"Has there been any movement from the Drathan?" asked Adam as he entered the room.

Around their large meeting table were the usual leaders. They had the military contingent with analysts and coordinators, led by Colonel Davian and General Carmichael. There were the Sentinel Army leaders, which was a little light this time due to most of Adam's friends and unit leaders standing by under the Drathan area. Only Lucas and Brittney had arrived while Adam led Golgarn to the workshop.

Finally, there were the civilian leaders, which included Detective Ron Baker, Adam's parents, people from the former mayor's office who had been involved since the beginning, and a few others.

Everyone looked at Adam with a variety of expressions, since he just burst in and disrupted the in-progress meeting.

"I heard you've given us more enemies to worry about, boy," said General Carmichael sarcastically. "I'm sure we told you to tread lightly."

Adam gave him a stormy gaze. Usually, Adam put up with his open hostility, not overly caring as long as he didn't cross any lines and continued to support humanity's resistance efforts. This time, Adam was already feeling the pressure. It was a sign of his control that he didn't lash out or have the inner voice demand he conquer the man.

"That possibility was shot as soon as they learned I didn't have a class or level," stated Adam with enough anger that Carmichael didn't retort.

"But wasn't the cause when Tom…" started one of the analysts.

Adam immediately interrupted while dismissively waving his hand.

"Tom might have egged them on, but he didn't cause it. I think he escalated things on purpose so that we would know how they'd react to us. If we had tried to continue being friendly despite their disapproval of me, then they might have invaded our territory while we were trying to work with them.

"By forcing a conflict between me and their leader, they know we won't be an easy defeat. It also showed part of their hand, which I'm glad I know about in advance."

"The power borrowing?" asked Ron.

"Yes," answered Adam. "If we do get into a fight with them, we need to target their lowbies first to make sure they don't empower the top. Although, even without borrowing power, if those Tier 4s gain many levels, they'll probably be able to hold me back or beat me outright. We need to step up our leveling so we can make the invaders think twice."

"And for that, we need to beat those Drathan," agreed Davian. "How did the power borrow work? Was it a skill?"

Adam thought about it for a moment, remembering when the Archbishop had done it. There hadn't been a flash of his skills. Instead, it was a glowing symbol on each of the Adherents' wrists. The glow had been white, not red like other skill activations.

"Now that you mention it, it didn't seem like a skill. It looked more like runes embedded in their bodies."

"If that's the case, is there a chance of us being able to do it too?" asked an analyst.

Brittney spoke up. "Even if the runes are usable by us and other non Juungii races, there must be some reason the others don't use it. Maybe there is a backlash after it, or a sacrifice of levels. Maybe even the weaker ones lose the ability to level, as far as we would know."

"I have no doubt we'd be able to find people to accept those consequences if it meant we could be more powerful as a group. If we could get the runes," said Carmichael.

"My examples were just guesses. For whatever reason, other races don't, or can't, share power."

"I'll ask both Lashtam and Golgarn what they know about it later," said Adam. Then he realized it was odd for Lashtam to miss the meetings. "Where is Lashtam?"

"Lashtam is spending time with Ashtala," said Davian. "He said he wanted to be there."

"Is something wrong with Ashtam?" asked Adam, a bit concerned. He hadn't seen her in a while. He even felt guilty that he hadn't thought about it, prioritizing all the soul research and fighting over his odd family. Whenever he asked the other girls, they didn't seem concerned and said everything was fine, which allowed him to compartmentalize the topic. With a shake of his head, he continued. "No, don't worry about that. I'll find out shortly. Let's get back to this group's matters."

"Who is Golgarn?" asked Carmichael.

"His race is Unklarn," answered Adam. "We had him sign an employment contract with the Sentinel Army. He has been crafting for a long time and should unlock a lot of runic and materials knowledge for us."

"Why did he come here?" asked an Analyst.

"His base was taken over by our acquaintance Sgolkr," said Adam with a wry smile. "That bastard evolved to the fourth tier and is forcing the Unklarn to create an armory for him."

Davian put a hand on his forehead and sighed. "Another enemy coming for us?"

