The Losers had spent most of the morning inspecting the dungeons controlled by the Unfocused faction. Billy and Bob had shapeshifted into Unfocused Imperials, while Jenna had shrunk to Barbie-doll size and hidden inside one of Billy’s pockets.

  Although the Unfocused faction was technically their ally now, Eleon had advised them to keep their presence a secret.

  “We have spies inside their camps, so we must assume they have spies in ours as well. For this crazy plan of yours to succeed, the fewer people who know about it, the better,” he explained.

  “What do you think, Bob?” Jenna asked.

  Bob pondered for a moment before answering. “The information Eleon has provided is basically accurate. Each dungeon has a different Core, which determines the type of fauna that inhabits it. However, from a geographical point of view, they are all practically identical, consisting of a central landmass surrounded by a circular body of water that behaves like a river, even though it should not.”

  “They all share the same sky, with the same stars in it. If we do this at night, we can pinpoint exact locations in the dungeons by navigating using the sky,” he continued.

  “Just to recap,” Jenna said, “for this plan to work, we must place two objects inside each of the nineteen dungeons: one Symbiotic seed and one dimensional beacon. The seed is simple enough; it will function as long as it is inside the dungeon when it implodes. We just need to ensure that each one is placed where it won't be found.”

  “The tricky part will be positioning the beacons. For our plan to succeed, we must treat all dungeons as sharing a single perimeter, placing each beacon equidistant along it,” Jenna explained.

  “We should anticipate danger when teleporting to any beacon except the Unfocused ones. We should consider those as rest areas, and distribute them accordingly along the circumference.”

  “And each beacon must be placed physically inside its dungeon. As I am the only one with no shapeshifting powers, I will take care of the Unfocused ones,” Jenna concluded.

  “I will do the Committed, as we agreed,” continued Bob. “I will design the perks I need this afternoon.”

  “I will take care of the Fluids,” said Billy. “I will have to use Revenant to steal the shape of one of them, though. Whisper alone is just not going to cut it.”

  Bob spent the rest of the afternoon in Discovery’s laboratory. He decided to use as a base form one of the Committed that Pob and his team had slain the day before.

  It resembled a floating manta ray, featuring vertical slits filled with teeth along its lower body and a large central eye at its abdomen. He had plenty of time to study the corpse. Impersonating a dead Imperial was an advantage as well; there was no chance of encountering his model in real life.

  The downside was that none of his Fleshshaping perks would allow him to imitate such an exotic form.

  The good news, however, was that he could now use Alchemy to enhance his perk-creating process. He had stored most of the exotic alchemical ingredients that he obtained from the Secret Mountain. Discovery’s laboratory was of top-notch quality.

  He spent the next eight hours carefully crafting a highly specialized potion, equivalent to a Rank 3 perk. The base ingredient for this potion was the sap of magical bamboo, which had a strong connection to shapeshifting magic.

  Potion of the Fluid Form (Tastecraft 3) This potion requires the sap of Evershifting Bamboo as its main ingredient. Its effects last for one hour for each hour spent crafting it. While under the influence of this potion, all perks ranked three or below that are based on Fleshshaping, or that require Fleshshaping as a prerequisite, are researched as one rank lower.

  He needed at least two rank-three perks to make the form credible. If he acted under the effects of the potion and concentrated solely on alchemy, he could create one in four hours.

  After sixteen straight hours—eight to brew, eight to sculpt—Bob emerged with two specialized perks.

  Shape of the Manta (Fleshshaping 3) Over the course of one minute of concentration, the user may shapeshift into a form similar to Oltra, the Committed. He may only perform actions that Oltra’s anatomy would allow.

  The transformation is perfect and will fool all physical senses.

  Locking the transformation to a specific form significantly reduced its rank.

  Manta Gliding (Athletics 3): While in the form of Oltra the Committed, the user may glide through the air at will, much as Oltra does.

  This last one was clearly another example of a convergent perk, which used a previous perk from another skill as a prerequisite, lowering its final rank.

  Now, he could shapeshift into a form that could fly, just like Billy did in his gryphon form.

  Bob berated himself; he should have thought of this first. Flying would not only be helpful but also incredibly cool.

