Chapter 266

Alexander raced through the mountain valley.

Trees blurred past on either side. Snow-laden branches whipped at the edges of his armor as he cut between trunks, threading gaps barely wide enough for his shoulders. The valley narrowed into a canyon and he banked hard, Metallokinesis pulsing in rapid bursts to adjust his trajectory. Stone streaked past inches from his nose.

Behind him, Droney beeped furiously. The little drone was struggling to keep up, hovertech pushed well past its normal limits by the steady flow of Animachina and Electrokinesis Alexander was feeding it. Even overcharged, Droney was falling behind on the straights.

Alexander eased off. Slightly.

He’d been testing all morning. The merged power responded to flight the same way it always had, Metallokinesis pulsing in layered waves, each one building on the last. But his control was something else entirely. Directional changes that used to require conscious calculation happened on instinct. Course corrections that would have cost him a fraction of a second were instantaneous.

Alexander released the sphere of electricity he’d been maintaining around himself. Lightning crackled outward to the boundary of his Domain and dissipated into the cold mountain air. It had left more than a few small fires in his wake, but given the temperature and the snow they wouldn’t last.

He came to an abrupt stop.

The valley fell quiet around him. Snow settled. Droney caught up, beeping once in what the bond conveyed as pointed criticism.

Alexander rotated slowly as he rose. He closed his eyes and let his Will build. Drew it inward, compressed it, held it until the pressure pushed against the inside of his skull.

Then he released his Domain.

The eruption rolled outward in every direction. Trees bent away from him, branches cracking, snow exploding off their limbs in a white cascade that filled the valley floor.

Silence followed.

Alexander opened his eyes. It wasn’t anywhere near as forceful as what Radiant had demonstrated. But he understood the phenomenon now. His Will was a representation of his presence within reality. His existence. And it was bigger than he was. Greater than the physical body it encompassed.

Unleashing it pushed back against reality.

And though it mimicked an explosion of invisible force, it wasn’t really an attack. The real power behind it remained the ability to pressure others with your existence. It was a threat. Maybe a promise. That you not only existed, but that your existence was superior to theirs.

It was the best explanation he could come up with.

That Julia and Maximilian hadn’t bothered explaining it to him made a lot of sense now that he’d both experienced and achieved it for himself. It just wasn’t something you could teach.

The other results were unambiguous. Willpower was directly proportional to the reach of his powers. It was something they’d all understood, but had never been able to lock down. It was different for everyone.

Annie had no reach. Talia’s was terrible. Augustus’s range was ridiculous when it came to conjuring portals, but he’d never needed to test the range of the rest of his abilities, preferring close quarters magical combat.

It turned out Alexander’s was measurable. His newly merged powers had given him the first clue, and his tests had done the rest.

One-tenth Willpower. One-times Willpower. Ten-times Willpower.

It was all very mechanical.

The first corresponded with the range of his Domain. 22.2 meters. And within it, whether the Domain was active or not, he now wielded perfect control over Electrokinesis and Metallokinesis.

Beyond that, out to 222 meters, his powers sharply degraded. Electrokinesis was the worst, and both the ability to control and generate fell off sharply. Metallokinesis became more of a club, less of a scalpel.

Technopathy worked perfectly all the way to the limit, then cut off abruptly. He knew from experience that the range could be extended as long as there were machines within the network, but out here that hardly mattered.

The reach of his Will was limited too. He’d exercised it over a crowd of people back in Dubai, and Ash had felt it from hundreds of meters away when he was testing Augustus, Talia, and Annie. Preparing them for what a Domain could feel like.

He couldn’t test it with precision here without abusing some poor wizard, but the numbers were too cleanly aligned to ignore.

The final range of the set covered his ability to sense. Electricity, metal, and the weight in reality some superhumans carried. If his guess was right, it would top out at just over two kilometers. Powered senses had always been far reaching, but at least now he understood the mechanism behind it.

Alexander ramped up his Core.

Electrokinesis poured through the Heart of the Machine. Current flooded his nervous system, cycling faster, hotter, more intensely than he’d pushed it since waking up. Electricity danced across the surface of his skin. It burst from his eyes in faint arcs that crackled and vanished in the cold air.

His physical senses peaked.

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The smell hit first. Pine resin. Frozen earth. Animal musk that he instantly regretted smelling. The mineral bite of snow. Cooking smoke from a settlement miles behind him.

Sight sharpened until individual snowflakes resolved at a hundred meters. The bark patterns on distant trees snapped into focus. Movement registered everywhere. Birds, insects, the trembling of branches in the wind he could barely feel.

Hearing expanded last. The creak of wood under snow load. Water running beneath ice somewhere below the valley floor. And the rapid, panicked thumping of a snow hare bounding away from him through the trees, forty meters out, zigzagging between trunks.

Alexander watched it for a moment, briefly considering it for lunch.

Then he let it go and relaxed, pulling the Core back to a sustainable idle. The electricity faded from his skin. His senses dimmed to merely superhuman.

He pulled the surveillance drone from his ring and released it. The pyramidal housing fragmented immediately, fifty sub-units separating and fanning outward.

“Keep them in the clouds,” he told Droney. “As high as they can manage.”