"As if the Drathan and Juungii weren't enough," grumbled Carmichael.

"Just because the other races haven't attacked us yet doesn't mean they aren't already our enemies," said Brittney with an edge.

"The Juungii might be strong, but they don't want their own casualties or lost XP through deaths," interjected Lucas. "I doubt they'll swarm us without a plan to keep their forces safe. We just need to set up enough patrols and reinforcements to hold them off if they come."

"That won't be easy," said Carmichael, "since most of our forces are on the other side of Tennessee to face the Drathan. Two of the four strongest races, according to your…" Carmichael paused and made sure Tom wasn't in the room before emphasizing the next word, "…rabbit people, and they are attacking from opposite sides of our hard to travel territory."

"How would you handle the situation prior to the [System]," asked Brittney.

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"We would pull our forces back and centralize them as much as possible so both fronts can work together. The way all this territory and lockdown work, we can't really do that anymore," answered Carmichael.

"How are the defenses set up?" asked Adam curiously.

Davian responded. "Without the Rift Menu we can't make any more rifles, so we had to take some from the south and north. We now have twenty with the group watching the Drathan. There have been a few flying scouts, but most were shot down. The situation is tense among our troops, not knowing when they will attack. If not for vitality reducing the amount of sleep people need, we would have a lot of people running on exhaustion and stress."

"This might be dumb to say," said Adam, "but I hope the Drathan get on with it before the Juungii attack."

"I think that's likely," said Jordan Lane's voice. "If the Juungii care about their people, and they saw that Adam didn't hesitate to attack them to stop the power transfer, then it is unlikely they will do that in a battle of armies."

"Oh, Mr. Lane?" asked Davian. "What do you think they will do then?"

"The answer should be obvious. They can permanently transfer levels. That way they get their lower-level forces to attack bases and collect XP, then boost their elites. They can manufacture more Tier 4s or just move the ones they have closer to Tier 5."

"That sounds devastating," commented Adam's mom.

"No doubt!" exclaimed Jordan. "It's the opposite of power leveling, where the strongest get levels for the weakest. In this case it's the weak empowering the strong. It's more like insects that use drones, or a terminal network."

"What is a terminal network?" asked Brittney, unsure of the reference.

"Back in the early development of computers, when they were being developed for businesses, you would have a single computer that ran all the programs," explained Jordan. "The monitors and keyboards that people used would connect to the one computer, with the terminals only being setup to access the main server. That way all the computing power was centralized."

"What was the benefit of what?" asked Lucas.

"Computer parts were very expensive, fragile, and things could go wrong a lot. Software also couldn't communicate well. Setting up their own computers at the terminals would have caused a lot of problems. It was much easier to manage and support a single location instead of spreading out all the effort.

"Of course, once personal computers were developed, and networks were more standardized, it allowed us to break from the terminal network model. The interesting thing is that even though the networking models kept changing, we kept returning to the model that used a centralized computer or server. Colleges and universities did it for security and licensing reasons. Businesses did it for data security and protection. Even the internet and web servers were based on this model. The web browsers were the terminal, and the websites were the centralized page creators and distributers."

"That's all very interesting, I'm sure, Mr. Lane, but can we get back to…" said Carmichael before Jordan's voice overtook him. There was an excitement in Jordan's explanations, showing that it really did interest him a lot. The analysts seemed to already know all this while the decision makers were uninterested. Only Brittney was listening attentively.

"There are also a lot of other computer networking models, some that had their time and faded, or those used in tandem with the main models. If the Juungii are using a terminal model, then everyone else seems to be using the personal computer model. We're all running our own programs, or classes and skills, and updates on our own time."

"Would it be more efficient if we used the terminal model?" asked Brittney.

"I'm not sure about that," said Jordan. "Both ways have advantages. It would lessen our variety of abilities. By concentrating the XP at the top, it would also crush our force if that person were to be killed. Unplugging a server renders all the terminals useless.

"Maybe if we had a way to incorporate a raid array," continued Jordan, "where several hard drives and processors are run in tandem for redundancy. One takes over as soon as another fails, although I'm not sure how you could split the XP like that."

