The vampire punk stood with her arms crossed and legs spread wide.

“Lady Rebel, please move,” Bennett said.

She blocked his way to the last of the Slaver King’s slave siphoning magitech devices.

The voice in his head urged him to hurry up and get the nullification crystals in place.

“Been following you this whole time, you know?” she bared fangs.

“Actually, yes. Which begs the question, why pop up now?” he kept his own fangs hidden.

“Instinct.”

“Can I ask you to continue following that for, say, one more minute?”

“Just got a call that your friends turned that big party into a bloodbath. Sucks that I’m here. Wouldn’t mind seeing all those blood bags thinking they’re powerful just cause they’re rich and got connections running like chickens when a fox gets into the coop,” she sneered.

“This might be presumptuous, but from my understanding of your… kind… kings and slavery aren’t compatible with your worldview.”

“You’re right. It is presumptuous. I also hate this place. Slavery. A king. Lords and ladies,” she laughed. “It’s grating that they’re pulling that shit today. I’d rather they all just died. No more rulers. No more government.”

“You’ll be stepping aside then?”

Rebel uncrossed her arms and walked forward.

Bennett moved away from the doorway. He relaxed, readying himself to react.

“I’m going to enjoy a drink while I watch you and your friends burn this place down,” she waved on her way out.

He rushed to the king’s device and placed the crystals.

The chime of a completed Sub-quest chased him as he stepped into a shadow.

Time to rejoin his friends.

Hopefully, he’d get there in time.

Cal had tracked the vampire’s progress, waiting for the exact moment to place Ms. Teacher’s magical artifact into the large, glowing orb.

He opened his mind to a staggering number of thoughts.

For the first time he saw it clearly in the mindscape.

It was a formless void.

The only things present were his mental image, which wasn’t different from his physical form, and a bright orb pulsing with ugly white light.

The sight, the feel of it permeated him with disgust.

Thousands of threads flowed out of the orb, connecting every collar to the control rods, to the central control unit in the physical realm and finally to the Slaver King.

They were all linked to him on a deep level.

Essences, souls or whatever else one wanted to call them, forcibly tethered to one evil man.

The connection was strongest with those enslaved forced into comas so that the king could steal their strength and give them his hurts.

This was the truth of ruler and ruled taken to its inevitable end.

Hope filled him as he watched Ms. Teacher’s magic begin severing the threads.

There was an immediate response.

The magic in the slavery system combined with the Slaver King’s Skills fought back.

It didn’t look conscious to Cal, but why not do something to help?

He reached out to the king’s mind.

What an odious place to touch and share.

He used that disgust to further strengthen his psychic assault.

The process sped up.

Nearly a thousand threads had been cut.

“What is this? Who are you?”

Cal turned at the voice.

The Slaver King.

The mindscape wavered, shifting back and forth from void to an exact copy of the great hall.

“When I ask a question you answer?”

“I’m your conscience. The weight of your countless sins becoming too heavy to bear.”

The king laughed. “My conscience is clear. I have no regrets. Never have. Never will. So, that makes you my enemy. Now, what is this? It feels… familiar.”

“It’s judgment. You died in that fight. So, just stand there and wait to be judged.”

The king dismissed him, choosing to focus his gaze on the ugly white orb.

He saw all that transpired in the king’s fetid swamp of a psyche.

Doubt.

Confusion.

Familiarity.

Certainty.

Rage.

“It’s you. You’re the one behind all of this,” the Slaver King’s voice grew cold. “You killed my nobles. Stole my property. Now you’re trying to destroy everything I’ve built.”

“I’m just a figment of your imagination. A subconscious construction your mind created in an attempt to make sense of your death.”

“No! I see your lies! That is mine!” he jabbed a finger toward the ugly white orb. “It’s a part of me. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

More threads were snipped with every passing second.

“Other people don’t belong to you. They don’t belong to anybody. What makes people like you think like that? Let’s review. Prescott Herbert Wilson IV, this was your life.”

An eight-year-old Prescott heard the sound of slapping flesh mixing with grunts and moans coming from his father’s study. Naturally, he was curious.

He entered to the sight of one of the younger maids bent over the desk with his father behind her.

Both were red in the face with a slight sheen of sweat glistening in the sunlight shining through the wall-sized windows.

