“This is …,” Mia started, trailing off as she couldn’t find a word that accurately described the situation Brent laid out after returning from his debrief.

  “Fucked,” Mark said. “The word you are looking for is fucked, both the situation and us. We are well and thoroughly fucked.”

  “Okay, you can stop cursing now,” Lina huffed with a halfhearted glare.

  “At least Konstantin’s group didn’t stab us in the back during the Raid,” Mia said, frowning. “So … silver lining, or something?”

  “Could be worse, eh?” Mark snorted. “Man, it was easier back when we only had to worry about monsters.”

  “This ‘Werewolf King’ is controlling monsters,” Nikki said, humming in thought. “Evergreen monsters, too. He somehow managed to subjugate an Evergreen Broodmother, those things are an absolute menace, kill on sight all across the Mystic Realm. They can overrun entire planes if not taken care of in time.”

  “And here I thought we were done with the hard part,” Mia sighed, slumping a little. “At least I got to go to sleep yesterday believing that.”

  “It shouldn’t be all that troublesome,” Nikki said. “If it really is subjugated in some way, Bonded or Tamed, then the monster won’t be able to grow in Level or Rank until its Companion matches it in level.”

  “Without the Obelisk, the Werewolf Cunt should be stuck at Level 10,” Mark said, rubbing his beard with a grin. “Same as us. Considering the Evergreen monsters have been around for weeks now, I doubt that Broodmother could have reached the peak of Rank 1 before it got its ass whooped by our furry friend.”

  “Does that sound right?” Brent asked, giving Nikki a significant look.

  “Sounds like the most likely scenario to me,” Nikki said with a dainty shrug. “Not that I expect us to get that lucky. I think I heard of Guardian-grade Evergreen monsters roaming the city, Rank one ones as well. It should be Level 15 at least, which would allow it to make monsters up to a single Level below it.”

  “There had to be a cost to it,” Helene said. “Right? How could it just keep making monsters?”

  “Biomass, mana, life-force,” Nikki said. “As in, feed the Broodmother living sacrifices and it’ll keep making new monsters.”

  “The scouts did report that some of the refugees seemed to be missing from the parts of town overrun by the monsters or the beastkin,” Brent said softly, his fists clenching and unclenching in what must have been a subconscious gesture to force himself to remain calm. Helene placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, managing to banish some of the tension from the man.

  Mia closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. It was one thing when it was inhuman monsters killing people in droves; that was how those creatures were made, born of miasma to be malicious and sadistic. But beastkin were obviously not; they may have been more predisposed to a slightly more primal way of thought, but clearly it wasn’t to a level where they were incapable of empathy.

  Mia’d met too many of them to even entertain that thought. Beastkin were people, just with their own quirks, like how Mia wanted to strangle anyone who stepped on a sapling or how Mark liked to lick rocks. That only made it so much worse. You didn’t blame a rabid dog for biting your hand, but when a grown-ass man did it?

  “You’d think people would come together when the world is practically ending,” Mia said, jaw clenched while her tone turned morose.

  “And we are,” Helene said, reaching over to pull Mia into a side-hug. “There are always bad apples. We are here together, aren’t we? And we are not alone either.”

  “Which might be a problem,” Nikki said, turning to Brent. The blue-haired woman looked nervous. “You said Zeigler claimed he now has someone from Starhaven helping him fight the beastkin and their monsters?”

  “Yes,” Brent said. “Apparently, they are under the impression that we don’t know it was their plot that saw Mia nearly dead. Zeigler is keeping the woman close and unaware of that fact. She’s apparently some Rank 1 secret agent. She supposedly promised to help take care of this mess and then to ensure Graz received the support it needed to rebuild afterwards … somehow I’m suspicious.”

  “Couldn’t imagine why,” Lina snorted, glancing at Mia. “Do they really think we’re that stupid?”

  “I highly doubt they took my presence into account,” Nikki said. “Perhaps you’d have arrived at the same conclusions without the context I provided, but I doubt you’d be as certain in it as you are.”

  “What could they be playing at?” Mark asked.

  “A colony,” Nikki said. “Or a vassal city-state, perhaps a protectorate. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’m guessing they want a foothold on the continent. It’s possible every city still standing has an operative or two trying for the same thing.”

  “They’d have the manpower for that?” Brent asked.

  “Rank 1s are a dime and a dozen.” Nikki shrugged. “You all would have achieved it weeks ago had you had an Obelisk available. I doubt they would all be good agents; training them up to be competent would take more effort than getting them to Rank 1.”

  “How many people live in Starhaven?” Mia asked curiously.

