Suiteonem Prime, Suiteonem’s Sanctuary, Suiteonem III, 20136

  A demigod child hit the dirt, rolled and came up shooting.

  Her rifle was as quiet as a whisper with recoil as gentle as her mother’s last caress.

  The dart zipped out just shy of the speed of sound as it pierced deep into the armored hide of the massive quad-horned beast.

  Its body bulged a moment before it hit the ground and plowed a deep furrow toward one of the convoy wagons.

  “The bee can sting.”

  “Yes, but will she die after one?”

  “Silence and focus, you fools!”

  “Hey, just cause you’ve got tits doesn’t mean you can tell us what to do! We’re all demigods!”

  “Have any of you led in battle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Maybe… how do you define ‘battle’?”

  The demigod child tried to ignore her newfound half-sisters and half-brothers as she sighted another target.

  “Prove the first one wasn’t a fluke, mouse.”

  She was really getting tired of them calling her every small animal and monster they could think of.

  How many different insects and rodents had they called her in the last week of travel?

  The quadhorn herd rumbled toward their snaking convoy.

  The eidolons had decided that it was a perfect opportunity for the demigods.

  Thus, the guards and adventurers simple stood back and watched while making comments, some of which were disgusting.

  “Girlie shouldn’t be floating in that skirt.”

  “That’s what you’re looking at? I’m looking at those mommy-milkers! Ha!”

  “Watch it, Dono. They’re all Suiteonem’s kids.”

  “What? I’m just saying, is all.”

  “What part of ‘kid’ don’t you get, you dreg-fucker?”

  “Ain’t no kid with those udders. Besides, you know the rules. If she bleeds, she breeds. Therefore, milkers! Ha!”

  “If there’s grass on the field, we play! Right, you degenerates!”

  They all laughed.

  She almost turned her rifle around, but remembered what her mother and father— not father— her father wasn’t her true father.

  The news had been devastating.

  She had barely any time to process before the eidolon had ushered her through a dizzying trip through the spires across several worlds until she arrived to learn and be tested at the feet of her real father.

  The thought still stung.

  She wanted to reject it, but something in her fought the disloyal thinking.

  Her mortal parents were gone now.

  Never to be seen again.

  Never to be even contacted again under the pain of death for them and their entire region.

  The eidolon had made that clear.

  Her old life was to be buried.

  Her new life was to be worthy of her God. Her father.

  All she had left of her loving parents was her gear. Prepared in secret and hastily gifted to her before departure.

  Thinking of the tears in the quick farewell feast watered her eyes.

  “Little baby’s crying!”

  Laughter.

  Her half-siblings were terrible.

  She missed her actual siblings.

  Breathe.

  Aim.

  Squeeze.

  The charging quadhorn’s eye burst.

  “Watch it, weasel!”

  A hand yanked her off her feet by the back of her collar and tossed her back.

  One of her half-brothers stepped forward with a fist glowing gold as he punched the quadhorn, bringing it to a dead stop.

  “I killed it!” she snapped as she frantically checked her precious rifle.

  “Sure you did. And I just saved you from being splattered like the tiny, vicious, little weaseling you are.”

  He shrugged.

  He was one of the bigger boys.

  Not quite a man, judging by his baby-clean face with nary a whisker, but tall and broad enough that he didn’t look out of place amongst the hardened adventurers and guards.

  He leapt into the air without another word and she lost him in the great clouds of dust the stampeding quadhorns kicked up.

  Another hand yanked her off her feet.

  This one was almost as big as her and translucent gold.

  “You moron. Why are you shooting from there?”

  A half-sister.

  She of the short-skirted robes and womanly shape despite being also under the age of majority.

  A spellcaster with a wand and spellbook.

  “Shoot from there. And you better not hit me in the back, you lizard!”

  A demigod child hit the top of a caravan wagon to the laughter of everyone around her.

  Her true journey had just started and she’d give anything to be able to go home.

