Skill Learned: Stormbreak

The shattered core within you offers power, if you can contain it. Burn mana from all sources in range, creating positive and negative zones around all targets. After burning the targets' mana, equalize the zones. With lightning. Lots of lightning.

Stormsteel Effects: 1. Each rank allows you to exclude up to one additional target from Stormbreak's Mana burn and equalization. You cannot exclude yourself.

Upgrade Effects: 1. Each rank increases Stormbreak's damage.

I hadn't asked for this. People had died because of Stormbreak.

But it was the perfect weapon for this situation. And with only two targets—Yalerox and me—I didn't need to worry about whether anyone else would get hurt.

I had no Mana. A negative zone appeared around me. My hair was already standing on end from the sheer power of the storm. But the static in the air tickled my skin.

Yalerox's blue-gray eyes narrowed. "What is this?" Then they opened wide. She started dumping Mana into spell after spell, not bothering to aim them. But even so…

Even so, the strongest positive zone I'd ever seen formed around her. No. Not around her. Around everywhere. My tiny negative zone crushed inward until it barely held me. The sheer pressure felt like being exposed to Angelo Lawrence's aura at point-blank range. My eyes bugged out. Blood vessels popped in them, and my vision shrank to pinpricks.

The Hurricane Paragon's casting meant nothing.

I laughed through the pain—a maniacal, hysterical laughter.

Stormbreak detonated.

Queen Mother Yalerox's Mana tried to drain. If it had, maybe she would have lived.

Maybe.

But she'd spent our entire fight opening the Eye of the Storm—an energy battery that had kept me in the fight against her even as we both drew off of its weakened, passive state. And now it was active. Yalerox had been right; with its full strength backing her, and in her own portal world, even Eugene wouldn't have beaten her easily. The ritual hurricane simply gave her too much Mana.

Almost infinite Mana.

So much Mana that she couldn't drain it.

My vision went white as two flowers of light bloomed. Mine lasted a quarter second, if that. Yalerox's bloomed and bloomed, its petals arcing across the portal world's sky. Negative connected to positive. Positive overwhelmed my negative space and shorted it out.

The last time I'd used Stormbreak, the world had darkened after. But the Eye of the Storm kept pouring Mana into Yalerox. The lightning flower in the sky didn't fade, even as I started falling.

Instead, it redoubled. Then redoubled again.

And finally, when the entire sky was blinding white that burned through my eyelids, it went mercifully dark.

Yalerox screamed. Rage? Pain? A mix? I couldn't tell.

And finally, the light began flickering. Flashbulbs, one after another. Four. Five. Six.

Eight total.

Then the sound. Eight massive drumbeats, one after the other. They echoed against the Eye of the Storm's collapsing walls.

Portal Collapse In: 59:54

She was dead, then. It had been enough.

I'd won.

The Eye of the Storm came apart around me, its controller no longer directing it. The massive, black walls of the hurricane shredded into confused bands of cloud, blinding rain, and howling wind that filled the sky over Queen Mother Yalerox's castle. And I plunged downward. The wind no longer held me up.

As I fell, my arm flailing to grab onto anything that might slow me and my vision blacking out, I thought about my promises.

To Ellen, that I was with her for the long haul? I'd done my best. Pushed her to B-Rank—hopefully—or at least let her survive this. She'd have to forgive me.

To the team? I'd told them we'd get through this. That it would be okay. And maybe it would be for them. Maybe they'd been out of Stormbreak's range. I'd given everything I could to them, though.

Dad? I didn't know. Hopefully, he was proud.

But Jessie? I wasn't going to be able to take care of her. And I wouldn't be coming home. I'd failed. The most important promise, and I'd done my best. More than my best. I'd pushed myself well past my limits; as the Eye of the Storm's energy dwindled and the storm inside of me slipped its harness of Laws, my body ached and shook from the strain I'd put on it.

But that wasn't enough. I had to do one more thing. One last thing. Then I could rest.

The ground—the shattered, twisted throne room—reached up to catch me. Jagged, shattered sandstone loomed all around. I grappled with the dregs of my energy. Summoned Tallas's Dueling Blade one more time. Weight. The weight of it almost pulled it from my hand. But as the floor filled my vision, I forced myself to use one more skill. It hurt. My veins and nerves screamed as energy poured through them one more time. But that was okay.

Pain was better than the alternative. I could deal with pain.

Flashstep.

Instead of slamming into the ground, I slid across it and crashed, legs first, into the wreckage of Yalerox's throne. Bone snapped. I screamed in pain as the last pinprick of light cut off, and my eyes slammed closed.

"Perfect," the God of Thunder said under his breath as he watched Kade break the power of the Eye of the Storm. "Simply perfect."

It was.

