An ethereal wind whipped around me, spiritual mass streaming into a dawning black sun. I was cast adrift amid the roaring rapids, struggling for something, anything to anchor me. After a few panicked moments, I realized that my body was a perfectly suitable anchor. The entire sensation was non-physical.

I opened my eyes to find myself perfectly still, on my knees in the little vestibule inside the tower. My hands were gripping at the rough concrete beneath me, slowly stripping off a layer of skin. The magical phenomenon hadn’t abated - essence from all around us was still rushing on into the endless black pool that was The Abstract Painter, but I was anchored in the physical now and was no longer quite so disoriented.

“What the fuck is that?” Joe said, looking off in a physical direction which vaguely corresponded to what was happening, “I can tell something big is happening over there, but it’s all… out of focus.”

“Be thankful for that,” I said, struggling to my feet. Despite the ephemeral nature of the maelstrom, I kept having to remind myself that I wasn’t literally, physically being dragged down in order to keep my footing.

“Please take my body to safety, I will reward you both,” a buzzing voice said. The Painter’s flat, magically generated voice. I glanced around at the tiny room, trying to find the source. Joe was standing without apparent effort. Lucky, blind bastard.

Where The Painter’s avatar had been standing was now a billowing cloud of raw, cold essence. The seeming source of the voice. I could see a fine filament of black essence running out from the distant unfolding magical disaster and into the little patch, probably what was left of its connection to the avatar. There were also hairline fractures forming along the floor and walls. Despite our apparent distance to the true core of the being that was The Painter, whatever was happening there was also causing some damage here. Probably through its avatar. At least its request meant that it wasn’t doing this intentionally, and wasn’t actually betraying us. Probably.

“Can you cut the connection? Just temporarily, I mean,” I said as I dashed into the cloud. It stung my entire body, but a light flex of my power was all it took to push it back. I didn’t even need to open a portal or move anything, merely asserting the sovereignty of my own essence over myself. Probably wouldn’t be so effective in any direct confrontation, but it certainly helped here. I used that black filament to locate the body inside the cloud, scooped it up, and dashed back and away. The cold crystalline certainty I felt from my last close encounter with this being started to creep into me from the body in my arms. How much worse would it be if I tried to store it? No. Not worth the risk.

“I cannot. It will be reclaimed if-”

The voice dissolved into static, sharp and unyielding. I felt something wet drip down the side of my face. There was a surge in the great black hole linked to my cargo. A pulse shot down the connection, the black crystals forming in my essence whispered that there was nothing I could do against something of that magnitude, and that it would strike too quickly for me to get away from the avatar, even if I tried.

In the split second before the pulse arrived, there was a massive flex of alien will and the pulse burst around the cloud where the avatar had been, rather than continuing down the connection to the body in my arms. The burst of energy sent lances of utter darkness into the walls and ceiling. There was a kink in the connection between The Painter and the avatar in my arms now, somehow pinning it near the cloud where the body had fallen. The connection wasn’t cut, but it looked like the worst of the backlash would be spat out here in the vestibule, rather than wherever we took the avatar. I made for the door leading out when a distorted voice called out.

“Not that way. The jailer comes.”

And she was coming. I could feel something big and complex moving around, getting closer. Without The Painter’s warning I wouldn’t have been able to tell where it was coming from though. I turned around and skirted the growing mass of entropy in the center of the room, hopped over a crack forming in the floor, and hit the elevator call button. The doors slid open and I darted inside, followed quickly by Joe. I mashed the eleven button, and stared out at the growing cracks in reality, wishing that this elevator had a door close button like real ones did.

An eternity later the doors finally closed, and I could feel a shift in space cut us off entirely from the vestibule that had been quite far along in the process of no longer existing. I set the avatar down and breathed a sigh of relief as I turned to Joe, noticing for the first time that he was bleeding all over the carpet. He was entirely missing an arm, his other hand gripping the stump just below the elbow. There was a second chunk missing from the shoulder of the same arm, but it was shallower and barely oozing blood.

“Little help?” he hissed through gritted teeth. He closed his eyes and held what remained of his arm out toward me.

