Max was really beginning to think of his training warehouse as his home. The smells, the silence, the utilitarian space, it all suited him. He especially liked how he could so easily transition from research to training.

  In his living area, he checked his messages on his laptop. The admins that Chad and Lance had assigned to him were both doing their jobs, going through all the potential boss monsters he could target to maximize his time.

  But at the moment, he felt he needed to solve an important mystery first. He snorted. It wasn’t actually a mystery, just knowledge he hadn’t made time for yet.

  He walked out to the middle of the concrete training area. Then Max placed all five daggers, ral’tek, he had taken from Adjudicator Swan's body on the ground in a row. He stood and observed them for a while, slightly shaking his head. Even now, as a four-star mana body blade sorcerer, he couldn't truly understand what they were or how powerful they might be, at least not by looking at them.. The only sensation he felt while looking at them was a low-level feeling of unease.

  Opening his third eye to look at them was out of the question. He’d learned that lesson the hard way and would never forget.

  Max pulled a folding chair from the corner of the warehouse and set it down in front of the five ral’tek. Finally, he said out loud, "Anansi, I know you're probably watching this. I would appreciate it if you could manifest physically for me so we can have a proper conversation about these…things."

  Almost immediately, the divine remnant appeared to one side. This time, Anansi’s spider body was about the size of a small dog, and his expression on his human-ish face was mildly amused, his eyes sparkling as he smirked at Max. Then, before speaking, Anansi slowly rose into the air. At first, Max thought he was floating, but then he saw the almost invisible series of spider threads leading from the divine remnant's spirit up to the ceiling.

  "About time.”

  Max frowned at the showmanship and asked, "Can you not actually hover? Or rather, why do you need physical threads in order to float?"

  Anansi shook his head. "No, I have mass right now. See?" He hopped onto Max's leg, and immediately, in addition to an absolute piercing cold sensation, Max could feel weight. It wasn't as much as Anansi would weigh in his current form if he were truly physical, but it wasn't insignificant either.

  "Just like Lavinia or her subordinate spirits, when I manifest physically, I have to use ectoplasm for it. Lavinia and I both use very, very small amounts to manifest compared to her spirits, but it's still not enough to allow for floating up through the air willy-nilly."

  "But what about going through walls? Can you still do that when you're physically manifested?"

  "Sort of," said Anansi. "Not all spirits can, it sort of depends. Of course, I can because I am powerful and awesome. But if I do, I’d leave my ectoplasm on one side of the wall and form it anew on the other side. This is one of the many reasons–even past wasting energy–that most spirits don't like to form physical, ectoplasm bodies unless we have to. Even though the ectoplasm doesn't hang around long in the physical world, it still allows those in-the-know to track us or notice our presence. If someone is skilled or sensitive enough, they can figure out things about us based on the ectoplasm we generate, too. It’s like a spirit’s fingerprint."

  Max nodded slowly. "Okay, I got it. Thank you for the explanation. Now I could use another one; explanation, that is. What the hell are these things?" He pointed at the daggers on the ground.

  Anansi chuckled and said, "I was seriously beginning to wonder when you were going to ask me about the ral’tek. It's been a while."

  "Yeah, well, I had a lot of things on my mind," Max scratched the back of his head. "I've also been training and fighting monsters and summoning friends. You know how it is."

  The divine remnant rolled his eyes. "Very cool, Max. So funny. Very droll," said Anansi, acting scandalized.

  "I can do sarcasm too," said Max. He lifted an eyebrow. "Are you surprised?"

  "No," said the dead spider god. "Even a dog can pretend to do things humans do, but they won’t really understand it. So…the fact you tried? No, that is not impressive. I'm only amazed by how poorly you do it. Please don't try again. Leave it to the masters." Anansi rubbed his pedipalps together, which was an extremely strange-looking thing to see, since his fangs were on the front of his spider body…despite the lack of a head. It was something Max hadn't really noticed before. It was something he could have probably gone the rest of his life without studying.

  He coughed, and Instead of saying anything about Anansi's very obvious teasing and provocation, Max said, "Okay, so I know that the black ral’tel will kill somebody in the Quartet for good, and I know that the white one sends a student back to their world. What about the others? Red, blue, and the purple that you came out of?"

