Rob.

  I had Rob in the third round. And he’d built himself in a completely different direction than I’d anticipated. When I’d last seen him, he’d been a fresh E-Ranker, with no experience and a mace that was probably too heavy for him. He’d used it to mash a bunch of Glade world wolves to death, and he’d been a reliable fighter. But in his first and second-round fights, Rob hadn’t played the role of fighter at all.

  He was still a bruiser. The new mace he wielded was a C-Rank weapon, self-repairing and enchanted to give off bursts of light with every impact. But his build…

  The publicly available record of his build was absolutely bizarre. He’d gone with a three-merge set-up that’d get him to high B-Rank, or possibly A-Rank if he was lucky. And each of his three merges pushed his Unique skill in a different direction. It looked like an unholy mish-mash of healer, mage, and fighter skills—and that only got worse when I looked at his three unmerged skills. If there was one thing I’d learned from Angelo Lawrence, it was that a focused build was almost always better than a jack of all trades one.

  Mine was an exception because I was cheating with five normal merges, a Unique, and Dual Skill Advancement, and because the Stormsteel Core had modified my skills so much.

  But it wasn’t until we watched Rob fight that Jessie realized what he was doing.

  “Paladin. That’s a paladin. I’ve never seen one before outside of build books—no one builds paladin anymore.” She stared at the screen for a moment. Then she shook her head. “They’re bad at almost everything delvers need to do.”

  I agreed with her. On paper, a paladin build was a terrible choice. It didn’t do anything better than a fighter, mage, or healer, and with six slots in a typical group, it’d almost always be better to bring a focused delver—or at least a spellblade or something similar. Even a fighter with a single mage skill would be focused enough to fill their role while still being flexible enough to deal with unforeseen problems.

  But Rob wasn’t that.

  Throughout both of his early-round fights, though, there was never any doubt that he was going to win. He flowed from mace to spellcasting to self-healing like a dance, almost overwhelming in his chain mail and open-faced helmet. It wasn’t that he was fast; I was infinitely faster than him. It was that he didn’t waste a single motion—everything he did set himself up for another strike, another cast, or to repair damage.

  “Well, good luck with that,” Jessie said, pointing at the TV screen and shaking her head slowly. “Yasmin, let’s go. We’ve got a conversation scheduled with a few people. We’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “Got it. Good luck, Jessie.”

  I went back to watching Rob fight. There had to be a weakness in what he was doing—one that wasn’t ‘he’s only average at everything, not amazing at anything.’ That wasn’t going to be enough. But for all that Rob had no real strengths, his build did have one massive advantage over almost every other delver I’d ever seen.

  He had no weaknesses, either.

  “That’s seriously your plan?” Ellen asked me a half-hour later.

  “Yep.” I nodded.

  She stared at me. Then she shook her head slowly. “Alright, if you’re sure, then I guess I can’t stop you. But—“

  “No buts. I don’t think anything else will work, so if nothing else will work, then this is the only possible strategy.”

  “It’s just so stupid.” Ellen groaned and stood up, stretching.

  “Yep. But enough about me. You have a date with Deborah Callahan. Let’s work on that for a while instead of focusing on my match-up. She’s probably the favorite to win the whole tournament,” I said.

  Jeff shook his head. “Nope. Current betting is that Rob’s going to steamroll everyone. His paladin build is just too—“

  “Okay, got it. It’s too survivable, and it does too much damage,” I muttered.

  “She’s the likely other finalist, though. Ophelia’s in third,” he finished.

  “And who’s fourth?”

  No one said anything. I waited for a moment, then pulled out my phone. Then I stared at Jeff. “Really?”

  “Yep. They’re pretty sure I’ll make the semi-final round at this point. This whole thing’s rigged against strikers. Tanks with an extra fifty percent damage reduction are just too unkillable, so they’re pretty sure I’ll go until I run up against someone who outlasts me. They think Deborah’s going to do the same thing—and Rob’s in my half of the bracket. Ophelia’s basically a tank, too.” Jeff looked both embarrassed and ridiculously happy with himself.

  I nodded slowly. It was all rigged, but we could still find solutions. “Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So, how do we get Ellen past Deborah?”

  We worked on that problem for a long time—almost two hours—before we eventually had a solid plan. It was simple; Ellen just had to break the fight down into phases.

