Rupert looked around at the torch-lit catacombs and at the gathered angels and at distrusting locals. Everyone on team “hated-winged-ones” seemed fine except for Jason who winced when he moved.

“Apprenticeship Catacombs,” Beyul offered.

Rupert rubbed at the spot where Jason had landed on his head. He half expected there to be a lump or something.

The spot was tender, and, when touched, the place invoked a vivid memory of the pain, the darkness, the Beyul messages.

He took his hand away and then touched the spot again.

Again the spot brought forth the memory of those few instants.

“Receiving a boot to the head isn’t exactly the sort of thing to pat yourself over,” Integrity said.

Rupert looked up at her offered hand. “This body has a strange sense for muscle memory.” He took her hand and got to his feet.

She looked over to the others talking with Jason. Then wearing a sly smile, she lowered her voice. “How so?”

Rupert opened his mouth.

But Integrity signaled for him to whisper.

Rupert glanced at the grumbling crowd which was beginning to disperse and nodded. “Touching the spot where —” he choked when he attempted to speak Jason’s name. He pointed to Jason. “— where he landed on my head …” He focused his eyes back into the present and found them resting upon the sight of Integrity’s breasts. He shook his head afraid to ask how long he had been staring.

Then he closed his eyes — the effect, whatever it was, was getting worse. This wasn’t hormones, after all, she was a she and thus not interesting. Jason, on the other hand, played for the other team making it impolite to express an interest in his body.

But this was a disconnect between what he was thinking and what he was seeing. Whenever he was thinking or creating, he stopped seeing the world about him. And it was taking him longer and longer to realize what was happening.

He frowned.

“Touching the spot triggers a memory of the impact. Everything. What I heard; what I saw; what I felt. Even Beyul messages. It’s quite vivid.”

His fingers itched. Some part of his soul was cracking. Here in Beyul, he was out of the House, and he had put neither notes to paper nor fingers to a keyboard in hours. He had experienced new things and wanted to — no, needed to — record the memories in song.

If Integrity noticed his blank-eyed impropriety, she gave no sign. Instead, she smirked and walked toward the other angels.

“Beyul, can I have a keyboard and music paper and pen?”

“Not recommended at this time.”

Rupert closed his eyes. At least it hadn’t been an absolute rejection. And, unlike the others, Beyul at least sometimes talked to him.

Then he heard another of his songs.

Beyul Corporation had taken him and some visual artists to one of the few surviving deciduous groves. Walking amongst the trees, listening to the wind rustling the leaves, feeling the bark and soil, and studying the insects had inspired several songs.

Now he heard the one incomplete snatch of music he wrote that day. From above. Someone was moving about in the chapel over their heads. The boots striking the floor echoed the bass line of the notes on that odd scrap of paper.

He looked up.

“Warning. Inbound Omicron Tier Threat. Omni —”

Rupert ignored the rest of what Beyul had to say. He looked to Integrity, Jason, and the others.

Somehow Jason had kicked Rupert several feet away from where the fellow angel crashed. And the others were in now gathered in the hollow — the missing center — of the spiral stairs coming down from the chapel. He needed to get the rest of them to move.

Integrity casually walked over to Jason, and, as if Jason was her proprietary property, she squeezed the injury spot on Jason’s wing.

The young angel gasped and fell to his knees.

Integrity looked down at him. “The bone seems mended,” she said briskly, yet innocently. “Does it still hurt?”

He glowered up at her and yanked his wing out of her grasp. “Not until you grab …” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You know something.”

Rupert raised his voice. “Yes. We need to move. The threat up there is looking to come down here.”

Jason looked up at the ceiling.

Powdered stone filtered down along with the grating sound of metal scraping against stone — heavy metal object scraping on stone.

“Get me up,” Jason snapped. “Move, move, move.”

Integrity and Chase each grabbed an arm and dragged Jason toward the retreating crowd.

Cornelia and Sincerity ran past Rupert.

Rupert stared at the floor.

Circles. The hollow of the stairs was defined by one engraved circle with a radius of about a yard. The descending stairs wound around and spilled out into another circle — its engraved circumference was nearly a yard away from the inner circle.

Rupert took a few steps back.

Another circle with its arc another yard from the prior.

