Dave attempted to stand. As he did, he realized exactly how old and out of shape Duke Lumir was. He nearly toppled over as he felt an awful weight within his own gut, the crystalline core of a 200-year-old mage. The core felt like a sphere made from pure gold that was lodged within him.
Power and magic poured from the core, taking control of his own body, arranging his motions in exactly the right manner so that his ancient bones would not snap from the motion, so that his organs would not explode from the pressure of the core.
Luck.
Dave gulped as he felt invisible threads dancing all over him, strings entwined between flesh and crystal that were keeping him alive.
Duke Lumir was a dead man walking, an old, bloated monster that had no right to exist. Every breath Dave took, every heartbeat, every motion were controlled by invisible threads of luck.
Luck stolen from the people of Shandria kept the monster that Dave inhabited alive!
“Efff my life,” Dave groaned. “How many peasants did this man rob of their luck? Christ! I feel really messed up, like I’m constantly being puppeteered by my own magic, not allowed to screw up or to take a misstep!”
“Far too many,” the Shandrian Empress sighed.
Lari walked over to Dave, wrapped her hands through his elbow helping him move.
Every footstep Dave took should have shattered his bones and didn’t. The treads of luck danced, controlled, readjusted his motions in just the right way.
“We best hurry,” Lari muttered as the tower around them vibrated with impacts of spellfire.
The couple descended down the vast spiral stairwell, massive white banners fluttering from the vibrations, crystalline lanterns flickering overhead. Dave took a brief look through a thin window. Spellfire collided against a massive bubble-like shield that shimmered over the city like flashes of brilliant lightning. A ring of pure black clouds circled the city.
“Cedez,” he muttered, recalling the other Shandria 200 years in the future.
“Hrmm?” Lari asked.
“My friend is out there, inhabiting the body of General Nox,” Dave said with a gulp.
“What if it's not your friend?” Lari asks. “If it's General Nox and she catches us alive she will use the Shadow to peel our flesh off our bones to pry the secrets of the city’s Ward from my lips. My core will keep me alive, rewind me… but I doubt that I will be able to endure the torture of the mad General.”
Dave frowned.
What if Lari was right? What if the Crown Engine shoved each of them into a separate, distinctive world? What if he had to prove his loyalty to a mad Nox that would torture his best friend?
“Shit,” he muttered.
“You don’t know, do you?” Lari commented, examining his expression. “If Shanria falls to the Verdant Republic… I want you to order me to steal time from myself.”
“What?” Dave blinked.
“I’ll… take time from myself and give it to you,” she said. “I’d rather be dead than captured and tortured by the enemy.”
The ex-programmer gulped, his heartbeat accelerating. The Crown Engine was really screwing with him now.
“Damn it, Lari!” he said. “I don’t want to lose you, I just bloody found you!”
The words of Cedez pulsed in his head. Twenty four hours. He would vanish from here anyway. He could do nothing at all for Empress Sari, could not save her in this Shandria. At the very least, he could get enough information out of her to perhaps do something in his Shandria, 200 years in the future.
The couple passed through several more doors and stairwells. Lari pushed a specific brick on a wall and then spun a lever thrice and a secret door unlocked within a stone wall, yet another stairwell leading down.
The way led down a truly gargantuan column. Dave’s eyebrows went up when he saw a vast, gothic catacomb-chamber stretching out into all directions, white columns leading down to the ground covered in mountains of what looked like sparkling dust.
“The ossuary of Shandria,” Lari explained.
Dave's eyes went wide as he and Lari went down the winding stairwell eventually emerging onto a desert covered in sparkling sand.
Mountains of white skulls sat on pedestals all around, embedded into the enormous columns, empty sockets looking out onto the sparkling sand from ground-up mage cores.
“Shit,” he muttered. “So Shandria ground the cores of its magi before Nox took over the city…”
“Yeah,” Lari nodded. “It’s a technique the Arx Banking conglomerate uses to protect their cities. Each citizen that dies sacrifices their core to the town’s defense. All enemies and citizens of Shandria are eventually ground into dust upon their death and end their existence down here as part of the Ward.
“How far does the Ward of Shandria stretch back in time?” Dave muttered. “I wonder if it somehow connects to itself to give its users this ability to leap backwards into… different people.”
Lari squinted at her friend as she sat down on a stone step. She sank her gold-plated sandals into the white, crystalline sand below and closed her eyes.
