"Err, what?" Jon asked, looking less than confidant in my declaration. Which was impressive given he didn't have a face.

"I'm going to turn you back into a human," I said, raising my hands. "I have Polymorph Other as a spell now. So, I'm going to polymorph you into a human."

Jon didn't respond. "Maybe we should wait for the actual experts to work on my condition."

"Oh, come on!" I said, annoyed. "You told me you got turned into a human by the Sisters of Mokosh for their orgies."

"They mostly hook up in couples and threesomes rather than the whole writhing group thing," Jon said. "Also, I may have exaggerated what I got to do this past week."

"You lied," I said, staring at him.

"Only a little!" Jon said, cawing, which confirmed I'd caught him. "I got to see things!"

"I'm surprised they couldn't help you," I said, disappointed.

"I'm a bird created by divine magic," Jon said. "My soul plucked out of the Underworld and bonded to this body. None of the sisters were willing to mess with that kind of power."

"Weis isn't a god," I said, pausing. "I think. He's just the world's most powerful wizard. Also, the chosen of Perun."

"You're not helping your case that he's just this world's version of Gandalf," Jon said.

"Gandalf is an angel," I said. "Weis is more like their version of Yoda."

"Still not helping!" Jon said.

"Listen, it's not a permanent fix," I said, crossing my arms. "I've read the spell description. You need to cast a PERMANENCY spell to make it last forever, which I won't have access to until I'm level sixteen. Curses are much easier, but I'd need to hate you to do it. Seriously, it's in the game codex."

"No one reads that!" Jon said.

"But imagine that I can turn you into a human for five or six hours every day," I said. "You'd be able to live a quote-unquote normal life."

Jon looked down and then back at the door. "You're making a compelling argument."

"You also wouldn't be utterly fucking useless," I added.

"Hey!" Jon said, turning around. "That was uncalled for, Auntforker."

I stared at him and spoke in a calm but menacing voice as my hands clenched on the hilts of my evil swords. "In the words of James Taylor on The Simpsons, I'm not nearly as laid back as people think. So quit with the incest jokes or I'm going to be earning some Black alignment points doing to you what every Legend of Zelda fan wanted to do to Navi."

"Okay, I may understand why you decided to throw in a few digs at me," Jon admitted, moving a few steps away on his perch. "I was 18th level Dark Undermaster Warrior with a Martial Artist specialization when I died. This could be a gamechanger."

I was skeptical of Jon's claim to his level, especially since he seemed to have just wandered around playing Pwiffle but some of his adventures seemed to have been true. Besides, to be the necrophiliac he was with the Witch Queen, that meant getting through her underground necropolis. Mind you, it would have been better if he'd destroyed the evil sorceress but baby steps. "That's what I'm thinking. We need to think outside the box if we're going to survive this."

"You always say that," Jon said. "But I'm not sure what the box in this case is. The box Dark Undermaster IV will come in? The Red Box of Dungeons and Dragons? The Epic DungeeoneringTM mail-in ones that you pay a massive yearly fee to not pay for shipping costs but don't give you commercial free access to the Epic Prime streaming service?"

I gestured to the television on the wall. "Actually, they have the entirety of Epic Prime's catalog here. The entirety of the FANT channel too since Valentin had a subscription. I don't know how they access internet across dimensions or galactic distances, but I assume magic is involved. Ania and I watched Dragonheart, Love Actually, and The Matrix."

"What did she think?" Jon asked.

"She liked Love Actually the most," I said.

"Of course she did." Jon sighed. "Well, let's do this, Slightly Scary Aaron. One who is totally not letting loose his inner Gollum."

"Please," I said, pausing. "I'm way more Saruman."

"Well, Wormtongue is the one simping for a girl out of his league," Jon said, dryly.

"POLYMORPH OTHER!" I said, pointing at Jon.

My magic felt different from before I'd become a demigod. Previously, I felt like I'd been channeling it through the Mark of the Champion. Now, I felt like it was channeling directly from myself as if I was a wellspring of mystical energy that could be drawn from. That I was a natural mystical reactor that was churning out its own power. Unfortunately, the spell seemed to warp and twist around Jon rather than function like I'd expected it to. Something was happening as I attempted to force the spell to succeed but what that something was, well, I had no idea. Seconds later, there was a rainbow-colored explosion of light beams before I saw the results of my efforts.

"Err, it's a work in progress," I admitted.

"What the hell did you just do?" Jon asked, spreading out his wings. He had transformed from a smaller-than-average sized crow into a larger than normal peregrine Falcon.

"Yeah," I muttered, staring at him with my head tilted to one side. "Peregrine falcons are an endangered species in Poland and may not even be native to the region. There's less than a hundred in modern day--"

"That is not the point!" Jon said. "You were supposed to turn me into a dude! A non-bird, dude!'

