“look around, look around, I see a lot of familiar faces.” Sam put his right hand on his hip, keeping weight off his stump with his left. He stood on top of the mountain, looking down at the assembled elven slaves. They watched him with a mixture of apprehension and fitful terror, glancing over their shoulders at the enormous cloud of smoke that was all that remained of the forest separating the two nations. Fitful and afraid was no good. He needed them angry.

Sam’s gaze fell on each of their faces as his Implant took a snapshot and ran them through his database of memories.

“Listen up. Yukenshya, pay attention, this is going to decide who lives and who dies.” The elves perked up, the old, square jawed elf whose name he’d called was confused, but he straightened nonetheless.

“All of you have been treated like slaves—no, worse, you’ve been treated like goddamn cattle. Maybe even long enough to start thinking you might be.” Sam let that sink in.

“Well I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. Your parents tore a fucking hole in space and time to get you where you stand today. Every single one of you is a goddamn walking explosion that would kill everything up to a one block radius. Your parents weren’t cowards, no matter what your monkey contemporaries might tell you.”

“Yukensha,” Sam said, singling the old elf out again. “Your mother was the leader of a resistance force, raided government facilities to give food and medicine to humans. She shot me three times in the chest, and once in the head, she had some goddamn balls.”

“Keya, your brother beat me in a fistfight. I don’t want to undersell it, let’s just say I bench four hundred pounds, and the man was almost hamburger by the time he grabbed a fork and jammed it into my eye.”

“You’re the people that summoned a new world right out of fucking thin air, and that dragon is goddamn terrified of you. He’s pissing his pants, wondering when the day you’ll give him the benefit of your attention and reduce him to a pile of smoldering bones.”

“The battle that will be waged over there will determine who’ll be wearing collars for the next thousand years, and by the looks in your eyes, I know which side you’re on. We have a big fucking stake in that battle.”

“I know you’re tenacious bastards, every one of you. Jimmy, your father hid in the attic of an abandoned building for three weeks, sleeping in his own filth for the opportunity to take a single shot at the son of a bitch organizing the Anti-Other movement of twenty one ten. The man who would later become the most disastrous president in history. The dumbass straw that broke the elephant’s back. If there were humans with the balls that your father had, Jimmy, That fucker’d have lost more than a lung, and none of us would be living in this shit-filth riddled goddamn squalor.”

“The elves over there have their job, we have ours. We’re going to march right into their city and wrap our masculine fingers around that fucking dragon’s throat, and we’re going to squeeze the life out of him and his army. When he comes back to bitch about how unfair it is, us giving him a good ass fucking, we’re not even going to do him the courtesy of leaving our number.”

“No one is going to know that a S4M unit and a regiment of elves are occupying the dragon’s tower. If you have a way of magically contacting your family back home, don’t. I want the first one to find out we’re eating his power base out from the inside out to be the goddamned dragon. I want him to rear up on his piss-soaked hind legs and cry ‘Agh, that walking death machine Sam and five hundred elves have neutered me!’”

“We’re going to lead that stupid beast around by the nose. We’re not going to play fair. If you follow me to that city, you’ll fucking find out what a red dragon’s tears taste like.”

“Some of you are not going to like the pace I set. You’re going to complain that fighting a war couldn’t possibly be this much effort. That’s your weakness talking. Kill it. I believe that an ounce of sweat saves a gallon of blood. Your blood, and the guy standing next to you. Every ounce of grain that we can sabotage or destroy is one less able body in that scaly bastard’s march, so I’m gonna push you, hard.”

“When this is over, three hundred years from now, when you’ve got your grandson on your knee, and he asks you where the scars on your neck came from, you won’t have to cough and say ‘well, your granddaddy was a battery in the enemy’s war machine.’ You’ll be able to show him your shiny red commemorative jock strap and say, “Well, a dragon got a piece of me, so me and an unholy abomination of science named Sam took a piece of him!”