He turned and followed the retreating refugees.

There were arcs of a total of five circles. Each arc engraved into the smooth rock floor of the catacombs about a yard from the one prior.

He stepped across the last arc, and the music changed. He took a step closer to the stair, and the song changed back. He tried straddling the line, and no song played.

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A shaft of light suddenly shone down upon the innermost circle.

Rupert stepped back outside the last circle. He turned and followed the retreating group walking into the dark minor chords of a song he wrote after watching a silent video about time traveling zombie hunters racing against a clock to stop the plague.

Why this song?

He needed to decide soon if he should tell the others of his connection to the game, should tell them about the message, should tell them of the proprietary music he needed to upload, should tell them about Beyul.

Something rattled the ground beneath his feet.

Rupert turned back to see a large man crouched in the innermost engraved circle.

The huge hulking human stood. Mountains of muscle moved like tectonic plates rearranging a planet. Other than a collar, the man wore straps around his upper arms, his forearms, his thighs, his calves, and zigzagging around his chest. Thin, liquid-filled tubes connected the collar to the various straps. A thin leather leash connected him to someone hidden above the line of the catacombs’ ceiling. And the features of the man’s face was buried beneath a black leather hood which looked straight out of a sex-toy catalog. On his chest and on his leather hood, the Greek symbol omicron was emblazoned.

“Omni,” Beyul needlessly provided.

Rupert nodded an acknowledgment. “Can I turn off the angel wings?”

Beyul’s song changed as if the AI’s attention had been dragged elsewhere, but Rupert did feel shorter.

Apparently having heard Rupert’s voice, Omni immediately focused on him and stormed toward the edge of the last circle. The seven-foot-tall man stopped — clearly staying inside the circle. “Where are they?” The voice rumbled through the catacombs sounding much like an audio recording of an avalanche. “Where are those evil destroyers?”

But Omni didn’t look directly at Rupert — like the few blind people Rupert had interacted with — Omni looking slightly to one side, missing the indications for eye contact.

Omni lowered his voice to whispering mumble. “It is all they know — destroying, killing, torturing, enslaving. No matter the honeyed words they use. They will never let you be free. Surrender them.”

Rupert stared at the eyes now deprived of their color by the retreating light.

But Omni’s eyes were blank as if someone had stripped away the life from behind them. The man’s soul glowed much like a retro lava lamp with large heated globules rising up from the man’s slabs of abdominal muscle flatting before reaching the top of his skull and sinking languidly at first and then falling more rapidly to splatter about inside the man’s pelvis. Some of the soul particles floated out and down his arms and legs only to drift back toward the cycle, the dance, of soul fragments.

The other souls Rupert had seen were constant glows about the edges of the other humans.

Tiny droplets of color entered the soul where the thin needles pierced Omni’s body beneath the leather harness straps, leather bracers, leather manacles, leather collar. While the colored droplets dispersed into thin wisps of color, each soul fragment which touched those droplets broke into two smaller globs of the soul.

“And what have you done to Omni?” Rupert whispered. “You are breaking apart his soul. You are destroying, torturing, enslaving. You are no better.” An odd thought struck Rupert. “Are you jealous that someone else is better at evil than you?”

Anger contorted the face beneath the black leather mask as the blank eyes met Ruperts. “The Alliance is not evil. The Alliance does what is necessary. The Alliance has defended the city, has provided food, clothing, shelter, water to those to those who have been rendered homeless, has offered medical assistance and medicines to those attacked by the invaders. We aren’t the villains. We are the bloodied and injured and wounded heroes who hold the line and who hold the city together.”

A massive hand wrapped itself in the loose material of the heavy workman’s clothes that Rupert was wearing before he entered the game.

He hadn’t seen Omni so much as twitch, but he spared a glance at the floor. Rupert at some point had approached the circle, and he had remained outside the last circle etched into the floor. More, the quick look told him that Omni’s hand which grabbed him had the usual expected soul aura. Tiny flares of light sparked off of the edge of the manacle on Omni’s wrist.

So, Rupert thought, the circle is a barrier of some kind — just not impregnable.

Beyul added, “Skill Point Earned: ‘Thin Red Line’.”

Omni moved slowly, deliberately, lifting Rupert with one steady and massive arm.

