It didn’t seem real.
As in it was impossible.
Alin had been concussed before, but they had never come with such vivid hallucinations.
Howard flew through the air, snarling with a glinting knife in hand. Flesh colored ropes splattered gore in his wake. The lower half of his body was gone.
It was theoretically possible that Howard’s healing factor would allow him to survive such a grisly injury, but testing in a mindscape or utilizing V.I. projections was no substitute for reality.
Except… Howard didn’t fly? Nor could he leapt without legs. How had he—
Kelci limped forward from Chamber 3’s west entrance.
The hybrid was on one good leg. The other was a twisted, broken ruin dragging behind her. One arm resembled one of those bendy straws his mom kept around for when Lera visited. Her armor was as broken as her bones. Shattered faceplate revealed a face so destroyed that it was a wonder she could see well enough to accurately throw Howard at the demigod.
Suiteonemiades aimed a blast at the snarling missile of rage.
Gold screamed.
Sudden stars sparkled in its path, clearing a path.
The burst of .50 caliber bullets signaled that Marloes wasn’t out of the fight.
Howard sliced a chunk out of the demigod’s cheek with his thin knife. He grappled the towering demigod like a rage-filled, giant weasel versus a grizzly bear. He stabbed and sliced, splattering wet gold.
Distracting bullets sparkled into the demigod’s eyes.
Twin beams lanced out into the distant northeast corner of the chamber where a tangle of half-destroyed trees lay.
The sparkles stopped.
Suiteonemiades pried Howard from his back, crushing hands around arm and neck.
“You’re at the apex of your kind to survive this long, let alone fight so viciously. Tough enough to do that, but not smart enough to find your lower half first. You understand what you did? You could’ve saved yourself. Crawled to your legs and stuck yourself back together.” Gold eyes flicked to the thin, double-edged knife. “Where’d you get this? This world doesn’t have natural mythril deposits.”
Howard spat a bloody glob in the demigod’s face.
“Open-faced helmets are shit, eh?”
He flicked his wrist despite the crushing grasp.
Thin blade entered the demigod’s eye with a wet squelch.
Gold flared instantly, sending the knife flying.
“A worthy effort, but not a lasting one,” Suiteonemiades said through grit teeth. “Unlike your fate.” He shifted his grip, bringing one hand on top of Howard’s broken helmet.
Kelci bellowed and tried to charge, but her pretzeled leg failed her.
Alin stood, made it two steps before the spinning chamber overcame him.
Suiteonemiades ripped.
“I’ve only heard stories of your kind surviving this.” He held Howard’s severed head in the palm of one hand, examining. “Can you talk? Do you understand what I’ve done to you?.”
Howard blinked, his mouth worked but only a wet gurgling sound emerged.
“No lungs, no air. No magic to make a mockery of natural biology.” The demigod regarded Howard’s torso for a moment before casting it aside like trash. “I am curious, but not that curious. You’ve hurt me, so I grant you an honorable death.” He closed his hand.
Alin swallowed back the bile.
“No more last second sudden surge of strength and power? No sudden level ups unlocking just the spells or Skills needed to overcome this challenge?”
The demigod raised a brow. His ruined eye barely seemed to bother him.
“Then, I shall depart.” he strode over to pick up Alin’s mom once again. “Remember my message. Grow strong and perhaps you may take your revenge… or join your brothers and sisters in Elysium for they earned their deaths.”
The golden portal awaited.
It hadn’t stopped opening.
Suiteonemiades, Alin’s mom in hand, strode toward it.
Large strides meant it only took two to cover the distance.
One more step.
A few more centimeters of portal growth.
The demigod stopped on the threshold.
A frown crossed his face.
Muscles grew taut.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he began to slide backward from the golden portal.
Alin’s HUD highlighted a gravitational anomaly approximately 10 meters directly behind the demigod.
More anomalies appeared.
Around him, his mom and Kelci.
There were also distant ones, which he took to be around Marloes, Drake, Adrian and Tabitha.
There were even ones around Howard’s… remains and Jayde’s—
“Alin, I can’t pull your mom out of his hand without hurting her,” Aunt Rayna said into the comms.
