The genocidal man looked much, much worse off than the last time he and Walker had spoken. His robe, previously so lustrous, was torn and had holes in places. Once magnificent and thready, his beard was now mottled with dirt and looked stiff and rigid to the touch- as if it hadn’t been washed in years. The smell coming off of him would agree with that.

  Red eyes and a frantic expression were the greeting he received from the man who’d once served as his guide. Albeit, a terrible one.

  “Finally! Finally we are here! But I didn’t finish!” Mr. Harrison screamed, bits of spittle dripping down his chin. Walker ignored the brief few that had landed on his face with extreme effort. “It’s all over, it’s over! I failed my taskkk!” He grabbed his head, multiple red splotches showing through on the back as he looked at the ground. “Over!”

  Walker felt David3 push on him a little, and he knew what that meant. Quickly activating the Gravity system, Walker covered the manic creature as deeply as possible before activating it. He didn’t know what to expect with this bastard, but he could prepare for the unexpected as best as possible. As the old man started to fall to the ground, the staff pulsed, shucking it off and letting him stand upright with no pressure.

  Walker glared at the staff as Mr. Harrison screamed again.

  “Over!”

  “Shut! Up!” Walker yelled back in his face, that familiar burning feeling rising in his chest. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done you fucking monster!”

  Red eyes looked at him in a confused pause before a pulse from the staff knocked Walker back two steps, “Of course I do, you fool! Destroy the Earth! Slow down the Creator of Symphony! Keep him here! KEEP HIM HERE!”

  Walker stood straight as the three Davids braced him from behind. He eyed the staff sideways, saying, “What in god’s name are you talking about?”

  “You left us! You left us!” He held both sides of his face as his nails dug bloody furrows in wrinkled skin. “A thousand years with no word, no messages or mentions. No sign that the Creator of Symphony would ever speak again. Do you have any idea what Symphony was like for us? The creatures that came from the dark! The mutated souls abounding across the territories! The cities! The fear!” He slammed his staff down, “But no! We had a plan!”

  Walker started to lift his foot for a step when the pulsing staff seemed to shift. Noting the warning, he placed his foot back down and asked, “What was the plan?”

  He looked away, staring up at the cyan-tinged sky, “It was simple. Simple! But I was too weak! Too soft. The sky. It’s so different. Not green, no-no.”

  “What was the plan?” Walker repeated.

  Red eyes met his own, “Take the conclave’s greatest weapon. Absorb the powers of our members. Take them all! Drain! Wait for the choice, the decision. The pick, picked, they picked me!”

  “Who did?”

  “The man. The man with stitches. Images, stitches. Stitches, yes.”

  He continued to mutter under his breath as Walker stared at him. The old man seemed to be having a stroke of some kind as spittle frothed at the edges of his mouth. He kept talking as the staff knocked back a few Crystal Nomads who’d approached the noisy area, a group of them gathering around the area.

  “The plan! Get picked! Take on the title. Nobody. Nobody needs to know. Nobody. The systems. The systems all broke. Shattered. Unfair.”

  “They broke?” Walker asked, taking what he said seriously.

  “Chaos. Uncontrolled. Something. Something about going somewhere. Old-Old histories. Base broken. Libraries, broken. No summit. Guardian genocide. Everything in chaos. No Creator, none.” His eyes rolled back into his head for a second, then shot down quickly, the pupils within expanding as he refocused on Walker, “You! Where were you!”

  He’s gone completely mad, Walker thought as he said, “I’m right, fucking, here!”

  “No! Gone! A thousand years!” His eyes began to water, “My family, gone.”

  “He’s flipped his lid,” One of the Davids commented.

  “Too much Jamba Juice.”

  Walker’s shoulders tightened as he held back from screaming at them. Even though the battle timer had, for the first time ever, disappeared from his overlay, he knew that the Omega entity’s timer was still continuing to tick down. Already he’d lost five minutes out of thirty. Instead of planning out how to kill an Omega Protocol entity, he was dealing with a crazy man ranting at him while a dangerous sentient weapon kept him from doing anything about it.

  He took two deep breaths, then asked, “What’s your real name?”

  “J-John. John Reed.”

  Walker tilted his head, “John Reed? I thought you were lying about that.”

  “N-no. Never lied to you. Did I? No. No.” He wiped his ratty robe across his face before looking up at the sky, “My family is descended from Lucy Reed, the first Adventurer. There were many Reeds on Symphony. Many, many.”

  Virgil: Ask him about the systems being broken again.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Walker gave a thumbs up behind his body, knowing Virgil could see it through the monitor. “You said the systems were broken. What did you mean?”

  “Altered. Not the same. Great power pressed upon people. Children even. No balance. None of the checks mentioned in the histories. A city would rise in a decade, only to fall in a day. Too many tools. Too many horrors.”

  Walker rubbed a shaky hand against his face, “How is that even possible? They’re designed to not be fucked with.”

  The man pointed a long, wrinkled finger at him. “The histories, they talk about who you are. The Alpha Protocol. And what happened after the final battle. Everything changed. They were old, some thought unreliable, but the Reeds. We held faith in them, as our ancestor did. We found them buried, underneath her shield cairn. No body, no bones, only the histories. Journals. We were confused. The Scripture had disappeared long ago, we couldn’t find it. But the Journals under the cairn explained much. What Symphony had been. What it could be.”

  Hearing something, Walker waved off a David who was about to make a joke, giving the reflection a fierce glare.

  “One journal spoke of listening in on the Creator's conversation with an assistant. A large squirrel, like, like the Guardians. Spoke of images, time, we could go back. We needed to be picked. The stitched man.”

