The rest of the team were waiting for us when we entered the next room. This was where things would start to get real. Five racks of weaponry and armour stood around the circumference of the room, each with an Edged Weapon at their centre.

I had a visceral reaction when I saw the Tactical Hatchet that had saved my life on so many occasions on Mori Island. My hand ached to hold it again.

Back at home I’d built myself an axe-throwing cage to practice my skills if EDGE Force came knocking again. It had been a hit when I had mates over for beers, but it was a little more serious than that for me. Every morning I was out there in that cage for an hour after breakfast, practicing my axe throwing skils.

I vowed that I’d be ready if I was called on again.

Xiphos stood with her hands clasped behind her back as we walked into the room.

“I trust nothing in that conversation is relevant to the mission?” Xiphos asked.

Miranda shook her head, then spoke with a tone of command. “It’s been a long time since Hatchet and I have seen each other, so we just needed a minute. We’re ready to proceed with system induction now.”

I joined the end of the row of EDGE Force soldiers and mimicked Xiphos’s stance with my hands clasped behind my back.

Miranda retrieved a small multi-faceted piece of glass from a holster on her belt. It could have been glass or some kind of clear gemstone – I wasn’t quite sure. It was spherical, but cut in very deliberate and precise angles. A light burned within it, pure and white, unlike the violet light that corrupted those cultists on Mori Island.

There was a palpable feeling of power emanating from that sphere and the light within. Miranda held it up, then released it. To my surprise the sphere stayed exactly where Miranda let it go. The light burned brighter, but didn’t escape the intricate vertices carved on the outside of the sphere.

“Xiphos, place your hand on the spark and the induction will begin,” Miranda said.

Without missing a beat Xiphos stepped forward and took the sphere in her grip. Veins of bright white light burned through her skin, charring jagged lightning strikes in her flesh which healed seconds later. The light ran up and down Xiphos’s body before her eyes blazed alight, shining with the power of whatever EDGE Force had trapped in that sphere.

The light faded. Xiphos let go of the sphere and stepped back. She immediately raised a hand and made some motions in front of her. She likely had access to her inventory and skills panes already.

Xiphos grinned a lopsided smile. “Fearless Leader? That’s my class name?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Miranda asked.

“Not quite,” Xiphos replied with a dry chuckle. “If anyone on my team wasn’t shitting themselves out of fear, I wouldn’t be able to trust them.”

I found myself stepping forward with my hand outstretched before I could think about it.

The power that came with EDGE Force’s reality hacks was intoxicating. I’d spent six months trying to recapture the feeling that came with a maxed out Physique skill. Every time I looked in the mirror now, I didn’t feel like myself. The dysphoria was overwhelming some days.

I simultaneously didn’t feel like the me that existed before EDGE Force came along, and didn’t feel like the strong, capable warrior that I’d been after power levelling myself back on Mori Island.

Sure, I was better than I had been, but I still didn’t feel like me. I felt like I was someone pretending to be me, if that makes any kind of sense.

“One second,” Miranda said. She grabbed the spent sphere as it hung in the air and slipped it back into the sphere holster. “This one’s yours.”

I thought I saw a flash of purple light shimmer as Miranda pulled out the next sphere, but the next time I looked for the flash of colour it was gone.

Without hesitation I stepped forward and took the sphere in my hand.

Blinding pain erupted from the point of connection. I wanted to scream, but my mouth was shocked shut, like I’d just touched a live wire. I watched as the energy forked up my arm, burning its way towards my chest. Then everything was white.

A window appeared in front of my eyes, and it was all that I could see.

Anima integrating…

System initiating…

EDGE Augment deploying…

System induction complete.

Progression system integrating…

Progression system unlocked.

Progression notifications unlocked.

Inventory system integrating…

Inventory system unlocked.

Congratulations! You’ve received a new class: Wandering Scribe

Class Skill unlocked: Man’s Best Friend

As that last notification rolled by, I came back to my senses just in time to hear a familiar bark. I let go of the sphere and turned around to see Kaiser standing at the back of the room with his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.

“How long have you been there, you little troll?” I asked.