  Phase One was the initial contact. Ellen had to gain control over the fight. We’d watched Harold the Herald fail to do that; he’d gone for a quick power-up instead. If it had worked, he’d have won. But it hadn’t, and Ellen wasn’t as fast as Harold. She could hit hard, but that wouldn’t be enough against a tank like Deborah. So, instead, she’d use Darkness, Shadestutter, and whatever else she had to keep distance, disorient, and get control of the fight.

  Phase Two would be a test of endurance. Ellen was shockingly resilient for a mage; most of the time, they were nukers. That was especially true by B-Rank, but unless a mage took serious steps to make themselves sustainable, they were more likely to burn their resources out than anything else. Ellen was different, though, and if there was any mage not named Angelo Lawrence who could handle outlasting a tank, it was her. This was the weakest part of the plan, and it didn’t take into account whatever Deborah had done to one-shot Harold.

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  And Phase Three, if she got that far, was the kill phase.

  It was messy. So many things could go wrong for Ellen, and none of the three of us were confident it’d work. But it had one thing going for it, and that was Jeff. He could fill the role of ‘Deborah’ for Ellen, help her practice, and make sure she was as ready for the fight as she could be. And as for him, he wasn’t worried about the archer he’d be up against in the third round. It was, in many ways, a mismatch that favored him.

  That left me with nothing to do, so I headed up to my room, sat on the floor, and thought about Andrew, Sarah Cullman, and her reaction to our fight. Something had gone wrong there, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  And even more than that, I thought about what Jessie had said yesterday.

  Something was coming. Something bad. And when it got here, it was going to mess up all of Phoenix’s plans. Whatever was inside the Fallen Delvers portal, I hoped it’d be enough to help—no matter which delver got it.

  And I hoped I’d be able to solve the Rob puzzle and be the one to get it myself.

  Jessie had a lot on her mind as she and Yasmin rode over to the GC’s headquarters building.

  Most of her thoughts were on the lexicon. She’d left it and her laptop at the Desert Wind’s base, just in case someone at the Governing Council got snoopy while she was there. The language was…needlessly complicated. Jessie had tried figuring out a few words on her own, and they all kind of stuck in her mouth when she tried to sound them out, but she was pretty sure her translations of the written language were correct. She had her online friends to thank for a lot of that.

  If she could crack the code on that one line at the very beginning and figure out the rest of the ‘Crone’s’ message, she’d be in business, she just knew it. But first came talking to the portal people, and that was going to be a challenge.

  The rest of Jessie’s mind was on three subjects.

  First, the Fallen Delvers Tournament. Something weird was going on with the entire thing, and Jessie wanted to know what it was. What had happened to force Kade into such a wild Lithic arena? What was going on with Deborah? Were they related? If Deborah had done anything to manipulate Kade’s fight, though, the GC wasn’t saying it at the Outer Council level. Andrew could have acted on his own, but Jessie didn’t have any information on that front, either.

  Second, the guild. Jessie had plans for it. Jeff and Sophia were critical to those plans—Yasmin, a bit less so. The reality was that Sophia didn’t have the drive to keep pushing. She’d hit B-Rank at some point thanks to her build, but she didn’t want A or B-Rank portals, not like Kade and Ellen did. So, Jessie was in the process of looking for E and D-Rankers who’d be interested in working with the guild. Recruitment would be tricky, but she was sure she could find the right kinds of people, and just as sure that, if she offered, Sophia would prefer lower-ranked portals.

  And Jeff? He’d go along with it. He wouldn’t like it, but it’d be a way for him to help people, with less risk of losing those people, and it’d keep him engaged. He’d be okay in the long run, and he was working on coming to terms with his position as a delver caught at the C-Rank bottleneck.

  Ideally, they’d both come to the same conclusion before Jessie had to ask them to step down from the main team, but she was ready to do it if she had to.

  And third—and most important—was the battle in the east. It’d come to its conclusion today, and Angelo’s latest reports had been made available for every guild leader. The S-Rankers were losing. They were fighting hard, but Globe was a lost cause, and the outskirts of Mesa—beyond the Wall, not where she’d grown up—were in jeopardy.

