“Alright everybody, let’s get this over with,” Blake said as he marched into what he called the “Council Room”, a meeting room with a large circular table in the center surrounded by chairs. Blake hated this place. This was where boring happened.

“My Lord,” Leo said, rising from his seat as Blake entered the room. His greeting was repeated by the others present, each with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Nearly all of the chairs were already filled by the members of Blake and Leo’s “Council”, a selection of people who were all intelligent, capable, and willing to be his lackey. The reasons each was willing to collaborate with an “Elseling”, and the degree to which they seemed happy about it, seemed to vary from person to person, but Blake didn’t care as long as they were willing and good at what they did.

“Where’s the kid?” Fricis Upeslacis, his ornery Minister of Agriculture, inquired.

“She’s grounded until she learns to behave herself,” Blake replied.

“Grounded?” Fricis repeated, confused. “What’s that?”

“She can’t leave her room until I say so,” Blake explained.

“Bah! No namby-pamby punishment like that will fix what ails her!” the older man scoffed incredulously. “Take a switch to her backside! Then she’ll learn to respect her elders! Why, back in my day, my father would smack me good if I even looked like I was going to be disrespectful! Raise me right, he did.”

“Yes, Fricis, a real bang-up job ol’ dad did with you,” Blake replied sarcastically, eyes rolling behind his mask. He turned to Leo, sitting to Blake’s right. “Is everybody here? Where’s Martis?”

“Martis is still on the road. He did, however, send back a report.”

“Great. Then let’s begin. Fricis, how’re the crops doing?”

“Crop yields are up significantly. If we can harvest and distribute it properly, this might be the first year I can remember where everybody has something to eat this winter. Not a lot, but at least enough to get by.”

“Well done! A round of applause for Minister Upeslacis, everyone!” Blake proclaimed, clapping his metal hands together. Tackling the lack of food was Blake’s first, most important milestone, and it was good to see that the situation improving so quickly. The others joined in as well. Regardless of their feelings on Blake and the baggage that came with him, they all understood the shadow that starvation that had cast over their country for their entire lifetimes.

“Shaddap! I’m not done!” barked the elder farmer. “There’s a problem. We don’t have enough people to harvest everything. The only way to pick everything is to reassign the field-clearing crews. We’re a little behind on the new fields as it is. This will make us miss your goal by a wide margin, but I don’t see any way around it. Can’t have fruit rotting on the vine.”

“No, keep the field-clearing crews as they are,” Blake responded. “I have some ideas for mechanical reapers and whatnot that should fix the issue. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

“Er, if you insist, Lord Ferros.”

“I do. I don’t want to slow down expansion unless we have no other options.” Blake smacked his hand against the metal table with enthusiasm. “Alright, let’s keep this moving! Age before beauty! Zigmars, how’s my income tax looking?”

Zigmars Vietnieks looked up from his papers. The thirty-four-year-old man was the second oldest member of the Council after Fricis. Blake wanted young people working for him. People who weren't entirely wedded to their worldviews just yet. People who would consider his perspective for reasons beyond the fact that he could easily kill them and everybody they loved. He wasn't entirely sure that he'd found such mythical people yet. Certain members still seemed very conflicted with the idea of his rule. Still, they'd all been doing a good job so far, as far as he could tell. He could settle with some distrusting glances for the moment, as long as they performed. Zigmars performed.

As Minister of the Treasury, the man was some kind of number wizard — within just a few days he'd organized the entire country's finances, figured out how much was still left in the treasury, and more. Blake, who until his sudden trip had basically just used credit cards to pay for everything, could not help but be in awe of the man's abilities. That was why Blake continued to employ the accountant even though the only word he seemed to enjoy using was "no".

“I looked into it and determined that it’s entirely infeasible, my Lord,” the man said. “To tax the wealthy by their gains is an absurd idea. I don’t see how it could realistically be implemented.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, to tax them by their income would require us to know how much they are making, which we don’t know.”

“So ask them.”

“Ask them? You want me to just go to the largest clans and say ‘tell me your income’?”

“No, of course not.”

Zigmars let out a breath of relief. “So you understand-”

“You’re going to have to audit them.”

“A-audit?”

“And don’t tell them you’re coming, either. Just show up and demand to see all their records. Even the secret ones.”

“My Lord, I don’t think such records even exist, I mean-”

“Then make them exist.” Blake growled. A hush fell over the room at the first sign of his temper flaring. “Listen up, Zigmars. And this goes for the rest of you, too. You work for me. I am the law here. That means, by extension, you are the law. If you need these families to do all their accounting in some new way just so you can get the data that you need, then they’re going to do them in that way. If you need them to give you access to all their holdings so you can get an accurate picture of their value, then they’re going give you that access. If you need them to do all their paperwork in the blood of their fucking first-born children, then they’re going to have books filled with red writing soon, or I’m going to come down on them.