  Mother, Father— her real one, even if his seed hadn’t created her— her real siblings.

  Everyone down in town.

  Even crochety old Mr. Ebensworth, who yelled at them, but always forgot an extra pie or pastry on his window sill.

  She missed them all.

  The adventure wasn’t worth it.

  Not even the awe-inspiring sight of the World Tree sitting astride a mountain range with its branches and leaves vanishing into the black sky beyond the blue sky could soothe the scared child within.

  …

  Her biological father sat in a golden throne overlooking the arena sands.

  She stood in neat rows and columns with ninety-nine half-siblings she didn’t know she had.

  So many.

  She had thought they were only ten, but apparently many caravans had made the journey from other parts of the continent.

  She couldn’t look at the God.

  Couldn’t fix a mortal form in her thoughts.

  Anger simmered inside her, so close to boiling over.

  An elderly male eidolon spoke.

  “— and so, to arise anew you must destroy all ties to your weak, mortal pasts.”

  Gasps filled the air as some of her siblings caught on quicker than her and the others.

  “Place everything you have brought with you in the sands at your feet.”

  Hesitation.

  “Now!”

  Her body moved before her mind told it to.

  She dropped her bag of holding and other sundry items she had in her pockets and pouches.

  Her precious rifle remained slung on her back, poking over her shoulder like a flag pole.

  “Everything!”

  Haltingly, she brought it to her hands.

  The dark wood shined in the harsh sun.

  It felt warm in her hands, like her parents’ loving embrace.

  She traced the inscription on the stock, feeling the enchantments purchased at great cost.

  An eidolon appeared in front of her.

  A woman.

  Young-looking, but one could never tell with them.

  “Place it on the ground.”

  The eidolon towered over the demigod child.

  “No,” she whispered. “They gave it to me,” she pleaded.

  “They? Your parents? Child. You have no parents. You have nothing. There is only your God.”

  The eidolon arched her perfect brows and turned to look up at said God on his golden throne.

  Before the demigod child could react her precious rifle was ripped from her hands and dropped coldly on the pile.

  She lunged for it but found herself spinning through the air to land in a heap.

  She snarled, spitting sand as she shot back to her feet.

  Too slow.

  Her biological father.

  Her God.

  Suiteonem raised a massive hand.

  Golden light criss-crossed the air faster than any of the demigod children could even think to react.

  When the flash vanished and their vision returned everything they owned, except their clothes, was nothing but a pile of black ash in the sand.

  A demigod child roared and launched herself at a smirking eidolon, only to be slapped back into the sand.

  A laughing voice filled her head.

  Good. Let your anger flow. Let it become rage to birth hate. It is your blood right. But, you must seize it. I will not give it freely like these gifts the weak mortals gave you.

  “Let the Grand Brawl begin!” the elderly eidolon intoned.

  Suiteonem Prime, Sinaya’s Gift, Apolakan, 213916

  Ragay sat in a tall chair.

  The junior reef defender was a glorified babysitter on this day.

  His chair faced the sheltered lagoon where the kids and old people swam.

  The real reef defenders faced the open ocean or patrolled the depths for monstrous threats, catching and killing them before they could even think of breaching the massive reef that encircled the large island.

  There were over ten thousand islands that made up the archipelago of his nation.

  Landborn and oceanborn.

  All called the islands and the surrounding oceans of Sinaya’s Gift home.

  A sharp nail gently tickled the webbing between his toes causing him to jump.

  “Talima! Seriously?”

  The pretty girl laughed and gave him a sharp-toothed smile.

  She preened a bit, briefly flashing the colorful fins along her shapely cerulean arms and calves before folding them tight once more.

  He sighed.

  “I’m trying to keep watch.”

  He was definitely not keeping watch on her bare skin and scales.

  The thin wrap around her chest did nothing to conceal her pleasing assets. High and firm in defiance of gravity, just like her backside, which was also laid bare by the tiny covering and string.

