The next morning, Blake found himself in the best mood he’d been in since he’d left the bunker. Though his current situation had only marginally improved—having a fake hand was much better than no hand, but even having two real hands didn’t magically make him meaningfully safer; he was still being hunted, as far as he knew—this morning was the first morning where he felt a smidgen of hope again. He wasn’t out of the woods just yet, literally or figuratively, but his discoveries gave him new tools to use towards his goals. Now all he had to do to make meaningful progress towards those goals was to put in the necessary work.

In order to do that work, however, he needed resources. The metal he’d carried with him these days was barely enough to make an arm and a small jug of water, while the single small crystal he’d taken from the bunker barely had enough juice to run his arm for fifteen minutes of constant movement before needing a while to recharge. That was alright, though, because he didn’t intend to use that crystal for his arm, anyway—that had just been what he’d used for testing. Now that the testing and experimentation were done for the time being, he could shift his focus to resource acquisition, starting with what was available right in his cave.

Blake had found that he had a bad tendency to tunnel in on the object of study while in Hyper Mode, but not even that myopic focus could keep him from noticing the sparkling shimmers emanating from somewhere deeper into the cave. He’d forced himself to ignore those signals for two days, but he knew what they signified, as well as the meaning behind the large grorange presence shining from deep below the cave floor. All he had to do was go get it if he could.

Slowly and cautiously, Blake delved deeper into the cave. Quickly, the ambient light faded into darkness, and Blake found himself groping in the darkness. He stopped after a moment and mentally smacked himself upside the head before heading back into the light. Leaving the cave, he scrounged up some fallen branches, started a tiny fire, and then used that to light a larger branch for use as a makeshift torch. He vaguely recalled something about flame in underground caves being a bad idea for some reason, but he decided to run that risk in the interest of not blindly tripping and breaking his head open against a rock.

Returning to the darkness, Blake made his way further into the cave, occasionally dipping into Hyper Mode to track his targets. He encountered the first one only about a hundred and fifty feet past where he’d been sleeping and experimenting, on the other end of a tight, winding corridor that left down and to the left. The crystal jutted out about halfway from the surrounding rock from what he could tell. How was he to get it out without breaking it?

Grasping the shaft of the crystal with his good hand wrapped in a bit of his shirt, he gave it a heavy tug. After a few moments of resistance, the long, hexagonal crystal slid from the surrounding rock with a rough scraping sound. Blake inspected his prize with satisfaction. While not approaching the size of the main crystals back in the bunker, at about an inch and a half in diameter and around a foot long, this crystal easily dwarfed the tiny sliver he’d been using for his experiments so far. He could feel the energy thrumming inside it, an order of magnitude greater than what he’d had to work with until now, just waiting to be used.

Proceeding deeper, Blake soon found another crystal, though this one was not so easily acquired. Visible only in Hyper Mode, it lay perhaps a foot deep into the solid stone below his feet. Blake pondered the best way to get to it. He could disassemble his left arm and make a hammer or a pickaxe, but something inside him rebelled at the idea of giving up his fake hand so soon after getting it, even if temporarily. Besides, right now, his metal limb was busy serving as an amazing torch holder. He didn’t even have to worry about the fire getting too close; it wasn’t like it could get burned.

Then, Blake had an idea and looked all around him to confirm, spreading his uncanny metal sense outward as best he could. Indeed, perhaps twenty feet away up and to his left, he found the grorange glow he’d noticed earlier—more of the same metal that his arm was made from! A lot more!

Mentally, Blake reached out to the metal and liquefied it, commanding it to flow to him. The grorange blob squirmed slightly in his sight, seemingly trying to creep closer but having a difficult time with all the rock in the way. He noticed that one small sliver was able to make better progress than the rest—a crack in the rock or something like that, most likely—and redirected the entire mass to push through in that space.

The metal inched closer as he guided it through the weak points of the surrounding stone, slowly but steadily, until it all came to a grinding halt about two feet from him. Blake ran his makeshift torch up and down the cave wall, looking for a crack, but found nothing. Probing on the other side with the metal produced similar results. With a sigh, he set down his burning branch and unhooked his arm. It looked like he would need to go without it just for a little while.

The arm wriggled and shifted, forming into a pickaxe with a lethally sharp point—if a bit small and light. Blake grabbed it with his good hand and went to town on the wall, letting loose upon the poor stone some of his built-up frustrations. Under assault by anger-buttressed super strength, the stone did not last long. With one final swing, Blake smashed a hole through the last of the rock between him and his desired resources. As he watched the grey metal spurt and ooze from the hole, he wondered if this was how it felt to strike oil back in the day.

Reforming the pickaxe into his handy prosthetic, he took some of the new metal and created a much larger and heavier combination pickaxe and sledgehammer, and within a few minutes, he held a second new crystal in his hand.

The glow of the new crystals was enough to light the darkness with a dim glow, so he put out the improvised torch and ventured further. Armed with his new mining equipment, he was able to grab everything he could see in relatively short order. In the end, he ended up with sixteen new crystals of varying size and a lump of metal about six or seven times the size of what he’d had to work with until now. All in all, the haul did not permanently solve his resource problems, but it did mitigate them for a while.

The first thing he did was to immediately switch out the crystal in his mechanical arm for a much larger one, letting him widen the channels to provide more juice to the joint motors while also increasing the time between required charges. With a little more work, he believed he could get the circuitry balanced to the point that its power consumption when idle would be lower than the recharge rate of the crystal, which would let him never have to worry about the crystal running out of power.

With that done, he could get down to the second order of business: weaponry. If he could use these crystals to make even a rudimentary gun, it would help in so many ways. Not only would it make him safer, but it would also help address the food problem—he was feeling rather hungry again, and one only ran across so many easily scared merchants that conveniently dropped food behind in a single week.

Making a gun turned out to be both easier and harder than Blake had anticipated. On one hand, because of the metal pathways’ magnet-like properties, turning a tube into a railgun that shot out a bullet at deadly speed took mere minutes. The hard part ended up being the rest of it. Blake had never held a gun before, and designing something that was comfortable to hold and aim, allowed for quick firing, and could hold a good number of bullets proved to be more difficult than he had originally imagined. If the timing was off, the gun would jam. If the balance was off, he’d miss his target—though with his aim, perhaps that would mean he would accidentally hit his target instead. Compensating for recoil also provided a challenge.

As he tested it, Blake found it strange how little noise the gun made. Because it did not use explosives, the loud bang was replaced by a heavy whoosh of displaced air. There wasn’t even a sonic boom, as he could get the bullets up to the edge of subsonic speeds but no further. He either lacked the energy or the technological know-how to accelerate the projectiles past the sound barrier. Not that it seemed to matter; his bullets were large and, judging by his tests, did more than enough damage for now. He could always shrink them if he really needed to throw them faster, but at the moment, the less noise he made, the better.

Sometime in the early afternoon, he declared his gun to be “good enough”, manufactured several magazines of thirty bullets each, and put it down. The final creation resembled his idea of an assault rifle—though if he had to be honest, it was based more on his memories of weapons in military first person shooters than anything he’d ever seen in real life. Built using the biggest crystal he had for maximum power, it could fire a single shot roughly every quarter of a second and held enough charge to empty every ammo magazine he had made and still have juice left over. It would more than do for the moment. Now, he just hoped he’d be able to find the time to practice with it. Even with super strength to contain the recoil, he found himself only hitting close to his targets maybe one out of every five shots.

Next, Blake decided he needed something to guard his back and protect him as he slept. He needed some traps. A warning system of some sort would be nice, too. Luckily, these sorts of things he could manage without even needing to use a crystal.

For early detection, Blake chose to create a few spools of incredibly thin wire, upon which he would hang several small bells. Whether or not anybody outside of a movie would fall for such tricks—or if the sound would even wake him up—remained to be seen, but they cost almost none of his metal to make, so he figured it was worth a try.

For his traps, Blake eventually figured his best option was to make a rendition of the standard bear trap. With his metal-shaping ability, he believed he could create something truly powerful without needing to use a single crystal, which in his eyes was a huge benefit over his other ideas.