“Change,” Rupert hissed to Beyul.

Then Rupert was in a bearhug with his arms pinned to his sides — not crushing but absolutely secure.

“Unable to change. Inadequate room to complete command.”

Omni turned swinging Rupert across into the circle and started toward the stairs. “And I can prove it to you.”

The bounding steps of Omni rang off the close walls like a slow drum beat.

“Rewind,” Rupert ordered Beyul.

Once in the hollow of the stairs, Omni hopped. But the hop was powerful enough to rocket them straight up and into the mausoleum, or rather the demolished ruins of the mausoleum.

What was probably the remains of an armored personnel carrier was a thin plating against the accumulated stones of every tomb, every support, every wall between the exterior and the back wall of the mausoleum. The air was thick with the white-gray haze of powdered stone.

Rupert held his breath. Somewhen he had learned stone particles would rip apart his lungs — slowly suffocating him and eventually killing him.

Omni took bounding strides as he ran for the entrance.

Even beyond the shattered front wall, the cloud of stone granules drifted close to the ground slowly thinning.

Omni took a step and stomped down hard enough to send the pair flying over the powdered stone clouds.

Rupert snorted to clear his nose before he drew in a breath and then breathed as shallowly as he could. “Rewind,” he pleaded with Beyul.

Omni landed near a group of soldiers. “One to be tagged.” Something had changed in Omni’s voice.

Facing Omni, Rupert didn’t get a chance to see who Omni was talking to or what actions being ‘tagged’ would entail. But moments later he felt something cold wrapped around his neck — not tight enough to strangle, but tight enough to make itself known. He heard a click, and then something jabbed itself into his neck.

He studied Omni’s eyes.

The dark eyes again had a life to them. Whoever had taken over Omni had released the man. And despite being free of the absolute control the other had over him, Omni was following through with the controller’s orders.

“Paralytic is in,” a voice behind him said.

The thing around his neck beeped.

“And it’s active,” the same voice said. “He ain’t going nowhere.”

Rupert mentally jabbed at the Beyal interface pieces which remained visible.

Information slid in and out of usability.

“Fast Paralytic. As one of the three standard parts of surgical anesthesia, a paralytic agent keeps the patient from moving thus allowing the surgeons to perform delicate operations without fear of the sudden muscle spasms creating potentially life-threatening ‘mistakes.’ Paralytic agents often paralyze the lungs stopping breathing which can potentially cause death due to affixation.

“Musician’s Administrative Override Standing By …”

“Activate override,” Rupert mentally yelled at Beyul. “Activate override.”

“Thank you, corpsman,” Omni rumbled and released the bear hug. He didn’t let Rupert fall — taking another fist full of Rupert’s workman uniform. “Bag him for express delivery.”

Dangling limply from Omni’s fist, Rupert saw injured soldiers being loaded into ambulances. And, he knew that the wounds were the result of Jason’s and the other angels’ swords.

Something heavy, cold, and unyielding was pressed against Rupert’s back. Straps were pulled around his chest and cinched tight enough to bite into his flesh.

Omni turned Rupert so that Rupert looked up at the stars.

Then a breathing mask was placed over his mouth and nose, and oxygen was pumped into his lungs.

“External Breathing Apparatus. These devices are used to breathe for the surgical patient while their lungs would otherwise be paralyzed by the paralytic agent given as part of the surgical anesthesia. Oxygen saturation is often measured to determine the level of external assistance needed.”

“Wait. They are going to operate on me?” Rupert demanded of Beyul.

Omni flipped Rupert around and grabbed ahold on something on Rupert’s back.

Rupert stared at the ground feeling like a piece of luggage.

“Give him the rest of it,” Omni said.

“Hypnotic is in. Give it a few seconds.”

“Hypnotic agents are one of the three parts of the standard surgical anesthesia, and they are responsible for putting the patient to sleep for the duration of the operation. Most hypnotic agents are quickly metabolized by the body and allow the patient to wake within seconds after the constant injection has stopped. Longer-acting hypnotics require larger doses and have substantial onset times.”

Without waiting, Omni crouched and leaped for the sky.

Rupert watched the ground fall away. He struggled to stay awake. The effort lasted a second or two and then nothing.