“What does that mean?” Tori asked. Her eyes were locked on the system message that was flashing across her vision. It blinked, pulsing like a warning to evacuate. Like a message that everything had gone wrong.

  “No idea, but it’s not good,” Carol muttered next to her. The girl’s spear was bloody—they’d been fighting for the last half-hour or longer, and they’d only just now gotten a reprieve under the shade of a row of destroyed grain silos on the lake’s shore.

  They also hadn’t killed anyone. At least, not intentionally. Carol had been working hard to take people out of the fight without actually ending their lives. Tori had been…less cautious. Her spells weren’t set up for caution and care; they were set up to beat dungeon bosses and kill monsters.

  The black, charred field that had once been the prairie around Chicago stretched out around them, and a massive, rusted hulk of a ship rested against the shore nearby. Tori stared at it. “Should we…”

  “We should,” Carol said quickly. Then she paused and shook her head. “No, that’d be too slow. We need to find them now.”

  “Right.” Tori took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So, I have a way to get us across the lake, but it’s going to be awkward.”

  “I can deal with awkward.”

  “Great. Put your weapon away. I’m just going to…” Tori wrapped her arms around Carol’s waist, then locked her hands together as best she could. Then she squeezed. Tightly.

  Carol looked over her shoulder at her eyebrow raising. “Tori, what are you—“

  Before she could finish, Tori cast Levitate, then Pushed herself up into the air, ripping Carol off her feet and catapulting them across the lake—and toward the factories below. The telekineticist Pushed them in reverse as they rocketed toward the ground, then crumpled to the ground as Carol’s weight slammed into her. They both lay there for a moment, breathing in the acrid, chemical air and laughing uncontrollably. “Sorry,” Tori gasped after a moment. She slowly unknotted her fingers from around the older girl’s stomach.

  “It’s…it’s fine.” Carol pushed herself up on her spear-butt and started moving. “We need to find them, though.”

  “Right.” Tori fell in behind Carol as the older girl headed straight into the heart of the factories surrounding them. She was so cool, and so focused.

  The moment Calvin Rollins realized the battle was over, he ordered a general retreat.

  It was the first part of the battle that felt like a good call to him.

  Museumtown had lost Whiting completely. His people had a foothold on the west side of Lake Calumet, but that was about it. The dungeon entrance—or at least what he assumed was the dungeon entrance—was contested. But the worst bit were the technicals. Three of them were out of commission completely, judging by what he could see from his perch on the hill. Two others were still running, but barely. And the sixth was nothing but a hospital wagon.

  “Absolute nightmare,” he muttered as the runners started spreading the word. “I’d stick it out, but there’s nothing to stick it out for, and no point in keeping on going.”

  The Fireborn Crusade was leaving, too. They’d started pulling back, leaving columns of smoke and flames behind as the town burned. And Calvin knew exactly why. The Beacon wasn’t operational anymore. The System hadn’t told him as much yet, but the light that had poured out of the ship on Lake Calumet was gone, and that was all the information he needed to know.

  “Sir, what do we—“

  “Don’t call me that,” Calvin snapped. “I ain’t an officer.”

  “You came up with the battle plan, sir,” the man said. He was almost Level Fifty and close to his Tier One Trial. “We won the battle. That makes you an officer to me.”

  Calvin shut his eyes and let his binoculars hang down from his neck. “Jesus Christ.”

  He’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t get people killed for some god-awful objective they didn’t even understand. Calvin was done being a medic, but the only thing worse than trying to help folks was giving the orders that got them killed. He stared at the burning town below him, then glanced over his shoulder at the busy field hospital Jessica and the other healers were running.

  Calvin would be having a talk with Hal and Jessica. They couldn’t keep doing this. There had to be a better way forward.

  “What do we do now?” the man asked again.

  He considered that. Then he nodded slowly. “Now, son, we go back home and figure out our next move. Battle’s over. Hopefully, the war is, too. But if it’s not, we need to keep moving. Either way, we keep moving.”

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  Whatever had happened, Hal would know what to do. He’d know how to solve it. He always did.

  Taven Liu laughed. He couldn’t help himself.

  His friends had picked the same option once, up against a powerful lich with the fate of the kingdom on the line. They’d been unable to win. He’d played the lich to perfection—way beyond what the guidebooks had recommended—and he’d wiped out the wizard in the first two rounds of combat, then locked down the rogue and fighter. From there, it had been easy.

  But even as the total party kill loomed, Andre’s paladin had decided that if they couldn’t destroy the Lich of Misty Manor, they could at least stop it from winning. He’d sacrificed himself, not to destroy the lich, but to destroy the soul engine at the center of Taven’s villainous plot.

  Taven had needed to give an epilogue after that. The lich had rained destruction on the countryside in cold malice, but without the soul engine, it could not truly claim dominion over the kingdom and crown itself immortal king. Hundreds died to the lich’s undead army, but in the end, the heroes’ sacrifice had been enough. The kingdom was saved, and they went down in history as heroes and martyrs.

