Gramok and Milo hefted the oak doors open, and there he was—the Magistrate, sat writing at his desk. Bastard didn't even look up.

Heat tingled across Ted’s fingers as his Firebolt completed. “Enkir!”

Cara added an icy arrow. Nammu sprinted forward, screaming “Ama-gi!”

The arrow and the firebolt flew true. Straight into—

—straight through the Magistrate, smashing into the desk behind.

Shit.

The image of the Magistrate faded and his silky-smooth voice filled the room. "You have become quite a thorn in my side, Crown Prince. Be grateful your father wants you alive—the same cannot be said for your friends."

Fire raced through Ted’s veins. He seized his mana for Area Visibility and stormed into the bedroom. The bastard had to be in there somewhere.

Halfway through the spell, darkness ripped the light from the room. Out of the void poured a cloud of blood. The blood swirled, blurring as it sped up, formed a blade, slashed.

The air cracked with the strike. Weakness ripped across Ted’s chest.

Strength fled. His knees buckled, his spell shattered. Mana exploded. Shards of distant pain tickled up his arms, like hearing about it third hand.

Light returned. The Magistrate stood five paces away, wearing smugness like a glove, clad in Protection magic so bright it hurt. From his neck hung the golden medallion, seeped in purple and blue magic.

Nammu’s boots thundered against the floor. She lunged.

The Magistrate flicked his fingers. A flash of white magic flung her through the air, smashed her against the wall.

Fire arrows plinked against his Armor effect, doing nothing to stop him weaving another Force spell, layering the magic thick and potent.

A searing chill spread out from Ted's chest. What little strength remained in his muscles incinerated, leaving behind only agony.

"GRAT KOVALNAK!" Gramok launched himself at the Magistrate, his greatsword on course for another decapitation.

The floor just short of his charge glowed white. Force magic erupted, hurled Gramok into the ceiling, pinned him there.

Ted pushed across the sludge that used to be his mind. Had to focus. Had to break free. Had to save them.

Milo circled three steps left and charged, snarling as he closed the gap. He swung for the Magistrate's heart, and the head of his battleaxe shone white.

The Magistrate stepped back and unleashed the full might of his Force spell at Milo’s head.

Ted winced, unable to look away as the blast… washed over Milo. Not even a flinch.

The Magistrate’s eyes widened. Silver magic crackled out from Milo’s battleaxe, ripping away magical protections, and the axe buried deep in the Magistrate's gut.

The quicksand pinning Ted down fled. Time to end this. He pulled himself up onto his shaky legs, already weaving a high-potency Firebolt.

The Magistrate looked up, his face one of pure rage. Twisted power gathered to him, sucked the life out of the air, sheathed his hands in darkness.

He pointed at Milo. Smokey tendrils erupted from his finger tips and coiled around Milo’s limbs. They dragged him into the air, forced his protesting arms wide.

Milo's legs flailed at empty air. The tendrils tightened. Agony flashed across his face.

Fire took form before Ted, sweat dribbling down his brow as he wrestled the last of the mana into place. Come on, come on!

Cara loosed another arrow. A flash of white caught it midair, sent it clattering to the floor.

“Enkir!”

The firebolt flew forward. Blue-red magic pulsed out from the Magistrate. Fire engulfed him, and… nothing.

What the hell?

The Magistrate clenched his fists. Milo's head twisted to the side with a crunch that made Ted's bones clench.

A corpse hit the floor.

Nausea swelled in Ted’s gut. He poured all his mana into a Blastbolt. The bastard would pay!

A sneer spread across the Magistrate’s face as he turned on Ted, casting Protection spells in both hands. Behind him, Nammu snuck up, daggers ready.

Cara loosed another arrow. Another flash of white, another clatter against the floor.

She growled, tossed her bow aside, and launched at the Magistrate, her daggers aimed at his head.

His fists closed. Two teal Aegises shimmered into existence around him, the Armor effect taking hold just in time to deflect stabs away from his eyes and back.

