Arson blinked. He felt as if he’d just slept for a fortnight, his head pounding as the light above him seemed to breach the depths of his mind physically.

“If this is the afterlife, shouldn’t it have come without pain?” groaned Arson underneath his breath.

He turned his head slightly as the sensation of a cool breeze touched his cheek and neck. A runic ceiling fan creating a slightly visible cyclone of air at the center of the room far above him. He hadn’t ever seen one with his own eyes, only knowing of their existence from books he’d read in the dump as a child.

“That is odd…”

He couldn’t take his eyes off the invention, knowing that the oddity was older than the orphanage of Maelstrom itself. The flickering pattern of runes spinning at various speeds formed that of a ringed planet above, also seemed to be what was illuminating the area.

Hmm, where am I?

Arson dropped his gaze to look at the rest of the room, his brow furrowing at his environment. White ceilings softly transitioned into deep blues. Every wall around him like that of the ocean depths, painted with fantastical monsters thought to be dead in most realms.

A soft heat touched his face and the smell of burning wood drifted toward him, and Arson looked to see a literal fire pit in the middle of the strange living room he found himself in.

Wood was stacked in a circle around the edges of the bowl that formed the pit, gravity used to keep the fire going; new logs dropping into the center with each set of logs that managed to be burned to ash within the miniature bonfire. Khalif walked into Arson’s view, adding more logs to the rim of the pit, before walking away.

Was he smiling?

Arson felt his pillow move, only then realizing as he turned his head once more that he was laying his head in Troy’s lap; the two apparently lounging on a rather comfortable couch.

Who cares about the pain, this is obviously heaven…

Arson closed his eyes as he rubbed his temples.

“You’re awake,” said Troy. Arson nodded, trying not to smile at the sound of Troy’s voice. He wanted to play cool with the young Cultivator, but found their every interaction to be that of a whimsical obstacle course that more often than not left him feeling like an undisciplined child, entirely controlled by overwhelming emotions.

“Catch me up, darling, what’s going on?”

“Okay, how should I put this,” started Troy, forcing a smile onto his face as she began to run her hands through his hair.

“You walked us down a dark alley, left us on a random doorstep on an abandoned block in the middle of nowhere, disappeared to go investigate something, all of which you know already,” said Troy in a way that made Arson know he was being glared at.

“Then out of nowhere, all of the lights on the block turn on, and everyone can all of a sudden see, or keep our attention on the buildings around us, weird, but we push pass,” said Troy, moving her hands to rub Arson’s temples.

“Your stupid robot started to scream for us to come help you, calling me a demon for some reason,” said Troy before Arson cut in.

“It’s your eyes, it is a trait of demon blood, it’s one of the reasons why Jade is viewed badly in many HonorBorn circles,” said Arson, opening his eyes as Troy stopped massaging his head.

“Really?”

Arson nodded. Troy’s hurumph and thoughtful gaze were enough to tell him that another conversation would more than likely be had, as the young woman continued where she left off. He once more closed his eyes as she spoke to him, rubbing his head.

“We found you dangling from a circuit breaker, that’s what Xani said it was called at least, I just assumed the thing was a bloody trap, I mean it was draining all the mana out of you. You looked half dead by the time we were able to get you off the sparking thing,” Troy explained frustratedly pressing harder as she massaged.

Good thing I’m stronger than I once was, or this would be even more painful rather than as soothing as it is.

“So where are we now, inside the hotel we stopped in front of?”

“Yessir, and this place is absolutely absurd.”

“How so?”

“For starters, it’s like your mother’s villa, way bigger interior than exterior, there is also a portal room with portals that leading to every other business on this block, not to mention there is another hallway full of dungeon portals, I’ll let Khalif and Rob explain that bit to you though, they’ve been exploring those while I stayed with you.”

“And Xani?”

“She is inside a repair plant or manufacturing assembly, she was speaking like ten thousand words a second when she was explaining it earlier so if I’m being honest I caught very little of what she said.”

