Toby was crying.

Yeah, That’s sort of a weird thing to focus on, but it had a more important meaning. Toby was still alive. I’d seen just how destructive Sandman’s abilities could be, so I imagined that was at least something.

I was a little numb. Yes, I was no stranger to death, but seeing someone I very much liked just get… disintegrated was a whole new level. I had no idea how I would do it, but that thing that called itself the Sandman was going to die.

Lauren was shaking my arm, with Toby held in her other arm, “George, I said she might still be alive!”

“Alive?” I asked. “I just watched her get disintegrated.”

She shook her head, “That’s not how Sandman’s powers work. He phases part of himself into a pocket dimension. My vision is telling me he used it to transport her to somewhere else, or her body would have been ejected by now!”

I looked around. Indeed, every time he had phased part of something, it had reappeared almost immediately only a few inches from where it had been. Definitely an effective way of killing someone, but there wasn’t any evidence of that here.

“Where could he have taken her?” I asked.

Lauren sighed, “I was saving two points for an emergency, but I guess this qualifies. Hang on a sec. I am going to take teleport tracking and dimensional tracking.” Her eyes seemed to go vacant.

“You are going to do what?” I asked.

After a few moments, she focused on me again. “What?”

“I said, you are going to do what?”

“I had two ability points, basically power evolutions, that I was saving for emergencies. I had to take teleport tracking and from there, dimensional tracking in order to catch his traces. It’s about seven thousand miles.” she pointed vaguely, “That way.”

“That’s like halfway around the planet. Can you get me there?”

I wanted to know what she meant by power evolutions. I know that with hard work and lots of training, certain powers could be enhanced in certain ways, but you had to know exactly what you were trying for, although on rare occasions people could use their abilities in new ways in an extremely stressful situation, sort of like a second awakening. I don’t know what she meant by points, though.

“Yes, but it’s going to take at least two ports, and I cannot go with you. I am not leaving Toby with someone after… that. I will take you to Seattle, and then open up a portal for you to wherever it was she went, I am guessing someplace in northern China, maybe.”

“You don’t know in advance?”

She shook her head, “Not exactly. It’s more like a direction and a distance for the tracking, and my portals don’t form inside solid objects. I can shift them around a bit, like when I create one here, but unless there’s a big electrical power source nearby or I have been there myself, getting it exactly where I want is a challenge. I can get you close, though.”

“Do you need to change? I mean, if you are going to be popping into Seattle?”

She nodded, “You should too.”

I pulled a hood out of my pocket and over my face. I always had one handy, but there was no way I was taking the time out to pull on my armor. “Let’s go.”

The portal was… unpleasant. Apparently, It wouldn’t even work on me until I had intentionally drained my electrical absorption. Before that, I could walk straight through it, and drain the energy that formed it as I went through.

I hadn’t really tested it before, but it looked like just because something was what I wanted, or was a positive effect, didn’t necessarily mean it just worked. I resisted it as much as anything else. Something about my bones simply did not like getting moved around with powers.

I mean that literally. Even when I reduced my electrical absorption to zero, my body still didn’t want to use the portal as a portal, just as an energy source. I had to pull all the power from another node, one I hadn’t realized existed, in order to allow myself to be taken to Seattle, and from there to… here.

Hello again, my old friend. It has been many years since I have seen your hellish landscape, which I thought to never see again.

Yeniseysk, Siberia. Well, it had gotten renamed to Krasnoyarsk Krai, and I could see the Podkamennaya Tunguska river… if you want to call a flat sheet of ice that stretched interminably into the distance a river… off in the distance.

Despite getting affected by whatever happened, I hadn’t been that close to the blast. There was a great flat plain ahead of me, the place where it had happened. Ironically, it was nestled in the middle of a great forest of firs, but the plain still wasn’t growing trees over a hundred years later.

The land was… scarred. Many battles had occurred here, and that was obvious. Great gouges rent the ground, but it was not snowy. Frost dappled the raw earth and occasional patches of grass that somehow managed to survive the twice or more battles that occurred at the site. The lack of snow was surprising, as it was already two months into the season of the heaviest snowfall in Krasnoyarsk, but it might have something to do with the… energy I felt.

Something was tingling at the edges of my senses like I was in a heavy electrical field or something. Yes, the cold was a factor, right now I was unprotected at about -5 degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t bothering me much, but the tingling did.

Far off ahead I could see a small, glowing spot near the center of the cleared area. I quickly started running towards it. Was it a rift? Proteus was supposed to be constantly monitoring the site, waiting for new rifts to form, and keeping at least a class C metahuman watcher on-site at all times.