"It'll wear off, I'm sure!" I said, embarrassed.

My bracelet pinged.

JON SNOWAN HAS ADVANCED FROM FAMILIAR TYPE I TO FAMILIAR TYPE II

"Or not," I admitted. "Hey, look at the bright side, you're now badass."

"I'm still a forking bird!" Jon said, sticking with his song lyrics profanity. I wondered why he was avoiding using the f-word. He used to use it every other sentence. Maybe the standards and practices people had brought it up in their reviews of Weis' manuscript.

"Sorry!" I said, pausing.

"Great," Jon said. "When I head to the Rookery, I'm going to want to kill and eat all of my fellow spirit guides."

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"The what?" I asked.

"It's an extra-dimensional space in Weis' bunker on Earth," Jon said. "It's where all of the ravens hang out when they're not guiding people like you or whatever the hell else we do. You saw there were like a hundred back there. It turns out he's been collecting dead heroes far longer than this stupid champion plan. No offense to any still-living champions still in the room. I wonder if they'll all look like food to me now. Ooo, we better warn Sparky about his corgi form now."

I took a moment to calm myself. "You have a way of going back home that you never bothered to mention?"

The prospect about telling my family I was alive, asking if Alek was in the service of Mordor, and other things all popped into my head. They immediately left when I remembered that only a handful of people could understand Jon. To most people, he sounded like an especially loud bird.

"I should probably have kept that to myself," Jon said, taking off. "Last one to the portal is a prey animal!"

I sighed and proceeded to get dressed in my armor rather than my civilian attire. I wasn't anxious to get back to the front line, so to speak, but a little girl was in danger. I also needed to move forward, or I would start questioning my insane decision to do this quest. Some of the polish had worn off from the initial awesomeness of being a wizard knight in a fantasy land.

It had its upsides, don't get me wrong. I'd made extremely close friends, gotten to see wonders no one from Earth had ever seen, and helped people. I was starting to fall in love with Ania, maybe already had, but until that was resolved, well, I wasn't going to complain about the sex either. To be perfectly tacky, I wasn't going to complain about cute monster girls and goddesses wanting to get in bed with me either. It was like a UndermasterCon weekend than never ended. But I'd also killed people.

A lot of people.

The Southern Kingdoms were changing me and not necessarily in a good way. It hadn't taken much to reveal I had a capacity for violence, and I was less upset about killing people than how little I was upset by it. I'd also started relapsing into my Pwiffle addiction. Several times, I'd started shuffling the cards and wondering if there was an expansion set in the world now. It occurred to me there was a whole bunch of EXP and gold to be had if I started challenging important NPCs to games. The fact I still thought of the people around me as NPCs was also a bad habit I was struggling to shake. About the only thing that distracted me from those kinds of thoughts was the prospect of gaining more magical power--which was a form of addiction displacement infinitely more dangerous in the long run.

You are fine, the Blades of Chernabog whispered in my head. You need power to save people.

"See, now that's suspicious since you're usually pretty monosyllable about murder," I said aloud as I finished dressing.

Err, kill, murder, piss, grr, the Blades said, reverting to their earlier type of speech.

"Uh huh," I muttered, putting up my cloak hood. I was officially now Aragorn the Ranger 2.0. If I ever saw my sister again, Arwen, err, Wendy would never let me live it down.

It was about a ten-minute walk from Valentin's quarters to the portal chamber. Along the way I passed elves, satyrs, humans, and dwarves alike. The forces of Veles had occupied the place with their hordes of monsters but there had still been an entire city's population here that had been forced to help in the harvesting of the trees outside. They'd been decimated in the Roman sense, ten percent of their population murdered to motivate the others, but were slowly recovering. I had to wonder if any of them knew that they'd been liberated before, only to have their memories erased when the champions who'd done it had died.

Weis' brainwashing was the biggest reason that I didn't disregard Jon's statement that we shouldn't trust him or his allies. Well, that and the fact he kidnapped me to come here in the first place. For the past ten years, the people of Ledziania had been trapped in a loop of repeating patterns. If they died, they died, but they couldn't really live either. It made me wonder if that was why the civil war had dragged on so long but pushed down that thought for now. I didn't have enough information.

Still, nowhere was the destructive influence of the past ten years of failed champions and conflict more obvious than the area around the portal chamber. The titular portal was a massive stone doughnut (or torus if you wanted to be respectful) that had once been part of a network stretching across the Southern Kingdoms. From the Carolingian Duchies to Qin, the setting hadn't been so much the Dung Ages as a magical Enlightenment verging on steampunk.

