Welcome one, Welcome all, to The second 'book' of the NewU series.

This is the latest in an ongoing series, I recommend starting at chapter 1 if you want the story to make even the slightest amount of sense.

A huge thanks to my editors who have made this story what it is. Kiwi, Ben, SP, and the ever-present Sophie and Freya, you are awesome. As I have said before, this second part of the story will be taking a much darker, more narrative-focused direction from here on out. There will still be some erotic scenes, but they will come when the story allows. Pete has discovered his powers, he had had his fun. Now it's time to deal with the consequences.

As always, all characters in this story are over 18 and the characters and events in this story are purely the work of fiction, any likeness to real persons or events is purely coincidental and - frankly - hilarious.

Now, on with the show

Nova

********

I rolled my neck and looked at the non-descript, single-story prefab building in front of me. Despite feeling a few pops running through the top of my spine, the neck rolling hadn't seemed to help, so I did it again.

It persisted in its unhelpfulness.

I'm not sure why I had expected something a little more auspicious for the meeting place of the local Conclave members, but the working-mans club in a suburb on the opposite side of the city was not what I had been picturing when I had been invited. I had expected a fancy club or an upscale bar of some downtown hotel. Hell, a stately home wouldn't have surprised me. The conclave was an ancient, proud, vaulted institution, after all, at least as Charlotte and Marco had described them. But No... Working-mans club.

I suppose it made sense. If this was an organization trying to stay below the radar of the Inquisitors, then low-key was certainly the way to go. But Jesus, any more low-key than this would have been off the piano.

For those of you who don't know what a working-mans club is, let me explain. During the 19th century, at the height of the industrial revolution, entire towns were founded on the backs of the major local industry. Hell, some of the richest towns on the planet back then could be found not far from where I was standing. For the part of the country I lived in, that had been coal, iron, and steel, and these workplaces gave jobs to thousands of the local population. But it wasn't only these industries that employed a lot of people. The products made or mined were transported by rail to the coast, where they were loaded onto docks and shipped all over the world. That meant a hell of a lot of miners, mill workers, railroad workers, dock workers, laborers, journeymen, Sailors, and a whole host of other professions were employed in a very small geographical area. Not to mention all the other industries that would normally be represented in any flourishing town or city.

These men needed a place to drink. Hence, the working-mans club was born.

Savvy local businessmen, or sometimes even the mine owners themselves, would throw up prefabricated concrete and brick box-shaped buildings with about as much character as a wet mop, throw in a bar, a fire exit, plenty of seating and some toilets, and there you have it. One ready-to-go working-man's club.

The concept was simple. No wives, no children, cheap alcohol, and all it took to get through the door was to flash your work ID. It was a good concept, and the clubs flourished as long as the towns did... and then, of course, they didn't. As the mines closed and the mills shut down, the railroads rusted, and the ships sailed to other docks, the clubs started to close down. Whereas there used to be a handful in every town, now there was usually just one. Often just one between a few towns. Of course, they relaxed their entry policies, and now anyone could get in, but the beer was still pretty cheap, and they were usually more than happy to hire out their bar for functions like this one.

I'm not afraid to admit I was more than a little nervous to step through the old wooden doors.

A week had passed since the weekend of sex, sex, some karaoke, and some more sex, and life had, more or less, returned to normal. I had exchanged messages with Becky, Philippa, Olivia, and even a few with Evie. There was even a very short-lived, probably drunken exchange with one of Olivia's friends - although I wasn't sure which one - which basically consisted of her expressing her hope that Livvy hadn't been teasing when she said she didn't mind sharing. I may have switched my powers off to Olivia, but the rest of the group had been getting the full dose; this one was just more forward than the others. Whereas most of my time was, as per normal, spent in my bunker working on my project, a great deal of it had been spent with Charlotte.

I had shared with her every single detail of my time with Marco. Some things had surprised her, and other things had made her scoff in disgust, but the offer for me to attend one of these gatherings had blown her mind. A key detail that Marco seemed to have left out of his invitation was that invites were rarely, if ever, given to people who hadn't already been welcomed into the Conclave. Even then, the initiates that were invited were known by almost everyone by the time they made it onto the guestlist.

"Just..." she had said with a hint of caution after I had shared everything with her, "...pay attention to your own intuit... no, wait, pay attention to Jeeves," she had finally finished, only to continue again after the quizzical look I had given her. "Everyone, human or Evo, has that sixth sense. Have you ever gotten the feeling you are being watched or followed? It's that, but in us, it's more heightened. People will try to look at your mind, most of them won't be able to help it. But if some of them get too pushy, or if anyone tries to intentionally test your defenses, don't question it, don't doubt it, let Jeeves point out the issue and confront it... loudly and publicly. That kind of behavior is a big no-no at these gatherings. If you make a scene, people will help."

"And if they don't?" I had been less than convinced.

"Then leave," She shrugged. "It's not like they can stop you. And good luck to them if they tried," The look on my face must have said more than my words were able to. "Alright, listen. There are one or two there who I would consider to be pretty powerful, but even compared to them, you are like Superman. Marco would be one of the more powerful there, and you know how strong you are compared to him. They will all be able to feel how powerful you are. If you are there and you don't like it, just get up and walk out. I can't think of a single thing they could do to stop you. What you are going to see there is a fairly informal version of the conclave as a whole. If you want to know who you are dealing with, this is actually a really good way to do it."

"So you don't think going is a bad idea."

"God, no. I think it's a great idea," She sighed and thought for a few moments. "Look, I'll be honest, I don't like the Conclave, obviously, but that is almost all based on the way they treated my parent's generation. Yes, you may have guessed by now that they tried to recruit me, and I gave it some serious thought. But I didn't like their organization, I didn't like how it worked, and I didn't like how it was set up, but the actual individual members? The ones I met, at least? Most of them were just normal, decent people."

"Aside from Marco?"

"Aside from Marco... Fucking Marco," she rolled her eyes with a grin. Her dislike of him had become something of a running joke between us. "Anyway, I don't think you have anything to worry about, Pete."

That had been an hour or two ago. She had hugged me with a kiss on the cheek, a playful swat on the ass, and had loaded me into the uber. Now I was standing outside the club, looking at the ugly, nondescript box through the October evening darkness and rolling my neck.

"All right, Pete." I took a deep breath and stepped forward. "Big boy pants."

Have you ever seen one of those Westerns where the stranger walks into a bar, and the whole place just drops to silence while everyone turns to look at him? Yeah, that is what greeted me! It wasn't quite complete silence, there were more than a few whispered conversations, but they were all about me. I could feel the scrutiny on me as I stood in the doorway and looked around the room, and the longer it went on, the quieter the room became. More and more minds knocked tentatively against the enormous walls around my city, none of them threateningly. It was more like they were trying to get a read on me, only to find themselves completely unable to. The silence started to give way to curious, almost excited murmurs until a familiar voice sounded over the crowd. "Pete, you made it!" Marco's soft Italian accent echoed above the whispers as he stepped between a few people and walked closer to me, clapping a hand on my upper arm and guiding me back through the crowd toward the bar.

The people parted before us like the red sea.

Marco seemed to have made a point of ensuring that everyone else in the room looked underdressed. The invitation, as brief on details as it had been, had said that the event was casual. He, however, was dressed in what looked to be a very expensive, tailor-made, designer suit. If he had been wearing a tie rather than having the top two buttons open, I would have thought he worked for a hedge fund. In contrast, I was wearing the nicest pair of jeans I owned and a plain white polo-shirt, and looking around the room, most people had taken the 'casual' aspect of the invitation as seriously as I had.

We finally approached the bar. I was quickly becoming very self-conscious, and although I doubted it to be intentional, Marco was the primary cause of it. It was the way his arm was around me. It was less of a friendly or welcoming gesture as it was something akin to possessiveness. It was like I was being shown off. I had never been, nor had I ever had, a trophy wife, but I imagine this was how they felt at parties. I had quickly come to understand what Charlotte had meant by "they will all know how powerful you are." I could tell that every person in the room had some vague sense of how strong my abilities were, in the same vein as I could tell that not a single person in the room came close to my levels. In fact, most of the people in this room combined were still less powerful than I was. But there was something about the way that Marco was acting that leaned itself, not to introducing me to the other members, but to being associated with the most powerful person in the room, of being the one responsible for bringing me into the fold. It was a little like fame by proximity.

The smartest dressed man in the room was friends with the most powerful Evo any of these people had ever heard of, and what was worse, it had worked. Almost every single eye was on us, and the ones that weren't, were talking about us. I couldn't help but think the whole thing had been staged.

I rolled my neck again as we approached the bar. This was all becoming very overwhelming very quickly. It was one thing to filter out all the inane and random thoughts of people around me, but I had specifically programmed my editing station to let me hear the ones about me, and although many of the Evos here were able to block those thoughts from me, there were plenty who couldn't. It was like being in the center of a very loud crowd, except I could only hear the noise in my head. What made it worse was the fact that no matter how well the others could block their thoughts, that did nothing for the feeling of ghostly tendrils harmlessly caressing my city walls as the hundred or so people in the room all tried - possibly automatically, as mine so often did - to connect their minds with mine.

As if by miraculous revelation, the reason why Marco had been so keen to get me to the bar revealed itself to us through the parting crowds, or rather, himself.

I felt a flicker of something approaching nerves from Marco as we approached the large man with his back to us, maybe apprehension. It took me a few moments to realize that the man was possibly the only person in the room who was neither trying to connect with my mind nor was particularly impressed by my presence. It was oddly refreshing, even after such a short period of time.

"Uri," Marco said with one of his trademark smiles, his arm around me loosening a little. "I would like you to meet Pete, the young man I told you about."

Uri turned round, placing his empty drink on the bar, and regarded me dispassionately.

