The Fallen Delvers Memorial threw blue light up into the evening air as Ellen, Jeff, and I opened Deimos’s doors. The clean-up and restoration of our new headquarters was taking longer than expected, and the three of us needed to sign up now or lose our chance at signing up at all. Yasmin and Jessie were back at base, making sure the cleanup finished on schedule. The deep-cleaners, especially, seemed frustrated by their lack of progress, and I could only feel for them.

  Apparently, they’d been held up by a stink in the sparring room that they just could not get rid of.

  The pyramid shape of the memorial usually stood alone in the middle of the courtyard, but tonight, a few white plastic tents framed it. Most were food vendors or breweries and distilleries trying to sell their drinks at what was likely going to be the event of the year. It smelled like a street party—barbecue, funnel cakes, sugar, and sweat; it was still late summer in Phoenix, after all.

  No one looked worried about the monster wave. No one seemed to be talking about the fact that the strongest delvers in Phoenix had been beaten at Carlsbad. The tournament was on everyone’s minds.

  “There,” Jeff said. He pointed at the tallest tent. Its walls were down to block the sun, a complex cooling system was propped against its back side, and a paper sign outside read ‘Registration.’ Nothing else—just those words.

  The three of us made a beeline for the entrance and ducked inside. The line was…nonexistent. I shrugged. “Must’ve missed the rush.”

  “Nope,” a GC rep said from the plastic table she was sitting behind. “There hasn’t been a rush. Maybe the first half-hour, but then people looked at who was signed up and stopped being interested. You should definitely know what you’re getting into before you register. It’s going to be a bloodbath of a tournament.”

  She pointed at a screen sitting next to her. I started reading out loud. “Deborah Callahan. Luke Walker from the Guardians—he’s an A-Rank tank, too. And is he related to Sophia?”

  “I’ll ask her later. Yeah, my Unique’s really similar to his. He’s one of the hardest tanks to attack in Phoenix. Pure defensive skills, armor-boosting and deflection, and then Revenge. I wish I was him,” Jeff said. “And then there’s Isaac from the Iron Falcons and Marcus from the Portal Tyrants. Strikers, twins, and rivals. They hate each other.”

  “Let me guess,” Ellen said. “A-Rank, too?”

  The GC rep nodded, looking down at her tablet. “Yeah. Every one of the guilds registered at least one A-Ranker in the first thirty minutes we were open. The Roadrunners got two in. They’re all names delvers know—“

  “I don’t know them,” Ellen said.

  “—so they had a chilling effect. No one really thinks they can beat Deborah, Luke, Isaac, and Jennifer, then turn around and handle Harold the Herald in the finals,” the GC rep said.

  Ellen shrugged. “I mean, I seriously don’t know any of these people. They weren’t any of the builds I studied. How bad are they?”

  “Harold the Herald’s the top Coyote who’s not S-Rank,” I said. “He’s a mage. A summoner mage. But he doesn’t fight like one. I’m not sure I could handle him, but you’d probably wreck him, since you can beat his summons efficiently.”

  I shrugged, turned back to the GC rep, and cleared my throat. “We’re signing up. I think we’ve got a good shot—all three of us.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sure. Your funeral. Not literally—the Spark of Life’s monitoring all the fights—but still, I doubt you’ve got what it takes.” I typed my name in, and her eyes widened. “I mean, maybe you do. You’ve been on the news enough that people know who you are, but…no title. That’s not a good sign. Most of these guys have titles. Even that B-Rank mage had one—the girl who gave me the willies.”

  As Jeff and Ellen signed up, I went back to perusing the list. What the guilds had done had chilled out the rest of the sign-ups, but there were still well over thirty delvers willing to give it a go. Not the hundreds I’d expected, but enough that there’d be five rounds of fighting. And there were a few other familiar names on the list.

