“I wish it didn’t have to be like this,” Jonathan said as he met Keris’ assault. His fists met the monk’s, parrying his blows. “You aren’t my enemy, Keris. My only true enemy here is Avarana.”

  “Be quiet!” Keris barked, rage on his face. “Stop trying to sway me with your honeyed words!”

  The monk raised his fist, and layers of elemental light condensed around it until it shone like a star. He planted his feet and punched, Jonathan the only thing standing in his way.

  “Fine,” Jonathan spat. “You brought this upon himself.” With a single breath that seemed to echo for eternity, Jonathan stopped holding back.

  The vast engine of Divine power that made up his Wrath of the Void skill hummed to full life, golden lightning crackling across his skin and armor. Jonathan slammed his fists together, and with a bellow, he met Keris’ strike with one of his own. So much concentrated Void energy coated his fist that it annihilated the air in front of it, sharp cracks ringing out as vacuums formed and collapsed.

  The two punches met and the ground beneath them buckled. Both men served as focal points for their power, the world bending instead of them. A canyon formed, their feet pushing the ground apart. Jonathan powered through, letting his helpless rage fuel his strength. He did not want to do this, but he had to.

  Keris’ wrist broke and the monk let out a cry of pain and shock. Jonathan closed the gap in an instant, and drove his fist into the Fistdancer’s jaw. Bones snapped and teeth shattered, Keris shooting up into the sky like a missile. He cried out, a golden light surrounding him. Wings formed from the ether, layers of elemental power turning into armor. Keris clenched his fists, and the world clenched with them, Jonathan finding himself caught in what felt like a hydraulic press.

  He broke free with a soaring leap that took him on a collision course with his foe. His fist buried itself in Keris’ sternum, and the naive monk broke around it. He nearly snapped in half, whiplash breaking most of his bones.

  Jonathan and Keris ascended into the sky for almost a mile, before Jonathan stopped, summoning a platform beneath himself. He stood there for a moment, looking Keris in the eyes. The monk’s face was unfocused, his eyes looking at Jonathan without seeing anything.

  “Last chance,” Jonathan whispered. “Fight with me, surrender, or die. Those are your only choices.”

  Keris spat in Jonathan’s face, blood and bone fragments mixed with the spittle. “I choose death.”

  Jonathan grimaced, and punched Keris so hard that his skull broke. The man’s head deformed. Only then did he fall silent. He was so badly wounded that Jonathan couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive.

  With a quick application of stamina manipulation, Jonathan punted Keris off into the sky, the monk shooting away like a meteor. He landed a dozen miles away, crashing into a faraway building.

  Jonathan sighed, and leapt off the Void platform. He fell towards the battleground below, watching Eliza and Arkanon tag team a small unit of guards. While both were nearly a Tier below the guards, they were stronger than their foes on an individual level. Working together, they could do wonders.

  Despite this, more guards came every few seconds, emerging from the city with a speed only possible for Tier 8s. They were so fast that they left treadmarks on the street, burned black from the friction. It seemed almost impossible that Arkanon and Eliza could stand against them. Stand against them they did, however, and the battle continued on. Eliza and Arkanon focused on stalling rather than direct combat, ensuring that Jonathan had enough time to achieve his own mission.

  Walls of obsidian and hurricane force winds pushed the incoming guards back, preventing them from reinforcing the prison defences. Slowly but surely, the walls crumbled and the wind petered out, but it always resumed before the guards could make too much headway.

  Jonathan headed for the prison and towards the floating cell that Keris had blocked him from reaching. He thundered across the scarred earth and jumped towards the cell. Landing on top, about fifty feet off the ground, Jonathan immediately felt his strength start to diminish.

  He gathered his Void energy before he was cut off from his strength entirely and drove it down into the top of the cell. Like a drill it cut straight through the metal and into the cell’s interior. The defences were not as substantial as they had been on Arkanon’s cell, given that Hushar and Tukar were quite a bit weaker.