His name immediately caused a spark of recognition in my mind, and Jeeves quickly came to my aid with where I had heard it before. It had been in the hospital all those months ago on the night that Marco had awakened me. Uri was the most powerful Evo known to the Conclave, at least until I had been awakened. He had been born from the fallout of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. His mother had absorbed catastrophic levels of radiation while she was pregnant, which in turn, due to the genetic mutation responsible for our species, had been absorbed into Uri en utero. If the severity of the fetus's illness was directly correlated to the power of that Evo when they were eventually awakened, then it was safe to say that Uri's mother had absorbed enough radiation to kill her, and him, ten times over. Instead, the world gained one very powerful Uri.

That thought alone made me wonder exactly how much radiation I had absorbed at the hands of a lightning-enhanced MRI machine.

Marco had called him the great Uri and had said that if the Conclave was ever said to have a leader, it was him. This struck me as odd, considering what I had learned about the organization of the Conclave in the time since then, and what was immediately even clearer was that Uri himself held no illusions of leadership. In fact, being in charge, from the brief reads I was able to get from him, was the last thing he wanted.

The man in question was a big guy. I had made myself a solid six-foot tall at my editing station and pretty well built to boot. But even with my size, Uri seemed like he dwarfed me. Easily six inches taller than me, he was the living definition of a brick shithouse. Massively broad shoulders propped up a shaved head with the hint of a tattoo creeping out of his collar and onto the side of his neck. His simple black T-shirt seemed like it was owed some sort of award by the way it seemed to cling to the enormous muscles of his arms without tearing, and each one of his legs looked strong enough to prop up a small building. What was more curious was that, just like I could see what Marco had looked like before he edited himself, I could tell that Uri hadn't actually edited himself all that much at all. Apparently, giants were actually a thing, and I happened to be staring at one.

The man looked me over with piercing, almost luminescent blue eyes before sniffing and offering out a hand. "Hello, Pete," I suppose that considering his origins, I shouldn't have been as surprised by the thick Ukrainian accent as I was. "I am Uri. It is good to meet you at last."

I didn't need my powers to know that this man in no way thought that meeting me was a good thing.

I'm not exactly sure why, but something inside me bristled. His tone, his posture, the look in his eyes as he regarded me; all of it felt a little too much like a challenge. I took his hand firmly and shook it. "Uri, it's nice to meet you. I wish I could say I've heard all about you, but..." I shrugged and glanced at Marco, letting the sentence hang in the air while I allowed the small tendril of inquiry from his mind to find what it was looking for. Not everything, of course, but just enough to see that the power that had placed him at the top of the metaphorical pecking order paled in comparison to mine to an almost laughable degree.

Uri frowned a little and seemed to straighten himself up, clearly now paying a lot more attention to who he was dealing with. He also flashed a glance to Marco, who, in turn, was grinning like an idiot. "I told you," He said smugly.

"Hmmm," Uri nodded, finally letting go of my hand and waving the barman over. "Very impressive. Having the biggest stick, however, is often not as important as how you choose to use it. You have a lot to learn."

"Is that a variation on the 'size doesn't matter' mantra?" I asked back, amazing myself at my ability to keep a straight face.

Uri arched an eyebrow, apparently not getting the joke.

Marco's smile vanished in an instant.

There was a loud female snort from behind me which I chose to ignore for the moment as I held the older man's eyes. "Never mind." I finally said before turning to Marco. "So, do I just... I don't know... Mingle or something?"

"Ummm," Marco coughed uncomfortably, his eyes flicking over to Uri, who had turned his attention to the barman. "Yes, sure... Umm... meet some of the locals. Come back to chat properly a little later." He frowned again at the larger man. Apparently, his idea of how this introduction was going to go was not quite honored by reality.

Part of me felt bad. Marco was my mentor, after all, and, judging by Charlotte's surprise at my invitation, he had gone out of his way to get me here. But another part of me was still a little annoyed at being shown off like the prize pig at a country fair.

"Oh, don't worry about these grumpy old bastards," the owner of the female snort said from behind me with an easy, friendly laugh and a slight Irish lilt to her voice. "You can start by mingling with us." I turned around to see the owner of the voice and immediately felt my jaw hit my shoes.

Some women are objectively beautiful. There are others who can only be described as stunning. But every now and then, you see a girl who seems to have been built from the ground up to be the walking, talking, smiling personification of perfection. I'm not talking about the airbrushed supermodels here, the ones that struggle to live up to their own photoshopped pictures, but the ones whose imperfections add to, rather than detract from, the whole. Charlotte was, until that moment, the best-looking woman I had ever laid eyes on. She had that regal, classical beauty that never failed to make me stop and just appreciate the sheer aesthetic brilliance of her. As jaw-droppingly stunning as she was, though, there was an air of artificialness to her looks. There was never a hair out of place, and she always wore just the right amount of makeup. I always found myself wondering what she looked like when she just got out of bed and how long it took her to get ready in the mornings. Don't get me wrong, the finished product was always worth the effort, and I had no doubt that her editing station made that morning routine redundant. She was also one of my closest friends, and I wouldn't have her any other way.

The girl in front of me, however, was not even close to Charlotte's level of perfection. But it was those slight blemishes on her otherwise flawless skin, the slight difference in her eye colors, and the way her fiery red hair seemed to live by its own rules that added together to form... this vision in front of me. My mind touched hers automatically, as people had been doing to mine all evening. I could see the thought process that went into her self-editing. She had looked at herself and what she wanted to change about her and decided that she didn't give two flying shits what other people thought about the way she looked. She was going to design herself based on what she liked. It was a simple yet profound difference in thinking that I was immediately attracted to. She liked the birthmark on the nape of her neck; she thought the shape was pretty, so she kept it. She wasn't sure about the freckles on the bridge of her nose, so instead of getting rid of them, she just thinned them out and made them a little lighter until she was. She had been teased mercilessly for most of her formative years about the difference in her eye color - two slightly different yet equally brilliant shades of green - but standing at her external editing station with the possibility of changing it, she had decided that they were hers, and if people didn't like looking at them, then they could look somewhere else.

It was a marked difference from the way I had edited myself. Even in those early days of my powers, when self-confidence had been a serious issue for me, I had changed myself to make me into something that other people would find more appealing. Yes, my confidence had grown, and the changes had worked. But for the first time, I was being confronted by the fact that the way I now looked was based almost entirely on what I thought other people wanted me to look like, what other people wanted to see, and very little, if anything, about my new physical appearance, had been influenced by what I had liked about myself.

No, there was nothing perfect about this woman in front of me, which is exactly what made her perfect to me.

"I... Errr..." I stammered a little, trying to retrieve my jaw from the floor. "Pete, It's nice to meet you," I said and held out my hand.

She took it with a smile, holding it softly. "Hi, Pete. I'm Faye. C'mon, I'll show you around and let these two VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE get back to doing whatever very important people do." She had almost shouted the 'very important people' part, making sure the teasing comment was heard by both Marco and Uri. My Mentor smiled, a little unease hiding behind his eyes. Uri pretended he hadn't heard her. For someone Marco had referred to as the great Uri, that man seemed like a little bit of a prick.

I smiled, nodded to Marco, ignored Uri, and let Faye drag me off into the crowd.

"Eucchhh," she shuddered as we got out of earshot, casting a look back at the bar. "Those are two men who take themselves way too seriously. It was funny to watch Uri squirm, though. Nice crack about the size thing, by the way." She laughed.

"I don't think he got it." I smiled back.

"Oh, he got it. I just don't think he knew how to act on being called out so quickly. It usually takes people minutes to realize he is a dick! At least an hour to call him one." She giggled and rolled her eyes before turning her attention back to me. "The fact you could squash him like a bug was probably a new one for him too. I'm pretty sure that guy has been the biggest little boy in the schoolyard all his life."

"You don't sound like a fan." I chuckled, following behind her and not failing to notice her hand was still holding onto mine.

"Oh, it's not that. He's helped a lot of us out when we've been in a jam, but he is a man who has been the top dog in an organization that is all about... how big your stick is." Another gorgeous giggle bounced musically from her lips. "We've all been wondering how he would act if you were as strong as we had heard. What makes it worse for him is that you are not like him. You are one of us." She grinned and nodded toward the rest of the room.

"Oh?"

"Aye. You're new." Her eyebrows bounced, and her grin stretched a little wider. It immediately took its rightful place as the most beautiful smile I had ever seen in my life. "There are already enough pompous asshats around, the world doesn't need any more of them. The rest of us have decided we are gonna keep you as one of us. So, we are gonna corrupt the shit outta ya."

Faye led me away from the bar and towards the corner of the room. The bar was laid out in a pretty typical working-mans club fashion. The bar was against the main back wall, but there was a gap on either side of it. One side had some more comfortable leather sofas, while the other side contained some gambling machines and arcade games. Not many, but enough to rob drunk people of their money. In front of the bar was a checkered-style hardwood floor containing the tables and chairs that the rest of the crowd were sitting on or standing around, and beyond them were the bathrooms. The main entrance had brought me in on the right-hand side of the room if you were looking out from the bar, and the doors were tucked into the corner between the comfy-looking corner and the wall holding the bathrooms. Its opposite number, the mandatorily required fire escape, was directly opposite it, halfway along the left-hand wall. The bathrooms didn't take up the whole length of the room, however, barely half of it, and the room widened as the wall ended. That recess contained more seats and two old and heavy-looking pool tables. For the same reason that there are never any windows in casinos, there were none here either. Drinking men didn't need to be reminded of the time. Knowing it was late and wives were waiting for them had the unprofitable habit of making them leave.

It was to the corner with the leather sofas that Faye led me to.

"You know Marco dragged him all this way from Eastern Europe to meet you, don't you?" Faye smirked

"Who?"

"Uri. I'm not sure he knew in advance, but the rest of us have our suspicions. Marco wanted you both to meet," she grinned playfully. "I'm not sure it went quite according to plan."

