? Huh?! Was Sofie right when she said you’re nothing more than a bully with delusions of grandeur?”

She kicked him again, once, then twice.

“Get up, you coward! Get up! Do something! I did not spend all this time learning your secrets for you to just lay down and die before I can kill you!”

Seemingly realizing what she was saying only after she had already said it, Samanta immediately reverted to her usual sullen self, only madder. Her words echoed through the tunnels, piercing the quiet that surrounded them.

Blake, for his part, watched the scene with befuddlement. Never before had he seen such passion from her. Slowly, the contents of her diatribe worked their way into his mind, seeping through the fear and despair that had smothered him like a waterlogged blanket.

A chuckle escaped his lips. Then, a giggle. Before he knew it, Blake found himself laughing aloud in the dark, unable to keep a huge grin off his face.

“Well said!” he declared to the gloom. Pushing himself back to his feet, he reached out and tousled Sam’s hair. Even after all she’d said, she refused to flinch or pull away. The girl had guts, he had to admit. It was one of the things he liked about her.

Few people had been dealt a hand worse than Samanta Zemzaris. She’d had her whole life ripped away from her to a degree that was hard to fathom sometimes. Not only was her family gone, but also her country and her place in the world had gone up in smoke. In the end, she’d fallen into a life bereft of control over her own fate, a powerless existence, all the while living beside literal walking weapons of mass destruction everywhere you looked.

Even most adults would completely fall apart under such a harsh series of blows, but not Sam. She’d gone from a normal girl living a relatively normal Otharian life to the most reviled traitor of all in the eyes of many of her fellow countrymen, and yet she’d never given up. She’d fought, she’d escaped, she’d laid low and worked to build up her knowledge and increase her capability, never in two whole years losing sight of her goal.

God damn, he was so proud of her.

But, Blake had his pride, as well. There was no way that he could let himself get shown up by a child! He was Lord Fucking Ferros! The man who’d single-handedly brought an entire nation to its knees! The man who’d stopped the Ubrans in their tracks! He hadn’t fought tooth and nail, barely surviving multiple brushes with death, just to give up here!

Was he going to give up now and just allow a bomb to destroy him and everything he’d worked for? No! Okay, well, most likely yes, actually. Physics was a bitch like that. But, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to go down swinging with everything he had!

But what could he even do? The whine in his head was approaching violin territory. He had a few precious minutes left, at most, before a kinetic nuke went off distressingly close to him, and there were scant few fridges to hide within down here in the sewers.

...Unless he made one.

Yes... yes, that might be their best chance at survival—not a fridge, exactly, but something made to enclose them and absorb as much of the blast energy as possible. Couple that with a larger shield between them and the bomb, and... and they’d still likely die, but maybe, just maybe, they’d live to see the sunrise tomorrow.

The best part of this plan—if you could even call it that—was that it would need only metal, which was the one thing he had in relative abundance down here. He just had to get it without killing himself.

“Sam, run that way for a bit,” he instructed her, pointing down the tunnel in the direction that led somewhat away from the bomb—the passageway traveled at an angle to the center of his fortress and the crystal’s location.

“How far?”

“You’ll know.”

Giving him an unsure look, the girl turned and did as told, hightailing it down the passage with Alpha tap-tap-tapping along behind her. Blake, for his part, turned in the opposite direction and ran, quickly widening the gap. Once he felt like he’d given himself enough space to work with, he slowed to a halt and took a deep breath.

Reaching out with his ability, Blake mentally touched the tucrenyx that coated the entire passage from top to bottom. Starting with the metal a good twenty feet further down the path, he liquefied it all at once and drew it toward himself as fast as possible. Backing away, he continued to pull out all the metal lining as he went, waiting for the inevitable. He didn’t have to wait long. With a crash that startled him in its suddenness even though he’d been expecting it, the tunnel’s arched roof gave in starting where he’d first pulled away the metal and racing toward him.

