So, wind equals danger... got it.

The sun beat down, the breeze kissed cooly at the warm skin on my face and ruffled my hair as I stood atop the mighty curtain walls that ringed my city. Across the vastness of the mindscape, I could see the enemy armies approaching. This wasn't the frenzied onrush I had seen during the duels at the party; there was no menagerie of beasts and cartoon characters, no competitor was standing on the city walls opposite mine, wildly waving their hands around, and there was no watching crowd. This was a battle to the death, not a spectator sport, and the thirteen armies were slowly, methodically advancing toward me. All to that backdrop of that almost pleasant gentle breeze.

No, not toward me... toward us.

So why, then, was there a howling storm when Sterling attacked me on his own, but now there is only a gentle summer breeze when thirteen of these fuckers are here? Fucking metaphors are never gonna make sense to me.

"You think Toussant could pick a few of them off for us while we hold our ground?" I asked nobody in particular as I squinted out into the distance.

"Unlikely," Uri answered as he rolled his neck and loosened his shoulders, looking like a champion prizefighter about to step into the ring. "There is too much power in the mindscape; the time dilation effect has to stretch to contain it all."

"It... what?"

Jeeves nodded. "He's right, Sir. Although it is technically possible that Toussant will be able to help us out, time is running at a rate of approximately one second in the real world for every four and a half hours in here."

"Shit, so even if he shoots one of them, we would have to wait in here for an hour or more just for the bullet to actually hit them."

"That's right," Uri nodded as he started to pace back and forth behind me. "And these things rarely last that long. We must hold them here."

I frowned out at the approaching armies. Every time I had been in the mindscape with another person, their city had shimmered into existence a few hundred yards away from mine. It would only take a few minutes at a gentle jog to traverse the gap between my walls and theirs. But the concept of the mindscape 'stretching' to accommodate the power being held within it - mine and theirs - seemed to be an apt one because there must have been two or three miles of open space between my city and the armies advancing on it. It's not like that distance made a huge amount of difference in terms of seeing them; simply focusing and concentrating a little let my eyes 'zoom in' - for lack of a better term - and see the enemy with all the nerve-wracking detail I'd always done.

"So you have done this before?" I arched a hopeful eyebrow at Uri. I held all his memories, but it was not like having access to my own, where I instinctively and naturally knew things. His was more like a library; I held the knowledge, but I would have to consciously look through them to find what I needed. I simply hadn't had the chance to do that since I had drained him.

"Nope," he shrugged back.

Faye giggled. It was an oddly out-of-place sound, given the circumstances.

"Well, that's helpful." I rolled my eyes. If Uri's need-to-know mentality had come with him into my mind, this was going to be a very long.... Eternity... or, I supposed, looking out at the oncoming hordes, a mercifully short one.

"We have sort of trained for it, though," he offered as if reading my thoughts. "The conclave would do something similar to what they are doing to take down another Evo if they had broken the law. But..."

I waited for him to finish, then turned and arched an eyebrow at him when nothing further was added. "Dude, seriously? But what??"

"Well, I was over there in my training," he nodded out at the enemy with a shrug. "I was always one of the people training to take down the errant evo. I've never been on this side of the fight.

"Well, that's better than nothing. Any ideas?"

Uri hummed thoughtfully and gazed out onto what would no doubt soon become a battlefield. "All I can tell you is how we did things in the Conclave, but it is safe to assume that they would do things differently because they would have always planned to fight other Evos, and most of them would have learned their combat skills with us." He had the decency to continue after only a short pause and before I felt another urge to prompt him - or punch him - again. "In the Conclave, we would combine forces into a few, much larger armies. One person would be in charge of attacking from range, another would be responsible for trying to storm the walls, one would try to tunnel beneath, one would try to sneak past you like Neil did in the duels, and so on. One large multi-faceted attack, and maybe three or four of those armies all hitting from a different direction. It made countering it very, very difficult."

Yeah, okay, that did sound kinda terrifying. It would only take one of the thirteen Evos to get into the city unopposed or unnoticed to do a truly staggering amount of damage.

"The problem is," he went on, his eyes still fixed on the enemy. "They are not doing that, at least not on the scale that we did. The only thing I can think of is that they mean to surround your city completely and hit it from all sides at the same time, probably from range, then charge your walls, all while undermining or sneaking as well. But instead of three or four concentrated forces, they have them all completely spread out. But there does still need to be a focal point."

I ground my teeth again as he stopped talking, but Uri wasn't paying attention to me. He was squinting harder out toward the horizon. "Uri, I swear to fucking Kermit! If you don't start talking, I'm gonna..."

"Thirteen armies throwing themselves at the same time sounds dangerous, but in reality, it's no different from them attacking one at a time; you could just pick them off. Divided, their forces still couldn't breach your walls. In fact, looking at them, I doubt most of them would even be able to break my old walls. The whole point of doing this is to combine their power to a level that could beat you. And there has to be a focal point, a commander, whatever you want to call it, around whom all that power is concentrated. He is the one we need to find and kill."

"What?? How does that make sense? How does it make a difference if thirteen of the fuckers are attacking all over the place or in a single spot? There are still thirteen of them!"

"Really?" Uri turned to me. "Which is the highest number, five or one?"

"Fucking hell, seriously?" He held my eyes. "Five, obviously!"

"Five?" repeated himself, holding his hand up with his palm facing me, "or one?" he clenched his fist.

I blinked at him. The wheels were starting to turn in my head a little better now. "Okay, so we have to look for the guy who seems to be in charge, the one with all the power. And then what? We kill him and...?" I waved my hand out at him, gesturing for him to fill in the blanks.

Uri opened his mouth but paused. I could almost see that the realization that he was having to teach me this shit on the fly was just dawning on him, and I was not going to be the easiest student; plus, given the armies still bearing down on us, time was a factor.

"Do you play chess?" he asked and waited for me to nod before continuing. "You need to think of their commander as the king, as in, taking him out is the way to win. Except in this case, taking him out doesn't automatically win you the game, but it will shatter any efforts they are making to... be 'one.'" He waved his fist at me again. "Taking out the others will be quite simple without him coordinating it all."

"Ohh, so he is like the command center for an army?"

"Yes, sort of." Uri nodded. "He doesn't just give out orders, though; he regulates the flow of power as well... every shred of energy they use comes from him, It's like he controls their combined wells. So there are two targets." He stepped forward to look out at the enemy and nodded to the oncoming masses. "Most of those are decoys; they have enough power in them to make a lot of noise, do a bit of damage, and generally keep you busy. But one or two of them will contain the combined weight of power of all of them. That is the danger. The king, the commander, is the one feeding the power to that army. If you destroy the powerful army, the king has to start again, but if you kill the king, then all of them do."

"And while they are all disorientated from the shift in power and getting themselves set up again..." I started to smile, finally getting the idea of what was going on.

"We unleash holy hell on them." Uri smiled back.

I nodded and turned out toward the field. "Okay, so how do we find the king?"

"With great difficulty," his smile turned into a frown almost immediately. "They know that he is their most valuable asset, so like the king on a chessboard, they need to defend him. But if they make that defense too obvious, they are essentially shining a big spotlight on him and highlighting our target for us. The King is out there," he gestured again to the enemy, "but he is hidden in plain sight. We need to draw him out."

"And how do we do that?"

"To borrow a phrase from the lovely Faye..." he almost bounced his eyebrows. "We fuck shit up."

I blinked at him.

Faye giggled again. I glanced at her standing next to me, bouncing with what looked a lot like excitement on the balls of her feet. She looked like she couldn't wait to get at our attackers. She seemed to know what my look meant as she met my eyes. "What? These are tha bastards that shot me in ma face! An' they're picking on ma man! Yeh just try and hol' me back, Sonnie!"

I rolled my eyes but couldn't help but smile at my warrior goddess.

"Alright, Jeeves?" I turned to the quiet, aged-looking butler. "Any idea how powerful they are compared to us?"

No, the "us" in that question wasn't lost on me either. This was more than just a fight for my own safety.

"I'm afraid not, Sir," he replied with a calm shake of his head. "They were blocking the entire time we could sense them in the real world, and with all the manipulations and redirection of power in the mindscape, not to mention the heavy use of decoys. It is hard to get an accurate idea of what we are dealing with. It is safe to say, however, that they should be considered a potent threat."

"You do have a few things going for you, though," Uri added as I turned back toward the approaching armies. They were at least a mile closer than when they had started by now.

"Oh yeah?"

"First of all," Uri went on as he nodded. "You are ridiculously powerful. I don't think anybody, not even you, really understands how powerful you are. You didn't just drain my power and download my memories when you performed the last rites on me; you downloaded my entire consciousness. Do you have any idea of how much power that would have taken?"

I didn't. I didn't have the first clue. I didn't even realize I had done it until a few minutes ago.

But Uri went on. "The fact that you were not only able to completely undo all of the Praetorian's defenses against you but do it easily and secretly is a testament to that. They are working on the assumption that you are a normal, albeit very powerful Evo. I can tell you categorically that you are something else entirely. Your power plants alone make you far more dangerous than they have accounted for. You can produce and hold more power than I can fathom, and you can regenerate it as fast as you can expend it. In a situation like this, that makes you lethally dangerous."

"Yeah, but surely Marco told them that... although based on how these fuckers were treating me, I'm not sure he understands the details"

"I don't think he does. In his defense, he was only here for an hour or so. I have been in your city for three months, and even I am struggling to comprehend the full measure of your power, so let's not judge the old boy too harshly for his mistake."

Faye, Jeeves, and I all just blinked at him.

"I grew up watching movies about the Battle of Britain. I've always wanted to call someone an old boy or a chap. It's a very British thing to do. This felt like a good time." he shrugged. "But anyway, they have underestimated you at every step, so it's fair to assume they are about to do it again. If you play to that assumption, you can lure them in close and then strike when they least expect."

"Okay, that's as good a plan as any. Anything else"

"Yup." he let the grin on his face grow a little wider. I must admit, Uri looked fucking weird with a grin. "They don't know about us!"

"Marco knew about Faye."

"No, he didn't," Uri's grin somehow grew a little wider. "Marco thinks that Faye is an echo, a glorified city ghost, a byproduct of your bonding. She isn't. You have downloaded her, too."

"What is the difference?"

"We can wield your powers; an echo can't." He rubbed his hands together. "They think they are dealing with just you. Instead, they are gonna find three of us here."

"Four," Jeeves corrected.

"You can...?" Uri's eyes widened before that grin returned. "Oh, these fuckers are about to have a really bad day."

"Careful, Uri." I chuckled. "You are running the risk of making me like you."

Uri barked out a laugh and, like Faye, started bouncing almost comically on the balls of his feet

"Alright," I huffed out a breath and stepped closer to the edge of the parapet. "Let's get this party started with some good old-fashioned psychological warfare."

********

Sound is a physical force. When emitted with enough energy, it causes the molecules in the air to vibrate, even to move. With enough power, it can form a wall of air not dissimilar to the shockwaves given off by explosives. That is why you feel it in your chest when you stand too close to a concert speaker or why your eardrums can be damaged by loud enough noises. It isn't just an excessive vibration but a change in the air pressure caused by those vibrating and moving molecules.

So when the wall of sound hit the enemy ranks hard enough to knock some of them off their feet and make the rest of them stumble backward, it must have come as something of a surprise to the Evos controlling them.

My voice, with all the power of a sonic boom, echoed over the field in a wave of incomprehensible power that shook the very ground on which my enemy stood             

"TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE PRAETORIANS.

"YOU ARE HEREBY CHARGED WITH HYPOCRISY, TREASON, AND GENERAL FUCK-MUPPETERY!!!

"ONE OF YOU KILLED MY PARENTS AND ATTACKED MY FRIEND'S MIND. AND IF YOU DIDN'T, I'M GONNA BET YOU KNOW WHO DID. I INTEND TO FIND OUT WHICH ONE IT IS, AND THEN YOU ARE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.

THAT IS ALL!"

The casual flippancy and general lack of concern in my voice, especially for the ending, made it sound like I was in a Walmart calling out the day's discounts. I was tempted to finish with "Have a nice day," but considering the plan that was starting to form in my head, their day - if all went well - would be a very short-lived endeavor.

The hordes that were advancing across the lush, green plains of the mindscape were nothing like the ones that had graced the field during the duels. There were two factors at play there that simply didn't exist here. The first was experimentation; it was a duel, they were practicing. And although I could argue that Sterling was a manipulative bastard who was far more experienced than anyone imagined when he fought Fiona, Fiona herself, Rhodri, and Neil were all trying new things to see what worked for them, or at least perfecting the tactics they had developed. The second factor was a simple matter of trying to one-up each other in terms of imagination. Seriously, Rhodri had sent Pokemon at me. It was funny, and in hindsight, it was a bold move, but it had no place in a real battle. It felt like a little game, seeing who could summon and then use the most obscure units in their armies.

The contrast between that and here could be summed up in a single word.... Uniformity. There was no showing off, there was no imagination in the ranks, and there was no room for experimentation. Every single unit was the same in all thirteen armies. There were World War 2 era infantrymen, there were tanks that looked a lot like German Tigers, and there was artillery which, under normal circumstances, would need to be hauled around by trucks but seemed to be perfectly capable of moving on their own here. At the back of each formation, just visible beyond the thousands of men in front of each of them, were the thirteen Evos whom I had to kill.

The sound of my voice smashed into them with the power of a sonic blast.

The effect was noticeable, and it was immediate. I may not have been a master at the art of war or psychological warfare, but a simple move like that only needed to have a simple effect. I was alone, at least as far as my enemy was concerned. Even though almost half of the original number of Evos present in the meeting room were now trying to deal with the inexplicably brainwashed Toussant in the real world, there were still thirteen of them. I should have been scared; I should have at least been nervous. Instead, I was not only confident in my ability to win, but I was practically daring them to attack me. I was threatening them. To their confused little minds, this was not how the script was supposed to go, and I could see the thirteen commanders of the thirteen armies, Evos, one and all, starting to cast worried glances amongst themselves. Their advance slowed considerably, that first inkling of fear was starting to set in, the first shred of doubt in their minds, and the first shadow of that single realization started to darken their thoughts... I was not who they thought I was.

Good. I wanted them scared. I wanted them nervous. I wanted them to question everything. Confident men charged the gates of hell, knowing their buddies were right behind them. Nervous men hesitated.

And hesitation would be their undoing.

Uri smiled and rubbed his hands together. "Nicely done," he nodded. "May I?"

Uri had a plan, and he had the experience to back it up. I had nothing. I was happy to let him take the lead. "The floor is yours, Maestro."

His grin grew. This was a moment he had been waiting for for years, the chance to fight on an equal footing with his enemy. Thirteen traitors were amassed against us, and he was chomping at the bit to dish out his own brand of justice. "Jeeves, your job is to guard the wall, as much of it as you can, stop them by any means necessary, slow them down if you can't stop them. Do what you need to do."

Jeeves offered him a small nod but said nothing.

"Faye, you are defending the inside of the city. You deal with anyone who gets past Jeeves."

"Aww," she almost whined. "I wanted to fuck up some bad guys!"

"Oh, you will get your chance," Uri grinned at her, "There is no way Jeeves can hold them all; some will get in, we're going to let them. Your job isn't just to kill the ones that do, but to make a mess, to send a message, make an example of them, and make it slow. We need them trapped in here and not out there fighting. You get to be creative with how you fuck them up. I want every bastard who gets past these walls to think he is walking into hell. Go nuts!"

Faye's frown vanished in an instant, replaced with an almost evil, wickedly intentfull grin. "Oh, now that I can do"

Uri then turned to me. "We..." he said, his eyes sparkling with the heat of battle. "We go hunting!"

I grinned back at him and nodded before looking out at the field. This was the part of the plan I had been most nervous about; this was where it could all go wrong. The forces massed against me could be enough to break me; they could be enough to beat me. My last moments on earth could have been filled with the contemptuous pain of my body being broken and my mind being destroyed; all played to the agonizing symphony of defeat.

But it wouldn't be today.

Today was not my day to die.

The job of a soldier was not to die for his country but to make the other bastard die for his.

And I was going to kill every single last fucking one of them.

********

Nathan Beauregard, a West Virginian by birth, was only a few years old when the Great War of 1812 ended and had been awakened by Marco only a decade after that. He lasted the whole of eighteen months in the conclave before being picked up by the Praetorians. A middling rank, he detested the humans whom he blamed for the death of his father and older brother in that war and the death of three grand-nephews in the Civil War that followed some fifty years later. Humanity was chaos; the Praetorians gave order.

Over the century and a half since those fateful days, he had learned to not only embrace the order that his organization fostered, but to rely on it. Order was predictable, and predictability bred power.

So, to say that the last few minutes had rocked him to his core was something of an understatement. Inquisitors were incorruptible; that was the very core of their being, the very essence of their function. They were not only completely immune to the manipulations of other Evos, but were unflinchingly loyal to the cause. So seeing Toussant, a man the rank and file of the Praetorians referred to as "the enforcer," smash into the conference room and start mowing down his own brethren was not only surprising, it could only have been the product of Evo manipulations and was, therefore, impossible.

Not very unlikely, not highly irregular, not just something that hadn't happened before, but actually, literally, impossible.

It was the equivalent of a car winning the Nascar championship, only to find that it was being driven by a blind hedgehog, with a gas tank filled with coffee and goat piss and on wheels made of string cheese... and it had driven every race backward. There were so many reasons why it shouldn't have happened that trying to explain how it had happened was doing a pretty good job of blowing his mind.

And then there was the gargantuan scale of the task ahead of him. He glanced up again at the walls; even from this distance, about two miles away, they were enormous. More than that, they were strong, very strong, maybe even too strong. He had heard of people able to make their walls look formidable, but more than a cursory examination of them showed them to be no more or less powerful than they had been before. These walls were not like that; he could feel the power coming from them.

More curious still were the markings on the outside of them. A patchwork of lines and blocks of blankness on the otherwise pristine surface, swirling patterns and shapes, something that looked like it could have been a tattoo... if it wasn't, you know, attached to a 150 ft wall. The tattoo part seemed important. But his mind was too preoccupied with the part of it that looked like a dragon's face. It was massive, taking up the entire front edifice of the colossal walls. Smoke, or at least the drawn pattern of smoke, billowed out of his fang-lined jaws, the hulking mass of shoulders, poised ready to pounce, and huge wings stretched out for hundreds of feet in each direction. All of it framed the massive, evil-looking horned head. The eyes of which seemed to be staring right at him.

And they looked fucking furious!

They looked dangerous.

He somehow managed to pull his own eyes away, glancing to his left to pick out the face of his friend. Dai Rhys was a Welshman. He had the accent, the humor, the singing voice, and the healthy dislike of the English that went with it. He had been in the cell next to Nathan's when they had undergone their own initiation and had been brought into the Praetorian fold together. They had been working together ever since. Over a hundred years. And this was far from the first time they had been tasked with destroying the mind of an uncooperative Evo.

Dai cast a glance back at him, and their eyes met over the hordes of men and machines of war between them. Nathan could see his own nerves and confusion reflected back at him in the eyes of his friend.

Twenty Evos was, by any stretch of the imagination, a huge number to take down a single man. But Marco had insisted that this Pete character was the most powerful Evo the world had ever known. Nathan had scoffed at the time; he had rolled his eyes, but - as always - he had carried out his orders. The most Praetorian Evos it had ever taken to overpower another had been four. Marco had insisted that at least ten would be needed. The Prefect, Tiberius, decided that number should be doubled, just to be sure. Twenty Evos to take down one was, in Nathan's humble opinion, a truly staggering level of overkill.

Okay, only thirteen of the twenty had made it into the mindscape after Toussant's inexplicable Rambo routine, but that was still thirteen of them. When he had marched his army out of his city gates, he had almost been smiling at how easy it was going to be to lay low the man who dared defy the last memories of the Roman Empire.

Now, looking between the size of those walls, the look on his friend's face, and those burning, furious eyes, he wasn't so sure.

The plan was the same as it had been for every other one of these missions, just on a larger scale. There were essentially three elements to it. The first was distraction; ten of the thirteen armies were spread out around the entire city, spaced apart yet suitably grouped up to make them, in fact, look like there were thirteen of them. With no variation between the aesthetic styles of the armies, the only thing distinguishing one from the other was the little gaps between them. Move those gaps around a little, and the guy on the walls would just assume that all thirteen armies were where he could see them. Dai was one of them, and Nathan was currently standing behind part of his army, making it look like he was in command of this section of the line. The job of his friends, his nine counterparts, and the masses of men before him was to keep the target busy. Throw enough pain and abuse his way to get him to focus on them.

The second element was the real attack. That was his job. His men, the thousands of them under his command, were currently a hundred feet or so behind him and were invisible. Cloaked, his younger compatriots would say, but he never watched TV, so the reference was lost on him. Their job, usually, would be to try to scale the walls of the target city, that was never an easy feat while it was under bombardment from your own side, but considering the fucking enormity of these walls, it was judged nigh on impossible. Instead, they would tunnel. It would take longer, and tunnels had the nasty habit of caving in when things were exploding against the ground above it, but as long as they took their time, and kept that Pete character distracted, getting into the city would be an inevitability.

Once the city had been breached, all of his forces would charge in, all of the forces of his comrades around the entrance to the tunnel would charge in, too, and then they would wreak havoc. But the main target, as always, was the palace. There was something oddly satisfying about watching the mind of an enemy Evo burn.

The third element was the silent one: the distribution of power. Not even he knew which of his comrades was responsible for that, only that it wasn't him. Such was life in the Praetorians; one hand didn't always know what the other was doing, and the fewer people who knew the lynchpin around which this operation hung, the less chance it could be given away to the enemy. Still, the power was flowing, and that was all that mattered.

Nathan was not a particularly powerful Evo under normal conditions. He wasn't weak, but he would never set the world ablaze with his might. But now he was being reinforced by the power of the rest of his team. Each conjured soldier under his command was about four times the strength of what he would normally be able to muster. The rest of it was being filtered to his own counterpart on the opposite side of the city. Each of them would attack his own section, and the first to get through would take the glory. His section was on the city's south side, the soft underbelly. Evos always seemed to gravitate toward the North of their walls; nobody knew why, they just did, but that meant that if there was ever a hole in the defense, it was often on the south side. It may not have meant much in terms of the actual battle, but this was the coveted "end of the line" position. It was where a good commander placed his best soldiers, meaning that in this particular endeavor, his commander was putting his faith and his trust in him.

He would love to say that didn't give his ego a little bit of a stroke, but he would be lying.

Still, his eyes kept getting drawn back to those walls.

They were fucking monstrous. He couldn't even begin to calculate how much power resided in the city that built them, nor could he help wondering if the plans made to take it properly took into account the inevitable increase in its defensive capabilities. But the power of thirteen Evos was stacked against it, and the men wielding that power were more than experienced in using it. Despite that, and with another look over to Dai, he couldn't help but wonder if the record that this unit had - having never lost a man to combat in the mindscape - would still stand when the dust of this battle settled.

The term "biting off more than you can chew" was not one that was often applied to soldiers of the Praetorian guard; they were an order that had backup plans for the fail-safes of their backup plans. But in this case, he wondered if the term may have been more than a little apt.

He took a deep breath. It didn't matter. Failure was not a word that really computed to a Praetorian. There was duty, there was honor, and there was decisiveness; that was it. He was given an order, and he would do his utmost to carry it out. It wasn't blind loyalty; this wasn't chasing his objective, even if it meant his own death - retreat was, after all, a perfectly acceptable outcome in the face of overwhelming adversity as the Praetorians themselves had shown when they left Constantinople - this was something altogether more unforgivable. This was fear.

And fear had no place in the Praetorians.

So he swallowed it down, nodded to Dai, and reset his focus on the city walls of his enemy...

Those... Massive... enormous... imposing... walls.

And that Dragon.

With those eyes.

He gulped harder. Apparently, this particular brand of fear didn't allow itself to be swallowed so easily, but he resumed his advance anyway... his lips parted, frozen somewhere between the growing bloodlust of soon-to-be-joined battle and soul-chilling trepidation.

********

Faye Marie Dughan, born of County Kerry on the Emerald Isle of Ireland, fledgling Evo and bondmate of the soon-to-be great Pete, murdered by treasonous Inquisitors and Praetorian bastards at a god-damned party, was having the time of her life... or her death... whatever.

Growing up at a time of shitty, cheesy, utterly incredible horror movies - the ones that had teenage girls screaming at the TV and hiding behind their pillows at slumber parties when the hunky boyfriend predictably turned out to be the knife-wielding maniac - and she fucking loved them. They were her guilty pleasures. The things she blushed in embarrassment about when she told her old friends. The gore, the violence, the twisted minds that thought up every gruesome detail, she loved it all.

And now she had free reign to release her own macabre imagination upon the cretins who dared to set foot into her beloved's city.

And that was before you considered what these bastards had done to her. Vendettas and reckonings be damned, this was a crusade. One filled with every Lovecraftian horror she could imagine.