“Damn it, Prescott!” his father snapped. “We’ll finish this later,” he said to the maid as the young woman rushed out while he pulled up his pants. “Not a word of this to anyone. You understand me?” his father loomed, a shadow falling over his stern visage.

Wide-eyed Prescott nodded, too scared to utter the question on his lips.

“Eh… might as well get this talk over with,” his father sighed.

The world shifted.

Family mansion became void became the side of a dark city street.

Red and blue lights flashed, giving a sense of unreality to the gruesome scene.

He tried not to look at the lump covered by the dark sheet a few dozen feet in front of his damaged Ferrari.

“My dad’s going to kill me.” He struggled to focus. The world spun. His eyelids drooped. He just wanted to surrender to sleep. “Call my dad, Prescott Wilson,” he said for the hundredth time to the cops around him.

“Fucking rich kid’s gonna get away with this,” one of the cops muttered.

“He’s a minor and he’s three times over the limit,” another cop said.

Prescott scowled, tried to stand.

Didn’t they know who his father was? Who he was?

The words twisted in his mouth.

He sat back down.

Dark city street returned to the void turned into a room in Prescott’s fraternity house.

“Damn, she’s fine,” Eric said. “Big tits, thin body. Perfect combo.”

“Real or fake?” a faceless frat brother said.

“Real,” Eric said. “You can tell by the way the flatten out when she’s on her back.”

“No way, bro. Thin chicks don’t got big tits,” another faceless voice said.

“I’ll put a grand down on it,” Eric said.

“You’re on!”

“How are you even gonna verify that shit? You can’t ask her, she’s blasted.”

“I know her friends. They’re downstairs. I can ask one of them.”

“Gentlemen, less talking, more fucking,” Prescott said.

The freshman girl’s friends were probably already looking for her. They seemed like cockblockers.

“I got a better bet. One that we can actually verify without a shadow of a doubt.”

“What?” Eric rolled his eyes.

“Virgin or not.”

“That is better. I’m gonna go with not a virgin. That body is made for fucking,” Eric said.

The freshman stirred.

Prescott wasn’t worried. She was drunk as fuck and he had slipped a little extra something in her last drink.

“Shit! Put a towel under her ass. I don’t want blood on my sheets.”

“Guys… is this smart? We could get in trouble.”

Laughter.

“Good one, Bart,” Eric said. “She’s blasted out of her mind. Look at what she’s wearing. No one’s going to believe her even if she remembers. All we have to say is that ‘it was consensual’. Besides, if it becomes a problem my dad can pay her off. Shit it’ll be down right cheep if all our dads pitched in. So, who’s going first?”

Prescott snorted.

He always went first.

Fraternity house.

Void.

Father’s study.

“I don’t get it. I never resorted to getting them drunk and drugging them,” his father sighed. “You’re young, handsome, an athlete, wealthy. Girls should be throwing their pussies at you.”

They did, Prescott thought.

“Do you understand how this reflects on our family? On your future?”

“Yes, father.”

Better to agree to everything. It went quicker that way.

“Not just monetarily, but in reputation. That is the true currency that runs the world. I’m going to have to donate more to the university. The police chief. The district attorney’s office. The judge, if it goes to trial. Make no mistake, your opponents will dig this up and use it against you in the future.”

“I’m sorry. It was a lapse of judgment. I won’t do it again.”

“Well. It won’t come to that. If the girl is intelligent she’ll take the money. Get out of my sight.”

The void returned.

“Unsurprisingly, you never had a chance to be anything other than a piece of shit. I guess there’s a sense of poetry, a shitty one, in that your family started its fortune on slavery and here you are doing the same thing a few hundred years later. Are the spires being ironic on purpose or is it a matter of your inner self rising to the surface?”

“Listen, you fucking beaner manlet, I’m not ashamed of anything. Like I already told you. We took because we were better than you. I take because I’m better than you.”

The Slaver King rushed forward.

Only to end up right were he started.

“Not that I wouldn’t kick your ass, but I don’t need to. Plenty of other people doing that already. So, just keep running in place while we free the people you enslaved and kill you.”

The Slaver King laughed.

Cal felt a worrying tingle.

“The collars just makes it easier for me. Gives me more slaves. Lets me own them despite the distance. Fine, take them away. You won’t be quick enough,” the Slaver King gathered countless threads in his hands. “Everyone in my republic belongs to me. The collars. The oaths my free citizens swore. They are mine!”

