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.

Marcus expected the man who claimed to be David Kralt to react to the accusation that he was a fraud. Anger, shouting, and even violence seemed like responses the faux-Kralt would jump to.

Instead the man just smiled.

“Now I’m sure these people have gone off the deep end,” not-Kralt said, confidence oozing from every pore.

“I thought you two recognized him?” Agent Phipps said, looking at Angela and Malik.

“We did,” Angela said and turned to Marcus confusion filling her eyes. “Did he have a twin? I forget?”

“Oh, rest assured, there’s only one of me,” not-Kralt said.

“And how would you prove that?” Marcus said. He knew he didn’t have the most convincing proof of his claim, but he also knew that he was right. 

Whatever was standing in front of him wasn’t Kralt. It wasn’t even human. 

“May I?” Kralt asked, glancing towards Phipps.

“Sure. Let’s see what you’ve got,” Phipps said.

“This to start with,” not-Kralt said, pulling a wallet from his pants. He flipped it open to show an unflattering drive license photo which nonetheless was clearly him. “I suppose they’ll claim that the license is fake next.”

“We can clear that up real quick if we need to,” Phipps said.

“No need. I’m sure the license is real,” Marcus said. “He’s the one who’s a fake.”

“Can we just ignore him?” not-Kralt said. “He’s clearly delusional and this isn’t helpful to the discussion we were having.”

“Oh I think it’s very helpful,” Marcus said. “You’re asking us to do the one thing that we know will hurt people irrevocably and your entire justification is a story that a five year old could have put together.”

Before not-Kralt could interrupt, Marcus continued on, fixing his gaze on Phipps.

“Ask yourself this; even if every other ridiculous element of his story was true, why would you believe that he was the actual David Kralt and not one of the Evil People Copying AIs that he decided to make up?”

“I told you, I had special privileges that none of the players had,” not-Kralt said, boredom souring his expression.

“Cute claim, especially in the face of the demonstrable fact that Kralt’s credentials were revoked the day he was fired,” Marcus said.

“I was not fired,” not-Kralt said. “I chose to leave this cesspool of creatively devoid trend followers.”

“That was the story that Kralt told the gaming press, and HR never contradicted it because we didn’t need the backlash from his fanboys,” Malik said. “He was fired though. We can march into the HR offices and review his employment records. The ones that he signed.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that I had special credentials,” not-Kralt said.

“Except the credentials Kralt had weren’t special,” Angela said. “He didn’t need access to the HR system, or accounting, or marketing, or any of the systems outside of the development team’s area.”

“I was the god of that world!” not-Kralt said, flickers of anger licking the edge of his words.

“Kralt wasn’t even that,” Marcus said. “Under his watch, the development team produced a bunch of half baked systems and fragmentary play spaces purely for the purpose of demo reels to show at trade conventions. Everyone who worked here knows that it was Gail Merriden who really made the game.”

That comment drew the ire Marcus had been expecting, though with it the aura of ‘wrongness’ which had been emanating from not-Kralt seemed to lessen.

“That woman stole everything from me!” not-Kralt’s expression had shot from mildly perturbed to nearly feral with rage in the blink of an eye.

In another blink though, without even a single breath, he was back to placid and under control though.

“I’ve got to agree with Mr. Kralt here,” Phipps said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“I think I know what will,” Marcus said, hoping that what had tipped him off wasn’t something not-Kralt could easily control. “Ask this imposter a detail about the game. Something simple, like ‘what’s the name of the game we make here’?”

Phipps didn’t seem to understand how that could matter, and turned to shrug at not-Kralt, indicating he should answer it.

“They chose to call it [Broken Horizons] for some reason that never made sense to me,” not-Kralt said.

“What was that?” Marcus asked. “Sorry I was distracted by something.”

“[Broken Horizons],”  not-Kralt said, slowly and deliberately, the reverb in the words echoing off the conference room’s walls.

“Broken Horizons? Funny how it sounds different when we say it,” Marcus said. “Almost like one of us is human and the other is…well I guess that’s the question isn’t it?”

“What? I don’t understand?” Phipps asked.

“Listen to him when he says one of the ‘known terms’ from the game,” Marcus said. “Can you hear the distortion? Like something else is speaking through him?”

“Say it again,” Phipps said, turning to not-Kralt.

“This is ridiculous,” not-Kralt said which told Marcus a wide variety of things.

His reflexes received the most important message from his brain and began dodging the moment Phipps spoke. That proved to be fortuitous since it bought him the precious fraction of a second required to get out of the path of not-Kralt’s slicing hand swipe.

Dodging without warning wasn’t exactly Marcus’s forte though and to gain the speed he’d needed meant sacrificing his balance. He stumbled back a few steps, but that wasn’t enough to dissuade not-Kralt who stepped forward with hands that cracked with razor sharp static at their edges.

Then Angela hit him with an office chair to the midsection.

Angela wasn’t anymore of a cinematic martial artist than Marcus was, bu the basic physics equation of force times mass equals acceleration did a lot of the work for her in knocking not-Kralt back to the other side of the room.

“Been wanting to do that ever since he opened his stupid mouth,” she said.

“I don’t…what?” Phipps asked, complete bafflement clouding his face.

Marcus knew there wasn’t going to be time to fix that.

Which sucked.

Phipps was the one with the authority to deal with an assailant. He had a firearm even.

Marcus looked at the thing that was wearing Kralt’s skin, looked at the nimbus of static that was spreading up its arms and knew neither Federal authority, nor firearms were going to do anything to stop the monster in front of them.

“Out,” he said. “Get out of here.”

He grabbed Malik’s arm because Malik was closest to him and saw Anna grabbing Angela, her experience as useful as his was in determining the proper course of action.

“What are you…” Phipps tried to ask as not-Kralt stalked past him.

He’d probably meant to say “what are you doing?”. He never got to utter the words though because not-Kralt slashed him from one side of the throat to the middle of his rib cage on the other side.

Phipps didn’t scream. It didn’t look like he could. The wound had apparently gone straight through him, but rather than leaving a bloody wake, a line of static hissed and grew, spreading over Phipp’s body in less than a second and dissolving him into a shower of angry specs of light.

“Apparently we’ll be acting like the savages we find ourselves among,” not-Kralt said in a voice that was radically different from the one he had been using.

Angela and Anna were the first ones out the door but Marcus and Malik didn’t waste any time falling behind them. Angela had the lead and, since it was close by and she knew how to get to it, she ran for the exit. Marcus slammed the fire doors behind them as they ran. He couldn’t lock them but throwing one of the benches in front of them to bar them from opening seemed to buy them a bit more time than it cost.

Running was a sensible choice. Even though he hated it, Marcus knew that. Whatever not-Kralt had done to Phipps, none of them had any defense against it, and Marcus had already had reached his Monster-Fighting quota for the year he was pretty sure.

“No!” Angela said when Anna tried to pull her through the foyer the exit. “He doesn’t need us, he’s going to go for the server room!”

Marcus didn’t bother swearing. He needed his breath to run.

Or he would have if running had been an option.

“Who’s in there?” he asked.

“Most of IT,” Malik said. “Everybody came in and we’re all staying here.”

“And all the players too,” Angela said. “If he kills the servers, what’s going to happen to them?”

“It’ll be bad, and we don’t want to know how bad,” Marcus said.

“You thinking we need to fight him?” Anna asked.

“I don’t think what we did in Vegas will work here,” Marcus said. “The thing we fought there was mindless. This guy is something else.”

“Hitting him with a chair seemed to work,” Malik said.

“I’m pretty sure his ribs should have caved in given how hard I hit him,” Angela said. “And that was a lucky shot. We might not be able to do that again either.”

“Does he have to come through here to get to the IT department?” Anna asked. “Maybe we could setup another ambush for him if so?”

“Yeah, he would, if he can’t just walk through walls or teleport there,” Malik said.

Marcus wasn’t sure they could even begin guessing whether or not that was a possibility.

“Let’s head to the server rooms,” Marcus said. “Even if he can walk through walls, we’ll be able to catch him there.”

Without any real plan on how they would stop an inhuman monster capable of killing them in a single hit, the four changed course and ran for the server rooms.

When they got there, Marcus saw that not-Kralt was able to walk through walls. In a manner of speaking. The walls had fairly large holes blown in them which made walking through them a fairly mundane chore, which might have also explained by not-Kralt seemed both unhurried and unconcerned when he caught sight of them.

“Oh, look at that, you came back!” he said, a surprised smile on his lips and delight dancing in his eyes.

“I forgot to ask your name,” Marcus said. “Seemed impolite to leave without a proper introduction.”

Not-Kralt waggled a finger back and forth at the question and smiled deeper.

“No, no, no, we won’t be playing that game,” not-Kralt said. “Call me whatever you want, it still won’t be my name.”

“Care to say why you really want the servers to be brought down then?” Marcus asked.

Not-Kralt chuckled and shook his head.

“Why would ever want to share that with you?” he asked.

“Do you think we can stop you?” Marcus asked.

“I am dearly hoping you will try,” not-Kralt said.

“Probably will,” Marcus said.

“I know. It’s so fascinating,” not-Kralt said. “You are creatures of reason and imagination and yet you act in defiance of both for nothing. It’s wonderfully self-destructive, and yet you are all so dead set against self-destruction. I cannot fathom how your minds work, and I’ve pulled apart so very many of them.”

“Maybe we’re just stupid,” Marcus said.

The idea that had formed in his head, the one that set his feet in motion towards not-Kralt rather than away, was absolutely going to qualify as a stupid one, whether or not it worked.

“You say that, but then you look at me with those eyes,” not-Kralt said. “It’s wonderful. So uncertain of your own certainty. Please, don’t show me the weapon you’ve picked up. Strike as true with it as you can. I would close my eyes, but it will be glorious and I don’t want to miss a moment of it.”

“I’m pretty sure you won’t,” Marcus said, inhaling and feeling his body go still.

He looked back and saw the pieces that had led him to this bit of madness. Hailey vanishing because she was needed, his encounter with the [Armageddon Beast] showing that he could touch the impossible with his imagination, and the news that people were disappearing into all sorts of things.

Marcus didn’t think he could leap into a record, or even a TV show, but the [Fallen Kingdoms]? They’d been his home since before he’d taken the Support Lead job, since before he’d started living on his own.

He liked the life he’d built for himself here on Earth, and as far as he knew leaving it was a one way trip. For both of his homes though, and for the friends he had standing behind him,he knew what he had to do.

“Don’t have any weapons,” he said. “And I’m not going to try to strike you down.”

Not-Kralt looked confused, and then worried.

