Zed worked fast. He had to if he wanted to disentangle himself from the net and get away before someone turned up to investigate the impromptu fireworks show he had just put up. The bright morning sunlight had hidden the flares for the most part and the fact that they were so close to a volcanic vent made the trails of smoke much less conspicuous. But why take a chance?

Besides, although the drones hadn’t been transmitting a live feed, they had constantly been uploading status reports and position data through a satellite uplink. Zed was making K2 transmit false data to confuse the supervisors, and it seemed to be working for now, but he knew that they would catch on very soon.

New Quest! Evade and Infiltrate!

Objective: Avoid detection by the hostile search party, find out about the organization behind them, and infiltrate it.

Reward: Title – Dagger in the Dark.

‘Well, looks like soon has arrived,’ he thought wryly.

The System generated quests based on the user’s actions and current circumstances, so reading between the lines of the quest often provided a lot of valuable information. This one, for example, told him that a search party had already been set out for him. Time was of the essence.

Authority: 60/100

A quick Appraisal told him that the wires making up the net had an alloy layer surrounding a carbon nanofiber backbone. Even with the Force skill enhancing his strength, there was no way he would be able to just tear his way out. If his magnesium reserves were full, he could have easily melted through the net, but they weren’t so that wasn’t an option.

Thankfully, the net was designed with quick incapacitation in mind. Not permanent confinement. It was structured like a spiderweb with weighted magnetic spheres at the ends. Whenever it snared a target, the weights would swing around it and stick to the net, locking it in place. As he had one hand free, he could just manually extricate himself.

It took plenty of writhing about on the ground and contortions that would put the best gymnasts to shame, but he finally managed to detach the last of the magnets from the net and pull it off him. Standing up, he patted the dust off himself.

Bundling the net up into a compact sphere, he tucked it under his arm and began running back up the slope to the caldera. He couldn't leave without his spoils of war, now could he?

Cresting the lip of the crater, he found K2 already there, hovering above the downed gunnery drone. Picking up K2's discarded machinegun from the ground, he walked up to the drone and reattached it.

Then moving within range, he cast Override on the fallen drone. It shuddered and its lights oscillated rapidly between red and blue, before finally settling on the latter.

Override successful!

Drone K4 added to device menu.

K4 was a twin of K2 with all the same features and attachments. The only defect was that it lacked two of its four propellers as a result of the violent takedown it had been subjected to, rendering it incapable of flight. Still, it was far from useless. In fact, Zed had already thought up a use for it on his way back up the slope of the mountain.

The drones all had a modular design, making repair as simple as just swapping out a damaged part. It made what he had in mind much easier. Taking command over K4’s AI, he ordered it to eject all its propellers. With four soft pneumatic hisses, two ruined and two whole propellers along with their motors were ejected from their sockets. They dropped onto the ground, leaving only the chassis and the gun attachment behind.

Unfurling the net, Zed fed it through one of the hollows left by the propellers and pulled it out again through the rest of the holes, forming a cross of netting with the magnetic spheres bunched up at the ends of the cross. Standing up, he wore the drone like a backpack, crossing the straps of netting across his chest and fixing them in place using the magnets.

Right now, he was all out of fuel for his flames. And without them, he was vulnerable. It would take some time – around a day according to his estimates – for his furnace to digest the oxide produced by the combustion reaction and regenerate the magnesium. In the meantime, he needed a weapon to replace his fire and give him some measure of self-defence ability. The two drones fit the bill perfectly. K2 for medium range and K4 – now acting as a back-mounted gun turret – for short range combat.

He swayed his body from side to side and jumped up and down to test the wobble of the arrangement. Adjusting the straps until the drone remained tightly attached to his back, he moved on to punches and kicks to familiarize himself with his new centre of gravity. Even without its propellers, the drone weighted around fifty kilograms, throwing his body balance out of whack. In the end, he had to resort to using his Force skill to reduce its weight and increase the weight of his lower body to balance things out.

Finally happy with how everything was working, he shot a look at the intact pair of propellers. ‘No. No more greed,’ he admonished himself. ‘I’ve learnt my lesson. Besides, I’m overloaded as it is. Any more and it will start affecting my mobility.’ Between spare parts to fix a drone after it got damaged in a fight and not getting into that fight in the first place, he much preferred the latter.