Uri had told her to make a mess of the intruders, to set an example. She would do more than that; she would have them cowering in terror just at the sight of the hell that awaited them, and then she would make every single one of their deaths slow. Graphically, horrifically, psychosis-inducingly slow. She had power now, power she could never have imagined before. Even as a single part of the quartet defending this city, she could call upon more power than she had ever dared to comprehend. Not a finite resource but a bottomless, endless ocean of fury that could refill faster than she could hope to drain it.

And she was going to gorge herself on it and unleash her own rage on those who threatened her home.

It was funny. She had never considered herself a violent person before the party, not even a little mean-spirited, let alone downright sadistic, but this was war, and the enemy was literally at the gates. Turns out she needed to be murdered to find out that she had an evil streak.

And if she had it - which, judging by the living nightmare she had set up for the invaders, she absolutely did - she was going to use it.

She had looked upon Pete's anger, that stalking, pacing, malevolent rage. She had seen its face and looked into its eyes. She had seen the horror and the trauma for what it was, and there was no doubt in her mind that some of it had rubbed off on her. Now was the time to let it out. Pete knew it, she knew it, and - perhaps more importantly - the anger knew it.

The south side of the city had been left open. Not undefended, that would have been too obvious, but as Jeeves dealt out his shitstorm of truly biblical and awe-inspiring proportions on the enemy surrounding the other three sides, the punishment doled out on the south side had been muted, not by much, but enough for the bad guys to see it as the opening it was designed to be. And with Jeeves intentionally making it look like his attention was being dragged further and further away from the south side, the enemy was making their move.

She fucking loved how Pete's mind worked. He could just see things and make predictions that almost always turned out to be true. It turns out that years of social isolation, beating the snot out of people on the internet at strategy games was not as much of a misspent youth as one would imagine. But in this case, it was Uri, calling upon all of his experience, who was running the show. He was just bypassing Pete's inexperience to use her lover's strategic acumen. Pete's knowledge, Pete's strategic mind, and Uri's experience in organizing it. Fuck, it was going to be brutal!

The logic was simple. If allowed to attack the entire wall at once, the enemy could theoretically breach it at any point; it was impossible to predict where and, therefore, very difficult to defend against. The city was huge, far too large for even the four of them to protect or even monitor properly. But... if you allowed them into one section of the city, especially if you made it look like the bad guys had made that breach on their own, then their entire focus would snap to there. The rest of the enemy armies would focus not on making their own assaults but on keeping the defenders - Jeeves in this case - busy while they poured their forces into the gap...

Straight into the waiting arms of the utterly livid Faye.

The enemy could only see Jeeves on the Northernmost wall. She imagined that the thirteen enemy Evos all thought that he was Pete. They had no idea that Jeeves existed, nor Uri or her for that matter. So, with the man on the wall being kept busy, they would have expected to get into the city almost unopposed - or at least barely able to be challenged by a single man once they were inside - and do as much damage as they liked. It was a pity she wouldn't get to see the look on this "King's" face when he not only realized that he sent his men straight into a trap but then see the fear in his eyes when the love of her life burst out of his own city to reign fire and death upon his armies while she was fucking up the ones inside.

Oh well, she would just have to make do with the fear and terror in the eyes of the men she did get her hands on when they realized what was about to happen to them.

Life - or death, whatever - was all about the little joys.

********

There was something to be said about timing.

Everything about the Praetorians' advance was measured and calculated for maximum effect. The concept was fairly straightforward: it was to instill fear in their target in the same way that my announcement was designed to do the same in them, except these fuckers had way more practice at it than I did. I had to admit, it was pretty effective.

I could just imagine it now, the lone Evo on his walls, already concerned with regulating his power use, trying to come up with a plan to survive their encounter with this faceless, merciless organization while the ground beneath their feet trembled under the weight of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, surrounding the city on all sides and even if you were lucky, you would only be able to see the ones on three of the four sides of your walls. The ones behind you would be hidden from view on the other side of your city.

If you struck first, you risked draining your powers, and killing the attacking enemies wouldn't actually stop them; they would just respawn in their own cities, marshal their troops, and march back out to attack you again. They could keep doing that indefinitely. Slowly draining you until there was nothing left. Their objective, after all, was not to beat you head-on, at least not at this stage of the battle, but to exhaust you. They could send hordes of decoys at you, and with it being impossible to tell which units were real and which were just for show, the defending Evo would be forced to hit them all, slowly draining themselves while taking almost nothing out of the reserves of the attackers. The tactical advantage here was very much with the Praetorians.

If you waited and let them attack first, only responding to events as they happened, you risked suffering some serious and very real damage to your city from their opening barrage. One errant artillery shell, hitting something important, could end the fight before it had begun. There was always the option of attacking their cities, charging in, all guns blazing, and dealing with one Praetorian at a time, but not only did that assume you could batter down their walls and beat them in a head-on fight, but it also assumed that your target's friends would wheel around and hit your rear while you were busy with them. You would be fighting multiple forces on multiple sides of you, out in the open. You would be crushed, sending you back to your city with your tail between your legs and nothing to show for it except a potentially large drain on your already limited power reserves... reserves that were undoubtedly already reduced after however long they had been torturing you.

More than that, leaving your city to attack the threat, while technically an option, was also leaving your own city completely undefended, which most certainly wasn't an option. It would be impossible for a normal Evo to charge across the mindscape, destroy an enemy city, and then get back to their own before the enemy got there. In all reality, your palace would be on fire before you even breached your target's walls.

The death or glory approach, the willingness to go down fighting, was very romantic in the movies, but the real world didn't really work like that.

It was called survivor bias. The stories sounded romantic because they were told by the men who had done them and survived. In reality, for every one such act that saw men live to tell the tale, there were a hundred where they had been wiped out. You just didn't get to hear those stories.

The options open to an Evo under attack like this were limited, but more than that, none of them were particularly good ones, and they were expected to make their decision under the pressure of staring down however many thousands of soldiers advancing on your city while the ground shook beneath their feet.

Of course, I wasn't a normal Evo. That gave me more options and massively increased the chances of success for whichever one I chose. But there were still limitations.

I couldn't, for example, spawn a bunch of nuclear-tipped ICBMs and turn their cities into the backdrop for the next Mad Max movie, at least not from here. My city was the physical representation of my mind, just like their cities were the physical representation of theirs. And Our minds were not actually linked. There was no way for my city, for my mind, to interact with theirs directly. That is what the mindscape was; it was the link between us all. To hit their cities at all - and I would need to if I planned to win this - would mean leaving the relative safety of my walls and hitting them from out in the field.

"What about a couple of B-52s?" I asked, semi-hopefully, while I looked out at the enemy ranks from the balcony that ringed the top of my monolithic palace's tower. "Send a few to each city and fucking flatten them. I can't imagine them not feeling that."

Uri, showing a remarkable amount of patience considering the number of these questions I had already asked, just shook his head. "Same issue; you would need to spawn them inside the mindscape, out there." he nodded out at the armies surrounding the city.

I scrunched my face up. "How is that true? When I fought Rhodri, he sent a whole host of flying shit at me. They all crossed the mindscape and were perfectly effective when they got to me."

"No, he didn't."

"Err, he did. I was there when it happened. He sent Helicopters, fighters, bombers, Dragons, and really big fucking pigeons."

"No... he didn't. Those units were Neil's, and he was...."

"... in the fucking mindscape. Fuck!"

"You know you swear a lot, don't you?" Uri's eyes didn't leave the north side of the battlefront.

"What's wrong? Afraid to get your words dirty? I use swearing as a form for grammar." I huffed and leaned forward onto the railing next to him and let my eyes sweep across the tops of my walls until they picked out the tiny figure of Jeeves pacing back and forth atop them. "Why is he pacing?"

"He's trying to look nervous."

"I feel the next question practically asks itself."

Uri took a deep breath, not quite a sigh, but close enough to one to suggest he was getting tired of the questions. "If we attack them now, launch everything we have at them, and utterly obliterate their armies, they will realize that something is wrong, and they will call off the attack..."

"Don't we want that?"

"No, we want to beat them."

"...."

Uri's next breath really was a full sigh. "Look, if they retreat, pull out of the battle, that means we have to fight them in the real world..." he held up his hand to silence the inevitable counterpoint from me. "... and yes, I know you have bulletproof skin and the backup of Toussant out there; killing them would be easy. But we don't want to kill them."

"Don't we??" I blinked. "I mean, I want to kill them."

"Before you find out what they know about the Evo who attacked Philippa and your parents? Not to mention the other stuff they probably know."

I blinked again... touché. "You seem a lot more confident about beating them than you were a little while ago."

"What we want is for them to think we are nervous, that we are just a normal, regular, run-of-the-mill Evo, albeit a very strong one," he answered. "A normal Evo would be nervous..." he nodded out at Jeeves, "...they would be worried about balancing their power; they would be trying to work out the enemy's plans."

"And?"

"And we are going to show them what they want to see." Uri let his lips curl into a smirk. "They are going to hit us first, and we are going to hit them back, but much, much harder. Then they are going to hit us again, and we will hit them back, but a little less hard, or in a little fewer places, and then they are going to hit us again. Every time we hit them back, we will condense the line, pushing our counterattacks further and further north with less and less power until they think we are starting to run low on power. Then they will commit."

"Commit?"

"Mmhmm, they will send men into the city. Once they are beyond the walls, they are cut off from communication with anybody outside it. The more of them we can get in here, the less people are out there for us to counterattack. Fewer armies defending their cities. That is when we attack. That is why I told Faye to make it slow; if she kills the invaders outright, they will just respawn back home and will realize they are being attacked themselves. In here, they are trapped, they are cut off, and won't know anything is going on until their friends start dying around them."

"Hammer and Anvil." I nodded.

Uri's smile widened. "Exactly. We lure them in, trap them either inside the walls or against them... the anvil... and then we bring down the hammer."

"Okay, so how long do we have to wait before..."

All hell broke loose.

Fucking timing!

The enemy fired first. Their artillery had been given plenty of time to form up, make ready, and take aim, entirely unmolested, and the vicious thuds - the sound they made when hearing them from this far away - crashed into my ears from every direction. The whole enemy battle line looked like fireworks reflected off a rippling pool. Flashes of color, echoes of sound, and then the brief respite before the shells found their target.

Explosions, some much closer than others, ripped through the air, and the violent earth-shaking vibrations, strong enough to make me need to hold tighter onto the railing, followed a few moments later.

I could feel them. Not just through the floor beneath my feet but inside my head, like I could physically feel the little pinpricks of damage being done to my city. Each shell found its mark; most of them detonated against the outer surface of the walls, but some flew over and obliterated whatever smaller, unimportant placeholder buildings they landed on. There wasn't much damage. In fact, the total amount inflicted from that first salvo was minuscule, but a minuscule amount of damage was still damage, and I felt all of it.

A few seconds later, Jeeves answered. The MLRS artillery platforms that had worked so well in the duel at the party seemed to be just as effective an answer here, and hundreds of them spawned at varying intervals behind my walls and unleashed their deadly payload.

There is something to be said about the psychological effect of rockets over standard artillery. Being able to see them coming, either at you or at your friends, couldn't have been a particularly comfortable experience, but that is exactly what the thirteen enemy armies were forced to do for those few terrifying seconds before the rockets made landfall.

The artillery shells that hit my walls were like firecrackers compared to the utterly devastating explosions that tore through the enemy line. Whole sections of men and machines were swallowed up in the cavernous balls of fire. Bits of men, tanks, artillery, and sundered earth were thrown in every direction: blood, screams, fire, and death.

Further back in the mindscape, about halfway between my city and theirs, hordes of Praetorian reinforcements - replacements for the units that Jeeves had just blown out of existence - shimmered into being and started making for the lines again. Three enemy cities opened their gates for their recently obliterated owners to rejoin the fray.

Three of the thirteen had been killed in that one opening barrage; hundreds of their men, maybe thousands, had been turned to body parts and scrap metal, and nothing had changed. The Evos had respawned and were now racing to rejoin their lines, and the lost units would be back in the fight within a few minutes. I was starting to see why this was such a daunting prospect for any errant Evo to go up against.

I cast a glance at Uri. He just leaned back against the railing, settling in to watch.

********

He watched Dai getting ripped apart.

It wasn't something quick and clean like the fates bestowed upon the countless men around them; he wasn't just swallowed up by an explosion from one of those horrifically powerful rockets. Nope, the shredded, twisted, sheared-off remains of a tank's side armor had been blown clear of its owner and had hit Dai with all the subtlety and grace of a jet-powered rhino. Taking a hit, going down for the cause, was a mark of honor for the men of the Praetorian guard; it was a rite of passage, and many cheers would go up amongst the men in the after-action soiree as they each laughed and joked while recounting the looks on the comrades faces as they took one for the team.

Of course, all of it kinda whitewashed over the fact that dying in the mindscape fucking hurt; more than that, the echo of those injuries would ache and bother a man long after he had regrouped in his city and rejoined the fight. Then there was the seldom-discussed psychological impact of watching your friends die, even temporarily. Some men were hardened to it, steeling their minds against the inevitable barbarism that his type of warfare produced, but Nathan wasn't one of them. Still, the after-party was something to look forward to: tankards of ale, enthralled, scantily clad women - and men for those so inclined - good music, loud voices, and a general blowing off of steam.

And yet, there was no overlooking the fact that Pete's response to their opening salvo had been nothing short of terrifying. He knew men on his own side who would struggle to put together an attack of that power at all, but he could still tell that Pete had more to give. It wasn't an attack that threw everything it could at the enemy in one do-or-die moment; he had seen those before, and this wasn't that. This was a message.

It was a message that said, "I am not going to make this easy for you."

Rumors had spread through the army quickly, radios weren't really a thing in the mindscape, and messages had to be passed along the ranks of men in a ridiculous version of Chinese whispers. The message rarely got as far down the line as him without being distorted in some way or another. But reports of the lone figure on the north wall, pacing back and forth in the classic sign of nervousness, if not outright fear, had been one of the few messages to get through clearly. Those rumors had hardened his resolve. If Pete was nervous, then he must have reason to be. Maybe those biblically massive walls were not as impenetrable as they appeared; maybe his reserves of power had been drained more than he expected by the torture he had experienced; maybe he realized the futility and hopelessness of his position. For a few brief, merciful minutes, Nathan found his confidence blossoming again.

And then all of hell had rained down on them.

He had seen some damage in his time, both in the real world and in the mindscape; weapons and ideas that had truly amazed and terrified him in equal measure, but the feeling of the earth being ripped out of the ground, the violence of the airblast that launched him off his feet and back some thirty feet, and the sounds of the screams of the armies around him being torn to pieces was an altogether new experience. He had pulled himself up onto his elbows, genuinely surprised that his avatar had survived unhurt, only to look over to Dai just in time to watch - almost in slow motion - the colossal explosion detonating in the ranks of his men and that twisted hulk of metal being launched through the air. Dai's body had just... Well, there were no real words to describe it; it was like how he imagined a human body would break if it were made of glass, fleshy, wet, gorey shards of glass, trailing blood and viscera as it tumbled through the air. There was no food in the mindscape, nor did he have an actual stomach, not a functioning one, anyway, yet he still somehow felt it turn at the sight of what had happened to his friend.

More than two dozen rockets had crashed into his section of the line. For a few minutes, their smoke trails were the denizens of the skies, and their blasts were the woe of the land. They were the harbingers of the end of everything. One after another, after another. Each one shaking men off their feet if they weren't blown to pieces by the explosions. Body parts, blood, and sundered earth rained down from the blackened sky. Over and over again. It was a tyranny that managed to squeeze the breadth of eternity into a few short minutes.

Nathan was not a religious man, at least not in the typical fashion, but it had felt like a vengeful god had descended on the battlefield with the sole intention of smiting him. It had come pretty damned close to succeeding too.

He'd pulled himself to his feet, watching as the rest of the army did the same, before turning to look back at the significantly safer, invisible men of his own army and to see how far away Dai was on his return from his city. His eyes, however, found something altogether different.

He blinked around with a newfound realization; the artillery was preparing to fire again. And if they were going to fire, then the city was going to respond. He braced himself for the inevitable.

Courage. He needed courage. Courage was not the absence of fear but the ability to act despite it.

The sounds of the Praetorian guns had made him bristle and preen with pride when they had fired the first time. The opening salvo in a battle for justice, for order against the chaos. He had watched with merciless glee as those shells had exploded against the white marble-esque walls and echoed through the city when a few of them cleared the wall's summit. He had no idea if they hit anything of importance, but that almost didn't matter; it was letting the petulant Evo know that they meant business. The smile had been bitch-slapped off his face by the city's response, and now, as the explosive thuds of Praetorian guns firing again smashed into his ears, he could only bring himself to brace for another blistering, reality-ending barrage of counterfire.

He didn't have to wait long.

Twenty-five rockets had reduced his line to the closest thing imaginable to hell on earth the first time, and the first rocket of the second counterattack landed about fifty feet in front of him. He winced, holding his arm up to cover his face as he ducked away from the explosion. Another one detonated a hundred yards or so to his left. Another at about the same distance on his right. Another one hit further along to his right and must have hit something important because the explosion seemed to be even bigger than the others. A mushroom cloud of black smoke was hurled into the air, along with all the death and debris from the impact. And then Another, and then....

...nothing.

He frowned and looked up... There was no another, at least not on his part of the line. A simple glance to either side of the white city easily showed rockets raining down onto his comrades, men, and machines being consumed by the city's vengeance, one after another after another... but no more fell close to him.

Twenty-five rockets in the first strike, five on the second.

The smile grew on his lips. The plan was working.

He turned and glanced at his shimmering, translucent men behind him and gave a nod. Their invisible shapes started to move, and, inch by inch, the opening of three tunnels started to grow into the land, far enough behind the main army not to be hit by an errant rocket and small enough and angled in just the right way to be invisible from the top of the wall. That Pete character wouldn't know that Nathan and his men were coming until it was much too late. And once they were inside the city, they would be unstoppable.

********

"They're, err, not going to hit anything important, are they?" I asked Uri as I watched the smoke rise from the three engaged sides of the city. Jeeves was still taking potshots at the south, and they were answering with the full weight of their guns, but - as per Uri's predictions - that side of the city had mostly gone quiet. The shells there had stopped clearing the walls and were, instead, smashing harmlessly into it.

Uri shrugged. "I doubt it."

"Well, that's hardly filling me with confidence. Doesn't artillery have a range of about twenty miles? There are lots of important things in that area."

Uri turned to look up at me without lifting his weight off the railing surrounding the balcony. "That is real-world artillery," he said simply before nodding out at the battle. "Those aren't. Why do you think some of the rounds are hitting the walls and some of them are going over?"

"I don't know, shit aim?"

Uri chuckled, seeming oddly calm for a man in a city literally under siege. "No, the power and range of those guns are not determined by firing angles or the ballistic properties of their shells but by the amount of power being pumped into them. Not a single shell has landed more than a mile inside your city, and there is very little of importance there."

"So they're basically making a lot of noise and trying to drain us by getting us to respond."

"Exactly."

"Sooo, then why are the guns to the south only hitting the... ooohhhh!"

"Yup, they don't want to hit their own men, which means they have started tunneling. It won't be long now."

"Until they are inside?"

Uri's smile grew a little larger before he turned back to look out over the battle. "Until you and I get to have some fun."

I nodded slowly. Faye and Uri were not like Jeeves. Jeeves was part of me; his personality quirks were ones that I had given him, even if the aged representation of my own subconscious did enjoy fucking with me on occasion. Uri and Faye were their own people, guests in my city, in a manner of speaking. They both had their own personalities, their own memories, and their own experiences. So watching the grins of anticipation on Uri's face, similar to the wicked smile of intent on Faye's before she set off to lay her traps and do her thing in the south, was more than a little odd considering I was physically feeling every one of those shells detonating inside my head. Little pinpricks of pain - or at least discomfort - behind my eyes.

For a moment, my mind drifted back to Sterling and his screams of agony, clutching at his head when those satchel charges started to blow the ever-loving fuck out of the buildings in his city. Jesus, the pain I had unknowingly inflicted on that man before I even started with conscious harvesting of his mind would probably have given Toussant's torture a run for its money. It was almost enough for me to feel sorry for the man.

Ah, who was I kidding? I would do it again in a heartbeat. The fucker deserved it all.

I glanced to the south of the city. "How are you doing over there, baby?" I sent to Faye.

"Oh, I'm doing grand over here, lover boy. Are yeh ready to go ass kickin'?" She sent back in that gorgeous Irish brogue.

"As ready as I will ever be."

"Ah, c'mon now. It's not often yeh are gonna be able to fuck up the bad guys like this. Enjoy it while it lasts. I know I am. I have a nice little surprise waiting for..." Her voice cut off abruptly.

"Faye?"

"They're here," her voice whispered back after a few moments. I'm not sure why she was whispering; we were sending messages straight into each other's heads.

"Do you need help?"

"Fuck no, I got this. Go do your ass-kickin' thing. I'm gonna have some fun. Love ya, darlin'"

There was that fun thing again. I rolled my eyes and shook my head; if there was ever a time to trust the voices in my head, it was now. "Love you, too. Give 'em hell, baby."

She giggled, not a playful or happy giggle like I was used to, but one dripping with malicious anticipation. "Oh, I intend to."

********

The city was enormous. That was clear from outside the walls, but it wasn't until he got inside that Nathan could really comprehend the sheer scale of it. In every other city he had ever been in - his friends, his enemies, even his own - you could stand at one edge of the city and fairly easily make out the tops of the walls on the opposite side. Down long central boulevards or over the tops of shorter buildings, the tops of the walls were always pretty easy to see. He had assumed, considering the size of the walls of this city - the ones towering ominously behind him - that this would have been the same, but no. There were no small buildings; they were all massive, blocking sightlines in every direction, and the long, straight avenues between them seemed to swallow up the miles of urban wilderness before fading into nothingness in the distance. He could just about make out the monolithic central tower, bathed in its blue luminescence, on the horizon. If that was Pete's palace, then it must have been ten or fifteen miles away... inside a city that only looked to have a radius of maybe four miles from the outside. This was like cracking open a walnut to find a watermelon inside it. It was like fucking Narnia.

But then the peculiarities of the mindscape and the interaction of power vs. perception was a subject for minds more disciplined and learned than his. He was a soldier, and he had eyes on his target. It didn't matter if that target was ten miles away or ten feet; he was here to destroy it. If anything, the sheer size of this city could work to his advantage; he would be able to disappear in the labyrinth of streets and hide behind the colossal buildings. If he couldn't see the man on the north wall, then the man on the north wall couldn't see him. The simple truth of the remainder of Pete's short life expectancy was that he had allowed his enemy into his city.

And he would pay for it with his life.

The winds were gusting; even popping his head above ground as high as his eyes was enough to feel it. Wind was not an uncommon feature in the mindscape; it was always present in some form or another during a battle, but it was never like this. Howling gales blew at his hair, and his collar whipped at the nape of his neck, but still, the sun was shining, and the streets - including his sightlines - were bright and clear. He turned back to the first man of his army and whispered an instruction, a message to be sent back to his comrades outside.

"The way is open."

He couldn't control the pull of his vicious smile curling his lips. The images of himself, two or three of his brothers-in-arms beside him, their armies at their backs, rampaging through the city of the most powerful Evo to have ever walked the earth, bounced around his imagination. It had been surprisingly easy. He would even tempt fate by saying it had been too easy, but the memories of those almighty explosions banished that thought before it formed. It was very easy to forget that his brethren were still dealing with the full might of Pete's defenses. He could still hear it, despite the distance, the thuds of explosions over the horizon. One after another, some softer and quieter - Praetorian shells, from Praetorian guns hitting their target - but others were much louder, almost sharper in his ears as the city unleashed its response. He felt a shiver run down his spine.

The first man of his army nodded to him; the message had been delivered. The two other tunnels, one on either side of this one, were currently being filled with Praetorian armies. Dai would be in one, who would fill the tunnel on the other side, he was less sure about. Maximilian, maybe, perhaps Rajesh, or possibly even both. Vasili had been on the other side of Dai, and maybe he would join the fray, too. Nathan hoped so; stampeding through a defeated city was very much a case of 'the more the merrier,' as long as they remembered that the final prize was his.

The minutes ticked by, each one interminably longer than the one that preceded it. The opening to the tunnel yawned up at the sky above his head; he and his men hid a few feet inside it so as not to tip off the enemy while they waited.

His fingers were doing that thing they did when he was nervous, drumming out some anonymous rhythm on his own bicep. If there were more room, he would be pacing... Maybe nervous was the wrong word, but those insufferable moments of waiting made him restless. He just wanted to get on with it. He knew he could do with the backup, and he knew the plan was a solid one; he knew all of that, but during that brief pause in the steady flow of battle, all he could think about was getting stuck in.

He almost growled up at the sunshine above him through the opening of the tunnel, watching as the wisps of black smoke, diluted by the distance it had traveled from the battle, drifted overhead. The rest of his men were feeling it, too, or they were at least mirroring his own feelings back at him. Shuffling on their feet, scratching at phantom itches, their eyes glancing around. He wondered if they possessed an imagination at all, something to let their minds wander. None of them had that glazed-over expression in their eyes that suggested their thoughts weren't in the moment, but...

