Legions of looming, blue-skinned giants swarmed down the dilapidated streets. Every single one of them wore plate armor that glinted in the sunlight with the dreaded Dream of conquest. Massive spears bristled opposite their shields aimed directly toward any who opposes their ranks. One familiar Azurite cradled the hilt of his greatsword. His eyes met Eli’s across the distance without a shred of uncertainty or mercy.

  Eli straightened his spine under the giant’s scrutiny. A fight seemed all but inevitable. He turned toward his friends.

  Roman stood beside him, encased in pyrovoltaic armor. Steria and Daisy waited by their side, ready to fight with moonlight and Eli’s copied teleportation. Probably. He looked at Scott and Celi’s highrise home, where they waited to ambush the Azurites with shadow and fire.

  One more fight. Battle. War. Profound Erudition buzzed the words of his conversation with Roman in his ears. When would it end?

  An Azurite hoisted a colossal horn carved from the ivory of a massive spawn and blew into the mouthpiece. Dust stirred in a vibrating wave, bathing them in grit and the promise of bloodshed. Unnatural fear stabbed his heart, choked it with its barbed thorns of cowardice.

  Deep, resonant voices burst from each of the soldiers, except for the leader with the massive greatsword. The one who had cut Eli with nothing but a Dream. He emerged from his entrenched ranks of soldiers like a turtle shedding its shell.

  “Submit or die. We only want the teleporter.”

  Eli moved forward, then jerked to a halt when three arms wrapped around him. His friends held him back.

  “Haven’t you been insane enough for a while?” Steria asked scathingly. He glanced at her determined, pale face.

  “If you rush out there alone, I’m telling your parents. Or Maeve.” Roman shook his head and wedged himself in front of Eli. Pyrovoltaic plate armor shone in the light, splitting into fiery hues of electric radiance.

  “Analytical Mind says that horn was carved from a dragon’s tooth,” Daisy said in a blank, matter-of-fact tone. “You might be somewhat impressive, but you should probably avoid fighting people that make instruments out of dragon parts. Just saying.”

  “Alright, I get it. I won’t comply with the spawn trying to kill us.”

  “Do they really have something made from a dragon?” Steria asked, retreating a step back, her cleansing moonlight pulsing silver. “What do we do?”

  “Are we running or fighting? These guys… these giants are different from the greants, Eli.” Roman lowered himself in a stance to either swing his sword, or barrel into a sprint.

  “I kn—“ Eli replied when the lead Azurite interrupted him.

  “It no longer matters. You have chosen death. May the victors grow from the spoils of the slain.” He unsheathed his sword in an efficient flourish and bowed. Dreams of doom washed out from the Azurite leader and settled over them with the grim certainty of the gallows. Run, fight, surrender.

  All roads led to their demise now that they pitted themselves against the Azurites.

  Ivory flashed with a twist of essence as the dragontooth horn roared once again. Every single one of the soldiers dipped their spears right at them.

  They nearly broke and lost right then and there.

  “Can you make a portal? Otherwise, I’ll try to build a plane. Or s-something. Okay? Eli?” Roman asked, his voice wavered with the same fear Eli heard about a month ago on the night of his birthday.

  Multiple realizations struck his mind like a bell clapper on fragile glass. Each and every one broke and shattered parts of him. Stomped on convictions he had held since the beginning. His drive for power, growth, and the destruction of how many lives had not been worth it. Only three fights had mattered.

  Protecting his sisters and family from Sandra, the battle with the greants for Farbrook, and this one.

  Thirty-six Azurites bore down on them in a charge that would have any old world cavalry trading in their horses. Quakes shook the streets.

  They stiffened in the face of that charge, ready to flee. Not Eli. He dug deep into the sub-reality of Stellar Body and inflated his mass until his feet sank into the asphalt. Essence churned inside of him, split between Profound Erudition and his celestial-reinforced body. It was not enough.

  “You guys should help Roman prepare. Once I have enough power, we can either truly fight or flee.”

  “What? Are you insane? You can’t fight them alone!”

