Back in the Tactician Trial, he'd used his spatial storage collar to tunnel his way down the cliff and into the base of the gorge. He'd had to create a tunnel on both sides of the canyon, which meant a heck of a lot of dirt.

Logan had no illusions that burying Mia under a mountain of dirt would kill her, but one thing was for sure, it would make him feel a heck of a lot better. It would also have the added effect of giving him time. If he positioned it right, the dirt should fall against the invisible barrier of his cell, piling up until Logan was cut off from view. That would hide him while he experimented.

And escaped.

Logan hadn't forgotten that Mia had mentioned that there was another array. Lachlan's business card had given Logan the willpower to use the drugged water to resist the effects of her mind manipulation skill, which had forced her to deploy what she'd termed her 'lesser array.' Lesser meant that it had vulnerabilities. He'd already tried pummeling the hell out of the invisible wall to no effect, so durability wasn't its weakness.

The walls surrounded him on all sides, forcing him into a compacted box. Glancing up, he could already see the faint glow of the cell's ceiling. There would be no escaping that way.

But the floor… the floor was another story.

This was the difficult part of his strategy. He needed to test this without Mia being aware that anything hinky was happening. For all he knew, his theory was wrong, and the forcefield was underneath his feet after all, just buried deeper underneath the ground.

"Well, that didn't work," Mia said with a frown.

"He stole my knife!" Charlie said with a scowl. "That was my favorite!"

Mia smirked. "You'll get it back once we kill him."

Charlie paused and then a hint of greed shone from his eyes. "I knew he had a spatial storage pouch. To fit my knife, it must be C Grade at least."

"There you go. I know you weren't excited by the bounty, but that has to be worth something, isn't it? You could give it to Lily."

Charlie's face bloomed with color. "Do you think she'd like it, then?"

Mia smothered a grin. "I know I would if I was her."

"Yeah, but you're… you. Lily's a nice girl."

Mia's face went blank. "What's that supposed to mean?"

He blanched. "Oi, not like that! I just meant that there's a reason that you're our leader. You took to this System stuff like a duck to water. Whereas Lily… well, she likes fashion, you know? Designer purses and all that girlie stuff. She'll say that the System pouches will cramp her style."

Her face was still blank. "If that's the case then you might want to consider your choices. Someone who isn't excited by a spatial storage pouch isn't going to help you advance, Charlie. My right hand represents me; the people look to you for guidance. If you make stupid decisions because you're led by your—"

"Oi, there's no call for that! You…"

Christ, maybe he didn't need a distraction after all. They'd created the distraction themselves.

Making sure that Mia and Charlie were focused on each other and not looking at Logan, Logan peered at the ground and examined his prison. He was standing on a street; the ground was asphalt—smooth asphalt, so removing a scoop of earth without them noticing would be impossible.

Hmm. But why did it have to be a scoop? While they were fighting, Logan willed out a bucketful of sand and deployed [Mimicry Armour] to reform his suit. He doubted the armour would be useful once Mia turned her attention to him and forced him to collapse it, but that wasn't his purpose.

He needed the facemask to cover his face and obscure where he was looking.

Logan needed to do this quickly. His shoulders tense, his pulse racing, Logan crossed his arms as if he were bored. He kept facing forward while behind his facemask, he peered at the corner of his prison.

This next part was the most important.

Logan focused on that corner, but envisioned scooping up only a handful of material. The size of a soup spatula. Concentrating, he willed it inside of his spatial collar. There was a slight resistance, hardly anything, really, and a sound like a crunch, gravel grinding against gravel, but the sound was so faint that it passed underneath the radar of Charlie and Mia's chatter.

A surge of excitement made him smile underneath his facemask. Logan remained standing in place as if nothing had happened, but behind his mask, he stared at that faint missing piece of asphalt. This time, he envisioned taking the same scoop, but directly underneath the first. He formed a narrow hole like a mousehole… a pothole that you would never think twice about while walking down the street. He went slowly at first, afraid of the dirt underneath the asphalt caving in and creating too much noise, before he increased the pace of his scoops when nothing happened.

Scoop after scoop, Logan drilled a narrow line directly underneath him, going what had to be ten feet. That had to be enough.

If there was a forcefield underneath his feet, there was no way it was any deeper than ten feet. That meant he was in the clear. His 'cell' had a fatal flaw. For someone with a normal spatial storage device, it wouldn't have created a problem. Most people couldn't use their bare hands to dig through asphalt anyway. But to someone like Logan, who could will an entire house inside of his spatial storage collar, the floor might as well be an open doorway.

Now, he just had to distract Mia enough so that she didn't realize that he could escape before she overpowered him with her mental manipulation skill.

That meant the mountain of dirt.

But still, there was one more problem.

Voss.

For the dirt to be effective against Mia, he'd need a massive amount, and Voss was in the direct path. Somehow, he needed to get him clear without alerting Mia and Charlie that he was doing anything suspicious.

