COLIN POV

Gambler’s ladder deposited us into hell.

The noise hit me first. Explosions. Gunfire. Screams. This wasn’t the pleasant vacation from level two I’d been hoping for.

We were in a tiny building built from gray wood. The roof was so low I had to stoop. It had a small wooden door on the other side. In between lay a couple of pallets with men on them, groaning and bleeding. The men wore khaki and gray uniforms. I looked them over, and my heart froze.

I recognized that kind of uniform, that style of canteen, the make of rifle leaning beside the door. We'd just landed ourselves in World War I. And I had a terrible feeling I knew what was on the other side of the door.

I pushed it open and found myself standing in a muddy trench. Men near me were shouting and screaming as they jostled on ladders.

"Come on, men," an officer urged. "We're going to push Jerry back. Time to go. Over the top!"

He signaled, and a bugler sounded the charge. The men swarmed up the ladders. The sound of rifle fire overhead increased. A shot landed near us, shaking the whole trench.

"What is this place?" Rok'gar demanded.

"It's from an Earth war over a hundred years ago."

He stared at me, his jaw dropping. "You humans have horrors to you I did not know."

I pulled up my mini-map. The icon for the treasure vault was in front of us. "I think we have to go over the top," I said. "I'll try to keep us covered.”

I swapped out a skill for one called [Improvised Shielding]. "Give me a hand," I told Rok'gar, and we seized the table in the trench shelter behind us. With a couple of minutes of work, we fashioned it into a shield with handles on either side for me and Rok'gar. Then we tossed it over the lip of the trench, swarmed up, Sage right behind us. Rok'gar and I grabbed the table and held it in front of us as we pushed out into no man's land.

There was fighting all around us. Men crawling on their stomachs with their rifles, others charging across. We stumbled forward, across what seemed like acres of muddy ground, and then found ourselves staring down into another deserted trench. We leapt down in, seized a ladder, turned it around, and crawled up the other side. More mud, more devastation. Bullets whistled past us as we slogged along. I was just glad nobody was focusing on us until suddenly an angel with a flaming sword dropped in front of us.

Sage reacted first. She had her lariat out, got it around him, and tried to Tame. It didn't work, and the angel swung on her.

Rok'gar and I dropped our shield. He grabbed his weapon while I pulled out my multi-tool and made it a shovel. As Rok'gar engaged the flaming angel and Sage lashed out with her lariat, I dug a circle around him, a ditch four feet deep.

"Stand back!" I shouted as I finished the ditch. Rok'gar roared and shoved the angel back into my circle just as I filled it with oil and lit it on fire. The angel went up in a burst of flame.

"What the hell was that?" Sage asked as we grabbed our shield and raced forward again. "I don't remember angels with flaming swords in World War I."

"Neither do I," I said.

I was worried we were missing something here. Through the smoke and gray, I could make out what I thought must be our objective. A square, boxy fortress looming ahead of us. There were gun emplacements on its walls, spitting fire all around. I didn't understand how it hadn't been destroyed by artillery. It seemed like the other side could have easily gotten heavy enough guns lined up to blow holes in it, but there it stood.

"We have to get in there?" Sage demanded. "Are you sure this is worth it?"

"Hang on," I said. I made an adjustment to my spellbook, then cast Read the Dev Notes. Now that we were close enough, items of interest showed up on my minimap, including one I zeroed in on. “There’s a culvert under the walls. They’ve got it blocked off, but I'll bet you we can find a way through it with my bag of tricks.”

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"Better than trying to go through the front gate," she said. "Let's go."

We slogged our way forward. Once I caught sight of what looked like a group of demons. They were racing through the no-man's land, slaughtering soldiers as they went. There were four of them, and each of them had an extra pair of arms hanging off their backs wielding scythe blades.

None of this was making sense to me. It was like the fragment was pulling from multiple different sources, which might make some sense. Gambler had said it was a mishmash. I didn't want to risk a message back to ask. Gambler said we could talk to him, but only in an emergency, as he didn't want to take any chance of the Dominators noticing our links.

We made it to the walls of the castle, and there was the culvert, barely two feet high with a heavy grate set in it. I pulled out a jackhammer from my multi-tool, equipped a demolition expert skill, and had the grate knocked down in 30 seconds flat. Then I stooped and started in.