The message rippled through the whispered murmurs of the ranks. The other forces were ready to go.

He closed his eyes and visualized his surroundings. It was always a good idea to have a clear idea in your head of the shitstorm you were about to rush into, even if that rushing was to be done silently and stealthily, and the shitstorming would come later. The tunnel opened up onto a T-junction at the very base of those fucking massive walls. The roads running left and right ran along the foot of the wall; one of those avenues would be taken by the team on his left, and the other would be taken by the team on his right. His objective was along the road that ran straight ahead toward the center of the city. He could see it perfectly in his mind's eye.

Buildings lined both sides of the road, moderately tall things that looked a lot like apartment blocks - something else he had never seen before and would need to ask about later. Those buildings provided cover. His mind was rapidly sending out orders to his men, telling them which units would take the east side of the road, which would take the west, and which ones would fan out into the alleyways that separated the buildings from one another. Causing carnage or mayhem this close to the edge of the city would be pointless; the important shit was always close to the center, and starting fires and setting explosives off here would do nothing more than alert Pete to their presence. So, the men were told to hold their fire until they came across a target of importance. There would be one eventually, and when it was found, the men were given the go-ahead to do what they liked.

His mind was processing this at speeds many, many times faster than he could calculate, not that he gave much thought to such endeavors. He was, however, very conscious of the fact that his grey matter, the real stuff, inside his real head, in the real world, was currently experiencing time on a vastly different level than this, and even when they were victorious here, he would still have to deal with a crazed, rifle-wielding Toussant. Fuck! This was gonna be a really long day.

He rolled his neck, took one more look at the clear sky - currently devoid of any of the smoke of battle - nodded to his men with one more silent order, clambered up onto the street....

And froze instantly.

The city was different. The city was very, very different.

The bright sky was gone, day was gone, the sunlight-washed, clean streets were gone. Well, the streets were still there, but they were bathed in darkness, not like nighttime, but, instead, like they were under the pall of some mysterious, ominous shadow. The wind was colder, his footsteps and those of his men sounded louder in their echoes than they should have been, and yet everything sounded deathly quiet. Not even the wind made noise.

The asphalt under his feet was cracked and weathered, weeds peeking into the darkness through the wrinkled crevices in the road. The street had been flawless on his first look; he was certain of it, but now, now it was different. It looked older, more worn, it looked and felt neglected, as if life itself had been chased from the streets, and all that remained was like one of the ghost towns: a frozen snapshot of a single moment, eternally corroded by the passage of time and the endless winds.

He squinted his eyes, looking into the faded light and toward his target. The buildings that lined the street had not been anything special to look at at first glance from the tunnel, but they had been clean and... well... intact. Now, they were crumbling, leaning into the streets like old, arthritic men, bowing to the ravages of age and painful backs. Parts of them were crumbling into the long, broad avenue, adding stale dust and debris to the already fractured road surfaces. Vines, like poison ivy or something that would smother the ruins of some ancient Amazonian temple, clawed and climbed their way over every building edifice. They looked like green blood vessels, each one feeding death and decay into the remains of this once vibrant city. He had once seen a TV program about what would happen to the world if mankind just disappeared; it told how nature would slowly reclaim the urban centers, how plants would carve their way through the concrete jungle, and how packs of wild animals would lay claim to the buildings and avenues of humanity's once mighty cities. This looked exactly like that.

But there were no packs of wild animals; it was too quiet, the wind was muted, and the sound of his feet as he crept cautiously forward was almost silent. Aside from that, there was nothing. Even the breaths of his men, the shuffle of the other armies being led out of their own tunnels only a dozen or so feet away, the sounds of the distant battle, the praetorian guns, and the sounds of the city's desperate defense... all of it was missing. Conspicuously so.

It somehow, for a moment, reminded him of snow. The dull silence of sound being absorbed by the layers of frozen particles on the ground. Nathan fucking hated the snow.

His men started slowly filing into the street ahead of him. They crept slowly, carefully, as if sensing an upcoming danger - the caution and confusion in his own mind being fed into the minds of his army. He passed a streetlight, twisted and gnarled, the victim of some now vacant force that left the monolith bending at an unnatural angle and the light itself hanging over the sidewalk and pointing along the street instead of pointing out over the road itself. The light was flickering, like the dying gasps of a wounded animal.

Wait. Streetlight? Why would there be streetlights in a city that was forever bathed in sunlight? They weren't there before, were they?

He raised his sword, a straight-bladed rapier, his sweaty palms keeping the weapon parallel to his body and ready to swing. His men all had rifles, able to launch power at range, but there was more energy packed into a single swing of his sword than in twenty of those bullets, and every single fiber of his being was telling him that he would be needing to use it soon.

The wind picked up a little. There was no discernible direction from which it was coming; gusts buffeted him from every conceivable angle except from the ground itself, but a soft, ominous whistle seemed to be carried on it. The wind itself was warning him of his impending doom.

No, it wasn't the wind whistling; rather it was carrying the whistle from somewhere else. It was a tune, one he recognized, although it took him a moment to place it.

Ring Around the Roses... or Ring a Ring o' Rosies for everyone not an American... was not a song that the wind should sing to an invading army. The sound came from everywhere, the same few notes, over and over. If bounced off vine-covered walls, off the cracked and scarred ground, off shattered windows and weed-covered abandoned cars...

He blinked... cars? Nope, his mind was too busy elsewhere to deal with that level of absurdity.

He shook his head loose and looked up the avenue toward the city center. Minutes were ticking by, and he hadn't advanced more than a handful of yards. The level of insanity in this city was already freaking him the fuck out, so the faster he got to the palace and ended the city's - and the insanity's - existence, the better. But the palace was invisible. In fact, the darkness seemed to swallow the miles-long avenue after only a few blocks. It wasn't a lack of light that halted his ability to see; it was more like a dense, black mist had descended on the city and had devoured all but this small section of it. He could barely make it out, but he could see the swirling wisps of blackness, dancing and coalescing around itself, blotting out the view of the rest of the city and - more importantly - his target.

He just stared at it for a moment.

He was still squinting into the distance at it when Dai silently crept up next to him and scared the ever-loving shit out of him.

"What the fuck is going on?" He whispered.

"Jesus, Fuck!" Nathan yelped and hopped away from him, his fingers clenching instinctively tighter around the grip of his sword. "You almost gave me a heart attack!"

"Sorry," Dai's eyes were darting around nervously. Well, that was good, Nathan supposed. At least all this shit wasn't in his head. "But, what the fuck is going on?" Nathan peered back over his shoulder; Vasili, Max, and Rajesh had all joined the incursion but were hanging back with their men while Dai consulted with the officer in charge. Heh, the officer in charge, an hour ago, he had been swelling with pride at the confidence shown in him by the overall commander. Now, he was feeling dangerously out of his depth. "Have you seen anything like this before?"

"Seen? I didn't even know most of this shit was possible, let alone seen it!"

"But... how? Who the hell is this guy?"

"I... I have no idea. You have the same information as I do." Nathan turned his head back to squint into the blackness. "Nothing has changed; this is just... a delaying tactic or something... I think. The target is that way, let's just..."

His words froze on his lips as a white shape started to emerge from the fog. Both men just stared in confusion as it faded into existence, skipping along the road toward them.

"Please tell me you are seeing this." Dai almost whimpered.

"I wish I weren't... cause that... is fucking terrifying!"

There was no real way to sensibly articulate what they were both looking at other than to say that - in the middle of a besieged Evo's city - what appeared to be a little girl, maybe five or six years old, with long, straight black hair hanging to her shoulder blades, and wearing what looked to be an 18th Century white nightdress, was skipping toward them. She was pale, so very, very pale, barefooted, and with mud, or at least dirty water, soaking into the bottom few inches of her dress. Her eyes were the color of midnight, and the dark, almost deathly rings of grey that surrounded them made her look like a younger and chirpier version of that girl from The Ring.

This whistle on the wind was clearly coming from her - Ring a Ring of Rosies - but the sound still stubbornly refused to bow to any sort of laws of physics and was still coming from everywhere. Interspersing the crystal clear, if directionally challenged notes, were the haunting giggles of a child having the time of their life. After a dozen or so yards of slow skipping, the girl seemed to spot them and stopped in place, tilting her head to the side and looking right at them.

"Hello," she said, a curious smile on her lips.

Nathan's mind and his tongue seemed to be in disagreement over what to do. All he could manage was a vague "Errr" sound. Dai raised his hand and gave a small, nervous, and uncertain little wave before immediately frowning and stopping himself.

"Will you play with me?" Her voice echoed happily and hauntingly on the wind and down the street toward them.

"Sorry, what?" Nathan spluttered back.

"Play with me." The girl repeated, putting her hands behind the small of her back and starting to sway her hips from side to side.

Nathan managed to pull his eyes away from the little girl and glance at Dai. Dai somehow managed to do the same and offered him a little shrug. The man was scared; that much was obvious. He was holding it together remarkably well, considering what they were looking at, but it was painted over every feature of his face. This wasn't the fear of death or the dread before a battle, though, that could be trained out of a soldier. This was something older, something altogether more primal and ancient. This was the fear of the things that hide in the darkness, the long arms and sharp claws and glowing red eyes. The fear of the thing that growled in the dark jungle depths, lived under the bed, or hid in the basement when the lights were out. It was intangible, it was faceless, it was the things that nightmares were made of. And it was standing a little further up the street, swinging its hips back and forth and asking them to play.

He looked back up the street, but not before glancing at his men first. They were looking as nervous and confused as he felt... which, considering they shared the same mind, wasn't particularly surprising. What was surprising, though, was that every single one of them had their rifles trained on the little girl. None of them was guarding the flanks, none of them was watching the windows or the streets toward the deathly blackness, and given their training... his training... they really ought to be. In that one moment, he understood their preoccupation. Their entire attention was on that little girl because all of his was.

He finally turned back to meet her eyes. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He felt the cold hand of fear tightening around that knot in his stomach.

"Play with me," the girl repeated, a little more force and, maybe, frustration in her voice. "Please?"

"I... um..." Seriously, the fuck do you say in a situation like this. "Play what?"

Bad idea, Nathan, bad idea. Why the hell would you ask that and not just fucking shoot it??

The girl smiled, a smile wholly too large for her little face. "Let's play..." she paused for a moment, apparently pondering a choice between the myriad of children's games available to her. "Let's play Hide and go seek." she finally said, her hips still swinging. "You can hide..."

She froze, her head snapping up and her eyes locking onto his with a horrifying intensity that he couldn't begin to understand. Her hips stopped swinging, and her midnight eyes seemed to darken even more as her viciously smiling lips parted to reveal a set of razor-sharp, blood-soaked teeth.

"...and I will find you!"

Her hands shot up and out in front of her as a blistering burst of wind rocketed down the street behind her and smashed into them.

Nathan and Dai, experienced, battle-hardened veterans of the Praetorian Guard, turned and ran for their lives.

********

"There's a dragon on my walls,"

"What?" Uri frowned at me.

"There. Is. A. Dragon. On. My. Walls."

Uri turned and looked back over his shoulder and glanced at the titanic defensive curtain that surrounded my city. The front edifice, almost all of it, was scarred and scorched with the blast marks from thousands of artillery shells, but the tribal-looking swirls and blocks of color mixed together to form a very clear image of a very pissed-off-looking Dragon. "Ha!" he barked, "I was wondering what would happen to that."

"You know what it is?"

"Of course I do."

"Well, do you mind filling me in?" I squinted at him.

Uri shrugged and turned his eyes back toward the enemy. "Do you really think now is the time?"

I sighed and turned my attention back to the matter at hand. His unwillingness to tell me things seemed to be abating, but when that habit reared its ugly head, it was like a red rag to my bull. But, in this case, he may have had a point. We were rather busy.

We were a few hundred yards into the mindscape now, charging down the first of the enemy armies. Charging may have been an optimistic word, considering we were in a fully enclosed golf buggy, like the one the Pope used to drive around in. But unlike his, ours had the turret from a WWII-era bomber bolted to the top, with two rotary machine guns sticking out of the front. I was driving, Uri was manning the turrets and seemed to be having a wail of a time mowing down anything that moved.

Well, almost anything. A pack of one hundred velociraptors and a few dozen laser-equipped T-Rexes were beside us and ahead of us, and they were gleefully turning the enemy army to mulch. The Dinos had worked pretty well in the fight against Rhodri, so I didn't see the need to alter a winning formula, but whereas in that duel, I was experimenting and had only filled them with enough power to test Rhodri, I had now stuffed them full of enough power to render them practically immortal.

It was like that scene in one of the newer Jurassic Park movies where that guy was driving a motorcycle along with a pack of trained raptors. Except we were in a golf buggy and had guns.

I smirked to myself and called up to Uri. "Hey, have you ever seen that movie..."

"Yes, I did, and now still isn't the time."

I jerked the wheel, not to avoid something, but to intentionally run over some poor enemy soldier. I glanced back up at Uri, grinning again as I saw him chuckling to himself while the mental images going through my head seemed to bounce around his, too. "Okay, that's pretty funny," he almost laughed. "But we need to be going faster."

"Urgh, there's no pleasing some people." I grinned wider. With a single thought, the golf cart started to warp, to change, while never slowing down. It elongated, the front of it stretching out and angling down toward the ground; the wheels at the front grew a little larger, while the ones at the back balloon to four or five times their original size. My seat lowered toward the ground, stretching my legs out in front of me rather than at the normal seated position, and Uri, along with his turret, shifted further back behind me. Roll bars replaced the roof, and the glass of the windshield poofed away and was replaced by the shimmering light of an almost completely transparent Star-Trek-style energy shield. A sleek, dangerous-looking, much faster, and equally heavily armed dune buggy now raced along the battlefield. "Better?" I called back to Uri.

"Didn't they have anything in red?" He grinned back

I snorted. "You want red?" I ran someone else over; the full measure of the energy shield hit the enemy soldier with the force of... well, the force of an energy shield moving at eighty miles an hour. His body basically burst, showering the front of the buggy in blood and body parts. "How's that for red, mother fucker?" I yelled back at him.

"That was all I asked." He laughed back before returning all of his focus to the job of eviscerating the enemy army. "All we need now is some music."

Gatling guns are monsters, and the things bolted into Uri's turret were just slightly scaled-down versions of the ones found on the sides of battleships; they were designed to turn incoming missiles and aircraft into shrapnel. To do that, they unleashed a truly staggering amount of bullets into the air. But saying they fired X amount of rounds per minute is a pretty useless fact when trying to describe the blistering amount of firepower we are talking about, so instead, I will say this. Each one of the guns under Uri's control was capable of putting a bullet into every single square inch of a standard-sized football field in under five seconds. From a mile away... and Uri had two of them.

The lasers on the Rexes' heads were gouging huge swathes of burned flesh and obliterated death through the enemy ranks, rending furrows of charred and smoking destruction into the landscape where men and machines had once stood. Anyone missed by those blasts was mown down by the astonishing - and limitless - sheets of lead being fired by Uri. Men were falling like scythed wheat, more than a few of them struck by enough bullets in such a short stretch of time that their bodies simply fell to pieces. Anyone unfortunate enough to survive that onslaught was left to the roving packs of raptors and the stampeding Rexes. Biting men in half where they stood, crushing them under the three-tonne weight where they lay, the Rexes were a force to be reckoned with. The raptors played their part in the destruction, too, but their role was more specific. They were hunting the Evos.

I watched as one of the Praetorian Evos - having seen his ten-thousand-strong army be reduced to nothing more than a field of bloodstains and pulp in a matter of minutes - turned and fled.

The raptors were on him in moments.

But my pets were not the mindless killing machines they looked to be. Simply killing that fleeing Evo would have him respawn in his city a few moments after his death, safe and sound behind his walls and able to regroup his army before either rejoining the fray or mounting a defense of his city. No. My beautiful raptors didn't kill him. They kept that fucker alive. They ripped off his legs, and before he could do something to end his own avatar's life, they rolled him onto his back, drove their five-inch claws into his wrists, and pinned him to the ground, unable to move. Two of them stayed with the captive while the rest of the pack began the hunt for the next of my enemies, the ones already - or still - under bombardment from Jeeves' rockets from behind the walls.

An entire enemy army and the Praetorian leading them had been reduced to nothing in minutes. And all of it to the soundtrack of Dire Straits' Money for Nothing.

God, I fucking loved that guitar riff.

"I fucking love the guitar in this song!" Uri yelled out over the constant drone of his guns.

I snorted loudly, shook my head, and turned the buggy toward the next army.

********

Hard footfalls onto the hard ground, punctuated by hard breaths. Nathan was running.

He was running, and something was chasing them.

The men around him were running. A few of them were taking potshots at the little girl, but from the one brief glance he had cast over his shoulder, he saw the bullets pass straight through her as if she wasn't even there. As if she was a ghost.

Fuck, get a grip! Ghosts aren't real. Right? Well, city ghosts were, but that wasn't what this was, although shooting one would probably have the same effect.

He glanced to his left; a squad of his soldiers were running with them. His link to them told him that they were his, not Dai's, some of the thousands who had streamed into the tunnel on his command and followed them into this... this fucking nightmare. They were all being slowed by their frantic looks behind them at whatever horror was chasing them down. One of them, the man at the rear, was suddenly yanked back by a vine wrapping around his waist, jerking him off the ground and almost folding his body in half under his suddenly halted forward momentum.

The man screamed, and then there was a crunch.

Another scream, another crunch.

Then silence.... And another crunch.

Jesus fucking fuck! He couldn't tell if the man had been battered to a pulp against a wall or if he had been fed to a set of hungry, monstrous jaws. But that crunch sounded... wet. Wet and deadly.

A hand, a claw, a long thing with fingers the size of a Volkswagen, black and made of shadow itself, burst from the darkness of the wall the men were running beside. It hooked its fingers around a soldier in the center of the squad and yanked him into the void from whence it came. There was no crunch this time, not even a yelp, just a gasp of surprise as the man was jerked off his feet and pulled into the nothingness of the wall. There was no body, no body parts, there was no gore, there was no mess, just the entire volume of the man's blood painted onto a perfectly normal-looking wall. He felt his control over the soldier blink out of his mind...

He was feeling a lot of his soldiers blinking out of his mind.

More clawed hands erupted out of shadowy walls, more men being jerked off their feet and pulled into the impossibility of nothingness.

Oh shit. Shit fucking shitting shit! Get back to the tunnels. Get the hell out of here. Whatever this was, they would have to deal with it in the real world cause this whole situation was fucking crazy!

He turned his head back up to look ahead of him. Rajesh was nowhere to be seen, but Vasili and Maximillian were on their hands and knees, frantically searching the area he knew... knew...the tunnel entrances were located. Their eyes rose to meet his. It wasn't just fear etched onto their faces; this was pure terror. It was the look of trapped prey as it stared at the approaching predator. This was fear of the darkness manifest.

Their men were in the street, the one running along the foot of the wall, all of them with their rifles raised, all of them looking as terrified as their masters. Suddenly, they all turned, facing down the road to Nathan's right. They lifted their rifles and started firing. Shooting at something hidden from him behind the buildings, and judging by the angle of their weapons, it was something that towered over them. Frantic, desperate firing, each man in the group of hundreds backed away from whatever they were shooting at while keeping up their barrage.

A vine as thick as the fuselage of a 747 slammed into the ground like a falling tree. The few screams were instantly silenced by the deafening crash, which threatened to shake the two running men off their feet. With a sickening, wet, mulchy echo, the vine dragged its weight back a dozen feet across the ground before it lifted itself out of sight again. All that was left of the men who had been firing was a blood-soaked jelly-like smudge on the asphalt, bent and broken weapons, and the odd protruding piece of bone.

Vasili and Max were still there, curled up in balls against the base of the wall. Whatever that thing was, it had missed them.

"RUN!" Nathan bellowed breathlessly at them. "GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND FUCKING RUN!"

The two men blinked as his words slowly broke through their frozen terror. They dragged themselves to their feet, looked along the road that the vine had disappeared into, and wisely sprinted the other way.

Nathan and Dai were still running. How were they still running? He didn't remember advancing anywhere near this far into the street before encountering... whatever the fuck they were dealing with. He looked around again. Another man was yanked into the oblivion of the wall by the shadowy hand of death, then another, then another, then another. Two more were snared by vines and ripped back into the distance behind them...

Scream... crunch... scream... crunch.... Silence

A group of men to his right were sideswiped by a vine. Like an overstretched elastic springing back into place, it smashed into the men like cheese wire. The men who weren't simply sliced in half were smashed into the wall where their bodies simply exploded.

"We need to get off this street!" Dai panted next to him.

Nathan didn't have the breath to answer, he just nodded and gestured to an alley coming up on their left. Both men adjusted their direction toward it, a group of soldiers had already taken refuge inside it, and a few of them were bravely leaning around the corner to fire at any target they could.

The sky seemed to grow darker. Sounds, new sounds, started to echo above the screams of terrified and dying men. He didn't want to look up, don't look up, for fuck sake, don't look up.

Nathan looked up.

God dammit!

The sky was black with ravens, or crows, or some manner of black-feathered monstrosities, thousands upon thousands of them, whole clouds of beating wings, squawking caws, and beady, black eyes dripping with malice... The cloud dove onto the street.

Fuck, it had all been going so well. Five Praetorians, tens of thousands of men, all that extra power fed to him by their commander, a plan that seemed to be going exactly according to script. All of it, decimated by the appearance of that girl, that apparition, that... ghost.

That was the problem with hubris and arrogance, he supposed. You didn't realize you were guilty of it until it was too late.

He dove toward the entrance to the alleyway, Dai just ahead of him and the squad of his own men yanking him to safety

Panting, his chest heaving to gasp at the air needed to calm his burning lungs, he kept his back to the reassuringly solid wall behind him. The corner out on the street was three inches beyond his right shoulder and therein awaited death. He watched a few more of his men run past on the opposite side of the street and was just about to poke his head around the corner to see if he could guide a few more of them into the alley when the Tsunami of deathly black feathers, squawks, and razor-sharp claws burst past the opening of the alleyway.

He yelped and stumbled backward, slipping on something wet and landing with a grunt on his ass. He could only watch, slack jawed, as the small group of men on the other side of the street took the full measure of horror from the possessed flock of birds. The man at the rear turned, seeming to prefer to meet his death head-on. He didn't have to wait long. A particularly zealous bird skewered his face through the eye socket. The bird's skull was caved in by the impact, but not before shredding the man's brain. The bird gave a few twitchy flaps of its wings before it - and the man it was buried inside - crumpled to the ground.

The rest of the men in the group were no less unfortunate. Two of them were hoisted into the air and swallowed up by the mass of black feathers. Only a single leg and a shit-load of blood spray ever touched the ground again. The other men were just ripped to pieces. Wings, beaks, claws, feathers, it didn't matter, anything that touched the men sliced through their skin like a hot knife through butter. Clothes, skin, muscle, sinew, blood, and finally bone, all of it scoured away like it was nothing. The endless torrent of crows carried away the tattered shreds of the men.

They were gone. They were all gone. He had entered the city with around eight thousand men; the only ones left were the men in this alleyway with him. Dai's men had been back at the T-junction before the attack; maybe they had fared better, but the look on his friend's face gave him little cause for hope.

The black thickness of the air, the endless, binding mists, seemed to follow them into the alleyway. Not the birds, not the girl, just the mists... and that voice.

"Ready or not, here I come," it said in that singsong drone of horror.

He was still panting. The fear, the adrenaline, and the shock all clawed at the spot he felt his stomach should be. He was in a literal nightmare; he was in a twisted version of hell and sitting in something wet. He absently lifted his hands to look at them.

Blood.

He was sitting in blood. Well, of course, he was.

Wait, but whose?

Dai was standing next to him, looking out into the street as the ravages of winged death flew past the opening like the blizzard of the apocalypse, but the rest of his men were standing around a little further into the alley and looking down at him. As if to answer his silently asked question, a shadow of... something... stretched soundlessly down from the sky. He couldn't help but shudder at the association as his mind decided it looked like an evil version of the laughing taffy from the newest rendition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The silent... thing... latched itself onto the head of one of the men at the back of the group; his sounds and frantic screams of terror were silenced by the thing covering not just his mouth but his whole head. He was jerked up into the sky. Nathan could only watch in stunned, muted shock. None of the others had heard a thing; Nathan had only noticed because he happened to be looking in that direction at that moment. The man simply disappeared into the darkness above.

And then blood started to flow down the walls. Not the deluge raining from the sky that his previous experiences in this fucked up carnival of the grotesque had taught him to expect, but an altogether more subtle flood, one that ran down the walls like a macabre form of wet paint, and when it finally reached the ground, it crept out to pool around him.

Dai was the first to notice. He glanced down to see Nathan's pale, horrified-looking face, holding his blood-soaked hands up and his wide eyes flicking frantically between them, the bleeding walls, and the sky. Dai frowned and aimed his own gaze skyward, just in time to watch another one of those things snake out of the blackness, latch itself onto the head of another of the men, and whip him up into the air so hard his neck snapped.