“Noted,” said Arson sighing as he sat up, beginning to scroll through the various notifications that had popped up into his Overlay whilst he slept.

“You good,” asked Troy, standing as Arson scrolled mentally.

“Yeah, just checking some things out, got new pages when my Overlay interfaced with this place.”

Troy softly lifted Arson’s chin, making him meet her eyes as she pointed at him with her free hand. The gesture reminding Arson of their adopted mother Almarine momentarily.

“If you die on bloody vacation, I’ll beat you back into the world of the living,” said Troy, her pointed finger transitioning into a clenched fist. The threat confusing but the seriousness of his best friend’s gaze making him believe the words completely.

“Noted…”

…

Arson explored the hotel with a far more precautious and slow evaluation of the building than his friends had. Not only because they hadn’t seen how many hidden rooms and portals truly filled the structure from top to bottom, but also because his senses told him from the very moment that he’d left the living room positioned just beyond the front door, that he was in constant danger.

Walking the halls put the hairs at the back of his neck nearly upright, and he wished his friends’ sudden love for the space helped, but it didn’t. In fact it only made him that much more suspicious. No, he hadn’t been attacked… yet, but it didn’t change the constant thrum at the back of his mind that sang of impending peril.

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So far he’d used the hotel’s elevator to climb the first few floors. The second floor was like that of an office building with an open floor plan and conference areas. The third housed all the portals and gateways to other buildings on the block the hotel was on. While the third was like that of a massive field filled with dungeon portals.

The third floor made no sense to Arson as the elevator exited to what seemed to be a day lit plain, completely outside and filled with a budding forested jungle. Monsters of various types seen in abundant numbers all coexisting without seeming care for one another. Which made Arson wonder if the animals and monsters were even aware of the habitat being filled with both predators and prey.

Some of the gateways on the third floor were framed in stone, and even had titles at their apexes that informed Arson what each gateway was likely used for without entering. As after he’d entered the one titled “Eggs” and saw a massive cave filled with bird-like creatures all laying eggs within a catacomb, he didn’t have to think too hard to realize the third floor was without a doubt being used as a type of resource farm.

He hadn’t been seen by the black hawk-like birds, until he’d actually grabbed a singular egg. This caused an all-out assault by all of the avian that filled the oddly beehive like catacombs, until Arson rushed free of the gateway.

A few of the creatures exited alongside him, all frantically attacking, until they emerged back onto the third floor. Then everything changed. The birds all fluttering off as if they were suddenly completely unbothered by Arson or the plethora of foreign creatures around them.

Arson left the floor and continued up. It wasn’t until he got off on the fourth floor that he processed the fact that the elevator only had two buttons, up, and down. This made travel rather slow in the elevator, and flared up in Arson’s mind as a huge red flag.

“Won’t be easy to escape the building if we were in a sudden rush to escape…”

Arson’s thought left his lips as he emerged onto the fourth floor, which seemed to be filled with lavish rooms. All of the room doors were open, leaving Arson to feel as if something could jump from any one of the doorways at any time.

Next to every doorway to either side were two large floor-to-ceiling paintings and portraits. A person to either the left or right was framed with their name in eloquent fonts, all striking various poses, in different settings. While to the opposing side of the doorway was a random place, also titled with what Arson assumed was the name of the place being depicted.

Having had been many places, he was easily able to ignore the foreign lands shown and even the strange cultures of each portrait he passed. Even more interesting to Arson were the walls in between. Every gap between the rooms seemed to be etched with scenes of battle, cataclysms, or even just glorious artwork of distant times and places that climbed all the way up the walls to the unseen ceilings above.

Arson’s eyes drifted up and down as he ventured forward. His path lit by dangling chandeliers in between the rooms. The lighting somehow unable to penetrate the darkness above where they were positioned.

Arson couldn’t see the end of the hallway as far as he’d walked in, and had even come to a crossroads where no ends could be seen no matter the direction he turned.

