Holy shit – I can’t believe it worked!

  Seymour scrambled to his left, narrowly dodging the blob of toxic green energy which gushed from the tip of Melvina’s wand. The impact site hissed, spewing putrid smoke and melting inward as if the tree he’d been hiding against had been nothing more than a candlewax replica and the witchy woman had just turned a blowtorch on it.

  It wasn’t lost on him that he’d very nearly just bit it, and that if she could have laid eyes on him just then this Melvina woman would no doubt have attempted to do him in again.

  But for the moment she couldn’t, because Seymour now held a Silver Badge of Full Transparency in his right hand. He’d always been a quick-thinker—a trait sharpened at the poker table where winning demanded he process information in a hurry and act decisively—but he’d really outdone himself this time.

  In the split-second before Melvina had attempted to murder him with her toxic wand, Seymour’s Sigil of Greed slurped his Silver Ring of Diplomacy—the one Eusebio had given him during his initial tour of the shop—straight off his finger so that Infringement could convert the silver it was made from into the dual-purpose Silver Badge of Full Transparency – the schematic for which he’d captured only a few hours earlier while performing his neverending inventory of the depot’s third floor.

  He had been planning to reproduce the badge later that evening when he got off work and had all night alone in his new digs to practice and experiment with Infringement, using silver borrowed from the supplies kept in Ridley’s workbench. He’d actually crammed his Object Memory almost completely full of schematics with simple material requirements for that same purpose. And for the purpose of ultimately converting the resulting items into gold coins using Cash Out.

  Talk about a stroke of luck. If I hadn’t been such a greedy bastard, she’d have straight up melted my ass into goo just now.

  “Magnus!” Melvina shouted and glared at the spot where Seymour had been standing only a fraction of a second earlier. Her voice then lowered to a growl as she admitted, “this Riftborn might just be a pain in my ass. I shall require your expertise to track him, after all.”

  Suddenly the air crackled with electricity and then a silver and blue slit sliced its way vertically through the air beside her, like the pupil of a cat’s eye – or a dragon’s. Seymour shuffled back a step despite himself, half-expecting Dragon Dan to materialize.

  It’s not a dragon opening its eye. His gut told him: it’s some kind of freaky portal.

  And then a man aged at least sixty pulled the slit open from the inside and stepped out, white-haired and impressively bearded like a proper wizard, though much bigger. He wore a robe that matched Melvina’s but he stood something like seven feet tall and despite his evidently advanced age he filled out his clothes with the physique of a lumberjack who had taken an overdose of human growth hormone.

  “Find him, now!” Melvina demanded. “And I shall lend my aid to the Brothers Stuczi, who are currently engaged with Miss Amberwine.”

  “As you wish,” the buff ass wizard agreed, eyes gleaming with evil intent.

  Seymour didn’t stick around. This goddamn Giga-Chad combat-mage asshole—Magnus, the witch had fittingly called him—would have towered over even Gaspar Stuczi, who up until about two seconds ago had been just about the scariest dude Seymour had ever run across. But Magnus here was so oversized that he hardly felt human. He felt like a legit giant or something; a different species than Seymour. And then he drew a similarly oversized wand that looked like a cop’s nightstick and had just started to etch spooky-ass purple-flaming runes in the air when Seymour made a run for it.

  He fled into the jungle without looking back. He sprinted off, fully intending to never look back.

  Right up until the girl who had just saved his life cried out in shock and he suddenly realized he had completely lost all sense of direction already, and that her pained screams had become his only landmark in the jungle where darkness would inevitably fall.

  Penny collapsed in a heap, convulsing on her side, muscles constricting involuntarily to such an extent that she effectively became paralyzed. She couldn’t so much as blink or turn her face away from the dirt. She caught a quick glimpse of the Brothers Stuczi’s feet as they warily backed away, and it immediately occurred to her that they weren’t responsible for her current indisposition. They obviously couldn’t have possessed such terrible magic as this. And only a moment later her deduction was confirmed in the very worst way when Melvina rolled her over onto her back and then knelt down, filling Penny’s entire field of vision.

  “Penelope,” she tutted, sneering angrily. “What are we going to do with you, child?”

  “Did you kill the girl?” Gaspar Stuczi wondered dumbly.

  Melvina ignored him and continued taunting her former apprentice, instead:

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “Your Riftborn friend will not escape us, either. Whatever minor invisibility item you gave the fool will only protect him for so long. Magnus is here now, and I assure you that my husband will find him.”

  Invisibility item? Penny hadn’t had time to give Seymour Little anything useful, let alone an item that could have hidden him from the Directors. He must have brought some sort of obfuscation device of his own.

  The question immediately became: had she underestimated the Riftborn?

  If Mr. Little had been capable of evading Melvina all on his own—a fact which somehow appeared to be true, since the Director was now torturing Penny instead of cackling over Seymour’s corpse—then surely he could have escaped the Brothers Stuczi, too. Her heart sank as she suddenly came to accept that she had made a terrible mistake by venturing into the jungle. She had come out of hiding and taken an unnecessary risk and now it would cost her everything.