Kaiser ran right at me, stopped to spin around twice, stopped again, then surged right at Miranda. He jumped up and lashed her face with slobbery German Shephard doggy kisses.

Miranda’s Commander Cullen persona slipped as she hugged Kaiser, and gave him a kiss on his wet nose.

A glance back at the other EDGE Force team members showed a mix of confusion and discomfort. I felt like these folks were all military, and all of this business with the dog was highly irregular.

“It’s cool,” I said. “My class is something called Wandering Scribe, and my class skill is Man’s Best Friend.”

Kaiser turned around to look at me with that big dumb goofy dog grin.

“Don’t get a big head,” I warned him. “You and I both know you can be a jerk when you want to.”

Kaiser snorted dramatically.

“That dog can understand you?” Stiletto asked.

I went to start explaining, but Miranda had it in hand.

“My father brought Kaiser through from another plane of reality,” she explained. “He’s a being of pure anima, brought forth in an experiment run by Mnemtech in league with the Fellowship of Cosmic Truth. It was easy enough for us to integrate Kaiser into the system. He and Hatchet are a team.”

“What does your class skill do?” Naginata asked.

“That’s a great question,” I said, then summoned my status screen.

It was a lot different than last mission.

The nine skill trees were nowhere to be found. Instead, I had a single skill tree with five different focuses: Defense, Offense, Support, Utility and Modifiers. An icon right at the top of the tree showed a stylised picture of Kaiser, like he was in a cartoon or something. When I looked at that icon, a window appeared.

Man’s Best Friend

Class Skill

Imbue your familiar with anima. This doubles their attack and armour values, and commands them to attack your current target.

Cooldown: 2 minutes

“Oh wow, that’s awesome,” I said.

Xiphos grunted in a satisfied kind of way. “Not bad. I’ve never served with a class that uses a pet before.”

Kaiser growled in Xiphos’s direction.

“We don’t use that word to describe our relationship,” I said. “I don’t own Kaiser, and he doesn’t own me. We’re-” I almost said partners, but that didn’t reflect our relationship at all, so I used the words that felt right. “We’re family.”

Kaiser barked once, which was our established code for yes.

“He can understand English, by the way. So watch what you say about him,” I added.

“Inu wa nihongo ga hanasemasu ka?” Naginata asked.

Kaiser inclined his head to the side.

“Ah, so he does not understand Japanese,” Naginata said. “Only English?”

“That’s all I know how to speak,” I said.

Kaiser barked twice, which meant no.

“A little shorthand for all of you,” I said. “One bark means yes. Two barks means no. He’s just as smart as any of us, and as he likes to point out, sometimes he’s a hell of a lot smarter than me. He’s an asset to the team, and I’m damn glad he’s coming with us on this one.”

Kaiser rubbed my hand with his snout, so I gave him a scratch behind the ears.

I noticed that Xiphos looked a little different than the rest of the squad. She was outlined in blue, and I had the option to inspect her.

A window opened when I inspected her, which showed her class title, currently equipped armour and her class skill. It was something called All For One, and it increased the weapon damage, healing and class skill regeneration rates of all members of her party. It didn’t say by how much, though.

“All For One looks like a handy skill,” I said.

It also evoked one of the classic rules of tabletop gaming: never split the party. Having Xiphos around to regularly boost the team would encourage us to stick together.

It would also make us a lot weaker if we were split up.

“Yes,” Miranda said. “Your leader is the linchpin of the mission. Her skills boost all of yours.”

It was also a hefty incentive to keep Xiphos alive. Without her, the rest of us wouldn’t be as effective.

The rest of the team took turns getting their classes, and I made note of each of their class skills as they went.

Naginata’s class was Onna-Musha, but I had no idea what that meant. Her class skill was Battle Trance, which increased her reaction speed and increased her chance to parry melee attacks.

Khopesh’s class was called Ancient Warrior, and his class skill was Desert Shield. I misread it at first as Dessert Shield andmy mind conjured images of a giant pavlova shield. Then I read the description of the skill. When activated, Sands from the Sahara Desert formed a shield over Khopesh’s entire body, which made him invulnerable to most damage for 5 seconds.

That would be very handy to keep Khopesh alive.