First, he formed the pressure plate, followed by the trigger mechanism, which he connected to a pair of springs, one for each “jaw”. Finally, he crafted two large semicircles of sharp, serrated teeth and attached them to the springs. His bear trap was a simple device, likely crude and unsophisticated when compared to modern traps back on Earth, but, like his gun, he figured it was good enough for now.

Taking his prototype out of the cave, he wandered the surrounding area, looking for a log large enough for testing purposes. He didn’t find one, but he did find a live tree thick enough for his purposes two hills over. After running back to his cave to make an axe, he returned and—after a quick apology to the plant—felled the tree with a few powerful swings. A few more blows turned the bottom half of the trunk into three separate logs, each approximately the thickness of his thigh and long enough that they went from the ground up past his knee. As stand-ins for actual human legs, this was about the best he could manage—not great, but something. At least the tree was softwood, he told himself.

With a grunt, Blake forced the prototype trap open, setting it down once he felt the side click into place. Taking the first of his logs, he held it vertically over the trap and then lowered it like it was the foot and leg of an oblivious tracker. The trap sprang up with stunning force, almost as if it were an ambush predator leaping for unsuspecting prey, and slammed shut around the wood.

Blake stumbled back in surprise, the log falling from his hands. He hadn’t expected that much force from his simple creation. In fact, looking at it again, Blake realized he’d made his trap too strong. The teeth had sliced through the wood about two-thirds of the way up with such power that the test log had become two test logs.

Maybe it was a stupid thought, given that he was being hunted by people that wanted him dead, but Blake didn’t want to be responsible for separating people from their limbs. He knew just how much it sucked to lose a body part. De-limbing had never been the purpose of his bear trap, anyway. What he wanted was for the teeth to dig into the victim’s muscle and hold them, not slice all the way through. This amount of force would only be good for people wearing armor, and he hadn’t seen much armor here outside of the occasional chest plate like Yarec’s.

Removing the lower two-thirds of the log from the trap, Blake went about weakening the device a tad. After shrinking the springs and lowering the sharpness of the teeth, he took his second test log and tried again. This time, the teeth didn’t even sink all the way in, meaning he’d overshot his target again. After partially undoing the nerfs, he tried once more with his last log and found himself satisfied with the results—the teeth were fully embedded into the wood, but not too deep. As soft as this wood might be, he knew a human calf would provide even less resistance. A trap like this would create an incapacitating injury, but hopefully not slice through the whole limb. Hopefully. He made a second one before deciding he couldn’t spare any more metal for the moment.

Now that he had something for offense and some options to guard his “camp”, as it were, Blake decided to round out his kit with something maybe more important than either of them, something that would have saved him from losing an arm if he’d had it during his escape. It was time to build some armor.

The plan was simple. First, he’d create the basic protection, then perhaps he’d add in some motors to assist in movement. After that, he’d move on to adding some simple weapons and other functions. He figured that would take him the rest of the day, even in Hyper Mode.

But first, Blake decided to run a few more experiments. He fully expected to use all his remaining crystals to power his armor, so if he wanted to test anything else, now was the time. There were, in fact, several things he still wanted to test. After all, every experiment he’d run so far only factored in a single crystal. How did multiple crystals interact with each other? Perhaps there were even more important secrets to uncover!

With that in mind, Blake took out his test cube from before and reconfigured it for several new tests. He started with two crystals connected in sequence, one’s energy flowing into the other crystal before traversing the circuit in the cube and returning to the first. After observing for a while, he determined that this configuration didn’t seem any different than the same circuit with just one crystal.

For his second experiment, he moved on to a circuit that featured two crystals in a parallel arrangement instead. Both crystals had a channel running from them, which merged quickly into a single channel and completed the circuit through the test cube before splitting back into two to connect to each crystal again. For consistency’s sake, Blake made the width of each section equal, so the single channel running through the test cube was the same diameter as each of the channels that fed into it or forked off of it.

Interestingly, he found that the lights behaved differently at different spots. Those leaving the crystals were packed together up to the point where the two channels formed back into one, slowly filtering into the main circuit like cars backed up in a traffic jam before a lane merge. He’d determined already that every channel only had so much bandwidth—which was determined by the diameter of the pathway— but it was interesting to watch the consequences of that manifest before his eyes.

Meanwhile, where the single channel split back into two, the opposite seemed to occur. The lights split roughly equally in either direction, seemingly rushing faster through the less congested pathway as if pulled back into the crystal. Notably, each of the two crystals pushed out enough lights to fill their respective channels, regardless of what bottlenecks might exist down the line, until their channels could hold no more. He made a note to remember this when creating his armor. He needed to either make sure to shrink parallel feed channels or enlarge the main channels to compensate.

Blake thought back to the first test with the crystals connected sequentially. The channel he’d used to connect the two crystals in that test had been the same width as the rest of the circuit. What would happen if he were to enlarge just the channel that went from the first crystal to the second, increasing that bandwidth, while leaving the rest the same? Curious, Blake reverted the circuitry to that test and tried it.

Watching through Hyper Mode, he observed the lights as they flowed from the first crystal into the second and then out into the circuit before flowing back into the first—the standard circuit he’d used before. Next, he widened the connecting channel, watching as the flow of lights from the first crystal into the second tripled, while the flow out form the second remained the same. More lights were entering the second crystal than were leaving it. Had he found a way to speed up recharging a depleted crystal?

Eager to push his discoveries further, Blake added two more crystals to the mix and connected them to the second crystal in the same way as the first. Now, the first crystal had two more helpers, all three of them feeding lights into the second crystal at the same time. Even more lights than before pushed into the second crystal, all while its output still remained the same.

After watching for a subjective minute, he could tell that the process would take a while before he would be able to see anything notable. Unwilling to wait through the severe time dilation of Hyper Mode, he temporarily dropped back into real-time and began planning the specifics of his armor to pass the time.

The first thing he needed to do was make sure his armor integrated with his left arm, he decided. Not only would it be useful for one set of controls to work with both, but he could even use the armor to encase and stabilize the hand better—it still slipped a little sometimes. Beyond that, he needed to make sure to focus on the feet and balance, as his armor would do him little good if he just fell over and-

Something nearby caught his attention, pulling him from his thoughts. He focused his senses, trying to pinpoint what it was, and for a moment didn’t find anything. Then he heard it again, only louder now: a high-pitched whine, one that reminded him of the sound he would notice just on the edge of his hearing when he turned on a television, except he couldn’t tell if this whine was in his ears, his head, or both. One thing he could discern, however, was that it was getting louder, and fast, the whine morphing almost into a shriek of something under extreme stress.

His test cube! That was where it was coming from! Blake dipped into Hyper Mode for the briefest of moments, only to find disaster. The three source crystals seemed fine as they continued to force-feed motes into the receiving crystal. No, the cry reverberating through his skull was coming from the receiving crystal—one glance was all it took to set off alarm bells screaming through Blake’s mind, body, and soul. The crystal blazed with a blinding light from trillions upon trillions of lights packed so tightly within it that it looked like it was going to burst. No, it was going to burst. The shriek he was hearing was the sound of the crystal about to go the way of an overtaxed boiler in an old west steam train.

Instinct kicked in and Blake dropped out of Hyper Mode, grabbed the test cube, and chucked it out of the cave as quickly as he could. An ear-shattering “BLAM!” echoed across the quiet countryside as the cube detonated about fifty feet away before it could even land.

As the ringing in his ears subsided, Blake thought he heard the pitter-patter of debris raining from the sky. He stepped back outside to assess the damage and couldn’t believe his eyes. A crater over six feet wide and several feet deep had been blown into the forest floor. The cube hadn’t even been on the ground when it had erupted! Tiny shredded bits of metal scattered about the surrounding landscape were all the remnants of Blake’s test cube that he could find, with no piece larger than half an inch. He took several deep, trembling breaths and suppressed a shudder. Just a second or two of hesitation and Blake would have become little more than a splatter on the cave wall.

Well, there went his test cube, and four crystals as well—a non-insignificant blow to his resources. On the bright side... if he ever needed to make something go boom, now he knew of a way to do it. In fact...

Blake grabbed three crystals from his collection. These three were the smallest of all of them, even a bit smaller than the one he’d taken from the bunker. He hadn’t known what to do with these, since their tiny size and lack of power meant they would be harder to work with, but now he could see one very good use. Placing them inside a metal shell, he set up a converging circuit similar to the one that had almost brought about his death but left the connection between them incomplete. Instead, he added a bit sticking out of the side that, when properly rotated and then pressed into the shell, would lock in and complete the circuit.

