With James’s final task accomplished and time about to run out, his entourage gathered around him.
“What do you suppose we do now?” Zora asked quietly. “I can see the timer, and it looks like there’s not much time left. I wasn’t a Ruler when the first announcement came. Did you get any information that clarified how this happens?”
James shook his head. “I guess the System figures we know enough after Orientation to stick close to each other right now, and it’s go...
2025-08-08 22:29:22 +0000 UTC
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After a stretch of further preparations, including studying documents, choosing equipment, and creating new monsters—mainly preparations for the Victors Tournament, if James was really honest—the morning of the World Leaders’ Summit came.
“... so that’s the state of the invasion,” James said. “After a single day of battle, we restored peace, order, and security to most of Orlando, the beating heart of Central Florida. With my new powers, we will spread our kind of order to...
2025-08-01 17:00:15 +0000 UTC
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Once James was alone again—only Mina with him—he reviewed his new Talents and the resulting Skills.
[Imperial Presence: As an Emperor, your presence creates a deeper and more lasting impression than those of lesser Rulers. Your rule can be much more oppressive, or more liberating, than that of a lower tier of Ruler, depending on how you choose to use this influence. Generates Skills “Imperial Motion” and “The Sword of Law.”]
Always treating me as t...
2025-08-01 00:38:12 +0000 UTC
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“Thank you for rescuing us,” Alan said, bowing his head slightly as he stepped in front of James. He wore his gratitude with slight but visible discomfort, as if embarrassed to be in anyone’s debt.
“I promised to take care of you back in Orientation,” James replied, “and I promised to take care of everyone here when they swore their allegiance to me. It may have taken me a little while to get here, but I hope you know I keep my word.”
“Yes,” Alan replied...
2025-07-27 16:55:25 +0000 UTC
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The monster disappeared from in front of James, and he suddenly felt himself pulled in a new, downward direction.
Did he crash into the ground? What’s going on? James wondered.
At the same time that he had these thoughts, he sent a hurried series of instructions to Doppelganger, and James deactivated Invisibility. He wanted the monster to see him now—to think that James was weaker, running lower on resources, than he really was.
Let him believe I can’t mai...
2025-07-27 16:54:00 +0000 UTC
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Rosslyn felt nervously for the telepathic connection between herself and Adon.
To her relief, she immediately sensed the light touch of his mind on hers.
So, you are still alive, she thought very quietly. It felt slightly treacherous to even imagine that something might have happened to Adon, or that he could not handle the situation she had left him in.
But Rosslyn could not control that. She would never have been able to forgive herself if Adon died covering her r...
2025-07-22 18:25:14 +0000 UTC
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Adon braced for impact in his stretched out humanoid form, his body suddenly ten feet tall and four feet wide—slightly overemphasizing width in order to better conceal Rosslyn, running away behind him.
The butterfly had concealed and conserved most of his strength all that day and throughout the chase with the Gold-Digging Ants.
Now, as they converged upon him, he finally cut loose, employing the physical strength of the body Transformation had built for him, plus a healthy infu...
2025-07-18 13:00:11 +0000 UTC
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A monster confronted James, the likes of which he’d never seen before—and the likes of which he suspected Earth had never seen before, including before the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. It boasted long, sharp finger-length fangs growing from a head roughly the size of James’s upper body, a long, thick neck, two pairs of wings, six arms and two legs ending in razor talons even longer than its teeth, and a tail almost as long as the rest of the body.
Every inch of ...
2025-07-17 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Rosslyn tried to shield her eyes as she ran.
Adon noticed too late that the Princess had been almost fully blinded by the sudden brightness of the glowing violet crystals. He only recognized what had happened when Rosslyn smacked head first into a wall and almost tripped over her own feet getting away from it.
Shit, Adon thought.
I need guidance, Rosslyn thought at the same time.
“Adon?” she whispered.
The quick march of the ants’ feet was...
2025-07-17 03:28:33 +0000 UTC
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“Wait, James!” Mina exclaimed.
Her husband was taking off after having given her the gear he had Pillaged from the possum Ruler—a fur coat that he said would repel most physical attacks. She hadn’t taken the time to examine the item more closely. It was too warm for fur here, and the battle was all but over, anyway.
But he was leaving much too soon—and leaving her in charge of what could be a fairly delicate process.
“What is it, Mina?” he asked, already hoveri...
2025-07-16 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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The descent resumed.
Rosslyn climbed, and Adon flew or stood on her upper back.
The downward climb this time was much less eventful—no sudden, radical shifts in the weather—than it had been before. Even the walls of the canyon seemed more uniform, with fewer jagged rocks than there had been earlier.
The space they descended through did not have half-formed, collapsed dungeon floors breaking up the uniformity. It seemed that, down this far, the Dungeon Core had yet to imp...
2025-07-16 03:42:08 +0000 UTC
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Air Strike!
An invisible blade of Mana and wind slashed through the air until it reached the slug Ruler and sliced her soft body in half—and almost as quickly, she reunited her severed parts. Little tendrils from each chunk reached out and pulled the whole back together, and in the middle of reassembling herself, she gushed a counter attack in the form of a wave of bubbling slime that surged out of her left half.
James’s body dodged and evaded successfully, moving alm...
2025-07-14 17:00:10 +0000 UTC
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The vision faded out after that.
Luna explained that she had moved further away, as she was worried that the dinosaurs would notice her unfamiliar scent—or just as bad, Alan might see her and give her away.
Good decision, James affirmed. Now I just need to figure out how I can get away from here and help you.
Do whatever you believe is best, my King, Luna replied instantly.
He took a few seconds to consider his next steps.
I’ve ...
