Two weeks of hell.

  Constantly drinking. Constantly paranoid. Constantly second-guessing himself.

  If things went poorly, he would not only die, he would witness the execution of Khana and Darius before receiving his own death. Xian did not mess around when it came to vengeance. The alcohol let thoughts he normally kept locked down slither all around his head.

  He’d betrayed more than the Lord General with his actions. He’d pced his family in extreme danger. And he loved them. Maybe what he felt for Khana wasn’t the pure love depicted in movies and songs and poetry, but it was real. His heart swelled when little Darius called him daddy or raised his arms so that he could be held.

  How could he reconcile the conflicting pieces of his heart? The hateful vendetta risked everything of value in his life. Yet he couldn’t stop himself. On the surface he might seem better adjusted than he remembered Thassily being at their st interaction. The poison in his heart was no less insidious, though. Instead of harsh words to his loved ones and willing surrender to alcohol, Volithur sought a violent retribution. It was so much more dramatic than quiet suicide.

  He couldn’t take it back now. The betrayal was in process. Backing out now would only leave loose ends that could unravel to reveal his involvement. The counter-pn had to succeed. For the sake of his living family as well as in memory of the ones passed.

  The drinking and chaos cultivation brought his soul up to a quarter of its capacity. Fast as his method of taming chaos was, the rapid progress was mostly the uncut spirits. It would take him five months to boost his reserves so much on his own.

  The downside of their debaucherous strategy became obvious to him after a while. Using his senses on his own body revealed that his liver had been ravaged by drink. He could recover from the damage, he felt certain, but it would require a lot of time. It would require years, perhaps decades, of work to reverse the side effects from the short term benefits.

  Had he kept up with his body enhancement, the damage would not be so great. Nothing could entirely prevent it, though. Human biology did not properly metabolize the votile compounds from the first cut of the distiltion process. Volithur didn’t remember much from chemistry csses back on his home world, but he knew that methanol was the poisonous variety of alcohol. Not that ethanol was exactly healthy, but it wasn’t so immediately toxic. The uncut spirits contained all the most dangerous compounds usually discarded. No one would ever drink such substances unless they wanted the liberated cosmic energy as their body metabolized it.

  Ultimately, Volithur was only another resource to the Lord General. Just like everyone was to the immortal lord. They existed for his pleasure and his pleasure was war.

  When the mandatory party finally ended, they had two full days to recuperate. Volithur spent the first day hydrating with water and soup when not napping. He spent most of the second day in briefings run by Perry, other than a trip to their target world by a trio of level six scouts. The first scout brought them to site A. The second moved them to site B. Then the third took him to site C, where Volithur held his hands behind his back in the agreed-upon gesture to inform the Jinn observers that this was the site to prepare their attack. Then the first scout took the four of them back to Tian.

  His guts twisted themselves into knots that evening. He received permission to visit home for an hour and spent the time holding Khana tight while watching Darius py with his blocks. Khana thought his nerves due to him going into war. She had no inkling of the depth of the trouble he had potentially invited into their lives.

  “I love you, Khana. Always remember that.”

  “And I love you, Volithur. Be brave. The Lord General will not let you come to harm.”

  Back at the pace, he slept not a wink in the servant’s room he’d been granted. His mind raced through the possible futures. He could get everything he wanted: the Lord General sin and him escaping back to Tian, no one ever realizing his part in the plot. That was not a guaranteed outcome. The Lord General could survive, either victoriously or in defeat. What then? Flee with his family to an unempowered world? A self-imposed exile would not please Khana.

  As dawn broke, the forces gathered on the staging grounds of the nearby keep. The Lord General gathered a few hundred sacrificial soldiers together. Meanwhile, Volithur joined up with Perry and Radish and the rest of the so-called elite force. He avoided looking at Master Aramar or Master Dorian. Master Corey csped hands with him, which proved just as painful. Would his betrayal cost this friend’s life?

  Aramar made clear his concerns about going into battle alongside untested soldiers. The comments seemed equally targeted at Volithur and Corey. Everyone seemed a little on edge, but the only person approaching Volithur’s degree of discomfort was Dorian, who very obviously did his best to keep other people between the two of them. The fact that Dorian, formerly his tormentor, felt terror in his presence would have been welcome if he didn’t have so many other matters on his mind. A petty grudge from years before hardly mattered any longer. Not when the life of a lord was about to be snuffed out.