“Well, that’s how I feel. Who wants to help make that bastard suffer?” Sam said, raising his hand.

The former slaves’ eyes burned with purpose. Ella raised her hand. Another hand went up, and another, until five hundred and seventeen hands were creating a forest of palm trees.

“All right, put your fucking hands down, you’re giving me the creeps. I want all the elders to get together with me, the rest of you, pair off and interview three other people, I want you to get to know each other, and I want you to get to know yourselves. If you can drive a truck, I wanna know. If you know magic I wanna know. If you know what’s edible and what isn’t, I wanna know. If you can shoot a gun, I wanna know. If you have any military or resistance experience, you can bet your ass I wanna know. Once you’re done, focus on resting and rebuilding muscle. Starting tomorrow you’re going to be eating well.”

Ella and three others came up and sat with Sam. He glanced around at the aged faces and relaxed his shoulders. “Patton?” she asked.

“A bit. Needed something to rile them up.”

“I guess it worked,” Jimmy said, casting Sam a critical eye. “But they don’t know you like we do.”

“Since you know me so well, you should know how good I am at what I do.”

Yukensha glanced between the two of them. “We do know, which is why the elders have made a conscious decision to lend our support.”

Jimmy leaned back, clenching his teeth. “Fine. Until the tyrant is dead, I will follow my father’s example.”

“What do we need to do?” Keya asked. the old woman’s silver hair was braided long and looped around her shoulders, sitting above the rags she wore.

“We need organization and training, food and supplies. We need them to gain thirty pounds of muscle apiece by the time we make Hope. We need a command structure, and a plan.” Sam said. He glanced up at the smoke-choked sky and clapped his hands together.

“Let’s get started.”

Sam walked just behind the long line of five hundred elves that marched abreast, twenty feet apart, forming an enormous comb as they searched for spider nests in the plains.

The number of elves capable of magic was higher than Sam had been expecting, but he realized he should have figured on it. They had been strapped to the chairs and drained until they were done making a jeep or howitzer, or they died.

The ones who remained were the five hundred with higher-than-average sized Yuenan. With a bit of practice, all of them became able to cast Sam’s modified Jyin suata.

“Picture the Jyin suata itself like a soap bubble,” Sam said, walking beside a young elf named Jordan, whose height barely reached Sam’s waist. “All the energy is stretched tight, and when it comes into contact with something, it pops. The stretched energy comes together all at the same time and when it all collects together, it establishes the direction it wants to go, that it, toward whatever popped it.”

“Doesn’t a soap bubble just explode?” the kid said, staring up at him while Ellanore chuckled.

“No, it looks like this.” Sam said, creating the illusion of a soap bubble, using a recording in his Implant for reference. “You see how surface tension draws most of the mass of the bubble into one location when it pops?”

“Yeah, but isn’t that the opposite side from where it was popped?” he asked.

“It is, but look at it this way, the point where the most water collects and the point that popped it are always opposites. All you have to do is add an instruction for the energy to draw a point between the contact point and point where the energy coalesces, and it will always cut a hole into the thing it hits, even if the contact was glancing.”

Sam focused, showing the water forming a glowing beam and shooting back the direction it had come from, toward where it was originally popped.

“Huh… I don’t get it.” Jordan said with a shrug.

“okay, look,” Sam said, exasperated. “You’ve got to make the Jyin suata shrink on contact and shoot through the other guy rather than just burn his skin. If you try to make it go through him or burn him, you get bruises or burns at most.”

“Why would you want it to shrink?” Jordan asked, shrugging. “Can’t you just put it through them?”

“can you explain surface area, pounds per square inch and force to this kid?” Sam asked, glancing over at Ella.

“I doubt it,” Ella said. “Jordan’s never been great at visualizing.”

“But if he got it, it’d be the equivalent of the kid having a thirty eight special on himself at all times.”

“Is that good?” Jordan asked.