Quickly backpedaling, Blake worked as fast as he could, building up ton after ton of liquid tucrenyx by his side as he went. After more than a minute of staying just ahead of the incoming cave-in, he called it quits. Luckily, once the earth reached the point where the metal remained, the collapse quickly came to a halt, leaving him coughing up dust but alive and with a wealth of resources to work with.

He beckoned to Sam, who was already approaching warily, and got to work. Distressingly little time remained. The crystal’s whine had risen to a worryingly high note.

Design-wise, metal wasn’t exactly feathers and fluff. He didn’t have many options. He did, however, have the concept of the crumple zone. Crumple zones in cars were able to absorb a significant amount of kinetic energy by trading their structural integrity to blunt the oncoming force—around a whole twenty-five percent or so if he remembered right.

The fact that he hadn’t died near the end of his battle with Gabby was proof enough that sacrificing metal to bleed off the energy of impact had merit. More so, he’d had just a second or two then to work with, and cars had limits to their size. Neither of those restrictions affected him right now.

Blake was going to construct the largest series of crumple zones this world or any other had ever seen.

In some ways, this proved to be quite easy—they weren’t highly complex designs with hundreds of interconnecting parts, after all. In others, it proved to be quite the challenge, especially when it came to growing the massive array further and further into the earth beyond the tunnel walls. Still, he persisted, working the metal as deep as he could in the time he thought he had.

Moment by moment, a somewhat concave shield formed within the tunnel and the surrounding ground, twenty meters in diameter and nearly as thick. He stopped there, as judging by how the crystal’s cry had reached the top of piccolo range, time was nearly out.

Using the remaining metal, he formed a thick and solid sphere large enough to hold the three of them, lining the outside and inside with more shock absorbers and forming a single seat with its back toward the crystal. He briefly considered creating more seats but realized that there was only room for one seat facing away from the imminent blast. Any seat facing a different direction would do little to help the occupant. They were going to have to share.

The purpose of the sphere was simple: withstand as best it could the crushing force that would occur when the blast hit and pushed them against the earth surrounding them. If it could hold out long enough for the ground above them to also get blasted away, then they might be able to avoid getting flattened between the blast below and the ground above. Getting out from there afterward would be a piece of cake in comparison.

“Okay, get in,” he instructed, opening an entrance in the side of his creation.

Clutching Alpha to her chest—a mannerism he’d come to realize she did when highly stressed—Samanta eyed it warily. “What is it?”

“Our best hope of getting out of here alive,” he told her. Not that it was a very bright hope, but he wasn’t about to say that aloud.

It said a lot about how much the girl trusted him—or, more likely, the capabilities of his creations—that she climbed inside without any more questions or arguments. Blake followed, taking his place in the seat and placing Samanta on his lap. More metal flowed up around them, forming tight body harnesses to hold them in place.

Thinking about his construction brought back memories of middle school when this science class had been given the task of designing building protective containers to keep an egg intact when dropped from the school roof. Even though they’d been limited to a short list of common materials, his team had managed to make something that let the egg survive—though only barely—in part because of the crumpled paper that had surrounded the egg.

Figuring it couldn’t hurt, he filled most of the open space left in the sphere with super thin tucrenyx, as close to aluminum foil as he could manage, making sure to make it moderately crumpled in on itself. He was the egg this time, and while the odds of survival were still so low that he would rather not think about them, he still wanted to do better than ‘barely’ survive.

The whine of the cantacrenyx in his mind was quickly transforming into a distressed wail, the ‘sound’ still growing in pitch and intensity to the point that it was starting to give him a headache. He wasn’t alone; judging from the way she was rubbing her temples, Sam seemed to be experiencing something similar.