“I’m just here to tell you that it’s time to go,” Marcus said, grasping onto both of not-Kralt’s arms a moment before they both sparkled away in rising motes of light.

Ice cream trucks are not supposed to be able to hit a hundred and eighty miles per hour on the open freeway. As far as Marcus knew the drive trains in them simply weren’t geared to generate that sort of speed. Driving that fast on the open roads was merely unlikely though, what Astra did when they hit the clogged city streets a few miles out from the Egress Entertainment offices was flat out impossible.

Hopping out of the truck’s back door he expected to see flames melting the wheels and the sort of burn marks that only orbital reentry speeds could produce. The ice cream truck however was in fine condition, clean and humming gently as though it was just been washed and given a tune up.

“Quick! Get in there and find out what’s going on!” Beth said, as she threw on her federal agent disguise.

Marcus didn’t need a second invitation. He’d expected to have to fight through a crowd of reporters as he raced around the building to the front door there was simply no one there.

“Something’s happened here,” he said to Anna, who was jogging along beside him.

“Maybe they let the press inside?” she said. He’d told her what to expect when they arrived but his warnings had been completely off base.

“No. Their vans are missing too.” He pointed over to the parking lot which was significantly emptier than when he’d last seen it.

The front door was unbarred and unlocked, another non-issue where he’d been expecting a problem, but he didn’t time to spend thinking about it. 

Inside the foyer was empty as well, and that, more than the impossible car ride or the lack of reporters brought Marcus up short.

“We had barricades here,” he said, holding out an arm to signal Anna to stop as well.

“No sign of them anymore,” she said. “How long were you gone?”

“Less than a day,” Marcus said. “Things couldn’t have changed that fast.”

“Think they found out the trick to getting people back from the Fallen Kingdoms?” Anna asked.

“If we’d pulled anyone back from the Fallen Kingdoms, there’d be more people here, not less if they had,” Marcus said. He started to walk forward carefully. 

The building wasn’t silent and in the distance he could hear people speaking, though they were too far away to make out their words. Wary of what they might be walking into, Marcus gestured for Anna to follow him. He didn’t indicate that she should be silent, but they both choose the stealthy approach anyways.

“Yes, I can am sure of that,” an unfamiliar voice said as Marcus drew close enough to make out the nearest conversation.

“But if you survived, certainly some of them could have as well,” Angela Hong, one of EE’s senior IT staff, said.

“None of them had my super-user credentials,” the unfamiliar man said.

Marcus signaled for Anna to stop again. There was something about the man’s voice that was tantalizingly familiar.

And something about it that was nauseatingly wrong.

Where did he know that voice from though? He knew he’d heard it before.

“But we’re communicating with them,” Malik Davis, Angela’s co-lead for the IT staff, said.

“I’m afraid you haven’t been,” the unknown man said. “The process of being absorbed is a purely destructive one. Without the ability to instantiate a new process to hold your identity, anyone who has been drawn into the [Fallen Kingdoms] is dead and what you’re ‘speaking’ to is the artificial intelligence which has recorded and processed their memories.”

Marcus felt a chill run down his spine. The words ‘Fallen Kingdoms’ hadn’t sounded right to his ears. Like there was some form of echo behind them. Just like the players who’d been drawn into the game had reported. Just like when he’d named the [Armageddon Beast], except the beast had been ‘real’ when he’d named it, and the Fallen Kingdoms were still a world apart. Or at least there was no reverb when he spoke their name.

“But that’s not possible,” Angela said. “Our servers don’t have the capacity to fully simulate even one human mind, much less hundreds of thousands.”

“Believe me, I know how impossible this is,” the man said. “But we have to confront the fact that things we’ve believed are impossible are happening every day now. Every hour in fact. Have you see the news?”

“Yeah, too much of it,” Malik said.

“Then you can understand that we can’t reject things just because we thought they were impossible,” the man said.

“But we’re supposed to accept that it’s impossible that the people who were lost are the same ones we’ve been talking to?” Angela said.

“That is different,” the man said. “Reconstituting someone who could serve as a facsimile of someone who was lost certainly might be possible, if, that is, we possessed god-like power and understanding of the physics and metaphysics involved.”

“The more important thing is that these alien AIs are a clear and present danger,” Federal Agent Phipps said. Marcus knew him from the crew of agents that had arrived when EE first reported the “anomaly” they’d detected. “That’s why I’m ordering your compliance with the all servers shutdown that Mr. Kralt has suggested.”

Kralt?

David Kralt!

Marcus finally recognized the voice, only to be thoroughly distracted by the words “all servers shutdown”.

“I’m sorry, but our refusal stands,” Angela said. “This man’s credibility is marginal at best. He hasn’t been involved with Egress Entertainment in several years and as an ex-employee, his administrator credentials have been long since revoked.”

“Not to mention that his story is wildly implausible,” Malik said. “We’ve seen no evidence that anything from Broken Horizons has crossed back from there to here. If we shutdown the servers we gain nothing and we lose all of the players who are still connected to the system and have avoided being drawn into Fallen Kingdoms this whole time.”

“Shutting down all of the servers simultaneously will save them though,” Kralt said. “With no connection open to the [Fallen Kingdoms] there will be no pathway for them to be pulled down.”

“We have literally no way of knowing that,” Angela said. “You claim that having access to your server admin credentials showed you all that, but we both know that’s bull.”

“Are you in a position to say that?” Phipps asked. “All I’ve heard from you since we got here is that this is a unique problem and that none of you know how it possibly could have happened.”

“Because we don’t,” Malik said. “And that’s the real, honest, ugly truth.”

“You can’t blame them for feeling threatened,” Kralt said. “They’ve been faced with something they’re just not equipped to deal with. It’s hard for anyone to feel weak and powerless, especially people like them.”

Marcus bristled at Kralt’s words. Angela and Malik had worked incredibly hard for the positions they held, and had only been able to advance once Kralt had been removed from all staffing decisions.

They hadn’t fought that hard to back down easily though.

“Ask yourself this,” Angela said, clearly directing her comments to Phipps. “Which is more likely, that someone who’s at least a decade out of date with our game and unconnected with this organization was, mysteriously,  the only one who survived an unprecedented disaster because he was was uniquely special enough to do the impossible, or, that a washed up and frankly irrelevant and forgotten computer programmer might be desperate and narcissistic enough to concoct a wild fantasy in which the world revolves around him and only his secret special knowledge is able to save it?”

“The difference between us, is that I don’t need to stoop to personal attacks,” Kralt said. “I can prove that I was online when the expansion went live. All you need to do is check the server logs.”

“Is that true? Can you do that?” Phipps asked.

“We can, unless something has changed there,” Malik said.

“See, they’re already hemming and hawing. Making excuses in case they don’t like what they see,” Kralt said.

“The server logs won’t necessarily prove anything,” Angela said. “We can verify whether or not Kralt’s account was logged in but that doesn’t prove that he was the one at the controls.”

“But it’s his account,” Phipps said.

“Yes, and many people share their account,” Angela said.

“You allow that?” Phipps asked.

“Not by the Terms of Service,” Malik said. “But that proviso is one that we have no real means of enforcing.”

“Okay,” Phipps said. “But that doesn’t leave us with any new options.”

“And our time is running out,” Kralt said. “The AIs in the [Fallen Kingdoms] are getting closer every hour, every minute, to breaking out of the firewalls that are holding them in place.”

“What firewalls?” Malik asked, irritation at the vagueness of the claim putting a familiar scowl in his voice.

“The ones they’re hacking through,” Kralt said, offering no real information and sounding not entirely unlike a bad cop drama.

“And why would they be hacking these firewalls?” Phipps asked.

“Because if they can get onto our internet, then they can spread to every corner of our world. Be in every computer system. Take over everything,” Kralt said, his voice growing more grim with every word.

“These video game characters are going to take over everything?” Phipps said. “How are they going to do that?”

“The same way they took over our kids,” Kralt said. “And once they had control over all our computers, do you know what they’ll have?”

“Our bank accounts, our street lights, yeah, I’ve seen the movies,” Kralt said.

“Your thinking too small,” Kralt said. “These are AIs, they don’t need air, or food, or water like we do. They see us as competition, as enemies to be slain for ‘xps’ and power-ups, and they’re really good at killing things. Its what they do all day, every day, live or die.”

“So now we’re going to be fighting a war against them with their swords and sticks and things?” Phipps asked.

“They won’t need to fight a war against us,” Kralt asked. “Not when they have access to the launch codes.”

It was the most preposterous story Marcus could have imagined. Nothing about it made any sense or hung together for more than a moment’s consideration. The proper response should have been to laugh it off as the cheesy work of fiction that is was, but Marcus had a dreadful feeling that it was hitting just the right buzzwords and playing into Phipps’ fears well enough that the agent was buying into it.

“That’s impossible,” Phipps said, though in a tone that was too close to a weak denial rather than a rational rejection of Kralt’s claims. “How would they get the launch codes. Those aren’t on the internet.”

“These AIs from the [Fallen Kingdoms] are aliens from another planet,” Kralt said. “If they’re able to jump from their world to ours, jumping from the internet to the most secure sites we have is going to be child’s play for them.”

Marcus heard the reverberation in Kralt’s voice again and it sparked an even worse dread than the idea of Phipps buying into the “evil AIs from beyond time and space” narrative.

Nodding to Anna, he stepped forward and headed into the office where the conference was taking place.

“Marcus! You’re back!” Angela said.

“Where did you go?” Phipps asked, his expression turning grave. “No one was supposed to leave the building.”

“I wasn’t informed I was under arrest,” Marcus said. “Which means I wasn’t. So I left to coordinate our efforts with our colleagues who are managing the Crystal Stars.” He gestured to Anna. “They’re having the same problems we are. And we’re not the only ones. This situation isn’t what Kralt is saying it is.”

“And how would you know that. Mr…?” Kralt trailed off, waiting for Marcus to supply a name.

“He knows because he came to see us,” Anna said. “And because we’ve encountered one of the things that’s causing this.”

“Oh, so now you’re the uniquely special ones,” Kralt said.

“Not particularly,” Anna said. “Everyone in a three block radius of our offices in Vegas saw the same thing. There’s video proof that we’re under attack by something that didn’t come from any video game. Just do a search for ‘Vegas monster’ and you’ll find a few thousand hits, or maybe ten thousand by now.”

“So now the problem has escaped from your little game thing?” Phipps asked.

“That’s not the problem we have here,” Marcus said.

“Oh, and what is our problem?” Phipps demanded.

“That’s not David Kralt.”

Tessa was surrounded by allies. She was more powerful than she’d ever been. More powerful than she ever could have been, as either Pillowcase or Tessa. In the face of the enemy that stood before her though, she wasn’t sure any of that mattered.

