It was only a few days later that Ashtoreth warped back into Nexus 001 with a newly-stocked bag of beast hearts. Her locket was full, of course, but these were set to start expiring in less than a half hour.

  “All right Hunter!” she announced. “Time to strap on the spacesuit and go exploring!”

  The others were standing in a circle around the central warp conduit—the place they appeared when they’d warped in from Core. They’d been waiting for Ashtoreth.

  “An astronaut, huh?” Hunter asked. “That’s an interesting way to see me. I’m not sure I agree.”

  “Well what other way is there to see you?”

  “You know in cartoons, when there’s like, a big conical piece of meat with a bone-shaped bone sticking out of it?”

  Sadie cocked her head. “Bone-shaped bone?”

  “Yeah, like in cartoons. You know? Most bones aren’t actually shaped like that. Anyway, if you put the giant piece of meat on the end of a big stick, then sort of jabbed it into dark holes to see if they held any vicious, hostile carnivores… that’s probably a better way to see me than as an astronaut.”

  Sadie could barely contain her laughter. “Okay—but if we’re using that analogy, we have to at least acknowledge we’re sticking you into some pretty important holes.”

  “Hey!” Ashtoreth said in protest. “Hunter’s not just a hole-poker—he’s way more important! He’s reclaiming the lost seat of an ancient humanity’s government.”

  “Which involves popping into an infested realm to see how dangerous it is before you get in and do the real work,” he said.

  “Okay, so that’s true, but you make it sound so undignified.”

  Kylie sighed. “Clock is ticking, you guys. If we spend too much time talking, Ashtoreth is gonna have to go farm up a whole bunch more of those muscly bear gorillas.”

  “True,” Ashtoreth said. “And I really don’t like the sounds they make when they burn. Ready to go, Hunter?”

  “Uh—yeah,” he said.

  “All right!” She cleared her throat, then addressed the system. “I’m granting Hunter Wolfhard permission to enter the Diadem realm! So can you give him an access code, please?”

  {Hunter Wolfhard has been granted a temporary rune sequence for accessing the Diadem realm}

  “Thanks!” she said, ignoring the system as it flashed the same warning about outsider presence.”

  “All right,” Hunter said. “I got it. Heading out now.”

  “Please, please, please don’t actually die,” Sadie said, rushing forward to give him a quick hug.

  “I’ll try my best,” said Hunter. “Wish me luck.”

  The attack came as soon as his [Runic Warp] spell concluded. He didn’t get a chance to get his bearings, check for system messages, or even get a good glimpse of his surroundings—instead he was instantly set upon by an overwhelming psychic presence that seemed to come from every direction at once.

  He had training in defending from psychic assaults, of course. But all that training really meant now was that he understood, instantly, how little hope there was off fighting off the adversary that was currently intent of crushing his consciousness into nothing. It would have been easier for him to hold an ocean in his two cupped hands.

  He should have been destroyed almost instantly. But somehow, impossibly, another psychic presence made contact with him a fraction of an instant after the first one.

  There! it seemed to say, and he understood its intentions for him faster than it was possible to think.

  In the infinitesimally small moment before he was destroyed, Hunter mustered all of his will and lashed out at the unknown adversary, gathering all his killing intent, gathering it into a point as small as the moment that he was gathering it in and then—somehow, impossibly—hammering his psyche into a singular, specific part of his adversary’s bizarre and alien mind.

  He got an impression of something that might have been as big as an ocean shattering…

  And then he felt as if he had been slammed into his own body, falling to his knees on the surface of a rough metal platform, his surroundings illuminated by distant lines and patterns of light.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Was that time magic? he thought. He was sure of it: in normal circumstances he would never have had the chance to even think, let along strike back, against a foe that fast and powerful.

  From there, though, he had no further time for thoughts: floating in the air a dozen feet away from him was an eight-armed starfish with hundreds of elongated human arms dangling beneath it. It lunged for him through the air, horrifyingly fast, and Hunter beat his wings to push himself away from the creature.

  He flew backward through the air, feeling hundreds of tiny impacts on his back and wings as if someone was throwing handfuls of gravel at him. He tagged the creature, reaching out with his senses at the same time to confirm what he’d suspected: he was surrounded by outsiders, and if the starfish with the dangling arms was any indication, they were all around level 1000.