It looked like a rift, more and more as I drew closer. But I had seen footage of rifts before. They might have been small 40 years ago, but today they were a giant glowing rent in the sky. There were portable instrument packs scattered around, but they were always destroyed when a true rift formed by whatever monstrosities spilled out. As I got closer, I realized that the instrumentation was disconnected, the power plant was turned off, and there was no monitoring going on.

It was only slightly larger than the height of a man, a rent in the air, like a frozen greenish lightning bolt. There had been no alert, no call for gathering Earth’s heroes. What the hell was going on?

If I had been more cautious, or more of a deep thinker, I probably would have paused to think about it… But this was where Lauren said the teleportation, or the travel corridor, or the dimensional space, or whatever it was that Sandman used to move here from the ship had gone. The rest of the plain was featureless, or nearly. It was an irony that despite the great boiling overload of creatures that appeared every time there was a rift, they soon dissolved, or evaporated, after their death.

There had been many theories about why it happened, but usually within 24 hours of a rift incursion, all signs save for the bodies of those who had fought, and died, against the hordes were gone. It was convenient since a giant field of rotting and stinking bodies would create almost as much of a hazard as the incursion itself, but it still left scientists baffled when they tried to preserve and study the basic material the invaders were created from.

Lauren was letting people know what was going on, but an organized group of metahumans that were capable of fighting someone like the Sandman would take time… and I had no idea of the time that Caelo had left.

So, like a honking great idiot, I decided that I’d probably survive whatever it was. I didn’t feel the electricity coming off of it, like Vectress’ portal, so I simply suppressed whatever it was that made my skeleton hate to be moved dimensionally, and plunged into the green-glowing rift.

There was blackness. And then, in front of me, I saw… a sign? A glowing sign with actual letters, in English rather than Russian, was in front of me. I wasn’t hovering or anything, I could feel stone under my feet and that same tingling sense of power, and it was still colder than hell, but right in front of me hovered a flickering illusion, or hologram in space, of a box. With text. Just like on a computer.

Welcome to unnamed beginner dungeon #0176.

There is currently a party inside that is less than the maximum size.

You are using The Game of War system 2.04. Current version is 3.11. Advancement is withheld until you perform an update. Would you like to do that now? It will take approximately 14 minutes to complete.

“Uhh…” I said out loud.” “What?”

The flickering screen changed slightly.

You are in an unnamed beginner dungeon. It is the 176the dungeon opened in your worldspace.

The maximum size of a non-raid party is 5 members. You may choose to join the party, or spawn a separate instance.

Your version of the Game is 2.04. This dungeon is designed for version 3.11. The current party has notifications turned off. The current party version is 2.04.

Due to version mismatch, and an excess of advancement energy due to improper formatting between versions, any death within the dungeon will not permit a respawn. Improper version deaths within the vicinity of the dungeon core will likely cause an energy overload, resulting in an overload event.

I guess, whatever it was, was capable of understanding and responding to my voice. “I would like to join the current group, I guess. Uhh… what’s an overload event?”

The last 175 beginner dungeons sent to your world were destroyed by an overload event. An overload event is sometimes called a world event, or world spawn. The death of an improperly formatted earlier version bearer with greater than average advancement energy for your world causes the core to overload, instantly creating a class 3 core.

In addition, the energy overload releases a strong spawn of materialized Chaos entities, in order to assimilate the energies without self-destruction.

“Is this some kind of a game or something? You are like an AI controlling it. Did we tap into some kind of superpowered entertainment system?”

Yes and no. It has been designed to appear similar to a game, but the fight between Chaos and Reality is very real. It was determined that guiding chaos incursions into an easily comprehensible shape, and guiding the resulting rewards into easily-understandable forms for most sapience, would improve the appeal and prevent the necessity of involuntary conscription or utter annihilation.

Would you prefer to upgrade to version 3.11 at this time, or rejoin your team?

I’d been talking and reading for over a minute, and said “I will rejoin my team.”

And the lights came on.

I was in something that sort of resembled a medieval bailey, I guess. Nothing like the Katorga camp I was expecting, where I had grown up. Not so Siberian, after all. There were creatures scattered all over the courtyard, large, green, and reptilian, wearing bits and pieces of medieval-style armor. There were piles of bits of creature everywhere, and it was clear that Sandman had been very busy.

I had seen the creatures that spawned with an incursion, pictures, at least, They were wildly different every time. Fire demons, icey monstrosities, giant spiders, hordes of barely-formed blobs, creatures right out of H.P. Lovecraft’s worst nightmares. Last time it had been some kind of worm-covered giant insects.