  “Aye, aye, stalwart reefguard. I just wanted to greet you, but alas one must keep watch or the old and young might drown in the waters, which we all can breathe in. May Sinaya guide your eyes to all potential dangers. Oh, I almost forgot. Bonfire cookout starting at dusk. You’ll come?”

  “Not all landborn can breathe the waters of Sinaya and there are many drylanders.” He gestured at the people swimming and splashing about in the large lagoon.

  Sinaya’s Gift wasn’t just comprised of those born to the live in Sinaya’s embrace. There were many others from many other places all over the world and sometimes from other worlds. He eyed the massive tower stabbing out of the thick jungle in the center of the island. Or more specifically, the giant golden eyes that seemed to look right at him. An ever-present reminder of the God that had so graciously allowed Sinaya to continue her caring stewardship of the world’s oceans.

  “Same place as usual?”

  “Yup!”

  “I’ll try to attend. I have some duties to finish after my shift.”

  “Please, please, please come?”

  “I said, I’ll try.” He sighed.

  She pouted.

  “I guess I’ll have to take that.”

  She dived.

  He said a silent prayer to Sinaya, thanking the Ocean Mother for making the lagoon’s waters crystal clear as he took a reasonable amount of time to watch Talima and her backside swim away to scare some children playing in the gentle surf.

  Less gentle were the massive waves crashing behind him in the distance.

  He knew what was going on without having to turn around.

  His people enjoyed the curling reef break.

  Depending on one’s capability, they either surfed using a board made from the lightweight, waterproof wood of the simply named water tree or they just used their bodies.

  He remembered once when he had been a child the Karagatan had used her power to create solid boards out of the ocean water for everyone.

  Thousands of landborn and oceanborn.

  He thought that was perhaps the greatest display of her power he had ever seen.

  Not even her battles with monsters and raiders projected from the orbs had struck his imagination so well.

  There was something about the use of power to bring smiles to many faces that he preferred to death and destruction.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “Help! Reefguards! Help!”

  Keen eyes had caught the splashing before the shout.

  Sometimes it was hard to tell if a swimmer was in trouble, having fun or just terrible at it.

  He would never understand why one would swim in the deeper parts when they were so bad at it.

  They would never see him hiking through a desert.

  One had to be mindful of what their bodies were capable of.

  It was one of the tenets of his lessons.

  Fortunately, the struggling drylander wasn’t in his section of lagoon.

  The red flag on Vinti’s tall chair went up as his fellow reefguard dived to the rescue.

  Ragay took his eyes off the rescue in progress to add the rest of Vinti’s section to his scanning.

  Reefguards never took their eyes off their charges.

  …

  The sun traced its arc through the sky.

  The Gold Moon was visible as always.

  Something to do with the World Tree’s connection to it.

  Ragay hadn’t done well in his world history classes.

  It was a moon that looked gold.

  He knew that the God had a palace or fortress on it that was probably larger than entire cities and even nations.

  He also knew that the World Tree’s upper most branches and leaves somehow reached across an impossibly far distance to touch the Gold Moon.

  It was all very esoteric and magical.

  He had been lucky to score passing grades for those classes.

  Dusk came.

  He had to stay and watch as the people were called in to shore.

  Well, landborn mostly.

  Most of oceanborn went to their fortified homes in the fortified domes on the ocean floor or in some cases deep beneath the ocean floor and the islands where pockets of habitation were connected by crafted, cultivated tunnels.

  There were always a few stragglers resisting the last call to safety.

  A rocket shot out of the ocean, showering him with cold and the pleasing scent of brine as it passed over him to land on the reef.

  “Tandol! Cousin! How went today’s patrol?”

  “I was fortunate to be as bored and devoid of activity as you, no doubt, were.” Tandol gave him a toothy smile.

  Ragay worshipped his much older cousin.

  A true reef defender. With the class and everything!