He couldn’t afford to make more than one “grenade” at the moment. Even that one was pushing it, but since it was his smallest, weakest crystals, he figured it wasn’t the biggest loss. It would be useful if he ever got into a fight that required a bit more destructive power than normal, though he’d have to be careful—it would be quite loud and draw plenty of attention his way if the cube was anything to go by. The cube... that had already exploded... with an incredibly loud bang... that would be heard for miles and miles...

“Oh, FUCK!” Blake cried out, sprinting around the cave like a madman and grabbing everything he had. He’d have to make armor later. Right now, he needed to get the hell out of town before his little accident brought all of Otharia down on his head.

Two bear traps, one gun he didn’t know how to use well plus some magazines, a grenade that probably worked, some wires with bells on them, a handful of spare crystals, and a heavy lump of metal... that was all he had to defend himself. He figured he might be able to handle a few attackers with that loadout, but only a few, and Blake was willing to bet that more people than he could handle were converging on his location at that very moment.

Quickly, he took the metal lump and grew two sets of chains from it to serve as straps, letting him carry the lump like a large backpack. With his abilities, he could meld his supplies into the solid metal and carry it all around in one piece while the supplies would stay protected inside. First, he melted his water jug into the rest, then he inserted his collected crystals and everything else save his gun and bear traps. If he needed something, he would remake it later. Picking up the traps with his mechanical hand and seizing the gun in his right, he picked a random direction and sprinted that way, leaving the cave behind for good.

“I have to say, I never expected to be working with you again, Yarec. I’d thought you were avoiding us.”

The words, barely audible, shocked Blake to a standstill. He’d been running for almost an hour, going as quickly as he could manage without making too much noise while he navigated the rough terrain, when he’d heard the gruff male voice coming from over a nearby ridge. Had he heard that correctly? “Yarec”? That Yarec?

“Yeah, what happened to you?” a higher-pitched female voice chimed in. “Ever since you got promoted, it’s like we aren’t good enough for you anymore.”

“Now is not the time or place for this.”

That voice! It was him after all. Blake’s left stump began to itch beneath his prosthetic as certain terrible memories threatened to resurface before he willfully shoved them back down. He slowly crawled up to the ridge’s lip to take a peek and listen better. He’d need to skedaddle as far from these people as possible shortly, but right now, their unguarded conversation was his best shot at gleaning some much-needed information about his pursuers and his situation. As soon as that changed, he’d slink away and nobody would be the wiser. For a moment, he considered setting up some bell wires between various trees and rocks behind him, but decided against it; it would take too long and he didn’t want to risk a bell going off by accident and alerting the others.

“We’re out in the middle of nowhere, waiting,” the female voice shot back. “What better time would there be?”

“Why are you in such a bad mood, anyway?” the non-Yarec man added. “You’ve been like this since we met up a few hours ago. Still angry about how the Elseling got away?”

Sitting down below him were three people: two men and a woman. One of them was Yarec, looking more disgruntled than Blake had ever seen him—and shockingly uninjured, given the ending of their fight. He was dressed largely like what Blake imagined a hunter or a scout from the Middle Ages, with a cloak around his shoulders, a tunic and pants made of rugged brown cloth, and high leather boots that went up almost to his knees. The only thing that stood out was the cloak, a deep blue with an elaborate yellow pattern stitched into it. The other two were dressed much as he was and were about his age as well, but he couldn’t make out too much about them through the leaves.

Three Apostles. Great news; he’d done so well last time with just the one.

“Enough,” Yarec replied. “We should focus on resting until High Apostle Atricia returns. We are close and the hunt will likely be long and arduous.”

“You’ve really changed, huh,” the woman said.

“I failed and embarrassed myself in the eyes of the highest leaders of the Church!” he snapped back. “Forgive me if I am not in the mood for banter when the Elseling is roaming free and attacking caravans because I underestimated him.”

“Alright, calm down, both of you,” the other man cut in. “Yarec, you said something earlier about special weapons? Now would be a good time to explain.”

“Agreed. Yusari, take these,” Yarec said with a grunt as he pulled out a pair of very solid and heavy stone maces.

“What’s this?” Yusari asked as she grabbed them and swung them about with far more ease than the considerably larger Yarec. “Ooooh, these are solid! I love their heft! But, what’s wrong with my regular weapons?”

“The Elseling is highly dangerous. He can alter the form and strength of metal. Your maces would be useless if he made them soft the way he did to the guards’ spears during his escape from Eflok.”

“Oh, exciting!” the woman chirped.

“Yusari, take this seriously for once, please. This isn’t a spar for your amusement,” the other man said. “Yarec, I thought you reported him as a Feeler, not an Observer. Are you saying that he didn’t rip through those shackles with his own strength?”

“No, you would understand if you could inspect their weapons. His shackles and the portcullis through which he fled also appear as if they were melted under a hot flame. He must be a Weaver.”

As Blake eavesdropped on his enemies discussing his awesomeness, he took a moment to study his surroundings. He could see two easy routes the Otharians could take to reach his position from the ground below—one path from the left and one from the right, each about fifty feet from his central position. The cliff in the middle separating him from the Otharians was far too steep for anybody to climb, at least not swiftly enough to matter in this case.

He found himself rethinking his decision to not lay down traps. While setting up the bells would take too long, he figured he could at least place one bear trap on each path, just in case. Unlike the wires, it would be quick and easy. After pulling both devices open, he picked up one of the jagged-toothed devices in his left hand while keeping his gun in his right. As silently as he could, he crept towards the left side of the ridge.

“A Weaver?! That’s impossible!” he heard Yusari snort. “There’s no way he Observed while in restraints made of tucrenyx! Nobody can do that!”

“And yet, he did. He also hit me so hard that I ended up with at least twenty broken bones and a pulverized sternum.”

“Are you sure you’re up for this?”

“I’m fine. They’re almost fully healed now—enough for me to participate, at least.”

Blake couldn’t believe his ears. How many days had it been since their fight? Maybe five?! And he was saying that he was almost fully healed?! What insanity was this?

“Still, to think that a Weaver exists who is that powerful in both aspects...” the other man said solemnly. “And that he can act even when bound by that horrid metal... May Othar protect us this day.”

Blake paused for a moment, registering the metal’s name in his mind. “Tucrenyx”. He liked the sound of it. Still keeping an ear on the conversation, Blake bent down and set the trap by the left edge of the ridge, making sure to camouflage it as best he could with some leaves and small branches. Then, he began to slowly make his way back up to his original spot.

“I cut off one of his arms, so he should be weaker than before, but just in case, I requested and was granted a dose of chimirin.”

“Are you insane?!?” not-Yarec exclaimed. “You know what happens to somebody after they take that!”

“It’s only if there’s no other option.”

“You’ll die!”

“Kirr, enough. He’s made his decision already.”

Blake didn’t understand what all the fuss was about as he slowly and quietly made his way back towards the top of the ridge. He spotted his other bear trap just where he’d left it, right beside his pack near his hiding spot. Once he set it up on the right side, he’d feel a bit better about his safety as he continued to listen to the argument brewing down below.

The sound of crunching leaves and snapping twigs behind him sent a chill down his spine. Blake spun about to find an older woman in her forties emerging from the foliage about forty feet downhill. Her clothes resembled those of the three Apostles but with an even more detailed and elaborate design on her deep blue cloak that indicated a higher status of some sort. As Blake locked eyes with the woman, he remembered that Yarec had mentioned a “High Apostle Atricia” earlier, though Blake had been too distracted at the time to recognize the significance of the statement. Suddenly, he immensely regretted not setting up the alarm wires.

For a moment neither one of them moved, the moment seeming to freeze. Then, the woman opened her mouth and shouted in a booming, commanding voice, “Apostles, to me!”, breaking the spell that had been cast over the scene.

Blake’s right arm shot out, lifting his gun to point in her direction. Steadying it with his fake left hand, he pulled the trigger and didn’t stop squeezing until the magazine ran dry. Of the thirty rounds within, most struck wood, rock, and dirt. This was to be expected. Blake had never fired a gun before that morning; between his unfamiliarity, the heavy recoil, and the sudden nature of his actions, the quality of his aim left much to be desired. However, as the saying went, quantity had a quality all its own. The High Apostle’s body fell to the ground, a bloody hole sprouting in her throat.