“It means you could kill the average human in one shot.” Sam said.

“Cool! Show me how to do it!”

“I’ve been trying!” Sam said, clenching his right hand and looking up at the sky for patience. In the distance, there was another thump followed by screeching as the elves shot another spider out of its nest. By the time they got to Hope, Sam thought they might have hunted out the entire plains of rabbits, deer and spiders. Spread wide like this, they were able to cast an enormous human net.

“Alright, nevermind.” Sam said, taking a deep breath. “Hang around, Ella’s gonna give me some pointers on something, then we can get back to the Jyin Suata.

“’Kay.” Jordan said, racing off to kick rocks through the grass.

“Okay,” Ella said as the two of them watched the young elf busy himself in the dirt. “Sleep is a tricky mind-based magic. Cast a very delicate sensor into his nervous system. Think of it as gossamer or cobwebs, so light and gentle as to be unnoticeable.

“Got it.” Sam said, stretching the energy from his Yuenan forward, forming it into a thin web that felt as though it would be ripped by the gentlest breeze. it drifted toward the boy, gently settling around him, seemingly unnoticed. Once the web settled around him, Sam made the hand gesture Ella had taught him, causing the webs to conch closed around the boy’s brain.

“So you feel anything?”

“It’s… kind of like watching a flame,” Sam said as the raw data from the boy’s brain was fed back to him, not words and images, but scintillating, ever shifting colors and patterns.

“You’ll be able to glean more if you get the knack for it,” Ella said. “And it doesn’t look like he felt anything, which is good. A word of warning. This spell rarely works on the prepared, and it can even be dangerous to use on someone better at spellcraft than you. They can follow your strand back and inflict damage on you.”

“Attacking your Isayatta?” Sam asked.

“No, overload your brain, but the danger is similar.”

“Huh,” Sam grunted. “Wonder how that works.”

“You don’t need to know unless you’re planning on fighting some elven wizards. Are you planning on fighting some elven wizards?”

“I have no idea what I’ll be fighting in the future.” Sam said.

“I suppose.” Ella said. “Now the tricky part. Observe the patterns of his brain, then introduce the notion of sleep to him. See what lights up.”

“Jordan.” Sam called out. The boy’s patterns shifted in Sam’s mind as the kid shifted gears from minding his own business to paying attention to him. Sam wondered if mind-reading would be possible with enough practice.

“We’ve been walking a good six hours so far today, do you want to get some rest before we move on?”

Briefly, in a pattern almost too quick for Sam to realize, the boy considered it, then shook his head. “Nah, I’m fine, I can keep up with everyone.”

“Did you see where his sleep resides? It should have looked almost like an echo of an action, stronger than an unconscious thought, but weaker than a conscious one.” Ella whispered

Sam shook his head. “Not sure that I did. It was fast, a dozen things at once.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Jordan asked, coming closer.

“Try again. Nothing like practice.”

“Are you sure? I’ve been thinking about stopping for dinner about now anyway. You could catch some sleep.”

Sam watched the fluctuating state of the child’s brain as he considered sleeping. There, I think that’s it, Sam thought as he sensed a familiar pattern pulse though the boy’s brain.

“I think I see it, what now?”

“Recreate the echo, just a tiny bit stronger.”

Sam sent power through the web, trying to recreate the faint pattern in the boys mind.

“It’s fine,” Jordan said. “I can…” he never finished his sentence, instead laying himself into the grass and taking a nap.

Ella rushed forward and placed a hand on the boy’s forehead, her eyes closed.

“What’s that for?”

“Making sure he doesn’t have an aneurism.” Ella frowned in concentration, moving her palm over the boy’s skull.

“That was a possibility?” Sam asked, ice running through his veins. Ella hasn’t told him anything about that. If he killed a kid in the middle of the march, they’d turn on him and rip him to pieces. Hell, he’d taught all of them his Jyin Suata. He’d be hamburger.

