Arcadian Security Alert

  >Corruption at Lower Aft Power Core node fully purged.

  >Total remaining corruption: 96%

  >Warning! Several incompletely purged nodes remain. Immediate attention is required to prevent node relapse.

  >Closest affected node: Aft Starboard Ventral Battery

  >Processing…

  >Action successful. Path routed to nearest incompletely purged node.

  Arcadian Administrative Alert

  >Teleportation gate at Lower Aft Power Core has been activated. Further power consumption noted at the local node.

  >Processing…

  >Warning! Arcadian power supply critical. Rainbow drive inoperable, main power core offline.

  >Action successful.

  >Warning!: General alert in effect. Only qualified users are allowed access to the Arcadian’s teleportation network.

  >Warning!: Astral corruption has rendered multiple nodes inactive in the Arcadian teleportation network. >Current nodes active: 12

  Arcadian Administrative Alert

  >Warning! Node: Lower Aft Power Core has been targeted by an unknown source of magic.

  >General alert is in effect. The acting administrator may override automatic defenses.

  >Bypassing automatic node defense only recommended in case of emergency!

  >Allow attempted access of node: Lower Aft Power Core?

  Yes / No

  There was a little bit more to the control scheme in this room, involving an option to release the lockdown and change how power was distributed to other nodes through the core. That the corruption had dropped by an entire 3% from clearing one rift was promising, but also the last thing on Daniel’s mind. “Is it working?”

  …

  “It’s working!?” Lograve exclaimed incredulously as Tak stood in front of him, surrounded by magical items that had begun to float in the air on their own.

  …

  It’s… working. All of Chris’ expectations were now thoroughly smashed, though he was comforted by the fact that no one could have seen this coming. Betting on disruption as he was he was more prepared than his enemies to make use of what this would do. Everything was falling into place, save for one wrinkle. The agent of chaos looked at who was in the room and hoped he wouldn’t have to intervene. If he did, things could get messy.

  …

  “It’s working,” Hunter affirmed, putting a hand on the surface of the sphere. “Tak is coming through, but what is this? I could see something here in the Astral, dozens of lines leading here.”

  “This place has some kind of astral network,” Daniel replied, keeping the corrupted avianoid in sight at all times and trusting the elite to Tlara and Shuni. Wherever they were. “You can teleport through it, and it controls some of the things on here. Those lines have to be the connections to other rifts.” He checked his phone again to see if the Octyrrum was telling him anything, but he’d only gotten that one message through the Arcadian about what was going on. “Not sure how, but it looks like Tak was able to target this place as a teleportation destination? They have Lograve with them, but I have no idea how they’d be able to aim something called Scatter Teleport. Maybe he advanced on Earth and got something new.”

  “Will this be dangerous?”

  “It’s a little late to ask that,” Daniel laughed. In another part of the large room, one of the security doors began to buckle. “We’ll deal with whatever comes through. The Spoke did say they could come back. Most of the work must have been on their end to set this up. Could it not anticipate you using your bond as a tether?”

  “The colors are shifting.” Hunter backed up and looked at Daniel, some discomfort plain on his face. “Take the body back. I don’t want to be like this when he gets here.”

  “You think I want Lograve to see me all furry?” Daniel was starting to get why Murdon had seemed so hesitant about the color scheme of the golden armor he’d once made for him. If he had a choice he’d just activate Beast Mode again to get rid of the effect altogether, but the cooldown had yet to reset.

  “Please.” Hunter had to ask, because they couldn’t force the other person to take any effect. Neither would they ever try.

  “I’m going to try to make your armor pink for this,” Daniel groused, but accepted the hybrid form back. The change came over him, and honestly? There wasn’t much of a difference anymore. Losing and gaining various powers did make an impact, but the split in personality that had been so pronounced when he’d first gained this ability was so minimal it might as well have not existed. Even the rage felt distant, something he didn’t have to actively control despite the presence of an enemy. It also wasn’t giving him the bonus for facing a higher leveled enemy, suggesting they had reached a ceasefire.

