Garth didn’t really mind Half-nose having the core, or even using it to boost his spells. As long as the thing wasn’t scrapped for parts by the end of this he could always get it back. Two factors kept Garth calm.

He was pseudo-immortal, and a little energy beam shenanigans wasn’t gonna do anything, Half-nose couldn’t keep this up forever.

“Maybe we could have a civil conversation, ‘cuz I mean, the property damage is getting – ack!” Garth ducked hard enough to slam himself into the ground, hands under his chest.

Fly

Garth shot sideways as the beam followed him down, tumbling behind the stone wall of a shop.

“Civil conversation? About what? Your grudge against the founder, who is the bedrock of my entire existance?”

“D’awww.” Garth glanced around the side of the building, noticing Woody in position to squish the distracted High Inquisitor.

Garth gave it the universal ‘stop’ signal by swiping his fingertips across his clavicle.

“I don’t know who you are, but I know what you are.” Half-nose said, oozing a little bit of blood from his nostril.

“Oh yeah, what’s that?” Garth asked, sneaking around the building while he threw his voice with a tunnel of compressed air.

“You’re an Ancient from the fall of man, like the Apostle of Kolath.”

A bolt of reality-melting raw mana blasted the spot where Garth had been directing his voice.

“To be fair, I am an Apostle.” Garth said, peering around the other corner of the building. Shadow sniffed his hand, and he gave him a quick pet.

“You’re one of hundreds of Ancients that have tried to tear the Founder down. Always with the same words, accusing the founder of tyranny, or selling us to another power.”

Garth ducked another bolt of energy that carved a hole out of his hiding place.

I’m running out of hiding spaces.

Garth made a maze of green mana, then tore walls of magically diffusing Ironwood out of the ground with it, causing the city to rumble and shake as the labyrinth formed in the heart of the city.

Not that there were any people within three blocks of them.

“I have to wonder, how soft were the Ancients? How easy were their lives that simply doing what must be done is considered intolerable?”

“Umm…pretty soft. America was literally the fattest nation in the world. I hate to admit it, but I was developing a bit of a gut myself when-“

A bouncy steel ball bearing the size of a beach-ball hit the far wall of Garth’s impromptu maze and rebounded into him, taking him off his feet with its sheer mass and crushing him against the far wall.

The steel beach ball rolled away while Garth groaned. Behind him was the outline of Garth’s spine and ribs pressed into the slightly softer ironwood.

If his pain receptors hadn’t been turned down to 40%, that would have hurt.

“Ow.”

Garth processed the thing’s trajectory overlayed on his memory of the labyrinth’s construction. It had come from…right there.

Garth took a step forward and kicked the steel ball, putting a bit of English on it. The spin helped it get back around the corner and made it unpredictable to the unprepared.

He was rewarded a second later with a grunt and the sound of armor crumpling.

A second later, Half-Nose came sailing over the edge of the labyrinth, straight onto Garth. The armor of his left side had been squished by the ball bearing. The golden armor was crumbled and there was a bit of blood dripping down from inside it.

The momentum took them both to the ground, and Half-Nose brought the Mythic core toward Garth’s chest. Garth reacted instantly, slapping his own hand around Half-Nose’s and the golden golf ball.

He had a disadvantage wrestling control of the mana away from Half-Nose, who had physical contact with the core, but it was enough to turn the beam of raw directed mana into a lightning storm of power around the two of them.

“I don’t think I’ve got what it takes to fix the government and all the world’s inequalities,” Garth said with a shrug, eyeing the snarling man on top of him as he slowly took more and more of the mana away from him. “But I do think Jim’s been misbehaving in my absence, and there’s no one more qualified to spank him than me.”

Half-nose raised a hand to strike him, and Garth caught it with his forehead, breaking the man’s fingers.

“You think you’ll be any different?” Half-Nose demanded, cradling his hand. “I’ve been off-planet. I’ve seen what the Dan Ui clan is capable of. Whatever half-assed plan you have to overthrow the Founder is hopeless. Even If you succeed by the grace of the gods, they’ll just use you as their mouthpiece, and in the meantime, you’ll be responsible for the disruption of the entire empire. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, for nothing.”

