Fintan flipped over onto his stomach. He sucked in the mist, breathing heavily through his mouth until he caught his breath. He thought the mist would restore him, but he was weak. He was still on the ground when the explosion flattened him into a slight depression in the clearing.

  While the others fought Angus, he struggled to climb to his feet. That might have been what saved him. Cherry and Paris flew through the air into the forest. They hit trees with bone-crunching screams, but in moments, they were back on their feet.

  The ogre had taken the brunt of the blast. He was at the epicenter and armored. He splashed into the center of the river. By the time Fintan reached a hobble, Angus had vanished beneath the current.

  RuTing watched the dark water. Most of the torches were out, either destroyed by the blast or fallen over. The few that remained left the dark water in shadows.

  He knew the river was deep. The river carved into the bedrock, smoothing the stone. Usually, they could see white sand at the bottom. He’d never seen anything alive in those dense waters. The weight of all Angus’s armor would have pulled him to the bottom.

  The river was dissolution. It was a feeling Fintan felt strongly since adding levels. If Angus was right, the gilders he absorbed weren’t levels at all. He had strengthened his attributes, increasing the peril of the water. He felt the same draw to the water as before, only as an echo. Something inside of him was missing—hollowed out.

  He thought of the over twenty-five elements necessary for biology. As a nutritionist, he spent time reading analyses and finetuning the alien environment with supplements. Critos was not Earth. What humankind created on Critos was an imitation. It started as a miracle, but after they destroyed it, much was left as a radioactive mess.

  Not everything necessary for life could be metabolized from the environment and he feared the mist no longer strengthened him because he was missing a vital ingredient that allowed him to do so.

  Whatever he was missing he passed on to Paris with a Skill he didn’t know he had. It was a worthless Skill if it killed the owner. The call to the water might be an echo, but he was no better than the patients, living on life support, barely able to move. If this continued indefinitely he was better off throwing himself into the water.

  His dark thoughts matched the night, but he endeavored to turn them aside. Their greatest challenge was behind them. Not all ogres were equal. The guards had fled, perhaps more interested in their burning city than enslaving strangers. The bridge awaited them, and Cherry had spent centuries studying the accumulation of all the knowledge in Bannerburg. Paris had Skills they did not understand and RuTing carried a bag of gold. Perhaps that would restore him.

  Fintan didn’t think so, the thought of more gilders left him nasues and he swallowed hard as he turned away.

  “Where do we go from here?” he asked Cherry.

  Before she could answer, a splash in the water returned his gaze to the river. RuTing had recovered and rejoined them in the clearing. All heads snapped around as water undulated by the shore.

  A massive hand reached out, streaming water from under plated guantlets. The fingers poked through stretched seams in the soft leather.

  Angus returned larger than before.

  With only one hand on the shore, he flipped his whole body with impossible speed, sending a spray of river water in all directions. Fintan ducked behind his companions. There was no other place for him to go. They stood in front and caught most of the drenching. The few drops that caught him in the face numbed his skin.

  In one hand, Angus held a bent silver flask, and he drained the serum, tossing aside the flask.

  “Millennia of serum has strengthened my resistance to the water,” Angus said coldly. “Clinical detachment of my actions isn’t the absence of will. We struggled to replace passion with determination. Cherry will go to the Adversary, but you three will be dissolved in the solution. Your continued existence as specimens is not worth the risk of another outbreak.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Angus was fast beyond measure, but he spoke at normal speed. Over the weeks Fintan spent with RuTing, he quickly realized it was her muscle memory and training that made her so dangerous. She decided to kill before the fight began. The ogre pontificated, and she flew through the air with a lethal strike aimed right at his eye.

  Her sword glinted off the failing torchlight almost too fast for Fintan to follow. Before it merged with Angus's head, she stopped in midair and Fintan blinked. Angus’s hand was around her body. He squeezed, and Fintan heard rib bones crack.

