Tartu stared, unseeing, at a show about cooking, or something, on the large screen in Shawn and Lenny’s recovery room. Shawn and Lenny were healed, but they were not whole, and they were currently under a medically induced coma so that the healing magics would work better. They had been up and awake for a few hours, but now they were back under and healing.

  Tartu returned to ‘watching’ the cooking show, to see some woman dump tomatoes into some sort of blender—

  He changed the channel to something else. Anything else.

  Now it was a show about boats. This was better. The cooking show had had too much blending. Tartu would never look at a blender the same way—

  Kardi walked into the entrance of the room, holding her phone. She looked up at Tartu and she opened her mouth to speak, but she stopped.

  Tartu was probably glaring at her again. He needed to stop that. Kardi was still a valuable member of the team, but she had crossed… She had crossed so many lines. Holy fuck—

  And now Tartu was getting mad again.

  Why the fuck did Tartu ever agree to bring her on to the team? She was 19. Three years younger than him, Lenny, and Shawn. An outsider with a grudge against a man who shouldn’t be on the front line at all. Tartu had hoped, originally, that he could have convinced Mark to not be a warrior, if Tartu had aimed his wand right.

  But Kardi wanted fame, and honestly? So did Tartu.

  He had 87 million Looks on his Crystal Tower hero profile right now. That number was going up fast. Fame opened a lot of doors. Not as many doors as money and power, but still, a good amount of doors.

  And somehow he had gotten caught up in everything.

  And Lenny and Shawn were in a medically induced coma and Tartu would probably have knee problems for a week or two, depending on if he could get some better healing or not. The guys would have issues for years… But they’d be back in Daihoon, soon, and…

  And Tartu hoped he hadn’t fucked up things too badly with his dad, with the settlement.

  Dad and the rest of Mage Society wanted Mark gone from the settlement, but…

  Tartu might be done with this particular fight.

  He looked away from Kardi, thinking about normal hero shit. Acting, maybe. Of course he would still fight monsters and kill horrors, but he was so much better against known threats than unknown threats. That was one of the reasons he wanted to go into the Hero Program. Reality show fights against known villains were easy wins. Or at least they were supposed to be easy—

  “Blackthorn sent out an action alert 20 minutes ago,” Kardi said softly, “Mark did some sort of ritual for power. That’s all. I’ll get out of your hair now.”

  Kardi walked away, though her eyes lingered sadly on the guys, laid up in bed.

  And then she was gone.

  … Did Tartu want to see whatever demon shit that Mark was getting up to? Under the control of another demon, acting through Blackthorn— Okay. Well. Yeah. Tartu picked up his personal screen from the nearby table, muttering, “Mark isn’t really doing some stupid fucking demon ritual, right? He can’t be. That’s dumb and…”

  Tartu went quiet as he flickered through the recent alerts for the Hero Program, and then the All Alerts, for all of Memphi. It didn’t take long to find Archmage Blackthorn’s alert. There it was.

  Tartu pressed it and a screen came up, asking him for credentials to view the alert.

  … Weird, but okay. That made Tartu a bit more worried, but it was fine. Alerts of a magical nature were Curtain Protocol sealed, so Tartu held his Mage Society ID in front of the screen’s camera and the alert flickered and faded to options.

  Tartu pressed the ‘view action’ button.

  There was a dot in the sky, and the land was broken and breaking, and Tartu was pretty sure he knew what he was seeing, but he wasn’t 100% there. So he poked around the cameras for the event, switching view, and he saw… Oh.

  Yeah.

  That was Mark.

  And he was…

  Yeah.

  It was what it looked like.

  “That’s fucking crazy,” Tartu muttered, sitting in a large, comfortable chair, beside Shawn and Lenny, as he stared at a screen in his hands, at utter destruction. He whispered, “Holy shit.”

  He was surprised, annoyed, and aghast all at once, because Mark was obliterating the land with adamantium monowire and violating at least 2 international treaties. Maybe 3. Tartu only really knew about the treaties against using uncontrolled powers in a large, open setting, and then, of course, there was the treaty that was actually the big one; the interworld agreement to not use monowire for any reason.

  That shit got everywhere.

