Seven snapped Sixty-eight out of it with his fingers.

  She didn’t like Fifteen.

  It wasn’t just because of the pretty face, though some of the soft roundness had been roughened into strong edges by the training and punching. It wasn’t because of the ridiculously large bouncy things on her chest. They were normal for a girl to have, not the size, nor firmness while still being bouncy—

  Sixty-eight growled.

  No.

  It wasn’t the physical qualities of her older, more mature half-sister that irked her.

  It was the smug superiority in the way Fifteen always looked down that perfect, button nose at her.

  “Her?” Fifteen raised a brow. “Why? And it better be rational or I’m walking away.”

  “Sixty-eight’s firmly in the top twenty, maybe top fifteen in being able to control it. Better than you.”

  “But, she’s so… small.”

  “She’ll grow. I want someone under her own control. I won’t work in a team with a raging grizzleback.”

  “Team?”

  Sixty-eight blinked.

  What was this about a team?

  Did she miss something in orientation?

  Her head had been a bit scrambled after the Grand Brawl, but she distinctly couldn’t remember anything mentioned about teams.

  Indeed, the main message she got from all the words the eidolon said was that she was on her own.

  “At least she’s somewhat quick thinking.” Fifteen snorted. “The messaging has been entirely one of the survival of the fittest variety. It’s not how I was taught back home, but a God knows better than mere mortals.”

  “My father— the man who raised me, when we learned that I was to be brought here. Let me start again.” Seven took a deep breath.

  Perhaps his control over his own pot wasn’t as steelclad as it appeared.

  “Knowing what we knew of my birth father, we crafted several projections on the potential possibilities that I faced. It’s all rather complex and extensive so I’ll keep it simple.”

  Fifteen smirked. “The little girl might need that. But, I don’t. I was studying spell formulae by three and casting by five without a class.”

  Seven rolled his eyes. “Congratulations,” he said flatly. “You read earlier than most and your divine blood activated earlier.”

  “Respect is required if we are to work together.”

  “Does that respect only flow to you, Fifteen?” Seven gave Sixty-eight a significant look.

  “Respect is earned, not given.”

  “Sixty-eight’s done more to earn mine than the rest of you. How would you say you’d have handled all of this if you were six years younger? No, no. Don’t give a flippant answer. Really think about it. You fancy yourself an erudite mage. Isn’t that what your type is all about? The thinking? So, think, imagine. Instead of spells, imagine yourself in her boots. Ten year old you. Right here. Right now. How would you have done on that first night?”

  Fifteen ground her teeth for a long moment.

  “Apologies,” she finally said as she locked eyes with Sixty-eight. “You’re a good shot with the rifle. I remember on the way to the tree. It was a powerful magic item. The elegance with the layering of the enchantments—”

  Sixty-eight slammed her fist on the table, rattling their trays, plates and glasses.

  Fifteen rolled her eyes.

  “I was just trying to find common ground for an accord. I had countless magic items of the highest quality. Gifts over the years from my mother and father and both their noble houses. But, my spellbook…” she scowled as her eyes began to glow with the red subsuming the gold. “I imagine that your rifle was as precious to you as my spellbook is— was— to me. My earliest memory is of my mother helping me inscribe my first spell. We created it together and now it’s ashes. They didn’t even let me keep those. My entire life gone in an instant and why? I know for a fact that it was of the highest quality. My mother is a Level 71 archmage. The greatest magic users on our world and many others beg for just one lesson at her feet.”

  “Sorry,” Sixty-eight grunted.

  “That’s as good as you’ll get, Fifteen. Most of her willpower is being spent to keep her firmly planted on her backside,” Seven said.

  How did he know?

  That made her even angrier.

  “Hurry up then. I’m not looking for a fight while I’m eating,” Fifteen said.

  “It’s simple. Our God isn’t going to waste our capabilities as mindless attack beasts. Sure, some of us are more suited to that role, but demigods across the entire pantheon serve in countless ways just below the Gods. From rulers of nations or entire worlds to generals of armies to head archivists and librarians of the most ancient archives and legendary libraries. There are roles for us that require more than a mindless capacity for unthinking violence. Therefore, I expect that our school will begin teaching and testing us in those specific aspects.”

