“You know what my one regret is?” said Dorian through a mouthful of fried locust leg.

“Mm?” said Sun. It was all she could get out. She’d managed to squeeze five into her mouth, which was quite the feat to behold. They bulged against her wobbling cheeks. It looked to him like one of those demon serpents that swallowed elephants—you could see the lumps bloating up the middle. But she had that fierce look in her eyes, that hard scrunch to her nose, as though she’d sooner her cheeks burst open than let the meat spill. Same look she’d worn fighting the panlong, or outside Meng’s hut. Food was on par with a life-or-death confrontation, apparently.

“It sure would’ve been nice to snatch one of those Princes’ Interspatial Rings. Or Hell, even one of Meng’s.” Dorian picked at his teeth with a clawed hand. “We’re about to go to the largest trading kingdom in all of Hell. We’re about to bargain at its auction houses! With what, exactly?”

He spread his hands. “I’ve got nothing. You have a Heavenly grade Spirit Stone up your ass?”

“MM-nMM,” said Sun, which he took to mean no. She finally managed to force down a swallow. Her cheeks shrank by half their size. “Don’t I wish! Only spices in my pack and knickknacks in my Ring.”

“‘Knickknacks’?”

“Magical ropes, lockpicks, ward-breakers, that kind of thing. For heisting.”

“Nothing of value, then.”

“Hey!” She chucked a locust head at him.

“Nothing of value to anyone who isn’t you.”

“Better.”

“Hmm.”

More chewing. Crunch-crunch-crunch.

They sat around a ditch dug in the red-brown ground. In any other plane it’d be a campfire, but here you hardly needed to dig five strides before you hit on a vein of magma. All about them, running out to a watery purple horizon, were red plains. Geysers spurted here and there. The occasional demon roamed about. But by Hellish standards it was rather calm.

An Iron Roc drifted overhead not thirty paces from where they sat. Utterly oblivious.

“How long can you hold this?”

“The cloak field?” She shrugged. “Couple more hours?”

“Excellent. I should be healed by then. Or healed enough to shadow-jump, in any case.” His veins still felt scraped raw. His qi was less than a quarter full, even with a cocktail of elixirs pumped through him. The locust legs did help—little things were surprisingly juicy with qi.

Crunch-crunch-crunch.

“The hug back there was a good call, by the way.” said Dorian, mouth half-full. “If you need to cross the bottleneck to Empyrean a few centuries later, that’ll pay. You can never have enough Dao Fruit.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. I did it ‘cause I wanted to.”

“You do that a lot,” said Dorian dryly. “Maybe you’re an idiot savant.”

“Why thank you!”

“…I don’t think I meant it as a compliment.”

“I know,” she said with an unflappable grin. “I choose take it as one anyways.”

Crunch-crunch-crunch.

She tossed a hollowed-out locust carcass aside, where it joined a heap of its brethren, and reached for another.

“So what’s up next? Stop by a market in Ur, try out the auctions?”

“Yes. We’ll make a few pit stops first—I’ll need a few Technique manuals, elixirs, and so forth. But the auctions are the main event, and they have plenty to taste. The Royal Auctions of Ur are the premier auction house in all the Multiverse! All kinds of ridiculously rare trinkets go on sale.” He paused. “I’ve seen eggs of every kind of Legendary Bird you can name. I’ve seen herds of Golden Ox sold for enough coin to ransom a Godking! Trust me, child, you’ll not be disappointed. It might be the most treasure-dense place in all of Hell.”

“Can’t wait.” Sun rubbed her hands gleefully. “I can taste them already…”

“How is it that you have such a single-minded focus on food?” snorted Dorian. “It boggles the mind. If you put half the effort you put into heisting into cultivating, who knows how strong you’d be?”

“Late-Empyrean.”

“That was rhetorical.” Then Dorian did a double-take. “Also, wait—really?”

Sun shrugged. “It’s what my ancestors said. And Grandpa Wukong. And the Spirit of the Jingu Bang, before it went into deep sleep. Always droning on and on about ‘wasting my Heavenly talents.’ What bores.” She yawned. “You folk like cultivating. I like eating. What’s so hard to get?”

