Azma

It fascinated Azma to watch the [Adventurers] she’d surrounded herself with stumble into an awareness of the decisions they’d long since made.

There was no doubt that they were going to attempt the transit to their home realm. If they’d lacked the conviction for that, they wouldn’t have broken the bonds of time and space to make it as far as they already had. Similarly it was a given that she would accompany them, though amusingly none had thought to question the viability of someone who was wholly unnative to their realm making the journey.

“What about Yawlorna though?” Lady Midnight asked as her young companion Rip moved off to hold a side conversation with the [Nightmare Queen] . “If there’s no alter-ego of hers from Earth for her to transfer into what will happen if she tries to come with us?”

Azma chuckled and corrected herself. The [Adventurers] weren’t wholly witless, just unused to multi-dimensional tactical thinking.

“Maybe we only have the Earthlings go back?” Matt Painting said. He was concerned about the return, not out of fear of the journey but from a dislike of the destination.

Azma toyed with the idea of giving him an “out” by claiming his time for some other venture in the [Fallen Kingdoms]. He would be an excellent asset for a number of possible missions, but that wasn’t the proper use for him.

Matt and all of the others of the little group they’d assembled were going to be far more effective if they remained as a unit.

“The journey will pose no hardship for her,” Azma said and notice the Celestial who was calling herself ‘Obby’ cast a glance over to Azma. 

‘Celestial’ might not be the proper term of course. Azma had never encountered one before, and from what little she’d glimpsed of Obby’s true powers and insight, Azma wasn’t sure if the categorization fit quite perfectly. Celestials were distinct however in that they were a class of being which even the [Consortium of Pain] refused to have dealings with. 

Where capturing a [Transcendent Entity] that could break all manner of physical laws and corrupt an entire fleet through data channels no wider than a whisper was seen as a perfectly viable resource for the Consortium to exploit, the standard mandate on Celestials was not only to leave them alone, but to abandon any systems they took an interest in. 

That would have been enough to put a smile on Azma’s face. If she’d been looking to climb any further in the Consortium’s hierarchy, the presence of a Celestial in the midst of a ruined mission would have absolved her of all guilt and changed her credit balance to ‘anything you can cleanly retrieve will put you in the black’. 

Azma was done with the Consortium though. Even if they survived, they had nothing left to offer her. True, she’d sunk years of her life into carefully gathering power and maneuvering within the confines of the system the Consortium had constructed but the end goal, though unstated, had always been the Consortium’s destruction at her hands. The only other stable end state was her demise and since that was laughably implausible, the Consortium had always and only been a gauntlet through which Azma knew she must pass to hone her abilities before creating her own all encompassing structure of power.

“How do you know she’ll be okay?” Obby asked.

“She is no more a native of this realm than I am,” Azma said. “Translation between realms can take many different forms, and I make no guarantee that any who choose to make the transit back to the Earth will retain their form or functions, but pathways and bridges between realms tend to be far more stable than is statistically likely. It is almost as though worlds that can touch on one another desire to be in communion rather than standing alone in the cosmos.”

Yawlorna looked like she was going to ask for clarification on that but was interrupted by a thundering flash of lightning that burst into the throne room and rose to stand as an entity of living electricity.

Azma smiled, and checked off the next box on her holographic project plan. The [Lord of Storms] had shown up almost exactly on time and with the minimal amount of predicted fuss, even in the presence of a Celestial!

There were several points she had laid out which she was not looking forward too, but, for now, the fact that they were marching towards their doom was a truly uplifting one

Marcus

The [Lord of Storms] arrived with a blast of lightning and a burst of thunder. Neither of those blew Marcus away as much as the words they spoke next though.

“It’s just Sam now. Wait. Gail?” the [Lord of Storms] said and then kneeled before her. “Or should I say ‘My Queen’! Either way, I am yours!”

“Sam!?” Marcus said, as though after everything else he’d seen and done that was the  most surprising thing he’d encountered all day. “Sam Greenweir? Is that seriously you?”

The [Lord of Storms], the once-again living god of lightning, turned to Marcus and threw up their hands as though to give him a giant hug. “Marcus? You made a cat boy character at last!? Oh my god! Why didn’t you tell me!”

Marcus grimaces and leaned back from the lightning hug before breaking into a smile and laugh along with the [Lord of Storms] and the [Nightmare Queen].

 “I’m sorry. What? Why? I mean, you all know each other? How?” Tessa said.

Marcus glanced over and had to stifle another laugh. Tessa was in her human form but could have been a [Metal Mechanoid] from how close she was to short circuiting.

“Oh wow,” Rip said. “That really worked.”

She was saved from hitting the throne room floor by Matt’s presence and quick reflexes.

“I don’t understand how you’re here?” the [Nightmare Queen] said.

“Yeah. Not real clear on that either. Though, wow is it cool to be a god! I’ve got so much energy now! This is amazing!” the [Lord of Storms] said.

“Hey, this isn’t fair,” Hailey said. “Why aren’t their god powers making them glitch out like I was?” 

“They are safely removed from the constraints of the mundane realm we were previously in,” Azma said.

“Oh. OH!” Tessa said. “Marcus…”

“Yep! Thinking the same thing,” Marcus said.

“Which is?” Hailey asked.

“If it’s safe to have admin level access here, then we can risk bringing more of the support staff over,” Marcus said.

“Hold off on that,” the [Nightmare Queen] said. “You’re not wrong in that assertion but support reps won’t translate as much more than [Demigods] or [Supreme Spirits]. They would be more powerful than any [Adventurers] but what we’ve lost already is far more fundamental to the realms than that.”

“You need the other [Creators] back,” Tessa said. “You need your old development team back!”

“Is that doable?” Lost Alice asked.

“In theory? Sure,” the [Lord of Storms] said. “If someone could call them like this brilliant young woman did for me, all of the old [Creators] could be reawoken. In practice though?”

“We would need people here who were faithful to the dead gods and hit max level in a god-sponsored class?” Tessa said.

“Or, there is another option,” Azma said.

“You know, listening to the expansion’s villain seems like a terrible idea, but under the circumstances, we just don’t really have a choice do we?” Marcus said.

“Would you expect me to arrange things in any other manner?” Azma asked.

“Team Azma,” Hailey said, bopping Marcus on the shoulder, to which he just shook his head at the debate they’d been having since the [World Shift] expansion was first announced internally.

“What’s our other option?” Tessa asked.

“Calling replacement deities to this realm requires tremendous affinity with them because the call must reach out across the spheres and find the Earth based fragment of the god in question. Far easier to simply go to the Earth and contact the fragments there,” Azma said.

“And they’ll be able to transfer here on their own?” Yawlorna asked.

“It seems to be a gift which residents of the Earth realm possess,” Azma said.

“Not normally we don’t,” Lady Midnight said.

“These aren’t exactly normal times,” Lost Alice said.

“Will that help you?” Tessa asked. “Will it be enough?”

“Yes it will help, but whether it will be enough I can’t say.” The [Nightmare Queen] had begun pacing in her throne room, in exactly the same pattern Gail used when she was chewing on a particularly tough problem. “The more of the old team you can get, the more we’ll be able to shore up the metaphysical boundaries and barriers which have been damaged, but nothing like this has ever happened or was ever planned to happen. There’s no roadmap for any of this.”

Yawlorna

Being in the middle of a disaster was calming for Yawlorna’s nerves. 

She knew she should worry about that.

After so much time worrying about her crew, and the bizarre inhabitants of the alien world they’d been stranded on, and the radical changes she was undergoing, Yawlorna found she was all out of worry, and with the world properly falling apart she could relax and stop waiting for disaster to strike.

It was already striking!

So it was time to strike it back.

“It looks like our path is open,” she said, gesturing to the far end of the throne room where a stream of stars in the floor lead to a brilliant and impossible distant point of light. “We need to figure out who’s going now.”

“All of us, right?” Marcus said. “Gods excluded obviously.”

“If you could stay that might help,” the [Lord of Storms] said. “We need a liaison back to Earth and in this state I don’t know how much connection to it I have anymore.”

“Won’t they need me to find the rest of the original dev team?” Marcus asked

“I got you covered there,” Hailey said. “I didn’t work with them like you do, but I’ve got access to the company directory and I have zero compunctions about hacking HR to find out their last known contact addresses.”

“You can’t ‘hack HR’ Hailey. We actually have decent security on those systems,” Marcus said.

“Oh, I mean ‘hack’ like with an axe,” Hailey said. “If Gilbert tries to give me trouble I will enjoy so much getting my revenge for those late paycheck deposits.”

“Uh, okay then,” Marcus said and stepped back towards the safety of the being made entirely of lightning.

“Are you sure you want to come Yawlorna?” Tessa asked. “You’ve done a ton for us already, and we originally invited you to join us to keep you safe, not drag you across the cosmos to fight some guy from the other side of the Twilight Zone.”

“I don’t know where that is, but of course I’m going to come with you,” Yawlorna said. “I know I look like a [Demon] to you, but I’m not. I’m an [Explorer]. I’m supposed to seek out new life and new civilizations. Taking bold risks is a part of that.”

“When this is all over, remind me to sign up with your crew,” Marcus said.

“Neeerd,” Hailey said and hit him again.

“That’s Ensign Nerd to you,” Marcus said.

“Is there anything special we need to do?” Rip asked.

“And do we know where it’s going to drop us off?” Rachel asked.

“Given that we are the first to walk this path, I suspect there’s only one method of discovering its destination,” Yawlorna said and placed her feet on the milky way of stars leading outwards towards infinity.

She’d expected she would need to cross the endless gulf one step after the other and that time would blur around her. Instead the distant stars surged forward at her so fast that they flared into a billion explosions so bright that the light filled her very bones.

Her second footstep landed not on the path of stars but on hard, night darkened ground in a world where the air was filled with a thick and billowing smoke.

Behind her, she heard the others stumbling and choking as they arrived.

On an Earth that was already burning.

Tessa

Gail Merriden had never been Tessa’s friend. Tessa knew that. The [Nightmare Queen] wasn’t a comforting, friendly entity. Tessa knew that too. She was able to rationally assert both statements with her big, rational mind. Her heart however had other ideas.

“What do we need to do next?” she asked, a hope rising in her that she hadn’t known she’d been missing since she arrived in the [Fallen Kingdoms].

She wasn’t friends with Gail or with the [Nightmare Queen], but as a fairly unhappy teen, she’d latched onto the stories of Gail Merriden’s work on [Broken Horizons] and elevated her to a position of near-sainthood. It was neither reasonable, nor healthy, and the dozen years that had passed since then had done a fair job of giving her the maturity to see that, but the fourteen year old inside her still cheered at the prospect of meeting one of her oldest hero figures.

“I have no idea,” the [Nightmare Queen] said. “She must know though.” A nod towards Obby indicating the ‘she’ in question.

Tessa blinked at that? Obby? Why would the [Nightmare Queen] defer to Obby?

Because Obby had destroyed Gulini Prime’s Oblivion Remnants and left the man himself a shatter, and purely mortal wreck, whimpering at the foot of the stairs to the [Nightmare Queen’s] throne.

But?

Tessa’s mind went fuzzy when she tried to connect more of the details and probe that idea deeper.

“Sorry there,” Obby said, and the fuzziness diminished. “She’s right that I could get us back to Earth, but I don’t think I have to here.”

“What do you mean?” Rip asked. She was shaking her head to clear away the last wisps of fuzziness.

“Oh, I see,” the [Nightmare Queen] said. “She’s right.”

