Ellen’s match was the next morning.

  I watched the screen, along with hundreds of other people. My attention was all on Ellen as she navigated a three-dimensional maze of Lithic platforms over a field of lava, searching for the archer. Meanwhile, arrows rained down on her, and she had to use Shadestep and Black Hole—a new, B-Rank spell—to warp the volleys away from her.

  I wasn’t nervous for Ellen—but I was concerned about the Lithic portal they were fighting in, and how Ellen would handle it.

  Sennie Quintana was a C-Ranker. She had no business holding her own under normal circumstances. But for the first time that I’d seen, the Fallen Delvers Portal’s effect mattered. The sheer evenness of the fight was overwhelming. It wasn’t that Ellen didn’t outclass the indie archer; it was that her most powerful spells…weren’t more powerful. They battled it out for almost fifteen minutes before Ellen changed strategies, covering the lowermost platforms in a wall of Shadow Shapes and maintaining the damage effects with her skills.

  After that, Sennie’s space gradually ran out, and with it, so did her time. When she couldn’t move anymore, Ellen’s shadows tore into her—but only for a minute.

  “Match,” Sarah Cullman said. The fighting stopped, and the Spark of Life got to work on healing the archer, whose legs had both been shredded by Shadow Boxing. Ellen, for her part, stuck around until she was sure her opponent would be fine. Then she headed for the stairs.

  I met her at the top. “You looked good on the screen.”

  “I know.” Ellen pulled a hair tie, letting her battle pigtails loose, and stretched. Her skin was covered in sweat, and she stank like brimstone and gym socks.

  I hugged her anyway, then passed her a water bottle.

  “So, what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day and tomorrow?” she asked.

  “No idea, but I think we head back to headquarters.”

  “Or…you and I could get out for a bit, just the two of us.”

  I ignored her wink and pointed to Deimos, whose driver’s door was open thirty feet away. “I’d love to, but babe, you’re covered in ash, and you smell like sulphur. How about we go back, check in with Jessie, and then grab lunch somewhere?”

  Ellen pretended to pout until she got in the car. Then, in a confined space, she nodded. “That’s a good idea, really. I’m curious what Jessie’s working on, though. Isn’t she supposed to be at school?”

  “She is,” I confirmed. Deimos accelerated, pressing me back into the passenger’s seat and swerving through traffic. “But a while back, I called her out for faking sick or hurt, and told her that if she didn’t abuse it, she could just ask to avoid school. Last night, she claimed she had something important to work on for the guild and asked if I’d call her absence in. She hasn’t been missing too much, so I said yes.”

  “Mature of her,” Ellen said quietly.

  “It is. She’s putting in the work, even if she thinks it’s a waste of time. The least I can do is keep my word, and she’s got a good reason to ditch. Or at least, she says she does.”

  Ellen closed her eyes in the driver’s seat. Deimos had the wheel, and she was asleep in under a minute. I held her hand until she was out, then let my thoughts drift.

  Logan. I’d beaten him twice, but neither time had been decisive. The real question wasn’t whether I could beat him again—I could, and I would. It was whether I could do something to get him to stop being pissed off at me. I doubted it. The only thing that’d help would be fixing his brother’s core, and I couldn’t do it. Not without the God of Thunder.

  Or with more resources than I had. I pulled out my phone and started composing an email to the Portal Tyrant, detailing everything I could share about the process that I’d used to repair my own broken core. I made sure he knew that I couldn’t share everything and that I couldn’t answer questions about some of the process, but I gave him everything I could. If anyone in Phoenix could figure it out, it was the leader of one of the big guilds. He’d know who to talk to in the GC for researchers, resources, and whatever else his guild would need to solve core breaks.

  It was strange, trusting him. I didn’t want to; my experience with the Roadrunners was that the big guilds were messy, complicated, and unpredictable, and Ezekiel—Zeke—had only reinforced that. But Terrel Young himself had been up front, and if there was anyone in a guild I wanted to cooperate with, it was him.

  Him and, just maybe, Angelo Lawrence.

  Jessie wasn’t in the atrium or the library, and she wasn’t working on anything. Her laptop was shut, and her phone was across her room when I eventually found her there.

  She narrowed her eyes when I tried to say something, and I shut up. The last thing I needed was her trying to hit me again. Her headphones were in, and she was glued to her TV screen. After a minute, she pulled a headphone out. “How do you feel about a B-Rank portal break, or something like that?”