I cast a look back over my shoulder toward the bar, wondering if I should have been a little more polite. I knew my social graces were not quite what they should have been, nor did I give a shit about that as much as I probably should have. Still, if Marco had wanted me to meet Uri, there must have been a good reason for it. At least a better reason that my cynicism was letting me see. Faye arched an eyebrow at me with a giggle.

"You're gonna have to teach your face to use its inside voice around here, Darlin'." She grinned, latching onto my arm, and guiding me through the last few people and into the corner where the leather seats were. "Subtly is not your strong suit."

Sitting on, standing around, or leaning against these chairs were a group of people, all of whom looked roughly around my age - although, being Evos, their appearance probably had no correlation whatsoever to how old they actually were. What was odd, however, was that they were all sitting in complete silence with their eyes closed. I cast a confused-looking glance at Faye. "Do we... errr... need to call a Doctor or something?"

She giggled a little louder. "Oh, you really are brand new, aren't yeh? They're dueling. Have you not been shown that yet?"

I shook my head, quickly deciding that this was something I should be paying a little more attention to. Between Charlotte's brief and fairly vague description of what dueling was when we first unlocked my city, and Marco's cryptic references to self-defense and combat, I was sort of aware of what dueling was but had never even been able to imagine what it would look like in practice. "Do you wanna watch?" Faye grinned next to me, Giving me a look I couldn't quite translate.

"Umm... Sure. But... How exactly do I do that?"

She squeezed a little tighter around my arm, and her smile grew bigger. "Oh, you and I are going to have so much fun together. All you do is try to connect to one of their minds, and that'll pull you into the mindscape. The two who are dueling will be fairly obvious. Everyone else is usually on a high point in the middle, watching. Just come over and sit with us." She shook herself loose, smiled at me again, then closed her eyes. Within a few seconds, a completely calm, neutral, and vacant look washed over her face.

Is that what I look like when I'm in my bunker? How the fuck hasn't Jimmy noticed that? I bet I look like I'm having a stroke!

I cast another look over my shoulder to the rest of the bar. Marco and Uri were deep in conversation about something that looked fairly serious, but otherwise, the room looked much the same as any other bar would on a Saturday night. Groups of people talking, laughing, and drinking together. The only difference was that everyone, generally speaking, seemed to know everyone else. There were many instances of someone crossing the room, tapping someone on the shoulder, and having a quick chat before moving on, or the shrieking, gleeful squeals and two women hugging each other, clearly not having seen one another for a while and not having expected to see each other tonight either.

No, I was wrong. This was very different from a normal bar. This reminded me more of something like a wedding reception or a family celebration. It was more friendly, more intimate. It was just... more. I smiled to myself, deciding at that moment that I rather liked it.

I shrugged, closed my eyes, and reached out to the closest mind to mine: Faye's. And as it had done dozens of times before, existence melted away into nothingness.

********

The gloriously warm, sun-lit meadow of the mindscape looked the same as it always had done, with a few minor differences. Having only shared the mindscape with one other person at a time before, the group of people setting themselves up on chairs a little ahead of me made it seem positively crowded. The second difference, which I only discovered after a quick look around, was that my city was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, two unfamiliar-looking cities stood on opposite sides of the sprawling field before me. The group was on a slight rise, overlooking the halfway point between the two cities, and were in the process of conjuring up seats and drinks as I approached. Faye had pulled a luxurious-looking, cream leather sofa out of nothingness and immediately made it clear she wanted me to join her on it by patting the empty seat next to her.

I gave her a smile to answer her beaming grin and cast a look over the scene around me as I sat down. The two cities were remarkably similar in both terms of power and size. One looked like something out of a Chaucer novel, while the other looked like it belonged in the revolutionary era, but as Marco had told me, the actual physical appearance of the city was more or less irrelevant. With that in mind, I could now see that both opponents were pretty equally matched.

Of course, not having a clue how any of this worked, I didn't know if that was relevant either.

To my admittedly untrained eye, nothing seemed to be happening. Faye seemed to pick up on my confusion and leaned a little to the side to start telling me what was going on. "Okay, so, you need to think of this as a sport not totally unlike javelin throwing or fencing," she started, "In that, it is a contest that has developed out of a very real form of combat. Javelin throwing is like lobbing spears at an enemy, and fencing is basically sword fighting, right?" She waited for my nod. "Good. Now, Evos have been around forever, long before The Conclave came around. Before we were brought together back in the 1300s, our species were divided up into something like little city-states, small groups of us vying for power and position over the others. This combat that you are about to see was very real back then."

I nodded again, letting her continue.

"So Maria comes along, forms The Conclave, and most of the infighting stops. There are a few holdouts, but, for the most part, we all get to live in peace and learn the words to kumbaya. But just like the Javelin throw and fencing, some people thought that they needed to keep their fighting skills sharp in case The Conclave, and the peace it brought, didn't last. That is how Dueling was born."

"Makes sense," I nodded again. I seemed to be doing a lot of nodding, so I conjured up a beer in one hand and took a sip just to mix it up a little.

"I'm glad you think so," She grinned, leaning over, taking my beer and an equally large mouthful of it before handing it back with a moan. "Oof, you've got the taste of that down to an art! Anyway, the goal is to get into your opponent's city for long enough to theoretically be able to do some damage. The only way to really harm one of us, without the use of military hardware, is to damage or destroy either our Wells, our Palaces, or our Marketplaces. In dueling, we don't want to actually hurt someone, but simply getting inside someone's city doesn't mean anything. There is nothing to stop the owner of that city from just kicking you out again before you get a chance to do anything. So the generally accepted rules say that you either have to be in their city for a whole uninterrupted minute or kill your opponent whilst being within their walls."

"Wait... Kill??"

"Oh, right, yeah... new... Sorry. You can't actually hurt anyone in the mindscape without doing damage to those three targets I mentioned. You can literally do anything you want to someone in here, and there is no lasting damage. I mean, it's not the most comfortable experience in the world, but you're not going to actually harm anyone in dueling." A grin spread over her face. "Watch. Hey Jerry, think fast!"

The man I assumed to be Jerry, given that he answered to the name, turned in time to watch a sleek and dangerous-looking black Baretta fade into being in Faye's hand, pointed squarely at his head. She pulled the trigger. The back of Jerry's head exploded outwards as his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he slumped lifelessly to the floor. The rest of the group just chuckled and went back to their conversations. I jumped out of my seat and immediately started backing away. Faye giggled and held up her hand. "Wait for it."

A few seconds later, Jerry's body faded away. "Oh, for fuck's sake, Faye! I had a mouthful of beer and everything!" I spun around to watch an annoyed-looking Jerry walk over from the spot I had entered the mindscape and slump back onto his seat, reaching for his drink and taking a long pull from it while scratching the spot on his head where the bullet had hit him.

"The more damage you do to someone, the longer it takes them to respawn." Faye turned her attention back to me with a grin. "So when people are dueling, they try to do as much damage as they can to each other and then work on breaching their opponent's walls while that person is out."

"That seems... barbaric." I frowned, taking another look at Jerry as I sat back down.

"Yup." Faye grinned again. "But it is a helluva lot of fun!"

"So... Umm... What are the rules?" I asked hesitantly, my eyes flicking back to the cities. It still didn't look like anything was happening.

"Aside from having to admit defeat if the victory conditions are met, and generally not doing damage to anything inside an opponent's city once you are in there... Ummm... There aren't any real rules. Oh, you have to start the contest on top of your walls. That's about it." I arched an eyebrow. "Okay, think of a normal human sport. There are only ever two types of rules. One set dictates how the game should be played and how the score is kept. Players aren't allowed to move before the whistle, get the ball over the line to score, and so on. The rest of them are to make sure the game is played safely, and none of the players are injured, no holding around the neck, and the like. But here, there is only one point which you can get in any way you like. And provided you don't damage anything inside the other player's city, it's impossible to do any actual harm to your opponent, so... no holds are barred. That is what makes it so much fun."

The concept was starting to dawn on me, and once you overlooked the barbarity of it, it did actually sound like it could be a lot of fun.

"You are playing on more than one plane," Jerry added, now following the conversation. "Fiona there..." He pointed to the city on our left, "...could go in all guns blazing, full offense. But while she is doing that, she is not defending her own city. All Sterling would have to do...." Another nod to the player on the right, "... is knock her out or trap her, and her city is his. So they are both playing offense and defense at the same time, laying traps or setting up automated defenses, or perhaps they are building an army they can send off to the other city. Maybe even forming a hunting party that will seek out the other player. The first one who decides they are ready will then make their first move... and then the fun really begins."

"Sterling," Faye snorted, giving me that indecipherable look again. "That is the most English name ever invented."

"So it's offensive strategy, defensive strategy, and only your imagination to limit how those are implemented. Deception, stealth, distraction, attacks on multiple fronts...." Jerry went on before Faye interrupted him again.

"But, most important is balancing your power. Their wells can only hold a finite amount of power; they can refill pretty quickly, but you don't want to use too much and then run short when you need it most." She said, subtly leaning a little toward me. I nodded but chose not to mention my powerplants and the seemingly endless amounts of power I could generate.

"Exactly," Jerry added, getting more animated as he spoke. "One strategy is to let an opponent burn themselves dry before making your move. Another is to throw everything you have at them early on to use up all their reserves before attacking personally. Then you have the psychological aspect of it..."

I was getting a bit of a headache being bombarded by all this information at once, but Jerry didn't seem to notice.

"The first person to make their move is the more confident, but did the other player finish before you to lull you into a false sense of advantage? Making your move first exposes your hand, but it also gives your adversary less time to counter it. You may see your opponent on their walls, watching the battle, but is that really them, or is it a decoy? Are they really sneaking around you or even tunneling under you to attack where you least expect it..."

"Alright, Jerry," Faye laughed. "Too much information is a real thing. Let the lad just watch. He'll pick it up quick enough." Jerry chuckled and held up his hands with a nod. A few of the other girls giggled softly. I hadn't been introduced to them yet. "What?" Faye asked them with a smirk.