“Gail? Could you dial back the cryptic to about a 3? Or maybe a 2? This has been a really hard sixty eight hour day so far,” Marcus said.

“Sorry Marcus,” the [Nightmare Queen] said. “You being here has opened a new pathway beyond the [Fallen Kingdoms]. It was something I had envisioned long ago, back when we were first laying out the original quest trees.”

“You were going to put in a quest where the characters traveled to Earth?” Lady Midnight asked.

“Not specifically. It was more an idea for what the final quest of the whole game could be,” the [Nightmare Queen] said. She gestured and the ruins of her throne room began to slide and fly back into place, each broken bit of rubble fitting itself neatly into the walls and columns it had fallen from. 

As the floor was swept clean a tableau appeared in the dark mirror of its surface.

“I thought that if we ever wanted to move the players onto a new generation of the game, we should give them a quest to bring their characters from the old world to the new one. Nobody wanted to put in the effort to do that of course. Why bother planning for a sequel when you don’t even have the original released and no one is sure if it’ll even be good enough to get out of beta testing in the first place.”

Tessa knew why though.

“You loved this place even then, didn’t you?” she asked. “And you knew we would too.”

“I hoped,” Gail said. “In the end, it was all I really had left to hope for.”

Lisa

Playing “Ask Me Anything” with a cosmic entity who was also her favorite game designer of all time seemed delightful to Lisa. As with so many other desires though,she had to crush the urge down. For as much as she would like to, she couldn’t ignore the ticking clock of the world’s end.

“We can access the final quest path then and direct it towards Earth? Where does it start?” Lisa asked.

“Wait, before we ask that, if it’s the ‘Final Quest Path’, does that mean we wouldn’t be able to come back here if we take it?” Rip asked.

“Coming back to the [Fallen Kingdoms] would be impossible,” the [Nightmare Queen] said. “Or that’s what the quest was supposed to tell you. It’s a path though. If you can travel it in one direction you can travel it in the other.”

“There’s a catch though,” Obby said. “The [Fallen Kingdoms] are ending as we speak. Gulini Prime wasn’t kidding when he said he unleashed a thousand apocalypses on it. If we leave here, there probably won’t be a [Fallen Kingdoms] to come back to.”

“And if we don’t leave here?” Tessa asked. “Byron’s gone to Earth. Will we be safe here if we don’t stop him there?”

“No,” Obby said. “Definitely not. If Earth falls every world connected it is going to fall along with it.”

“Not much of a choice then,” Lisa said. “There’s a lot of other [Adventurers] fighting for the [Fallen Kingdoms]. We’re the only ones here.”

Tessa took Lisa’s hand and laced their fingers together.

“She’s right,” Tessa said and Lisa could feel her gathering her strength. “But there’s a lot of danger if  we go back. We’ve been fighting here because we knew we couldn’t really die. If we go back to Earth though?”

“There’s no [Heart Fires] back on Earth,” Hailey said. “No respawning if we die.”

“And we don’t know who or what we’ll even be if we can get there,” Tessa said. “We might be stuck in our Earthling bodies. Maybe with only our Earthling minds too. We might not have anything more to fight with there than any regular person would. In fact, that might be all that we are there. Just regular people.”

“But you’re still going,” Rip said. It wasn’t a question at all.

Tessa glanced to Lisa and met her gaze. A quiet resolve lay in Tessa’s eyes. She knew what they needed to do. Lisa did too. Tessa wasn’t looking for permission. She didn’t need it. She was simply honoring a commitment she’d made. She’d promised Lisa that she wouldn’t run off on her own. Wouldn’t hurl herself into danger alone. The soft, lingering gaze was the fulfillment of that promise. Tessa had to go, but she wasn’t going to leave. 

Love was too easy a response to that. Lisa knew she was already hopelessly drowning in a sea of love for Tessa. Somehow though there was still room for new emotions to rise up in her, and in this case, that turned out to be pride.

So many fears had been nibbling away at Lisa’s heart but in the face of Tessa’s calm courage, Lisa felt pride crush them all. Tessa was right that they had to go, and Lisa was going to follow her no matter where their path lead. Her expression seemed to convey enough of that to Tessa but Lisa added a quiet nod just to make it certain.

“Yeah. We’re both going,” Tessa said, squeezing Lost Alice’s hand.

“You’re wrong,” Rip said, shaking her head. “About being normal people, and about why we’ve been fighting.”

“Not being able to die for real was nice,” Matt said. “But all the times you lead us into battle it was because it was the right thing to do. Even those first bugs we took on. You fought those because you knew Rose and me needed to be stronger to safe here and you didn’t want us to really get hurt.”

“You’ve always cared about us, so don’t you think for a second that we’re not coming with you,” Rip said.

“And you’re also wrong about us only being able to fight like normal people there,” Marcus said. “I dragged Byron back here once already and I bet that’s something he’s going to remember real well. Especially if he used up his last ticket back to Earth already.”

Jamal

A part of Jamal wished Rose had argued against going back. A part of him had no interest in returning to Earth, ever. And a part of him didn’t want to die and absolutely did not want to see Rose die.

Plus there was Matt Painting. 

I have to admit I’m curious if I’ll get to come along for the ride, Matt said internally.

I really hope so, Jamal said. I need you man.

Need? Nah I don’t think so, Matt said. I think you’re a lot stronger than I am. But that doesn’t mean you should have to face anything alone, and I will definitely be there for you if I can be.

“I wish to join you as well,” Starchild said. “If that proves to be possible.”

“What will happen with her and Pete?” Tessa asked turning to Obby.

Obby paused for a moment, staring out into the middle distance.

“I don’t know? Neat!” she said after a quick blink to refocus on the group.

“Seriously?” Tessa asked and Jamal had an inkling of why she was having a hard time believing that.

Obby had removed all the monsters that had been waiting for them, all on her own. She’d claimed that it was because she didn’t have to hold back ‘out here’. For just the barest instant too, Jamal had caught a glimpse of what Obby really was.

All of that should have been mind blowingly important.

But it wasn’t.

Obby was strong. Okay. Fine. He already knew that. He could feel a subtle pressure directing his thoughts away from questioning too much deeper into that. It wasn’t mind control though. When he focused on the question of who, or maybe more importantly what, Obby really was, he saw the holes in his knowledge, but was also able to put together a picture of her that held enough of the important truths about her that the rest didn’t matter as much. 

She was their friend. She would fight for them. She was funny, and kind, and she loved being who she was. She was also keeping things from them, but Jamal had the sense that even that was being done out of love.

“Yeah,” Obby said. “There are a ton of possible outcomes, and I can’t tell which one will become real. Heh, Jin is going to be so jealous. This is a rare delight!”

“Uh, the world is still ending right?” Rose asked.

“Oh, yeah, right. Sorry,” Obby said. “I think they’ll be okay, for a wide variety of possible ‘okays’. I think that’ll probably be true for all of us.”

She nodded to Jamal and he had to wonder if she’d heard the private conversation he’d had with Matt Painting?

Rose

They were going back to Earth. Rose could see the path starting to form at the end of the hall, past the starscape that blazed on the floor below them. 

That meant it was time. Any longer and her voice wouldn’t be able to reach far enough.

“Uh, Your Majesty?” Rose said, unsure what the proper title for the supreme being of the [Nightmare Realm] might be.

“Yes?” the [Nightmare Queen] said, turning to Rip without really looking at her, Obby having engulfed most of her awareness with Marcus occupying the majority of the remainder. 

“I think I brought someone for you,” Rose said.

“Something? For me?” the [Nightmare Queen] asked, carving off a thin slice of awareness for her.

“Someone,” Rose corrected her. “They’re dead but I don’t think that’s a problem here.”

“Rose?” Jamal asked, concern and confusion warring in his voice.

Rose couldn’t blame him. She told him about the [Lightning Archer] class she’d developed. She’d explained the link she felt to the [Lord of Storms] and how she hoped that her belief could serve as an anchor to bring the dead god back to life. Listening to her theorize about resurrecting a deity was one thing though. Watching her do so was something else entirely.

“Who is this someone?” the [Nightmare Queen] asked, far more of her attention falling on Rose.

“I think they can help,” Rose said. “You know them right? They were on your team when you built this place.”

“Who?” the [Nightmare Queen] asked and the world seemed to drop away leaving only the Queen and Rose within it.

Except Rose wasn’t alone before the [Nightmare Queen].

“It’s time,” Rose said. “We need you now.”

She didn’t scream the words. She didn’t whisper them. She simply spoke them with every ounce of truth inside her and with each one she felt the world expanding around her as the words reached out, seeking their destination, seeking to the edge of the sky, to the stars, and out, far beyond the edges of reality, across a gulf of light, calling to someone she carried in her heart and who was worlds away.

From beyond the farthest reaches, from the world she’d once called home, a voice, surprised, afraid, and yet awoken to the destiny Rose summoned them to answered.

“I AM CALLED BY MY FAITHFUL,” the [Lord of Storms] said, manifesting as a bolt of golden electricity. “LET THE REFUGE OF DEATH SHELTER ME NO MORE! I LIVE AGAIN!”

The [Nightmare Queen] stared at the god before her and took a long moment drinking in the sight of them.

“Samantha? Is that you?” the [Nightmare Queen] asked.

“It’s just Sam now. Wait. Gail?” the [Lord of Storms] said and then kneeled before her. “Or should I say ‘My Queen’! Either way, I am yours!”

Baelgritz

Baelgritz was standing at the end of the world. Under usual circumstances that would have been a metaphor, but the chasm in front of him was doing a very good job of presenting a literal depiction of the world’s demise.

“They’re even eating the magma?” Damnazon asked pointing to the [Terravorlings] that were piling up at the bottom of crater that had been torn in the world’s skin. 

“The question is what happens if they burrow down to the core?” Mellisandra asked.

“I don’t think we’d be around to see that,” Illuthiz said. “These things aren’t gaining volume when they eat. Not like their progenitor,” she pointed to the spikey spherical corpse of the  [Nightmare Terravore] that still floated in the sky above the ruined landscape. The corpse they’d spent the last several hours battling into its current state. The corpse a steady stream of world eating maggots was pouring down from. “No volume gain means that if they eat to the core, their gravitational force along with the the rest of the planet is going to pull everything into the space they ate through, which is going to shatter the entire crust and plunge everything into a sea of lava. Until they eat all of that too.”

“That just does not seem fair,” Cambrell said. “When you kill something it should have the decency to at least stop reproducing.”

“Nothing about these things is even within the same light cone as decency,” Hermeziz said. 

“Cheer up though, Grenslaw says we’re one of the lucky groups,” Baelgritz added.

“How are we lucky? We’ve got no mp left and those things are breeding like crazy still,” Cease All said. She and the rest of the Army of Light were recovering from the battle with the [Nightmare Terravore] as best as they were able but some of the creatures attacks had left them with unhealable wounds, or stat reductions that even trips through the [Heart Fire] couldn’t repair.

“The lucky part is that, while there’s a lot of these things, they’re capable of dying,” Baelgritz said. “Some of things Penswell’s teams are fighting don’t do that.”

“So they’re invulnerable?” Cease said. “That’s not exactly unheard of. Probably just need to find their mechanics.”

“That’s one theory. The [Scourge of Serpents] is the nearest one,” Illuthiz said. “Grenslaw asked if we could teleport there and help figure out what the mechanic could be.”

“Teleport with what? We’re wrecked here,” Cease said, and at least a dozen of her comrades nodded in agreement.

“I explained that, and explained that we have an ongoing problem here still,” Illuthiz said.

“Yeah, too few of us and far too many of them,” Damnazon said.