Cal fought to pull the threads away.

Some came free, allowing Ms. Teacher’s magic to sever them.

Many more remained in the king’s greedy grip.

“Without the collars the transfer from them to me is a one time thing. I get most of their strength and they get to be vegetables. I thought it was a waste. Better that I only get a sliver while they get to remain alive.”

“Not much of a life being in a coma.”

“I had a rotation. I periodically cycled them out. You know, to be fair.”

“You actually believe in what you’re saying.”

“I did. I do. But you’ve fucked them over now. I have no choice. The fate of my New American Republic, the world, requires their sacrifice. King’s Due: Your Soul Feeds My Power.”

Cal felt them die.

Thousands of enslaved people’s souls flowed through the threads into the Slaver King.

They came from to Miami from hundreds of miles away.

Cal stretched his mind as far as he could reach in a desperate attempt to stop them.

He acted instinctively.

Not knowing exactly how, he managed to reach some of the souls, barring their path to the king, encouraging them to return to their bodies.

It became clear to him what he was doing.

It wasn’t a matter of forcing the enslaved souls to return.

It was being the voice in their head encouraging them to fight the collars and the king’s Skills.

Sadly, more failed than succeeded.

The king’s form was lost in the ugly white light turned blindingly bright.

“It’s over!” the Slaver King laughed, drunk on power.

“For you. This isn’t enough to beat me. You could drain every enslaved person and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

“Somehow, I believe you, but that’s not a problem. If twenty thousand slaves aren’t enough. Then a million subjects will do.”

“You’d kill your own people?”

“Not all of them. Just as many as it takes to end you.”

“You’d cannibalize your own kingdom.”

“I can always rebuild… starting with your friends and family in California. After I teach your friends here a lesson in knowing their place.”

The Slaver King vanished from the mindscape as Cal was forced to focus all his attention on the losing battle to deny the king’s greed.

The strain was comparable to holding a tsunami back.

So much so that he was only able to send out a feeble warning.

The chaotic fighting in the great hall had spilled out to the grounds of the king’s estate.

Adal had been forced to stab a fork into the eye of an essential worker that had tried to throttle his mother.

He couldn’t understand the hatred he had seen in the young man’s eyes.

Together with his father and brother, Adal managed to shepherd his mother and sister in-law through the melee and into the open.

Talia and Mena found him shortly after through their bond, bringing along the rest of his father’s bodyguards.

They had been eating and waiting in their assigned pavilion.

He eyed the essential soldiers among their number warily. Their collars were in place and they looked as loyal as they always had.

Talia and Mena only looked at him with loving concern.

“Bring the car around, captain and get us out of here,” Adal’s father said.

“Sorry, Lord Jefferson, but it’s parked near the outer wall. It’s too dangerous for your family to wait here.”

“C’mon, Dad, we need to get away from this place,” Cedric, Adal’s older brother, said.

“Our lives are in your hands, captain,” Adal’s father said.

The guard captain barked orders.

Bodyguards fell into formation around Adal’s family.

Talia and Mena stuck close to his side.

Lesser guests, the ones not given the honor of dining in the great hall, eyed the fleeing nobles.

Some decided that they too needed to flee.

More milled about uncertainly.

Adal knew that there were dining pavilions scattered all over the king’s estate.

The distant ones would only have the barest inkling that something had gone so terribly wrong.

How had that one-eyed woman destroyed all the collars in the great hall?

He regarded the ones around Talia’s and Mena’s necks with concern.

No.

He would never lose them.

He loved them and they him.

Their bond was special.

It was a pulse-pounding walk to the parking lots but they made it without incident.

They were getting inside the SUV when the shadows underneath the lights suddenly began moving like a monster’s claws reaching for their throats.

Screams of fear filled the parking lot.

Adal noticed the rain water in his hands.

Blood red.

He looked at his parents.

Their faces were streaked with red tracks.

“Go, go, go!” the guard captain urged them into the SUV. “Head to the estate! Don’t stop for anything!” he barked at the driver.

The SUV squealed as it peeled out of the parking lot, swerving around frantic nobles and VIP’s trying to get into their own vehicles.

Adal’s face was glued to the window.

A shadowy streak, like a large piece of cloth fluttering in the wind, appeared to envelope one of the fleeing nobles.