  Jonathan slid his hand into the hole and set his feet. With a grunt he started to lift, using the top of the cell to push off. Stamina cycled through his muscles giving him the strength of a demigod. The metal creaked as he pulled, until a strip tore free from the cell.

  Jonathan continued to rip the cell into shreds, combining his raw strength with his Void mastery to make short work of the reinforced metal. As soon as a person sized hole was opened up in the roof, he leaped in.

  Hushar and Tukar lay on the ground, seemingly unconscious. They were breathing raspily, and twitched every now and then. Jonathan frowned and closed his eyes, laying his hand down on Hushar’s back. He extended his Void senses, and found that there were currents of poison running through the Uthraki’s bloodstream.

  Jonathan extended his Void powers through the man’s body, burning away the poison while leaving his blood untouched. It was a delicate process, and wouldn’t have been possible before Jonathan became a Lesser God. Now, though, he possessed enough control to be able to do almost anything with his element.

  Hushar’s eyes fluttered open as Jonathan worked, but the Uthraki was still too weak to move around.

  “Where… where am I?” Hushar asked weakly. “All I remember is getting beaten nearly to death by some guards.”

  “Shh,” Jonathan said. “Don’t overexert yourself.”

  He extracted the last of the poison over the next minute. Hushar got to his feet, still looking a bit worse for wear. The Uthraki looked like he had gone without food for months, withered and shrunken. His muscles were deflated, and his eyes hollow.

  “Damn, what did they do to you?” Jonathan couldn’t help but ask.

  “Not sure,” Hushar grunted. “Some sort of poison. I don’t know what exactly.”

  Jonathan bent down and got to work on Tukar, repeating the same process. “At least it wasn’t meant to kill you, as far as I can tell. It just suppressed your strength.”

  Indeed, Hushar was already looking better, his regeneration in action. His deflated muscles were growing back to their normal size, and his eyes were no longer as sunken.

  “We might have made a mistake…” Hushar said, trailing off at the end. “We shouldn’t-”

  “Save it for after,” Jonathan said curtly. “What matters right now is getting you and Tukar out.”

  Hushar nodded, and after regaining a bit of his lost strength, headed up out of the cell. Jonathan finished up with Tukar a moment later, and rather than waiting for the man to recover on his own, he lifted the Uthraki over his shoulder and jumped up through the opening in the roof.

  Outside, the battle was steadily tipping in the enemy’s favor. Arkanon and Eliza were rapidly retreating, trying to avoid attacks more than anything else. So many of the guards were firing off projectiles at once that the air was filled with multicolored beams of light, arrows, and all manner of stranger weapons besides.

  Hushar was fighting alongside the others, though not at the peak of his capability. He was slower and weaker than normal, and his elemental abilities were muted. Instead of summoning manifestations of volcanic wrath with the power to level mountains, he instead conjured blades of obsidian in lieu of his greatsword. He couldn’t hold his own against the guards, and instead was trying to distract them so that Arkanon could strike.

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  Eliza floated overhead, raining down spears and arrows of compressed air upon her foes. The elemental techniques were surrounded by halos of Divinity, golden fire lighting up the world around it.

  “Let’s go!” Jonathan shouted as he emerged from the suppression cell. He jumped, landing a moment later in the midst of the guards. Slamming his hand down, a wave of Void energy erupted out, tearing guards off their feet in every direction. As they fell, Jonathan ran, heading for the winding streets of the city. The others followed, outpacing the shell shocked guards.

  They quickly vanished into the city, blending in with the crowd. While the conflict around the ruined prison had seemed all consuming at the time, life went on uninterrupted for the rest of the city’s populace. Barely half a mile away, a market continued to operate, vendors selling their wares to anyone they could entice to buy from them.

  This quietude quickly vanished as a cavalcade of soldiers came rushing after Jonathan and his allies. They trampled through the tents, spilling the various goods onto the ground.

  “Hey!” one especially high leveled blacksmith bellowed as a guard kicked his anvil over and scattered chunks of red hot metal. A muscular orcish man, he was heavily armed, showcasing his own products on his body. He drew a massive iron mace, and got to work, brutally beating the guard who had disturbed him.