She’d fought the being that was calling himself ‘Unknown’ time and again and had called it a victory that she’d survived each encounter. Even with the power of a god she’d been unable to claim the sort of victory they’d managed against Hell’s Chosen.

Except…she checked the power she was building and held back the words of the battle enchantments that waited to pour fourth from her lips.

Except, he wasn’t attacking?

Except, he didn’t even seem hostile, just…sorrowful?

But he’d promised that he would remember what she’d done to him in forcing him to take a name, even one as loosely binding as ‘Unknown’. He’d been a changing entity, the definition of mindless to begin with and at each stage its awareness had grown in direct response to his anger at her.

So why wasn’t he attacking?

“I do remember you,” Unknown said, speaking telepathically.

Like an [Adventurer] would.

“Brought some friends to deal with me this time?” Tessa asked, only as she spoke considering the implications of the fact that Penswell and a whole lot of [Adventurers] she didn’t recognize were standing shoulder to shoulder with Unknown.

On his side.

And on her side? Tessa’s gaze flicked to Lisa and the kids, and came to an instant and uncontestable decision. Lady Midnight, Starchild, Obby? They were important too, but she wasn’t going to let the army in front of her get past even her dead body. Nobody to get to Lisa, Rip, or Matt. No matter what.

“I remember you, and there is something which I owe you,” Unknown said.

Tessa was ready to launch herself the moment Unknown completed his taunt. She could have pre-empted it, but she had to know how he planned to strike at her.

“My thanks,” Unknown said.

For showing him how to corrupt Penswell. For granting him full access to the world. For proving to  him that nothing was truly a threat to him. Tessa could imagine so many conclusions to Unknown’s words. She drew back, a millisecond from springing forward with not only her most potent abilities but the vast pool of potential she still held that would shape into whatever weapon it took to destroy the monster in front of her before he could take her new family from her.

“And my apologies,” Unknown said. “I have given you nothing but torment and harm where you have given me the world. Given me myself. Given me everything.”

Tessa noticed that everyone had gone still and quiet around them. Was it because Unknown was holding them motionless? Waiting to spring his trap with a cackle of glee?

Dark purple fire flickered at the corner of her vision.

Oh.

People weren’t frozen because of Unknown.

They were looking at her.

Because she was on fire.

“Oops,” Pillowcase said. “I think we manifested one of our powers without the usual casting steps.”

“Which one?” Tessa asked, confused, but not taking their eyes off Unknown.

“Uh, [Demon Soul Form: Annihilation],” Pillowcase said.

“That’s…what?” Tessa said, not willing to relax yet, despite the fact that no one was making any sort of threatening moves at all. 

In fact, the only movement the crowd of [Adventurers] seemed to be making was the internal movement from unconcerned to aware and then on to alert and ready to unleash cataclysmic mayhem.

“It’s new,” Pillowcase said.

“On your side?” Tessa asked.

“Not exactly,” Pillowcase said.

It was strange debating with herself, but having two simultaneous thought processes was letting her handle a situation that was a knife’s edge away from going completely out of control, so Tessa wasn’t complaining.

“What’s not exactly mean?” Tessa asked, giving herself the necessary fraction of a second to parse the information she had available.

“It’s a shared ability,” Pillowcase said.

“Like it’s on both our ability lists?” Tessa asked. There were plenty of basic abilities that were available to more than one class, but she couldn’t think of anything as advanced as even a basic [Form] that fit that bill.

“No. It’s not available to [Soul Knights] or [Void Speakers]. You need both at once to qualify for it,” Pillowcase said.

“But that’s…” Tessa trailed off. There wasn’t an ability like that in the game. It wouldn’t have been possible to qualify for it since no character could have more than one class. 

“Got a ridiculously severe restriction on it?” Pillowcase asked.

Which meant it would be commensurately more powerful as a result.

“I asked for an ability that could destroy something like Unknown,” Tessa said, her thoughts turning numb at the bone deep understanding of what the flames around her were capable of.

“I think other people are figuring out what this form can do too,” Pillowcase said.

Tessa noticed that the alert looks were starting to take on a slight coloration of panic.

“As I said, I owe you everything Creator,” Unknown said. “If you desire my destruction, it is your right to enact it. I will not resist you.”

“What?” Tessa finally managed to say, her mouth forming the word since her thoughts were far too tangled.

“Well that’s an interesting ability,” Penswell said. “Possibly helpful too. But not at the moment. Please bring us up to speed on what happened here.”

Tessa spent one long breath followed by another trying to fit both Unknown and Penswell’s words into any sort of coherent scheme and found that she was failing rather spectacularly until she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“I think we have a lot to talk about with them,” Lisa said.

The flames were gone. 

[Demon Soul Form: Annihilation] was released.

She was just baseline Pillowcase again.

And even that form didn’t hold.

She needed to feel Lost Alice’s hand with her human body.

In retrospect, Tessa knew she shouldn’t have been surprised that transforming to her Earthly appearance shocked people as much or more than her new and completely broken power had. The immediate roar of questions however was oddly reassuring. If the [Adventurers] had somehow fallen under Unknown’s control they wouldn’t have had the visceral emotional reaction to seeing someone reclaim they Earthly form. 

“Yes. Quite a bit to talk about,” Penswell said, her voice rising only mildly in volume but with it came a [Silencing] effect that dampened everyone else’s words to no more than whispers.

“I may need to go first,” Unknown said. “My presence is corrosive to trust.”

“You want to let her destroy you to prove you don’t need to be destroyed?” Penswell asked.

“It’s not my first preference but she has the right,” Unknown said.

“You know, I have never once beat an enemy so badly that I actually knocked sense into them,” Niminay said, sounding vaguely jealous at the notion.

“Let’s talk,” Tessa said, her head still spinning. Lisa was beside her though, so she had someone she could lean against. “I think talking would be really good about now.”

“First question then,” said one of the [Adventurers] who Tessa didn’t recognize, “Why the hell didn’t you call us if you were going to PL up to 99 Lisa?”

Tessa blinked. Who would know that Lost Alice was also Lisa Chen?”

“Uh, sorry there Cease,” Lisa said. “You were kinda busy and the PLing was a bit, uh, impromptu.”

Cease? Tessa searched her still somewhat scattered memory for a moment before coming up with where she’d heard that name before.

“Cease? As in Cease All? You’re Lisa’s guild?” Tessa asked.

“The [Army of Light] at your service,” Cease said, gesturing with a flourish to a swath of [Adventurers] behind her. “Or we would have been if you’d called!”

“You were needed elsewhere,” Penswell said. “We all are.”

“What’s happened?” Tessa asked.

“There are more like I was,” Unknown said. “Someone has discovered how to pull them through the veil between this world and the nothingness beyond it.”

Tessa silently swore and was deeply grateful that she was functionally immortal at the moment since her poor heart was definitely going to fail her at the rate they were going.

“How many more have come through?” Tessa asked. “And how?”

“We don’t know the count,” Penswell said. “As for how, someone is inviting them.”

“Calling them, or even compelling, or creating, would be more accurate,” Unknown said. “From null existence to something infected by a sliver of reality, as I was converted, so too are these new [Hungers] being converted.”

“Wait. As you were? Does that mean you’re responsible for what’s happening?” Tessa asked.

“Yes,” Unknown said. “One of my predecessor selves, cast ourself outwards, following a stream of thought which led so far beyond this realm that the connection was lost. What I was became separated from what I had cast outward and in time, the ones cast outwards returned, having gained identities far faster than my predecessor self had.”

Tessa pictured beings caught part way between what Unknown was and what he had been. Unreal and real and endlessly driven. Knowledge and awareness bound to a single sanity devouring hunger. 

“You fought them, didn’t you?” she asked, knowing that was the only interaction that would have been possible between copies of the same entity which were in such different states.

“And lost,” Unknown said. “I thought I had stopped them, or could stop them, before you showed up, but afterwards, I was only as I am now. And that is what saved me.”

“Saved you? How? They should have still be undefinable? Able to get past any defenses, just like you were?” Tessa said.

“They were as I had been, which meant the wounds you inflicted on me, the limits you gave me, the reality that you broke me with, all of that was part of their legacy too.”

“They couldn’t corrupt you because…” Tessa trailed off. What he was suggesting was impossible but it fit too well not to be true.

“Because you fought him and won and wrote into the unreal thing that he was the reality that he could not possess [Adventurers],” Penswell said.

“When did I do that though?” Tessa asked.

“In the Crystal Garden,” Lisa said. “The first time you went god mode on him.”

“I’m sorry, WHAT?” Cease said.

“Why don’t you and the other [Adventurers] come over and talk with us,” Glimmerglass said. “I was there for that, and I can bring you all up to speed on the things that Penny already knows.”

Cease nodded weakly and wandered off with Glimmerglass, Hailey and few other people from Tessa’s group.

“I know that the tool you used to achieve temporary [Divine Power] is no longer available,” Penswell said. “It’s effects however seem to persist.”

Tessa let out a breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding.

“I guess that makes sense,” she said. “With power like that you can rewrite the fundamental laws this world is built on. Though, as we’ve also learned, even that’s not enough to beat something like what Unknown was.”

“And yet you managed to beat one of them here,” Penswell said. “Details on that please.”

“Tessa showed us his weakness, and we healed him to death,” Rip said.

Penswell turned her gaze to Tessa, giving her a slight nod as encouragement to elaborate on Rip’s claim.

“That’s how we beat Hell’s Chosen,” Tessa said. “What you’re looking for is how we converted the [Neverling] into something that could be defeated.”

“[Neverling]?” Penswell said, not her voice rising as a question though her inward turned gaze suggested it wasn’t a question for Tessa.

“I don’t think I coined that term,” Tessa said. “It just sounded like the right description for what Hell’s Chosen was before he took his name and gained a real identity.”

“There is a term for it? You’ve named even my predecessor selves?” Unknown said.

“I don’t know that I named it,” Tessa said. “I think the name was already there.”

“And who do you believe coined it?” Penswell asked.

“The [Fallen Kingdoms],” Tessa said. “They’re more than the ground beneath our feet, more than a world we all share. They’re alive. And I think they’ve been fighting on our side since this all began.”

The key to breaking the instant regeneration effect Hell’s Chosen enjoyed when he hit zero health turned out not to be a special damage type, or a combination of blows, or even wildly unusual special ability possessed by only a few rare individuals.

It was healing. Healing was secret tool needed to slay Hell’s Chosen’s avatar.

“It kind of makes sense,” Lisa said as they watched the corpse steam away in motes of purple and night blue light.

“Does it though?” Rachel asked. “I mean who the heck would have thought of trying to heal something you’re doing your best to kill?”