  “Someone has to. All I need is to kill one or two.” His only option was to fight as he always had. Stellar Body attuned to the earth beneath his feet, the atmosphere, and the planet itself. Embodied it in flesh, bone, and muscle.

  Eli charged into the first row of Azurites. Erudition tallied the six spears, biting the profound crust of his skin, yet none of it pierced the mantle of his skeleton. He surged forward in the brittle snap of wooden shafts. Crashed against their shield wall. Their line caught him, braced against the foundation of the System’s powers.

  As if they could stop an earthquake or an avalanche.

  Columns of fire and toxic shadow rained from the sky, washing over the Azurites, attempting to encircle him. Bullets of silver chipped off armor. Only the first row of six Azurites had been touched and were barely harmed. So far.

  He rammed his fist into the interlocked shield wall. Wedged his hand into the gap where they jabbed at him with short replacement spears or hacked with axes. Enchantments flashed each time he encountered a piece of their equipment.

  I’m bleeding… everywhere. It hurts.

  Eli grabbed the shields on either side of him, wrestled them and their Azurite wielders aside. Pulled and yanked where he felt the enchantment’s essence.

  “Stop him! Kill the teleporter!”

  “We are trying!”

  He disabled Profound Erudition’s efforts to parse their orders and commands. Used the power to wring every iota of force out of his weary muscles. Ignore the sundered woodland of his skin, the carved chasms spilling rivers of lifeblood. No need to numb the pain. Metal folded with a squeal, crumbling their enchantments.

  Eli quaked forward, consuming the essence inside the shield. Flattened his hand and chopped at the rightmost Azurite’s knee. Its companions stabbed, swung, and pounded on him with their weapons.

  He bled. Healed. Bludgeoned the joint until more enchantments failed. The Azurite toppled amidst nonsensical shouts and roars. Gray eyes peered into his own wide and frightened like a cornered rabbit.

  “I am sorry.” Eli closed those eyes forever with a sharp jab on its jaw. Once, twice, thrice until its will sundered like a mollusk, revealing the aspected pearls of its powers. War, the hunt, and melodies offered themselves to him on a tide of essence.

  He crushed each aspect, one by one, and slurped the essence down. Power fizzled inside the constellations strung in the strands of his DNA, washed over the horizons of his mind, and the aura of his will that contained each of his powers.

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  Space and gravity warped around in a hard, sudden pulse, driving all the common Azurite soldiers away from him in a heap. Blades of Dream hung above him, then descended on an executioner’s sweep.

  Eli spun out of the way of the leader’s fantastical sword. Same as the other attacks from the Azurites strong enough to resist him. Essence trickled to the most grievous of his wounds, extending the amount of time his body had.

  “Mone co! We hvae ot go!”

  Swords, spears, and axes scythed for his body to harvest all that made him powerful. He bounded back in a dancing retreat. Leaning, crouching, and sliding. Giving himself time to heal and refuel his powers.

  An edge of tempered thought, hopes, and emotion clapped the back of his head. Grazed along the side, clipping the top of his ear. Eli narrowed his eyes at the commanding giant where his aspects bellowed in victory and the hunting exchange of sword and word. Precision lurked behind the Azurite’s eyes.

  To him, Eli was likely nothing more than a gallivanting threat or an upgrade to the spawn’s campaign. But to Eli? This was a feast of growth, essence, and plundered aspects. Saliva leaked out of the torn, bleeding hole in the side and corner of his mouth.

  They closed. Drawn together in this waltz of death and greed. Walls of flame spiraled in a cordon around them. Harsh screams gurgled in his ears.

  Kill. Profound Erudition streamlined his singular goal at the expense of any irrelevant details. Why concern himself with the lengths of material lodged inside of him? The cries of his companions separated by flame, shadow, and squabbles.

  Eli warped under the leader’s sword held in a high guard. Gravity and mass folded in a frame centered on his fist. A mesh of Dreamed lines criss-crossed in a secondary armor over the giant’s breastplate. Boiling blood exploded from Eli’s sliced flesh in a steaming cloud of mist.

  “Ztub. Ee gxechane nmaes bfroee delu to daeth, telerpotre.”