Wait, what was that? Another noise, deep and grinding, caught his attention - a real noise this time, not one being broadcast directly into his skull. It came from just beyond the sphere, which brought him great worry. Had something collapsed out in the tunnel? Or... he’d forgotten for a moment about their mysterious adversary. Were they undermining his already nearly futile efforts? Hoping that they still had a few more seconds, he opened a small hole to see what was going on and froze at the sight, his mind going blank.

Through the hole, Blake saw light. Daylight. Widening the hole a bit more, he found himself staring at a ramp of stone just outside his sphere, lit dimly by light from above—a ramp that had not been there a moment ago. Moving the hole upward, his eyes gazed upon something bewildering: a tunnel, slightly inclined, leading to the surface.

His mind raced with possibilities. What was going on? For a moment, he thought that this was his hidden stone Observer adversary leaving him with one last taunt before his demise, showing him salvation just out of reach. On second thought, he realized it was quite the opposite. This tunnel was circular, smooth, and just wide enough for his sphere to fit inside.

They’d been given an escape route. Not one they could run up—the crystal would rupture at any moment—but a path for the sphere to launch away instead of getting crushed. Their mystery antagonist had made a gun barrel, and they would be the bullet. If the angle was correct—and it seemed like it was—they wouldn’t have to worry about being crushed like a cardboard box in a trash compactor. Now, they would just have to survive the impossibly powerful force of the blast itself and the deadly acceleration that would come with it.

Yeah, they were still going to die. At least it would be quick.

Hugging Sam tight to his chest, Blake let the metal of his suit melt away, pressing her shivering back to the skin of his chest. It was stupid, he knew, but his body was softer than his suit, and it might increase the odds that she, at least, somehow made it through this. One last buffer to absorb whatever it could.

The wail had become a mind-rending screech at a pitch that no human could hear with their ears, loud enough that he felt like his mind was going to melt. The crystal, his great, wonderful, giant crystal blared out its agony, almost like a cry for help, or perhaps a siren of warning. But no help would be coming now, and any warning was far, far too late.

“Sam... I’m sorry.”

The crystal cracked. For the tiniest fraction of a micro-second, the screaming in his mind ceased, and his thoughts were graced with blessed silence. And then, his world came apart.

The blow hit so hard and so suddenly that Blake wasn’t even capable of processing it in real time. One moment, he was seated in the sphere, waiting for the blast. The next, he was tumbling wildly and untethered around the inside of a half-crushed ball, the shape like that of a ping pong ball after you stepped on it really hard. He found thinking hard and moving even harder.

Pain suffused his existence. How many bones had been broken? How many organs damaged beyond repair? How many fractures were there in his skull alone? He didn’t know, nor did he have the mental capacity to even ponder those questions. He could not think; he could only feel as he was turned from an egg in a protective capsule into a rock in a rock tumbler.

That didn’t mean he didn’t try. Blake even went so far as to try to enter Hyper Mode, only to find that all that did was make the blinding pain even more blinding. He tried to reach out with his powers and fix the capsule, and perhaps construct some sort of parachute from the outside, but even without the crippling pain, he would have found it nigh impossible with how quickly both he and his environment were spinning independently about multiple axes.

Then, a second impact hit, completely changing the capsule’s spin, followed a moment later by a third and very final crash.

Blake opened his eyes. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. He didn’t know where they’d come to a sudden stop. All he knew was that he wouldn’t be going anywhere for quite some time.

His body was an absolute wreck. He didn’t know the full extent of the damage, but his pain receptors told a very comprehensive, whole-body story, and it was a dark tale. Anything more he could discern came from what he could see of his limbs. Mangled and broken possibly beyond repair, it was quite apparent that moving anything, even his neck, would be a very bad idea. The blood covering much of the area directly around him wasn’t a good sign, either.

And yet... his heart beat, quickly and urgently but with vigor. Breathing didn’t come easy with all the broken ribs, but he could manage it, and it didn’t feel like his lungs had been punctured or anything. The world swam, but he could think—at least while the adrenaline was flowing.

Somehow, despite everything, he remained alive—broken and in pain, but alive.