Howard’s knife! The thought came immediately as the cobwebs in his head began to clear.
He scanned the floor, finding it quickly.
Despite being at the epicenter of a burst of divine energy the shining blade remained pristine.
“I’ll do it. But, I’ll need help getting in and out with her.”
“Got you covered. Let me know when and be careful.”
Alin scrambled for the knife.
Suiteonemiades caught him out of the corner of one eye.
The demigod was a veteran of likely countless battles across nearly a millennia.
He knew that there had been one thing in the chamber that was a threat he needed to be wary off.
Twin beams danced across the air toward Alin.
They arced— around him.
Round and round they went until he was cocooned in gold.
His aunt’s gravity field moved with him. Rather, she moved it with him as he scooped Howard’s knife off the floor.
“Now!”
Sudden acceleration faded just as quickly into weightlessness.
The demigod’s beams vanished, revealing a tower of midnight black muscle growing rapidly in Alin’s faceplate.
His mom fired a blast of flame from the underside of her armored arm into the demigod’s face.
The demigod turned. Instead of resisting the powerful pull, he leapt with it. Only to find himself suddenly weightless, floating in midair.
Alin’s flight brought him close enough to reach.
The demigod’s hand looked even larger up close.
An instant before grabbing Alin the demigod was suddenly pulled to the floor.
Metal crumpled beneath his sandals.
His right arm suddenly rose to full extension.
Alin’s mom dangled like a flag in the wind.
Alin cut deeply across the underside of the demigod’s wrist, severing tendons.
The demigod’s hand opened against his will.
Alin grasped his mom’s outstretched arm as the two of them were floated out of the demigod’s reach.
Twin beams gave chase but couldn’t escape the gravity field around the demigod.
Suiteonemiades roar of frustration was drowned out by the sound of the ceiling opening up and bathing Chamber 3 in sunlight.
Thousands of tons of earth were pulled and pushed into the sky to rain down somewhere over the Pacific.
“Ah!” The demigod’s expression went from frustration to eagerness in the blink of an eye. “The eponymous Rayna of her famed rangers! Adras would give you an entire world if you give him your faith.”
“Pass.”
“Good. I wouldn’t recommend it.” His lips twisted. “You’d be given anything you could imagine, but a cage is a cage regardless of the gilding. Unless you’re the sort that wouldn’t mind being treated like a prized brood mare until you’re no longer capable. And from the looks of it that’d be a long time.”
A dark shadow fell, blotting the sunlight.
“Have you marked the target?”
A beat.
“Fire at will.”
R.S. Rayna One rained hell upon Suiteonemiades.
“Don’t use magic!” Alin’s warning was too late.
“Yup. We made contact with the evacuation party. Dayana woke up long enough to warn us about that.”
Flechettes shattered against a golden forcefield.
Shrapnel filled the chamber, but nothing got close to Alin and the others as his aunt’s power turned them into miniature asteroids orbiting their planets, never to be drawn to their surface.
Collateral damage didn’t exist when Aunt Rayna was in the fullness of her superpower.
Deft manipulation of multiple fields created something like the ocean where all currents led to one place.
Again and again, the projectiles slammed into the demigod’s forcefield each time breaking into smaller and smaller pieces until they were fine dust.
Arcane symbols flickered and vanished.
The demigod fired back through the forcefield somehow.
Alin couldn’t tell through the flashes of light and choking debris clouds.
“Any luck draining him?”
“No… sorry. It hasn’t worked.”
“Keep trying.”
When Aunt Rayna told him to do something he did it.
The gray licked at the forcefield.
He found thin seams and larger holes that continually shifted location.
That’s how the demigod fired through with his eye beams and hand blasts.
He pushed the gray inside like the fog creeping onto the beach in the dead of night.
Pulling with all his might he felt the slightest tingle.
A trickle so faint that he wasn’t sure if it wasn’t just the product of wishful thinking.
The demigod certainly didn’t show any of the typical signs that Alin’s ability was working.