“This makes me feel like I’m exploring the most dangerous sectors of the dump at night.”

Arson didn’t even have to look at his watch, feeling the AI’s intangible shrug at his words.

“I would normally take the time to call you paranoid, or even tell you to quit being a punk, but seeing that painting constantly changing, I’m rather uncomfortable, I honestly feel like this is a sparking haunted hotel or something…”

“What do you mean,” asked Arson, slowly turning around to look at each portrait that could be seen from where he stood. A room could be accessed from each corner of the hallways crossroad, the walls long and slanted enough to form a octagon around him. Four rooms framed by four equally spacious hallways branching off from this point.

Arson stopped turning, when he realized the eyes of one of the portraits was following his every movement. He took a step to the left, and then to the right. Each direction he moved, the paintings eyes followed. The blond was wearing a suit of slender red and black armor, her brown eyes penetrating through Arson as if the woman was alive and staring him down. He was momentarily drawn into the woman’s gaze so much in fact that—

“What are you doing all the way up here, there is like three entire floors beneath this one that are—“

Arson screamed and jumped backward, the cracked scythe he’d gained from his first event inside RaidCorp Coliseum instantly in his hands from his spacial inventory; the weapon instantly thrumming with violent energies as he spun to face the speaker. Only to see a smirking Troy just standing there.

“Geez woman, you scared the sparks out of me,” said Arson storing his scythe. Troy laughed, shaking her head at him.

“Didn’t even think something like that was possible, but okay, what are you doing all the way up here?”

“What do you mean? I’ve only checked out four floors, who knows how many levels this place even has, the elevator doesn’t have any numbers?”

“Umm, this is the seventh floor buddy, and I know you can count, did you hit the button a few times and forget?”

“Seventh floor, what are you talking about,” Arson trailed off, seeing the giant stylized seven above the elevator just down the hall behind Troy.

What in the bloody sparks…

“This floor is weird, all the portraits are filled,” said Troy, brushing past Arson as she started to look around.

“What do you mean?” asked Arson, his attention fluttering between the confusion brought on by his traversal of the building thus far, and Troy walking slowly around him.

“On the fourth floor, all the portraits were empty until we entered the rooms and claimed them,” said Troy.

“Then what changed,” asked Arson once he realized Troy wasn’t going to say anything further; the young woman lost in her own perusal of the hall.

“Oddly enough, pictures of us replaced the portraits, and random places none of us had ever been before filled the frames on the other side of the doorways.”

Troy stopped, crossing her arms before facing Arson as his mind drifted between countless conclusions; Troy raising a brow at his faraway stare.

“That’s odd. What place popped up beside your portrait,” asked Arson, causing Troy to simply shrug before responding verbally.

“I don’t know, some place called Lemniscate.”

“Hmm, show me…”

Arson pushed the odd paintings on the fourth floor to the back of his mind, following Troy down the hall and back into the elevator. He watched as the young Cultivator pushed the button three times, and the pair arrived on the fourth floor, detailed by the giant four that stood above the elevator once he stepped free of the lift.

“Strange…”

How did I end up on the seventh floor then?

“See, this is the place that popped up next to my door, but I’ve never seen this place in my entire life,” said Troy. Arson looked away from the number above the closing elevator doors, and approached Troy that stood just down the hall from him.

The painting she stood before was of an absolutely majestic dynasty. A seemingly endless landscape of mana and light infused into every aspect of the architecture and design of the civilization presented left Arson momentarily captivated.

“Wow,” said Arson, glancing over to see the nodding Troy smiling at him.

“I know, right? So far, I think I have the coolest painting beside maybe Khalif.”

“What is his like?”

“You’ll have to look at it yourself, I couldn’t describe it without reading a dictionary’s worth of words first.”

“Hmm, that peaks my interest, not going to lie, where is it?”

“It’s over there, but I want you to pick a room first and see what yours ends up being,” said Troy, pulling Arson past a few claimed rooms to a doorway with two empty picture frames to either side of the empty rooms entryway.