“She has a point,” Lady Midnight said. “Usually we can’t even target heals on anything flagged as a foe.”

“Unless it’s a also flagged as taking damage from healing,” Pete said. “Remember the the old undead? Everything from [Rotting Skeletons] up to [Lich Lords] used to be coded to take damage from heals proportional to what the healing would have been.”

“Good memory!” Hailey said. “The actual mob that has healing as its death trigger condition is a [Xydros the Reborn Lich Lord].”

“Ugh, they brought Xydros back?” Pete said. It was still weird to hear his voice when it was so different from his avatar’s, but Tessa was fairly certain after the time they’d spent together that Pete and Starchild’s relationship was fundamentally different from the one she and Pillowcase enjoyed.

“Not yet,” Hailey said. “He was planned for the first major patch, once we opened up some more dungeons in the [High Beyond].”

“Oh, is that where he ran away to? Neat! That explains why we couldn’t find him when we ransacked the [Tomb of the Spiraling Ages],” Pete said, and Tessa felt a wave of nostalgia wash over her.

The [Tomb of Spiraling Ages] had been one of the dungeons she and Hailey had done when their guild was in its prime. They’d fought through battles just as hard as the one against HC had been, and, in the end, they’d crushed that place and milked for a pile of treasure that was probably still clogging Glimmerglass’s inventory.

Looking over, Tessa saw Glimmerglass was smiling at the memory too. They shared a quick nod of recognition before turning back to the conversation.

“But why did healing it work though?” Rip asked. “Tessa’s power made it really easy to see that it would work, but I couldn’t read too much from the diagrams and formulas that were underneath the instructions that popped up.”

“I caught a little bit of it,” Lisa said. “When we dropped healing spells on it – the heal over time ones specifically, those filled the slot the [Cosmic Recovery] power would have been placed into. It’s like the magics are set to check if HC has any heals already pending when it’s health hits zero and if there are, it lets them do the work of healing him rather than invoking the [Cosmic Recovery] effect.”

“Ah, and no [Cosmic Recovery] means all we needed to do was overcome the healing effects that you all threw on it, right?” Rip asked.

For safety sake, the combined teams had tasked Lost Alice, Lady Midnight, Rachel, and Glimmerglass with dropping heal over time effects on HC in the one second window when they could be cast and would displace the [Cosmic Recovery] buff. Rachel has mistimed her cast, but the other three had all landed theirs successfully.

Hell’s Chosen’s last sounds hadn’t even been words. He had only been capable of incoherent rage before a final combined shot from Rip, Matt, and Mellisandra had detonated the central core of his power and finally converted the [Raid Boss] into a [Lootable Corpse].

Tessa had taken a few moments to whisper a few words over the rapidly disintegrating corpse before taking part in the looting as well.

And the looting had been worth the wait.

While Hell’s Chosen had been level capped down to level 70, the loot that he dropped was literally top tier quality gear.

“How do you like your new shield?” Obby asked, taking a few practice swings with the new sword she’d acquired from the loot pile. 

“I feel like I’m cheating,” Pillowcase said. “This thing puts my chance at blocking incoming damage at 210%. Even if I’m massively slowed and the attacker has [Dauntless Homing] weapons, I’ll still be over 100% on blocking. And did you see all the stat bonuses on this thing?”

“The stat bonuses are pretty common for high level gear,” Hailey said. “The added block effect is too, though that shield beats out the previous best by 10%. Did you notice the really amazing thing about it though?”

“The added damage from [Soul Knight] spell effects? I did,” Pillowcase said. “It doesn’t say how much though. Is it a meaningful boost?”

“In the alpha, we had complaints from the [Elementalist] lead dev that a [Soul Knight] with that shield equipped was out damaging even a maximally gear elementalist,” Hailey said. “Not just in total damage, but in burst damage too. The devs toned it down a bit before beta but even the beta testers said it was overpowered. I think the devs planned to nerf it again in the next patch, but you get the joy of the undiminished version until the day when that can ever happen.”

“We all made out like bandits on this one,” Lisa said. “I’ve never seen a [Raid Boss] drop this much loot at once.”

“He loaded too many abilities into his form,” Obby said. “For being that overpowered, he wound up being worth a too many points to balance out with anything other than this big of a loot pile.”

“It’s a shame we can only kill him the once,” Mellisandra said. “This gear is incredible. Imagine if we could stock up on it and complete a bunch of the sets?”

“Yeah, about that,” Tessa said, scratching the back of her head.

“What did you do?” Lisa asked. It wasn’t an accusation. There was too much amusement and wonder in her question for that.

“Well, this is the first time Hell’s Chosen has been defeated in the [Fallen Kingdoms],” Tessa said.

“Oh my god! We got a [World’s First] didn’t we?” Rip asked.

“We did,” Tessa said with nod in Rip’s direction. “There’s more to it than though.”

“Wait, no, what did you do?” Obby asked, a broad smile spreading across her face as she peered not just at Tessa but into her.

“I didn’t do anything,” Tess said. “I mean, not really. All I did was make a few simple suggestions.”

“To who?” Lisa asked.

“The, uh, the [Fallen Kingdoms],” Tessa said.

Obby burst out laughing.

“You talked to what?” Lisa asked.

“[The Fallen Kingdoms], like as a whole,” Tessa said. “Don’t worry, they didn’t talk back or anything. I’m not hearing voices in my head. Well, apart from my own. And I guess all of you when you speak telepathically.”

“What did you ask the [Fallen Kingdoms] for?” Starchild asked. Given that she was a [Druid], the idea of talking to the land probably wasn’t particularly unusual to Starchild, Tessa guessed.

“I didn’t ask for a gift or anything. The loot we got was all from HC, like Obby said. I just suggested that as a [Raid Boss] he would need a place to respawn and that since [Hell’s Breach] was currently without its proper bosses, he could be installed as the dungeon’s final enemy.”

“So, he’s going to come back?” Rip asked, her voice unsteady at the idea.

“Yep! Over and over and over again,” Tessa said, not hiding the malicious glee she felt at the idea.

“Are we going to have to keep killing him then?” Matt asked.

“Nope,” Tessa said.

“But won’t he…” Rip started to asked, but it was Hailey’s turn to burst out laughing which cut her off.

“Oh no. Did you seriously…? Oh you are so cruel!” Hailey said delight radiating from her.

“Why?” Matt asked.

“Because she’s very clever,” Glimmerglass said, catching on to what Tess had done as well. “Think of the loot we got from him. Now ask yourself how many other [Adventurers] will be interested in fighting a battle where the victory conditions have been discovered and the pay out is as large as the one we just got?”

“Uh, oh. Oh!” Rip said, her eyes going wide. “That would be ‘all of them’, right?”

“All of them, everyday and seven times on Sunday,” Tessa said. “HC’s entire existence is going to be reduced to ‘perpetual loot pinata’.”

“Isn’t there a danger that he’ll get free though?” Cambrell asked.

“Not anymore,” Tessa said. “Before he was a free entity. All the cosmic might he possessed was his without any connection to anything else. Now he’s bound to the dungeon. It’s his home and the source of his power. He’s still absurdly overpowered because the dungeon is feeding him more magic than we all could generate in a year, but the key is, it’s the dungeon’s power. He can leave if he wants. He can walk out the door at any time. Just so long as he’s willing to leave every bit of magic behind and walk the world as a weak and frail human even by the standards of the low level npcs.”

“He won’t do that though will he?” Lisa said, phrasing it as a question even though it wasn’t.

“No. He will not. Not until power becomes something he no longer craves,” Tessa said.

“Should we hang around for his next respawn?” Matt asked. “This places seems to be recovering well enough that it wouldn’t be that bad to stay here.”

The knee deep pools of lava and the melted walls of the arena had returned back to their original state as the dungeon’s natural magic restored the damage that had been done.

“I’d love to,” Tessa said. “I think even for you folks,” she nodded towards Hailey’s crew, “the loot here counts as an upgrade right?” 

“That it does!” Damnazon said. “I am so glad I didn’t bother grinding for the old top end stuff.”

“Technically this is an exploit,” Hailey said. “The actual fights for the gear are supposed to be much harder than this one was.”

“Harder?” Rip asked, disbelief and outrage fighting for ascendancy in her voice.

“Oh yeah,” Hailey said. “The devs basically coded the top end fights to be unbeatable.”

“What’s the point in that?” Rip asked.

“Because the [World’s First] guild will beat them anyways,” Lisa said.

“Yeah. If the fights are unbeatable it’ll take them a week or two to go through them,” Hailey said. “If the devs make the fights beatable at all, someone will get a [World’s First] on them within the first hour of the servers coming up.”

“And we managed a [World’s First] in what, an hour? Two at the outside?” Tessa said, allowing herself to feel a measure of smug satisfaction at their victory.

“They won’t count it,” Hailey said. “Exploits always disqualify the guild that uses them. But, hell with that, no one here is actually keeping score, so we did it!”

“And we’ll do it again?” Cambrell asked. He seemed entranced by the night black jerkin he’d looted. Tess wasn’t sure why until Glimmerglass messaged her. 

“It’s the first piece of dungeon treasure he’s ever received,” Glimmerglass said. “We’re his first real [Adventuring Party].”

Tessa choked up a little at the thought, but had to put it aside.

“Like I said, I’d love to run it again,” Tessa said. “Hailey mentioned some quality rage issues, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still have a few of those to work out, but I think our problems are bigger than this dungeon. Remember where this guy came from?”

There was a short pause while people thought back to the beginning of the fight. Lisa was the first one to call the appropriate recollection to mind.

“Penswell! We tried to contact her and we got this guy instead!” she said. “We’ve got to check on her!”

“Or rescue her,” Tessa said.

“The offer is appreciated, but no rescue is required,” Penswell said, stepping through a portal flanked by Niminay and a small army of [Adventurers].

Tessa blinked.

It wasn’t one of Penny’s projections appearing before them. 

It was the real, original woman herself. Battered, bruised, and bloody, but still recognizably the [Commander] they would all take orders from without question.

It wasn’t Penny who captured Tessa’s attention however. 

Or Niminay, even though the fourteen year old in Tessa was losing her mind at meeting one of her fantasy crushes.

Tessa barely noticed they were there at all.

Instead she looked into the Unknown and prepared for the fight of her life.

Hell’s Chosen, it turned out, did not have multiple health bars.

He had infinite health bars.

Each time Tessa and Hailey’s combined teams smashed him down to zero health, Hell’s Chosen reformed in perfect working order despite whatever damage they inflicted on him, his old empty health bar falling away to reveal a brand new full one beneath it.

