Time Limit: One Hour, Fifty-Seven Minutes

  I buried Tommy on Northerly Island, south of the Adler Planetarium, next to a pond. Tori came with me, and so did Jessica and the twins, but they didn’t do any digging. I’d already taken care of that, and I’d wrapped Tommy’s body in a sheet so no one would have to see it. No one needed to see what had been done to him.

  The few Mages we’d successfully captured called their boss the Fireborn Crusader. According to them, he was nearly Level Sixty—and that had been a few days ago. He ruled a bunch of the safe zones southeast of Chicago, and he had an eye on expanding. The hand-shaped burns on the side of their heads, clear up into their scalps, reminded Tori of the orcs in the Lord of the Rings movie.

  I’d never seen it, but I knew the image she was thinking about. Whoever this Fireborn Crusader was, he was bad news.

  Tommy had similar burns. His were a lot fresher, though. I wished he’d lived, because he knew something we desperately needed to know. He’d told the Fireborn Crusader about us. I needed to know just what he’d said, and what our brand-new enemy was thinking.

  I also needed to know why he’d left.

  But he was dead, and like my grandma said, the dead never speak.

  It was a quiet ceremony. We didn’t have anything to say about Tommy. I’d hardly known the man except as someone who was starting to make good choices for the first time in his life. That wasn’t enough to fill a eulogy, but it felt right to bury him. He’d died fighting, whether it was to protect others or because he couldn’t be a cog in someone else’s machine anymore. That was worthy of respect.

  I’d put all my points—the six from defeating the Tower Guardian, the four I’d gotten from Tommy and the Enforcer, and the two I’d earned after that—into Charge. My reserves were finally growing, and I needed to get back to crafting—but at the same time, I had loot to deal with from the Seared Wilds Tower.

  After Tori and I divided it up, I ended up with a pair of rare weapons that weren’t good for anything but scrapping as well as two absolute gems.

  Liquid Charge Generator (Epic)

  This device allows the user to convert Mana stats on both weapons and armor into Charge. It does not allow the user to add Mana stats to created items, and the delicate Voltsmithing and Spellcoding inside will fall apart if it’s disassembled by any but a master craftsman in both.

  Equip? Yes/No

  The Liquid Charge Generator could be a game-changer; right now, I probably had the Charge to power the full Autoplate Armor, but it was barely functional—much less what I could create now that I was Rank One. I’d barely scratched the surface of what I could create, and the Liquid Charge Generator almost certainly fit into my Voltsmith’s Laboratory. It’d be a powerful tool that could change how I valued magic items.

  Fabrication Crystal (Epic, Charge 10)

  +5 Body, +15 Mana

  This magical item allows for the creation of magically-powered minions. On activation, one minion will be created for every ten Mana the user possesses.

  The Fabrication Crystal seemed similar. My first thought was to use it as a weapon—or to let Tori or Zane use it. But its potential as an object to research and reassemble as a Charge-based tool was too high, and Tori had already made out with the epic loot. I’d disassemble it later, but I had visions of spiderlike metal drones assisting me in the lab and in combat. It’d take some doing, though.

  Neither of the new pieces were combat-ready. At least not yet. But both were going to be very useful, very soon. But Tori and I did both get one other item.

  Title Stone (Legendary)

  This item bestows powerful magical effects to one item or spell. It is rewarded for defeating the Guardian of a Tier Three dungeon, and due to the nature of Tier Three dungeons, may only be awarded to the first party to clear that specific dungeon. This Title Stone grants a given item or spell the “Tower’s Bane” title, granting additional speed and fire damage to the target. This item may be used only once, and its effect is permanent.

  I had a feeling I’d be targeting either the Trip-Hammer or the Voltsmith’s Grasp with the Title Stone, but it didn’t have a time limit on it, and I had no real desire to work in my lab. Right now, I needed to take a few hours where a timer wasn’t ticking down to my doom and simply relax.

  With all the gear taken care of, I opened up my status screen.

  [Hal Riley] [Class - Voltsmith] [Level - 61 Rank One]

  [Stats]

  ?Body - 35

  ?Awareness - 47

  ?Charge - 16/87 (59 Used)

  Stat Points Available: 2

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  [Class Skill - Decharge/Recharge - Drain the charge from magic items to power your own creations]

  [Class Skill - Remote Voltsmithing - Use your Voltsmithing to empower Creations even when others are using them—or when no one is.

  [Skill - Spellcoding - Transfer spells from Tomes to Spellscrolls, allowing weaker versions to be cast with Charge instead of Mana]

  Items

  ?Autoplate Pauldron (8 Charge)

  ?Voltsmith’s Grasp Upgrade One (19/30 Charge) - Rail Gun Module, Taser Launcher

  ?Heavy Trip-Hammer 2.0 (25 Charge)

  ?Warrior’s Sheath (Bio-Electric Scanner) (7 Charge)

  I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but if Voril told me I was the most powerful person in Illinois, I’d have believed her—though Tori was very close. I doubted I could beat her in a fight, but I didn’t think she’d be able to kill me, either. We were too evenly matched.

  “What’s next?” Tori asked.

  I shrugged. As far as I was concerned, Phase One of Integration was over. “Now, we wait. And if you want, you can use your spells to help me move this to Cindy’s.”

  When I’d finally delivered the new machine to my lab in Cindy’s Garage and both wrestled it into position and plugged it into the lab’s ambient Charge, there was nothing left to do but wait.