  They were having a hell of a time burning the squirrel kaiju’s corpse because of its tail hairs, which were not monowire, but they were close. That stuff had injured one worker who went out to clear it up, severing his leg, but only because he wasn’t wearing proper PPE. The guy thought —and usually rightfully so!— that he could walk into a kaiju cleaning with PL15 gear. Kaiju bodies didn’t normally retain any sort of PL modifier at all after death, except in the internal bits here and there, like some mana crystals and otherwise. But the physicality of the molecularly strong kaiju hair had been too strong. Some hair had gotten into his basic gear and then cut his foot off when he took the gear off at the end of the day.

  And here Mark was throwing actual monowire all over the place, and flying at the center of it. Adamantium monowire! Holy shit! If he lost any of it then someone was going to die. Multiple someones, too! Adamantium was PL 79!

  And the fucking dragonspawn could fly now.

  Fucking great.

  And! And! He was also obliterating the land and anything that grabbed his attention. Just think of all the moles in the ground and the birds in the trees and… Well the monsters were dying, too, so that was good. But...

  Tartu felt small as he moved through several cameras so he could actually see the monowire.

  That shit was impossible to see unless you looked very close, which was the main danger of it all, but when you used as much as Mark was using right now then you could see it. Sometimes. And there it was. A grey haze around Mark’s skin. All the rest of it was ‘invisible’, though the AIs watching the event had determined Mark’s range at 1,200 meters in one direction, but most commonly 600 in all directions.

  Tartu wondered how much adamantium he was actually using. That much monowire should have a great weight to it. But Mark had basically spread out his weight of, what, 180 kilos? All across all of that space? A strong wind would have moved Mark across the land like a rolling horror—

  Tartu’s heart slammed in his chest as he rapidly flicked through screens to check the weather, but he didn’t need to go far. The AIs watching the event calculated that there was roughly a 0% chance of the wind pushing Mark toward the city. The wind was north-to-south, and Mark was already south.

  That was why Blackthorn had taken Mark south of the city—

  Mark’s monowire slammed out of the sky, into him, and sent him falling to the ground, right before he flickered his adamantium into spherical shape all around him, at about 5 meters out, which wasn’t enough to slow his fall at all.

  And then Mark bloomed into a monowire menace, yet again, right before he hit the ground.

  The ground disintegrated under the dragonspawn, turning to boulders and then car-sized rocks and then gravel where the demon-touched flew.

  Tartu muttered, “This is fucking insane. This is…”

  This was beyond him.

  If Mark could do that on command, instead of under the effect of a Shaper Decouple ritual, then…

  There was a reason Archmage Addashield had been one of the strongest archmages to ever exist, to change the world, to rescue humanity from the Reveal. This was one of those reasons. Stuff like this.

  … Tartu wouldn’t have even seen the alert unless Kardi had come through and told him about it.

  Tartu was horrifically worried for the new dragon tyrant growing in their midst, for the warrior that should be disqualified for being a warrior because healers were more important, and for the possible response from the hidden dragonists in the Empire. But he was mostly wondering what Kardi’s real deal was…

  And then, no.

  Tartu turned back toward his own concerns, his own future, as he watched Mark destroy everything around him. With renewed disgust, Tartu slapped the screen, saying, “Just look at this fucker! The physical embodiment of destroying everything around him to get what he wants. You know, Lenny? Shawn? I think I am over the politics of this shit. This is so far out of my power level that it’s insane. But no. I’m not stopping here. I truly, honestly, simply, just hate this bastard, and I want to punch his stupid fucking face.”

  - - - -

  Kardi walked down the hallway, holding her phone in her shaking hands. She held it together for a while, for a long walk, knowing that the AIs were watching her, recording her. This was the Hero’s Association hospital, and the AIs and the eyes were everywhere.

  But Kardi walked far enough, for long enough, just trying to calm down, that when she calmed down she found herself in a dead zone. One of the cameras was obviously broken, seeing as how it was sparking and only connected to the ceiling by a single wire, and though Kardi wasn’t sure if this was good enough, she felt Lucky right now. Who broke the camera? No idea. Why did Kardi feel secure? She wasn’t sure.