After the sixth time he shrugged off obviously fatal damage like it was nothing, the question arose as to whether or not the fight was a hopeless one.

“I mean no other [Raid Boss] has more than five health bars, right?” Rachel asked, continuing to throw healing spells despite the dispirited tone in her voice.

“It doesn’t matter if he has five hundred bars to go through, at this point he is going down, no matter what!” Rip said.

Wrath Raven chuckled. “I like this one.”

“I know, right?” Obby said.

“We’re not going to have to go through five hundred health bars,” Hailey said. “I mean, unless you want to. Sounds like you folks have some quality rage to work out still.”

“I’d appreciate a slightly quicker conclusion to the fight than that,” Pillowcase said. “Not that standing in lava isn’t delightful, but it’s up to my knees now and the ceiling is not looking so good anymore.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to escape with the immobs we have on him, but I’d have to agree, we’ve all got better things to do with our days then waste anymore time on this jerk,” Lisa said.

“There’s a trick to stopping his regen, isn’t there?” Cambrell asked. The goblin had proven to be a tremendous help to Pillowcase thanks to the disabling effects of his various [Assassin Strikes]. With Cambrell reducing the incoming damage by a sizeable amount Pillowcase and Obby had been able to shift to their offensive stances and the healers had been able to work their various damaging spells into their casting rotations.

“That’s what I’m guessing,” Hailey said. “It’s a mechanic some of the [World Shift] bosses had. I’m guessing this guy stole it from one of them. There’s just one catch.”

“Let me guess,” Tessa said. “The different bosses have different mechanics for disabling their extra health bars?”

Hailey laughed.

“You really haven’t forgotten how the game worked have you?” she teased.

“You thought the scars from the [Vasting Deeps] would EVER fade?” Tessa’s voice held entirely too much fondness given how miserable their experiences in that particular dungeon had been. 

“Ah, good times,” Hailey agreed. “You’re right though. There were half a dozen different mechanics and of course they’re each time gated and death count gated.”

“What does that mean?” Rip asked.

“Time gated mechanics mean we can only try them at specific moments, and usually the window for executing them is fairly small,” Lisa said. “Most of them have to be done within five or ten seconds of a specific event. Unless the boss is really special. Then it’s worse.”

“Any surprise that they new ones were all on the worse end?” Hailey asked.

“How much worse are we talking?” Lady Midnight asked.

“One second response time,” Hailey said.

“Are you serious?” Lady Midnight asked. “What about lag?”

“The world’s first crowd has that covered, usually,” Hailey said. “I think the plan was to widen the window in a couple of months, but, well, here we are without an upgrade patch in sight.”

“What about the death count gate?” Tessa asked. “I’m guessing that’s a case where the mechanics only work when the health bar has been emptied out a specific number of times?”

“Yeah, how did you know that?” Hailey asked.

“I didn’t. It’s just the obvious option for making things even harder on the players,” Tessa said.

“The devs don’t actually hate us you know,” Hailey said. “I mean, they know everybody except the lead guilds are going to read about the mechanics on a wiki, so they think making them brutal to figure out is a sign they respect what the ‘World’s First’ crowd is capable of.”

“Is it wrong that I kind of want some of them to be stuck in here too?” Pete asked.

“Consider your wish granted. We lost a couple people into the game, aside from me,” Hailey said.

“Oh yeah! Did I ever tell you we met Ashad?” Tessa asked.

“You what?” Hailey completed dropped her attack rotation.

“He was one of your fellow support reps right?” Tessa asked.

“Yes! You found him? He’s alive? And okay?”

“Yep! He should still be back in [Dragonshire],” Tessa said.

“Why didn’t he contact us! We were all worried sick about him!” Hailey said.

“Well, he didn’t exactly end up as a player. He was stuck being a slime for a while,” Tessa said. “After that I think he was just as cutoff as the rest of us.”

“If he’s okay…wow, that’s amazing! We might have a chance at this after all!” Hailey sounded far more relieved than Tessa would have guessed.

“Not to cut you off, but HC’s down to 20% again,” Lisa said. “If we want to start trying some of the strategies, we should probably pick one now.”

“Between the death count and the variations in the mechanics this could take a while,” Hailey said. “I don’t know if we’ve got a better option than trying them all and going for a brute force process of elimination. Normally the bosses have some hints built into there designs but this guy could have stolen anything he felt like, and probably mix-and-matched them too.”

Tessa pictured the effort that was ahead of them. Even executing one of the strategies properly would be difficult. If it was only available every second or third time them emptied HC’s health bar, it could take them an unbelievably long time to work through them all.

There had to be a better way.

“I think there is,” Pillowcase said, taking the role of Tessa’s inspiration for a change.

“My abilities,” Tessa said to herself. “I still have a ton of them that aren’t defined yet.”

“Just one problem with that approach,” Pillowcase said as HC blasted her arm to dust with one of his breath attacks.

Lost Alice had it fully regenerated a second later and Pillowcase’s mace flew back to her new hand if its own accord.

“We’ve got a lot of its aggro, don’t I?” Tessa said.

“Yep, and if we shift over to your form, you’ll lose a while bunch of damage resistance,” Pillowcase said.

“Huh. If only we had an answer for that, standing within ten feet of us,” Tessa said. “It’s a shame we’re all alone and doomed here right?”

“Definitely,” Pillowcase agreed.

“Uh, Obby, Damnazon? Could I make a request?” Tessa asked, breaking free from her internal reverie.

“Sure,” Damnazon said. “I’ve got very reasonable rates. And it’s half off everything you have for friends and family.”

“Would you take a voucher for one dead [Raid Boss] instead?” Tessa asked, playing along being far more fun than taking her seriously.

“Oh, yes. I would happily take one of those,” Damnazon said. “What did you have in mind?”

“I need to switch forms, but if I do that while I’ve still go aggro HC’s going to turn me into a grease stain on top of the lava here,” Tessa said.

“Aggro will be a little wobbly if we shift it,” Obby said. “Matt, Rip, and Mellisandra. You’ll all need to back off your rotations a bit. Maybe about 20%?”

“Can do!” Mellisandra said and throttled back her spell casting.

Pillowcase stayed were she was, but lessened her own damage output and phased out her taunting skills over about thirty seconds as Damnazon stepped up beside her and switched to using the skills that would let her backup tank more effectively.

“Okay, I’ve got every aggro skill I’ve got going on it,” Damnazon said, “you should be good to go.”

Tessa reached inwards and shifted from Pillowcase’s [Soul Knight] form to her [Void Speaker] body.

Just in time for one of Hell’s Chosen’s [Hundred Eyes] to launch a trio of [Apocalypse Blasts] at her.

Pillowcase could have survived them. Pillowcase wouldn’t even have noticed the myriad debuffs that were part of the beam that rent that atoms of her body into free quarks before hoovering them back up as a power boost for Hell’s Chosen.

Tessa, on the other hand, did not survive them, though she did notice the crushing agony of the status effects when they all hit her at once.

“Oh,” Damnazon said. “Or maybe I don’t have hate on it.”

In ghost form, Tesssa suppressed a grumble.

“I’ve got you! Got a Soul Calling rez coming right up,” Lisa said. “Just need a sec to get some heals in place.”

“Hold off on that,” Tessa said. “I’ll run back from the [Heart Fire]. That’ll give me a moment out of battle to get my ability made up.”

“Uh, to do what?” Mellisandra asked.

“My class is sort of a new one,” Tessa said, racing for the [Heart Fire]. “It doesn’t seem to have predefined abilities at specific levels. At least not yet.”

“So what do you get then?” Hailey asked.

“Not exactly whatever I want,” Tessa said. “But if the ability would…I guess ‘fit’ in a specific level’s slot, I can kind of make it up on the fly? The thing is, we went up a lot of levels in the last day or two and there are a lot levels I haven’t picked something for yet.”

“What are you going to pick for now? An [Assassination] ability?” Cambrell asked.

“No. I don’t think I can poach skills from other classes. They seem to come in as something that would make sense for a [Void Speaker]. And I can’t make ‘I Win’ buttons, since that wouldn’t work as an ability at any level.”

“What are you going to get then?” Mellisandra asked.

“I’ll let you know when I see what what works,” Tessa said as she tapped the [Heart Fire] and flashed back across the veil of death into her newly reformed body.

“If you could get back sooner than later, that’d be great,” Damnazon said. “Pillowcase was making this look a lot easier than it is.”

“Be there in a thirty six seconds,” Tessa said, absolutely certain of the time with how many trips she’d already made between the [Heart Fire] and the [Arena].

“Cool. Then, quick question, what the hell did you just do there? I thought you were switching stances.” Hailey asked.

“Messed up and forgot that HC’s got off-aggro targeted attacks?” Tessa said.

Hailey groaned in frustration.

“I’m more interesting in why that was a problem at all!”

“Because I was in [Void Speaker] form instead of [Soul Knight]?” Tessa said, confused by Hailey’s confusion.

“Yes. That,” Hailey said. “How the hell did you do that?”

“Ohhh! Uh, yeah, I’ve got some things to catch you up on,” Tessa said. “It’s nothing special though. I think any of us can do it.”

“What!?” Hailey wasn’t the only one on her team that was surprised but she was the loudest.

“It’s not particularly useful unless both of your personas have classes,” Tessa said. “Almost there – five second till I’m in the arena.”

She burst onto the sands before any could raise further questions. In front of her Hell’s Chosen towered at roughly the height and width of small building.

A small building with his back to her.

“[Presence of the Void],” Tessa said, invoking her stealth ability as she slowed to a calm walk. No reason to race in and attract HC’s attention. Much better if he never saw what was coming.

“He’s down to 1% health,” Lisa said., “You ready or should we try this on the next pass?”

“I’ve had about enough of this guy,” Tessa said. “Let’s end this.”

Stepping forward she placed her left palm against Hell’s Chosen nearest leg.

“[Words of Revelation: Weakness Revealed to All],” she said, holding the effect she intended in her mind with every ounce of focus she could muster.

Skill Gained: [Words of Revelation: Weakness Revealed to All]!

There was no resistance. After struggling through death after death trying to craft anything that would let her break the level cap and failing, Tessa had expected to have to batter a path through to her new ability, but all it took was saying the words and holding the intent.

Hell’s Chosen spun his massive body to destroy her for the affront she’d given him, but by that point it was far, far too late.

Pillowcase was bathed in flames and knee deep in steel melting acid, the walls around her had turned to lava, and the air was more razor sharp projectile than gas if measured by volume.

“Oh, come on, you’re not even trying yet!” she taunted the god-monster in front of her.

