“When did this start?”

  I removed the magnifying scope from my eye and handed it back to Frankfort. As much as I wanted to rush directly to the museum and stop whatever they were planning on doing with the machines inside, it was evident that Sloan had dispatched a large number of well-armed militiamen to guard the building. Veronica brought us to a nice vantage spot so we could check the place out before jumping headlong into danger.

  “Three days ago, according to the people I spoke with. They moved in and started closing the building off to outsiders. Those guards have been on station ever since.”

  Samantha was the one who knew best. Around halfway through our mad dash to the downtown district did she make a noise that communicated her understanding about the threat that now loomed over us.

  Frankfort leant against the stone wall in front of us and crossed her arms, “What’s in that museum that’s so important?”

  “Henry Snow’s Etherscope,” Samantha explained, “It’s a device that amplifies any magic cast while inside of the chamber...”

  “He’s going to cast some spells? There’s clearly more to it than that.”

  “Maria might have figured something out,” Sam shrugged.

  “I did. The Etherscope is an interesting device, powerful even. I think what may be of interest to Sloan is the material that is used to create that high-energy field in the chamber. We already know that he’s been gathering materials to study the summoning of demons for his soldier project.”

  Veronica scowled, “And if he were to perform the same type of ritual inside of that chamber, or by removing the mechanism from inside and using a larger circle...”

  “He could tear a hole in the Veil that would make the fort attack look like a joke, a mere blustery wind in the face of a hurricane-force gale.”

  The gravity of the situation settled in amongst the group. It was obvious now why I was in such a hurry to get here and put a stop to it. Durandia was the only one who knew what was about to happen, but that didn’t mean that she was capable of comprehending the horror that was due to be unleashed. If there was ever a world-destroying threat on the horizon – this would almost certainly match that description. The Alchemist was so powerful that it could transform anything it looked at into gold. What would happen if a similar ritual were conducted using the catalysing mechanism from the Etherscope?

  I was in no hurry to find out. We had to get into the museum as soon as possible and put an end to this madness. All this for the sake of enhancing soldiers with magical abilities that would simply kill them within a few months of ingestion. Sloan was so hyper fixated on cementing his name into the history books that he never considered whether such articles would be ones of universal condemnation.

  He’d be lucky if there was a nation left to reckon with a disastrous legacy like this.

  The biggest question in my mind was Durandia’s involvement in the process. She was the one who told Henry Snow to build the damn thing in the first place. If the primary concern was preserving the greater good and protecting the planet from destruction, then it would beg to reason that the Etherscope and Sloan’s use of it was a necessary evil to avoid a worse outcome.

  “Wait, he’s trying to summon more of those horrible bloody things?” Claude muttered.

  “Yes? He wants their blood to make more of those crazy mages for his new army,” Max replied.

  Another problem was that the entire team of side characters had decided to come along and witness the carnage for themselves. Adrian, Max and Claude couldn’t exactly defend themselves if the infiltration turned into a firefight.

  “Do you three need to be here too?” I asked.

  Max was quick out of the blocks; “No. Not really.”

  “Aw, come on!” Claude whined, “This is the big climax! You can’t expect us to hide in that dingy warehouse while you get all of the glory.”

  “I’m not a glory hound! The entire point of doing this is so that nobody finds out that you or I were involved. I would very much prefer to live the rest of my days never thinking about this again,” I sighed.

  “Even though you’re so good at it...”

  “I won’t accept any talk like that from you. You were the one screaming from the rooftops to anyone that would listen that I was a trained assassin a few months ago, but now you’re pretending that you don’t mind one bit.”

  Claude clammed up, “That’s... different. I forgive you because you’re my friend.”

  Max rolled his eyes. That was so typically Claude that it summed up his entire personality in a single statement. That unwavering sense of justice was joined with a strong undercurrent of childish glee whenever something cool or dangerous happened. Claude assumed his amazing detective skills would come in handy when we stormed the museum.

  There wasn’t going to be much investigating going on. I knew that Sloan was likely to be in there. All we had to do was break in, shoot everything that moved, and pick through the mess to find out if he was included. Destroying the Etherscope for good was also a distinct possibility.

  “You’re more of a liability than anything else,” Veronica chided him.

  “I’ve dealt with stuff like this before.”