  But this felt right.

  Kardi said, “I need help.”

  Someone was surely watching. Probably a lot of someones. But most of those someones would see her prayer as a prayer, and nothing more. If the gods were any help she would have prayed to them long ago. She had tried praying to the gods. To Freyala, Malaqua. Verdago even. Kardi would have happily worshiped at the halls of Pluta, the Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity, because Kardi wanted all of that, most of all. She had even tried going to Citadel Pluta, but she came from a poor family and she had no real connections to get not-poor, so she was not welcome at Citadel Pluta.

  But she did have Luck.

  Luck was all she needed.

  Kardi prayed to herself, to her Power—

  A twitch of wind.

  A feeling in the gut.

  Kardi… Stepped to the left. Yes. Now she… stepped to the right. Yes. And then she walked forward— Turned around. She walked back the way she came— Pause! Stop right here. Where was she?

  Kardi was at a crossroads of the Hero’s Association.

  … She pulled out her phone and she… Opened the phone app.

  Kardi stared at the numbers on the screen, from 1 to 9 and then 0.

  With her finger hovering over the keypad, Kardi… pressed this number, then that number, then she found the numbers she was looking for and kept pressing them. 17 total— Ah. No. Back up. Delete… this one, and then that one…. And then put them back, but where the other ones had been. Yes. Still a 17 digit number.

  It was an Earth connection, according to the first 2 numbers. 22 was for Daihoon, but the 11 at the start of this phone number was for Earth. Who was she calling right now? And why was she specifically using the Earth area code?

  Kardi pressed the call button and held the phone to her face.

  The phone rang and rang and rang—

  The line picked up.

  An impatient man asked, “Who are you and why do you have this number?”

  Kardi chose not to answer, because that felt like the right—

  Kardi felt the urge to answer, so she said, “I’m sorry. Is this not Aunt… Uh. This is obviously not my aunt in Daihoon. I, uh, put the number in wrong. Sorry. I’ll try again.”

  Kardi hung up—

  She pulled out the identification card on the phone and she tossed the phone in one trash can and the card in another can, further down the hallway. Act natural. Act natural. Be normal.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Where was she walking right now? She looked up—

  Oh.

  The Villains In Memphi wing of the Hero’s Association. There was Credenza in a large sculpture statue, and Grey Phantom in another, and then most of the rest of the current crew. There were ten pedestals for villains, and on the other side of the Association there were ten pedestals for heroes. The pedestals were to display the top people in the HVP in the city of Memphi, but while there were maybe 200 villains, there were thousands upon thousands of heroes. Not many heroes or villains that actually mattered, though, for Kardi’s purposes.

  Most of the villains were glorified trainers.

  Most of the heroes were people with hopes of getting glory.

  Only the top 10 got statues made of them.

  The metrics for getting a statue, and placement in the lineup of statues, were heavily influenced by income in the HVP, popularity contests online, and value to the community of Memphi as a whole.

  Sentinel and Kraigen Steele were the top two heroes of Memphi, both of them certified superheroes who killed kaiju on their own, and regularly.

  Credenza had recently catapulted into the #1 supervillain slot, and she was probably never getting ousted. Her international fights with Glorious Man were some of that good shit, and the public loved her.

  Kardi stood in the space and felt the whims of Luck around her, from the school trip with young kids walking down the rows of statues, their teacher telling them all about heroes, to the janitors cleaning the windows and emptying the trash that she had just thrown her old phone into, to the… the cameras in the sign for Villains In Memphi, that were looking right at her.

  Kardi waved at the cameras and then she stood there, waiting. Who was going to show up? Who knew. Not Kardi. She only knew that she had waved, and someone had seen, and now she would wait.

  When she was young, before she knew anything at all, her grandmother had been alive and she had taught Kardi a lot about a lot. Kardi didn’t know anything at all back then, but Grandma’s words resonated these days, and everywhere she looked.

  Grandma had told her, ‘Be careful of what you do to others, Kardi, because what you do will always be returned three fold unto you.’

  So far she had worked Mark over to make him impossibly famous, and she had done the same for Tartu and others. She was a little famous now. But she could get a lot more.

