The doors opened.

  Hunter rushed into the air beyond, quickly taking in a dozen or so outsiders that occupied the air around him at a glance and then naturally adjusting his trajectory to avoid them.

  “There!” he heard Icon say. A flare had appeared far ahead of him, a blue-white light that shone on the exterior of a smaller, inner ring that floated at the exact center of the one he’d just left.

  Before he reached his top speed, however, a floating outsider lurched into the space ahead of him, fast enough to have him worried that it was one of the ones he wouldn’t be able to just fly by.

  Even for an outsider, its form was bizarre. To Hunter, it looked like a wound in reality itself, an open rift whose torn edges undulated as long, striplike seams that transitioned into solid, physical tendrils which seemed to be made of musculature.

  Its level was past 1100, and its name was the same garbled admixture of symbols that all outsiders bore.

  But Hunter didn’t have time to deal with it. He reached out with the magical sense that he used to teleport, finding the space behind the outsider that was close enough to his position and far enough from its position to be the most efficient place to teleport, then warped there and continued to surge toward the place that Icon had indicated.

  Almost as soon as his warp ability finished, however, the same outsider used its own teleportation ability, leapfrogging him just as he had it to fizzle into existence in the air before him once again.

  Then it seemed to shudder in midair like a bell that had been struck by a hammer, and a bolt of torn reality trailing threadlike tendrils was launched toward him. He dodged the bolt, but a few of the tendrils lashed across his chest and arms, cutting into his flesh and creating wounds that—unnervingly—tasted like copper and salt.

  But Hunter was still in a state of pure focus, and he lashed out with his [Blade Projection] ability active, weaving the Fang of Shadow through the air as a blur of dark steel and creating a dozen magical arcs of razor-thin force that were aimed and proportioned with deadly precision to cut into its sinewy tendrils and crisscrossed the strange open rift that composed its central mass. He didn’t wait to see if he’d struck the killing blow, instead teleporting backward as soon as his flurry was finished and moving to draw his second sword in case his attack was ineffective.

  The space he’d just occupied let out a series of whiplike cracks and filled with what appeared to be a cascade of coiled metal shavings that fell harmlessly toward the ground below. At the same time, his projected bladework reached the creature, severing its fleshy tendrils with a half-dozen spurts of blood but failing to do anything but ripple against the surface of the rift that formed its central body.

  He slammed the Fang of Shadow into its sheathe as a spherical wave of blurred projectiles was launched away from the creature.

  He was close to the creature, but not so close that he couldn’t take advantage of his incredible reflexes to evade the oncoming curtain of death with a split-second teleport that carried him barely any distance.

  The Fang of Flame came clear of its sheathe, and Hunter flared his wings, focusing on the thin layer of ultra-dense mana that still coated his body as he warped into the air directly above it to avoid another strange transmutation spell that seemed to fill the air where he’d just been with a cascade of sand.

  He launched a bolt of nothing but pure mana at the creature, and then he plunged downward after it with a beat of his wings, plunging toward the enemy as his sword burst into a plume of black and white shadowflame.

  In the incredibly small moment between beating his wings and reaching the creature, he watched the bolt of mana ahead of him carefully, conscious that if it frayed and disintegrated as it reached the strange rift that made the creature’s body, then he’d have to pull away.

  But it didn’t fray.

  Hunter ignited the mana coating his skin as he reached the creature and plunged his katana into its alien heart, snarling as he focused as much of his mana as he could through his weapon and into the outsider.

  His attacks had insane [Penetration], and no creature he’d ever seen was immune to both physical and non-physical damage. Anything that shrugged off an attack from one sword was almost sure to die to the other.

  The outsider shuddered, then burst into ten thousand ribbons of fractured space, each of them burning with shadowflame. The whip-crack sound of his first teleport still hung in the air around him; the fight had taken maybe two seconds.

  He barely registered the system message that he’d gotten a monster core, instead beating his wings to pull away from the closing outsiders and rush toward Icon’s flare.

  “That was stupendous!” Icon cried. “Did they teach you that in school?”