Turning around decisively, he vaulted over the edge of the caldera and sprinted down the slope of the volcano. K2 activated its stealth and followed close behind. With the Force skill allowing him to perform supernatural feats of acrobatics, he leapt from rock to rock like a mountain goat and slid down gravelly slopes like a skier on snow. It took him less than five minutes to make it halfway down the mountain, to the treeline of the verdant forest spreading out below.

Entering the forest was like entering an entirely new world. Tall trees caged him in from all sides and the vines and the lush undergrowth worked to limit his vision to within a couple of feet. Spears of sunlight penetrated through the canopy above and dappled the vegetation with patches of green-tinted light. Crickets chirped, birds sang and the hoots and calls of various animals filled the air.

Zed’s burning feet hissed and steamed as they sank into the moist ground, leaving charred footprints in the layer of decomposing leaves below – a clear track for even the most unskilled of pursuers to follow. Reining in his flames until the only external manifestation of them was a thin layer of white fire on his head, Zed lightened himself and did his best to place his feet on rocks or dry ground.

The deeper he got into the forest, the denser the vegetation became. For a while he was worried that K2 wouldn't be able to follow him, but his worries turned out to be unnecessary. The drone was amazingly manoeuvrable. Each of its propellers could tilt to any side, and taking a page out of nature’s book, it could even use its gun as a counterweight to balance itself midair like a bird would its tail.

This was both a relief and a concern. A relief because he wouldn't have to abandon the drone or carry it all the way, reducing his pace even further. And a concern, because if K2 could do it, the drones that had been sent after him could too.

He picked up speed.

All the way, he kept both his Thermal and Force Fields active around him, alert for any signs of pursuit. The Force field would alert him to any sudden movements while the Thermal field would inform him of any spots with temperatures suspiciously higher than their surroundings. Both were at level 4, giving him a range of 4m in every direction.

Suddenly, something moved at the edge of his perception and he whirled around to face it. His Thermal Field was detecting nothing, but his Force Field was telling him that something in that direction was fleeing rapidly away from him. ‘A thermally camouflaged surveillance device?'

Cursing his misfortune, Zed abandoned stealth and crashed through the undergrowth towards it, sending K2 ahead on an intercept route.

After just a few moments, he got a message from the drone informing him that the target had been successfully apprehended. He couldn't help but rejoice that he had taken the risk to capture the drone instead of just destroying it. The decision was already paying off in spades.

It was a fine line he was walking. If he didn’t take risks, he wouldn't be able to progress faster than the other, more experienced Keepers and would find himself hopelessly outmatched in the endgame. But if he was too much of a daredevil, he would just die early and spare the Keepers the effort of offing him. Deciding which risk was worth it and which wasn’t was the real challenge.

Bursting out into a clearing, Zed found K2 squaring off against a creature coiled around the branch of a tree. The creature had a cylindrical body without any appendages, a diamond-shaped head with vertical-pupiled eyes, and a hinged lower jaw from which a jet-black forked tongue intermittently flickered out to taste the air. The surface of its body was textured with brown scales that let it blend into the bark of the tree. It stared nervously at them, its eyes flickering from the drone to him and back again.

A quick level 1 Appraisal gave him the name of the creature. ‘A snake? So that’s what it is...a brown tree snake.’

Zed pulled the description of the creature from K2’s reference library and his Universal Translator helped him make sense of it. According to the library entry, snakes were one of the sentient species on this planet. Its threat level was marked as ‘null’ and its surveillance priority was similarly ‘zero’. Whatever organization was behind the drones didn’t much care about what the reptiles were up to.

Zed supposed a sapient species with the ability to make something as sophisticated as the drones would be justified in ignoring a barely sentient creature like the snake. But that was before the Advent of the System. Now…

Rearing up until the front third of its body was vertical, the snake hissed, and the Universal Translator immediately translated its words within Zed’s mind:

“What does the Steel-bird-with-four-wings and the Burning-man want with Hess?” it asked obsequiously. “Hess assures you; he does not taste good.”