  And if the whispers around the extended family were to be given credence then Tandol wasn’t far off from leveling up into an upgraded class.

  “May the Frozen Empress wander the desert!” he cursed. “That’s bad luck. I heard you’re close to an upgrade?”

  Tandol crossed his scale-covered arms and made the sign of Sinaya.

  “Careful, cousin. Words have power. You may draw the wrong eyes down on you.”

  “Superstitions?” He raised a brow. “I didn’t know you believed.”

  “In the Frozen Empress?”

  “She’s just a story. Like Potty Pot Pot Man, he’ll scoop you up and boil you in a pot till you turn red.” He repeated one of the old rhymes his carers sang to him whenever he was being a naughty child. There were so many. Enough that they could sing terrors to him for literal years before they had to repeat one. “Or the Anglerfish lurking in another dimension. Shine the lure, shine the lure. Don’t run, don’t run. Already too late when you see the shine. Pray to Sinaya, she’s your only hope.”

  “You haven’t been away from the island. Maybe one day. And you’ll see that some of those stories are more real than you think or want.”

  “Which ones?” He shuddered.

  “I’m not too sure about Potty Pot, but the empress… well, I can’t say, but I strongly suggest you never swim down to the south pole.”

  “It’s all ice anyways.”

  “Not if you go deep enough where it grows black.”

  …

  Ragay carried the serious look on Tandol’s face with him all the way to the bonfire cookout in Twin Lovers Lagoon.

  Young people partied around the many fire pits in the sand.

  Live music from all manner of instruments fought for dominance.

  The scent of food cooked over fire and hot coals, likewise, struggled against each other to be smelled.

  He found Talima amongst their friends and acquaintances.

  Naujon, big, brawny Naujon leaned close whispering something into her ear.

  Ragay felt heat pulse in his chest and past his ears.

  He walked faster.

  Talima’s eyes kept scanning the crowd even as Naujon continued to whisper until they locked on Ragay.

  She gave him that same dazzling smile as she skipped away from Naujon.

  “You made it!” She giggled as she threw a salute. “How went the watch?”

  “I retrieved five— no, seven balls from beyond the reef.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Kids,” he shrugged. “They thought it was funny. I’d get mad, but I’m not supposed to be a hypocrite.”

  She laughed.

  “We did that to Semerae all the time! She’d get so mad that her stripes would start flashing through every shade of red!”

  He thought of the reef defender.

  “Huh, is that why she’s so hard on me in training?”

  She tugged at his arm, pulling him lower so she could whisper.

  He flushed, hoping it wasn’t visible through his cobalt blue skin and scales.

  Her warm breath tickled.

  “Don’t tell anyone you heard this from me, but my sources said that your progenitor mother and progenitor father ordered that you get the worst treatment.”

  He thought a moment.

  His birth parents hated each other and had perhaps said less than a hundred words to him each in the once a year progress report he had to give them, separately, of course.

  “Awww! Don’t make that face. It might be nothing. I’m not sure about my sources, after all.”

  “I do not want their attentions. Either for good or ill.”

  “Well, you can’t do anything about it. They’re both rich and powerful.” Talima shrugged. “C’mon! Let’s play!” She hopped on his shoulders before he could do anything and proceeded to rein him around by his hair like a seahorse. “No! Wait!” She jerked him toward the nearest food fire pit. “You haven’t eaten yet. Food first! Then play!”

  He walked, trying not to pay attention to what he felt around his neck and on the back of his neck.

  Talima hadn’t changed out of her swim clothes.

  Or rather, a lack thereof.

  Suiteonem Prime, Frozen Eternities Fortress City, December, 2057

  Tremulac the Flenser and Goretrand the Bonesmasher reacted like statues.

  Armored boots flat on the cold floor.

  Hands at their sides instead of drawing weapons.

  Skills just on the tip of their thoughts, but held rather than loosed.

  It wasn’t their doing.

  In normal circumstances they would have reacted quicker than many despite their bulk.

