March had been a busy boy, which was cause for concern. He had taken liberties. One of those liberties had been to direct the nanite spiders at Crystal Lake Temple up to the tip of the highest temple, where they were to burrow in and wait for a signal. He had done this without telling Maya or Perry, simply as a matter of course. The ‘spiders’ were tiny and blind, but they could receive radio. That he’d done this two weeks ago and never told anyone was bad enough, but he’d also strewn a full gram of nanites all over the Cicada Temple, some of them as simple listeners and others as the microscopic spiders. When the time came, they would be able to make contact, and more importantly, listen in.
“It seemed prudent at the time, sir,” said Marchand.
“How’d you have control of the nanites?” asked Maya.
“After some extensive negotiations, I was able to convince them that I was working in the best interests with regards to your defense,” said Marchand.
“You were spending power on this?” asked Perry.
“Yes, sir, until the point you introduced stringent mode,” said Marchand.
“I mean, it does seem prudent,” said Maya.
“It does,” said Perry. “But March doing things on his own … I can’t say I like it.”
“No, I suspected you might not, sir,” said Marchand.
Perry frowned, but he didn’t overrule it. If this was the result of March taking initiative, he would allow it, especially if there wasn’t time for discussion. The nanites now littered around Cicada Temple had been spread during the fight that Perry and Maya had narrowly escaped from, and it was March’s opinion that a number of the tiny spiders would now be riding Xiyan — which meant that he would be able to sense her when she appeared, if not necessarily track her across the Great Arc.
Maya had gotten through becoming a werewolf with Perry’s help. He had a mild expectation that they would have sex, but it hadn’t happened, and he thought that was probably for the best. Part of that had been because he’d been armored. There were a few times Maya’s aggression had seemed to take on a different tone, but he was encased in metal. It hadn’t helped his perception of things that she was wearing what was effectively a nanite bikini. By all rights she should have been emaciated, but she hadn’t been idle while locked up, and energy recycling or internal alchemy or whatever it was had left her lean and muscular.
He wouldn’t admit to finding her attractive though. That seemed like a good way to get punched in the mouth. Besides, the last time he’d let his horniness get the better of him, he’d gotten stabbed in the stomach.
“Your biopunk modifications made it through fine?” asked Perry. “Going wolf and back, it didn’t do a factory reset?”
“Nah,” said Maya. “I think … maybe it was the other way around?”
“Which would be?” asked Perry.
“I think it made me stronger, as a wolf,” said Maya. “Not sure though. I wasn’t really in my right mind. It was cool, right, blasting myself in the head with the last little scrap of stored moonlight?”
“I thought you might choke yourself out with the stock,” said Perry.
“Nah,” said Maya. She looked down at the bikini again. “I’m really going to need to find some clothes.”
“Or use the dark arts of wearing something skimpy,” said Perry. “Now that you have your wits about you, we should take off.” He looked at the house. There had been no sign of Xiyan since cutting through the door, but she surely knew where this place was. Perry was relieved that they hadn’t been ambushed while Maya was going through the rage-monster phase of becoming a werewolf, though she had drawn blood from the grandmaster. Maybe there was something to the idea that she was stronger as a wolf because of the modifications that had been made to her.
“So how do I do the thing?” asked Maya, looking down at her body. “Spread this out to cover more than just the bits?”
“It happens naturally,” said Perry. “You just have to pour out some energy to accelerate it. And since you can charge up from sunlight, you should have an easier time of it. Draw in the energy from the sun, the moon, wherever, and vent it out.”
Maya tried, but to no obvious result.
“It works best on obvious problems, stains and frayed edges, little dents and nicks,” said Perry. He gestured to his chest, which had been gouged by her claws, and once, in the place where she’d bitten him hard enough to leave a dent. Going half-wolf was clearly possible, but he hadn’t managed it since the night he was turned. Having claws on demand seemed like it might come in handy, especially if there wasn’t the attendant lack of control. He’d already partly repaired the damage she’d done.
“But not the core?” asked Maya.
“No, not the core,” said Perry. He placed an armored hand over it. “I’m not sure why.”
“I mean, it’s obvious, right?” asked Maya.
“Obvious how?” asked Perry. “What are you thinking?”
“It’s magic,” said Maya with a shrug.
“That’s not really helpful,” said Perry. “I mean, of course the repair thing is magic, if you want to call it that, but —”
“No,” said Maya with a sigh. “The reactor.”