  “I see regret in your eyes, dear one.” Melvina’s smirk was so near now that little flecks of spittle touched Penny’s cheeks with each word. “But you did come surprisingly close to toppling Magnus and I, didn’t you? You worked and you planned and your schemes proved mostly successful – right up until today. I must admit to being impressed by your capacity for treachery, girl. You’ve hidden it well for all these years. And this was meant to be your victory stroke, was it not? Did you intend to prove that Ridley sent the Riftborn out here with a sabotaged Treant Tap? And you expected to connect that to my husband and I?”

  A modicum of control was returning to Penny’s facial muscles and vocal cords. She used it to haltingly utter: “I… neither… confirm… nor… deny… your… accusations.”

  Melvina tossed her head back and cackled. “Foolish, foolish girl.”

  “Fair… enough.”

  “Gaspar,” the Director turned to address her minions, “collect Penelope and carry her back to the carriage. I assume you two parked it nearby?”

  “Yah, it is very close,” Janez answered for them both. “You want us to take her back to guildhall?”

  “Correct, and see that she isn’t harmed. Magnus and I still wish to interrogate her.”

  “Understood.” Janez turned to his brother. “You heard Lady Malveau, Gaspar. Pick Miss Amberwine up and we be on our way.”

  The brutish brother lifted Penny with ease and threw her limp body over his shoulder. Still functionally paralyzed by tremors throughout all of her major muscle groups, Penny could only watch Melvina’s back as she hurried toward the tree where Seymour Little had been left to hide. Regretful tears stung in her eyes.

  If they catch him, all my work will truly have been for naught.

  Soon she was deposited roughly within a black-lacquered, brass-trimmed mana-steam carriage, propped up on the rear-facing bench seat. Janez slid in to sit on the bench opposite her, and then Gaspar gingerly shut the door as if he were a simple valet and not a thuggish henchman.

  “My brother will drive carriage,” Janez explained, “and I will be keep you company.”

  She glared back at him but said nothing.

  The carriage lurched into motion, trampling through the undergrowth. She knew the journey would require the better part of three hours to complete, but would her paralysis recede before then? She doubted it, and in fact she suspected she would be debilitatingly immobilized until Melvina personally corrected her condition – perhaps even longer.

  Perhaps forever, she worried.

  Janez Stuczi seemed to be reading her mind:

  “She do that same thing to me and my brother when we first come here, too. Freeze us, I mean. It is horrible, awful feeling, no?” He paused before adding, “so helpless.”

  For a time they rode in silence, until the carriage began to gradually slow and finally came to a full stop and its engine shut off. The sounds of the jungle seemed louder then, without the noise of the mana-powered carriage overriding them.

  Janez frowned. “Gaspar? Why are we stopping?”

  The door of the carriage clicked and swung open and Gaspar stood there, his broad shoulders slightly slumped. He couldn’t look his brother in the eye. And while Penny still couldn’t turn her head, relief flooded over her as she caught a glimpse of Seymour Little on the extreme edge of her peripheral vision.

  He stood off to the side and behind Gaspar, and he was holding the sharp tip of a plain-looking shortsword to the big oaf’s throat. He had come back for her. Furthermore, he had placed himself in great danger in order to come to her rescue. She had underestimated this Riftborn in multiple ways, and to a degree which she now found embarrassing.

  Your prejudice has endangered everything.

  “Get out,” Seymour ordered Janez, pressing his weapon against Gaspar’s flesh until it puckered inward. “And don’t try shit, or I swear, man. I’ll cut your brother’s head clean off.”

  “Little,” Janez began, “you don’t want to do this.”

  “You’re right about that – I don’t. Not at all. I really wanted to run off and hide. But then I heard Penny here scream and I had to come back.”

  “How heroic of you.” Janez scooted to the open door but didn’t climb out.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as ‘heroic’. I also want some answers, and I get the feeling that nobody else in this weird ass world can give ‘em to me the way you two can.”

  “What you want to know?”

  “Just get out of the goddamn carriage first, Janez!”

  Seymour pressed his sword against Gaspar’s throat harder still and the big lunk dropped to his knees. “Brother, do what he say. Please – Little is crazy little man.”

  Eyes narrowed with resentment, Janez Stuczi held his hands up at his sides and moved carefully out through the open door. “Be cool, Seymour. Get a grip, ya? It nothing personal here, we’s just doing our job.”

  “Yeah, I get it. But what I don’t get is: what the hell are you two even doing here?”

  “You mean on Heschia?” The gangster smirked. “Let me guess: you don’t remember nothing about how we got here, do you? That make sense.”

  For a moment, surprise caused Seymour Little to retract his sword from Gaspar’s throat. But then his expression shifted, and he pressed it against the flesh there with renewed intent.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We all came here together – you, me, Gaspar, and….”

  “And who, Janez? Spit it out.”

  His smirk widened. “Why, the vampire, of course.”

  Penny just listened then and her mind reeled as she listened to Janez’s story about the night these three Riftborn had come to Heschia. If what he said was true, then it hinted at the existence of a persistent portal between their world and hers.