“Thought that was every day that ends in ‘y’ for an [Adventurer],” Cambrell said.

“It is, but this feeling different,” Mellisandra said.

Below them, the [Terravorlings] stubbornly refused to burn up in the lava like good little world destroying maggots were supposed to. From the insatiable manner in which they torn into the molten rock, their original nature as spawns of a [Relentless Hunger] was readily apparent. Baelgritz  had to wonder though if any of the Hunger’s drive towards oblivion remained. Eating the world’s core would cause it’s destruction in the distressingly short term, and they could theoretically eat the rest of it if given time, but given how the [Terravorlings] were moving it looked like they were taking pains not to devour each other.

“Saving each other for dessert?” Cambrell offered when Baelgritz shared his observation.

“Could be, but what happens to the last one?” Baelgritz asked, feeling like that was a more important question than it should be.

Melissa

Feral Fang was exhausted. [Jormungand] was supposed to be the name of a specific mythological beast, not a species name.

“Fish us up another one! The ocean’s draining away faster than ever!” Niminay said.

Below them, the tide had sunk another ten feet down the cliff face from where Melissa was perched with her [Compliant Rod].

“Have you gotten the [Bottle of Eternal Sweetwater] out of the last one yet?” Melissa asked, replacing the one hundred and one enchantments on the [Compliant Rod] so that it could even begin to withstand the beyond absurd levels of force it was going to have to endure once again.

“Nope,” Niminay said. “The dungeon inside the last one is even bigger than the one before it. The team that went in to get the bottle is still working through it. Is there anything else you can work with?”

“Yeah,” Feral Fang said. “Pure skill.”

Her cast wasn’t a thing of beauty. She had precisely zero interest in looking graceful or showing off. All that mattered was pure efficiency.

The lure she used was an illusion, a bit of magic woven around itself to attract the eye and ensnare the mind of her target. Despite the tight focus on who the lure was designed to attract, Feral Fang still cast it a good ten miles out into the ocean to be sure she didn’t inadvertently captivate her allies. In theory fishing magic only worked on creatures that swam in the deeps, but Feral Fang was overcharging techniques that only the very highest tier of fishers were capable of attempting. If she’d messed up the luring spell she was pretty sure it would detonate with the force of a small atomic bomb.

It was only somewhat distressing that an explosion of that size would barely scuff a [Jormungand’s] hide.

“Any idea how many more of these things there are?” Melissa asked, feeling the ten mile long line go taut almost the instant she sensed the lure plunge into the ocean.

“The good news is they don’t seem to be breeding new ones,” Niminay said. “Not anymore at least.”

“Not anymore? How long were they breeding for?” Melissa asked.

“Uh, are you sure you want to know the answer to that?” Niminay asked.

“Want to? Oh definitely not. Need to? Yeah. Probably,” Melissa said, unable to keep the heavy sigh from her voice.

“We sent a team to [Subaquatica]. Penny hoped it would make a good observation platform,” Niminay said.

“That’s like twenty miles away? Could they see anything from there?” Melissa asked.

“Not exactly? [Subaquatica’s] gone. The [Jormungand Breeding Grounds] covers the whole area now.”

Grunvan

It felt good to be driving a wagon again. After the fuss and bother of the last several days, having a nice simple assignment that was well within her wheelhouse put a broad happy smile on Grunvan’s face.

“We’re out of [Sky Scorcher Missiles] up here. Pass me another crate of them!” Argwin said as she tossed the last of their loaded [Inferno Cannons] to their [Octopire] friend Kolovin.

Yep. Just a nice, normal wagon delivery.

“I think those [Soul Shriekers] up ahead are trying to rot the bridge out before we can get there too by the way,” Argwin said. “You know, just in case you hadn’t noticed the explosions an such.”

Grunvan had, in fact, noticed the explosions. She also saw how the aforementioned [Soul Shrieks] were distorting the air out a twenty yard radius from the bridge. It was of course possible that the distortion would give them a nice massage and maybe do a little exfoliation to clear their pores. Magic was funny like that. Just because it was bending solid metal and causing wood to age into dust before her eyes didn’t mean that it would be bad or harmful for them, right? 

She tossed another [Inferno Cannon] from the box she’d been using as a wagon seat back to Kolovin. It joined the other three that the [Octopire] was wielding and together the quad-array of Consortium heavy ordnance weapons looked like they would be enough to push back the [Wraithwing Assault] long enough for Grunvan and her crew to reach the bridge.

Where they would either plummet to their death or be corpsified by the [Soul Shriekers].

The alternative, however, was worse.

Death had come to the [Fallen Kingdoms], or, more precisely, [Death Shadows]. Creatures that could inhabit anyone’s shadow and instantly drain the life from them, before peeling their shadow away and stalking away as a dozen copies to do the same to anyone even slightly touched by darkness. 

Penswell had passed on the good news in a rather hasty conference. Apparently the world was falling apart in a variety of places and thanks to the actions of a staggering assortment of different enemies, and Penny had the [Adventuring Parties] out dealing with the different threats. 

All of them. 

Every [Adventuring Party] in the world. 

Even the ones who hadn’t taken up arms against the [Consortium of Pain].

And, they weren’t enough.

That was why Grunvan was barreling down a shattered road in a the makeshift remains of a stolen Consortium wagon, being pulled by [Lava Demons] who mostly seemed to understand the commands she was giving them, while being pursued by a flight of [Wraithwings] sufficient to blacken the sky on what should have been a bright and sunny day.

Why the [Wraithwings] had shown up was something of a mystery. As far as Grunvan knew, they weren’t allies of the Consortium and shouldn’t have had any particular interest in the critters that were trying to end the world. [Wraithwings] could die the same as anything else, and the [Death Shadows] didn’t seem picky about who or what they stole the life from.

So far as Grunvan could tell the only reason the [Death Shadows] hadn’t swarmed over them as the [Wraithwings] blotted out the sun was the fear of the [Sun Bombs] her team had stocked the back of the wagon with.

Bombs made for terrible defensive tools but, with the stockpile they were sitting on, Grunvan guessed the [Death Shadows] within a couple hundred miles wouldn’t exactly be able to gloat over their victory.

Kamie Anne Do

Grace was deader than dead. She was okay with that though. They’d been doing good work. Hunting the [Disjoined] down into the deepest reaches of the [Dead Lands]. Developing new skills and even new classes, and putting an end to nightmares she’d never even imagined existed before.

And she’d gotten to scritch a [Hound of Fate] behind the ears.

It had nuzzled her hand in response, and if that was all she really accomplished in her life, that was fine. Good life. A+ score. Met the victory conditions and she could retire in peace.

Except, no matter how tired she and her team were, there was no rest to be had.

“Is it a bad sign that we don’t look like we used to?” Battler X asked, holding up a hand that was no longer a ghostly image of a human hand but rather a chalk white and disturbingly solid appendage with joints spaced noticeably off from where they should have been.

“That’ll depend on whether we can change back to how we used to look once we get back to the [Heart Fire],” Buzz Fightyear said.

“If we can get back to the [Heart Fire],” Grail Force said. “I don’t know about you all, but I lost track of where the path back home was about three layers of the [Emptiness] ago.”

Kamie turned to Grail, her unliving breath caught in her throat..

“I’m sorry. The what?” she asked.

“The [Emptiness],” Grail repeated.

“Why does that sound like a real term?” Battler asked.

“Because it is” Buzz said. “Where did you hear it?”

“I didn’t,” Grail said. “Check your map.”

“This area doesn’t have a map,” Kamie said.

“Right, but look up at the breadcrumb,” Grail said. “The region is still listed.”

“The [Emptiness]? But I thought we were in the [Dead Lands],” Buzz said.

“We were,” Kamie said. “We definitely were. But we chased those things so far. When did we get here? I mean when did the region change?”

“I don’t know,” Grail said. “I noticed a couple of drops ago. Was going to call it out, but we’ve sort of had other things to worry about.”

“I don’t get it though,” Battler said. “This place isn’t empty. The Hounds are here, and we fought those gray hydra things, and the [Disjoined] came here for something right?”

“They did,” Kamie said. “The whole time, they weren’t just running from us. They were running towards something.”

“So how is this place empty then?” Battler asked.

“Can’t you tell?” Grail asked. “Look around. The gray hydra followed us here. The buildings are reflections from our memories. Even the [Disjoined] didn’t last. They were finally falling apart when we got to the last of them. There’s no one here. No people. No ghosts. This isn’t a place for the dead. This is a place for no one.”

Tessa saw Obby starting to change before anyone else was aware of it. 

It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Somethings the mind can encompass.

Not that however.

“You really don’t want to see what comes next,” Obby, or whatever Obby had become, said, and with a wave of her hand, a veil of darkest night slid across the throne room, cutting Tessa’s party off from the horde of Hungers, Gulini Prime, and Obby’s new form.

***

Gulini Prime saw the [Adventurer] step forward, heard her hollow boast and prepared to slap bits of her into nonexistence. Just for fun.

It was wonderful that some opposition had made it this far in a desperate attempt to stop his victory. It was wonderful specifically because it was already far too late. He’d long since won, but having an audience around to watch all of the pieces fall into place made it all the more worthwhile.

The [Adventurer] was changing though.

That didn’t look right.

“By all means, cast your full might against me,” he said. “Summon your most terrible powers. I want you to know just how hopeless all this was.”

The [Adventurer] was laughing.

Or, was she?

Gulini couldn’t tell where the laughter was coming from, and was reasonably certain, that no human throat could have made that sound. For that matter, mortal throats in general didn’t seem like they were designed to make the thin fabric of the Dreamlit World quake.

“Play whatever tricks you like,” Gulini said. “I’ve won on every front.”

“Have you now? Do tell. Gloat all you’d like.”

It was the [Adventurer] speaking.

Gulini was sure of that.

Except, she was gone.

She’d blurred, and twisted, and stretched, and then cloaked herself in darkness.

As though invisibility would hide her from him.

Gulini laughed at the idea.

Did his laugh have a nervous catch in it? No. Certainly not. He had nothing to be nervous about. He’d already won. This was his chance to enjoy himself.

“Where do you think you are?” he asked.

“Why don’t you tell me.”

“This isn’t just any center of power,” Gulini said. “We stand in the birthplace of this realm, and in the presence of its chief architect.”

“So I see. And it appears you have her quite trapped?”

“It’s not a trap,” Gulini said. “It’s a tomb. The [Nightmare Queen] is cut off from the realm she breathed into life by her own power. She’s devouring herself in order to stave off the Hungers that surround her. She hopes to buy a precious few more moments for her world to exist, but even those moments are bent to my will.”

“You’re not just attacking her are you?”

“Of course not,” Gulini said. “Her [Fallen Kingdoms] have a thousand calamities that have risen up, any one of which is capable of ending all life in the world. And do you know what the best part is?”

“That she would be able to fix all of them if you weren’t here?”

“No! Just the opposite,” Gulini said. “Each of my beautiful, impossible children, is real enough that she couldn’t touch them even if she wanted to. I could let her go right now and the [Scourge of Serpents] would still encircle the world and crush the planet to dust in its coils, or the [Unquiet Shadows] would stretch across the land and pull everything that wasn’t bathed in pure light into the endless abyss, or the [Ashes of Doom] would fall endlessly and reduce everything they touch to cinders and broken memories.”

“That sounds very thorough, but maybe you should explain it a bit more.”

Gulini, on some level, knew he absolutely did not need to explain his plans. Or justify them. Or do anything the invisible and all-encompassing voice was saying.

But he wanted to.

No, he needed to.

