It was educational watching the other teams fight. Team Spice was like a well-oiled machine with Tiff right up there at the frontline doing crowd control with her electric whip and wraithlike summoned creatures made out of Darkness.

  Team N3m3s1s, on the other hand...it’s not that they were bad, they just weren’t...optimized. The strongest one on the team was Kiki, whether by nature or design, and she ruled over them as a harsh Mistress.

  I still remembered when Kiki’s fire summons were these cute little flaming snakes that could be extinguished with a bit of Water affinity action. Now her much-evolved power — foreshadowingly called Effreet-o-lay — let her summon bigger, scarier fire beasts, and lots of them, and I suspected that if she wanted to she could put it all into one very big, nasty, fiery summon. And that heat ray power? It shot from Kiki’s eyes. Her eyes! Terrifying.

  I hate to say it, but Kiki was one of the strongest Players out there, not just on her team, but on the planet. Certainly her crowd control methods were much more effective than Tiff’s whip. I almost felt sorry the battle was so quick. With her mana recovery gift, it would’ve been interesting to see how long she could maintain her summons while also scorching her heat vision around and frying whatever she looked at. Most impressive was the surgical precision she employed on her talents, using them with meticulous control to direct and dispose of her opponents non-lethally.

  I had to smile when I saw her baking skill. How many cookies do you need to bake to get it up to Adept? Was that actually how she controlled her boys, with sweets and baked goods? Nah. It had to be her winning personality.

  Her second affinity with Ice was also interesting. It was only at Competent and she had no specialized powers utilizing it like she had for Fire, so I figured she must have only recently acquired it. She herself was a walking contradiction so having opposite affinities fit her, especially those two. Fire and Ice pretty much summed her up.

  Kiki also seemed to really enjoy cutting loose. The grin on her face was infectious as beams of pure hotness shot from her big pretty eyes, her long blonde pigtails swirled around her head as she directly her gaze toward the bad guys. Once, our eyes met and thankfully she held back on heat visioning me. Instead, her face flushed slightly and she looked around for some proper foes to burn. Her eyes kept flickering back to me as she set upon our opponents with renewed gusto, as though making sure I saw she wasn’t holding back against her former allies.

  Yes, helping her cross the floor to our side was definitely the right move. I’d much rather be fighting with her like this than against her.

  Oh yeah. We were in the middle of a big fight. Watching Kiki was so distracting I almost forgot.

  Anyway, long story short: although Lianna and I did a lot less of the heavy lifting, we collectively did pretty much the same thing on the ground as we did up top. Ducks in a barrel. And while Pinky scurried around in their ranks bumping into them as much as possible while we took them down, I got the distinct impression that the little monstrosity was having even more fun than Kiki.

  In what felt like no time, nobody in Overgeared or Karma was moving. We were a bit more casual about double-tapping the ones on the ground, strolling among them and lazily firing another stun or two into each one.

  I took no satisfaction from the way they twitched and spasmed each time. Honest.

  Tiff came up to me as I was doing that. “Um, hey Daniel?”

  “Want something, Tiff?” I said.

  “Kind of.”

  “So tell me what you want, what you really really want.”

  She smirked and held out her hand. “Stop right there, thank you very much.”

  “Too much?”

  She groaned. I didn’t really need to ask what she wanted. She was practically undressing my pistol with her eyes.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “You want to try one of these, huh?” I said, gesturing with one of my pistols. She nodded hungrily, so I held it out on my open palm. ”If you can take this from me, then you—”

  Before I could react, Tiff reached out to snatch the gun but inches away from reaching it her hand rebounded off the Holtzmann shield that her rapid movement toward me had triggered.

  “What the hell, man? A shield? That’s not fair. How am I supposed to take it?”

  “Says the woman who tried to grab it before I was ready,” I laughed, and she started chuckling too. “Honestly, I forgot about the shield.”

  “How does one forget about something like that?” she said, probing my personal force field with little finger pokes. I tugged the shield ring off and the force field dropped just as she was jabbing her finger at it and she ended up prodding me in the forehead.

  “Ow,” I said, rubbing the spot.

  She yanked her hand back like I’d burned her and used it to cover her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

  I held up the ring. “Well I was going to give this to you as compensation, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Compensation for what?”

  “For the cruel trick I was playing on you. I was going to let you grab the gun then laugh when you weren’t able to use it because it’s user-locked to me.”

  “Even without that your gun would be useless to me, I don’t have the right affinity. I was hoping you had a different version tucked away I could use.”

  As we talked, Lianna was still going around ensuring our captives would stay down. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the look on her face as she did it, she appeared to be enjoying the twitches and spasms a bit too much.

  Tiff followed my gaze over to watch her too.

