“They’re a bunch of Mages,” Calvin said. Power swelled around us as Voril prepared to teleport us to three different places at the same time—even at her power level, magic like that took time to cast. Not much, but some. “They like fire spells, and they’re well-organized. Someone in their leadership is ex-military. Maybe current. Find the head, cut it off, hope the rest buckle. You sure you’ve got this?”

  I finished checking over my gear and nodded. “You two’ll be okay in there? Jessica, you good?”

  “No, I’m not. But we’ll be okay, and…Tori’s powerful enough to make a difference safely.” Jessica swallowed. It looked painful, and the frustration and helplessness in her eyes looked even worse.

  “Okay. Let’s go.” I gritted my teeth and readied my hammer.

  “For what it’s worth, I hope you win,” Voril said. Her magic peaked, and a moment later, I found myself standing in front of the fish-hugger’s statue in the middle of Museumtown.

  My head spun. The twin smells of smoke and blood filled my nostrils even from this far away. But I was exactly where I’d asked Voril to put me, and that was something. Tori would be on the wall and Calvin and Jessica would be right where they’d been taken from—the center of the Reliquary of Bones’s lobby. They’d be safe there, and Tori could make an immediate difference on defense.

  As for me? Like Calvin said, find the head and cut it off. No one was well-organized enough yet for the loss of their leader and strongest to go unnoticed.

  He’d be the biggest, baddest guy on the other side. He’d either be in the back where it was safe or the front if he felt so strong he couldn’t be stopped.

  I readied the Trip-Hammer and headed off into the chaos.

  But I hadn’t made it ten feet before a massive wave of freezing air crashed over me.

  Tori hit the barricade like a vengeful Valkyrie.

  The fireball she’d been watching on the screen during that whole Matrix-like reveal exploded above her, and the flash-heat threatened to set her hair ablaze. She didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, nothing out there could match her Level Fifty-Seven. She was finally caught up with Hal, and no one could possibly be as strong as they were. They’d cleared the Seared Wilds Tower, after all.

  She Pushed the fire away, simultaneously dropping a full-powered, massive Gravity Well on the attackers. Most of them had no way of stopping her, but a couple of mages managed to cling to their ground with spells of their own. The rest slid into a pile, and a pillar of flames crashed down over them. Zane stared at the burning, screaming heap of enemies, no emotion at all on his face.

  Tori didn’t care. In the moment she landed, she’d seen a familiar face out there. Tommy. The man who’d cut her stepmom’s cheek and left a twisted, nasty scar across it.

  It had been an accident. Jessica had forgiven him.

  Tori didn’t care about that either. She was going to end this invasion. And then?

  And then, she and Tommy were going to have words.

  There were dozens of injured.

  The marble floor was slick with blood.

  Whether she liked it or not, this was where Jessica was meant to be.

  Calvin had already run off to take command of the reserves and get them where they needed to be. Tori was on the rampart. And Hal? Hal was about to wage a one-man counterattack.

  But Jessica was already on her knees, kneeling over a boy who couldn’t have been more than twenty, stitching his stomach back together with her magic. It’d take him hours to recover, but as her energy poured into the burned and ruptured wound, she knew without a doubt that he would.

  The other healer—the one she’d been working with—was covered in gore, too. Jessica took one look, nodded, and stood to find the next victim of the fighting.

  “Next!” she snapped at the assistant who hadn’t even realized she’d vanished and returned. He led her across the hall to a woman whose leg was almost completely detached. Only a thin column of muscle and bone held it together, and she looked deathly white.

  “We were going to finish cutting it off,” her assistant—Grant—said.

  She shook her head, even though her stomach was doing backflips and trying to escape through her throat. “No, I can save it. I’ll need a few minutes, though. Get the next ones ready for me.”

  Like it or not, this was where Jessica was meant to be.

  Shards of ice rained down around me, jamming into the dry dirt and scorched grass. But right away, I knew none of them were meant for me. This wasn’t a direct attack. I’d been peppered by shrapnel from a blocked attack—or caught in a blast meant for someone else.

  I lowered my hammer and pauldron. We were well behind the line. That meant either a mage from Museumtown with an incredible amount of range, or someone fighting closer. I was willing to bet it was someone closer. As far as Calvin had said, no one in Museumtown had that kind of range.

  It didn’t take long to find the fight.

