It’d been a month since the defeat of Dearth in Arizona. The Silken Sands Nu-Earth Campaign, they called it right up there on the multiversal TV.

They say everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame. If so, that was it there. Glamorized video and images of me punching tanks, exploding slimes, and even one of me freaking out and running hard, bleeding and gasping, while a gigantic, tentacle-waving cockroach chased after me down the hill.

Phyllis loved that clip. She even found a way to get her suit to save it so she could play it back whenever she needed a chuckle.

And there was the montage of me punching out the windows on Mr. Sada’s truck. He’d uploaded them from his MortMobile device, to a church-run social media app.

RIP, the poor bastard, his shit immortalized across the for-profit news networks and information affiliates that proliferated through the BuyMort multiverse.

I was apparently quite the star. A plucky doomed go-getter, Tracy Mills from NewsCom Multiversal Incorporated called me. But most of the rest called me The Windowpuncher, Warlord of Arizona.

There was even a song about me. Done in “Nu-Earth Style” or so the artist said. Sounded like garbage to me.

But like it or not, my mirrored helmet and I were all over the media and, to be honest, it helped out Silken Sands a lot.

We’d gone to war with Dearth, their remaining local branch anyway, escalating to real war after my seizure of their space elevator. Bad thing was that they had a lot of money. Good thing was that the many pay grades worth of bureaucrats above them didn’t give a damn.

I was fighting with a local chapter, not the whole multiversal corporation.

And on my side were the hobbs, tens of thousands of them swarming to my cause from Storage, proficient with every weapon we could give them.

Nu-Earth humans too. From all over the continent, those who could, did. I made a point of looking for survivors to rehome, and by that point I was the only Nu-Earth native affiliate with balls left in the game as far as I could tell.

Everyone started setting up more communities, adding their own bits of production to the affiliate. Helping out the war cause too. Prescott became more than just a space port, it became a Nu-Earth trade capital. A hub of humanity, and hobbs.

BuyMort even leveled me up. Got a bunch of company perks, a minor portaling license and personal access to set up a firm in Storage itself.

Every major affiliate needed one eventually.

And The Church of BuyMort, well, they tried to send me a new church representative after all the dust had settled. But we stuck by Molls and let them know that we were well represented already. Our contract designated her as their representative, and Silken Sands was unable to process any church requests through any other agent.

It meant exactly as little as their contract with us had meant, which meant nobody dared recognize that fact. We had ourselves a cultural stalemate, controlling the narrative among their own population to reflect our relationship in a positive light.

Axle had a good laugh about that. Said that he’d never seen anyone get so cheeky with the church and even made a bet that she’d be reinstated within two months.

He was right. The morties mattered more than any other motivator, especially once they were coming from a slice of the space elevator and port.

That’d been a good time. We’d been drinking some, hanging out around a card table, playing on an other-dimensional VR system called Realer-than-life, 750,000 morties, 4.9 star.

Now here I was, surrounded by blasts of metal and flame, my hovercraft quaking like one of those insert-a-dollar shake beds in a Las Vegas brothel.

At the time, with the flak going off all around us, it seemed scary. And I was shit-my-pants scared. My brain was telling me that we were going down and I couldn't stop it from howling at me to break some windows and get ready for action.

After all, that'd worked so well in the past.

But it was fine. Just my ape brain not having any understanding of the physics involved in the choppy, halting flight.

You see, Jada, in her capacity as my military intelligence specialist, had employed good strategy, a modified Wild Weasel. It was something she’d picked up from Axle’s library, after Lee had submitted some content.

We purchased small flicker-shields, 300,000 morties apiece and 4.7 stars, to cover the hovercraft’s engine compartments. Then we just layered the bellies and cockpits, anything critical really, with physical armor and let the flak shred the rest of it. Easy and cheap repairs back home, with our stolen Dearth hangar facilities.

Plus the onboard computer mapped the enemy antiaircraft fire, where it originated from, and sent the coordinates back to Silken Sands for relay to the assault wave hobbs, for use in taking the wall.

When the flicker-shields engaged, a metal hatch slammed closed across the engine to protect it from flak, opening and closing dozens of times per second. Made for a hell of a bumpy ride.

The city itself was a sprawling disaster zone. Fires and dream storms had run unchecked for weeks as Dearth established a foothold in the only area of the city that mattered to them.

Long Beach.

There were roads, very similar to my own, covered in armor and protections that coursed through the ruins, but by and large the sprawling city of Los Angeles had been left to rot.

