“That’s enough sleeping!” said Blackthorn, as he threw open the door to the team room.

  Mark was instantly awake and sending out a jolt of Union that woke everyone else. Eliot yelped. Isoko groaned. Sally was up and on her feet without being actually awake, and then she blinked her eyes and focused on Blackthorn. She grumbled.

  … And Blackthorn’s words registered. Complaining about ‘too much sleep’ seemed like a non-valid complaint—

  “I promised you magic lessons! And we only have the next 10 hours to do that!”

  Mark was actually awake now, and he got up and started putting on some real clothes—

  “Mark. Only wear what you’re fine with losing because your clothes will get shredded. Isoko. You’re going to be catatonic for an hour and unable to defend yourself at all, so dress warmly. Eliot. I have secured some more lessons from Sentinel for today, since you two had to split early last night. Sally. I want to interview you about your desired path in this life and these worlds. It will be an exhaustive interview.” Blackthorn clapped his hands. “Everyone move! Mark’s lesson is going to take us far away from the city because he will kill everything within a kilometer of himself. Maybe even further out than that!”

  Everyone was already getting dressed but they all kinda paused when they heard Blackthorn’s final proclamation.

  Mark asked, “Uh… What sort of lesson is this?”

  “A tap to your soul, done in a very specific way, that you will have to do yourself. It’s basically a ritual, known as the Shaper Decouple Ritual. It should help you disjoin your kinesis from your physicality. I expect you will be able to return to normal functionality with your kinesis after an hour, but until then you will be shredding everything near you because your adamantium will move at your max range and… Well. I’ll let you figure it out. It’s better that way. The end result should allow you to spin adamantium faster than normal, allowing you to fly, after a fashion. After it is over Quark should be able to help you to understand what happened, so you can create the effect again. Most other Shapers would take months or more to recreate the feeling that caused them to disjoin the first time.” Blackthorn grinned. “Maybe if you’re truly determined you might be able to fly with your adamantium by this time tomorrow, so you can fly for Episode 4!” He clapped again. “Let’s get going! 24 hours to the final episode!”

  Mark rapidly finished getting changed.

  He was practically giddy by the time they loaded up into Blackthorn’s sometimes-invisible hovership.

  - - - -

  Grax the goblin sat upon a block of ice carved into a throne, far outside of the city walls. Light danced around him, illuminating the cave with subtle glows. Three servant goblins chewed the bones of some malformations, eating instead of spreading the Bite. Their hungry chewing echoed Grax’s growing hunger, the gnashing and the gnawing feeling like mirrors of Grax’s stomach. The sound of teeth on bone made Grax’s teeth drip with venom. He tasted hunger, and… he spat the spit out, trying to ignore the hunger. The drive to Bite.

  Grax had tamed himself ever since the Tutorial.

  He was no longer a slave to his emotions, or his desires. He was an enlightened soul.

  And he was on a hunt for much better prey than a simple meatsack to birth a brother or ten.

  Grax spread himself outward, light blossoming from his soul, filling the cave, and then fading to invisibility as Grax’s light became one with the light of outside. His sight went with his light, and soon Grax was flowing across the sky, looking for something that would be beneficial.

  The goal was to get back to Daihoon.

  He did not know exactly what he was looking for, what would help him cross the Veil, but every day he learned new things about humans and he learned new things about the worlds. He even found some monsters that might be helpful.

  There was an ice snail that vanished into the ice, into some other place beside the ice. It was similar in nature to the dark snails that ate corpses until you got close enough, and then they evacuated elsewhere, too. Both the ice version and the shadow version were possible solutions to Grax’s issue. But whenever Grax approached the shadow snails they simply vanished. Light could not catch a shadow, it seemed. Grax doubted that light could catch ice, either. Now if there was a light snail… But Grax had not found one of those. Those were just the monstrous solutions to his problem, anyway.

  Grax kept looking.

  Over the hills, through the ice sheets of ponds, into caves, Grax searched.

  Primarily, he searched for an actual opening back to Daihoon. Monsters sometimes popped out from Daihoon onto Earth, but Grax had never managed to find an open hole. The holes closed too fast.

  Secondarily, he searched for a way to force an opening back to Daihoon.

  Grax needed to get back to Daihoon, to Goblinhome, so that Grax could take his rightful place as one of the Elders. Once he did that, he would come back with an army, because he could not believe what he was seeing out here.

  The humans were ripe for the picking.

  Weak ones walked out of the walls all the time, looking to kill things. Strong ones rarely showed themselves. Based on some of the humans that walked outside of the walls, Grax had his pick of good birthing targets. So many powers! All of them up for grabs!

  And then, Total War.

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  Yes, it would be difficult and billions would die, and humanity would be reduced to nearly nothing, but the goblins would come out on top, and then they could cage the humans into one city and use them as breeders for goblinkind. Humans made the best birthers, by far!

  Grax was pretty sure he could accomplish the dragon’s share of the coming war, too. He had passed the Tutorial and he had gained true power. His flashes of light did a lot more than disorient, and distract. He could do a lot more than blend in with the light and heat of the world.

  Grax could do a lot.