Winning and crushing all hope from a world needed the proper garnish of active despair and there was so little time left to enjoy it.

“Throughout the wretched little world you call home I have seeded a thousand Hungers. But why would that be threatening you ask? After all, you know how to beat a Hunger. You converted that pathetic predecessor of mine into ‘Unknown’. And I suppose you also dealt with one of my minor fragments too.”

“So you made the Hungers better?”

“No. I didn’t make them Hungers at all. I made each one into its own unique apocalypse. So now there are a thousand ends of the world, all tearing it apart or ready to blossom.”

“All that work, and you don’t need any of them do you?”

“Of course not,” Gulini said. “Those are just for fun. Let the [Adventurers] struggle and die against them. Let them win and win and win. They only need to fail once and that’s the end of everything, except their true end awaits right here.”

“Because you’re going to destroy the lynchpin the entire realm is built on.”

“Because I’ve already destroyed the lynchpin the entire realm is built on. The Queen made this world, not alone but all of the others who stood with her are long gone. Her dominion encompasses all that the [Fallen Kingdoms] are. Destroy her and the realm she is a part of will shatter and fade away back to a forgotten corner of Oblivion.”

Gulini threw his arm wide in a grand gesture to take in the throne room that was all that remained of the Queen’s sanctum of power.

Except he couldn’t make out the walls of the throne room.

Or the throne.

Or anything.

“Hiding behind the shadows won’t save you when the last flame of existence is snuffed out,” Gulini said. “You will only die in darkness like a coward.”

“No one is going to die here.” Footsteps echoed in the darkness behind Gulini. No matter which direction he turned, they were always behind him. “Not even if you ask nicely.”

Gulini reached out with the emptiness that remained within him, the infinite hunger that still sought to consume everything and then itself. He’d been transcendent once, and so he remained, but the scope of his infinity had narrowed and been hedged in so greatly. He wasn’t yet the man he’d once been, and with the destruction of everything, he never would be, but as his pulse quickened, he felt a cold fear rising that was all too familiar.

“You should check on your prisoner. You wouldn’t want the Queen to get away.”

Gulini couldn’t see the throne the Queen had been driven back to. He couldn’t see the sphere of swirling space where she twisted the fabric of her realm and herself to keep his Hungers at bay. When he looked, in fact, he couldn’t even make out his hands at arms length.

“Where are you?” he demanded, searching the shadows that refused to yield.

“I’m right here.”

The voice came from everywhere around him.

It came from beyond the farthest star in the cosmos.

It came from right inside him.

“What are you?” Gulini’s voice broke as he stumbled in a few running steps.

The illusion of darkness couldn’t be that big. The Queen had set the boundaries of her throne room at static positions, not infinitely flexible ones. It gave the room a measure of reality. It made her weak. She accepted a limitation in order to be closer to the realm she had a hand in crafting and now he was going to use it against her and her would-be rescuer. 

He stumbled farther forward. The ground was level, but his feet weren’t finding support or purchase on it. 

“You can’t run away from this.”

“I don’t need to run. Your world is ending, and you and I are going to end with it. No matter what you do, I will return to blessed unbeing and my last thought will be satisfaction that I’ve brought everything and everyone else with me,” Gulini said.

“No. Like I said, no one dies here. Not even you.”

“How will you stop me then, if you won’t destroy me?” Gulini asked, smug delight rising in him again.

“By giving you what you’re missing.”

There was no force in what happened next. No sense of talons larger than a galaxy spearing into Gulini and pouring themselves into the void that lay within him. He felt no pain, and no terror as something without form or limit was dragged from inside him. There wasn’t even a sense of loss as the gateway to unspeakable power was torn away and he came crashing back down to the small, fragile, and terribly finite limits of his skin, his life, and his own empty mind.

“You can keep the memories,” Obby said, returning from the woman she truly was to the roll she’d chosen to play in the [Fallen Kingdoms]. “What you were, what you did, what you could have become, that’s all still there for you. Maybe you’ll even learn something from it.”

“What have you done?” Gulini asked as he collapsed to the throne room’s floor too shattered and overwhelmed to maintain consciousness any longer.

“Put things back where they belonged,” Obby said. At her gesture, the veil of shadows that had blocked them off from the Queen and Obby’s team receded.

“What just happened?” Rip asked.

“And where did all the Hungers go?” Matt asked.

“Back where they belong,” Obby said.

“How?” Tessa asked, more confused than the rest because she’d seen more than they had.

“Like I said, I don’t have to hold back here as much. But that’s not important. We’ve got bigger problems to deal with.”

“Do we?” the Nightmare Queen asked, rising from her throne.

“You’re diminished, but you’ll be able to recover,” Obby said. “At least as long as your world endures.”

“The Consortium Fleet will be deployed and ready to annihilate the system within half a day,” Azma said. “The Hierarch of this system will not need her full power to contain that threat.”

“Unfortunately, she’s going to have several other more urgent problems to deal with,” Obby said.

“More urgent than the sun exploding?” Lady Midnight asked.

“Yes,” the Nightmare Queen said. “I can sense them already. There are new threats, Hungers changed into a thousand unique tools, each bent on destroying our realm.”

“Ours?” Tessa asked.

The Nightmare Queen chuckled at that.

“We’ve always made this world together,” she said. “I hold the place I do only because I was the leader of the earliest efforts of creation. That creation didn’t end when the other gods left though, or when the kingdoms fell. You all have played a role in carrying it forward. Your adventures have been what preserved this world, time and again.”

“But we don’t make anything in the world. That’s the developers,” Pete said through Starchild.

“Would the developers have a job without players to engage with what they built?” The Queen’s voice sounded slightly different to Tessa’s ears. Almost familiar, though the memory felt long distant. “You’re the ones who make guilds, who build halls and houses, and who create the stories that bring our world to life.”

“Apologies for asking this, but you sound like you’ve played in the Earthly version of [Broken Horizons]. Are you one of the developers?” Lisa asked.

“Not for a long time, but I was,” the Nightmare Queen said.

“What happened?” Rip asked.

“I died,” the Nightmare Queen said. “I worked and worked and poured so much of myself into this world, that when it came time to shuffle off the mortal coil and move on, this is where I moved on to.”

“And you wound up joined with the Nightmare Queen?” Tessa said, an understanding of who they were talking to bubbling up in her mind.

“I was surprised at the time, but I suppose I had set her up as something of a self-insert character.”

Before Tessa could speak, Marcus did.

“Gail? Is that you?”

The Nightmare Queen blinked in surprise.

“Marcus? You finally made up a cat boy character?”

“Umm, who is that?” Rip asked on the team’s private channel.

“That’s Gail Merriden,” Tessa said. “She was the first Lead Designer on [Broken Horizons]. She shaped everything about the game and she died bringing it to life.”

“So how is she here?” Rip asked.

 “Maybe the same as we are,” Lisa said.

“Wait, you mean we’re dead?” Matt asked.

“No. We’re not,” Tessa said. “But we are needed here, and I think so was she.”

“The question is, will she be able to help us?” Lisa said.

“I’m pretty she can,” Pillowcase said. “Take a look at your chat log.”

Quest Complete: The Call Is Answered

New Quest Unlocked: Save The Worlds

Only a small flicker of divine power was left in Tessa’s hand. She’d been carefully releasing it as the conversation continued around her and could only hope that the sparks she’d been casting off would find the places they needed to be. The sparks weren’t  their only hope but Tessa suspected they was going to be the best.

“If Byron has gone to your world, will he be capable of returning here?” Penswell asked.

“No,” Azma said, answering faster than Tessa could. “If he could travel freely between the worlds, he would be assaulting us right now.”

Penswell paused for a moment and then nodded in agreement.

“He will build up his forces on Earth,” Penswell said. “But he wouldn’t wait for that to attack us again. We have people here who understand what he is and that number will grow exponentially the longer he waits. Also we’re as weak now as we ever will be.”

“Plus Tess is almost done with enacting her plan,” Azma said, nodding towards Tessa who people seemed to be forgetting existed despite the fact that she was glowing like a bonfire.

“Your plan?” Cease asked, startling a bit when she noticed that Tessa was no more than two paces away from her.

“She means this,” Tessa said, showing the tiny mote of light that was left in her hand. 

“That was…it was brighter before wasn’t it?” Cease asked, shaking her head. She wasn’t the only one trying to clear away the cobwebs.

“It was,” Tessa said. “It’s almost used up now.”

“What was it doing…?” Cease started to ask before losing her train of thought as she started into the dwindling flame.

“Empowering more soldiers?” Azma guessed. 

Gazing on the divine wasn’t something mortal minds were meant to handle well. Tessa wondered how worried she should be that Azma was able to dispassionately regard the god soul and neatly file it away as just another tool she might be able to use.

“Not soldiers,” Tessa said. “This is a gift. To the world. To the ones who need it.”

“You’ve saved a measure of it though,” Penswell said.

“Enough for one more minor miracle,” Tessa said. “Though I know we’re going to need a lot more than that.”

“Why waste it then?” Cease asked.

“She didn’t,” Penswell said.

“You should tell them what the miracle you’re holding the last bit for is,” Lisa said.

“I can’t open a portal back to Earth,” Tessa said. “Not without causing problems over there, and probably here too. The [Fallen Kingdoms] is fine with portals though.”

“We can teleport here, what would we need a portal for?” Cease asked.

“For a place we can’t teleport to,” Lisa said. “A place the devs never intended us to reach.”

“Hailey, Marcus, this is where you come in,” Tessa said.

“Us?” Hailey asked. “What can we do?”

“We need to get back to Earth the right way,” Tessa said. “We need to complete the quest we got when we landed here.”

“Quest?” Marcus asked. “You didn’t do your starter class quests?”

“Not that one,” Tessa said. “The broken one. The one that’s preventing us from logging out.”

“But we don’t know what that quest was,” Hailey said.

“I think you do. I think it’s how you got here,” Tessa said. “You heard something calling you right? And you followed that call. From something, or someone.”

“Yeah. BT was calling to me, so I just kind of let go and let myself be drawn over here,” Hailey said.

“But BT doesn’t have the power to pull people across worlds. Neither did Pillowcase, or Lost Alice, or any of our alter-egos,” Tessa said. “Someone else was calling to you in BT’s name. Someone who is that powerful. The someone who brought us all here because this world needed us, and our world needs the [Fallen Kingdoms].”

“We don’t know who that could be though,” Marcus said.

“Maybe not, but you heard their voice stronger than any of us, and I think with this you can lead us back to them.”

Tessa held out her left hand, palm up with the dazzling spark of the god soul still flickering on it.

“We can’t use that like you can,” Hailey said shying away from the divine light, some portion of her psyche evidently recalling the trauma of glitching out while she carried a fragment of the divine upon her arrival.

“That’s why we’re going to use it together,” Tessa said.

“All of us?” Niminay asked.

“We’re going with her,” Rip said.

“The rest of you will probably need to stay here though,” Lisa said.

“This world needs you. It’s not even close to out of danger yet,” Obby said.

“I should go with you,” Penswell said. “I need to understand what transpires on both worlds if we’re going to extend our plans and save them our worlds.”

“Here we reach the crucial juncture then,” Azma said. “You know you cannot leave, or take your attention from the battles here. You will invite immediate disaster if you do.”

“They must have a tactician with them,” Penswell said. “And this mission does not offer a viable profit profile for you.”

“She’ll go anyways,” Grenslaw said, stepping up to stand beside Azma.

“And we will go with her,” Ryschild said, flanking Azma on the other side.

“You will now, will you?” Azma asked, looking uncharacteristically stunned.