He lay on his back on an incline, half-in, half-out of a broken chunk of his safety sphere buried into a hillside. They’d landed somewhere outside of Wroetin and, from what he could tell, come to a stop when they’d crashed into the hill. Bent and twisted bits and pieces of metal of all sizes were strewn about the land in front of him like the scene of a particularly deadly plane crash. Not far to his right, he found the remains of his seat, the harnesses snapped and broken.

Speaking of deadly... he didn’t see Sam anywhere. Had he alone survived? Scyrians were notoriously hardy, but their advantage lay primarily in their stupidly capable healing, not in some ability to tank a sledgehammer to the face and walk away unharmed.

When it came to sheer durability, Earthlings—well, not counting Sofie, at least—had them beat by far. Without that superhuman toughness, he would have died long ago. That had been partly why he’d put himself between her and the blast.

A flash of motion on the left edge of his vision caught his attention. Alpha—somehow seemingly completely undamaged, the little shit—scrabbled into view, clambering over rubble and pushing through the tall grass that covered the ground around the crash site. Emitting a series of plaintive chirps and beeps, it ran several circles around one particular small pile of wreckage before pushing its little body against the metal, half-digging and half-climbing its way inside.

The rubble shifted, several pieces sliding or falling over to reveal the battered, unmoving form of Samanta Zemzaris. No! Not after all he’d done... Wait, was that? Blake let out a breath of relief, wincing as he did so, at the sight of Sam’s chest rising and falling. She’d made it too, and she’d be fine. With her Scyrian nature, she’d be back to normal in a week.

...

Soooo...

Now what?

Having survived the unsurvivable, Blake now found himself stuck with the question that he’d been too busy trying to not die to ponder. He’d made it through the eye of the needle, and only now did he realize he didn’t have a plan for what to do on the other side.

Things weren’t looking that great. He was heavily injured. Sam was out for the moment. Alpha was maybe a foot long and had no real weapons. His home base had just been converted into a crater, all his allies were elsewhere, and he still had to protect a child along with his own life. That had proved hard enough with a functioning body. There wasn’t much he could do now except maybe build some sort of automated cart to help him move? Then, perhaps find more resources, build better transport, and get somewhere safe until they could get back on their feet?

Easier said than done, even if you took out the fact that somewhere between one and three villains were likely still searching for him. Maylanth was out there, somewhere, though he had a feeling that she’d flown away; if she wanted him dead, she could have killed him multiple ways without resorting to all of this.

The mysterious stone Observer was likely alive as well. He doubted they had sacrificed their life to create that tunnel and save him. They could show up at any moment. Then, there was Torso Lady. Blake could only hope the blast had disintegrated her on the atomic level. Unlike the others, who seemed to get some amusement out of messing with him, Grabby von Smashalot seemed the no-nonsense type to a fault. He wouldn’t be able to talk or finesse his way out of things if she—

As if summoned by his thoughts, the limbless woman dropped out of the sky, quickly slowing into a static hover just above the earth not more than five feet away from him. Though now bloodied far beyond her previous state, with the star of the show being a hole going clear through what remained of her left shoulder, the woman seemed completely unaffected by her condition, as if she couldn’t even feel it.

Her expression, once detached and impassive and later angry and emotive, had become that of cold hatred sharpened to a lethal edge. She stared at him like one might stare at a bug, wondering how best to pull off its wings to cause the most pain without killing it.

And yet, the one thing that had not changed since the moment he’d first seen her remained the vacantness behind her eyes. Even after all this, from the dispassionate apathy to the scalding rage to the current icy fury, something in her gaze made him feel like everything he’d seen from her was more of an emulation than something real. It was like, even with all the emotion and violence, she was sleepwalking through this whole ordeal.