The drain was full of about three inches of muck. Hopefully, just mud. I tried hard not to think about it. I could hear Sage and Rok'gar grunting as they splashed along. It seemed to go on forever. Then at last, we came to a round opening, a cistern with a ladder leading up.

"This is it," I said. “Best be prepared for anything."

I stood up and shook the muck off my hands as best I could. My trousers were coated with it.

Sage had mud in her hair and on her face, but she was smiling grimly. "Let's get in there."

I swarmed up the ladder, pushing the trapdoor up, expecting to be greeted by a hail of bullets. Instead, I found myself in an empty room. I swung up and helped Sage and Rok'gar up.

"Well, that's a bit of an anti-climax," I said. I checked my map. We were close now. Very close. I Read the Dev Notes a second time and received a complete schematic of the castle.

We were on the first floor. The treasure vault was in the western tower. There were dots moving about on my map. Red, orange, and yellow. I didn't know what all those colors signified, except red would probably try to kill us the moment they saw us. Orange and yellow might wait a minute before they realized we were up to no good and then try to kill us.

We slipped out into the halls. Soldiers were running past, yellow dots carrying crates of ammunition, dressed in Imperial German green coats with brown boots. They ignored us, and I did my best to keep it that way. The hall led toward the west tower.

Soon, we found a door and a spiraling staircase. We raced upward and into the tower room. There were a pair of guards on duty, who raised their rifles as they turned toward us, shouting loudly in German. Sage Tamed one and turned him on the other, while Rok'gar and I burst open the chests and started looting.

On the wall was a picture. It shifted and shimmered as I looked at it, my eyes not quite able to resolve it into an image, like an old-fashioned static-y television but iridescent. I reached out toward it and felt an electric shock in my fingers. I backed off. I didn't know what that was, but it didn't seem to like me, and I wasn't going to mess with it.

“Cleared!” Rok’gar said as he emptied the last chest. "Let's get out of here!"

We retreated back down the stairs, only to find ourselves facing another squad of demons.

"Run!" Sage yelled and took off the other way down the hall. Rok'gar and I pounded after her. She tossed down her Mucking Out the Stalls behind us. I heard the demons hitting it. They were red-skinned with long arms, wearing tight black suits that covered their torso but left arms and legs bare. The one at the front was carrying a short-barreled gun of some sort. He shouted at me. I couldn't understand the words, but for an instant, all I wanted to do was turn and fight him. I fought off the taunt, focusing on the need to escape.

Sage lashed out with her lariat. She roped one of the other demons and Tamed him.

And then, to my horror, the illusion broke around that one individual, and I saw who it was.

What the hell was going on?

Sam was a short, slim Asian man, only a couple years older than me. We’d been working together for years now. My old teammate’s face went slack with shock. "Colin. You're alive! Or — is this fragment that big an asshole?” He turned to the other demons and his eyes went wide with shock as he backed up away from them. “What the hell!”

I was confused too, but what I knew for sure was I needed time and space to figure out what this meant. Too much was riding

I held up my hand. "Listen!" I said rapidly. "This is really complicated. We can't let the Dominators find out about this. You understand? There's a lot going on here. I want to tell you, but I can’t.”

“I don't understand—”

“I need you to figure this out. Sam, you're always the fastest. You need to understand. Don’t talk about this anywhere they can hear. I have to let you go, and I need you to let us get away.”

“I —” Sam’s expression cleared. He nodded. “You got it, boss.”

Rok'gar and Sage had kept running, thankfully. I wasn't sure they'd seen what was going on. Her Tame hadn't yet forced him to turn on his comrades, probably because we were distracted trying to escape.

I caught up to the others. "Break the Tame!" I yelled to Sage.

"But—"

"Break it!"

I glanced back as Sam vanished, replaced by a demon. The demon spread its arms and stepped in front of the others, clearly yelling at them.

We raced ahead and out into a courtyard, then doubled back. There was no sign of pursuit.

"We need an exit,” I called to Gambler, no longer caring if a Dominator heard us. "Can you get us out from here?"

"Now that you're in the keep, I can make a connection. I've labelled it on your map."

“Hurry!” I raced for the new marker. Within seconds, we were back at the ladder, sliding down, descending back into level two and the safety of our base.

My mind was whirling. What had that been all about? What were we going to do next?

What would happen when Williams learned the truth?