The instant she returned from her world within, Ranthia did her best to absorb as much detail in an instant as she could. Her vitality had passed 30,000, her speed was close, and her dexterity wasn’t too far behind that—or at least those had been her stats before [Blessed With Chaos]. Either way, with her perception fully focused, Pallos itself positively crawled along. …Usually.

  Ranthia was still lying on her back. The Commander’s tent was filled with flying debris—fragments of furniture. There was screaming. But the biggest problem was what was visible through the new hole ripped in the top of the tent—an expanse of stone, large enough to blot out the sky.

  There was no time.

  Ranthia had no idea where her bandolier was; she’d taken it off before she went under. The adamantium spear was still clutched in her left hand. The [Healer] was staring upward, as if she was still trying to figure out what was going on. [Analysts] were panicking. The Commander was signaling for Ranthia to go—but how?!

  There was no time!

  Ranthia had no idea how much of what she did was pure instinct and how much was a conscious decision. In her final moments she sent an image outside the fraying tent and began the process of shifting into it. A process that was never instant.

  There was no time. She had waited too long. Even that was too slow. There was no way for her to run, no way to escape. Xaoc Himself had tried to warn her, but she—

  Ranthia’s perspective suddenly was outside the tent, just in time for the force of the impact to take her off her feet and send her tumbling. She put another image atop the nearest section of the wall and, once again, shifted. The process concluded faster than she could catch herself.

  Gods and goddesses, she had just died. Her true body was gone. She felt woozy—was she already disappearing? No, she refused. She needed to kill whoever had done this—there was no way in Xaoc’s eternal name that she was going to let Black Crow take her before she killed the scum that had murdered her! Ranthia leaned over the wall, ready to leap, as she scanned the battlefield. She was low on knives, especially without her bandolier, but she still had—

  Wait, how the fuck was the adamantium spear still in her hand? It should have—

  “Amaranthia.”

  Ranthia had experienced Xaoc’s words more than once throughout her lifetimes. Every time He spoke there was a weight behind the words that defied the norms of the world. For lack of a better way to explain it: He didn’t speak, He Spoke.

  Ranthia would have never expected a similar—if less weighty—effect to come from a bird.

  Ranthia had faced many nonsensical things in her lifetime. Her lifetime was, in and of itself, a nonsensical thing in the eyes of most that walked Remus. She was a Paladin, she had been reborn, and she had accomplished numerous feats. She had finally achieved her third class—something that was believed to be impossible when she was a child. She had seen and learned so much.

  She still shrieked in terror and promptly tipped straight over the wall.

  There were… odd things missing from her chaotic knowledge, omissions that made no sense. But for someone who had died before? The fact that White Dove wasn’t just a metaphor had to be the weirdest possible omission!

  Ranthia landed inelegantly on her butt after her tumble, but her focus was already locked onto the perfectly ordinary looking dove that had fluttered down to her level again. …Perfectly ordinary looking, if she somehow ignored the amused smirk that was impossibly plain on its beak. A minor impossibility upon an impossible being beyond her comprehension.

  “Shouldn’t this be your counterpart’s job?! But I’m not going with you, I refuse! I’m not finished!” Ranthia shrieked, failing utterly at keeping the hysteria out of her voice.

  “I’m not here to reap you, I am here to curse you.” The avatar of death replied dryly. There was less power behind these words than her first proclamation of the name that Ranthia had left behind.

  Ranthia’s thought processes ground to a halt. A demand for an explanation nearly passed her lips, but she bit down on her tongue to stop it. White Dove was real. She was about to demand answers from the next best thing to one of the five great gods—it was a blasphemy quite nearly as great as any the Paladin had performed.

  “Unless you have come to your senses and are ready? You had almost impressed me, denying yourself the temptation of immortality for so long. Yet, ultimately, you disappoint me as all too many once-mortals have.” The deific bird’s next words shook Ranthia out of her spiral, that or it was the sight of a dove shaking its head with obvious disappointment.

  Ranthia shook herself out of her reverie and kipped to her feet. One of the shimagu’s ogre puppets was drawing near, eager to smash the idiot that had fallen over the wall. Ranthia stalled for a heartbeat, then bowed low—dodging the club that swiped for her head. What White Dove did was… hard to quantify. The bird didn’t visibly dodge, yet the club plainly never touched her despite her never moving from its path.