  Not as much as that Rainbow Person of that settlement, just beyond the gate of Memphi. But close enough.

  Grax was in his cave, and also a hundred kilometers away, right next to a particularly slow ice snail, creeping toward the monster, gently reaching for the—

  The snail turned to ice, and not ice that was actual ice, either. It inhabited the ice that it became. It wasn’t actually in the ice, though. It was in some sideways thing that was near the ice… And Grax still didn’t understand any of what he was seeing and feeling. So… Not a great way forward, to forge a path to Daihoon.

  … Well… Maybe the snails didn’t hold the key at all.

  Grax already knew what truly held the key.

  The gate.

  It sat there, beyond the city, and yet still contained within the walls of the city. Seeing it was difficult, for when Grax got too close to the gate his vision turned hazy. Something within the space was disrupting his own power, and if he tried to push through that disruption then something tried to follow him back through the light, to find where he was, and what he was doing.

  Grax had learned very fast that whatever tracked him was not to be trifled with.

  If he couldn’t have hidden himself as well as he could, then the kill team that had tracked him back to his previous lair would have gotten him. That kill team, all black and yellow, had looked rather powerful, too, as Grax walked around them, ducking out of the way of their scanning lights and might. They had almost caught him, and they certainly would have caught him if Grax would have attacked. But Grax knew that to hide was better than to strike without a plan.

  Old Slave had been right about that lesson. It was the most important lesson of all.

  Most goblins never learned that lesson.

  So Grax learned to keep his sight to long measures, when he investigated the gate.

  Grax looked at the gate, now.

  It seemed so docile, from so many kilometers in the sky. When it had opened those few times several days ago, Grax had almost dropped everything and rushed through, even with all of the humans everywhere around the opening. The opening had filled the world with the sound of tearing, and afterward Grax had used that sound to find other, temporary openings to Daihoon. The normal ones that dropped monsters off all the time. But back then, at that first gate opening, Grax had frozen, thankfully.

  He spotted the Light Queen, the one who brought down the auroras, and the Black King, the one who killed with dark lightning.

  His two most loved and hated humans in the world. Grax wanted to Bite them both, but he knew he was still too weak to do that, and besides, those two were being met with other humans who felt almost as dangerous. So Grax had ran.

  Grax still remembered watching the Black King strike his troops with sparks and kill them all, bursting them like blood-filled sacks.

  And now Grax watched the gate, both the larger one and the smaller one in the middle, lensing the air and spying closely at the people walking around. He read their faces and understood their words, and his sight passed by posters on the walls here and there, and he read them again.

  The signs warned of ‘gate rage’, which caused people and animals to go crazy when a gate was open and active, and it was quite common. The stronger you were, the more rage you experienced. A normal being would not know a gate was open at all. Someone like Grax felt it every time the gate opened, for any length of time at all.

  The artificial gate, located here in that archway of stone, made the Veil scream when it was torn. The natural openings, the ones that wild monsters fled through, were much quieter.

  Every day, Grax was learning new, important things.

  Hopefully they would do another test soon, while he was fully awake and investigating, because maybe Grax could learn how to open the path to Daihoon if he saw it again. Once he learned how to open his own rift he would be able to escape everyone that ever came for him. He could attack with impunity, and then swirl through the Veil to escape across worlds—

  The Veil thrummed.

  They were doing another test.

  Grax needed to see.

  Grax risked it all to slip his sight closer to the gate, to the small arch at the bottom where the Veil parted like so much broken reality—

  A twitch in the light.

  The only warning Grax ever got.

  He came back to his body all the way and started running.

  His three servants looked at him.

  The smartest one of them asked, “What happen?”

  Grax was already far, far outside of the cave, his brothers left to their fate as he slipped through the ice, under the snow—

  Light. Fire. A roaring pressure.

  Fire exploded the cave, cracking stone and sending snow and trees flying upward. A rocket strike, Grax was rather sure. The fire burned, and now his three servants were gone.

  … Annoying.

  Now who was going to get him food? Himself? No way.

  … Maybe these humans needed to learn not to shoot rockets at people who were just spying. Yes. Grax decided he would embiggen another animal. He might not have learned how to open a gate to Daihoon yet, but he had certainly learned how to do one thing very well.

  He could turn an animal into a kaiju.

  He had gotten to see more of the Black King’s capabilities when he embiggened that squirrel the other day, too, which was just silly. Why did the Black King come out? Did this place not have proper defenders of its own? Surely they did. So why didn’t the other ones appear?

  One very large human did not count as a defender in Grax’s opinion. The squirrel would have killed that ‘Titanfist’ if not for the Black King.

  … Grax’s fangs dripped venom as he thought of Biting the giant man.

  … No no. Not ideal. Let it go. Titanfist had taken down the squirrel with just the Black King at his back, but thousands had been ready to step in to help, and Grax knew nothing about those other humans.

  Grax turned to light and flowed across the world, looking for more embiggen targets to test more of Memphi’s defenses, for humans to Bite and make into new servants, and to see if he could find an easy way home.

  He wondered which he would find first.

  … The Black King had been hunting yesterday. Perhaps he was out hunting again?