“What I’m trying to say is, I’m here to back you up. What you need to do is to figure out what you need from these families to accomplish this goal. Then you go to them, maybe with a few skitters for show and backup, and you tell them that they’re going to do the things you need them to do. Because if they refuse, I’m going to pay them a personal visit, and I will be very, very unhappy. Capiche?”

“Y-yes, my Lord.”

“Great. Gunta! Talk to me! I hear the new draft of the prison report is ready?”

Gunta Izkapts coughed, probably to give herself a second to collect her thoughts. Gunta, as the Minister of Justice, predictably was also the person in the room who had the hardest time coming to grips with her situation. After all, how could you believe in justice and then work for a murderer? Blake believed that she viewed it as some sort of sacrifice so nobody else had to do it, some version of “taking one for the team”. They were both still adjusting to each other, and it had not been the smoothest of rides so far. Such was to be expected, Blake figured, both because of the aforementioned issue and because her idea of justice still leaned towards the previous regime’s definition.

“Yes, my Lord,” the thirty-one-year-old replied. “Currently there are over two thousand prisoners accounted for across five prisons. By your definition of unjust imprisonment, about four hundred prisoners qualify for release. The full breakdown on the prisoners and the quality of the facilities are in my full report.”

Blake’s eye twitched as he noted the subtle emphasis the woman put on the words “your definition”. He’d tasked Gunta with this report before, only to learn that she viewed every prisoner to be justly imprisoned. If you were rightfully convicted then you were rightfully imprisoned, no matter how bullshit the laws were. He’d put his foot down after that and made her redo it, only to find that their perspectives still did not match when she found that only seven people deserved freedom. Eventually he’d had to give her a literal list of all the crimes that shouldn’t have counted as crimes. Going through the old system with Leo, he’d been astonished at the absurd ways you could end up behind bars during the past regime. Vomiting on a high priest was a crime? It was lunacy. Gunta would realize this too, eventually. A work in progress she was.

“That few? There’s what, a million people in this country? At least? How can there only be two thousand prisoners?” Blake asked.

“Low-level criminals are dealt with by the local law enforcement. Anybody can chop off a thief’s hand, after all,” Gunta replied. “Also, the poor food and lack of concern for the prisoners’ health means that many die in their cells.”

Blake let out a sigh. There was still such a long way left to go...

“Alright,” he said after a second. “Release the four hundred. Work with Zigmars to coordinate a sum for damages so they can at least make it back home. Those who don’t have a home or don’t want to go back, send them to me. We could always use more people willing to work.”

“You wish to employ these... degenerates?” the woman questioned, appalled.

“Hey, watch your mouth,” Blake warned. “Leo’s a fine man.”

“I-I apologize, my Lord, I was not aware that Minister Feldmanis was...”

“Leo, if I had just let you out of prison after years inside, and you had nothing to do every day, how would that have gone for you?”

“If I didn’t have my wife and this labor, I would likely have gone mad,” Leo responded.

“See?” Blake said, pointing towards Leo. “What’s the point of letting them out if they just end up on the street in a few months?”

“As you wish, my Lord.”

“Anything else besides the report?”

“No, my Lord.”

“Very well. Next! Uhhhh... Leo who’s older between Simona and Martis?”

“Martis, my Lord.”

“Dude, you didn’t even look that up. How do you remember all that shit?”

“Minister Tievais reports that his team has located a significant deposit of cantacrenyx crystals west of Nont.”

“Yesssssssss!” Blake let loose a fist pump of victory. Cantacrenyx was the bottleneck to Blake’s long-term plans. He needed more crystals to power his upcoming creations, but more importantly he needed bigger crystals. Stuff with the juice to power freight trains, perhaps literally. “How soon can get them out?”

“I’ll ask him the next time he is near a Many, but it will likely take a while. Setting up a proper mine takes time.”

Blake grumbled unhappily at the answer. Ideas for strip-mining passed through his head, but he discarded them. He didn’t have the large, high-capacity crystals needed to power the mining machines — ironically, the needed crystals were what he needed to dig up. All his largest crystals had gone into his tunnel-borers, and those were completely unsuited for the task. He needed those buried crystals intact, not ground into dust, and the borers were busy chewing up trees and rocks out in the country anyway.

“Alright, Simona, sorry to keep you waiting. What have you got for me?”

“It’s alright sir,” the twenty-six-year-old chirped. “Gotta save the best for last, after all.”