Droney beeped. The sub-units raced upward, disappearing thirty seconds later into the low cloud cover overhead before spreading out. Footage began feeding back to Droney, then through the bond. Mountain peaks. Snow fields. Valleys. The distant rolling grasslands far to the south where the clan was camped.

The sub-units passed over the nearest peak to the north.

Alexander went still.

On the other side of the mountain, an army had gathered. The fortress was still standing, though already the damage was being repaired with magic. New structures were going up around the perimeter. They were expanding and refortifying.

Two ships hung in the air above it. Smaller than the patrol vessel he’d gutted. These were sleeker hulls with fewer turret housings but heavier armor plating. These weren’t capture vessels. These were built to fight.

Alexander let his senses stretch out carefully. As subtly as he could manage, extending his awareness toward the fortress like sliding a hand into still water.

He found hundreds of signatures. On the ships. In the fortress. Spread across the encampment on the ground. Tier 1, almost all of them, with only a handful of Tier 2s scattered among them.

And one that made the others feel like candle flames next to a bonfire.

On a hunch, Alexander added his Will to the mix.

Gold threads reached upward from the signature, stretching into the sky. Hundreds of them, pointing toward something beyond the atmosphere.

But they weren’t alone.

Red threads spread outward across the surface of the planet. Thousands upon thousands.

Alexander frowned. When he’d learned about the Prophecy of Eight, and that the so-called Divines were all superheroes, it had struck him as obvious that the other realities must have their own.

The Divine wizard was proof. The first of many that he’d encounter, probably.

The mixed threads were another first. Red and gold threads had seemed mutually exclusive so far, but maybe it made sense.

If the Empire of Stars lived above, and the people of the Earth populated the planet, then his own people worshipped him, while the others feared him.

He pushed his senses deeper, looking for what he’d come for. The Orbital Assault Combat Suit and the rest of his drones. He found them in the chamber buried beneath the fortress where the anti-flight ward was. That was a problem. There was no path that he could sense down to them, and it was dozens of meters beneath the earth.

Wizards and their teleportation.

He’d either have to excavate his way down, risk death at the hands of the Skipper, or wait until the gateway opened.

Augustus and the others would be waiting on the other side when it did. He knew it. And Augustus could open a portal to the buried chamber, solving the problem in a matter of seconds.

In the meantime, he’d just have to wait. Maybe work a little on his Strength, Dexterity, and Agility. They’d finally hit Tier 2, but they were seriously lagging behind. His combat style just didn’t quite match the attributes. And maybe he could hunt down a few slavers while he was on vacation.

A voice whispered in his ear. Close, and intimate. As though someone were standing just behind his shoulder.

“Ah, there you are. I knew you would have to return at some point. For the gateway, if not your... machines.”

Alexander spun around. There was nothing around him but empty air, snow, trees, and silence.

“You should come inside. We can talk, just you and I. Two would-be conquerors sharing tea and tales of our worlds.”

The voice tickled.

Alexander stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it around.

“I am Artensah Driscol, of the Fifth Circle.” A pause. “I am also known as He Who Whispers.”

“Because you’re creepy, right?”

A short silence met his words.

Then a chuckle, warm and amused. “There is our invader. Tell me, superhero, how are you finding my world? Are you enjoying the sights? Partaking of the local delicacies? Killing the simple people bound in the dirt?”

Alexander wasn’t paying attention to the words anymore. His focus had shifted to the fortress. The two ships had begun to rotate. On the ground, signatures were moving with purpose. They were forming up. Mobilizing.

It had started shortly after he responded.

Alexander’s jaw tightened. “Are you fucking kidding me? Was this some kind of collect call? You traced my location because I answered? I thought you already knew I was here.” He pulled his finger from his ear. “That is a dirty trick.”

The ships began to pick up speed. Both angling away from the fortress, heading in his direction.

“Look,” Alexander said. “If you send those after me, you’ll lose them.”

Silence.

“I’m serious. I will kill everyone on those ships if I have to. There is not a single wizard among them capable of withstanding—”

Two power signatures appeared, one on each ship. Far beyond the Tier 1 crews. They materialized from nowhere, teleported in from somewhere beyond his range.

Both ships shimmered as magic rippled across their hulls, and every signature aboard vanished from his senses.

Alexander sighed. “My big mouth keeps getting me into trouble ever since Dubai.”

He burst upward, Metallokinesis pulsing hard. The mountain peak rushed toward him. He cleared it in seconds, wind screaming past, and the surveillance drones were already streaming out of the clouds toward him. All fifty sub-units racing to rejoin him.

He couldn’t afford to lose them. They were the only eyes he had left.

Alexander pulled them downward faster once they entered his range, collapsing the swarm into a tight cluster and stuffing them back into the ring one handful at a time.

The last unit vanished into the ring just as the lead ship crested the mountain behind him. Its turrets were already glowing.

It opened fire.

Alexander threw himself sideways. Beams of colored light carved through the air where he’d been. He dove, racing back down the far side of the mountain, putting rock and snow between himself and the ships.

He seized Droney, pulling it close enough to grab, and tucked it under his arm.

Then he took off.

His vacation was not off to a good start. Now the slavers were hunting him.