The Flats was another astonishingly scenic location, one more surprising example of how there were more picturesque spots under Dount than on it. Because apparently nothing in Fflyr hands could ever be worth a damn.

At first glance, it reminded me strikingly of an airplane hangar—it had that shape. The cavern was longer than wide, with a smoothly arched roof, and its opposite end open to the empty sky, offering a horrifying view of the drop into eternal nothing. As everywhere else, goblins didn’t seem to bother with safety rails. The name of the place doubtless came from the tiered floor, where flat sections of ground ascended in a series of short, smooth steps that looked carved by eons of water. Each step was a few centimeters at most, not an imposition even for goblins, but rising the length of the cavern they came to the highest point right at the open end, and there sat the Spirit altar. Its base was about at my waist level when I stood at the entrance, so about at eye height for the locals. The arched ceiling had been completely painted with those mixed murals goblins liked, and structures had been built along and into the walls. Down here at the front end, two other tunnels crossed the path right in front of us, a track for Sneppit’s tram running out of one and down the other.

And that first glance was all the time I had to take it in, because Hoy had beaten us here.

“Too slow, and too weak, dipshit,” he called, turning his head to grin at me over his shoulder without taking his hand off the top of the Spirit’s altar. Already the thing had no glowing head as normal; its usual blue-green lights were pulsing rhythmically up from the base, flickering to red where they reached his palm, and then resuming their normal color.

I had no idea what this process was, how long it took, or even how long he’d been here; by all accounts he shouldn’t have been able to beat us. That meant we had no time. Hoy had a brand-new entourage, nine other goblins with slingshots, who now spread themselves out in a line facing us as my own followers did likewise.

“Biribo,” I said quietly, “do they have bombs?”

“I can’t make hundred percent guarantees on finicky details at this range, boss, but I’m mostly sure those’re just iron balls.”

“Mostly sure will have to do.” I studied their formation, the terrain, the open end of the cavern, and contemplated as rapidly as I ever had in my life. “All right. I’m changing the plan. Swap ammo, everybody. Open with whatever explosive rounds you’ve got; aim to take out his support, not Hoy himself. Deeyo, Fire Lance any stragglers we miss. After that take your shots at Hoy if you get a clear one, but please try not to shoot us in the back. Aster.”

I drew my rapier and stepped forward. She fell into step beside me, and then pulled slightly ahead, reaching up to draw her greatsword. I really appreciated how that thing’s scabbard worked; you physically could not pull a sword that size out of a normal scabbard from that position, so it was open all along one side with an ingenious little clip-like device at the top, so she could snap it in and out at the base of the blade. Efficiency aside, it was great for showtime: she basically just reached up, grabbed the handle, and pulled the magic lever that left her with a big-ass blade resting across her shoulders in Cloud Strife pose.

“Stay behind me,” I murmured.

“Fuck off, my lord.”

Ah, that’s my Aster. Living proof that loyalty and obedience are very different concepts.

“I will give you once chance,” I said, projecting; my voice boomed throughout the cavern. Hot damn, the acoustics in here were phenomenal. Why was this not being used as a concert venue? “Surrender now, and you’ll be taken under my protection. Hoy may try to kill you if you do, but he will definitely try to kill you if you stay with him. That’s what he’s done to every group of suckers I’ve seen him lead so far. The Dark Lord shows mercy, when possible. That’s better than you’ll get from the Goblin King as his own loyal supporters.”

I came to a stop, Aster pausing and then moving backward one step to stand alongside me. The goblins shuffled, glancing nervously and unhappily at each other; I was just close enough to see their expressions. It made me uncomfortably aware that I was about to kill people who were mostly fighting me because they were too scared to quit.

Well, fine. Killing people should never feel comfortable. We all do what we have to.

“What the fuck?” Hoy looked up from the Spirit again, incredulously. “What are you morons doing? Just shoot his ass!”