Almost everything about Simona Jumala was... different from the others. Born in one of the northernmost villages in the country, close to the Eterian border, Simona grew up watching the local Eterian border partols waltz into Otharian lands and take whatever they wanted from the areas near the border, making her life and the lives of her family and friends miserable. Otharia seemed completely unwilling to challenge the stronger country as long as it was just a dozen troops here and a hundred troops there and as long as they didn't go more than a few miles in, so the Eterians did as they pleased for years and years. That was why she'd grown up with a healthy dislike of both other countries and her own regime.

Desperate to escape, she’d studied as best she could and left for the Wroetin as soon as she was old enough to get a job as a aide, with the hope of joining the government and eventually working her way up high enough to make a difference. What she’d discovered was a disgusting, demoralizing morass of apathy, greed, and complacency that drove her to drink. She’d felt lost and hopeless, unable to accomplish anything against such an entrenched, uncaring system.

Then Blake appeared and everything changed. The words he’d said, the promises he’d made of a bold new Otharia, one that cared about its people and wouldn’t allow others to walk all over it, struck the mightiest of chords within her heart. And so, Simona Jumala had become something Blake had thought impossible at this juncture: an honest-to-goodness Lord Ferros fan. That’s when she’d started knocking on his door and refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer.

Many days back, when Leo had first mentioned a woman actively seeking audience with him, Blake had never thought they’d be talking about his future Minister of State, but life was funny sometimes. Simona was brash, confident, and kind of a jerk, which in no way seemed the usual portrait of a diplomat. That was part of the appeal. The other countries looked down on him and Otharia, laughing at the country and its backwards ways. This was with good reason, of course — were Blake anywhere else, he’d likely be laughing at them too. But this was a new era, a new Otharia, one that wouldn’t be taking shit from others anymore. Blake needed a representative that embodied that “you’re not going to fuck with us any longer” attitude, and Simona had that in spades. She seemed to take an almost perverse glee in making life harder for whoever was on the other end of the negotiating table.

“What’s the rest of the world up to?” Blake asked.

“A lot of people want to trade with us,” Simona replied. “I get requests for trade negotiations every day.”

“Have they said anything about what they want?”

“They don’t get that far, but we both know what they want.”

“Right, and that’s not going to happen.”

Otharia didn’t have enough food to feed its own people, let alone export any. They didn’t have the infrastructure to harvest and export raw materials. Their produced commodities, be they tools, weapons and armor, or textiles, were low in quantity and generally inferior to their foreign counterparts. No, there was only one thing that Otharia had that anybody else wanted, and Blake would never give that up to anybody. He couldn’t even trust his subjects with his secrets. How could he give away his only card to another country?

“Are we going to begin trading with others in the future?” Zigmars inquired. “An extra revenue stream would always help.”

“At some point, yes. But first we need to get to the point where we can produce enough of something that we can afford to sell what’s left. That’s one reason I’m pushing for as much farm expansion as possible. The soil quality in Otharia isn’t the best, but we should be able to produce more than enough food to sell off a good amount in a few years. In the meantime, I’m going to work on improving the industrial sector of our economy shortly. That’s another reason I want you to get all the info you can on the rich merchant clans. I have a feeling they have a stranglehold on the market, and we might have to bust up some monopolies fairly soon.”

“I-I see, my Lord,” came the reply. “I’ll endeavor to find what you are looking for.”

“Only if it’s there,” Blake reminded the Minister. He took a look around the table at all the others. “I want to make clear to all of you, if I haven’t already, that I value the truth far more than I value being right. If what you find goes counter to what I expect, let me know. Don’t go massaging the truth to tell me what you think I want to hear. If I find that anybody here is feeding me false information, let’s just say things will get very ugly very quickly. You all understand?” A smattering of nods and acquiescences came in return.

“Alright then!” Blake pounded both palms against the table and stood up. “Let’s all get out of here and on with our days. Leo, I have something special I need from you, so meet me by the front entrance in an hour.”

“Yes, Lord Ferros.”

Satisfied with the proceedings and eager to be anywhere else, Blake strode quickly from the room and headed off to get a bite to eat in the cafeteria. The fortress employed several cooks now, enough to feed all the ministers, their assistants, and all the other employees who now worked in various sections of the building. While the center half remained his and Samanta’s exclusive area, the start of an actual fully-functioning government was now present in this very facility. Soon, he figured, he’d have to build more offices. Perhaps over the ruined Academy? He’d probably need to find some housing for the vagrants living in those ruins first. It didn’t feel right to pick on the weak. Those people had it hard enough as it was.

