Liora gasped and Adarin groaned. Oh great. Now he’s gone fully off the edge. Should I run? No—he can fly. Fuck.

  Liora had begun to shiver, eyes wide in alarm.

  “You… destroy the world?” she whispered. “How?”

  Rüdiger stared at her.

  Then—slowly—his serious expression twisted into a wide, crooked grin.

  “Oh, verdammt,” he snorted—then burst out laughing, the sound just a little too sharp, too long. “You should have seen your faces.” The mirth didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  He clapped his hands together, laughter bubbling up like steam. “Yes. Absolutely hilarious,” he said—but the grin lingered an instant too long, and the air never lost its tension.

  Liora glared at him—uncertain now. Her panic dulled into hesitation.

  Adarin just shook his head. “Okay, Rüdiger. I’ll give you that one. You got me.”

  He looked up at the man. “I assume you had some other purpose—besides screwing with us?”

  Rüdiger’s face shifted—laughter vanishing like a guillotine drop.

  “You,” he said quietly, locking eyes with Adarin. “You should know what happened to this world.”

  He stepped in much closer and squatted beside Adarin’s wooden form, arms settling around him, lips far too close for comfort. Adarin had to consciously will himself not to recoil.

  “I am like you, Adarin,” he whispered, voice trembling with intensity. “I was born in another world. Not this one. Not theirs.”

  Adarin’s avatar’s heart thundered.

  “You know what an economist is,” he pressed. “The people here? They think it’s a strange joke. They think I made it up. They don’t know the weight of it.”

  Is he telling the truth? Adarin wondered. Or is this a trick? A manipulation?

  Rüdiger grinned.

  “Ah,” he said softly. “I see you understand.”

  Adarin considered the situation. If he’s my enemy…

  He glanced at the level inked on Rüdiger’s arm. Level 27. Flight. Pistols. Power.

  If he wants me dead, I’m already dead. And I don’t have better options. He nodded the core of the wooden puppet he inhabited.

  “Very well,” he said. “What do you intend to do?”

  Rüdiger turned to glance at Liora, who stood at a cautious distance, watching them like someone might watch a madman with a live grenade.

  Rüdiger smiled at her. “Listen well, girl—no, I apologize. Liora. You’ve earned the right to be called Liora.”

  She wrinkled her nose in contempt.

  Rüdiger took a few steps back and began pacing the cracked street around them. “It’s a common fantasy where I come from,” he said, tone reflective. “You get transported to a medieval world. You become the hero. You spark a revolution.”

  He chuckled—but it was a bitter, dry sound. “I tried it. I introduced ideas. Innovations. Reforms.”

  He snorted. “Met with ‘learned men’ who called dogma knowledge. Who called ignorance wisdom. I was banished from three countries.”

  His hand stroked his goatee with increasing agitation. “Three.”

  Then his eyes gleamed. “But I saw an opportunity. A market gap. A product the world had never seen before—”

  He pointed at Adarin. “Dark magic. Necromancy. Undead labor is just labor, Adarin.”

  “You know,” he added, eyes narrowing, “we had something like the undead in my world.”

  Adarin murmured the word without thinking: “Robots.”

  “Ja! Ja, ja, ja!” Rüdiger jumped, spinning once in place.

  Liora backed away slowly. “That’s it! The system hates working machines. The fucking primitivists who designed it—”

  His voice dropped to a low growl. “The ideology of the god-machines who built this thing…”

  His hands trembled. His tricorn hat crumpled in his grasp. Suddenly, Rüdiger spun on his heel, finger snapping out like a bullet toward Liora. She yelped, stumbling back a step.

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  “You,” he growled. “You care. You want to help people.”

  His voice was sharp, cutting. “Imagine the jobs that break people—labor in the fields, mindless work in factories, dangerous toil in the mines. Imagine that being done by unthinking, unfeeling constructs.”

  He took a step forward, intensity radiating off him. “Imagine people freed—to pursue what is meaningful, instead of what is merely expedient.”

  Then—suddenly—the tension drained from him. He calmed. His voice turned soft. “That’s the world I want to build.”

  He looked her in the eyes. “That’s the world I want you to help me build, Liora.”

  He took a long breath. Exhaled. Then bowed his head. “Will you?”

  Liora swallowed, visibly struggling. Her voice came in fits and stumbles, anger and fear wrestling in her throat.

  “What… what about the gods?” she asked finally. “Aren’t the gods blessed by the System? If you go against the gods…”

  Rüdiger waved a hand. “Adarin. Tell her.”

  Adarin nodded grimly and turned to her.

  “Gods,” he said, “are just powers greater than humans. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  He spoke slowly, carefully.

  “They’re not the same as the philosophies their followers develop. Gods are machines. Their bodies are the stars and plants they transform into computronium, thinking matter. The System—it’s poison. A foreign god brought it here. It killed the god that lived in our sun.”