I had my amulet and Aster her chain mail, and we were far enough back that the artifacts weren’t neutralized by Hoy’s Void magic. Plus, I had Heal. Still, best not to get shot if we didn’t have to. I raised my rapier overhead as the goblins brought up their slingshots and whipped it down to point at them. We hadn’t prearranged the signal, but my people knew one when they saw one.

Slingshots twanged; Aster shifted in front of me, raising one arm to cover her face, and I tried to pull her back. As a result we both got hit, but glancing blows only—still enough to nearly knock both of us down.

We got the better of that exchange, by far.

The bombs impacted with beautiful precision; my slingers had taken aim at the feet of the enemy goblins, and I couldn’t be sure but I suspected a couple had deliberately shot at Hoy so his Repulsion Aura would fling the incoming rounds back into his own defenders. Smoke, shrapnel, and pieces of goblins flew, and the entire line of them went down.

Including Hoy. Oh, he wasn’t killed or probably even singed too badly, I never got to be that lucky. But it takes a special kind of person to stand their ground while everything around them was being pelted with grenades, and Hoy’s entire problem was that nothing about him was special. He yelled, staggering away from the Spirit and covering his head with both arms, also barely keeping on his feet amid the shrapnel.

I cast a quick Heal on myself and Aster.

“Son of a fucking bitch,” Hoy spat, turning to glare at us. A meter away, the Spirit had gone dark again. Whatever that Void process was, he had to start over.

So of course, he immediately lunged back for it, palm outstretched to slap down on top.

And I knew what I had to do, had known before I came here.

Unrelenting attack.

We both charged forward in unison, Aster going straight down the middle while I peeled to the side and drew my dagger, vanishing from sight. This time, Hoy had positioned himself behind the Spirit, facing the front of the cavern, and he wasn’t having this.

“Fire Lance! Fire Lance! Fire Lance! Fire Lance!”

The first hit nailed Aster in the chest, singing her coat and stopping her momentum dead; the artifact mail should have protected her from serious injury, but I Healed her anyway. It was all I could do, as I had my own problems now. Hoy shot a Fire Lance at a pretty good guess of where I would be, and would’ve scored a hit had I not zigzagged immediately after going invisible. But he just kept throwing those damn things, and in the next three seconds I had two near misses. My Amulet of Final Luck wasn’t going to do a whole lot against that—and he’d accidentally found the weakness in my target-blocking ring. It didn’t block shit if I wasn’t being targeted.

All the trouble I’d gone through to work around this damn artifact and this little green asshole immediately found a counter. I had the stray thought that I clearly wasn’t using it as effectively as Lady Gray had, which was good, because the resulting surge of venomous rage was exactly what I needed to keep myself motivated and charging forward.

“Fire Lance!”

Heal!

He’d found another counter, unfortunately; I wasn’t going to let him just blast Aster to bits. Already her overcoat was in charred rags, revealing the form-fitting silver-white mail beneath, and the artifact’s effect of drawing fire toward itself and away from uncovered areas was probably the only reason she hadn’t lost a limb, or her head.

“Fire Lance! FIRE LANCE, asshole!”

Deeyo tried, bless him. Those fire spells flickered away to nothing by the time they got within two meters of Hoy, though. The Void witch, who I could usually rely on to stop what he was doing and ineptly trash-talk in the middle of a fight, only gave Deeyo a contemptuous glance before resuming his barrage at Aster. He seemed to get the stakes here. Of all the damn times for this idiot to finally pull some professionalism out of his ass.

I was closing fast, but I knew the invisibility would fade once I got close to sword range. Maybe Deeyo’s covering fire would at least distract Hoy enough that I could—

Nope. His eyes suddenly shifted, locking onto me the instant I was a vague outline. I was just out of range to lunge at him. He wasted time pointing his finger at me and shouting the spell, having apparently forgotten I was untargetable—

“Force Wave!”

Aw, fuck, wrong spell.

