Derek froze.

  He wasn’t sure for how long, but when his sister barked a “hey, are you still there?” over the phone in his hand, he found himself paying attention once again.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he sighed. “Where?”

  “Back home.”

  Right.

  “See you in a sec.”

  Then, he hung up, feeling his heart start to pound.

  Isaac was back.

  The brother he’d always heard about, never met, the man whose accomplishments had ensured that no one in the Thoma family would ever have a quiet life, even if their sisters hadn’t managed to put themselves in the spotlight quite handily.

  And he was here. Well, not “here” here, after all, Derek was presently on Mars, a whole other goddamn planet, but that was something he could fix with the Fast Travel System that had been set up in the solar system via World Item.

  So, he stepped across space, from the family villa on Mars straight into his childhood bedroom. And froze.

  Oh God, Isaac could not see in here, Derek hadn’t spent enough time in here since leaving for Seoul Acadmey to clean away all the trappings of his teenage years, and it was looking appropriately childish and … shit.

  Shit. Fuck. Goddamnit.

  Isaac could, quite famously, see through walls.

  Isaac was in the house.

  Isaac knew.

  Derek deflated, cursing internally while he marched towards the room’s door, towards the meeting he couldn’t avoid, even if he tried.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to depress the handle, as though fearing alerting anyone, as though he were … nah, he was being a stupid coward about this.

  So he slammed it down the last couple of centimeters with utterly unnecessary force, yanked open the door and, once again, froze at the sight that greeted him there.

  It was a face very similiar to what Derek saw every morning in the mirror. A little sharper, a little more angular, maybe, but it was immediately apparent that they were brothers.

  Though, at the same time, it was also quite apparent that the other man had evolved his race further, his skin unnaturally pale, the black hair they both shared so dark it swallowed up the light on him, while the family’s shared green eyes had seemingly hardened into emerald gemstones that glinted in the light, shining.

  But it was the necklace he was wearing, visible to all, a strand of knotted blue leather, with an oddly jagged, inverted teardrop of tooth and bone hanging from it.

  On the surface, it was a simple hunting trophy.

  It was oh so much more, however. In fact, it was the creation of one of the world’s most renowned blacksmiths, forged from the scraps of leftover materials from the first [World Boss] ever slain, something the necklace’s wearer had played a significant, if not to say pivotal, part in.

  The very essence of that battle was backed into this item, radiation outwards to prove just what its wearer had acomplished, in a way that made both it and, by extension him, inimicable as decreed by the very [System] itself.

  That was Isaac Thoma.

  “Uh …”

  Excellent first impression, Derek, excellent fucking impression …

  “Hi, you must be Derek,” Isaac replied, holding out his hand, which Derek shook, but only after having waited a couple of seconds too long to avoid all awkwardness.

  And his response was certainly nothing to write home about either.

  “Hi …”

  “I hear you’ve set quite the record,” Isaac offered.

  “Yes?”

  Okay, at this point, he was throwing this hard. So he repeated himself.

  “Yeah, it took a while, though.”

  “Everything worth doing does,” Isaac said, it somehow not sounding like an empty platitude from him. “But I think Mom and Dad might be getting concerned that all their kids are a smidge insane.”

  “I think they’ve thought that for a century,” Derk replied dryly.

  “Also possible,” Isaac laughed.

  “So, Tanja said you had news?” Derek asked.

  “I do, but I think I’ll tell that to everyone at the same time, and our sisters are waiting outside,” Isaac said, gesturing towards the door. “Shall we?”

  Derek noddded, and together, they headed towards the garden of the small, suburban house their parents had been living in since well before the [System], and since then, it had gained very little to indicate just what children had been raised within.

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  Granted, the house itself had been heavily enchanted and reinforced to make sure no one decided to attack their parents while the kids were away, and wasn’t that an absurd statement to make?

  Also, the grill had been set up, burning merrily with an oddly golden-hued flame.

  Huh. Granted, they all had hellfire abilities, but as Derek himself had found out the hard way, the black flames were too inherently destructive to be used for utility purposes. So, what the hell was that?

  “Those are the flames of Hestia,” Isaac explained, apparently having sensed Derek’s confusion. “Copied from one of her priestesses, with permission. They’re the conceptual embodiment of the hearth, and when it comes to anything related to cooking or warming the home, nothing can beat them.”

  “So, what I’m hearing is … this is going to be the best barbecue ever?” Derek joked.

  “Well, I don’t know about that, I’m not exactly the best cook …” Isaac shrugged. “… but that’s why I’m just reheating takeout.”

  “Takeout from the literal best restaurant in the world, made by a cook who would be considered S-Rank if any of her [Skills] had combat applications,” Tanja added.

  “Oh, she’s got tricks, she just doesn’t want the hassle of anyone looking at her as someone with that kind of combat potential,” Isaac corrected as he started pulling massive steaks out of his storage ring and dropping them on the grill.

  As far as Derek knew, re-grilling meat like that was the cardinal sin when it came to cooking.

  So those magical flames were either more effective than Isaac had indicated … or this was about to be a disaster.

  While the meat heated up, Isaac turned towards Derek and the twins.

  “I’m sorry I stayed away so long. Things … I got distracted, and I shouldn’t have just run off for that long. No excuses.”