Ted forced frantic breaths to still. Focus, damn it! This one had to count. He poured the last of his mana into the Blastbolt, and fired.

The bolt smashed through the Magistrate’s protections, sent him sprawling to the ground. Blood seeped through the gold of his robes.

Ted took a step forward. That should have ended it. Should have triggered an XP notification.

Movement. The Magistrate dragged himself up, smiled, and pressed a Life spell to his shoulder.

Muscles clenched through Ted. If that hadn’t done it, nothing would.

Cara screamed and stabbed at the Magistrate’s eyes. Another spark of teal foiled the kill.

Time for a new plan. Ted lowered his shoulder and charged.

The collision was like running into a brick wall.

The Magistrate shoved Ted away with one hand and hurled a forcebolt at Cara with the other. It struck her in the chest, slamming her into the deck with a thud that jolted through Ted’s insides. She couldn’t take many more of those.

Nammu slashed at the Magistrate one, twice, thrice, her roars rising with each futile attack.

Think! There had to be a way.

There! The slave collar on the cage.

A forcebolt smashed into Nammu, slammed her against the wall. She stumbled, clutching her head, her legs giving way.

Heart racing, Ted pulled away and cast Invisibility upon himself. Cara, grab the necklace, he messaged, sneaking over to the small cage.

On it.

Ted stashed the slave collar in his belt and ran back to the fray. Hold him still.

As one, Cara and Nammu grabbed the Magistrate's arms, twisting his fingers. A blast went off in his right hand, rippling through his absorb.

Ted opened the slave collar, darted in, snapped it around the Magistrate's neck.

The Magistrate’s eyes widened. “Icha—”

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Ted shoved his fingers into Magistrate’s mouth, accepting the pain as teeth bit into skin.

Cara grabbed the medallion, unhooked the chain, and danced away with the prize.

The fight fled from the Magistrate’s eyes. His jaw slackened. Ted pulled out his hand. The man slumped to the ground and double over screaming, his hands clamped to his ears, finally getting a taste of his own medicine.

Adrenaline fading away, Ted snatched the medallion from Cara and honed in on it with his mind. He felt them, all of them—hundreds of slaves bound by its power.

No. Not the power of the medallion, or the collars. This was deeper, stronger, greater.

Magic able to connect over long distances. To do what should have been impossible. A source of power, of control, of communication.

A portal core. The power to connect different peoples turned into a nexus of evil.

Heat seared through Ted’s veins. An abomination like this couldn't be allowed to stand.

He honed in on the Magistrate and forced him to his knees. Wait for it, Ted messaged.

Nammu grabbed the Magistrate by the throat and lined her dagger up with his temple, pressing its tip against the Armor effect.

Gramok dropped from the ceiling with a cacophony of clanks. "Bloody magical traps," he growled, pulling himself to his feet.

A tingle raced down Ted’s back. There it was, the key to the man’s mind. He seized control, dropped the Armor spell, and pulled out. Now.

"This is for Milo," Nammu snarled, and drove the dagger into his brain.

1,155 XP received!

The dead body crumpled to the floor.

Ted reached down and grabbed the slave collar from the Magistrate's neck. It came away easily now. "Sorry about Milo."

"Don't be. He wouldn't want a mage's pity." She paused over Milo, bowed her head, gritted her teeth, and turned on Ted. She bore down on him, her hand extended. "Hand it over."

“Give me a moment to free them.”

She grabbed the medallion, tried to rip it from his hands. “Don’t. Not yet.”

Ted stared at her. She couldn’t be serious. “You want to use them.”

“I want to end this.”

“You can’t fight slavery with slavery!”

“They're our chance to burn down the whole damned system.” The tip of her dagger suddenly pricked at his gut, pushing the fabric of his robes into him. “Hand it over. Now.”

Cara and Gramok raised their weapons, but Ted shook his head. “Let’s not make any enemies we don’t have to.”

Nammu’s eyes narrowed. “We hired you to do a job. Do it, unless you’d rather make your appointment with the Emperor.”