  A whole lot more.

  And then she would be rich! So very rich! She could buy and sell an entire Temple of Pluta, and buy her way into the highest halls of Pluta’s halls of power…

  So why was she still standing here? It had been 10 minutes so far. Had the person behind the camera up there not seen her? Surely they had. Kardi almost didn’t believe in herself, in her Power.

  And then a grey hand reached up from the floor and grabbed her, dragging her down into shadows, through the ground, though stone, to a hallway far below all of the normal things up there.

  Kardi stood in an underground tunnel that looked like a hallway in a training facility, facing an older man of grey hair and a grey suit. Grey Phantom. Father of Sentinel, though not many people knew that, because Grey Phantom clearly had some de-aging work done. Maybe by Mark’s True Healer Uncle? Probably!

  Kardi hadn’t known what was going to happen, but she was good at thinking on her feet, and Grey Phantom was not wearing his mask today. That was good for her. Emotions were easier to play off of when she could see unobstructed faces.

  Gray Phantom asked, “What are you doing, Kardi Shale?”

  Kardi said, “I need to make a deal to ensure that you don’t rescue Mark after Episode 4 is over because he needs to be captured. You see him out there, right? It’s all over the alert systems. Mark is a massive liability to everyone near him, and he needs to be taken away by the empires anyway. Just let it happen.”

  Grey Phantom frowned.

  Kardi already had him.

  He asked questions of ‘why’ and Kardi practically saw which words and actions would steer him the ways she wanted him to go, so Kardi did the steering she needed to do. She spoke of dragonists and empire influence and how the HVP was propaganda, and how if push came to shove then the Aluatha Empire would shove, and they would shove hard.

  And then Grey Phantom asked, “Why do you hate him?”

  Kardi played innocent, “You think I hate him?”

  “Don’t kaijushit me. I deal with Credenza all the time and I know exactly what you’re doing, but I’m allowing it, Kardi. So tell me why you hate him, and tell me true, or else this conversation ends now and I remove you from the program.”

  Kardi had hit a block. This happened sometimes. Even Lucky shots could still only hit armor when the coverage was complete.

  Kardi still felt out her Luck and picked the best answer, her mouth almost moving on its own as she said, “He’s got a big secret and it’ll hurt a lot of people when it gets out. That’s why he shouldn’t be anywhere near anyone—” Kardi wasn’t sure what she was saying, but dots suddenly connected, and then, came enlightenment. In that moment, as her mouth opened to form the next words, Kardi felt amazingly correct, like she was aiming through clouds, and falling rocks, and bird swarms, but suddenly the sky cleared and a line of light pointed straight ahead, illuminating the target. Kardi hit that target, “It’s never really been about hate. I played up the hate because it suited me. In truth, I used him as much as I could because I am a greedy bitch. And that time is over. It’s time to dump a dangerous animal. I suggest you do the same, while you can. It’s all ending soon.”

  Kardi stood there, not quite realizing her words until they were done.

  ‘It was all ending soon’?

  What?

  Kardi tried not to let her suddenly worry contort her face too much as she raced to think of what she could have possibly meant. Something was ending?

  Grey Phantom studied her, but he was also worried. He knew something was up. He connected dots that Kardi didn’t know existed.

  Kardi put her internal crisis on hold and waited.

  Grey Phantom decided to point up and behind Kardi, and say, “The stairs are there.”

  And then he practically got sucked into the ground, his Intangibility pushed hard and specifically to make him zoom through the ground, getting wherever he needed to be.

  Kardi turned and saw the staircase…

  And then she saw the hallway ahead.

  … Feeling another tug of Luck, Kardi walked down the hallway, passing the stairwell and a sign on the opposite wall that pointed in two directions. The direction she was walking in was toward something called Training Servitor Room U-3, CQC; Underground, Close Quarters Combat. Training Servitor Room U-4, Guns, was in the other direction…

  Kardi turned around.

  She always loved shooting things, at making her power known at as far of a distance as she could. It was just… magical. Plain magical.

  Kardi arrived at a gun range with ten shooting booths and a long hallway on the left with stationary targets and a shorter room on the right, but with mobile targets. Several were shooting, but there was room for more.