A litany of profanities running through his mind, Blake rushed the final few feet to his sack and pulled out his one experimental grenade and a new magazine. To think that, just hours ago, he’d chosen to alter his bear traps to be less lethal. Now, a mere moment after encountering his first adversary since escaping the city, he’d already doubled his murder count. Part of him laughed scornfully, calling him foolish and naive. Another part chided him, saying that he wouldn’t have more blood on his hands if he had just run away as he had before. Well, while he couldn’t undo what was done, he could still belatedly heed the latter’s words and escape before things got any uglier.

The Apostles below had surely heard the High Apostle’s shout and would be coming for him any moment now. Blake needed something to buy him a momentary window to get away. Lacking options, he turned to his single, untested grenade in the hopes that it would do the trick. Activating it, he chucked it over the edge without even looking and went to pick up his pack of supplies. A few seconds later, a loud bang reverberated through the air, accompanied by several alarmed shouts.

For a fraction of a second, Blake thought he was free. He thought wrong. Just as he leaned over to pick up his metal with his supplies inside, a shadow passed over him. Spinning around, Blake looked up just in time to see a tiny blond woman descending towards him from above with two stone maces in her hands and a toothy grin filled with malice plastered on her face. To his dismay, he realized he’d still been thinking of the Otharians as if they were just regular Earth people, people who couldn’t jump twenty or more feet into the air. The ridge had never protected him at all.

The woman landed just beside him and brought both maces down at him with ferocious power. Blake jumped to his right at the last second, barely dodging the brutal attack. A tremor rumbled through the nearby ground and threatened to disrupt his balance as twin plumes of dirt burst forth from the impacts. Almost immediately, she spun towards Blake again, swinging her weapons straight at Blake’s left side. Blake braced himself and gulped as he raised his left forearm to block, hoping to hope that his new arm would be hard and durable enough to take the hit. The stone weapons smashed into his prosthetic with a resounding clang and Blake felt intense vibrations shoot through his entire body, but somehow, the arm held.

“Buh?” the woman—who had to be ‘Yusari’—blurted out when Blake didn’t go flying, his powerful legs letting him hold his position.

Stepping forward and planting on his left foot, Blake delivered a mighty kick with his right foot to the woman’s side. With a shout she flew down the ridge, crashing through branches and bushes on her way down before bouncing off a rock and tumbling just out of his view. Somehow, the diminutive fighter had held on to both her weapons. Blake couldn’t help but be impressed. He doubted he would have been able to do the same if in her place.

Before he could even admire his greatest kick since fifth-grade kickball, Blake heard the sound of footsteps coming around the left side of the ridge, followed by a sharp cry of agony. Looking through the gaps between the rocks and foliage, Blake found his personal nemesis Yarec frantically wrestling with a set of metal jaws clamping down upon his calf. Blake couldn’t help but feel a shiver of vindictive delight at the sight of the man’s pain.

That was his chance. Blake felt a tinge of regret about killing the High Apostle, and he doubted he’d feel good about the violence he’d have to do to the others in order to survive, but Yarec was a different story. Blake would feel no guilt about what he was about to do. The barrel of his railgun swung upwards to point towards the one man he despised more than any other.

Just before he could pull the trigger, the sound of something whistling through the air caught the edge of his hearing. Twisting and throwing himself toward the ground, Blake felt something cold zip by his cheek and leave a small, thin cut on his face before smacking into a nearby rock and cracking in half. He glanced at the clear, gleaming remains of what appeared to be an icicle with dismay. The enemy had a ranged attacker.

Pushing himself back to his feet, Blake turned to find a man sporting a golden, bushy mane and a full matching beard—the heretofore unseen “Kirr”—glaring at him by the right end of the ridge. The man wasted no time as a tiny sliver of ice began to form between his palms.

His heart pounding from another brush with death, Blake immediately placed the blond atop his priority list. He knew that the range of his gun was his greatest advantage; Kirr’s existence nullified that advantage significantly, turning an already deadly scenario into something far worse. The man needed to be taken out of the picture as soon as possible. Luckily, the man stood in the open without any nearby cover—having not witnessed Blake’s killing of the High Apostle, he likely didn’t recognize the gun or know what it could do—and Blake wasn’t going to let the Otharian’s mistake slip by.

“I was right!” a familiar female voice laughed from above him, sending a spike of panic through Blake’s racing mind before he could even bring his arm up and take aim. He leaped desperately down the slope, barely avoiding two large stone bludgeons crashing down upon him as Yusari landed where he’d stood just a split second prior. The small woman rose from her landing crouch, blood dripping down her face from a large gash in her forehead, and giggled. The wound didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest as she watched him with a gaze that he could only describe as ‘unhinged delight’. “You’re going to be so much fun!”

Blake swiftly backpedaled as the woman launched herself at him, a demented glint in her eye and an ecstatic leer on her lips. Blake pointed his gun at the swiftly approaching figure, only to hear the soft whistle of airborne chilly death approaching him from his right once more. Instead of firing, he dodged and weaved desperately, dancing a deadly tango with his overenthusiastic partner while her friend took potshots at his exposed flanks. Together, the two of them forced him off the ridge and down into the nearby forest. Blake just thanked his lucky stars that Yarec was too busy dealing with the bear trap to make this even worse.

Blake’s heart pounded in his chest as he backpedaled, sweat dripping down his forehead and threatening to get in his eyes. Even without Yarec’s contribution, he was in dire straits. Yusari’s movements lacked finesse, but she made up for that with a heaping spoonful of power and fervor that made every blow potentially deadly. Meanwhile, her speed nearly matched his and her agility far outstripped what he could manage. Every time he would try to get off a shot at her, she would zig out of the way at the last possible second, jumping off of rocks, kicking off tree trunks, and flitting about like some crazed, super-strong hummingbird.

When she wasn’t avoiding his counterattacks, she was breathing down his neck, keeping him from making an escape. She rarely attacked with both maces at the same time after that initial attack, instead trying to get Blake to block one weapon with his metal arm so she could go after the fleshier parts of his body with her other hand. Blake found himself wishing he had more metal available to make a shield or something along those lines, but other than his arm and his gun, all the rest of his tucrenyx sat in a large lump back up the hill.

Blake darted behind a tree, hoping that the foot-wide trunk could give him a second of respite with which to recollect himself. Instead, the tree trunk suddenly exploded, splinters as long as his hand flying everywhere. Only his enhanced reactions prevented a certain three-inch-long piece of wooden shrapnel from embedding into his left eye, and several other pieces lodged themselves in his arms and torso. Luckily, the wounds seemed shallow, less than an inch deep, but the new pain only added more pressure on his already stressed mind. A cackle caused him to reflexively jump back as a mace swung through the space he’d occupied just a moment before. There was no doubt that the woman was enjoying every second of this. Blake was decidedly not.

The icing on his shit cake, however, was not Yusari but rather Kirr. The Otharian ice mage had taken up a position at the top of the ridge to get better sightlines—putting himself just a step or two away from Blake’s second bear trap and lump of excess tucrenyx in the process—and seemed content to sit back and take potshots while Yusari commanded the majority of Blake’s attention. The man had an infuriating ability to strike right at the worst moment, usually when the woman would overextend and leave herself open to retaliation for a split second. It didn’t take long for Blake to realize that this wasn’t an accident. Each time Blake would spot something to exploit, a perfectly timed ice spike would come flying his way and force a sudden change of plans. Yusari would do the damage, but Kirr was the one holding everything together. Blake knew his best chance at taking down this dynamic duo would be to remove Kirr from the equation first, but how?

A sudden flash of inspiration presented Blake with a solution, though a risky one. If he wanted to stop Kirr, he needed to take a page out of Yarec’s book. First, he reached out with his powers, feeling for the large chunk of metal just a few feet away from his target. To his relief, he found that his range did extend far enough to control the metal, though doing anything would take much more effort from this distance. That was alright; what he wanted was more than simple enough to manage, even while avoiding Yusari’s constant assault.