  “I am afraid that I cannot, noble servant of Thanatos. My sincerest apologies for my earlier rudeness. I will not selfishly take up your time—I will seek my own answers. Once you are finished with me, please feel free to take any food or drink you might wish from my tent. The mushroom bars with bits of vegetables are far more delicious than they appear. I only wish I had better hospitality to offer you.”

  Ranthia dodged another swipe from the club and asked a final question.

  “May I dance while you do what you must?”

  Ranthia thought—hoped—that White Dove seemed mildly pleased. The dove’s head inclined slightly, granting permission. Immediately, Ranthia embraced the rhythm of her deadly performances. She only had three knives left on her person, so she lashed out with the spear instead. It was a clumsy dance partner, but 512-ish levels in [Ranger’s Lore] did a lot to offset her issues with wielding spears.

  The dove remained perfectly static in Ranthia’s perception, floating a few arms’ lengths away from her face. The bird’s wings beat far too slowly to keep her still, yet there she was no matter how Ranthia spun or danced.

  “Amaranthia. [Diffuse Reflectance]. [She who Dances with Chaos]. Newly [Blessed With Chaos].” White Dove inclined her head ever so slightly.

  Ranthia nearly missed her thrust through the ogre’s neck. The spear really was just a pointed stick—albeit, one made out of some mythical metal she had never heard of—but it was proving effective. Not that anything in her class worked with it. It seemed that she had gotten far too reliant on [Void Edge]. But more importantly—had White Dove seriously just congratulated her on unlocking her third class?!

  “A soul stolen by a god. A life that should have never been lived. And yet even with such a boon you have had the gall to steal time from me. You, who proclaim your respect for divinity to be second to none, have dared to deny me what is rightfully mine. The rejection of my gift is a sin that can never be forgiven.”

  Ranthia danced to the side as several arrows came her way. A human—wearing Legion-issued equipment, but plainly not from her base—rushed her with a hateful roar in the shimagu language, even as he threw his bow to the side and drew his sword.

  He never saw the end come. Her spear had significantly better reach than any Legion sword, and he had only been level 219.

  Though by Xaoc it was hard to focus on her dance while White Dove proclaimed her sins. How had she stolen time? What had changed?

  …Had her true body truly just been an unnecessary burden all this time?

  “I curse you. You have long pretended to be blind, now become an honest woman at last. You who love the guise of the moons shall forever be defined by them. When darkness falls and there are no moons to light up the night’s sky, so too shall your own sight be absent. May you truly come to understand what it means to be unable to see.”

  Ranthia nearly tripped over her own feet. These words had far greater impact; Pallos itself trembled beneath the weight of the judgment of White Dove. Ranthia’s own inattention would have been her undoing… but for the minor fact that the shimagu near her—near White Dove—had collapsed.

  For all Ranthia’s own progress, it was hard to endure the words. Xaoc’s may have possessed a grander weight, but He had never levied such hatred towards her. And, even worse, the meaning of those words drove a spike of primordial terror through her mind.

  She was in a war zone, in a base that had been forgotten.

  And she was going to go blind?!

  White Dove paused for a heartbeat to let the weight of her words truly settle upon Ranthia’s heart, before the deific dove’s visage twisted into a savage sneer that promised that Ranthia would see her again soon. With that, White Dove beat her wings as she rose into the sky, only to then dive toward the scattered Legion forces that were still embroiled in a deadly battle with the shimagu. White Dove’s form twisted to black as Black Crow seamlessly took her place in an instant, just before the bird slipped from Ranthia’s perception, as if she—he, whatever—had passed through some barrier beyond Ranthia’s senses.

  Ranthia felt like she was in a daze, but hurriedly threw an image back to the wall and shifted to it before the shimagu could recover. The spear impossibly stayed with her, but she needed to focus. Ogres were powerful, but none of them had a fraction of the strength required to have thrown that rock that had destroyed the Commander’s tent. …And all that had been lost with it. Gods and goddesses…

  No. She couldn’t think about that, she needed to focus.

  For the first time, Ranthia truly took in the battlefield. While she had been distracted by a god-like being she hadn’t even known truly existed—godsdamnit Ranthia, FOCUS!

  She gritted her teeth and forced herself into the moment; everything else could wait. She hadn’t been down long—it was still nighttime, not that she spared much attention for the skyline—but already the battlefield was a mess. The Legion forces were still scattered, and it seemed like the shimagu had learned to keep them separated. That was problematic, but the real issue was that there were far more shimagu than there should have been. In the brief time she had been down for her class up—and then was distracted by something she couldn’t think about right now—the shimagu from the camp had joined the melee, but it seemed as if a second (third, whatever!) horde of shimagu were on the cusp of arriving from the west as well.