Blake didn’t even have time to finish thinking ‘well, shit’ about her arrival before he felt thick, unseen fingers wrap around his body and constrict tightly. The woman lifted him up into the air, inspecting him as if wondering how much she could squeeze and still successfully complete her mission. So intent was her gaze that she didn’t notice Alpha until the little skitter leapt through the air and latched onto her face like a facehugger from Alien.

The woman’s reaction was immediate, instinctual, and altogether understandable. Dropping Blake without a thought, she flailed about wildly. Her hands—which Blake could still partially make out thanks to stains of blood, chili, and dirt—desperately tried to grab and dislodge the robot without taking her head off with it.

Meanwhile, Blake let out a groan as his body hit dirt and metal, limbs splaying this way and that outside of his direct control. It took a moment for his head to clear enough for him to see the woman finally wrench his first-ever robot off her head and throw it into a nearby rubble pile. Before he could even speak, she raised a massive paw and slammed it down atop the metal over and over, turning perhaps his most beloved creation into unsalvagable junk.

That poor little guy had been with him and Sam longer than pretty much anything else he’d ever made. Outside of his suit, most everything else had been replaceable. He would create, evaluate, reclaim, and replace his skitters without even a whiff of sentimentality. Yet, despite being mostly unchanged since its creation, he’d never once considered scrapping the thing.

Part of it was because of the data he got on Sam from it, and some was due to the important data he got studying it and how it learned and adapted well beyond the capabilities of his other creations. But really, he knew, he’d kept it around because it was maybe the only thing he’d ever made since coming to his world that he saw directly bringing joy to somebody.

Other inventions like his farming equipment had delivered more widespread good and helped people live better, happier lives, but that was always in the abstract, happening to other people in other places. Alpha’s contribution had been something he could experience firsthand.

At first, Sam had loathed and feared the machine, viewing it as an extension of him and his will. But, as time had gone on, she’d started to tolerate it, then accept it, and eventually love it. When she was feeling lonely, she’d play with it. When she was feeling down, they’d snuggle together under the covers of her bed. The bond that had formed between girl and machine had been one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen, a direct manifestation of everything he dreamed of bringing to the country as a whole.

And now, it was gone. Alpha’s unique computation and evolving subroutines were only part of the picture. He’d been studying the thing ever since he’d noticed how its machine-learning capabilities seemed to outpace far more advanced models by leaps and bounds. He’d even started making nightly backups for study in the future. But, he’d never been able to find the time to sit down and figure out just what made Alpha special. Loading Alpha’s nightly backups into other machines, even exact copies of Alpha’s design, failed to reproduce the same level of behavior and growth.

In the end, Blake had come to conclude that there was some oddity in Alpha’s construction, some small mistake that he’d made back in his early days when he hadn’t quite known what he was doing, that had turned into something beneficial. He’d never had the time to study it in depth, not to mention that he’d feared that digging too deep into its circuitry might accidentally ruin whatever made the bot special. He’d never get the chance again. And those backups? The server they’d been stored on was little more than dust, now.

That was why he felt such tremendous satisfaction when, at just that moment, Samanta reached out from behind his creator’s executioner, placed her hands on the woman’s temples, and, just as he’d taught her, let loose with every ounce of juice she could muster. Never had Blake thought the crack of electricity arcing through the air could be so cathartic.

The woman howled. She bucked and writhed, her giant physic hands flailing about and sending pieces of the wreckage flying every which way as hundreds of volts coursed through her head. Sam collapsed to the ground, unconscious and utterly spent, but the effect of her actions persisted. Still alive after what would have fried the brain of even a Scyrian person—that Earthling durability showing its stuff once again—the woman seemed to be having some sort of freak out. Shrieking like a banshee, she bobbed about seemingly randomly, as if she were losing control of her hovering. Two of her massive hands were now wrapped around her head as the woman sobbed and screamed and cried.

She turned back his way, and Blake was shocked to see a clarity in her gaze that hadn’t been there before. For the first time, the woman was present. The haze over her mind had disappeared, and with it, everything that kept her from feeling every bit of well-deserved agony that was coursing through her veins.

