Thanks to my transit control key, I suddenly became aware that a new transportation node had just opened up. It had to be the one at the Citadel.

  I didn’t know exactly where it was yet, but I had five minutes to go there and find out before Team Ninja would show up. After all, the rules said nothing about having to wait until your appointed time to go to the Citadel.

  A System window opened up listing the rules of the Citadel quest Annabelle had explained. I swept it aside and shut down my telepathic connection with everyone except Lianna.

  Me: Let’s go. Now.

  Lianna: What’s the rush? Thanks to me we’re going second last, remember?

  Me: Trust me.

  Lianna: You know you say that a lot, right?

  Studiously ignoring all of Team Maple Leaf around us to prevent accidental communication with another team, I grabbed Lianna’s hand and dragged her to a nearby space with nobody else around, where I opened a portal, pulled her through, then closed it again before anyone could realize what happened.

  We stepped out of the portal onto the affinity circle under the gazebo, thankfully before anyone else had time to leave the arena and see us. We immediately teleported to the circle outside the labyrinth. I didn’t want to go directly to the Citadel before telling Lianna what was going on, but that was a conversation I wanted total privacy for, hence the quick stop at the labyrinth first.

  “Seriously, what’s the rush?” Lianna said, wresting her arm free and shoving me.

  “As soon as Annabelle told Team Ninja they had five minutes, a new transportation node opened,” I said, pointing down to the circle we stood inside.

  Lianna switched to business mode. “That must be the one at the Citadel.”

  I knew she was the right choice.

  “Exactly. Which means we have just under five minutes to go there and do some reconnaissance.”

  “You are such a cheater!” she said.

  “Am I? Tell me what rule we’re breaking.”

  Her eyes looked up at nothing as she thought about it. Neither of us needed to look at the quest rules, we’d both memorized them with our eidetic memories along with the layout of the Citadel and the locations of all the tokens.

  “I guess...there isn’t one,” Lianna said.

  “Ready then?”

  She grinned. “Let’s go.”

  We teleported into a round room under a domed ceiling with one set of arched double doors as the only visible way out. A small golden orb floated over us as we stood in the center of an affinity circle. Translucent hourglasses began hovering over both our heads the moment we arrived, their virtual sand trickling slowly down. Our quest wasn’t supposed to start for a couple of hours when it would be our allotted turn to come, but Annabelle had said that our quests would begin when we arrived at the Citadel. And, well, we’d arrived. Just a bit early is all.

  Team Quest: Save the Citadel by subjugating the demons

  Rewards: Dungeon Control, Reward Tokens, Reward Boxes

  Time Remaining: 24:03:39

  It took me a few seconds to make sense of the timing showing the notification window, and why there were more than 24 hours remaining. But of course the 24 hours weren't set to begin until the first team was scheduled to arrive and begin the quest, which wouldn't happen for almost another four minutes.

  Then again, that wasn't the most interesting part of the quest notification, which was how it didn’t mention collecting those golden orb tokens an all. There wasn't time to think about that right now, though. There were more pressing things on my mind.

  When the new transportation node had appeared and I’d felt that pleasant sensation, all I’d known at the time was that it existed. I didn’t know exactly where it was yet, but now that we’d traveled to it, I did. I checked the big map and saw its location marked and all of a sudden a lot of things made sense.

  The Citadel was located four hexes away from the city to the Northeast. If you drew a straight line from the city to the Citadel, it went right between the hexes where the Light and Nature Dungeons were located: the exact path Ruka had presumably led the giant ants along when I’d helped Team Legion with their subjugation quest.

  That was the reason I’d guessed that Ruka was from somewhere to the Northeast the first time she’d visited me. Now, all her strange behavior last night and her news about not being able to visit me again as of tomorrow made sense. She’d been warning me.

  That tomorrow she’d talked about was now today, the day the quest started in a fortress to the Northeast controlled by demons. Ruka must have been living in the Citadel all this time.

  That’s what she’d been hinting at with that talk about me visiting her, but I’d been too dense to realize. For whatever reason she’d been unable to come straight out and tell me, so she’d tried to give me hints. Perhaps she’d also been trying to tell me more.

  What else had she said?