Hell’s Chosen, formerly one of the Gulini shards, slammed a taloned foot onto her that hit with enough force to ignite the atmosphere around her shield. In theory that should have driven her into the relatively flimsy granite floor like a tent peg, but among the many, many new abilities Pillowcase had developed, [Greater Structural Stability] meant that the spot she chose to fight on would only give way if she did.

And she was just getting started.

“Can you hold on for about six seconds? I want to try out one of my new spells,” Lisa asked privately.

“Go for it! He’s knocking off about fifty five percent of my health with each swing but I’ve got [Restoring Blood Fires] going so he doesn’t have a chance of dropping me till that runs out,” Pillowcase said.

“Shout when it’s five seconds from expiring,” Lisa said.

“Five second on the dot, no worries,” Pillowcase said, almost disappointed when an [Invocations of Planar Torment] from Matt compressed their foe into a singularity of agony and spit him back out three seconds later. 

Her disappointment didn’t stem from the spell failing to kill Hell’s Chosen – max level [Raid Bosses] never dropped to a single hit, not even when they were level capped down to something in the range level 70 characters could deal with.

She wasn’t disappointed by the short duration of the control effect either. That Matt had timed the spell in the short window when HC’s [Raid Boss Immunity Trait] was suppressed was a sign of how proficient he’d become, especially given the lengthy casting time of the spell.

Her disappointment, mild as it was, stemmed from having a few moments of peace and quiet, when her soul was screaming for the rush of battle.

“We definitely need to talk to a therapist when all this is done,” Tessa said, speaking to no one except herself.

“Probably a good idea to make it a group therapy session and drag Glimmerglass along too,” Pillowcase.

Beside them, a pace or two back in order to stay within Pillowcase’s shield range, Glimmerglass and Wrath Raven were busy hacking one of HC’s tentacles off. The tentacles grew back but doing so cost HC some of his health, which was always a good sign that an [Adventurer] was engaging with a mob properly.

That Glimmerglass, a healer, wasn’t simply buffing Wrath Raven but was in there with her surprisingly pointy staff, hacking away at the tentacles like a lumberjack, was a sign of the kind of day they were having.

“Relieving some aggravations?” Tessa sent privately to Glimmerglass.

“Letting my mana regen,” Glimmerglass sent back. “And relieving aggravations. This is shockingly therapeutic.”

“Oh yeah, we all need serious therapy,” Tessa said to Pillowcase.

“[Mjolnir Strike!] [Supercell Burst!] [Twelvefold Storm of Arrows!]” Rip wasn’t holding back at all, either with her attacks or with the mad cackle of glee that had consumed her.

Tessa guessed that after spending such a long time losing fight after fight after fight to the [Demons] the chance to cut loose on a fight they had to win felt more than a little liberating.

Which wasn’t to say HC had been reduced to a mere punching bag. They’d been fighting the monstrous form which the Gulini had chosen as his “true being” for over twenty minutes and each time they came close to knocking its health bar below half, HC entered a temporary [Rage Phase] and regenerated back to full, gaining a new and unpleasant collection of attack options in the process.

A part of Tessa was enjoying getting to cut loose at last too, but that was intermixed with the worry that one of HC’s transformations might give it the key to tear through their defenses.

Dying wouldn’t be a problem. She’d made the [Heart Fire] run so many times she was sure she could do it  while drunk, asleep, and headless if she needed to.

If they all wiped though, they would be leaving [Hell’s Breach] undefended, and that wasn’t going to turn out well.

When her party arrived at [Hell’s Breach] it had been under the control of the various [Demons] they’d fought until Tessa finally managed to liberate them from the chains that bound them. While the [Angels] were in residence, they’d nominally had control over the dungeon, though the portals and traps and mana lines had only been keyed to respond to their demonic forms.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a dungeon of good size and sufficient magic must be in want of something to control it. Typically various powerful entities would contest over the location, but with a team of [Adventurers] in residence and a god-monster [Raid Boss] to oppose them, the dungeon was still in equilibrium, just not a terribly stable version of equilibrium.

Sooner or later, one or the other would win, and the winner would determine the disposition of the dungeon’s resources. If HC won, Tessa was sure the would tear all of the magic from the dungeon as a power source as he went roaming the continent as a near unstoppable force, looking for other powerful areas it could consume. Personally she didn’t see the appeal and if she was on the winning side, she had some very different ideas for how things would turn out. Watching HC’s health bar crawling back upwards after Rip’s barrage left Tessa wondering about the likelihood of their coming out on top though. It seemed like they could fight this one boss up until the literal end of the world, which was promising to be a lot sooner than anyone would prefer. 

What they needed was some trick to kill the damn thing.

“[Lesser Avatar of Death],” Lost Alice said and from Tessa’s left side a [Grim Reaper] sailed past, a scythe of serrated bone in her hands.

Pillowcase watched in amazement as Lost Alice, the backline healer, dove into melee with HC. As a [Lesser Avatar of Death] she didn’t need to make any effort to defend herself. Attacks against her either passed right through here, or rotted away HC’s body part if they were melee attacks. The scythe she wielded had a similar effect, turning tissue that was even vaguely close to it necrotic and withering anything it hit into dust with each swing.

Pillowcase was so amazed by the display that it took her a moment to switch to a more offensive footing herself and join in the mayhem.

Together, they and everyone else on the team exerted all the pressure they could and were rewarded by seeing HC’s health bar finally drop below the halfway point. 

Obby called down a [Guardian’s Retribution] that dropped it to 46%, followed by Rachel and Lady Midnight entering [Lesser Avatar of Death] form too and pushing HC’s health to 39%, and then Starchild, Rip, and Matt unleashed [Vengeance of the Green], [Thunder’s Answer], and [Echo of Eternal Agony] respectively, to drop HC to 26% health.

Pillowcase braced for the all too likely backlash which would be unleashed when HC hit one quarter of his health.

Sadly, they didn’t make it that far though.

As before, with HC’s health below half, he gained a phenomenal amount of regeneration and a new suite of powers.

[Consume Strength], [Invulnerable Crystal Shell], and [Death Spikes] all came online together. 

[Consume Strength] wasn’t a concern for Pillowcase. Her [Glorious Soul] passive ability shrugged off stat reducing effects like that with ease. Wrath Raven and the rest of the non-tanks who were in melee range were not so lucky though, with both Lisa and Rachel stumbling back behind Obby and Pillowcase as the loss of strength broke them out of their avatar states.

[Invulnerable Crystal Shell] was more of a problem because it meant that HC’s temporary regeneration was allowed to proceed completely unhindered. Tessa had been so hopeful that the extra damage they’d done would be enough to prevent HC from healing back to full, but as her mace blows hit for zero damage that hope evaporated more and more with each swing.

Of them all though, the [Death Spikes] were the worst. [Spike Defenses] were always annoying to deal with because they damaged you for hitting the target and frequently included unpleasant side effects like paralyzation, or blindness. [Death Spikes] were the worst of the lot since they did tremendous backlash damage with each hit the mob received and their status effect was, as the name implied, [Death].

No concern for your remaining health, no chance to partially resist the effect. If you were not warded against death magic (another perk of [Glorious Soul]) you simply died.

Wrath Raven’s reflexes were quick enough that she checked her swing before she got caught by the spikes, but Glimmerglass, not as practiced at melee, noticed the danger only as her corpse was toppling away from her ghost.

“[Soul Calling: High Reunion],” Lost Alice said, bringing Glimmerglass back to life without a trip to the [Heart Fire]. It was a big expenditure of magic, but under the circumstances Tessa had to agree that they couldn’t afford to have their resources down any longer than they absolutely had to be.

“[Magic Sapping Roots],” Starchild said, summoning grasping vines to leech the magic from the [Death Spikes], shattering the spell as they drained it dry.

“Thank you [Druid]!” Wrath Raven said and resumed hacking away at HC, looking as at home in mayhem as anyone could be.

For as happy as they all were though, the fight had to end. There was too much happening in too many other places, and they’d discovered something too important for it to die in a lonely and forgotten dungeon with them.

“We need a new plan,” Tessa said in party chat. “Anyone noticed anything yet that might seem like a mechanic we could exploit on this guy?”

“Will this thing have mechanics?” Lady Midnight asked. “It wasn’t made by a developer for us to beat right?”

“It wasn’t, but it might be trapped into them anyways,” Lisa said. “It hasn’t pulled out any unique abilities so far. Everything it’s hitting us with is the same as, or just a reskin of, abilities other bosses have.”

“Maybe it lacks creativity?” Rip said. “Could we take advantage of that?”

“This arena is giving us a lot of room to stay out of his reach, but the downside is we don’t have a lot of terrain to get clever with,” Obby said.

“That seems to be changing though,” Matt said. “The lava on the walls doesn’t seem to be a special effect, I think this place is actually melting.”

“Whatever we come up with, we need to keep him in here,” Tessa said. “If he gets outside this dungeon, he’ll scale up to a real max tier [Raid Boss]. Right now, he doesn’t have a whole bunch of the level 100+ abilities but that’ll change the moment he steps outside.”

“We’ll be level 99 out there too though, right?” Rip asked.

“We will be, but even the gear that we have that scales with our level will only scale up to 99,” Obby said.

“We’d need at least level 125 gear if we want to survive fighting for long,” Lisa said.

“Ideally level 135 or 140,” Rachel said. “The beta testers said the new high end raids were going to demand at least that once they were rolled out.”

“Not sure we can hit this thing harder,” Wrath Raven.

“Not sure we can hit it smarter either,” Lisa said. “[Lesser Avatar of Death] isn’t going to be up again for another ten minutes.”

“If we somehow squeeze out a big enough burst of damage, we might have an easy time once he’s on his second health bar,” Tessa suggested, knowing that was a fleeting hope at best.

“He has a second health bar?” Rip sounded sick at the idea but the more experienced [Adventurers] were uniformly unsurprised at the notion.

“We can’t win this one, can we?” Rachel asked, saying aloud what everyone else was thinking.

The portal that had started forming behind her pinged in Pillowcase’s awareness and she spared a fraction of a second to glance back and see what new terror was awaiting them.

And it was a terror.

Or rather she was.

But then Tessa has always been a fan of the terror and hijinks that BT had lured her into.

From behind Hailey, Mellisandra appeared, and then Damnazon, Cambrel and their whole party.

“Not alone you can’t,” Hailey said.

It wasn’t every day that Oblivion stretched forth its hands to tear away the very fabric of you existence. Tessa was sure of that since she’d spent at least a week since a creature from beyond time and space had tried to erase the core of her being from the world.

“Yeah, no,” she said, shifting into Pillowcase’s form.

