Barely a few seconds after they defeated the giant crab monster, a power card indicator appeared in Blake’s view.

When Blake looked over at the dead body of the giant crab monster, he saw multiple power cards floating on the surface of the water. The majority of these cards had big red circles over them, and as Blake focused on them he saw that each of those cards was owned by someone who participated in the battle.

The same thing had happened when he and Harry defeated the Ultra Rock Crab back at the Whispering Pines Campground. Regular enemies had a chance of dropping power cards, but Level ?? Boss Monsters appeared to have a guaranteed drop for all of the people who participated in the battle, whether or not those people had power cards at all.

Now, how to reach all these cards floating atop the murky water?

Blake was almost out of anima himself, but he still had about fifteen minutes left on his summon for his Crusher Minotaur. So Blake commanded the minotaur to jump into the water and push one of the resinous floating platforms over to the side of the walkway so he and the rest of the survivors could get on.

The minotaur did this, but it looked very awkward doing it. The Crusher Minotaur had nothing to hold on to or get leverage on while it was in the middle of the murky water, aside from the corpse of the giant crab itself. It also clearly wasn’t made for swimming and struggled to move through the water gracefully.

Once the floating resin platform reached the walkway, two or three people loaded themselves onto it and pushed themselves toward the center of the pool. Blake was in the very first group, as he was most keen to get his hands on whatever new card.

Blake hunkered down and balanced using two feet and one hand as the minotaur helped to push them toward the location of the cards. Blake reached out and took his power card. His eyes widened.

The image was of a building with a big red cross painted on the side. It was a facility card that would spawn a Hospital when played.

Blake grinned. This was the bargaining chip he needed to be able to get close to Clay Atlas. If he could tell Clay that he had a hospital card and was willing to trade it for his parents’ and Harry’s freedom, then he might be able to navigate this situation without a fight.

However, exchanging this card for their freedom wouldn’t stop Clay Atlas from treating the people of New Meridia the way he did. He would keep them enslaved through work orders and solidify his own power base by forcing people to give up their power cards under duress.

Blake sent a quick message through to his AI assistant. He asked the assistant whether it was possible to merge a regular power card with a facility card.

There was a pause.

A window appeared, displaying the results of his query, but the cursor was stuck in a dot dot dot blinking motion. Then suddenly the AI assistant’s voice broke through.

‘I honestly don't know,’ the assistant said. ‘I can find information about card synthesis which only allows ability and environment cards to be combined, but there is nothing at all within the system information banks I can access that mentions a Monster Synthesis Lab, or the rules surrounding one. I simply won't know whether it's possible until you try to merge a monster with a facility card. Maybe you should try it out and see if it works?’

Blake smiled to himself. He might be able to save not only his parents and Harry but everyone else in New Meridia from being stuck under Clay Atlas’ dominion.

Samuel received a card called Carapace Armor, which was a suit of armor that would take the form of a rock crab’s carapace. It was still an earth element ability, but provided a toughness ranking that was quite enviable. This was the second evolutionary stage of a card called Chitin Armor.

Kerry had received a powerful card as well called Crushing Grip. It transformed her hands into giant crab-like pincers and increased the crushing pressure they could put on an enemy in battle. This was also an earth element card. It seemed like the type of monster one defeated heavily impacted the type of element that the card was aligned to.

The Crusher Minotaur pushed them back toward the walkway so the next ground of survivors could come over and collect their cards.

Blake stepped off onto the concrete platform with the hospital card weighing heavily on his mind, and in his pocket.

There was a lingering question in his mind that needed to be explored. What would happen if he merged a monster card with a facility card?

One of his monsters was already gargantuan in size, the Meteor Colossus. Its size was what gave it such an advantage in battle. What would happen if Blake combined his Meteor Colossus with a Hospital card?

He was also tempted to fuse some of his other cards.

Though amazing, the Fire Drake had some serious limitations. It could fly, but it lacked one of the hallmarks of what a dragon should be able to do.

A dragon should be able to breathe fire. It had claws and teeth and armored scales to protect it, but it was a Fire Drake. It should be able to breathe fire. The most logical monster to combine the Fire Drake with would be the Pyrestalker.

From what Blake understood about the monster merging process, each of the attributes that had a potential to be taken on by the merged monster also had a chance to not be integrated into the monster. So, if the flight attribute lined up with the fiery claws attribute, then it was possible that fiery claws might override flight.