"I think someone has a bit of a crush." The one with the blonde hair said with a smirk of her own.

Faye laughed, looked back at me, and then shrugged. "Aye, you're not wrong. Now shut up. Looks like Sterling is ready to go."

There was a familiarity, or perhaps a comfort, to how close Faye was sitting to me. She wasn't leaning against me, she wasn't touching me, nor was she making any sort of attempt to change that. She was just close. The group had fallen silent, my eyes were the last to join the others on the field, but for a moment, I just looked at her.

I'm not sure I am ever going to be able to tell you how it felt, not in any meaningful way, at least, but for the briefest of moments, I saw something. A possibility. An almost perfect compatibility. Like my mind was trying to tell me that Faye could be something a lot more. The closeness of my relationship with Charlotte, coupled with the romance and intimacy that I would probably never find with my strawberry-blonde friend. The staggeringly good couple that would almost certainly never happen with her could potentially happen with Faye. In that single short moment, a lifetime of possibilities seemed to lay itself out in front of me. It was all so clear. What shone through it all was the realization that I may never, in the rest of my long life, find someone I was as compatible with as I was with Faye.

It was over in seconds, a spark of a feeling of an idea. Then it was gone. I'm not sure if she felt it too, it may have been a coincidence, but as I turned my attention to the battle in front of me, Faye's body inched itself a little closer to mine.

"Hey, quick question," I asked suddenly as a query popped into my head. The crowd all turned to look at me expectantly. "Has anyone ever felt something like wind, or even a breeze, while in the mindscape or in their city?"

A series of "nopes" and shaking heads was my reply. "I'm not sure that is possible," Jerry answered, turning back to the contest ahead of us. "Uri would be the best person to ask, though."

I frowned but said no more, finally turned my attention to the spectacle in the field just as something started to happen around the city on the right.

Sterling was pacing back and forth atop his walls, his hands making all sorts of wild gestures which may or may not have been important. Despite the distance between where he was and my vantage point, I could see clearly as his city gates opened and an army of ghostly figures started marching out. True to the middle-aged aesthetic of the city they were defending, the chainmail-clad swordsmen and archers spread out into formation across the front of the city. There were thousands of them, roaring and chanting intimidatingly and bashing their swords against the insides of the spectral shields as a few dozen catapults shimmered into existence to their rear.

It was hard to explain, but it was like I could almost feel how powerful each individual soldier was. I had no idea how much each of them was worth in comparison to Sterling's overall power levels, but it was like each figure on the field had a value. Those values added together constituted the total amount of Power he was throwing at Fiona's defenses. Without knowing exactly how powerful Sterling was, I couldn't tell if this was a sizable commitment by him or not. But I could immediately see that these forces on their own were not enough to breach Fiona's defenses.

With a yell from somewhere in their ranks, they started to advance. The ground seemed to shake under the weight of each synchronized footfall as the steady march became faster and faster until the formations of ghost-like warriors were charging Fiona's walls at a full run. A series of loud, creaking thuds echoed over the field as the catapults released their payloads; boulders the size of a small car were hurled into the air and towards the city on the left. They crashed into Fiona's walls with what looked to be devastating force, yet her walls did not crumble.

The army was about halfway across the divide between the two opponents when Fiona made her countermove. The thunderous roar of men on horseback, their war cries reverberating into the air, rumbled from behind her city. Thousands of riders came into view as they rounded the corners of her walls and charged towards either side of the formation in the middle, a textbook pincer move that I had used myself in hundreds upon hundreds of strategy games over my life.

The army charging the walls, however, didn't miss a step. The archers stopped, drawing their bows and aiming toward the cavalry charges on either side of them. Some of the swordsmen, their swords suddenly stretching and changing into long spears, moved into defensive positions between their allies and Fiona's horsemen while the rest of the infantry maintained their charge against the walls. The air erupted into a storm of arrows as the archers let loose their projectiles. It was like watching something out of Lord of the Rings as riders or horses were hit by arrows and crumbled violently to the ground under the weight of their own momentum.

Part of the cavalry formation broke away, making for the undefended catapults just as Fiona made her second move; the tops of her walls became a hive of activity as her battlements spawned a line of revolutionary-era cannons. A command was yelled into the air from someone on the walls, and the cannons all fired as one. The formation of men charging the city disappeared in a hail of explosions as the artillery found its mark. Body parts and pieces of broken men were thrown into the air at almost the exact same moment as the cavalry smashed into the catapults.

Sterling seemed to be a little slower in his reactions but still managed to spawn a line of archers on his walls. In only a few seconds, they had taken aim and loosed their arrows, but it was too late. Despite the catastrophic losses being suffered amongst that wing of Fiona's cavalry from the arrows being rained down on them, almost all of the catapults were destroyed. The melee in the center was swinging back and forth in terms of who held the upper hand. The spearmen were making short work of any horsemen who attacked them head-on, but there weren't enough of them to completely defend the archers, and Sterling's numbers were starting to be whittled down.

Another deafening salvo was unleashed from the summit of Fiona's walls, and the center of the brawl exploded. Fiona, it would seem, was happy to sacrifice her own men if it meant destroying the enemy. Despite not being overly enamored by the violent barbarism of the description I had been given, I was enthralled. Even though I had no idea who seemed to be winning, one thing was clear: Sterling's assault had not only stalled, it had failed.

"The tide is turning," One of the men in our group of spectators commented. There were a few mumbled agreements from the others.

"Sterling can still win this. Fiona is an amateur." Someone else said. Faye rolled her eyes as almost everyone turned their attention to the smug-looking guy sipping a beer in a wingback to our right.

"Rhodri, everyone is an amateur to you," She almost growled. "This is, what, her third go ever? Of course, she is an amateur, you fucking cretin. You were an amateur on your third duel too. I should know. I kicked your ass in it!"

"He's right, though," The man sitting next to Rhodri said quietly. "Not about being an amateur, but she has over-committed her power on those cannons and the cavalry charge. She is playing too defensively."

Faye rolled her eyes and then turned her attention back to me. "Rhodri and Neil, here, fancy themselves the next champions. They are a little too smug for my liking."

"Ranked second and third, respectively," Rhodri smiled with a gesture to Neil, indicating that his friend held the third position.

"Who is ranked first?" I asked.

"I am." A heavily accented voice came from behind us. The whole group turned around to see Uri leaning against a tree behind us. "And I am yet to receive a challenge from the man who has to beat me to become champion. Fiona, on the other hand, has challenged me. What she lacks in skill, she makes up for with balls." Uri's eyes left the carnage on the field and fell on Rhodri. "Balls which you seem to lack. But you are right, she has over-extended her defenses. However, your protege has made no move to capitalize on it. Maybe he needs a better teacher."

Rhodri bristled but made no reply as the rest of the group chuckled. I was starting to wonder if this was the Evo equivalent of trash talk.

Uri turned his attention back to the duel as Marco, who had been standing next to him with an amused-looking smile on his face, stepped forward and clapped his hand back on my shoulder, casting a knowing look between Faye and me. "How are you enjoying it?" He asked.

"I think I'm getting the hang of it," I answered with a shrug. Faye shuffled herself a little closer to me.

"Think you would want to give it a go?" He asked with a smile. I suddenly became aware that every eye in our group, even Uri's, were firmly on me.

"I could give it a try," I shrugged. I was aware that I wasn't exactly getting a masterclass from the spectacle in front of me, but the concept seemed fairly simple. My own background as an avid strategy gamer seemed like it would be more than a little relevant too. Faye sucked in a deep breath at my answer, although I couldn't tell if she was impressed by my reply or fearful. She groaned softly and rolled her eyes as Rhodri immediately spoke up.

"I'll duel you," he said with that stupid smug grin on his face. That smugness seemed to be a look he was physically incapable of losing. "You and me. I will make sure I show you how the game is supposed to be played."

"Well, that was nothing if not predictable," Faye rolled her eyes again.

"And I didn't mean right now," Marco added.

"Doesn't matter. The challenge has been made. Do you accept?" Rhodri was almost daring me to turn him down.

I held his eyes for a moment. In the ranks of power of the various Evos I knew, Uri was easily at the top, a very distant second to me. Charlotte and Marco were about the same and shared third place, but both of them paled in comparison to Uri. Rhodri was not too far behind in fourth, and the others, Faye included, were some ways behind them. Rhodri's eyes, however, held a confidence that should have been at least partially negated by the fact that, in terms of power, I could crush him like a bug. Yet, by looking at him, you would think that he had absolutely no doubt he would win.

"If I didn't understand that cheating wasn't really a thing in games with no rules," Jeeves whispered into my mind, "I would say that... gentlemen... has some extra cards up his sleeve."

"Then I guess we know what your job is going to be when we fight him then, don't we?"

I shrugged nonchalantly, not bothering an attempt to knock his confidence. "Why not? I accept. It should be fun."

Rhodri grinned a little wider, leaning over to whisper something to Neil. I didn't hear it, but whatever it was pulled a chuckle from both of them. Faye almost growled before finally bridging the tiny gap between us and leaning against me. "Please, I beg you, kick his ass and wipe that stupid fucking smirk off his stupid fucking face."

I didn't get time to answer as one of the girls in the group leapt to her feet. "She's making her move!!"

The scene in the field was vastly different from the one I had turned away from only a few minutes earlier. All that remained of the melee in the center was a pile of dead bodies and a few wandering, riderless horses. Sterling had spawned another formation of men, almost entirely made of swordsmen, and they were, once again, charging across the field. Fiona's wall-top cannons were making short work of them, just as they had the first time. But it was the movement on her walls that had everyone excited.

Brandishing a scimitar, a long sword that curved and thickened towards its point, once used by Muslim paladins during the Crusades, Fiona vaulted over her battlements, dropped the twenty-odd feet to the floor, landed with a roll, and took off running towards Sterling's city.