The feat shouldn't have been possible. Surviving a core break alone was an achievement, although Eugene had never doubted Kade Noelstra's ability to make that happen. Every Paragon on the Stormsteel Path did, eventually. He'd even taken steps to help the kid afterward. A B-Rank core was ready to help him with the long, agonizing process of reforging a core.

But to use the two Laws the kid had, and to twist them into a harness for the storm—even a temporary one—that let him continue fighting? That was new. And even better, Kade's decision to fight had paid off in exactly the skill the God of Thunder had hoped he'd get.

A skill as dangerous as the storm itself.

The best silver lining, though, was the A-Rank core. Eugene spirited it away even as Kade crashed toward the ground. The B-Rank core would have been good enough, but with an A-Rank—and one Kade had earned—his recovery would be that much faster.

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"Of course, I do regret what I had to do to get here. I didn't lie to Kade. Not once. But keeping the truth from him? That was necessary. If he'd known…would he have pushed himself so hard? For Stormbreak?"

All the musing about what might have been, though, did nothing. The God of Thunder had taken the actions he'd taken. There would be consequences. His relationship with the kid had been damaged. That wouldn't recover.

But that in itself was more interesting than any student-master relationship the God of Thunder had ever had. A pupil—even one who was vengeful and bitter—was one thing. But one with a legitimate grudge and a debt to Eugene? This could be downright fun.

Of course, Kade could very well die in the next few seconds. And wouldn't that be disappointing? The God of Thunder could intervene. He could save the kid's life. It would be easy—one trip into his portal world, and he'd be able to stabilize the broken core. Not to fix it, but to stabilize it.

Then one of the spares Kade delved with charged him. She slid to her knees, shredding them on the broken stone, and gingerly placed a hand on the white, exposed femur sticking through his pant leg and another on his stump of an arm. He groaned, but didn't open his eyes or show any other sign of awareness, and healing slowly poured into his body. But that in itself was impressive, too.

"The entertainment never stops with you, does it?"

Of all the things Angelo hated, waiting was the worst.

He'd stopped staring at the ruined, sun-bleached church's doors almost three hours ago. The portal had been there. Then it had shut down. He'd given it the hour to shut down and eject any delvers inside. When it hadn't, he could only assume it was a trap portal.

And that meant it could be hours. Or days.

Angelo was not a patient man. He needed to be doing something. So he was.

He ran free across the half-glassed desert. The rest of the team had hunkered down around the Loving church, and Deborah's skills were working overtime to protect the convoy from his wrath. Supercritical ran hot, pouring energy into Fusion. His spells flickered and popped around him, stabilizing the reaction inside and protecting him from his own wrath.

They were the only thing that moved within three miles of him.

Angelo lifted his watch to his ear. Its ticking, pinging sound—the onboard Geiger Counter—sounded less like a metronome and more like a machine gun. There was no background radiation. Everything near him was saturated with the stuff.

A monster twitched, two miles out. Its aura shone for a split second. Then Angelo dropped a Fusion bomb on it, and it died.

It was excessive. Gratuitous. But, as he'd learned in the last three hours of fighting, it was the only way to be sure.

And more importantly, Angelo Lawrence was in a situation he didn't like. He was being forced to wait. And all his power couldn't change that. Another Fusion bomb slammed into a group of monsters. The sand turned to twisted, cracked glass. Then he threw two more at that group.

Nothing moved. The wind from the collapsing hurricane around Carlsbad Fortress blew irradiated sand and dust westward. It howled against the flat desert; not a single cactus, tree, or cluster of sagebrush had made it. The Light of Dawn had burned off every single one.

In the distance, Carlsbad's wall stood strong.

Angelo's radio crackled. He looked toward the northwest, toward Loving. A mirror flashed three times. Then twice. Then once. The signal for him to return. Something had changed.

Was the portal open again?

Angelo smiled. Supercritical faded. One last Fusion explosion shook the desert and rattled the fortress's walls. Then Angelo Lawrence, the Light of Dawn, turned his back on the killing field. A three-mile radius around him was completely dead. Salted like the Romans had salted Carthage, and glassed like sand in a clay kiln. Not a single monster had lived within ten.

It took him fifteen minutes to return to the convoy's makeshift camp. He stripped and stepped into the decontamination tent—an unfortunate truth about his skills was that other people were not immune to Fusion's aftereffects, even if he was—and let the chemicals pour over his body. He breathed in the acrid gas, coughing as it burned his lungs in a way Fusion never did.

The Demon Core inside of him longed to activate. It wanted more. It always did. But Angelo Lawrence had passed his Trial of Responsibility and Trial of Determination long ago. He could hold his power in check.

It took almost twenty minutes before the chemicals stopped and water rinsed them away—the longest twenty minutes of Angelo's life. But eventually, his watch's counter settled into a normal beat, he pulled on a fresh linen suit—this one white and airy—and stepped into the church.