The next chance he got, Blake stepped behind another tree trunk. All he needed was a split second where his opponent was attacking something that wasn’t him, and Yusari was kind enough to oblige, smashing through the obstruction with gusto. Taking advantage of the tiny window created by the exploding foliage and his distracted opponent, Blake spun out of the way of an oncoming icicle, raised his rifle, squeezed the trigger... and missed. That was fine—expected, even. Given the split-second nature of his window and his complete lack of training and experience with firearms, Blake had never hoped on hitting the distant Apostle in the first place. The area around him, on the other hand...

As Blake had hoped, several of his bullets struck the rocks to the Apostle’s left, startling him and making him take a step back. What the man hadn’t accounted for, unfortunately for him, was the low wall of tucrenyx Blake had silently extruded from the nearby metal. About a foot tall, the obstacle sent Kirr crashing backwards to the earth, right around where Blake’s second bear trap sat, waiting hungrily.

Then, the screaming started. From his vantage point, Blake couldn’t see exactly onto what part of Kirr the trap’s tucrenyx teeth had chomped, but it seemed bad; Blake was pretty sure he’d seen both of the man’s legs unharmed, which bode poorly for his more vital organs above.

“Kirr!” Yusari cried out, a panic-stricken look on her face. Against Blake’s expectations, the small woman seemed to tunnel-vision on her squadmate, making a frantic dash towards the ice mage in an effort to save him from disaster.

“Yusari!” Yarec shouted as she turned her back on her adversary. “Look out!”

Blake didn’t know why Yusari did what she did. Perhaps the Otharian hadn’t fully internalized how his weapon worked. Perhaps she was still thinking of it as something that fired as fast as a bow and that her great speed, agility, and small stature would be enough to make it up the hill unscathed. Whatever the reason, Blake wasn’t about to let such a gift go to waste. He emptied his mostly full magazine in her direction.

Yusari’s body shook as three rounds drove through her chest. She staggered, looking down at the holes in her ribcage in confusion, before finally toppling like a stone.

“NO!!” Yarec howled, his voice overflowing with agony.

Blake ignored him for the moment and instead headed towards Kirr and the nearby metal. The ice-wielder glared at him with pain-clouded eyes, his free right hand desperately wrestling with the bear trap as it bit down upon his left shoulder, upper arm, and the left side of his torso. It looked as if he’d fallen on the device armpit-first, which struck Blake as rather nasty way to trigger a trap like this. Blood covered the Otharian’s chest and side, with more dripping out to stain the ground beneath him every moment he continued to struggle.

The sight was gruesome enough that, even with all the adrenaline pumping through his veins, Blake couldn’t help but stop and stare for several moments. His thoughts began to war with one another. On the one hand, this man had been trying to take his life only a minute or two ago. On the other, he was currently incapacitated and no longer posed a threat. Did Blake want to kill a defenseless person? Then again, he’d already done just that when he shot Yusari in the back. Besides, Kirr looked in bad shape. Given the location of the wound, there was a high possibility that the bear trap’s sharp teeth had stabbed into one of the man’s lungs. From what Blake could remember, that was basically a death sentence, right? Wouldn’t this be a mercy killing? Or was that just some misremembered bit from an old fantasy book he’d read years ago, which might have been talking about horses instead of humans, anyway? Maybe he could...

Blake shook his head. As much as he hated to admit it, from the moment he’d killed the High Apostle, he’d committed himself to killing the others as well. Doing a half-assed job would only lead to problems later. He’d barely survived three Apostles; what if they came back with ten? Twenty? Blake had backed himself into a corner, and this was the only foolproof way out.

Ejecting the empty magazine from his gun, he pulled out another one and shoved it into the bottom of the weapon, all the while looking about for any more surprises. All he found was hate—pure, unadulterated hatred overflowing from the Otharian’s gaze. With a weary sigh, he wondered once more what drove these people to be like this.

Taking careful aim, he put several bullets through the area around Kirr’s heart. The man twitched and gurgled before falling silent. Blake turned away, not wanting to see such a sight any longer. He told himself that he’d had no choice, that all three of the people whose lives he’d ended today would have killed him without a second thought and then slept peacefully afterward. It only partially worked, perhaps because he knew that one more person remained before he would be done.

Speaking of which, as Blake picked up his lump of supplies, he looked back over by the left end of the ridge to where he’d caught Yarec. Panic surged forth as he realized that the man who’d abused him for days was no longer where Blake had last seen him. He raced around the slope, skidding to a halt where he’d left his bear trap, only to find his fear unneeded. He could see a clear bloody trail from Yarec’s previous position that led to a nearby rock, against which the damnable man limply reclined with the bear trap still latched onto his lower leg. Blake’s eyes caught the glistening of tears upon his cheeks and a small black bottle resting just inches from his left hand. The man’s enmity-ridden stare, more bitter and filled with loathing than any Blake had ever witnessed on either world, drilled deep into Blake to the point that it nearly unnerved him.

“I’ll make you pay for what you’ve done, you vile thing,” the man growled.

“I’m sorry, what I’ve done?!” Blake spat. “You starved me and made me soak in my own piss and shit for days, delivered me to be executed, nearly bashed my skull in with a rock, and lopped my fucking arm off, and you have the fucking audacity to talk about what I’ve done?! I actually felt a little bad about killing the other people here, but you? No, I’m looking forward to this.”

Blake raised his weapon and took aim at Yarec’s head, taking in the horrid Apostle’s face one last time—his long and messy fiery red hair, his overgrown, bushy red beard, his normally handsome face twisted into a snarl of hate, and his glowing golden eyes. Blake blinked and shook his head, wondering if he was seeing things or if it was just a trick of the light, but no! The man’s eyes radiated a brilliant golden hue that was growing brighter by the second, easily outshining the rays of the sun.

Blake had watched enough anime and comic book movies to know just how bad an omen this was. He pulled the trigger. A small chunk of tucrenyx, accelerated to great speeds from within the barrel via a pseudo-magnetic coil powered by unexplained energy found in battery-like crystals, emerged from the muzzle of Blake’s gun and headed straight towards a spot right between Yarec’s shining eyes.

It never reached its target.

Faster than Blake could even see, a spike of stone shot out from the rock against which Yarec rested, intercepting the bullet mid-flight. Blake kept the trigger depressed, but a sudden forest of spikes ensured that not one projectile in the spray of bullets got within three feet of the Otharian.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” Yarec told him icily.

A subtle rumble beneath Blake’s feet was all the warning he received before a column of stone burst from the ground in front of him and slammed into his chest, knocking the wind out of him and sending him flying. Spinning uncontrollably through the air, Blake landed a good fifty feet away in an uncoordinated heap. He wheezed, pain shooting through his ribs with every breath—likely proof of broken ribs. He felt like he’d just been slugged by a boulder, which, looking at the large protrusion of rock sticking out from the earth where he’d stood just a moment ago, was somehow not just a figure of speech but an accurate description of events. At least he could take a small amount of solace that he hadn’t landed poorly on his neck or head.

As Blake struggled to his feet, he watched as a dozen grey stone hands rose from the earth around Yarec’s leg, grabbed the bear trap, and pried it open with ease. Freed from the ravenous device, the Otharian stood up—favoring his unharmed leg but still standing on both feet—and held out both hands with his brows furrowed in concentration.

Blake watched in awe and horror as every nearby rock, from the tiniest of pebbles to the boulders that comprised much of the ridge itself, melted and melded into an ever-increasing surge of liquefied stone. Flowing like water, the enormous gray mass obeyed Yarec’s command, stretching and flattening with startling speed until Blake found himself staring up at the gaping maw of a forty-foot-tall serpent. Raising its head up high, the golem-esque creation stared at him with four monstrous eyes before opening its mouth to show off more than its fair share of gigantic fangs. It towered over everything else in the area, and suddenly Blake felt very small.

Blake was injured, outnumbered, and utterly outmatched. It didn’t take much thought for him to realize that his best option at the moment would be to bail as soon and as swiftly as possible. He reached for his gun and his lump of metal with his supplies inside, both having fallen just several feet from his location.