"…you know that she just needs the motivation. You'll see, she—"

"Hey," said Logan, inching closer to the front of the invisible forcefield.

Charlie gave him a glance. "Eager for more, huh, mate? Wait your chance and we'll give your beheading another go!" Charlie turned away from him and back to Mia to resume their conversation.

Like hell.

Logan slammed his fist against the wall. "HEY!"

"What?" snapped Charlie.

Logan gestured with his chin at Voss. "He's about ready to keel over. Give him some bandages so he can wrap his hand."

Mia sneered. "We don't carry around bandages. Only someone with a weak constitution attribute needs them. Besides, why should I care about someone without a frigging hand? He'll be useless to us."

Stolen novel; please report.

"Voss upped his constitution attribute by ten. He didn't lose his hand; it's healing as we speak. But there's no reason for him to walk around with a raw wound. I see you weren't lying about that pharmacy… it's just a few doors down. Let him get bandages."

Mia tilted her head and gave him a once-over, staring from his facemask to his armour covered feet. "What's your angle?"

"What?"

"You're trapped. You know I'm trying to kill you, and instead of pleading for mercy and trying to sell me on letting you go, you're asking for bandages for a level 39 user? What's your deal?"

"My deal?"

"There has to be a play here that I'm not seeing."

For all her power, Logan was starting to suspect that Mia had commonalities with Matt. Her age. Her immaturity. And a warped, cruel personality that gave her pleasure in killing people like Lachlan.

"There's no play. I like Voss, and I think he got a raw deal here. He's in pain, and I'm trying to help. What's there to understand? Come on, I know you have people other than Charlie who are following you. Those soldiers aren't guarding your complex on their own initiative. You have to know that surrounding yourself with good people is the key to success. Voss did everything you asked, and more. He's standing there, not saying shit in his own defense, letting you do whatever you want while he's in agony. You'd want to keep someone like him around you. You'd want his loyalty. What's a little bandage in the scheme of things?"

Mia snorted. "So you're saying that you know that I'm going to kill you, and you're worried about bandages for some asshole that you've known for less than a day?"

"Yes."

She put her hands on her hips, her book jutting out of her waistband. "How did someone like you get to be rank number two in the world?" Mia flipped her ponytail. "Something here's not computing, Charlie. Something's not making sense."

Charlie shifted and touched his knife sheath with the missing knife, his mouth pursed. "So let's just kill him. Mystery solved."

Mia stared into Logan's eyes. "No, I think he's right, mate. Go take Voss to the pharmacy, will you? Get him those bandages?"

Shit. Logan had wanted to get Voss out of the impact zone, but he'd been hoping to take out Charlie at the same time as Mia. Although he was high leveled, that much dirt coming down all at once might have been too much for him, killing him in one shot. If he went with Voss to the pharmacy, that meant that Logan would still have to deal with him once he escaped.

Oh well, it's not like he was someone that Logan couldn't handle.

Charlie glared at Voss. "Mia—"

"Do it," she said, her voice hard. "I want to have a little chat with Idiot here, high ranker to high ranker."

"Fine," Charlie said, his smoker's voice rough as he walked over to Voss, his footsteps louder than they needed to be. "Come on, weakling, you heard Damsel. Let's get you those bandages."

Voss straightened from leaning against the wall of the building, his lips pinched. "I appreciate the fact that Logan wants to help, but I'll be fine until we return to the complex."

"Oh yeah?" said Charlie. "And do you know how long that's going to take? Because I don't. That knife should have gone in his chest and out the other side. No, this one's got something else that might keep us here longer than we want. And he's right. Least we can do is try to make you comfortable."

Charlie smiled. "On first glance, we might seem rough and hard, but once you get to know us, you won't find a better group. Damsel has decided that you're worth keeping around, which means that here on out, it's all gold, mate. We'll get you healed up, and then you can start profiting just like the others."

Voss's gaze lingered on Lachlan's body. He gave Logan one last lingering glance and then followed Charlie down the street.

Logan felt his tension ratcheting up. He watched them, each step down the street closer to when Logan would hit the trigger on his spatial storage collar. As soon as they stepped through the doorway of the pharmacy, there was nothing stopping him from slamming a mountain on top of Mia's head.

Mia approached the invisible wall and gave him a smile, her nose scrunching. "This is your own fault, you know."

That was rich. "Oh?"

"I wouldn't have done this if not for the bounty. You were a bit of a drongo, mate, weren't you? Whatever you did to deserve that must have been the shit. Well, satisfy my curiosity, then? I don't want to be on the System's shit list. What did you do?"

"Do?" Logan asked, distracted. Charlie and Voss were two doors away from the pharmacy.

"To piss off an alien. I haven't had the chance to meet one yet, and there's you, getting yourself put on their murder list. What's your secret?"

The pharmacy door had just swung shut behind Charlie and Voss.