  “Can you fire a gun, or defend yourself? This isn’t going to be a polite stroll through the museum. Everyone there is armed and ready to shoot at whoever walks into that building without permission. Even hanging back and keeping hidden might not protect you from a stray bullet.”

  “I bet Maria’s going to cut through those blokes so quickly that they won’t even have a chance to fire back at her,” Claude scoffed.

  Max wasn’t amused; “Why don’t you listen to the expert for once? I’m not going in there without a good bloody reason.”

  “Why don’t we get the police to come help as well?” Claude continued.

  Frankfort shut him down, “That’s a no-go. We’re past the point where the leaders will feel comfortable acting against the King and parliament, as rotten as they are. They only moved before because they were murdering people in the street. All it takes is the wrong person in the wrong place of authority to flip their intended function on its head.”

  Samantha was being unusually quiet. Her eyes drifted from person to person as the discussion bounced between us. There was something on her mind that she needed to say, but wasn’t confident in speaking it aloud around the others. I put my hand on her shoulder and gently guided her away from the group.

  “Keep them entertained, please.”

  Veronica glared, but said nothing.

  “What are you doing?” Sam blustered as we approached a quiet corner of the layered urban park.

  “Is there something you want to say? You’ve been dancing on the balls of your feet this whole time.”

  “It’s only natural. You’ve been gone for so long, I was getting worried about you.”

  “That’s very nice to hear – but we’re coming down to the wire now. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of Walser and the world is depending on what happens in the next few days.”

  Samantha’s mouth thinned out in anxiety, “I know the Goddess said that we were the ones chosen to do the job but...”

  “Yes. I understand that it may lay a heavy weight across the shoulders of one who believes so strongly in her.”

  “I learned something new about my regeneration magic the other day. When I think back to all of the books I read at the academy, they were heavily based in theories about winding back the clock or fusing tissue together. Those were simple literary devices intended to help us visualize how the spell should operate.”

  The books on nihility were much the same. The metaphor was more load-bearing in the learning process than one might expect. Magic was something that could be as instinctual or as scientific as we wanted it to be, it still followed the natural laws to some extent after all.

  What happened at the palace was a revelation to me. We weren’t simply in possession of two rare schools of magic thought, Durandia had given us more than that. Our powers reached into the realm of the irrational. We had abilities that could warp the very fabric of the universe around us and create immensely powerful effects.

  “When I was experimenting with some rubbish in the safehouse, I realized that I can quite literally do just that. I can turn back the clock, or fuse something together, and that even allows me to generate a dangerous amount of energy depending on what I use in the spell!”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  I nodded, “I’ve had a similar experience. I can go beyond simply infusing an object with energy and making it disintegrate, I can erase them from existence. Space, air, and the things around me, it also allows me to shift objects from place to place. Xenia was pointing us in this direction when they spoke with us before.”

  Samantha thought about it for a moment.

  “Perhaps Durandia gave us powers which she and her peers beyond the Veil use when maintaining their own worlds? The power to create and destroy, it’s like the scriptures that my Dad always read to us.”

  “I believe that may be the case. Xenia was upset because of the exceptions that they made to let her do it.”

  The blood drained from Samantha’s face, turning her tanned skin a strange shade of off-white. Her mind was racing. She was thinking about all of the responsibility that was being hefted unto her by the Goddess, and the incredible danger posed by the powers she was given to complete the task. She could theoretically cause a nuclear detonation by merging the wrong rocks together, and so could I through a reversed version of the same process.

  “Do you need to sit down?”

  Samantha shook her head, “N-No. I’m fine!”

  “The question is, what possible purpose could these abilities serve in this situation? They’re far too dangerous to be given to us as a means of self-defence. I suspect it may have something to do with what Sloan is planning for the Etherscope.”

  The nuclear solution was handed to us under the expectation that it would be needed. There was nothing on this planet that could withstand my base-level nihility attacks as it was, so what kind of incredible horrors was Sloan going to unleash that demanded even more than that?

  I kept my worries from Samantha. She was already starting to panic from the power she held in her back pocket, and revealing that the issue was going to get far worse before it got better was not going to ease her nerves. The more hopeful take on the problem was that these two abilities were to be used for an incredible specific purpose, and not as a means of killing horrors beyond our human comprehension.

  What could Sloan possibly have in mind that needed god-like powers to fix?

  First, I needed to calm her down. I reached out and took one of Samantha’s calloused hands into mine, clasping it between my palms and transferring some of my heat into her body.

