Two unfamiliar figures in robes stepped out from behind a house and watched Max from a distance. He recognized the robes. These were Quartet people.

  Shit.

  A chill ran down his spine as his instincts screamed that this was a fight he couldn't win. In fact, if he was assessing these two individuals correctly, they were both as dangerous as he was, if not more so.

  Without hesitation, Max pulled a flare from his belt and ignited it. The green, smoky light rose into the sky. Despite the stress of the situation and the aches in his body from being tossed around like a ragdoll, he breathed a little easier.

  There was no doubt in his mind that the people he faced were adjudicators. Max had anticipated this day for some time and had kept a flare ready since reuniting with his Quartet friends. The agreement they’d made, had promised, was simple: if Max popped the green flare, everyone would run away immediately, no questions asked.

  Hopefully the adjudicators had no quarrel with them as long as they didn’t attack. He had to believe so.

  His friends had returned from the Quartet within the rules of the system, even though Max had sent them back early with a ral’tek. As such their only crime was being friends with Max. He wasn't sure if that would be enough to save them if he died, but it was certainly better than the odds of any of them surviving an attack on an adjudicator. Even now, after growing in power, he knew that neither Momo nor Lance had what it took to fight an adjudicator. It wasn't just about raw power, either; it was about savagery and ruthlessness. Both his friends possessed these traits against monsters, but against people, Max doubted it.

  The standoff continued between Max and the two strangers, one male and one female. The female appeared human, with dyed pink hair—or perhaps it was her natural color; Max couldn't tell. The male was a gray-green-skinned reptilian humanoid wielding a spear. On some unspoken signal, they both opened and dropped their cloaks, revealing a brace of Ral'tek daggers on their belts.

  Definitely adjudicators. Shit.

  "We're adjudicators," the woman with pink hair said, unnecessarily. Then she continued, "And Max Cunningham, you have been very, very bad."

  After a somewhat feeling tickled the back of his neck, Max suddenly turned to the reptilian adjudicator, his eyes wide. The feeling was similar to what he felt when he fought Adjudicator Swan. He blurted, "You're a Champion!"

  The reptilian adjudicator shrugged. "So what if I am?"

  "Wait. You're a champion? Since when?" The pink-haired adjudicator turned in surprise.

  The reptilian adjudicator shrugged again. "Since about twenty years ago."

  "Well, damn," said the woman. “Nobody tells me anything. Even you, it seems.”

  The entire time they were talking, Max was quietly preparing for the fight of his life. He deployed spirits within his body, ready to explode outward at a moment's notice. He also allowed his spirits to strengthen the armor around his body that had been made using a combination of Lavinia's spirits and Tamiko's power.

  “Look at all that armor,” said the pink haired women. “Effective looking, too.”

  The lizard adjudicator seemed curious in a detached way. "He is awfully powerful," he rumbled. "Fighting will mean that one of us might actually die."

  "Well, we don't have to fight," said Max. "You guys could just fuck off back to where you came from. Maybe just enjoy the fact you hit me with a ton of power earlier and threw me through a house?"

  As he spoke, he opened his hoodie and swept it back dramatically, revealing his own brace of Ral'tek that he kept on himself. This time, he got a genuine reaction from the adjudicators. Both were obviously shocked.

  "How does he have Ral'tek?" complained the woman.

  "He must have got it from Adjudicator Swan, obviously," the lizard man's voice was mild, but he seemed to be calculating new odds in his eyes.

  Max didn't really understand what the response was all about, since he'd been relatively underwhelmed about the Ral'tek after learning about them from Anansi. There were only a few that seemed to have effects that would warrant any sort of respect, especially against a truly motivated Challenger. As he scanned the belts of the two adjudicators facing him, he got a bad feeling as he saw an empty space where daggers were missing. If their Ral’tek was configured in the same way Swan’s had been, it meant their red Ral'tek daggers were missing, and unfortunately, now he knew what that meant.

  They had likely locked down the area from movement or teleportation abilities working.

  Mas himself didn’t have any teleportation powers, but others in the world did, and he had a feeling that the first thing Lance would do after the green flare, right now, would be to trying to organize a teleporter to grab Max and get him to safety.

  With the red daggers locking down the area, that was no longer going to happen.

