Familiar, lighter footfalls approached and broke Wyatt free of his thoughts. When he turned around, Annabeth grimaced at the card in his hand and pointed the way Wyrin had gone. “There’s more options down that way. Better than tainting your deck with miasma.”

  Wyatt nodded, slipping the card into his pocket and began heading toward the end of the hall. The last thing he wanted was to add a miasmatic card to his deck, though he did wonder how that would interact with Gabriel’s soul. Would the Archangel cleanse the miasma from the card?

  That seemed like the only reasonable answer to Wyatt. Angels and Devils were like two sides of a coin or oil and water. Similar but different, and they definitely didn’t mix. No way, no how.

  So he hoped one of the Devils dropped something that wouldn’t force him to find the answer to that question sooner rather than later. He stopped at both of the imp corpses and found two more Infernal Flames there and pocketed them too.

  He could feel Annabeth’s disapproval without seeing her. “What?”

  “You know cards steeped in miasma have another name?” she asked, her arms crossing when he turned to regard her.

  “Cursed cards. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” Of course he knew. He had seen countless miasmatic cards in his time in Demiurge. Especially as one of his caliber. With his full deck of summons, he was a walking army and could’ve singlehandedly dealt with this Rare incursion with little problem. Even now, with enough Ambrosia and time, he’d be able to mitigate the worst of it. “They can be dismantled and used to upgrade other cards.”

  “And you know how to do that?” Her brow arched, more curious than judgemental now.

  “Personally? No.” He shrugged. “Respectable guilds will have someone who can though, and what better way to set ourselves up for future success than to reap the bounty presented before us?”

  “Opportunism when presented with a crisis situation seems a little strange, Wyatt,” she hissed. “Instructor Monaya is dead, along with most of our class! Does that not bother you?”

  His eyes narrowed and his voice lowered as the fury he’d bottled up reared its head once again. “Of course it does, Annabeth! What the hell?”

  “That’s what I should be asking you!” She began pacing the hall. “I… I’m trying to understand. You spent a lot of time in the future, but that doesn’t excuse this… this numbness to death. This coldness. Like you don’t even care.”

  He rose from beside the fallen imp, staring at her in disbelief. “Fifteen years of war. I never once remained idle, Annabeth. If I wasn’t in Riacore, I was turning in a bounty and collecting another, or I was responding to a crisis somewhere across Eyanora, or reporting to Demiurge.”

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she scowled, but silence returned to the hall. Given the incursion running rampant across Demer, the silence felt entirely wrong, uncomfortable even.

  He met her eyes with steel. “I survived when countless others didn’t. You were one of those. Cameron is one of those. But there were thousands more I grew to cherish, grew to understood deeply, and they fell anyway while I remained to carry on the weight of their deaths, living for more than myself no matter how each time I survived drew me deeper and deeper into isolation. Only Cameron remained by my side until the end, and he’d been lying the entire time.” He sucked in a harsh breath, his head dizzy from the grief, the lies, the rage. He spoke quietly. “Of course it matters, but what else can I do now besides put a stop to it all?”

  Her eyes widened. “You don’t mean…”

  “I’m going to end the war, one way or another. I will make all of them pay for the countless lives lost. For this life and the last,” he growled, his fists clenched. “Now let’s move. I need to get my Class.”

  When they began to walk the hall, they did so in awkward silence. Once they turned the corner, a wry grin snuck its way on his face as he saw the swaths of Devils Wyrin left piled in her wake. The whole hall was filled with their corpses, and their black blood pooled. It would stain the ground if the building remained after the incursion ended, a reminder.

  “Before we do this, you need to drink some Ambrosia,” Annabeth said, slinging her pack from her shoulders. She set the bag on the ground away from the black blood and rummaged within, freed a vial, and offered it to him uncorked.

  He saw it for what it was, her concern. As close to an apology as he’d ever get with Annabeth. Wyatt took the vial, downed it, and grimaced at the sweet flavor. It didn’t feel right to enjoy the flavor after the death he’d just witnessed, the death he knew would follow the day, yet he couldn’t help it. After so many years of gritting his teeth and suffering through the acid-like flavor, the vial felt like crystal wash and childhood nostalgia. Warm festival pies with his granny during the fall, before winter had set in.

  He’d almost forgotten where he was when Annabeth spoke again. “Those summons are incredible and had to have cost a ton to activate and for sure cost a ton to keep active. It would be bad news if you didn’t upkeep your Holds.”

  Of course she was right. Wherever his summons dematerialized would be where he’d have to collect the cards from without an auto-reloader. And the hordes of Devils being kept at bay outside would swarm the academy in moments.

  “That’s why Instructor Monaya…” That conversation had happened only minutes ago, yet it felt like it had been weeks. The class of more than fifty had been reduced to less than ten in an instant. It reminded him of what he still had left to do. “Let’s focus. I need a summoner class if I’m to sustain Illia and Wyrin long enough to close the incursion.”