  “It’s your life, you should live it,” Tanja replied. “If there’d been any disasters we couldn’t handle without you, that would have been a different story, but there wasn’t. It’s fine.”

  And she seemed fine with it. But Derek wasn’t sure whether or not he was. Or if it was even his place to get upset …

  “Why did you come back, though?” Tanja said. “I don’t think an apology counts as ‘news’ by most people’s standards.”

  “Right,” Isaac said, suddenly straightening and growing serious.

  Derek froze, shivering despite himself.

  “I’m going to speak in front of the United Nations in four hours, but I think it’s only fair to tell you too: things might get crazy again. I found a Dyston sphere, out there, and it was a grave. They summoned some ghosts they couldn’t handle, an entire civilization died, and when I showed up, the monsters were in the process of turning into a fully-fledged World Boss.”

  That drew a wince from everyone.

  World Bosses were, as the name would indicate, monsters that were meant as a challenge for the world as a whole, the kind whose battles required maps to be redrawn afterwards, and they were the reason why Pluto was no longer there, having been replaced by a cloud of loose gravel after the Behemoth had been killed.

  And there used to be a mitigating factor, these monsters had to be summoned to fight by people who wanted the overpowered Aspects they dropped, and the World Items they granted, so even though they were an absolute nightmare, they would not show up on their own and could only be summoned once a decade anyway.

  World Bosses were a calamity, but they were one that could be at least somewhat controlled … or, at the very least, they wouldn’t pop out of nowhere.

  Except that had just changed, that fundamental stabilizing factor of the post-[System] world had just had its legs knocked out from under it.

  No one knew how many civilizations were out there, and definitely no one knew how many had destroyed themselves, which meant there were God only knew how many walking weapons of mass destruction out there in the black. And while, as far as they knew, they didn’t have any FTL capabilities, all known World Bosses did have the ability to both survive in a vacuum and propel themselves through space, if left alone for long enough.

  And all that was already a massive issue without considering the notion of what World Bosses did if they existed for long enough.

  Normal monsters started spawning more of themselves and, apparently, eventually, turned into World Bosses.

  So, what kind of hell would come from a World Boss existing on its own out there, unknown, until shit hit the fan?

  They’d have to be found, fought, and hopefully killed, ASAP, and one of the few people who were the most likely to be able to deal with issues like that was the man standing before tehm.

  “You’re not staying, are you?” Viktoria asked quietly.

  “I am, actually,” Isaac sighed, suddenly sounding … not broken, exactly, but closer than Derek had ever expected from someone like him. “If I go haring off into space again, I won’t be in a position to do anything if a problem is found.

  “But I can’t find them all myself, that’ll be on the scouts and survey ships and everyone else who heads out there …”

  While Isaac was “stuck” down here.

  Isaac who, if the things history had to say about him were even remotely correct, was pathologically incapable of sitting still or staying out of fights that needed fighting.

  But if he were to be here for a long time, did that mean he could teach Derek …

  Well, it did, but asking for that right now felt tacky. As did offering to head out to do some of the scouting if only his rich older sibling were to buy him a starship. Seriously, he’d dismissed that last one a single millisecond after he’d had it … and he was still cringing about it, thirty seconds later, with no end in sight.

  So while Isaac was in the process of pulling steaks off the grill and plating them up, Derek was mostly just focusing on not showing his embarrassment and anger at himself.

  In fact, he was so focussed that he wound up ignoring God only knew how many attempts at talking to him, until Tanja flicked his ear.

  “Derek, are you listening?”

  Shit.

  “Yeah, now I am, sorry.”

  He was probably outside of “first impression” territory, but it was still a bad look.

  “So, where are you going on holiday?” Isaac asked him.

  “Holiday?” Derek asked.

  “You’ve been working your ass off for fifteen years straight, please tell me you’re going to take a break now.”

  Isaac sounded genuinely horrified, while Tanja snorted into her wine glass and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “says the workaholic in chief.”

  “I mean, I’ll be lying at a beach somewhere when digging my way through the textbooks,” Derek said defensively.

  “You have a learning-related [Class], right?” Isaac asked.

  “Can’t you see that?” Derek responded with another question.

  “The bloodline has some protections against inspection, and I wouldn’t invade your privacy like that.”

  Huh.

  “Basically, I can get General [Skills] for something I study, and then use [Skill Fusion] to combine them until I get something superhuman. I can already do the work of a navigation and fire control computer in my head, and I’ve only had my [Class] for a few days,” Derek explained.

  “We’re talking about starships, right?”

  Derek nodded.

  “What are your interests in space?”

  Derek thought about it for a couple of seconds, then replied with a single word.

  “Everything.”

  “Oh, that …” Isaac began to respond, then his phone rang and his face fell.

  “Shit, I need to go,” he muttered and rose to his feet. “Sorry about this.”

  Then he raised a foot and kicked off the very air itself in a flash of white light, and in an instant, he was hurled skywards, any further similar motions invisible to Derek’s eyes, happening to quickly for him to follow, until he vanished over the horizon.

  “That’s Isaac for you,” Mom commented, speaking up for the first time since Derek had arrived.

  And the conversation quickly moved in that direction, while Derek took a first bite of his steak and nearly fainted on the spot. So good …

  ***

  Yet, an hour later, Derek found himself sitting on his bed, in his room, face buried in his pillow.

  Could that have possibly gone any worse?