  Anansi shook his head and did a strange sideways shuffle with his spider body that was a bit disconcerting. "Your understanding of what the ral’tek can do is inherently flawed. These are not tools merely of the Quartet. They can have different functions sometimes in a Quartet, though. In fact, they may have even more functions I am not even aware of, but in general, outside of the Quartet, the white ral’tek destroys or dismisses summons and temporary states of being. The actual theory and methodology can get fairly complex from an arcane perspective, but the white ral’tek does not just send students back from the Quartet; it would also theoretically disperse my essence if I were physically manifested and I were stabbed with it. And of course, it wouldn't kill me, but it would make it very difficult for me to manifest again for a while. The effect would be stronger on weaker spirits. Also, theoretically, it could also be used to affect me, or another spirit even if we were not manifested, but I'm not entirely sure how that would work in practice.

  "The black ral’tek does not only kill in the Quartet. Theoretically, it can kill anything, anywhere. But the more powerful the being in the real world, the longer the blade would have to stay lodged in the body or be connected somehow to the entity you’ve marked for death. My understanding is that adjudicators outside the Quartet most often use a black ral’tek as a finishing weapon. Apparently, it works well against creatures that regenerate or can move their soul into different bodies. If you get killed with the black dagger, that's it. Lights out. It’ll even work on a lich." Anansi drew one end of his spider limbs across his thick human neck.

  Then he pointed at the blue ral’tek. "The blue one is administrative," he explained. "The way Adjudicator Swan usually used it was to plant it into the ground and create a magical console linking to the General Quartet system or to pull up information."

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "Wait a second," said Max, holding up a hand. "I thought all these things were stabbed into people, or constructs or spirits. Like, I thought they were all weapons."

  "I never said that," Anansi sounded a bit smug, which was irritating, but Max kept a blank face. "If anything, I would say that the ral’tek are meant to interface with ‘various entities,’ and from a mystical perspective, each Quartet or world is an entity. Since it's easy to find the surface of the entity, in this case for your world–the ground–stabbing the ral’tek into it means that you are interfacing with that entity."

  "So it was like an admin system that Swan called up?" asked Max.

  "That's probably a good way to put it," said Anansi. "I'm not sure what she did to access it, though, and I was kind of mostly…asleep until I met you, so I can't really give you much information past that."

  Max nodded. He said, “Understandable.”

  Then Anansia moved, stopping above the red dagger. He pointed. "The red ral’tek is a little more mysterious to me. I've only seen Adjudicator Swan use it one time, and it was to lock down the area so that a Challenger couldn't teleport away."

  Max blinked at that. "So it's like a spatial lock or something? How did she use it?"

  "The same way as the blue one," Anansi explained. "She stuck it into the ground, and it created a dome of sorts that spread out before disappearing. I think the effect stayed in place as long as the dagger was planted."

  Max slowly nodded. "Okay, so it's some sort of suppression tool. And what about the purple one? You should know the most about that, right? Since it's the one you came out of."

  Anansi laughed. "Yeah, I wish. You ever see your own back?"

  “My back?”

  “Yes, you ever look at your own back?”

  "I can if I look in a couple mirrors," said Max.

  "Okay, what if there's no mirror?" Anansi's voice was grumpy, and he muttered something about his contractor being pedantic.

  Max rolled his eyes. "Okay, I get your point. So while you were in it, so you didn't really understand it that well. But you must have seen Adjudicator Swan use it before, right?"

  Anansi nodded. "It was actually the adjudicator before the one before Swan who used me. Swan never really needed my ral’tek because of her powers, her Path, I think. But anyway, my dagger, my ral’tek, was used to cut through a barrier before. A very powerful Challenger had enacted an extremely strong barrier, and when the adjudicators came, my ral’tek was shoved into the protection and cut through it like tofu. The ral’tek didn't destroy the thing, but it did open up a breach, and you can imagine what happened after that."

  "Yeah, dead rebel Challenger, huh?" said Max.

  "Exactly," Anansi grinned. "So, anyway, I think you're kind of dumb for not asking me about all these things earlier, but on the other hand, I guess I have to admit that knowing about them before this probably wouldn't have helped you much. And I know you've probably asked yourself that question after the giant monkey almost killed you, right? Like, ‘If I knew about the weird daggers, would I still have almost gotten flattened by a huge gorilla foot?’"

  Max slowly nodded. "The thought had crossed my mind," he admitted.

  "Yeah, well, don't sweat it," said Anansi. "It wouldn’t have made a difference. And I'm really not sure when you're even going to have a reason to use these things unless you run into more adjudicators, and hopefully that won't happen for a long time, right?"

  "That is the hope," said Max. He paused before gathering up all of the ral’tek again and putting them into his storage. "Honestly, more than anything, this conversation is just making me feel super weak again."