  He shook his head to clear his head of the spawn’s buzzing. Language was unnecessary right now. Why—

  “Understand me now, barbarian? Tell me your name so I may offer it to Mother in honor.” The Azurite glared him down while he recoiled, Profound Erudition throbbed from the psychic clash of a superior Dream power. Awareness returned in a roar of traded blows, screams, horn calls, and the voices of his friends.

  “Eli Newton,” He said, drooling bloody spit from the ravaged hole in his cheek. Crimson life oozed from hundreds of wounds head to toe. Countless varieties of pain shifted, grinding inside of him like tectonic plates under the earth.

  “I am Huntleader Wulfrend. Your aura is unlike any prey I have met yet. Explain?”

  Wulfrend circled around to the right, backlit by what he recognized to be Celi’s walls of flame. On the other side of their burning enclosure, his friends fought. Separated.

  Alone.

  “The System no longer confines me,” Eli admitted, somehow finding it easier to be honest to a stranger. A spawn he planned to reduce to a—

  “You are free? Truly?” Wulfrend narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “No longer trapped by the dens of death and rebirth?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me how to accomplish this feat.” He shifted his stance, sword held in a bar covering most avenues to his body.

  “I don’t know what to tell you. It just happened. My friend and I pushed too far and the System broke.”

  “And now you are your own person?”

  “Nope, I am not and have never been alone.” Eli smiled, a stinging, bittersweet smile. Even now, he hungered to rip the spawn apart for his essence and aspects. Did the spawn feel the same way about them?

  Wulfrend eyed him for a single lingering moment, then spoke, “Retreat!”

  Hostilities immediately ceased, ensured by hovering swords of Dream aimed at his friend’s vital organs. The thirty-one remaining Azurites closed in around them. Surrounding him. Several were hurt, some horribly so, but most were fine.

  “Run Eli! Get out of there!” Scott yelled from his and Celi’s part of the battlefield. His friend teetered as if he was a hard breeze away from collapsing. All the scales of his midnight black armor had dulled to an almost luminescent glow.

  “You will release me, and then us, from the Accursed Daughter’s chains. Do this and I will ensure there is peace between your hunt and mine.”

  “I don’t know if I can.” Eli wobbled unsteadily. Bones shifted in his left leg back to their proper place. Freed arrows and shrapnel fell to clatter on the ground.

  “Try.”

  “Okay, fine, I will need my friend’s help. Yeah?”

  “Very well. While you do that and prepare whatever you need, we will build fortifications. Tend to your wounds, share stories of your glory, and then we will talk tonight. If you cannot help us, we will resume our fight in the morning. Run and I will kill and mount every one of your funny human heads on my dwelling’s wall. Yes?”

  Eli opened his mouth to speak. Closed it. Nodded. The remaining Azurites parted out of his way to let him pass. Foreign words rumbled behind him in a melodic flow from one giant to the next.

  “What’s happening? Are you okay?” Roman limped toward him once he was far enough away from the Azurite’s growing camp.

  “They’ll give us a break for at least tonight. I don’t know if we can do what they want. They want us to do what we did on accident before coming here, Roman. Should we do it?”

  “What?” Roman frowned. Viscera and oil matted down his hair, dripped down his face to stain his clothes. A lopsided contraption waited in the middle of the street beside a lumpy wall.

  “Before you ask, we have to tell you guys something. Let’s take a moment to get situated, check over our injuries, and then we’ll talk? Okay?”

  “This better be good, Eli, we almost died covering you.” Scott and Celi stumbled over to the sidewalk, where they plopped down.

  “Do you need me to heal you? You’re covered in blood.” Steria held her hands out, preventing him from walking around her. He blinked in surprise. Looked down. His once pristine clothes copied over from his sanctum were now little more than tattered, brackish rags. His shirt hung off him, resembling a fishnet toga instead of his usual style. One of his legs was completely bare except for his shoe.

  “Oh uh sure. Thank you.” Eli’s smile tugged at the crusty scab of his lacerated cheek.

  “So, why didn’t you kill the bastard while you had him? With him dead, you would have had more than enough juice to use your other powers, right?” Daisy teleported beside him with an Azurite spear propped on her shoulder.

