That was good enough. The Sentinel was already charging, and he didn’t have enough time to plan deeply. He just had to trigger the card.

  Jumping away from a swing, he sent a pulse of Aes through his core, socketing and activating the card. At first, it didn’t feel like anything was happening. As he processed what the card was doing, the Sentinel charged, but Lessa blasted it in the chest, delaying it long enough for Jace to get out of the way.

  The card’s usefulness built up over time. It was active and waiting.

  First, he used [Questforger]’s predictive ability to plan his attack. He wouldn’t have long, so he had to chain as much together as he could. At the same time, since he didn’t have a quest to generate, the excess impact flowed into the card, stored and waiting.

  He imagined where the Sentinel was going to emerge, then zipped over to the other side, right behind it with a [Hyperdash]. Again, the excess distance converted to impact, stored in [Impact Channel].

  Next was [Purify]. Since he didn’t reset all the cooldowns, he registered more impact getting stored away. Another [Hyperdash] sent him to the other side of the Sentinel as soon as it emerged, confusing it even more. It was a bit of a waste, but he was just building charge. And the charge was building faster than it ever had before.

  [Radiance] and [Veins of the Universe] both triggered next, but they only awarded him minimal impact. Then he snatched up a handful of rocks.

  “Let’s see if that’s enough…” he muttered. With [Questforger], he knew exactly where the Sentinel would appear again. “Lessa, get down!”

  As soon as the Sentinel appeared again, he triggered [Impact Channel] a second time. Energy blasted through his body, stored now in his core, and he funnelled it all into [Wanderer’s Banishment].

  Everything went quiet, then a white flash erupted in front of him. The Sentinel’s entire upper body disappeared, leaving only its legs standing in the puddle. But the pulse of rocks and matter flung through hyperspace continued on in front of him.

  They scoured the landscape, ripping up a mountain, carving a slice in the Earth like some massive monster just slashed it with a sword, and whisked away a slice of the storm before leaving a streak of fire in the atmosphere.

  “Woah…” Jace breathed. With [Veins of the Universe] still active, the new Aes flooding into his body nearly took him off his feet. He gasped and clutched at the burning sensation in his chest.

  A sheet of light sprang up ahead of him, reading:

  [Quest complete: Kill Sentinel. Reward: five thousand (5000) units of Aes.]

  [DESTINED quest progress: Kill four (4) Sentinels: 3/4]

  The golden sheet hovered in the air, and he focussed on nothing but the letters, just trying to stay conscious through the enormous influx of energy. It didn’t work.

  When he woke up, he was laying on his back on the muddy ground, Lessa leaning over him. He blinked himself awake, then slowly sat up, rubbing his head. Spears of pain soured through his mind, giving him the worst headache he’d ever had. Some of it was probably due to dehydration. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually drank normal water (although at his level of advancement, he didn’t really need to drink as often, it would eventually catch up with him), but that probably wasn’t the main culprit.

  He opened his main status, then checked his advancement progress. From the last two Sentinels and the immense power they held, he’d climbed up to sixty percent advancement progress.

  “How are you doing?” Lessa asked.

  “I’m getting closer. [Veins of the Universe] really helped. But…only sixty percent might not be enough.”

  She laughed softly. “I meant physically and health-wise.”

  Jace glanced down, then pulled himself out of the mud. “Uh, I think I’m alright. I’ll need a shower.”

  “You’re pretty covered in blood.”

  “It’ll heal soon enough.” He rubbed his forehead. The headache was fading, but not as fast as he was hoping.

  “But with your advancement progress,” she continued, “do you think the last Sentinel is going to be enough to push you over the edge?”

  “I don’t think the progress is only factoring in Aes,” Jace replied. “I don’t just have to accumulate a lot of it.” Technically, he was still at stage one, despite all the Aes he had. “I need to seek enlightenment or something like that.”

  Lessa winced. “Do you know what you have to do?”

  “Not really. I don’t even know how to go about looking for the answer.”

  “Maybe the books we acquired will have something more? We could’ve missed something in the quick skim we did.”

  He nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Of course I am. But you need a shower at least, and we can’t just go on a reading spree out here.”

  He pushed himself up, trying not to let the sudden burst of static in his vision make him want to fall over again, then brushed himself off as much as he could. The military would probably be on their way, but they didn’t have to worry much about them. As things stood, Jace could pick and choose how much he dealt with them—they posed no real threat to him.

  “I’m going to head south,” he said as they jogged back to the Drowning Gull. “When we reach the continent with the last Sentinel, we can rest a little.”

  “That Australia place?”

  “Yeah, that.” He smiled at the phrasing. “We’ll see how the cities there are doing, see if we can find a place to hide out.”

  They climbed into the Gull. LeeKay had kept it running for the most part, and it wasn’t long before they lifted up and shot into the sky, zipping through the clouds of the storm. It was breaking up, revealing a flooded and eroded landscape completely decimated by the Sentinel’s weather.

  “Why would the Split do this to your world?” Lessa asked. “I mean, are the Sentinels supposed to be a challenge?”

  “I have no idea what they’re supposed to be.”

  “Well, okay, if the Split is the light, then why would it do something like this?”