  The two current groups of shimagu were doing their best to kill the men and women that Ranthia had lived alongside for nearly three years. They couldn’t withstand a third. The base’s walls were still compromised, which meant that they had nowhere to retreat to.

  The newly immortal Adventurer—er, Ranger—War Ranger—whatever, was discombobulated and off-balance in the extreme. But sorting through the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions was a luxury she didn’t have the time to indulge. She mentally shoved everything to the side and did her best to tamp it down as she allowed herself a single deep breath.

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

  She had to stem the tide of the third group before they reached her people.

  Ranthia sent an image as far as she could ‘reach’ and shifted to it.

  Ranthia began her charge. First, she was joined by one image, handed off smoothly to [Submind] the instant it took form. Then two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. She was barely thinking, instead she fell back on old instincts.

  She didn’t form a defensive line. She formed a hard wedge—with the image she inhabited at the tip. A short while later, she punched through the front line of shimagu, each as weak and ineffectual as they ever had been. The spear in her hand tore through flesh and bone, driven by her strength and the momentum behind her speed. Her images were both more and less effective—they had knives and access to reflections of [Void Edge] and the rest of her Skills, but their potency was firmly gated by [Ideal Reflectance]. 1% of her own power wasn’t quite the joke it once was, especially against those with no Skills, but it wasn’t good enough either. She wanted more. She needed more.

  Not that the System deigned to grant her a miracle.

  [Combat Awareness] and [Rhythmic Grace] had tremendous synergy—even if they refused to merge for some reason—and the combination had saved her life more times than she could count. Once again, their gifts allowed Ranthia to evade an attack that came far too quickly. Ranthia pirouetted once she danced clear of the arc of devastation and faced her new opponent.

  [Warrior – Light] level 868. [Warrior – Forest] level 804. [Warrior – Void] level 510.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what the beast was. It wasn’t quite as tall as some ogres were, but it was far broader. The tusks though… gods and goddesses, was it a troll?! Her International Studies course had warned that they were a savage and powerful people. They were supposed to favor masks though, yet this one wore no mask!

  Worse—trolls were supposed to be indestructible unless they were touched by sunlight, and dawn was still far away.

  Instead of a mask, this probable-troll was covered by vines, wooden plates, and chunks of stone that wriggled and moved across his body. A living armor born of Skills. A weapon unlike any Ranthia had ever seen before was clasped in his hands. It was like a great pillar of bone—carved and engraved with such fine detail it must have taken an absolute age—had been split in two, with each half impossibly connected to the other by a strip of some sort of hide. It was a strange and confusing weapon, but her new opponent wasn’t about to stand around and give her a better look.

  The troll made a simple flick of its wrist and the ‘free’ end of its weapon flailed through the shimagu pawns—and Ranthia’s images. The weapon itself was engulfed in a pitch black energy that roared from it like an inferno. Ranthia had sorely underestimated the bastard’s reach.

  And she’d certainly never expected a second—far more powerful—twin to appear so soon! The presence of the stone in his armor made it obvious; the troll had no Earth or adjacent element to provide it, only the parasite could have.

  There was no space to evade. Ranthia silently apologized to her new spear and braced it defensively, praying against all odds that adamantium would miraculously survive Void energy long enough to bleed the weapon’s momentum.

  It was hard to say who was more surprised when the troll’s strange double club deflected off the adamantium, leaving her weapon unscathed—unlike Ranthia’s own arms. Her right wrist felt like it had been on the brink of dislocating and her left arm, that she’d used to brace the spear, cracked ominously from the force of the troll’s blow.

  His strength was in a completely different league than her own! She hadn’t even been close enough to receive the peak of the force behind his attack, even setting aside how blatantly casual it had been.

  The spear really made no sense. Adamantium was (apparently) remarkably durable, but to shrug off an attack like that through its mundane properties with no damage at all? It was unthinkable! It made just as little sense as its inexplicable ability to stick with her when she shifted without being in her images and—

  The troll was pressing his attack, she couldn’t let herself get distracted!

  Ranthia resumed her dance and tried to ignore her aching arms. She lashed out at his knee with her spear, as she spun to avoid the next sweep of the ogre’s weapon.

  The ogre missed, but her own attack deflected harmlessly off his armor. Without [Void Edge], she plainly couldn’t hope to punch through.