  “Then why are they driving us to that violence?”

  “It is our God’s domain. The anger, the rage without hesitation. It is his source of power, which makes it our source of power. The true test is for our ability to control, to harness it.”

  Fifteen had good questions and Seven was convincing.

  Sixty-eight hated it.

  “Why teams?”

  Seven regarded her like an arrow claw crab in a boiling pot without a properly secured lid.

  “Simply put, they are a common feature in schools like this. At its core, working together will teach us how to lead and be led. However our teachers implement their system it will show us our likeliest futures.”

  Sixty-eight wanted to ask what she should do if she wasn’t interested any of that.

  Then she remembered that she couldn’t trust them.

  “Okay, I agree, provisionally. The three of us? Not good enough. I might decide to search for those that fit my purposes,” Fifteen said.

  “You could, but I doubt you’d find any takers that would give you the respect you want, at least to start and a bad start is very hard to recover from,” Seven said. “And you won’t find anyone with better control over themselves than me.”

  Fifteen glanced at Sixty-eight.

  “Who else?”

  “I have other prospects in mind. You two were at the top of my list. For obvious reasons, I shall keep their names to myself until after I approach them. So, can I count on you two?”

  “For now. I commit to nothing until I know the others,” Fifteen said.

  Sixty-eight shrugged.

  She didn’t know about a team or whatever with her half-siblings, but it would be nice to have some people that she didn’t have to be a hundred percent wary of all the time.

  At equal levels a lone fighter died to a squad.

  “Okay.”

  Escape was impossible on her own.

  That much had become clear to her in the two months.

  They could help, if only as distractions.

  Suiteonem Prime, Sonombera, Anitune, 213916

  Ragay sat on a tall chair.

  It was an exact copy of the chair he had sat on when performing his duty as a reefguard watching over people swimming in the lagoon back home.

  It felt like another life.

  The chair’s dark surface was as hard and unyielding as the wood of the old man trees on his home island, yet inside the hard skin the deep ocean water swirled with living currents.

  As cold and dark as the tides at midnight.

  The entire chair was supposed to be solid, hard water.

  Ragay thought cold thoughts for he sat over a roaring fire.

  All of the potentials in Miss Karagatan’s training chamber did as he did.

  The practice was simple.

  Maintain concentration, keep the chair from evaporating or boiling or fall ass first into hungry tongues of yellow, orange and red.

  He was approximately a quarter year into the training and he had yet to learn any of the other potentials’ names. Hadn’t said a single word. He wondered if any of them had spoken to each other.

  The thought they likely hadn’t made him sad.

  What didn’t make him sad was Talima’s last message.

  She had recorded it on the beach and she had less on that she typically wore during a surf or swim sessions.

  He had burned it into his mind to help keep the loneliness at bay.

  The only problem was that it also kept his concentration at bay.

  It wavered and like a falling tower of blocks when he picked the sticky one, his chair toppled into water.

  If only it put the fire out.

  Alas, it didn’t.

  Ragay rolled, but it was too late.

  Full coverage clothing might’ve helped.

  But a loin cloth left a large portion of both globes of his backside bare.

  His skin was tough and there was partial scale coverage, but the fire burned him nonetheless.

  “One minute break, Ragay. Then begin again.”

  Miss Karagatan was still a hero of the people, but he had decided weeks ago that he didn’t like her very much.

  …

  Weeks? Months?

  Time flowed both slowly and quickly.

  It felt interminable waiting for messages from home.

  It felt like a rip current dragging him out to the deep water watching the messages.

  Still no conversations with anyone, excepting the brief ones with Miss Karagatan. All of which directly related to his training.

  Training was going well.

  He could will constructs of simple, solid shapes without difficulty and hold them for a long time. From a knife to a sphere large enough to carry him and Miss Karagatan around Sonombera for an hour.

  The old chair over the fire test?

  He could hold it for hours.

  And perhaps the best sign was his continued presence on the Sonombera.

  Three of the other potentials had vanished.

  Part of him was jealous that they got to go home.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Back to the training.

  He could will static or semi-static objects into existence with ease.

  Moving objects with him as the fixed point in relation were more difficult.

  Ragay faced off against Miss Karagatan in the training chamber.

  Today was dryland combat training.

