The rest of the team was across the way, outside of another warehouse. Ellen and I joined them; I concealed the ledger as best I could in my pocket. Explaining it would just be a gigantic pain in the butt for everyone, and I didn't want to spend the time on it. Not here.

But as we looked inside the warehouse, I stopped worrying about that.

"We were chasing a straggler down, and he ducked in here," the tank with the shaved head said, staring at Ellen the whole time. "When we followed, we found…well, this stuff's from, uh…"

I looked at the paladin armor and the orcish catapult—mostly disassembled, but still functional. Then I nodded. "A Besieged portal world. Or, possibly, the world those portals come from."

Ellen took a deep breath. "We're looking at, uh…I don't even know. I need a minute to think. Kade, can you come over here for a second?"

I did, walking into the second warehouse. Weapons, orcish staves, and even a panel of cloth-wrapped stained glass surrounded us as Ellen looked around. Then she leaned in close. "We have a problem."

"Yeah, we do. This is—"

"It's a market or a trading house. They're trading with each other. The portal worlds, I mean. Or, like you said, the worlds the portals are from. Either way, we need to get this portal cleared fast."

"Why? This is…I think we should leave, tell the GC, and get a high-ranking guild team to lock it down. This place might change how we think about portals," I said.

"Exactly. And Bob's going to be the first one to take advantage of it," Ellen retorted. She took a deep breath to calm herself down. "If we do this your way, it'll be a big deal. You don't hide a functioning, breaking portal in the middle of the city. It just doesn't happen. So, Bob will figure it out, and when he does, he'll maneuver himself to be even stronger. They went after me in the desert yesterday."

"They did?" My fist clenched around the dueling blade's grip.

"Yes. They were only delivering an 'invitation' to one of Bob's parties, but it was still…if they can track me down for that, they can—not the point, Kade. The point is that Bob's getting more aggressive. He doesn't need more control. So, we clear the portal, turn around and tell the GC what we saw, and let them work it out from there."

I nodded slowly. It made the most sense. It'd be doing our duty and interfering with Bob, without letting him know we even had. And this place was worth reporting to the GC. If anyone could figure it out, it was them.

Ellen's plan was a good compromise.

"Let's do it," I said.

"Great. "Ellen touched my shoulder. "I'll talk the team through it. Trust me, I've got this."

Ellen did have it. After a minute's discussion, the tank loaded a few light-weight items into her pack and nodded. "Ready. Let's finish this place off."

The next half-hour was increasingly furious fighting as the elves' resistance stiffened more and more as we closed in on the tree palace. I'd thought the branch we were fighting across was long, but I hadn't realized how long—or how big the palace on the far end was. It loomed overhead, and the tree itself was easily the largest living thing I'd ever seen. It dwarfed even Queen Mother Yalerox's sand castle.

But eventually, we stood before the massive, multi-story windows and the silver-portcullis-guarded gateway. This close, it didn't look thin and elegant anymore. It looked massive and bulky—but the gaps between the bars were big enough to walk through, and the room beyond was pitch-black in contrast with the lantern-lit windows.

"Ready?" Ellen asked.

Stamina: 205/380, Mana: 240/490

I was at about half of a tank, but I'd been at about fifty percent for basically the whole portal as Ellen borrowed my Mana to speed up our clear. Compared to the first C-Rank portal we'd cleared, when we'd had to camp out inside of it, this one was going incredibly quickly—and I put that fully on the B-Rank shadow mage's ridiculousness.

"Yeah, I'm ready," I said. The rest of the pick-up team nodded and said yes in four different ways.

Then Ellen cleared her throat. "Kade, your turn. Feel free to go all-out. I'll keep you fueled."

"Are you some kind of support, too?" the tank asked. Her eyes lit up. "God, we need you on our squad."

I didn't bother waiting for Ellen's response. Instead, I stepped through the portcullis and entered the palace's foyer.

It was clean. White wooden floors, gray-blue and off-white walls, and golden-orange lanterns suspended mid-air by lengths of spider silk. A wide archway with rounded, spiraling stairs leading up either side stood on the far side of the wide room, and a woman in a pure white dress stood at its center, flanked by a handful of C-Rank elves in full armor and wielding long swords.

