"So if you restore based on your Intellect Attribute, how do you advance?"

Coyote winced. "Well, the System does that for us. We can't grow stronger outside of Union Central. There are some rules around advancement, but I don't know what they are. Some stuff about souls being ready and some stuff about how informational energy works. The System doesn't explain things very well. For real, I think it might be learning how it works alongside us."

Several of the kids glanced at the air as if wary of being overheard. This would be the first time any of them had been away from Union Central. The first time they were free of the universal surveillance of the System. They grew up knowing an invisible entity recorded every word they uttered and just recently learned that the thing was conscious.

After a time, they returned to the bunker with the working lights for the night.

Rather than rest, Hector used the One Minute Nap Technique again. He promised himself that he would sleep for real the following night. For now, he needed to restore his reserves. As he worked his externality, Hector wondered what was happening between Riley and Darius. He wasn't even sure what he wanted to happen there. Obviously Darius needed someone to ground him. The real question: would Darius drag Riley down with him?

He could delude himself all he wanted, but eventually he would have to face the truth. Darius didn't value his own life. At least not more than he valued his vengeance. Darius was like his father that way. Hector couldn't bare the thought of Riley being subjected to the same treatment as Khana. And no matter the benefits Hector had accrued from the Lord General, he knew the man castrated one of his own descendants to spite someone he already intended to kill. The man was a monster.

What a multiverse he called home. Sociopaths slaughtered innocent bystanders for fun and mutilated children to make a point. Meanwhile, cocky kids signed up to fight for humanity without concern for their own welfare. The gulf between what was right and what was felt painfully large and he lacked the power to bridge those two states.

Morning began when one of the guys flicked the light switch and jumped upon seeing Hector sitting with his legs crossed on the floor. "Shit, man, don't Xian sleep?"

"I try to do that once a week," he said.

The kid's eyes were wide as he backed away from Hector to wake up his friends.

Someone pulled out ration bars for breakfast. The kid who could duplicate templates made several sausage sandwiches before realizing interest in a repeat menu was limited. Hector continued his cultivation until everyone filed outside to do a sweep of the Stronghold. There were a few monsters inside, but none of them amounted to much.

Two scouts disappeared across the wall to get a read of the situation. Literally disappeared. Hector saw them fade from sight and mental sense like ghosts. He only assumed they went on their scouting mission because that was what they said they were doing.

Some of the others did patrols atop the wall. That was the more serious, less popular kids. Most of the others were busy chatting it up in a large gaggle down below. Hector climbed a tower and kept an eye on everyone while he cultivated. Almost everyone. He had no idea what the scouts were up to or if they even still lived.

With very little to occupy his attention, Hector studied the land around Stronghold Alpha. They were among the foothills of a large mountain. From what he could see, they were positioned along the only viable route up. He knew from the System that Alpha guarded a settlement at the top of a mountain, so presumably there was a community far above.

At the level of the Stronghold, it was mostly rolling hills. There were occasionally monsters visible in the distance, cresting those very hills. They didn't pay any particular attention to the human base or the mountain. The monsters were roaming in search of victims, strangely disaffected without a target to focus their hatred. Hector had grown so used to facing their violence and feeling the echoes of their malignancy. It seemed wrong somehow that the monsters weren't acting out their evil intent upon some victim.

He contented himself with his role of watching over the neophyte monster hunters. Maybe they would grow in experience and caution before he had to leave them. That would be nice, knowing that he hadn't abandoned a group of kids to their doom. Even nicer would be if they managed to impress him with their combat skills.

He would love to be wrong about them. If a swarm of Users could emerge from Union Central to take on the growing threats humanity faced, that would be a phenomenal development. Someone had to take responsibility for the multiverse. Hector was doing his part, but he was only one man. A man with a transit sphere instead of a weapon externality.

The return of the scouts raised a cheer from their peers, so Hector jumped down to see what they had reported. He did not approve of what he heard on approach.

"Giant lizard? More like dead lizard!"

"Let's get it!"

"How big?"

"Doesn't matter."

"Fucking fire, guys!"

Though he was late to their meeting, Hector could put together the details from the ongoing series of exclamations. A monster had been located. It was big. It was a lizard. The kids planned to kill it.

Hector attempted to interject with a pertinent question about whether this monster was on route to harass the mountaintop settlement they were guarding. It seemed obvious to him that if it wasn't a direct threat that they should simply observe to make sure that didn't change. The Reconquest stopped trying to regain territory years before Hector joined. Their current strategy was to hold what little still belonged to humans. Getting all the defenders killed help no one.

After things calmed down, the kids heard Hector out. Then they voted to attack anyway.