“Yes [Supreme Commander],” Grenslaw said. “By our calculations we will provide a positive measure of support even discounting our efforts for the required trust deficient.”

“And how much distrust have you calculated I should maintain against you?” Azma asked.

“Seventy three percent,” Ryschild said. “At the outer limit. Risk analysis would allow for as low as thirty percent, but that would be an unnecessary gamble.”

“I should like to check your numbers,” Azma said. “My own suggest that the outer limit is at seventy two percent. Present circumstances will have to defer that pleasure however.”

“We will look forward to our after mission review,” Grenslaw said.

“That’s good. We will trade reports as to the events we encountered,” Azma said.

“Pardon?” Ryschild asked.

“Risk analysis is a tool ill suited to this juncture. I am turning over complete control of the forces who are reporting to me, the [Adventuring Companies], the forces we brought with us from the [High Beyond], and the one reclaimed Consortium forces in the ships we’ve been able to commandeer,” Azma said. “You now possess all of the power and authority I have wielded to this point.”

“[Supreme Commander]?” Grenslaw asked, looking distraught at the notion.

“This world needs you,” Azma said. “And we need it. I do not speak in sentimental sense. This operation can only end in our destruction or the end of the [Consortium of Pain]. The world holds every resource we presently possess to ensure the conflicts turns out in our favor.”

“Why would you entrust its management to us then?” Ryschild asked.

“Because you are ready for it,” Azma said.

She didn’t say that she trusted them, and neither Grenslaw nor Ryschild shed any tears. Their silent nods spoke like thunder though.

“Would it even be worth asking if we can trust you?” Marcus asked.

“Of course,” Azma said. “And I would tell you that you absolutely cannot. A fact which Penswell will easily confirm.”

“Just as easily as I will confirm that you do need her,” Penswell said.

“Why can’t we trust her then?” Rip asked.

“Because I’m going to try to take over the world,” Azma said. “And I will use every tool and advantage I can get to do so.”

“Oh, I like this one,” Zardrak said. “I might even stay out of prison if you’ll be around to play with.”

“Not for long you won’t,” Azma promised.

“It’s time,” Tessa said, drawing people’s attention back to her.

“I’m losing track of you?” Hailey said.

“The divine isn’t something we’re meant to perceive,” Tessa said. “Our mind’s edit it out of reality, unless we’re very close to it.”

Lisa squeezed Tessa’s other hand in acknowledgement.

“What do we need to do?” Marcus asked.

“You two hold this with me,” Tessa said. “Anyone who’s coming along, place a hand on one of us.”

“How will we know when you’re ready?” Lady Midnight asked.

“If this works, it’s going to be hard to miss,” Tessa said.

She felt Rip, Matt and Rachel place their hands on her back. Lady Midnight, Starchild, and Obby placed their hands on Hailey, while Azma, and Yawlorna placed their hands on Marcus.

As Hailey and Marcus placed their hands in hers and joined in communion with the god soul, Tessa felt an unexpected power surge through.

“What is this?” Hailey breathed.

“I think it’s us,” Tessa said. “Roll with it. Think of the voice that called you here. Reach out. Let the light carry us to it.”

Even before she finished speaking, Tessa saw iridescent motes begin to rise from her outstretched hand.

And then her body was dissolving away once more and she was traveling again.

But this time she wasn’t alone.

And she didn’t have nearly as far to go.

Where the trip to the [Fallen Kingdoms] had felt like a journey across interstellar space, out passed the farthest edge of the cosmos, this trip held a different sort of grandeur. 

It was only a few steps away, but Tessa had the impression of stepping backstage, behind the curtain and into a realm beyond the artifice of anything like ‘reality’.

Glancing up as she felt herself reintegrate, Tessa saw they were no longer standing in an arena, but rather in a vast throne room.

A vast throne room that was filled with Hungers of all types.

“We can’t beat this many,” Tessa said staring into a writhing sea of Remnants.

“No. No you can’t,” Gulini Prime said, stepping forth from the mass of Hungers as though he was striding out of a curtain of torrential rain. “You beat one of my fragments? And imprisoned it a a purely physical form? Unmaking you is going to be delicious.”

“Maybe we can’t beat all of these things, but we definitely know how to beat you,” Rip said.

“Please. Do try,” Gulini said. “This will be entertaining.”

“How did you get this many Hungers in here?” Obby asked, stepping in front of Rip.

“We are outside the [Fallen Kingdoms],” Gulini said. “The normal rules don’t apply here. Byron learned the trick to summoning them into reality but reality corrupted them, and him. He’s only a pale shadow of what I still am. Here, anything I wish is possible. From here, from the birthplace of this world, I can unmake it with ease.”

“Then why haven’t you? Asking for a friend,” Obby said.

“Because he can’t while I still stand.”

The voice belong to a woman.

A Queen.

The Nightmare Queen.

Tessa wasn’t sure how she knew that. There was the dimmest, quietest fragment of an awareness tickling at the edge of her consciousness. If she just reached out to grab it, she knew it would share so many important secrets with her.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” Obby said, glancing back and meeting Tessa’s gaze just enough to pull Tessa away from the distant awareness that was calling to her.

Tessa blinked and felt the weight of her body settle over her again.

That was weird, right? Pillowcase asked.

Yeah, I don’t know where we were going there, Tessa said. And I feel like that’s a good thing.

“And how, exactly do you ‘have this’?” Gulini asked. “I see your little skill there. [Transdimensional Integrity]. You know that doesn’t work here right? Not against me.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have to put that to the test,” Obby said, advancing towards the infinite horde of Hungers.

“And why is that?” Gulini asked.

“Because like you said, we’re in the Dreamlit World now and we’re not bound by reality’s constraints anymore,” Obby said. “And that means I don’t have to hold back anymore.”

Or was it Obby?

With each blink of her eyes, Tessa saw Obby changing, her [Adventurer] persona falling away like a flimsy Halloween disguise that hid a far greater nightmare than any of the Gulini’s ever could be.

Everything was thwarting Byron’s plans. Even the damnable name he’d cast off had come back to envelope him like a smothering blanket. He’d been so clever, and so close to bringing oblivion to every creation, and yet a lowly Tech Support manager and Byron’s eternally damned ‘Creator’ had managed to be at just the right spots at just the right times to prevent the simple, barely noticeable actions he needed to take to end all existence.

How was that fair?

Worse, even by burning off the last bit of god soul that he had immediate access to, he hadn’t been able to return to the point he’d intended too. He’d been sure when the left the [Fallen Kingdoms] that he was returning to the exact point in space where he’d been standing when Marcus had somehow dragged him beyond time and space back to the [Fallen Kingdoms]. Instead of the hallway leading to the local server farm in the Egress Entertainment headquarters though, he’d appeared in the void of space.

Which was troublesome.

His lungs had burst.

His blood had boiled.

He’d both frozen and burned.

It just wasn’t fair.

Byron however was used to life being unfair, and used to overcoming the trivial problems which it presented. A destroyed body was hardly an issue for someone who could define his own reality after all. 

Well, define it to a certain extent.

Enough to repair the body and make it resilient to anything as trivial as the concept of ‘damage’.

That’s he’d been damaged at all though was worrisome. He was supposed to be beyond that, or, to be more accurate, he was supposed to be beyond all concepts. He was supposed to not be at all, and to be leading all of existence to share in that state.

He was the end of everything, which also made him the beginning, and, as he had always known to be true, the only meaningful thing in all that was, or would ever be.

He deserved better!

He deserved for everything to become nothing and then nothing would be better than he was.

Byron felt the empty clarity of space fill him, but where there should have been the joy of reconnecting to his primal lack of essence, Byron felt little needling bites of ‘being’ corrupting him even here.

Cosmic rays, photons of visible light, microscopic dust, a stay lug nut.

Okay, that last one was particularly annoying. 

The chances of being hit by random space debris, even in Earth orbit were vanishingly remote. 

Someone hated him.

Which was fine.

He hated them back.

On general principal and because if they existed in the first place, they were worth hating.

“Enough dawdling,” he said, speaking to the only audience who mattered, himself. That an airless vacuum is incapable of carrying sound was just another physical law he was delighted to be violating.

The best violations required proper victims though, and those were all going to be found on the rapidly receding blue green rock. The one the god soul was supposed to have transported him to. The one that was apparently in motion.

Why hadn’t anyone told him the Earth was orbiting a sun, and the sun was orbiting a super massive black hole in the center of a galaxy, and the whole galaxy was wheeling around in a universe where no part of it seemed to understand how to sit still?

Byron searched the memories he’d absorbed when he’d eaten David Kralt. The idiot had been aware that the Earth was in orbit and hadn’t seen fit to pre-warn Byron of that before he’d been eaten. Not that Byron had needed the warning. He knew perfectly well how solar systems and galaxies worked. It was simply ridiculous to expect that he would consider anything as powerless and unimportant as a planet like the Earth to partake in such cosmic structures.

Why build an entire universe and then put such a drab, pointless place like the Earth in it?

He was doing the cosmos a favor by putting it out of its misery. The designer was clearly a hack and a sadist to inflict such mundanity on the people who roamed the world like particularly irritating fleas.

“Still dawdling,” he said, growing displeased with himself.

Which was good.

If you didn’t hate yourself, then could you really claim to be self aware?

Before his thoughts could spiral around on themselves even further, Byron corrected for his error in position. 

Or he tried to.

The Earth didn’t seem to like the idea of allowing him to teleport back to the server room. It didn’t like the idea quite strenuously in fact. Byron knew that didn’t matter. He wasn’t bound by any silly reality a world might be clinging to. If he wanted to do something, he certainly could.

But it might change him again.

It seemed that every time he fought against a world, he won the battle but the victory gave him too much. He was able to do what he wanted but it became a thing within him. The capacity to do again the thing he’d insisted he could do.

He hadn’t seen the harm in that at first, and so he’d broken every rule of reality he could find in the Fallen Kingdoms, and in return they’d given him back his name.

His “Creator”, the true worst horror in all creation, had come so close to drawing that name down onto him completely, like a straightjacket of identity that would have bound him more tightly than even his idiotic prior-self who’d apparently just given up and accepted becoming a real entity. 

“Unknown” was a good name for the fool, as Byron couldn’t imagine what had convinced the weaker, lesser version of himself to abandon the comfort of oblivion offered in favor of enduring the misery that was an actual life.

“Ok. Just stop. You are still in space. Move already! Now!” he commanded himself, and for a change, followed his own advice.

Teleportation was off the table, for now, because he chose to ignore it. Not because he couldn’t. He simply wished to arrive in style.

Earth’s reality didn’t object to the concept of acceleration though so Byron gave himself some of that. Reality wasn’t happy to see a force without an equal and opposite reaction, but it complained less than it would have against teleportation for some reason.

That reason might have been the amusement factor of watching Byron plow face first into the planet’s surface at several thousand times the speed of sound. 

“Less acceleration next time, perhaps,” he said as he rose from the crater and dusted himself off.

The next step was to get to the servers which linked the Earth to the [Fallen Kingdoms]. According to Kralt’s knowledge, they were the central point of connection between the two realms. Without the servers, Kralt believed the worlds would be cut off and no one would be able to communicate between them.

That idea pleased Byron since he knew what it would drive the Earthlings who were trapped in the [Fallen Kingdoms] to do. 

They would open a gate back to the Earth using a god soul like he had, or some even clumsier means. A much bigger and more stable gate which would let them return to their precious homeworld, and also allow all of the Hungers that he’d pulled through the pathetically thin veil around the [Fallen Kingdoms] to crossover to the Earth as well.