  All across the marketplace, a vicious melee broke out, with merchants either running or staying to fight if they were high leveled enough. The same was true for the customers. In a city of warriors, in a realm of constant war, the lines between the city guards and the regular people were blurry.

  Jonathan easily made his escape, vanishing into an alley with the others.

  “That was close,” Eliza breathed as soon as the group were in safety. “I almost died a few times back there. Damn Tier 8s…”

  “At least we got out with what we wanted,” Jonathan said. “We have a good portion of the original team back together. Speaking of that…”

  Hushar and Tukar nodded apologetically. “We know that we were foolish in setting off alone,” Hushar said. “It was an error on our part. We thought we had what it took to thrive without you, but still acted as if you were there to save us.”

  Arkanon remained silent during this, but let out a sigh after Hushar finished. “I too fell victim to my ego. I picked fights that I should not have, thinking myself the match of warriors an entire Tier above my own. I actually was, at least one on one, but not against a group.”

  Jonathan smiled. “Well, it looks like you all learned your lesson without serious harm. How did you larger mission go in this city? Did you find anyone who could help us?”

  Hushar nodded. “That was the reason we were caught. There’s an underground cell of resistance fighters. They call themselves the Bloodscorned. They’ve found the ethos of Bloodspill to be utterly abhorrent, and try to foster peace whenever they can. As you might expect, the city officials don’t like them very much.”

  “Where are they based?” Jonathan asked. “I feel like they would be interested in meeting with me.”

  “There are hidden chambers all throughout the city. The one I was in fell to a raid. Everyone was captured, including myself and Tukar.”

  “What about the others?’

  “I only know the location of another two holdouts. The whole organization is compartmentalized to avoid discovery. There are thousands of members, but the city has millions of guards.”

  “I can see how that would be a problem,” Jonathan said. “This realm has the highest concentration of high Tiered individuals relative to the population that I’ve ever seen. In the Ash Heaps, Tier 2s were semi-mythical. It’s so different here.”

  “I suspect many of them were bottlenecked by the ambient mana,” Arkanon suggested. “In fact, you might be the reason there are so many of them.”

  Jonathan grinned, shaking his head. “Suffering from success, I guess. I put so much fear in the hearts of the Circle Lords that they gave up their old order just to survive.”

  “As much as I’d like to bask in our glory,” Eliza said, “we are in the middle of an alley. Weren’t we trying to get away from the guards?”

  “Right,” Jonathan said distractedly. “Hushar, can you take us to one of the safehouses? I want to see if we can swing these Bloodscorned to our side fully.”

  ***

  The closest branch of the rebel group was fifty miles away, secreted away beneath an abandoned church. It wasn’t to any god that Jonathan knew, and none of the others recognized it either. Perhaps that was the point. It would hardly be a secure hiding place if people went there all the time.

  Jonathan was impressed that Hushar knew the exact location of the hideout, despite having never been there before. According to the Uthraki, the Bloodscorned utilized a form of mental magic that implanted a map of the safehouses in the minds of its members, pinpointing them in relation to the rest of the city. Otherwise they would have been nearly impossible to find.

  The interior of the church was covered in cobwebs, and a rich layer of dust lay on the ground. There weren't any seats, or pews, just a flat floor of marble engraved with carvings.

  “So… how do we get in?” Eliza asked. “There’s nothing here.”

  Hushar walked over to one of the carvings and set his hand down on it, bending over to do so. He whispered something under his breath and tapped the carving in specific points. It lit up a moment later and the ground started to shift.

  The marble came apart in a grid-like pattern, a hole opening up in the center. A ladder led down into the darkness. Jonathan immediately frowned. For the dark to inhibit his vision at his stage of advancement, there had to be some sort of magical effect.

  Jonathan walked over, standing next to Hushar. The closer he went to the hole in the ground, the more certain he was that some sort of enchantment was layered over the whole thing. He could only see five rungs down, after which a uniform cloak of blackness blocked out his vision.

  “What’s the point of the illusion when you can see the ladder?” Jonathan asked. “There’s clearly something there.”