For his part, Sterling didn't just look worried, he looked thoroughly exhausted. Fiona was running as fast as her legs would carry her, but apparently, that was not fast enough as an armored horse shimmered into existence behind her and galloped after her. Fiona, in a move that looked straight out of the circus, weaved left, reached out a hand to grab the mount's reigns, and then swung herself up onto its back, kicking the horse to go faster while holding out the sword ahead of her. At the same time, the cannons on her walls disappeared and reformed in a line on either side of her, immediately opening fire against Sterling's walls.

In only a few salvos, the walls started to crumble. There was a yelp from Sterling as, first, his archers were decimated in the explosions, and then the wall collapsed beneath him. His body fell with the rubble.

The look of exaltation on Fiona's face was hard to miss, even from where we were watching. She charged harder, her entire focus locked solely onto the breach in her opponent's defenses, pushing the horse harder and faster... galloping straight for the hole in the wall...

And straight into Sterling's trap.

Faye groaned loudly and slumped back into our sofa, apparently seeing what I did not.

As soon as Fiona crossed the wall, the debris reformed around her. Solid stone walls grew out of the rubble pile on every side and trapped her within. A soft chuckle echoed across the field as Sterling, the real Sterling, faded into sight as he strolled casually across the field, far behind Fiona's static cannons in the center. The frustrated shrieks and curses from Fiona echoed out of her prison as Sterling walked up to her gates, kicked them open, and stepped inside.

I flashed a confused glance at the dejected-looking Faye. "I thought you said it took a little while for someone to respawn when they are killed," I said.

"It does," Jerry answered before Faye had a chance to. "But that wasn't Sterling falling off the wall, it was a decoy. He allowed her to breach the walls so he could trap her inside."

"Wait, so he turned himself invisible and just walked past everything?" I asked in surprise.

"Necessity is the mother of all deception," Marco said from beside me. "It's something to keep in mind when you face Rhodri." He added before heading back to stand next to Uri.

********

I rolled my neck again.

This was a bad idea.

Fiona and Sterling had shaken hands, the former congratulating the latter on a victory well won before they had made their way back to the group. They had barely arrived before Rhodri jumped to his feet and declared that we were going to do this now and started to make his way to the right-hand side of the field.

I had given Faye a look, shrugged, and made my way to the left.

Rhodri's city looked like it had been pulled straight out of a Dickens Novel. Smokestacks stretched towards the sky over the tops of his walls as a thriving, albeit small, industrial-aged metropolis faded into view. Rhodri was quite proud of his city by the look on his face. I had to admit, it was by far the most modern looking of any others I had seen.

If you didn't count my own, that is.

The look on his face changed to one of complete and utter astonishment as I let my city materialize behind me. I could even hear the gasps from the hill where Faye, Marco, Uri, and the others were all watching. Even Uri seemed to stand up straight, marveling at the truly mind-boggling size of my city. Marco beamed proudly, finally having gotten to show off the real measure of my power to an equally impressed-looking Uri. Faye's mouth was hanging open. More and more people were blinking into existence and joining the crowd on the hill as word of the duel spread through the bar. People wanted to see what the fuss was about, and looking up at the sheer enormity of my white marble-esque walls, they really did see it. The fuss, it would seem, was warranted.

As I have said many times before, scale is a hard concept to quantify. But the comparison here was like someone standing on a milk crate and looking up at the Great Wall of China. To say one was larger and stronger than the other didn't quite do it justice.

Standing here though, I suddenly realized that I was grossly underprepared. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

"Jeeves, any ideas?"

"Not really, Sir"

"That is very helpful, thanks"

"I suspect," He started as I looked down at Rhodri's city, "that a large aspect of this game is experience. You have experienced or seen something happen, so you spend this time making preparations to defend against it."

"Cool, okay, let's do that."

"I'm not sure there is a need, Sir."

"Jeeves, now is not the time for being cryptic. If you have something to say, spit it out."

Jeeves sighed dramatically. "Very well, Sir. You have a distinct advantage."

I looked over the parapet and down the ground, a few hundred feet below me. "No shit."

"Not the size of your walls, sir... Well, not ONLY the size of your walls. From what I understand about most Evos, their well is the reservoir from which they draw their powers, the deeper the well and the faster it can be refilled, the more powerful they are."

"Yes, we already knew that."

"Yes, Sir, but in a duel, they are expending power with each move they make, meaning they have to measure the power expended with each move against the total power they have available."

"Right, they can't drain the well faster than it can be filled. Otherwise, they'd run out of power and would be defenseless."

"Precisely." He replied, "But you don't have that problem. You don't have a well, you have power plants. They can produce all the power you could ever need almost immediately. You couldn't empty that power reserve if you tried."

"Ahhh, okay. I'm following. So you are basically saying that I not only have huge walls, I have an almost unlimited pool of energy from which to make my moves."

"Yes sir. That is exactly what I mean."

"So what do you suggest we do."

My subconscious, represented as an aged butler with the sarcasm of a British plumber, shrugged. "I would recommend we do nothing. Use this as a learning experience and counter any moves he makes as he makes them. If we find ourselves able to attack as well, then we do that too. Just see what happens."

"I really would like to wipe that smug look off his face, though."

"I know, sir. But if it helps, he is not looking smug anymore. In fact, he is looking like he knows he is about to have a very bad day."

Jeeves was right. Even across the distance between our cities, I could clearly make out the look of worry on Rhodri's face. It was the expression of a man who was starting to wonder if he had bitten off more than he could chew.

"Well, we best not disappoint him then."

It was another 15 minutes or so before Rhodri made his first move. His gates opened, and an enormous mass of creatures poured out of it. Axe brandishing Minators, sprinting Lions and Tigers, World War II-era jeeps with men on .50 cal machine guns, Sherman tanks, Velociraptor packs, Halo franchise Spartans, Roman Legionaries, and more Civil War-era infantry than I could count. It was like a scene out of Ready Player One.

I rolled my neck again and did nothing.

They were halfway across the field when I decided to respond. With a single thought, A few hundred MLRS artillery platforms materialized in my city, hidden from sight behind my walls. A few seconds later, the sun was blocked out as thousands of rockets streamed overhead and smashed into the crowd charging my city. If Fiona's cannons were effective, these rockets were downright apocalyptic. The ground shook as the advancing... "army"... was blown to pieces. Even though I could tell that each individual soldier within it was significantly more powerful than anything that Fiona or Sterling had put onto the field, I could also tell that their combined strength could have hacked into my wall for a few decades and would barely scratch the smooth white surface. In reality, there was no real reason for me to respond at all... I just decided I could, so I did.

Rhodri frowned but didn't miss a beat. The air suddenly filled with P-51 Mustang Fighter planes, B-17 bombers, Vietnam-style Huey gunships, oversized birds of prey and Dragons. At the same time, a few dozen self-propelled drills, the sort that the Underminer used in The Incredibles movies, appeared in front of his walls and immediately burrowed into the ground. Thousands of First World War-looking infantrymen quickly followed them into the maw.

I had no idea if the relative technological abilities of each individual unit made them more or less powerful, or even more or less effective. It stood to reason that with the physical appearances of cities meaning absolutely nothing, surely the same would apply to these units. There certainly wasn't any power difference between them. But at the same time, I seemed to instinctively understand that despite not knowing if a Vietnam helicopter gunship posed a greater or lesser danger than, say, a very large Eagle, they were certainly more versatile. The gunships could attack from range, and although the eagle could do more damage in a single physical blow, it had to be able to get close to me. Combined together though, one could distract me while the other closed the gap. All the while, the miners would be tunneling their way toward my city.

I instantly knew that they were too deep to be affected by my artillery, but I could still sort of sense where they were. It was like I could follow the bubbles of power as they crawled under the field and toward me. I took a deep breath and flashed my eyes skyward.

In a heartbeat, dozens of rotating cannons, the sort of Gatling guns that are usually bolted onto the sides of Battleships and used to shoot down incoming missiles, sprouted along the forward-facing top of my wall. In a noise that sounded more like a drone than individual shots, they all opened fire at the fleet of airborne enemies approaching the city. Fighters banked hard to avoid the maelstrom, the vast majority of them failing miserably as they, and the bombers they were escorting, were ripped to shreds by the hail of explosive-capped lead that was being thrown at them. The Dragons dove low, possibly thinking that getting below the guns would keep them safe, The gunships opened fire and the eagle launched themselves forward. All of them thinking that splitting up and laying down cover fire would allow them, and their underground friends, to close the distance.

They were wrong.

The sky erupted into explosions, flying missiles, racing rockets, and walls of bullets. The fighters that hadn't been hit in the opening salvo banked back towards my city, only to fly straight into the path of the guns. Wings were ripped from their fuselages, cockpits burst into red-stained puffs of splintered glass, engines caught fire, leaving a black smoke trail in their wake as they nose-dived into the field. Most of them were just blown to pieces and vanished in the debris. The gunships didn't fare much better. Their rockets and missiles raced through the sky, not a single helicopter managing to get off a second slavo before the wall mounted Gatling guns turned their attention to them. Hovering stationary in the air, they had no means of escaping the hail of lead and were torn to shreds. It wasn't even like shooting fish in a barrel, those fish were still able to move. This was like shooting a rusted closed barn door; it was almost impossible to miss.

The walls beneath my feet vibrated slightly as the rockets slammed into it. The explosions were impressive, and looked like they should have shaken the wall to its foundation. But it barely charred the surface. They were the equivalent of throwing spit wads at the walls of Troy.

In only a few more seconds, the field was filled with the burning wreckage of planes, helicopters, and their pilots, interspersed with the colossal corpses of dead and dying dragons... and a lot of blood soaked feathers. Every living creature that had been in the air had been eviscerated by the guns, parts of them laying dozens of feet away from the rest of them, smoldering blood leaking onto the grass, and their groaning death rattles echoing around the carnage. Anything that moved in a manner that looked like it wasn't related to dying, was subjected to another burst of fire from the guns to finish them off. It was almost enough to make me forget about the miners burrowing their way toward us.

Almost.