I reached out and produced a point of light, holding it close to the wound as he pulled his remaining hand away. The air in the elevator suddenly jumped in temperature, Joe’s bleeding wound seared shut in an instant. Some of the chill and clarity faded from my system.

“Will,” Joe said as he opened his eyes, “they’ve got guards posted at the level twenty barriers now. They started doing it about a week ago.”

“Fuck. I really don’t want to be seen.”

I turned to the avatar lying still on the floor, still subtly connected to the much larger being which had just pledged to reward us. And we were heading toward the elevator access in towers, a spot right outside the twentieth floor boss room, a place where it had already proven it had significant power to act.

“Painter, can you hide us from the guards’ senses somehow?” I asked, not entirely sure it was still listening given the turmoil it was currently undergoing.

“I can. It is done.”

Its voice buzzed unpleasantly, the words soft enough that I had to crouch down near the avatar to hear them properly, but they were reassuring nonetheless. When the elevator doors opened, I stepped out, my power stirring at my command, ready to lash out at a moment’s notice. I didn’t doubt The Painter’s power, but it didn’t seem smart to rely entirely on protection from entities beyond my control.

The two guards lie dead. Decapitated very recently. I suppose we were technically hidden from their senses at the moment.

“It’s clear,” I called. Joe stepped out, the avatar slung over his good shoulder, and chuckled.

“Can’t complain,” he said, “Thieving bastards, the whole lot of them. Tried to extort magic items from me and force me to register when they saw me last time. Had to kill them that time too, though it was a close thing. Haven’t been back since.”

“Can we take their stuff? Serves them right for trying to rob other players.”

“Won’t work. Go see for yourself,” Joe said, gesturing with his stump.

I walked over to the bodies, a bright red and orange scaled lizardman like Joe, though smaller and slimmer, and a human whose skin and hair marked him as likely from the Urban States assuming he hadn’t adjusted his avatar. Both wore basic grey clothing, but had a number of other trinkets about them. Most eye-catching were a sash with a bunch of emblems on the human, and a baton that looked like it was made from gold in the grip of the red lizard. I didn’t even need to get any closer to know that Joe was correct.

As soon as I turned my attention towards them, I could feel that there was something wrong. Something was missing, from the items and the bodies both. It was like the material of the first barrier, that hard black metal/glass that evaporated once it was pulled away from the barrier that created it. I picked up the gold rod, feeling the weight of it. The physical substance would stick around for a little while, but any magical function had already decayed. I set it back down. How did that work?

“Yeah, losing gear on death is always a terrible mechanic,” Joe added, “especially in a game like this where getting magical stuff is all RNG.”

Ugh. Whatever. Today was not supposed to be a work day, and yet I’d already started picking at the edges of sorcery, triggered a localized magical apocalypse, and now spotted another mechanic that did look suspiciously like a game mechanic. I shook my head, trying to clear out the rapidly accumulating mental debris, and moved on.

We headed down through the pile of random junk obstructing the stairs. As it had last time, the pile adjusted itself to permit us to pass. Once we were at the landing with the floor twenty-one checkpoint, Joe set the avatar down.

“Should be safe here,” he said, “I don’t know that anyone has figured out the trick to get that second key legitimately.”

“Your info’s a week out of date though.”

“Hmm, alright.”

Joe scooped the avatar up, and set off down the stairs. I followed along.

“You wanted to kill some monsters tonight, right?” Joe asked, I nodded, “Well, twenty-five in this tower is a really good one. I haven’t been all the way through, but I think you’ll enjoy it.”

We made our way down, the absence of any sounds but those we made lending credence to the idea that no one else had made it this far yet, but relying on outdated information was never a good idea. We pushed open the door to the twenty-fifth floor, and were greeted with a blast of warm, damp air. I stepped out onto the rocky precipice just beyond the door and looked out.