  Perry determined the timeline using a miniature hourgss that he flipped the moment the Lord General’s transit sphere vanished. When Aramar attempted to flex his authority, Perry issued a casual ‘at ease, soldier, I run this combat group’ that made the bossy noble shrink upon himself. It was obvious to Volithur that Perry was the thing in truth that Aramar only wished he was.

  They had to pack into his sphere more than would be socially acceptable in any other circumstance. The journey went quickly and he let them out right on the designated spot of staging point B. In the distance, a row of Jinn buildings dominated the skyline. They radiated the spiky-feeling legal energy of the Jinn. It would obviously hold great value to their enemies. Enough value that they would be willing to split the fleet sent to attack the Lord General’s army.

  Perry snapped his fingers. “You’re off to collect the Lord General, Harridan. Be quick about it.”

  “On my way, Master Perry. Good luck.”

  His next stop was in accordance with the counter-pn of the Jinn. He cast about with his eyes for several moments before spying the individual he was seeking. The mechanical Jinn from his home world sat nearby, hard to distinguish due to the missing spider legs. “Josh?”

  “I am here, Volithur. It is good to know I’m in the proper spot. Bring the Lord General. I’m ready for him.”

  Volithur gnced about. “Where are the fighters?”

  “It is just me, Volithur. I am enough.”

  “That…. No, Josh. I don’t know what kind of weapons you have, but the Lord General isn’t weak. You need an army. At least a couple of war barges.”

  The sigh coming from the machine sounded real. “I am an antimatter containment unit, Volithur. Do you know of antimatter?”

  His favorite show as a child had been ‘Space Adventures’. He knew about antimatter. “You are… how does that even make sense? You uploaded yourself into a robot that holds antimatter?”

  “It’s impossible to safely store the quantities of antimatter held inside me using normal means. My conceptual realm lets me tame the interactions enough to contain it within a magnetic field. If I ever rex my control, I explode. A machine cannot do what I do, Volithur. I’m a living deterrent. And if called upon, I am a suicide bomber. The Lord General will not survive and neither will I.”

  Volithur looked down to the ground. “I’m sorry, Josh.”

  “I didn’t choose my fate in ignorance. I devoted my life to my people. This is my own choice and I make it gdly. Just do your part so that my sacrifice is worth it.”

  He bowed low to the machine man and a few minutes ter stood surrounded by the army of the Lord General. The elites of that group converged on Volithur eagerly.

  The Lord General, Yowl, three footmen with strong chaos bolts, and Ulysses crammed themselves into Volithur’s transit sphere with palpable excitement. Volithur stared at Ulysses for far too long, remembering the kindness the boy had shown by teaching him how to properly cultivate with his aura so long ago.

  A rough hand on his shoulder brought Volithur back to the present. “Don’t go limp dick on us now, Harridan,” the Lord General snapped.

  With a fake smile, Volithur welded his sphere closed and took his passengers to their demise.

  He didn’t have a great ability to adjust his exit point, but he could make small changes. Volithur managed to come into normal space ten feet above the ground. He forced his externality to drop forcefully, giving the effect of a popped bubble rather than a graceful opening. The shock of the painful operation barely registered as Volithur used his domain to explode skyward in flight even as he brought his aura to bear at full strength.

  The explosion came a second ter. Just mere moments after his comrades dropped unexpectedly towards the ground. It didn’t even register to him as an explosion. There was simply a bright light. Then he became aware of himself lying on a hard surface, every inch of his exposed flesh burning with a degree of pain he could not believe possible. He could neither see nor hear due to the damage done to him.

  Yet, somehow, he still lived. Volithur gasped air, refusing the call of death. He’d done it. He’d sin the Lord General and survived, even if barely. His parents were avenged. His city, his entire world, was avenged.

  Cables of force seized each of his limbs and stretched him painfully in four directions.

  “You would betray me?” The angry growl came across the mental band. It wasn’t an authentic reproduction like the truly skilled would create, but he knew its source anyway – from the sheer presence bzing cosmic energy beside him. It was a Xian lord.

  There was only one Xian lord on this unempowered world.

  The worst had come to pass. The Lord General survived the ambush.

  Cables constricted ever tighter, crunching bones. Volithur could not hear anything with his shattered eardrums, but he felt the vibrations his screams made in his chest. He felt them until he lost consciousness.