I was starting to wonder if distracting me from something else had been the whole point of that assault. Faye was on her feet, almost giddy with excitement. A few of the others, including Jerry, were cheering loudly at the ease with which I seemed to be dispatching Rhodri's forces. Uri, however, was frowning. It was clear that he was something of a master at this game and had spotted something I hadn't. The look on his face, along with the cheers, whoops, and applause, were suddenly silenced when the ground in front of my walls fell away into a huge, physics-defying, twenty-foot wide trench which then inexplicably filled with lava.

That outta stop those miners.

I only had to wait for a few more seconds before the unmistakable hiss, and a few bubbles, found their way to the surface. I couldn't see it, but I could almost feel the lava rushing into the tunnels created by the miners. Swallowing up the thousands of men that had followed them in and burning them alive. A sadistic grin curled at my lips as the screams echoed out of the entrance to the tunnel close to Rhodri's walls. The man himself was treated to a symphony of death cries from their battlements.

"Umm, Sir?"

"Yes, Jeeves?"

"Apparently, at least according to the minds of the people watching us, that little trick should have been impossible."

"The lava?"

"Well, yes. But specifically, nobody else seems to be able to directly make any changes to the mindscape itself. They can only make forces to cross it and interact with the field through them. They don't seem able to wield it as a weapon in itself. Jerry is currently hypothesizing that the power needed to dig that trench is greater than the entire reserve that Rhodri possesses."

"That's cool... isn't it?"

"They think you are over-exerting yourself. They think you will be running out of power soon. Uri is telling Marco that it is a common mistake for new players."

"Are they right?"

"About over-exerting ourselves? No, not even close."

"So, it might be time to show them that then. Okay... let's see..."

With a thought, five massive, circular, Alien looking disks meteored out of the sky and smashed into the ground about a quarter of the way into the field. It took a few moments for the dust around the craters to clear before the lids slid open with an ominous-sounding scraping noise, and the first of my offensive forces climbed out of them. From two of them grew the Alien Tripods from H.G Wells's War of the Worlds, or at least what I had imagined them to look like when I had read that book as a child. Towering above the battlefield at a height of at least eighty feet, they immediately started lumbering toward Rhodri's city.

Behind them, from the other three pods, lept enormous Tyrannosaurus Rexes with lasers strapped to their heads.

Jeeves, invisible to everyone but me, just arched an eyebrow and looked at me. I shrugged in reply, a grin pulling at my lips. Subtlety was still not my strong suit. Rhodri, on the other, looked wide-eyed with terror. He frantically started assembling his defenses.

To be honest, neither the walkers nor the laser-wielding dinosaurs were particularly powerful, at least not compared to the power I could have given them. If I had judged it right, taking all five of them down would cost Rhodri about double the amount of power he had spent on all of his combined assaults so far. I had no way of telling how much he had in reserves, and I was more than aware that I was toying with him. I was seeing what he could do before he ran out of power. In terms of measuring his power against mine, that was easy, I could tell he was nowhere near as powerful as I was. But that was a measurement of his maximum power. It was impossible, as far as I could tell, to be able to judge how much of that power he had used, or still had left in the tanks. Still, his frantic efforts to mount some sort of effective defense were fun to watch.

The concept of the duel was pretty simple, but the practice, I was quickly learning, was a little more complex. The power you put into an individual unit was only as important as what that unit was capable of doing. For example, my artillery had been significantly more powerful than Rhodri's miners, but they hadn't been able to hit them while they were underground, just like I couldn't have sent out swordsmen to deal with his bombers. I could have made each of those swordsmen immeasurably more powerful than all of his bombers combined, but they simply wouldn't have been able to touch them and would, therefore, have been useless. Suddenly, the plethora of different units that Rhodri had thrown at me during his three assault waves made a lot more sense. A duel wasn't just about the expenditure of power, it was about intelligently being able to use that power to counter, or overwhelm your opponent. A significant amount of energy could be wasted on making the wrong move at the wrong time.

The question very urgently being asked of Rhodri was how to effectively take down two alien tripods and three technologically adept T-Rexes.

With a wave of his hands, Rhodri spawned a wall of RPG-wielding soldiers to his parapets. Only two of them managed to get off their shots, though, before the whole top of the wall was bathed in what H.G Wells had called 'the heat rays.' I had always imagined these as bright red, flesh-rending beams of energy... and that is exactly what hit the men on the walls. As if like falling dominos, one man after another crumpled under the force of the tripod's weapon. Some of them burst into flames. Some of them managed to take cover for as long as it took for the munitions in their RPGs to detonate and blow them to pieces. Rhodri dove for cover but was too late. He took the full force of the weapon as he scrambled to get behind the battlements of his wall.

His scream sent chills down my spine as his flesh burned away and his blood boiled. In only a few seconds, a pile of charred and disintegrating bones was all that was left of him and his men.

It took another minute or so for Rhodri to respawn somewhere behind his walls, and out of sight, it was from here that he made his next move. This time his gates opened, and hundreds of tanks rolled out into the field, their cannons blazing and each of them aiming for the closest enemy. One of the Rexes lept into the air, crushing a tank below its oversized feet before snapping its head down to rip the turret out of another. With a roar, it tossed the remains of the gun to its side, obliterated six more tanks with a few bursts from its laser, and then charged another. Every tank in the vicinity stopped and concentrated its gun on him. A handful more of the tanks exploded under the Dino's laser, but in a barrage that would have made Rommel weep with pride, they brought the first of my offensive units crashing down.

The other two Rexes tore into the tank formation as the tripods also turned their attention to them as well. Taking down one Rex only seemed to piss off its friends. The Dinos closed the distance, seeming to understand, as I did, that the closer you were to a tank, the harder it was for it to aim at you. Their turrets couldn't turn that fast. A tail swipe smashed into one tank, launching it through the air and crashing it into the city walls. Rhodri, who was carefully scrambling back to their summit, was rocked off his feet. With the tanks desperately trying to avoid the close-up attacks from the Dinosaurs, not to mention the devastating damage caused by their constantly firing lasers, the Tripods were able to pick them off from range. Huge swathes of them burst into flame and detonated in terrifying sweeps of the Tripod's heat rays.

Rhodri took this opportunity to reform the men on the walls, and a hail of rockets was quickly launched from the battlements and smashed into the closest of the walkers. The tripod rocked on two of its three legs, the canopy around its cockpit smashed open and billowing with flames. It collapsed to the side, crushing a few dozen tanks under its enormous weight.

The men on the walls never managed to get off another shot as the remaining tripod repeated the work of its twin and turned the top of the wall into a blazing, uninhabitable inferno, Rhodri, once again, being immolated in the process. Between the Alien Walker's 'heat ray' and its massive legs kicking and crushing any tank it could reach, not to mention the frenzied, laser-shooting Dinos tearing into anything they could get their jaws on, the enemy tank formation was falling apart. But they were doing damage.

Another concentrated barrage brought down the last walker, most of the tanks managed to get out of the way of its falling body this time, but they drove straight into the Rexes in their efforts to scatter and were torn to shreds. By the time the Dinosaurs were eventually killed, only three tanks remained. They turned and headed straight for my city, apparently forgetting all about the artillery that defended the pass. They were quickly turned to shrapnel.

A few minutes later, Rhodri reappeared on the top of his walls. "Is that the best you've got?" He called out challengingly over the charred remains of the battle. His voice, far from being confident or menacing, which I'm sure was the effect he was going for, sounded like it was taking all of his depleted energy to project.

"Hey, I'm an amateur, remember? Do you want something bigger?" I called back. There were a few guffaws and chuckles from the rise where the spectators had been watching in utter astonishment. If they thought the lava pits would have depleted me, my assault had proved them wrong.

"Gimme your best shot, big boy!" The tired-sounding voice echoed across the field.

I cast a look at Jeeves and shrugged. "Are you thinking what I am thinking?"

"Sir, you and I thinking different things is quite literally the definition of schizophrenia."

"Fair enough. Smart Ass"

"I am as you made me, Sir."

I chuckled to myself and rolled my neck... again. A few options rolled through my mind before I settled on one. Godzilla, in all its nuclear powered pissed, off fury, at the highest power I could make him.

Oooh, what about four of them, one for each side... and some of those flying insects from Starship Troopers. They could just chase him around and lop off his head over and over again.

I grinned and rubbed my hands together, "That oughta wipe that smug..."

Something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. A hint of movement in the field to the left side of my city. Godzilla would have to wait. With a thought, I willed myself to the battlements overlooking that part of the field.

"Don't keep me waiting too long, I am at risk of growing old here." Rhodri called out as I moved, a little more of a hint of concern in his voice. I ignored him and kept looking. The field was empty, there was nothing.

And then that nothing moved.

For those of you who have seen the Predator movies, you will know what I mean when I say it looked like the light was bending around a few slowly moving shapes, each of them stalking closer to my walls. It was nothing more than a shimmer, almost like a wobble in the scenery, but the shape of each wobble perfectly matched that of a human.

I scratched my head and peered over the battlements. One of those shapes was using some equally invisible rope to slowly but surely climb up my wall. He was about three quarters of the way up and judging by the speed he was moving, he must have been climbing since before Rhodri had launched his first attack.

I squinted at the shape.

The shape froze and squinted back up at me.

"Neil! I was wondering where you had gone!" I grinned sarcastically. Neil shimmered into existence on the side of my wall, and so did the rope he was tightly gripping onto. He didn't get the chance to answer, though, as, in true Looney Toons fashion, I dropped an anvil weighing several hundred tons onto his head.

His head exploded under the impact, staining the white wall he was scaling in blood, bone and brain matter before the anvil chased the rest of his body to the ground, where it unceremoniously turned him to pulp. Visera sprayed out in every direction. It was like popping a grape, but in truly spectacular fashion.

The blood hadn't even had time to settle when the semi-invisible shapes in the field suddenly became visible: Masses of men, all of them with comically large packs of explosives strapped to their backs. Suddenly their plan made perfect sense.