“How do I claim it?”

“Just walk in,” explained Troy.

Arson shrugged, walking into the room. He spun slowly looking around at the extremely accommodating living space with multiple rooms and comfortable furniture; only turning around after hearing a strange noise behind him.

“What the…” said both Troy and Arson at the same time.

Arson stared at the name, Reaper as it was scrolled fancifully in Uni-Vare. The runes both foreign and familiar to Arson all at the same time. He squinted at the name, confused as to why it appeared there, his thoughts racing wildly until he finally gave attention to Troy; the young Cultivator also wearing an equally confused face.

“What is it?” asked Arson leaving the room as he spoke. He turned around to see a painting with the title, CloudLake City, and froze himself.

The realm was that of a giant circular Platform. Made from white marble, floating through a vast sky. An entire civilization built atop the rock. The Seven Halos that separated the powerful from the impoverished, diminished in size as you traveled from the exterior to the interior of the CityNation, and Arson couldn’t take his eyes from the painting.

Not because the painting was of a place he’d never been before, but because it was of a place he believed now, that he may have been before.

A flickering image in his mind as he thought of his first memory, chaotically shifted between that of Armor Archon and Jade. The queen’s grimace transforming into Jade’s rarely worn warm smile.

Though that was the most prominent detail for Arson when he scanned through his memories while in Endless, as he stared at the painting before him, another detail became far more notable to him.

The skies are the same,” he mumbled to himself. The beautifully depicted space above the floating CityNation matched that of the sky that could be seen behind Jade in his memories.

“Hey Troy, are you sure that you have never been to that place in the portrait?”

No response came from Troy, which made him look at her. Her gaze flickered through the many details of the portrait of Arson on the opposing side of the room’s open entryway, which in turn made Arson look.

There was a man completely unfamiliar to Arson. The man looked more like king LightLord than Arson. However the details that made Arson believe he may be the person in the portrait were numerous.

The crown above the man’s head was undoubtedly Arson’s own. The black cowl that hung above a face made of stars was also unmistakably Arson’s skill while in its stealth functionality. As well as the swirling gateways to Arson’s soul that were filled with what looked like moving galaxies seen from a vast distance. All of these features were familiar.

Yet these weren’t the only significant details in the portrait. The man was flanked by countless people, all whose faces carried as much distinction if not more than Arson’s own. Each person as unique as the person beside them. Seeing this Arson understood what had kept Troy’s attention for so long. As he looked back toward himself, he knew instinctually that he could spend a fortnight looking at merely those gathered beside him and not come across the same detail twice.

Yet his eyes were drawn to the man’s wings. Even from the crouched position the man was in, sitting on his heels casually smiling, his wings were spread wide.

The angelic anatomy was captivating in its own right. Each feather like diamonds consuming light and mana of untold variety.

Arson’s eyes moved to the man’s arms. One completely tattooed like that of Jade, filled with mythical beasts of legend. While his opposing arm was seemingly crystalline in nature. The structure of the arm seemed to be filled with countless moving gears, all different colors within the entirely black mass that made up the arm.

The tattooed arm held a shield bow, and Arson immediately felt connected to the weapon as he took it in. The moment he saw it, he felt as if his very soul reached out toward the weapon. His family’s symbol runically inscribed across the face of the triangular shield, was attached to a bow that seemed to be constructed from dragon bones or maybe even that of a hydra. Arson was unsure.

“What is that…”

Troy bent down, looking at a creature hiding behind Arson’s crouched figure, and Arson couldn’t tell if he was looking at a dog, a drake, or some sort of quadrupedal bird. The creature was large, but positioned perfectly in the portrait to be mostly hidden behind the man’s wings.”

“Well,” started Troy looking back at Arson over her shoulder with a sigh.

“What?”

“I owe Khalif money, you definitely have the coolest portrait…”

“What?”

Troy stood, headed toward the elevator, ignoring Arson’s question entirely.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“To blow off some steam, I got an event soon.”