Chapter 9.

The meeting with the Party lasted two hours, and it was mostly boring, but eventually everyone was on the same page. The adults departed to do some shopping – or rummaging through their basements, attics, and garages. The teenagers remained behind to explore their new abilities in the privacy of the woods behind Eli’s house.

John Junior went with his father, the two tinkerers putting their minds together to figure out how their class worked, but of the teens, everyone else was eager to explore their system-granted abilities.

Peter, the thirteen year old warrior, dueled with Maia, the knight who was Eli’s classmate, under the watchful eyes of Eli’s mother, Matilda “Call me Mattie,” who tried to teach them Tai Chi. Surprisingly, they all managed to actually move their internal energy like she said they should be able to.

Internal energy was definitely a thing that all of the martial members noticed. The system called it Stamina. They also lacked Mana.

Fortunately they had Gabri to explain the difference.

“Stamina is lifebound Mana. It’s not the same thing, you have much less of it than a true mage. But what you do have is easier to use. But less versatile. Like a club versus a scalpel, you can smash and smash, but a mage can be precise. Eventually, at least. Low level magic is so very … brutal. It’s why I prefer Scholars as contractors,” the faerie said, floating about in his little toga.

“I have Stamina on my menu too,” Luke pointed out.

“Of course. But you have much less stamina than a warrior. The system doesn’t tell you that since you it defaults to one hundred at level one, whereas mana is a fixed unit. That’s because mana can be measured empirically, whereas high level warriors’ Stamina can only be measured by the system, and it prefers to keep those measurements...confidential, shall we say? If a mage ever ran out of Mana and Stamina at the same time, they’d be dead. One or the other is just very uncomfortable,” the fae said, picking his nose. “But if you’re running out of Mana and Stamina at the same time, you have bigger problems. Like the monster that’s tearing through your party and pushing you into your final reserves.”

“Right, thanks Gabri,” Eli said.

“Anytime, loser,” the faerie said. “Hah! Take that.”

Eli wisely decided to ignore the remark, which caused the faerie to frown intensely and go back to browsing Eli’s phone. The surefire insult he’d researched had somehow completely missed its mark, and he had to figure out why.

~~~~~~~

Miguel Phelps drank more coffee than he’d ever consumed before in his life. He’d broken his opsec rules and brought a team of webdevs into his circle, explaining that he was establishing a website for those awakening from the temporary comas to connect with. He was using his cousin, rather than the Runekeeper, as a source for the images of the kid’s interface. The images had been carefully edited to preserve the kid’s identity, of course, but the style of the system was easy to duplicate by the graphic artist he brought in.

After that, it was almost as easy as establishing a role playing forum for table-top or online games. After a few hours, he had a working prototype, and he pushed it live shortly after that. He’d test it live.

Given his background, he was a little concerned about this website’s potential for abuse, and he quickly began pulling in some of his friends for moderation, even as he began spreading the words through less conventional information distribution networks about the website’s existence.

He received his first takedown notification within two hours of posting it live. Fortunately for him, the government had no jurisdiction in the locality where the server was hosted, and he sent them a flat “Screw you” in response.

Unless he was distributing drugs or engaging in certain other illegal activities, he was protected by the First Amendment and its equivalents in every jurisdiction that mattered. Including the ones which hosted his server.

He watched as a few users began slowly signing up for it.

Then it went viral as the people who had been verified as having been released from the hospital after suffering a ‘feinting spell’ caused by the meteorites began confirming that it matched the format of the system in their heads.

The servers were overloaded swiftly.

Swallowing, Miguel began purchasing more processing power from the cloud. Within hours, he was receiving buyout offers from established social media corporations. He ignored those, despite the numbers attached to those numbers.

Then he received an offer that he couldn’t ignore.

Because it didn’t come from the computer.

“Hello, Miguel Phelps,” a voice said behind him. Miguel turned, and he found three men in black suits standing behind him. “Let’s go have a chat, shall we?”

They didn’t stop him from flipping the switch that turned all of the hardrives in the house into fancy paperweights, but they really were just there to talk. They didn’t care about the website. They had known that something like that was inevitable as soon as the first ‘victims’ awoke and began talking about systems in their heads.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

They wanted to know about Erandius. And the dungeons. And they wanted to know how he knew about those things, since they knew for certain that his cousin did not.

Fortunately, the hydra that was TitanSystem.app could survive Miguel Phelps being taken in for questioning at this point. Indeed, it did.

And also fortunately, Miguel survived his interrogation to claim his ownership of the monster that he created. But not for an entire week, which is how long it took for the interrogators to get Eli’s name out of the man. By that time, the boy was already in the dungeon.

And out of their reach completely.