The cooks in his kitchen were fairly good at their jobs, he had to admit, given the limited ingredients and spices they had to work with. Still, he didn’t trust them, despite Leo’s assurances. If somebody wanted to kill him, the single best way was likely through poisoning his food. Maybe his new body was resistant or immune to poisons, but there was only one way to find out for sure and it would be too late at that point if he wasn’t. That was why he refused to eat specially-prepared meals made just for him, instead insisting on eating the same stuff that was prepared for the others. The consequences of his death, and what it would do to their families, had been made quite clear to all the cooks, but one never knew for sure. Maybe one of them would think it was worth the sacrifice.

His stew-filled bowl in his hand, Blake glanced around at the few others currently in eating in the dining hall. They were each partially through and having no problems, so he made his way to an empty room, sealed the door, removed his mask, and tucked in. A sigh of relief escaped his lips. All this social interaction was wearing him out. He needed a little alone time.

Still, he had to admit that the meetings and whatnot were at least distracting him from the massive potential problem he’d discovered the day before. Yesterday, after sending Sam outside, he’d entered into Hyper Mode with the intent of finally studying the complex contraptions that had plucked him from his friendly abode. He didn’t know anything about dimensional physics, of course; the theoretical aspect of reality had never interested him. His world consisted of levers and gears, circuits and motors. But he knew that, given enough time to study and tweak the ensemble, poking and prodding at his leisure, he’d be able to figure out a thing or two. Good thing Hyper Mode gave him a lot of time to work with.

After more than four hours, or internally more than one hundred days, of non-stop scrutiny, his findings left him incredibly worried. From what he could tell, the device was not some sort of two-way contraption where he could just flick a lever and throw it all in reverse. Instead, the whole thing seemed sort of like a bowl under a faucet, something designed to suck in and capture what came out, collecting it and absorbing it. While the possibility existed that he just didn’t understand enough to grasp the machine’s true nature, he’d found enough to be very, very disturbed by what he could deduce. The signs suggested that this was a one-way street, and he’d never go home again.

That was why he’d embarked on a search for documentation. Blake found the fact that the computers in the facility had been wiped to be both frustrating and concerning. Why had they bothered to do such a thing? Whatever the reason, it certainly made researching much tougher. He’d been forced to look for alternative sources, which was why he and Sam had ended up in the weird backup archive last night. Maybe the answers lay in one of the weird books with the flowing vertical script that he’d liberated from the repository, but since nobody could understand any of it he had no way of knowing at the moment.

Blake had never expected to discover that Otharia’s beloved hero/god was actually an ancient Greek man. In some ways, it made everything about this place even more laughable than it already was. On the other hand, it was precisely the sort of story he’d been afraid of. The idea that a man as heralded as Otharo had gone off to battle and then just... vanished frightened him. The man would have had to return to Otharia to use the machines in the mountain to go home. Would he have been able to do that with nobody knowing, given that he’d be a conquering hero, loved by all? Blake found the possibility doubtful. Even more, judging by the man’s personality, Otharo seemed to seek out adulation. Then suddenly no farewell speeches? No victory parades? It just didn’t add up. Maybe he’d just died in battle?

Either way, the hoped-for “and then he went home” line was nowhere to be found within the legend in the book or the official Samanta-approved version. After all his searching yesterday, all that he had was some very discouraging technical findings and nothing to contradict them. He’d have to go back later and conduct more research. It would be nice if he could turn the devices on, but he couldn’t risk dragging another person into his mess, especially if there really was no way back.

The stew all finished, Blake was just standing back up when a massive wave of agony washed over his body, sending him to the ground. Another attack. The frequency of these pain-filled episodes was rising in the recent weeks. What had been one or two a day was now up to three or four. Stress, most likely. The burden of ruling, combined with his unknown future, was beginning to wear on him in ways that he wasn’t used to. This wasn’t like the stress of crunching at the end of a project or dealing with student loans. This was a constant grind, each day harsher than the last. There were days that he felt like he might drown beneath it all, but all he could do was keep pushing. Anything less than his all might lead to disaster for him, or perhaps even for the entire country.

He was late for his rendezvous with Leo. Pushing himself back to his feet, Blake headed for the main entrance. Today was an important day. One of his pet projects, the sewer system, would take another step forward today. Soon, very soon, this city would no longer smell like ass all the time, and it wouldn’t be so hard to get water. Maybe then the people would begin to understand.

Blake found his Chief of Staff waiting for him by the gate. Employing the ex-prisoner administrator had ended up being perhaps the best decision Blake had ever made. The man was diligent, intelligent, organized, and trustworthy. Blake did worry about the older man’s health, however. The days of long hours spent keeping Otharia an arm’s length from chaos, combined with his endless off-hour search for his missing wife, were taking their toll on him. Dark bags underlined his tired eyes, standing out on his pale face. Blake couldn’t help but notice that he’d been losing weight recently, as well.