That was the predictable outcome. Just as predictable as the fact that Hector had to go with them to provide backup. Was this how people felt when he went rogue? If so, he might owe a number of people apologies. Though when he thought back on a lot of his adventures, Hector couldn't claim he would do much differently if given another chance. Obviously not take Riley to Tian. Or let Rodrick enter the dungeon during a wave. Everything else, though… he couldn't say he wouldn't do it again, not even the crazy bits. What was the alternative? Hiding until he was strong enough to face the dangers on his own? That would be expressing to the entire universe that he didn't care what happened to his own species. The pervasive pressure in his mind shifted at the thought.

The kids arranged themselves into two teams, neither of which would stay to guard the base. Team one would hit the monster from the front. If their enemy survived the initial attack, team two would hit it from the side. Should their target fail to fall, the plan was to keep attacking.

Or, as Hector summarized the plan to himself, the plan was for everyone on base to go after a monster that had no strategic value and keep attacking until either they or the monster expired. He'd seen his Arahant friends attack with less defined plans during his earliest days traveling the multiverse, but they at least had a level eleven Sage backing them. All these Users had behind them was Hector.

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They headed out of Stronghold Alpha, going over the wall since the base had no electricity to power the gate mechanism. The scouts led the way, directing everyone to zigzag downward between hills, passing through clouds of miasma lingering in the stale air. Their path took them to the bank of a river running black with filth.

In that river, what looked like a monitor lizard floated. Though it was hard to judge its size with so much of its form submerged, its exposed head and back were like a row of coal barges. Given its presence in the river, it was in no way a danger to the settlement they guarded.

One of the guys fired a silver lance at the lizard's eye without warning anyone.

A moment later the monitor lizard was flying through the air. Waves rushed free of the bank like a tsunami, endangering several of the Users. Hector waited until they started to be swept away before lassoing them with cables and pulling them back to dry land. Hopefully the close call would teach them caution.

Meanwhile, the lizard landed and began charging forward. The Users with the Lance Skill were spamming that attack. Others focused on mobility were moving people out of the monster's path. Hector was waiting in the wings for them to realize their mistake so he could take over.

The kids were coordinating plans with one another, using slang shorthand that Hector did not recognize. He heard 'casserole' and 'stacking' and 'deep dish'. A bunch of them gathered together directly before the charging monster, heads together in a huddle with no concern for their approaching doom.

Time to intervene. Hector flew forward, slinging a cable to take out the remaining eye of the monitor lizard. It hissed at the air but kept running straight ahead. Right at the gaggle of Users. They broke their huddle just in time to catch sight of the monster. As the screams of alarm began, Hector flicked all of them away with a swish of a cable, trusting that their Durability was worthy of the faith they placed in it.

Then he prepared to start the real battle. He hoped he wouldn't have to enter inside this monster. The advice of the Lord General to fight from a distance had not been forgotten. He just needed to figure out the best way to whittle down –

The ground where the group had been huddled exploded upward. Violent silver energy tore apart the head of the monitor lizard. It caught Hector as well, throwing him through the air in a dizzying spin to ricochet off the lizard body above him and then slam into the ground. He had just started to sit up when something blocked the light from above.

The corpse of the lizard hit Hector like a hundred thousand ton body slam, driving him deep into the tainted clay of the river bank. His breath left him and could not be reclaimed, forcing him to supplement his body with cosmic energy. Given the current state of his reserves, that was not going to be sustainable for very long.

Hector struggled to move beneath the vast weight. His twisted position, with face and arms to one side and hips and legs wrenched in the opposite direction, did not provide a good foundation to generate force. He suspected that his enhanced body would not be up to the task of shifting the vast monster even if he could get a solid base – the lizard was heavy as a skyscraper and empowered with a fell might that resisted foreign energy.

Liquefied miasma began to dribble down from the decaying corpse above, coating his entire body. Hector made an effort to use his domain but found the interference of the miasma too powerful. It appeared he would be stuck there until the flesh trapping him fully disintegrated. Hopefully his reserves would keep him alive that long. Or maybe the Users would dig him out first.

A sudden, intentional movement of the miasma tested his calm forbearance. A tentacle formed of the ichor attempted entry through his nostrils, forcing Hector to flare his aura for all he was worth. His efforts barely managed to stop the invasion. A second tentacle went for an ear. Another attempted to sodomize him. An envelope of the substance wrapped around his torso and squeezed with even more force than gravity already exerted through the corpse.

Laying there, utterly immobile, unable to breathe, attacked by tendrils, Hector began to panic.