  “Don’t panic. I’m right here with you. Just focus on what you know you can do instead of worrying about what you can’t. A lot of horrible incidents have occurred, and we’ve been in mortal danger every time, but we’re still here.”

  Samantha’s brow rose at the display of companionship. It was the friendliest I’d ever been with her. I put up with her stories about the farm and hung out with her during lunch break, but physical displays of compassion were entirely new. She wanted to cherish every second of it. She wrapped her other hand around the bundle and gripped it tight.

  “Alright. When you say stuff like that, I can’t help but feel confident all of a sudden.”

  She thought I was always confident? That was bad. I was getting too reliant on being the ‘main character.’

  We headed back to the group, where Max and Claude were still arguing back and forth about coming with us to the museum. Claude had gotten the idea in his head that he was the main character instead, with all of the privileges that it came with.

  “We’ve survived stuff like this before.”

  “You got shot through the crotch and almost bled to death! You were lucky that Samantha was there to patch it up!”

  “Everyone has to go through a little adversity from time to time, that’s how every good story is written.”

  “Adversity? The only adversity you’ve been through since then is coming up with a good lie to tell your parents, and you didn’t even do a good job of that.”

  “I got us that evidence, didn’t I? That has to count for something!”

  I cut in, “I’m afraid that Maxwell is correct. Bullets do not discriminate, and they do not respect your sense of self-importance either. The museum is heavily guarded on all approaches, and they’ll have been instructed to shoot anyone who tries to enter the building.”

  I learned my lesson from our invasion of Welt’s tower weeks before. Even when I thought the place was clear one of those mage cockroaches had to crawl out of the timbers to try and murder one of them. It was a risk I was not going to take a second time. The problem was that Samantha would have to come with us and Claude was not going to be happy about being left out.

  “You should be grateful that you’re not forced to run into there,” Max reasoned, “Not like the rest of the team. Why don’t you sit this one out and pray for them instead?”

  Claude laughed, “Pray for them? The Goddess herself descended from the bloody sky to make all of this happen. What good is our prayer going to do?”

  For once Claude made a good point. Everything was out in the open in relation to our divine guidance thanks to Xenia’s little leisure visit.

  “Maybe you should take that to heart and realize that Maria and Samantha are the ones who’ve been picked for it,” Max fired back.

  Claude bit his lip and exhaled. There was a lull in the debate, during which time he turned his attention to Samantha.

  “Are you okay with this?”

  Samantha smiled and nodded, “My dad would never let me live it down if I backed out now. I’ve got a responsibility to see this through, and I kinda’ like living in Walser as well. The Goddess thinks that this Landon fellow is going to cause an almighty mess of things.”

  This was for the country she grew up in, and believed in, and the one where her family and friends were living. Her motivations were purer than mine could ever hope to be. The divide between my selfishness and her selflessness was never clearer than it was right now.

  “If she’s going to go, why can’t we?”

  Max grabbed his shoulder and squeezed hard enough to bruise; “You are not going into that museum. I’m going to wrestle you to the ground and tie you up if you even think about it.”

  “I’ll help,” Veronica grinned.

  Claude meekly backed away before they could get their hands on him, settling the debate once and for all. It was going to be me, Sam, Frankfort and Veronica. But there was still the looming question of how we were going to get inside of the museum without being badly outnumbered and outgunned.

  We needed a weak point to exploit.

  “Are you all as worthless as I think you are? How in the name of all that is holy are you being bested by a mere teenager! She should have been dead weeks ago, but now she’s running roughshod over our plans and foiling you at every bloody turn!”

  Nobody in the room had ever seen Landon Sloan like this before. He was furious; red in the face with bulging veins and bared teeth. It was an all-hands-on-deck meeting before they launched the most important stage of their scheme. The success of their takeover was riding on this, not just so they could secure the internal security of Walser, but also so they could destroy their rivals in Avatria and secure a strong popular mandate that would silence their doubters.

  Nothing rallied people around the government like an easy victory.

  So why was it anything but easy? Why were his men, who were heavily armed and transformed into nigh-invincible killing machines with incredible grade six magic powers, being foiled by a mere teenage girl? Landon couldn’t comprehend it, and as a man of reason his only recourse was to believe that every person who failed to kill her was a bumbling idiot taking advantage of the deal he offered them.