  Jessie wasn’t worried about the city, of course. The 303 Wall would hold. It always held, every time there was a portal surge. Nothing had ever breached it; the closest had been the two times an open gate got rushed, and even then, the gates could be shut remotely—and quickly. Angelo’s report had explained his thinking, too. Giving up the field to the S-Rank monsters wasn’t ideal, but it was necessary. It was better to preserve the S-Rankers’ lives than to hold the desert.

  She understood. She even agreed with him. But even though the 303 Wall had held through a dozen portal surges in her lifetime, that didn’t mean she wanted to test it.

  There were too many things going on, and Jessie Gerald couldn’t affect too many of them. She took a breath in the passenger’s seat—Yasmin had insisted on the driver’s spot, even though Deimos was doing all the work—and let it out in a long, drawn-out sigh. Yasmin shot her a look, and Jessie shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “No problem,” the support delver lied. She’d been high-strung for days—just one more thing Jessie couldn’t affect.

  She stared at the GC’s headquarters as Deimos pulled up outside and headed for the front door. After all, she had a meeting, and if she was lucky, she’d be in control of at least one part of the chaos swirling around her by the time it was done.

  I was still watching the horizon three hours later, when Ellen came up. She wore her battle robes, and she looked exhausted. “Forty percent. Eight out of twenty attempts. That’s the best I could do. How’s it going up here?”

  “It’s fine,” I lied, turning away to focus on her. “Forty percent isn’t bad at all, especially for a new-ish strategy.”

  “It’s the same strategy I just used. Darkness, wait for openings, win the battle of attrition. Almost identical to what I did last round, but forty percent isn’t anywhere near enough to beat Deborah. She’s a whole different animal than Jeff.” Ellen’s face shifted from exhaustion to frustration, then resignation. “This one’s not going to work.”

  “No, it’s going to work,” I said. “We just need more time, and…”

  “And what?” Ellen asked. She paced the room for a few seconds, then flopped onto the bed.

  Instead of answering, I sat down next to her and put a hand on her back. “If it was Jeff you were up against next round, do you think you could beat him? And how would you do it?”

  Ellen snorted into the pillow. She said something.

  “What?”

  “I said I’d destroy him. He’s got a half-dozen glaring weaknesses that Deborah doesn’t have. She’s just…better than him in every way.”

  “She’s not. You’ve just got a lot of time fighting with Jeff and sparring against him, and only a few fights to watch what Deborah’s doing.” I started pushing on her spine. It popped slightly, and I adjusted to get deeper into the surrounding muscles. She groaned, and I kept working on her back as I talked. “Now, how would you beat Jeff?”

  “Okay, fine. I’d exploit his lack of range. He’s stuck with his sword and shield, and he doesn’t have a superhero throwing skill. Jeff’s hyper-specialized for being a tank for a group of delvers. He can put out damage, but the way he beat the last mage he fought was by getting in close, using his Taunt skill, and pummeling her when she got forced into attacking him directly. I’m fast enough to avoid him. I’m not fast enough to avoid her.”

  “You’re right. So, you can’t outrun Jeff. What do you do?”

  We played this game for half an hour. The whole time, I resisted the urge to look at the horizon. And then, when she was finished, I waited. After a minute, she cleared her throat. “I don’t have time to figure out how to beat Deborah like that, though, and the odds aren’t in my favor at all.”

  “You’re half-right,” I said. Then I stood up and walked to the window, looking east. “The odds aren’t in your favor right now, but…come look at this.”

  “At what?” Ellen said. She pushed herself off the bed and glared at me. Then her eyes widened. “Oh.”

  In the distance, maybe ten miles from the 303 Wall, the day and night strobed back and forth fast enough to give me a headache. Angelo Lawrence was in Mesa, and he was hard at work. Explosions rippled out from him—sixty or seventy-percent-powered explosions, in spite of Fusion’s power being behind them. He was holding back this close to Phoenix.

  I’d been awestruck watching the Light of Dawn and Depth of Midnight work outside of Carlsbad, but it took the sprawl of Phoenix to put his power into perspective. Angelo Lawrence was, if he wanted to be, a city-ender. No other delver I’d ever seen came close. Only a handful of monsters I’d heard about came close.

  And all around him, a shimmering wave of something slid across the desert and into the ruins, towering thousands of feet over Angelo’s atomic combo.

  “Yeah. You’re going to have some time—if we’re not too busy fighting to use it.”

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