Perry stared at her. “I was just about to say that there’s no way that’s right, but I don’t know enough about microfusion reactors to dispute it. March?”
“Yes, sir?” asked Marchand.
“The microfusion reactor takes special materials, right?” asked Perry. “And … our timelines split off from each other around when Napoleon was stomping through France or whatever, which means the terminology is different, but …”
“You wish to know whether the microfusion reactor is magic, sir?” asked March. His voice was dripping with scorn.
“No, I want to know if it’s … if there’s some way that,” Perry faltered. “If it’s anomalous, the material.”
“I can provide you with several Gratbook pages to peruse, sir,” said Marchand. “A quick search of them shows that neither ‘anomaly’ nor ‘magic’ are terms that make an appearance.” He was incredibly snide as he said this.
“Okay, but in the historical record, is there anything?” asked Perry. “Some miracle material, something that people have argued over, something that doesn’t fit within the Standard Model?”
“I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with the Standard Model,” said Marchand.
Perry sighed. Trying to talk to Marchand about any field whose terminology was solidified after Napoleon was very often a pain. It had taken months to get his vocabulary updated with the original Earth’s terms, and for the more complicated things, Perry wasn’t entirely sure that his word replacements were correct. Of course, Perry wasn’t an engineer, scientist, or computer guy, so it largely didn’t matter.
“Does this need to be done now?” asked Maya.
“If the reason the core can’t be fixed is because it’s magic, I need to know,” said Perry.
March responded by giving them three paragraphs of technobabble, all ‘accelerator injector array’ and ‘tertiary hull materials’ and ‘thermionic conversion balancing’. This was accompanied, for Perry, by what felt like a flurry of nicely animated diagrams. None of it felt all that meaningful. If it was magic, then Richter’s people didn’t know it was magic, and Perry didn’t have the technical expertise to figure it out from comparison to his own world. All in all, it was just a guess from Maya, but it was one that sounded like it was worth investigating to Perry when he had more time and wasn’t being hunted by an assassin.
After another scouting run by the drone, which was pushed to its vertical limits, they set off, Maya in her black bikini and Perry in his full blue armor. They probably looked ridiculous walking together like that.
“Sorry for turning you into a werewolf,” said Maya as they walked.
“Yeah,” said Perry. “Sorry for standing back and deciding that maybe it was fine if they killed you.”
“Sorry for instigating the fight,” said Maya.
Perry was fine leaving it at that. They weren’t okay with each other, not really, but they only had to be okay enough to work together as a team, or at least not get in each other’s way.
“If Xiyan weren’t here, would that whole thing have been enough for you to kill me?” asked Maya.
“Yeah,” said Perry. “Probably. Although …”
“Go on,” said Maya.
“Xiyan isn’t just awful, she made me recalibrate,” said Perry. “You started this whole thing saying that thresholders were always some kind of asshole, and maybe you were more right than I’d thought. My last world, Cosme was more or less a decent enough guy, not that different from me. But the worlds before that, I was attacked out of nowhere, or at least had someone who was just starting from the premise that we were destined to fight each other. So when I met you, I thought ‘oh, maybe this woman is like Cosme, maybe I can at least understand her thought processes, even if she’s bloodthirsty’. But now I’m back to thinking that the average thresholder I’ll run into deserves a bullet. I don’t know.”
“You think I’m bloodthirsty?” asked Maya. “You’re thinking of vampires, I’m a werewolf.”
“I think you like hurting and killing people, yeah,” said Perry, ignoring the joke. “But … I guess I like it too.”
“Only people who deserve it,” said Maya.
“Sun Yizhong, the sister at Moth Lantern Hall,” said Perry. “At the time, you had no idea what she’d done. You were running on what, vibes?”
“I guess I don’t consider myself a detective,” said Maya. “It’s not my skillset. You’re the one with a robot built for spying.”
“I take offense to that, Miss Singh,” said Marchand, speaking through the armor’s speakers. “I was built for warfare and retrofitted for recreation.”
“So you’re fine killing someone based on vibes?” asked Perry. “That’s kind of what I mean when I say ‘bloodthirsty’.”