  Time Limit: Eighteen Minutes

  So I waited.

  But I wasn’t idle. I headed back toward Museumtown and the beach; we’d watched Phase Zero end while looking over the shore of Lake Michigan, and I wanted to do the same thing here.

  Besides, I had a lot on my mind.

  Tommy’s death still weighed on me. The Fireborn Crusader was out there. I hadn’t seen Bobby Richards since the battle in Museumtown; he’d vanished in the chaos, but he’d be back—I was sure of it. Phase Two was approaching, and I had a bad feeling that the world Tori, Calvin, Jessica, and I had been building was about to change in some permanent and unexpected ways.

  And beyond Phase Two—beyond all of that—there was a bigger problem.

  “As I said, your world’s destruction is inevitable.”

  Voril’s words hadn’t left my head since the moment she’d said them. She’d said them with the conviction of someone who believed them absolutely. To her, they were the truth. And not only that, but this was her three-hundred-fortieth Integration. She knew from experience that what she was doing was what was best for everyone—not just for the Consortium, or for the universe as a whole, but for us.

  She knew we’d failed our filter moment. We’d failed to ascend, and to her, Integration was a gift being offered by the Consortium. It was a way to help us through a disaster that, as far as she could tell, was unavoidable.

  I couldn’t see a way through it either.

  But I hadn’t seen a way to fix the Ford Explorer, either. That didn’t mean it was time to give up. It just meant I needed more time, or a different way of looking at the problem. Granted, a world-ending Armageddon brought about by an alien presence so powerful it could change both the structure of Earth and the very rules of physics on its surface to create the dungeons was a little different than a fuel line problem.

  The principle was the same, though.

  I made it to the beach before the timer ran completely down. A cooler sat there, and inside, I found a few bottles of lemonade and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread. I’d made those for Beth when we were kids and Mom and Dad were busy. Then I’d made them for myself for dinner more times than I could count in Mrs. Faren’s attic.

  I unwrapped it and bit into it. The sweetness of the grape jelly was almost overpowering; I quickly washed the bit down with a shot of lemonade and stared out at Lake Michigan.

  Calvin joined me. I handed him a bottle, and he twisted the lid off in one quick motion. Then he sat on the sand.

  The waves came in one after another, their gold and orange crests reflecting the sunset back toward us. We sat quietly for a while. The timer ticked down below three minutes.

  The silence stretched on and on, and I thought about Mom and Dad. How was Cozad doing? Had they cleared their Tier Three Dungeon, or had someone else? And where was Beth? She was out there somewhere, and even though I hadn’t had time to find her, I was still worried. Was she okay? Would our fight the day she disappeared keep going if I ever did track her down?

  How would I track her down, or make it all the way to Nebraska? Could I, or would whatever came next keep me locked into Chicago?

  I had so many questions, and so few answers.

  “I’m impressed,” Calvin said.

  “What about?”

  “I didn’t think you’d get that girl to the Field Museum. Then I didn’t think your plan would work against The Captain. But you kept proving me wrong, Hal. I’ve lost a dozen cans of beans on bad bets because of you. So, thanks.”

  “No problem,” I said, unsure how to respond.

  “We’re gonna be in for a rough ride in Phase Two. Nothin’ like this ever gets easier. Just harder and harder, whether it’s the shelters closing down, benches with dumbass bars in dumbass places, or those laws against camping. The people with the power never realize they’re making it worse for everyone else. It’s gonna be the same with the Consortium.”

  I nodded. Calvin had been furious with Voril, but it hadn’t been strictly about the battle at Museumtown or how unceremoniously he’d been pulled from it. It had been about the Consortium itself.

  On some level, I understood. A lot of people came to towns like Cozad thinking they’d do good, only to realize that their idea of what good was didn’t match the people there. Most of the time, they didn’t have the power to change our community.

  Most of the time.

  And they always ran over the people living there. People like that didn’t understand what held a town like Cozad together. I didn’t understand what had held Calvin’s community of homeless people together, either. And that was the problem with the Consortium. They hadn’t bothered to understand Earth, just pronounced it a failure and proclaimed its destruction inevitable.

  I didn’t have the power to challenge that—at least, not now. None of us did.

  We lapsed into silence, save for the chewing and swallowing of sandwiches and the peaceful crash of waves on the shore. After the frantic rush to finish Phase One in time, even these few minutes felt like the calm before an even bigger storm, but I was determined to enjoy them as much as I could.

  “Calvin, can I ask you a question about Vietnam?” I asked. The timer was at less than a minute.

  He took a long, slow drink—so slow, in fact, that I wasn’t sure he was drinking it at all. Then he nodded seriously. “Make it a good one. We’re about out of time.”

  I refocused as the timer passed under thirty seconds. “Were you ever worried about making it out the other side?”

  Calvin laughed. It wasn’t a joyful one; this laugh felt empty and bitter and full of pain. But he answered me. The answer didn’t help.

  “Every day, Hal. Every goddamn day. When you’re in it, you’ve just gotta take things one day at a time.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t thinking about taking it day by day. This apocalypse was a disaster. It was by far the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. But it was also a problem, and every problem—from engines to people to the apocalypse—had a solution. The Consortium’s solution was bad—like replacing the whole engine to fix a timing belt. It worked, but the costs were too high. There had to be a better one.

  And I was going to find it.

  Congratulations on surviving Phase One: Advance and Uplift!

  Phase Two will begin after a few short messages.