Indeed, Suiteonemiades threw his head back to the sky and roared.
A thick beam of golden light poured out of his mouth, searingly bright.
“Careful, Aunt. I saw him shoot down the Rayn of Fire.”
“Meh. I wouldn’t go that far. They had already taken a lot of damage from the harpies and missiles.”
The demigod melted a literal cloud of flechettes.
The skyship’s shadow moved.
“Then again…”
Suiteonemiades turned his attention to Aunt Rayna hovering where Chamber 3’s ceiling once stood.
Golden beams lanced out.
Only to be captured by her gravity.
Energy bent, curved at her will.
Flowing around her to be shot harmlessly into the empty sky.
She gestured.
Just a slight twist of her wrist and a flick of her fingers.
Such a small movement for a monumental effect.
The super megalith rose from where it leaned against the destroyed wall and crashed down on the demigod.
Over a thousand tons propelled down by a force of gravity greater than that of the planet.
Dense-packed earth, hard as stone shattered.
It didn’t go alone into its ruin. It dragged the golden forcefield along.
The demigod cursed as he punched up with explosive blasts of golden energy, creating just enough space to avoid burial.
He blasted shots from both hands and eyes.
Bright gold screamed with rage as they zeroed in like a shark on a seal.
Alin flinched as his aunt’s field captured the blast and turned it into a harmless satellite around him and his mom.
He lost concentration. Lost the link he hoped wasn’t just in his head. Lost the trickle of the demigod’s vitality.
No.
Not a trickle.
That was a generous term.
It had felt more like a microscopic particle of glowing gold stretched into a microscopic thread. Not even rising to the level of the most infinitesimal drop of miniature’s paint on the wet palette when he had to squeeze out every last bit from the small dropper bottle.
The floor buckled beneath the demigod.
Legs like tree trunks bulged and quivered as he strained against the pull.
Arms trembled, fighting to remain on their targets.
Veins in his neck and jaw wriggled like fat worms as the muscles fought to keep his eyes skyward.
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Aunt Rayna clapped her hands as though catching an annoying gnat.
The remains of the super megalith slammed into the demigod.
Other fields isolated the demigod and the dense-packed earth from everything and everyone else in Chamber 3 and the rest of the environment.
The laws of physics be damned.
His aunt had never cared much for that part of science anyways.
The force was so great that dense-packed earth changed shape, slowly turning into a giant orb with the demigod entombed within.
Eternity in seconds? Or was it the other way around?
Alin couldn’t tell.
It took less than 3 minutes going by the clock in his HUD for his aunt to complete her work.
Her eye twitched as a bead of sweat fell from her brow to trickled down the side of her face.
Alin was about to warn her that he could still feel the demigod, but remembered that she could too through her gravity fields, possibly even better than he could. At least going by the morning’s events.
“I’m going to drag him into space. Maybe throw him into the sun or use a mini black hole. That’ll probably work,” Aunt Rayna said.
“Yes, please.”
“Okay—” her eye twitched, brow furrowed.
Dense-packed earth rumbled and cracked.
Fault lines spread across the brown globe, leaking gold.
The giant orb exploded.
Jagged debris, some as long as a man was tall, scattered across the chamber. So many creating a swirling sea of brown in the eddies of his aunt’s power.
His aunt cleared the cloud from where the demigod had stood entombed.
Empty.
The only thing that remained was a hint of fading gold as ephemeral as the morning mist chased away by the rising sun.
“He’s gone.”
“I’m not sensing his energy nearby.”
His aunt had him beat for range.
He could spread the gray out to maybe a thousand square meters on an average day.
In addition to creating her own, she could connect to the Earth’s gravity field and make it hers for a time.
Aunt Rayna floated down to land next to him. “Watch my back. I’m going to see if I can find out where he went.”
Wherever Suiteonemiades had portaled to, she failed to track him.
The demigod had failed his stated main objective.
However, Alin couldn’t see it as their victory.
Not when he took in the devastation everywhere he looked.
Not when he thought about what he couldn’t see. Who he would never see again.
----------------------------------------
Washington, D.C. Spring 2053
Washington T. K. George.