Maya pursed her lips. “I don’t know. By herself, no, I guess not, she was just there and ready to fight me. Standing beside her brother and the other dude, the black ops guy. Bad vibes, but sure, I’ll cop to not having done due diligence, to not holding myself to a higher standard of justice.” She shrugged.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Yeah,” said Perry. “You know, the times I’ve liked fighting most, it was when I really thought the other guy had it coming. But I do like fighting and killing. I think I can accept that about myself. Even back on Earth, I sometimes thought to myself ‘you know, I would love to just throw a supersonic punch and splatter this asshole’s skull all over this CVS parking lot’.”
“Same,” said Maya. “Including the part about the CVS parking lot. Or every now and then, I would have that fantasy of pushing someone into some industrial equipment, even though I’ve never been around the stuff. Not some random guy, just … I don’t know, some member of the senate, some asshole billionaire, some dude on Twitter.”
“Not that I would ever have in real life,” said Perry. “Did you ever read the Unabomber Manifesto?”
“What?” asked Maya. “No, why the hell would I?”
“There’s a part in it where he’s talking about how we’re all powerless,” said Perry. “I don’t remember exactly how it goes, but he thought it was a biological thing, that we’re wired for power in some way or another, and that modern society was basically super super bad at actually satisfying a feeling of power. So you get a bunch of stuff that’s a result of an acute feeling of powerlessness, stuff like power fantasies, but also stuff like school shootings, road rage, internet trolling, all kinds of antisocial behavior.”
“Wasn’t he before the internet?” asked Maya.
“I mean it’s been a long time since I read it,” said Perry. “Maybe he didn’t mention that stuff. And a lot of what he was writing wasn’t his own thoughts, it was cobbled together from the thoughts of other people, books that just never got all that much attention because their authors never mailed bombs to people.”
“I guess that just goes to show that mailing bombs to people works,” said Maya. “Glad we cleared that up.”
They walked in silence for a bit.
“So you think that we were both suffering under powerlessness,” said Maya. “That’s why we were uniquely primed to cut loose?”
“Sort of,” said Perry. “Though I don’t think we were unique. I think that’s how lots of people were on Earth, just bottled up and completely lacking in even the smallest scrap of power. Over time, maybe that does something to you.”
“Huh,” said Maya. “I guess I can see that.”
“And then you have someone like Xiyan, or to a lesser extent, Grandmaster Sun Quying,” said Perry. “People who have power, who delight in using it. And you start thinking that maybe a civilization that makes sure people can’t have as much power as they want would be a good thing.”
“You think that’s how it was on Earth?” asked Maya.
Perry laughed. The laughs never came out right from the power armor. “You think I’m a moron?”
“Kind of,” said Maya with a laugh of her own.
“Nah, Earth sucked,” said Perry. “No offense to our home planet, but I couldn’t have gone through that portal fast enough. I just never felt like there were any answers, any way to change the outcome. It was like being on an out of control train. And I felt angry about that, but I couldn’t do anything with that anger, not unless I wanted to throw my life away in the process, which I didn’t want to do.”
“Huh,” said Maya. “I guess I felt the same. Different targets, maybe.”
“Maybe,” said Perry with a shrug. “We haven’t really talked politics, but —”
“Yeah, and probably better we don’t,” said Maya.
Maya was barefoot, barely making a sound as they moved down the road, and Perry’s armor crunched with every step. He resolved to steal her some clothes at the next opportunity, or possibly buy them if he could find someone to take the single gold coin that was secreted away in a tiny pocket of the suit.
“Did you find out about her?” asked Maya.
“Who?” asked Perry.
“The sister,” said Maya. “Sun Yizhong. Because she was a self-confessed pervert, but I guess I was thinking she said that just after her brother was revealed as basically a rapist. Might not have been that bad, by our standards.”
“She bit off a guy’s dick,” said Perry.
Maya kept walking as she digested that. “As … like a sex thing?”
“Not clear,” said Perry.
“Or a self-defense thing?” said Maya. “Because I could see that. It’s a real power move.”
“She did it twice,” said Perry.
“I mean, if you find a gimmick that works, go for it, right?” asked Maya. She started laughing. “You know, you’d almost talked me into feeling bad about her?”
“Well, the point is that you didn’t know,” said Perry.
“Dick chomper,” said Maya, shaking her head. “Wait, first sphere or second sphere?”
“Both first sphere,” said Perry. “It’s nuts that it took her doing that twice to get exiled.”