  “A bit under 500 million,” Nikki said. “Not sure how many lives the plane’s rough merging with this planet of yours claimed, but I doubt it reduced the number all that much. The vast majority of those are capable of achieving Rank 1 in their lifetime.”

  Well, shit. Mia thought, feeling numb. That was more people than the entire combined population of North America, though more than 200 million short of reaching what Europe’s population had been before the magical apocalypse made a mess of things.

  “I’d recommend avoiding that agent at all costs,” Nikki said seriously, her ice-blue gaze landing on Mia with renewed focus. “Especially you. Attempting to kill you had been monumentally stupid of them. If the Great Spirit King ever found out they killed a member of his Court, he could make Starhaven bleed for it, if not raze the entire plane to the ground if he is in an especially foul mood. They might want to tie up loose ends in the vain hope it’ll be the end of the matter.”

  “And it won’t?” Mark asked.

  “No,” Nikki said. “Anachreon is the Avatar of the Archon. If anyone in all the Realms can claim to be omniscient, it’s him. His blood flows through your veins; he will know if you die, and there will be hell to pay. There are records proving it, but the agent might panic anyway. The fact that they even attempted it spoke of especially poor decision-making skills or a lack of knowledge. She might not even know just how much trouble she is in … and all of that is somewhat the case for you too.”

  Carmilla stiffened under Nikki’s attention. “It is?”

  “You are a Nightshade Vampire, aren’t you?” Nikki asked, receiving a hesitant nod from the resident redhead. “I know your Clan’s Progenitor is still alive, and he is said to be rather … mercurial. It’s not a certain thing that he’d take vengeance for you, but the death of his descendant in the new Cosmic Realm might just draw his attention to this portion of the Multiverse. His attention is known to be rather unhealthy for anything or anyone even vaguely within the vicinity of whatever caught his eye. Hell, if they are unlucky, your death might even draw the eye of the Firstborn for the same reason.”

  Camie shuddered for some reason, a haunted look in her eyes, and Mia bit her lower lip in worry, grabbing the girl’s hand and giving it a reassuring squeeze.

  Camie shook it off after a moment, squeezing back with a smile that was only a bit forced. Those stupid Bloodline memories were torturing the poor girl, and as much as Mia hated it, she couldn’t do anything to help aside from hugging the girl whenever she looked like she needed it.

  “The Firstborn?” Brent asked. “Do I even want to know?”

  “No,” Nikki said. “Let it be enough that it’s a creature touted as being both the first Vampire, and the single oldest living being in the Mystic Realm. It’s … primordial. Similar to Anachreon in that way, but the latter is much more ‘human’, as you would say. The Firstborn is a walking, crawling cataclysm. I’d call it a living natural disaster, but there is nothing natural about it, and saying that would be disrespectful to Elemental Lords who pride themselves on being just that … living natural disasters, that is.”

  “Alright, let’s keep the Eldritch horror for when we don’t have trouble with shitty little goblins anymore,” Mark said. “So! We have these salad monsters, the werewolf twat, and now this Starhaven bitch who may or may not want to disappear all of us. What do we do?”

  “Let them deal with it?” Mia asked, then frowned when everyone gave her looks. “What? The Starhaven agent supposedly promised to murder our monster and werewolf problems into non-existence. I say we let her. We’ll have two of our problems solved … if she wasn’t just posturing and lying.”

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  Mia certainly wouldn’t shed a single tear if either the werewolf kidnapping innocent people or the Starhaven agent who tried to kill her ended up dead. Mia didn’t need to be the one to save the city; her ego was perfectly healthy and could more than survive if the survival of Graz wasn’t ensured solely by her own magical might and cunning. Nobody could accuse her of having a saviour complex, much less a martyr one. Dying probably sucked ass, and she didn’t care to find out whether it really did.

  The Raid was certain death versus a low chance of success. This was not. This didn’t need her, or her friends, who’d by some miracle, had all come out of the Raid physically unharmed and only slightly traumatised.

  “Doesn’t matter whether they die or not after killing us,” Lina said. “Doesn’t make us any less dead.”

  “Which is why not dying is going to be our primary objective going forward,” Mark said, giving a sagely nod. “Any objections?”

  “Nope,” Mia said, and the others echoed the sentiment.

  They turned in for the night soon after, relaxing and trying to reclaim some measure of vitality. A single night’s sleep was not quite enough to wipe away the bone-deep exhaustion the Raid had left them with; it certainly wasn’t for Mia, and she assumed it was the same for the others.

  By the next morning, Spectral Blade was fully usable again and, more importantly, all of its base runes were now upgraded to Rank 1. Mia began absorbing the other Rank 1 runes from her new Conjuration Lexicon, which she’d need to add in the Chaos Aspected edge function. Until that was done, she would keep the old version of the spell in her Spell Tome in case she needed to cast the spell before all the new runes were absorbed into her runic model.