Two versus one combat, except nobody would ever know the second person was there. It was actually pretty clever. Rhodri would keep their opponent busy, only needing to distract them for as long as it took Neil to climb the walls. That climb would have been significantly faster on normal-sized walls, though. All Neil would have to do, when he and his men made it inside, was place his forces close to the wall, and detonate them. A wall seeming to blow up entirely of its own accord would have confused and disorientated anyone, and that was if the player was not caught up and killed in the explosion. With the wall breached, Rhodri could overwhelm what was left of their opponent and take the victory. Even going as far as Neil combatting the city owner and keeping the coast clear for Rhodri to be in the city for long enough to count as a win.

And not a single shred of their plan was against the rules.

It would probably be considered unsportsmanlike, or at least unfair, but if it meant winning, I doubted either of them cared. A series of gasps and murmurs from the spectators voiced the surprise of the people watching, the cat was well and truly out of the bag now, and both of my opponents knew it. Uri had something like an impressed-looking smile on his face. Faye was positively bouncing. There must have been almost a hundred people on the rise, all of them watching with rapt attention, and not a single one of them looking impressed by the stunt that I had just exposed.

Jeeves acted before I even thought about it. The left-hand field erupted into a cascading barrage of explosions as the artillery rained death down onto the suicide bombers. As each one detonated, it took the men to each side out along with it. In only a few seconds, the entire field was nothing more than a patchwork of smoldering craters. With a sniff, I turned my attention back to my opponent's city as Neil respawned on the wall next to Rhodri. They gave each other a nervous look.

I'm not going to lie, I was pretty pissed by this point. There was no telling how far up the rankings Rhodri had pulled himself by using this stunt. It stood to reason to think that Neil was no different, they just swapped roles for the duels that Neil was supposed to be fighting. That was not what was pissing me off, though. They were using this stunt to make themselves look better at my expense. Beating me, a brand new participant, would have done nothing for their rankings, it just would have given them bragging rights. I'd had a lifetime of that shit already and I was not going to tolerate it this time.

A dangerous, almost feral growl rumbled out of my chest as I leapt over my parapets and out into the field. But unlike Fiona, I was in no rush to cross it. One step at a time, my eyes never leaving my opponents, I stalked towards their city. I had left Jeeves up on the battlements, making sure that even the slightest hint of movement on any of the other three sides of my city was utterly destroyed by artillery fire.

Rhodri and Neil both looked at each other again, then started to wave their hands around. The city gates opened below them, and all of hell poured out of them.

The menagerie of creatures that spewed forth from the gates was as ridiculous and desperate as it was varied. In a single, combined attack, they went all out on the concept that keeping things as varied as they could was the surest way to keep an opponent on the back foot. To make things more interesting, both men spawned mighty looking long-swords into their hands, hopped over their wall, and joined up with their forces in the head long attack.

I didn't even slow my pace.

Something tickled at the back of my mind. A memory that morphed into the inspiration of an idea. In some form of mental acrobatics, my imagination drifted, for the briefest of moments, to the dream I'd had while sleeping with Becky a week earlier. The stark grey tunnels, the beast hunting us. But more specifically, I remembered what I had done to it, I remembered the power growing in my hands and being launched at it with the fullest measure of force I possessed.

The armies of Rhodri and Neil were closing the distance fast. They were already approaching the halfway point as I crossed the one-quarter mark. I straightened myself up, letting the full might of my power channel from the power plants in my city and into me. I could feel it. It started in my chest, like a tingle just below the surface of my skin, a sizzling warmth that grew exponentially with every step I took. It was a conscious effort to direct it all upwards to my shoulder and then down the length of my arm, but after a few more steps I could feel it gathering against my palm. It was like trying to force hydraulic fluid through a system. The energy didn't want to naturally flow there, but that was where it was going, whether it liked to or not.

I could feel my outstretched fingers vibrating, I could feel the skin on my palm heating up, I could feel the energy building there, trapped only by my will. I instinctively knew, without the slightest idea of how, that there was more power in the palm of my hand than my two opponents possessed combined... The screaming Mongol riders, the Valkyries from Flash Gordon, the Star Wars speeders, the charging war Rhinos, the Egyptian chariots, The Dr. Who Darlecks, the varying assortment of angry-looking Pokemon, and the German Panzers... the entire vanguard of the charging armies... were only a few yards away from me.

With a backward swing of my arm, something reminiscent of a softball pitch, I launched every shred of energy toward them.

Everything slowed down. It was like the frame rate of the mindscape dropped to compensate for the massive amount of energy it now had to account for. To everyone watching, be that the hundred or so people on the hill, the armies charging me, my two wide eyed opponents within their ranks, or even to myself, it took a few seconds for the supersonic-traveling blast to cross the hundred yards or so of the field.

It looked like a vaguely yellow glowing bubble with a comet-like corona tailing out from behind it, but it was the size of a house. The force of it ripped open the very air of the mindscape, tearing a deep gouge into the land below it and then letting the air slam closed again after it had passed.

Anything it hit was turned into little more than blood spray and flying body parts. That included the terrified looking Rhodri and Neil. Neither of them had a chance to even change direction before the blast of energy smashed into them, and then smashed through them. Faye had said that the length of time it took for a player to respawn was directly related to the amount of damage done to him, and judging by the slack-jawed look on her face, not to mention the wide-eyed Uri and the maniacally grinning Marco, nobody had ever been subjected to this level of damage in all the time that dueling had been a sport.

The thunder-like crack of the air slamming closed behind the bolt of energy was only drowned out by the deafening crash as it finally hit Rhodris walls. The masonry and stonework that had once been part of his fairly formidable defenses were treated no different than the body parts of the army he had created. The walls were completely obliterated. Chunks of stone the size of Buicks started raining down onto the field, even more peppered the buildings of his city. It was only a fluke of how the mindscape worked that stopped this apocalyptic barrage of falling debris from damaging the buildings that constituted his mind. Simply put, parts of his own mind could not be used to damage other parts without some serious thought being put into it. It was also biologically impossible for a person's sense of security to be used to destroy, say, his ability to breathe.

Either way, by the time the dust and the debris settled, there was nothing left of the entire front facing section of his city walls. Nor was there anything left of the armies that they had sent to attack me. The field was completely silent. Even the crowds on the hill to my right were muted.

A few minutes later, I crossed the threshold and stepped into the ruinous remains of Rhodri's city. It was a peculiar sensation, I was suddenly aware that I could access the very core of the man, everything that made him... him. I had been inside Charlotte's city, but she had invited me and, apparently, that distinction made a difference. I could rob this man of his memories or stop his heart in his chest with little more than a thought... It was a very sobering realization. He was a smug, vaguely-cheating douche, but I didn't want to actually harm him. I had been tempted to have a look around, but with this new realization in mind, I just took a few more steps deeper into his city and stopped to wait.

As if on cue, the man of the moment launched himself from the shadows between two buildings, wildly swinging his longsword. His eyes were wild with fury, his face a mask of desperation. I instinctively held up an arm to block a long, powerful swing and he connected. The blade shattered as soon as it touched my skin. Both of us just blinked at it a few times. His eyes flicked up to mine, a face filled with a mixture of confusion and awe, his jaw slack and his brow unable to decide if it wanted to raise, or furrow itself above his eyes. I shrugged, picked him up by the scruff of his neck, swung his seemingly weightless body around in a wide arc, and dashed his head against the wall of his hospital.

There has to be some irony in that.

Neil, looking significantly more exhausted than his friend, threw himself at me before Rhodri's lifeless body had reached the ground. Too drained to even conjure up a sword, he had picked up a chunk of rock and was making every attempt to introduce it to my skull. I spun around and drove my fist into his gut. It took me a few moments of staring at my arm, I had buried my forearm deep into the man's abdomen, to realize that I was still filtering every ounce of power from my powerplants, and had just used that force to impale a man on my clenched fist. Neil, for his part, looked just as surprised at the situation as I did.

"Well," I mumbled to myself. "That was unexpected."

I felt something hard brushing against the back of my knuckles, grabbed hold of it, and pulled hard. Neil's spine snapped under the force, and was yanked out of his stomach. With a lung crushing gasp, his whole body collapsed in on itself and crumpled to the floor. Once again, silence fell around me. A few seconds later, the city around me seemed to evaporate into thin air. The ear splitting squeal of joy from Faye, followed quickly by the resounding applause from the crowd on the hill, snapped me back to the moment as the meaning dawned on me.

I had won.

Rhodri and Neil both shimmered into existence next to me. Rhodri looking more than a little defeated, but Neil was smiling. He clapped me hard on the back with one hand and shook mine with the other. "Shit, man, that was intense!" He commented breathlessly. "I mean, Holy fuck! That energy ball thing... I've never seen anything like it!"

Rhodri finally turned and offered out his hand. I shook it, noting the complete absence of any smugness on his face as I did. "Good match, Pete," He said with something approaching a smile. "I'd be honored to duel against you anytime."

"Thanks, guys." I smiled back, rolling back the flow of energy still being pushed into my chest. "You were right, that was fun." My sentence was cut short by Faye almost barrelling me over. She had sprinted as fast as her legs could carry her from her place on the rise and had thrown herself at me in prideful joy. A fair-sized crowd, including Marco and Uri, was not too far behind her.

"OhmygodohmygodohmyFUCKING GOD!!!" she breathed excitedly into my ear as she hugged me tightly. "That was fucking INCREDIBLE!! Shit, I know I told you to kick his ass, but Jesus-fucking-fuckballs!..." She was interrupted by the rest of the crowd joining us, a few of them offered their commiserations to Rhodri on his loss, but significantly more of them eyed him suspiciously, wondering if Neil's assistance was the reason he had beaten them in the past.