  “The light doesn’t necessarily mean good.”

  “Well, it certainly implies it.”

  Jace snorted. “True. But like, its definition of good could be pretty different than ours.”

  “Can it?” Lessa asked. “I mean, considering we came from two completely different galaxies, but still stumbled upon a somewhat cohesive and similar moral system seems odd, no?”

  Jace shrugged. “I didn’t really think about that, but…”

  “The fact that you’re just a regular man, too. Not some kind of alien.”

  He chewed his lip. “What are you saying?”

  “What if the Split isn’t the highest force in the universe? Say, the Split hadn’t fully reached Earth yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something else out there. Like, some other kind of energy field that hasn’t been relegated into rules and such?”

  Jace considered for a moment. A moment dragged into minutes as the Gull soared above Asia. He travelled southeast, and most of the landscape turned to a blur.

  “Perhaps the Split has a presence across all of existence,” Jace suggested. “But not like, a System-y existence. Just as a fundamental law of the universe, which the System-side of it has taken control of. But it can spread its presence wider. Its rules and nudges allowed humans and human-like creatures to evolve in basically the same way everywhere, even without the direct influence of a conscious system.”

  “As for moral systems?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve just done what I felt was right. Like it was part of my biology.”

  “Well, it doesn’t make much sense for a species of creatures to evolve with a system of morals that would lead to its own destruction, would it?”

  He nodded. “That would do it. Plus, if the underlying Split nudged along evolution or allowed it to take effect in certain consistent ways, it would do the same with behaviors. Creating a cohesive, universe-wide notion of morality.”

  “So then why would the light-based part of the Split just decide that it was going to mess up your world? For amusement.”

  “What if the Split needs to be in balance?” he suggested. “And with how out of balance it is at the moment, with its darkness locked away, it’s becoming almost as destructive as the Enemy is. Given time, it’d become no better.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “But—” Jace scrunched his lips. “I mean, I’ve seen things like it. People thinking they’re doing the right thing, imposing rules and making things worse for everyone because they think they’re helping. A tyranny exercised ‘for our own good,’ but still tyranny. And in the end, it’s unhelpful. It falls apart.”

  Lessa sighed. “So what do we do about it?”

  “I don’t know. But something tells me this is important, at least. Or that we’re on the right track. Let’s just see what we can figure out once we’ve landed.”

  31

  PERTH

  Despite not having to worry about the military, Jace was going to need their help against the last Sentinel. And they might still try to contact him or use him. But he wanted to stay off the radar for a little while. They still had a few days to defeat the last one, and they needed to actually prepare.

  Initially, Jace flew a little too far to the west, but he adjusted their course until they flew over the mainland, initially aiming for Perth. At the moment, he couldn’t see the last Sentinel or its storm, which was a good sign.

  Before he reached the city, he navigated the Gull in a wide arc around it so he wouldn’t attract too much attention, making sure to stay low. Once he had made it inland, he set the starship down in a clear patch beside a road. A forest of scraggly trees surrounded the road, and though the ground was dry, there was still a light spattering of shrubs and ferns. It wasn’t nearly as hostile as he’d been expecting.

  “Be careful,” he said once the Gull touched down. “I’m not sure what kind of horrible creatures we’re going to find here. I’d bet there’s a massive spider of some kind.”

  “When you say massive, how massive are we talking about?” Lessa asked.

  Jace shrugged. “It’s Australia. I don’t know what the Integration did to it.”

  “This looks like snake territory.”

  “I dunno. I just always heard about the spiders.”

  “You’ve never been here before, then?”

  He shook his head. “But I don’t want any nasty surprises.” At least the flora wasn’t any different than the pictures he’d seen—not yet.

  He popped the viewscreen open and jumped out, then gathered their books and equipment and stored it in his backpack—but made sure to leave the Halcyon Spear behind. He didn’t need it to have a malfunction and decide to carve a hole in the side of a hotel room.

  “LeeKay, look after the ship, okay bud?” Jace asked. “I need you to keep the viewscreen closed and move it if anyone finds it. I’ll find you again as long as you don’t go too far away. But the last thing we need is the military messing with it.”

  With that dealt with, he walked back to the road. There was no trail. A few plants with glistening purple mist on their leaves grew in patches, and he avoided those with utmost self-concern.

  They began walking down the road, staying on the shoulder, until a truck honked at them from behind. Jace flinched, then realized they were walking on the wrong side of the road. Australians drive on the left.

  “Wrong side of the road,” he muttered.

  “That was enough to make him sound his siren at you?” Lessa asked.

  “They’d probably call it a horn. I think. Australians might have a different word for it.”

  “Really? Do they speak a different language here?”

  “Sometimes you’d think they did.”

  “You knew some of them?”

  “Sometimes, they’d come during the winters and work at the ski hills. Really, I shouldn’t be calling them Australians. They’d tell me ‘it’s pronounced Aussie’.”

  She snickered. “They sound lovely.”

  “Let’s just see if they’ll let us into the city. I don’t think we’ll get much peace and quiet before the military finds us again, so we should try and make use of what we can get.”