He’d tried pulling Hungers to the Earth directly after he’d arrived there originally. As with all other things, it was quite possible for him, the problem was the Hungers he’d summoned had all been carried off to other realms almost as quickly as they appeared. 

Worse, each Hunger he summoned let a little bit more of the Earth leak into him. 

It was so unfair.

The more he tried to destroy the world, the more it tried to create him.

It shouldn’t be able to do that. 

It should simply fall apart on a quantum level and return to incoherent noise and possibility until even that drained away into proper nothingness.

It was so simple! Why couldn’t everyone just see that?

“I should find out where I am,” Byron told himself, since wherever the servers were, they didn’t seem to be within his field of vision.

Looking around he didn’t see anything interesting at all.

The big crater he was in was filled with scraps of destroyed cars and maybe a highway interchange? Buildings towards the edge of the crater had fallen over, or were burning, or both. Some screams filled the air, sirens blared, and rising from where he stood a minor mushroom cloud had formed over head.

So nothing interesting at all.

He tried listening past the sirens, wondering if he could hear any of the Hungers that he’d released still being active somewhere in the world.

Someone shot him.

“Ah, I must be in America,” he said and turned to look at his assailant. He expected to find a police officer, or military personnel but instead a group of men in combat fatigues with flag bandanas were taking up firing positions behind their oversized pickup trucks.

They seemed both terrified and excited and each one was so much more interested in getting their shots in than in helping any of the wounded around them that it touched Byron’s heart.

He ate all of their minds.

Because, of course he did.

Humans on Earth didn’t have the annoying protections that [Adventurers] did against that sort of thing.

In consuming them, he took their husks and filled them with the killing skills they’d been so eager to use as well as all the hate that would fit within them. He was surprised at how little hate he was able to add though. They were so full already there was barely room left to cram more in without popping them like overstuffed sausages. 

He popped a few just for fun.

It was a learning experience.

For them. 

He already knew they’d basically explode.

But it was still enjoyable to watch, and didn’t he deserve to have a little enjoyment in his day? Hadn’t he worked enough to justify a reward?

He popped another one, but it wasn’t the same.

“I have things to do,” he said, speaking to his puppets and definitely not chastising himself for getting lost in the moment, again. “Here, go play with this.”

He pulled forth another Hunger, a wonderful, raw patch of absolute nothing, easily able to devour the world, his puppets, and even himself. 

The smoke in the air tickled his nose – which should not have been able to happen!

Scowling he waved the [Relentless Hunger] off to cause havoc and bid his new minions to follow.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said to no one, confiding in the only person he could trust. “I can’t do all this work on my own.”

And that was the problem, wasn’t it?

He wasn’t meant to be a worker bee.

He had never been a ‘doer’.

He was supposed to manage.

No, he was supposed to Direct!

Doing labor? Himself? It was a worse abomination than existence.

What he needed was someone else to do all the hard stuff for him.

Hadn’t that been why he’d had a Gulini?

He probably should have taken better care of the Gulinis if so.

Except how was that his problem? It sounded like more work!

No, if Gulini couldn’t take care of himself then he wasn’t the minion that Byron needed.

Which meant that he needed a better minion?

So, interviews? Ask for resumes with past experience on destroying worlds? Put up an ad on Craigslist? No, that was old fashioned. LinkedIn?

Again with the work?

He didn’t need any of that.

All he needed was an idea.

Ideas came at a cost though. 

He’d need a dime to get a dozen of them.

Stealing someone else’s ideas was always free though.

How many stories and games hadn’t had self-replicating foes as either an implied threat or an outright one?

Enough that it wasn’t going to cost him anything!

Byron smiled and began drawing another Hunger forth from Oblivion.

This one wasn’t pristine though.

This one he gave a tiny kernel of identity to, a single reference point and a new name.

Seeing the [Spawning Hunger], he smiled. His work was done.

And so was the Earth!

The god soul was burning within her and Tessa began to experience a terrible sensation. For something that on one level was just a reflection of the admin rights the EE personnel possessed, the ball of power in Tessa’s hand pulsed with glory and righteousness and cosmic insight. She knew, intellectually, that she needed to get rid of it before too much longer. Emotionally though? In the depth of her heart a terrible realization was being born.

I’ve figured it out, she whispered to herself. I don’t need to be afraid of this, and I don’t need to give it up. I’ve come so far. I could hold this and retain all the parts of me that I want to.

It wasn’t the same temptation she’d felt before. There was no terror or desperation pushing her to cling to the power she held. Calm certainty filled her, chipping away her reservations with tools she’d never had to resist before.

“You feeling okay there?” Lisa asked, stepping in close to provide a little more support.

“Nope,” Tessa admitted. “I have definitely been messing with these things a little too often.”

“Drop it then,” Lisa said, tightening her hold on Tessa’s arms.

“Can’t. Not yet. We’re going to need it. I can see something, a bit of the future maybe? Not too far ahead. It’s not specific, but I know. We’ll need this,” Tessa said.

“That’s the power talking. We need you more,” Lisa said.

“I know. And I’m not going away,” Tessa said. “I can hang on for a bit more. I’m still me. Still human. Or still mortal I guess. Or, sort of? Are [Adventurers] even mortal? Really? I’ve died like a billion times today. And that just doesn’t seem like a ‘mortal’ thing to be doing. I think?”

“Hey, take a breath,” Lisa said. “You’re starting to sound scattered.”

“That’s not a great sign is it?”

“I don’t know. You sound a little more like yourself when you talk like that.”

“More like myself than when?”

“Than when you’re asking us to ‘Rise’! How did you do that?”

Tessa wondered that herself. She’d gotten used to hearing the weird reverb around names and other special nouns in the [Fallen Kingdoms]. [Rise] was different though. There was an almost irresistible imperative there, like it was more the god soul speaking through her than anything she was saying.

“I don’t know if that was me,” Tessa said.

“Interesting,” Penswell said, eyeing Tessa from three different vantage points.

Tessa hadn’t noticed Penny calling forth echoes of herself. She also hadn’t noticed the [Adventurers] turning from the seconds of silence following her words to break into a cacophony of individual conversations.

“I like the idea that the world is fighting on our side,” Niminay said. “And that its on us to keep pressing the battle forward. I think it’s what we would do anyways, but it felt right when you said it.”

Tessa grinned. Niminay was taller than she was used to seeing her, but then she was used to seeing her through Glimmerglass eyes rather than her own.

“What I don’t like,” Niminay continued, and Tessa felt herself tense for an impending rebuke. “Is that the person who seems to be our primary foe is off on his own to the gods know where.”

It wasn’t a rebuke. Even to Tessa’s ears it didn’t sound like one, though she immediately wondered if there hadn’t been something she could have done to stop Byron’s escape.

“I believe even the gods themselves could not tell where Byron escaped to,” Penny said. “That was a god soul that he used to escape, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” Tessa said. “I think. I don’t know where he got it but there are a lot of possible places given how easily he can destroy things.”

“Every [Heart Fire] has one, don’t they?” Matt asked.

“Yeah, and he’s not afraid of pulling more of the Hungers through the breeches in reality that result when you take a [Heart Fire] apart,” Tessa said.

“He spoke as though they were a limited resources,” Penny said and then corrected herself. “No. He spoke as though he regretted the necessity of using the god soul he held.”

“Maybe he was fond of that one?” Rip said.

“It’s not the loss of the power he objected to,” Unknown said. “It’s the effect using that power will have on him.”

“Oh, wow! Yeah!” Tessa said. “He used a piece of divine power from the [Fallen Kingdoms]. He’ll have absorbed even more reality than before. He’ll be forced to change again.”

“Yes, though perhaps not as much as he should have had to,” Unknown said. “Using the god soul meant that it could bear the brunt of reality trying to assert itself, even if some portion of its power must spill over into him and change him in the process.”

“Then why use it to escape at all?” Niminay asked. “Couldn’t he have just teleported away on his own? It wouldn’t even be a unique skill. Plenty of bad guys can do that.”

“We can also use [Teleportation] to arrive in a timely fashion as well,” Zardrak said.

Every [Adventurer] present, Niminay included had their weapons in their hand, their spells on the lips, and their strongest cooldown abilities ready to fire before Zardrak finished speaking.

“Hold for a moment,” Penswell said. “Zardrak, you decided to leave your cell somewhat earlier than you’d planned?”

“No. I released him,” Azma said, stepping through the still open portal behind him, followed by Yawlorna, Baelgritz and the rest of the crew.

“And you came here?” Penswell said, wonder dawning on her face. “There are new terrors afoot? Or, no, a terror we’ve been expecting?”

Azma nodded, and Tessa felt like she was seeing at best ten percent of the conversation that was passing between them.

“They’re early too then,” Penswell said. “Curious.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Cease asked.

“The Consortium’s eradication fleet,” Azma said. “They’re here to detonate the local sun and then get serious about erasing any still coherent matter from the system. Or at least that’s what their original mission was.”

“But now they’ve been subborned by Byron,” Penswell said. “Which doesn’t change their goals of objectives, does it?”

“Excuse me, did you say there’s a fleet here that’s intent on blowing up the sun?” Cease asked.

“We have plans to deal with this eventuality,” Penswell said. “The question is which ones we move forward with.”

“I was hoping to make use of that,” Azma said, nodding towards the god soul that was still burning in Tessa’s hand. “But I see that isn’t an option.”

“It’s not?” Cease asked and turned to look at Tessa. “If that thing has admin right, can’t you just delete the Consortium or something?”

“In theory, sure,” Tessa said. “In practice though? If they’ve got even one of the Hungers with them, it’ll eat the [Divine Edict] and just grow stronger. This thing isn’t how we fight them.”

“Then what good is it?” Cease asked.

“I’ll show you in a bit,” Tessa said. Her vision of the future wasn’t anything clearer or more solid than her imagination, but her intuition was all but screaming at her that she had something important to do.

“So, we’ll need a fleet of our to oppose them then?” Penny asked.

“And an army to take control of the fleet,” Azma said.

“We have an army,” Penny said.

“And a fleet waiting for us,” Azma said.

“The only problem being our fleet is in a far orbit still and is being overrun by more freshly decanted Hungers every moment.”

“That’s far from our only problem,” Azma said. “For as many [Adventurers] who have risen to serve, there is the need for a hundred more. With the force we have now, we will need approximately thirty four miracles to manage even basic survival.”

“Thirty four is a tiresome number,” Penny agreed. “How far can Zardrak reduce that number?”

“Oh my own? If I was truly motivated and you returned me to my throne? Perhaps half?” Zardrak said.”But, I have no desire to take my throne. And, I feel little motivation for a grand battle with an overwhelming foe. So perhaps I could manage three, or two miracles maybe?”

“Or maybe just one,” Yawlorna said. “But that could be enough.”

“They’re [Adventurers] now too,” Azma said, cutting through the coy banter due to a keen awareness of how little time they had left.

“What does that mean?” Cease asked.

“It means, we got a whole bunch of new powers to work with,” Baelgritz said.

“And that we will die permanently no more easily than any other [Adventurer] would,” Illuthiz said.

“Can anyone use the process you’ve come up with to become [Adventurers] too?” Tessa asked as she started doing some quick metal mathematics.

“Anyone who wants to,” Baelgritz said.

“Anyone who is sapient,” Yawlorna said.

“And we need to trust him on that?” Niminay said, her bow still drawn and pointed at Zardrak.

“You could let the world be destroyed if you preferred,” Zardrak said. “Do consider though that I have always professed a desire to rule the world and that is rather pointless when it is an ever expanding cloud of dust.”