President of the United States of America.
Or what was left of it from its height over 30 years ago.
A height they would, God willing, reach once again as they claimed their Rightful Destiny. Or should that be Gods?
The thought irritated like a splinter that slowly worked its way deeper into his thumb.
A young man… for a president.
Just turned 40.
Multiple classes.
He had gained and lost several as he climbed the ranks.
Councilman to congressman.
The only ones that always stayed with were soldier and politician.
President of the United States of America.
Low level since he was only partway through his first term.
Still, he had discovered that it was more powerful than any of his predecessors had said.
It was mindset that set him apart from them.
They had all been relics of the previous era.
A world without the spires, without classes, without tangible evidence of one’s inner qualities.
He had grown up in this world.
Steeped in it from his childhood.
Thus, he could make full use of his Skills, develop them to their utmost and transform them into even greater versions.
‘Washington’ wasn’t the name his parents had given him at first.
They were shrewd political operatives that had managed to secure a place in the emergency bunkers when the spires apocalypse descended on the old world like a dark blanket. They had risen in the struggles over that first decade. They had charted his path from those dark days to be the light that would truly take their country back from the monsters and the traitors.
To name him such was an evocation of the nation’s origin. Everything he had ever done at their guiding hands was to embody the echoes of that ancient founding father.
He sat in an oval-shaped office, using a Skill to review the multiple reports spread out on his desk simultaneously.
There was a smaller, more practical office, but what was the point of being president if he couldn’t be in the Oval Office?
He was alone.
Secret Service bodyguards were just outside.
The rest of his staff was busy performing their own jobs.
Another Skill allowed him to keep track of them.
Several were slacking off, but he’d allow it.
Each had lost someone in the military operation against the traitors in Southern California.
He had decided to inform them as soon as there had been confirmation of the casualties rather than conform to the standard timeline.
His staff was hardworking, competent and loyal.
They deserved better than to spend the next several days agonizing over the unknown fates of their loved ones.
The thought interrupted his task, sending his gaze away from the reports.
His desk was devoid of personal touches aside from a simple framed picture of his parents and a magic gem.
The latter was ruby red, but not a ruby.
He had gained it nearly a decade ago in a nameless spawn zone near an abandoned town whose name he couldn’t remember.
It pulsed and sometimes when he looked at it out of the corner of his eye he could see veins beneath the glossy surface, beating like a heart.
Next to the one picture it was his most valuable belonging.
He was alone in many ways.
No family after his parents had been murdered by political rivals when he was barely a man.
No relationships aside from his brothers and sisters from his days in the Combined Armed Forces.
Lasting connections had never come easy when life and death was always balanced on the edge of a blade.
His opponents had tried to use his lack of a wife as an attack during the campaign, but failed miserably.
It was only a concern for the most aged of the electorate and they were, sadly, a rapidly vanishing demographic.
The vast majority of the populace found greater value in what he stood for and what he had done in the service of them.
Truth spells.
The old generation hadn’t fully understood how those changed the political calculus until it was too late.
They could’ve obfuscated and outright lied about what they did or would do in the pre-spires days.
Not in the modern world.
His parents had recognized that sooner than most.
Which was why he had never done anything that could’ve been used against him in a catastrophic way.
A simple question about taking advantage of one’s position to coerce sexual favors had been devastating to one of his opponents during the first debate.
The populace saw a refusal to answer the question as tantamount to admittance.
He was the only one that answered in the negative.
That glowing truth gem had gained him more votes than any number of campaign ads and speeches.
No rapes.
No murders.
No war crimes.
The first two had been easy.
I never had the inclination to do either.
As for the last?
Well… he owed it all to his parents and their allies for keeping him out of positions where such things might have become a necessity… for the most part.
As for when that had been impossible?
It wasn’t that difficult to write the histories when they won.
It was, after all, a time honored tradition dating back to whenever humanity began recording their history.
Suiteonemiades.
He didn’t like the demigod, but only with time and distance.
He liked the demigod whenever he was in the presence.
Supernatural charisma.