  Then, he remembered that he hadn’t had a free moment since Activation Day, so he decided to forgive himself.

  Billy waited in his hiding spot, which Jenna had calculated was statistically more favorable to his plan.

  “Get ready; it is coming near,” he heard Jenna’s voice through their blood link. How did she know it was approaching? She wasn’t even present. But sure enough, there it was.

  Billy saw a shifting shape moving along the facade of the building in front of him. It looked like an ovoid creature with eight legs sprouting from it, clinging to the walls like a spider sprinting at phenomenal speed.

  In terror, he screamed to draw its attention and ran away, clutching something precious in his right hand—a progression core. The Fluid detected it from its perch and leaped to the floor, pursuing Billy with the speed of a cheetah. There was no way Billy could escape.

  Not that he wanted to.

  He exploded as soon as he felt the alien limbs grabbing him from behind. He materialized inside the Blue Room and read the prompt from his respawn module.

  You have just slain a Fluid Explorer with Three Evolutions. Do you want to use your Revenant power to assume its shape? Doing so will permanently add this form to your Akashic Library.

  Cost: 500 achievement points per Evolution.

  Activate Revenant? Y/N. You have one minute to decide.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Billy noted that each Evolution was roughly equivalent to ten Avatar levels.

  He decided to buy the complete package for 1,500 achievement points.

  The alchemical pills they had created enabled him to keep acquiring achievement points, even in Belona, and the Essence Digestion ability would double the rate at which he collected them until he recovered the full price the Imperial had cost.

  He mentally pressed the button and respawned in the most alien form he had ever tried.

  Bob flew through the rift entry into the first of the dungeons he had been assigned. Flying in Oltra’s form was not at all like he had imagined it. It felt like sliding down a snowy slope, his tail steadying him and keeping him on course.

  Oltra gained altitude by glaring at the ground through the large eye in her abdomen, which emitted a low-energy kinetic pulse that propelled her upward. It turned out not to be a sensory organ, but a movement one.

  He had bumped into many buildings until he had discovered the trick. To complicate matters further, Oltra also had scores of diminutive eyes located along her superior side. The final effect was akin to trying to drive a bus with broken brakes down a steep incline while simultaneously watching fifty TV channels.

  Jenna tried to give him advice, feeling his panic through the blood link. She had learned from her time piloting Captain Beaky.

  “Just think where you want to go and let the body take care of the rest. I'll share a little visualization trick I used to control Captain Beaky: Imagine that the body you're in is Morgan Freeman, and your mind is Mrs. Daisy. Think of it that way; it helps,” she tried to calm him.

  “He has turned around and is looking at me, Jenna. He is not Morgan Freeman. He is Charlie Vanaugh!” Bob muttered, clearly afraid.

  Charlie Vanaugh was a Hollywood star known for his eccentricities. He mainly played action heroes and was famously known for once biting the ass of a stuntman during an action scene, just to make it more credible.

  Bob glided through the entry rift, unmolested by all the other Imperial Committed that were entering and exiting at the same time. He had chosen a high-traffic dungeon as his first stop. It was probably the Committed’s main headquarters and, paradoxically, the easiest one to infiltrate.

  This dungeon had an enormous Yggdrassil-like tree at its center, around which a massive caterpillar-like Core entwined itself like a scarf around a neck.

  Jenna did mental calculations, guiding Bob to the point above the river where he should drop the first dimensional beacon. He opened one of his numerous vertical maws, which were all filled to the top with different cores, giving him the strange sensation of having his own mouth filled with mothballs.

  The dimensional beacon fell on the desired location. They had covered it in lead, which both disguised its true nature and guaranteed it would move to the bottom of the river and stay there.

  Then Bob looked for a different spot in the ground and buried one of Morton’s symbiotic seeds. It did not really matter where he did it, as long as it remained hidden.

  Bob flew out through the rift again and glided over the Beli River, using its spatial distortion properties to reach his next target, another Committed dungeon, this time based on a bone graveyard and a hyena-like Core.

  Bob repeated the same operation three more times, without being challenged even once.

  “It is a piece of cake,” Charlie Vanaugh confidently told him from the driver’s seat at the front of Bob’s brain.

