Icon eyed him, crossing her arms.

  “All right, Sir Hunter Wolfhard—let’s suppose for a moment that I go along with your plan to… bring one other level 650 here. Naturally, having had so much time to think about it, I can present you with options.” She paused, frowning. “Well, really only one option. It’s a poor showing for me… but they stopped time. Having even one answer is, I would say, admirably functional.”

  “So we can get the Queen.”

  Icon seemed to hesitate. “The purview of my responsibilities does not extend to the matters of war. I am not meant for tactics. One one hand, the outsider presence is in a state of remission. The more time that passes, the more of them will come into being. Perhaps more importantly, the more likely it is that they will begin to coalesce into gradually stronger beings.”

  “So we should handle this quickly,” Hunter said.

  “Or,” Icon said. “If Orchard is functional, get you out of here so that you may return with a full-fledged army of humans ready to fight the outsiders on equal-leveled footing. Before you leave, I can furnish you with the information necessary to prepare another attack that will shatter the outsider presence into those weaker entities you evaded outside should it reconstitute itself into one overwhelmingly powerful being.”

  “Do both possibilities require the same intervention?” Hunter asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we can argue about it on the way.”

  “Excellent—truly excellent!” she said. “Now, I should perhaps warn you that we may only be able to transmit information out of the Diadem realm.”

  “What.”

  “Come on!” she said, floating into the air and down the hallway behind her without turning around.

  Hunter began to fly after her through more of the featureless metal hallways, quickly finding that she flew just ahead of him no matter how fast he went. “Listen,” he said. “Can you possibly give me the position of our destination? I can probably figure out a rune sequence to warp there.”

  “Unwise!” she called back. “Diadem already runs strong interference on teleportation!"

  Hunter made a noise of discontent. He’d thought that was an aura from the outsiders.

  “If you try a long range warp, your arrival position could be offset further than your actual distance travelled. It would be prohibitively dangerous!”

  Hunter sighed. He hated when anything interfered with teleportation. He understood it perfectly, of course—teleportation was busted.

  But he still hated it.

  “And what was that about… not getting out?” he asked.

  “Oh—that. Well, we’re about to trigger a very hefty failsafe!” she said. “Something well above my in-built privileges. Naturally, I’m not privy to all the information that one would need to seriously destabilize the five realms, and as such I’ve had to determine a lot through creative inference. In any case, breaking through the time stretch may trigger a heretofore unknown defense mechanism that locks us in the realm in any case—and you, brave scout of the true monarch, will nobly sacrifice yourself for the glory of humankind.”

  “Right. Well if I get locked out, it’ll just be another problem to solve,” Hunter said.

  “Possibly, yeah!” she said, never losing her bright enthusiasm.

  “I appreciate the optimism.”

  “I appreciate the compliment! Now are you sure you don’t want to retreat to return at a later date, but with an army?”

  “Right now, the plan is to call in the Queen. We can reassess when we finish your plan.”

  “The level 650 queen,” Icon said dubiously. “I apologize for my lack of faith, sir, but—oh. I get it!”

  “You do?”

  She nodded emphatically. “I think so, yes! I can only assume than humanity has accelerated faster than predicted, technologically speaking, during Cradle’s tenure as an an outer realm.”

  “Okay.”

  “To proceed with that assumption… I feel compelled to warn you that Diadem imposes a much harsher reduction on fissibility than a typical inner realm.”

  “Uh. Okay, what?”

  Icon nodded consolingly. “Sad as it may now seem, even elements of extremely high atomic mass that have been stabilized through alchemical or transmutational magics won’t be fissile enough in the Diadem realm to create a halfway decent atomic explosion.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That we can’t… nuke the ring?”

  “It’s theoretically possible, I’m sure… but realistically speaking? No, we won’t be able to nuke the ring. Not with a warhead made from a functionally stable isotope of the mid-hundreds elements, that is.”

  “Uh… look, chemistry is my worst subject. And even if I was good at it, we’re a ways away from building nukes.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  She cocked her head. “But you understood what I meant.”

  “Yeah, because… look, I meant that we don’t build nukes in school, is all. I still know what a nuke is.”

  Icon turned midair and eyed him appraisingly. “School? Perhaps I took you to be more physically mature than I thought.”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “How long ago were you school?”

  “However long ago we initialized.”

  “You’re… a schoolboy?”

  “No,” Hunter said, bristling. “I’m a [Twinfang Assassin of the Shadowflame Dragon].”

  “I see,” Icon said, the words seeming heavy with meaning. “In any case… I have perhaps misdressed myself.” She glanced down at her bare belly. “I must say, whether you’re dressed as a schoolboy, an assassin, or some mingling of both, the newly-evolved fashions are drastically different from what I’m used to.”

  “It’s… this isn’t really either,” Hunter said. “This is sort of my own thing. You don’t have to dress like me.”

  “How does the monarch dress? As her familiar-to-be, I ought to follow after her mode of dress—minus any signifiers of rank, of course.”