And always, there had been what was referred to as Kaiju. The Japanese word for giant monster. Often similar to the rest of the horde, but much, much larger, often hundreds of feet tall. The creatures that spawned sometimes took on the appearance of some kind of intelligence, occasionally using weapons or armor of some type, but when they came out of a rift they were ravening berzerks, sometimes even throwing weapons away so that they could attack with their bare hands.

The stone walls were made of roughly-carved granite blocks, including wooden-door entrances to various towers set along the wall’s length. A patina of dripping gore along some of the walls implied that there had been more lizardlike creatures along the walls, possibly some kind of missile troops, that Sandman had eliminated. There was even a hay wagon and a giant pile of hay near one of the walls as if the wagon had gone out somewhere and returned with fodder.

The Bailey would have looked right at home in a medieval castle on earth, save that instead of great walls surveying the countryside, the roof was a giant stone dome, brown rock roughly carved right from the top of the walls and curving overhead, with some kind of brightly illuminated globe at the summit of the giant curve. Ahead, with the trail of bodies leading right towards it, was a lifted portcullis, which, since it seemed the obvious direction, I sprinted through.

Inside, the walls were lit by sputtering torches in iron holders. There were several more bodies, half-spattered in trademark Sandman style, and ahead of me, I could hear guttural screams. Running into the room, I noticed that Caelo was lying on the floor near where I entered while flickers of motion were appearing and disappearing.

There were creatures, and Sandman was flickering in between them. They didn’t appear to be much of a challenge, despite being much larger and seemingly better armed in some kind of golden plate armor and carrying flaming halberds. He would disappear and reappear in seconds with a hand INSIDE of one of the large, winged humanoid reptiles, a spatter of gore appearing seconds later leaving behind a huge hole.

He seemed to be distracted, and I had to make a choice. Rescue Caelo, or try to kill the son of a bitch before he could disable me just like he was taking out the creatures.

Yes, I know I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, but was not a vengeful superhero, either. I grabbed Caelo, realized she was unconscious, and picked her up in a princess carry, running for the exit.

Whatever this place was, it seemed to be supercharging my pools. I actually had to be careful not to hurt her unconscious form, with my strength and the speed I was able to take while charged. I ran out of the hallway, across the bailey, and was back at the starter point in mere seconds.

I looked around. There was a great door in the wall, and it was open, but beyond it was nothing but a solid rough stone wall. “How the hell do I get out of here?” I asked.

This is a training dungeon, part of the tutorial. You cannot leave until you have reached the center of the dungeon and completed the tutorial. You do not need to defeat the creatures, stealth or misdirection to pass through the final exit will suffice. If you upgrade to version 3.11, you would be able to gain more information on the tutorial.

“What will happen if I upgrade to version 3.11?” I asked.

You will be placed in a temporary stasis field while you complete the introduction and selection process and your system is upgraded.

“Can Sandman get to me while I upgrade?” I asked.

No. His powers work by utilizing an extradimensional space. Extradimensional spaces do not function within the stasis field, for safety reasons.

“What about Caelo? Can I take her with me?”

No, each introduction is individualized for security reasons.

“Okay…” I said, my mind working frantically. I could probably live through whatever it was Sandman did, but the same could not be said for Caelo. If I could get her safe while dealing with Sandman… “Can Caelo go into the introduction?”

Yes. She is currently unconscious and damaged, with several damaged nerve complexes. She has enough energy for a healing respawn, would you like to place her into a stasis field for upgrade and repair?

This would normally require her consent, but due to several parts of her hind brain and spine being removed, she is currently incapable of consent.

That son of a… “If you can help heal her, so it. I don’t know whether or not it is what she wanted, but go for it.”

Player Calixte Lovelie Dupree is being placed into stasis for healing respawn and system upgrade. Estimated time, 23 hours 59 minutes. Estimated advancement Rank, 6. Due to healing respawn, however, her beginning rank will only be 5.

I noticed her weight was gone. I could still feel her in my arms, but she was floating, not with any weight on me anymore, a shimmering, purplish aura surrounding her. I slowly lowered my arms, and she hovered there.

“What the hell! What have you done??” I heard an almost screech behind me.

Wow, right on schedule. “Well, I couldn’t get her away from a psycho like you due to whatever this place is, so I put her in stasis. When she gets out, she will be… upgraded, whatever that is.”

“You can’t do that!” he frothed. He was standing a few feet away from me, and I assumed since I hadn’t heard his approach. His dreadlocks were lashing, and his deep-black skin was sheened with sweat.

With the way bits of his body seemed to be pulsing in and out of reality, He would be intimidating if I hadn’t figured out during training how to stop him from doing much more than just punching me. “I did. Too bad for you.”