  Taven, however, wasn’t the lich. He didn’t care about vengeance. Without the Waypoint Beacon, there was no further need of Whiting—or of this dungeon. Without the Waypoint Beacon, Museumtown and Hal Riley were no longer his enemies. He didn’t care if they lost, but he also knew that only one side could win, and he was prepared to do whatever it took to make sure it was the Crusade. That meant finding a different beacon—before Hal did. It meant consulting with his uncle.

  He shuddered a little.

  The Fireborn Crusader stared at Hal Riley with burning eyes. Then he took his helmet off, lifted his sword, and rested it on his shoulder. He took a knee and put his face next to the Voltsmith’s ear.

  “You’re right. I lose. But you haven’t won, either. You know something, though. I admire you. I hope that, for the remainder of this phase, your people remember you and the kid as the brave heroes you were. Goodbye, Hal Riley. Zane, stay here and make sure Hal doesn’t leave this room.”

  He stood up and strode out of the room, leaving the Voltsmith and the Fire Mage behind. The last thing the Fireborn Crusade needed were martyrs and heroes.

  Failures served him much better.

  The device I’d been working on had been simple. It was a little like the Heart in the center of the Voltsmith’s Grasp, or the ones that powered the technicals outside, but much, much less functional. If I’d had longer to work on it, it might have gotten closer, but at its most basic form, it was nothing more than an emitter, a refiner, and a few wires and tubes—plus a couple of other small doo-dads I’d been playing with.

  What it did was pretty simple, too.

  Charge Converter, by Hal Riley (Created Consumable Item)

  The Charge Converter uses the Principle of Liquidity to modify static, electric Charge into fluid Charge. Lasts five seconds before overloading its refiner. First created by Hal Riley of Earth.

  Warning: The Charge Converter will also attempt to overload any creations it is connected to in a chain reaction.

  The Waypoint Beacon, it turned out, was a creation. I couldn’t tell who’d invented it, or what it really did. My vision was blacking out, and my stump kept shooting rippling waves of pain along my arm and up into my shoulder. I wanted to climb up to the catwalk and find it—and more importantly, to find Zane. But I couldn’t move. It hurt too much to try.

  So, instead, I watched the Beacon as it overloaded and the Charge welling around it rushed inside. The Charge Converter was still stuck to the off-white, ceramic-feeling plating that covered its side; in fact, it looked like it had almost welded itself there. Orange arcs of Charge surged into the fraying, burning wires, then through the Refiner and Emitter and into the red-hot tubes that had fused with the Beacon. I watched through the pinprick of light I could still see as the device poured fluid Charge into the Beacon, and through the gap in the plating, the hundreds of gears, batteries, and Lens Arrays inside it started to move.

  The room went purple—a deep purple that overrode everything else and burned my eyes. The orange Charge faltered, then built up again from the floor, slower and slower, but never stopping until it reached the Charge Converter’s burned-out husk.

  Then the Beacon activated, and for a second—just the shortest flash of a moment—I got to see what it was trying to do.

  The Graft had finished. But Earth was going to slowly lose to the Grafted bits of Solemnus Six over the next week as they naturally expanded. The Waypoint was a signal that we could maintain our boundaries. And, for that second, the Whiting Beacon had signaled that.

  Then it flashed, and my eyes squeezed shut against the burst of pure white light as the Beacon imploded.

  Principle of Voltsmithing Learned: Overload

  Charge, in its electric form, is the potential for energy. Counterintuitively, its fluid form is pure, active energy. The same principles that allow for efficiency at scale and in closed systems can create self-sustaining reactions, and those reactions can quickly grow out of hand. The Voltsmith’s understanding of this risk and its management are critical to their success in crafting more advanced creations.

  I stared at the light—and at the message—through my eyelids. They hardly helped; it was like something being burned into my brain, seared into my memory. I’d lost the fight—but so had Taven Liu, and of the two of us, I was the only one coming away with something.

  No.

  No, that wasn’t true. Zane…

  I tried one more time to push myself to my feet. The Principle of Overload could wait. I needed to find Zane. But a hand pushed me back down, and a familiar voice said, “Hal, stay down. You’re hurt bad. I’ve gotta get you to Mom.”

  “Zane…” I whispered.

  Tori didn’t say anything for a minute. She wrapped my stump in a cloth, then helped me to my feet. I leaned on her, and she looked up at the catwalk. “Carol’s taking care of him,” she muttered after a moment.

  The sound of fighting echoed from above, and I winced. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can talk to her about it later. For now, we need to get you to Mom, and then we need to figure out what’s next.”

  My arms hurt, and there wasn’t any experience nearby for a level-up. I had no idea whether Jessica could fix a missing arm, but whether she could or not, whatever was going to happen next was going to be tough. We had less than one week before the end of Phase Two, and as it stood right now, I was down.

  But I wasn’t out. Even as Tori helped me out of the storage room and I left the burned-out beacon behind. I already had ideas for fixing that.