Sprawling out before me was a lush jungle island. It was far enough away that I could take in the whole thing at once, but not so far that I couldn’t make out most of its major features with the naked eye. Thick tangles of green dominated roughly two-thirds of the area I could see, with the remainder divided between grassy plains, a river running down to the ocean, and the mountain rising from the center. Wisps of black smoke drifted up from the peak. A volcano. Even at this distance, I could somehow hear the calls of various birds and beasts, none of which I could readily place. I could make out some rather large shapes moving in groups across the plains. Now that I thought about it, some of those birds circling seemed a little large and…

Then it struck me. I recognized some of those larger shapes making lazy circles in the air. Those weren’t birds. A huge head and beak. A long thin neck ending in a body that was entirely wings, broad and smooth. Quetzalcoatlus. I looked back at the large shapes on the plains, and could just make out long necks protruding from their massive bodies. My growing excitement was feeding my sun, which was in turn feeding me energy and burning out the remaining dregs of the Painter’s cold certainty.

“Joe…” I turned to the grinning reptilian, who had set the Painter’s avatar against a formation of rocks next to the exit door and returned to stand next to me on the precipice.

“Yes, Will?” he asked, feigning innocence.

“Is this floor an entire island of dinosaurs?”

His beaming grin was my answer.

“This is exactly what I needed. Thank you.”

I tore my gaze away from the primordial vista before me, and walked over to the Painter’s avatar.

“Are we good to leave this body here? She won’t be able to track you here?” I asked. There was a delay before the answer came, drifting gently on the crippled connection.

“Yes.”

The sound was weak and distorted, but the message was certain. I couldn’t feel the sorceress getting any closer either, though disturbingly, I could still sense her if I reached. Something vast and intricate, somewhere nearby but thankfully not too near. The Painter, too, was out there. Even if I turned my metaphysical eye away from the connection to the avatar, I could sense the turbulent pool of cold off… somewhere. There was something else out there too. Something somewhere below-

I wrenched my thoughts away, shaking my head vigorously.

“Are you going to be alright?” I asked the Painter.

“Yes.”

Its voice was even softer this time. I could feel that the distant storm at its core was picking up again.

“What happened?” I asked, on the off chance it’d actually say.

“…awaken…new…aspect…thank…”

And then it was gone. The barest shred of a connection to the avatar still existed, but the entity itself had fully withdrawn into the core of its being. I guess whatever was happening required all of its focus. Wasn’t that a scary thought.

“Did we just power up a rogue element, one that was probably already raid boss tier?” Joe asked.

“Probably,” I said with a shrug, “but he’s been good to us. It’s probably fine.”

And if it wasn’t, there was not a thing we could do about it. I turned back to the scenic overlook. We could worry about things beyond our power later. For right now, we had dinosaurs to hunt.

The climb down was unexpectedly easy. That cliff that somehow overlooked the entire island was just a little spear of rock jutting out from the ocean, no more than thirty or so feet high at its peak. There was even a relatively manageable path that didn’t even require any serious or dangerous climbing to make it down. Obviously some perspective wizardry was going on there to give us a look at the whole island before we set off. We reached the sandy beach, a small patch separated from the rest of the island by a strip of pristine blue water. As we approached, I could see down through the clear water, revealing suspicious translucent masses, almost invisible in the water, trailing bundles of tendrils.

“Those look like they hurt.”

“Yep,” Joe threw back.

“When I say ‘flash’, close your eyes for a second and a half.”

“Sure.”

“Flash.”

Joe closed his eyes immediately. I breathed in, feeling my solar essence flow through me. Breathing out, I opened a channel to my corona, releasing its radiant energy into the world. I scored a trench between this beach and the one on the greater island. A great plume of steam burst forth as water poured into the rough glass-edged crevice. Unfortunately, the rush of water filling the gap had pulled more jellyfish into the shallows between the two beaches.

No matter. I stepped back toward the stone spire and removed a few slabs from it, and deposited them directly into the water. Instant bridge.

“How’d you do it? Just teleport across?” I asked Joe, as we crossed my stone walkway.

“Hah, no. I thought that my scales would be too tough for jellyfish, and tried to wade through.”

“How’d that work for you?” I asked, playing my expected part.

“Not well. I freaked out and torched the water. I boiled the hell out of everything nearby, but I haven’t got the output to glass the beach. Still, it did the trick, and I waded the rest of the way. Good thing that the immunity to your own powers is smart enough to make you immune to first order effects too, or that would have been a short run. The sting’s the main reason I didn’t finish the level though, the fucker was hurting for hours afterwards.”