“Rarely, if you fumble around the brain like a brute. You always had the most delicate touch, Sam.”

Sam’s brows rose.

“And even if you did mess up, I can fix it.”

“That’s…” Sam searched for the words to describe her decision. “Practical.”

“It is,” Ella said, coming to her feet, aided by a staff one of the younger elves had fetched for her from the bottom of the mountain. “He’s fine.”

Sam let out his breath, unaware he’d been holding it. He’d been fairly cavalier toward death until the Baths were destroyed. It was starting to sink in that this was his last time walking the earth, out of a million lifetimes. And it might have damn well ended because he accidently killed a kid. What a stupid way to die.

Sam shook his head and put those thoughts aside, kneeling beside Jordan and shaking him.

“Jordan. Wake up, we have to keep moving.”

Jordan’s eyes drifted open, and he sat up with a yawn. “guess I was sleepier than I thought. Waiting for you guys is boring.”

“Come along,” Ella said, reaching out her hand with a gentle smile. Jordan took her hand and the two of them walked off through the grass that had been cleared by the long line of elves marching through the grass. So far none of them had been dragged into the spiders lair and sucked dry, but there was always tomorrow.

“How did the insects get so big, anyway?” Sam said, coming to join her.

“Oh, when an insect Molts, it tends to get bigger, and all its progeny will share its size. When the insects become too big for their environment to sustain them, they die off. After several generations of molts, you have rather large spiders.”

Sam had been picturing the end result of gargantuan spiders visible from space, but he supposed there would be no prey for something that size. About as big as a man was as large as a trap-door spider could get before it ran into some serious trouble feeding itself out on the plains. That might explain why he hadn’t seen any mammalian predators all eaten by the spiders. Lucky they didn’t get smarter.

“How many rings do you have beneath your Isayatta?” Ella asked as they walked, the white walls of hope a glimmer on the horizon in front of them.

“Four, how did you know?” Sam asked.

“It shows in the way your magic forms, the speed and control. Someone taught you the fundamentals for real power. The kind the gods of our realm used, and the men who ran from them. Who gave you that?

“I’ve got a million memories,” Sam said, tapping his temple as the old woman watched him with interest. “A few hundred Sam’s saw bits and pieces. I put it all together.”

“I suppose you’ve earned it then. Our greatest taboo is to teach the Isayatta, for fear of history repeating itself, but we can honestly say you earned every bit of your knowledge. And there is no taboo against that.”

“Thanks.”

“How long did it take?”

“What?”

“To make four rings, how long did you spend creating them?”

“I started just a few days after the last time I died, so about a month ago? I’d work on it every so often before I went to sleep.”

Ella did a double take and nearly tripped over her bad leg. Once she righted herself, her face soured and she grunted. “Put more effort into it, four rings isn’t enough to defeat a dragon. At your current pace you should be able to form another ring or two before we reach the city. Make that your priority.”

“What about learning a spell to kill a dragon?” Sam stroked his chin. “Or if we could somehow get an RPG to the Factory, we could duplicate them and tear that bastard to pieces in a relatively short amount of time.” There was a simple plan, unfortunately for Sam, he didn’t know where he could find any more RPGs.

Sam did a quick search of his implant for bunkers that housed that kind of firepower, and discovered that the one with the Ungrin living in them was the closest one for hundreds of miles.

Even if he could get past the burning forest and the army, and the dragon, they’d taken all the RPGs and Sam wasn’t confident he could bypass the biometrics on the anti-armor rifle, which was the perfect goddamn solution to their dragon problem.

“You would have a hard time finding volunteers for that.” Ella said with a grim smile.

“looks like we’ll stick to the current plan.” Sam said. It wasn’t a plan so much as a suicide pact that Sam had spent hours convincing the Elders to go with.

“By the way, the sleep spell, is it just me, or is it the start of something a little more.. mind fuckery?”

