Chapter 506: Destiny

[Congratulations, players and civilians, on surviving the first wave of phase 3. You have made it to the main portion of the Great Game.]

Blake glanced up from his latest project—a delightfully dangerous construct made up mostly of swinging blades. In theory it was designed as a wedding gift to Ilya’s distant relatives, but he was starting to think it would send the wrong message. He read the text and frowned.

[Initial planar invasions are now ended. Randomized minor planar events are now in effect. Biological imperatives have been slightly reduced. All beacons are officially active. Good luck, players and civilians. The world is officially open. All dungeons, items, and events are available. You have at least one month until the final portion of the phase.]

“What is it?” Ilya said, apparently noticing the change. They were sitting by the fire in her private room, half naked after a long and very satisfying evening. He’d been tinkering away with his design while she’d lain across his lap, just touching his skin.

“Nothing.” He smiled, annoyed at his natural and reflexive lie. With Ilya he tried not to. Most of the time. “I…have a kind of message. From the human gods.”

Ilya’s amber eyes went wide. She sat up and her furs slid away enough to distract him.

“What did they say? Your gods are so…active. I can hardly believe how much they speak to you.”

“They certainly make us humans feel…special.” Blake sighed and tried to decide what to tell her. One day he hoped to explain everything. But he didn’t even know what Ilya was. A literal creation by their synthetic overlord? A real being with its brain scrambled?

He’d stopped caring what the answer was some time ago. But if he tried to explain it to Ilya, he figured he needed some kind of answer. The more he thought about it, the more he decided it was probably unnecessary and cruel. There was nothing he could do about it anyway, so why put her through it?

“They want us…coming together,” he explained. “We humans, I mean. We’re spread around the world and they’re giving us the tools to…Ilya?”

The orc’s beautiful eyes glazed with the familiar interference of the system. She smiled and blinked, grabbing Blake’s arm.

“The gods have given me a beacon! A teleportation circle in the lower levels. I think they want me to help you!”

Oh yes, Blake thought, the gods are very helpful. Especially when you were doing what they wanted.

Still, he couldn’t help but feel a spike of opportunism. If nothing else, this likely meant he could teleport straight to Nassau, and maybe other places on the continent. And it probably meant he could go to the east…

“I need to see it,” he said, hopping up and getting dressed. Ilya’s eyes followed him and he grinned. The beautiful orc was at the end of a kind of monthly cycle of heat, and she was just about insatiable. “No time for that, my love,” he said. “The beacon could be dangerous. We have to make sure it’s locked down.”

Ilya let out a long sigh but stood and dressed. “I’ll come with you,” she said, and he was going to say it was a bad idea but instead took her hand and pulled her to the door.

A half dozen of his own constructs jerked to motion from the hall, and he rolled his eyes.

“The impertinence is astounding. I made you and I can unmake you, hired goons. Call off your muscle, please, Lady Ambereye.”

Ilya laughed and waved a hand, and the constructs settled.

“If we were married,” she said, “you’d have direct control, High Wizard. My flesh would be as your flesh.”

He met her eyes and grinned, fighting down the little stab of lust at her words and tone.

“Our flesh has been hard to tell apart all night. And we’ll be married soon. I promise.”

It turned out marrying an orc tower lord was harder than he’d initially thought, mostly because Ilya was female. You had to get the family’s permission, which in Ilya’s case involved distant relatives because her direct kin were dead.

Ilya’s whole situation was unprecedented. Because she’d been ‘gifted’ a highborn bloodline, she was the only member of her ‘tribe’ (the Vori) who wasn’t lowborn. But Ilya’s new vassals and shamans all agreed the rules were the same. Any suitor had to have the family’s blessing. This always involved some kind of ritual engagement.

In the case of the Vori, this meant a literal, group wrestling competition. With clubs.

A typical suitor would be expected to square off against half a dozen male tribesmen, usually just doing his best to survive the experience. Make it to the end without embarrassing yourself or getting completely knocked out? Welcome to the family.

The ritual obviously didn’t appeal to Blake. He expected the average, blue-collar, Vori orc could break him in half without working up a sweat. He didn’t need to imagine what five or six in a row would do.

But this left him in something of a pickle. His hope was to meet with the tribal leaders and win them with…charm. And definitely, absolutely, most especially without using mind control powers. Probably.

He hadn’t gone so far as to promise Ilya he wouldn’t. But she’d given him enough meaningful looks he was pretty sure she wouldn’t be pleased.

On the other hand, he’d disappointed people who loved him before…

They usually got over it.

Blake found Annie and Seul-ki waiting for him on the way down to the beacon. Seul-ki was back in her disguise, calm and serene as ever. Annie actually looked excited, a rare smile on her face as she came running ahead.

“There’s a portal thing!”

She pointed with her disturbing axe, which kinda ruined the excited cute-girl image. He had no idea why she carried it around so much, it was innate and could be summoned at will.

“Seul-ki says it’s a teleportation beacon. There’s like a whole chart thing full of symbols and names, I think it’s other beacons!”

Blake smiled for her, just happy she was enthusiastic about something. He also felt a bit guilty because the girl still had a kind of teenage crush on him, and didn’t know he was sleeping with both Ilya and Seul-ki. At least he didn’t think she knew. Either way, he hadn’t tried to pursue anything since the Neutral Zone.