  Everything in a dryland environment was more difficult.

  It was obvious why.

  His hooked staff allowed him to wield Sinaya’s very realm.

  Of course it’d be easier when doing so immersed in said realm.

  “Attempt to kill me,” Miss Karagatan said in that flat tone. “Choose your method.”

  She looked at him with huge, black eyes, but he had realized weeks ago that she wasn’t seeing him.

  Ragay raised his staff.

  The swirling orb dangling from the curved hook, like an angler’s glowing lure, spat out three spears.

  Like the kind he used for spearfishing.

  It was easier to will the constructs into shape the firmer the mental image in his head.

  Miss Karagatan stood with her empty hands at her side.

  He had yet to see her wielding her famous staff. Had yet to see a staff at all.

  He fired the spears just as he had done it a thousand times with a speargun.

  The ocean water constructs flew exactly as fast as a real one.

  Miss Karagatan didn’t even need to create her own construct to defend herself. She simply snatched all three out of the air with one hand.

  They held their shape for a moment before splashing to the floor.

  “Picturing the spear is necessary for a beginner. True mastery is forever unattainable if you cannot go beyond your memories and let your imagination reign.”

  At least he didn’t need to make a construct of a speargun to fire the spears anymore.

  It had taken weeks of hard work to get past that block.

  And did she give him any praise?

  Nope.

  “Again. More. Faster.”

  …

  Talima smiled. Wide and happy, crinkling the skin and scales around her eyes.

  That’s how he knew it was genuine and unfettered.

  A true relief.

  “I guess I’ll miss you at Winter’s Dusk. Maybe— no, you’re right. She’s testing you at every moment. Asking about a break is probably a failure condition knowing how elite units and organizations work. I asked around. Pulled on sources. Okay, most of what I found out was from Aunty Bilaya. Did you know— wait! No! I can’t say. That part was off the record. But she did give me some stuff she said I could share that might help. She wanted me make it clear that she only told me so that I could tell you instead of her having to do it. These message time limits are so unfair.” She pouted, blowing air out her cheeks. “Here’s what she told me about her hypothetical experiences training for a hypothetical elite military unit thing… hypothetically.”

  He soaked in the information with wide eyes, stopping and rewinding several times to take notes.

  …

  Miss Karagatan appeared in his room through the small pool in one corner.

  He didn’t know that was possible.

  “Ragay. Your first ocean excursion will be tomorrow. One hour after rising. Eat well and void your bowels. We will travel far and spend half the day in treacherous depths where breaks are inadvisable.”

  He blinked and she vanished into the brine without him registering her departure.

  That had been her in the skin and scales.

  Not a water construct of her.

  His gut clenched.

  Voiding them wasn’t going to be a problem as the stress rose with his inner warmth.

  There was no way he was ready to face what she thought were treacherous waters.

  He agonized for hours if he should record a goodbye message to Talima and his house.

  In the end he decided against it.

  It was crueler to leave them waiting another month for the subsequent message to learn that he had survived.

  Suiteonem Prime, Frozen Eternities, December, 2057

  Cal watched.

  From as far away as the clouds to as close as an arm’s length.

  He trusted a few revenants.

  He didn’t trust the undead.

  He didn’t trust luck.

  Good or bad was a matter of perspective.

  A young warrior woman on top of the ice wall was lucky that the frozen rock ball shifted its flight path just enough to catch the lip just right that it bounced right over her.

  The old fishermen in the processing shack a few dozen meters behind the wall were unlucky that the frozen rock crashed through their flimsy wooden roof to crush them.

  Or rather they would’ve been had Cal not pushed the rock to the side, forcing it to embed itself into the frozen mud.

  His undead hordes attacked the five fishing villages scattered across the rocky southern shore over hundreds of kilometers.

  Each belonged to a different mountainhold, which were analogous to the city-states from Earth’s history.

  The people living in the fishing villages weren’t the greatest examples of their kind, but the hairy, blue-skinned humanoids were on average still built like a strength athlete with the height of a basketball player.

  The warrior woman shouted the alarm.

  Horn blowers took up the cry.

  They had magic eyes and telescopes trained on the vast ice sheets for just this moment, but they were severely under-leveled compared to the revenants.

