Melvin awoke to confusion and pain. He had been so close, his team had gone in to finish the evil wizard, and they had almost done so. They had made it through his hideout with almost laughable ease, thanks to whatever tricks the mage had used. They had fought, and they had been at a stalemate, neither side winning, but they didn’t need to win the fight, they just needed to hold out until the ritual stalled out, hold the [Wizard]’s attention until he made a mistake, and he had. Of course, the wizard was also playing for time, if he could keep the ritual going long enough, he would accomplish whatever goals he had, but there really wasn’t an alternative, they had failed at preventing the ritual from beginning, and they couldn’t stop it once it was going. Well, maybe Mage could, but he said it was better to let the ritual run down, than to try stopping it directly. Letting a fire run out of fuel, rather than trying to extinguish it.

So, they had fought, and the wizard had thrown them back, they had gotten a good hit in, thanks to Chloe, and it turned into a brawl, like he had wanted. A direct fight, where the last one standing would be the winner, and he was very good at being the last one standing. But somehow, somewhere along the line, something went wrong. Every time the [Wizard] threw them all back, he lowered his guard for a moment to focus on the ritual, and they had a chance to further bloody their foe, if they were fast enough. They didn’t always make it, perhaps half of the time they were too slow. But the [Wizard] didn’t go down, even with what should have been a debilitating wound, even after what had to have been hours of spellcasting, He didn’t stop his casting, never stumbled over a word, never flinched as they pounded on the ward’s mere inches away. But they had Mage’s potions to keep them going, and he knew he had the endurance to keep going, even without them. But then at the climax, the moment of the [Wizard]s glorious victory, when even he felt the ritual had reached its climax, He had gone down.

The [Wizard] had sent the walls and floor and ceiling swirling together, making a thin wall, and Mage had vanished. Then, as he had bashed through it, hoping he wasn’t too late, he had seen them, Mage behind the [Wizard], that creepy knife he gave Chloe in hand, and then Mage stabbed him. Right between the shoulder blades. And Mage looked at him, and he smiled, and he vanished.

Melvin opened his eyes. He was sitting in the [Wizard]’s ritual room, where they had fought him. Sitting against the wall he had made a hole in, but he had been on the other side of the wall. he looked to the left; Chloe lay propped up against a bench. He looked to the right, ben was propped up in a chair, hit bow across his lap, swords and quiver at his feet. He looked across; the wizard lay where he had fallen. And standing over him was Mage. Melvin rolled his head, but nothing else responded.

Mage noticed, and was by his side in an instant, checking him over, hushing him, reassuring him that it was over, they had won. “How, what? I can’t move.” He mumbled, ‘I know,” Mage responded, “It’s just a minor sedative, to keep you down for a while, it’ll wear off in an hour or so, I wish I could have kept you under for longer, but anything that strong would be, well, having you awake isn’t a bad thing, it’ll give us a chance to talk.”

Realization led to rising horror, betrayal, he had known Mage as long as any of the party. They had all been summoned together, after all. They had fought side by side and back to back ever since. True, he didn’t know the other mans name, but it had been a joke, or so he had thought, when they first met mage was the first to figure out what was going on, or at least the first to voice it aloud. While everyone else was introducing themselves, mage had opened his status, before anyone knew they had a status, and confirmed his class. And it had stuck, a new name for a new world. A new life. And mage had been there from the start, urging them on, determined, sure, that there was a way back.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than Mage spoke to address it. “No, no I’m not betraying you, not really. It’s not like that, this is part of the plan, I didn’t tell you about it because, well” he gestured around, at the room they fought in, the bodies of his teammates slumped around, the wizard lying with a dagger in his back. The daggers in all of their backs, actually. They all had those same handles protruding from between their shoulder blades. “it had to be like this, I, I had to do it, couldn’t let you know, knew you wouldn’t agree to it.” Mage tried to explain, but all Melvin saw was the room, filled with magical substances, artifacts stolen from across the continent. The bodies of his friends in a triangle around the body of the wizard, laid out naked.