  Max drew his sword, Blackmist Incident, and sighed. "Always got to be doing shit the hard way," he muttered.

  The pink haired woman overheard him. "Not really." She gestured, and suddenly two huge giants made of scarlet arcane energy manifested to either side of her, crackling with power and potential.

  Each giant was twenty feet tall, misshapen, and had eyes that burned coal-black. Both of the constructs were roughly shaped like enormous, humanoid monsters. They were abominations, but didn’t have demonic energy. Instead, it felt like both giants had been pulled in our reality from a place where these things were common.

  At the same time as the giants appeared, similar colored energy covered the woman’s hands, and she pointed at Max, ready to strike. The two giants spread out to either side as the reptile man gestured, and skeletons began crawling from the ground. All over the housing development, the dead rose again. There were dozens of them.

  Skeletons and half-corporeal images of death made mounds before pulling themselves from the earth, moving in disturbing, jerky cadences.

  Then the reptile man pointed at a few of the skeletons individually, and when he did, they were surrounded by a cloud of darkness and underwent a transformation, coming back with glowing eye sockets and holding bony staffs.

  "Oh, shit," muttered Max.

  "Indeed. Oh, shit indeed," said the woman. "But the worst thing is, you truly never had a chance to begin with."

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Max frowned. He hadn't sense any openings or good times or ways to attack at all, but just standing around all day wasn't a good way to survive much of anything. He decided to try creating his own opening. He sensed that going after the adjudicators directly wasn't a good idea. He slashed his sword, sending a truly nasty mana energy attack at one of the big scarlet giants, but the construct held out a hand, easily blocking the arc of magical power. Then the glowing giant held out its other hand, the other giant following the gesture, and suddenly, there was a barrage of small scarlet projectiles from the giants, similar to machine guns.

  As the giants delivered dozens, hundreds of lethal little energy orbs, Max took off, jumping up and using his wings to make micro adjustments in the air. Shield walls of power, created at just the right moment and at the right angle, allowed him to deflect most of the arcane barrage he was under. The monsters’ attacks and blasts ended up destroying surrounding houses, but not Max. He survived by a hair.

  When he hovered in the air after that first barrage, he watched everything going on around him warily. The fact these two adjudicators were not even taking him very seriously, and just casually creating their own armies was adding insult to injury.

  “Are you sure we can’t just hug this out!?” Max knew it was hopeless, but even as he dodged another blistering set of rapid fire energy attacks from the giants, he delivered a slash at the pink-haired woman. A screen of energy manifested between the two giants, blocking it, and Max tsked. He’d expected powerful defenses like that for an adjudicator. But then suddenly, almost at the last moment, even as the skeletons raised their weapons to deliver green, sickly energy at Max, he felt another glimmer. The feeling was in the back of his neck; it was faint, and given the stress of the situation, he almost ignored it. However, there was no reason that he should be feeling such a thing, either.

  He trusted his gut and his senses.

  Max spun in place, delivering a savage mana-infused, hacking cut behind him with Blackmist Incidence. At the same time, popping out nowhere, a man in black clothing appeared behind him; some sort of powerful assassin or stealth Path, no doubt. Max's shock was so strong, and his adrenaline so high, he didn’t even question was his senses were telling him. The man's hand was outstretched, and to Max's horror, he saw a...tunnel..burrow through all of his mana and ectoplasmic armor. The disruptions wasn't an attack, and didn't do any damage, but at the same time, the man thrust with the blade.

  The man was holding a silver ral’tek. It was a kind that Max had only ever heard about, never seen in person.

  Max's cut with Blackmist Incident landed at the same time the Ral'tek did, planted in his chest. Unfortunately, would ambusher had some sort of bracer on his arm that blocked the majority of Max’s attack. As a result, the attacker only lost a hand, not his neck.. Meanwhile, the Ral'tek was buried in Max's chest.

  He looked down in horror, and part of his mind was equally astonished that he felt no pain. The pink-haired woman said, "It was nice knowing you, Max Cunningham. We didn't come here to kill you. We came here to send you back for interrogation. Goodbye."

  Max lurched forward, grabbing the clothing of the startled, wounded adjudicator who had stabbed him—another Champion. The man's eyes widened in shock and confusion as Max held on. Meanwhile, he felt energy stirring around him with the force of a hurricane.