  After a few minutes, they arrived at a roadblock much like the barrier around Philadelphia. A hasty gate had been set up, and a barrier of shipping containers and other debris formed an outer wall, cutting through suburbs and other structures unfortunate enough to be within the city’s defensive barrier. There were a few watchtowers around with floodlights mounted atop them, but since it was still midday, they weren’t lit yet.

  Jace extended his senses as he approached the gate. Most of the soldiers were just mortals, but one of them radiated a slight well of spiritual power, tingling in the back of Jace’s the closer he got to the wall.

  It was hard to tell. There was so much life around, and his senses still functioned best on how much danger something posed to him.

  Which meant that when a swell of warning rose behind him, he lost all focus on the guards and whirled around. One of the soldiers shouted something at him, and Lessa pulled her rifle off her back.

  Three emus charged at them. But they weren’t regular birds. They were slightly bigger in every dimension, and as they ran, they held their wings out to the sides. Their feathers rippled with glimmering blue crystal, sharp as knives, and their beaks were coated in the same substance.

  “Oh shit,” Jace whispered. “I was expecting spiders.”

  “Get down!” the soldiers shouted.

  But Jace examined the birds. They were only about the equivalent of Soul-Circle opening, according to his senses. Deadly to a mortal human, but not to him or Lessa. He drew his Whistling Blade and flashed forward with [Hyperdash]. Lessa blasted one, and Jace cut through the other two before they could even see what the crystal-covered knife wings could do. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

  When he looked back at the soldiers, they were staring at him and Lessa with expressions of shock. They’d raised their rifles, and one of them had been running to a turret mounted beside the gate, but they stopped.

  “Ay mate!” one of the soldiers shouted. “Who are you?”

  Jace winced, then approached the gate. “Sorry about that. We’re just travellers. We were hoping we could find a place to stay for the night, then we’d be out of your business.”

  “He’s a canuck,” the soldier said. “Ay, sorry mate. We didn’t know if you were nice or not with that armour and such, but…”

  The soldiers turned to each other and whispered softly.

  “What’s she?” one of them asked.

  “Uh, the integration caused a few mutations,” Jace tried. “She’s fine.”

  “I’m fine,” Lessa added.

  “Where’s she from? Never heard that accent before.”

  “Uh, Greece,” Jace said. They probably wouldn’t know what a Greek accent sounded like off the top of their head. Neither did he.

  “Sure, mate,” one of the soldiers said. “Long as you have money, you can find a place to stay. Can’t say how long it’ll last. These fuckers’ attacks have been getting worse, and word is, the Sentinel is gonna start moving west.”

  “And we don’t think we could really stop ya’,” a different soldier added—the one who was exerting a slight bit of arcane presence. “How’d you get so strong?”

  “Just, uh, got lucky. Do your best to start drawing in energy, and it’ll start snowballing.” He wasn’t sure if that was really that good of advice. Not everyone had direct access to the Split, and even if they did, they couldn’t do much without technique cards. Here, they didn’t have thousands of years worth of practice and experimentation and arcane infrastructure set up to learn these things. In Lessa’s galaxy, there were academies and schools to teach people how to use their abilities, even if they couldn’t interact with the Split. Earth had none of that.

  But somehow, the Split expected the people of Earth to kill Sentinels? It was a cruel joke at best. A test that they were designed to fail. But it would be for the Split’s own good—it would spread into this galaxy, using Earth as a Headstream, protecting itself at the cost of one world.

  “Don’t cause any trouble,” a different soldier said.

  Jace nodded. “Thanks. We won’t.”

  The soldiers pulled open the gate wide enough that Jace and Lessa could slip through, then they continued on toward the city beyond.

  It looked like an average city—as average as they could get. Glass-covered towers, some tall office buildings, some hotels on the shore. He was about to say that it didn’t look like the Integration had done much, until he spotted a pillar of swirling air. He never thought he’d actually see the air itself, but it was like the heat coming off a warm road in the summer. It spiraled up, holding chunks of an office tower suspended in the air. A few helicopters hoovered around it, but no one seemed too concerned. It’d probably been there for a while.

  “By the look on your face, that’s not normal,” Lessa said.

  “Well, I know we used to joke that gravity was reversed in Australia, but…”

  “Why would it be reversed?”

  “Upside-down— You know what, nevermind. Anyway.” They kept walking along the road. “I just hope that wall is keeping out the spiders.”

  “What is it with you and spiders?”

  He cleared his throat. “Nevermind. Look. Pretty floating building.”

  Lessa smiled and shook her head. “Any idea why it’s doing that?”

  “Nope. Probably something to do with the apocalypse.”

  Aside from the floating building, Perth seemed like a relatively normal city. As normal as a city could be with most of the power out. There were less people, and everyone seemed to be eating fish. It certainly smelled like it. There were a few old trucks—ones that could get by when their fancy electronics broke down inside—which raced around, delivering crates of supplies. A few tanks patrolled the city.

  The second problem was that they didn’t actually have any money. Most of the hotels were abandoned, and many of the beachfront properties had either been destroyed, flooded by tidal waves, or taken over by the military. There was no corpse of a giant kraken offshore, but Jace could only guess what had been coming out of the sea lately.