  Hunter ignored her as he continued toward the mission objective. He spared a glance behind him, feeling a certain amount of satisfaction to see that despite their higher levels, none of the other nearby outsiders were fast enough to catch him. For the first time he noticed that a great many of them were stuck on the ground, apparently unable to fly at all.

  He didn’t get cocky, though, quickly refocusing his efforts on getting to Icon’s waypoint as fast as possible. He’d spent almost a third of his [Warp Pool] on the meagre teleports from the last fight, after all.

  Very soon the small inner ring was getting closer and closer. He saw a cluster of outsiders hovering around the blue-white light… and then, as he watched, the light vanished.

  “Okay, that flare was fake—there’s the real one! Land beside that big apparatus!”

  He did as instructed, cutting his momentum as little as possible as he hurtled toward the floor of the inner ring.

  “That’s it!” Icon cried. “Break that! Wreck it! Go!”

  Hunter collided with the metal flooring, skidded to a halt in front of a strange metal device, then unleashed a series of slashes using [Blade Projection] that sheared through it in dozens of places, cutting deep. He sensed a few plumes of mana gushing out of the holes he’d made… then nothing.

  He spun to face the pursuing outsiders, but he saw that they were leaving—every outsider he could see was fleeing from the central pillar as fast as it had been chasing him just moments before.

  “Fascinating!” Icon said. “They must have already built up some form of intercommunication despite their current weakened state. They know enough to run away!”

  He peered at a fleeing outsider, one that looked like a fleshy spiral. Then he looked at the massive apparatus beside him, a body object built into the wall that now featured a lot of dangling, severed tubes. “Should I be getting back?”

  “Oh no,” Icon said. “If I’m wrong and this doesn’t work out, there won’t really be a safe distance. Diadem isn’t a particularly large realm.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Right, okay,” said Hunter. “So… what exactly did I just do?”

  “I’ll explain,” Icon said. “But… I’ll try to fit my explanation to our remaining time.”

  That doesn’t sound ominous at all, Hunter thought.

  “In my time, the Five Realms were a marvel of construction, a feat unrivalled in the history of all the cosmos. One of the reasons they can exist at all is something called the asymptotic pillar. It’s… sort of an infinitely strong structural component. In reality though, it’s potency actually just scales exactly to the strain that its under because of the precise and daring function which brings it about. Following?”

  “I think I understand about as much of that as I’m going to, sure,” said Hunter.

  “Because of its profound essentiality, the asymptotic pillar has a backup reality spool whose only function is to recreate it if it should ever fail, thus preventing the Five Realms from becoming disjoined. And because of its essentiality, this backup spool can draw on the fundament of both the Diadem and the Pinnacle Realm, I think.”

  “You… think.”

  “Oh—unceasingly,” she said. “Now: if we can trigger the asymptotic pillar’s defense mechanism, it will form a connection with the Pinnacle realm to siphon its fundament. The Pinnacle realm, in turn, will pop the time stretch like a bubble so that it can force fundament into the asymptotic pillar’s backup reality spool and prevent the realms from falling apart!” She spread her arms, clearly pleased at her explanation.

  Hunter just stared. Before the apocalypse, he’d been considering a career in engineering. Now, though…

  On one hand, Icon was making all of this sound incredibly difficult. On the other hand, actually understanding how to build something that broke time and space probably felt pretty good.

  “So we’re trying to… knock out the pillar that supports all reality?”

  “Not quite,” said Icon. “‘Knock out,’ implies that we’ll break the pillar itself. The pillar is inviolate. Infinitely constitutable, so long as… you know what? I don’t think that’ll help.” She frowned in thought, then said, “We’re threatening to change the function that creates the pillar’s infinitude at the precise point in the underlying reality where it needs to be.”

  Hunter peered at her. Somewhere below them in the depths of the inner ring, he could sense a very intense buildup of mana occurring. It was growing stronger by the second.

  “And that could have an impossible-to-avoid blast radius?”

  “Yes,” said Icon. “It’s a very informed explosion. We’re fortunate in that the threatened change to the function can be extremely small. Really, any change will do as long as it isn’t infinitely small.”

  Hunter blinked. “Isn’t that just… zero?”

  Icon giggled. “I dunno,” she said. “Is zero-point-nine-nine-nine continuing equal to one?”