  “Look, you can figure this out when you meet her and just wear what you want until then. But can we get back to the—you were talking about nukes, before?”

  “Well yes,” Icon said. “I just sort of assumed—quite reasonably, I think—that the Monarch had a sequestered nuclear arsenal which you assumed would function within the Diadem realm.”

  He scowled. Why would she assume that so quickly? What were the old humans like, that the first answer was nukes? “The Queen doesn’t fight with nukes,” he said. Then, after a moment’s thought, he added “Not… literal nukes, I mean.”

  He avoided mentioning hellfire. He’d already decided that Icon could find out that Ashtoreth was an archfiend after she got to Diadem.

  “How disappointing,” Icon said, somehow not losing her cheer. “But also somewhat auspicious! If we ever do get out of here and find the right amount of time and resources, I can show her—and you—quite the enlightened panoply of explosively impressive elemental magic.”

  Hunter took a moment to parse this. “Elemental magic as in… fire and water?”

  Icon grinned. “One of those things is involved, yes!”

  Hunter just stared at her. Other people tended to hold almost no intrinsic interest to Hunter whatsoever, and because of this he was usually fairly bad at getting a read on them. But he was starting to think that Icon was… weird, even for an ancient curator of human knowledge. Her unshakeable enthusiasm was starting to come off less like that of a robotic customer service representative and more like that of someone who was either insane, on drugs, or both.

  She was really starting to remind him of Ashtoreth.

  “Trust me, Hunter Wolfhard,” Icon said, carrying on. “With me to guide you, your defects regarding chemistry will count for very little—whatever they may be!”

  “I’m not defective.”

  “Oh—have I offended? I apologize; my social skills can only have deteriorated during my isolation—and they were hardly something I was optimizing for in the first place.”

  “Huh,” said Hunter. He shrugged. “That’s me as well, actually.”

  “I’m an archive, after all,” she said. “A repository of information! An encyclopedia! A library! And you know, as a library, it follows that I’m actually quite fond of human schoolboys. I hope we can get along.”

  Hunter eyed her suspiciously. If this was Dazel, then it was his best work yet.

  And if it wasn’t Dazel, then he wondered what the damned cat would have given to be here for this.

  “Uh, let’s just move on…” he said uncertainly. “Where are we going, exactly? I assume you have an objective for me.”

  “Definitely!” she said. “But it shouldn’t be much of a challenge; I just need you to break something made of metal, glass, and crystal.”

  “All right. Do you need to be more specific?”

  “Nope! I can if you’d like me to be, though.”

  “Uh—no, that’s fine. Not unless you want to.”

  “I definitely want to,” she said. “At this moment, we’re circling the ring a bit because the outsider presence is concentrating most of its fragment outsiders in the locale where you arrived. Soon you’ll emerge from these passages to fight your way to the object that I designate and then break it—it’s a big metal-ish thing with tubes. You’ll see.”

  “Okay.”

  “Once the mana compression pulse inhibitor is broken, I can hopefully cause the Diadem realm to damage the asymptotic pillar.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sensing that you need more explanation to be impressed by the details of my plan,” she said. “I propose we table this discussion until you’ve dealt with the problem at hand—right now, you’ve got to pass through the danger zone. Also, we’re turning up here.”

  Hunter slowed, then beat his wings once to rush upward along another metal shaft and then halt before a seamless roof of metal.

  “Through those doors lies a veritable squadron of anatomically absurd undesirables!” said Icon. “You don’t need to kill them, but you do need to keep them from killing you.”

  Hunter debated which sword to choose for a moment, then drew the Fang of Shadow. “Simple enough.”

  Icon beamed. “Steel yourself, exalted scout of humanity! Our liege’s will is served by every stroke of your sword!”

  “Wow.”

  “What is it?” Icon asked, sounding anxious. “Is it my enthusiasm? Is it undesired?”

  “No. It’s just… the Queen is going to love you.”

  Icon seemed to melt under the praise, raising a hand to cover her smile as if it were embarrassing. “Really? she asked. “You think she’ll be happy to have me as her familiar?”

  “She’ll be thrilled.”

  “Really?” Icon said, her voice breaking. “I’ve just been so lonely for so long. I didn’t even have the reality spool to make myself any dogs.”

  Hunter glanced over at her. What the hell did the reality spool actually do?

  A moment later, pieces of the ceiling above him started turning into glittering metal sand and falling away.

  “Looks like they know you’re here,” she said. “I’ll make a flare at your objective site. Shall I open the doors?”

  “One moment.”

  Hunter began to coat himself in a thin, but highly concentrated layer of mana, preparing to ignite it into shadowflame.

  Then he pushed from his mind all thoughts of Icon, or Ashtoreth, or the importance of their mission. Within a moment, he’d reached a kind of meditative state, his mind filling with nothing but killing intent.

  “Open the doors, please, Icon.”