  Someone had completely encased themselves in a mobile ice armor. They looked like a walking snowman, and wielded a blade made of ice so sharp and pure it was blue. I had just enough time to check their nameplate before they disappeared in a whirlwind of flame and steel as the mages opened fire and a single warrior rushed him.

  Thomas Wright: Level Forty-Five

  Class: Ice Sculptor

  Tommy was here? I had no idea what he was doing, but at Level Forty-Five, he wasn’t strong enough to survive his main opponent, much less the half-dozen Mages pouring flames into his ice armor. The hulking, massive man he was up against wore steel on his arms and legs, held together by leather straps across a rippling wall of bare muscle, and the axe in his hands had to be an epic weapon from a Tier Two dungeon’s endboss or somewhere in a Tier Three dungeon.

  Worse, he was Level Fifty-Two. Thomas didn’t have a chance against him.

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  And even worse, the Mages were still pumping fireballs and gouts of flame so hot they were blue where Tommy had been standing. Steam poured upward into the evening sky; the plume had to be fifty—no, a hundred—feet tall and growing by the second.

  Fury filled me. I’d spent every last moment in the last three weeks growing stronger, and almost all of that time, I’d been focused on helping people and solving problems. First Tori, then Jessica, then all of Museumtown. Tori and I had risked everything over and over in the Seared Wilds Tower to protect not only ourselves but the survivors in our settlement.

  And these people…these fanatics…had showed up trying to take what they could and burn out anyone who resisted? I couldn’t let that stand, and I had only one solution to this problem.

  I revved the Trip-Hammer and lowered my shoulder, then charged the first Mage.

  He tried to scream.

  He didn’t have time. The hammer came down, and a moment later, the spinning, spiked hammers ripped into his body. He hadn’t even been Rank One; he simply didn’t have the stats to tank a hit from me.

  Neither did the other Mages. It took a few kills for any of them to realize something had gone wrong, but as the constant barrage of flames ripping across Tommy dwindled and faltered, one of them turned his attention to me long enough to shout a warning.

  The big man—the Level Fifty-Two Enforcer—had been stalking the edge of the steam cloud, waiting for an opportunity. The steam pouring off his back and the hole punched through his oversized pauldron told me he’d been Tommy’s target, and he’d no doubt been ready for revenge.

  He turned toward me at the shouted warning. “I’ll deal with him. You, keep the pressure up! Don’t let the heretic escape!”

  “Heretic?” I asked. I revved the Trip-Hammer for a moment, letting the hammers beat at the air. “I don’t think so. He seems like a braver man than you.”

  I didn’t get to finish my taunt. The Enforcer roared and rushed me, his axe coming down in a vicious overhead chop.

  Tori stood in the center of a circle of calm almost twenty feet to a side.

  She hadn’t created it—not with a single spell, at least. Almost everyone in the fight was simply smart enough—or too cowardly, depending on which side they were on—to get close to the pissed-off Telekineticist. Only three people weren’t.

  The first was a battered, bruised, and smiling Carol, whose spear had broken and who’d switched to her own Sword of the Forgotten Pharaoh—the same one Saul Williams had taken from the first boss in the Reliquary of Bones. She stood in front of the only fire Mage Tori could see who wasn’t one of her targets, Zane, who was blowing through his spells at a terrifying rate. He reminded Tori of the machine-gun Fire Mage build from one of her MMOs, and was almost as emotionless as the video game avatars.

  And then there was Bobby Richards.

  His breath was ragged, and he had a dozen wounds across his white suit. That wasn’t clean anymore, and for the first time since the Blood in the Water fight, he didn’t look smarmy or slippery. He just looked determined and angry.

  Part of Tori wanted to blast him and rid Museumtown of someone she was sure was going to be a problem. But most of her was just happy for the help. Everyone needed it, and without him, the defenses would probably have fallen.

  Together, the four of them had been enough to turn the tide and buy the defenders a few valuable minutes to regroup.

  Tori wasn’t ready to regroup, though. She was ready to fight. To end this. And then, she was going to figure out why the fuck Tommy had brought all these fire Mages here, and what she could do about it.

  She jumped down off the rampart, letting Push catch her before she hit the ground. As she moved forward, the circle of calm moved forward with her.

  Almost no one wanted to fight a Level Fifty-Seven. Those who did didn’t last long.

  The axe-head didn’t even make it to my armor.

  It caught in place, almost jerked free of the Enforcer’s grip. He wrenched it back—or tried to. But before he could, the whirling Trip-Hammer’s twin sledges slammed into the axe’s side. Once. Twice. Three times. Again and again. The sound was like a jackhammer trying to punch through a solid steel block. It was agony; my ears rang and my arms shook.