  It had been easy for his revenants.

  His undead hordes?

  His revenants?

  The thought tasted bitter in his mouth, but he choked it down.

  For his son.

  For himself and his selfish desire for revenge.

  He embraced the hypocrisy.

  “The calamity rises once more! Fear me, flesh of the living! The Eternal Empress of the Frozen Eternities arises once more! Tremble and die to rise in service to her glories!” Arsenalian disintegrated large holes into the enchanted ice wall with crackling black lightning. The revenant spellsword waved a long, curved sword. This, like his armor, was completely mundane. High quality steel, thicker and heavier thanks to his greater strength, but devoid of magic.

  Cal had destroyed the revenant’s previous enchanted gear to teach humility and wanted to give the blue-skinned people a better chance to fight back.

  The revenant led the charge ahead of a horde of basic skeletons and zombies.

  Ranged revenants fired spells and artillery-like arrows and bullets from much farther back with the higher quality undead.

  They had strict orders to avoid targeting people directly, but Cal made sure that misfortune didn’t claim any lives.

  His plans gave him a lot of leeway to avoid casualties in this early stage for a variety of reasons.

  That would change once he moved on the Empire of Man much, much farther to the north.

  But, one thing at a time.

  The blue-skinned people were brave and hardy.

  It came with the requirements of living in the harsh frozen land and mountains.

  They rallied, ready for a grim final stand, allowing the youngest and fastest among them to run into the mountain tunnels to raise the alarm.

  He spoke into the communication gem he added to his helmet.

  “Arsenalian. Capture them all alive.”

  “Yes, my eternal empress!” The revenant saluted to the south, maintaining the deception.

  “Sgt. Rethguals, fortify the village. You’ll be getting curious monsters from the ice and the mountains within two hours at the latest.”

  “Your orders shall be carried out,” the Level 41 revenant elite sergeant said briskly.

  He could control hundreds of simple undead like a necromancer and he was a military man to his core.

  “You should all get Quests for that. It’s harder to keep them alive than just killing them, after all.”

  “Yes, my eternal empress. I have received a Quest. I shall not fail. Their warm flesh shall not be sliced by my masterful blade,” Arsenalian said.

  The hordes had cleared many encounter challenges and spawn zones on their trek across the ice sheets, but there were many more untouched.

  It was unavoidable with a land area over a two-hundred thousand square kilometers.

  The taking of captives was within the empress’ standard operating procedures.

  The avoidance of deaths and casualties was not.

  When the eidolons came with the demigods and asked questions he’d frame it as a need to replace losses taken from the constant battles in and around the rime pits and the underworld.

  …

  Sslamako rode the rays of the sun for the first time in thousands of years free in her barely beating heart and finally shining soul.

  It had been so long that she felt happiness as if for the first time. It was the first tickle or hiding and seeking game with her loving parents. It was the first frozen cream dessert. The aptly named happy fruit flavor. She remembered.

  Seven Calamities in the Empress of the Frozen Eternities name— may it lay burning through eternity beneath the harsh justice of the Sun God’s gaze. Seven times she betrayed her very soul.

  She had come to this world so long ago to bring the sun’s light of justice and she had failed.

  For that failure she welcomed her death beneath the dreadful, frozen gaze that ground her down like the mighty glaciers ground even the stone beneath their implacable advance.

  Instead, fate, her god, everything in existence, punished her for that failure.

  Not this time.

  This time she was free! And let the sun’s light burn away all injustice on this world and the next!

  The radiant sunguard and revenant traced her pointed teeth with her forked tongue.

  She was happy.

  This time she would level her true class, not the one forced on her.

  She saw it with the hard wisdom of the millennia.

  The Cruces spoke with truth and conviction.

  She had detected no lies.

  They were going to free this world from the true evil that birthed the calamities for his entertainment.

  Her tail lashed.

  Her claws tightened around the sunlight.

  She bore no weapons, wore no armor.

  Clad only in simple cloth more threadbare than a penitent monk’s.

  It fit her like a glove.

  For she had seven Calamities worth of penance to perform.

  Sslamako crashed through the fishing village’s thick ice wall.

  The sunlight blazed.

  She blazed.