Ohhhh, it felt good to watch. He knew he wasn’t supposed to take pleasure in the suffering of others. He knew Sofie would smack him if she knew the gratification this scene brought him. But, he couldn’t help it. This was the person who’d ripped apart his home, dropped fucking boulders of all things on it, killed his underlings... If he wasn’t allowed to feel good about this, when was he? What would it take?

Yet, against his expectations, Blake found his schadenfreude fading as the scene continued. The more he studied her, the more he began to grow concerned. It hadn’t been obvious at first, masked by the anguish, but with each passing second, he became more convinced it was genuine.

Confusion.

The woman didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t know where she was, why she was there, who he and Sam were, what the mess strewn everywhere was about, and likely most of all, why everything hurt. She only knew sudden and unexplained, all-consuming agony.

The inference that came with this observation made his stomach drop. Somebody else out there had used this woman as a weapon. Somebody with some form of mind control. Somebody who harbored ill will toward him. And, he had no idea who that person might be.

At least momentarily freed from whatever mental compulsion that had dictated her actions so far, Madam Mc—no, referring to her that way now felt gross—the woman finally gained enough control of her faculties to do the only smart thing. She fled, launching herself into the sky and out of his view.

Blake let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and allowed himself to relax a bit. They’d made it through once again. Yet, he couldn’t get the taste of bitterness out of his mouth as he took in Sam’s limp form. The cost had been high this time. Maybe too high.

“Ahhhhh... Truly, nothing can match the feeling of a perfect plan executed exquisitely.”

A man Blake had never seen before walked into view. Tall, especially for a Scyrian, with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a thin scar on the right side of his face running from his chin to his nose, the man had a chiseled handsomeness and magnetic charisma that made Blake think he would be perfect as an actor in soap operas back on Earth.

It was the sort of suave good looks that Blake had always envied, the sort possessed by men who always got all the chicks. However, the man’s beauty quickly lost all importance the moment Blake saw his right side.

The man’s arm and leg were prosthetic, but not just any prosthetics. They were crystal tech. Ugly, rudimentary crystal tech, but without a doubt cantacrenyx-powered machines. The crystals were exposed, sticking out of the metal. Rough, jagged circuits were engraved across the surface, crisscrossing the machines like a giant game of connect-the-dots. Yet, Blake could not deny that, aesthetics aside, they seemed to be perfectly functional machines filling in for his limbs, and judging by his lack of limp and his incredibly natural stride, filling in quite well.

“It is a pleasure to finally meet the great Lord Ferros face to face,” the man said with a slight and very mocking bow.

“Who the fuck are you?” Blake asked, though the only sound he could manage was an irritated huff. Thankfully, Scyrian language rules would handle the rest.

“My name is Gyan Agharia, though few still alive in this world know me by that designation. If it pleases you, you may call me...” He smirked. “Sebastian. I must apologize for delaying our greeting for so long, but it took time to prepare my surprises for our dear princess, you understand.”

Sebastian? Why did that name ring a bell? Where had he heard that before? And princess? Who was he even talking about? There were no princesses in—

A late night, a lot of alcohol, and a long conversation half-forgotten.

Oh. Oh, boy.

“Ah, I see she told you of me. Wonderful. That makes things so much easier.”

The man casually approached, navigating the uneven and unsteady terrain with the ease of a man with all his original limbs.

“I must say, Mister Myers, how much I respect your accomplishments so far. A single man, conquering an entire country on his own through nothing more than ruthless and efficient brute force? Truly remarkable, even if that country is this shoddy excuse for one. I only hunt the biggest of game, you see, and so it means something when I say that you were worth hunting.”

He crouched down in front of Blake, so close that he could hear the whine of the motors supporting the man’s weight.

“But, the hunt is over now. Now that I have your technology, I no longer have need of you. The only reason you still breathe is that he insisted upon it. But, you may take solace in knowing that your technology will be a critical driver of my coming rise.”