  I held on, though. However bad it was for me, it was worse for the man on the other end. Every blow shook his bones and drove him back a step as my weapon tried to tear his from his grip—or just tear it apart.

  I had no sympathy. This man had come to my town, my city, and tried to hurt my people!? He was a problem, and I’d solve it the only way I could.

  The Trip-Hammer hit twelve times before the axe finally broke at the haft. The two twisted and mangled beards separated and clattered across the concrete sidewalk, leaving the Enforcer with nothing but a shattered stick.

  He stared at it for a moment. Then he pulled a new weapon out of his inventory.

  I didn’t bother checking what it was. The Trip-Hammer was already running full speed and already overhead. I slammed it down. The moment it stopped, I let go of the weapon with one hand and punched into the big man’s gut with the Voltsmith’s Grasp.

  Charge poured out of the emitter on my palm and into the Enforcer’s chest. It was enough to stop Ursa Prime in its tracks, but the man tanked it. Not without pain. He staggered backward, and the sword he’d grabbed went flying as the Trip-Hammer ripped it from his grip and thrashed against his armored forearm, shredding steel and leather. But he did tank it.

  That was impressive. But more impressively, he didn’t give up. I had five levels on him, but even with his injuries, mangled arm, and lack of a weapon, he kept coming.

  The man wasn’t a coward. I wanted to talk to him and figure out who he was and where he’d come from. But all I had on him was that his name was Cam Rendon, and he didn’t seem interested in talking.

  In fact, quite the opposite. A buff appeared on him.

  Elite - This Delver moves faster and hits harder than a similarly powerful Delver (Eighteen Seconds Remaining)

  His eyes went red, and he rushed me, fists swinging.

  I didn’t have a choice. The Trip-Hammer wasn’t going to be fast enough. So I leveled the Voltsmith’s Grasp and fired two railgun bolts right at him.

  He didn’t have time to dodge. The two shots punched into his chest and head. Part of his skull exploded out the back, and he hit the ground in a pile of gore. I closed the gap, Trip-Hammer ready; until I saw an experience orb, he wasn’t out of the fight.

  His remaining eye glared at me. It blinked and glared again. I swung the hammer into his chest, where it landed with a final, sickening thud and the crack of ribs. Then the red glow disappeared, and the blood-red experience orb appeared.

  Level Up! Fifty-Seven to Fifty-Eight.

  It turned out, Calvin was right.

  As soon as the Mages attacking Tommy realized their leader was dead, they broke. Some of them ran into the darkness. A handful tried to surrender. A couple of them turned their burning spells against me.

  Those ones didn’t last long. The others did.

  The steam slowly faded, and a red experience orb appeared at it center.

  My heart dropped.

  I’d never liked Tommy. He’d been a bad man when we’d met—a gangster and a criminal whose boss had attacked us outside the Union Pier dungeon. But when I’d offered him a choice in The Void, he’d made the right one. And he’d done it again afterward, when I’d sent him to find the twins. He’d succeeded, and he’d put his own life on the line to do it.

  He’d been recovering. A few setbacks were expected on the road to recovery.

  It was a shame that his setback had gotten people killed—including him. His body was burned and scalded, his skin red where he still had some, and his clothing half-disintegrated from the steam that had engulfed him for nearly a minute. I didn’t look too closely—even with the horrors of the fight around me, his wounds were disturbing.

  And Tori was getting closer. She’d see in a minute, if she hadn’t already.

  I quickly dragged a mage’s body over and flipped the robe across Tommy’s corpse. It wouldn’t hide him for long, but in the dark, with battle still raging around him, it’d be long enough.

  The blood-red experience orb sat there ominously. I hadn’t wanted to take Eddie’s orb, and I certainly didn’t want Tommy’s. But at the same time, I couldn’t leave it there. Tori would be drawn to it like a moth to flame, and she didn’t need to see that.

  I swallowed down my apprehension and touched the experience orb. It felt wrong to take one from someone who, at their core, had died doing the right thing.

  But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I could honor the man he’d been trying to be.

  Level Up! Fifty-Eight to Fifty-Nine.

  That was what I had to do. He’d been trying to be a good man, and the experience was a last gift and something to carry him forward.

  Tori hurried through the semi-dark field toward me, and I stood up to head her off. She’d have questions, and I only hoped I had the right answers for what had happened here.