Everyone heard that.

"Nath, we need to get out of here!" The sound burst from Dai's lips, unable to draw his eyes away from the man vanishing into the inky mists of death above them and then the almost serene flow of blood down the walls.

Nathan didn't answer. He just watched.

"We need to get back to the tunnels."

"They're not there." Nathan finally answered.

"Then we need to find the others. Lose ourselves in the city, keep moving. If we can get..."

"To the palace," Nathan interrupted, his eyes snapping to Dai's. "If we can get to the palace, we can end this!"

That wasn't what Dai was going to say, not at all. He was gonna suggest trying to scale the walls and get the fuck out of dodge, but Nathan's idea was no less crazy than his. Both of them would involve holding off those things that were attacking them long enough to complete their objective. However, Dai had to concede that Nathan's idea allowed them the use of both their hands rather than have them occupied trying to scale a hundred-and-fifty-foot, featureless marble wall.

A voice echoed into the alleyway. One that seemed to make their decision for them, even if the taffy-looking nightmares hadn't been snatching men off the ground.

"Come out, come out wherever you are."

Dai dragged Nathan onto his feet, doing his best to wipe the blood off his hands and onto his tattered pants before they all bolted for the other end of the alley.

*******

The second army had been obliterated to the musical machinations of Queen's We Will Rock You. Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me was an odd choice for the third army, but I thought that we had hit something of a sweet spot for army number four with Gun's N' Roses' Welcome to the Jungle.

Each army had been wiped out to a man in mere minutes, and with their commanders pinned to the ground by heavy, angry-looking velociraptors, none of the armies seemed to be in any rush to rejoin the fight and abandon the defense of their cities. That part was to be expected, even with my limited experience. The only reason I could have had for not killing those Evo bastards outright - aside from keeping them in fairly significant amounts of pain - was to stop them from respawning in their cities. And If I wanted them kept out of there, that could only mean I wanted in.

The fifth army, however, was significantly harder to take down. Whereas a few bullets from Uri's turret had scythed through whole ranks of men, detonated shells inside the still-firing artillery's barrels, and turned tanks into a barely stitched-together patchwork of holes, the fifth army proved a little more resilient.

"I think we have found one of the powerful armies!" Uri yelled over the music, the roars of pissed-off Dinos, and the drone of gunfire.

"What makes you say that?" I shouted back.

A tank shell detonated against the ground a little ahead of us, buffeting the buggy in mud and sundered earth before - a split second later - another shell smashed into the energy shield. The whole buggy was tipped up onto two wheels for a few seconds before crashing back down to the ground.

"Well... that, for a start," Uri answered.

"No, I meant, how can you tell this is the strong army and not the King?"

"Oh," He was still shouting to be heard over the din of battle. "I guess I can't. But I'm also guessing that all of the Evos we have captured so far have had their power allotment dropped down to almost zero to feed back to the King, and these fuckers don't seem powerful enough to have that much energy."

I frowned at that, trying to follow the logic while also trying to steer us around shell holes at eighty miles per hour and keep the steady stream of orders flowing to the rampaging Dinos. "Wait, you mean you don't think the King would be sending that power back to the still-intact armies?"

"I doubt it." Uri shrugged. "It's possible, but I would keep it all to myself - if I were him - as the last line of defense. He is the one that needs protecting, remember, and by now, he has to have a pretty good idea that his side is losing. He could also be sending it to the guys in your city."

My mind flashed to Faye's for a moment, and a cold chill ran down my spine. I was aware of what she was doing to the men who had breached my walls, but I wanted to spend as little time thinking about it as possible. That whole thing was fucked up. "I... don't think he is. Faye is beating the shit out of them... sort of."

"Of course she is," Uri laughed. "That girl is holding onto more anger than you are"

"Is she??"

"Pete... they murdered her, and now they are after you. How would you feel if the roles were reversed."

I thought about it for a moment and found myself shuddering again. "Oh, those guys are screwed."

Uri's grin grew a little wider. "Yup!" He was genuinely loving this. This was the culmination of a lifetime - and a death time - of dealing with an enemy he couldn't even see, let alone fight head-on. Ok, he had been mistaken about who that enemy was, but that hardly mattered. The organization these men fought for was irrelevant; they were his enemy, they were here, and this man meant to do them as much harm as he possibly could. "Send the raptors to flank the rear and get the Rexes to focus on the tanks." He yelled again as his foot tapped along with the beat of the music. "I want these fuckers dead by the time this song ends!"

I chuckled and shook my head. Of all the people living in my mind, I was the calm and sensible one. Who'd have thought it?

He doubled down on his fire, tracking the aim of his guns to keep just ahead of the thunderous charge of the Rexes; the men brave enough to stand and fire were hacked down by the relentless onslaught of 40mm hunks of steel; those who dove for cover were given a moment of respite as bullets kicked up puffs of dirt around them, but that reprieve only ever lasted as long as it took the dinos to get to them. Being hit by a few bullets not much smaller than a can of Red Bull was gonna fuck up your day, but being stamped on by a three-tonne reptile with a laser strapped to his head was a whole new level of fuck you. The tanks, as a rule, never managed to get off more than a single shot or two. Being priority targets for the technologically adept dinosaurs had the unfortunate habit of making them explode. Any who managed to avoid that fate were pounced on and ripped open like their hull was made of aluminum foil and optimism. The artillery, at this range, was basically useless, and almost all of them were either trampled into twisted tubes of metal by the Rexes or had one of their rounds hit by the sheets of death fired by Uri. One after another, they exploded like firecrackers.

Ram Jam's Black Betty blasted from invisible speakers and out over the field of carnage as the fifth army, now flanked on three sides - with us driving along its face, the raptors ripping into its rear, and the Rexes charging into its side - started to collapse, and then rout, only to be mercilessly slaughtered to a man.

********

They burst out of the alleyway and onto the street, gasping and panting, hands on their knees and sucking in the much-needed breaths while looking back in time to watch the body of one more of his men disappear into the darkness above. The top of the building, or what he could see of it, looked like a writhing mass of tentacles and teeth. He was, perhaps, more than a little grateful that the shadowy forms on the shadowy roof, backdropped by the shadowy sky, limited his view of the man being silently pulled apart and shared out amongst the shadowy jaws.

He shuddered, swallowed down the imagined meal that threatened to regurgitate itself onto the ground, and turned to look into the street. He froze again.

The last street had been black, blacker than night, blacker than black. The air had been filled with a soup-like mist that swallowed the light and reduced the enormous city down to a few very small and hauntingly dangerous square blocks. The birds, the little girl, the shadows lurking in shadows, they had wiped out all but a small handful of his men in... okay, it felt like hours, but could only have been a fraction of that. This street, however, was different.

The sun beat down on it, but this wasn't the bright yet actual sunless daylight of the mindscape; there was an honest to god sun in the sky. Nathan had seen enough of the world to recognize it for what it was. This was a desert sun.

The heat was dry, and it was relentless. It could only have been thirty seconds since they left the darkness of the alleyway, but the sweat was already starting to bead on his forehead. He glanced back toward the darkness and the taffy monsters, his mind already looking for ways to escape the heat.

The alley was gone. It had been twenty feet away, but now, instead of the opening into the shadows from which they had bolted, there were the crumbling remains of a vine-covered apartment block. Nathan frowned at the building. It's not like the alley could have been used as a means of escaping, well, anything. Not the heat and not the horrors that he already felt he would inevitably find in this new reality, but at the same time, alleyways didn't just disappear, and it took an awful lot of energy to alter a city's layout like that. New buildings, sure, they were fairly easy to create, but to move them around and suddenly block off a means of escape was something else entirely. His eyes scanned the roofs, too. The shadowy mass of tentacles, teeth, and terror was gone as well. That was something to be grateful for, at least.

With a sigh, one that only seemed possible now that his lungs weren't screaming at the exertion of his flight from the darkness, he turned and glanced at Dai. Dai's eyes, however, were busy elsewhere.

Nathan did the only thing he could and looked around, too. He regretted it immediately.

The decaying, crumbling buildings and the cracked, scarred roads were the same, but that was about the only similarity to the street they had just left. The vines, rather than being the dark green of poison oak, were now a deathly looking, beat-colored red, like something out of the final parts of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Blood vines, feeding, or perhaps draining the buildings they were connected to.

Cars... nope, still not dealing with that... were overgrown with them and sat abandoned at interspersed points on either side of the street. They looked like enormous turtle shells in the concrete but with their blood vessels on the outside. In fact, now he looked at it, the whole street seemed to have been the victim of a rampantly out-of-control circulatory system of death.

Everything was caked in sand-colored dust, which added enormously to the desert motif of the scene. It wasn't sand; it was too fine. It really was just dust, but it had that off-yellow shade that made everything it touched look like it belonged in some abandoned Mojave town as it swirled around in the wind.

Most of the windows in the buildings had been smashed, and the odd pile of broken glass lay at the base of the buildings, but a few of the windows were still intact and were caked in a layer of grime and that same sandy dust. Doors to buildings swung open and closed like an old west saloon door on the breeze, the eerie creaking to go with them, too. At least the doors not fixed in place by the vines did.

The wind, he had forgotten about that, what with the nightmares he had been subjected to, but his mind couldn't remember if he had felt any after that initial scream from that little girl.

Fuck, the girl. Where the hell had she gone?

He craned his ears. There were no whistles, no haunting tunes, no terrifying giggles, and, apparently, no more playing. Aside from the soft scratching of dust being blown along the ground, the scene was completely silent.

He frowned and looked behind him; the walls were still there, towering, colossal, and imposing over this small section of the city. Its shadow, based on the position of the sun, yawned out into the mindscape beyond, but plenty of shadows from the buildings, cars, and streetlights stretched along the street toward it. He eyed them nervously; he had just seen firsthand what sort of things called the shadows home. But no, he wasn't sure how he could tell, but these weren't the same shadows of darkness from the other street; they were just regular shadows, a product of their creator's position relative to the relentless sun.

He frowned at them anyway.

"Err, Nathe?" Dai's voice snapped him out of his thoughts.

Nathan turned to look at him, and Dai nodded his attention further up the boulevard and toward the center of the city.

Their target! Nathan whipped his head around and peered into the distance. Yes, he could see it! The mists that had obscured their vision were gone, and his target was now in sight. He still had a good ten miles to go to get there, but at least he could see it.

"Okay," he said, his breathing was still heavy from the running... from the fleeing in terror, and a small frown crossed his brow at memories of him thinking that fear was unbecoming of a man of the Praetorian Guard. He didn't even know what fear was back then, and 'back then' had only been an hour or two ago. "We need to get moving unless you want to hang around here and wait for little psycho Suzzie to find us?"

"No, nope, I good. I'm ready to g...."

Noise from behind them, back toward the wall, cut them off, and they both jerked themselves around like a top to look, both of them crouched and ready to fight or run, as the situation dictated.

A man, alone, was running across the opening of the street beneath the walls.

"Rajesh?" Nathan murmured, "Hey, Raj!" he immediately yelled down the street.

Raj skidded to a halt and peered back at them. "Nathan?"

"Get your ass over here!"

Two more men burst out of the shadow between the building on the right-hand corner of the street, stopping when they saw Rajesh starting to run up the street and then started to follow him. They had a small, tattered-looking group of soldiers with them, maybe twenty.

"Fuck," Dai huffed, standing up straighter and relaxing, "Max, Vasili, are we glad to see you."

"The fuck did you go?" Vasili panted as the group of them finally reached them.

"We ducked through the alley." Dai sighed, his breathing returning to normal.

All of them, Evos and soldiers alike, turned to look at where the alley had been. "Don't ask," Nathan grumbled and waved a hand dismissively at it. "Just... don't. I'm guessing the tunnel entrances weren't where we left them?"

Max shook his head. "No, we couldn't find them. We went back and looked again, but they just weren't there."

Nathan huffed. "No, I'm not surprised. This guy seems to be able to rearrange his city at will; that building was an alley a minute ago. I just..." he frowned, "Wait... what do you mean, you went back? When? Those birds were slaughtering everything."

"Birds?" Vasili squinted, casting a glance at his equally confused-looking comrades. "What birds? We went back there about an hour ago; there were no birds, just that fucking mist and a shit load of blood."

It was Nathan and Dai's turn to look confused. "An hour ago? We told you to run away from that vine thing maybe ten minutes ago."

Rajesh's eye twitched. "Nathan, we ran away from that vine, fuck, five hours ago? At least?" The others nodded in agreement. "We circled back after a couple of blocks when we noticed you weren't behind us. That first avenue was empty when we got there, so we looked for the tunnels again so we could get the fuck out of here, but they were gone. We were attacked again, and we've been running since."

"Fucking shadow things almost wiped us out," Vasili was still nodding, his arms wrapping around himself and holding his arms. "One man after another, whole squads, just ripped apart."

Max shuddered. "And those fucking spiders..." The entire group of them joined the shudder, even the soldiers. "Nathe, we have been looking for you for hours."

Nathan frowned but let the men talk.

"Any news from outside? Maybe another army got in." Dai asked absently. He already knew the answer without it being spoken. Communication was all but cut off once inside an enemy's walls. Sending a runner back was the only option, and that was impossible without being able to find the tunnels. Still, the other three shook their heads anyway.

"We need to get to the palace and burn it to the ground," Nathan said, standing himself up straight to resume his position of command.

All three of the other men winced. "Every time we have tried progressing in that direction, something has attacked us," Max said.

"No..." Dai said slowly, his eyes pointing at the floor between them and his face looking lost in thought. "No, they haven't attacked us. They have attacked our armies. Think about it: those shadow things, the birds, the vines, any of them could have easily hit one of us, and statistically speaking, they should have if the attacks were random. But they haven't; they are killing our soldiers."

"Jesus, I think you're right," Rajesh answered cautiously as if acknowledging the fact would cause it to vanish and put them in danger. "Fuck, that spider walked straight past you." He looked at Max, who, in turn, shuddered again and nodded his agreement back.

"But... why wouldn't they kill us?" Vasili tilted his head, following the conversation.

"Fuuckk," Nathan groaned. "Because if we're killed, we just respawn back in our cities and rejoin the fight out there. We are being isolated. This really is a delaying tactic!"

"Of course, I'm not going to kill you, silly," a child's voice echoed down the street from behind them. The five men spun toward the source of the sound. The little girl, blood droplets splattered up the side of her dress, was sitting on one of the stone steps leading to one of the buildings. She hopped up, hooked her hand around a streetlight, and started swinging in lazy, playful circles around it. "...at least not yet. We are still having fun," The evil grin stretched across her face again. "Let's play a different game."

"No more games!" Nathan barked, his sword appearing in his hand before he stormed furiously toward the girl. In only a few steps, he was on her, drawing the blade back and swinging it forward toward the girl's neck.

The sound of metal clashing against metal reverberated down the street, but the girl had vanished at the last possible second.

"How about..." she said ponderingly. Nathan spun around, his eyes widening as he watched her casually swinging around a streetlight on the opposite side of the street as if she had always been there, "... tag!" Her giggles echoed around the buildings.

Nathan's eyes flashed back to his men.

"Don't let them catch you." the giggling, sing-song voice was suddenly and violently cut off by a grunt and another loud, wet crunch as something that looked like a razor-sharp scaffolding pole skewered down through the head of one of the new group of soldiers--impaling him through the helmet, skull, throat, through his chest and out between his legs.

All eyes shot upwards.

"They got bigger," Raj murmured to himself.

"Run!" Nathan yelled, turned toward the city center, and led the group of survivors as fast as his legs could carry him.

********

Things are always found in the last place you look for them.

I mean, that's kinda obvious, because why would you keep looking after you had found them? The cliche had more to do with things never being in the first place you looked, and that was perfectly true here. We had attacked the army on the eastern side of the city first, the one on the end of the line, the first one who had stayed in the enemy formation after the five armies had poured into the tunnels. If we had attacked the western side first, the second army we would have found would have been the Kings. But no, this way, it was the last but one.

The combined power of all thirteen armies had exploded into the side of the buggy only a few seconds after engaging and sent the damned thing tumbling through the air, bits of it breaking off, including the turret, and tossing Uri and me out onto our asses.

I didn't understand how Uri saw this coming, and I couldn't imagine what fighting him would be like until we were right on top of the asshole. But as soon as he hit us, I could feel it. This was a man who was currently more powerful than Uri ever had been and, vastly, insanely more powerful than anyone I had fought before. Even combined, Rhodri and Neil, my only other experience of something close to actual combat, were not even close to this level of power. I thought Sterling had been strong, but compared to the hit that ripped the dune buggy to pieces, Sterling was a fucking pussy.

I pulled myself to my feet, dusting the sod and dirt off my clothes, and glared out into the battlefield.

I should have been scared; I should at least have been nervous, but no... I was just fucking angry!

The gates holding back my rage had been swung open, and I let it consume me, I let it fill me, I let it claim every part of my reasoning and tactical thinking. I had suffered pain and loss and torture at the hands of these assholes for months before I even knew they existed. Faye and Becky were dead, Philippa was broken and may never be healed, Evie's life had been altered irrevocably, my parents had been murdered, Uri'd had to sacrifice himself to the cause, Marco had betrayed me, I had wasted three months of my life pretending to be tortured to get here, and so far the only battles I had fought had been as easy as swatting down fucking children.

To my rage-flooded mind, rightly or wrongly, the man in front of me was the enemy I had been looking for. He was the representative of his order, and he was the delegated epitome of the threat they posed. He was here for the sole purpose of killing me, and for his crimes, I was going to make him beg to die before I ended him.

Huh, maybe Faye's sadistic streak wasn't so unexplainable after all.

And to make it worse, the music had stopped.

The battlefield was carnage. It was pure chaotic savagery. Velociraptors hurled themselves through the air to attack the enemy soldiers, ripping into them with talons and teeth while the enemy thrashed underneath them, stabbing and shooting until the last possible moment. These soldiers were no more organized than the ones in the armies we had obliterated already, they were just stronger, much stronger, and instead of poofing out of existence at the lightest touch from the dinos, these fuckers were making the raptors work for every single kill.

Each raptor was five or ten times more powerful than any of the soldiers they were attacking, but they were out numbered 100 to 1, and they were starting to take losses. The Rexes were even more powerful again, but there were fewer of them, and, just like in the last five engagements, they were the target of every one of the hundred or so tanks in the formation. The first one to go down had taken three shells to the head within a few seconds while he rampaged over the battlefield. The ground had shaken when he finally toppled forward, his chin hitting the earth and digging in, catapulting the rest of his body over his head in a move that snapped its neck with a sickeningly loud crunch. On the bright side, it landed on and crushed all three of the tanks that had killed it.

I looked around for Uri, but there was no sign of him, just the burning, broken wreckage of our buggy.

I growled and turned my attention back to the melee.

The smoke from the buggy, the burning wreckages of tanks, and the fires started by the Rexes' head lasers wafted in thick plumes over the field, obscuring most of my view of the enemy ranks, but it didn't take long for my presence to be noticed. A tank rumbled toward me; I could feel it through my feet long before I saw its main gun fade into being through the dense smoke, followed shortly by the rest of its hull. I snarled at it, the anger building inside me - just at the sight of it - to almost feral proportions. I leaped forward, wrapped my hand around the barrel of the gun, and jerked upward. The turret was ripped away from the rest of the tank.

Weight wasn't really a thing in the mindscape, and neither was physical strength. It was all a product of comparative power. The tank was strong, but compared to me, it was nothing. The turret, despite being a dozen meters long and looking to be made out of solid steel, weighed no more in my hand than your average ping-pong paddle. I smashed it into the top of the tank, bursting the head of the driver like a grape as he peeked up above the hole. The waft of air displaced by the attack, however, blew away the smoke in front of me, and a group of about thirty enemy soldiers turned to see what was happening. Their weapons were on me in a heartbeat.

Bullets worked in the same way as weight; all about comparative power. I didn't have bulletproof skin in the mindscape, but the projectiles needed to be strong enough to pierce my skin. These weren't. I stepped to the side, putting the tank between me and them, put my foot against the tank's hull, and shoved hard. The tank was launched toward my attackers at a rate of about fifty miles per hour. The men who hadn't dived out of the way were simply reduced to body parts and body spray under the impact of the vehicle. A corner of it dug into the ground, and it flipped, bouncing and cartwheeling across the battlefield and crushing anything it hit before it smashed into the line of artillery pieces.

My move and the resulting explosion drew a lot more attention my way, and seeing that their bullets were essentially useless against me, a few hundred men charged. I dropped the turret and stood my ground, feeding the staggering power of my powerplants into my fist as I had done a few times before.

The dull tingle turning into a throbbing vibration under the skin, the heat burning against the center of my palm, the pressure of forcing every ounce of my energy through my body and down my arm to feed that growling, glowing ball of yellow light, the incandescent fury that burned brighter with each passing second, and then... when the charging hordes were only a dozen or so feet away... the release.

I was starting to understand my powers, maybe not on an intellectual level, but on an instinctive one. I didn't know how it worked; I didn't really understand how it manifested, but I did understand that thought or, more accurately, intent was key to making it do what I wanted it to.

It was subtle, but it was effective. The last few times I had used my energy ball thing, I had swung my fist in an underarm motion a lot like a softball pitcher. This time, I swung it sideways like a haymaking punch. The energy ripped out of my hand like a wave rather than a ball. A wafer-thin slice of power that arced away from me with devastating force, a wave of violence no thicker than my arm and spreading wider as it traveled, smashed into the onrushing enemy soldiers with as much finesse as your average nuclear detonation. Men exploded under the force; it was like each of them in the ever-widening cone of destruction was hit by a large building traveling at the speed of a meteor. There were no screams, there was no fire, there were no gorey body parts flung off to the farthest reaches of the battle. They were simply vaporized. Hundreds of them. And the wave of power kept going long after it had dealt with the immediate threat.

By the time it hit the last remaining artillery pieces, the wave was fifty feet wide and had carved a path of devastation through the King's army. It was like the parting of the Red Sea; nothing lived, or even moved, in what was left of that corona. Just the burning, eviscerated hulks of shattered tanks, the smoldering wreckage of Praetorian guns, and the red-soaked grass swaying in the breeze.

The rage huffed a snort of derision inside me, satisfied that first blood was mine before I turned my attention back to the rest of the enemy army. I was about to take my first step on a charge of my own when a groan pulled my attention back toward the flaming remains of the buggy.

Now that the smoke was cleared, it was easy to spot Uri, or at least what was left of him. He was lying on the ground; a large chunk of the wreckage of the rear part of the buggy had pinned him below the waist, one of his arms was missing, and his face was covered in blood, but it was the hunk of metal - jagged and bloodsoaked - protruding out of his chest that really caught my attention. His eyes met mine, a gasp of air accompanied a bubble of blood from his lips, and he nodded to me.

I reached down, picking up the battered remains of the tank turret...

And threw it at him.

The impact turned his upper body and his head into mulch.

Twenty seconds later, he shimmered into existence next to me as if he had stepped out of a rip in the fabric of reality. He looked at me; his smile was gone, replaced with a look of grim determination. He nodded again, spawned a Katana - a samurai sword - in each of his hands, and charged toward the enemy.

I was right behind him.

********

Nathan had never minded spiders. He didn't like them in the way that would make him want one for a pet, but they didn't give him the creeps, they didn't gross him out, and the thought of one crawling over his face while he slept didn't send him into a blind panic. Cats, on the other hand, cats freaked him out, evil little fuckers, but that was a thought for another time.

Right now, his lack of aversion to arachnids was being challenged by the forty-foot monstrosity, with apparent spears for legs, charging after them as they ran. He glanced back over his shoulder and up. The thing's body was tiny in proportion to the size of its legs. It reminded him of a Daddy-long-legs from his childhood days. Apparently, those spiders, found in almost every home in the northern hemisphere, were among the most venomous spiders on Earth compared to their size. The comedy of it was that they didn't have fangs long enough or strong enough to pierce the skin of anything bigger than a housefly. All that lethal strength and no way to use it. He had no idea if that was true or if it was one of those myths that caught on, and right now, it didn't matter cause the thing chasing them had fangs that looked like they were big enough to impale a buffalo.

The really repulsive part of the whole scene, though, was the fact that the first man it had skewered on those pike-like legs was still there. The soldier's lifeless body was now padding for the creature's appendage as it rampaged after them. The man's vacant eyes - eyeballs burst under the sudden pressure change in his skull, his arms and legs flopping around limply - stared emptily after his former comrades as he rode along on the leg of the monster that had killed him.

He wasn't the only man to have fallen, either. One of the soldiers had stumbled while turning to fire at the beast and got impaled through the back. Another had tried darting to the side to get out of its way, but the massive spider had kicked out at him with his equally massive, pincer-like blades on the bottom of his legs and had split the front of the man open from his balls to his brains. He had folded open like a hot dog roll as he hit the ground.

But, as strange as it may have sounded to anyone else, the spider wasn't the part bothering him.