  Both were from species that were at their baseline physically superior to the Earthian.

  Stronger, faster, tougher, so on and so forth.

  Like a power lifter or a football lineman with the reaction time of a boxer and the nimbleness and agility of a young gymnast.

  None of which mattered to Cal Cruces.

  He simply made them stop.

  Moving, thinking, anything, really.

  Nila swept in with their Alin’s multiweapon.

  Yellow hardlight in the form of a longsword swept across Tremulac’s head. Right at eye level. Skin the color of stained leather parted, then bone, then brain and out the other side in reverse.

  Crimson stained the yellow as it swept through its arc, scattering bits of pink and ivory in its wake.

  Goretrand had a helmet, which saved him for a second.

  Nila cut across his green throat.

  The hulking revenant fell, clutching the fountain of crimson as his tusked mouth worked in a wordless scream.

  Cal read his thoughts and prevented him from activating his Skill.

  Undo Death Blow! Undo Death Blow! Undo Death Blow!

  Fear, surprise and disappointment, with a swell of relief at the end.

  The lights vanished.

  From Alin’s blade as Nila deactivated it and Goretrand’s eyes as he died.

  Cal turned his dark faceplate to the last revenant in the chamber.

  The footman was low level compared to the other two.

  Not even Level 30.

  Don’t move. Unless you want freedom.

  These revenants would never see his true face. There was no need to maintain the fiction that their heads were barred to him.

  The footman froze like a mouse under the tiger’s blazing gaze.

  Words trembled like his limbs.

  “Please don’t kill me, whomever you are.”

  Doesn’t know that he’s already dead? Nila thought.

  The revenant class is a lot closer to being alive than other undead conditions.

  They moved quickly through corridors and chambers of ice and metal.

  The temperature was well below freezing.

  There was no need to make concessions to living beings this deep inside the Empress of the Frozen Eternities’ fortress city.

  Cal deactivated traps and destroyed countless undead guards ahead of their advance.

  He scanned the entire city for thoughts and found a scant handful. Revenants and enslaved people in warmer areas tasked with keeping things running while the empress sat on her throne like a sculpture.

  Ten Thousand Fingers?

  More like eight thousand and change.

  The vast majority of which lay in stasis inside their tombs of ice, waiting for the time of their awakening.

  Barely contained rage roiled in Cal’s thoughts, agitating everything with a semblance of thought in his range.

  Love? Nila thought. Calm. She sent him the warmth of her love.

  Yeah, sorry.

  Focus recaptured, he read as they ran.

  The revenants were people.

  They lived, lusted, hated, dreamed and hoped according to their personalities and experiences when they had drawn breath.

  At least, they would have had their wills not been the empress’.

  Less like puppets on strings or dogs on leashes, they were an extension of her.

  Until she was destroyed.

  He reached into the revenants and began learning about them while building walls between them and the empress.

  There was Falliana, Paladin of the Western Reach.

  A native of this world, she had served her nation and people with honor and diligence, rising past the Level 50 barrier and nearing Level 70 in the span of one mortal life, which was unheard of.

  Until Suiteonem’s manufactured apocalypse.

  The Empress of the Frozen Eternities swept northwest behind her uncountable horde of undead.

  The Western Reach lasted for decades until the inevitable end came.

  Before the great golden gates of the last city where the last of her people took shelter from a horde that darkened the entire horizon, Falliana hewed down elite revenants in the dozens before reaching the empress and taking a single immaculate finger with her broken blade.

  Death took Falliana then, but did not keep her.

  She awoke in service to a new master. She watched, participated and made more efficient the genocide of her people. The last remnants of which could be found in the odd skeleton, zombie or ghoul.

  Thus, Falliana, Revenant Paladin of the Western Reach, slept in her nightmares awaiting for the next time she’d be called upon to further stain her soul, if she had one left, she wasn’t certain and she didn’t know whether it was better that way.

