“Only one?” Xavier asked, sitting across from the most powerful Denizen in the sector. A Denizen that had seen glimpses of the future—a future with him at the centre.

  And he was in space. The back room of that bookstore was through a portal to space.

  Whenever he forgot that, he would simply turn his head and look through the window at the stars out there in the void.

  “That is more than I give others.” The dark-haired woman looked out the window herself. “The things I see… The threads of fate… They are forever changing. Shifting. There are some futures that have remained solid since the first moment I saw them, and others that are as impossible to grasp as smoke. Having the answers you seek… Well, knowledge of the future is not always a boon. Often, it is a burden.”

  Xavier thought of his own future—or his possible future—at the end of the universe. He recalled an older version of himself. A version of him who’d failed.

  “I’ve seen my future before,” Xavier said. “Or, at least, one path.”

  The empress leant forward in her seat. “What future do you speak of?”

  Xavier felt no need to hide this from the woman. Though he had been surprised by her transformation from humble bookstore owner to ruler of the majority of the sector, there was something about the woman that felt trustworthy. Something about her that felt oddly genuine.

  He wondered if that thing he felt was legitimate, or if it was perhaps the effect of some kind of spell.

  “I spoke to myself in the Tower of Champions. He told me that one day, I would become the Weapon of the System. That one day, I would be responsible for saving this universe from destruction.”

  Empress Larona became stone-still where she sat, almost as though she’d been frozen in time. But Xavier had frozen his fair share of people in time before and knew that wasn’t the case.

  She was processing his words.

  He couldn’t help but smile, then. He had come here for answers about his future and had clearly given her something she hadn’t known.

  “The Weapon of the System,” Larona said, after a full minute had passed. She sunk back into her chair. “I have been inspecting the threads of fate that weave around your life since before you were born, Xavier Collins. I knew there was something… More to you. Something… Hidden, beneath the fog of the future.”

  She was looking at him in slight awe, now. To the point where it was making him a little uncomfortable.

  “I have never heard of this title that you speak of, but I have seen that the System is watching you. I just never knew what it was watching you for.” She tilted her head to the side and narrowed her eyes to slits as her gaze bore into him. “I can see hints of how this knowledge has burdened you. Before you ask your question, I must ask you one in return. Do you truly want the burden of more knowledge?”

  Xavier thought about that, but not for long. Knowledge was power—and just as the woman had said, none of the futures she had seen were certain. Xavier had seen different unfoldings of his future before, even if those futures had been more immediate than what he was enquiring about.

  “I still wish to know,” Xavier replied. He had his mind split into multiple parts, his thoughts ordered, and he knew exactly what question he wished to ask.

  Though he was reminded that the woman had said he could ask one question. She’d never said that she would answer it. Though he hoped she wouldn’t be so sly as to pull that on him.

  “When will I face the enemy that threatens this sector?” Xavier asked.

  Empress Larona closed her eyes, and they moved behind her lids. “That… I cannot answer in full. I see the enemy, though I cannot read their level. They are a world eater. A galaxy destroyer. They are death and we are the life it craves. It began as nothing more than a parasite on the side of an asteroid. It had the spark of life, and the System turned that spark into a flame upon its integration. Now, it consumes all it touches. The only emotion it feels that could be close to human is one of hunger.” Her head cocked to the side at an odd angle, sharply as though someone had grabbed her and done it by force. “I see… Three possibilities. Fifty years. Ten. And…” Her eyes flicked open. “Three.”

  Xavier blinked. “Three years?”

  The empress’s eyes widened in slight fear. “It… It has never come so swiftly in my previous visions. The threads of fate even now keep changing, faster than ever before. I can’t… Grasp them.” She released a long sigh.

  “What can change future in such a way?”

  She stared into his eyes. “You. You are what could change it.”

  Xavier lowered his head in thought, struggling to digest what the seer had just told him.

  Three possible times the threat would come…

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Fifty years sounded like a long time from now. Plenty of time for Xavier to become far more powerful than he was right now.

  Ten sounded closer than it truly was.

  But three years…

  That felt soon. Too soon. He wasn’t sure how prepared he could be in three years to tackle a sector-ending threat like this world-destroying monster the woman spoke of.

  Am I… somehow making this enemy come faster?

  Earth’s restrictions wouldn’t even be stripped by then. He had been using those five years, in his mind, as a scale of how much time he had. Now that scale had been thrown out the window. Into the void of space…

  A thought slipped into his mind. He was reminded of something that Felicia, the barkeep back in the Hunter’s Home tavern on the hundredth floor, had told him.

  The System had compelled her to push him toward harder and harder challenges. Xavier had believed the woman instantly, for he’d seen the System directly do that to him in the past, what with sending him to the hundredth floor in the first place.

  He couldn’t help but wonder if this was another instance of the System trying to “help” him along. Trying to put him through more and more challenges of greater and greater difficulty. Through harder ones, faster than should have been possible.

  The System wasn’t merely watching him. It was intervening. It was pushing.

  And it was pushing hard.