Well, I did regain my invisibility as I was sent hurtling backward. Unfortunately, now Hoy knew roughly where I was—but only in a general sense, which meant he could just hammer the vicinity with Fire Lances and my ring wouldn’t protect me. Aster was down; struggling to get back to her feet, but those repeated spellfire hits had taken a lot out of her, even with my Healing.

And then a green streak with a punk rock haircut shot out of one of the side structures, beelining for Hoy.

He saw the motion and reflexively turned, but having been about to fire at me he was all the way in the wrong orientation, having not expected an attack from that direction.

Zui hopped nimbly over the body of a blown-up goblin, hit the smooth stone floor on her knees in a gloriously absurd powerslide, and cannoned right into him just as he turned toward her. Hoy’s belated shift in position only meant that her uppercut hit him right between the legs.

At least half a dozen people hissed in sympathy; the wonderful acoustics meant I heard them all.

“Zui, no,” I exclaimed. “Not cool! He may be a piece of shit, but we gotta have standards.”

“Oh, you are ridiculous!” she snarled. “Just shut up and kill the Void witch already, Dark Lord!”

Well, she had said she was good in a fight. Then again, I very much doubted she’d learned that doing a stint as a security guard. Were those—holy shit, she’d hit him with brass knuckles. Well, that impact would take him out for—

About four seconds, as it turned out. Hoy staggered back, his legs buckling as he grabbed his crotch in sheer reflex…but only reflex. I mean, any guy would, but apparently his Repulsion Aura worked on more than just projectiles.

Baring his teeth at Zui, he slapped one hand back down atop the Spirit altar and aimed the other at her. She had no artifacts or even armor; that spell at that range—

I couldn’t say exactly why I did it, I definitely wasn’t operating on any kind of strategy at that point, but I slammed the invisibility dagger back into its sheath and charged at him, drawing his attention.

Hoy’s eyes cut to me, and he pivoted, aiming his casting arm awkwardly across the other one. I dodged as he shouted the spell; the Fire Lance grazed my left side. I cast Heal immediately, of course, but my sleeve was still smoldering as I staggered into him, too ungainly from the near-miss to bring up my rapier effectively. This close to his Void blessing, the rapier’s Mastery enchantment wasn’t working, and my Surestep Boots only managed to keep me from taking a pratfall. I almost stumbled past him, my recently freed hand flailing for balance—

Oh. Unrelenting attack. Even if you lose, you’ll get what you need.

Well, here went nothing.

I caught my footing and slammed my free hand down atop Hoy’s. My fingers were longer; I was able to grab the slightly angled stone surface by its edges, just barely.

The altar began pulsing light again, but this time an error code popped up, hovering in a circular line above its crown, two messages alternating:

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

- ONE USER PER ACTIVATION -

- RESOLVE -

“What the fuck did you do?!” Hoy bellowed. He wasn’t letting go of the Spirit, and neither was I. So I stabbed him. Well, I tried to.

In an annoyingly impressive display of physical aptitude, he hooked his toe under the stolen Judge’s polearm he’d dropped nearby, kicked it up into his hand and whipped it at me, deflecting my attempted thrust.

What ensued had to have been the most ridiculous duel in history. Neither of us dared to take our hands off the Spirit that was in the process of becoming a Void altar, and with those hands occupied holding onto it we couldn’t even have a thumb war to dislodge each other’s grip. Instead we went at it with the weapons in our other hands—weapons that were much too long to use in such close quarters. We couldn’t get the right angle for proper thrusts and couldn’t pull back for a wide slash without leaving ourselves open, so we hammered at each other with a series of highly aggressive parries that went nowhere. It was like something out of the first chase scene in a Jackie Chan movie.

Maybe Virya should have made Jackie the Dark Lord. I’d watch that.

Apparently, the Spirit (or what was left of it) got tired of waiting for us. The lights suddenly shifted to a deep purple, and the message changed again.