A frantic drive found them back home.

None had dared say a word.

Adal held his mother’s hand to help her out of the car when an ear-piercing shriek filled the air.

He spun.

That sounded like—

Mena was on her knees on the cold, wet driveway, clutching at her neck.

“Mena!” he rushed to her side.

Talia screamed.

“What the hell, Adal?” Cedric said.

“Adal, get away from them. Everyone inside now,” his father said.

“But—”

“Leave them, Adal, now!” his father snapped.

Hot pain penetrated him.

He looked down in shock.

A knife in his side.

Mena’s hand held the grip.

“Wuh— Mena—?”

“That’s not my name!” she screamed in his face with tear-filled eyes.

“The collars!” Cedric cried.

“You made us slaves!” Talia roared, hacking Cedric in the neck with her sword.

The driver pulled out a gun.

“Wind Wall!” Mena cast it underneath the man’s feet, sending him flying dozens of feet in the air. He spun wildly, landing on his head with a loud crack.

Adal’s mother and sister in-law screamed.

“Get behind me! In the house now!”

His father’s voice.

Adal raised his hand at Talia’s back as the young woman raised her sword with an inarticulate roar.

So much hate and fury.

He hesitated.

He loved her.

He loved them.

“Wind Whip!”

Mena struck his outstretched arm.

Talia’s sword descended with righteous vengeance.

Once, twice, thrice.

Adal fell to his back, staring up into the rain.

His lifeblood running down the driveway like paint.

Mena stood over him.

Talia came next.

“Why…” he croaked. “Lov—”

“You enslaved us, you sick bastard,” Talia said.

“You raped us!” Mena snarled.

“We… happy…”

“Lies. Only because the collars made us. I’d never let someone like you touch me if I had the choice,” Talia said.

“Here, I’ve got something for you to suck.”

Adal’s last sight was Mena reaching down with a bloody knife in one hand.

The two girls entered the home to find people like them, newly freed, fighting with people like they used to be.

“Don’t kill them!”

They helped knock out and restrain those still enslaved before heading upstairs where they found a group of people surrounding a dark-skinned woman guarding a door.

An artful sign indicated the room’s owner.

Amelia.

They recognized the head maid, Jane, which was her real name just as much as theirs were Talia and Mena.

The group parted for them.

They had weapons and everyone knew they were fighters.

“It looks like you’ve already got your blood,” not-Jane said with an eye to their weapons. “Amelia is innocent.”

“I don’t think I believe that anymore,” Talia— no, Cally said.

“We were innocent. Then they took us,” Mena— no, Faith said.

“You’d be just like them. She’s a child,” not-Jane said.

“It’s justice!” one of the others said.

The rest agreed.

“I suffered the same as the rest of you and yet I’m not willing to stain my soul like those people did. We have to be better. Please,” not-Jane brandished a kitchen knife.

“Okay, fine,” Cally said. “But I’m not raising a finger to defend her. It’s on you if you want.”

“Wait!”

“No!”

“They owe us!”

“Shut up!” Faith snapped. “I want this off in case whatever freed us is temporary,” she grabbed at the cold metal collar. “And we need to tie up everyone that didn’t get woken up.”

“We need to grab weapons, armor. Get ready to defend this place,” Cally said.

“Fuck that, I’m taking a car and getting out of here.”

“And where the hell do you think you’ll go, huh?” Cally said.

“We need to defend and maybe try to group up with others. Something happened at the king’s party. I’m pretty sure that the slavers are under attack. It’s the only possible explanation,” Faith said.

“Hey, you can do whatever you want, but me and her are the best fighters here, so maybe you should stick with us,” Cally nodded at Faith. “Let’s get a group going. I want to get the armory. The guards you haven’t killed are probably regrouping there.”

A few people grumbled, but they heeded the words and headed down after her.

Faith stayed behind to have a word with not-Jane.

“My name’s ‘Faith’, not ‘Mena’, that’s what that sick bastard named me. Like I’m a pet to do whatever with,” she spat.

“‘Latasha’, my name is ‘Latasha’. I know. I think we all do. Everyone that’s got one of these,” she touched the collar.

“Listen, if this goes bad, you don’t owe that girl in there your life. I just want to make it clear. We’re in this together so, I’ll fight my hardest to help one of us, but I’m with Talia— fuck, I don’t even know her real name,” Faith sighed. “I’m not fighting for any nobles,” the word tasted like rotten meat, “ever again.”

