As far as I was concerned, this whole situation was straight messed up.

When I'd joined Blackett's little crusade, not that I had much of a choice, but I thought maybe it'd be fun, help some people out, make something of myself, right?

I was NOT signing up for walking in this freakshow video game funland.

I thought video games were cool enough. I had a couple consoles growing up, played sports games and a lot of the big releases, shooters and stuff.

But this Kingdom Blade shit was just way out there. This shit was for nerds who thought doing the same shit over and over again for hundreds of hours was fun, losers who got excited by bigger numbers. I tried a game like that once, one of my friends wouldn't shut up about it so I borrowed it from him, and the first hour I played was just people talking and cutscenes. The whole friggin' hour.

Now, I knew Chariot had a good head on his shoulders, maybe a little young, a little green, but sharp kid, clear-headed and didn't panic, good choice for a leader, I thought. I think we all thought that, which is probably why he got the position, not that anyone was really gunning for it. Point was, he was sharp, seemed to get on well with people and have a lot of friends even though he was Exhuman like us.

I couldn't imagine him wasting hundreds of hours on a game like Kingdom Blade, and from his comments, it sounded like he didn't.

But the body modder he'd brought, the girl with the hair that looked like cables, who'd visited the barracks that one time, from the way they talked and how he clung right to her side, with the hunter watching the two like a hawk, it was obvious they were close. Maybe even an item, wasn't really my concern. But how a straightlaced kid like him wound up with someone like her…

Well, she was a body modder, I guess. I'd heard the weird ones like to get freaky, and he was just a stupid teenager. Easy enough to imagine what he saw in her, I guess.

It was just weird to hear her so confidently and intelligently talking about every friggin' thing we passed like she memorized the whole damn game. She sounded sharp, but wasted it on this shit? And what the hell kind of name was AEGIS? All-caps apparently; trying to be as edgy as possible. Probably ran away from home but used her parents money to buy those expensive body mods.

To his credit, he sighed with the rest of us every time she launched into some other story about how this-and-that inn was where such-and-such questline started, and the touching story of some girl trying to find a rare flower to remember her dead father or whatever.

But seriously, Chariot, there's more to a relationship than freaky, kinky sex, bro. Run! The hunter's making goo-goo eyes at your back every five seconds, go tap that.

Wasn't gonna say that on an op though. Maybe when we got back. Didn't want a breakup here in the middle of all these crazy stone-faced golems or whatever. Shit was crazy enough already.

And besides, I had my own shit to deal with. Being Moon's partner gave me a lot of insights into who and what she was, and I think she hated me for that. When she used her powers, our minds merged in the most messed up, uncomfortable way imaginable. There was actually some concern when she joined that she was code-X, but since she couldn't affect anyone's mind directly, she was given a pass as a variant physiokinetic.

Which was good, because even though New Eden was open, the kill-on-sight order on code-Xs had not, and would never be taken down, I heard. Kinda sucked for them, but I got it, and since Moon had started sometimes crawling around in my head, I got it even more. Shit was messed up there too.

The modder girl had been going on forever, and we just followed in a loose column, some probably listening, I definitely wasn't. I wanted to switch off the comms channel and put on some music from my wrist holo to drown her out, but if shit went down, I'd regret it fast.

Didn't even need to have music for that actually.

"Everybody get that?" Chariot confirmed.

"Uh, no. Get what?" I asked.

He sighed heavily, the comms putting his breath right in my ear. Kid had to stop doing that.

"As AEGIS explained, in-game, the castle is protected by magical defenses. We need to test if there's anything like that here. If so, our job got a lot harder."

"You don't think there's any actual magic here, right?" I asked.

To my surprise, he didn't answer for a second. "Magic isn't real, I know. It's just...if it were, this is definitely where it'd be. I mean, look around."

I pulled my hood back a little and did something other than just watch the person in front of me. We were totally surrounded by the golems as they went on their business, but they weren't just copies of people walking around.

They were weird copies of things walking around.

There were old men with huge wizard hats three feet across and tall, lithe animal girls with legs that bent backwards, with tall rabbit ears that bounced with every step they took, grumbling packs of dwarves with pointed ears and thick, braided beards, guards standing at rapt attention every dozen feet, with broad shields and ornate spears. An elegantly twisting bridge crossed the broad street we were on, with flourishes and flowers set into the stonework which acted as support and a guardrail in one, dozens more of the golems walking across it above us like it was a daily commute for them.

I heard a rumbling screech, halfway between a hawk, a lion, and an avalanche, and looked up to see a pair of armored men with long lances riding a winged serpent creature in the sky far above us.

While the tall buildings on either side of us loomed with impossible architecture, ornate facades held up with impossibly delicate pillars which looked more like decoration than anything, and above it all, the huge castle, the Stellaris Forge, if I picked up that right.

I realized it wasn't just the golems walking around that the terrapath was controlling. The thing flying through the sky was just a hunk of rock, the buildings around us were structurally impossible for their materials, even the dome of the castle was too huge to ever stand on its own. Everything here was in his or her grip, standing or moving or running only because they permitted it to.