  "It should," said Anansi, his voice flat. "I'm not one of your little Challenger, Scooby Gang friends on this backwater world. The only reason you are still alive is through sheer happenstance, mad dog tenacity, or winning by the skin of your teeth. You got very lucky against Adjudicator Swan. Many adjudicators are stronger, or at least at the same level, as the headmasters in the Quartet system. Most of them are stronger. If a few of them came at you at once as you are right now, well, you're fucked."

  Max grimaced and didn’t directly respond. He was already still training, still working on his five star mana body, but it might take a while for various reasons that had been annoying him. Instead of thinking more about it, he asked, "How many other colors of ral’tek are there?"

  "I have no idea," admitted Anansi. "But I know what a silver ral’tek does. Swan didn’t carry one, but they were common.”

  “Siver?”

  “Yes. The silver ral’tek is used by adjudicators in special roles to send Challengers to a prison system. Just like how you go to the Quartet the first time, and your real body is put in stasis, the silver ral’tek puts the body in stasis and sends the spirit to a penal pocket dimension, like a prison Quartet, and basically strips you of all your gear and a lot of your power too."

  "Oh wow," breathed Max. "So it's basically the perfect way to arrest somebody before they’re either incarcerated, or the adjudicators torture the fuck out of them or something like that, right?"

  "Probably the latter if we're being honest about it. If they didn’t need information, or want to punish you further, they’d just kill you. But I’m sure they’re very good at extracting information. I mean, how do you think they eventually eliminated almost all mention of ancient Summoner abilities in all the Quartets?"

  "Damn. Okay, that makes sense. But if Summoners are so bad and they wanted us neutered so bad, why is there even still a Summoner academy?"

  "Well, I don't know for sure," said Anansi. "I'm not best friends with whoever is running this shit, Max. We don’t play cards on weekends. But I can guess it's probably two reasons. One, and this is just a guess, just a theory…I don't think the Quartet system run by Challengers actually has any say or even communication with the messengers that help people find their Path seed. I don’t think all the adjudicator control freaks can touch or influence the system that allows people to become Challengers in the first place."

  Max nodded slowly. "So if they didn't have a Summoner academy, they would still end up with Summoner students with nowhere to go, which would make people ask questions, even if they suppressed it, which would be the opposite of what they want, since they don't want questions, right?"

  "That's my theory, yes," said Anansi. "The other reason might be because of the spirits themselves. Some spirits can get stronger with time or can cause problems all on their own. Summoners not only have the ability to contract with spirits and effectively make them harmless to others, but they can also directly combat spirits."

  Max raised his eyebrows. "I didn't know that."

  "Yeah, well, you don’t know a lot of things. Didn't you get like the shittiest Summoner education ever? You're still getting the middle-of-nowhere community college version of Summoning with Lavinia, right? And you haven't even graduated yet."

  Max made a face. "Anansi, anybody ever tell you you're an asshole sometimes?"

  The divine remnant grinned. "Anybody ever tell you the same thing, Max?"

  "Shit. Touché."

  Anansi rose in the air on his almost invisible spectral threads and said, "If either one of us is going to get butt hurt about this back and forth, it should be me. You were just a hero of your world in your past life. I was a god."

  "How powerful of a god were you actually?"

  "Very powerful. Consider this... I've been dead a long time, and there are still many, many, many legends of me in many, many worlds. That should tell you something."

  "Maybe it would if I didn't know you were such a bullshitter," said Max, expression serious.

  "Touché," Anansi said. The divine remnant lowered himself back down to the ground again and said, "You know, I have to admit, Maxie—"

  "Don't call me that," said Max.

  "Whatever, Maxie," said Anansi. "Anyway, if I had to be contracted to somebody, I'm glad it was somebody like you."

  Max blinked. "I can't tell if you're complimenting me or if this is some sort of really subtle insult."

  Anansi laughed. "If that's how you feel, then I suppose I haven't lost my touch." The divine remnant began to fade away, with only his head, and lastly his mouth remaining remaining visible, floating in the air, like a cartoon of the cheshire cat.

  When he was alone again, Max looked up at the ceiling and sighed. Then out loud, he said, "Why is everybody close to me such a weirdo?"

  He sat still for a moment, thinking about what to do. Eventually, he decided he didn’t feel like training, and got up, heading for his living area. Then he pulled up the emails on his computer, and sent Momo a text.

  If he didn’t feel like training, he still shouldn’t waste his time. There were still plenty of boss monsters to kill.