  Jonas Rentree and Jerimiah Vincent were also in attendance to play peacemaker, although there was no peace to be negotiated with Landon going postal and hurling virulent insults at the men who remained. Darin thought he was the one who suffered the most indignation after his team’s failure at the academy, but it was nothing compared to the vitriol being spewed into the room like toxic smog.

  “Can someone explain this to me? How could you possibly be so incompetent so as to lose again and again to this little girl?”

  The room was dead silent. A dozen mournful faces sat around the table in the centre, including Charlie and the remaining enhanced soldiers. Darin was the one who spoke up to explain the problem.

  “That isn’t any normal girl. She’s gunning people down in droves, getting into places using her clout as a noble, and she knows about everything that we’re doing. I can’t bloody explain it either. The only explanation I can think of is that those WISA bastards trained her from birth to do this.”

  Landon scowled, “WISA already told me that they shuttered that program years ago, and even if they hadn’t she wouldn’t have been chosen. They only selected girls from orphanages or poor families.”

  “So do you suppose that it’s all luck? Even if we’re as incompetent as you think we are, she’s been fighting off groups of two dozen people on the regular without breaking a sweat!”

  Rentree crossed his arms, “Do you suppose that WISA is still hiding information from us? It’s obvious that she is highly trained and skilled in the art of subterfuge. She’s also working with Gladwell and Frankfort, perhaps they were her handlers even before they were forced out of the agency.”

  “I don’t care how it happened, or who’s responsible, or about her life’s fucking story! I want her dead. I want you to bring me her head on a bloody platter so I can be sure that you worthless pricks actually did what I told you to do!” Landon ranted.

  The audience concluded that no constructive discussion with Landon was going to be possible for the next few hours while he stewed in a broiling pot of his own fury.

  “All you have to do is make sure that nobody gets into this building for the next twelve hours. That’s all you have to do! Do you understand me?” Landon begged.

  A murmur of agreement came from the men. He smoothed out his hair and left the room in a huff, with his son in hot pursuit. Charlie couldn’t get a word in, with Landon marching down the marble steps and into the main showroom where the Etherscope was located.

  His loyal Scuncath was feverishly sketching out the final lines on the summoning circle. The exterior of the great machine had been stripped away, leaving only the catalytic coils and other mechanisms. The goal was not to generate a hyper concentrated field of energy inside of the chamber, and it was too small to contain the type of circle they wanted to create.

  “Is it nearly ready, Dean?”

  “A-Almost. It’ll be an hour or so, I think.”

  Charlie eyed the demonic circle wearily. It was made from blood taken from volunteers and a local hospital. The stench of iron hung heavy in the air.

  “Are you sure this’ll work?” Charlie wondered.

  “It has to. The fate of Walser depends on our success here and now. This will be what the people really remember us for! Not only for revolutionizing warfare and making Walser unparalleled in the field, but also for this...”

  Landon pointed to the table placed beside the modified machine. Atop it was a metal frame, and within it was a large, blood-red crystal that pulsed with energy. The harsh, geometric shapes and symmetrical edges suggested that it was an artificial construction. Charlie approached the strange object and tried to figure out what made it so special.

  “This crystal, what does it do?”

  “It may be the single most expensive item either of us ever lay eyes on. A crystal of this size costs millions and millions and millions of marks, but it is also one of a kind. Soaked in the blood of the demons until it contains enough energy to power every city in the nation for a decade without losing its shimmer. It is the key to the other side.”

  “Those cultist maniacs didn’t use one of these before, did they?”

  Landon chuckled, “Oh no. They saw the practice as dogma, not science. They believed that a living sacrifice who held a strong association in the minds of the masses was the most potent tool of all. My experiments in the field have proven otherwise. This is a beacon. A bounty of riches that those demons will not be able to ignore. They’ll pour through my gate to the slaughter, and we’ll concentrate their gore into a serum that will take the world by storm.”

  Charlie looked back at the machine and wondered to himself how that was going to work. There were no great storage tanks for the blood they gathered, nor a safe place for the beasts to be corralled and killed. There must have been a secret to the procedure that his father simply didn’t feel like explaining.

  “If that Walston-Carter scum comes here again, it’ll be the last time she ever interferes with you, Dad.”

  Landon’s rage fizzled out. He put a firm hand on his son’s shoulder and nodded, “That’s what I want to hear. Do me proud, will you?”

  Charlie was determined to do just that. It was the only thing he ever really wanted.