All of them congratulated me, though, the vast majority making some sort of complimentary remark about the resounding, unequivocal style in which I had done it. There was a buzz of excitement in the air, as if everyone there realized that what they had just witnessed, if not something remarkable, was certainly something special. Marco finally pushed his way through the crowd and found his way next to me. "Nicely done, my apprentice." He beamed proudly.

"Umm. Thanks Obi Wan." I smiled back, Faye chuckled a little louder than she meant to at the look of confusion that momentarily washed over Marco's face.

"Jesus, it's a Star Wars joke." Uri said as he pushed past a few people to join us. "You need to get with the times. But, I agree, that was very impressive. Perhaps I judged you too soon, my friend. We will let you enjoy your victory, but once you are done, we should talk." With that, he held out his hand, and, after I had shaken it, he offered something of a respectful nod and then he and Marco faded out of the mindscape.

********

It had taken over an hour for things to settle down in the mindscape. There had originally been a few more duels scheduled after ours. Allowances had been made for the fact that Rhodri, in his haste to battle with me, had skipped the queue. One of those duels was supposed to have been between Jerry and Neil, but between the excitement of my victory, the exhaustion of Neil after his defeat and Jerry's discovery of Neil's tactics, they had both decided to postpone it for another time.

Gradually, however, the crowds began to thin. I wondered, briefly, what it must have looked like to the bar staff of the club, trying to serve a room full of people, all of whom were standing perfectly still and silent with their eyes closed. Whether in groups, or individually, the people in the mindscape started to leave, heading back to the bar to continue the party. Finally, only Jerry and Faye's blonde friend remained with Faye and I.

There was clearly more than a friendship between the two of them, maybe not something as typical as a full-blown, official relationship, but there was definitely something. The slight glancing touches, the teasing smiles, the lingering gazes, all of it added up to a familiarity that seemed to be burgeoning, if not quite fully developed. But as we stood there, the last of the gushing congratulations and amazed remarks being thrown my way, I couldn't help but notice that something similar was starting to happen between Fay and I as well.

That sense of comfort and compatibility that I had felt on the rise had been forgotten during my duel with Rhodri and Neil, but it had reannounced itself with a passion as soon as she had tackle-hugged me after my victory.

Just like the feeling of compatibility, it was a very hard thing to describe, even to myself, let alone explain. There was just something about her. I found myself inexplicably mesmerized by her fiery red hair, the way her cheek dimpled when she smiled, and the way that her eyes seemed to dance and sparkle magically when that smile reached them. There was something about the way it felt having her close to me, like she belonged there. What was more inexplicable was that I could tell that she felt the same way about me.

I should be clear here. Faye was not human, just like I wasn't. The gifts that I had given myself to make girls swoon at the mere sight of me, the ability to wet panties at 50 paces and have them drop almost on command, simply didn't affect her. Nor, for that matter, did it affect any of the other Evo women in the bar. I didn't know if it was because they also had power, or if it was a more complex matter of brain chemistry, but Faye was completely immune to the changes I had made in my internal editing station.

Yet she wanted me. She was as drawn to me as I was to her. She was gorgeous, she was beyond beautiful, there was absolutely no denying that, but it was more than looks and attraction. This was more like gravity. There was a force that I could neither see nor understand, pulling us together. It was more than that 'lightning in a bottle' effect I had felt with the other women in my life too. With them - possibly with the exception of Olivia - I had seen them, thought they were hot, and that was all it was, from that moment onward, they were throwing themselves at me, either figuratively or literally.

With Faye, it was slower, yet it seemed cumulative. Like each passing moment in proximity to her added something more to the whole. What was more confusing, at least to me, was that neither of us seemed to be doing it intentionally. With human women, I was influencing them to act out on the sudden, often overwhelming attraction they felt towards me. It was me affecting them. This wasn't that, this was different. But the lingering gazes and subtle touches coming from Faye told me that I was not the only one who was feeling it.

Jerry and his blonde companion were making small talk that I was in no way paying attention to. Faye was smiling politely and nodding along but she seemed to be just waiting until they left. Finally they did, saying something about getting us a drink to celebrate my victory and they both faded out of the mindscape. Faye and I just stood there for a moment in complete silence, her fingers brushing lightly against the back of my hand.

"Well, this is unexpected." she sighed softly.

I arched an eyebrow and looked at her, just in time for her eyes to turn to mine. "What is?" I feigned ignorance.

She smiled. That bright, almost luminous glow spread across her face. "Oh, that's right. You're still new. You feel it too, don't you? This... pull toward each other. This thing we've got going on." I nodded, swallowing with a gulp.

"I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that nobody has bothered explaining to you how our..." she blushed a little, her eyes faltering as they dropped to look at something on my chest. "Erm... how our... Mating practices go, have they?"

I shook my head. I would have gulped again but my mouth was suddenly very dry.

"It's complicated." she smiled, taking a deep breath and turning her body to face mine, one of her hands reached out to take mine and her eyes locked onto it as my fingers curled around hers. "The important part, though, is that we don't necessarily choose our partners. At least not in the manner that a human would recognize. With us, it's more like instinct. Animals have the instinct to migrate south for the winter, or the urge to to travel in herds, hunt in packs, or return home to give birth. It is not really a conscious thought, it is a product of aeons of evolution. It is similar with us. Our minds, for reasons we don't fully understand, seem to find us the perfect mate. Physical attraction, genetic compatibility, even geographical proximity, they are all factors, but don't really explain it..." Her eyes slowly rose to meet mine. "It is two souls finding their perfect counterpart in each other. It is almost spiritual."

"Is that why I feel so..."

She nodded. "Yes, I feel it too. It was small at first, I felt it when you arrived, it made me approach you at the bar. But bit by bit, it has been growing to the point where it can't be anything else. Normal relationships, ones based on personality or physical attraction, are perfectly normal between Evos. We seek companionship as much as any normal human does. Those are a dime a dozen. But this..." her fingers curled a little tiger around mine. "... this is pretty rare. Some Evos go their whole lives without experiencing it, some are drawn to someone but find that person isn't drawn to them. To find something so mutual and so... Strong... is fairly uncommon."

"What does it mean?" I asked after clearing my throat.

Faye licked her lips, her eyes holding mine with something that was approaching nervousness. "It means..." she swallowed hard, "That our bonding process is starting. It means that our lives will become linked... It means we will be... mated. I mean, if you want to, that is?"

I wanted to. The more I listened, the more sense it made, and the more Jeeves seemed to use his innate understanding of my mind to fill in the blanks. There was a connection of such a deep level that everything else, all the other women in my life, any other men in hers, would be inconsequential. They simply wouldn't matter. We could continue relationships with them or end them as we saw fit. But Faye and I would be together on a level that a human simply wouldn't be able to comprehend. We would become two halves of the same... one. We would be one. The simple insufficiency of words like 'love' when describing what would grow between us would be like describing World War II as a bit of a scuffle, or a thermonuclear bomb as a pretty big firework. A whole new vocabulary would need to be invented just to give any sort of meaningful description to what had started to blossom between us.

I must have been standing in awkward, stupid-looking silence for longer than I reaslized, because the nervousnes in Fayes eyes had exploded and was now approaching something close to embarrassment. She opened her lips to speak, to back away from the moment, to make a joke about it, to say it wasn't as big a deal as we both knew it to be.

I silenced her lips with my own.

There was a squeak of surprise, a moan of acceptance, and then she melted into me. Her arms wrapped around my shoulders, her mouth parted to allow my tongue entry, she purred happily into my lips as she started to kiss me back. This wasn't sexual, this wasn't even passion; this was a melding of two halves. This really was a bonding. I knew it would take weeks, perhaps even months for the bonding process to complete. But for the rest of our long lives together, we would always remember this as the day we found each other.

Time itself submitted to the power and the meaning of the moment, to the depth of the kiss. In the fields on either side of us, both our cities shimmered triumphantly into being. Once we were bonded, they would become permanently joined, intermixing, sharing the characteristics of the other's. We couldn't share power, we couldn't share bodies, our Palace, our marketplaces, our powerplants and Wells would always remain our own, they had to, we would always be two physically distinct and separate beings. But in every single other way, we would be more than joined. We would be merged.

Her city started to take on the characteristic blue glow of mine. A small lake grew in one of the massive parks within my city, a tribute to the water that played such an important part in the life of a woman who had grown up loving the sea. Every single part of me was open to her, in an even more profound way than Rhodri had been earlier, or Charlotte had been before that. Every single part of me opened to her in return. I could spend days pursuing the story of her life, getting to know her on a level that would make even Charlotte feel like a stranger. But there was no rush, we had all the time in the world to learn about each other. Right now, there was only the timeless, soul-merging kiss.

It would be an understatement of biblical proportions to say that, for the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to start falling in love with someone.

I knew that for both of us, our old lives had ended. The old Pete had died in that car crash, the new Pete was being sacrificed on the altar of 'more' with this kiss. From tonight onwards, the world would have the better Pete. We would face the world together, we would love, laugh and live together. And all of hell would not be able to protect the man who ever hurt my Faye.

To be continued...

********

Yup, as you may have guessed from the name of this chapter, this is the end of NewU pt10... (a)

That's right, there is still a lot more to get through and still so much more for our hapless hero to experience on this auspicious evening. But with a desire to keep to some sort of schedule, not to mention a vague attempt to keep my chapters at a roughly consistent size. I have decided to split this one into two parts in order to tell the story properly.

As I have mentioned before, this is the first chapter in what we can call the second 'book' of the NewU series and the story will be taking a very different path than it has done before now. But more about that will be revealed in the final part of this chapter. Those of you who have left comments applauding the story-over-sex qualities of my work will not be disappointed and many of the small, seemingly insignificant details that have been given throughout the first book will start to become more important.

It is a journey I am very much looking forward to taking you on.

As always, please feel free to leave your comments on the story, us authors do thrive on feedback.

Thank you all for your continued support of the NewU series. It would never have survived its infancy without you and I can only hope you continue to enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it. Lit has the best and most supportive reader's community that I know of. You are all awesome.

Nova.