  “Healers through the breach. There will be injuries. The rest of you encircle the village and send the undead into the mountains to begin cleansing it of monsters. We shall not deviate from our orders.”

  She commanded the other revenants.

  The hairy, blue-skinned humans dwarfed her, but she was over double the level of their highest warriors.

  It was fists, feet and tail work.

  “Touch as light as a ray of sunlight,” she murmured.

  Redemption began with a very light punch to the jaw of a roaring giant.

  Five minutes is all it took for the Level 64 Radiant Sunguard and Level 9 Revenant to subdue and capture the entire fishing village.

  Her heart swelled to know that they lay bruised and bleeding, but not a single broken bone among them.

  She had even taken care to avoid damaging their village… aside from the hole in their wall.

  …

  Falliana and Bellicosiaxtramondagron tore the mountainside open.

  The latter’s breath was so cold that it froze everything it touched in an instant. It seeped into the earth, through the gaps in the stone. The sudden expansion of locked moisture turning into ice cracked tons and many meters deep.

  The former opened a bag of holding and upended its contents.

  Falliana, Revenant Paladin of the Western Reach enjoyed using relics from the empress’ armory for the first time.

  Needle-shaped bones aligned themselves as they fell, putting on a burst of speed the moment before impact. They pierced through the cracked mountainside, the magic making them fly through the solid ice as if it was water.

  She listened to the beating of her heart, counting.

  So much slower than one in a living chest.

  Ten.

  The bones expanded from the size of a human finger to a giant’s.

  They crumbled to dust a split-second later.

  The mountainside bulged and collapsed, revealing a gaping look into a monster’s lair.

  Falliana pulled a short javelin from the quiver on her back.

  “Ready yourself, monster.”

  “Puny human, you shall learn the price of your impudence when I swallow you whole.”

  She eyed the undead dragon’s bony, desiccated neck from where she sat behind the desiccated muscles pumping his enormous wings.

  “A fate most dreadful,” she said flatly.

  His gullet opened to the air a quarter of the way down his long neck of mostly exposed skeleton.

  A high-pitched screech shattered the relative quiet of the mountain air.

  Waves of distorted air pulsed past them as the undead dragon twisted and rolled like a bird a fraction of his size.

  “Weak, little worm in his hovel. Come and face the power of a true dragon.”

  Lord Cross had told them that the lindwurm was young. Only two centuries old.

  She would have hesitated hunting the lindwurm down under other circumstances, preferring to leave the task to those weaker than her for the experience and levels. However, time was of the essence.

  It helped soothed her conscience that this lindwurm possessed a malign intelligence and soul, delighting in sowing terror and suffering on the blue-skinned humans living in the area.

  Blue-skinned humans?

  There had been no such thing when she had lived far to the north in the Western Reach of the land that was now called the Empire of Man. She didn’t recall the empire being present the last time she was awoken for a Calamity. She had skipped the last two according to the other revenants she had interrogated and the meticulous historical records the empress commanded them to keep

  She would never sleep again.

  The thought swelled her breast with hope and joy.

  It had been so long that they felt strange in her, like an ill-fitting suit of armor unlike the one she wore that felt like a second skin.

  A second shriek just missed them.

  “What are you waiting for, monster? Dive! So that we may end this.”

  The undead dragon chortled.

  His voice seemed much to small and weak for his immense size and strength.

  She sat alone on a back of exposed bones and strips of desiccated flesh only sometimes covered by ancient plates and scales large enough to fit over a hundred just like her.

  “Child! You reveal your youthful inexperience and naivety. One does not go into a dragon’s lair. Not even for that wingless worm screeching pitifully down below. He may be a weakling, barely a dragon, but barely a dragon is still one to be wary off in his domain.” A beat. “Feel free to jump. I shan’t oppose the idea.”

  “A full grown dragon scared of a worm?”

  “Your puny words mark me not. Inferior being that you are, I shall grant you a boon of wisdom. He fears me, but his contempt for you transcends that.”

  She regarded the black, gaping hole.

  “Weak little worm, come! Face me! Falliana, Dawn’s Light, Paladin of the Western Reach! Face your doom!” She grit her teeth.

  Revenant Paladin of the Western Reach.

  The spires revealed the truth through her words no matter how much she wished it otherwise.