  “And you think I’m scary,” I said.

  “No kidding. Lianna’s all kinds of awesome,” Tiff said.

  Seeing Tiff and me together, Kiki rushed over to join us.

  “Great job, Kiki,” I said.

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” she snapped back. Then her tone changed instantly and she said, “It was a crude plan, but good enough, I suppose.”

  “Thanks. I suppose.”

  “I just have one question,” she said, one hand on her hip and the other gesturing at the incapacitated bodies around us. “What do we do with all these jokers now?”

  “We put them on ice,” I said.

  “You’re gonna deep freeze them?”

  It was a valid question. Everyone had seen me use Ice when I fought Flint, after all.

  “It was a figure of speech, but if my plan doesn’t work we can go literal and call the cryostorage idea Plan B.”

  “Actually,” Tiff said, “I have a question too: what the hell was that thing that came crashing through before you guys?”

  “That was Pinky,” Lianna said, joining us after delivering the last double-tap and jerking her thumb at me. “This guy’s pet.”

  “Familiar,” I said.

  “Pinky?” Tiff said.

  “I got him off a guy who was a brain,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “You can tell me after all this is over and I take you out for several well-earned drinks,” Tiff said.

  “You got it,” I said.

  “Hey!” Kiki squealed. “I’m coming too. Uh, because, you know, I guess I owe you too.”

  “It’s a date, Kiki,” I said.

  “A what? I suppose, I mean, oh whatever. I just want to say thanks too, alright? Don’t make me regret being nice.”

  “Yeah, I know: don’t get used to it, either.”

  Say what you want about Kiki, she was a bit of a psycho who tried to kill me several times and succeeded once, but she wasn’t so bad, really, and rather fun to tease. Lianna seemed to be getting a kick out of it, too, she kept smiling at me all knowingly. What exactly she knew she kept to herself.

  Grace was the next to come join the group.

  “Well?” Tiff said.

  “We counted them twice, all enemies accounted for,” Grace said.

  “You asked Grace to count the bad guys?” I said. Tiff nodded. “Great idea, Tiff. It would’ve been a hassle if any of them got away. Well done.”

  Grace beamed as I praised her leader. “We also handled the twenty demons who showed up.”

  “Any problems with that?” Tiff said.

  “None worth mentioning. Between us and N3m3s1s it was a cake-walk.”

  “Nicely done, Grace,” I said, and she beamed brighter. “Sorry I forgot to mention a new crop of those buggers always shows up five minutes before the next team arrives.”

  “That would’ve been nice to know, but no harm done. It felt good to let loose,” Grace said, raising her arms over her head and stretching her back languidly before inclining her head toward our captives. “It was tough restraining ourselves against these jerks, though it’s good nobody died, obviously.”

  “Speaking of whom, like Kiki said, what’re we gonna do with them?” Tiff said.

  “Whatever it is, we need to get a move on. There’s another team coming,” Lianna said.

  “Oh I know,” I said with a grin. “That’s when the fun’s really gonna start.”

  “The next teams coming are the Droogs and Invictus,” Kiki answered for me, face implacable. “That‘s your idea of fun?”

  Dealing with all the captured Players wasn’t going to be an issue, but it had to be done quickly. Tiff’s crew had already wrangled them all together and relieved them of their weapons. Then, starting with Overgeared, they hustled the captives back inside the transportation node in the dome. Between my TTC Control key, my affinity with Void, and my Great Sage benefits I had considerable control over the teleportation network, enough to forcibly bring people with me when I used it to go somewhere. Anika, the Spice girl with the wicked sleep power that made our stun rounds possible, came along.

  I took them to the labyrinth, then opened a portal to a suite of special welcoming rooms I’d asked Alice to prepare. A comfortable, safe space where they could relax for the next, oh, 22 hours or so, under the watchful eyes of some of the more intimidating denizens of the Light Dungeon.

  As insurance, Anika stayed behind with a crate of mana potions, charged with the job of keeping any Players who had abilities that might help them escape snoring.

  I’d contemplated creating a special dungeon for them to crawl through as a way to pass the time and have a little fun, but then I remembered that Overgeared had probably kill-killed a few of Team Happy and decided they didn’t deserve it. I’d also considered having a squad of Doppelgangers copy a few Overgeared Players and send them in to lead Invictus and the Droogs into an ambush, but as fun as that would be it would just be overcomplicating things. I had to stop doing so much and let the other Players play.

  Before I left, Alice told me that the other thing I’d asked her to do had been completed.

  “And?” I said.

  “They were surprised, to say the least,” she said. “But very happy.”

  “I bet they were. I love it when a plan comes together.”

  Up next: So what now?