"Report."

Deborah reported. She sounded clinical. Detached. Which meant she was furious. "Thirty-eight minutes ago, an injured team of delvers appeared in the church's aisle. The A-Ranker—the only A-Ranker—had a collapsed chest and major scarring on his heart, partially healed. The three C-Rankers' injuries ranged from scrapes and bruises to a severed spine. The B-Ranker was deep into Mana Burn. Sarah Cullman said it looked like she'd attempted to push from C to B-Rank without any Mana, or with an external source of it. The team's healer was mostly uninjured, but had pushed herself to the edge of Mana Burn keeping the four most hurt delvers alive."

"And?" Angelo asked.

"Kade Noelstra." Now Deborah's voice betrayed her frustration. "That…kid…is on the edge of death. Sarah dropped everything to focus on the four of them, but mostly on him. His leg's destroyed and his arm's missing, but Sarah's got both of those under control. They'll heal. It's his core, though. He did…something…to his core. Something bad."

"He broke it," Terrel Young said from the pew he was lying on. He shook his head. "After all I'd invested in him, he went and broke his core."

Angelo filed that away. The alliance between the Roadrunners and Portal Tyrants was relatively strong, but a weapon was a weapon, and Terrel's slip-up gave Angelo information he wasn't supposed to have. "He broke his core?"

"Not only that," Deborah said, "He broke it and then did…something. According to the team's support, it let him keep fighting."

"With a broken core?"

"Yes," Deborah said.

"I need to see him immediately."

Terrel snorted. "You're welcome to try. When I demanded it, Sarah Cullman said she'd use her Unique on me. Do you know how many diseases she's got stored up in there? I'm not messing with that, and you shouldn't either—radiation treatments or not, that woman will screw you up bad."

Angelo thought about ignoring the warning. The truck the convoy was using as a makeshift medical station was right there. It'd be easy—almost as easy as wiping out the army of skeletal insects he'd been fighting. Threat or not, he was in charge of the convoy, and he deserved to know everything that had happened to his teams. More importantly, he needed to know.

Instead, he stared Deborah down. "Get the convoy moving. I want us inside of Carlsbad Fortress within forty-five minutes. We will deal with Kade Noelstra later, but for now, we must finish our mission."

Then he sat on a hard, wooden pew—ignoring the half-rotten wood as it creaked under him—and started waiting.

I wasn't conscious.

But I was aware.

Aware of the ache that consumed every cell in my body. Of the sense of emptiness where my core had been. Of the loss.

Whatever the healers were doing, it was working. My body felt like it was recovering. But that didn't mean the pain had stopped. If anything, it had grown in intensity. I wasn't sure what was happening around me. I couldn't react to it. I could barely perceive it. But I could focus on something.

While my body bumped along and healing magic poured into it, my mind was in the God of Thunder's realm.

"You did good, kid," he said.

I lashed out. Or I tried to.

"Look, I know you're mad. I know you know I could have pulled you all out of there. But if I had, then what? Your S-Ranker goes through the portal—right into the Eye of the Storm. I give Yalerox sixty/forty odds of winning that fight on her home turf. And yeah, I'd win either way—kind of—but everything I've done for you has been to unlock your full potential and move you along the Stormsteel Path."

God, I hated him. The God of Thunder. The bastard. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to hurt him. To attack and land a single blow to his smug, electrical face. But I couldn't. It wasn't just the fact that this was a dream. It was that I had no weapons to do it with.

"My core is gone."

The four words hung there in the air, between the towering pillars and in front of the red-and-blue sky—a truth I couldn't overcome.

"No, your core was imperfect. Flawed. Incomplete."

"What do you mean? I did everything right. This is how cores form and grow," I said.

"Then why am I SS-Plus while your strongest delvers are only S?" the God of Thunder asked.

I paused in the middle of a response, mouth open mid-word.

"That's what I thought," Eugene said. "This isn't the end for you, kid. Not if you don't want it to be. What you have to do from here will be painful."

"I can handle pain."

"Can you handle what I'm about to ask you to do?" Eugene asked. I could almost feel the dragon's sneer.

"Yes."

"Good. Then rest. Recover. Celebrate your victory. And get strong. I'll come for you with the step back on the Stormsteel Path when you're ready."

I tried to protest. To fight back. To tell the God of Thunder that I didn't need to rest or recover, or to celebrate my so-called victory. I needed a solution. And I needed to fight him. To make him pay for lying to me and putting my friends in danger. Fury fought with exhaustion, and it was winning.

But the dream ended, and the pain hit me, and I decided that maybe he was right. I did need the time. Just enough time to recover, and then I'd be back to rebuilding. He'd offered me hope, and I intended to grab that opportunity with both hands. I had too many promises to keep to give up now.

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