  “Close… it?” Annabeth’s jaw slackened.

  “Of course.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to hold them off and wait for support from Cynal? And doesn’t the Meven Empire have multiple adventurer guilds there and support for specifically these kinds of situations?” she asked.

  All he could do was shrug. “I never really had a reason to pay attention to kingdoms and their jurisdictions or any guilds outside Demiurge.”

  “Fifteen years, and you don’t know anything about your home country?” she asked, her voice an octave higher. He could tell she would start lecturing him, so he started collecting the cards strewn about corpses of Devils as she began. “Fifteen years, and you paid no attention to the way the world around you works? It’s like you lived in Riacore the way you talk sometimes. Do you really not know of local policies in regards to incursions?”

  “Aside from getting the required credentials to cross borders and find a new portal that had a bounty, which was generally handled by guild administration or whoever placed the bounty, there was never a need to stick my nose where it didn’t belong.” He stopped himself from shrugging again as he perused another card, one that didn’t have the miasmatic taint to it. “That wasn’t my thing. I went where I was needed, did what I had to, and then got what I was due.”

  She stared at him, ignoring the card in his hand. “That makes you sound no better than a mercenary.”

  He stilled. “I kept busy to save people, Annabeth, to hopefully find intel that would allow me to save more people. Not because I wanted to hoard wealth and built a comfy, cozy dragon’s den. What I was doing, it secured important information and footholds in Riacore to create a stable supply of cards to train a fighting force that could survive the worst Riacore had to offer.”

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  And all that time, all that effort had amounted to nothing in the end. The very people he supplied betrayed everything he stood for. Commander Marlon had become Lucifer’s vessel and allowed the leader of the Devils to operate from Eyanora, free of shackles, free of Riacore’s restrictions. Right under Wyatt’s nose.

  He let out a harsh sigh. When she had disappeared, he had only become more frenzied in his efforts to find her killer and push deeper into Riacore, to put an end to it all. “I had a guild and all the support I needed to be effective, so no, I didn’t pay attention to an individual country’s policies. Guilds are independent organizations anyway, and the only thing that ties them to a country is their taxes. Aside from that, there was no reason to pay attention to local policies. Demiurge already had their own internal policies for responding to incursions, and we rarely fought over jurisdiction. None of that mattered to our goal, our mission.”

  She nodded. “Fine, fine. That’s only fair, though it bugs me out of principle you didn’t bother to further educate yourself on these kinds of things.”

  He scowled. “So that I can get roped into it all? So that my time is regularly wasted by bureaucracy and ineffective governance? I think not.”

  “Still…” She went quiet for a moment, her scrunched thinking face regarding him. “How many countries did you visit anyway?”

  That, he had to take a moment to think about. Eyanora was large. The continent they resided on, Abathys, spanned vast distances that would take months of hard travel. Long and hardy land, Abathys was in the center of the seven continents, and unless Riacore had offered him access through an exit, he had never stepped foot on other lands. He knew what everyone else did.

  The Twin Isles, Svana and Dorgan, to the east. He couldn’t remember which was more southern or northern, only that they existed. Northwest, a crescent land with a great sea between it and the Twin Islands and Abathys, named Onyrn. To the southwest, Frongord. As for the sixth and seventh continent, he’d never seen a world map containing them. Word had it they were on the opposite end of the world from Abathys. Only traders brave enough to venture tumultuous highwaters or rich enough to hire a high-end escort team through Riacore had ever witnessed more than two or three of any of the lands.

  As for Abathys, Wyatt had been all across its lands. “I lost count, then stopped paying attention.” He tried to recall his journeys, but found it difficult. “I’ve done so much, it all blends together.”

  “How much of that was… after I died?” she asked, her voice small and lacking that confidence she’d had previously when questioning. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  Even thinking about the five years following her death left his chest aching. He didn’t bother trying to find an accurate answer. “I couldn’t tell you. Those time were the worst of the lot. At least when you were around, things didn’t feel so miserable. I remember this one time I pulled your ass out of a whirlpool. You’d jumped into it because you thought it was a hidden gateway to a lost city of merpeople and wanted to go digging through their ruins and claimed some of them might still be active.”

  He continued to tell stories of times he’d stopped her from getting herself killed, and she’d laugh or grin wildly after each while he continued collecting cards. By the time he finished, he had a handful to choose from to slot in as his tenth and final card. Once he did that, his consciousness would be sucked into his inner world, where he’d undergo his Class Trial and hopefully pick up some kind of summoner class.

  “You…” Annabeth started. The mirth she’d shown as he’d spoken of their misadventures had dried up, and now she stared at him with a level of seriousness he didn’t expect out of her. “You did all of that for me, but how well did you really know me?”