  Ranthia drew one of her three remaining knives.

  The other shimagu were scrambling to get away from their fight, which was good. But what was even better was that they were staying in the vicinity to watch. It wasn’t like she was going to trust the honor of a species of parasites—she refused to ignore them and hope they wouldn’t try to stab her in the back—but at least they weren’t going after her people yet. Not that she could spare the time to look back at the legionaries to see if they were doing alright with the overwhelming numbers they already faced.

  The dance resumed. Spears had always felt strangely clumsy to Ranthia and she could never explain why. It was as if they were ill-sized and their weight was nonsensical. [Ranger’s Lore] helped to prevent it; her body was less inclined to overcorrect while the Skill granted her fundamental proficiency.

  But trying to dual wield a spear and a knife was just wrong on every level—her flawed instincts and [Ranger’s Lore] seemed to be united on that. Not that she disagreed, but the situation was weird. The spear was able to—somehow—withstand at least brief contact with her opponent’s Void. She also had no way to stow it easily, but setting aside her only protection seemed especially idiotic.

  Ranthia’s footwork entered a frenzy as she closed in. The troll looked plainly amused, even as she closed the gap and dodged under what had to be the most half-hearted swing of his weapon yet.

  Immediately, Ranthia sprang forward and called on her own Void energy. The troll’s Void was a roaring darkness, a black surge of hatred. Ranthia’s was fundamentally different, her Void was nothingness—a rejection of all that existed. [Void Edge] granted her knife lethality. [Flowing Momentum] guided the cut. And [Echoes of Devastation] echoed the cut with additional damage.

  Ranthia’s slash landed perfectly across the troll’s chest.

  Yet even as her knife was consumed by her own Void, the cut failed to pierce through the troll’s living armor.

  The creature sneered with contempt. Ranthia pushed her speed to the limit and replaced the knife with her next. She delivered the follow-up seemingly before the troll could react—yet it too failed to quite pierce through the twin’s armor.

  Ranthia was ready to dance away from the troll, but he simply laughed—a horrific sound by any metric—and spread his arms wide. The wood, vines, and rock that covered him writhed—regenerated—and parted, exposing his bare chest. His eyes fell on her final knife in her belt.

  A challenge.

  Ranthia snarled and drew the knife as he asked. If the bastard that worked with the parasites that ruined so many lives wanted to learn how deadly she could be, so be it!

  Ranthia let the rhythm guide her strike and telegraphed her attack as a sweep across the troll’s foolishly bared chest. At the last instant, she kicked off the ground and drove her knife directly for where his heart should be—she had no idea how much troll anatomy differed from humans and every other beast she had killed. Trolls were supposed to heal quickly, but even they shouldn’t be able to survive a lethal blow.

  Her knife was consumed as troll blood flowed freely. Ranthia danced away, hoping to avoid the troll’s final retaliation. After it was dead, she’d need to act fast to take care of the parasite before it could do anything. She just needed the kill notification to come…!

  The troll plucked the remnants of the knife out of his chest. A heartbeat later, the wound closed.

  Fuck.

  Ranthia had no intention of giving in. The troll was proving harder to kill than she had expected, and she was out of knives—fine. She still had a life to live—apparently a very long one—and she wasn’t going to get cut down so easily.

  Ranthia’s dance resumed as she replaced her lost images. The nine of her swarmed the troll, even as Ranthia shifted to another image. The spear was a hilariously blatant giveaway of which body she inhabited—she had no way of adding it to her images on the fly and if she handed it off to an image she would be wholly unarmed—but it was an extra note of chaos in her dance. One that she had gone without for all too long.

  She had the mana; she had the magic power. Her days of channeling were behind her—not that she was going to part with such a useful feature for the Skill.

  Ranthia’s dance continued, frenzied and chaotic. The troll was blatantly toying with her, making only highly telegraphed attacks that were gradually getting faster. He was trying to learn her limits.

  The sick thing was that he was succeeding far more than her own efforts to kill him. The spear, without her Skills properly behind it, couldn’t breach his armor. Her images never could with their pale reflections of her attacks. Each image she abandoned had to be replaced—her presence within the image effectively disarmed it once she left for another. The spear should have been left with her true body, beneath—well, it shouldn’t be there at any rate. Only visible equipment that was both on her person and present on the image that she shifted to should have transferred with her. Each time she shifted, the knives that were part of the image vanished since her own knives were absent. Not that there was a tremendous difference between the damage capability between her armed or unarmed images, it seemed. The troll was far too resilient, even before his accursed regeneration!

