The first thing Edmund felt when he woke up was emptiness. Utter, soul crushing emptiness that was only overshadowed by the knowledge that he was powerless and defenseless.

0 Humes.

He stared at the number, eyes focused on the thing. It was still, unmoving like a drop of glass, staring back at him. Barely a moment, but it felt like an eternity. It ended only when the counter went up by one. He was out of stock, but the flow coming from the Pylon was still intact. He also remembered, now more lucid, that he was no longer a fragile human of flesh and blood, but a nearly indestructible machine made of countless tiny machines.

The failsafe didn’t activate. Did they really incapacitate me only to leave me here like this?

He sniffed the air. An eyebrow shot up. “Tachyons?”

That might have to do with why he was sucked dry of all Humes. He looked around, but the fleeting smell of time-traveling, universe-crossing particles was gone. What was not gone was his anger, redoubled now that he had suffered such a humiliation. The cellar, plunged in darkness after the source of the light had been incapacitated, flashed bright one last time.

The guild building was massive. The door was carved into a large, protruding rock that came out of the ground as if it was put there by ancient giants, while at the sides grew majestic towers that overlooked a garden of rocks and sand. The city all around seemed to vanish like a mirage, leaving the whole world an expanse of sand and rock with at the center the building, and the gate. There were lanterns on the steps, and the people were smaller than the lanterns, and the steps empty so big they were, no matter the traffic that stepped on their stony surfaces.

The guild hall was busy as usual, and a quiet chatter drowned out any words that were being said, all of them converging into one single white noise. Someone slammed his hand on the counter, and a wave of unease propagated out from him and into the magical senses of all people inside the room. All conversation died down, the chatter snuffed out like a candle and all heads turned to stare at what was going on: it was clear even to the lowest rankers that something was odd about the person in question, and this was not just going to be another banter where the offender was going to end up thrown out.

C-rank power emanated from the person, but of a flavor unknown to all but very few. Those few were those who were considered reckless by the others, or crazy, or worse. Most of them claimed to have been at least once in pilgrimage to Lightsbane, and came back. Those who actually told the truth knew what they were witnessing, and seeing them react like that, even the single S-ranker in the room stood in silent watch. He slid into the shadows, and retracted his aura with the masterful control only experience and rank could give.

And E-ranker tried to make a comment, but was quickly silenced by the rest of his team, older and more adept D-rank adventurers who knew better than to speak right now.

Edmund stared at the clerk.

“Listen here you little shit. How I see it is that you sent Shiningstars to pick us up, and then all this mess happened. Now you tell me that they have nothing to do with it?”

“I assure you sir—"

“Assure this pair of nuts.” He said, and power began to build up in his right hand.

“Excuse me, are you Edmund?” A voice cut through the crowd. All heads turned once, then twice to look between the two.

“Yes?”

“I’m the guild master. Please, there is no need to threaten her. She doesn’t know anything. Here, come to my office.”

Edmund followed, scanning the path ahead suspiciously. His steps were heavy and random, and he wasn’t trying to conceal his emotional state in his very alien, but very present C-rank aura. He was aware of other auras in the room, included that of an S-ranker who was hiding himself but not the fact that he was here in the guild hall, as a show of force. It felt different that the vague awareness he had back when he was first told about auras, when he was weaker than a D-rank magic user. Now, he could feel them.

Praetor, add a new process. You have expanded your capabilities with the dreamers, so you should be able to read auras for me.

The AI acknowledged. Gradually the auras assumed color, each one different in the hues it glowed in. From the vibrant blues and green of water and plant-based magic systems, to the black streaks of a not-so-hidden past of that rugged man over there sitting at the corner of the room, to the carefully controlled red aggressiveness of a veteran berserker. The S-rank aura was like a hard shell, impenetrable, but also impossible to pin down. Edmund swept the room before turning away to follow the guild master, unsuccessful in his attempt to get a look at the powerful adventurer.

S-rank… attached to the machine, it would net me… a thousand billion Humes a hour.

The room was big, but felt suffocatingly small. Stacks of paper occupied any flat surface, piling up until the towers they made tilted dangerously to a side, held reluctantly there by a weight that could be a crystal or a dark rock with no rhyme or reason.