“Well, this time you’ll get to actually enjoy it.”

“Now you’re talking!”

I had played this game before. This exact game.

The sound of a branch cracking brought us to a halt. Joe and I both held our breath, listening to the soft rustle of the warm wind through the leaves. We stood as still as possible, ready to spring into action if it became necessary. We should be downwind of it, whatever it was, but you never know if that would be enough. After what felt like an hour, we heard crashing through the jungle, moving away from our position.

No minimap. No tech. Just you and the primordial wild.

Joe wrestled with the sleek, scaled creature, as a second and third tried to menace him, held back only by the rough spear I was thrusting in their direction anytime they made a threatening move. They snapped at my spear, but didn’t approach, and ran off after Joe had broken the neck of the one he was working on. I was pretty sure raptors had had feathers, but according to Joe this was what we used to think they looked like, back in the nineties. Weird.

We had restricted ourselves to internal powers only for actual combat. I was leaning on my boundless solar energy, and Joe had restricted himself to merely being an enormous lizardman. Though he only had one arm at the moment, he was more than a match for anything smaller than himself.

Ok, there were a few differences. Last time I played, I was clumsy because the dev needed the player to be. Here, I was clumsy because I had only been fighting for my life for a few short weeks, and a lifetime of physical safety had left me poorly suited to it.

We made our way through the ruined lab. The island, it seemed, was not as pristine as it had originally looked. The other side of the island had a bunch of enclosures and buildings, all of which were crumbling and didn’t contain anything of value. Deep in the jungle, however, there were a few structures as well. These were invariably guarded by a pack of raptors, which seemed to speak to one another in chirping bursts of sound. The first time we had seen one, they had driven us off. Now, however, we had found something that changed things. Spears. Not makeshift sharpened wooden sticks. Actual professionally made devices that looked like they were created specifically with controlling dinosaurs in mind, complete with a tip designed to deliver a shock. Sure, they looked like they had sat unused for decades, but Joe and I had gotten one of them working, and the second one we brought along was still a hell of a lot sturdier than what we had been using. There was sure to be something valuable in those labs, but to get it we’d need to challenge the pack again.

The quetzalcoatlus dove in twos and threes, sending us running for any overhead cover we could find. The vast pterosaurs had beaks that were longer than I was tall. I was definitely on the menu. Even Joe, who was probably too big for them to swallow whole, could probably be chomped into edible chunks in those massive beaks.

We had long since abandoned our self-imposed limitations on our powers. The T-rex fight had shown us what a bad idea that had been. It was just lucky that there were those weird colored cars around for us to cover behind. There was no such convenient cover here. We scrambled across the rocky ground, working our way up towards the caldera. Beams of flame and polychromatic solar flares burst forth, scorching our enormous aerial attackers, killing some and maiming others. I stored my half as we went, keeping some of the maimed ones as well with the hope that Nico could do something with them. Certainly better combat units than huge butterflies. Over the course of our visit to the island, I had accumulated enough raw monster materials to more than finish my pending minion. No idea what I’d use the excess for, but having additional raw materials was never a bad thing.

I had also finally had the opportunity to find a limit to my sun power. If I tapped only the corona, which seemed to be totally and rapidly renewable, I could only produce a full on solar flare for about six to seven seconds before I ran dry. At that point I’d need to either wait or tap the core of my star instead. It seemed to take about fifteen minutes to recover completely, meaning I could fire about a half second flare every minute or so - enough to knock down even such massive enemies if they were close enough, and rapidly enough to be a reliable second option for if Joe was out of position to take one down. I suspected that tapping into the core of my star would actually reduce it, in exactly the opposite way that it had been slowly growing over time. Not something I wanted to test too much. Fully depleting the corona also thinned out the buzz of energy that had been keeping me going, but thankfully didn’t cut it off entirely.