“Children don’t chose their parents,” Latasha said.

“Thanks to Amelia’s parents I don’t know if mine are still alive,” Faith said.

Hanna twisted the blade, pulled it out and slashed the Slaver King’s neck.

The impact jarred her hands and arms like she had just hit granite with a normal steel blade and not flesh with a blade made out of alien super metal.

The king gazed up into her eyes as he pushed the blade out of the side of his neck, revealing a thin cut which sealed up quickly, just like the wound in his chest.

She slipped the blade out of his grasp, slashing quicker than the eye could follow.

Vibrating Blade—

Blocked by a muscular arm.

She withdrew before he could grab the blade again.

Even with the Skill the cut was shallow, perhaps a tenth of an inch deep and gone in less than a second. The only evidence she had cut him was the blood.

A baseball curved around her body, becoming a dozen that cut and burned the Slaver King.

“Hanna! Over here!” Hillary waved the gauntlet of the Threnosh-made armor.

Basilisk and the rest of her students had gathered with the Watch they waved her on urgently as they cast spells and used Skills.

An island under siege in the middle of a chaotic melee.

“Yeah, less naked fighting!” Trevor said.

The Slaver King leapt for her.

Only to be knocked back by a pillar of stone shooting out of the ground.

“Hurry up!” Jayde called out from the other side of the central platform.

Hanna retreated to the Watch.

“Armor up,” Demi said. “Listen up,” she addressed Hanna’s students, “if you’re willing, I’m inducting all of you into the Watch.”

“Her Skills will affect you,” Hanna said as she struggled into her undersuit. The lack of vision on her left side kept forcing her to compensate by moving her head around more than she was used too. The concussion made her dizzy. She was just noticing it in the lull. “Can I get a heal?”

Max waved a hand in her direction.

She saw green sparklies dance from his fingers to her head.

The dozens of stinging cuts in her face slowly closed and scabbed. A week’s worth of healing in seconds.

The throbbing in her empty eye socket faded.

The itch, however, remained.

Finally, her head cleared.

It was like she had been viewing the world through foggy glasses while having cotton stuffed in her ears.

Her students eagerly agreed to Demi’s offer.

Hope when there had been none, no matter how thin the rope, was something a person would always reach for.

“I hereby grant you Temporary Induction Into The Watch,” Demi said. “We can make it permanent after we get out of this.”

“Oh, shit! This is great! It’s like I know exactly what to do!” Lance said.

Hanna donned her Threnosh-made armor.

Sliding the helmet on last.

The HUD lit up, tracking allies, enemies and neutrals with the appropriate colored outline.

“Here!” Ginessa tossed the Threnosh-made round shield.

“Watch Commander, I’ll engage the king while you retreat from here. Find a better place to fight,” Hanna said.

“No. We do this together,” Demi said.

“I got a short message,” she tapped the side of her helmet. “The plan worked… then there was a complication,” she nodded to the Slaver King. “The enslaved are being freed, but he’s still got hooks in a lot of them. And he’s a lot worse then I ever imagined.”

The king climbed the circular platform.

His expensive suit was bloody tatters though his skin was unmarked aside from the blood of wounds long healed.

He pulled a phone from his pocket and sent a message.

“That was too close,” he whispered. “You won’t take it away from me!” he roared. “I need more… I can always start over… I can always get new subjects… by my authority, I withdraw protections from all occupied structures within my domain.” He cast around the melee until he found what he was looking for.

A camera crew, up on the second level mezzanine, one of several filming the great hall so that the masses could watch and be envious of how their betters partied.

“Focus on me!”

They obeyed.

He stared up into the camera as it zoomed down.

“My people. Enemies have invaded our city. They came accepting our gifts and hospitality. They repay us with treachery and blood. They would undo everything we have accomplished. Will you let them take away your God given rights and freedoms? I call upon you all to fight! Teach them what it means to dare rise up against the New American Republic! So long as you fight with me in your hearts and minds you will do so to the utmost of your potential. King’s Command: Fight For Your King!” He raised his fist triumphantly, keeping his gaze locked on the camera. Then he turned slightly, hiding his lips from view and spoke in a soft whisper only a handful of people in the great hall caught. “King’s Due: I Activate The Soul Tithe.”