While the fleet of hovercraft that comprised my side of the LA assault wave flew over the rest of the city, I saw BuyMort bugs and Sleem roaming the streets freely. There were also clear survivor outposts, some fallen, some seemingly still intact.

I used my anti-magic helmet to take photographs of them for later confirmation.

The helmet was a pretty stock-standard nano-tech device, in spite of its ‘magic’ theatrics. It lived underneath my skin, which dramatically increased my pore health. When deployed, a shining chrome helmet would form around my head, protecting me from all but the most serious direct attacks.

Its specialty was negating other so-called magical effects, through malicious programming. Axle had run me through the specifics, but like any other item that called itself magic, it was just really high tech.

So when I took pictures, it stored them as ‘memory magic’ in an ethereal floating spell-book that only I could see. But it was a photo album, like any other electronic, data-based device could craft for me.

It just had a magic theme.

I had gotten so used to it that I no longer even noticed the theme, I just cared about the functions. Those photos could be shared over MortMobile, the psychic phone network that connected the BuyMort universe vocally, and via text.

I’d give them to Rayna and have some squads assigned anti-Sleem gear to come search for survivors. The more Nu-Earth humans I could save, the better. In the first few days of BuyMort, our numbers had dropped from nearly eight billion to just under nine-hundred million.

In the weeks since then, it had fallen even further. Less than half a billion of us remained, and just over a million of those were already in my state and under my care.

I wanted the rest.

My photography was interrupted as we approached Long Beach, and Dearth’s emplaced weapons opened up on us. Primarily it was flak cannons, as we used their stolen hovercraft, which they expected to be vulnerable to flak.

Thanks to Jada’s sound advice, Axle’s buying ability, and our hobb army’s work ethic, our entire fleet was equipped to surprise the enemy.

The Dearth Conglomerate had built another fortress of black plastic construction blocks, walling in the entire Long Beach area. All they cared about were the docks, everything else was underdeveloped, and appeared focused around dock worker’s needs. Gigantic ocean-faring ships that dwarfed the Jahre Viking dotted the coastline, lined up to deliver cargo.

My ships hovered over the defensive wall, six of the middle group of hovercraft deploying shielded hobbs on cables. They spread out to cover all of the Long Beach wall, and within seconds, the flak in the air was gone, replaced with heavy fighting all across the defensive structures.

The forward tip of our fleet, which was my ship and two others, went straight for the Dearth tower at the heart of their operation. These guys were predictable, just like the Sleem, and they always built a tower just like the one I had taken in Prescott to run their operations out of.

A penthouse with a meeting room on the top floor was what I was expecting, so the hovercraft moved into place high above the tower’s roof. I leaned out and leapt from the door of the craft, more than forty floors in the air.

Doofus, my giant malamute, leapt out at my side in perfect synchronization and plunged into a dive.

His bright orange hard light wings deployed, erupting from his battle harness with a shower of orange sparks. They caught the air and he glided faster toward the top floor. With a single bark, amplified by his sonic weapon, Doofus blasted out the floor to ceiling window that protected the penthouse just before I slammed into the roof with my atomic breaker gauntlets.

A huge chunk of the top floor vaporized in an explosion of blue light, and I slammed through the ceiling into the penthouse boardroom, cracking the tile with my landing. Doofus landed at the window and slid across the floor, his own personal shield protecting him from the fast moving glass shards that accompanied his arrival.

My starfish suit deployed thin metal tendrils, repairing any damage that crashing through the roof of a building had done to me, but I wasn’t worried about that anymore. In the month of time I’d had growing my crystalline colonies in relative peace, my body had become much stronger.

Axle rated my strength on the BuyMort standard stat shot system. Most wealthy people within BuyMort were able to purchase stat shots, nanorobotic body enhancements. The problem with them was that in order to grow stronger, or replace lost nanobots, one would have to purchase another stat shot, and they each cost billions.

Axle told me that there was even a rating system for those who were able to afford the shots. It all started at humanoid common which was 1 and represented a basic human, hobb, elf, or orc’s level of strength within natural variations.

I, with my exotic crystalline body enhancement, was ranked a five. My crystalline colonies were another relic from the Teslak Cooperative.

The source of my biggest personal strengths.

The microscopic crystalline entities not only improved my muscle tissue, eventually hardening it as well. It was more difficult to cut me, or break my bones, now that I had been enhanced for so long.

Nowadays, most of the wounds my starfish suit repaired were superficial.

But the board room was empty. At the far end, a BuyMort portal still stood open. The other side showed the space station overhead, a room up there filled with aliens and uniformed humans staring back at us, while stars twinkled through a massive viewscreen.

The owner of Los Angeles had run away, rather than face me and lose everything.