“If so, I expect we can travel back to Nassau without much problem, if that’s what you mean,” Blake said. “It’ll be nice to see everyone.”

Annie shrugged her now wiry shoulders and looked embarrassed.

“I just thought…” she trailed off. “Maybe we could find more people. Like…maybe our families.”

Blake’s cold heart threatened to…well, at least crack for the poor girl.

“Yes, maybe,” he lied, with a polite smile. He knew the math of the thing was cruel and brutal beyond reason. The chances so small as to be beyond hope. She probably needed to hear that. To be a little ready. “But I wouldn’t expect it, Annie.”

“I know,” she said, like she didn’t really mean it. Like she still held out hope. Blake wasn’t going to push the issue. If she wanted to believe, he didn’t see how it was his business to convince her otherwise. Not if it helped.

The four of them (with a few lumbering construct guards) made their way to the beacon, which had apparently just appeared in a room not far from Blake’s laboratory. He grinned and walked inside, eyes moving over everything.

It was how Annie described—an obvious, circular portal almost like you’d see in StarGate, but with a more sci-fi sort of square platform on the ground beneath. The platform had a console with symbols and numbers, all of which transformed before Blake’s eyes with his runic sight.

“You were right, Annie,” he said. “This shows every other beacon in the world. All we have to do is dial them in and teleport. Though it seems like they can have passcodes.”

“Should we try one?” Annie looked ready to charge right through, but Blake shook his head.

“There’s nothing that says where they go,” he lied. “We’d have no idea what we were getting ourselves into.”

Blake’s power allowed him to easily read what were invisible words for anyone else. They glowed a faint blue around the other symbols, listing either settlement designation, or ‘Uncontrolled’ beacons.

But he saw no reason to tell anyone that little piece of information. Not just yet.

“Can we control if this beacon is open to others or not?” Ilya asked. “Does it…give us any kind of warning?”

Blake held back his smile because the answer seemed to be ‘no’. Which meant the other beacons couldn’t stop him from crossing back and forth, except with physical barriers or guards, or the small number with codes. These didn’t worry him much.

“Unfortunately, no. But our beacon is in a nice, defensible tower. We can surround it with construct guards. Lock the doors. I can build a small fortress around it with a little time. A few sentient constructs to interact with…guests, and tell us when there’s visitors, should suffice. Don’t worry, it won’t be a threat for long.”

Ilya smiled and leaned in to kiss Blake’s cheek.

“I leave it in your capable hands, Wizard. I’m going back to bed,” she said this with a very meaningful look. “I’m very tired and should be there for several more hours.”

Blake met her eyes with a tight-lipped smile.

“We’ll be here, my lady. I expect to work for at least twice that on the beacon.”

Ilya looked ready to pout, or possibly beg. But she glanced at Annie and Seul-ki and took a long breath, leaving with a nod. Blake watched her hips as she walked away, but fought off the temptation.

This was too important for any delays. He ushered the girls out before he started, opening his Primordial Making power and starting on a physical barrier.

Over the next few hours he did exactly as he’d suggested, building a series of gates and prison-like barriers for someone coming through uninvited.

With Primordial Making it was all a little…insane, with differently themed structures and kinds of stone or metal depending on Blake’s unconscious, or possibly a random thought as he built. One part looked a little Arcatraz, another more like a rainbow-colored, high-tech vault.

But it would do the job. Even if someone like Mason came through it’d be awhile until he could smash and break his way out. And other than Jeong himself, there was no one like Mason. So he felt pretty safe.

It took far less time than he’d told Ilya, of course. It was always better to under promise and over deliver. And he was tempted to go back up and enjoy a little more gratitude. Maybe even swing by and pick up Seul-ki on the way…

But after he was finished, he stopped and stared at the beacon, feeling a strange impulse to simply walk on through. The longer he stared, the stronger the desire, and he even Mentally Influenced himself with a shot of Rationality just to relax.

But the urge remained. As he began to consider, he realized it was an intuition as much as anything. A gut feeling that now, right now, was the time to go through and begin his work with the eastern capital. To learn, to ingratiate himself, to plant the seeds of destruction.

Logic told him to turn around—to at least tell the others what he was doing and maybe why. Or to at least rest a night and start out in the morning.

But the pull. The feeling in his gut. All his life he’d had it. It had told him to run away from his drug-addict parents, to run out of his neighborhood. It had even drawn him to Mason in the orphanage.

The system called it ‘luck’. Something about ‘innate, adaptive energy’. Blake just called it destiny.

His hands twitched as he stepped towards the beacon, opening the newly created gates one by one as he stepped to the panel. His hand drifted over the symbols, and he flicked open the ‘major settlement’ beacon that was obviously the only city.

No password was required. A pulse of blue light flared with a growing hum of energy, stopping as the portal stabilized in the circular device.

Blake stepped in front of it and couldn’t fight the smile. He’d be totally alone, possibly walking out into the main source of power of his enemy. It was bold beyond reason. Maybe even crazy.

It was perfect.

With a mind for now cleared of the complications and questions, Blake trusted his intuition. He activated Adaptive Veil, and stepped into the blue light.