  "Wait. Why is he not gone yet?" asked the woman. "And why is Hodges just hovering there?"

  Max could feel a few strange sensations at once, energies pulling him in at least three different directions. Two of the “directions” felt bad with a capital “B,” so instead of entertaining them, he threw his power and his soul into heading for the third option. The last "direction" did not give of the same sense of doom as the others. From what he could feel, there was complete darkness, but still not..."bad"...not inevitable death.

  When his spirits felt what he was doing, they added to his effort, and even as he flexed, putting a lifetime of energy into resisting the other two directions, Max realized what might have happened.

  He couldn’t pull the dagger, the ral’tek from his chest, and with his hand on the handle, his other hand on his attacker, he intuited that his suspicions were probably correct. Instinct guided him now, including his assumptions.

  He already knew the silver ral'tek was meant to operate similarly to a white one, but in reverse. A white ral'tek sent students in a Quartet back to earth, destroying a spiritually-made body and returning a Challenger's soul to their physical body. But the silver ral'tek, this one, was meant to make the person's spirit leave their physical body and go to a prison dimension.

  For interrogation, apparently. Or other bad things.

  But something had gone wrong for the adjudicators. After all, Max was still in his Quartet body. He wasn't technically flesh and blood, so…the ral’tek's dagger.exe was malfunctioning.

  Power, several different kinds, swirled around the area in a maelstrom, like Max was a stick jutting up from the water, sticking out of the middle of a rapids.

  Whatever Max was doing with the help of his spirit seemed to work, especially once Anansi threw his weight into it. He moved “away” from the two directions that felt like death…or worse. Suddenly, a portal, a gaping black, terrifying thing, opened in the world, bigger than a house. It sucked Max and his would-be ambusher into it, and the last thing he heard before the portal closed was the pink-haired woman screaming, "What is that!? What's happening!?"

  ***

  There was a transition period after that, a time that Max couldn't recall afterward and really had no desire to.

  ***

  When genuine, conscious thought came back, he found himself drifting in…nothingness. At first, he wondered what happened to the other Champion, the adjudicator who'd attacked him, but then he spotted a cloud of dust and a few ral'tek in the distance, tumbling end over end, heading slowly away from him in the infinite darkness, probably for eternity.

  However, the ral'tek that had sent him here, the silver one, Max had in his hand. He stared at it.

  The sequence of events unraveled in his addled mind. He’d pulled the dagger out of his body at some point and hadn't let go.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he croaked. As he spoke, his lungs didn’t fill with air, and the sensation was utterly bizarre. It was like he was speaking, but not speaking at the same time.

  In his mind, he heard a slow whistle, and then Anansi said, Hey kid, I think the only reason you still exist is because you don't really exist.

  "Thanks," said Max. "That clears everything up. Perfect."

  You're welcome. And hey kid, added Anansi. Guess what?

  "Yes?" said Max.

  It's probably also a good thing you have that Quarted body and don't need any food or water to survive because I don't think you're going anywhere anytime soon.

  "Similar thoughts had occurred to me," said Max sarcastically.

  Anansi chuckled. Look, just making sure, just helping out. But there's a bright side to every cloud, you know. A silver lining to every story.

  "Okay, what's the positive side to all of this?" asked Max, his voice flat. "Please educate me on what the silver lining is here, I mean other than the fact I’m not captured…or dead yet…I think."

  Anansi chuckled. Well, if we're going to spend a lot of time together and you don't have anything to do, that means you can listen to me freestyle and give me some constructive feedback!

  Max was silent for a few moments before he asked, "Can somebody please tell me what he's talking about?"

  Lavinia's voice was quiet in his mind, worried and annoyed sounding as she said, I think Anansi is telling us he’s intending to try freestyle rapping at us…for a long time.

  Voice smug and confident, Anansi delivered, It’s all about the mom’s spaghetti. I’m ready to go to war, like a whore. Make it heavy. A spider’s got eight legs, but don’t be scared, I’m a trickster, gotta be prepared, dig? For real for real. No cap.” The divine remnant fake-coughed in Max’s mind and asked, “What did you think? Was it fire?”

  Max was still as the grave for a moment before somehow sucking in nothingness and shouting, "No!!!"