  A servitor floated in the middle of the room, surrounded bunch of guns that were under its control.

  Kardi’s hands shook, only partially because of having them regrown so recently. She needed rehabilitation, and she needed it fast. Kardi approached the servitor and pulled her hero card out of her pocket—

  She fumbled the card and it fell to the ground, right at the feet of some handsome guy in casual jeans and a shirt who picked it up, smiling. He had dimples, and he was her age. He was really quite cute.

  He handed the card over, saying, “You dropped this, Luckygun.”

  Kardi’s eyes went wide and her heart beat hard. She grinned, and felt seen. “Thank you! You know me? Who are you?”

  The guy grinned, his dimples intense. “Name’s Johnny, but the hero name is ‘Fiveguns’. Arcane Power. Multi-Bolt.”

  Kardi decided that this was a good contact for the future, but not right now. “It’s nice to meet you, Johnny. Maybe we’ll see each other around again— Thank you for noticing me. I’ve… I’ve never been noticed before. Heroically, I mean.”

  Johnny grinned wide, looking a little embarrassed but also—

  Kardi said, “Are you in the spotlight program, or headed that way? Because we got this Attack the Gate thing happening and we need to boost the defenses of the gate, and a good gunner would be a nice addition.”

  “Another good gunner, you mean.”

  Kardi blushed.

  Johnny instantly started talking shop, because this was exactly what he wanted to happen. Kardi easily navigated all the best choices for herself and him, and soon she was waving goodbye to the guy, with plans to have him join the volunteer forces for the gate defense, under her letter of recommendation. And then she grabbed a pair of revolvers from the gun servitor in the middle of the room and got to working on her aim, with her stupid, tingling hands.

  Her shots went absolutely wild for a while, but she was getting her feeling back fast enough.

  - -

  A guy in a surveillance room, in the middle of Memphi’s main defense center, sat at a desk and typed away at a keyboard. He was rather determined to find out who had called him. Who had bypassed all of the natural defenses of the calling system, and called him, straight up!

  His phone number was private, dammit!

  The trace put the cell tower at the one on top of the Hero’s Association, so that narrowed his search a lot. The phone call had been full of static, though, otherwise the AI voice cleaners could have cleaned it up, but he was pretty sure the guy who called had been heightening his voice to make him sound like a girl. So that was one clue.

  But it had been 20 minutes and he couldn’t figure it out.

  A woman came by with two cups of coffee, one in each hand. She set one down in front of the guy, saying, “Still no solid leads?”

  “It’s infuriating!” said the man. “The AIs are helping but almost all of them are watching the Careed kid blender the land, trying to get good footage and to make sure he doesn’t roll into town on accident.”

  The woman grinned, unworried about the call. The guy was being way too paranoid, by half. She said, “I was watching that footage, too. He’s really cute.” She added, “That suit they got him wearing does him the opposite of a favor, though. Such a shame.”

  The guy flicked through several surveillance camera feeds at once, looking to find guys on phones. None of those calls were from when he had gotten his call, 20 minutes ago. He had already discounted all normal phone calls happening in real time and he had moved on to phone calls set up on phones and temporary AIs. Maybe a recorded message attached to an autocaller? Mmmm.

  The guy didn’t respond to the woman’s regard for Mark Careed.

  The woman scoffed. “I’m not going to stop you, but you really should watch for things that are actually important. There was that strike on the gate scryer and possible kaiju-creator four hours ago, and now Careed is having a Power Fluctuation. There are more important things than some phone call from some random person. It might have just been an honest misdial and the system let it through for whatever arcane reason.”

  The guy gave the woman a Look, and said, “I researched the Daihoon number that matched mine. It is not in service, but when it was, it belonged to a male fighter’s gym.”

  “Probably no aunt there, huh?”

  “Highly unlikely.”

  “Well there’s your coffee, anyway.”

  The man got back to searching for whoever had called him… and yeah, he was probably being derelict in his duties, but he was just one analyst, doubled up on the eastern wall alongside ten other analysts. Sure, he might have been the only one doing his job instead of watching Careed learn how to control himself, but he could indulge a personal fascination for a minute...