  I blinked at her. “Ellen burned a ton of Mana earlier, and—“

  “Yeah, I know she did. Look, there’s a lot going on, and I’ve been reading between the lines. The news broadcasts are asking people to avoid the area around Phoenix’s west gate. That’s fifteen miles from here. Twenty minutes in Deimos, even in bad traffic. I haven’t heard from any of the S-Rankers except for the Light of Dawn and the Phoenix Reborn. All the others are missing. Gone. So, if there’s a section of Phoenix people aren’t supposed to be in, there’s probably a problem there.”

  “And you think it’s B-Rank?”

  “No. I know it’s B-Rank, because an A-Rank portal would have eaten half of Phoenix by now without a team in the way.” Jessie sighed. “Should I text the team or not?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Then I nodded. “Let’s get everyone together and check it out. You can come with us if you—“

  “Nah. I’m not a GC rep, and I don’t need to be standing outside of angry-looking red portals. And I’ve got other work to do; I’m mostly doing this to get Jeff and Yasmin out of my hair. They need to break up or make up, Kade.”

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  I snorted and shook my head to clear it. “You might be right, but I’m not going to tell them that. They have to figure it out themselves.”

  Ten minutes later, the team—minus Sophia, who was on her way from GC Headquarters with her handler and would meet us there—had jammed into Deimos. The car was not built for five delvers, and Yasmin, Raul, and I were squished into the back seat while Jeff and Ellen took the front. It was the only way to make it work.

  Jessie called while we were halfway there. “So, update. Not a portal. More of a breach. You’re looking at a handful of A-Rank monsters, mostly B and C-Rankers, and no opposition. They’re currently on the correct side of the 303 Wall, and they haven’t managed to break through, but—“

  “Where are the S-Rankers?” Raul asked.

  “I was getting there. Jeeze.” Jessie paused until she was absolutely sure she wasn’t going to get interrupted again. Then she waited a few more seconds, just to be petty. I rolled my eyes, and she kept going. “They’re all east of Phoenix. This isn’t isolated.”

  “And the guild teams?” I asked. “Oops, sorry.”

  “It’s fine, Kade. All of the big guilds’ teams are occupied. Right now, the GC’s keeping this attack on the down low. It’s unlikely that it’ll breach the 303 Wall, but…”

  “But we’re available. Got it.” Ellen grabbed the wheel, pushed a sequence of three buttons on the dashboard, and took over. Deimos’s engine roared, and I pressed back into the passenger’s seat, then slammed into Yasmin as Ellen took a corner fast.

  The B-Ranker at the gate took one look at us and triggered the unlocking mechanism. “I’m going to shut it behind you six. When you signal, I’ll open it again, but not if I still see monsters out there. You’re taking all the risk, understood?”

  “Got it,” I said. The process was way less formal than a portal clear check-in with the GC. I fired up Stormsong and geared up. Jeff was still tightening straps on his armor, and Yasmin had her Script book open, tearing out pages and applying buffs to everyone. “We’re ready in two.”

  “Awesome. The inner gate is open. We’ll airlock you out.”

  We piled in, and the inner gate slammed down behind us.

  “Ready,” Sophia said quietly.

  The B-Ranker’s voice came scratchy over the intercom. “Alright. They know something’s up. One of the big boys just moved toward the outer gate. Be ready for a fight.”

  I nodded.

  The gate screeched open, a hundred tons of steel and concrete lifting into the air overhead. The 303 Wall didn’t use portal metal to resist monsters. Instead, it relied on its sheer bulk. It was so big that it was a challenge, even for monsters—and the defenses the GC wouldn’t tell anyone about were ready to activate, on top of the sheer size.

  The incredible weight of the door overhead sent a shiver down my spine. So did the monster waiting on the far side.

  Silkstormer: A-Rank Monster

  It was thin. Not insect-thin, but elf-thin. Silk and brass armor covered its body, silvery mist spurted from a handful of wounds, and a needle-pointed staff hung from its arm. “Arboreal break,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” Ellen muttered behind me. She pointed at the B-Rank monsters surrounding the Silkstormer. They were all covered in cut marks across their brass bodies, but not one of them bled. “Brass, not silver. I’m not sure what this is, but it’s not an Arboreal. They’ve been fighting, though. No idea what.”

  The gate ground the rest of the way open, and we moved.

  Our battle plan was simple. Jeff and Ellen were a team. They’d pick up and fight as many of the weaker monsters as they could. Raul would cover the flank, keeping Yasmin and Sophia safe and killing where he could. And I’d go after the A-Ranker.