  Cal decided she would go one of two ways when he asked the question.

  Oblivion or atonement.

  Then there was Tashly the Cyclopean Serpent, Ravager Lord.

  He wasn’t native to this world.

  He had been lured by the prospects of levels and loot.

  It was a war. Or so said a golden-eyed emissary claiming to represent a God.

  The ravager lord had lands, settlements, subjects, but he had grown bored without pillaging and ravaging.

  His class growth had stagnated for over a decade, barely scraped to Level 50.

  Peace had reined upon his world after a time of great upheaval.

  He’d have rather continued leveling, but he had lacked the strength to challenge the peace fuckers in control.

  A new world.

  A new war.

  New peoples to take.

  It had worked out great.

  Five levels in as many years.

  So much pillaging and ravaging.

  Until he was betrayed.

  Success was its own punishment.

  The empress had seen a use for him.

  Thus, he died and woke a slave in all but name and class.

  There was still pillaging and ravaging, but it offended his sensibilities that it was so controlled, manufactured.

  There were rules and what sort of war had rules?

  A false one, as far as he was concerned.

  Cal marked the ravager lord for another sort of use.

  He wouldn’t unleash Tashly on people, but there were other places and purposes where Tashly could earn atonement, whether he wanted to or not.

  There were others even worse.

  The kind that couldn’t be controlled without the empress.

  Pain and suffering incarnate.

  The evil they would bring couldn’t be rationalized with the good that they could be wielded for.

  These he disintegrated in their tombs, ripping them apart at the molecular level.

  The fortress seemed to shudder as the sleeping giant entombed in its frozen halls began to wake.

  Oops…

  Nila tensed.

  It’s ahead of schedule.

  Time ran out, so the quickest route between two points was a straight line.

  He grabbed his wife in a telekinetic grip and used the same ability to part the way to the empress.

  Whether enchanted for strength or not the ice and metal gave way in front of them like butter did for a hot knife.

  The empress’ throne room was less a room than a small city.

  The ceiling rose high enough to hold several structures and sculptures tall enough to fit in with any metropolitan downtown back on Earth.

  Undead began to swarm out of these structures in their hundreds of thousands.

  They still had approximately a kilometer to go to reach the empress seated on her throne atop a ziggurat writhing with her special mix of ice and death mana.

  Cal pulled the nuke out of a bag of holding and threw it at her.

  The blast wave came first, sweeping through the city-sized cavern and destroying structures and undead alike.

  Fire bloomed just behind it.

  Cal and Nila were safe in his telekinetic bubble as he blocked every exit with walls of invisible force.

  It’s nice that she despises the living so much that she keeps the enslaved far from here. Otherwise I’d feel bad about irradiating this place.

  You’re sure it won’t seep into the ice and get into the water?

  Magic ice. Broke, but not even melting. So, don’t have to worry about contamination. It’ll stay mostly in this throne cavern.

  The blast waves bounced back and forth.

  He gave them a helping hand so they only intensified rather than weakened.

  The grand opulence to the empress’ greatness was rapidly reduced to rubble.

  Jagged pillars of ice suddenly stabbed out of the choking clouds of debris, showering Cal and Nila in ice and undead.

  One, a giant bear-gorilla thing, slapped a hand large enough to palm his telekinetic bubble like a baseball around them and hung there.

  Its torso opened up, front and back.

  Dry and cold, lifeless.

  Revenants leapt out.

  Arsenalian attacked first. Clad in red armor outlined in white, he fancied himself amongst the best of the empress’ revenants when in truth he would always be in the second tier. He just lacked what it took to breach into the top tier.

  The revenant spellsword held an orb of crackling black lightning that disintegrated what it touched in one hand and a curved sword sheathed in rippling magic that simply deleted anything he struck out of existence.

  A useful one, so Cal just broke his limbs and crushed his enchanted armor around him into a cage before throwing him out of one of the exits for later.