Blake was a microsecond from liquefying the man’s limbs then and there when the ground opened up behind the gloating bastard, revealing a tunnel lined with stone.

“See, I told you he’d still be alive if you listened to me,” a female voice said from out of sight. “It’s simple physics.”

A grunt, deep and gravelly, with meaning infused within. “Hmph. You gloat too much.”

“And you refuse to learn from your mistakes. Even after what happened, you’re still playing with your food.”

Another grunt, once again with meaning. “Silence, you damnable woman. That is not what this is.”

A woman’s head appeared, quickly rising as they ascended what Blake assumed was a slope in the tunnel. She had fair skin and long, curly burgundy hair, but the thing that jumped out to him the most was how thin she was—not unhealthily so, but bordering on it.

Then, another face came into view, and Blake’s mind went white.

No. It wasn’t possible! He’d watched him die! And yet, no amount of denial could change what Blake saw.

That ruggedly handsome face. Those hazel eyes, burning with intelligence and hatred. That red hair, the color he’d never forget, now cut short to match his trimmed beard.

Yarec.

Except, things were not quite the same anymore. The first and most obvious thing was that the man appeared to be confined to a wheelchair currently being pushed by the thin lady.

The second took longer for Blake to grasp, because what he was looking at made so little sense that he wasn’t sure he was seeing things right. Grey and tan streaks covered parts of his body, interspersed between bits of normal skin. Some areas were more covered by the colors, and others, like his head, were less marked, though still marked. It was like somebody had tried to cover his whole body with a camouflage pattern using body paint, except they’d given up halfway through.

It was only when the pair drew closer that Blake realized he wasn’t looking at paint the color of stone—he was looking at actual stone. Somehow, Yarec had become half-man, half-statue. The stone growing over him—or, upon closer inspection, through him—was the reason for the man’s wheelchair. The rock looked especially bad on his limbs, but the worst single case was probably the jagged spearhead-shaped stone that went up his chin and over half of his mouth, seemingly sealing that half shut permanently. Hence, the grunts, he supposed.

“Are you done?” the former Apostle grunted.

“Indeed, I’ve said all that I desire,” Sebastian replied, turning and walking away without a care in the world. “He’s all yours.”

The woman wheeled the stone Observer close, then stepped back, leaving the two of them alone.

For a few moments, they just stared bitterly at each other, until Blake got tired of it.

“Well, look who it is,” he grunted with fake bravado. “You’re not looking too hot, there, Yarec.”

“Says the cripple with a dozen broken bones in his legs alone,” Yarec grunted back. “Though I suppose you cannot feel those, can you? To think, after all your talk, you were laid low by a mere child.”

“Yeah, to think that a kid was able to do what the oh-so-revered and respected elite Apostle couldn’t. Is that all you have? You had years to work on your trash talk and that’s what you came up with?”

Yarec paused, and for a moment, Blake thought he’d gotten to him. But then, he chuckled, the sound low and rasping but full of mockery and disdain.

“Look at you. Your forces ruined, your friends gone, your body destroyed. All you have left is your sad little words. How pathetic you have become.”

“Says the pot to the kettle. What do you have, Mister Gargoyle?”

“What do I have? Why, that’s a simple answer. I have revenge. Sweet, long-awaited revenge.”

Something cold and smooth wrapped around Blake’s neck, choking his airway and pulling him up.

“Do not think I will allow you the luxury of a painless death, Blake Myers. Your fall has just begun, and it will only get more terrible from here. You will beg for finality’s cold embrace before I am done with you.”

Blake saw two stone vines sprout from the ground in front of him. He saw how quickly they grew up to face height, the stone flowing like water. He saw their sharp, pointed tips turning directly toward his eyes. He saw them shoot toward him, their movement so quick that they blurred in his vision. And then, Blake saw nothing at all.