“The only people who die are the ones who don’t do as I say. I have infinite, self-replicating generosity for those who align themselves with me.” Garth said.

The lambas potato being a case in point.

Garth kicked the Inquisitor off him, causing the man to tumble backward into the ironwood wall, coughing. The wizard duel was starting to take the shape of a knock-down, drag out fight.

Garth glanced up at the sky. The dimensional trap must be active somewhere in the rubble, making teleportation highly impractical.

Garth glanced down at the High Inquisitor with a critical eye. The guy was beat to shit, and he was on the verge of an aneurism from magical overuse. His nose bleeding freely down the front of his face, creating twin channels of blood that dripped down his lips.

Probably time to get the hell out of here before he does something stupid like-

“Hurk!” A sword slid off Garth’s skull, then pulled back and squeaked past his ribs to lodge itself in his lungs. Inquisitor number 4, We’ll call him Tranqs, had decided to wake up and assist his boss.

Garth looked down at the sword in his chest, then back up at the guy.

Down to the sword.

Back up at the guy.

Garth grabbed the blade and backhanded the guy with telekinetically assisted force, sending him slamming into the wall and back to his dreamless sleep.

You fuckin’ try to take it easy on someone and they stab you in the lungs.

“You know how many times I got stabbed in the chest before I became immortal?” Garth wheezed as he removed the steel and tossed it aside, squatting beside the shivering High Inquisitor. The shivering was most likely a combination of pain, overwork, and adrenaline, because the guy didn’t look the least bit scared.

“Not hardly never.”

“You know why it’s happening now?” Garth asked, peering into the man’s swelling face.

“Because I can afford to take it easy on you. You’re beneath me. Old me would’ve probably just killed you and been done with it. I’m honestly interested in what kind of force the ‘Mississippi Empire’ can muster if you’re their best and brightest. Makes me wonder why Leanne’s so paranoid.”

At Half-nose’s widened gaze, Garth shrugged. “Not all Ancients know each other, that’s ageist, but in my case, we go way back. Almost as far as me and your bitch-boy founder.”

Half-nose snarled and brought the mythic core up, into Garth’s waiting palm. Garth scattered the energy while placing his other hand on the man’s forehead.

Heal.

Can’t let this guy croak on me just yet.

“I apologize, that was offensive to bitch-boys. Jim’s a cold-blooded, opportunistic, only-slightly-more-intelligent-than-average, narcissistic, self-righteous waste of space. And you can tell him, from me, that his statues suck.”

Garth hit the man with a dose of tranquilizers that would be enough to kill a normal human, and watched as he nodded off, desperately trying to keep his eyes locked on Garth.

Garth took a moment to pry the Mythic core out of the man’s death-grip, marveling at the burns on the man’s palms where he’d channeled so much raw mana.

Garth pocketed the golf-ball sized doom seed and stood up.

All around him were devastated buildings and streets torn apart like tissue paper. The sky had a full laser show happening in the clouds above.

Garth pulled the energy out of the massive tree towering over the city and watched it begin to rain down as ash. In a matter of minutes, the city would be covered in a fine layer of white powder, making it seem like an apocalyptic volcano or meteor strike had devastated the city.

Alright, if that doesn’t get the empire’s attention, Idunno what would.

He eyed the guy one more time. One was easy, but about three to five High Inquisitors could probably toast him as the economy of numbers worked against him, and he had to assume that the empire could field a lot more than that.

Not to mention there could be people from the Dan Ui clan above third tier, easily.

I need to make some more preparations.

And he didn’t have a lot of time to do it.

Garth had just proven that this High inquisitor couldn’t beat him on his own. That meant, if he was a professional, he would request reinforcements.

Good thing I already did that for him, In case he decided to get cold feet.

Garth flew up into the sky and angled toward the west, toward his nice little subtropical slice of coastline.

***Finn***

The explosions and flying chunks of stone and buildings had finally stopped rocking the tiny desk that Finn had huddled under, and after a minute or so of silence, he finally dared to peek his head out into the ash-filled air.