  He stopped going through the cards lacking miasma and looked at her, long and hard. “I could tell you all of your favorite meals, when you preferred to sleep, the libraries you frequented, what mysteries truly piqued your interest. There was hardly a thing I didn’t know about you, but you never talked about your family. I never did find out where you came from, and I respected that privacy. Everyone has their secrets, and you’d made it clear that you wanted to keep yours, so I never pried.”

  She blushed, her rosy cheeks stirring up old feelings. The more they interacted, the more unbelievable everything felt. He’d let those feelings for her die, and they’d been torn open from the moment he’d seen her again, had tempted him continuously. But he'd also known that everything with Gabriel and his Double Awakening would be dangerous, and she wasn’t the same person he’d spent ten long years with.

  “Thank you,” she muttered quietly, staring down at her feet with her arms across her chest. “That means a lot.”

  “Can’t say I wasn’t interested though, but that was more because I wanted to know more about you. What shaped you to be the person you are,” he admitted, thinking of his own family.

  They had died to an incursion years from now and the town he’d grown up in had fallen to ruin, completely abandoned. Just another thing he aimed to change in this life. He had plenty of time to stop that from happening, even if he had to go to Riacore and find the Dungeon Region responsible.

  Two cards remained in his hand, the others stuffed in any pockets on his person and in every nook and crevice within either of the two packs where he could fit them. And even then, he’d resorted to stuffing them in his boots. He’d need to find a reliable card bank soon after everything was said and done with the incursion.

  Now, he’d narrowed his selection of cards down to two. Both had their merits and both were Manifest cards, because his previous fight with the Dire Imps had shown him a clear weakness in his current deck’s layout. If he couldn’t get his summons up and running and had to fight himself, which he often tended to do, even with his summons, he needed some kind of way to protect himself and neutralize a threat if he was caught without his summons or had to react to a threat faster than he could summon.

  Gods, I hope I get a summoner Class. He looked between the two options, not entirely satisfied with either. A greatsword or twin daggers.

  The greatsword’s oval border had three lines intersecting it to create the weapon’s frame, all blue. One flickered as if burning while the third was thicker, sturdier, more solid. The card likely had some kind of body enhancement while the sword was wielded and could draw on flames to for elemental damage. With these kinds of weapons, the enhancement was often some kind of strength-based boost to make the weapon less unwieldy.

  Still, it wasn’t at all his style.

  The twin daggers’ lines were a static-like blue and frayed at the points where it interwove with the others. Likely a lightning based element. But one of the others was more fluid and a less aggressive, vibrant shade of blue. Water, then. A strange mix to see from a Devil drop. He almost wished he’d been able to see the thing in action and tried to remember what had dropped it, but he’d collected dozens of cards from the fallen Devils. This one hadn’t stood out at the time.

  Wyatt waited a second and confirmed the activation of both elements across the twin daggers’ edges, then turned to Annabeth, offering her the greatsword. “I know it’s not really your style, but it seems the only thing fitting.”

  Her nose wrinkled as if she smelled something bad, then declined, waving the card away. “It’s fine. I’ll find something that fits my deck a little better.”

  “What, a greatsword with flames doesn't fit your flaming motif?” he said with a grin. He didn’t think she’d accept but had offered anyway. He’d only ever seen her use a whip, a chain and sickle, or flail. An odd combination, but he wasn’t one to judge.

  “Let’s find somewhere clear of corpses to settle down. It’s time I get my Class.” They didn’t have to go far to find another, smaller simulation chamber.

  One of the few private ones Demer had to offer to their high performers. When they stepped inside, Wyatt sucked on his teeth. Even though it was a different room, the familiarity of it to the simulation chamber with Malcolm, the survivors, and the ash of the fallen made his throat fall into his stomach.

  “When I start, I’ll need you to feed me Ambrosia every fifteen minutes or so,” he told Annabeth.

  “I’ve heard Class Trials can be long, but do you really think it’ll take that long?” she asked, clear skepticism in her words.

  “I’m not going to trust my Double Awakening to make this Class Trial normal,” he admitted, his nervousness carrying over into the way he rubbed his thumbs on the face of the twin daggers card. “Honestly, I have no idea what to expect. No matter how much I’ve looked into this part, I’ve never seen any record of what Double Awakened actually faced in their Class Trials. Only that they grew rapidly after they had their Class.”

  “Then I wish you the best of luck,” she said with a frown, opening her mouth to say something else, then snapping it closed just as fast. “Yeah, good luck.”

  When he slotted the twin daggers card into his deck, his status appeared before him. One of the few times the system provided it without access to a Registry.

  Wyatt Calloway | Archangel Gabriel

  Class: N/A

  Attunement: HolyIchor Hold 1: 0/42Ichor Hold 2: 112/250

  Deck Capacity: 10/10

  Class Trial available. Begin?