“Jeez, Leo, you look terrible.”

“Thank you for your concern, Lord Ferros, but I’m just fine.”

“Like hell you are. Once we’re done with what I’m about to show you, I want you to take a week or two off and relax. Doctor’s orders.”

“If those are your orders, my Lord.”

“Come now, Leo,” Blake said as the gate opened and a squad of skitters, each as tall as a man, formed up around them, “aren’t we friends? I shouldn’t have to order you to take care of yourself. It’s okay to be selfish every so often.”

“... very well,” Leo replied as they both walked out of the fortress. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You do that.”

The pair walked a short distance from the central fortress, coming to stop in the middle of a nearby main avenue. The guard skitters fanned out, forming a wide defensive perimeter to protect him from the... complete lack of nearby people. The citizens had scattered as soon as they’d spotted him heading their way. Some were hiding inside houses while others had just run for the hills. Either way, he had a nice, unobstructed view of the nearby avenue, stretching away from him straight towards the city walls. He walked over to a nearby building and leaned his shoulder against it, motioning his assistant to do the same.

“So all the main sewer tunnels were completed a few weeks ago,” he began, holding his arm out towards the empty avenue as Leo came to stand a few feet away. “They follow the main streets, like this one, all the way down. Since then I sent the borers out to join the others working on clearing new farm fields, and have been working on making enough smaller borers to do the rest.”

“You’re saying there’s a tunnel here? Right beneath us?”

“Yep, a huge one several feet beneath us, going all the way down this street. They all eventually converge and drain into the river to the east, the one that flows straight into the sea.”

“Why do you follow the streets?”

“Basements.”

“Basements?”

“Basements. This sewer does nobody any good if they can’t actually use it. For now I’m going to place some temporary public toilets around on the main streets along with some faucets, but ideally we want actual plumbing coming out of everybody’s ground floors both for waste going out and also fresh water coming in. I now have enough small borers to dig the tunnels from the main sewer pipes into everybody’s homes, but before we begin we need to know where the basements are so we can watch out for them. That’s where you come in. I need you to find every basement in this city and its dimensions.”

“Every single one?” the man gulped, looking about at the sea of houses just on their current avenue.

“Every one,” Blake responded. “Of course, you can have whatever resources you need that I can provide to get this done as fast and accurately as possible.”

“I’ll need to hire a good amount of people.”

“Might I suggest looking into the prisoners that we’re about to let out?”

“Going from such a sequestered existence to that might be too much of a jump.”

“Well, at least consider it. The last thing I want to do is let these people go and then have them just end up in alleys somewhere. That used to happen a lot in my old world, you know. People would end up in prison again in part because they’d be left out to dry with no help after getting out the first time. I’d like to avoid that in this case if we c-”

SMASH!

Out of nowhere, something bashed into Blake’s side like a tractor-trailer going a hundred miles an hour. The impact threw him across the avenue with incredible force, sending him crashing through the shop on the other side like an impromptu wrecking ball, battering his body and knocking him nearly senseless as his armor hurtled through the wooden building. Tumbling completely through the now-destroyed store, he smashed into the building behind it before finally coming to rest amidst a pile of broken wood.

Blake coughed and groaned in pain as he quickly took stock of his situation. His head hurt, his arm hurt, his torso hurt... if he could still feel his legs he was sure those would be hurting now as well. Something pressed painfully against his side. Looking down, Blake was shocked to find a massive dent more than a foot in diameter in his thick powered armor. Just a little more, and the metal would have completely ruptured! Quickly the dent disappeared as he entered Hyper Mode, checking the damage across his body. He needed his armor at full capacity if shit was going down. He found extensive damage all over his suit and went about repairing all the damaged circuits and mechanisms, sending out a distress signal to every skitter in the city to swarm towards him as he did so. After weeks of adjustments and improvements, his battle suit was now orders of magnitude more complex than its initial form, and restoring it to how it was just moments prior would take a few seconds.

The wind whipped about him as he pushed himself to his feet, his repairs completed. Whipped about him? It had been a calm sunny day just a minute ago, and now the wind was whirling around like he was in the center of a tornado. Wait a second... Blake took a look around him, eyes growing wide as first one piece of broken wood lifted off the ground, followed by another as the wind’s velocity continued to increase. While in Hyper Mode, it was easy for Blake to lose track of his surroundings as the world slowed to a crawl and his focus shifted to the metal around him. Somehow, in the scant seconds it had taken him to repair his suit, an actual cyclone had spawned, wrapping his world in an endless wall of flying dirt and debris!