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the Great Arc should be burned to the ground,” said Maya. A shadow crossed her face. She’d had her hand cut off and been stuffed in a basement for weeks, and sometimes her effort to avoid the subject came off a bit forced and manic. Every now and then, he caught her staring off into the distance, or looking angry about nothing. She’d been through a lot though, ten worlds of fighting and killing, had been beaten to within an inch of her life on more than one occasion, and he hoped that she’d bounce back from this too. “It’s a shame we’re going to have to settle for only burning down a part of it.”
“You’re going to have to watch your mouth, just a bit,” said Perry. He didn’t like having to turn toward seriousness, but they were going to need something approaching diplomacy.
“My mouth is often considered one of my best features,” said Maya.
“We need support,” said Perry. “I legitimately think we don’t have a shot of winning without it, and not winning means that both Xiyan and the grandmaster go through a portal to the next world once they hunt us down. Also, we most likely die.”
“I guess I have to stop pretending that you’re a henchman,” said Maya.
“Nah,” said Perry. “But I did save your life, at great personal expense.”
“I was about to say I’ll never live that down,” said Maya. “But actually, we’re going our separate ways soon enough.”
There was more silence as they both mulled that over. She wasn’t a friend, not really, and she’d violated trust in a way that had felt like the worst possible betrayal until getting partially disemboweled had given him some perspective. Still, she was from Earth, and that was something.
“If we’re talking about first impressions, I should probably not meet the king while wearing a bikini,” said Maya. “Just a thought.”
~~~~
Finding the former king of the Grouse Kingdom was super easy, barely an inconvenience. He had been booted out of his castle, but settled not all that far from it with a slim fraction of his former forces. He had no authority over the military nor the people, or at least, none that was recognized any longer. There would be a new king, who would rule over what was technically a new kingdom, placed on the throne by celestial decree. Perry had first thought that celestial decree meant something mystical, but when it had been explained to him, it seemed more like how things were done on Earth, with the new king being the guy who could gather up alliances and stake a claim that people actually respected. If you succeeded, people would say you had the celestial decree, and if you failed, people would say that you didn’t have it, but it was a thing that was decided on after the fact.
Wu Xianlong had suffered the loss of three sons, and following that, the loss of his kingdom. He was widely hated by the people of his former country for his failures as a king and the civil disruption that had followed the kingdom’s collapse. Perry had spoken with a number of commoners as they’d made their way through the Grouse Kingdom, and most of them spit at the very name of Wu Xianlong. They had been more than happy to tell Perry where to find the man.
Their trip hadn’t been entirely without incident. They’d been ambushed by what were either bandits or local enforcers, who took Perry to be some kind of slaver and Maya to be some kind of slave, and rather than attempting to free Maya, they had wanted to take her for their own. Maya had dealt with them swiftly, testing out her newfound werewolf strength, and then took the clothes off the one of them who had died while the rest ran off. She hadn’t seemed happy that Perry insisted on burying the body, but it gave her a chance to practice the cloth-mending technique with something a little less exotic than nanites.
There was not, however, any hint of either Xiyan or the grandmaster. Perry looked nervously at every door he passed, thinking that she might pop out with an army, but if she had the ability to do that, she wasn’t using it. He thought it more likely that the doors she could use had to be specific, but it was an open question that he wished he had the answer to.
The tea house was three stories tall and towered over the rest of the village. It had once been a retreat for the king, a place at the far edge of the Grouse Kingdom, with picturesque little buildings surrounding it, almost a tiny model village. Perry vaguely recalled that Marie Antoinette had built something similar, a place where she could pretend to be living like a commoner, which was of course completely inauthentic and created with the use of tax money.
The fake village now had soldiers in it, most of them guarding the tea house, but there were fewer than Perry would have expected. Food had quickly become an issue in the Grouse Kingdom, for all the reasons that food always became an issue in times of civil unrest. Perry hadn’t eaten during their whole trip, and his stomach was rumbling. Maya had simply said ‘learn to not need food’, which she knew wasn’t helpful.
It took some talking to get to see the king, but surprisingly little of it. The king only had perhaps a dozen people with him, loyalists of one sort or another, but given they were mostly second sphere, that was more than enough to put Maya and Perry down.