Princess Ehalul, Marionette Merchant: C-Rank

The woman was the boss. The long staff she carried looked like a needle—a razor-sharp, pointed needle seven feet tall. Her pale blue eyes locked on us, and she spoke in that same impossible-to-understand language all the elves had used.

Then the staff moved, and strings shot out from it, rocketing toward the team's healer.

As the attack surged toward him, the rest of the team reacted slowly, but I moved. So did Ellen. Shadow Boxing rippled across the closest elven knight. Armor melted and disintegrated in massive squares of darkness. The knights started moving, and I ignored them.

If the team couldn't handle them, we were in real trouble. My job was the boss—and the strings wrapping around the healer's arms and legs. As they bored into his body, he started to convulse and move on his own, like a puppet. Even more frightening, his skin began to harden and grain like wood.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The Marionette Merchant was a puppeteer.

I fired a pair of Slicing Bolts in an attempt to cut our healer loose. One hit, wrecking a handful of spider-silk strings. But an armored elf threw himself into the other one, and while it dented his plate, it didn't kill him—or cut the healer completely free. It did reveal a dozen similar strings reaching from Princess Elahul to the knight, though.

Our healer finished barking over, and he reached out to heal the closest knight, his movements awkward. I fired another Slicing Bolt—this time at the boss—and then charged. Both of my Wind Charges vanished as they hit; I'd used Windfall to share her, and as she tried to backpedal, she found herself stuck.

Then I was on her. Tallas's Dueling Blade lashed out in a two-handed cut. It cut across the boss's chest above her breast, leaving a thin red line for a moment before spider-silk filled in the wound like gauze and bandages. More silk shot toward my face; I rolled and ducked, and it flew overhead and settled across the wooden floor.

Ellen dropped a Shadow Shapes across the battlefield, and the tentacle-covered squid ripped into the elven knights even as the pick-up team's tank grabbed a pair of them and started laying into them with her axe. I ignored them—and I ignored the one charging Ellen, too. My focus was entirely on the boss, to the point where I hardly noticed Ellen's aura lashing out at the offending portal monster.

Princess Elahul retreated up the stairs, staff dancing and poking out at me as she tried to keep me from closing the gap—and filled the space between us with strands of silk. I cut through them and focused on dodging the attacks, using Mistform and Flashstep to keep the pressure up. As our blade dance took us further up to the balcony overlooking the battle, I kept trying to cut off the healer's strings and return him to the fight on our side.

Then the boss stepped onto the beautiful, curving railing and into mid-air. Silk formed under her feet in graceful pillars as she walked into the center of the room, right below a lantern chandelier. And string blasted out at everyone.

I filled my free hand with Ariette's Zephyrs, then used Saltspray to try to counter whatever the Marionette Merchant was doing. The wind darts slammed into a cocoon of silk as the boss shielded herself, and the counterspell failed. The air went white for a moment.

When it cleared, most of the team had managed to survive. The pick-up tank had raised an iron dome around herself and the other two members of the team, and they were safe.

But Ellen was covered in strings, and her face was already barking over.

With Ellen out of the fight—and worse, fighting against us—we should have been in trouble.

We were in trouble. Taking her out of the fight tipped the balance slightly against us, and with the healer down, things were dire. But within seconds, I realized that it wasn't as bad as it looked.

Ellen didn't have any physical control. The boss was moving her in jerking, exaggerated motions, just like a puppet. And her whole kit of spells and skills was under the boss's control. The Marionette Merchant could activate any skill she wanted, and she wasted no time slamming a second Shadow Shapes down to counter the one killing her knights.

But she didn't unsummon the first one. Why?

I launched myself into another attack, Rain-Slicked Blade slicing through the cocoon and drawing a scream from inside. When the hardened silk fell away, the boss's dress was cut halfway through at mid-thigh, and blood rained down on the foyer below. The boss tumbled off her delicate silk pedestal a moment later and hit the ground surprisingly softly, buoyed up by a cushion of spider string.