People studied to be priests and wizards the same way that people studied to be doctors or scientists. There had been active trade via airships and the sailing variety that never ran out of wind due to elementals propelling them forward. The Grand Temples had been pilgrimaging sites for millions and cracked ruined mansions around it showed the kind of wealth that had once been abundant.

The conflict among the gods and never-ending conflict had caused a Great Reset and the results were more a Medieval Mad Max than a chance to rebuild society as something better. A setting that had once resembled Final Fantasy was, well, resembling the Dark Ages. Okay, I ran out of metaphors there. It made me think of the fact that your typical Dungeons and Dragons setting was technically post-apocalypse with massive numbers of ruined cities left to be reclaimed by the wilderness. It was one thing to wonder what had happened to the people who had built the giant statues of Isildur and another to see a stone city in the trees with only a handful people on the streets because they were still too scared to leave their homes.

"This will be the last loop," I muttered, looking at my bracelet. "For better or worse."

Weis had said as much.

There were no more to make.

The fifteen, now thirteen, could be reclaimed or redistributed but I wasn't sure that was anything but throwing good money after bad. After all, Weis' plans so far had just given Veles champions like Valentin as well as subjected the people to unending misery. But was there any other option? No one else was stepping up.

Nope, it was all on me and my team.

Damn, we were screwed.

Ania, Bloodstorm, Sparky, the Great Mother, and Agata were at the side of the portal. It was about twelve-feet-high and designed for large caravans of merchants to go through. It reminded me a bit of the Stargate from, well, Stargate. I didn't think it was Weis ripping off another franchise, for once, since it seemed more like something from druid times versus the Egyptians. There were a handful of priestesses and former slaves moving around the portal.

An altar with a bunch of gemstones embedded in it served as a kind of control panel and was being operated by the teenage priestess, Dahna. She was a chestnut headed girl, a bit on the plump side, with freckles that did, indeed, look about Sparky's age. Sparky was hiding behind Ania from her. It seemed that she'd been premature about assuming how much the occasional corgi was interested in that sort of thing.

"So, you turned Jon into a falcon, huh?" Ania asked.

"It's a work in progress!" I said, raising my hands defensively.

"Do not tamper with divine magic," the Great Mother said. "It is beyond your comprehension."

I bit back a nasty retort along the lines of, 'I don't take advice from dead beat mothers.' Which was very out of character for me. Perhaps the swords were influencing me. Another possibility was I just had gotten sick of everyone thinking they could tell me what to do.

"So noted," I said, instead. "How is this going to work, exactly?"

Dahna looked up from her position at the altar. "Devil Pass used to be an important trade route to the Turquish Empire before the Death Mountains erupted and killed most of the region. The portal is still there, though it hasn't been used in decades. It should bring you right to the base of Castle Bloodmoon, though."

"Sounds great. It'll save on travel time, at least," I muttered, thinking of Stompy. My flying demon steed had sacrificed himself to keep me alive. Stompy had reassured me that he'd just return to the Underworld, but my summoning rune had been inert since. I wondered if we'd ever see each other again.

"Unfortunately, it is a one-way trip," the Great Mother said. "We can open the portal on this end, and it receives but there's apparently no altar to return you. You'll have to take the Pontifex to safety on your own."

"Where?" I asked.

"That is up to you," the Great Mother said, being incredibly unhelpful.

"Gotcha," I said, taking my place beside the others. "Let's do this."

The South Asian-looking priestess from earlier walked in with what looked like a six pack of unmarked glass bottles before handing them to me. "You should also take these."

I took them from her hands. "Okay."

YOU HAVE RECEIVED SIX POTIONS OF REFRESHMENT

"What do these do?" I asked.

"They restore your entire spell compliment after it's been expended," the Great Mother said. "I expect you're going to need a great deal of magic in order to deal with what you find there."

"Dracula's Castle" from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night started playing on my bracelet and I wondered if that was legally allowed.

I nodded and handed them over to Agata, who would get more out of it than anyone else despite my status as a sorcerer. She'd gone up a couple of levels herself thanks to killing Chernabog and while it seemed to drive her crazy that spells were uploaded into her mind directly, the extra firepower would help tremendously as would her healing spells. We could have used a dedicated healer as well as a dedicated spell-slinger but Agata handling both roles was better than nothing.

"May the goddess bless you," the Great Mother said. "Radu the Impaler is the only vampire member of the Thirteen. He is the son of Veles, the Son of the Dragon, and without any of his father's redeeming qualities."

What a strange thing to say given Veles was attempting to kill everyone in two worlds.

With that the portal opened and looked like a pool of glowing water coming into existence.

I walked through first.