Not just because the demigod was beyond physical perfection and seemed to know exactly what to say to anyone in any setting to have them gazing up at those gold eyes like a small child looks up to their parents.
There was a tangible, intentional effect generated by the demigod.
The highest leveled and most powerful individuals had all agreed.
An aura that some, like Captain Patriot, saw as blazing golden light.
While others had described it as more of a feeling or even a faint choir singing with the voices of the angels.
Gods?
He wasn’t a believer.
No.
He had seen too many things in his days as a soldier.
Beings with so much power that the distinction in specific terminology didn’t matter.
The nation walked the blade’s edge.
Alliance with the pantheon risked being turned into a vassal state.
History was the guide.
Nations had done it throughout human existence.
The only difference was the scale.
Power in the form of nuclear missiles and air superiority in the past.
Power in the literal form of individuals in the present and future.
The new arms race that the old hands, by and large, had failed to understand.
They had antagonized power when they should’ve placated.
They had let idiotic racial biases form their policies.
What did the color of one’s skin or their ethnic origins matter when they could single-handedly destroy an army or a giant sea monster with teleporting tentacles?
It was too late now.
The nation would never be whole again, would never take its rightful place as the leader of the world without the aid of the pantheon.
Ally with people from beyond their world to defeat people from their world.
The hypocrisy was not lost on him.
The reports were mixed.
Multiple operations with multiple outcomes.
Failure to success in varying degrees.
Which could be said of the most important operation.
Heavy casualties taken and given.
He didn’t find that objectionable.
The harpies bore the brunt of the losses.
His soldiers had achieved parity with the Cruces insurrectionist forces.
A skyship had been downed. Presumably, it would be out of commission for a long time even if Rayna’s Rangers could even repair it.
The demigod had personally killed many high value targets. Some had been marked as important assets for the insurrectionists. Others had not, though the demigod had assured him that all deaths served their goals.
He didn’t, for a second, take it for granted that those goals would always align.
There was no way that the demigod was completely transparent.
The godlike man had to have more he wasn’t sharing. He was too powerful to be bound by the spells and Skills they had at their disposal to find out. A Level 40 individual could lie to a Level 20’s spell or Skill.
The deaths of the gray aliens achieved strategic and tactical aims.
For the former, the hope was that it would be the catalyst to start a rift between the Threnosh and the traitors.
Somehow, they had made it to the Threnosh world well in advance to poison the well for American diplomacy.
Violence involving the first scouting parties they had sent through the spires had not helped.
As it stood the diplomats they sent later were as effective as pebbles thrown at a steel door.
In any case, diplomacy with every other polity on other worlds had been put on indefinite hold.
A condition of their alliance with the pantheon.
The hints of ideas mulled around in his head.
He gave them no voice because countermeasures against spies weren’t perfect.
Levels and Skills.
A double-edged blade.
There were counters for everything.
Even counters for the counters.
The Threnosh were a possible future ally against a potential common enemy once the insurrectionists were dealt with.
He reached for the water pitcher and found it empty.
“Excuse me, can someone bring me more water, please,” he said into the intercom. “And an apple.”
Success and failure.
Suiteonemiades hadn’t returned with his main target.
No hostage meant everyone had been keeping one eye on the sky even when sitting in their office for the past week.
Condition red.
Expectation of a sudden and devastating attack.
Perhaps, like the ones that kept melting or exploding vehicles and munitions at every military base in the eastern half of the country.
All the warships they had spent so much time, effort and resources at getting back to working order had likewise been destroyed. The one silver lining was that the traitor responsible did most of his work at the docks or he dragged the ship to shore first. Ironically, doing them a favor since the most valuable parts of a warship were its crew.
Naval officers and sailors needed to be trained and leveled up.
The nation had only just begun to reach population replacement level.
It’d take at least a decade to replace an entire crew.
An aide entered the office after a perfunctory knock on one of the side doors.
A woman of indeterminate age.
Blond hair cut short to just past her jawline.
Blue eyes.
He kept his gaze to those.
Eye contact.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Never give anyone any ideas.