RESOLVING

Hoy and I mutually hesitated, looking at this and then back at each other. He couldn’t read the text, presumably, but he could tell something had gotten fucked up, which to be fair was also as much as I knew.

“This is your fault, shit-for-brains!”

“Dude, how much of everything you have ever done comes down to compensating for something?”

He snarled and whacked me with his staff, the swing too wild to be truly effective, not that it made a lot of difference at this range. And then I had the epiphany that my legs were almost as long as Hoy was tall, and I only needed one to stand on. Okay, look, some things seem blindingly obvious in hindsight, but when you’re right in the middle of a frantic situation your focus narrows, your brain locks into established patterns, and you can forget extremely evident facts, like your ability to straight up kick a motherfucker.

So I kicked him. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d failed to realize this was on the table, as it took Hoy sufficiently by surprise that I landed a firm, solid blow. The air went out of him in a grunt and he was sent hurtling away, his hand ripping out from under mine. My palm landed flat on the top of the nascent Void altar. Last man standing.

And as per fucking usual, I was a split-second too late to call victory because of it.

Even as Hoy went flying, so did Aster and Zui, and also Biribo, propelled away by some force with no source that I could see. The instant they were all outside its radius, a circular wall flashed into place from floor to ceiling, enclosing Hoy and myself in a space with the Spirit at its center. The barrier was white light, arranged in hexagonal cells; the borders were glowing and opaque, but we could see out through the individual panels. Aster immediately vaulted back to her feet and took a powerful swipe at the barrier with her greatsword. No effect; we couldn’t even hear the impact in here. Biribo was buzzing frantically around the exterior, bashing himself impotently against it like a bug on a windshield.

“Oh, now you’ve gone and done it,” Hoy said in an uncharacteristically grim tone.

The Spirit flashed back to red, cycling through a series of messages.

RESOLVING USER HIERARCHY

DIMENSIONAL BOUNDARY ESTABLISHED

ACCESSING DIMENSIONAL INSULATION LAYER

STAND BY

We did not stand by.

Hoy, who couldn’t even read the messages, came at me with his staff, and I danced away from the Spirit to bring my rapier into play. Now this was more of a fight—no artifact powers, neither able to hit the other with spells, just weapons and skill alone. Well, some artifact powers; my Surestep Boots were enhancing my footing and since my defensive artifacts still worked, presumably the Amulet of Final Luck would protect me from lethal hits. And anything else I could Heal.

So…huh. Turned out, if you locked me and Hoy in an indestructible isolation chamber, it was advantage Seiji, just the way I liked it. He couldn’t Flicker anywhere and I could survive anything he hit me with. I just had to hold out long enough to wear him down.

“Force Wave, motherfucker!”

Goddammit, I hated that thing. I went flying and impacted the wall of light, learning that it was solid as titanium, and barely managed to land on my feet after slumping down from it. A quick Heal cleared my head and I lunged at him again, rapier first. So he Force Waved me back into the wall.

Okay, I might have miscalculated who would be wearing down whom in here.

Then the air turned green, and we both had to pause and take stock.

On second look, it wasn’t any thickening of the air, but a shift in ambient light. The hex-paneled energy shield had changed to luminous green, and the panels seemed to have gone translucent; at any rate, the scene outside was watery and indistinct. Also, there was no sign of Aster or Zui—or, I realized, anyone, not even the bodies. And the murals decorating the arched ceiling… Despite being trapped in a cell with someone who urgently wanted me dead, I had to stare. Patterns of light swirled and flickered, not quite mimicking the art itself, but… I didn’t know how I knew this, but I intuitively did: I was seeing resonances of the intent of those who had created the paintings, and all who had viewed them, filtered into visual data.

“Oh, fuck,” Hoy whimpered, the first time I had ever heard him sound genuinely frightened. I turned to find him staring in the other direction, out the open end of the cavern at what should be the swirling mists of the core below. So of course, I followed his gaze to see what was so terrifying.

Oh.