  He turned to Rüdiger. “Can you really bring the future back?”

  Rüdiger grinned and steepled his fingers theatrically.

  “I will give it my very best try,” he drawled—clearly quoting something.

  Adarin shrugged. “Good enough. I’ll support you.”

  He turned to Liora. She looked between the two of them—eyes filled with uncertainty. Slowly, unconsciously, she shifted closer to Adarin.

  “I… I’ll follow you,” she said at last, voice ragged. “But only on one condition.”

  She straightened. “That you allow the Holy Mother’s healers to minister to your people.”

  Rüdiger gave her a solemn nod. “Done. I accept your terms. And I’m glad,” he added with a grin, “to welcome you… as my apprentice.”

  They sealed the pact with handshakes.

  Moments later, they were soaring over the ruined streets of Northgard—Rüdiger’s flight magic and distraction spells bearing them aloft like leaves in an invisible current.

  Below, the city seethed with chaos.

  Adarin saw search parties of knights, clashes between Olivists and armored noble troops, and dwarven artillery firing in bursts across barricaded avenues.

  “How haven’t they found us?” he asked.

  Rüdiger smiled, then raised one arm and made a peculiar gesture. Midway through the motion, his limb simply vanished—from view, from presence.

  No—not from view. From attention.

  Adarin squinted. His mind slid off it, like oil off glass.

  “I convinced them,” Rüdiger said, mimicking the tone of an ancient master, “that you are not the druid they are looking for.”

  Adarin rolled his eyes, but said nothing.

  Soon they crested the wall and floated toward another camp—this one outside the city, fortified on a small hillock.

  Undead milled across the landscape, thousands strong.

  Necromancers worked tirelessly atop the rise, raising fresh troops from a vast grave. The dead clawed their way up as if called by gravity reversed.

  Barricades circled the hilltop. On one side, a creek formed a natural moat. On the other, the ground turned swampy—defensible but bleak.

  Ordinary soldiers held the lower slopes—disciplined, uniformed, surprisingly organized.

  The upper ridge bristled with strange knights clad in metallic, scale-like armor. Their gear shimmered in ways Adarin didn’t like.

  Rüdiger growled.

  “Marholians,” he muttered. “And the Dragon-Blooded.”

  He spat the names like curses.

  “One, vultures. The other, mercenaries. They serve the crusaders with blind zeal—and they seek to condemn the Order.”

  Adarin took in the layout.

  Trenchworks had been dug—but they were crude. A wave of undead could sweep them aside, heedless of casualties.

  At the center of the hill, beneath a cluster of trees, necromancers had erected a tent-city of strange geometry and funerary designs.

  Rüdiger brought them down near the edge.

  He dismissed the invisibility spell.

  They landed softly—right beside two familiar figures: Johan, looking a little taller than Adarin remembered, and the steely-haired necromancer woman who had handed them the distraction pebbles.

  “Mathilda, report,” Rüdiger said in a clipped, professional tone.

  Then he turned.

  “Liora. Johan. See if anyone here is wounded and heal them. Oh—and Johan, you have a fellow apprentice now. Liora, official meet Johan. Johan, Liora. It’s a pleasure and all of that. Ja, ja. Now, shoo-shoo.”

  He waved them off, then turned to Adarin. “Adarin. I’d like your assessment of the situation.”

  The steely-haired necromancer—Archmagister Mathilda—gave a brief rundown. But it was mostly a summary of what Adarin had already seen from the air.

  He listened politely. Then asked the one question that truly mattered. “How long do we have?”

  Rüdiger shrugged. “The city’s unraveling. No official war between the factions yet, but there are skirmishes. ‘Elements on leave,’ they say.” He made air quotes with his fingers. “The Crusade is falling apart,” Rüdiger said grimly. “Knights are deserting. Factions are circling each other like wolves. One wrong spark and the whole war turns civil.”

  Adarin nodded slowly, scanning the chaos below. “Then we don’t have much time. I want to try something.”

  He turned and walked toward the orchard on the southern slope of the hill. It was filled with twisted apple trees—green, under-ripe fruit dangling in the heat. Many of the trees looked barely alive. “I have an ability.”

  He dove into his protocol database. “There’s a recipe. Something special.”

  Rüdiger cocked an eyebrow. “Special, you say?”

  “Yes.” Adarin’s voice darkened.

  “A chemical agent for riot control. Butyric acid mixed with hydrogen sulfide.”

  Rüdiger wrinkled his nose. “My chemistry’s rusty, but… let me guess—it makes men collapse in their own bile?”

  Adarin chuckled. “It’ll rob them of the will to fight. Clear the field without casualties.”

  He looked around.

  “But we’ll need masks. And the wind has to be on our side.”

  Rüdiger nodded. “Don’t worry—we’ll handle the wind.”

  Adarin scuttled off toward the orchard, giddy as a child.

  Let’s see what these System skills can really do.

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