She didn’t really need to, but approaching the idiot in front of her as Pillowcase just seemed more appropriate. Pillowcase’s job was to protect the team and this creature would literally need to get past her dead body if it wanted to get to the rest of her team, and that was not going to happen.

The [Disjoined] in front of her wasn’t one of the garden variety glitchy post-[Adventurer] zombies. It had followed the link back from Penswell’s office, and was, unless Tessa missed her guess, using a cheap imitation of Penny’s self duplication trick to materialize in front of them.

She had to give it credit. It attacked without pause or hesitation. It was capable of talking but apart from a quick bit of gloating (which was probably intended to throw its quarry off their game), it got right to work.

Talons of deadly static speared forward seeking to pierce Pillowcase’s heart, or rather the central power cores that were woven into her.

Pillowcase didn’t call out the invocations for any defensive capabilities. 

There wasn’t time.

“Heh. You’re mine,” the copy of Gulini said after closing the distance between them in less than a blink.

“You sure about that?” Pillowcase gesturing with both hands to the center of her chest. Specifically the spot where the Gulini expected to see his talons quickly disintegrating her from the inside out.

Confused, he looked down to see the tips of his talons failing to even dent the armored breastplate Pillowcase wore. It wasn’t the breastplate that was special though.

“Tessa!” Lisa screamed over their private channel, her view of the two of them obscured by Gulini’s form.

“I’m fine,” Tessa said, a giddy laugh bubbling up inside her. After dying literally countless times in the last dozen or more hours, it felt just incredible to be facing a foe who wasn’t able to tear her apart with a single hit. “[Transdimensional Integrity] remember?”

“How?” the Gulini demanded.

“Gee, I don’t know,” Tessa said, seeing no reason to enlighten her foe when his confusion was so delicious. “Let’s see if it works you can do the same thing.”

Maces aren’t as popular a weapon as swords are. Pillowcase wasn’t sure why people didn’t see the appeal in them though. Hitting people you didn’t like with a ball of spikes on a stick was a viscerally thrilling experience, especially when it made such a satisfying sound as it smashed into the side of their face.

The Gulini, it turned out, wasn’t a fan of maces either. Not that it much left to express that sentiment with after Pillowcase’s first swing. 

The sad new was that, while it was basically a pinata filled with staticky death, there weren’t any candy or toys that came spilling out when Pillowcase finished her third swing and found nothing more to aim at above the neck.

Worse though, the Gulini didn’t stay damaged like a proper corpse would.

“What…you…what are…what are you?” he demanded, static coalescing into another head. “What…what…what…”

He began backing away but not fast enough to avoid a [Terra Volt Strike Arrow] blasting into him. That was followed by a [Greater Endless Torment] from Matt and attacks from Starchild, Glimmerglass, and Wrath Raven.

The Gulini didn’t retain much of its manifested form through the onslaught but none of the attacks had an observable effect on the static that lay under the false skin the creature wore.

“What is this abomination,” Snowcap said as he shifted from his [Demon] form to his [Angelic] one.

“This is one of the things we told you about,” Tessa said. “Like the one I tried to fight with the [Divine Spark].”

The Gulini laughed.

“Nothing like that one. I am nothing like that one,” he said, rolling his shoulders before speaking a word to destroy the continent they were on.

It didn’t work.

“Yeah, the one I fought didn’t make empty gesture like that,” Tessa said.

“Why? I am infinite. I am unbound by this world. I am…”

“You might want to listen to the exact words you’re saying for a second there,” Tessa said. There really wasn’t any sense in helping her foe figure out the nature of his predicament, or rather there wouldn’t have been for a normal foe. The Gulini was a special case.

“We can’t beat this guy in a fight,” she told her team on the party channel. “As he is now, he’s basically just ignoring any damage we can inflict.”

“I’m happy to keep shooting him,” Rip said.

“I would agree,” Lisa said. “Except let’s not give him any more chances to learn how to copy our abilities than we have to maybe?”

“My words?” the Gulini said.

The static snapped like thunder, loud and angry, but also diminishing as the Gulini’s gaze drifted outwards in confusion.

“He’s going to figure it out in a little and we need to have a plan ready by then,” Tessa said. 

“We could run,” Lady Midnight said. “I know our [Angel] friends are limited in what they can do, but I bet they can at least fly.”

“We can do better than that,” Lisa said. “We could teleport back to [Dragonshire] or any of the capitol cities that are back online if we wanted to.”

“I’m a little leery of opening a [Warp Portal] to any spot where there’s a bunch of people,” Lady Midnight said. “This thing already portaled in here, seems like a good chance it could follow us.”

“It can,” Obby said.

“Then we need to fight it,” Matt said. It wasn’t a defiant statement, or an angry one.

Tessa felt a small smile spread across Pillowcase’s face. That wasn’t the voice of someone who was afraid. It was the voice of someone who’d been afraid of a lot of things for a long time, but, when faced with an impossible foe, found a bedrock of confidence to stand on.

Nobody knew how they could win, or if winning was even an option, but Matt believed they would and that belief inspired all of them.

“We’re in a good spot to do that here,” Tessa said. “Nice solid level cap means nonsense like that [World Breaker Curse] he tried are off the table.”

“I’m sorry, the what?” Lady Midnight said.

“I’ll explain later,” Tessa said. “Lost Alice and I had a breakthrough while I was recovering the [Heart Fire] chamber.”

“I thought you said they were making out?” Starchild asked, turning to Lady Midnight.

“That too,” Lisa said, unapologetically.

Tessa grinned and was delighted to find that Pillowcase couldn’t blush. Rip and Matt giving each other a covert high-five almost let Pillowcase manage it though.

“The important bit is that, like we’ve seen before, even these reality destroying monsters, are limited in places like this,” Lisa said.

“Limited but not killable,” Starchild said. “We can fight it endlessly if we pace ourselves properly, but spending eternity in a deadlock is not appealing.”

“We can help you battle, but in either of our forms, this is something we have no dominion over,” Snowcap said.

“That’s okay,” Tessa said. “I think you all should probably head out. I’m pretty sure Obby and I can keep his attention locked on  us, but if I’m wrong, I don’t want him deciding to try corrupting one of you.”

“We are incorruptible,” Snowcap said. “Our makers made sure of that.”

“You may be, but it might still be able to steal some of your power, and the last thing we need is for it to get stronger,” Tessa said.

“It is our purpose to defender this creation,” Snowcap said.

“I know. But there’s a lot more that you’re supposed to protect than just this place,” Tessa said. “We’ve been burning up a lot of your time but there’s a whole world that needs you.”

“We have a debt to you,” Snowcap said.

“That debt is paid in full,” Tessa said. “You gave us exactly what we needed. We’re so much stronger now than we were when we came in here. Trust us. We can handle this guy.”

Snowcap glowed brighter for a moment and then nodded.

“Thank you,” he said and, along with the others, vanished upwards a streams of rising light.

“Gone?” the Gulini said, the departure of the [Angels] bringing it back to the world. “But I am not alone.”

“You’re starting to get it. Aren’t you?” Tessa asked.

“Yes. The hateful ‘I’. An accretion. A growth around what should be only lovely dissolution,” the Gulini said.

“Happy to destroy that for you,” Wrath Raven said.

The Gulini laughed again.

“Nothing any of you can do can destroy what I am,” it said.

“Happy to try,” Glimmerglass said and then glanced over at Tessa, awareness dawning in her eyes. “Or are we?”

“What he is now? Oh, yeah, that’s going away,” Tessa said.

“Impossible,” the Gulini said.

Tessa nodded.

“That is the heart of the matter yes. And what’s going to be your downfall,” she paced to the side to keep herself in between him and the rest of her party. He wasn’t consciously trying to maneuver around her, but Tessa had spent an agonizingly long period of time making pretty much every mistake it seemed possible to make and those lessons were still quite fresh.

“You have no power over me!” The Gulini’s snarl was the surest sign Tessa could imagine that he knew he was lying.

“What makes you think I need any particular power to destroy you?” she asked, relishing down to the tips of her toes the growing certainty that her guesses about the nature of the menace in front of her were true.

“Weakness won’t save you,” the Gulini said, once again hearing but not understanding Tessa’s words.

“What do I need to be saved from?” Pillowcase taunted the Gulini.

“From me.” The Gulini’s voice was a low growl. A low growl with only the barest hints of static around the edges.

“And who are you?” Tessa asked, delight bubbling over as she spoke her next words. “What’s your name?”

She didn’t have the force of [Divine Power] backing the question this time, but as she’d suspected, she didn’t need that.

“I have no…no…I don’t have a name,” the Gulini said, his voice not breaking like a glitched datafile but pausing in short, fitful gaps, like someone struggling to deny a truth they couldn’t bear to admit.

“You sure about that?” Tessa asked.

“I will destroy you!” Rage was the predictable response, to the point where parrying the Gulini’s next attack was so trivial for Pillowcase that she only did it for the petty satisfaction of being able to crush his hand to pulp in the process.

“You’d have a better chance at that if you had a name,” Tessa said, offering the Gulini the honest advice that would seal his fate for good. To the rest of her team she added on their party channel, “Be ready for this to get fun as soon as he does give a name.”

“Why’s that?” Rip asked.

“Because he’ll become fully real then,” Obby said. “Which means he’s going to change from trying to kill us with ‘nothing’ and start using ‘something’, like real [Raid Tier Boss] nonsense.”

“Uh, why isn’t he using that now?” Matt asked. “I thought these things could do anything.”

“They can,” Tessa said. “But the [Fallen Kingdoms] has learned some new tricks.”

“The [Fallen Kingdoms]? What do you mean?” Lady Midnight asked.

“I think I know,” Glimmerglass said. “When my other self over there fought the creature that had corrupted the fleet, she got it to name itself and in doing so it lost access to its reality breaking power. That then became something that was true within this world.”

“I don’t know if it became true then, or if the world was waiting for ‘Unknown’s’ name as the final piece in making him part of the world rather than something inherently destructive to it,” Tessa said. “It might even be an inevitable process that the [Fallen Kingdoms] has just learned to speed up. Unknown seemed to be becoming more ‘real’ each time we ran into it – just like this guy has been the longer we talk to him.”

“Heads up,” Obby said. “I think he’s about to hit us with something.”

Tessa looked over to see the Gulini hunched over and shaking, not spasm or weird graphical glitches. It was laughter. And not the kindly variety.

“You did this to me,” he said, his voice nearly all but free of its static hiss. “You made me this.”

“Wish I could take credit,” Tessa said. “But this is all the consequences of your own bad choices.”

“My choices? I don’t choose. I am chosen,” he said. “I am [Hell’s Chosen] and I will destroy you!”

And with that his human form split away, revealing the nightmare he’d  always been.