  She’d said that I could visit her as long as I didn’t mind teleporting into the middle of my enemies. Bet you anything that was a warning and this dome was surrounded by demons. I tried to open a map of the Citadel, but all I could see was the circle of the dome we were in. The rest was obscured by the cloud of war. No matter, I could remember the model perfectly, and that inner wall around the dome with its towers now made sense. The perfect place for an ambush.

  “Stand back,” I told Lianna, then cracked one of the doors open a sliver to peek out. An arrow immediately struck the door and I shut it again. Yup, an ambush.

  There was one last enigmatic thing Ruka had said to me at the end when she’d hugged me and whispered in my ear: “I’m counting on you.”

  Okay, so not everything made sense. Counting on me? Counting on me for what? What was that even supposed to mean?

  “What now?” Lianna said.

  “Now we leave some spies behind.”

  I summoned Pinky from the Void Dungeon and the gross little blob appeared on the floor in front of me. Fortunately, I’d already introduced Lianna to the Shoggoth so we didn’t need to go through that initial horrorshow again.

  I also summoned a falcon, which seemed to unfold from a single point of light floating mid-air before flying over and perching on my outstretched arm. I went to the wall of the dome directly opposite the doors and used Earth to create my own opening. At first it was just a tiny hole, just big enough to peek out using thermal vision to check if there was anybody waiting on the other side. There wasn’t, so I made the hole bigger then switched my view to the falcon’s and had it swoop out and soar around the area, giving me a literal bird’s eye view of things.

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  It was the same as the model Annabelle had shown us, only now in real life I could see more details as well as color. Apart from the hexagonal shape of the outer and inner walls there were very few corners or straight lines, everything was rounded or curved. Everything was in shades of white except for the big phallic tower, which was pitch black making it stand out even more from the rest of the Citadel.

  The inner wall surrounding the dome wasn’t really a wall, it was more of a hexagonal ring of cylindrical towers about twenty-five feet high, each studded with a few of those oval balconies and connected to its two adjacent towers by a catwalk supported by an arch.

  These catwalks had crenulated battlements behind which defenders could lurk, but instead of square merlons to hide behind their rounded shapes made the entire top look like a continuous sine wave. Similar wavy battlements topped the main outer wall and the six larger towers dotted around its vertices.

  Getting through the inner wall around the dome should be as easy as going under one of the connecting archways, except for all the demons. I counted about twenty of them, some lurking inside the pod balconies, some standing atop the wavy battlements, and some down on the hexagonal paving stones.

  It wasn’t hard to identify them as demons, they looked like something straight out of the Monster Manual. The nerd in me couldn’t help wanting to correct the game’s terminology, however, because the devil’s in the details and in D&D terms the creatures I saw would more accurately be called devils, both in appearance and temperament.

  They looked more Nine Hellish than Abyssal, and they also seemed to act a lot more lawful-evil than chaotic with a plan that amounted to more than just sowing devastation and destruction. You know, Calamity Demon aside. Ruka had called it the distant cousin nobody wanted to mention, after all.

  There were a few different types of demons represented among the ones guarding the dome, but they were all like tall, gangly humanoids with leathery skin, horns, and a mass of jagged teeth in their maws. Some wore basic armor while wielding a variety of black metal objects that looked like they'd been designed by a poorly-programmed AI chatbot given an ambiguous query to make some scary cool demonic weapons. These were the footsoldiers. The archers had large batwings and only one arm that they used to draw the string; where the other arm should have been there was a fleshy stump with a grotesque biological armbow growing out of it. There was only one of the third kind, a fearsome creature several feet taller and wider than the others, a rippling mass of muscle and mean-spirit that screamed officer-rank demon.

  It would've been nice to evaluate them, but I couldn't do that when seeing them through the falcon's eyes. Fortunately, I had a fix for that.

  I made the falcon fly over and land on the top of one of the larger structures, then switched back to my own view and sealed up the hole I’d made in the dome wall.

  “Okay Pinky. Shift into your fastest form that can run up vertical surfaces.”

  All thousand eyes on the creature blinked once in unison, then the monstrosity stretched and morphed into a sort of millipede with a flattened body about three feet long, covered in popping eyes, and with a whole lot of thin, stubby tentacular legs.