"My secret?" said Logan. "I like to kill the hell out of shit." Concentrating on the mass of dirt and rocks inside of his spatial collar, Logan focused on the air fifty feet above Mia. There's a good place for it, just there, he commanded his spatial collar.

There was a rumbling noise, like thunder. A sound so ear splintering that it made the ground shake. And then as if a massive spaceship had just flown over them, casting a shadow and blocking the blue sky and the glare of the sun.

"What…?" Mia had just enough time to say, before she screeched, two football fields worth of dirt piling on top of her as if Logan had just blown up a mountain top.

Up against the ceiling of his invisible cell, dirt clattered against it like rain, before the mass spread over top of it until there was nothing but brown covering him in darkness. Against the invisible wall, so much crap had fallen it had buried Mia to the point where Logan could see nothing but dirt and earth.

No time. His nerves surged as he focused on the ground underneath him. He had seconds, a minute at most before she dug her way out of that dirt. He needed to do two things at once. Find something that he could use to cause himself pain if he ended up under Mia's spell again, and haul ass to tunnel out of here until he left the effects of the cell behind so he could deploy [Threshold Shift].

As for pain, there was only one thing that had managed to cut through his armour and cut deep into his chest, causing more pain than should be possible with [Idiot's Paradox].

The aura emitting metal that Matt had used in one of his traps at the cabin.

Logan had noted its strangeness, threw it inside of his spatial collar, and then promptly lost the plot as his anger had exploded when he'd realized that Matt had managed to get a hold of the other Pink Sock and gain access to his Tree Fridge. He'd been running his ass off since then, not having time to even scrub his face and eat, let alone examine the strange metal. But one thing he did know was that it had caused him pain, and he needed pain now if he wanted to avoid Mia's mind tricks.

Willing it out of his spatial collar, Logan blinked at the glinting metal. It looked like shrapnel, about ten inches long, the width the size of his sword. It radiated an aura that had to be System sourced, and its edges looked sharp as hell. Collapsing the armour around his left leg, Logan ground his teeth and then jabbed the end of the metal into the meat of his upper thigh.

Oh fuck!

It felt like a million teeth had clamped down on his leg, sending shooting pain into his nerves as if acid had been injected into his bloodstream. It was all he could do to hold back a scream. Swaying, he clutched the invisible wall with one hand and gasped, feeling like he couldn't get enough air.

Ding!

[Idiot's Paradox is level 29!]

Good enough. Grimacing, Logan left the metal strip in his leg, the sounds of falling dirt still around him.

Concentrating on the ground, he willed a barrel full of material inside of his spatial collar. He dropped like a stone and fell into the hole, but Logan didn't give himself a second to get his bearings. Scoop after scoop, he drilled into the ground until his next drop put him over top of what must be a city sewage pipe. It was so large it covered the whole hole, no maneuver room on either side.

Not another sewage pipe! Just thinking about the stinky snail made him want to gag.

Logan was out of the cell, and this had to be far enough away from the forcefield for him to portal the hell out of here.

Focusing on a point beyond the pharmacy, Logan deployed [Threshold Shift] and sent himself a block down the street. With a gasp, Logan looked around, a dust swarm swirling around his head, his facemask keeping the dirt away from his eyes.

He was on the street.

He'd materialized where he'd wanted. Plastic crunched underneath his boots as he faced the way he'd came. Dirt continued to fall from the sky in a mini avalanche, making it difficult to breathe and see.

A bell jingled. Charlie stumbled out of the pharmacy, his mouth gaping and his eyes wide. He blinked in place in stunned surprise, before he narrowed in on Logan. "What did you do?!"

Farther down the street, the dirt had piled up in front of Logan's invisible cell and formed into a hill. Not quite a mountain, but so large that it reached the top of the three-story buildings on either side.

Logan looked down at the metal sticking out of his leg. It throbbed in time with his heartbeat, agony shooting through his body like his nerves were on fire. His sword was in his hand, and he'd formed his talons into weapons. His mouth was dry, anticipation and anger surging.

He tightened his grip on his sword. He was as ready as he could be… except for one last thing.

With a blink, Logan removed the Cursed Rope from his spatial collar.

With a crackle of blue electricity, the rope swelled in size and darted through the air, the dust acting like static. Too much put away, too much put away.

Sorry, Rope, responded Logan. It was necessary. But now it's your time to be free. There's a pest that we need to defeat. I want you to fly at her and keep her distracted. You won't be able to defeat her on her own, but that's not your purpose. Spray your acid, get in her face.

Distract the fuck out of her.

The rope can be good, sent the Rope, the rope will obey.

Before Logan could say anything, there was another crackle like thunder, but this one came from down the street. Something exploded out of the hill, dirt flying everywhere, and an eerie screech made his ears bleed.

Mia.

The mountain had buried not just her, but one of the streetlights. Mia was using her skills to lift it up in the air. With dust streaming off her hair and clothes, she balanced on top of it as if it were a tightrope.

She was flying.

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