  At length, Ranthia was forced to parry another blow with her spear. Once again, the adamantium inexplicably withstood the Void of the troll—much as the troll’s own bone weapon did—but the impact still drove Ranthia away.

  The troll snarled at her and shouted something. Ranthia was left momentarily puzzled, wondering if it was the shimagu tongue badly mangled by an accent or an unfamiliar language, but ultimately that wasn’t relevant at the moment. What was relevant was that a therizinosaurus came charging out of the crowds that still watched the farce of a battle.

  Ranthia twirled to dodge the beast, but it ran past her, only for the troll to drop his weapon, grapple, and lift the significantly larger dinosaur. Ranthia swore the bastard smiled at her, before he turned, swinging the dinosaur, and threw the beast into the air.

  It had to be some sort of absurd distraction, but Ranthia’s eyes couldn’t help but to follow along the dinosaur’s arc and…

  …No.

  It was impossible.

  The bastard somehow lobbed the dinosaur so that it’d land in the middle of her base?!

  Ranthia hesitated, but the troll made no move. He didn’t even pick up his weapon, he just watched her confidently. He had been in control of their entire match, and now he was plainly waiting to see what she would do. What mattered most to her.

  Ranthia could only curse him, as she took off for the base. The shimagu puppets that had boxed her in simply parted and gave her room.

  And the troll stood there and watched her go.

  The base was a scene of chaos when she arrived. The bulk of the combat-capable legionaries were outside of the walls and the few that were trying to fight the therizinosaurus were plainly outmatched.

  Ranthia and her images surged through one of the gaps in the wall. [Echoes Reflected] let them roar out a challenge at the beast as… well, not quite one. Also, one of them definitely came off more as a squeak.

  The dinosaur still turned her way, which let her send a new image behind the dinosaur and shift to it. She lashed out with the spear the moment her perception changed and drove the tip into the dinosaur’s spine.

  The beast screeched in fury.

  One of the trio of legionaries that had been trying to fight the beast—bloodied but alive—called to Ranthia and threw her his knife. She caught it by the hilt, then leapt into the air. It wasn’t entirely elegant, but [Void Edge] took hold across the edge of the proper steel—a waste of a reliable blade—just before the knife pierced through the back of the beast’s neck.

  [You have slain a dinosaur [Therizinosaurus] (Forest, level 605)!]

  No shimagu kill? Ranthia risked a second cut with [Void Edge] from the same knife, but the blade shattered halfway through the slash. Fragments of it tore up her fingers, but no second kill notification came. It was probably just a tamed beast, but Ranthia had no time to waste on making sure.

  Instead, Ranthia put a fresh image on the wall and shifted to it—the spear was still in the dead dinosaur’s spine and did not somehow return to her hand, which was kind of a relief at that point. She had expected the situation to have worsened since she last surveyed the entire battlefield, but instead…

  The troll was nowhere to be seen, and the rest of the shimagu forces were in the process of withdrawing. For a terrible instant, Ranthia weighed her temptation to chase them down.

  But she hesitated. She glanced around at the legionaries, both those still beyond the walls, and the personnel still in their base. On another section of the wall, she spied the plainly shellshocked Subcommander who wasn’t doing a damned thing.

  They needed her. They all needed her.

  Ranthia took a deep breath and accepted that she needed to assume command.

  “Retrieval squads, find our wounded and get them to the [Healers]! You have full authority to pressgang any hale legionary you need to—we need to get our people back here as swiftly as possible!

  “You, find the old [Healer] and get him to the tent! I don’t care what condition he’s in; we need every hand we’ve got!

  “Subcommander, I need a full assessment of what we lost since the attacks began! Work with the [Analysts] and get it done!

  “Mud [Mages] on me! Pull what you need from my arcanite, but we need these walls back now!”

  Ranthia roared her orders as loudly as she could manage—she needed a Sound classer, but that had to go on the massive pile of things that she needed to handle later.

  She was, somehow, going to live. And she was going to do everything in her power to make sure no one else died. The shimagu had taken enough from them.

  She could deal with the reality of what she had just gotten herself into later, along with the implications of everything else that had just happened to her. Assuming that this madness wasn’t somehow some inexplicable and unprecedented tribulation for her class up or her nightmares suddenly showing true inventiveness instead of poorly remixing prior horrors.

  Gods and goddesses, she wished it was all just a nightmare.

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