Our coordination had improved quite a bit since we had started. Early on, we had a few close calls with me nearly blinding Joe, but as we worked our way to the summit, those incidents were a thing of the past. I called out that we were just about to cross the threshold. We made the final push, crossing the largest open stretch of land yet. The moment we had both crossed the invisible border, the remaining pterosaurs broke off their attack, drifting in lazy circles as they had before they had noticed us. Looks like they’d leave us alone for now, though they’d probably dive in once we triggered the boss. Now, to figure out where in the caldera it actually was…

[Quetzalcoatl]

The quetzalcoatlus before us wasn’t any larger than the normal ones, with its ‘mere’ thirty foot wingspan. It was, however, covered in iridescent feathers and significantly faster. We had found it atop a platform made of golden bricks, right next to the lava flow.

“Dibs!” I called, as soon as it had taken flight.

“Really? That looks like it might be a stretch for you.”

“The risk is proportional to the reward.”

Getting a shiny quetzalcoatlus subordinate was definitely worth a bit of potential pain. Almost the entire fight, I had been leaning more on my sun than my native power, so it should be almost totally fresh. Wait a sec… did my normal power work the same way as my sun? Did I have some core of ‘inventory’ essence, and I was siphoning off its output to store or retrieve things?

A rapid rainbow dive and the roar of wind as it passed pulled me from my musings. Joe was using his power to try to drive it toward me. I just needed to get a single hand on it, but this one was a lot more shy about landing than its mundane counterparts. They had landed to batter us with their massive limbs and leathery wings, probably intending to stun us before scooping us into their vast maw. Fortunately, they were always easy targets once they landed, so neither of us ended up on the menu. The boss, unfortunately, was either wary of leaving itself vulnerable, or content to batter us with bursts of wind as it flew past. I was seeing some sort of wind magic at work as it flew, so that was a vote in favor of it simply having no need to land to mess with us.

After a few more exchanges - Joe and I being tossed around but never being in any particular danger of landing in the lava or being badly stunned, and Joe never quite managing to land a solid hit or force it to the ground. I was starting to get impatient, and could feel my time here coming to a close.

“Joe, set my shirt on fire and toss me next time it dives. Your power will help you hit if I’m on fire.”

“Don’t know if I can make a throw like that even with both arms. I can try though, buddy.”

And true to his word, the next time the boss dove, flames burst around my shirt, setting it alight, and Joe grabbed me around the waist, spun once, and sent me on a collision course for my next prospective subordinate.

“Oh shiiii-” was the last thing I heard as I sailed away from my friend. That didn’t bode well.

The boss saw me and banked down and to the right at the last moment, emitting a burst of wind in the opposite direction. The rush of air extinguished the flames around me, and knocked me up and away from it. I reached for it with all my might, but I only just managed to pull a single feather free, unable to wrap my power around the entire entity before I was sent rocketing at least a hundred feet through the air in the opposite direction. Just the one feather ended up in my inventory, as I reached the peak of my trajectory. I looked around frantically, but I was already starting my descent. Directly into the lava.

“Oh shiiii-”

Mercifully, the impact killed me instantly, so I was spared the lava. My dreams were of industry. Nico diligently putting the finishing touches on my wilderness survival minion. Vague ideas of what I would do with Quetzalcoatl, after I go back and claim it next time. Then, something moved. Something nearby.

I woke with a start. Early dawn light filtered through the curtains of my hospital room. Someone was here.

“I am gratified that you are another data point in my hypothesis,” the intruder said. A male voice, arrogant.

I sat up, to the best of my ability, flexing my abdominal muscles and propping myself up against the head of the bed. The man stood, and in the dim morning light I could see he was wearing some kind of military uniform.

“What?” I asked, no clue what he was talking about.

“We regenerate, like starfish,” he said, taking a step closer to my bed. He was a thin man, probably close to average height. He wore an insignia with the hammer and sickle, his features stern and proud. A pistol sat at his belt, holstered, but no less threatening for it. This was the Chinese officer that I was supposed to meet, though I hadn’t expected him to show up for a few days yet.

His most striking feature, however, was not a physical one. There was a faint haze of essence about him, a cloud of gunsmoke that clung to his form and swirled as he moved. He smiled at me, the smile of an executive who had you just where he wanted you.

“Hello William,” he said in a clear, deep voice, “I am Zhou Wei. You and I have a lot to talk about.”