“You could taste so many more delicacies as an Empyrean!” Dorian didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You wouldn’t even need to heist them! You could snatch them by force!”

“Yeah, but why go through all the effort? Don’t you get bored sitting on your ass doing breathing exercises for centuries on end? I can heist anything I want to eat as I am now. Who needs strength when you’ve got a plan, a cloak, and really fast legs?” She said. “Oh! Speaking of—I assume we’re not paying for whatever’s at the auction house.”

“…We’ll see,” hedged Dorian. “If you thought stealing from Meng was a bad idea…”

“Well I didn’t have time to plan for Meng, did I?” Sun leapt up, thumped her chest. “You haven’t seen the half of what I can do, buddy. Planning’s my real strong suit—it’s what kept me alive! You’ll see. It’s when I have to think on my feet that I get in trouble. Don’t you know how hard it was to get down to that Torchdragon egg? That took five tunnels, months of digging, a stolen beast-skin wetsuit and a snorkel fashioned out of a minotaur horn. And I nearly pulled it off!”

Dorian pushed her head down with one finger. “Nearly hardly fills me with confidence, runt. Simmer down.”

“Just—hear me out, alright? I do the cloaking, you do the stabbing. I do the planning, you do the improvising! We’ll clean out that auction in no time.”

“You did well back in the Swamp, I’ll grant you that. But let’s not bite off more than we can chew, shall we?” said Dorian, glancing pointedly at the cicada legs spilling out her mouth. “Your strengths are twofold: cloaking, and doing as I tell you. Actually, add a third: eating so much I’m beginning to suspect your stomach’s an Interspatial Ring.”

Sun swallowed, then pouted. “At least hear me out first. Let me whip something up! You can reject it if you want.”

“…If it’ll shut you up, fine.”

Sun beamed as Dorian wiped his mouth. “But I sense you’re seriously underestimating the Royal House of Ur. Trying to steal from them is such a bad idea it is literally a saying. As in, ‘that’s ‘stupider than stealing from the Auction of Ur!’ Or ‘I got beat up so bad I looked like I’d stolen from the Auction of Ur!’”

“Huh. Not very catchy, is it?”

“Nobody has ever accused the demons of being creative.”

Crunch-crunch-crunch.

“Well, I mean…” Sun grinned. “You have a better idea up your ass?”

Crunch-crunch-crunch.

Crunch-crunch-crunch.

Crunch-crunch-crunch.

And then, with a roll of the eyes—“…Don’t I wish.”

***

The Labyrinth

Jez found Kaya soon enough. A teleportation took him to the dungeons. Before he’d come they’d been grimy places, void of light, reeking with ten thousand years’ rot. There were curse seals, traps, and all manner ghoulish magics that made even the wardens nervous to enter.

Now he stepped onto smooth stone floors flanked by smooth stone walls. Little squares of light let the sun into the room from above. Skylights, piping in a glow from a sunlit pocket dimension. The air smelled of fresh-mown grass.

This was humanoid corridor 13B. Where Kaya had apparently wandered.

He came across his first cell. “Greetings, Golothian! Or would you prefer Golo?” The lizardman was a rather dour sort, but Jez supposed it was understandable, given that the state of his affairs. He was given tomes, and a cot, and daily meals—not that he needed them, being the 51st ranked Godking on the Multiversal Rankings—but Jez figured he should do this much. He was holding him against his will, after all. Golo didn’t so much as look up at him as he passed by.

“Good day, Yves!” The Phoenix-Queen glared at him, which he supposed he deserved. “Sorry,” he whispered, for what it was worth. Which he knew was very little. But it was a war, and it couldn’t be helped.

He nodded, greeted the rest of the prisoners as he went—and there sure were a lot in this corridor, some 838 by his last counting. The Godkings were first up. Then there were a host of Gods—

“Greetings, Rao!”

“Good day, Yu!”

