“Good riddance!” Axel said. “Pesky little things are such a nuisance.”

  “Is that how you feel about humans as well?” I asked.

  Axel’s face grinned at me. “Close! Very close!” he said gleefully. “I get to see humans so rarely nowadays, and demons are depressingly common.”

  I nodded. “You said that it was a bad idea to deal with demons before,” I said. “But aren’t you dealing with them?”

  “Is that a question? Nah, I won’t count it. I’d hate for anything I said to be left unclear.”

  I wondered about that, thinking back to everything he had said thus far. Was that true? Or were we just still in boasting mode?

  “This is one of those do as I say, not as I do situations,” Axel advised us. “Dealing with demons is invariably a bad idea, but there comes a point when you’ve tried every permutation of every good idea, and there’s only bad ones left.”

  “Can you say it was a bad idea when it worked out for you?” I countered.

  “Did it?” he asked carelessly. “I’m part demon now, and I’d invite you to consider how that would translate to your fragile human bodies.”

  “We wouldn’t make a deal for that—wait, did you not want to be distributed?”

  “I’d count that as a question, but I can’t really answer it,” Axel said. “Distributing myself across multiple universes was such a fundamental change that I can’t say with certainty just what I was thinking back then. It’s almost certain that my memories were modified to some extent. If I hadn’t wanted to make the change, those memories would be the first to go.”

  I stared at his image, existential horror creeping over me. He winked.

  “I’ve got a question.” Borys cut in over the silence that sat between Axel and me. “How do we get in touch with the people who are trying to save the Earth?”

  “Oh, that.” Axel waved dismissively. “It’s as your companion suggested. She simply needs to configure the Gate to connect to the appropriate world.”

  His image shrunk to half the screen. On the other half appeared a… diagram, I suppose you might say. Axel had already said that I’d need to use [Theurgy], so I guessed this depicted a particular arrangement of mana streams.

  Thanks to [Memorise], it was the work of a moment to retain the image. It would take longer to understand it. I walked closer to the gate and studied it with [Sense Mana] to get an idea of what I was supposed to be working with.

  “Why can’t you do it?” Borys asked.

  “Mhmmn. I may have been a teensy bit misleading before,” Axel said. “I can’t control the gate.”

  I whirled around, but Borys was on the case.

  “The reason we’re down here is because you’re controlling the gate,” he snapped.

  “That is what I led you, the gods and those boring elves upstairs to believe, yes,” Axel said. He grinned smugly. “Since you’re down here now, there’s no real point in keeping the illusion alive.”

  “How?” Borys asked. I turned back to the Gate. Even if I hadn’t decided to do this yet, learning how to control the thing would be useful. Maybe I could figure out how to turn it off.

  “I can affect the Gate,” Axel explained. “I can’t set its destination, I can’t cause it to connect, but I can control how long it connects for. That’s enough for what you’ve seen.”

  “So,” Borys said slowly, puzzling it out. “If you like what the Gate connects to, you extend the time, and if you don’t, you shorten it?”

  “Exactly! Right now, I’m holding it open to a fairly neutral world. It’s unlikely something will come through and interrupt us. Every time I terminate a connection, it reconnects to a random universe. Well, random-ish.”

  “Wait. Your distributed intelligence thing requires you to reconnect to universes where your brain is,” Borys objected. “How can you do that with random connections?”

  “There may be infinite universes,” Axel said. “But this portal doesn’t connect with all of them. Not only does it come back to the same worlds, but some worlds are more likely to appear than others.”

  “How many worlds?” Borys asked.

  “Thus far, I have connected to 523,176 worlds,” Axel said. “I suspect the total number available is 531,441.”

  “That’s not a power of two, though,” I said, coming back from the Gate. I’d worked out what I needed to do. Shutting it off entirely was beyond me, for the moment.

  “Indeed, the computer people do love their powers of two. I think some other logic is at play here, though.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  I let [Calculate] run through the maths, trying to work out what was special about 531,441.

  “It’s a power of three,” I said slowly. What was the significance of that?

  “Or nine,” Axel said. “I think the other numbers look better that way.”

  “What numbers?”

  “The probabilities,” he replied. “There are 81 worlds that show up one time in three. That is, one of those worlds will show up that often. The chance of any particular one showing up is one in 243. There’s another set of around sixty-five hundred that also shows up one in three times. The last third of the time is shared between all the other possible worlds. Less than a one-in-a-million chance for each of them.”

  “And you’ve gone through them enough times to get the odds?” I asked.

  “The first two sets, yes. I haven’t seen every member of the third set.”

  “So the first set is nine squared,” I said, feeling out the logic. “The next set is… nine to the fourth?”

  “Minus the original 81 from the first set,” Axel corrected me.

  “And the final set is nine to the sixth—minus the minuscule first two sets.”

  “All this talk about maths is very interesting,” Borys interrupted. “But are you going to open the Gate?”

  I looked at him. “Do you think that’s wise?” I asked. “Everything we’ve seen says it's a bad idea.”

  “I’d chip in here, but you’d be quadruple-guessing my intentions and my judgement until you died of old age.” Axel put in.