Blake wondered if there was any way to influence attributes and choose which ones were integrated into the new monster or not, and his AI assistant showed a notification as though it was listening to his thoughts.

‘Each new rank of your monster lab will allow you to choose one attribute that you absolutely want integrated into the new monster that you create. For example, at Monster Synthesis Lab Rank 2, you can set one attribute out of the available four. At Rank 3 you can lock in two attributes. This increases one attribute per rank until you reach Rank 5 in the lab. It looks like you have lots of credits available to you, and now that you're a Rank 3 challenger you should be able to unlock the next rank of your lab.’

Blake's eyes lit up. He had plenty of credits sitting in his account and this would be a fantastic way to spend them.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

By the time the rest of the survivors had collected their cards, a plan was coming together.

Samuel got everyone up to date with all the conversations they'd had so far and made it plain to everyone what his intentions were.

“You all know what people are saying about New Meridia out there in the Wilds,” Samuel said. “Everything that we've heard from Blake about what it's actually like living in that city has both confirmed things that we were terrified of and given us even more reason to be afraid of Clay Atlas and his grip on the city.”

Blake was starting to think that Samuel Jackson, the old man, was not just an old man wandering the wilds. He spoke with the gravitas of a leader, and all of the survivors looked up to him like one.

“You're more than what you've said you are, aren’t you Samuel?” Blake asked.

Samuel smiled knowingly. “I am exactly what I've said. I'm an old man looking for his son, but I am also the leader of a collective that represents all of the little people out there in the monster-infested Wilds who look up at the big city and see nothing but a boot waiting to crush us all.”

David stepped forward and spoke, “And the boot will come if we let it keep gaining strength.”

“Do you think you could do a better job of running the city?” Blake asked, directing the question at Samuel.

“You may not recognize me, but I know exactly who you are, Blake Thornwood. You left Cedar Creek the moment you became a man, and you probably didn't take notice of who the Mayor of the town was. But you're looking at him right now. Samuel Jackson, Mayor of Cedar Creek, and a friend of your parents.”

Everything fell into place then. Blake did remember the older man with the gray hair who used to come into his parents’ store for his daily paper, and his milk, eggs, and bread. Samuel didn’t have the beard back then that he did now.

“Why didn't you tell me all of this after I defeated Gorgos? Why did you wait until now?” Blake asked.

“You destroyed a monster that almost killed my entire group single handedly. You summoned a flaming stone giant. You were here on a work order from Clay Atlas, which means that somehow he knew that my son's expedition was missing.”

After a breath, Samuel continued, “I needed to know whether I could trust what you were saying was true or not. Now, I believe it's true. I believe that you do want to do what's best for the people of New Meridia.”

“I do,” Blake said with conviction.

“Do you honestly think that you have a chance of standing up against Clay Atlas?” Samuel asked.

“Nobody knows exactly what powers Clay Atlas has, aside from the fact that he is a City Lord,” Blake said, even though it wasn’t exactly the truth. He’d seen the stone knight Clay summoned back in the tower, but he wanted to know what these people knew. “If I challenge him, I’ll be going into the fight completely blind, unless any of you have any insight about his powers.”

Sarah lifted her hand and cleared her throat. “This is just second hand knowledge I heard from someone who stumbled across Clay after everything started. They said that Clay just showed up one day in the middle of their commune. They were a bunch of hippies all living off the grid, and this guy just randomly shows up in the middle of their community garden. The moment any of them got close to him, the system spread into them.”

“We absolutely know for sure that the system spreads from person to person when they come into contact with someone who’s already a part of the system,” Samuel said. “Nobody really knows exactly what the system is yet, but it spreads like a virus, and as far as we know there is nothing anyone can do except become infected by it.”

“Yeah that makes a lot of sense,” Blake said. “But it can happen by finding cards, too. When the system spread to me, it was because I came into contact with a power card.”

Sarah continued. “So this guy, Clay Atlas, just randomly shows up in my friend’s community garden, and then the system spreads to all of them. Power cards started appearing all over the place near them, and it was all good until Clay Atlas tried to convince some of the people to pledge their allegiance to him. He has some kind of power that gives him the ability to strengthen anyone who is loyal to him. He arrived as a Rank ?? Challenger, but he soon found a way to suppress that information from appearing when he was in the presence of other Challengers.”