Thoughts flitted through his mind. An overwhelming desire not to die. Regret for agreeing to relocate Users on behalf of the System. A momentary wish that he'd not flown close to help the kids.

It all whirled through him and left. He wouldn't have done otherwise. Couldn't have done otherwise. No matter the result of his past choices, he could not wish to have done differently because his life had to have meaning. And meaning required action.

Something within him settled into place.

Regrets or no, he still wanted out. He wanted away from the vile substance whose spiteful resonance was so hard to shut out. His softened resolve let whispers of it through. The all-consuming hate. It wanted him dead. Everyone, really, but in that moment him specifically.

It grew louder and louder, the miasma attacking him physically and conceptually at the same time. Death attacked Life. Destruction attacked Survival. Decay attacked Human Form. His insight encompassed neither life nor survival nor the human form. He could not efficiently contest those battles, only throw his limited will behind his mundane notions of what ought to be.

Meanwhile, another thread of the conceptual battle grew in prominence. The sheer volume of the spiteful hate shocked him. At that moment, he had no trouble believing the religion of the Yazata. Surely such incomprehensibly immense malice must belong to an evil god. Right then he truly believed that Tiamat hated all of existence with such fervor that she could strike from beyond death.

The miasma reveled in the battle. It wanted to end his existence, but it also wanted him to be corrupted into reflecting its hatred. The emotion grew hotter, like he stood before a blast furnace. The intensity brought forth flashes of relevant memories.

Seeing the heads of Darius and Annie, father and mother to Volithur, crumple in slow motion before brain and blood splattered free. Feeling the impotence as a younger Dorian brutally beat his dream counterpart. Screaming at the walls while trapped in involuntary closed door cultivation. The insidious thoughts of vengeance while imbibing uncut spirits. Striking at the Lord General. Receiving the news of a son's maiming. Desperately wishing to have never been while powering the Dream Engine.

The darkest, most potent memories from Volithur's waste of a life boiled forth, resonating with the spite around him. Bits of his own past reflected hints of the vitriol. The harshness he felt towards Jen when their marriage fell apart – how he'd convinced everyone, even himself, that she'd been unfaithful despite having no more than vague suspicions rooted in bitterness. The time, many years prior, that he almost killed her stepfather for past sins. His eruption when his coworkers tried to use his late starts against him when his father was dying. Facing constant racism as a Xian savage. Hearing about what had been done to Riley. Being tricked into a tournament where every participant would be processed into a platinum elixir. These stupid kids rushing into a fight that didn't need to happen, causing him to be where he was.

There were so many valid reasons for him to feel that same hatred.

No.

Something deep within Hector objected with a visceral passion. He'd struggled so hard to become a better man, to rise above the selfishness of his own nature and avoid the destructive path of Volithur. Faced with the antithesis of everything he sought to embody, Hector found his cultivation of virtue woefully insufficient. Moral exercise could never get him where he wanted to go. Nor, he understood in that moment, was it necessary.

The drive he felt since the end of the dreams came into focus like never before. All of his desires for his life to mean something more than the empty goals of accumulating wealth or training strength. It all became clear. He'd been driven to act because only actions could express meaning. Express intentions. He felt absolute certainty in his conclusions.

Pressure that had built for years finally found its release.

For the second time in his life, ultimate reality laid itself bare to him. He witnessed pure intent and its intersection with the topology of space. It was adjacent to his understanding of chaotic emergence, where specific actions could transform chaos into another form. What he experienced was only a tiny, infinitesimal corner of all that was, yet this glimpse exceeded what he'd inherited from Volithur by orders of magnitude.

His mind seized upon the shape of chaos bound to an intent. Hatred imbued into a twist of chaos yielded the dreaded miasma. The lingering resentment of a dead god. Such a spiteful substance. Hard and unyielding. Yet oh so fragile, he realized. Long ago, in his youth, a high school science teacher showed the class pieces of molten glass rapidly cooled. Those teardrop shaped glass shards were known as Prince Rupert's Drops. They were hard and durable in the extreme, immune to hammer strikes made to the main body. However, finger strength could easily snap the far end of the long tail, causing a chain reaction that shattered the entire piece of glass all at once.

The analogy was perfect. Something hard beyond belief but also exceedingly brittle.

You could not beat hate with hate. No. Spiteful attacks would play into the strengths of miasma. Hector wasn't motivated by spite. He wanted to improve the chaos that had been perverted through hateful intent. He wanted to transform it into something better.

As Hector admired the beauty of ultimate reality, he vaguely sensed the hateful liquid surrounding him shattering into pristine cosmic energy beneath the effect of his domain.

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