  “They want the same thing I do and I think they should get it.” He shrugged with a painful ripple of itchy, healing wounds.

  “Don’t move.” Steria swatted him with a silver hand. Lunar serenity streamed into him, easing his painful burdens, dissolving the filth plaguing him into motes of moonlight.

  “Let me guess, you want to be the greatest apocalypse survivor of all time? Dimensional traveler? Never would have guessed aboms would care about that,” Daisy snorted.

  “I wanted to be free just like they do.” He shrugged. Steria and Daisy shared a look before piercing him with a withering stare. Both women crossed their arms. “What?”

  “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. You can literally teleport anywhere you want. Aren’t you already ‘free’?” Daisy shook her head.

  “Yeah, what she said. Didn’t you and Roman come here from the west coast? Just like that?” Steria snapped her fingers.

  “Okay, that’s fair, but I mean free in a different way.” Eli blushed under the combined weight of both women’s obviously immense disappointment in him.

  “Do you mean free in a ‘I want no responsibilities or consequences’ sort of way? From your family?”

  “Free from the law?”

  “That’s a good point! Wanting to be free would make sense if you were secretly a criminal. Are you?”

  “No, I’m not!”

  “Then, what? What do you want to be free from so desperately that you can make peace with a literal abomination over it?” Daisy tapped her cracked glasses with a flex of a power readjusting the bent frame, leaving the lenses in the same condition.

  “I don’t know! I never really thought about it before.” Eli shrugged and tried to pace, getting another slap from Steria for moving. “Ever since this began, it felt like freedom was one of my biggest motivations. I fought to get stronger, but also so that I could be fine, you know? Do what I wanted, finally.”

  “So you have or had controlling parents?” Steria scrunched her nose.

  “Kind of? They’re better now, even if they still pry a lot. It was pretty bad, but my sisters have it worse.” Seeing their expressions and the devastated street of Anhedonia Prime, he realized how much of an idiot he was being. “Okay, never mind, I get that I’m being na?ve and a little rude. I’m sorry. You’re right.”

  “Still, it must be nice to still have both parents to badger you.”

  “Oh, you have a parent alive, Steria?” Daisy asked, as if it was an accomplishment.

  “Grandparents.”

  “Shit. Are they a part of Land and Sky’s crew or…?”

  “No idea where they are, but Oraclur Eclipse says they’re alive. Can’t get the precognitive power to give me any more detail without seeing them, though. You?”

  “I’m the last one left.” Daisy walked away from them to where Roman sat by the lounging couple.

  “Damn, I really am so incredibly sorry—“

  “Shut up about it, Eli, it’s fine. Complain about wanting to be free from your living family again though, and I will blast you. Deal?”

  He nodded.

  “Stop flirting with Moongirl and the Collector and get over here and tell us what the hell is going on!” Scott shouted.

  “What? I’m not flirting. Are you?” Eli asked Steria, who laughed far too loud at that question. They headed back to the others.

  “Definitely not with you. Pretty sure Daisy might be, though. Sometimes. She never hung around new people this long without exploiting them.”

  “With the debt power you both mentioned before we fought the Azurites?” Eli asked, turning back around to peek at the square box of metal and ice in the middle of the road. Six Azurite soldiers stood sentry around it.

  “That too, but well, I have known her since middle school and she’s always had a habit of using some people in any way she can. Not in a mean or manipulating way. It’s more like a ‘give me something and return the favor’ type of thing, though?”

  “Not sure I really follow, but I’ll keep an eye out, I guess.”

  “To be honest, you definitely should watch out for any of your secrets or valuables. There were rumors going around that she was a huge kleptomaniac. Supposedly, she returned whatever she took. Still. She was a good friend for a while, at least.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ask her about it sometime, yeah? Instead of talking behind her back, let’s hurry up so you can tell us why the murderous giants decided to spare us.” Steria dragged him over to the sidewalk huddle.

  “Out with it,” Scott demanded without sitting up.

  Eli took a deep breath and explained how he and Roman had fucked up their System.