Nathan was getting tired.

It was bone-deep fatigue that seemed to be sinking into him more and more with every passing moment. They were running at a pace that most marathon runners would be soul-crushingly envious of, and they must have run for well over a mile by now, powering toward the city center as fast as their legs would carry them. But he knew that wasn't the source of the tiredness. Power, even a paltry amount of it, would completely remove the need for any sort of rest. He didn't have any physical muscles to get tired; there was no lactic acid build-up, there was no calorie-to-output ratio, there was only power. The power in his well fuelled everything, and somehow, it was running out.

The strange part about it was that he had barely used any of his own power since entering the city, let alone the massive amounts of additional power directed to him by his commander, which could mean one of two things.

Either his superior officer had gotten another team inside the city and, unimpressed by Nathan's progress, had redirected that additional power toward them, or, more likely - given the incomprehensible things that had happened to him and his men since he got here - the battle outside was going very badly and the Commander had needed to pull back all of that power, including most of Nathan's own, to combat whatever the hell Pete was doing to them.

Fuck, even that name sent a chill down his spine. The depravity of the mind that could conjure up this level of barbaric insanity was something that Nathan couldn't begin to understand, but imagining what that would look like in open battle... he shuddered again.

They couldn't keep running forever.

They would have to find a way to escape this nightmare, the little girl, and the horrors chasing them, or they were going to have to stand and fight with what little power they had left. The time to make that decision was quickly approaching, and if left too late, they wouldn't have the energy to do either. They would be trapped here until whatever was happening in the rest of the mindscape either ended or killed them outright.

********

I was getting angrier. I could feel it.

There was nothing particularly annoying or even frustrating with how the battle was progressing; I had long since gotten used to the idea that this army would be the true test, and I was carving my way through the ranks of enemy soldiers just as I had always hoped to.

And yet that anger was building more and more.

I could feel it. That throbbing behind my eyes and beneath my temples, like a building pressure, the tingle under my skin, and the heat burning inside of me. It was all growing. The enemy had realized that their backs were against the wall and had formed a tighter, more defensive circle around a central point, probably around the King. Every one of them we killed would respawn at some point further back into the mindscape and race to rejoin the fight, endless waves of them, and with no way to effectively surround the enemy completely - at least not with the forces on hand - there was no way of stopping them... yet.

But, that nuisance aside, it did make killing them a lot more enjoyable.

Picking up what should have been a fifty-tonne tank and throwing it like a hand grenade into the tightly packed ranks of enemy soldiers was entertaining, to say the least. Watching the lines being ripped open by a blast from one of the Rexes's lasers, only for the gap to be swallowed up again by the endless sea of men, was, somehow, strangely beautiful. And seeing the raptors ripping chucks out of the reinforcing waves, like a pack of bears snapping salmon out of raging rapids, was pretty impressive.

But I was getting impatient.

Maybe that was what was feeding my anger.

I mean, we should have accidentally killed the King by now, considering the level of violence being rained down on that group. But, clearly, it wasn't enough.

"Jeeves, do me a favor, will you?" I didn't need to finish the request; I just took a few steps back to lean against the burning hulk of a Praetorian tank and folded my arms in petulant annoyance.

A few moments later, the enemy formation erupted in a series of massive explosions. The entire weight of Jeeves's rocket batteries filled the air for a few seconds before the men and machines in the praetorian ranks were obliterated. Dozens upon dozens of explosions, each one big enough to level a small city block, rained down on the enemy. Over a hundred by the time the smoke trails cleared.

There was nothing left--just a hole in the ground filled with the charred and destroyed remains of soldiers. The smell of death and cordite filled the air. There were no bodies, no intact ones, anyway, nothing more than a few shreds of vaguely recognizable bits of tank, and no raging infernos. There were no screams of pain, no sobs of fear, and no rattles of men in the death throes. More importantly, there was no dead praetorian Evo, either.

I peered into the crater. "The fuck? Oh, this cunt is getting on my nerves now!" I spun around and looked out over the field. "Alright, I fucking give up, where is he??" The enemy reinforcements had stopped. They were now forming a defensive line between where we were and the closest Praetorian city. I squinted at them. There was still no sign of the King.             

Uri stepped up next to me, his eyes on the same thing as mine. We just stood there in silence, me with my arms folded, him with his blood-soaked swords hanging by his sides, and watched as the mass of enemy soldiers started to coalesce into something close to a coherent defensive formation. But something wasn't adding up, and it was starting to piss me off. "Does that seem a really strange place to form up to you?" I finally asked him, tilting my head at the sight.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, why there? Why not further back and out of the range of Jeeves's rockets? Hell, why not go back to their city, where they may actually have a chance? Why there? Why that exact spot?"

Uri tilted his head and squinted a little harder. "You think it's a trap?"

"Or at least a way of luring us away from the city, yeah."

"Hmmm," Uri nodded. "What do you want to do?"

"Me? I'm not doing anything... you are gonna follow them."

Uri rolled his eyes but smiled as the Dinos started to get into position to charge. "This is payback for leaving you at the party, isn't it," he grinned at me as he hoisted himself onto the back of one of the Rexes.

"Dude, you are literally riding a fucking dinosaur right now, stop complaining.... And also, yes." I smirked back.

"You know that if this is a trap, they are gonna spring it as soon as we move off, don't you?" He asked over his shoulder as the rex started to head toward our lines.

"Well, yeah, obviously," I shrugged. "But we don't have all day, and I'm just about done with this peek-a-boo bullshit. Either he shows himself in the next few minutes, or I start flattening cities and let him watch! One of them has to be his, right?"

My anger was stalking back and forth impatiently; it was craving carnage. It was eyeballing any one of the thirteen cities around us and wondering why the fuck we weren't kicking in gates and obliterating palaces. But I needed to wait; I needed to lure the King out, just as Uri had suggested at the beginning, and I was finally starting to understand how the game was played.

I took a deep breath and focused.

The sounds of jet engines on huge aircraft rippled over the relative silence of the mindscape. The last Praetorian army was off in the distance, watching impotently while my forces crushed their infinitely stronger allies and knowing that there was nothing they could do to affect the outcome of this battle. The King's army was preparing to take on the might of the entire pack of Dinos head on and were clearly nervous about it. They also all had to be aware, by now, that they were still inside the range of Jeeves's rocket batteries. The King had gambled, he had sucked every measure of usable energy out of the men on his own side, hoping it would be enough to defeat me, and he had lost.

Now, the seventh and final army was just sitting there. Unable to advance, unwilling to retreat, just forced to be unwilling spectators to the end of their efforts. Forced to watch as a fleet of twenty enormous B-52 bombers faded into existence in the skies over my walls, picked a city at random - not the one directly behind the waiting enemy trap - and started off toward their target.

I looked up and watched them go. One of two things was about to happen, either this mother fucking King was going to show himself, or I was going to level one city after another until he did.

Movement flickered out of the corner of my eyes, a spec in the endless sunshine of the mindscape skies...

Fucking finally!

I turned myself to look up at the rapidly descending man of the goddamned hour.

The King was, by all appearances, just a normal-looking guy, albeit one who had managed to jump - or fly - a hundred feet into the air and was currently plummeting toward me, sword held in both hands above his head, ready to cut me in half as he landed.

I was tempted, for the briefest of moments, to let him. To let him cut me down, to let him kill this avatar, even if only to see the look on his face when I reappeared in the mindscape, just like he could, and show him that he had achieved nothing. That to stop me, he would need to kill me and to kill me, he would need to get his ass inside my city - not as if that idea was working out so well for his buddies, but he didn't know that - and to get into my city, he would need to go through me. I wanted to watch the look of realization spread across his face when he finally understood that his plans had been to take down a normal Evo, one with a finite amount of power at his disposal.... An Evo just like him, and that I was more. I wanted him to finally understand that I could, and would, do this all fucking day, and he would run out of power... and then die... long before I even broke a sweat.

For a few heartbeats, I considered it. Just breaking the man's spirit before breaking the rest of him.

But as I said, I was pretty pissed off by now, and my patience for mind games was just about through.

The King was screaming against the wind rushing past him, a scream that could be hurled at the raging oceans or the mightiest of storms, and they would be forced to take notice.

My anger purred.

I yawned.

The look of blind fury seemed to explode across the man's face; his eyes widened in furious disbelief at the blase look on mine, and the sounds of his Battlecry finally reached my ears. I watched him plummet toward me.

One hundred feet.

Seventy

Fifty

Twenty

Ten

My hand snapped up and caught the man's wrist below his now useless sword. My other hand grabbed him by the scruff of his collar, halting his dive in the space of two feet, and I yanked him in close, all the way in, until his eyes were inches away from the burning orbs and utter loathing in mine. The look of shock on his face was almost enough to satisfy my rage... almost...

"Took you long enough," I growled into his face.

"Fucking DIE, you little fucking piece of..." The spittle from his screaming tirade splashed onto my sleeve as I backhanded him. The same force used to kick a goddamn tank across the battlefield was fed into the back of my hand and then smashed, almost casually, into the king's jaw. His limp body flew through the air, some seventy or eighty feet, and bounced along the sundered earth of the mindscape before his back crashed into one of the husks of a tank that I had destroyed. The sound of breaking bones was loud enough to be heard over the jet engines flying above us, ready to hit the first city. He groaned pathetically.

But I wasn't done yet. Not by a long shot.

With a growl, I stalked toward him.

********

Maximilian froze, a look of undiluted panic on his face. It was enough for Nathan, his group, and the surviving members of their armies to skid to a halt and look at him. "Something's happening to my... Arrrrgh" He dropped to his knees, his hands clutching and clawing at his head as he screamed in agony, and then vanished.

Just blinked out of existence.

The rest of his men looked up at him in shock and confusion while Nathan stared, wide-eyed in shock, at the spot on which his comrade had been kneeling. They may have never seen anything like that before, but he sure as hell had. And he knew what it meant.

But there was no time to explain, no time to do anything. "He's gone, we need to keep..."

The spider barrelled into them with the force of a runaway freight train.

Nathans's world turned upside down; the sound of breaking bones echoed through his ears as he tumbled, rolled, and cartwheeled away from the impact, bouncing heavily against the decaying concrete until his back - and then his skull - crashed into the concrete wall of one of the buildings. The sickening crunch, the blinding white flash before his eyes, and the deafening ringing in his ears were the sum of his existence as his battered body and impact-dazed mind tried to put the world back together again.

It could only have taken a few seconds for consciousness, or at least conscious awareness, to return to him, but it felt a lot longer than that. He couldn't move. He knew bones were broken; he could feel them, but he could also tell that they weren't broken enough to stop him from dragging himself to his feet. It was more like his body just didn't want to listen to the hazy commands given to it by his brain. His vision was blurry, even more so when he moved his eyes, and trying to focus on anything sent a jolt of electrified pain through his skull. The ringing in his ears muffled the sounds coming from whatever it was he was looking at. His mind felt... slow.

Maximilian, a man he had fought beside more times than he could hope to count, was dead. Not dead in the mindscape, not killed as part of this endless game fought between minds, he was dead... really, actually, properly dead. His palace had been destroyed. The rest of his men had never been inside an enemy city when its Palace had been burned down. They had never seen a target's avatar scream out and collapse and then just... vanish. They had never seen that look of realization, of terror, wash over a man's face. That final moment when they understood that they were about to die.

But he had.

That was why he had been chosen to lead the southern assault on Pete's city. His experience, his ruthlessness, his ability to break into the deepest parts of a man's mind, to feed on the power and the knowledge that person had, to drain them by force, and to look into the desperate, pleading eyes of someone who knew they were about to die... and kill them anyway.

It was cold, it did something to his soul every time, and it left more scars than he would ever admit, but it was his duty.

And a man of the Praetorian Guard put his duty above all things.

But this time, he had failed, and he had failed spectacularly.

They had known Pete was powerful; they had known that before any of this started. But to say something is powerful is the same as saying that something is big. A rat is big when standing next to a termite. Without context, it was just a word. They hadn't even seen this as just a word, though. Their arrogance, their unshakable belief in their own superiority, had led the Praetorians to do something worse than be dismissive of Pete's power. They had taken it as a challenge.

Jesus, even when he had been outside the city, he had considered the possibility that the unit's record of zero casualties may not survive. But he had been more concerned with the record itself, the honor it bestowed; and the bragging rights of his leading part of the unit possessing it, than he had been with the reality that someone would actually need to die in order for it to be broken. And even then, the idea that they may actually lose had never occurred to him. It had been inconceivable. He had called the ratio of thirteen to one overkill, for god's sake, when in reality, they were doomed from the start.

And now it was clear: the rest of the praetorian army was beaten, and cities were being destroyed. Men were being killed.

Really killed.

Properly, permanently killed.

All these thoughts bounced around his head as his vision slowly cleared. It felt to him like that took inordinately longer than it should have done, though. Time had lost all meaning. Hours must have been squeezed into the few seconds he had been slumped against that wall; he could tell it hadn't been too long by the scene of devastation being played out in front of him.

All of it in slow motion.

Dai was on the ground, kicking and clawing his way backward away from the stamping and kicking monster, rolling to dodge one of the spear-like legs from impaling him through the chest.

Rajesh and Vasili were running. They both must have been knocked aside by the impact as well because they were much closer to Nathan's side of the street than they were to where they had been hit. They were aimless; they happened to be running along the boulevard and toward the city's palace, but the looks on their faces told him that was pure coincidence. They were just trying to get away.

The spider, its many beady eyes looking everywhere, must have seen them because it kicked out hard and low. Rajesh took most of the force just below his hip and was launched, cartwheeling and tumbling through the air and into the side of the building a little way along from where Nathan was slumped. His body folded at a hideously unnatural angle as the wall violently halted his flight path, and he dropped to the floor.

Vasili wasn't so lucky. If Rajesh took most of the force, it was because the pole-like shaft of the spider's leg had hit him; Vasili took the softer but equally horrific hit from the pincer-shaped blades that the spider had for a foot. Both of his legs were sliced clean off, one halfway down his thigh, the other just at the knee, and his whole body was sent careening almost straight upwards, maybe ten feet, before he smashed back into the ground. Rajesh was unconscious, or at least too badly hurt to move; Vasili, however, was more than aware of the pain ripping through his body, screaming out in agony as both of his hands reached down to grasp his legs above the stumps that were left of them.

Most of the soldiers were already dead. There had been about twenty-five of them with the Evos when the monster had hit them; about ten of them were now lying on the ground, or at least pieces of them were. Some men were shooting; others were looking for cover. One man had his rifle raised high and was unloading as many bullets as he could into the monstrosity. It was impossible to miss at that range, and yet they didn't seem to be having any effect on the beast whatsoever. A mass of white shot out from the spider's rear and plastered the man to the floor. Spider Web? Neither Nathan nor the soldier had much time to think about it; a leg speared the man through the chest, and he instantly stopped struggling.

Vasili was still screaming, writhing on the ground, unable to do anything more than try to will away the searing pain, all that remained of his legs.

That scream; it sounded so far away. The whole thing was like watching a movie in slow motion while wearing heavy-duty ear protectors and suffering the worst of all imaginable hangovers. The world was spinning.

Dai was still scrambling backward, but the spider's legs seemed to be moving with him, one of the eight extraordinarily dangerous appendages dedicated to making sure he couldn't get far and didn't get up.

His eyes found Nathan's, the look of fear and confusion on his face staying there for a few pointed seconds before being replaced with one of shock...

Dai blinked out of existence, too. All but three of the remaining soldiers vanished with him.

"Please... stop..." Nathan tried to say as a tear forced its way out of his eye and rolled down his cheek, but even he could tell his voice was coming out as little more than a groaned incoherent murmur. "We... surrender.... Please."

The little girl's head almost instantly appeared six inches in front of his, upside down, as if she was clinging to the wall above him. He didn't bother to look up to check."What did you say?" She said in that haunting, sing-song voice that seemed to bounce off everything, inside and outside of his head. He looked up at the spider in time to watch a pair of still-kicking legs disappear into its mouth.

"Mercy... please."

"Do you give up?" she grinned a little wider.

He nodded... ah, fuck! He shouldn't have nodded; pain ripped through him again, and the world resumed its spinning. "Yes."

"Then you have to say it."

"We... give up..."

"No, silly," she giggled again and bopped a finger onto the tip of his nose. "It's a game. You have to say, 'You win.'"

Nathan looked past her and out at his comrades, at his friends. The last two soldiers were still shooting, but the spider slammed one of his legs into the front of the car they were taking cover behind, sending it flipping into the air before it crashed back to earth right on top of them. Nathan could only groan as blood started to run out from beneath it.

"You... win..."

"Yay!" The girl hopped off the wall and landed on her feet in front of Nathan, giggling, skipping, and hopping around before starting to dance something that looked an awful lot like 'the floss.' "I win, I win!" she sang over in a tune he didn't recognize but was doing nothing to help his blinding headache.

She jumped, spun in the air, and landed in a crouch, her face a few inches away from Nathan's again. "Okay, what do I win?"

Nathan blinked.

She giggled again. "I'm only teasing you. I know what I win." Her smile vanished, and she started to change. Her body grew, no longer a little girl but a full-sized adult woman; her hair changed color from black to a fiery, blazing red, and her eyes, black with evil menace, faded to a deep, almost glowing, emerald green. "It's yer unconditional surrender," The woman said in a thick, oddly attractive Irish accent.

Nathan frowned at her. "Who are you?"

"Apparently, I'm yer worst nightmare," she shrugged and stood herself up. The white dress was gone, replaced by faded blue jeans and a white tank top. He squinted up at her. Something in the back of his aching, painful mind told him that she looked familiar, a face on a report he had read months ago. A woman who had been killed in an op that had gone very badly. The op that had started the whole hunt for Pete.

"You're... a ghost?" Nathan blinked. Ghosts couldn't wield power. What the hell was this guy?

"Not quite, I'm sum'thin else. Now... yer surrender? Otherwise, I can do this all day."

Nathan sighed and cast a look over at the still screaming and writhing Vasili and the crumpled and still unmoving Rajesh before looking over to the spot where Dai had been lying before his death... not disappearance, his death.

Dai was the closest thing he had to a brother. And he was dead.

He nodded. "You have it."

"So, is there, like, a sword or sum'thin yeh give me?"

Nathan squinted at her.

"Oh, I dunno, I've never done this before, and I used ta watch too much TV." she shrugged and stood up straight again before turning to look up at the spider. "Alright, yeh can go play with Daddy now," she shouted up at it.

The spider seemed to shiver with excitement before it too started to change, shrinking and morphing, its legs folding back in themselves and its body squashing down into the shape of a five-foot-tall mole...

With a World War II-style metal helmet on its head and leather flying goggles over its eyes,

It flashed a salute to the red-haired woman, flipped a middle finger to Nathan, turned, and bounded down the street toward the walls.

The city seemed to change as he watched it go. Like a wave of reality washing over the decaying and crumbling landscape, scouring it all away and leaving in its wake the city he had seen when he had first looked out of the tunnels.

The streets were no longer cracked and scarred, nor were the buildings bowing over in arthritic reverence to the trees that replaced the sand-crusted streetlights. The sun was gone, the vines were gone, the cars were thankfully gone and the view to the city center, the tower, and what had recently been his target, was bright and clear.

He had lost, he knew it with every fiber of his being, and he still couldn't move.

"Now what?" he looked back up at the red-haired psycho.

"Now, yeh feck off."

"Sorry?"

"Yeh leave, quit, drop out of the mindscape, bugger off back to the real world. This will be over in a few seconds of real-world time, we expect you to be on yer arse, with yer hands on yer head when we get there. Or.... yeh know, take yer chances with Toussant."

Nathan sighed and nodded, slowly, carefully, and excruciatingly painfully pulling himself to his feet. The woman was looking at him strangely.

"Why do yeh look familiar?"

"What do you mean?"

"Hmm, it doesn't matter, He'll deal with it later." she tossed a thumb over her shoulder toward the wall.

"What... what is he?" It was a stupid question, but one that Nathan couldn't help but ask.

The woman grinned. "He's better than you."

Well, yeah. It was hard to argue against that sort of logic, especially after the things he had just been through. "Can I...?" he nodded toward what was left of his men.

The woman turned and looked over at them. "Oh, right, aye, go ahead."

Nathan nodded, looking at the woman, whoever she was, with a newfound weight of respect. This pretty little redhead was a fabrication of a mind capable of dispatching the biggest Evo force the Praetorians had - to his knowledge - ever assembled. Nathan was a soldier, and if even loyalties, ideologies, and battlelines were separated by insurmountable differences, he could always respect a fellow soldier. He offered her a nod and hobbled his battered and broken body over toward Vasili. He leaned down and touched his hand to the man's shoulder, his comrade was blind to everything but his pain, and yet he still hadn't abandoned his duties. More grounds for respect. "Come on," Nathan said softly, "We can't win here, I have given her our surrender. It's time to leave."

Vasili's eyes widened, his pained moaning stopping as the weight of Nathan's words settled on him. For a moment he looked shocked, for a moment he looked betrayed, he looked furious, he looked hurt, but those sentiments were quickly washed away by the inevitable realization. They had done their best, they had done their duty, and they had failed. There was no reason to die needlessly. Vasili sighed and nodded, and his body shimmered away naturally into nothingness as he left the mindscape.

Nathan stumbled over to Rajesh. The Indian man was still in the crumpled heap he had been in since he had hit the wall. It wasn't until Nathan got closer that he could see that Raj's neck had been broken. It was a cruel feature of the mindscape that you didn't need to breathe or have a fully functioning nervous system to be considered alive in it. The only way to kill someone in here was to destroy the brain or do enough damage to the body to make that irrelevant. Apparently, Raj hadn't quite crossed that threshold, he was conscious, he was awake, he was just completely paralyzed, not even the ability to breathe or to speak, let alone move, passing the damage done to his neck.

"Did you hear that?" Nathan asked.

Raj's eyes flicked around a little before they fixed back onto Nathan's and he blinked once. A tear started to form at the corner of his eye, then trickled down his face.

Nathan nodded softly. "Max and Dai are gone."

Raj blinked again, more tears coming.

"Get yourself back. Hands on your head and kneeling, okay?"

Raj blinked again.

"I will be right behind you." Nathan pulled himself back to his feet, another burst of indescribable pain shooting through him as he watched Rajesh fade into nothing. The man had been broken, beyond broken, yet he didn't quit, and neither did Vasili, for that matter. There was only the soul-deep conviction to see the job through. They could have killed themselves, they could have killed each other, it would have allowed them to respawn in their respective cities and rejoin the fight outside. But it would also have been an admission of defeat. The only way to kill Pete was to destroy his palace, his marketplace, or his well, and that meant that someone had to be in the city to do it. If they had respawned outside, they would just have been sent in again and would have had to start this whole ordeal from scratch.

He couldn't help but feel that despite the crushing defeat, it really had been his failing that led them to give up, rather than the inevitability of their situation. He looked up at the woman, then turned to look down the boulevard toward the city center.

All that running, all that death, all that horror... and they hadn't even gotten close.

Faye watched as the last of the city's invaders faded into nothingness. She almost felt sorry for them. She didn't, but it was close. But she turned her head toward the sound of distant battle and nodded determinedly to herself. She still had a job to do, and there was nothing saying that those bastards had been the only ones who would try to sneak into her home.

********

He had barely stepped forward from the tank when my fist slammed into him again. His body was thrown back with enough force to leave an asshole-shaped imprint in the hull of the vehicle while the sounds of a fourth city being bombed out of existence reverberated around the mindscape. Four of the thirteen had been reduced to smoldering rubble, another three - thanks to Faye - had been forced to abandon the fight, and judging by the look in this piece of shit's eyes, he was very aware that he was down to less than half strength.

I didn't care; this was war, this was revenge, and there was no room for mercy in my head, even if this man had thrown himself to the floor before me and begged for his life. I would have let him beg, and then I would have killed him anyway... slowly.

The beast had been unleashed; the rampant, furious, fathomless depths of my anger wasn't cooped up and contained behind the mighty walls of its prison; it was roaring fire and fury at the moon, and I was letting it. It wasn't stalking patiently and deliberately, its eyes on its prey; it was attacking, it was going for the jugular, and in this kill-or-be-killed world, it was the difference between total victory and ignominious defeat.

It was all coming out, a catharsis of everything I had held back for all of those years. Anger was healthy; pain was healthy. It was okay to be hurt by the betrayal and abuse of my parents; it was okay to be blinded by a desire for revenge for the murders of Becky and Faye, it was normal to want to inflict harm upon those who had inflicted harm upon me. Most people lacked the means, not the intent. I had both. Bottling it all up, caging giants behind flimsy city walls, that was the dangerous thing to do. Trying to control emotions was like trying to control the tides; you could either give in to the inevitability of defeat and let the tide flow, or you could destroy the landscape forever in trying to hold it still.

My control over my anger was something I had learned. It was something beaten into me with belt buckles and cigarette butts, it was reinforced through social isolation, self-inflicted or not, and it was tested to its limits by the deaths of almost everyone I loved. Keeping it from exploding at people who didn't deserve it was good, but holding it back forever simply wasn't an option. The trick, the thing that life teaches you in the cruelest ways possible, is to know when it is better to keep it caged and when to let it burst out of you.