“How long has it been since you’ve lost me?” She asked Dave. “What have you been up to since you’ve last seen me? Did you finish your LLM gaming system?”
“No,” Dave shook his head. “I crashed into a tree right after your funeral… and a man who called himself the God-Emperor summoned me to Arx. I got away from his domain and ended up in Shandria. I spent three months there.”
“Doing what?” Lari opened her eyes.
“I… met a girl,” Dave confessed. “Two girls, actually.”
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“Oh?” Lari leaned in. “Do tell.”
“A dragoness blacksmith and a reincarnation of General Nox,” he explained.
“A reincarnation of Nox?” Lari blinked.
“She’s a bit like Nox from what I understand, but also not really,” Dave shrugged. “She was raised in the farming quarter of Shandria. Unlike the mad General you know, she’s a good, kind person.”
“A kind… General Nox?” Lari laughed. “I find that very hard to believe. Are you certain that she won’t go mad on you?”
“I am,” Dave nodded. “I’ve spent an entire lifetime with her in another version of Shandria. She really is kind and wants what’s best for this city."
"Right," Lari nodded. "So what else happened in your three months on Arx?"
"I somehow gained a skill on the same day when I was reincarnated - Phantomancy, a way to control… souls.”
“Your skill can control souls?” Lari’s silver eyebrows went up. “What’s the downside?”
“If I absorb souls that are too powerful, they can influence me,” Dave shrugged. “I’ve found a way to work around that though - I started to put souls into rings and other crystal artefacts.”
“What did you murder to get that skill? An omega-leviathan?” Lari asked.
“Nobody,” Dave shook his head. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“That’s… not possible,” Lari muttered.
Dave simply shrugged in response. “The people I talked to seem to think that there’s another me on Shandria, another Dave who killed someone or something. Do you remember what you told me in the ambulance, Lari? I was dead for three and a half minutes. If it was a version of me dissatisfied with corporate life, one that never met you… I suspect that he’d make a lot of terrible mistakes here on Arx… you’ve really influenced a lot of my life, made me a far better person, Lari.”
“Oh pssh,” Lari waved a hand wrapped in white and gold silk. “Maybe the other you just got trapped by the Bankers and became one of their minions... forced to do terrible things, just like me.”
“Maybe,” Dave shrugged. “I haven’t met him nor heard anything about another Dave.”
“Another Dave… hmm? I wonder if he has an evil goatee,” Lari smirked.
“Can you control this place?” Dave asked, looking over the sparkling desert stretching across the vast catacombs beneath Shandria.
“I cannot,” Lari shook her head. “I’m just a figurehead who steals time from the downtrodden and gives it to the highborn magi. But you might be able to do it.”
“I can? How?” Dave blinked.
“Come,” Lari grabbed Dave’s fat hand pulling him along across a walkway that stretched towards another great gothic column.
Lari tapped another combination of stones and a compartment slid open, featuring a gold-plated hand-print.
“It’s aligned to Duke Lumir’s core,” Lari said. “Press your palm into the keystone and you should be able to ‘sense’ the Ward of Shandria.”
Dave did as Lari advised. He suddenly felt his mind spreading out across the city. His senses careened across the great towers surrounding Shandria. He saw a great army of magi gathered outside, striking the ward from all directions. The towers controlled by the Lumis Archmagi fired back. Unfortunately for them, a monstrous cloud wrapped itself around the city. Its great, long limbs swallowed or swatted every spell fired by the town defenders.
“You should be able to make the Ward visualize the entire city from here,” Lari said. “I’ve seen Lumir do it many times over the decades.”
Dave nodded. His body and Luck knew exactly what to do.
A hologram-like 3 dimensional visual projected itself from several massive white columns, painting an illusory image of the city of Shandria in front of Dave and Lari. It even portrayed the Shadow wrapped around the city and spells fired against the towers like a beautiful, incredibly detailed diorama.
“Is there an announcement system or something?” Dave asked.
“There is,” Lari nodded. “I’ve seen Duke Lumir make announcements across the city. There are voicecast projection orbs within each tower.”
“Great,” Dave smiled.
He mentally dove into the ward once again, searching for a way to speak to the invading army. Thanks to the luck pulsating in his core, it only took him a moment to find the system that could project his voice across the city.
“1 - 2 - 3 - testing,” Dave said and suddenly heard an echo of Duke Lumir’s voice dancing across the city projected by a thousand crystal orbs.