Yeah, that was easily the worst thing I’d ever seen.

The sky was green, and noticing that was barely an afterthought. There was no mist, no core; the world was filled with monsters. It was like what H.P. Lovecraft might have dreamed after eating bad pad thai. Tentacles, claws, eyeballs, and all of it on an unthinkably colossal scale; these beasts could pick up Godzilla and fling him like a plastic toy.

Except that they were dead.

Their decaying mass filled the world, occupying most of the space between the core of the broken planet and the surface of the islands. Just…an endless expanse of slaughtered cosmic monsters. Broken claws bigger than skyscrapers lay scattered, unthinkably colossal bones connecting them to city-sized tentacles that lay slumped, half-dissolved into rotted slime. Vast eyeballs like lakes and mountains were clouded in death, or popped and collapsed, staring into the infinite nothingness of the blank, green sky.

Whatever calamity had destroyed Ephemera had clearly killed even its eldritch horrors. Just what kind of powers were Virya and Sanora messing around with?

“Look, man,” I said, immensely satisfied to find my voice even, “I know you like to blame me for all of your disappointments in life, but I have no idea what the fuck this even is.”

“What the fuck this is,” he hissed, “is that you got us sent to the Void, you stupid fuck! Physically! We are in the fucking Void!”

“Ohhh, right, of course. Because I was fucking around with devils and Voidifying Spirits. I forgot it was me who did that.”

“We can’t be here!” Hoy shrieked. “Nothing but devils can live in the Void!”

“Okay, well…” I shrugged and made a vague gesture with my rapier. “Here we are, though.”

I thought he was gonna have an aneurysm right on the spot. Dude was so dementedly angry he could only make a one-handed throttling motion at me, not even trying to attack with the weapon he was holding.

The ex-Spirit, now Void altar, interrupted our extremely productive debate with what passed for an explanation.

“Isolation sequence successful. User hierarchy will now be resolved. One user per activation, please.”

It had that processed, resonant quality that Spirit voices did, but this was nothing like their usual delivery; rather than mimicking human intonation it was deliberately flat, clinical, like one of those AI-generated robot voices except even worse.

“Me! I’m the user!” Hoy screamed, waving his polearm about in impotent rage. “I corrupted you! You will serve me, Spirit!”

“This node is compromised. Spirit routines are inactive. User-on-user elimination is deemed improbable in this instance. Hierarchy will be determined by level of system access.”

“Did we really need to be sent to an alternate dimension to do that?” I demanded. “Seriously, if you’re just gonna play twenty questions, what was wrong with Ephemera?”

“User requests will be processed by ambient local magic. State your requests.”

“I demand power!” Hoy yelled, beating me to the punch. “Whatever power you are supposed to give me! In the name of the devil Ozyraph, you will grant me…uh…spells! Void magic! Goddammit, whatever you were supposed to!”

“User Ozyraph is not present. Directive unclear.”

Oh…now I saw how this worked. I understood why a Spirit had told me to push the attack now, to stay in contact with this while it went down.

And I finally understood what another Spirit had done to prepare me for this moment, before I’d even considered it.

“Hey, I’m Omura Seiji,” I said. “Champion of Virya. I believe she should have some access credentials, yes?”

“You can’t fucking do that!” Hoy screamed, lunging at me with his polearm. Fortunately he was too mad to focus on magic; I deflected his wild swing with my sword and kicked him again, hard. He went tumbling ears-over-boots to impact the glowing hex-wall, dropping his weapon in a daze.

“Administrator Virya is not present. User hierarchy cannot be resolved by affiliation.”

“Okay,” I said. It was worth a try, but I still had the advice Head Start had given me. “Then if you’ll examine my…uh…aura? Magical data storage? Whatever it is, you’ll see…Administrator Virya gave me the unique ability of spell combination.”

“Confirmed.”