“We agreed to free slaves, not use them.”

She scoffed. “Outsiders! You think freeing a few slaves will do shit? They’ll be locked up or dead by the end of the week. We need an army, and we need it now.”

Ted looked her in the eyes, stared into all that anger, all that hatred. It was easy to understand. Easy to empathize. Easy to be tempted. “An army of slaves isn’t the way to do this.”

The tip of her dagger pushed a little deeper. “For a donkey, there is no stench. For a donkey, this is no washing with soap.”

The weight on Ted’s shoulders only grew. Why did it always have to be on him? “Cara, Gramok, thoughts?”

Time dragged out. Neither rushed to answer, but Cara broke the silence first. “I get it, Nammu, but this…? No. You’ll find another way. You have to.”

Gramok nodded. “People’s minds are their own. Once you start taking that away, there’s no going back.”

Tension coiled in Ted’s stomach. If that was true— “They’re right, and you know it. Find another way.”

Seconds ticked by like chalk screeching down a blackboard.

What if Nammu was right? What if that was the only way?

Nammu’s point pressed harder.

Oratory skill increased 0 → 1!

“Fine.” She backed away, sheathed her dagger. “Release the slaves. Condemn them to die in an uprising that can’t work.”

Her words struck like daggers, but what was the alternative? Enslaving them all over again?Becoming the enemy? “You made the right call.” The words came out hollow, even to his ears.

He shifted his attention to the medallion and searched for an option to free them all.

Nothing. Nothing at all. He could go through and release them one by one, no doubt, but that would give them even less chance than releasing them all at once. “Let’s get out of here—I’ll figure this damned thing out in the sewers.”

“Wait.” Nammu lifted Milo’s axe from his dead, broken body. “We can’t let them trace him back to the Resistance. Incinerate him.”

Ted's jaw clenched, but damn it, she had a point. He kneeled down by Milo's body, laid his hand upon the dwarf's chest, and drew on his mana. “Enkirtara!”

The inferno consumed Milo’s body, reducing him to nothing more than ash.

Nammu's hand settled upon Ted's shoulder. "Thank you," she said, her voice so quiet he half-suspected he imagined it.

They scurried back down into the secret room in the basement and threw back to the lever, sealing the false wall behind them.

Nammu hesitated, and turned to Ted. "You wanna kill the Emperor, right?"

Ted paused. Orlanda’s face flashed before his eyes and memories of frost exploded in his chest. "Yeah."

She shoved Milo's axe at him. "Here. Take it. Give the fucker Milo's regards."

Ted took the axe, and bowed his head. "Thank you."

"Alright." Nammu nodded to them each in turn. "I've got a revolution to run. Your contact, Ria Siala, is down this tunnel, second right, third left, second left, and then first right. Good luck."

"You too."

Questions nibbled at his gut as she walked away. What if—

No. Freeing the slaves was the right choice.

Ted took a deep breath, stilled his mind, and focused on the medallion's magic. On the raw power it directed, on the collars it held the keys to, on the portal core that held it all together.

Connections and knowledge flooded into his mind. He could reach into the heads of any of the slaves connected to it—control them, speak through them, even kill them with a single thought.

His stomach turned. No one should have that kind of power.

He closed his eyes and immersed himself in the flow of information. Hundreds of mind: all their thoughts, their fears, their anger.

Deeper. He had to go deeper, follow the magic down, beyond the minds it bound.

There. The nexus holding it all together—a portal core. Shit. Killing the Magistrate so quickly might have been a mistake. Without the full access code to the portal, they’d need direct physical access to control it, and no way it wasn’t heavily guarded.

Probing the network, it didn’t feel like they’d need it. The system was supported by the portal core, but existed externally to it. Accessing the system wouldn’t require accessing the core itself.

Good news for once.

Deeper probing revealed a rather less welcome fact: an anti-tamper mechanism, built into the collars. A kill switch. If he messed this up, the newly freed slaves wouldn’t have to worry about surviving an uprising.