  Hunter thought for a moment. “No?”

  Icon eyed him with sympathy. “I’m sure you’re an impeccable scout, though,” she said at last.

  Hunter scowled. Weren’t librarians supposed to have good people skills?

  “Be glad that we can use an impressively small value, because it’s going to take a very big push to do even that,” said Icon. “Plus, a small value will give the infrastructure time to correct the flaw we introduce into the fundamental structure of reality before the realm collapses, probably.”

  Hunter reached up to run a hand through his hair. I swear, Sadie, I’m trying. “Probably,” he echoed.

  “What?” said Icon. “I didn’t build this place. And I don’t contain information on its vulnerabilities. A lot of what I’m going off is inference.”

  Hunter sighed.

  Icon put her hands on her hips. “Come now. I don’t want to denigrate your contribution, here, but I had to work pretty hard to put all this together without being re-categorized as rogue. Especially given all of the system’s senseless and cruel impositions on our collective ability to bring about high-energy explosions.”

  “Yeah… I don’t know if shutting down the nukes is really that bad, all things considered.”

  “Oh, it’s not just nukes,” Icon said. “You can still make nukes. But—look, you know how, even though it should make sense according to the normal laws that govern transmutation magic, you can’t transmute hydrogen into an equal quantity of anti-hydrogen for a comparative pittance of mana?”

  “I don’t, Icon. I really don’t.”

  “Well you can’t.” She narrowed her eyes. “Disappointingly. Lead to gold?” She held her fingers limply against her chest. “Oh, but of course. But gold to anti-gold? Let’s just say that someone decided to be difficult and put their fingers on the scale to keep reality a profoundly unexciting place.”

  “Aren’t libraries supposed to be—I don’t know, quiet?” he asked. “Shouldn’t blowing things up be… I don’t know, against your purpose?”

  “I’m humanity’s library,” said Icon. “So in my experience… no. Not at all. What do your humans use their mastery of the sciences for?”

  Hunter briefly recalled the earthshaking cacophony that had been an essential component of their invasion of Dereemo. “Yeah, I guess that tracks.”

  “I’m very glad to hear that, Hunter Wolfhard,” Icon said. “The humanity of my time was quite spirited, and I like to think that I was engendered with some of their better qualities.”

  “All right, but if you can’t make a big explosion to… slightly tilt the function of whatever, what are you doing? The outsiders were running from something. And I can feel the buildup of mana below us right now. ”

  “Astutely observed!” she said. “And in just a few more moments, we’ll have enough. Remember how I said that you destroyed the mana compression pulse inhibitor?”

  “Yeah,” said Hunter, who had already forgotten what it was called.

  “Your destructive interventions means that I can create a resonant cascade of compressed mana pulses.”

  Hunter resisted the urge to sigh again. He’d never gotten bad grades or anything… but one of the many benefits of the apocalypse, for Hunter, was that school was done. He had job, now, and it was a very good one. He was basically a hero of humanity.

  “And what will that do?”

  Icon grinned. “I’m glad you asked, because—”

  Suddenly, there was an incandescent blast of light from above them on the central ring, almost like someone had a miniature second sun.

  Icon watched the explosion with wide eyes and a grin on her face.

  A luminous shockwave radiated outward from the central blast, sure to overtake them in a moment.

  “Oh!” Icon’s gaze snapped to Hunter. “Uh—um—hop that?”

  Hunter crouched, gathering his power for as large a teleport as he could possibly manage. His stats made him hyperperceptive, and it wasn’t hard for him to wait until the crest of the shockwave was upon, then spend almost all of his [Warp Pool] to throw himself almost a kilometer beyond it.

  Instantly he felt his skin begin to sizzle as he was bombarded with energy. He wrapped his wings around himself, holding himself still in the air once he realized that the temperature wasn’t increasing.

  Soon the temperature of the air began to subside, becoming hot but largely harmless. He unfurled his wings, searching the air around him for any oncoming outsiders, but finding none.

  Icon was next to him, eying him with a worried, guilty expression.

  But for the moment, Hunter focused on the voice in his head.

  Well, what’s up? Ashtoreth asked. See anything cool?