I sure as fucking shit knew which one this was.

Everything was coming out. I had spent my whole life being cold, keeping my distance, shutting myself away from the rest of the world. Cold metal walls inside my head that kept everyone and everything at a safe distance. Those walls were gone now. Now there was fire, burning hatred, an inferno of searing rage. Cold metal walls were replaced by the molten sludge of their remains. Every hit, every punch, every ounce of pain that was systematically breaking this fucking piss-ant peasant of his will, his strength, and his body was a blazing indictment, not only of him and his megalomaniacal fuck-wit friends but of me, of the world, of an existence that let shit like this happen without consequence.

Why were my parents such utter fucking cunts? Why didn't any of the host of people who saw what was happening lift a finger to help a god-damned child? Why did these assholes kill the bastards before I got a chance to confront them? And their deaths? Noble and honorable death, Dad? Finally... Finally... thinking of someone else before yourself? Too little, too fucking late! The manner of your death does not excuse the crimes of your life!

Why hadn't I told Becky I loved her? Why was I too much of a damned coward to even look and see how much she loved me? And don't fucking kid yourself, sunshine. You knew she did! You saw it in her eyes dozens of times, in hundreds of gestures, before that last final look of surrender! I knew they were coming for her, I knew they were coming for Evie and Phillipa and my parents and everyone else. Jimmy - the one person, the one fucking person to see through my bullshit and, like me anyway - had been saved by the virtue of him being out of the area, but they were coming for him too! And I knew it! They fucking told me! And what did I do? Nothing! Or at least not enough!

Oh, I used to be cold, distant, and numb. But not anymore! Now, I was the blazing epitome of rage, hate, disgust, and revenge!

Each thought drove another punch into the face or the body of the King and drove him, in turn, further and further into the crater that was growing around his shattered body. Every hit was met by the same snarling smile of defiance from him.

Fuck him, fuck them, fuck the world and every psychotic power-hungry shit stain in it. I wasn't just going to kill this asshole; I was going to burn down his existence. I was going to rend them asunder; I was going to dance in the rain of their blood and let their own pets shit on their graves! I was going to utterly destroy his order and end any and every single aspiration they had ever conceived. The moment I learned of their existence, my sole purpose was to end it. I was death; I was the destroyer of worlds. Fuck you, too, Oppenheimer!

This went on for a while.

Finally, Uri rested his hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me back. I kicked the King in the face instead, one last blow before I was dragged out of reach of the man, and the madness consuming me. "Pete..." he said softly.

"What!!!" I spun around, my furious gaze burning so intensely into Uri's eyes that he had to take a step back. I didn't really think to question why he was there and not fucking up the King's army.

"He's down," he offered me a small nod and a gentle smile. "It's time to finish this."

Music to my fucking ears!

I spun back to face the groaning, crumbled, beaten remains of my enemy. "Hear that, you little maggot? Time's up. It's time for you to die!" I reached down and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him with one hand from the ground and hoisting him into the air. I growled at him before turning to face one of the cities. Uri was right; it was time to end this.

The King's arm moved; I glanced down at it and rolled my eyes as a sleek, black handgun shimmered into his grip. "Jesus fucking Christ, what do you think that's going to do?" I almost laughed. "Don't you people ever lear..."

He shot himself in the head.

And then shimmered out of existence.

"Oh, you fucking ASSHOLE!" I bellowed in rage, spinning around to glare angrily at the wincing Uri.

The seventh army, seeing their chance, charged. I had no idea what power they were charging with, and I doubted they did either; it was a blind, rageful, almost manic charge. I could see the look on the lead Evo's face as he and his army hurtled themselves toward me.

Then, a tiny furry hand shot out of the ground and grabbed his foot. His roaring battle cry turned into a panic yelp as he flopped forward, tipped over, and fell flat on his face, tumbling and grunting a few times, then coming to rest on his back. With his mind busy with his sudden lack of uprightness, his army vanished. I could see his look of confusion, even from this far away, as he turned to look behind him. The ground shifted. A mound of earth seemed to grow out of it and a few feet toward the sky before a metal helmet with a mole under it popped out of the top.

The evo looked at the mole.

The mole tilted his head and looked back at the evo. Then he flipped him the bird and threw a satchel charge at his face.

The Evo managed to blink before the bomb that had landed in his lap blew up.

I wasn't done; I was barely paying attention to that sideshow because my limit had been reached. "All of you!" My voice echoed with the power of a thousand sonic booms to every reach of the mindscape. "You have lost; you have seen what I can do! You have ten seconds to surrender, to get the fuck out of here, and join your friends on their knees in the real world! Anyone still here after that is going to die! All of you except that son of a bitch!" my hand shot out and pointed at one of the cities, one that - now I had touched the King - I knew was his. "He is not leaving here until I get what I came for! TEN.... NINE... EIGHT..."

All but two of the other cities faded out of the mindscape.

That's what I thought. Loyalty only ever went as far as the next meal, the next pay cheque, or the next death threat.

There was an odd feature of the mindscape that I had never really considered before but was now forced to. What was stopping the King from just leaving anyway? I said he wasn't going to get away, but realistically, what was stopping him from dropping out of the mindscape on his own? The answer - something I was understanding, again, on an instinctive level rather than an intellectual one - was something to do with intent. In the beginning, when the thirteen of them were first attacking my city, I couldn't have "bravely run away" if I wanted to. But since then, the tide had turned, and I seemed to know that for them to leave the mindscape, I had to let them. It was difficult to put into words, but the only real comparison I could think of was to imagine if you were on a video call, but the only way to leave it was if both parties agreed to end it. If one wanted to stay on it, the call would keep going. The person who wanted to leave was basically trapped in it. When the men invading my city, and then the men in the retreating armies, had decided to leave, I had let them. With the King, he was firmly locked in here with me.

With a deep but wholly unnecessary breath, I started forward toward his city. The cities of his two remaining allies stood sentinel on either side of him as Uri, Faye and the Dinos stepped in beside me. Behind us, the entire might of the US Marine Corps, Men, tanks, aircraft, and all the weapons of war, a million men, faded into reality and into formation.

And behind them, Godzilla, because why the hell not?

Yeah, mother fuckers, I can do armies too. And mine are bigger!

********

It is hard to describe, in any meaningful way, what a crowd of a million men looks like. You could argue that the great armies of historic wars or the populations of certain cities were made up of X amount of million people, and you would be right, but they were never really all together, in the same place, at the same time, at least not in a way that you could stand on one spot and see all of them.

The same goes for civilian events. The "million man march" that descended on Washington DC in October 1995 wasn't literally a million men. It may have been; nobody really thought to count, and those who tried all came up with different numbers depending on which side of the political argument they stood, but the estimates, however controversial they may have been, put the number somewhere around 870,000 people. The same could be said for the more recent funeral of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. A million people were estimated to have lined the route of the funeral procession, but again, nobody bothered to count, and more than that, they were spread out over the entire 25-mile length of it, not exactly all bunched together out in the open in a massive field.

Do you have any idea how big of a field would be needed to hold a million men lined up in rank and file? Well, it's fucking enormous!

Wrapped in a besieging circle around the three enemy cities - which were, admittedly, much closer to each other than they had been to mine - the formation of men stretched more than five miles long, and more than a mile out into the distance. Thousands of tanks, each one more than capable of reducing their city walls to rubble, were lined up in front of them, and an equal number of self-propelled, rocket, and standard artillery pieces circled around their rear. Apache gunships hovered in loose formations above the mass of men, and AV-9 Harrier jump jets circled lazily overhead.

Yes, Yes, I know the Harriers are no longer in service in the Marines, but fuck you, they are cool, and I liked them, so they were here. Besides, we've all seen True Lies, that scene where one of them was hovering next to a building and fucking up the bad guys inside it was awesome! Show me an F-18 that can do that. Now... Moving on before someone brings up the F-35 or that whole "combined arms" argument and ruins my logic.

The Dinos were pacing. They had lost a fair number of their ranks in the first charge against the King's army, and he had bravely retreated to his city before they could take out their anger on them during the second charge. The rumbling growls vibrating from their chests echoed over the relative silence of the mindscape as they stalked back and forth between the line of tanks and the enemy walls.

Godzilla was at the back, towering over it all at a height that would have had him at almost the same level as my walls. He was looking bored.

I was standing ahead of the main formation, Uri to my left and Faye to my right, and looking up at the King, who was pacing nervously back and forth on top of his walls. Nervously? I wasn't actually convinced about his being nervous. He looked utterly livid, and after watching Jeeves pretend to be nervous earlier, his theatrical pacing being one of the things that had lured the Praetorians into their doomed attack, I wasn't jumping to any conclusions.

I was trying my best to calm the raging beast inside me, the one that wanted nothing more than to obliterate my enemies' walls, turn their buildings to rubble, one at a time, and then dismantle their palace, brick by brick, while forcing the fuckers to watch. I was trying to stay in control. And that was for one single reason.

That guy had pissed me off.

I could smash down the walls with little more than a nod of my head and let the Marines do their thing. I could sit back on a lawn chair with a Jimmy Special and just enjoy the fireworks as my army carved through their defenses like they were made of wet cardboard. But that was too easy, it was too quick, and it would allow that fuck muppet the honor of dying a warrior's death. He wasn't a warrior; he was the closest thing that this superhuman world could have to a terrorist, and I wanted to break him. Not his body, not his mind - those were basically the same thing in here, and that ship had sailed - No, I wanted to break his spirit. I wanted him to taste defeat, to know it, to feel it in his soul before I ripped the fucking thing out of him. I wanted the last look in his eyes before the lights went out behind them to be complete and unequivocal understanding.

He. Had. Lost.

Okay, the more rational part of me knew that this guy was, by no means, the man in charge. That distinction was reserved for Tiberius out in the real world. But that bastard had the unfortunate privilege of being an Inquisitor, and I would need to break into his mind in the same way I had done to Toussant. And he could bet his ass that I was gonna do it. But there was no catharsis in that. Tiberius would already be beaten by the time I got my hands on him; it would just be a harvesting of information. A large part of me needed the fight; it needed the release of anger in the crucible of combat. My anger needed something to vanquish, and this guy would do for now. More than that, I didn't know the organizational structure of the Praetorians, but Tiberius had mentioned Senators of the order, meaning that these fuckers were not only not in charge, they may have been pretty low in the pecking order to start with. For all I knew, I could be barely making a dent in their organization.

And then there was Marco.

Marco was the man who had the vast majority of my anger reserved for him. Holy shit, the things I imagined doing to him if he was here made even my skin crawl. I mean, I would still do them, and I would happily live with the nightmares after them, knowing it was worth it and that treacherous, duplicitous, murdering asshole deserved it. But he wasn't here. The King was. So, the King would be the one to suffer.

Sucks to be him, I guess.

He had stopped pacing and was looking down at me from the top of my walls. "I propose a parley," His deep, almost taunting voice crested the parapets of his walls and echoed down to me.

Wait... what?

I glanced at Uri; he was looking as shocked as I was and offered me a small shrug. "I don't see the harm; he can't do anything to hurt you, and if he tries..." he nodded behind us at the million-man army and shrugged again.

"You and your two little friends, me and mine," the King continued. "Halfway between your lines and mine, in, let's say... ten minutes?"

I looked at Faye. She shrugged, too, "It'll give yeh a chance to punch him in the face again if he pisses yeh off."

I snorted a small laugh and nodded. Realistically, there was nothing this King or his friends could do. He was surrounded, he was outmatched... grossly, laughably outmatched, and he knew it. Jeeves was still on the city walls, albeit out of sight, in case he tried something sneaky like tunneling beneath us again or sending another invisible army to attack me from another point in the mindscape. His actions in the battle had shown me that units could be spawned anywhere up to the halfway point between his city and mine, so nothing was stopping him from trying again once his feet were on mindscape soil. Jeeves could not only defend the city, he could alert the rest of us if something were up, and we could end this asshole in moments.

I looked back up at the King and nodded. "Ten minutes," I shouted back.

********

Oh my god, this guy even looked like an asshole.

I hadn't noticed it on his face the first time; To be fair, I had been too busy punching it, but there is a certain sort of way that assholes look at you. Sneering down their noses at you as if you are unworthy of even having their attention. Female assholes are particularly good at it, but the guys aren't far behind.

This asshole seemed to have that look down to a fine art.

His friends on either side of him were looking decidedly different. One of them, the one from the city on my right, had a look on his face of pure, utter loathing. It wasn't anger, or rage, or any of the things that had probably graced my own face during the battle; this was pure hatred, it was disgust, it was absolute contempt. The other guy, Mr. Left-hand City, was looking a lot more uncomfortable, not subdued, more like he was waiting for something, and seemed completely incapable of meeting my eye. He just kept looking ruefully at the masses of men a few dozen yards away and at the dinos who had ripped his army to shreds and, no doubt, bitten his legs off in the process. They eyed him back with the closest thing a gigantic, carnivorous reptile could conjure to an ominous smile.

I'm pretty sure one of them winked at him.

"I must say, I am impressed," the King said after flicking a glance at each of my companions.

"Good for you. Let me know how that works out for you." I flippantly replied.

The King was unphased, though. "It is not very often one meets a man willing to respect the conventions of civilized war."

I snorted out another laugh. "Is that what this is? Civilized war? I thought it was me beating the ever-loving shit out of you, killing your friends, and forcing the rest of them to surrender."

The man on the right, the one who had faceplanted the mindscape before being delivered a bomb by a mole, almost growled. "Real men fight to the end, no matter the odds, but you know what they say about rats and sinking ships!"

"They say you should follow them, you fucking moron!" I snapped back at him. "You know why I am here, so tell me what you want and why I am wasting my time with you!"

"Oh fuck you, you pathetic worm!" Right-hand man snarled, ignoring the King's raised hand to silence him. "Don't think you can scare us; we know decoys when we see them. If you could do anything to break into our cities, you would have done it by now. I am going to enjoy killing you, and once I am done with you, I am going to hunt down and kill everyone you have ever known, and there is nothing you can do to stop me. You are as drained as we are, you little fucking cunt!"

"Oh, is that what you think is happening here?" I laughed in his face and then nodded into the air behind him.

The three of them turned to look, a mixture of shock and then fear, washing the previous expressions off their respective faces as a meteor - a burning ball of rock the size of a football stadium, trailing a huge tail of blazing fire - rocketed out of the skies and smashed into his city. It was obliterated in a heartbeat. The snarling, venomous man on my right didn't even have time to lift his hands to his head before he blinked out of existence. The air blast and the shock wave smashed into us less than a second later. Uri, Faye, and I, being the owners of the power used to inflict that damage, just stood there, but the King and his one remaining, utterly horrified-looking ally struggled not to be blown off their feet.

The dinos all ran back toward the left-hand-city, trying to get as far from the meteor and its crater as possible. I suppose, judging by the looks a few of them gave me, that shouldn't have been surprising given their history with chunks of rock falling out of the sky.

The man on the left seemed to take that as his cue. With the Dinos not quite as close, and the rest of the army some ways behind us - and apparently not seeing Uri and Faye as threats - he launched himself at me. There was something in his eyes, almost like a Hollywood-esque, psychotic glee, as he clamped his hands on either side of my head. A raging, almost feral laugh erupted from his lips as he started to pull the power out of me.

Well, that was new.

I must admit, his little outburst caught me by surprise, and it took me a few seconds longer than it should have to realize what the idiot was trying to do. He had formed a link directly to my power; he had connected his well to my city in much the same way as I had with Jerry when I topped him up in Donetsk and was trying to pull the power out of me through sheer force of will. I glanced down at the King. I'm not sure why; my eyes just flicked down to him automatically in the way a child would look at their parents when some random old stranger started pinching their cheek as if to say, "Who the fuck is this person, and why are they touching me?" The look on his face was one of horror, though. Whatever this asshole was doing, the King thought it was a mistake.

A snort of laughter burst from my lips as the realization dawned on me. He was trying to drain me. This little snot, a fraction of the strength of someone like Jerry or Fiona, nowhere near as powerful as Uri, let alone me, thought he could overpower me and drain me of my energy. I mean, seriously, to where? Wells had a finite capacity, and even if he thought mine was almost empty, that wasn't how this worked. The burst of laughter seemed to snap the madness off his face a heartbeat before my hands came up and clamped onto the side of his head, too.

"Oh, you want to take my power?" I snarled at him from behind an evil grin, my anger fully unfurling itself as it finally... finally... found someone to unleash itself on. "Here, fucking take it!"

I could feel my city behind me, more than I could see it, but I knew the glowing blue luminescence was getting brighter. The halo of color and light that lined every one of the skyscrapers was pulsing more and more powerfully, the vibrating thrum of power was getting louder and I could feel all of my powerplants - each one vastly more powerful than anything this dickhead could absorb, and I had nine of them - kick into high gear. My power smashed into the man with the force of a typhoon.

For a moment, the man's eyes widened, jubilation and euphoria shining through the madness, a granite-strong belief that he had won, that this new power was enough to beat me, to restore the honor of the Praetorians, that would see him rise to new heights of acclaim and prestige. It lasted less than a second.

Then his well-overflowed

But I kept pumping it into him, more and more and more of it. Overwhelming him with it, Flooding him with it, drowning him with it. His city started to tremble in my peripheral vision, like an earthquake was rocking it to its foundations. Buildings started to topple, the tops of them crumbling and then collapsing behind the shadow of his walls. The man tried to break away, but my grip on him was like steel. His eyes widened in horrified realization an instant before they started to bulge as the pain hit him.

More and more and more.

He crumpled to his knees, but my grip didn't falter. His walls started to collapse, the power being forced into his city having the same effect on it as centuries of water erosion would have on a cliff face. Undermining it, washing away the weaker parts of every structure and leaving the stronger parts dangerously unsupported. A gasp of agony burst from his lungs - the last sound they would make as his marketplace was washed away in the deluge of my power.

More and more and more.

The total volume of power I had used in the entirety of the battle was eclipsed by the amount I was forcing into him.

He started convulsing, seizing, his eyes started to bleed, so did his ears, his hands dropped limply to his sides... and then his head exploded.

Okay, I admit, I didn't expect the last part.

The King, coughing and spluttering against the dust and debris from the blast wave, and trying to wipe the blood of his comrade off his face, just blinked at me. After a few pointed minutes, he finally straightened himself up and looked at me. The asshole look was gone. Apparently, he had been thinking the same thing as his recently deceased friends, and those little demonstrations had corrected his rather flawed assumption.

My eyes settled back onto him with a self-satisfied and smug sigh. "And then there was one."

"That...was unnecessary," he grumbled, now seeming like he finally understood that this parley was not going to go the way he thought it would.

"I know, right?" I shrugged. "If only they had kept their mouths shut and stopped being such insufferable and psychotic pricks, I wouldn't have had to drop a rock on one of them and blow up the other."

I nodded to Faye; she knew what I was asking of her, and she skipped off toward the remains of the enemy cities to see if anything could be salvaged from the library. It was unlikely in this case, but I had higher hopes for the four bombed shells of cities a little further away. If downloading my two companions had told me anything, it was that the mindscape was capable of transmitting huge amounts of information, even as someone was dying. If there was anything left of the libraries in any of those cities, we wouldn't have many real-world moments to get it before the last remains of their owner's minds faded into nothingness.

There was a moment of silence as the King looked at me; he looked at the huge number of men and machines behind me, he looked at the Dinos, he looked in the sky at the aircraft above us, he looked back at the burning wreckage, all that remained of his now-dead comrade's city as Faye walked toward it, and then down at the spattering of blood on the mindscape soil, he looked at Godzilla, he looked at the towering walls of my city in the distance, still massive, even from this far away, and his eyes lingered on the eyes of the Dragon on my walls, and then finally, his gaze returned to me.

"Thirteen armies, defeated, all at once, ghosts that can wield powers," he nodded to Uri, "the ghost of the infamous Uri, no less. Tell me, did we even get close to draining you?"

"Nope."

"What about if all twenty of us had made it in here?" I said nothing, just held his eyes impassionately. "Thirty? Fifty? Do you have any real idea how powerful you even are?"

"I am powerful enough to have beaten you, and I will be powerful enough to beat the rest of the Praetorians," I replied with something close to a dismissive shrug. "That is all that really matters."

"Hmm, yes, I suppose it is," he nodded. "And you are going to kill me now?"

"Unless you tell me what I need to know, yes."

He smiled, almost a serene smile of resignation. It was something that seemed to make the anger pacing in my chest pause and take notice. "Were it only that I could, my friend," he sighed. "I'm afraid I know nothing about your parents, or your friend, or any of the other activities or other Praetorian Cohorts. I am a simple soldier, like you. I know what I am told. That is something you would need to ask the Prefect Tiberius."

"I hope you don't take offense when I don't take your word for that."

"No, of course not," another calm, almost resigned smile. "So, I guess this is where I bargain for my freedom? I give you access to my library, and you let me go."

I huffed another laugh. "Fraid not, sunshine. Being let go is off the table. You can show me your library, or I can take the information by force and kill you in the process. There is no letting you go. You will be taken into custody, there will be trials, and you will be punished according to your crimes."

"Even if I haven't committed any..."

"If you haven't committed any, then you have nothing to worry about in a trial, do you?"

"That largely depends on the person passing judgment, young one." he smiled.

"I will be passing judgment," I answered back plainly. "Your idiot leaders were stupid enough to tell me that your order has infiltrated the Conclave, the Sect, and the Inquisition, so I don't trust them to do it."

He snorted... I arched an eyebrow at him and waited for an explanation. "We have done more than infiltrate them. We practically control the conclave. I don't know the details, as I am sure you will soon find out from my library, but there is no way we could have manipulated them as easily as we had without people in the highest echelons of their order."

I nodded. I had assumed as much, or at least Uri had worked that much out, and his knowledge was slowly being passed to me. "Where is Marco?"

"Ah, Marco," The King sighed. "A truly exceptional spy who has employed some astonishingly insidious methods to mask his trail. I can't say I am an admirer of his means, but his results have spoken for themselves. Your power being an obvious exception, of course. I'm afraid he left the compound shortly after you were brought here, and I don't think he has been back since. Are you going to kill him?"

"Yes."

"No trial for Marco?"

"Not a chance."

"I see." the man nodded slowly.

"You don't sound too upset with that."

"Let's just say that our professional rivalry is a little more heated than most. I have been a Praetorian for 439 years, Marco barely a century; his arrogance is... enough to see him disliked by many. The Senators appreciate the ends to his means, however, and their word is law."

"Roman senators," I snorted again, "It almost sounds ridiculous. And where would one find these Senators?"

"In Rome, of course, where else?" I blinked at him. "The Praetorians are a global organization that spread from Russia; we didn't contain ourselves there, why would we? And where better to monitor the Inquisition, the church, and the Evos they hunted than right under their noses?"

Well fuck.

I took a deep breath and held the man's eye. It was time for him to make his decision.

"Well then, My Lord, Pete." The King stood himself up a little straighter and looked me in the eye. "I offer you my surrender, but please understand me well when I say that I offer it to you. Only you. I will not submit to trial or judgment by any other. Not Inquisitors, not either of the Evo orders, only you. Do you accept?"

"You know I am not going to be the one guarding you, right?"

"I assume you have friends, colleagues you trust."

"I... I do."

"Then my surrender extends to them as well. I will neither try to escape nor allow myself to be liberated as long as my terms are met. Do you accept?"

I glanced at Uri, he had been paying careful attention to the whole exchange, and he offered me a small nod. "I accept," I finally answered.

The King nodded and stepped aside, turning to let me see his city gates opening. Uri stepped behind him, acting the part of jailor, while I took a deep breath and stepped into the King's city.

********

The world exploded into carnage the moment I stepped back into it. It felt like I had been in the mindscape for hours, and I had been. But that only translated to a few frantic and violent seconds in the real world. Of the twenty Evos lining the room, seven of them immediately sat down and put their hands on their head, Julias - The King, a man whose name I had learned from his library - among them. Six of them just flopped to the floor and started bleeding out of their eyes and ears, and Tousant simply shot the other seven. Most of them were waving wildly with their hands, no doubt trying to redirect their powers away from me and toward the rampaging former Inquisitor, but none of them managed to affect the flight path of even a single bullet, and all of them were dead in seconds.

I should have felt bad watching fellow Evos being killed. I had spent the entire time since my awakening thinking of them, maybe not as allies, but at least as the same as me. Victims in an ongoing war being waged against them. But I felt nothing. These men were as guilty of murdering our brethren as the men who had attacked the party.

A few seconds later, a group of about thirty heavily armed humans burst into the room, but I had been inside their heads for weeks, and they were firmly under my control. They had taken advantage of the chaos to raid the base's armory and were now ready for orders. "Round up who you can and bring them here," I barked sharply, "If they resist, kill them!"