“I ask again, are we supposed to trust him?” Niminay could have been cast from solid marble with how little her aim wavered.

“Of course not,” Azma said. “You may however trust Penswell. When Zardrak tries to betray us, she will select the most appropriate, or perhaps most amusing plan to stop him. By my estimation his betrayal will last no more than a handful of seconds.”

Penny huffed a small breath of disbelief.

“So little faith in me?” she asked, looking at Azma and not Niminay.

“Don’t show off and do it in less than one second,” Azma said. “No one will get to appreciate it if you stop him that quickly.”

“I can see one little problem with the ‘build a bigger army’ idea,” Cease said. “Those things can’t take over our minds, but they can still do a number on our bodies. I know ‘send more people to hit them’ is tried and true [Adventurer] strategy but if you send tens of million of us against those things rather than hundreds of thousands, I think all we’ll get is a pile of bodies that’s tens of millions high rather than only a few hundred thousand corpses tall.”

“I think that’s what I needed this for,” Tessa said and raised the god soul high enough for everyone to see.

Which involved calling its power into herself and floating off the ground.

The overwhelming force did not overwhelm her. She could handle it. Just like she’d thought she could.

In her hand, the power to define the cosmos blazed and Tessa felt there was no more than the thinnest of veils between her and a full understanding of it.

“Show us what you got!” Obby cheered from below her and Tessa turned her attention from the god soul to the small army around her.

As Pillowcase, it was her job to protect them, and as Tessa she knew how.

“[Transdimensional Integrity],” she said not taking anything from the god soul but  instead sharing her own soul with it.

The light of the god soul didn’t shatter, but fragments of it kindled within everyone the light touched. Sparks of divine power joined with the souls of all those present, creating in them the same resiliency to the Hunger’s attacks that Pillowcase possessed.

“What was that?” Azma asked as Tessa descended, the god soul a much smaller and more flickering light in her hand.

“A gift,” Tessa said. 

“You gave us your talent? The one that keeps you safe from the Hungers?” Lisa asked.

“Not ‘gave’. Shared, like sharing fire,” Tessa said. “I can still use it too. You’ll be able to share it onwards too, spreading to everyone who fights with us. We won’t lose anything in making each other stronger and I think it’s what we needed to take the fight to Byron.”

“Our fight isn’t with Byron any longer,” Unknown said.

“What do you mean?” Azma asked.

“My principal divergent self is no longer here,” Unknown said. “I’ve searched for him and I find no trace of him in this sphere.”

“Could he be hidden from you?” Penny asked.

“He could but he never would,” Unknown said.

“He hasn’t been destroyed,” Azma said.

“No,” Tessa said, understanding why Byron had been loath to use his last precious fragment of a god soul. “He’s gone to Earth.”

In the wake of a god soul’s destruction the arena was perfectly silent.

For all of two seconds.

Then the cacophony of questions of exploded from nearly every mouth present.

“It worked!” Lisa said on their private channel and Tessa felt her pulse descend from a nine digit number of beats per minute down to something that wasn’t giving her blood the pressure of a neutron star.

“I believe an explanation of what just occurred would be advantageous for everyone present to hear,” Penswell said, her voice once again only slightly louder than casual speaking volume and yet sounding clearly audible throughout the arena as every conversations were hushed to a whisper.

“If you could start with what in the actual hell that thing was, that would be really nice,” Cease said.

“We don’t have words to describe him. Yet,” Tessa said. 

“But we can explain his history,” Unknown said.

“He can’t change that can he?” Tessa asked.

“No. None of them can,” Obby said. “They can cheat reality without limits along some axis but not others.”

“Those are words, but we don’t have enough context for them to really make sense yet,” Damnazon said.

“Let me start at the beginning then,” Tessa said, and gave Penswell and the small army of [Adventurers] who’d come with her a high level recounting of the various encounters they’d had with the [Formless Hunger] and the various permutations that it morphed through, finishing up with a description of fighting the [Broken Hunger] on the fleet’s capital ship and demanding its name with the force of the previous god soul she’d wielded.

Unknown stepped in at that point and explained the experience from his perspective, how he’d been slowing accumulated little bits of reality, like grit in a clam, becoming more real, despite his strenuous objections, with every passing interaction he’d had with anything and everything in the world.

It hadn’t been until he’d taken a name though that he’d become fully part of the world, and while he could call cosmic power to his fingertips, the [Transcendent] quality he had once possessed was forever lost to him. 

He was a part of the [Fallen Kingdoms] and though he’d fought against it with lethal and absolute force, the self he’d gained had turned out to be the very thing, possibly the only thing, that had been able to fill the infinite hunger within him.

“So why isn’t that guy like that too then? Or is he just terminally hangry still?” Cease asked.

“His name was Byron,” Tessa said. “I saw that right as he was leaving. I don’t know what he is now exactly, but he’s the one who’s been pulling in the other Hungers.”

“And how did you see all of that?” Penswell asked.

“With this,” Tessa said, holding up her fist and the blazing light it contained.

“You called that a god soul?” Penswell asked.

“Yeah. It’s not it’s real name,” Tessa said. “You can hear that right?”

“I can,” Penswell said. “Though I can discern little else about it. Have you become adept enough with handling them that you can now carry that one safely?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Tessa said. “I just have a fairly good idea how long I can stand it before it destroys everything mortal in me.”

“You said you were okay holding onto it?” Lisa asked privately.

“For the time being, yeah,” Tessa said. “But this isn’t something I can just put into my inventory and haul out as needed.”

“How long are you good for?”

“Another fifteen minutes, for sure, if I need to I think I can push it to twice that,” Tessa said. “So my plan is to ditch it in ten minutes or so.”

“If time permits then, can you explain what we just witnessed?” Penswell asked.

“I think that needs to start with Marcus,” Tessa said.

“Oh, my bit’s pretty simple,” Marcus said. “I got back to EE HQ and found some guy who looked like David Kralt – he was the original lead developer for the game – talking with a federal agent about taking the servers down all at once.”

“Wait? Kralt? That’s…that’s really odd,” Tessa said. “We ran into Kralt earlier. Up in the high beyond. He was a slime. I mean he was literally a [Slime Type] mob.”

“What happened to him there?” Marcus asked.

“I…uh, I kinda destroyed the pocket dimension he was in and then stuff him in my inventory bag.”

“We need to talk for several weeks about your adventurers to date,” Penswell said.

“Let’s hope the [Fallen Kingdoms] has that long,” Tessa said.

“So where is he now? Kralt I mean?” Marcus asked.

“Did I let him out?” Tessa asked searching her memories. So so so many more important things than Kralt had been happening though that she drew a blank. “No, I think he should still be here,” she searched around in her bag only to discover that, while it held many other things, it did not in fact have any [Slime Type Monsters] inside it. “Or not. He got out.”

“I just checked, I’m not seeing him as a listed [Adventurer] anywhere,” Lisa said.

“Byron got to him,” Obby said. “What you met was the skinsuit that remained of him.”

“Thanks. That’s going to be right up front in my nightmares for the next several forevers,” Marcus said.

“If you’re correct, then we have a rather sizable problem,” Penswell said.

“And an opportunity,” Tessa said. 

“And those would be?” Cease asked.

“The problem is that Byron was able to crossover from this world to Earth,” Lisa said.

“And the opportunity is that might mean we can too,” Tessa said.

“You’re holding a piece of a god right? Can’t you just use that to get us back?” Cease asked.

“Maybe. Probably,” Tessa said. “But there’s a whole bunch of problems with it. First, any portal I open I can only hold for a few minutes at most. Out of the hundreds of thousands of players who got drawn over to here, how many do you think we could get through a portal in a couple of minutes. Let’s pretend we can magic up an acceptable answer to that, the [Fallen Kingdoms] is used to having portals opened in it. Earth isn’t. If I rip spacetime open there, how stable do you think things will be? We could wind up unleashing things like the [Formless Hunger] on Earth and there’s no one and nothing there that would have a chance to surviving them.”

“Uh, about that,” Marcus said.

Tessa looked at him and felt her heart sink.

“Oh do not say what you’re about to.”

“I was in Vegas a few hours ago. I ran into an [Armageddon Beast] there, and yes, the words sounded exactly like that after I figured out that was its name,” Marcus said. “We managed to get that one to destroy itself, but there are a lot of others showing up. Reports are coming in from all over the world.”

Tessa found herself leaning against Lisa as the strength went out of her legs.

“There’s not going to be an Earth left to go back to,” she said.

“Well, there might be,” Marcus said.

“How?” Tessa asked.

“This isn’t the only place monsters can be dragged too,” Marcus said.

“Uh, what?”

“You ever played the Crystal Stars MMO?” Marcus asked. “Cause they started having people disappear too, just like we did. And they’re fighting monsters just like the ones we’re seeing here.”

“How is that possible?” Tessa asked.

“It’s not,” Obby said. “Or, more precisely, it wasn’t. Think about what we’ve seen here though.”

“I still have no idea what we saw here,” Cease said.

“My fight with Byron?” Tessa asked and Obby nodded. “Oh. OH! I think I see.”

Noticing that almost no one around, Lisa and the rest of her team excepted, seemed to have a clue what she was talking about, Tessa took a few mental steps backward and started to explain.

“When Marcus and Byron landed, I recognized that Marcus was carrying a god soul and that Byron was bad news,” she said.

“Yeah, the bad news part was an easy call to make,” Cease said.

“I also knew, or guessed, that the [Fallen Kingdoms] was hard at work on Byron and that with Marcus’s god soul, I could help push the process along.”

“What do you mean the [Fallen Kingdoms] was ‘hard at work’?” Cease asked.

“Well, we’ve got Unknown here as our proof of concept, and I know one data point does not make for good science, but I can kind of feel it, which, yes, also bad science but…”

“But what, just give us the theory,” Cease said.

“Okay, sorry, so the Hungers are [Transcendent Entities]. That means they are effectively unbound and definitionless. Like a null pointer or a cosmic divide by zero error. None of the rules of reality apply to them. It’s even deeper than that though. It’s not like they have infinite damage resistance. It’s that they don’t possess the capacity to be damaged. It’s a quantum spin axis they lack to completely mangle a metaphor.”

“So they’re impossible to beat,” Cease said.

“Yes. Except they don’t stay like that,” Tessa said. “There’s a weird balance they have. Right from the start they begin catching little viral bits of reality. With even the tiniest cells of reality, they start to fall prey to some of reality’s restrictions. Things like ‘time passes for them’ and ‘level caps effect them’. With each change that the [Formless Hunger] went through it gained new and more deadly power to resolve the problems it encountered but with each change it lost more and more of it’s transcendent capacities. I thought that was just a natural tradeoff when I first noticed it, like how if you jump out of plane you gain velocity but lose potential energy.”

“But now you believe the process has a guiding will behind it?” Penswell asked.

“I do,” Tessa said. “Some of this is guesswork, some of it is intuition from by a few oddball senses I seem to have picked up as a [Void Speaker], and some of it is just plain observation.”

“And what have you observed?” Penswell asked.

“When I fought Unknown, before he was Unknown, I tried to use a [Divine Mandate] to force him to reveal his name. It didn’t work – it couldn’t work – what he was then was still [Transcendent] enough to ignore trivial law of the universe like that – but he gave me his name anyways.”

“Is that such a big deal?” Cease asked.

“Yes,” Unknown said. “The me I was then hated her beyond all bounds of this world. Giving her anything was unthinking and a name? I fought against existing with infinite force, I tried everything, and yet still when asked, I was compelled at last to at last accept a name and finally become.”