  “Impressive,” Angus said. His other hand closed in the grasp around her torso as RuTing fought to escape, and he measured her like a grown man playing with a doll as she beat her blade ineffectively against his forearm. “I wish I had the time to examine you more completely. What secrets do you hold?”

  I will kill him. The thought was unbidden, and it didn’t replace the core of what Fintan had lost. He was a shadow of what he had been, but if he was going to spend the shadow, maybe his friends would live.

  At least he could give them a chance to run.

  He Stepped and fell on the Ogre’s head like a wet paper towel on a massive stain.

  “Run!”

  Fintan’s scream was nearly inchoate, and his poniard flashed into his hand with practiced ease. This animal needed to be put down. He didn’t know if there was enough left of him to do it, but he jabbed upwards with the sharpened tip. He felt the soft flesh under the Ogre’s chin part for the blade, and the hollow core bit into the soft upper pallet before connecting Fintan with Angus’s brain.

  This was what Fintan did. He killed to collect. The ogre was his specimen and involuntarily, he extracted his due.

  The echos of his attributes ballooned in strength, and Fintan solidified.

  With strength, he plunged the dagger deeper, searching for the amygdala. The ogre's head was huge, and Fintan’s poniard was only the length of his forearm.

  He scraped along, doubling in ability, but strength wasn’t what Fintan wanted. Somehow, he knew what the ogre had suppressed was key. When his point touched on that brain structure, Angus seized, and he shrunk.

  The hollowness inside Fintan was filled to overflow, but it was not enough; he wanted Angus dead. With the same Skill he used to give Paris his life, he sucked on Angus until there was nothing left but a hollow crust.

  Fintan’s feet touched the ground, and Angus was no longer a man but a hollow statue glowing faintly in the torchlight. He was the same color as the foundation stone but empty. Fintan’s poniard broke through the top of Angus’s head, and when he put a foot into the statue’s chest to remove the blade, the hollow form collapsed into white sand granules.

  “You killed him,” Cherry said. Fintan could tell she was shocked and scared. She didn’t do well with change. She trusted them because of the Union, and she understood ogres and their strength. She looked at him horrified, as if he’d grown a third arm.

  “Something else happened,” RuTing said. She had recovered. Fintan’s skill took only seconds, and in those seconds, her bones had reknit along with her clothing.

  “I drained him,” Fintan admitted. It was obvious what happened. There was no denying it.

  “Like a vampire,” Cherry said.

  “Like a Daimone,” Paris said. His pronouncement was more thoughtful than Cherry’s. “This is a Skill unlike any other.”

  “It was more than that,” RuTing replied.

  “Manifesting uses mist,” Fintan said, “Gilders and serum magnify attributes. If the river and the mist are like the blood of the afterlife then there is something else. Something that lends solidity like bone. Bone produces blood while giving the organism structure.”

  “You sound like a doctor.”

  RuTing made the observation, and it chilled him. He drained Angus of more than his attributes. Had something else passed between them?

  There was nothing he could do about that now. Bannerburg was still burning, and Angus was not the only threat.

  “Where do we go from here?” he asked Cherry. She had time enough to gather her courage.

  “Yuxia is the closest land where we will be welcomed. Paris would know more.” Cherry looked at him expectantly, but the Zeusopolan had grown silent “Was your plan to get there all along?”

  Paris’s downcast eyes rested on the pieces of Angus’s arm cannon. Most of it was blown away by the explosion, but some of the metal fragments were embedded into the dirt like daggers.

  “They are technomancers,” Paris admitted.

  “They are enemies and Bannerburg and Zeusopolis,” Cherry said. “They serve the Adversary, but the accounts are confusing, and I’ve often wondered if they are biased. They are builders. They control the water with machines. Real builders can’t follow the Adversary because all he stands for is destruction.”

  “The ogres won’t follow us there?” RuTing asked, and Cherry nodded, but Fintan felt the hesitation.

  “What’s the catch?” he said.

  “The price of entry,” Cherry said. “Bannerburg gives you credit, but we have to pay our tariff to get into Yuxia.”

  “We have gold.”

  “That’s not the price they are asking.”