  That didn’t necessarily mean it was Council Member five…but what are the chances that it wasn’t? And if it is, then what does that mean? What kind of game is he playing?

  Suddenly, Walker couldn’t help but consider for a second time, why the Councilmember had Godeater lines across his body. Just to confirm, he asked, “And the stitched man picked you?”

  “Yes! Me! A Reed. It made sense. But there were problems. The journal from the scripture said that you were fallible. Human. Your hands, they don’t, you don’t write well. So, slow you down. Slowest instrument possible. Force a harder task. First task. Make it so you have a harder time, don’t think about the Earth. The people. The weakness of your soul. Make it so you don’t leave!” He screamed the last word. “Make it so you don’t have a home to go back to! No more Earth! No more family! Just-” He paused, “Just like me.”

  The Davids weren’t joking now as all three tightened their grip on his clothing. Walker’s mind shifted through his memories, one thing standing out. The blackboard. The first creation instrument he’d ever had. It had been almost impossible to use with his Dysgraphia, something that didn’t even touch him now. But, if the tasks hadn’t been harder; if he hadn’t been forced to constantly go back and fix things, as frustrating as they were, he’d never have leaned into building systems on Symphony. It made him think about fixed fate again. Just as he started to travel down that rabbit hole, something else stood out to him.

  “You destroyed the Earth, so I couldn’t return to it. That’s the reason you murdered billions of people? You killed my friends and destroyed my planet, just so I’d have nothing to return to?”

  “Yes! Of course! Symphony is all that matters! It wasn’t easy, no. No, no.” He gave a hectic laugh that seemed to bubble from the inside, “Everything for Symphony. Everything from Nobody.” Just as fast as he’d started to laugh, he began to cry again, “It was so hard! I didn’t want to kill them. It’s what was required. Needed. Demanded. Blood for blood. Save Symphony, doom the Earth. All for Symphony. Savior, yes. I’m Symphony’s savior now! I’m a Reed! Faith for the Creator!”

  John Reed gave Walker a smile that said he knew he was doomed, but he didn’t care.

  “I have saved my family.” The staff stopped pulsing as hands left it. It fell to the ground just like any natural piece of wood would.

  John Reed’s smile seemed to fill Walker’s entire vision, his eyes locked in just as his mind fractured.

  Like a tide rising, each wave of thought slammed into the next, pushing and shoving each other out of the way. He should be shocked, but he wasn’t. He should be burning with rage, but again, he wasn’t. He was cold. Inert. Some piece inside of him, something that wanted to save itself, died this day.

  The Earth was gone, because of him. Him. Did he choose the Alpha Protocol? No. That was taken out of his hands. It was never his choice. But that didn’t seem to matter much, now did it?

  To this creature, the lives of those people were disposable. He didn’t try to reason with Walker. Didn’t try to help him succeed in the Protocol. He’d made a decision for him, taking away one of Walker’s options in a bid to control his fate.

  Small parts of him argued that this meant he would succeed, but Virgil had already nipped that thought in the bud. All of the images were taken from potentially successful worlds in the Alpha Protocol. All likely stemming from the stitched man. Council Member Five.

  There were no guaranteed victories, only potential ones.

  The David’s remained silent. Virgil didn’t send another message. Time in this moment seemed frozen. Everything around the area was quiet, as if the world was holding its breath. The only thing Walker could hear was his own heartbeat.

  Ba-duh-Ba-duh-Ba-duh

  Even as the waves started to slow, as his mind tried so very hard to find a way to explain how this wasn’t his fault. How none of it was his fault. To excuse him. It didn’t matter. His life had led to the end of his homeworld. It wasn’t global warming or nuclear winter that had destroyed the Earth. It wasn’t an asteroid or overpopulation. It was the life of Walker Reed.

  He couldn’t save the Earth…but he could avenge it.

  Two hands balled up into fists as the cold feeling in his chest gave way to a spring of warmth. That John Reed was insane wasn’t in the least bit of doubt. He was the executioner and destroyer of the Earth. The monster in the shadows that people spoke of when awakening from nightmares. And he stood right in front of Walker with a happy smile on his face.

  Virgil’s voice drifted into the area from nowhere, “If he is to be believed, I can keep the systems from going out of control. I can keep Symphony safe.”

  The sound of Virgil’s voice threw Walker out of his need for vengeance. For a moment, he mentally paused and processed how Virgil was speaking to him. It was the new Linking system Walker had created while within the Time Rings. The system allowed the Supreme Assistant to use all of his abilities, something Walker thought might be necessary with the final battle arriving.

  Accepting that, he asked, “How?” through clenched teeth.

  “It is best left unsaid, but please be aware, as long as we win here, Symphony will be fine.”

  Having listened in, John Reed crowed with an ecstatic expression, “Hah! I knew it would work!” just as Walker’s fist descended on the old man’s face.

  The cracking sound of a shattered cheekbone rang out in the clearing as the old man fell to the ground. Walker stepped closer, shaking his fist at him “You didn’t cage me, John.” Walker said through the tears flowing quickly down his face, “You didn’t free me either. All you’ve done is sacrifice my homeworld for NOTHING!”

  The old man rolled to his back as he stared at the sky, ignoring the blood, bone and torn muscles jutting from the side of his face. With a pained smile he said, “You may not be free, but I am.”

  Walker began to reach down when the man in front of him exploded in a fountain of blood and gore. Pieces of him flew in every direction as the staff on the ground rolled a small distance away.

  “What the fuck!” One of the Davids yelled as Walker took two steps back, swiping what looked like a large ear off his chest.

  “Finally!” A hissing voice said nearby, “Finally, I’ve found you.”

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