They knew as well as I did that I was referring to any other Praetorian inquisitors or Evos in the complex, the ones that weren't involved in meeting me and judging by the thoughts in their heads, there were more than a few of them left. "You, you and you," I pointed out three of them and then gestured to the surrendered Evos, "guard this lot. If they move, shoot them, and then shoot one of their friends." Julias had offered me his parole, and I oddly trusted him on that, based on what I had learned of the man from his city, but the others were all strangers. Perhaps the threat that it wouldn't only be them in danger if they made a play for freedom - or revenge - would be enough to stifle that urge. The controlled humans nodded and took up positions on the other side of the room and leveled their weapons at the captives while the rest of their group flooded back out into the hallway. "Oh," I said, turning to the Evos themselves and nodding to the humans. "They are mine; try reasserting control of them, and I will know immediately. Don't. Test. me. Again!"

There was something of a tick in the back of my mind. This was the first time I had automatically made, and then used, the distinction between humans and what I was: a higher being. It wasn't a product of ego or of hubris; it was just a fact. Their minds had been seized, and their will had been crushed like roadkill; they were not people in that moment; they were tools, and a small part of me wondered if I was feeling my last connection with my humanity breaking. Up until that point, including the reasons I had given for not joining the Praetorians, I had seen myself as one of them: A human who now had an Evo's powers. That wasn't a quirk of my situation; that was how I had always thought of myself - as one of them. Now, though, I was actively thinking of the humans around me as... well, as... less than me. My mind, for the briefest of moments, flashed to Jimmy. He was a human but still the closest and best friend I had; he was certainly not less than me, and yet, my thoughts about the men going off to do my bidding remained unchanged. Tools. Nothing more. Even if that meant them dying in the process of following my orders.

The thought was quickly squashed by the sounds of gunfire coming from the hallway. Toussant looked up and found my eyes, the silent communication flowing between us, before he nodded, changed the mag of his rifle, and headed back out of the room to assist my lemmings.

My eyes flowed over the captives. All of them had their eyes down - no doubt reliving the events of the mindscape battle - all of them but two. One of them was Julias. His face contained no hostility as he watched me; he was just keeping tabs on his surroundings. His eyes looked oddly calm and deep considering the frenzied bloodlust in them when I had first seen them... just before I had beaten him, and his face, into a pulp. The other man looking at me was a stranger, a tall man with short hair, dirty brown hair, and blue eyes, but he wasn't looking at me with any sort of hostility in his expression either. There was something else there.

Curiosity.

I turned to face him properly, really taking him in, looking at his face rather than just looking at him as a defeated enemy. But there was something else there, another tick in my mind. There was something about him that looked familiar. "What's your name?" I finally said to him after a few moments of us staring at each other and with the rattling of automatic gunfire echoing around us.

"I... um... it's Nathan."

Nathan. No, it wasn't ringing any bells; perhaps he just had one of those faces that...

"I know you," he said slowly, his head tilting to the side a little and his eyes squinting. I crouched down and squinted at him. The more I looked, the more I seemed to recognize him, too. It was faint, faded, like a memory half-remembered, which was odd in itself considering my mind's perfect recall ability. But there was a context to the recollection, though, like he was not the focus of the memory he was in but just a background part of it. There were emotions, or feelings, associated with his face, too, like an expression that he was missing, that his face looked odd without... he should be...

I frowned, ignoring the other captives, ignoring the sounds of the gunfight in the rest of the complex, ignoring the panting, frantic, panicking breaths of Tiberius behind...

Panic! That was it! Nathan should look scared, terrified, like he was panicking, trapped, a soul-crushing fear, but... not of me... of something else.... Of something behind him.

No, not behind him, behind us.

Chasing us along dank, stale, old corridors in some underground complex.

The Dream! The first dream I had. The one with Montreaux's beast hunting us. He had been one of the Evos in the group, fleeing from it with me.

The shock was enough to knock me back onto my ass, "Holy fucking shit!"

His eyes had widened, the recognition hitting him at the same time that it had me, and his jaw was hanging open. "It's... it's you!" he murmured in a voice that almost sounded reverent. His eyes flicked down a little, like he was looking at the collar of my shirt, and then back up to my eyes. "You bear the mantle."

Mantle? The fuck is that?

I squinted at him again but was too shocked at the prospect of meeting someone I had dreamed about six months ago to really give that random word much thought.

"You... The Dragon... You are the Dynast." His voice was filled with emotion, the sort that would be used by a star-stuck child on the first time meeting their idol. But that word, "Dynast," seemed to grab the attention of every other Praetorian in the room; all of them, including Julias, snapped their heads to him and then to me.

"It can't be," Julias muttered, his eyes now seeming to match the curiosity, if not the awe, held in Nathan's.

"Treason!" the screeching voice of Tiberius behind me broke the moment. "The Dynast is in Rome! He is not the Dynast, and you will hang for your blasphemy!"

Nathan's eyes darkened instantly as his gaze turned to glare at Tiberius, then back to me. The curiosity was gone, replaced by a burning, rampant hatred, not one aimed at me, but at his former superior. "My Lord, please... please... allow me to fucking kill this piece of shit."

I growled and shook my head, overlooking - for the time being - not only the title and the sudden reverence these men seemed to now hold for me but the sudden hostility they were showing toward their leadership. "This one is mine," I muttered. That seemed to satisfy both Nathan and Julias, each of them offering a small nod before settling themselves back against the wall. I stood up and turned to face Tiberius, drinking in the sight of his fear. He started trying to scramble back away from me, kicking his legs out at the carpeted floor and his hands working to push himself away from me. It felt like hours since he had been blasted out of his chair, and in a manner of speaking - at least to my perception of time - that is what it had been, but I could only imagine what it must have been like for him.

One moment, he is talking to me. The next, the table is blowing up in his face and killing his buddies. Then, the twenty men in the room brought in specifically to combat my powers are ordered to take me down, just as the crazed and apparently turn-coat Toussant bursts into the room to start gunning down the guards. Before he is even finished, Six of the Evos suddenly drop dead, seven promptly sit down with their hands on their heads, the others are shot, and a bunch of humans, people who had worked with him for years, seem to have started some sort of armed uprising. I suppose that would have been very confusing to even the most composed of men, but his composure was breaking rapidly at the sight of me standing to my feet and stalking dangerously toward him.

I smashed my boot into his face. Fuck, I mean, I really kicked him hard! Hard enough to drive the heel of my boot into his forehead with enough force to be able to hear the breaking of bones over his cry of pain, the sound of his head whipping back so hard his neck almost snapped, and the back of his head crashing into the floor.

"You are a lucky man, Tiberius," I growled menacingly. "You can't even imagine the things I did to your friend, Toussant, before I worked out how to get into his mind. He's gone, by the way, dead. That guy out there," I tossed a thumb over my shoulder, "is a shell. I ripped everything out of him, every single shred of what made that piece of shit a person, with a rusty fucking spoon. He is a puppet, a thrall, a little sliver of me that makes it walk and talk and do all the things a real boy can do. But your friend? He's dead. I wanted you to know that before I got started on you."

Tiberius was conscious, but just barely. His eyes were finding out what the inside of his skull looked like, and a not-insignificant amount of blood was leaking out of the heel print on his forehead, and there was enough of it on the floor around his head to suggest that their collision had done some pretty serious damage. But I didn't care, and Tiberius wouldn't live long enough for it to matter.

His skull was fractured, a spiderweb of cracks in multiple places around his head. But I only needed one, just that tiny break in the otherwise utterly impenetrable shield of his power. And it really was power; I could see that now. Their power was different from an Evo's; it was more subtle, but it was there. It was the reason his mindscape was dark, it was the reason their auras were brighter or dimmer depending on the strength of their abilities, and it was the reason they were so deadly in combat.

And all of it was rendered utterly meaningless when I smashed my mind and my will into his.

********

Tiberius was vastly more powerful than Toussant had been, a product of his breeding, I assumed. He was still nowhere near the levels that Montreaux had been, and Bob was somewhere close to that, but both were still far below the truly astonishing powers of Isabelle. As much as I understood that an Inquisitor's power was similar to an Evo's, I didn't really know how that would translate to their minds. I mean, it couldn't simply be a matter of how thick their skulls were, right? Or how dense the lattice inside them was?

The question, to some degree, was answered when I emerged into Tiberius's mind. Toussant had been shattered, literally. His mind - or what was left of it after his ordeal - had been represented by shards of broken glass. His body had been frozen to the spot, just standing there, but his head looked like what I imagined a window looked like in the split second after a child's soccer ball went through it. But his mind itself had been as talkative and 'intact' as I assumed it had been beforehand. Now I thought about it, that fact alone made him something of an unreliable baseline by which to judge all other Inquisitors, and that was a fact made all the more apparent by the physical appearance of Tiberius.

He was sitting at a desk.

It was a very large desk - grand, even - and made from some sort of reddish wood. It wasn't the darker red-brown of mahogany but more like it had been made out of an actual ancient redwood. There were a few little trinkets on it - a small cup holding a few pens, a small potted cactus, a photo frame facing toward him, and one of those desk protectors that looked like an oversized mouse mat - but otherwise, it was empty. The darkness of the mindscape, such a sharp contrast to the glorious sunshine of my own, was chased away by a simple, modest-looking desk lamp sitting on one corner. He was rocking nervously in his very oversized, brown leather office chair. If it had been any larger or any more opulent, it probably could have been described as a throne... one you could spin around on, and the man was looking at me with an expression of horrified trepidation and, oddly, confidence. Each of those looks was such a juxtaposition to each other that it was almost impressive for him to be wearing both at the same time.

"So Jean-Pierre is dead?" Tiberius said as I sat into a chair on the opposite side of the desk, a much simpler one that may or may not have been there when I first entered.

"Yup," I answered with the same amount of gravity as if someone had asked if it were raining.

"Did he die honorably?"

I laughed. I probably shouldn't have, but I did. That was the fucker who murdered Becky, and this asshole was probably the one who set those wheels in motion. "Fuck no. I broke that man in every way there is to break someone. As I said, you should be grateful; that son-of-a-bitch suffered, so you don't have to. All I did was kick a crack into your skull. Your friend out there had the top of his skull cut off while he was still awake and nailed to a chair!" It was a little bit of an embellishment, but not by much.

Tiberius's jaw clenched. That mental image hurt him; I could see it on his face. "You're a monster," he shook his head.

I leaned forward, setting my elbows on his desk, lacing the fingers of both hands together, and rested my chin on them. "But you know whose fault that is, don't you? I was nobody; I knew about none of this, and, knowing who I was back then, I probably never would have. This is what you created."

That was the thing about the mindscape; there was no deceit. There were no lies. He knew immediately that what I was saying was true, or at least that it was something that I absolutely believed to be true, and he was unable to lie to himself, let alone me, by pretending it wasn't. "We underestimated you," he nodded, that look of confidence finally fading.

I shook my head. "And that is where your problem started. It wasn't about me, underestimating me or not; it was about you. Your need to control, your need for power, your need to get your own way. If you had left me alone, if you had left all the Evos and the Inquisitors of the world alone instead of trying to push forward your agenda, none of this would have happened."

"It was our sacred mission."

"Sorry, pal," I shrugged, leaning back into my chair, "but that isn't good enough. The insanity that people will stoop to in the name of their little crusades is astonishing. Only a few minutes ago, you were telling me of the madness of Hitler, how he twisted one little bit of information to chase his genocidal ambitions. What part of this is any different from that?"

"It's not the same."

"It is exactly the same. You have convinced yourself that you are the Master Race and are killing people who don't fit in with your plans, all in the name of controlling the masses."

"We are the Master Race!" he snapped.

"Maybe," I nodded. "But having the ability to rule does not give you the right. And the worst crimes in history have happened when people who are hungry for power, for power's own sake, are allowed to have it."

Tiberius let out a breath, not quite a sigh, but something close enough to one to suggest he had at least considered my point. I didn't know if it was possible to change his fundamental, core beliefs, and I wasn't really in the mood to try, but although he wasn't arguing against my point, we both knew he didn't accept it. Divine right to rule, as far as he was concerned, was an absolute truth, and there wasn't much I could say to convince him otherwise.

Of course, that presupposes that I was willing to try. I wasn't. The furious levels of blazing anger I had unleashed in the battle may have simmered a little; they may not be boiling to the surface in acts of pure barbaric violence, but that didn't mean it was sated. He was going to tell me what I needed to know, whether he wanted to or not, and then he was going to die.

"You know how this whole mindscape thing works, right?" I asked him.

He nodded, trying and failing to maintain eye contact.

"Good. How many people have you killed?" I asked, crossing one leg over the other.

"None,"

I rolled my eyes. "Okay, smartass, How many people have you had killed? How many are dead by your command?"

"I... I don't know."

"Take an educated guess.."

"In person, seven hundred and twelve. People who had died as a result of orders I have given? I don't know, five, maybe six thousand."

I let out a whistle. "That's a lot of people, T." I held his eye. He couldn't hold mine.

"I did what I had to."

"Eh, you did what you wanted to. Let's not mince words here," I almost laughed. "How many of those people have you regretted killing? How many of them have kept you up at night?"

There was a long pause. "... None."

"Hmm. Kinda says something, doesn't it? Now, of those people you've had killed, how many of them were from the Inquisition offices in Ukraine."

"The Praetorians do not recognize the borders of modern..."

"Dude, I am in your head. I can inflict more pain on you than you can possibly fathom, and I can stretch it out for as long as I need to. Or you can answer the question you know I am asking you."

To prove my point, I sent a searing blast of agony through his mind. For a few brief seconds - which almost certainly felt like a lot longer to him - Tiberius's skin became convinced that it was on fire. I had to wait a few minutes for the howls of pain and then the sobs to die down before I arched an eyebrow at him.

"Twenty-six," he finally said through panting breaths.

"Out of how many?"

"About two hundred,"

"And where are the rest of them?"

"They're here, ready to start their training."

Well, shit. I didn't know that, - the humans didn't know it, and had never seen them, and there had been no unencrypted mention of them on the computers - and it did jam something of a spanner into the works of my escape plan. Initially, I had planned to hijack one of the vehicles at the compound and drive - or have someone drive - me out of Russia and back to friendly lines. Unfortunately, it was a little difficult to squeeze that many people into the trunk of one car, and trying to force a whole convoy of vehicles through heavily fortified front lines was going to be complicated, to say the least. It was an issue that was going to come up anyway. My original plan to just kill everyone and leave had been rendered obsolete the moment I took prisoners.

I shook my head clear. That would be Bob and Isabelle's problem. If they were ready to start their training, then they had already been through the torture process and had broken. I had no idea how to undo that sort of damage, especially not on a large scale, and certainly not to Inquisitors who would need their skulls broken for me to even try. I couldn't imagine Isabelle agreeing to that, and understandably so.

I looked back up at Tiberius, who was, in turn, looking back at me nervously. "Tell me about Marco. Where is he?"

"I... I don't know."

"Do I need to make you suffer again?"

"No, really, I don't know." he almost whimpered. "Marco uses this compound as a home base. But he doesn't work for me. I have no authority over him. All I do for him is provide supplies and logistics, and I pass his reports up the chain of command."

"To whom? Who does he work for?"

"Rome. He works for Rome."

"Rome is a place, not a person. Give me a name!" Another burst of searing, torturous pain erupted under his skin.

"I don't know, please, I don't know!" he cried out as he felt the imaginary flames licking at the soles of his feet. "I pass the reports back to the central Nexus--the main HQ in Rome. I don't know who they go to. I'm not supposed to know; that is the whole point. But..." I let the pain subside again. "... but, someone with Marco's access to the Conclave? I'd imagine he works directly for the Senate. And based on the fact that Reinard Montreaux attacked the party you were at, his father would be a good bet."

I nodded, pondering for a moment.

"So if Marco passes his reports to you, I'm guessing you have a way of contacting him." Tiberius nodded, sucking in quivering breaths as his body tried to forget how it felt to be cooked alive. "Good, I will be taking that. And the decryption key for the computer systems?"

"How did you...?"

"I have my ways. Now, do you have it?"

He sighed and nodded. "There is a random code generator in my pocket; It's tied to the system, and the code on it changes when the server's does. My password is..." He cringed. "... NurseHotlips246"

I held his eyes and smirked. "Classy."

Of all the pain, of all the torment of being defeated, of all the shock of his world being ripped apart, it was that final humiliation that seemed to break the man. He slumped back in his chair and sighed. All further resistance was gone.

"Now... let's talk about Rome."

********

Compared to the last time I had re-entered the real world, it was relatively calm this time. The gunfire had been reduced from the din of a full-blown gun battle to the odd spattering of shots. I quickly cast my mind out to check on the progress of Toussant and the humans under my control. Only eighteen of the twenty-seven I had sent out were still alive, and Toussant had taken a round to the leg. But there wasn't the slightest shred of sympathy in my mind for any of them. Toussant was still Toussant, and the human soldiers he was leading had been here through choice. None of them had been forced to participate in the actions of the Praetorians, but almost all of them had carried out some truly horrific acts on their behalf and had done so willingly. Having sympathy for them would be like feeling sorry for the guards at Auschwitz. Sure, they may have had no part in the command structure at all, but they were still guilty.

I looked down at Tiberius. His eyes were open and staring lifelessly at the ceiling; the sclera - the whites of his eyes - had turned crimson red in his final moments, and a small trickle of blood now leaked from the corner of his eye. The man had given me everything, and the things that he couldn't give me were - he assured me - on the computer system that Jeeves had cracked. His cooperation toward the end of the interrogation was almost enough for me to consider sparing him and passing him onto trial with the others, but he was personally responsible for the deaths of thousands. Not only Evos, not only Inquisitors, but any civilians he had decided were not compatible with his cause. The massacre in Alchevs'k, the pile of dead bodies that had sickened me so much, was committed under his order. Men, women, and children had been butchered without mercy, so he deserved none either.

Nor did he receive any.

He may not have died screaming, but it certainly wasn't a silent step into night's cold embrace.

The small trickle of blood running from each eye was the only movement on his face; it ran in a small, almost mournful cascade down onto his cheek, where it merged with the blood that had leaked from the heel impact on his forehead. Now that his heart had stopped, the larger wound no longer bled freely, but there had been enough of it beforehand, coupled with the blood seeping from the back of his head onto the ground, to make the manner of his death look a lot more violent than it actually had been.

More violent than it probably should have been.

Tiberius was a man who disgusted me on every level of my being. He wholeheartedly endorsed the idea that power was an end that justified whatever means were necessary; anything or anyone that stood in the way of the Praetorian's quest for 'more' should not only be destroyed, but deserved their fate. On face value, it seemed at odds with the glacial, methodical, and incredibly patient way the Order seemed to work; plans were made, nurtured, and then carried out over a span of decades, if not longer, and yet Tiberius's lust for it suggested that he would go to the ends of the Earth to acquire it, immediately, and to hell with the consequences.

But then, of course, I could be wrong. I was basing that interpretation of the man on a very brief glance at the enormous quantities of information I had harvested from him. In fact, now that I thought about it, I had been the recipient of truly staggering amounts of data recently. All of Uri's memories and knowledge - that had been there for months, but I hadn't had a chance to trawl through it yet - all of Tiberius', and all of the information Faye had pulled out of the dead Evos' wrecked cities. She had managed to pull the memories out of every single one of the six fallen Evos except one, the man whose head I had blown up. His library, like the rest of his city, had just been washed away. There was nothing left. Between all of those sources, I had enough information to keep me busy for... well... for weeks, months, maybe longer; generally sifting through it and plucking out the relevant and useful details. That was before I went through the astronomical amount of information copied and held by Jeeves from the Praetorians computer network.

But... There was one name that was already starting to stand out. Another Evo who had used this compound as his home base, and used Tiberius to pass reports further up the chain to the Senate. A name that kept popping up over and over again whenever Tiberius thought about the operations being carried out in the UK.

The Judge.

Tiberius knew nothing of the man. He had never seen him, he had never spoken to him in person, only over the phone, and - as far as any of the Evos knew - he had never been to this compound, despite it supposedly being the center of his operation. But they all knew the name, and they all knew that he was a man to be feared, not because of how powerful he was - he wasn't as powerful as Uri, for example, - but because of how utterly ruthless he was in pursuing his goals.

There had been a report, one that Tiberius had read in the aftermath of the party attack. It had discussed what had happened and what had gone wrong, based on the evidence given by the two men whom I had allowed to leave. There were not very many things about it that stood out to Tiberius at the time, just details of a seemingly unstoppable Evo who had decimated their forces, and a casualty report that had Montreaux's name highlighted in bold. But at the bottom of the report, the section that discussed ways to avoid similar failures from happening in the future, someone had asked the Judge to suggest a way that the operation could have been improved. His answer had chilled even the remorseless Tiberius.

Chemical weapons. Nerve agents, specifically.

I shuddered as I looked down at the dead Praetorian prefect. Almost forty Evos, including Faye and Neil, had been killed during the attack on the Party, there had been more than a hundred of us there in total. At the time, right up until that memory surfaced in Tiberius' head, I had considered that a truly horrific casualty rate. But if the Judge had his way, the workingman's club the party was held in would have been sealed up and chemical agents introduced into the ventilation system. Not only would a one-hundred-percent casualty rate - including me - have been an almost guarantee, but collateral damage with the very possible chance that the agent spilled out into the local community was disregarded as inevitable collateral damage.

The Judge, whoever he was, was a very, very dangerous man. One who would have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Especially if he was the one responsible for the shattering of Philippa's mind or the deaths of my parents. The simple fact that the Praetorians had a man like this in their employ - and he was not only given free rein to act as he pleased but his ruthlessness and barbarism encouraged - practically mandated the Order's destruction on principle.

This was an Order that would blow up the world just to see if it could further their goals.

I had killed, I had tortured, I had chased vengeance across a continent; I could hardly be called a just and righteous man. But the level of depravity and downright evilness on display here was enough to make my stomach turn. It needed to be stopped, even if I had to wade through a river of blood to do it.

In that moment, all I wanted to do was to sit down for a drink in the Queen's head, drink with Becky, Charlotte, Philippa, Olivia, and even Evie... but most of all, Jimmy. To just relax, not be in this world, and not deal with this anger all the time. To not have that anger justified time and time again. I would give anything to be able to see Becky smile again or to watch Philippa tease her about it, to just sit with Olivia and her friends, or to talk with Evie about her project. No sex, just... be. Spend time in the company of people whom I was close to. Charlotte and Jimmy, above all. It would never happen. Becky was gone, Philippa was broken, and Evie would forever see me as the reason her life was changed. Even Charlotte would find out about the things I had done in the hunt for my revenge; would she ever be able to look at me in the same way? Jimmy would; I think if Jimmy knew everything that had happened, he would be more pissed at me not bringing him along than he would be at the things I had done. He would buy me a drink... or, more accurately, get one free from the bar. And just sit with me and listen. He was a good friend and a good man, the best sort of friend someone like me could ask for, and he would put himself in harm's way just to help me.

Which was exactly why I wouldn't be able to tell him.

I sighed and shook the thought from my head. For now, there was still work to do.

I turned back into the room and pushed down the revulsion in my stomach at what I had learned, swallowing the lump in my throat at the thought of a life that would never be, thumbed over the code-generating keyfob thing from Tiberius's pocket and returned instead to the task at hand.

Another quick mental check-in with Toussant was enough to tell me that the rest of the compound was more or less secure. There were a few Praetorian holdouts who had barricaded themselves into some isolated rooms, but not anywhere near where I wanted to go. I looked down at the Evo captives. "Sit. Stay!" I growled at the ones who weren't looking at me with the same almost idolizing curiosity as Julias and Nathan, nodded at the guards, silently reinforcing their orders, and then made to leave the room.

On second thoughts.

I turned back and looked at Nathan. "You, take me to the initiates barracks."

"Yes, Sir." He scrambled to his feet, nodded respectfully to me, and led me into the corridor.

Nathan was to be my map instead of me wandering the complex partially blind. I had a vague understanding of the layout of the complex from the humans, but it was like trying to have it taught to you through the use of photos and crudely drawn maps. It was probably enough to get around, but it wasn't the same as being there in person, and I didn't have the time or the inclination to work out how to get to the initiates barracks on my own. The room itself was where both Julias and Tiberius's minds told me the surviving members of the Ukrainian Inquisition were being housed. There were also another three inquisitors and a captured Evo in the cells around mine. I had been quite surprised at that, never once being able to read any of those rooms as occupied, but I supposed, being inquisitors, I wouldn't have been able to sense their presence without damage to their skulls anyway, and the one Evo, I wouldn't have been able to communicate with their mind unless they were able to send their thoughts through the metal chain as well. My mind had been connected to it via the mind/machine interface, and unless theirs was too, it was useless. Judging by the fact that I couldn't connect with them, and the Praetorians had never thought to reinforce that part of the cell, I had to assume that power was pretty unique to me.

After only a few minutes, I was starting to regret my decision. "Stop looking at me like that," I rolled my eyes at him after catching yet another curious and starstruck glance.

"Sorry, Sir, it's just..."

"Yeah, I know... Dynast." Nathan nodded slowly and gave me another one of those looks. I rolled my eyes. "Alright, fine. What is the Dynast?"

