Kiki: All set here. Team N3m3s1s is ready.

  Tiff: That was fast.

  Kiki: I have my boys well trained.

  Tiff: I bet you do. Team Spice is on board too.

  Me: I’m gonna need another minute. My team seems to have a mind of her own.

  “I heard that,” Lianna said aloud with a grimace.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “If things go off the rails I’ll just open a portal to escape through. It’ll be fine.”

  I saw the muscles working in Lianna’s jaw as she clenched her teeth. Then she exhaled deeply and said, “I suppose I’ll have to get used to fighting sometime.”

  “I’m sorry. If you’re really uncomfortable, you can stay here and I’ll take care of it myself.”

  She shook her head. “No, no I need to do this. It’ll be fine, right?”

  “I’ve got your back, always,” I said.

  I noticed Tiff watching us with an approving grin. “All set now?” she said.

  “All set,” Lianna said. “Let’s do this.”

  “Everybody ready?” I said.

  “As we’ll ever be,” Tiff said. Her teammates all wore a serious expression, the look of people about to go to battle. I’d heard Tiff giving them a pep talk, focusing mostly on her newbies. All of them had adventuring experience, their ability mastery levels proved that, but this would be an entirely different type of encounter than anything they’d pulled before.

  “Does it matter if I say no?” Lianna said. Those who didn’t laugh outright at least cracked a smile, and the tension that had filled the dome a moment before relaxed noticeably.

  “Here we go.” I opened a portal between the dome and the top of the wall behind Kiki’s team. We’d chosen this spot because it was far enough away that Team Karma on the other side wouldn’t be able to see.

  “Holy shit, he really can do it,” a Spice girl said.

  “Told ya,” said another.

  A couple of the Team N3m3s1s members looked back at us through the portal upon hearing them.

  “Keep it down,” Tiff hissed, “and let’s go.”

  Tiff stood beside the portal as one by one her crew filed silently through it like paratroopers making a drop. They didn’t dare make a sound now. When it was her turn to go last, Tiff winked at us and stepped through. Then it was just Lianna and me left in the dome, so I closed that portal and opened another one. This one also led to the top of the wall, but on the other side, behind Team Overgeared.

  Lianna and I slipped through, then I closed the portal and did some summoning. I would’ve used all my summoning slots to conjure a flock of seagulls, but I needed to maintain the bees to keep tabs on where the other teams were so I only had one slot open. I used it to summon the falcon again.

  “You ready for this?” I said. “I’m bringing Pinky back.”

  Lianna nodded. “I’ll just try to avoid eye contact.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said, and the little shoggoth appeared in front of me, its thousand eyes blinking and popping in — forgive the pun — a now familiar way.

  Pinky had finished mapping out the Citadel’s interior a while back and I now had a clear picture of what was in every building and every room, including any occupants. There were roaming mobs of demons and some of the rooms with tokens held stationary groups of demons, but Pinky had managed to evade detection, thankfully.

  The different buildings and the rooms inside them were what you’d expect to find in a medieval castle. Places to cook, places to eat, places to train, places to sleep, places to store sundries, yadda yadda yadda. As I’d suspected, the rooms with tokens to capture were all larger, more significant places.

  Annabelle had said that this used to be the fortress of the Faerie King, and the stylings and decorations around the gave off a fae kind of vibe, but the one thing the Citadel didn’t have was any fae people or creatures at all. Just demons, and the signs of demonic occupation were everywhere.

  Many of the rooms looked like a hotel room after a particularly unruly rock band had stayed there, while others were even worse. A lot were filled with literal trash, enough to tell me that the demons had been there for a while, certainly since before we’d arrived on the planet.

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

  But where were all the fae? Had the demons wiped them out? Could that be the secret quest, to not only remove the demons but also restore the faeries? Then again, Faerie King sounded like the sort of title that one might earn through a hidden dungeon quest, so perhaps it needed more than a simple restoration.

  There were still some areas of the Citadel that remained a mystery. Pinky hadn’t been able to find any way into the black tower. Perhaps the entrance was underground, or perhaps there was a different way to get inside. In a world where teleportation was common, who needed doors?

  Pinky had still been exploring around the tower in search of something it had missed when I summoned it to me so it was still in its large millipede form, but that wasn’t big enough for what I had in mind. I had it grow into a giant millipede, engorging itself from three feet long to over ten, and half as wide as the catwalk on top of the wall.

  “Oh god,” Lianna said. She’d clearly made eye contact. How could she not? There were just too many of them.

  I sent the falcon soaring and had it swoop around so I could confirm that everyone was where they were supposed to be, then had it dive straight toward the Overgeared leader. The bird pulled up at the last moment, dropping a nice fresh dollop of poop on his head.

  If you’re wondering why I’d originally wanted a flock of seagulls, it was because I wanted to have them all dump on the whole Overgeared at the same time, but I had to make do with only soiling the main jerk. Hearing his curses and his teammates’ mocking laughter was decent consolation, though.