Through that wall stepped two men, walking through the raging winds as if they were not even truly there. One was a giant of a man, nearly seven feet tall with broad shoulders and a chiseled, muscular body. His large hands held a massive hammer, its head easily twice the diameter of Blake’s head. Blake decided to call him ‘Smashy’. The other man was smaller and older with a well-trimmed gray beard, but still fit. He carried no weapon, so was probably the one making the tornado. Blake tentatively named him ‘Windy’.

Blake swore as he spotted the pair’s glowing yellow eyes. This was a hit, a well-planned one at that. Ever since his battle with Yarec, Blake had learned to respect the abilities of somebody on chimirin. That was why he would always strike them with superior numbers and range, overwhelming them with firepower before they could even get close enough to strike back. But this pair had caught him unaware. It was likely that they had expected the initial blow to kill him, but once that had failed they’d immediately isolated him so they could finish the job. Try as he might, Blake could see no metal anywhere on either of his assailants. Even Smashy’s hammer was entirely composed of stone and wood. Yes, these people had come prepared.

Through the dusty winds, Blake saw a guard skitter arrive and try to chase them through the howling storm, only to get thrown helplessly to the side like a child’s toy. Another came just after, its guns blazing, but the wind smacked down the bullets like it would an insect. He was on his own for the moment.

Sending new instructions to his nearby skitters, he took a balanced stance, or as balanced as he could manage in the middle of the maelstrom pushing him back and forth. Metal began flowing towards his right hand. “Fuck it, I needed to let off some steam anyway,” he muttered.

Blake’s supply of metal on hand, especially tucrenyx, was alarmingly low. Everything around him was wood, leaving nothing for him to work with but his suit. Not sure if his armor could take another hit like the first, Blake didn’t want to risk weakening his chest protection, instead drawing his resources by thinning out some of the armor on his legs. A small tube formed over his right wrist, wide enough to fire small bullets the rough equivalent of piston rounds at his unexpected opponents. He couldn’t make anything larger or he’d risk running out of metal.

The large man rushed forward, weapon at the ready. He was faster than he looked, moving through the mighty gusts as if they had no effect on him. They probably didn’t. Neither of the two seemed to be affected by the wind, the no-good cheaters.

Despite the fact that Smashy was the one being the aggressor, Blake decided to deal with the smaller man first. The tornado was a massive disadvantage. Unlike them, Blake was having trouble breathing, could barely hear anything besides the wind howling through the cracks in his armor, and couldn’t move freely with being buffeted about by the currents. He thanked fortune that he wore a giant suit of heavy armor. Without it, he’d likely be a hundred feet in the air already. Luckily it looked like this whirlwind was the small man’s limit, even with chimirin; as long as Blake avoided the screaming wall of air circling the perimeter, he wouldn’t be sailing off into the atmosphere any time soon.

Circling around the oncoming brute, Blake took aim and let loose several shots towards Windy off in the distance. None of the bullets even got close, the wind knocking his projectiles from the air far before they reached their target. With a curse, Blake began to close the distance.

Smashy had different ideas. Blake hopped back as the gargantuan warhammer dove through the space he’d occupied just a split second ago. The mallet struck the ground with shocking power, the tremor knocking Blake off balance and throwing dirt into the air. The soil quickly blew off to the side as Blake took aim at the hammer wielder’s skull, holding his right arm with his left to steady it against the push and pull of the air around him. Just as he was drawing a bead on Smashy’s head, he saw a hint of movement to his left and instinctively let go with his left hand, raising it up to ward off any attack coming from that side. Stability gone, his shot flew wide.

However, Blake didn’t have time to think about his missed shot, because he was suddenly busy with a dagger rising towards his chest, wielded by a lanky woman who had not been there just moments ago. He could not help but notice not just her glowing yellow eyes but also her knowing grin as the bone dagger collided with his forearm and, instead of scraping off, sank into his armor like his arm was made of liquid! The woman laughed as she released the knife, the tip of the long blade now poking out the other side of his prosthetic.

Without hesitation, Blake fired three rounds point blank into the woman’s chest, only to watch in astonishment as the rounds passed through her like she was just an illusion! Was this woman phasing through objects like some kind of ghost? Was that how she’d bypassed his armor? It would explain how she’d snuck up on him at least. First Smashy and Windy, and now ‘Ghosty’? This was getting downright unfair!

As if to reinforce such thoughts, Smashy sent his mallet whipping around in a mighty horizontal swing. Blake did his best to duck out of the way but the top corner of the hammer’s head clipped the side of his torso. The sound of metal ripping graced his ears as he rolled and tumbled across the rubble-filled area before stumbling back to his feet.

As he stood back up, Blake noticed Ghosty’s look of disbelief. Why did she seem so shocked that he was still able to fight? He glanced at the bone knife still lodged in his fake arm and his blood ran cold as he noticed the blade’s glistening blue sheen. Poison!