He smiled.
“General Nox,” he spoke, focusing on projecting his voice to the dark cloud and the army of magi beneath it dressed in black and silver uniforms. “I would like to parlay!”
The dark cloud wobbled for a minute. Spellfire from the invaders quickly ceased. Then the cloud converged into the shape of a woman.
“You’re a pawn of the Bankers, Lumir,” she said. “Don’t take me for a fool. There will be no parlays. You’re just buying time because you know that your Ward will fall tonight.”
“Cedez,” Dave said. “If it’s you in there, please… let’s talk. I don’t want to fight you. I want to find a compromise, so that..."
“Cedez?” The woman woven from darkness suddenly barked a laugh. “So it was you, then?”
“I don’t follow,” Dave said, his heartbeat accelerating.
“Your character-assassination attempt failed. You’ve attempted to inject a foreign stable-resonance pattern into my crystalline core,” Nox said. “An interesting strategy to influence my decisions, Lumir, alas it was for naught.”
Dave opened and closed his mouth, not sure what to say.
“You bankers take me for an idiot, but I am far more clever than you are,” Nox boasted. “Once my core surgeons isolated the magical resonance that was dominating my mind, they’ve had it expunged. It pays to have archmage Crystalmancers on hand, you see. I’ve had my entire staff scanned. There were a few others… who had been affected.”
Dave swallowed. Somehow the Ward of Shandria failed catastrophically here!
“An amusing try,” Nox laughed. “Alas, I have a well-coordinated army on hand. It didn’t take long for my Archmagi to figure out that some of us were acting odd and to fix the problem.”
Dave’s plan to talk to Cedez and to simply surrender the city to her suddenly careened sideways and sunk into a mire of despair.
“It won’t work again, darling,” the massive shadow-mage-shaped cloud grinned. “My Scrutimancers determined that the attack came from the Ward of Shandria via direct-target Astral-projection waveform vectors. They said it was a rather unique way to completely overwrite a person. Don’t worry, when I take the city I’ll take that curious toy from you and play with it myself!"
“I…” Dave suddenly didn’t know what to do or say. Cedez and the others were gone, he was all alone now.
“No doubt, you’re speechless and impressed with my prowess,” Nox laughed. “I know, I’m great. Why don’t you disable the Ward defenses and let me and my troops in? I’ll have my Mentalists pry your knowledge from your head gently and keep you alive as my adorkable pet, Lumir.”
“Don’t you dare do it,” Lari hissed from Dave’s side.
Dave noticed that his blubbery hands were trembling. Would the Ward of Shandria kill his friends because they were caught so easily and failed to even do anything? Were they already dead? Were... Cedez and Remy... gone?!
Terrible, dark thoughts were pulsating in his head.
If Nox had so easily dispatched Cedez and the others, then this place wasn’t a simulation. The Ward of Shandria was some kind of a network, a web of interconnected Shandrias across the multiverse, a weapon that overwrote real people! He had previously overwritten the mind of a teenage prince, unknowingly took away the life of Argon Rim!
Dave’s fists opened and closed as rage boiled inside him. The Ward of Shandria, the Crown Tower Arcane was a heartless machine that played with the lives of its citizens. It was just a stupid algorithm, a ridiculously complex tool that was being poorly used by various factions that held Shandria over the ages. General Nox must have figured out how to use it, must have tied herself into its system to overwrite newborn children like Natalie and Cedez with an echo of herself!
The only reason Cedez wasn’t 100% Nox already was because the corrupt Shandrian highborns wanted power and figured out how to partially block Astral Projections vectors that were supposed to remanifest Nox again and again thanks to the Crown Tower Arcane!
“Come on now, Lumir,” the titanic shadow-mage purred. “We can be best friends. Surrender the city and you’ll be spared, I promise. Open your heart to me, darling. Open the gates, disable the Ward!”
Dave felt himself slide sideways, felt tendrils of alien something invading his mind.
“Turn off the voicast receiver! She’s using her Charismancers to influence you!” Lari yelped, grabbing at Dave and shaking his blubbery body.
Dave wasn’t listening.
His mind was drowning in molasses of absolute love for Empress Nox.
Everything was going to be alright. All he had to do was surrender the city to Nox. This was the only option to end the Game, the only way to wake up two hundred years in the future next to Cedez who would awaken as Empress Nox once more and take control of Shandria!