  We exploded out of the door. Yasmin’s buff spells had picked up force, and the gap between the Silkstormer and me disappeared in seconds as a trail of dust ripped up from the cracked asphalt. Behind me, Jeff’s taunt skill rippled out, and Ellen slammed a Shadow Shapes down.

  The Silkstormer whirled, and cloth billowed up around the elf. I caught a glimpse of the hundreds of tiny silver razors woven into the dozens of streaming bands of silk. Then they whipped into a cyclone of flashing metal around the monster.

  I narrowed my eyes as the battle trance took over. The storm wasn’t this monster’s domain. It was mine.

  Mistwalk Forms. Blade in front, free hand trailing behind. The first silken band lashed out. I parried. Ducked the second. Chopped into the third—to no effect. I hadn’t expected success there, though. As the attacks rained down, I played defense. Parry. Block. Probing counterattack. The Silkstormer’s cyclone stopped it before it could get anywhere. My stabs punched holes in the silk cloth, but it didn’t rip. The monster in front of me outmatched me in combat. I couldn’t beat it in a straight-up fight, but it couldn’t hit me as long as I focused.

  I used two Rainfall Charges. Mistform activated, and I slid through the cyclone of silver-silk and reformed next to the monster. Before it could react, I fired a single, un-strengthened Lightning Chain into it, then pulled. The elf-thing outranked me, but I outweighed it, and it stumbled. Stormsong struck like a rattlesnake, punching a hole between the monster’s armored breastplate and greaves. Silvery mist poured out, then choked off in steam and smoke as the lightning charred flesh.

  And the silk collapsed around me.

  I was still in Mistwalk stance. I blocked and parried, then used Mistform a second time. The Silkstormer couldn’t stop me from going where I wanted. I shifted stances—this time to Cyclone—and started casting. Thunder Crash ripped into the hurricane of cloth, and a handful of cloth separated from the whirling storm. Then a second burst of a half-dozen massive lightning bolts tore down from above as I cast it a second time—not with Lightning Strikes Twice, but the hard way.

  With my aura running, the damage was significant, but this was an A-Rank monster. Not quite as strong as Tathrix, but still strong. It weathered the storm, not undamaged, but still more than capable of fighting. Its remaining bands of silk lashed around its helmet. The helmet popped off a moment later, and even more silk erupted from the empty spot within.

  “Construct!” I yelled. It wasn’t an elf at all; it was a being made entirely of cloth.

  “Yeah, I figured,” Ellen shouted from across the battlefield. “They all are!”

  I rolled under a lashing cloth. She didn’t sound worried. They’d be fine.

  Two Wind Charges. Two Rainfall Charges. I consumed a wind Charge, activated Windwalk, and took off, running on solidified air as I tried to get an angle on the thrashing mass of cloth that had, a few seconds ago, been an elf. What was going on here? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t spend the time to find out. A wave of silk surged underneath me. How could I damage a monster like this?

  Idea.

  A stance-shift to two-handed, high-damage Thunderbolt Forms. No more spellcasting for now. I kept moving. The cloth swirled up around me, filling the air with silver and shimmering silk. I waited as it closed around me.

  Howling Gale. A slashing cut that ripped across the monster’s tendrils of cloth. The attack echoed. As the Silkstormer reeled and howled in a deafening whisper, I shifted stances again. Cloth bands rained down around me. My feet hit the ground. I planted them, cast Polarity Shift and doubled it with Lightning Strikes Twice. I could only do it once; both casts applied to another Thunder Crash.

  Electricity opened up from above, like heaven had found the Silkstormer lacking. Lightning bolts the size of my torso ripped into the monster. It caught fire, and its whispered screams echoed against the 303 Wall.

  I waited. One second. Two. Three. The fire spread, and I backed up against its heat. Four. Five. The Silkstormer thrashed and flailed. Six. Seven. Eight.

  It stopped moving. A hand pressed against my shoulder. “Let me help you with those,” Sophia said quietly.

  For a moment, I wondered what she was talking about. Then the pain ripped through me, and I realized I’d been burning Stamina for almost a minute. I was covered in cuts—cuts so clean they hadn’t hurt until Sophia had pulled me out of my battle trance. Then they all had, all at once.

  I let her work on fixing them. They were all flesh wounds. None of them were going to be lethal, but the sooner they were closed, the sooner we could keep hunting, and the sooner we could figure out what was going on with these monsters.

  The corpses of the ones Ellen and the rest of the team had killed were scattered around, too—and every one of them was a brass construct.

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