  Xavier closed his eyes. Three years. He couldn’t simply believe it would take longer than that to come. He couldn’t go by the ten-year number, or the fifty. He didn’t know if his hunch was correct—that the System had something to do with this or not.

  But he didn’t want to deny his hunch.

  “How do I do it?” Xavier asked. “How do I defeat this enemy?”

  Empress Larona turned her head away from him. “I only gave you one question.” There was an odd look in her eye that hadn’t been there before.

  To Xavier, it looked like sorrow. What she’d seen—the three-year timeline of the sector-ending threat coming to Silver River—it had been the first time it had happened that fast.

  Xavier blinked, the wheels in his mind ceased their turning as something clicked into place. The surprise she’d felt. The sorrow in her eyes. The rapidity with which this threat might reach their sector…

  “I don’t defeat it,” Xavier said. “In this three-year timeline… I don’t defeat it, do I?”

  Empress Larona stared at him, that sorrow still darkening her eyes. “I will give you no more answers today, Xavier Collins.” Her voice sounded sad, which only confirmed Xavier’s suspicions. “Too much knowledge is only a burden. Trust me on that.”

  Xavier frowned. He believed otherwise, but he didn’t respond as such. Instead, he turned inward once more. The System, he was sure, was pushing the threat toward the Silver River—toward Xavier—faster than it should have come.

  So fast that the threat would be too big for him to face by the time it got here.

  He shut his eyes, taking in all of this information.

  What the woman saw were simply possibilities, not actual futures. That was why those futures kept shifting and changing on her. And she was wrong. Most definitely wrong.

  Xavier knew for a fact that knowledge was indeed power. Having the knowledge that the threat their sector faced would be coming sooner than he’d ever known gave his goal more immediacy.

  He needed to expedite his plans. Speed up his accumulation of power—as though it hadn’t been fast enough already. He needed to do all of this without truly knowing how strong the threat that was coming toward him would be.

  Though he did know a few things. First, he knew that the sector-ending threat was more powerful than the woman sitting across from him. She was a powerful C Grade, who seemed confident that she would be able to defeat The Collector.

  Xavier drummed his fingers on the heavy wooden desk and turned his gaze toward the window once more, his eyes taking in the stars.

  There were other options available to him. Ones that didn’t involve fighting and possibly dying facing this threat. In his Storage Ring, he had a key that he’d found in that troll’s treasure chest. A key that would lead him to anywhere he wished to go in the entire universe.

  It would be easy enough for him to avoid this threat.

  Xavier frowned. He didn’t want an escape route. Didn’t want a way out of this. Leaving this sector would mean giving up on Earth, not to mention trillions of other Denizens in the sector—whether they be friend or foe, it didn’t matter. Many innocents would perish. More than he could fathom. And while he imagined there were things like this happening all over the universe—cities, worlds, sectors being snuffed out like they were nothing in the blink of an eye by some unknown powerful entity—and worse, whole universes simply ceasing to exist because of the threat he might one day face at the end of time…

  But it didn’t matter what was happening elsewhere. This was his sector. He had walked the streets of Mareketh. He had seen that so many of these people were just people.

  This was too close to home for him to simply ignore, and he knew that he would never take that option anyway.

  This was a threat he was destined to defeat, else he wouldn’t be sitting in this woman’s Personal Space, floating in the void.

  If the System is sending this challenge toward me, then it means it knows I’ll be able to face it.

  As reassuring as that thought was, Xavier didn’t know it to be the truth. The System might very well be able to see the future, but if it could, why hadn’t it managed to figure out how to save a universe as of yet? The System existed in countless universes for untold trillions of years, after all.

  Maybe it doesn’t know whether I’ll win or lose. Maybe this same scenario is playing out a thousand different ways in as many different universes. I’m just one of many Xaivers. I’m just one test subject playing out in what the System probably thinks of as a sophisticated simulation…

  Xavier found that he was turning a little too far inward.

  He raised his chin and looked over at the woman across from him. “Will you help me with the Class Grafting?” That was the whole reason he’d come to the bookstore in the first place. The reason he was sitting here right now. He hadn’t known who would be there to greet him. “Are you even an Inscriber?”

  The woman smiled. “I dabble in inscription. I have the skills, the spells, to pass off as one easily enough. In fact… I might very well be the most powerful Inscriber in the entire sector.” She shrugged. “Though that’s only because I’ve been around long enough to practice the art.” She peered at him. “You have a Denizen’s remains?”

  Remains. Sounds an awful lot less sinister than corpse.

  “I do.” Xavier touched a finger to his Storage Ring. He’d been fully expecting to pay this woman for the service. He wondered whether she would still charge him. “Shall I present it to you now?”

  The empress stood and walked over to another door in the room, the one Xavier had thought led to her apartment. Though that was before he’d known who this was, or where they actually were.

  There was no dial on this door, which meant the door was actually, indeed, a door. “Follow me,” she said simply.

  Xavier stood, and obliged, following the Empress Larona deeper into her Personal Space.

  Accidental Champion!

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