  Gladis Sharkbane came a hair after.

  She was among those too dangerous to free.

  Whirlwind of the Great Blue Death.

  The Skill turned her into a literal whirlwind filled with the snapping teeth of the eponymous animal that she had hunted and carved her class out of in the ancient oceans of this world.

  He ripped her apart at the molecular level.

  Nothing remained.

  Not even the jagged teeth.

  Tulis, Death of Camalaryn, opened a portal above them to shower them in superior ghouls. The likes of which they hadn’t seen back on Earth. The slavering monsters were Level 40 threats.

  They vanished into red mist from a single thought.

  The revenant ghoul necromancer— which seemed redundant to Cal, but he didn’t make the rules— joined them a few seconds later as it took that long to pop the protections enchanted into his robes and carved into his pallid skin.

  Sslamako, revenant and radiant sunguard, was a first for Cal and Nila.

  The hero of her people was a bipedal lizardwoman, complete with a long, whipping tail.

  The resemble was superficial.

  She neither had cold blood, nor did she lay eggs.

  In fact, her blunt face reminded them more of a chimpanzee’s than the long snout of a monitor.

  She hissed revealing sharp teeth and a long, thin, forked tongue as she called burning rays of solar light down on them.

  Cal broke her and sent her out of the cavern, although he treated her better than Arsenalian because she was or had been a good person before falling to the empress.

  Nila viscerally recoiled from the sight of Donaldreliax.

  The beyond morbidly obese revenant was as girthy as ten men wrapped together like a bundle of sticks.

  Fat flopped in great folds, while his skin stretched to the limit with only the orange slime he excreted keeping it from tearing completely.

  Inside his folds and mounds of fat lurked his summoned creatures.

  They were clad in the skin of his victims and wielded weapons made from their bones.

  In life and in death his one true passion was raping boys and girls to death.

  The younger the better.

  But not babies for in his delusions he thought that a man needed to have standards.

  His swollen tongue lolled as he drooled orange slime down his corpulent chest and rotund belly, which writhed with the eager creatures waiting to emerge.

  You better not be thinking of using that one! Nila thought angrily. Kill it before they come out!

  Donaldreliax exploded into red mist.

  Fifty-seven revenants and countless undead erupted out of the pillars stabbing after Cal and Nila as he zipped them around the city-sized cavern in his invisible bubble.

  The fifty-seven were part of the hundred.

  Her greatest revenants tasked with her protection and fulfilling her greatest desires.

  Fifty-seven crippled and thrown out or destroyed, ending centuries, sometimes millenia of life after death.

  And then there were two in the city-sized cavern.

  No other revenants were coming.

  They couldn’t for Cal had blocked the empress’ link to them.

  There were a scattered handful out in the world doing her will, but he had blocked them from her as well.

  As for the rest of her undead minions?

  Too weak to matter or too far to make a difference.

  The Empress of the Frozen Eternities burst through the choking clouds seated upon her throne inside the ribcage of her undead dragon.

  Bellicosiaxtramondagron the Belligerent.

  As large as an old commercial passenger jet liner and he was the significantly lesser threat.

  Okay, Love. You’re shot.

  Nila pulled out a missile the size of her arm from her bag of holding, pressed a button on its side and threw it toward the empress and her undead dragon.

  Targeting in her HUD locked on and took care of the rest.

  Cal’s nuke had been one he had taken from one of the old American warheads that had escaped their sweep.

  Nila’s was new.

  Threnosh built with vengeance in their minds and hands.

  They couldn’t come for Suiteonem, so they had decided this was the next best thing.

  The nuke exploded in the undead dragon’s boney face.

  The powerful forcefield in the back half of the missile activated.

  All the devastation of the nuke contained in a bubble with its targets inside.

  The undead dragon was mighty magical creature even in death.

  The empress was a lich somewhere between Level 70 and 80.

  Could they take a nuke in an enclosed space?

  Cal and Nila waited to find out.