  Hushar laughed. “It’s a trap. A localized sensory deadening array prevents people from noticing the danger. I’m surprised you didn’t pick it up yet.”

  Jonathan leaned in, feeling a sudden prickle of danger as he neared the hole. He extended a finger of Void energy down into the pit, only for his connection to suddenly cut off as it touched the dark cloud.

  “It’s a portal,” Hushar explained. “It leads to a dangerous elemental phenomena called a spatial labyrinth. Nobody who has gone in there has ever come out.”

  The others neared, looking at the portal apprehensively.

  “What would happen if we went in? What is a spatial labyrinth?” Eliza asked. “Some sort of maze?”

  “No,” Hushar explained. “It’s a zone where space is folded in on itself so many times that you can walk for years without moving a single foot. Even worse, the edges of folded space are generally sharp. People can cut themselves to death so easily that it’s almost terrifying.”

  “He’s saying this like he’s an expert,” Tukar confided, “but the Bloodscorned explained it all to us when we first met them.”

  Hushar glared at his brother, but didn’t say anything.

  “How do we get in, then?” Jonathan asked. “If that’s a trap.”

  Hushar gestured to the grid pattern still visible on the marble around the ladder. “This is a puzzle. You have to follow the instructions to get in.”

  Jonathan frowned. “What instructions? There’s only lines.”

  “It shows a certain way to walk to deactivate the traps,” Hushar said. “If you do it in the right order, the portal will vanish.”

  The Uthraki started tracing the lines, walking slowly and carefully along them. As he moved he traced out a pattern that Jonathan’s enhanced senses were able to make out. It spelled out the word ‘Entry’. It seemed pretty rudimentary to him, but as he looked at the tangled grid of lines, he realized that it would be impossible to pick out if you didn’t previously know it existed. There were millions of possibilities, with that only being one of them. Presumably, picking the wrong option would end in disaster.

  The darkness surrounding the ladder vanished bit by bit as Hushar walked out the password. Eventually, it was completely gone, revealing a normal looking chute that led down for about a hundred feet before ending in a dark hallway. That led off for an indeterminate distance.

  Hushar leaped down, landing a few seconds later with a dull thud. The others followed, Jonathan going last.

  He landed next to Eliza, looking over her shoulder to see the end of the tunnel. Three people waited there, an elven woman, an orcish man and a member of a species that Jonathan didn’t recognize. It was still clearly a man, but he had three arms, one protruding from his back like a tail. He also had three eyes and bright violet skin.

  “Who sent you here?” the elven woman asked, her voice hard. “If you are not another member, this place will be your grave.”

  “I was recently initiated into the branch under Horthis Blackwater,” Hushar said. “Our password is “Only the brave.”

  “Really?” the woman asked. “So if I told you that I was the leader of this branch, you would know my name?”

  Hushar smiled. “Your name is Areala Brightquiver. This is the seven hundred and fifty first branch.”

  Areala let out a sigh of relief. “I’m glad you aren’t an enemy. The purges are more common now. We have traitors in our midst, it seems.”

  “Who are these people?” the orc asked. He was strange, for an orc. His skin was a lighter shade of green than normal, and he had four tusks instead of two. Each was curled slightly at the tip.

  “They’re my allies,” Hushar said. He pointed at Jonathan.“That one there is very interested in helping with your mission. He has one of his own.”

  Jonathan nodded. “I’m sure you’ve heard that six of the Circle Lords have died by now?”

  “I have,” the orc said suspiciously. “They were killed by a single man.

  “Well, I am that man,” Jonathan replied. “It just so happens that Avarana is next on my list.”

  Areala narrowed her eyes, and used a skill to scan Jonathan. Her eyes widened as she read what she saw. “It is you…”

  “I can help with your mission,” Jonathan said. “I can transform your rebellion into a revolution. Give you the strength you need to take down a Circle Lord.”

  “We could do with help like that,” the orc said. “What do you want from us, though?”

  “Nothing. There’s strength in numbers. We can help one another by fighting together rather than apart.”

  Areala smiled. “We can agree to that.”