The king sat in an extravagant room on the third floor, slumped in a carved wooden chair that was serving as a makeshift throne. Perry had talked with Maya ahead of time, and agreed that they would address him as ‘king’, even if no one was calling him that anymore. He was wearing black silks, mourning garb, and his face was a scowl, though it didn’t seem to be directed their way. He was thin and tall, and looked younger than Perry would have thought, though that was definitely just because he was second sphere. He didn’t look particularly kingly, aside from a golden scepter that was held loosely in his hand. His hair was jet black and quite long, falling loosely around his shoulders, without so much as a ponytail or top knot.
“There was a time I had one hundred visitors every day,” said the king. “My advisors managed every minute of every hour to keep them flowing through the throne room, as regular as the drop of a water clock.”
“We appreciate you taking the time to meet with us, your grace,” said Perry, giving the former king a low bow. He felt thankful that Maya followed suit, then a little annoyed that he should be thankful about that.
“I was told you have word of my sons’ killer,” said Wu Xianlong. “I would hear it right away, rather than waiting another moment for pleasantries.”
“Yes, your grace,” said Perry. “I am Peregrin Holzmann and this is Maya Singh. We are warriors from another world, sent here to combat another warrior, one with a heart of evil. She currently goes by the name of Lu Xiyan, but she’s had many names and many faces. She told me directly that she had worked within the palace, but —”
“Lu Xiyan,” said the king, sitting up slightly. “It does not ring a bell.”
“Whatever name or face she was using then, she is the one who killed your sons,” said Perry. “She can take on a mantle of smoke and move silently through the night, as quiet as a falling leaf. She can move through doors as though they weren’t on other sides of the building from each other. And she has a knife that can cut through steel. There are other powers, strong ones, but we don’t know them in full. Aside from her account of being a servant at the palace, there was a death of a second sphere man, cut to pieces without warning —”
“Where is she?” asked Wu Xianlong, rising from his wooden chair. His scepter was gripped tightly in his hand.
“We last saw her at Cicada Temple, in the Green Snake Valley, under the protection of Grandmaster Sun Quying of the Worm Gate Sect,” said Perry. “She might have moved on from there, or lost his protection, but we’re part of an eternal battle across the worlds, and she’ll come for us eventually, one way or another.”
“Point me in her direction and I shall carve a path of devastation,” said Wu Xianlong. He was wielding the scepter like a cudgel. “I will rip apart those who have sheltered her and burn to ash any place where she has stayed. My sons!”
“Your grace,” said Perry slowly. “The man she’s with — who she was with when we left — he’s third sphere, and of considerable power, not only because of his techniques, but because he’s the head of Worm Gate.”
“Do you question my power?” asked Wu Xianlong. “Have you heard the poisoned words of my subjects, or the slithering lies of my advisors?”
“No, your grace,” said Perry. “I only meant that going full force against Grandmaster Sun Quying might not be —”
“I am no coward,” said Wu Xianlong, brandishing his scepter and striking a pose. “I will take what men I have left, and we will move at dawn.”
“I had hoped for a diplomatic solution, your grace,” said Perry. “We came to this world to kill Xiyan, through the arcane rules that govern our kind. If she’s sheltered by Grandmaster Sun Quying, we have no hope. I was hoping that you could put pressure on him to cast her out. We need to be the ones to kill her, otherwise there’s a chance she’ll slip into the next world, beyond your reach.”
The king deflated into his chair. “You mean that justice is beyond me?” he asked.
“No,” said Perry. “I only mean that we’ll be the instruments of your justice.”
The king twisted his face into a frown. “You are sure it is her?”
“As sure as I can be,” said Perry. “Xiyan attacked me in the night, while I was unaware, and I only barely escaped with my life. I don’t know why she attacked your sons, but with her powers and her history, I have a hard time imagining that it was anyone else.”
He didn’t really have that hard of a time imagining it, but they needed someone on their side, someone who could neutralize the grandmaster. Perry had no idea whether Xiyan was going to team up with him, but the grandmaster had every incentive to latch onto her so he’d have a way to go through the portal, whenever it showed up. It did seem very likely to him that Xiyan was simply a killer, attacking people in the night because that was her preference, and if he was overstating his case, he didn’t really care. They were in a bind.
But once the king started moving, he’d be hard to stop, and Perry could only hope that the weakened king and whatever warriors he could bring to bear would be enough to make the battle against Xiyan less one-sided.
There weren’t too many cards left to play, and Perry hoped they would be enough.