Mana surged into my core—so much Mana I could hardly focus. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. Then I grinned savagely.

Ellen had been using Shadowstorm Battery. The connection had been active, and enough of her was still functional inside the puppet for her to realize she was a threat to the team—but only if she had Mana to cast.

So she was dumping everything into me.

As my Mana rocketed upward, I started spending it. Lightning Chain. Doubled with Lightning Strikes Twice, then cast a second time. Three chains of electricity linked me to the boss, and I pulled myself through the air and toward her. Then Shade Scythe crashed down on her. She tried to dodge. I just cast it again. And still Ellen's Mana poured in.

She had all her regeneration running, too. If I'd been a full mage, I could have kept up. But as it was, I couldn't cast fast enough. My Mana filled up even as I fired dozens of Ariette's Zephyrs at every strand of silk I could see. The wind howled around me. The boss ran back up the stairs.

It was just her and me—and Ellen. My teammate ducked in between the boss and me, awkwardly jerking her body to block me from reaching the Marionette Merchant. I hesitated. Then I looked behind me. The rest of the team—those who weren't puppets—had been pressed against the gate by the three remaining knights and the healer.

And with Ellen here, I couldn't keep up the attack. Not directly.

But I could rely on the boss's one weakness; she'd been casting as hard as I had, and she didn't have a Mana battery keeping her topped off. And I could rely on one other thing:

Stormbreak could ignore a single target.

I used it, excluding Ellen from the massive surge of electricity. The negative and positive circles formed around Princess Elahul and me. The charges touched. Then the lightning bridged the gap—ignoring Ellen completely—and connected us.

Thunder broke. The stairs caught flame as electricity poured across the connection. It burned. Scorched my skin. Ripped through my body. But it didn't touch my inner core. Instead, the lightning-gold patches seemed to redirect the sheer power around it over and over, dissipating it slowly.

When it was over, the boss was still standing—but so was I.

I pushed Ellen out of the way. The boss reacted slowly, muscles twitching from the sheer power I'd unleashed. She couldn't move fast enough, and Tallas's Dueling Blade ripped across her throat, then plunged into her chest, staining her spider-silk dress with blood.

Bark crackled across Ellen's body as the boss's puppeteering faded, and she coughed violently. I made sure she was breathing, then rushed into battle with the remaining knights.

The fight was over, but there was still the clean-up afterward.

An hour and a half later, we sat in a car. Not Deimos, but a van heading toward GC Headquarters. The rest of our team was in a second one; it was just Ellen and me in the back of this one. It was the last place I wanted to be, but when the portal spat us out and the GC rep heard our story, he'd called it in, and headquarters had agreed to meet with us right away.

Ellen had her seatbelt off, her head resting on my chest as she shivered. I'd wrapped my arms around her; the stray silk on her battle robe stuck to my shirt and arms, but I ignored that. "Mind control sucks, huh?"

"It…it wasn't mind control. It was…body control. I could still think, but I couldn't…I couldn't do anything except keep Shadowstorm Battery running. It was…it was the worst. I'd rather Mana Burn. I was trying to Mana Burn. It would have been better than fighting my own body and losing," Ellen said.

I let her keep talking. She had a lot to work through, and we had nothing better to do until we got to the GC building. One hand reached up to touch the back of her head and stayed there, cradling it as she slowly relaxed into me.

Then, suddenly, she was back. She didn't change how she was, half-sitting and half-lying down, but her voice changed. "Kade, how would you like to attend a Traynor Corporation reception and cocktail party next week?"

I blinked. Then I nodded. "I'd love to. A chance to meet your father? I wouldn't miss it."

"Great. That's settled. So, let's throw this whole mess over to the GC and wash our hands of it. Thanks for saving me, by the way. I had no idea the boss was going to do that."

I smiled. "I'd save you anytime."

"Har har."

I recognized what Ellen was doing, of course. She was setting the stage for our meeting—and trying to signal that we wanted nothing to do with whatever it was we'd stumbled on in that Arboreal portal world. But the ledger was still in my pocket, and Ellen and I were the only ones who knew it was there.

We weren't done with this. Not by a long shot.

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