“The plan?” He asked, “the plan was to stop Him, return everything to the way it was, use what we found to find a way home.” And then he got it. Mage had been the most determined, from the start he had tried the hardest to find a way home, not for himself, but for them. Mage had been the crux of the whole operation. The whole reason they got involved with the wizard was because Mage was investigating ways to get back. The resources he said he could use, stolen. The people he said could help them had conditions to their aid. Access to knowledge required them to provide a service of equal value. Everything they had done had been guided by Mage, until it wasn’t. Until mage went off and returned more powerful than any of them, with a fourth class. After that mage hadn’t led, they had wandered along the path in front of them, solving problems, completing tasks, but there hadn’t been any goal. Mage stopped leading so He had to step up, had to decide what they did as a group, because otherwise they would’ve drifted apart, and he still wanted to go home, they all wanted to go home, and whatever chance there was of that, it was with all of them, together.

Except mage, he hadn’t wanted to go back to Earth. He hadn’t wanted anything except what they wanted. Until he wanted to stop the wizard. Until he took charge like he used to. Until he led them into a cave filled with exactly what he had spent so long trying to get hold of, all at his feet, his friends unconscious by his own hand.

“You’re sending us back?” he whispered, half asking half just unable to believe.

“I am” Mage whispered back, “I’m sending you all back, but the sender can’t be sent, I have to hold everything together from this side, and besides, I’m more fit for this world anyway, or another, there are others, you know, uncountable others. Maybe one day I’ll come back, but not yet. I have more to do. I need to stop the summoning’s. Not just for us, but for the others who could one day be where we are, where we were.”

Mage glanced over his shoulder at the entrance, and stood, Gesturing. In marched goblins, dozens of them, carrying baskets and bags, some with weapons, some without. And passing him without a glance, they began unloading their goods where mage directed them. Piles of stuff, most he recognised, stuff the wizard had taken, stuff they had reclaimed, stuff that had been left where they found it. Piles of ore, and herbs, crystals and relics. An old sword they had recovered from a bandit group, chests of gold they found in a series of lakes, each with the location of the next carved into the bottom of the lid. There were the crown jewels of a king they had met, and the pearl necklace that he knew to be cursed. On and on they came, until finally in came the captives, the monsters the wizard had defending this very room, bound and in cages, and then mage began to stab them, those daggers of his plunging again and again into creature after creature. Their bodies desiccating and shriveling before his eyes.

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“The problem was power,” Mage called as he worked, “the amount you needed was beyond anything I could handle, More than any mage could. But the wizard here knew that, he knew that there were limits to what a human could do. But there are ways to handle more. Blood magic, for example, can give you a temporary boost. And dungeons can handle obscene amounts, in theory, thus the wizards plan to create one bound to him. But even then power alone isn’t enough. I advanced from mage to blood mage for the power, but It wasn’t enough, so I became a sorcerer, mages handle external magic, sorcerers handle internal, you have to be born a sorcerer, or at least that’s what everyone believes. To move between worlds though, simply tearing a hole isn’t enough, you need to get to the other side, then tear another hole. And you can’t let any of the in-between bits out.”

Mage seemed to be unable to stop once he started speaking, as though he was unburdening himself of a long-held secret. “that’s where the warlock class came in, I needed access to knowledge, the sort no one had, not just magical, or the power they can lend, though it certainly didn’t hurt having the extra oomph. And you know what I found? It didn’t matter. None of what I found was something we could do. Sure, with every living mage I could create a portal, like the one which brought us here, but that’s not going to happen. There are pinnacle classes that can do it, but none of you would be able to get them. So I got creative, if a dungeon could do it, then I needed a dungeon. But I couldn’t create one, And I certainly wasn’t about to bind an existing one, even I’m not that twisted. But what do you know? our old friend here is making one, and all I have to do is let him do most of the work, then swoop in and steal it out from under him? He does all the work, he makes all the sacrifices, the enemies, and I get all the rewards? Well, couldn’t say no to that.”

By the end Mage was practically shouting, growing more fervent by the sentence. And then Chloe moved, standing up. And instantly he froze. She didn’t move though, she just looked at him. And the look of betrayal was enough to break both their hearts. Finally, mage went on, his tone subdued, “I’ll send you back, the wizard was only going to make a tiny dungeon, enough to boost his power, make him unkillable, that sort of thing. But there’s more a dungeon can do. A true dungeon, that’s a half step from divinity. Inside, Reality is what the dungeon makes of it, even the impossible.