  Or however long it took, really.

  “Who flippin’ called me,” the guy whispered to himself, as he flicked through screens.

  - -

  Grax found five different possible embiggen targets and also the Black King.

  He rapidly retreated when he saw the Black King.

  The Black King was a swirl of dangerous cutting wire, as large as an embiggened monster, which was strange to see. Grax watched, enthralled, for some amount of time. He eventually ventured closer, to actually attack, but the Black King reached him thorough his untouchable light and cut at him.

  He cut the light, which made no sense at all, but it was a fact that Grax needed to understand.

  Grax had first met the Black King in his first home, in the dragonoid canyons, and the Black King had destroyed his people to the last, even killing those of them who hid in the light, in the stone, and in the water and elsewhere. Grax had never forgotten that. He would always remember the killer who killed his first people.

  Grax had thought he was beyond the Black King’s touch after winning his Power from the demons, but that was untrue. He was just as vulnerable. Just as dead, if he chose to attack the Black King directly.

  But maybe, now that Grax was stronger, and since the Black King was clearly occupied, maybe Grax could learn from him. If the Black King could cut the light, without using light, then maybe Grax could learn how to grasp shadows without using shadows. Maybe he could grasp the Veil itself and rip the barrier keeping him from home, from escaping this awful place.

  Grax decided to go and embiggen some targets, to see how the Black King would react to a real monster in his face.

  He went around the city and eventually decided that the target on the sunrise-side of the wall was the best, closest one to the Black King. The target was located far away from the wall. It was in the frozen hills, in a broken tree with a rotten core. It was a beetle. A bright, shining beetle, made of crystal and with crystal spikes all around it.

  Grax knew it was an embiggen target because it had the same sort of aura to it that all the other embiggen targets had. It was covered in whispers. Whispers that spoke words that Grax did not hear, that he did not know.

  He didn’t need to know what the whispers were saying to use them, though.

  Grax reached for the beetle, light dancing around his fleshy fingers, his intensity growing, his fingers plucking the fabric of reality, like thrumming a taut belly, full of brothers just below the surface—

  ~don’t~

  A voice that made sense?

  Grax stopped.

  This was no longer an embiggen target. Grax’s fangs dripped. This was a Bite target.

  “Who speaks to me? Who attempts to command that which they cannot command? I would know your name before I Bite you.”

  ~If you wait a day, if you leave these seeds to fruit when we want them to fruit, then you can get through the city’s gate without an issue. They will be too busy to stop you~

  “I will Bite you now.”

  Grax reached in to the rotten tree and grabbed the jeweled beetle—

  A violent force slapped Grax across the land. He tumbled and tossed and skipped across the snow before he realized he had been attacked.

  Grax roared.

  And then he turned fully to light and returned to the beetle and this time he did not use his weak physical body. He was a being of light and he Bit—

  His jaws of light were stuck around a very bright sphere, containing the beetle. It was like biting a stone. He had bitten stone before, but this was—

  ~Let this one go and we will teach you to break the Veil. You are so close. You already touch it when you try to wild these seeds~

  Grax bit down harder—

  Another slap, but this time Grax was immaterial and the slap only moved him. He chuckled.

  ~Stupid goblin! Listen to your master!~

  “I am my own master, stupid beetle.”

  He bit, and the spherical shell cracked—

  A man appeared to the side and Grax moved before he even knew what he was moving from.

  He ran without looking back, without stopping. He ran and ran and ran.

  Gradually, deeply, absolute terror filled his everything, and Grax ran faster.

  The man had been wearing a suit. He had looked perfectly ordinary.

  But the white handprint on his face had been laced with power. That handprint wrapped around his entire skull, the hair white where the fingers were, the face white where the palm lay. The man had been a cultist of some god that Grax did not know, but which he Knew, in the deepest parts of his mind, in the history of his soul.

  Maybe Grax could have won that fight, or maybe not. He wanted to say that yes, he could have won that battle.

  But Grax ran away instead.

  - -

  The cultist sighed.

  “Damned fool goblins. And now they know. Have to scrap… Fucking stupid...”

  The cultist vanished into the world again, gone, elsewhere.

  - -