  In the meantime, she practiced Arcane Mana Manipulation. The Wisp Form saved her life during the fight with the Guardian, and she wanted to get started on making the bootleg version of the Shimmer Skill as soon as possible. That meant she needed a much firmer grasp on transforming arcane mana to kinetic energy, and then on manipulating that energy, even while in Wisp Form. The practice also had the benefit of not requiring her to leave the apartment.

  It was slow-going, but fun. Who didn’t imagine moving objects with their minds as kids? Mia distinctly recalled attempting to use the Force with all the willpower a ten-year-old girl could manage to grab her phone from across the room without getting out of bed.

  It never worked, not back then … but now? Now she had not one, but two clear paths towards achieving her dreams of being the ultimate couch potato. Arcane Thread, and mastering this arcane-mana kinetic-energy technique. Luckily, the training manual she’d gotten from a previous Rift had dozens of exercises she could use.

  Which is why Mia was presently occupying herself with trying to keep a tennis ball floating above her palm. It bounced up and down in the air as beads of sweat formed on Mia’s brow. Sending out blasts of kinetic energy was easy. Keeping up a constant stream that was just powerful enough to keep the ball afloat but not strong enough to send it into the ceiling and then smack her in the face on the way back? Much harder, and very much a work in progress.

  When she got tired of that — as in, physically and mentally exhausted, not merely bored — she returned to brainstorming on her new passion project: the custom Spectral Blade spell circle.

  That was even more slow going in progress, but it worked an entirely other part of her mind than the brain-numbing focus the previous exercise required, so it was a perfect way to take her mind off of things and exhaust herself in yet another way.

  Maybe if she were exhausted enough, she wouldn’t have the energy to worry about the clusterfuck that was the current situation in the city.

  ******

  A scene of utter devastation spread out before Gabriel Vexley, rubble and death lingering in the valley, crawling up the slopes of the Alps that had once cradled the city of Salzburg within their protective grasp. Fire Drakes ruled the wasteland, dominating the lesser monster species that had crept in from nearby Rifts or Nests.

  “At least the Rifts are gone,” Gabriel said absently, feeling numb. He still held fond memories of the school trips he’d taken to Salzburg, seeing Mozart's home, the beautiful architecture and the city that itself had once been one of the cultural centres of not only the German-speaking world, but of Europe as a whole. “Even if the city is gone.”

  The fact that the Rifts were gone made it evident that Salzburg hadn’t fallen without a fight, or that it had been avenged since. He could still sense the lingering chaos in the ambient mana as new prime currents were still getting established. He could feel great swathes of the ambient mana being siphoned away in no less than five directions, signifying five different Rifts nearby still standing and gobbling up the mana to fuel their own growth.

  That was the problem with Rifts that had been left to grow unchecked so close to a Supreme Leyline. Even destroying them didn’t help, since doing so removed the primary mana-sink in the area, leaving the ambient mana to run rampant until another Rift managed to draw it in and establish a new current. They would stabilise in time; the System ensured it, but things tended to get worse before they got better.

  “Gabriel,” Sophie said softly, standing nervously at his shoulder and twitching every time a Drake smashed into his Barrier. “I think we should go.”

  “Yes,” he said, giving a morose sigh as he turned to his sister. The first city they’d stumbled upon in Austria, and it was a ruin, did not bode well for the rest of the country, and Gabriel struggled to shake off the dread he felt imagining what he would find when they finally reached Graz. “It is time to go. We've wasted enough time as is.”

  It was his fault. New York had been too much of a mess for him to involve himself, but they’d travelled through Edinburgh, York, London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich before reaching Salzburg. All of those great cities still stood, though greatly diminished and hanging on by a thread more often than not. Each of them was locked in desperate struggles against the monsters pouring out of the measly Rank 1 Rifts in their cities.

  Gabriel hadn’t been able to stop himself from stopping at each city, quickly doing what he could to assist. He couldn’t destroy the Rifts for them; they wouldn’t allow a Rank 3 like him to enter, but he could give them breathing space to organise raids and train up proper delving parties. He even found a man who had spent the last five years wandering the Mystic Realm, just like Gabriel, though the man had been much less successful in advancing himself and reached only low Rank 2 during that time.

  Still, his presence had been enough for Gabriel not to feel any guilt over skipping over Brussels and Amsterdam without helping them.

  “So, to Graz?” Sophie said, anxiety clear in her voice as Gabriel’s wings snapped open behind him and he moved to grab his sister for another few hours of exceedingly uncomfortable flight.