There were certain triggers you could use that would get most people who spent half their life rationalizing their own weaknesses, and while I was not exactly a cape, guys like Blackhawk specialized in getting bad guys talking, I had seen it done often enough to have a good idea of how it worked.

“I am surprised. I thought you were a decent guy, a man of honor. Kjootoo let you into his family, took care of you as part of his crew, and you repay him by stealing his daughter, to… I guess… what, sacrifice her to the core? What a sick little man you must be.” I was channeling most of the energy this place was giving me into my resistance to ‘displacement’ effects, the same thing that had somewhat stymied Lauren’s portal, and my own strength, durability, and speed. We both know he couldn’t kill me. Not forever, anyway.

He fumed, “You don’t understand. I have to! Do you know what will happen if the masks don’t have a common enemy to fight? They will go crazy! Only the occasional invasion lets them keep themselves in line! The common cause… bonding with an enemy over a common enemy, keeps the game going, keeps humans alive, and keeps the entire world from descending into endless war!”

“And for that you needed Caelo?” I asked, scowling at him.

“Yes, her boyfriend dropped stronghold, where we were keeping the worst of the worst. All we have to do is kill a class C or better over the core, and all the heroes and villains with real power join together to fight it. Do you have any idea how close we have come to world war? With Nukes and metahumans capable of wiping out entire cities?”

I sighed, “Proteus would…”

He yelled, “Fool! Proteus is me! And people like me, willing to do whatever it takes to keep the world, OUT world, from dying under a mountain of superpowered freaks!”

He shook his dreadlocks. “We lost our supply of incorrigible Class C and above cowls. He saved the monsters from their just deserts, dying to protect the world from themselves! So yes, I decided to use the mulatto bitch instead. Killing off his mongrel girlfriend would not only let him know that we can get at him no matter what but have you seen her powers? She can get IN your head! Change your emotions, your mind, make you feel like you are in love, or do whatever she wants!”

He looked at me slyly, “Just like you. I bet the bitch has you wrapped around her little finger. That’d be a real coup… scoring both of Kjootoo’s daughters at the same time. The silent one and the screamer. All you have to give up is your own soul. You know what, though? Naomi might be able to disintegrate anything she touches, but you cannot touch what is not there… I bet that half-breed bitch would work just as well for feeding the overload.”

Wow, this guy had a real stick up his ass about mixed-race people. I never considered myself woke, but he was going pretty far off the rails. One of the hazards of using words like ‘honor’ and ‘nice guy’ is that it tends to trigger the full download, including whatever sort of crap filled their heads as rationalization.

“Won’t work. You can’t leave. Otherwise, I would have taken her out of here. You and I both know you cannot kill me instead, and your powers are useless. Unless you want to throw yourself on the core instead?”

He grinned, “No, YOU cannot leave. I can go anytime I want to. All you have to do to go is get to the end, past the core, and exit… I can do that as easily as pie. You, on the other hand, will have to fight…”

I turned my ‘displacement’ absorption to the max and tackled the bastard.

Okay, I am not going to try and pretend it was some amazing fight. The moment I started to hit him, I was soaking up his power like I did Naomi’s. He was a very big guy, probably 6’5” and corded with muscle, sort of like a scarier version of Wilt Chamberlain, which is definitely saying something.

But outside of his extremely scary power, his strength was human strength. His toughness, which relied on his power to never be touched, was normal for a human. He couldn’t take a hit, and when I hit him, trying to disable him, I guess I went a little harder than absolutely necessary.

Maybe he didn’t realize that my absorption would allow me to interact with him even when he was trying to displace me. I don’t know, but I realized the moment I hit him that not only had I shattered his jaw but that the impact of slamming his head into the stone ground caused his eyes to roll up. He was no longer among the living, his brain probably pulped.

Important safety tip. Pull your punches, unless the guy was a real rat bastard serial killer type with unresistable powers. Then you can slam his head into the ground just like I did. I wasn’t sure if it was an accident or if some part of my subconscious had just decided he had to die. Time to jump on the rationalization train, but at least I knew when I left the station.

Fact. He planned to unleash a plague that would doubtless result in dozens or hundreds of dead or dying metas trying to protect the world.

Fact. He had done it before, known exactly what he was doing, and would probably do it again.

Fact. He had a reputation as a cold-blooded killer. Maybe I did too, now.

Fact. He was going to murder a girl that I could see myself falling in love with. One who might be able to be with me longer than just an eyeblink.

That last fact let me throw away the rest, and was the only one that really mattered. I barely even needed to rationalize it at all to feel better.