  “It’s the only way we’ll ever get back to Earth,” Borys said. “If we have to help put it together again, there’s no way we can ever go back without dealing with these people.”

  “Whoever they are,” I pointed out. “We don’t know who they are or why they want to put Earth back together.”

  “Isn’t it obvious that they’re refugees like us?” Borys asked.

  “I don’t trust obvious,” I said. “And I hardly trust Axel. He hasn’t told us anything about them, and I find that suspicious.”

  “If I’d told you more, you would have found that suspicious,” Axel protested.

  I paused. “That’s true,” I admitted. “You’re suspicious; it doesn’t matter what you say.”

  Axel didn’t seem upset or insulted. He just grinned back at me.

  “I don’t think there's any chance you’re not going to open the portal,” he said. “You couldn’t live with the curiosity afterwards if you didn’t. However, you might want to use up your remaining question before you do.”

  “And ask what’s on the other side?” I said, eyes narrowing. “Why would I trust you at this point?”

  “I’ve been fairly honest with you so far,” he replied. He was clearly amused by the exchange.

  “All part of the set-up,” I countered. “If you were going to lie to us, it would be on the final question.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Axel agreed. “So what are you going to do?”

  I glared at him. He was right about the curiosity. But my instinct was screaming at me that it was a mistake.

  “Where are the gods in all this?” I wondered aloud. “We’re supposed to be on a mission from them; they were all up in my head a few days ago, but nothing right now. When it might be useful.”

  “The whole point of this Champion thing is to take the gods out of it,” Borys said. “Have humans make the decisions.”

  “They said that, but they haven’t been shy about poking their fingers in when they want to,” I griped. “Why have they got cold feet now?”

  Axel giggled. “They want to see what’s on the other side of the portal as much as you do, but they don’t want to take the blame for doing it,” he said.

  “So that’s what Champions are,” I complained. “A scapegoat.”

  “No, we get to decide,” Borys said. “They wouldn’t be able to blame us if we didn’t have the choice.”

  “Then let's choose the safe option,” I said. “Let’s leave this shithead to flicking through portals. We can go back to killing monsters and civilising this damn place.”

  “What about the demons?” Borys asked.

  I glared at Axel again. “He started letting demons through to attract our attention; now he’s got it, and we’re not going to do what he wants. There’s no point to him continuing.”

  Axel did a fair impression of someone whistling innocently. There was no sound, just his miming. Borys stared at him, trying to read something in that expression.

  “What if he escalates?”

  “He won’t,” I said with certainty. “He was riding a thin line with the gods as it was. If he steps over that line, they’ll do something final.”

  “Kandis,” Borys said. “Don’t you have friends and family that you want to get back to?”

  I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at Axel smirking either. I looked at my friends, who had been standing in silence the whole time. I looked at the deluded fools who had been created by a mad machine.

  “I do,” I admitted.

  “I can’t leave them in that… state. Decompiled or whatever. If there's something I can do, I need to bring them back. If it's something someone else can do, I need to go there.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I need this, Kandis.”

  “I know,” I repeated. “That’s what makes this the perfect trap.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “As long as there's a chance.”

  I finally let myself look at him. “You know this is a mistake.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Even if it goes wrong, it wasn’t a mistake.”

  “That’s not how mistakes work,” I griped. “But fine.”

  I looked over at my friends again. “Gonna do something dumb,” I said. “Be ready for anything.”

  “It can’t get that bad,” Felicia said. “One thing we do know is that the gods are all watching this closely.”

  “That does not fill me with confidence, given how they generally solve out-of-hand demon problems.”

  “Talnier will be fine, though,” Felicia said. Her smile slipped. “I’m sure some of the elves will survive.”

  “Here’s hoping.”

  I went back to stand in front of the Gate. Now that I knew about the ninth power thing, it made more sense. There were six conduits that had to be arranged just so. Assuming that these had nine valid positions, that would be all nine to the six universes.

  Two more conduits seemed to run from the dungeon floor. I couldn’t tell where the six others came from; they just faded out of view. The two conduits must be how Axel affected the Gate. If they powered it, then interrupting power might terminate the connection.

  Of course, if cutting off the power was possible, surely the gods would have managed to shut the thing down much earlier.

  There were four more conduits that faded away into nothingness. According to Axel’s diagram, these were already in the correct configuration. I wasn’t sure what their purpose was. Perhaps they controlled some aspect of the Gate, like its size or colour.

  The six were the important ones. I reached out with [Theurgy]. They moved easily as if they had been intended to be moved this way. They probably had. Once all of them were in position, I just had to feed some mana through and…

  The surface of the portal stopped its flickering changes and stabilised, becoming a mirrored flat surface. I slowly withdrew my [Theurgy] from the mana flows, and they remained stable.

  “What now?” I asked. “Are we supposed to go through?”

  “You can if you want,” Axel said gaily. I gave him a look and took a step back from the Gate. He giggled. “Someone should have noticed the connection.”

  I took another step back. “Someone?”

  Before Axel could answer, the portal shimmered. Its surface rippled like water, and a person stepped through.

  I stared, completely flummoxed by who it was.

  “Reggie?” I asked.