I sort of knew the answer from Tiberius, or at least I knew what Tiberius thought the answer was, but it was a vague term and one of those that was open to some serious interpretation.

"I don't know, Sir," he shrugged. "I'd barely heard the word before today."

I stopped and looked at him. "Sorry?"

"You've been in my dreams, Sir," he said cautiously as if trying not to offend me with the wrong answer. "The Dynast is supposed to be almost a spiritual leader for our kind..."

"An Evo Dalai Lama?" I almost laughed.

"Well, yeah, kind of," He shrugged again, "But not just Evos, Inquisitors, too. It's not religious; it's more like..." He paused for a moment, "...you are supposed to be the moral compass for the order. You are the one who is supposed to unite us. Fuck, it sounds almost juvenile, but its almost like you were prophesied."

I squinted at him. "And yet you had never heard the term before."

"I know, right?" Nathan laughed. "Freaked me the fuck out. I recognized you from my dreams and bam! The information is just there; every part of me is telling me that I should be following you and that if you are pissed at me or at the Praetorians, then something has gone seriously wrong."

I frowned but nodded anyway. "It seemed to mean something different to Tiberius." Nathan scrunched up his face and looked over his shoulder at me like he was waiting for me to go on. "To him, it was a political position, almost a stand-in for the Emperor. Hence, someone using the title is in Rome."

It was Nathan's turn to frown. "I suppose it could be a political position, but I don't think there would be more than one. So either that guy's making shit up, or the mantle has changed its mind."

"You mentioned that before. What's the mantle?"

Nathan's frown somehow grew. "It's... err... that thing," he said, nodding to my upper chest. "Or at least that is the mark of it."

"What?" I looked down at myself in confusion and then back up at Nathan. We had stopped in the middle of a hallway by this point, and he was looking at me as if I had lost my mind. He reached his hand up and pointed at the side of his neck while nodding his head at the same part of me. I pulled the collar of my shirt out a little and yelped.

I quite liked tattoos, and I had always planned on eventually getting one, but those things weren't cheap, and I had always been broke. I hadn't really had much of a chance to rethink the tattoo idea since I had come into money, and so, as far as I was concerned, I didn't have one.

Except that I did.

I had a tattoo.

I was absolutely convinced I didn't have one when I left home, and I was sure I would remember getting one in the time I had spent in a Goddamned warzone. I looked up and around where we were standing; I had a fairly good idea of where we were and strode a dozen yards or so further along the corridor and shoved open the door to a bathroom, peeling off my shirt and looking into one of the vanity mirrors over the sink.

Yup. Tattoo.

It was one of those tribal designs that ran from the bottom of my ribs on my right side, up across my chest, and onto my shoulder, peeking down the top of my forearm and snaking up onto the very bottom of my neck. It was a surprisingly intricate pattern, one of those ones with hundreds of little swirls and blocks of color that, on their own, meant nothing but, when taken together, formed into a larger, more abstract image. And this one was of a Dragon.

And it looked exactly like the one that was stamped onto the outer side of my walls.

"Uri!"

I could hear him chuckle. "That is the mantle, Pete. You have been chosen."

"Chosen? For what? By who? The fuck is going on?"

"That... is complicated..."

I rolled my eyes so hard that they almost fell out of my head. "Of course, it is. Why would something just have a simple fucking answer when 'complicated' is an option?"

"I will tell you what I know when we are back on friendly ground, Pete. You have my word."

I growled at the mirror. "You're gonna have to work on your communication skills!"

He had a point, though. I was in the middle of a Praetorian military compound, and I needed to get this whole thing wrapped up. I was pretty sure no emergency requests for help had been sent from the complex, but I couldn't be 100% sure, so I was on the clock.

I took one more look at the tattoo, rolled my neck hard enough for it to pop, pulled my shirt back on, and left the bathroom. Nathan was waiting outside for me and was looking at me like I had grown a second head. "It wasn't there last time I looked," I shrugged at him.

His eyes widened a little at the implication, but he had the good sense not to press the issue. "The.. err.. Initiates barracks are just down here." I nodded for him to lead the way, and he walked deeper into the compound.

********

The barracks was a large room; that much had been obvious considering it was holding more than two hundred people in it, but it still was something of a surprise to actually see it. The one-hundred and seventy-odd remaining Ukrainian inquisitors had been joined by a few dozen non-affiliated Inquisitors as well, and the odd Evo. People who had been picked up as part of wider Praetorian operations or had been found inside Russia. Some of them, clearly not the ones who had been taken from Donetsk, were very, very young. One kid barely looked to be twelve years old, huddled in the corner and looking utterly terrified. All of them were guarded by two of my controlled humans.

I raised my hands to silence the commotion as I entered.

"You have no right to keep us here!" A man's voice shouted in Ukrainian from the crowd.

"We have done nothing wrong!" another one, a woman, called out immediately after.

I arched an eyebrow at them and waited for silence. It took a while, but eventually, the room settled down. "Who here knows Bob?" I shouted out. "Fuck, no, not Bob, Arnold... who here knows Arnold..." Shit, I had no idea what Bob's surname was. "... old guy, works for the Princess, Isabelle."

A few hands raised slowly, then a few more, until a crowd of more than half the people in the room had their hands up. "Okay, good. Well, he sent me here to rescue you. We have been fighting and searching all over Ukraine for you, followed your trail to Alchevs'k and then to here. But if I understand it right, you lot don't want to be rescued."

I leveled an accusatory glare over the crowd.

There was silence. Half of the crowd looked guilty, the other half thoroughly confused for not having the first idea who Bob was or what I was talking about. One man, middle-aged and with a moderate glow of an aura around him, finally stood up. "The Inquisition lied to us."

"Did they? How?"

"They didn't tell us about any of this." The man gestured to the room we were in. "Inquisitors and Evos? Working together? No more of those stupid, ancient rivalries? What possible reason did they have for not telling us?"

"You know the Conclave still thinks that they are at war with the Inquisition, right?"

"What?" The man blinked at me

I nodded, "Yup, your new Praetorian friends have been orchestrating a war between the two factions for centuries. They have been attacking the Conclave, killing hundreds of Evos in that time, and making sure it looks like Inquisitor attacks."

"That's impossible. The Philadelphia accords have been..."

"It is absolutely possible because they have infiltrated the Conclave as well and have suppressed all knowledge of the accords. The average Evo knows nothing about them."

The man frowned, looking confused, and slowly sat down again.

A woman spoke up but didn't stand. "That doesn't explain why they lied to us about the Praetorians."

"You assume they knew."

"They had to have known," the woman gasped, "right?"

"I have been working with Princess Isabelle and Bob... sorry, Arnold, for months now. When you went missing, they were distraught; they dispatched a team, me included, to look for you. I can absolutely guarantee that they didn't know. We found evidence of a massacre outside that camp; Arnold literally waded through it trying to identify you. Not only does that show that they care deeply about you, but why would he stand, knee deep, in dead bodies if he knew this place even existed?" another piece of embellishment, but the point still stood. There was zero doubt in my mind that Bob and Isabelle really didn't know anything. "Which one of you stapled a note to the bottom of their desk in Donetsk, telling us about the camp in Alchevs'k?"

Everyone looked around at each other, almost all of them looking confused. A voice from the back eventually spoke up. "That sounds like something Dimitri would do."

"And where is Dimitri? Bob found his note; that is what led us to you."

"He didn't want to join; they sent him somewhere else."

I frowned at the voice. That didn't fit the... the realization hit me. "There were twenty-six people who didn't join, weren't there?"

"Y..yes... how did you know that?"

"Tiberius told me," I sighed. "Those twenty-six weren't sent somewhere else; they were executed."

"No, you're lying!" The woman shouted, shock and fear written across every feature of her face.

I shook my head. "I am an Evo; you know what I can do, and these men are human..." I nodded to the two guards. "They can take you to where the bodies were dumped. We are in Russia, and they were killed in the middle of winter. The ground was too frozen to dig graves. They are still there."

"N.. No... Oh god!" The woman started crying, and a few other voices in the crowd started doing the same.

"The modus operandi of the Praetorians is simple, ruthless, and effective. Over the course of the next year or so, you would be conditioned to believe their philosophies of domination over the human population and to agree with their pursuit of violence between the non-human factions. Those of you who resisted that conditioning would have been killed. They estimated that only eight percent of you would ever actually join the Praetorians. The rest of you wouldn't survive." That part was true; it was one of the more immediately useful things I had harvested from Tiberius's mind.

Silence descended on the room.

"What do we do?" The first man stood up again.

That was actually a pretty good question and not one I had a solid answer to. I had been tasked with finding the members of the Ukrainian Inquisition, but that was all. We had always assumed they had been taken against their will. We had never even considered that they would be the victims of a mass Stockholm Syndrome situation. Their denouncing of the Inquisition, I imagined, would have some sort of impact on their future within the order, but what that impact was, I had no idea. That was grossly above my payscale.

"I honestly don't know," I said. These people had been through enough, and they didn't need my lying to them. "Not all of you here were with the Inquisition; those of you who were, I imagine - in the short term at least - that the Princess will be happy just that you are alive. What happens after that will be up to her, but I will personally tell her what you went through to break your bonds with them. You were tortured; make no mistake about that. I have no doubt that will be taken into consideration."

The man didn't sound particularly happy with that answer, but it was more of an answer than he had expected to get and more of a cause for cautious optimism than he expected to have.

"What now?" The woman finally asked after another sorrowful pause in the conversation,

"For now, sit tight. Once I am sure the rest of the complex has been secured, we will bring food and so on to make sure you are fed and comfortable. For obvious reasons, I can't have you wandering the compound unsupervised, so I will ask you to stay put in here until we can organize a way to get us out of here and back to the Inquisition. You won't be harmed, you have my word.

"I... I.. " The woman sighed and nodded. "Thank you."

********

It took three days to organize transport. Isabelle had been overjoyed to hear of the safety of her people - the survivors, anyway - and had been at least equally happy to hear from me. Bob had been told what had been happening to me thanks to my link with Jerry, meaning that Isabelle had spent months being forced to listen to some fairly graphic details of my torture. Her mood had soured quite dramatically when she finally understood that not only had her people also been the victims of those methods, but those methods had worked, and every one of the former inquisitors being returned to her had broken their oaths and turned their backs on the Inquisition as a whole. Mostly, she was just happy that I was okay.

I filled her in on as much of the details about the identity of the Praetorians as was possible in our conversation, but the calls were not particularly long, and I had enough data in my head and on my computer system to require a few months of bunker-enhanced work to digest. Of course, she asked to be made privy to any information that I found, and of course, I agreed.

By the time the sun went down, Bob, Jerry, and the rest of our original escort team had been flown in by chopper and had helped secure the compound. How the hell they got that helicopter past the Russian air defense system was beyond me, but somehow they managed it, and the whole team - minus Henry, of course - were back together.

The plan was to use the trucks and other vehicles in the compound to ferry all of the Inquisitors and Praetorian prisoners the twenty miles or so to the Coast. The compound and the town it was close to wasn't far from Rostov-on-Don, which in turn was one of Russia's major shipping ports into the Black Sea. Getting a boat to ferry us all around the Crimea to a Port in Northern Turkey was, apparently, child's play to the Princess, and from there, a chartered plane could take us all back to The Hague. The humans I had enthralled would help guard the captives and the Inquisitors for the entirety of the journey, as would our escort and all of them would be handed over to Isabelle once we arrived. After that, I was free to go home.

Home.

It was such a simple word, and yet one with about as profound a meaning as could be imagined. It was like 'love' in that so much weight was placed onto so few letters. I couldn't imagine it, though. I could understand the depression and the struggles of veterans returning home from conflict; how could you make family and friends understand your ordeal, explain the nightmares and the habits that had been born out of a need to survive when words were just incapable of portraying the incredible alienness of war? How could you go from this - all the war, the terror, the death, the constantly being on edge - to grocery shopping and daytime tv? It was the very best and the very worst of life condensed into an environment of sheer horror. How could you come to terms with something so difficult to express, even to yourself? Psychological scars would forever haunt my mind, regrets and second guesses, the trauma of having taken lives. I may not feel the guilt or the regret for it now, but I had no doubt that a time would come when I did. Jimmy couldn't be told, and even if he could, he would never be able to understand. Charlotte would, Charlotte could be shown, in brutal, graphic detail, everything that had happened, everything I had seen.... Everything I had done.

But did I want that? Did I want to tarnish her smile and her opinion of me in a selfish need to have someone else see what I saw, feel what I felt, and justify my actions as anything other than the barbaric acts that they undoubtedly were? Would it not be better to let her live in ignorance? For her... and for me?

I didn't have the answers to those questions. I'm not sure anyone did. Bob was feeling it as acutely as I was, but the rest of the escort team, when I brought it up, just smiled sadly, put a hand on my shoulder, and left me to my thoughts.

I'm not even sure there were answers to those questions.

There was a part of me that felt proud that I had achieved what I set out to achieve. There was a much bigger part of me, though, that was not only devastated that it cost Uri's life and Henry's health to accomplish, but I was still no closer to bringing the traitor, Marco, to justice, nor was I any closer to finding the man responsible for the death of my parents and the destruction of Philippa's mind--the Judge.

Every question I had wanted to answer had been answered, only for new, more pressing questions to arise in their place. The hunt for Marco was on, and there wasn't a rock on earth that the slimy little bastard could hide under to escape my wrath. That was one death I would never feel guilty about, and it was coming for him. The Judge would be harder, or at least would take longer, I had no information about him whatsoever, or at least not that I knew of yet. I had to discover who in the Conclave was responsible for the deception of its Evo ranks, who was guilty, and who was innocent, and then make a decision as to what to do about it.

I had to discover what this mantle was all about, the same for my apparent position of Dynast, at least in the minds of the Praetorian prisoners. Being the spiritual leader for not one superhuman species but two was not an outcome even the sanest of men could have anticipated, and yet, despite my constant assertions that I would never have been involved in any of this world or this conflict through choice, I kept being dragged deeper and deeper into it. My alliance with the Inquisition was now, apparently, carved into stone, and Isabelle insisted I be honored for the efforts I had made. My relationship with the Conclave was nowhere near as cordial, and yet I had one of its greatest and most loyal members living in my head.

Everything was so complicated, so convoluted, I yearned for the simplicity of just having to focus on my college project and get Jimmy home after drinking too much.

I rubbed my hand over my face and sighed heavily; it was spring now, late March, and the steam of my breath was carried away on the marginally milder air to the predawn light. The Praetorian captives, another forty or so of them, were being loaded onto the trucks along with the six Evos I had defeated in battle - Julias and Nathan among them. The Ukrainian Inquisitors had been transported before sunrise and were no doubt already loaded onto the cargo ship anchored offshore. But there were a few jobs still left to do.

Bob sighed as well. This was the part of the whole ordeal he had dreaded the most. We were currently looking at the dumped bodies of the people executed by the Praetorians when they refused to break. Except it wasn't only the twenty-six from the Donetsk office; there were more than seventy bodies lined up in a row against the outer perimeter fence. Some of them had been there for the whole of Winter - some had been there longer - and were far too decomposed to identify, so, preferable to leaving a brother or sister behind; Bob decided that we were going to take them all. Each of them, friend or foe, would be given a proper burial once their identities had been confirmed and efforts to find their families exhausted. We were in Russia, after all, and information was not exactly free-flowing.

"What do you think will happen to them?" I asked, nodding behind us to the captives.

Bob turned away from the bodies being gathered and bagged up by the enthralled humans and looked toward the trucks. "I don't know," he shook his head. "There will be trials, obviously, but a very strong argument could be made that not only were they following orders, but that they had been tortured into compliance. Legally speaking, they are innocent, no matter what they have done."

"Even if they were responsible for this?" I said, nodding back to the rows of dead. "Or the Alchevs'k massacre?"

Bob shook his head. "I don't know." He repeated. "That isn't even the hardest question. If they are found innocent, what happens then? We can't keep them locked up, and they are too dangerous to let go."

"Jesus." I hadn't even thought of that. "What about your people?"

Bob's entire body seemed to slump a little as if the weight of reality was pressing down on his shoulders. "I'm not sure if they are our people anymore," he sighed. "And I can't even say I blame them. The Inquisition has problems, internal strifes, just like the conclave does and The Praetorians, the history of our peoples, it's just so... big. I'm sure there'll be a lot of people who reject the idea of a combined order of Evos and Inquisitors out of hand, but it will make a lot of sense to most. We have long understood that the church used us, and we have never been able to find out where our people or even our Order came from. To find out that we were corrupted so viscerally by the Church, and our original order has been looking for us, after centuries of war which none of us signed on for, is an enticing prospect. But at the same time..." he gestured to the rows of dead, "...this is what happens to those who defy them. I know that, you know that, but they didn't. Some will be brought back into the fold, I imagine," he sighed again, "but most of them won't. I can see it in their eyes. The problem is that all of them will have to be watched, even those who leave, none of them will fully be trusted again. They know too much, and after what happened to them? They are going to be hurt, angry, and looking for someone to blame. Eventually, that blame will turn onto the Inquisition, whether we are responsible or not."

I nodded softly. It was a sobering thought but more than likely an accurate one. It had taken months to find them, and I knew firsthand the suffering that had been inflicted on them in that time. I couldn't honestly say that I wouldn't have broken if I didn't have my powers and my link with the outside world to back me up. But going through that without that, then being offered a way out of that torture, at the same time that it is revealed that there is this whole new organization, secret, and promise of a future of peace and community between the Evos and the Inquisitors? Yeah, I could definitely see how these people broke.

"Send them to me," I said, almost out of nowhere. "If they don't want to stay with the Inquisition, I mean."

Bob turned to look at me with a blink. "To you?"

I shrugged weakly at him. "Fuck, I don't know, Bob. They're going to have nowhere to go, they're going to be alone in the world, and there is nobody who knows what that's like more than me. The Conclave can't be trusted, at least not until this conspiracy is dealt with, and a bunch of unprotected Inquisitors will be a tempting target for some pissant Evo trying to show off. The Inquisition won't be able to trust them, the captives won't trust the Inquisition to protect them, and the Praetorians are still out there. They've been through too much to be abandoned now. So... send them to me."

Bob huffed a laugh, a strange sound considering what we were currently watching. "Maybe there is something to this Dynast thing."

I smiled, "Maybe. I keep thinking about it, you know? The battle, fighting Julias, I was so fucking angry, it was like having a caged and abused animal in my chest, and some poor son-of-a-bitch had left the door open. It was going to rip him apart, and I was more than happy to let it... and then I spoke to him, and anger, that rage, that... fury... it just vanished. It was like I could see that he was a good man who had been dragged down a bad path by evil people. He has done some really shitty things, Bob, vile things, things that are going to haunt him, but he hated it. It is the Praetorians who have drummed this notion of duty and honor into them, but it can only be achieved by doing exactly what they tell you to do, even if that means selling your fucking soul. Nobody has ever sat down and said, 'You know what, something needs to change.' The Inquisition hasn't, not really; they have just adapted to the times. The Conclave certainly hasn't; the Sect just bury their heads in the sand and hope the problem ignores them, and the Praetorians are the sort to make the problem worse. They would burn down the world just so they could rule the ashes. The Inquisitors and the Evos working together? Being part of the same community? An end to this divisive, factional bullshit with all its corruption and conspiracy? Yeah, that's an idea I can get behind, but not so we can rule the fucking world. Not killing anyone who disagrees with us. Not looking for ways to start wars so we can get even more power than we have. Just so we can... I don't know,.. Just exist."

Bob was looking at me with an odd expression on his face, almost like a fatherly smile, before, eventually, he nodded and turned back to the pile. "Maybe I'll join you one day."

I chuckled. "Think you can tolerate being called Bob permanently?"

"It's growing on me," he laughed as we watched the last of the dead prisoners being zipped up into body bags, ready for transport. Not the place most people would expect to laugh, but the situation was just too foreign for any previously held expectations to stand up anymore.

I sighed and turned away from the scene of death, away from the trucks having their canvas rear flaps pulled down, and engines starting, and toward the east. The sun was starting to peek over the tops of the hills in the far distance, just black shadows against the sunrise. Burning rays of orange streaked out into the skies, puncturing and painting clouds with color as they sailed silently through the vastness of the skies and played the part of a backdrop to the flock of birds following behind them. A moment of perfect stillness in the chaos of war.

I smiled at Bob, patted his shoulder as he honored his dead, and headed toward the compound.

********

Toussant looked at me. His eyes were vacant; I hadn't really had the chance to look at the man properly since I had released his shell - this thing in front of me - from the Christmas cottage, but the spark that had been behind them when he was alive, that little flicker of light in the eyes of every living person, was gone.

Toussant really was dead. The man responsible for the death of Becky was dead. Even back when he had shown me what had happened to my parents, it had been apparent that he wasn't the one in charge, that honor belonged to the Judge, but knowing nothing at all about the man, not even his name, Toussant hadn't been able to share any information with me. Toussant hadn't been there for the destruction of Philippa's mind and been following orders when he killed my parents, but he had still pulled the trigger and had done so without the slightest shred of remorse or hesitation. It had been his utter, sadistic glee in killing Becky that had sealed his fate. Julias and Nathan, men who had never been asked to do the sorts of things that Toussant had done but probably would have done the same if ordered to, had been spared because of the revulsion they had felt at actions that went against their core beliefs; Toussant had enjoyed it, and so he needed to die.

I looked at the husk of the man, his face, his body, and the memory of everything he had been before I ended him passing in waves through my mind, and I tried to feel something, anything, even the smallest shadow of regret for what I had put him through to get to where we were standing now.

Nothing. He had deserved his fate, and there wasn't a single part of me that felt bad for what I had done to him. I took a moment to wonder if that would ever change.

And then I shot him.

Between my ability-enhanced skills and my recent combat experience, my aim was millimeter-perfect. Three shots, one that ripped through his skull above his left eye, aimed so the bullet carved through the bone and deflected away rather than shredded through the brain. It would look like a lucky escape to anyone who found him. Another shot through his shoulder and one more into his gut, but intentionally missing anything of vital importance. The second two shots had been fired and hit their target in the time it had taken Toussant's head to whip back, and his body started to fall.

He crumpled to the floor of the control room, still alive but unconscious.

I looked up at the security cameras. The servers they connected to were local only, not able to transmit their feeds to any outside location, so - after every byte of data had been pulled off them by Jeeves, they had been shot to shit. Completely and utterly destroyed. A few hours after we left the compound, Toussant would wake up, drag himself to the nearest phone, and call in the attack to the Praetorian command, and they, in turn, would send a force to secure the base. They would find the bodies of the men who had been killed, most of them gunned down by a mysterious attacker, some killed by me, allowing me to escape and take my prisoners with me and - with no information able to be gleaned for the internal security system - they would have to piece together events based on the clues I had intentionally left them. Toussant would be assumed to have been overlooked, his wounds looking fatal, and he would tell of how armed men, possibly my escorts, had tracked me, found the base, and attacked. With any luck, the Praetorian command would buy this story; he would be pulled back into the fold and could continue his role as my double agent. If not, they would kill him. It didn't really matter.

I looked down at his bleeding body, sighed, and made my way outside again. By the time I got there, Bob and the escort had loaded into one of the SUVs and were waiting to follow the prisoner's trucks to the coast and home. But I had one more thing left to do.

I looked down at Tiberius's phone in my hand, tapped the screen a few times, and called the number.

Marco's phone was a burner, disconnected from the battery, and unable to be traced. He would only turn it on occasionally to check his messages and to report in, and there was no way to know when that would be. Of course, the number would be monitored and traced as soon as it came online, but it was very unlikely he would keep it after news of my escape had reached him. No, this was about sending him a message.

I pulled the phone up to my ear, waited for it to connect to the voicemail, and started to speak, trying to keep my voice calm, level and dripping with venomous but measured intent.

"Hello, Marco. Very soon, you are going to hear that the base you left me at has been destroyed. All of them are dead. I could sit here and argue about the flaws in the Praetorian's plans, their goals, their methods, or their motivations; I could sit here and tell you that the acts that you and they have committed in the name of power are the epitome of evil. But I'm not going to. It is too late for that. It is too late for you. There have only ever been two people I loved, and you are to blame for the deaths of both of them. You killed Uri. You are responsible for every death at the party, and for that, you are going to die. It will not be fast. The hell you find will be one of your own making, and I am going to be the one who sends you there.

"You can run, you can hide, or you can fight. But make no mistake... I am coming for you."

Short and sweet, I disconnected the call and tossed the phone away. And once again cast my eyes toward the rising sun and took in a deep breath. The breaths of the wind and the caws of passing birds, the rustling and creaking of trees, all of them were barely whispers in the moment. The road ahead was clear, perhaps for the first time in months. There were still unanswered questions, and there was still fighting to be done. But for now, at least for the time being, I could relax and let my thoughts drift to home.

I walked to the car, climbed in silently, offered a nod to Gabriel in the driver's seat, and then leaned my head against the cold glass of the window to watch as the car pulled away into the early morning countryside.

I was going home.