~~~~~~~

Erandius looked down at the world that he would break himself defending, if it came to that.

He sighed, knowing that it was impossible. Even though he did his best to defeat the Antithesis in orbit, it always made landfall. And from there, the endless swarms which devoured all life.

There was a secret that he knew, as one of the ancient Titans. A terrible secret about the Antithesis and it’s purpose. And that terrible secret was as simple as it was horrendous.

There was no purpose to the devastation that the Antithesis left behind.

It was enough, sometimes, to break through the ennui of showing up to defend a world, only to find that someone had beaten him to it and the system was already in place, and the population raised to a level well prepared to defend themselves. It would take some argument, but he would eventually step aside and let the younger races prove their valor, remaining just out of sight in case the world needed the intervention of the Titans.

Lately, the younger races had proven that they were growing strong indeed.

It had been so long since Erandius had last spoken with another of his kind that he sometimes questioned if he was the last of the originals left. There would be duplicates, of course. Every ship manned by the lesser races carried copies of the original Titan crew. But the younger races took pride in their ability to allow the Titans their rest.

He understood their dedication, but although it was tempting, sometimes, to go into an abandoned star system and simply … go to sleep and not wake up … he had a duty.

Erandius thought of the child who had contacted him, and he steeled himself, and he felt validated for every century that he had put off powering down his systems. A child, a distant cousin of his own people perhaps, born on the same world as Erandius and the other Titans.

He had a purpose once more. And that purpose was to protect Earth a second time.

Even as he monitored the primitive information networks and realized that many of the people dwelling on the surface wouldn’t enjoy the salvation that he offered, he knew that they would take it in the final hour, when the Antithesis arrived and the realization that something Antithetical to their very nature was arriving.

Because where Erandius and the Arcadia brought salvation in the form of the power to defend oneself, the Antithesis brought with it only death. Waves and waves of death, of the dead that it had claimed over eons of its implacable march forward.

He glanced at the time until the Antithesis’s arrival, and he examined the schedule for the system. He recalled the initial distrust that his own people had faced in entrusting their fates to the system that they themselves had designed. Would sixty-eight thousand years of evolution make much difference in that regard? Should he do something to convince them to trust their fates to the system?

He frowned and drank his stimulant drink as he continued to think, watching a man speak in a language he couldn’t understand as words he couldn’t read flickered by him; a two-dimensional image with the logo of CNN in one corner of the screen. A lot of people on the surface were watching this man speak, and he was trying to learn the language, but like the last time, there were so many languages.

He frowned, and with a sigh, he decided that was something he’d have to do something about.

“Arcadia, activate the Language of the Birds Protocol,” he said.

“Yes, Erandius,” the ship answered.

He watched as the man speaking suddenly paused and began speaking in the language of the titans. He frowned, then apologized in his native tongue for the slip and resumed speaking in English.

Erandius smiled. He’d known all along that this man had a system, but it was amusing to see the language slip, and the effort that the man had to put into speaking the language he’d been born into after the system had updated the region of his brain responsible for language. It would take a while for the process to complete, and until it fully differentiated, a lot of people would find themselves slipping in and out of the ancient tongue.

It felt good for Erandius to hear his mother tongue spoken by one of his cousins. He allowed himself a single moment of simple pleasure, replaying the slip.

“The President of the United States issued a statement that there is no indication that the incapacitation—” that was the extent of the slip, and it didn’t translate perfectly into the ancient tongue. More like “The leader of the unified faction,” while the rest of the message was pretty congruous with his own understanding.

He sighed. Language was such a frustrating barrier, he thought. So many races who hated the Titans because of simple misunderstandings that had taken generations to correct. Once the Antithesis arrived, of course, things were different.

But a part of Erandius still questioned. Would the younger races fear him so greatly if they’d only learned to listen to him sooner? Would they still turn him away from the fight against the Antithesis if they knew what motivated him?

He thought of the child who the fey had put him in contact with, this Eli Mathews. And he thought of another boy, sixty-eight thousand years dead.

He sighed and took another sip of his stimulant drink.

It was black. It tasted bitter. It reminded him of home.

It was the same drink that the replicator had been making for him for sixty eight thousand years, and he still drank twelve of them every day, just like he used to.

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