  Rob. He’d been a fighter in my first E-Rank clear after merging the Stormsteel Core skill. He’d been good for an E-Ranker, but I wasn’t sure he’d be good enough for this. Andrew—the fighter who’d tried to get me killed in a Rime portal when I was still E-Rank. And Logan Fritch. I hoped I wouldn’t have to fight him. He’d been furious with me over what had happened to his brother, and I doubted that the news that Bob Traynor had known about core breaks would temper that fury. He was probably pushing his luck just being in the tournament, and so was Ophelia St. Vrain.

  And then there was Caleb Richter.

  He had to be signed up for the chance at beating Deborah Callahan. I didn’t know what his game was, but I did know he’d be in trouble if he got that far. I did hope I’d get to fight him, if only to protect him from the fight he wanted.

  The rest of the names didn’t stick out to me the same way. They were all threats—that was the way the Fallen Delvers Tournament worked—but I didn’t know them, and they weren’t big names like Marcus, Isaac, or Harold the Herald.

  “Alright, you three are in. We’re closing sign-ups in an hour and a half, so if you know anyone else who wants a shot at the Fallen Delvers portal, this is their last chance. Brackets’ll be sent out after we know who’s in, with preliminary matches to cut down to thirty-two tomorrow morning.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Then the three of us left, but before we could get to Deimos, I spotted a delver.

  He wore a coyote armband on his pristine white armor. Thin, but not skinny. More lithe, like a dancer. Four different spellbooks—Bindings and Scripts—hung from his belt, and a thin silver dagger rested on his other hip. His hair was snow-white, and so were his eyes. Harold. A summoner mage.

  I’d briefly looked at summoner as an option, but unless a delver got a Unique skill that made it more Mana efficient or increased the strength of summons or something, it wasn’t usually worth it. Harold’s Unique was. It increased his personal strength for every summon on the battlefield. That let him hit like an A-Rank fighter, cast like an A-Rank mage, and move like an A-Rank striker—and do it for less Mana than anyone else did. And it didn’t have any obvious power cap.

  “He’s gotta be the favorite to win this thing,” Jeff said quietly.

  Ellen shrugged. “I think I can take him. Let’s get back to headquarters and get to work. If we’re smart and fast, we can have dossiers for every one of these delvers by tomorrow morning.”

  “What I don’t understand is why,” Jessie said. “Why would the guilds agree to put on a tournament, then try to shut down competition? Especially with the monster tide coming, wouldn’t we want as many people as possible testing themselves?”

  The library was clean, and it had a connection to the Phoenix network. The four of us sat in bean bag chairs that Ellen had added to the space, under new lights, with computers and phones in our laps. We’d gotten over halfway down the list before Jessie stopped typing and started stretching. Harold, Isaac, and the rest of the A-Rankers had taken the longest because there was so much to know about them. Even in a tournament like this, the sheer number of skills and spells they could bring would be a significant advantage.

  Ellen shrugged. “I think I get it, but I want to hear other ideas first.”

  “Sure.” Jeff set his phone down. “There’s no monster tide. This is all a setup to get one of the guilds access to the Fallen Delvers Portal and whatever’s inside. Every one of them is trying to be the one that gets it, because whatever it is, it’s going to propel its owners into the next level of power. Not the next rank, just, like, stronger than they are now.”

  Ellen rolled her eyes. But Jessie nodded. “That fits in with what I know about the guilds. There’s probably a secret they’re keeping. And speaking of secrets…I have a meeting I have to be at tomorrow night, Kade. I’ve already rescheduled physical therapy for the next night. I just need a ride.” She looked at Ellen.

  The shadow mage shrugged. “I’ll let you take Deimos. We’ll be busy, but the car’s free. I think Jeff’s half-right. It’s not about an individual guild, though. This whole thing serves two purposes. One’s like Bob’s parties. It’s here to keep everyone a little off-guard, let people meet each other, and relax all the attendees. The fact that it’s happening before a big uptick in monster activity makes me think it’s not here for the delvers. It’s really here for everyone else.”

  “So we’re entertainment?” I asked.

  “Yes. Partially. Whatever’s in the Fallen Delvers Memorial must be important. I’d be surprised if the guilds didn’t know what it was already, even though they haven’t killed the boss guarding it. It’s probably something that all the guilds can benefit from, though. And then there’s a third reason.