At this level everyone, even allies, were always looking for something to use to their advantage.
In his case it meant levers they could use to move him in the directions they wanted.
He amended the thought.
That was the human dynamic across all levels.
It had been like that back when he was a young soldier worrying about things on the squad level.
The only difference was the scale.
Like going from a small puddle to an ocean.
The aide replaced the empty water pitcher.
Fresh fruit bobbed around with rattling ice.
He liked it cold and the hint of flavor was refreshing.
“Ms… Foster, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
She could’ve been anywhere between 20 and 40… years old, not level.
A quick glance confirmed it.
She was the only young or young-ish woman on the staff that didn’t dress in a way to draw his eyes.
The others tended to tight business skirts falling well above their knees and tight business jackets that purposefully pushed their breast up and out.
The most audacious ones left the top most buttons undone.
It was almost funny how when they first started they’d follow a pattern.
More undone buttons combined with bras that pushed up higher when he didn’t show interest.
Traps and spies or both.
From those looking to advance their lives for their own personal goals to those doing the bidding of their backers for all sorts of reasons.
All this despite his express written orders to his chief of staff to not hire attractive young or young-ish women.
The problem was that other types of people didn’t apply and he wasn’t about to force those people into the job.
Ms. Foster was his favorite amongst the newer hires precisely for the fact that he sensed that she didn’t want anything from him.
Not wealth and an easy life.
Not connections to power.
Nothing beyond doing her job.
He was tempted to make her his direct assistant, but his current one was the daughter of a fellow party senator with seniority and too professional and competent to justify removal.
Honestly, he was satisfied with the young woman’s work aside from the flirting.
“Do you need anything else, Mr. President?”
He blinked, momentarily lost in his ruminations.
“Ah… no. Thank you.”
Ms. Foster departed without another word.
He liked that.
No bullshit.
Did her duties and left him alone to devote all his brainpower to the work.
Where was he?
The rituals protecting American territory.
Stacks of paper, closed notebooks and folders.
A Skill to read their contents without opening them.
The rituals held.
Then again the fact that a flying man or two hadn’t come knocking on his window was perhaps a piece of concrete evidence he could rely on more than the assessments of his magic user-types.
It was the same elsewhere.
Boundaries remained un-violated by specific traitors.
The cost in blood was high and had he known that the demigod had already sacrificed humans in different parts of the world to get it started he might’ve refused permission for the operation.
That would’ve been interesting.
What would the demigod have done in that case?
They had both been careful to avoid putting each other and themselves into situations where outright refusal from either party was likely.
Which of his allies would have stood by his side?
He may not have been able to remain president.
A coup was a distinct possibility.
Perhaps a recall election?
The events in the bunkers in the decade after the spires had appeared necessitated changes to the laws.
Using criminals and traitors had been distasteful.
If not for the replacements provided by the demigod, he might’ve refused to continue with the rituals.
Though they were criminals and traitors, they were still American citizens.
He would’ve much rather put them to use in more dignified and less final ways.
After all, an individual could serve the nation for years, eventually earning freedom through rehabilitation into a productive, loyal citizen.
On the other hand, a sacrifice could only be spent once.
“Thank God for the rabbits.” He sighed.
Still distasteful, but he could choke it down.
Those unfortunate creatures were only good for two… well, three, things.
Better they became fuel for the rituals than the true purpose they had been bred for.
His alarm chimed.
He put his reading aside and prepared his thoughts.
Meetings upon meetings.
Politicians.
Lobbyists for the last few ultra wealthy relics impatient for a return to the days in which they owned everything and everyone.
Joint Chiefs.
The— his Cabinet.
Those were easy.
The Eidolon of Sunor was difficult in a way that reminded him of being a child back in the bunkers struggling to please his teacher in the classroom. Her majestic presence filled him with equal parts awe, fear and, shamefully, lust.
The demigod was on another level.
If the eidolons were a bright spotlight then Suiteonemiades was like the sun.
President George always struggled to stop himself from falling to his knees in worship like primitive humanity must have once done in the days before science drove away ignorant superstition and faith.