Judging by the look on their faces, whatever was on that blade was strong enough that he should have been dead already. He couldn’t risk getting hit anymore. Not by anything, especially the new knife Ghosty had just pulled out. But his plan wasn’t ready yet. He needed to play keep-away for just a little while longer. The question was, how could he manage it wearing a large metal suit while inside a tornado? The center. He had to get as close to the center as possible, where the winds would be negligible, and then he’d have a chance.

Blake made a break towards the tornado’s eye, but Smashy wasn’t having any of it. He charged forward, swinging his mallet about like a baseball bat with enough force to knock his head clean off. Blake jumped to his left and let loose several more shots towards the large man. One aimed towards his head missed again, but two others struck his upper torso, lodging themselves in his massive pectoral and shoulder muscles. Smashy roared with pain and swung his hammer down towards him once more. Great, all Blake had accomplished was making him mad.

Blake hopped to the left again, avoiding the hammer by a hair’s breadth while keeping Ghosty on the other side of Smashy, but she simply jumped through the large man as if he were immaterial. How did the woman keep from falling into the earth? Blake’s mind raced as he desperately tumbled away from the woman’s unexpected strike, trying to find a weakness. Ghosty’s body seemed to lack substance, and yet he noticed that the she was careful with where she put her feet as they traversed the littered ground. Could it be that her feet were solid?

Backing away from the incoming specter, Blake quickly fired towards the woman’s shoes. She immediately jumped away, her eyes suddenly far more wary. He’d found a crack in her ability. There was just one problem — he was practically out of metal to use for bullets. What was he supposed to do now? Make his left arm into a blade and fight them up close? That was basically a death sentence!

Blake backed away, trying to make for the tornado’s eye. If he could just last a few more seconds...

The duo didn’t give him a chance. In one swift motion, Smashy grabbed his partner in crime and hurled her headfirst right at Blake’s chest. Blake dodged to the side with everything he had and time seemed to slow as he realized it wouldn’t be enough. Ghosty’s long arms would still reach him with ease, piercing through his armor to deliver a deadly stab wherever she could. If only this godforsaken wind weren’t getting in his way...

Suddenly a thought flashed through his mind, offering salvation. If he couldn’t beat the wind, he needed to use it to his advantage instead. Blake entered Hyper Mode for a split second. In a flash, long, thin sheets of metal emerged from his limbs and torso, connecting and fusing to one another to create what looked like a wingsuit made out of aluminum foil on his armor. The tornado caught his new form with gusto, ripping him away from Ghosty just before she was close enough. He grinned as she let loose a howl of anger as she flew by.

It was finally time. His pieces were in place. He’d checked while in Hyper Mode. Windy noticed his new shape and Blake felt himself lifted into the air, but it was too little, too late.

All this time, Windy had constructed what seemed to be an almost insurmountable defense. His winds would knock away any projectiles headed his way from anywhere around him, even above, while also preventing others from closing in on him. But there was one thing the man hadn’t realized: he’d been standing directly over Blake’s new sewer. As soon as Blake had grasped that neither he nor his minions could easily reach him from above ground, he’d ordered several of the nearby guard skitters into the sewer tunnels to drill up through the tunnel ceiling beneath the older man. Then, once the hole was big enough, they’d switched out with the one other robot he’d sent down there: a battle skitter. One of the ones with gatling guns.

Blake’s larger battle-only skitters were generally retired now that he’d conquered the country. For one they were much larger than the average skitter, with the smallest being over ten feet wide. They were also only good for killing things, meaning they didn’t handle guard duty or police work well. But Blake kept them around anyway just in case, tucking them away in a hangar within his fortress for the next situation that needed overwhelming firepower. A situation like today. The sewers were large enough that a small battle skitter could squeeze down the main tunnels, and now one had it’s gatling cannon pointing straight up at the unsuspecting man with only a foot of dirt between them, its cannon revved up and ready to go.

The ground beneath Windy exploded as the massive rounds blew through the remaining ground like a hot knife through butter, tearing the doomed man’s body to shreds in just a second. It’s power shut off, the tornado dissipated in mere moments, leaving the other two assassins looking about in surprise as over a dozen skitters surrounded them.

“Playtime’s over, fuckers,” Blake snarled as he crashed back down to earth, giving his units the green light.

Hundreds of bullets from all directions ripped into Smashy’s body, rendering him into bloody pulp. With a cry of fury, Ghosty, the only assailant remaining, streaked towards Blake, the bullets passing through her like before. Blake adjusted the skitters’ target downward, peppering the ground around her with bullets, but she kept coming, screaming through the pain as rounds pierced through her feet. He shouldn’t have been surprised; nobody ever survived a dose of chimirin, so why not kamikaze yourself to get the job done if you had to?

