After a minute of flying, Lisa was forced to stop, her chip reader indicating that she had an incoming call. Just when I was picking up speed, she sighed. As soon as she saw the caller, however, she perked up.

“Lisa,” Bath began, “you wanted to speak to me?”

“Yeah. What do you know about Tollan?”

“Everything,” Bath said cheekily.

Must’ve been eavesdropping, Lisa thought, snorting at Bath’s complete disregard for privacy.

“I kind of messed everything up, didn’t I?”

Bath tsked. “It wasn’t your best moment, but what happened wasn’t really your fault.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Your trump card–mind manipulation–was rendered useless, and you were caught off guard. You were sent into a situation that exploited your weaknesses.”

Lisa harrumphed. “I guess.” Like you have any weaknesses, she grumbled.

“Anyways, we have something more important for you to work on.”

Lisa paused. “What?”

“How would you feel about helping your Aunt in the Ukraine?”

Lisa mulled it over. I was headed in that direction anyway, she reasoned. Kray City would only be a short flight away.

But the idea of working with her Aunt made Lisa nervous. Aunt Lauretta was a much stronger kursi than herself; Lisa didn’t want to jump right back into a situation where her “trump card,” to use Bath’s terminology, was rendered moot.

“Can’t she handle the situation herself?”

“She could,” Bath admitted. “But she actually asked for you by name.”

Lisa did a double take. “She did?”

“Yup.”

“I thought we were sending in her and Uncle Bern?”

“Ah,” Bath intoned. “Right, about that...Lepochim requested that Bern stay in Basalith.”

Lisa’s eyebrows pinched together. “Is he still using Bern for interrogations?”

“Right,” Bath said, voice clipped. “Anyway, Lauretta agreed to go to the Ukraine, but she requested that you come along. I’d go if I were you.”

Lisa crossed her arms, looking down at the yellow Mexican plains below. “I’ll do it, then.”

Appearing to sense her reticence, Bath continued, saying, “I think it’ll be a good idea. She has over a millennia of experience, more than any of the kursi you’ve spent time with so far.”

Lisa had to concede Bath’s point. Zhou Wang, the leader of the vanguard kursi, wasn’t even three-hundred years old. “Fine, fine, I get it.”

“Cheer up,” Bath said. “Remember that COTD wouldn’t be possible without you.”

His words were like a punch to the stomach. But...wouldn’t it be possible without her?

Bath fleshed out his point. “Without you, I wouldn’t have ever considered making an organization like COTD, nor would I have discovered the Ritus gate. Truly, Lisa; don’t sell yourself short.”

Lisa’s mouth twitched, her lips curling up into a reluctant grin. “Alright, I get it. Let Lauretta know I’m on my way to Basalith.”

---

Bath smiled grimly as he hovered in the sky above Basalith, his signature cape rippling behind him. His essence, strewn throughout the city, continued to give him detailed sensory input on all that was occurring within his range. After encountering the tortus “trap” on Illudis, his expanded range of influence made it easier than before to roam around Basalith. Where previously he needed to be conscientious not to overstep the city’s boundaries (lest the opposite end of the city fall beyond his range of influence), now, he had an extra 0.2 miles of radius to work with. With a radius of 3.6 miles, he used to have a maximum volume of influence of 195 cubic miles. With an improved radius of 3.8, his volume of influence stood at 230 cubic miles–an almost 20% increase.

Well, Bath thought, flexing his right arm. It’s time to go. In an instant, his essence dissipated. Now, Bath was contained unto himself, his body: he only saw through his two human eyes, only felt through his soft, human skin. It was relaxing: constantly monitoring Basalith wasn’t tiring, per se, but it did take a nontrivial exertion of effort.

In the blink of an eye, he took on his favorite guise: that of his multicolored, feathered dragon. He shot forward, pumping his wings and shooting out particles of mass behind him. At one point, he was going so quickly that he needed to materialize scale plates over his face to protect himself from the whipping wind.

He knew that Lisa had gone the subtle route, so he decided to do just the opposite. When he reached the outskirts of Tollan, Bath began to rapidly increase the size of his form until his wings encompassed half of the city in a rainbow crescent.

When he roared, the city itself shuddered. Bath was pleased to see that all below him were frozen in shock. Well, the humans, at least: the quasi-sapients had recognized his presence immediately, and had accordingly bowed in supplication. Upon the ziggurat at the city’s center, the many feathered snake quasies met his roar with little crowing noises of their own, jubilation clear on their faces.

Bath noticed at once that many of his quasies had a yoke of haziness about them. When he tried to communicate with them directly, as normal humans could do with the assistance of a frond of dragonleaf, their minds seemed half-closed. Almost as though their thoughts are being censored, Bath thought.

The tampering with his quasies quickly sent Bath’s temper into a roiling boil. There was no doubt in his mind: some kursi was audacious enough to interfere with his quasies, his creations; by many definitions of the word, his children.

To say that Bath was not pleased was a serious understatement.