Casting his mind along the stream of magic, much like Farsight but not in the physical realm, he followed it back to the source, and a whole new world opened up before him. A plane of existence.

A plane of magic.

Zelnari runes stretched out in chains that split and merged, defining the magic that bound this all together. It was finally starting to make sense.

Portal cores worked across huge distances because they reached out into this other dimension, this realm beyond the physical. Here, Zelnari runes, building blocks of magic, were reality. They defined it, shaped it, gave it meaning. All he had to do to change the magic was rewrite the Zelnari.

No biggie. Just rewrite a hugely complicated, multilayered system created in a dead language that he barely understood, with the knowledge that one wrong move would kill hundreds of slaves.

This was an utter abomination, but the potential was staggering. What else could be achieved this way? No wonder the Destroyer had been so desperate to get his hands on a portal core.

Ted's consciousness focused upon the Zelnari runes directly connected to the medallion and the collars. There were snippets he recognized—Dark magic here, Affect there, Telepathy over there, and so on—but each were only tiny pieces of a much larger puzzle.

His mind raced. Time was running out—it wouldn’t be long before they thought to search the sewers, and he didn't know where to even begin. With the weight of hundreds of lives resting on his shoulders, he needed an expert.

He cast a Telephone spell and connected to the Valbort portal, calling in a favor. Within a few minutes, Runesmith Idonia was connected, and he relayed a telepathic awareness of that other dimension to her as best he could.

Have you seen these conjunctions? Idonia said. The multilayered chains? The precision of the interlocking exchanges and non-linear complex compounds?

I know. That's why I need your help.

You have it. That book you found’s been a myrellium mine, but this? Let’s start over there, with the Telepathy-Portals conjunction.

Under Idonia's direction, they began to dissect the intricate web of runes. They deciphered rune after rune, determining the multilayered meaning of each one. Excitement tingled across Ted's skin—they could do this.

Yet, the mores runes they understood, the more harder Ted’s stomach became. There's a bigger picture here, and I can’t see it. We're trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces.

There was a long pause before Idonia replied. Too many unknowns, too many layers. The errors compound exponentially.

A heavy silence fell between them, and Ted’s stomach churned. Doing nothing wasn’t an option, and time was ticking away. Yet with the lives of so many, he couldn’t afford to mess this up. We need to lower our expectations. Break the connection with the portal stone at the source, collapse the system entirely.

Another pause. If we don't cut the connection as one…

The fail-safe would trigger. A knot twisted in Ted's gut. More like fail-deadly. We’ll do it right.

They pored over the runes, dissecting their individual meanings, slowly grasping the patterns that made up the underlying structure of the magic.

Here, Ted said, highlighting the compound rune trol-(mort-(krin-rain)). Power from a great power source.

This one too, Idonia added, pointing out an identical rune built into another branch of the magic. I don't see any others.

Tension coiled around Ted's chest. This was it—all or nothing. You’re sure?

Silence. The only certainty here was that doing nothing was the wrong call.

It wouldn’t need much, just enough to alter those two links in the chains. He focused in on both runes and channeled two points of mana.

The power surged through him and into the medallion, flowing into that other dimension. There, he wrestled it into place, forcing it to settle next to both the runes. He had to be precise, time them exactly together.

The mana bristled, even this sliver of power straining his control to the limits.

He formed each point of mana into a new rune. Crak, safety. Bracing himself, moving both at once, he slid them in, swapping out trol, replacing power conveyance with safety.

The magic shuddered, shaking Ted's mind and soul. The flow of magic from the portal core slammed into a halt, and the entire chain of magic collapsed in on itself like dominoes.

Tension flooded out of Ted. Thank you. Couldn't have done it without you.

Anytime, Deputy. You've given me much to dwell on.

Idonia’s presence faded away, leaving silence and doubt to claw at his insides.

He gritted his teeth and opened his eyes. He’d given them a chance, that was all anyone could ever do. “It’s done. Let’s move.”