Last but not least was Stiletto, whose class was called Shadow Assassin. His class skill, Cloak & Dagger, let him turn invisible for 5 seconds. Any edged weapon attack made from stealth then did quadruple damage.

Miranda took the sphere back. “Now that you’ve all received your classes and class skills, I’ll run through some of the differences between a solo and a team mission. You’ve all run solo missions before, but Hatchet and Stiletto have never run a team mission, and things work very differently.”

Miranda motioned on her tablet screen, which opened up another holographic display in the middle of the room.

“Your class skill is core to your survival,” Miranda continued. “Like solo missions, your level cap is 50, but you no longer obtain specific skill experience. Growth has been streamlined. Each defined action you take grants you experience, and that goes toward your overall level.”

Stiletto cleared his throat. “What’s a defined action?”

“Killing a monster, scoring a critical kill, picking a lock, stealthing through enemies undetected, discovering actionable intelligence, etcetera. The list goes on,” Miranda explained. “Each level you gain, you get a single skill point to invest in one of three main trees, and two ancillary trees. The main ones are Offense, Defense and Support. The two others are Modifiers and Utility.”

“What is the difference between a main tree and an ancillary tree?” I asked.

“Ancillary trees contain unique bonuses which modify your class. For example, eventually you’re going to be able to modify your class skill to open a portal between your location and the location of the enemy you want Kaiser to attack.”

The mention of portals hit me hard for a minute. Last time portals were the key to everything, whether they were to my creative nexus to get weapons and to power level, to Kaiser opening portals between places we’d already been, to Miranda ripping a hole from our reality into another.

That’s why I’d seen a tinge of purple in the light of the sphere. Somehow Miranda had saved a little bit of her mother’s power purely to give us an edge in this mission. EDGE Force would have known about Kaiser’s powers then, otherwise they’d never have been able to use this strange white anima to activate Kaiser’s innate anima abilities.

“That’s pretty awesome,” I said. “Portals, huh?”

Miranda nodded, but the knowing smile on her face said all I needed it to.

“There will be time to agonise over skill trees once we’ve arrived in the mission zone,” Xiphos said. “If you folks don’t have any further questions, I suggest we armour up and get this show on the road.”

I nodded. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified, but I’d also be telling a fib if I said I wasn’t a little bit excited about getting back out there.

There were no more questions, so we suited up in our EDGE Force combat gear. This new combat gear was heavy duty and insulated, which gave me the impression that Romania would probably be pretty cold. If we were just coming into Summer, they were probably heading into Winter.

I took my Tactical Hatchet off the rack and equipped it. I reached back with the hatchet and felt the mount pull at the head of the weapon, snapping it into place.

“Make sure you check the back of the rack too,” Miranda said to me.

Two weapons waited for me on the other side. My signature pistol, Ironbark, and hanging beside it, the shotgun called Gravedigger.

The shotgun was no ordinary weapon. It was an anima construct, pulled forth from one of the worlds I’d written a series of urban horror novels in. I figured that it must have disappeared after the events of Mori Island, but here it was. Still as beautiful and powerful as ever.

As I looked around at the other members of my EDGE Force team, I got the feeling that they all had their own styles.

Xiphos’s sword hung in a scabbard on her hip. She carried a wicked looking assault rifle across her chest.

Stiletto had a pair of daggers tucked into his jacket and a massive sniper rifle hanging from the mount on his back.

Khopesh held a strange curved sword unlike anything I’d ever seen before. The blade curved in an arc, which then attached to the haft like a normal sword. It looked like some kind of strange fusion of sword and axe and evoked the feel of an ancient weapon.

Naginata’s weapon was different again. It comprised of a staff, with a short but gently curved blade at the end. The subtly curved style of the blade reminded me of a katana, wakizashi, or tanto – the weapons used by the samurai in ancient Japan.

Well, not really all that ancient, considering the samurai existed all the way up until the end of Japan’s feudal age toward the end of the 1800s.

The naginata was graceful and formidable, just like the weapon’s namesake.

Each of us also had an earpiece, a torch, and an EDGE Force bag, which granted me 10 inventory slots just like last mission.

“Once everyone’s ready, follow me to the translocation chamber,” Miranda said.