Blake couldn’t recall seeing anyone who didn’t have a rank listed. That was until he realized that Clay Atlas himself never had any information listed for him when he had met him in person in Atlas Tower.

Blake had been too intimidated by the City Lord and the situation that he hadn’t even noticed.

“Clay is the one in charge of handing out ranks, he could easily just give a higher rank to someone who was loyal to him,” said Blake.

Sarah nodded. “From what we know, Clay has a history of giving higher ranks to people who are loyal to him, and then finding a way to take power cards from anyone who steps out of line.”

“As far as we know, there is no way to remove a rank level once someone has achieved it,” Samuel said. “Once you’re Rank 3 or Rank 4, you can’t be demoted back down to a lower ranking, but you may be in a situation where you lose the power cards that let you keep that ranking, so effectively you look stronger than you actually are.”

“But what about Clay’s powers?” Blake asked. “Do you know anything about the types of abilities that Clay has?”

“The only thing we know is that the majority of his powers are earth element based,” Sarah said.

“When I was there with him in the tower—” Blake began, but Samuel cut him off.

“Wait, you’ve actually stood in the presence of Clay Atlas?” Samuel asked.

The change in attitude of the gathered survivors from jovial to wary was instantaneous. Regardless of everything they had been through with Blake, the fact that Blake had been in the presence of Clay Atlas made them all take a step back.

“Hey, you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s quite likely that all of you are going to be called to meet him as well. The reason he wanted to meet me is that I was a Rank 1 challenger when I defeated a Level ?? Boss monster, which should have been far beyond my abilities. You’ve all done the same thing right here and received what it looks like as incredibly powerful cards beyond your current rank status. He just wanted to know how it was possible that a Rank 1 challenger could take down such a powerful enemy.”

“And he still made you go through the examination process?” Samuel asked.

“Yes, I got the feeling that he wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a fluke, and that I actually had some kind of talent or power that just hadn’t been recognized yet.”

“Well, you’ve certainly proven that to us. So Clay Atlas is real, then. He’s not just some projection of the system?” David asked.

“That’s the rumor,” Sarah said.

“I honestly couldn’t tell you for sure,” Blake said. “But he looked real to me. He played a power card just like a challenger would-”

“What kind of power card?” Samuel asked.

“It was some kind of card that summoned a stone suit of armor with a massive sword and shield.”

Everybody’s eyes went wide.

“He can’t just be a projection of the system if he has power cards that he can play,” David said. “Until now we just thought it was a rumor that he had power cards at all, but if you’ve seen him play one, then he is a Challenger just like us.”

“I think that Clay Atlas had a super rare card that let him spawn an entire city,” Blake said. “From what I’ve heard from people within New Meridia, Clay’s power grows with the number of citizens the city has. But the more citizens he has, the more problems there are, the more maintenance that needs to be done, and the more upgrades he needs to secure to be able to take care of his people.”

“So Clay is trapped within the system, just as we all are. But he is in a position where he can gather power around him and hand power out to those loyal to him. We must scramble to get the bare minimum to survive, and Clay gets to hand out rankings and positions of power for what? Because he was lucky enough to get the right card?”

Suddenly Blake had a thought, and it was a crazy thought that really made a strange kind of sense now that all the pieces were starting to come together.

“Back when all of this first started happening, the system spread from multiple different places around the globe, right?” Blake asked.

The group all shared looks and nodded their heads.

“Do you remember how many places the news identified as the initial locations of the spread? Because I think it was seven. I think they traced it back to seven individual locations where the systems started to spread.”

“That sounds about right,” David said, nodding slowly.

“I trust what David remembers. He tracks all of this stuff for us,” Samuel said.

“When I was meeting face-to-face with Clay Atlas he said that there would be seven hub cities of new humanity. New Meridia is one of those places. I have a sneaking suspicion that hub cities appeared within the vicinity of those initial places where the system began spreading. You said that your friends in the commune thought Clay Atlas just appeared out of nowhere?”

Sarah nodded. “That’s what they said. Well, not just appeared, but it was almost like he crawled out of a massive crack in the earth. Like there was a fault line in the middle of the commune’s community garden that they had never known about that just split open to let him crawl out.”

Everything Blake was hearing was leading toward one singular crazy impossible explanation.

“What if Clay Atlas and the other six who also spawned hub cities didn't come from our world at all?”