  “If the GC has thirty of the best delvers—or at least the thirty who think they’re the best non-S-Rankers—downtown when the fighting starts against this monster tide, everyone else is going to have to step up to defend Phoenix. It’ll be major growth for the average delver, and it’ll be growth they wouldn’t get because someone like Kade or Deborah would usually claim as much as they could.”

  “Or someone like you?” I shot back, grinning.

  “Guilty. Very guilty.”

  “So, what’s your meeting?” Jeff asked Jessie.

  “It’s top secret. I’m not allowed to talk about it.” Jessie held her straight face for a few seconds, then cracked. “I’m kidding. I mean, I’m not. It is top secret, but I’m totally going to talk about it anyway. Basically, there are two councils in the Governing Council. As a Tier Three guild leader, I get to be on the Outer Council. The agenda’s all about those people Kade and Ellen found out in the alien town.”

  “Roswell?” I asked.

  “Yep, that’s the one. I don’t know the details, but it’s gotta be juicy stuff,” Jessie said. She shot me a look.

  I knew exactly what that glance meant. Jessie did already know the details—some of them, anyway—even though she wasn’t supposed to. I rolled my eyes at her, then shook my head slightly.

  “Anyway, I’m looking forward to finding out more about those people. Don’t know what they’re all about or anything, but still—people from another world? That’s huge, and I get to be part of it,” Jessie finished.

  “Just don’t do anything dumb,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Come on, Kade, you know me. We’re related.”

  “Yeah. So, seriously, don’t do anything dumb.”

  Ellen laughed. Then Jeff’s phone, hers, and mine all went off. Jessie’s buzzed a few seconds later, while I was still reading my message.

  Governing Council Message:

  Status: Medium Priority

  The Fallen Delvers Tournament is set. With the number of delvers, the decision has been made to delay the fights by two additional days. This will provide additional preparation time for the bouts in your brackets and allow for last-minute build tweaks and adjustments. The opening round’s bouts are as follows:

  I skimmed the list, jotting the most important ones down on a sheet of paper. The bracket was divided into four sections with eight delvers in each. Ophelia St. Vrain, Caleb Richter, and Isaac Renhardt were all in the same bracket, but none of them were fighting each other. Ophelia was an interesting case—I had no idea how she planned on winning her fights, but I knew it’d be hard for her to lose unless she made a mistake.

  Jeff was up against a Guardsman fighter for the first round, and he was in the same quarter as Luke Walker—Sophia’s brother. We’d asked, and she’d confirmed it. When he saw, his face fell. I felt for him. In a straight match-up, he’d almost certainly lose—and it would almost certainly take at least fifteen minutes. And worse, there’d never be a point where he had the upper hand. Fifteen to twenty minutes of being ground down—that’d be awful. His only hope was that someone else beat Luke before they matched up. That wasn’t likely, though.

  There were three bouts that mattered in the third quarter of the bracket.

  Ellen Traynor vs. Sennie Quintana

  Deboran Callahan vs. Oscar Osario

  Harold Jennings vs. Xander Panchek

  Ellen would have to fight Deborah eventually—either that, or she’d have to beat Harold. Unlike Jeff, though, her eyes were focused. She was only looking at her current match-up, against Sennie, an archer without a guild. The rest of it didn’t seem to matter to her.

  I wished I had that kind of focus, but my quarter of the bracket was a mess. Marcus Renhardt was probably the favorite. He and I would meet in the second round, after he beat Andrew—the man who’d tried to kill me. Rob was also in my bracket, which was completely full of melee delvers. There wasn’t a single mage or archer anywhere. I had no idea how that had happened.

  But my first-round match was the biggest one on my mind. It was against the one delver out of the entire list I didn’t want to fight—not because I was the most likely to lose against him, but because he was the one with the least to lose, and at the same time, the most. His core was almost certainly about to break. His twin’s had, and he’d blamed me.

  I had to fight Logan Fritch.

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