  I checked the quest timer. We still had a few minutes until Team Ninja would arrive. Long enough.

  Byron’s portal power limited him to only opening them within his current line of sight. My improved version allowed me to open one to any place I’d seen, within range. I had tested it before and seeing a place through a summoned creature’s eyes counted. I opened a portal between where I was inside the dome to where the falcon was perched on a tower. I'd also tested sharing my powers with a summoned creature, and while that wouldn't work I did find I could share them with Pinky.

  “Okay Pinky, off you go. Get a good look at the demons out there, then I want you to explore the entire place and map it out for me.”

  The thousand eyes blinked and my loyal familiar scuttled into the portal with surprising speed. I braced myself and switched to its perspective.

  Looking through a falcon’s eyes was disorienting enough, but at least birds had the same number of eyes as me. Seeing through Pinky with its myriad of eyes was the very definition of sensory overload. The sense-sharing power translated the input into something my human brain could make sense of, but it was still nauseating.

  At least the Status windows it could see after I shared All Can Be Revealed came through clear.

  Meh. They weren't as tough as they looked.

  Once we'd seen the Status of all three types of demon, Pinky skittered down the wall and entered the structure through a balcony pod. The room inside was decorated as a simple bedchamber, no golden orb.

  I went back to my own perspective and opened my map. Sure enough, the room Pinky was in was now included. It was a different kind of map, not the usual top-down view but the same isometric model we’d been shown during the quest briefing. The important difference was that my map also showed what furnishings were inside each space. Yup, like a Sims game.

  Lianna had been keeping an eye on the quest timer. “You need to hurry up and finish what you’re doing,” she said. “We’re about to get company real soon.”

  “Almost there.”

  I summoned a few honeybees, which I knew had excellent vision, and while they lacked ears they could still hear through vibrations making them pretty good spies. I sent a few through the portal, keeping the rest back in the dome.

  “Now are we done?” Lianna said, a nervous tinge in her voice.

  “I suppose we have to be. Let’s go.”

  We both stepped into the circle and teleported to the labyrinth just before Team Ninja arrived. The first thing I did was open a connection to one of the bugs I’d left in the Citadel dome.

  “Do you want to watch the fun at the Citadel?” I asked Lianna.

  “Can I? I mean, sure,” she said.

  “Okay, but prepare yourself. Bees have compound eyes and they also detect sound through hairs on their legs and antennae, so what you’ll hear will also be a bit funky.

  “How do you know so much about bees?”

  “I dunno, I just like bees. There’s nothing about them that isn’t cool. I also have the Trivia skill, so I find myself suddenly knowing all kinds of useless things, like how the life's work of a single bee amounts to less than one gram of honey."

  "Seriously? Poor bees."

  I looped her in with It’s All In Your Head and shared my senses, which at the time were actually the bee’s senses. I heard Lianna gasp when the sensory shift hit her, but she got used to to it quickly.

  Team Ninja was there, arranging themselves near the door in preparation for going through it. They’d chosen that name for the team because almost all their members had stealthy abilities. Not on Kenji’s level, but decent enough.

  The Ninja team builder had been none other than Marc Shaw, the guy I’d found Kiki and her crew bullying that first night. Interestingly, he was not their Captain, that was a woman named Ai Momochi. It didn’t take long to figure out the dynamics at work: Marc was clearly smitten with her, and she clearly did not reciprocate.

  His abilities weren’t all that stealth-oriented, he was more of a support type, but hers were absolutely Ninja-like, and she had the Shadow affinity like Kenji, too. It didn’t take a big leap to assume he’d recruited her early, then she’d taken over and had him stack the team with Players who synched well with her abilities.

  The bee had to fly pretty close to them to hear well, and occasionally one of the Players would swat at it in the air when it ventured too close, but nobody seemed to wonder why there was a bee buzzing around in a fully enclosed room with nothing else in it. They were too busy figuring out what to do next.

  Lianna and I settled in to watch the show.

  Chika dance at the end of S1 episode 3 (a rotoscoping triumph) and the rap at the end of S3 episode 5 where the Japanese voice actors of Miyuki and Chika do the singing to a completely different character animation style. Such a banger.

  Up next: Watching the show