“Yes, it’s one of the most basic mind-control spells, but all the others follow the same technique. You learn one, you learn them all. They only vary by degree of difficulty.”

“So why is it okay for me to learn it? Isn’t it dangerous to let me mess with people’s heads?”

“Wizards as a rule are unafraid of having their minds manipulated.” Ella said with a shrug as Jordan watched their conversation intently. “The gossamer threads of the spell can be blown away by the faintest application of Nuetta, and attempting to take control over a wizard’s mind through brute force is like a patient wrestling a scalpel away from his brain surgeon. Either nothing will happen, or the patient will die.”

“Or become a vegetable.” Sam offered.

“Yep.”

“damn,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Still got a lot to learn.” He glanced at Ella walking beside him, his curiosity piqued. She’d been weathering the turn of centuries while he’d been endlessly drilling. she was a huge source of information as well as a lead weight in his gut.

“So how have you…” been? Sam bit his tongue as he studied her scars and her missing fingers. Obviously she hadn’t been great.

Ella caught his eye and smiled. “I’ve been well, Sam. Most of my life has been happy, believe it or not. I’ve grandchildren in First Word. Things weren’t like this the whole time you’ve been gone.

“I suppose not,” Sam said with a shrug. If they had, the old woman would have been dead already. “So what were you doing all the way out here?”

“As one of the last elves with an Isayatta, I am obligated to occasionally travel the world.”

“I imagine the dragon was a bit of a surprise.”

“Just a bit.” Ella said with a gap-toothed grin.

“Sorry about your dad.” Sam said, staring at the city wall emerging from the distance. “I know this Sam didn’t have anything to do with it, but I can’t help feeling responsible for anything any of them have ever done. When I experience their memories…they become a part of me.”

“I don’t blame you, Sam. I don’t even blame that Sam.” Ella fell silent for awhile, the sound of their walking sticks and the grass parting around them the only sounds.

“I looked for you, you know. After I escaped. I had some girlish hope that we could run away together and be happy…I don’t know, on some deserted island or something.” She had a faint smile as she spoke. “I never found out what happened to you.”

“Oh, I died... He died, the same night. Greg asked him to burn his books, but Sam got caught before he could do it and interrogated. When they decided he wouldn’t stop loving you, they,” Sam gave a raspberry and made an exploding motion next to his head. “Activated the Failsafe and blew the bomb in his brain.”

“You two had sex?” Jordan asked, wide eyed, drawing their attention to the little brat walking between them. “But she’s so old!”

“Five hundred years ago, she was smoking hot.”

“Ewww…”

“Get the hell outta here, kid.” Sam said, shooing the brat away. Jordan broke into a run and joined the knot of a dozen elves about his age, trailing behind the curtain searching for spiders.

“Now, let’s get started on transmutation.” Sam said, rubbing his hands together. He’d read about it in his past lives, The ability to change one thing into another would come in handy if he wanted to make another RPG.

“You’re not strong enough to transmute more than a grain of sand.” Ella said, glancing at him. “I’m not strong enough to transmute more than a golf ball. What would be the point?”

“A golf ball of TNT could do some damage.”

“Granted, but you need to work on the rings of your Iseyatta, it will make your use of Nuetta much more efficient. Gain enough of them and you might be able to make your own golf ball of high explosives with your limited Yuenan.”

“What I want you to do,” she said, coming to a halt and giving Sam a severe look. “Is master the art of forging new rings as you walk and talk. Link it to your breathing, or your heartbeat, whatever it takes, make it something you constantly improve. It’s the most basic technique from our world, and if you hope to do anything more than shoot a handful of Jyin Suata, you’ll need it.”

“How about this,” Sam said. “I learn to add rings to my Isayatta from breathing, you teach me transmutation.”

“Deal.” Ella said with a smile.

“Any advice on how to do the breathing thing?”

“It works best if you figure out your own way to do it,” Ella said.

That’s a little suspicious.