“How’s the calf, Theonen? Do you—do you get it?” To a centaur with abnormally muscular legs. He rather hoped the joke would lighten the mood, but the creature spat at him as usual. He winced. “Sorry. I admit… not my best work.”

On and on he went. It wasn’t until he got to the higher-end Demigods when he knew he was getting close.

He knew he was getting close because of the screaming.

He froze when he heard it. And then he was a beam of golden light, rushing past the rest of the prisoners. To the end.

There was the Confessions Room. A lightless room, all blank steel walls lined with nasty instruments. One of Jez’s least favorite places in all the Labyrith—but yet another painful necessity. Some prisoners had truths that had to be dug out—truths that would end this horrible business far quicker.

The door was left conspicuously open, and through it he saw a demigod Orc chained to the wall. Fists thudding against flesh. Screams. Flashes of gold.

His gold.

He rushed in. There was Kaya, breathing heavy, fists clenched. She’d beaten T’pon so badly his ribs were caved in. He coughed black blood onto the floor.

“Stop,” whispered Jez. Then, as the blows kept up—

“STOP!” he cried.

“Oh, hey!” Kaya grinned at him. “What’s up?”

“What are you doing?!”

“I asked your head torture guy—”

“Wendel.”

“That’s his name? The big lizardman? Anyways, yea. Asked him to let me have a go at it.”

“What secrets could captain T’pon here possibly know? He was but a guard of the Twilight watch!”

T’pon jerked up, lips dribbling black blood. He looked shocked. Shocked from the pain or shocked that Jez remembered the lovely little conversation they’d had last time he visited, he didn’t know.

“I wasn’t beating him up to get answers.” Kaya looked puzzled. “I just… I dunno…felt like beating something up, I guess.”

“This room is to be used only when absolutely necessary,” said Jez. “How could you—”

He shook his head, took a deep breath. “You must know I don’t like seeing hurt done to others. But to see my powers put forth for that purpose… it is especially hurtful. To me. Please, cease.”

“I don’t get it. Don’t you kill people all the time? How’s that different?”

A tightness in Jez’s chest. He sighed. “I wound when I must! Some evils are necessary—awful, but necessary. Was this necessary?”

“No?” Now Kaya wore a lopsided grin. “But it makes me happy! Isn’t that something?”

“I… Never mind.” If he was to try to pull every one of his allies to his side with words alone he’d never conquer the Multiverse. Only he’d had some hope Kaya—this wrong young lady, so young, not yet twisted up by time like the rest of them—that she might come to see things his way.

A dialog for another time. More pressing matters awaited. “I need your help. Dorian has slipped our grasp.”

“What?!” Suddenly her face darkened.

“He’s found a way to escape all of our tracking devices,” said Jez uncertainly. “Blood Probes can’t find him. Neither can our most sophisticated instruments, following the threads of Fate.”

“So what will?”

“Only the most severe bonds of Blood and Fate intertwined. One he can’t slip. It is why I recruited you, in fact… As biological siblings you share natal blood. In both Blood and Fate you are linked at the basest level. There is a Technique which only you can use to seek him out.”

And it was of vital importance to Jez, and to the Multiverse, that one of its most destructive actors still loose be brought to justice. Weakened as Dorian was, he still ranked among the top handful of threats to his plans.

So despite his niggling unease at the look in Kaya’s eyes, he spoke. “I am considering tasking you to lead a hand-picked strike force to bring him to Justice. You know his thinking better than they. You can act as their living compass. Can you do that?”

Not a second’s hesitation. “‘Course I can.”

Then she glanced down at her hands. “But I’m weak as Hell right now. I’ve been slugging at this thing—” She jabbed a thumb at T’pon—“For hours, and I barely put a dent in him!”

T’pon’s torso begged to differ. Jez winced once more. Blithely Kaya carried on. “You want me to hunt him? Give me more.”

Gold wreathed her knuckles. Gold swirled in her irises. Jez felt sadness sink like a stone in the well of his heart.

“So? What’ll it be?” said Kaya, grinning fierce.