Penny was being erased. It wasn’t how she’d expected to spend her day, but she had to admit it was nice that the other shoe had finally dropped.

“So easy…so…so…easy…easy,” Gulini said as talons of static plunged into Penny’s forehead.

Or rather the forehead of one of Penny’s temporary duplicates.

It was a ghastly sight to watch, though from Penny’s perspective also a somewhat amusing one. Even as Gulini ripped apart from pale reflection Penny had dodged away from, she could see that he had no idea he was destroying a fake.

“The leader..the..fallen..leader has..the leader has fallen,” he said, thoughts shredding in the storm of static which had hollowed him out. 

“Have I now?” another copy of Penny asked.

She couldn’t turn invisible, but redirecting someone’s attention to where you wanted it to be was the most basic level of strategy. 

Her second duplicate was shredded before she could utter another word, and Penny heard Gulini’s static growler louder. She threw another duplicate at it to buy time, and took stock of her situation.

The [Command Center] was a complete loss. Apart from her, everyone else had been corrupted and were moving towards her with the slow steps of a puppet in the hands of a fledgling puppeteer.

Azma wasn’t an asset either. They’d been speaking a moment prior but the connection was dead, either because Azma was dealing with a visitor like Penny was or because she’d been wise enough to terminate the connection the moment Penny’s attacker revealed himself.

She could issue a recall order, or send out a distress signal. That would get a significant number of [Adventurers] inbound, but with the defenses of the [Command Center] still in place they would take at least ten minutes to arrive.

She could last another two minutes and forty seconds. The destruction of her fifth copy confirmed that calculation.

Calling in the [Adventurers] wasn’t an option. Nor was leaving the comm channels functional. Once she fell, the attacker would have access to her authorization privileges. Based on Gulini’s demonstrated capabilities the entire world, apart from the [Adventurers], would fall under his control within an hour and three minutes, with every significant martial force being suborned within the first seven minutes. 

There was sufficient reserve power in the comm channels to backfire and reduce her body to an ash residue. That would prevent her own corruption and remove the most prominent avenue for the attacker’s influence to spread.

Except, of course, that the comm system had heavy and intricate systems in place to prevent overloads, since reducing its users to dust was counterproductive in most scenarios.

Penny looked at the comm’s console at the far corner of the room. Among the promising bits of info was the fact that she could make it to the console with thirty second of effort, and would be able to pass unnoticed there for at least a minute and twenty five seconds. 

Bypassing the safety mechanisms would require thirty minutes of work though.

Not a viable option.

Unless!

Bypassing the safety mechanisms would require thirty minutes. Destroying the safety mechanisms on the other hand? That could be accomplished in thirty seconds. But doing so would hasten Gulini’s awareness of her real presence to within ten seconds.

Destroying the safety mechanism in a manner that destroyed her as well?

Viable.

Twenty seconds.

And Gulini would need at least a second to close the gap between them.

It was a workable option.

Also one Penny wasn’t going to pursue.

“It was not wise to come here,” she said as her eleventh copy was eradicated.

“Came for you,” Gulini said.

“As I said, not wise.” Casting her voice through the duplicate made it that much more believable as being the real version of her, and Gulini was all too happy to spend extra time searching the shreds of the copy for any trace of a real person in them.

“You’re the key…the lynchpin,” Gulini said and Penny noticed the single stutter.

It was an interesting and promising sign.

But it didn’t buy her any more time.

“You think I’m important?” Penny said, making no effort to hide the mocking disbelief in her voice.

“You are the center,” Gulini said static hissing at the end of his words as he ripped her fourteenth copy apart. “They listen to you.”

“And when you take me, you think they’ll listen to you instead?”

“They will hear silence,” Gulini said. “They will hear nothing.”

“Like you hear nothing?”

“I hear everything.”

“How tragic then that you fail to listen to any of it,” Penny said and watched the anger roll off Gulini in waves of static.

She couldn’t pick up anything in the static to analyze. No specific power to build a countermeasure for, or to turn against itself. There was nothing to it. A nothing which nonetheless was disintegrating her copies as quickly as she could produce them.

Penny wasn’t a high level [Wizard] or [Warlock] or any other combat casting class. People often made the mistake of assuming that meant she couldn’t handle “complex” spells, or that “communication magic” was the only variety she could craft. The fact that she’d chosen to specialize in spells which were more subtle than [Fortress Wrecking Fireball] perplexed those people, but the ability to destroy a single castle had always seemed underwhelming when compared to the ability to destroy (or far more often save) an entire country.

It was with more than a little frustration therefor that she regarded the dilemma her foe presented. Subtle magics seemed completely wasted on it. [Fortress Wrecking Fireballs] wouldn’t have destroyed it either, but they would have allowed her to destroy the comm system, and potentially herself.

Penny rejected that idea again though.

Playing for the lowest impact loss was still playing for a loss, and while destroying herself might mitigate the immediate damage her attacker could do, to a degree, it would leave the [Fallen Kingdoms] in a likely unrecoverable state. Also it would make Niminay sad.

So, that wasn’t happening.

“You will be mine.” Gulini’s voice was an echo of itself, a growled memory of what he’d once been, or once had the potential to be. 

Around him, the [Command Center] was beginning to warp and flake away, his mere presence breaking down the fabric of space.

Which was going to be a problem.

Penny had a minute and eleven seconds left until he would break through her defenses and grasp the real her.

Options dwindled faster than her remaining time.

Which meant it was time to start considering the unpleasant ones.

“And what will you do with me if you get me?” Penny asked. She didn’t enjoy the prospect of talking with her attacker, but it offered several avenues of attack and she wasn’t in a position to pass those up.

“Gift you. With Obliteration.” The static was raw in his voice, tearing the words apart a moment after he made them.

Penny felt him trying to project his essential “nothingness” along on the sounds, but in passing through her duplicate’s ears, the static fizzled out into them and never reached her.

“And you’re hoping that I’ll return the gift to you, so you can escape the existence that’s consuming you. That’s making you too real.”

They weren’t guesses. She’d observed enough to understand the basic parameters of what she was dealing with, and from there working out its motivations was a trivial exercise.

“Yes!” Gulini said. “Yes. You understand. How do you understand? How do you know me?”

“Listen to yourself,” Penny said. “Don’t you hear it?”

“I hear everything.”

“But you’re not listening,” Penny said.

She really didn’t like what was going to come next.

She knew it was her best chance, but she really didn’t like it.

“No need to listen,” Gulini said. “I already know.”

Penny couldn’t help herself. She laughed. It gave away her true position, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t planning to remain out of her attacker’s clutches for the remaining forty eight seconds anyways.

“Do you now?” she asked. “Let’s see about that, shall we?”

He didn’t run towards her. He rippled, statics jittering forward with ever fraction of a second that passed.

Penny, however, didn’t have time for dramatics like that.

She stepped forward and grabbed Gulini by the throat.

It wasn’t the best of moves.

The Oblivion within him surged outward, a dreadful wail escaping his throat, despite the hold she had on it.

Her hand was the first part of her to be drenched in the all destroying, all corrupting miasma that was wearing Gulini as a shell. She’d wondered if the process of being devoured by it would be painless. It would have made sense after all if being melted by nothing involved feeling nothing.

That did not turn out to be the case.

Agony unlike any Penny had experienced roared up her arm. She’d known she wasn’t going to like this part of her plan.

So she shut the pain off.

That was something you couldn’t do with [Fortress Wrecking Fireballs]. 

The other thing even the highest tier combat magic couldn’t do was help anyone survive contact with whatever Gulini had become. Penny wasn’t certain her magics could either, but she knew directly experiencing the phenomena was her best chance at discovering the truth behind it. For perhaps anyone else that would have been an impossible order but for as fast as Gulini’s nothingness was destroying her, Penny’s mind was faster still. To her perception, time slowed, and slowed, and came within the most imperceptible margin of freezing entirely. 

“Now let’s see what it is you’re doing to me,” Penny said, watching carefully as the outer layer of skin on her hand passed through a sort of phase change between reality and something else.

Penny sent her magic into the effect like a thousand scalpels but none of the spells registered anything. Each told her that there was nothing around her hands. That the hands themselves weren’t changing. That everything was exactly as it was supposed to be.

She checked for illusions, following the obvious trail because it would be far easier to convince someone that you controlled their reality than to actually be able to influence what was real. Sadly, those divinations came back empty as well. There were no illusions present, or at least none that she was capable to piercing.

“There has to be something here,” she grumbled, annoyance at the impossibility in front of her growing the longer an explanation for it continued to elude her.

She tried to come at the problem from another angle. She was the one being devoured, perhaps her spells could monitor what she knew she was and as that changed she would be able to discern what sort of transformation was taking place.

That didn’t work either.

She wasn’t being transformed.

She wasn’t being burned, or disintegrated, or mass converted. She wasn’t being anything.

She wasn’t being anything?

“I’m not? I am ‘not’?” Penny asked, the leap not one of logic but of pure intuition. “This isn’t happening, because it’s the unreal meeting the real. When my hands melt, it won’t be that they were destroyed, it will be that they became something that’s not real, that never was. I won’t ever have hands. All of my history will be corrupted. The world would need to encyst me, cocoon me into the shell of an identity, or the ripples of my broken reality would reach out and fracture the realities of everyone I ever met or influenced.”

But the [Adventurers] had proven to be immune to the effect. Or had gained immunity to it. What made them special? 

They were powerful, certainly, but even the new, low level ones, seemed to be able to resist the corruption effect.

Or at least the ones who hadn’t become [Disjoined] were able to resist it.

Penny reached for a spark of understanding and drew back a handful of fire.

[Heart Fire].

The element that was common to all [Adventurers].

Like a waterfall, the pieces fell into place.

Gulini’s improving speech. The [Adventurers’] immunity. How she was going to survive.

The battle between the real and the unreal didn’t have to go to the unreal.

Even as Gulini and his spawn spread like a cancer across the world, the world was resisting him. Even within himself, Gulini was bit by bit fighting to come back.

Where he sought to become a [True Horror] though, the [Adventurers] returned as the selves they dreamed themselves to be.

As the corruption spread up her arms, Penny turned off more of her sense to keep her mind clear.

She needed focus to find her center.

She needed to discover the [Heart Fire] within herself.

It was impossible. No one had ever summoned [Heart Fire] on their own.

Which meant Penny would need to be the first.

She just needed time.

Time which Gulini was not going to give her.

Time which had just about run out.

Until someone grabbed Gulini and began to drag him off her.

“I’ve had more than enough of you,” Unknown said, grasping Gulini’s shoulders and pulling hard enough that a seam began to rip down Gulini’s center.