Just as he’d managed to grasp the gun grip, another tremor underneath his feet sent Blake lurching backward. He jumped high into the air right before a cluster of stony vines sprouted from the ground, each seeking to ensnare him. As if that was what Yarec had been waiting for, the gargantuan snake pounced, its fang-filled mouth crossing the distance between them with alarming quickness. Blake fired at the onrushing silicon serpent as best he could from his mid-air vantage point, but he might as well have been shooting spitballs at an elephant for all the good it did. The recoil altered his trajectory just enough that he avoided the long, deadly-looking teeth, but that didn’t stop the lower jaw from slamming into him with incredible force and sending him crashing through a nearby tree.

Blake groaned as he sprawled across the forest floor, the shattered pieces of the trunk poking into his back. Branches and leaves rained down upon him and he let out a cough, which filled his mouth with the wet taste of iron. His head swam and everything looked blurry. Blake didn’t have to be a genius to recognize that he was suddenly way out of this league.

It boggled Blake’s mind just how powerful Yarec had become seemingly out of nowhere. He’d watched the man grow stone in the past, and it had been nothing like this. Hell, the last time they’d fought, they had done so in a room made entirely out of stone, and yet the Apostle had managed to do nothing more with all that material than make a protrusion to trip Blake one time at the beginning of their battle. Now, he was throwing around twenty tons of rock as if it were nothing and controlling it all with an absurd level of precision.

As Blake tried to sit up, something cold and smooth wrapped around his torso and pulled him back down. He struggled, squirming against the stone vine’s grip, but quickly others appeared to wrap his arms and legs as well. More and more tendrils constricted around him like stone boa constrictors, and within moments he found himself firmly tied down, completely unable to move. More tendrils wrapped around his gun and quickly wrested it from his hand, removing the one method Blake had of effectively fighting back.

“It’s over,” Yarec stated, closer than before. Blake could hear the sounds of his footsteps approaching, though he couldn’t see him from his perspective.

A moment later the ground beneath Blake rumbled and suddenly he and the earth beneath him lifted off the ground and pivoted ninety degrees. When it was over, he found himself held vertically and upside down with a wonderful view of the Apostle’s ankles, his body still firmly tied to the stone and ground at his back. The entirety of his restraints rose higher until Blake’s head came level with Yarec’s chin. The man stared down at him with a smoldering golden gaze that promised nothing but bad things in Blake’s immediate future.

Blake desperately wrung his brain cells for some way out of his predicament but found himself coming up empty. He couldn’t move, his gun was unavailable, and all the rest of his metal and crystals could be found out of reach twenty feet away behind Yarec. Though the metal was in range, Blake didn’t have enough confidence in his control to use it from that distance to make and aim a second gun. He was just as liable to shoot himself as he was to shoot Yarec. Sadly, his materials were essentially useless to him in his time of need.

Unless...

A risky—and likely suicidal—idea crossed Blake’s mind. It would take a bit of time and wouldn’t succeed if Yarec got wise to it, but Blake couldn’t think of anything else, so he immediately got to it. The first order of business: distracting his adversary well enough that he didn’t move or turn around for a little while.

“Well, congratulations. You won,” he told the Otharian as he reached out to his spare tucrenyx and began to reconfigure it. “Now what? Gonna take me in? Set up another stupid show like the last time?”

“Now I put you in the ground,” came the reply. A hole began to form beneath Blake’s prison.

“Literally?” Blake asked as the hole grew bigger and bigger. Within the tucrenyx lump, Blake extended channels, forming connections between crystals. Every so often, he would bring the crystal in his fake arm up against his skin, entering hyper mode for the briefest of moments just to see the positions of the crystals. Slowly and quietly, the lump began to slide towards the two of them.

“A quick death is far too good for what you’ve done.”

“There you go again with this ‘what I’ve done’ nonsense,” Blake sniffed, still making more connections. “I’m sooooo sorry that I killed your boss and two people you didn’t even like very much. From where I’m at, I did you a favor.”

Yarec drove a hard fist through a gap in the tendrils and into Blake’s gut, eliciting a pained gasp. “Don’t presume to talk about things that something like you could never understand.”

Blake did his best to keep his gaze away from the slowly creeping tucrenyx, still a good eighteen feet away. He made a few more connections within the lump and decided it was the best he could manage. Now it was time to wait.

Instead, he turned his focus to Yarec’s strange anger. Sure, Blake expected the man to be angry about the death of his countrymen and colleagues, but his anger over the deaths of the High Apostle and two people with whom he seemed very standoffish struck Blake as far deeper and more personal than expected. Thinking back, Blake quickly reexamined everything that had happened since he’d stumbled upon the group, this time focusing upon how Yarec had reacted to everything. Something strange jumped out at him, and suddenly he found himself looking at it all from a different, more revealing perspective... if his guess was correct. He needed confirmation.

“What? Don’t tell me you’re upset that I killed Kirr. I know you didn’t like him; I was listening. Even though you knew him, you talked to him like he was a stranger. You didn’t even say anything when he fell into the bear trap. The same goes for that insane little bitch Yusari-”

“Silence!” Another fist, this one the size of a bowling ball, drove into his gut, cutting him off. Blake coughed. He felt like he’d been struck by a battering ram, but beneath the pain, he rejoiced. His conjecture seemed correct. His coughing gave way to a chuckle, which soon turned into full-blown mocking laughter.

“You loved her, didn’t you?” Yarec froze, and Blake continued with a wicked grin. “You didn’t say a word when Kirr went down, but when Yusari turned her back on me...” He laughed as piece after piece came together in his head. “That was why you left, wasn’t it? You loved her and she didn’t love you back. No, she barely even noticed you existed! When you went down, she didn’t even bat an eye, but when Kirr got into trouble, she cared so much that she seemed to forget everything to go to him! You loved her, but she chose him instead and you couldn’t stand it, so you left, got yourself promoted-”

“Shutupshutupshutupshutup!”

Blows rained down upon Blake’s torso and head, pummeling him viciously, but he pushed through.

“You lost, Yarec, and now you lost again! She’s gone forever! Never coming back! Dead! Deceased! Perished! Terminated! Extinguished! Kapu-”

“Damn you!” Yarec howled with tears falling down his face. His hand, wrapped in a stone gauntlet, shot out to grasp Blake’s throat and began to squeeze it with crushing force, finally bringing an end to Blake’s cruel mocking.

Blake’s body spasmed as he unsuccessfully fought for air against the vice-like grip around his neck. He tried to bring his arm up, to use his great strength to overcome the stone locking him in place, but his bruised and battered body proved incapable of such a feat. That was alright, however. It was nearly time. The lump had crept closer, now under ten feet, and grew even closer with every passing moment. Blake just had to hold on long enough to finish his plan. He just had to stay conscious, keep from blacking out...

Finally, as Blake’s vision began to go dark, Yarec released his grip, and sweet, life-giving oxygen reentered Blake’s lungs. He coughed and wheezed, regaining his senses as Yarec collected himself. While angry, the man reminded Blake more now of the Yarec he’d known before than the emotional, furious man that had just nearly choked him to death. He looked at Blake calmly, his gaze purposeful, a decision made.

The hole beneath Blake grew deeper.

“Enough. Before the chimirin runs out, I’m going to bury you so deep into the earth that not even an Elseling like you would be able to escape. Your death will be agonizing and torturous as you slowly suffocate, unable to move or free yourself. It is not as terrible a death as you deserve, but it will do. Any last words?”

Blake could “hear” it now, the “sound” in his mind of imminent victory—or at least, mutually assured destruction—building ever stronger, getting higher and higher and higher. Whether Yarec couldn’t hear it or he was too worked up to notice, Blake didn’t know and he didn’t care.

“Yeah. How did you put it back then? Oh, right,” he rasped as the whine finally transitioned into the full-on agonized wail of a crystal at its absolute limit. “Every Apostle knows to never speak with an Elseling, idiot.”

Just six feet away from Yarec’s back, Blake’s largest crystal ruptured. Force-fed energy from every other crystal in Blake’s possession until it could take no more, it exploded with terrifying power.

The quartz-like rock, many times larger than the one that had exploded back at the cave, erupted with a cataclysmic thunderclap, unleashing a concussive blast that struck Yarec with incredible force—a force so strong that it shattered the thick stone holding Blake in place into tiny pieces. The two men were thrown through the forest, careening off trees, rocks, and whatever else was in the way, until finally, they came to rest nearly fifty feet from their original location.