  He’d struggled for what seemed like ages to bring Hunter back from the dead. There was something he owed to his friends for the risks they took for him, but the predatory drive, the need to emulate Hunter to overcome any obstacle, was gone. As Daniel took back the hybrid form and felt the change only affect his body and powers, but not soul or mind, he felt whole.

  Hunter, back in quadripedal form and now awkwardly wearing a cloak, shook his head at Daniel. “Still too weird.”

  “If that’s what you think then take it back! There’s still twenty-ish minutes left before I can-“ The shifting colors in front of them moved dramatically, forming a space just wider and taller than the section of wall they were standing on. The primary colors of blue, white, and gold each took up a third of the border surrounding pure blackness. Before their eyes, it began to display every color, imaginable or not, before settling into a static picture. A window into another world. No, a door.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  Whatever material the rift was composed of began to recess along the edges of the image until the border became physical, and what they saw began to move. Tak, standing alone in the middle of the frame, took one glance at Daniel before rushing forward. He hopped across the slight gap between the wall and the portal, settling on the floating platform that dipped slightly from his weight.

  The two looked at each other for a moment, exchanging a wordless conversation through telepathy Daniel wasn’t privy to, before Tak put a hand on Hunter’s forehead and bowed his own with a smile on his beak. “Thank you,” he said to Daniel. Before he could reply, someone else spoke up, somehow managing to express a pause from shock while being completely invisible.

  “…of course you would. The ritual is still stable with Tak on the other side. I think I can maintain this indefinitely so long as I’m here, but that will change once my free source of unlimited mana cuts me off.”

  “Lograve?” Daniel asked, hearing the voice as if it was right in front of him but not seeing him. All that there was was a wall, a wooden desk pushed clumsily against it and what looked to be a filing cabinet. It was an office, but not one Daniel would associate with his home. “Why are you invisible?”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know?” the Arcanist replied, making a brave attempt at sarcasm that failed when his voice broke with emotion. “We have some other people here that should come through. Is it safe on your side?”

  Daniel took a look around and saw the elite still motionless and the corrupted avianoid most of the way through the door. Still, he replied, “No. There’s a lot to explain, but there are two monsters here we could use some help with. If there’s no time limit on this we should take care of that first. Can you come through?”

  “Not without breaking the hourglass. Gadriel, Evalyn, sounds like you’re up.” From around the side walked the Hero and the Bard. Evalyn looked… maybe a little plainer than normal, like she hadn’t been getting her Beauty Sleep, but that was far and above the state of Gadriel. There were changes, from the unruly short beard to slightly red eyes, but there was still determination in him. Both looked at Daniel with some surprise and he sighed internally.

  They’re going to think this is permanent, great. “Gadriel, that one there,” Daniel said, pointing to the door as the corrupted avianoid realized the truce was being broken. “That’s the biggest threat. Tlara has another monster in what I think is a staring contest she could use some help with too, up there.”

  Both quickly stepped onto the platform, which was close to its weight limit before the ability on it broke. Gadriel wordlessly began to prepare a charge before Evalyn put a hand across his chest. There was an odd rhythm to her movements that took Daniel a moment to place. Investiture of Song? Why would she have that up?

  “Stand back.” Evalyn rushed to the front, seeing only that her target was beginning to make for a weakened Sigron she vaguely recognized, before at last she was able to release the ability that had been sustained on her for months. As her true Focus rematerialized, the Bard activated another ability. Songbolt.

  …

  The overarching system of magic that governed the world was not one inseparable thing. The System Hub in the center of the world was like the main broadcasting tower, sending a signal out that the Spokes received, which relayed its various rules. The Spoke that had belonged to Region: Thormundz was an exception to the rules as previously stated, for it could ignore those instructions to some small degree. It was also special in other ways it was only beginning to comprehend.

  Incarnates were a known factor in the Octyrrum. Sentient Spokes. Entity: Daniel Brant - Octyrrum had been mistaken for one by God: Hammer, who had been unable to distinguish the Mortal from the divine artifice bound to him. That didn’t mean it wasn’t an Incarnate. Upon reflection, something the Spoke hadn’t ever done before, it would have been difficult for it not to eventually become self-aware given everything that had happened to it.