Some strange shadow creature fit only for a nightmare had put out all the lights in the building and stalked them, then the precinct had exploded with no warning, until finally Finn had simply decided to stay under his desk where it was safe until people stopped throwing each other around like dolls.

“Hello?” Finn asked the silence. There were dark, smooth wooden walls made of a single, polished piece of wood surrounding them, coming out of the very ground.

“Hello?” He tried to quell the tremor in his voice, but it didn’t seem to want to go away.

Off in the distance, there was some quiet coughing and scraping. Finn wasn’t sure if it was the Good Guys or the Bad Guys, but numerically, it was more likely to be his people.

Plus they didn’t sound good, so maybe they weren’t a threat, one way or another. With that in mind, Finn grabbed a broken chair leg and began to creep through the wooden labyrinth, heading for the source of the noise.

After about ten minutes, he happened across the source: High Inquisitor Nathanial was pawing at his chest, trying to undue his armor strap with his burned right hand. His left hand laid limp at his side, crushed and swollen.

“Finn?” Nathanial said, glancing over, peering through two swollen eyes. “That you?”

“Yes sir!” Finn said, dropping his improvised weapon and rushing to assist.

“Get this breastplate loosened, I can’t breathe.”

“Right away!” Finn knelt down to loosen the straps tucked away inside the armor’s plates, then pried the severely dented golden armor away from the man’s chest.

Had they actually come across the Apostle of Kolath? Finn would have assumed she’d be on the other side of the world, building her power. Finn couldn’t imagine the forces involved that would reduce the man’s armor to such a state.

Beneath the armor, the high inquisitor wore a simple brown padded suit under the armor, stained with sweat.

“Fetch my seal, it’s in my satchel.” Nathanial said, pointing.

Finn felt the large porcelain piece lacquered with gold and jade in the man’s leather pouch, pulling it out reverentially. It was a beautiful, priceless piece of art in the shape of a dragon, unique to each High Inquisitor. Stealing one was punishable by death, forging one was punishable by death. Handling it without permission, death, looking at it wrong…you get the idea.

Finn blew a bit of lint from Nathanial’s pocket off it, his hands trembling nervously, taking care not to damage it in any way. At this moment in his life, Finn literally held his life in his hands.

“Here you go.” Finn said, offering it to him with both hands.

“Good, now smash it.”

“What?” Finn asked, breaking out in a cold sweat. Was this some kind of game, or test? Did he want him to get himself killed for heresy?

“Smash. The. Seal. I know you’re not an idiot Finn.”

“are you sur-“

“Do it!”

Finn obeyed reflexively, tossing it away as hard as he could. The piece of porcelain sailed through the air for a timeless moment that Fin could swear lasted for half a minute, then it smashed against the wooden wall, it’s white, gold and green pieces falling to the rubble-filled ground.

Well, that’s it. If he was messing with me, then I’m dead.

Finn glanced back and flinched at the vicious smile on the older man’s face, but relaxed when he realized it wasn’t for him.

The broken pieces of the seal began to shake, trembling in the dirt before they were lifted in the air by some unknown force, forming a large circle in midair.

The air in the center of this circle formed a swirling shimmer that eventually stabilized, then darkened and gained color, revealing the throne, where the Emperor was sitting, apparently bored.

What’s going on?

The emperor glanced up and seemed to notice them.

“Oh, Nate…You look like shit.” He glanced over at Finn sitting next to the High inquisitor. “Hi Finn!”

“Greetings founder!” Fin said, groveling before the image in the air.

“Whaddya need?” the Founder said, unperturbed.

“I’d like to make my report in private.” Nathanial said, still leaning against the wooden walls.

“You heard the man, get outta here!” The Founder said, and unseen courtiers strode away, their heels clacking against the marble floors of the palace.

“All right, we’re alone,” he glanced at Finn “-Ish. What do you have to tell me?”

As the details of Nathanial’s report flowed, The Founder’s expression was amazed at first, then it became darker and darker.

“We’ll be there in two hours.” he said, and the tiny portal shut, the porcelain tinkling back down to the ground.