He roared again; this time, his roar sounded like a wailing screech straight out of a Jurassic Park film. His fangs shone sterling white in the light of the sun, while his feathers scintillated dangerously, as though each feather were an oil-soaked blade.

Then, a disembodied voice boomed out:

“The Dragon has come to liberate this city from its hidden oppressor.”

Each word was so loud, they caused the ground to tremble. All present felt an immense pressure come over them, as though there were a physical weight to the air, and they were submerged in water.

“For where free will is stifled, so dies self-determination.”

As the final syllable exploded out, the ground buckled. Innumerable mottled, thorny vines snaked out, seemingly encompassing the entire city in a spiny thicket.

Thankfully, whatever power muffled the minds of my quasies only had a trifling influence on spineroot. The usurpers had only controlled spineroot via ordinary dragonleaf-tether communication, suggesting that these mind-control kursi powers were unable to effectively work on the defensive plant. Even if most kursi lacked the expansive mind-dominating ability manifest in Tollan, Bath expected that they would run into kursi with similar powers in the future.

Realizing that his spineroot was resistant to kursi domination caused a swell of confidence to rise in his chest, one he tamped down on as he focused on rectifying the situation at hand.

Ever since his arrival, Bath had been sending out his essence into the city in an attempt to locate the individuals responsible for the current situation. Where words failed to make the culprits reveal themselves in panicked fear, his spineroot demonstration produced the desired effect.

Deep in the labyrinthine basement of the ziggurat, Bath snared a contingent of five individuals with his thorns, digging deep gashes into their skin. He couldn’t hear them scream, as he neglected to manifest ears in their location, but he could feel their mouths gaping in rictus, their eyes bulging wildly with pain.

Bath’s eyes narrowed coldly. He yanked the people out of the ground, spineroot tearing open a path to the surface. He saw that all he uprooted were garbed in the brown robes of peacekeepers; however, Bath didn’t recognize them: He had taken careful note of the peacekeepers assigned to Tollan, and these people weren’t them.

A moment later, his expanding essence detected the presence of people located at the very ends of his range, buried deep underground.

His expression darkened. If not for my expanded range, I wouldn’t be able to detect them. That indicated that whoever these five conspirators were, they had intimate knowledge of his limitations, and had tried to exploit them to hide their captives. It was unlucky for them that they were working with outdated intelligence.

He suspended the five above the ziggurat for all in the city to see. As he did so, he confirmed that the people stashed underground were the missing kursi. No Maya, though.

“These five have used their power to cast a shadow on Tollan,” Bath boomed, his voice severe enough to cut metal. As he spoke, he constricted the thorny vines, causing the captives to yell out in pain as blood dripped down their bodies. “They usurped your peacekeepers, profaning the gifts I granted them.” This was true: Bath could sense that the quintet possessed his boons. If they take my gifts, and then turn around and stab COTD in the back–they have no excuse.

If they were kursi attempting to stand up to the sudden takeover of COTD, stubbornly resisting his power, Bath would have no small amount of respect toward them. In fact, while he’d publicly punish them, he’d privately send them over to Lepochim with the intention of turning their allegiance towards COTD. Bath recognized the utility of having subordinates with strong backbones.

These people, however, appeared to be only interested in accumulating power. They’d taken his boons, then greedily worked to take over one of his cities. They’d even gone so far as to attack Lisa.

He constricted the vines further, letting the cracking of ribs sing out. Even as he made their punishment into a spectacle, Bath continued to ponder the five’s motives. They had to know that this would end in failure, he reasoned. They hadn’t been subtle in their activities, what with silencing all news sources. Moreover, Bath couldn’t fathom what they had been trying to accomplish by turning mutated animals on the city after dark, as Lisa had reported.

Nothing seemed to add up.

After a solid minute of constricting the quintet, Bath made a show of devouring them with his massive jaws. In reality, he merely internalized them in his gullet, knocking them unconscious for transport to Basalith.

Whether it was the intense pain, or being knocked out, Bath wasn’t certain; but the cloud over the minds of his quasi-sapients began to subside. He began to communicate with them directly, hoping to dredge up any information about Maya’s whereabouts.

Nobody, however, seemed to have any idea where she was.

By now, three minutes had transpired since his arrival, and Bath was growing impatient. Had they hidden her somewhere outside the city?

If that was the case, she could be anywhere. Bath sighed internally at the situation, frustrated that he couldn’t immediately wrap everything up.

“Maya is no longer in this city,” Bath’s disembodied voice sounded out. “Until she is located, a new human shall be appointed to preside over this city-seed. All interested in vying for the position should meet at the stadium. A small tournament will be conducted; the winner shall become the new ruler of Tollan. I shall wait ten minutes before conducting the trial.”

With that, Bath’s draconic form vanished in a puff of shimmering dust. In the meantime, he relocated the five kursi imposters to the chamber underground where they had originally stowed the real peacekeepers. He’d pick them up on his way out.

A moment later, he appeared in a flash of light over the stadium, his human form garbed in his black COTD uniform. He crossed his arms and began the ten-minute countdown.