  “We shall see,” Bob answered demurely from the back of his mind, holding Mrs Daisy’s handbag close to him.

  Bob knew the last dungeon would be trouble as soon as his multiple eyes perceived it. It stood apart from the others and seemed to have been recently conquered, probably taken from another faction.

  There were plenty of Committed hovering near the entry, watching it.

  Bob decided he would use bravado to clear the entry. He flew through it imperiously, as if he could not be bothered to be asked questions.

  For a moment, he thought it had worked, but then he saw another committed, this one in the form of a thorn-covered Zeppelin, cross the rift, pursuing him and emitting chirping noises. He assumed it was demanding an explanation for Bob’s entry into an unsecured dungeon.

  “He must be some kind of overseer,” Charlie volunteered.

  “Want me to shake him off?” Mrs Bob mutely nodded, and his Committed body flew down among the forest, dodging between the trees.

  Charlie felt the need to give him conversation as he dodged Oltra’s strangely agile body among the trees.

  “I am very good at this. I do most of the car stunts in my own movies, got this scar on my chin doing…” he said, taking his eyes off the steering wheel to show it to Bob.

  Bob screamed in terror as they approached a large tree, which Charlie dodged at the last moment.

  “The stuntmen just love working with me,” Charlie confided as he dodged a never-ending series of trees, the Zeppelin still pursuing them.

  “I am not surprised. Didn’t you have to pay two million dollars to that guy you bit in the ass? He had to get a graft,” Bob answered.

  He immediately regretted it. It did not pay to give conversation to some Hollywood star with attention deficit disorder as he flew you through a forest.

  Charlie turned around, a huge smile on his face.

  “But did you see the movie? That fight scene just rocked. I gave it my all!”

  Bob screamed again as another tree appeared in their way.

  They finally gave their pursuer the slip. Bob buried the symbiotic seed among the trees and headed for the last river spot Jenna had triangulated.

  He dropped his last dimensional beacon in the precise spot and then heard a chirping noise behind him.

  Damn!- not only had the overseer found him again. It had witnessed him dropping a core into the river. The overseer totally ignored him and headed to the place where the core had been dropped, clearly trying to ascertain its nature.

  “You can’t let him live, you know that, don’t you?” Charlie asked him.

  “Shut up,” Bob answered, “you have no combat experience at all.”

  “I survived the Gulf War! And three sequels!” Charlie countered.

  “You slew your commanding officer in the second one,” Bob answered. “That does not fill me with confidence.”

  “Yes, yes, I had to do it, but I had just thought this beautiful one-liner, and he was the only one alive, so I had to blow his head off so I could say it…”

  Bob looked for a vantage point, listening to Charlie’s endless prattling.

  There! That knoll would do it.

  “...and as I was producing the movie, they had to use it…”

  Bob got distracted for a second.

  So that’s why Sergeant Rockbottom kills General Taylor after they survive the last Republican Guard wave in part two.

  Film critics are still wondering about that one.

  Enough. He could not do this with Charlie talking nonstop.

  Bob landed on the nearby knoll and assumed his true form. Charlie disappeared inside the folds of his mind.

  He took one single red pill from one of the pockets in his cloak.

  The Fiery Pill of Death (Tastecraft 3)

  Swallow this pill and get up +3 to the Fire Magic tertiary mind Stat for ten seconds. If you lack the stats to anchor it, it will transform into Magical Focus and Mind.

  Bob had a Mind Stat of +6, but no Magical Focus at all, so the pill granted him +2 Focus and +1 Fire magic.

  He shot a single fireball at the Zeppelin as it hovered over the river. It exploded into burning pieces as soon as the overcharged spell hit it.

  He had to get out of there. He was drawing too much attention.

  He regained his Oltra form and returned to the rift. This time, he used Veil of Shadows to become invisible just before crossing it.

  The ruse worked, and Bob left the dungeon behind without being chased.

  He returned to his true shape and contacted Jenna through the Blood link.

  “It is done,” he said. “All cores in position. How is Billy doing?”

  “Well, truth to tell, he is still trying to figure out how to make his Fluid walk,” Jenna answered.