So like Chariot was hinting, this world was already impossible. It really wasn't too outlandish to buy the theory there might be magic at work here, too, if you forgot all about Exhumans and the world outside of here.

The fact that there were powers which could do things like this, it gave me a real sense of inferiority about being able to zip around and smash shit real good.

So I could understand what Chariot meant, but the fact was, this place was still straight up fucked, and I wanted to kill us an Exhuman and get the hell out. As magical or amazing as this place was, it was also sitting on a few thousand dead real humans, and that tainted everything about it.

As we continued towards the castle, the ground now definitely sloping upwards at all times, sometimes gradually, sometimes in sweeping staircases, AEGIS suddenly grunted and fell backwards.

Had to give the team credit, each of us had our guard up and weapons out in a second, but there was just a little stone girl also knocked to her butt, apparently just walked into AEGIS.

"Gotta watch these rats, they like to go after your purse," AEGIS growled as she pulled herself up.

"No, miss! My apologies," the girl said in a lilting singsong voice, jarred with the screeching of grinding stone. "I am no urchin, and I beg your forgiveness."

"Oh ho?" AEGIS said bemused.

"Indeed, I...I am sorry for running miss, it's just, my brother is in trouble, and I needed to find a guard, but there are none to be found. Please, miss, can you help me?"

I spun around and sure enough, the guards who had been stationed seemingly everywhere before were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't like we'd wandered into a ghetto, it was just...none were around, almost conveniently.

"Oh, I remember this quest," AEGIS said.

"A random quest in the middle of the Empire District?" Lia asked. "I don't remember this."

"Hey, let's do it. I think we need the experience," AEGIS said, seeming excited.

"Okay, time out, Chariot. Is your girl here bananas?" I interjected. "She thinks we're going to do a quest and get experience for it? And then what, we all level up and buy new equipment until we can kill the boss? This is the girl we're following?"

The group seemed about fifty-fifty split on staring at me like I was a jackass and at her like she was incompetent.

"Uh, I meant experience in fighting and killing some golems where it won't cause a huge panic in the town. You do know this isn't a video game, right?" AEGIS asked.

Oh. I was just a jackass then.

"All right then, lead on," I said shaking my head.

We followed the panicked little girl as she led us down some back-alleys, making abrupt twists and turns until we were fully lost, with nothing to go on but the grey all around us and the impossibly-animated billowing of her stone hair and dress as she pressed forward, urging us constantly that we were nearly there.

Finally we broke into an empty lot. I guess it was kind of a dump, but the fact that it was the same plain stone as everything else made it hard to tell. There were a number of kids here, and one, presumably her brother was lying on the ground.

"Neat," said AEGIS. She pivoted and lifted her leg in the air like a ballerina, and her hips glowed with yellow pulsing spinning circles and the faint roar of of an engine as she slammed the leg downward into the little girl's head, exploding the child into a shower of stone like she'd been cracked with a rocket-powered sledgehammer.

"Holy shit, AEGIS!" Chariot said, backing away from the legs and bottom of the dress which remained. "You just murdered that girl! What the fuck?" He sounded pissed.

She rolled her eyes with enormous effort. "That wasn't a girl, it was a golem, okay?"

"Still, Jesus--"

"And it wasn't even a golem of a girl, it was a monster in the game, a Dhavari, a shape-shifting flesh-eater. See?" she pointed at the others who were spitting and hissing and crawling on all fours now. Or...all...eight. More limbs seemed to be emerging from them, and they became more spidery and less childlike, their faces splitting down the middle to make room for more eyes and fangs. It was actually pretty horrifying, and I was glad it was all just stone.

"Okay what the actual fuck," Chariot said, now in the proper mindset.

"I am not certain if I should be impressed that someone devised such a monster, or concerned that this is the idea of recreational activity for you and Lia," Karu said, carefully folding her robe and placing it off to the side, her weapons thrumming.

"So now we can fight these things," AEGIS said, ignoring Karu entirely. "Figure out how they work a little bit, without alerting the general public."

I had to admit I was a little impressed. Maybe I'd underestimated her in assuming she just played games and was a huge nerd. I had definitely underestimated the level of body mods she had going on. Golem or otherwise, she just kicked a statue apart with one leg and didn't even flinch.

The child-spider monsters moved towards us which was like a starter pistol firing for the group. Everyone moved at once, spreading out between the targets, weapons at the ready.

Well, most everyone. I had no idea where Tem was, and Moon and Jack were just standing back there.

"Not going to fight, Jack?" I called, launching myself forward.

"I have a knife. They're made of rock."

I laughed as I sailed into one, and felt stone fangs bounce off me, sending it flying away with multiplied force. Before it could land and get its feet under it, I followed and smashed it, magnifying the impact force and channelling the half of it that should have gone into me into it instead. The effect was as explosive and satisfying as I expected, with none of the gore that usually accompanied smashing something that hard.

So I guess this place wasn't all that bad.