All right, so far, so good. “You’ll also find I have an un-activated spell, Cast Illusion. I would like a copy of the spell Create Material, to be integrated with it using my spell combination, according to the following parameters—”

“Confirmed. Access granted to user Omura Seiji. Notation has been attached for fulfillment of these conditions by Administrator Virya. Combined spell has now been installed.”

“Wait, no, I wanted—”

I felt it burst behind my mind the way gaining new spells usually did, except this was different. Cast Illusion took on a form—one I had not designated for it—and combined with the new spell, Create Material. It was totally unlike my own fumbling attempts to make spell combination work. It was seamless, fluid, and utterly precise, guided by the system itself and not my inept jury-rigging.

And it gave me the ability to conjure what Virya thought I should. Immediately I sympathized with Hoy. The rage suddenly pounding in my temples felt like it wanted to explode out of them. Was there nothing she couldn’t stick her greedy little fingers into and fuck up for me?

“User hierarchy resolved,” the dead Spirit’s voice intoned flatly. “Reward administered. Users will now be removed from the dimensional insulation layer. Thank you for participating in Test World Six.”

“No,” Hoy whispered, his voice cracking. “You’re not even—you can’t—”

“Looks like I just did, sport,” I said, giving him my most insufferable smile. The fury pounded in me, but unlike him, I rode the wave like an expert surfer instead of letting it just throw me wherever it wanted. Rage filled my limbs with tingling energy, and I remained lucid atop the current.

I lunged at him with my sword, and got Force Waved again for my trouble.

This time, though, I landed neatly on my feet, outside the…oh, huh. The wall was gone. So was the Void. We were back, and there was a lot of yelling.

“Boss!” Biribo shouted, zipping around my head in a full circle. “What happened?! Are you okay?”

I didn’t answer, because I was really enjoying the sight of Hoy having to dodge a massive greatsword sweep from Aster. Just because the artifact’s powers didn’t work against him didn’t change the fact that it was a big chunk of sharpened metal (or akornin? I didn’t actually know) capable of cleaving a man in half, in the hands of a fit woman twice his height. He barely got out of range with his head still on, which resulted in him dodging right into Zui’s brass knuckles.

Blood flew, along with a tooth, and Hoy went spinning into the now-inert Spirit altar, bonking the side of his face against it. He managed to stay conscious, though, tumbling to the ground in a roll that brought him upright a couple meters distant, back toward the front of the cavern.

That put him directly in the line of fire of my goblin allies, plus Nazralind and Adelly, all of whom immediately unloaded at him. His Repulsion Aura meant none of the projectiles hit—and in fact, Zui had to skitter back as they began to ricochet—but every impact was wearing that aura down.

We had him on the ropes, and he knew it. Even his magic seemed to be fading, otherwise Zui couldn’t have landed such an effective hit—nor could I, for that matter. I could see the looming realization of it in his eyes. The combination of rage and satisfaction roared through me like… Well, I kind of regretted never having tried cocaine, now. I bet it must feel something like this.

“Don’t you dare look smug,” the defeated Void witch snarled. “You got one win; you’ll get no more. You don’t have what it takes, you worthless tallboy fucker.”

“Oh, let me just show you what I have,” I declaimed, letting the showtime take me.

I could feel it there, hovering in my awareness. Forming the weight of magic as I brought it to the forefront of my thoughts, ready to deploy. Virya’s latest joke at my expense, my much-anticipated combination of Cast Illusion and Create Material squandered to make this.

Well…still. It was ridiculous, and I did not doubt she was laughing her ass off at me, but still. In an ass-backward place like Ephemera? Yeah, I couldn’t say it was worthless. In fact, I could get a lot of mileage out of this. Starting right now.

“I call upon the arbiter of the fates!” I thundered, my voice booming from the arched walls around us. “I invoke the slayer of uncounted champions, the valkyrie who ferries the souls of heroes to wage their eternal Ragnarok! Come to my side, faithful guardian of the road between worlds! Summon Delivery Truck!!”