“Become what?” Cease asked.

“Real. Before, I could have vanished. If I’d succeeded in devouring the cosmos, I could have returned to the silent tranquility of unbeing. I could have stopped being. By taking a name, by becoming real, I gave all that up. Imagine, if you can, infinite peace and forsaking it for strife, pain, and uncertainty.”

“But’s that not all that living is,” Cease said.

“No, it’s not,” Unknown said. “There is so much more.”

“It wasn’t me that showed him that,” Tessa said. “I challenged him, I fought him, but there was something much bigger than me that moved through me when I spoke. I don’t know what it was, or who, but it was vast. Vast and changing too. Just like the Hungers change to deal with the threats they face, I think the [Fallen Kingdoms] are capable of adapting too, of becoming familiar with the things that are trying to tear her apart and finding better and faster ways to make that not happen.”

“So does that mean that we can just leave things up to the spirt of the [Fallen Kingdoms] then?” Cease asked. “Basically just give it time to have a cosmic fever and burn all these infections out?”

“I think she needs us to fight for her,” Tessa said. “The [Fallen Kingdoms] story has never been one of evil defeating itself. It’s always been about us. Whoever we were, wherever we came from, and whatever talents we bring to the party, what matters is that we step up. That we [RISE] to the challenge.”

Tessa could feel the breath of the world. Not the wind. There was no physical component to it. Not exactly. It was more like a long pulse that rolled through her, each gentle wave the periphery of an existence which she could only infer from the strength it seemed to fill her with. She turned inward for a moment, trying to put that into the words that would convince Penswell and the others the [Fallen Kingdoms] were alive in a non-metaphorical way.

Her inward journey was cut short though as the world drew in it’s breath.

“Something’s coming,” she said, glancing skyward despite the ceiling offering no view of the heavens above. “No. Someone.”

“Who is…” Lisa started to ask.

The meteor that interrupted her wasn’t a unique occurrence in the [Fallen Kingdoms]. It wasn’t even unique in the experience of some of those present.

“Oh no,” Hailey said, her gaze shooting from the meteor, or rather the men rising from the meteor’s crater, to Tessa. “You need to do the thing.”

Tessa wasn’t sure what ‘thing’ Hailey was thinking of, but seeing the two men who were climbing to their feet from the knee deep crater they’d made in the arena’s floor, a more pressing question arose. 

Which one she was supposed to fight.

“Hold and engage on my mark,” Penswell said, the impact failing to rattle her in the slightest.

Tessa felt relieved to have someone else calling the shots, especially since it was singularly unclear which of the figures, if either, might be on their side.

“Oh, how very clever, you brought us back here to keep your little world safe?” said one of the men. Roughly two third of his body and both eyes had been replaced by static, suggesting along with his words that he and Tessa were not going to be particularly good friends.

“I…I…don’t…I don’t believe….believe…believe…that…I don’t believe that worked,” the other man, a lithe [Tabbywile] said. He wasn’t covered in static, which was likely a positive sign in Tessa’s books, but the record scratch repetitions of his words was gut wrenchingly familiar.

Why would a [Disjoined] be fighting a being made of static though?

“Oh, rest assured, it didn’t,” the static man said.

“You…you…sure about that?” the other man said. “You’re not exactly…exactly…you’re not…alone here.”

He waved an arm that flickered through its arc towards the [Adventurers] who surrounded them.

“An audience? How wonderful,” the static man said. “There’s so many thing I can do that I haven’t had the time to explore yet.”

“I think I know which one we should be hitting,” Rip said on the party’s private channel.

“Yep. Wait for Penswell’s signal though,” Lisa said. “She’s letting him talk so he’ll give us as much free intel as we can get.”

“Care…care to say…say why you wanted to…to erase the servers?” the other man asked.

Tessa’s vision sharpened as she tried to place where she knew him from. It wasn’t vision that made the connection for her though. It was his voice.

“Marcus?” she said, recognizing the voice of Hailey’s manager that she’d last heard something like a hundred million years ago.

While her question got Marcus’ attention, the sound of her voice had a far stronger effect on the static man.

With moving through any of the angles between where it was and looking directly at her, the static man snapped his gaze to Tessa.

“You.” Hatred, vast and overwhelming, filled the entire arena with that one word. 

As though Marcus didn’t exist, as though no one else existed, the static man began to stalk towards Tessa, each step bearing the weight of a mountain, making his advance inexorable.

Until Unknown hit him with a left handed punch to the face.

Whatever mass the static man possessed, whether it was as much as a human his size, or the mountain he moved like, it was far too little to resist the impact.

Tessa didn’t see his flight. Even with her inhuman reflexes, she couldn’t really even say she’d seen the punch, just the aftermath, Unknown’s body in the posture of having thrown a colossal haymaker and the static man embedded in a new crater that been carved thirty feet into the solid stone seating area of the arena.

“This isn’t a fight for any of the rest of you,” Unknown said. “Now is the time you need to leave. Right now.”

“This one isn’t like the others,” Penswell said.

“He’s not,” Unknown said. “He was one of the prime castaways from my former self. He was the greater of the two.”

“Do we have the tools to fight him?” Penswell asked.

“No power you have can destroy him,” Unknown said.

Every other time Tessa had faced one of the Hungers, she’d fled from it. Fighting them wasn’t an option. She’d proven that with the god soul and her battle against Unknown’s former state. 

But that had been before.

“We don’t need to fight him,” Tessa said. 

“He’s…he’s looking to destroy…destroy us all,” Marcus said.

With her sharpened vision Tessa saw a familiar glow buried deep within him, and she smiled, offering a silent thanks to the [Fallen Kingdoms] for looking after her so well.

She was about to step forward and tell everyone to move behind her when she stopped herself.

“I think I know what to do,” she said on the private channel she shared with Lisa. “It’s maybe not a great idea though.”

“Are you asking permission?” Lisa asked.

“No, I’m asking for a sanity check,” Tessa said.

“Were you thinking of charging out there alone?” Lisa asked.

“That was my first thought, but I don’t want to do this alone,” Tessa said.

“You never have to,” Lisa said. “Tell me your idea, but know that I’ve got your back no matter what.”

Tessa swallowed a lump that formed in her throat and told Lisa what she had in mind. With the static man already rising from hit he’d taken, there wasn’t much time left, but they agreed that the rest of their team needed to know too.

Leaving that to Lisa, Tessa walked to Marcus, who was glitching out far worse than Hailey had been. She didn’t rush to his side, but spent each step clearing her mind and focusing on the burning light within him.

“I think we got a new perception ability from the [Void Speaker] line,” Pillowcase said internally.

“Maybe a few new abilities? Or one that senses a lot of different things?” Tessa said.

“Either is good. More intel is always valuable in battle,” Pillowcase said.

Marcus and the others were watching the static man recover, so he startle-jumped when Tessa reached him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I think I know what’s happening.”

“That makes…makes one of us,” Marcus said.

“If I’m right, I can fix this, but it will involved taking something from you,” Tessa said.

“What do I…I have to give up?” Marcus asked.

“The bit of divine power that’s stuck in you,” Tessa said. “It’s this world’s version of your admin rights.”

“But Mewlodious doesn’t have admin rights?” Marcus said, naming the body he was currently inhabiting. 

“Right. But you do,” Tessa said. “We’re both sides of ourselves here.”

“You can…you can remove the admin rights? How?” Marcus asked. “No, just do it. I can’t fight that guy like this. Is it going to take long? Or hurt? Am I going to lose my memories or something like that?”

“Nothing like that,” Tessa said with a broad smile and a blazing golden glow in her hand.

“What’s that?” Marcus asked.

“A god soul,” Tessa said. “Or your admin rights. However you want to look at it.”

“You’re done?” Marcus asked.

Tessa nodded and turned to see the static man roll his shoulders as he got to his feet.

“Well, that was unexpected,” the static man said. “I was under the impression Gulini had already consumed you, Unknown?”

“Why are you all still here?” Unknown asked the [Adventurers] behind him, desperation twisting his flawless face.

“Because we’re done with running,” Tessa said.

“Creator?” Unknown asked.

“Thanks for stepping in there,” Tessa said. “You did good. Let me take it from here though.”

“But he…” Unknown began before Tessa laid a hand on his arm to shush him.

“We’ve fought already, a few times, remember?” she said. “And that was before I had any clue at all. Imagine how terrible I’ll be now that I think I know what I’m doing.”

Unknown’s eyes widen slowly, surprise giving way to amusement.

“As you wish, my Creator,” he said and bowed with a flourish to move out of her path.

The other [Adventurers] were being filled in on Tessa’s plan as she walked across the arena floor to confront the static man, and a part of her was surprised that they hadn’t charged forward with her. It would have been a disastrous action for any of them to take, but these were [Adventurers], taking incredibly ill-conceived actions was written into their DNA. If they were maintaining discipline, Tessa could think of only one reason.

Penswell.

There was a lot to be learned from observing a conflict between a high order Hunger and someone bearing a god soul and Penny was definitely not the sort to pass up such a chance at unique knowledge.

Or there would have been a lot to learn if Tessa had been intending to fight the static man.

“Do you think you can hurt me with that insignificant little speck?” the static man asked.

“What makes you think I intend to hurt you?” Tessa asked.

“Come now, lies and trickery are beneath you, aren’t they ‘Creator’?” the static man said. “We both know that there can be no co-existence between us. I will destroy you, or you will destroy me. There can be no other result of our meeting. Oh, except, I can’t be destroyed.”

“I agree. As you are now, you do not possess the ability to be destroyed,” Tessa said.

“It is such a shame you don’t share that quality,” the static man said, and struck.

Where the Gulini had stabbed at Tessa with daggers of static, the static man lashed out with a flood of it which slammed into her whole body at once.

“Are you sure about that?” Pillowcase asked, grinning as her [Transdimensional Integrity] rendered an attack of destructive nothingness into simply nothing.

“Oh yes,” the static man. “We have seen that trick before, haven’t we.”

“A few times now,” Tessa said. “It’s okay though. Those entities weren’t really you, were they?”

“Of course not,” the static man said. “I am something unique. I am something more than they ever were.”

He closed the distance between them and Tessa did nothing to stop him.

“Also, unlike them, I can learn,” he said and uttered a word Tessa had not expected to hear. “[Fracture]!”

There was a gasp from the small army of [Adventurers] as the light from the god soul Tessa was carrying went dark, and Tessa herself was blasted into discorporate motes of light.

“That wasn’t quite as satisfying as I hoped it would be,”  the static man said. “But then I suppose nothing ever is. Guess I’ll just need to erase everything else too!”

“Or,” Tessa said, the scattered motes re-coalescing and the light of the god soul bursting into brilliant illumination once more, “You could just give up?”

The static man stumbled a step backward before catching himself.

“How?” he asked.

“I’ve already pulled myself back from the edge of oblivion once before,” Tessa said. “What makes you think I would find it any harder now?”

“Well that is a problem,” the static man said.

“No, a problem is what I can just about see lurking at the edges of what you are,” Tessa said. “You have a name. But you’re hiding from it? Interesting. I didn’t know you could do that? The important thing though, is that I think I can see…”

A look of stark terror had been growing across the static man’s face as she spoke but as Tessa got closer to perceiving his name the terror fell away, replaced by sharp determination.

“Nothing. You see nothing,” he said and drew forth a glittering spark of golden light, a weaker twin of the one Tessa held. “I really didn’t want to do this, but discretion and valor and all that.”

Before Tessa could react, the static man closed his fist, shattering the god soul and vanishing in the blinding flash that followed.