Chariot seemed to be having a lot of trouble, as was the hunter, Karu, to my surprise. She'd started by unloading scattergun fire into it, which just left a slightly charred circle where the laser blast hit, and then followed with a shotgun, swearing when the pellets bounced off the stone, chipping it if anything, and came back at her armor.

One had taken a full blast from one of Tem's lasers and was moving sluggishly, glowing yellow-hot, when another even larger laser appeared from above and sustained fire until nothing remained but a black circle and a pool of slag. I shook my head at how ridiculous Tem was when unleashed. Straight up melting her enemies with the only look on her face being a sidelong glance at Chariot to see if he was watching.

"Athan, freeze!" I heard a girl's voice in the comms. He did, instantly, as though on instinct, and in the next second, there was a boom like a thunderbolt struck directly overhead, and one of the golem monsters had a hole in it a foot wide.

"Nice shot, Lia," he said with a proud grin as he moved to engage one of the remaining spider things.

"Are you not concerned about alerting the whole kingdom to our presence?" Karu said annoyed.

"Sure I am, but I had to test how my rifle stood up to these things. I'd say, pretty well."

"Where are you, even?" Athan asked.

"Oh, we're around," Taglock answered evasively. "Following you as we need to."

"Very helpful. Definitely the answer I was looking for." Athan slashed bitterly at his opponent, hitting it with his blades over and over with all the effectiveness one could expect trying to burn a rock to death, if one wasn't as outrageous as Tem.

It leapt at him, and he wrestled with it in both arms before they fell to the ground together in a heap of writhing stone legs.

Tem screamed and the air began to ripple, and then Jack appeared next to her and they were both gone, taking the tearing air with them. AEGIS leapt forward and snapped off of a couple of the long limbs, but suddenly the fighting stopped, and Chariot was just trapped under a still statue.

"Well that's cool," he said. "There's something in them where their heart should be. I jammed it full of current and it died and just became rock again."

"Really?" Lia sounded interested. "What's in there?"

The monsters now all broken or dead, AEGIS cracked open the chest of the one astride Chariot, her shoulders thrumming and dancing with circles of lights while she pulled the thing apart. Inside was what looked like broken pieces of white glass.

"Shattered gemstone, cracked from the heat differential caused by your electricity," she mused. "Give me a second." She picked up the largest intact piece and held it to her eye for a long time. "I can barely make it out, but it's there. Crazy. It's like a programming language nobody's ever invented."

"What is?" Lia asked.

"The gem we found inside the monster," AEGIS clarified verbally. "It's fundamentally like a data encoding crystal. Remember those, Athan? Not quartz, but same concept. But at the same time, totally not. It's not like there's a port inside these things to interface with it...it must be interfacing with the Exhuman's powers directly. Or...hmm, how to put this. Maybe his or her power is to be able to autonomously run any golem which has a crystal like this in it? Such a crazy combination of tech and powers."

"Almost like a technopath," Karu said frowning. "Perhaps this Exhuman has been misclassified and this situation is far more dangerous than we originally perceived."

"I don't know," Chariot said, getting up as I offered him an arm since everyone else seemed focused on studying. "Thanks. I'm just happy I can do something against them. If they were just solid stone, I don't think I'd be any use at all."

"Oh, don't sell yourself short, I can think of a few uses--" AEGIS said, wrapping an arm around him. He jumped. "Oh shoot, still hot. Sorry!"

"Regardless," Taglock's voice said, clear and confident, "I think we have learned something awfully valuable here, thanks to AEGIS. They can be killed, aim for the heart...and something more. Something potentially even more valuable, I'd wager."

"Something more," Lia said out loud while AEGIS looked pleased with herself and Chariot looked annoyed.

Everyone paused for a moment to consider Taglock's riddle. Everyone except me, that shit was stupid. I just wanted to blow this place up and bring down all these stupid impossible buildings and--

"Impossible buildings," I repeated. Everyone else was still deep in thought. Had I really figured out Taglock's puzzle before all these smarty-pants?

I mean, not that I cared, but I'd take 'em where I could.

"What I think Mister Lock is trying to say is...the golems ain't the only thing which is being held up by the Exhuman around here. The buildings, especially that building," I pointed at the castle, and AEGIS slapped my hand back down to my side with impressive force and speed. "Something's keeping them all upright too."

"Which means," Lia stumbled in, "these data encoding crystals must exist in the buildings too and are keeping them up. Everything here must have a 'heart', not just the golems."

"Bingo," said Taglock, not specifying for which of us, which made me feel just a little robbed.

"That's something we can use," Chariot said, his face serious. I liked that face on him, it meant the gears were turning, and whatever was going to come out, it was good. "Even if we can't get into Stellaris Forge, we can bring it down."

"Well, I had packed quite a bit of explosive ordnance for that eventuality," Karu said, sounding a little defeated. "But now I suppose it is still the most effective weaponry I possess against the golems." She frowned. "I wish that Deej had come, his ability to shatter specific substances is nonpareil."

"We'll make do," Chariot said. "Okay, this was a very useful stop, but we need to keep moving. We've got a magical barrier to test."