  “Vienna,” Gabriel said, shaking his head. “The Leyline leads that way anyway, and the amount of mana I feel from that direction is frankly terrifying. I need to know what happened there, or if we need to grab whoever we can and just flee the Continent.”

  “Wouldn’t it be smarter to skip it and jump right into fleeing with Mom and Mia?” Sophie asked, letting him gather her up in a bridal carry with only a slight twitch of her lips. She’d stopped whining about his carrying skills after he'd dropped her in the Atlantic in his frustration.

  “Perhaps,” Gabriel said, his gaze darting across the ruined city. “But it’s not much of a diversion, and the new intel might save our lives in the near future. Don’t worry, my Barriers are strong enough to hold off a low Rank 4 Lesser Dragon on a rampage, and nothing of that calibre should be present on the planet yet.”

  “That’s strangely specific,” Sophie said, her entire body going taut as Gabriel shot off the ground with a mighty flap of his wings. She’d blessedly stopped screaming during takeoffs somewhere around the time they reached Newfoundland, which did wonders for his mood. His ears were sensitive.

  “I’ve tested it,” Gabe said mildly, a faint smirk flickering across his lips as his sister went stiff.

  “YOU FOUGHT A FUCKING DRAGON?!”

  “Soph, tone,” Gabe said with a pained wince, his ears ringing. That was his punishment for teasing her, he supposed. Honestly, he would have thought Sophie had some Banshee bloodline if he weren’t sure she was just a half-elf with the same minor Pegasus bloodline as him. “And I wouldn’t say I fought a rampaging dragon … more like it failed to kill me before my allies beat it up enough to send it into a retreat. Plus, it was a Lesser Dragon; those things are about as close to True Dragons as lemurs are to humans.”

  “Still,” Sophie whispered, much more subdued as she sent him one of those worried glances. The ones that weren’t quite sure he really was the brother she’d left behind. It hurt to see his own sister look at him like a stranger when he said something that had become the new norm to him, but was outrageous to her. “A dragon. Are they like in the stories?”

  “Eerily so,” he said. “Though they don’t have a habit of kidnapping princesses, per se … though dragon-blooded people tend to have high standards for their mates, and they don’t have a good understanding of consent. Maybe that’s how the tales were born? A dragon kidnapping a Fae princess to be his mate?”

  He sometimes worried Mia would give him the same looks. They hurt enough from the sister that he barely knew and who abandoned him; how much worse would it be coming from the little sister who’d been practically glued to his side since they could walk?

  Still, he’d rather take those looks than to only find her cooling corpse in some shallow mass grave or in the belly of some monster. The nightmare of seeing the vacant, empty eyes of a corpse in Mia’s eyes had been haunting him for months now, and every bone in his body cried out for him to return to her first, damn the consequences, but he had grown somewhat in the years he’d spent away.

  He could prioritise. If Mia had survived this long, she’d probably survive another few days. He needed to know if the System had seen fit to dump one of the Dungeons on top of Vienna though. That could have major consequences, and he’d need to evacuate his family from Graz as fast as possible, somehow. He’d figure it out. A wild Dungeon was worthy of being nightmare fuel. Dungeons were, in essence, permanent Rifts, or rather, Rifts that manifest in realspace and become a part of the world, continuing to grow and expand unchecked. Where Rifts were tiny pocket-spaces maintained by a Rift Core, Dungeons manifested in realspace and acted much the same, expanding their boundary and absorbing more and more of the surrounding environment. They were much rarer than Monster Nests, which were the result of a Rift stabilising and its pocket-space getting dumped into realspace just moments before the Rift Core ran out of energy and died. Usually, a single Dungeon could keep the ambient mana of several smaller planes in order, which was what kept the number of Rifts low in the Mystic Realm. The fact that the System had announced the formation of five on Earth didn't exactly fill him with much hope for the continued existence of his home planet.

  If there was a Dungeon in Vienna, it was only a matter of time before it grew to swallow up the entirety of central Europe and transformed it into its own unique interpretation of hell. The way things were going, he might be forced to take his family and escape this Realm entirely and wait for things to calm down. He'd read the history books during his stay in Starhaven, and while the Beast Realm had been the latest addition to the System before the Cosmic Realm, that had already been ancient history. Still, records remained, and what followed the Realm's addition to the System had been described as a cataclysmic upheaval that lasted nearly an entire century, and only stabilised a millennium later into something even remotely resembling a functional society.

  The prospect of keeping his family safe from all that would have made a man many times more powerful than him uncertain, perhaps even afraid, but it needed to be done. Gabriel wouldn't rest until it was done, or he died trying.