It took Blake several minutes to determine that he was still alive—almost miraculously so. As battered as his body was from the blast—and all that had come before—the stone encasing him had absorbed a large amount of the force of the blast—enough for him to survive, at least. Even Yarec himself had taken much of the blast in place of Blake’s face, something that Blake couldn’t help but revel in a little bit. Eventually, he worked up the strength to push several large pieces of rock off of him and raise himself up onto his hands and knees. For a few moments, he just coughed out blood onto the rubble below him. Damn, he felt like shit. Still, what counted was that he was alive and ticking.

The same could not be said for his old pal Yarec. Blake staggered over to his enemy’s body and took a closer look. The man who’d taken his arm from him, and just now nearly taken everything else, laid motionless on the uneven ground. The Apostle’s eyes were open and unfocused, no longer glowing as they had before. Blake checked for breathing and found none. The man was dead.

It started with a chuckle—one that seemed to escape by accident—then another, and another, each laugh building upon the previous one until Blake could barely breathe as he shook with relief. He’d won. By all rights, he should have died. He knew that well. He, with his complete lack of experience and training, against four well-trained killers? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he would have died. And yet, here he was, somehow the only person to walk away from the encounter.

It hurt to move—it hurt to do anything, really—but Blake forced himself to walk. No good would come from staying here longer than necessary. His makeshift explosion had been by far the loudest yet, a veritable beacon calling every would-be hunter for miles around.

First, he returned to where he’d landed. Digging through the rubble, he found his gun. The weapon had been bent and dented in several places by the blast, barrel the worst of all, but that was nothing he couldn’t fix. The same went for his prosthetic arm, which had fared somewhat better. A few moments later, he tucked his repaired weapon under his arm and slowly returned to the site of the blast.

He stumbled over to ground zero, amazed at the forty-foot-wide crater that the crystal’s death throes had left behind. A quick search revealed nothing but rubble and scraps. His tucrenyx and all the rest of his supplies had been blown to smithereens. The most he could scrounge up were a few coin-sized bits of what had once been his spare tucrenyx. Having been so close to the exploding crystal, the vast majority of the tucrenyx had been destroyed so thoroughly that it was a lost cause. Blake couldn’t find a single crystal, either. Returning to Kirr’s body, Blake recovered the bear trap, though he chose to melt it into a more convenient traveling form. One tucrenyx prosthetic arm, a gun, and a bear trap’s-worth of tucrenyx... that was all he had left.

He would have to make do. Picking a direction, Blake limped away before anybody else showed up.

Blake crested a hill and paused to appreciate what he could only describe as a delightful sunset. The sun, or what little of it still remained above the horizon, lit the land in front of him in crimson hues that struck him as particularly picturesque. Not for the first time, he wished he’d had his phone on him when this had all started.

The area in which he found himself felt and appeared more arid than even the rocky and shrub-dominated areas through which he’d passed so far during his stay on this world. While not a desert, the plant life was much sparser and the terrain was even rockier than before. The red light against the rocks and the long, overlapping shadows they cast struck him as a sight to see, but also warned of issues with finding water.

While he had the high ground, Blake took an opportunity to inspect the landscape before him for anything notable, be it landmarks to help his navigation, a water source, or something he could use as a resting place for the night. His eyes eventually fell upon a gorge he could see in a small mountain in the distance. The giant crevice seemed to be at least thirty feet deep and more than a dozen feet wide, with rough, craggy walls that probably contained at least one good sleeping spot somewhere inside. Perhaps, if he were lucky, it would have a stream inside it and both his problems would be solved. He rolled his eyes. Maybe he’d find an all-you-can-eat buffet inside as well.

The trip to his destination took longer than it would have the day before, but not as long as it would have that afternoon. His body felt somewhat improved, the pain caused by walking or mere existence somewhat less agonizing than before. He was fairly certain he had a handful of broken ribs and his body was covered in painful deep bruises, but his enhanced durability had come to the rescue and kept his arm and legs unbroken. He could walk steadily again and without too much pain—the deep bruises notwithstanding. He didn’t want to think of what would have happened had his legs been broken from the final blast. He would have been captured by now, for sure.

The closer Blake got to the ravine, the more he began to second-guess his decision. As he neared it, he spotted what appeared to be a road, though one far less maintained than the ones he’d seen before. It looked more like a wide path, really, but it was enough to make him start to worry. His worry only escalated as his nose began to pick up whiffs of smoke that grew stronger as he approached. It wasn’t just smoke, either; there was something else there, some barely noticeable but putrid scent that he couldn’t quite place.

That worry transformed into something far darker once he reached the canyon’s opening. A thick, smoky haze filled the air and made it harder to see, but it wasn’t thick enough to obscure his sight of the two burning, overturned wagons blocking the way fifty feet into the canyon. Blake’s breath caught at the sight of a dead body on the ground near the left wagon, an arrow protruding from its back. Against his better judgment, Blake crept closer, the need to get a better understanding of what had happened here driving him forward. The air currents shifted slightly, letting a wave of that formerly elusive smell, the one he’d barely detected before, waft across his nose and make itself fully known—singed hair, charred beef, the metallic aroma of burning blood. Blake gagged. Though he’d never smelled the scent before, he instinctively knew it to be the smell of burning bodies.

Several other bodies laid across the ground further in, each face down with an arrow in their back. Blake spotted several other bodies within the wagons; it wasn’t easy to see what had happened to them through the damage brought by the flames, but several had clearly been killed by a blade of some sort, large gashes visible on their necks.

Not even the garophs had escaped a grisly end. Slumped dead in front of the wagons, they stared blankly ahead with arrows sticking out of their skulls. Blake guessed they had been the first beings targeted, their deaths rendering the wagons immobile for the following attack.

Blake focused his gaze further into the chasm and spotted another blazing wagon. Holding his filthy shirt over his nose and mouth, he worked his way past the first two and approached the third wagon. The scene here largely resembled that of the others, but he found his eyes drawn to something on the ground nearby, a splash of color that stood out against the canyon floor.

It was a quilt, or half of one at least. Blake studied it for a moment, the colors and pattern gnawing at his memory. He could have sworn he’d seen the quilt before, and recently, too. He couldn’t quite place where, though. Then, suddenly, something in his mind clicked together and he hissed in recognition. He’d seen this quilt hanging off a wagon in the caravan that he’d accidentally run into a few days ago. It had hung from the back of the wagon in the rear of the caravan, the closest to him when he’d ran by, so he’d gotten a fairly good glance at it as he passed.

This was that caravan, the one that had fled from him as he’d fled from it. The one that girl, Samanta, was a part of. Was she here? Blake found himself battling a sudden urge to push deeper and find out.

When it came to his immediate safety, he couldn’t deny that it was a terrible idea. His body was in a bad state. He had several broken ribs that made it hard to breathe, he hadn’t eaten or drank anything in too long, and he felt exhausted. To make matters worse, he was down to his final magazine of ammo and he had almost no other resources to work with should he need them.

That said, his mind kept going back to the girl, the one person in this damned world to treat him like something other than a hideous monster. He didn’t want the only decent being he’d met so far to meet a horrible end. She was probably already dead, but what if she wasn’t? Did he want to walk away when she might need his help? And if she was... well perhaps he’d give her a decent burial at least.

“Fuck it,” he grumbled, working his way deeper into the canyon. He’d just do a quick check and leave, just to soothe what remained of his conscience. That was all.

It didn’t take long for him to stumble upon more bodies. Not more than a hundred yards past the third wagon was a bend in the canyon. Rounding that bend, Blake confronted a terrible scene. Dozens of bodies littered the ground, lit orange by the crackling inferno of what he guessed to be the rest of the wagons in the caravan. Even after seeing the carnage before, even after having killed four people himself, the scene threatened to make Blake vomit. The smoke here filled his lungs, the putrid smell of burning flesh clinging to his nostrils. Blood pooled in the cracks and divots of the canyon floor; if he looked closely, he could see bits of internal organs mixed in or strewn across the rock.

Inspecting the myriad corpses, Blake spotted some standouts mixed in with the simple cloth of the traders. These corpses wore simple armor, stuff that resembled the equipment the guards at Eflok had sported. He didn’t remember seeing any of that in his short glimpse of the caravan. That, plus their positions, led him to assume they were members of the group responsible for this slaughter.