All around was a field. Edmund didn’t feel it when he entered, but now it was all around him. He tapped the wall, and nodded to himself as small ripples of white extended outwards in a crisscrossing fashion.

“Quite simple in design, and yet…” he punched it, and for a moment the Humes made the white lines vanish. The moment passed, almost imperceptible, and the hole closed up. “Sometimes brute strength does the job better than unnecessary complexity.”

The guildmaster was an old spectacled man, white of hair and grey of beard but of a beard so thick that if he had an axe on him Edmund wouldn’t have had issues believing he was an old lumberjack. And yet, this mountain of a man was hiding behind rotund, golden glasses with a small chain, sitting on a small chair behind a landslide of paperwork.

The man was silent. Edmund asked the question he wanted to ask.

“I assure you they have been questioned and monitored closely. There’s no indication that—” The guildmaster replied, but was interrupted.

“Tell you what, send me on a quest with them. I’ll ask them myself.”

A huge hand readjusted the golden glasses “Are you sure about that?”

“Oh yes. Oh, yes I am.” Edmund said slowly.

“Alright then.”

When Edmund left, a small part of his brain told him that this had been too easy. However, despite knowing how much he should have listened to that part, how much he should have stopped to think for a moment, he really couldn’t see any obvious angle the guildmaster or any other external party could have had. And, at times like this, getting lost in thought was useless. Better to act and be wrong, than do nothing. Not like he had actual solid information.

But he knew that soon he would have it.

Of the four members of Shiningstars waiting for him at the city gate, only Vytryat reacted visibly to Edmund’s arrival, with a gasp. His aura was dense, held in so tight to be almost impenetrable, but to Edmund’s expert eyes it betrayed the genuine confusion and worry in the old god’s head. Edmund just knew him too well for the old being to be able to hide his emotions from him. Compared to the S-ranker, this aura was much millions of times weaker but woven with unparalleled mastery. No wonder the others took their anger out on the diminutive elf. With an aura like this, they must be thinking that he is nearly powerless. If only they knew.

The others were average. What felt like trying to punch insurmountable mountain, or drowning in an endless sea just a few days ago right outside Testament Hill now felt like just another set of randos. He saw them stare, and even before they asked he knew what they were thinking, but said nothing. He just nodded to them.

“Sup.”

The muscular man growled at him, but a hand from the other member of the team, the one dressed in black garbs that Edmund was sure was the leader, stopped him. The mage giggled.

“Well hello there sweetie. No hard feelings, right?” She winked, and blew him a kiss.

He smiled. “None. If you ask me, it was high time I got rid of those stupid women.”

“We have been told that you will be joining us on a mission,” the leader said. “See that you aren’t as useless as that one,” he pointed to Vytryat, “or Mel here will fix you up real good.” His voice was raspy, like rocks gritting on each other.

Edmund shrugged. “Not at all.”

The leader nodded.

“However,” Edmund said, to which all members of the team, minus the god-turned-elf, tensed. “You seem to have gotten it backwards.”

The man reached for a knife, trying to not to be seen. “What do you mean.”

Edmund looked at the hand behind his back like he had x-ray vision. It was reaching for the concealed knife. He followed its movement with his eyes for a moment until he was sure that they all knew that he knew then he shrugged, his mind moving on from the event.

“I’m not coming with you. You are coming with me.”

The muscular teammate, visibly angered, prepared to move. His face was frozen in a snarl of rage and contempt, but soon the gasps coming from his mouth betrayed something very different. Much like the other members of Shiningstars, he had not moved an inch.

Edmund laughed. “What, you frozen in fear?”

With a move of his fingers, the three bodies of the members of the team, minus Vytryat, went limp on their feet.

“Come with me.”

They moved, with the jerky movement of a nervous system forcefully hijacked by external forces, in this case the nanites that had been planted on their leader and the spread to them via touch. Nanites which had then replicated unseen and had taken over most of their essential organs. Vytryat followed quietly, wondering if he had just gone from bad to worse and they left the city, venturing along the winding road until they disappeared behind the rolling verdant hills.