  The falcon flew up, crying a harsh kak-kak-kak as it climbed. That was the signal to start.

  Trusting Tiff and Kiki to hold their side, I sent Pinky skittering ahead toward Overgeared with Lianna and I following close behind, both of us holding a P3 in each hand like gangbangers, phasers set to stun, our Holtzmann shields shimmering around us. I was also sharing superspeed with Lianna. I’d considered doing more, such as obscuring the area with fog or darkness, but that kind of felt like overkill.

  As a mere baby Shoggoth, Pinky didn’t have a lot of combat power — all it could do was thwap people with tentacles — but that was fine. I didn’t need it to fight. Its mission was all shock and awe, and on that front it was the most powerful weapon in my arsenal, truly shocking and awesome.

  I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to hear the shrieks and cries of grown men as Pinky charged into the Overgeared ranks. Most of the Players in its path were knocked down, one even fell right off the wall. Well done, Pinky.

  In the ensuing chaos, Lianna and I came storming in at superspeed, firing off stun rounds indiscriminately. My quick reload method worked like a charm. As soon as a pistol ran out of juice, we’d slap its butt on its holster to jam in a fresh mana crystal and keep on shooting. Before they knew what had happened, all the Overgeared Players on top of the wall were down and out.

  We did the same thing to Team Karma's ranks up top, sweeping through them with surprising ease. They’d tried to break ranks and run away, but were met by the full force of both Teams N3m3s1s and Spice blocking their path with a solid wall of sharp, pointy things and various affinity barriers.

  When Pinky reached our allies, it veered off and skittered down the side of the wall. Soon Lianna and I found ourselves face to face with Spice and N3m3s1s, a trail of bodies strewn behind us. Not dead, but also not a threat anymore. Screw you, fatality factor.

  After we turned off our superspeed, Tiff peered over my shoulder at the human wreckage we’d left behind. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I suppose that’s one way to do it.”

  “That was a lot easier than I expected,” Lianna said, smacking fresh crystals into both of her guns. “We didn’t even need our shields after all.” She tapped the gem on her ring and the Holtzmann haze around her vanished as the shield dropped.

  “You guys are a bit scary,” Tiff’s Vice-Captain Grace said. “You know that, right?”

  “You’re not the first to say that,” I said with a grin. “We’re just lucky, though. See you on the next level.”

  Lianna and I turned around to sweep back the way we’d come. To make sure the bad guys stayed unconscious until we were done mopping up their teammates down on the ground, we made sure to double or triple-tap each one with more stun rounds as we passed them. It was Lianna who fired down at the poor bugger Pinky had pushed off the catwalk, but along with a pair of stuns she also sent a healing shot into him to counter the damage he’d taken in his fall.

  Once we’d secured the catwalk, we nodded at each other and leapt off the wall. When I’d added the jumping power to Lianna’s boots I felt a bit foolish, but I was thankful for it now. This little drop off the catwalk was like stepping off a chair. No problem.

  In the time it had taken us to double back for our double-taps up top, our allies had come down the regular way on the stairs, ready to act once again as a human barrier, corralling our opponents to keep them in the (non-lethal) killing zone. As above, so below.

  The bad guys on the ground were in complete disarray. If the screams from up on top of the wall hadn’t thrown them, nor seeing their comrade falling off of it, the appearance of Pinky scrabbling through their ranks on its countless stubby tentacle feet surely did. The moment we landed we started shooting, standing back to back with a gun in each hand, blasting anything that moved with fewer than a hundred legs.

  “Hey Lianna, stop shooting,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Let’s let the others have some fun.”

  Me: Kiki? Tiff? You guys good to finish things up?

  Tiff: Yeah, sure, of course. Anything wrong?

  Kiki: I suppose since you're begging for my help.

  Me: We actually just thought you might enjoy a little action.

  Kiki: Erg.

  Tiff: That's most neighborly of you, Daniel. I have been a bit jealous watching you have all the fun, although you mostly move too fast to see.

  Me: Just remember, nobody dies.

  Lianna and I switched tactics and now it was our turn to do crowd control while Spice and N3m3s1s took over and mopped up. Once or twice I had to step in with a quick burst of superspeed and a well-placed stun or health round to prevent anyone from getting seriously hurt, but on the whole our allies did a commendable job and seemed to have a lot of fun doing it.

  Would it have been faster, easier, safer, and cleaner to do it ourselves? Of course. It had become obvious even to me that I had crossed over the power level threshold for this game, and dragged Lianna along with me. The polite way to say it would be that I had irrevocably altered the game’s power dynamics; the other way would be to simply say I'd broken it.

  That’s why I told Lianna to stop and let the others have a little fun. You know, while they still could.

  WWKD? (What will Kiki do?)

  Up next: What do we do with these jerks?