There’d been a battle here, he deduced. The caravan, finding themselves blocked in by the disabled wagons in the rear, had pushed forward, hoping for escape. Whether they’d decided to stop and fight on their own or they’d run into a trap he couldn’t say, but the end result seemed clear. Most, if not all, of the caravan merchants had fought for their lives here and perished. At least, to their credit, they’d taken a good number of their assailants down with them.

A high-pitched scream coming from further down the chasm tore him from his thoughts. Somebody was still alive! Quickly, Blake moved to the right edge of the canyon and began to make his way past the bodies, using the burning wagons to conceal his movement from anybody who might be lurking on the other side.

He didn’t have to go far. Just as he passed by the final wagon, he spotted some people in the distance. Three men in uniforms that resembled the dead attackers were holding down a struggling woman that Blake immediately recognized as Samanta’s mother. They laughed as she fought against their grip, her gaze never once leaving a fourth man holding a dagger to a young girl’s throat. Though he couldn’t see the girl’s face, between the mother and the matching hair, he felt sure that she was Samanta.

On the one hand, he felt a bit of relief that Samanta was still alive. On the other hand, it didn’t look like he would be able to say that for much longer if something didn’t change very soon. He could see another ten or so fresh corpses bleeding all over the canyon stone behind the men.

Quickly, Blake ran down a mental list of possible actions, finding no simple solution. He was too far away to melt away the men’s weapons. He wasn’t too far to shoot them, but with his terrible aim, he was just as likely to hit the girl or her mother as he was to hit the others. That left getting closer, but that ran the risk of the men spotting him before he could do anything, which might make them do something he didn’t want. Without any better ideas, Blake began to creep his way closer, hiding behind outcroppings to maintain cover wherever possible. All he could do was pray that the situation wouldn’t devolve before he could get close enough to do something.

His prayers went unanswered. Well before he got within metal-control range, the woman said something to the girl, then reached a hand towards one of the men holding her down. The man’s uniform suddenly burst into flame, prompting him to let go with a startled cry and frantically roll around on the rocky terrain to put himself out. The other men did not respond well to this turn of events. One drew a sword and stabbed the woman in the back. With a shudder, she collapsed and went limp to the sound of her daughter’s scream.

Abandoning all pretense of stealth, Blake rushed forward, pushing his battered body to its limits for every extra foot. He needed to get within range of the hostage-taker and take the man’s dagger out of the equation before they noticed him. Even then, the possibility remained that the man had some ability like super strength and that the dagger had been only for show. The only true way to save the girl named Samanta was to separate the two.

As he ran, the complicated machinery inside Blake’s left arm liquefied and flowed inward, the metal below the elbow condensing and elongating into a deadly sharp blade over two feet long. A detached, analytical part of his mind noted how much better he’d gotten at manipulation in only a few days. A simple action like this almost ran on autopilot now, requiring nearly no conscious thought in the same way stuff like driving did. That was a good thing, as Blake couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the situation at hand.

Luckily for both Blake and the girl, the hostage-taker didn’t just immediately kill his hostage in retaliation. He snarled and threw Samanta to the ground, proceeding to furiously kick the poor child while ranting something about how her mother was a filthy whore and something else about lost men and lost goods.

Blake was too focused on the blade in the man’s furious grip to care about the details of what he said. He needed to time his metal-melting right. Too early, and the men would notice something was wrong. Too late, and... well, he didn’t need to think about that.

Against his expectations, that crucial moment never came. The hostage-taker and the other men were too distracted by the hostage-taker’s antics to notice Blake’s approach, especially with the roar of the inferno behind him helping to mask the sound of his steps. The next thing Blake knew, he was just a few steps away, and the man had yet to raise his dagger for the feared strike.

In the end, Blake never even bothered to melt the man’s knife. The bandit, or guard, or whatever he was seemed to notice his approach far too late, stopping and turning to look back just in time for Blake to step up next to him swing his arm blade upward with all his might.

Unnatural strength combined with an edge formed to a near-molecular level, and the man’s arm—dagger and all—fell to the rocks at their feet. The man looked for a moment at the space where his arm was supposed to be, stunned, and Blake brought his blade down on his head before he even thought to scream.

The sight of the hostage-taker’s body falling dead to the ground struck the other men like lightning. They scrambled back, as Blake stepped between them and the girl. One man—the one whose clothes had been temporarily on fire—pulled out two short swords, while the second dove for a nearby bow and a quiver of arrows. The third man, who’d already drawn his longsword and killed Samanta’s mother with it, stared at him warily.

“Who the fuck is you?!” he demanded to know.

Blake didn’t respond; he didn’t care to explain his presence to murderers and would-be rapists.

“I-It’s the Elseling!” the burnt clothes man cried out, the terror in his expression plain as day.

“Doesn’t matter! Kill him!” the longsword man snapped. He rushed forward, the burnt dual wielder right behind, while the bowman fell back and circled to the right.

Without saying a word, Blake raised his gun and fired a spray of bullets towards the bowman before the bandit could get off a single shot. The man fell like a sack of potatoes, at least four puncture wounds in his chest.

The others reached him, but Blake didn’t budge. Their arms lashed out, only for the weapons in their hands to melt through their fingers to their complete befuddlement. With a scowl, Blake emptied the rest of his magazine point-blank into their chests.

Pathetic. Apostles, these were not. They were nothing more than butchers and thugs, and Blake had no time for wastes of oxygen like that.

Blake found his gaze drawn to the face-down body of the woman not twenty feet in front of him. It was a shame. There’d been no way for her to know that he would come to their rescue just a few moments later, but still... truly a shame.

At least, he told himself, he’d saved the girl.

“You okay, kid?” he asked as he started to turn around and check the girl behind him. “Did they hurt you too-”

A cold sharpness plunged into Blake’s lower back. His legs gave way and he collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Pain coursed through his spine and upper body, and he let out a scream. He tried to get up, he tried to stand again, but something was wrong—terribly, terribly wrong. His legs wouldn’t move. He couldn’t feel them.

Blake’s mind swam as panicked questions bombarded him left and right. What was going on? What had happened? Had he missed one of the bandits? What had happened to his legs? Why couldn’t he feel his legs?!

Blake gasped in agony as he twisted his upper body, pushing with his one good arm to turn and see behind him. The sight that greeted him left him stunned. At the edge of his vision he could make out the top of the hilt of the hostage-taker’s dagger—angled and positioned in a way that told him it was currently stuck deep inside his spine—and behind that stood a weeping, trembling Samanta.

“B-b-blessed are the heroes w-who slay the f-foes o-o-of Othar, f-f-for the spirits of their clan shall r-reside in His h-h-hallowed halls f-for all eternity,” the girl stuttered through choked sobs as she stared at him with eyes filled with equal parts terror, sorrow, and joy. “I d-d-did it like y-you told me, Mommy. I stopped the Elseling. Othar will w-welcome you now. You’ll be alright. Y-you’ll all be a-a-alright.”

They’d gotten to her. Somehow, in the scant hours since he’d seen the child last, they’d gotten to her, the only person to look at him like a goddamned human being. He didn’t see any of that in her eyes anymore; all he saw was the same hatred and fear that he saw in the eyes of the other Otharians. And as he looked up at her, one single thing she’d sobbed kept looping in his mind, over and over and over and over: “I did it like you told me, Mommy.”

Like you told me.

These people—these animals—taught their own children to kill enemies of the church. They taught them that killing an innocent person was not only good but the greatest thing they could ever accomplish. They brainwashed their own kids. It was the only thing that made sense, the only way he could understand how a little girl whose entire family had been murdered around her could, just minutes later, stare down at his prostrate body with happiness.

A society like that could not be reasoned with. It could not be bargained with. It could not be swayed by ideas or charitable deeds, for no benevolent act could overcome their devotion to their own ignorance and hatred. Otharia embraced it. Celebrated it. Wallowed in it. No amount of words would sway a culture that taught its own children to rejoice in the act of killing those different from them. Blake understood this all, now that it was too late. In Samanta’s teary yet ecstatic eyes, Blake saw a society beyond salvation—a nation of people who hated him, feared him, despised him, and would stop at nothing to send him to his end.

Deep down inside of him, something snapped.

They thought him a monster.

He’d show them a monster.