  He beat his wings hard, throwing himself straight up into the air before warping several dozen meters to one side.

  A split second later, their attacks hit. Sparkling dust, rippling air, sudden growths of root-like structures and all manner of bizarre things seemed to overlap in both the space he’d first launched himself from and the end of where his trajectory would have taken him without his teleport.

  Not good. Hunter might have been able to fight one of them, but not dozens. He reached out with his telepathy… and felt nothing. He’d been cut off from Ashtoreth and the rest of them, somehow.

  He had a brief, terrible thought of the four of them standing back in the Nexus, unable to contact him… and then he pushed it away. He needed to find a place safe enough to perform the warp spell that would take him back to them.

  But as he sped away from the outsiders, the air around him seemed to warp and distort, and what he’d meant to be a straight line away from them quickly curved back upon the very enemies he was trying to escape. The air began to fill with spreading, twisting roots, and he warped away once more, watching as the space where he’d just been filled with a sudden burst of blue-white fire that seemed to burn in reverse, then vanish.

  He dove, aiming for an opening in the strange, metallic superstructure below him as the air around him began to glow with a faint orange light.

  One of them must have had some kind of interdiction aura, because as he dove through the air to avoid the growing orange light, he saw that his [Warp Pool] was depleted to just above half.

  And then he heard a voice, sensing it with telepathy at the same time.

  “Not that way,” she said, her vocal tones strangely modulated in a way that struck Hunter as a mix between auto-tune and a supernaturally melodious angel. “There!”

  A small ring of blue-white light appeared on a seemingly random point on the massive metal structure. Sensing that the person trying to guide him now was the same force that had assisted him in the moment of his arrival, Hunter didn’t hesitate—he warped into the space before the ring.

  Immediately, a seam appeared in the metal where there had been none before. The ground opened like an automatic door, and he dove inside, finding himself in a long, vertical shaft lit by more lines of the blue-white light.

  Hoving in the air below him was another person, seemingly another human.

  Strangely, she was dressed like he was. The same style of long scarf and tight pants covered in straps, though she’d added a strapless strip of cloth to bind her breasts. Where his tattoo was a draconic pattern made of points and curves, though, she had a series of asymmetrical lines that ran along her arms and then down her abdomen, where they formed a pattern centered around a circle that had been painted on her belly.

  In Hunter’s opinion, she looked pretty cool.

  “This way!”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He rushed after her as she flew, wingless, through the air before him. They turned a corner, and he got a single glimpse of the metal floor that had sealed shut behind him: it was opening outward in the shape of a flower’s petals, transmuted according to the will of one of the pursuing outsiders.

  He followed his guide through a series of turns, flying as fast as he could. As he did, he thought.

  Something was wrong. Even if he was extremely fast for his level, at least a few of the outsiders should have been able to keep up with him. What was more, the chances of none of the random assortment of dozens of outsiders having a psychic mode of assault were close to zero—they loved psychic assaults. And yet none had come as he’d fled their presence.

  Somehow, he guessed, all of them were struggling with some kind of weakening debuff. Whatever his guide had done when he’d arrived, it was continuing to save his life.

  He followed her for almost a minute, flying as fast as he possibly could the whole time. At last, they emerged in a strange chamber—a long, cavernously large hallway supported by what looked like circular pillars made of glass.

  His guide stopped midair in the center of the room.

  “Stop here,” she said, her voice sounding a little more normal. “There’s enough shielding here that they might not find you—and if they do, we’ll have time to run.”

  “Right,” Hunter said uncertainly.

  Feeling something strange, he reached up and ran a hand through his hair, pushing several objects free. Grabbing one to examine it, he saw something that resembled an elongated human molar before shaking his head and tossing it aside.

  Outsiders.

  In truth, they had some of the weakest defenses of anything he’d fought, along with poor protective instincts to boot. But he still hated them: psychic attacks, reality warping and a tendency to interfere with teleportation all made them some of his least favorite enemies.

  “Excellent work, my liege!” his guide said, beaming at him. “Though I must say—I still fear for your safety.”

  “Right,” said Hunter. “So, uh, who are you, exactly?”

  She cocked her head at him. “You… don’t know?” Then she shrugged. “I am your faithful servant—Icon, the archival spirit of all the Five Realms.”