Jordan was really on a roll, fueled by Brittney's interest.

"Doesn't the [System] make all that obsolete anyway?" asked Brittney.

"We don't know how the [System] is set up. Is it sentient, or is it like an AI, still following its programming? It might even be a server cluster, where instead of the network computers duplicating responsibility, they all have an individual function, only running part of the whole.

"These were used often prior to multicore processors, when powerful chips would overheat easily. To keep the heat down and the chips from breaking, they would set each networked computer to share the overall load. One might work as the memory cache, another for the storage of written information, more could be database servers while others ran the distribution programs and backups."

Suddenly Adam stood from his seat violently. The throne slid backwards, but Adam's eyes were on fire. No one had even thought he was paying attention, but clearly something caught him.

"Jordan!" he snapped. "Overheating? Storage space? Different purposes?"

"W-what? D-did I say something wrong? I must have been rambling. Just ignore it. I'll just be quiet now, sorry," stuttered Jordan, his voice diminishing in volume. Even watching the meeting through a display, he could see the intensity Adam was showing at such an unrelated topic.

"No! Explain the clusters to me!" ordered Adam as a growl rumbled in his throat.

"W-well, back when the internet was spreading, servers weren't powerful enough to handle all the page requests for large sites. The software to balance the requests between redundant servers wasn't very good. So, they would connect several different servers together and each had its own purpose. One would receive the page requests and send them to a computer that could build the pages. Another computer would run the database, while a final one was where all the physical memory and cache was. The different computers all had different purposes and software but ran together to achieve their goals."

"Like an anime gestalt robot," added Brittney with amusement.

"Each computer served a different purpose to prevent each from having too much load," contemplated Adam softly, while looking at the ceiling. The mood he gave off, the level of thought he was putting into it, caused everyone else to be quiet as well. They weren't sure what was happening, but no one wanted to interrupt it, even Carmichael.

"Do you think the people with classes in the [System] could do something similar?"

Adam asked the question rhetorically, but there seemed to be something deeper to his thoughts than anyone else could guess at.

"Honestly, I'm not sure how that would work, Adam," said Jordan hesitantly. "It would be more like a bunch of people having the same class, with each only able to use one or two skills from the class. That would create an easy model to defeat and would waste a lot of resources."

Adam's skin began to turn red and the air warmed. He stayed staring into nothing. After a few minutes, all of the people in the meeting looked in confusion at each other or gestured for an explanation. Davian coughed pointedly.

"Adam, is this something we should discuss?"

Adam's eyes snapped to Davian's, and the colonel jumped in his seat. There was something different than fury in them this time.

"I have to go," said Adam in a rush. "Let me know if something happens. Otherwise, try to find some way up to the floating base."

Adam took two long strides towards the door before Brittney used [By Your Side] to block his path.

"I felt that, Adam! You've only had that emotion once since we've set up the connections. You're about to do something dangerous, aren't you?"

Adam stared down at Brittney, meeting her eyes. They both looked intently, but Adam seemed unsure of what to say. Instead, his mother was the one who spoke.

"What emotion?" Mrs. Clemens asked.

"Hope!" said Brittney curtly. "The only time he felt hope was after he unlocked his [System] status. Then he went and was captured by our enemies."

"He has a status?" Lucas exclaimed while jumping onto his own feet. "You didn't tell us that, Adam."

Adam looked up at him awkwardly. "I didn't mean to keep it from you. The girls know I have one but not what's on it. I think it's safer for everyone if they don't know."

"Are you sure that's the reason you didn't say?" asked his mother.

"Yes, mom, and just now I thought of something else I can't share. I need to go. Now!"

"Adam! Is…it…dangerous?" asked Brittney, emphasizing each word.

Staring down at her, Adam nodded. Then he said in a whisper, "It's the only hope I have."

Before Brittney could say anything else, Adam kissed her, blocking her mouth.

"I'll be back," he said and rushed past Brittney towards the door.

She watched him leave at practically a run. Her own expression was morose.

"But how long will you make us wait this time?"

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