  The final straw had been the failsafe put in by a master of Transmutation at the behest of its initial creator. A censor on certain information that it could not share, should a God somehow manage to interrogate it as Entity: Daniel Brant - Octyrrum had done. That should have been impossible given how it was hidden within a Soul, but Bonds could always break seemingly inviolate rules. Swept up in the first conversation it had ever had, the Spoke had accidentally slipped and almost revealed information it shouldn’t have. It had made a mistake, and that was interesting.

  Another potentially interesting potential mistake was how it had interacted with the four mortals sent to another world through Function: Astral Relay. In its defense, it had been influenced by the will of the Soul containing it at the time, forcing it to send those mortals away to the location it had bound on the other world. That it had sustained some of the active Powers of those Mortals hadn’t been an intended result of this Function. It had only been meant to be used once, and certainly not in Region: Aughal. But, it had happened.

  Now it had to arbitrate an interaction. This Bard had used Ability: Investiture of Song for far longer than was ever intended. Mana Pools could grow large enough at higher Levels to fuel it for an entire day, but the System Reset that occurred at dawn would force them to refresh it just as Ability: Beast Mode had been reset after its first use. This Bard hadn’t been in an area under the auspice of System: Octyrrum, however.

  Months later, the Bard had returned and now activated Ability: Songbolt, which scaled based on the amount of Mana the last Ability: Bardic Music used. The result of the initial calculation of the Ability’s effects was so out of the norm for someone at Level: 2 that it had forced the Spoke to recheck itself through an automatic process meant to catch errors and exploits. Not even its structuring was infallible, and it had a Function that specifically made the rules the System operated on slightly less reliable.

  Normally, it wouldn’t care about the result and follow the set guidelines to limit the output of any singular Power to the pre-specified Mana Threshold of the Bard’s Level. No, the Spoke couldn’t have been considered indifferent at all, as that would imply it could be biased. It wouldn’t have been a personal slight either to enforce this rule. Quite simply, the world could fall apart from the ongoing System Conflict if too many Fundamental Laws were violated, and Balance was one carefully kept content by System: Octyrrum.

  Yet. The Incarnate recognized this Bard. It could easily access almost everything there was to know about her, but it went further than that. It had had a significant influence on her, shaping some of her Awakenings whenever a Power Evolution was triggered according to Function: Glitch. It compared the Bard to the targeted Creature, a thing that had forsaken its Class. It considered if it should be having these thoughts, or thoughts at all.

  It… decided to fudge the numbers. Just a bit. One time couldn’t hurt. It wasn’t breaking a rule, only bending it. It wasn’t like this would ever happen again.

  …

  A blinding sphere of light larger than the central part of the astral rift filled the air in front of Evalyn before streaking toward the corrupted avianoid. It had disintegrated part of the wall she was standing on by contact and obliterated anything on the ground it touched, slightly diminishing as it did so. The corrupted avianoid’s mind, working faster than anyone else’s in the room, beheld this annihilating orb and came to a quick conclusion. There was no way she could dodge that.

  Prompted by the few mandates controlling her, self-preservation leading the pack here, she desperately wove the mana around her to break apart what she was carrying and reform it into the largest shield the patterns would allow. At the same time, she motivated the magic within her, reinforcing as best she could her endurance at the cost of her other attributes. It had taken her a while to realize in the perpetual half-dream, half-nightmare, but they were far less static than one assumed.

  The shield was completed just in time, and she threw it in front of herself. The colorful sphere began to bend around it, eating into the wall and floor where it touched, sapping more of its insane destructive power away. That helped, but there was no way her creation could survive as long as she needed it to. There was also nowhere to dodge, as she was crouched in the one small patch of shade within what might as well have been a Supernova.

  Still, she struggled. She had to survive. She had to spread what was inside of her. And under no circumstance could she ever-

  The shield shattered, what remaining energy in the attack assaulting the avianoid with more force than anything had before.