She didn’t speak, didn’t try to stop him, just stood there, then slowly, she sat back down. Perhaps that hurt the most. That Chloe chose not to act, that they all knew if she asked he would, might. No one spoke after that. There was no point. This was what they wanted, not how, but they could live with it. Mage would stay, and they would let him, they would let him drain the life from the wizard, dozens of monsters he had put to sleep rather than let them fight their way through to get to this room, this point. At some point Ben woke up as well. They told him, he took it well, just sitting, perhaps the lure of seeing his family again was enough to quell any resistance. The wizard never woke up. When Mage plucked the daggers from their backs, they sat together, like they had after Mage left, like he was leaving them again, only this time, he was having them leave him. The room changed, the offerings or resources, or fuel, vanished, and then an arch rose from the ground. Behind the core, which had taken shape like a growing pearl. Mage stopped moving, at some point, and when they passed through the shimmering curtain of light, they saw his eyes were empty. They came through into a room, unfamiliar, a bed, tv on a cabinet, shelf of clothing, and a single picture on the wall gave them some idea, Mage, holding a ginger tabby. He was smiling, mage didn’t smile very often.

Chloe was the first through, Melvin bringing up the rear, a reversal of their usual marching order. And as he looked around, she darted back through tears beginning to run down her face, before he could process she was gone, the light flickered, and she was back, Mages form clutched in her arms, then the world vanished.

Mage felt them leave, he felt Chloe dart back, he felt her scoop him up, his body larger than hers, but she did it anyway, system granted strength on display, and he felt her take him through the portal. He didn’t know what would happen then, while hooked into the dungeon he was disconnected from his body. He felt the world unravel, the room around him vanish, replaced with the between, the empty nothing that contained everything.

He felt his grip slip, holding to the one world even as he reached for the other. He managed to hang, suspended, but to hold to one fully would mean releasing the other, and he was the bridge Chloe had to travel across. So, he held on. His mind the bridge she carried his body across, and as she drifted across, no time passing from one end to the other, he felt himself pulled along, until he was hanging to neither, fingertips touching both. He felt himself detach as she crossed through, pulling him away from the world where he was a dungeon, able to stretch across realities, and into the world where he was an empty husk. Pulling him away from the world where he had a body, and a life. He couldn’t hold both, be both, so he pulled them together. Not close enough to touch, or even interact, but enough that he wasn’t torn apart.

He was a core, in a land of magic and system. He was a man, on earth. He was both, he was neither, a core, on earth. Reality slipped, sliding past, through itself.

He plummeted towards Earth, pulling the weight of a world. For a brief infinite moment, He was the destroyer of worlds and the creator. Power and reality made manifest. But he was not omnipotent, he couldn’t change that he was on a collision course, he could adjust where he fell, but it would not matter, it would be the end either way. So, he shifted direction, instead of just moving through space he moved through time, sending himself back, forward, anywhere. He struck like divine retribution, impacting with a force equal to that of a star going supernova, and it didn’t matter, he took the strike, absorbing the impact. Dungeon cores were made of sterner stuff than anything reality could dish out.

The impact washed out, energy converted to energy, force to force, and it washed out, a wave that swept away from him. And he rode it, his consciousness expanding to cover everything within his domain. Within his dungeon.

And then it reached the end, sweeping past itself and back to his core. But he had so much energy, so he swept himself backwards through time again, with almost contemptuous ease throwing himself back through time, he didn’t care when. and he did it again, dropping himself from orbit to impact the Earth. Again he swept out, covering the surface, and again and again he repeated the process. until his energy was spent, until when he reached out and pushed, the world pushed back, and he felt the resistance.

So he plucked himself from the surface of the Earth, and sent himself back, the tether he had used to find Earth leading back to the cave he would likely spend the rest of his life in. Eternity or until he was destroyed.

In a cave a world away, several things happened at once, a portal closed, the only connection between core and body severed. Another portal opened, swallowing the orb, only to disgorge it near instantaneously, But the cave was awash with energy, space so knotted and warped it refused to allow any more perversion of its natural laws. It tried to snap back into shape, displacing him to the edge of the nearest stable stretch of space that could contain him, and He once again found himself falling, to a world spread out below him.