Luckily the gap between them was now considerable. At Blake’s orders, a skitter interposed itself between the two of them and began to melt as he willed the metal to liquefy and spread along the ground between them, creating a puddle many feet wide and long and a few inches deep. The woman paid no heed to the spreading muck, charging straight into the gray soup with her eyes locked on him. With a thought, the metal hardened around her front foot and she tripped forward onto her face. Blake winced as her ankle twisted and snapped from the sudden torque. Ghosty flailed about, materializing various parts of her body in an attempt to get closer, but Blake had her trapped now. Every time she tried to put leverage on a body part, Blake would just trap that part in the tucrenyx puddle.

“You might as well give up,” he said after a minute of her struggles getting her nowhere. “I can do this all day.”

The woman glared at him, hatred in her eyes, and laughed. Then suddenly she was gone, her whole body disappeaing into the earth.

“Shit!” Blake cried. He’d always known Ghosty and the rest were consigned to die; they’d sealed their fates as soon as they’d consumed that damnable drug. But he’d been hoping to use her body, at least, to look for clues to where these people were from. The other two were far too destroyed to get any real evidence. But she’d robbed him of that. There were no sewer tunnels beneath where they stood. There was nothing but dirt and rock, all the way down. Perhaps she would fall all the way to the core. What a way to go that would be.

Hurriedly, Blake entered Hyper Mode and repaired his suit once more, rebuilding the melted skitter while he was as it. It was imperative that he looked unhurt, untouchable. He had to seem strong and unbeatable at all times. The public’s belief in his invincibility was key to his control over them.

“Leo!” he called, his repairs done. He looked around. People were just beginning to poke their heads from their houses now that the ruckus had died down. Blake spotted his assistant peeking around the corner a block down the street. He waved the man over.

“Find out where those people came from,” he ordered. “By any means necessary. Do whatever you have to.”

“Surely they were part of the resistance?” the other man wondered.

“Not a chance. There’s no way what remains of the resistance movement would have three people that powerful and not use them earlier. This was a team sent in from somewhere else.”

“Do we have any clues?”

“Just what remains of those two men, and this,” he said as he liberated the bone knife from his prosthetic arm. The part of the knife’s blade that had been inside his arm seemed to be made of a different material now, as if the tucrenyx and bone had fused together into a new substance. Crafting a small box from some metal taken from the nearest skitter, Blake placed the knife into the box, closed it, and handed it to Leo. “Be careful, there’s something on the blade. Probably deadly poison. I don’t care what you have to break to get me this, Leo. I want answers.”

“Understood, Lord Ferros,” Leo replied, eying the box in his hands warily.

“I’m going back. Sorry but your vacation will have to be postponed.”

With that, Blake marched back to his nearby fortress, his strides filled with purpose. He could feel the awe-filled stares of the Otharian citizens as he made his way home. He would bow to no one, and he made sure that all who witnessed him knew that. He was Lord Ferros, and he could not be defeated.

Blake’s strength gave out as soon as he was back in his chambers, where he was sure to be alone. Unable to maintain the facade any longer, he staggered and fell to the floor, his armor melting away as he hugged himself while trembling uncontrollably. His breath came in fits and gasps, his heart pounding in his chest as he shook and rocked back and forth. His mind raced through the prior events over and over, consumed with one simple fact. He’d been lucky.

Everything had worked out in his favor. His armor had held against the initial attack. He’d been near his fortress, meaning plenty of skitters on hand, as well as battle skitters. The wind Observer had been standing over a sewer tunnel. Plus all the near misses where he’d escaped death by a fraction of an inch.

But his mind kept coming back to one thing: the first stab. He should have died right there, he knew. That was where they’d won. Only the fact that both his arms looked the same with his armor on had saved him. If they’d known, or if she’d just picked the other side for her initial strike...

This wouldn’t be the end. They were going to keep coming. The whole world might be after him now, for all he knew, and they had plenty of lives to throw at him. He only had the one. All it would take was one stray arrow, one lucky strike... How much longer could his luck hold? Not long enough, surely.

He needed to redesign his home. If one person could phase through objects, why not others? He needed to make thicker walls, and motion detectors, and maybe even facial recognition if he could manage it. Yes. Cameras everywhere. But was that enough? No. They’d gotten into Otharia somehow. He wasn’t patrolling the border enough. No, every square inch of the border needed to be monitored. He couldn’t let more people get in like that. Otharia needed to lock down.

Better security. Better border control. Better surveillance. Blake laid there on the floor, naked and helpless, grasping at straws, searching for a way out. A way to safety, to peace. A way to happiness. A way to home.