2025-07-12 02:14:51 +0000 UTC
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Who could have known the whole wasp force would start to self-destruct as soon as the leader died? James thought as he laughed. The sight of the enemies dying, tearing themselves apart, or simply standing down was rather absurd, considering how he had spent much of the fight trying to avoid being swarmed by the Wasp Queen’s devoted followers.
He finally shook his head and looked down at the corpse.
The Queen was pretty tough after all, James assessed. It to...
2025-07-10 03:37:53 +0000 UTC
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One moment, Claudius was a part of a charge, shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other men, about to clash with a loosely packed mob of possums.
The next moment, the furry creatures and the humans collided. Then Claudius was hacking and slashing at the monster nearest to him—and being slashed and bitten in turn by the possum-thing with its extra limbs and sword-like claws.
He managed to kill the first one with a stab through the throat—and a remarkable strength Claudius hadn...
2025-07-10 02:41:43 +0000 UTC
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As soon as James reached “one,” he threw a pair of Air Strikes behind himself and propelled himself forward at a flight speed he hoped none of the enemy Rulers could match.
There would be no second chance for those creatures to escape, not if he had anything to say about this.
James flew toward the Precision Paper Wasp Queen first. Her body type told him that she would be nimble, especially in the air. She was the most likely to be able to retreat swiftly once she saw that the...
2025-07-07 02:56:20 +0000 UTC
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Claudius Galt shook slightly as the horde of lizards ran away.
Yes, the monsters were afraid of him and his fellow soldiers. But he knew worse was coming. This was the city he had fled mere weeks ago, after all.
It belonged to the creatures now.
As he tried to steady his hands, he realized that some of the shaking in his body wasn’t coming from nervousness. The ground was moving slightly, too.
He swallowed and tried to tell himself the Orlando monsters were more afra...
2025-07-06 20:10:48 +0000 UTC
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“All right,” James said as the strategy meeting broke up. “In ten minutes, we hit Orlando. Everyone get ready.”
The meeting broke up, and leaders began moving toward their respective groups.
Mina walked off to go be with Mitzi. The older woman had not been speaking much to James since Alan was captured, but she and Mina had been coordinating closely in recent weeks to take the Kingdom’s Mage Corps from a semi-theoretical strategic concept to a deadly reality.
There...
2025-07-06 02:25:49 +0000 UTC
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Alistair felt a gentle stirring at his shoulder.
I need a bit more sleep, he thought. Feel sore everywhere. Not sure what happened to me…
He was a bit groggy, but he felt confident that Carolien would let him sleep if he simply ignored the rustling by his arm.
It continued for a few minutes, but Alistair mustered enough energy to actively turn away from the motion. Whoever this was—clearly not his wife after all—had not taken the hint. Maybe this woul...
2025-07-04 02:51:33 +0000 UTC
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Goldie tried to remain very still and keep the mana circulating through her body in a regular, uninterrupted pattern, even as she felt herself pushed closer and closer to a blisteringly hot stone wall.
She drew to within two inches, an inch, half an inch, of the surface, before the knight whose back she rode on managed to crawl through the gap without pressing her into the surface. Even with mana keeping her internal temperature as close to stasis as it could, Goldie doubted th...
2025-07-03 00:31:13 +0000 UTC
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The level was meant to be full of undead, all controlled by that guy you just killed, Adon sent. These ones that I was just fighting—and the ones I destroyed before you got here—were his half-finished prototypes.
“How do you know all that?” Rosslyn asked, not doubtful but curious.
Adon fluttered through the air in front of her, flitting back and forth over the body of the creature, as he communicated. His colors had switched to a bruise-like blue-black, c...
2025-07-03 00:21:48 +0000 UTC
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James performed his daily ritual quickly and almost without hope.
He attempted Summon Divine Helper to bring Alan back to the Fisher Kingdom. Mana built up, ballooned, was discharged—and once more, Alan did not appear before him. Yet James sensed, again, that his advisor was still alive. He could feel Alan’s life force when he reached out for it with this power, even as something kept it from being pulled to James’s side.
Was it just Alan choosing to remain on his own? Or wa...
2025-07-02 04:50:09 +0000 UTC
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“Adon?”
Rosslyn called out into the darkness.
Enough time had passed that she had finished the meat, wiped away any remnant of its juices, and almost begun to drift off to sleep. She had caught herself, of course. She wasn’t going to fall asleep inside the Dungeon.
Not while she was alone there, anyway.
Then Rosslyn began healing her hands. She had ignored the damage as best she could as she was climbing down the cliff face, but now that she was out of the cold, ...
2025-06-26 16:00:14 +0000 UTC
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Adon and Rosslyn dropped at a fast clip, accelerating through the air with each passing second.
The Princess, Adon could feel, was not afraid. She was weirdly at peace, almost sleepy, which worried the butterfly more than an actual fear response would have. As she fell, though, he tried not to think about that problem. The issue of potential hypothermia was what he was solving by having her fall.
Instead, he focused on clinging to Rosslyn’s body. He used Transformation to make h...
2025-06-26 01:32:28 +0000 UTC
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The butterfly and the Princess had not been climbing downward for very long before the climate began to noticeably change.
Adon was the first to feel it. The air became uncomfortably chill for him. He felt his body begin to slow down, his internal parts and even his wings affected by the sudden and pervasive drop in temperature.
He had been flying beside Rosslyn, moving under his own power, but at this point, he landed on her back. She immediately understood that something was off...
2025-06-25 01:09:52 +0000 UTC
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Deep in the frozen East, a man trudged through layers of snow.
Every breath Lev Kazanov took came out as a visible cloud of vapor. The temperature was well below zero, and it was a relatively mild day, considering this was winter.
But the environment hardly bothered him. He was a native of this godforsaken land, though he had been gone for years, evading civil disorder and consequent mass death.
Now I’m home, he thought. I missed you. Gods know why, but I miss...
2025-06-20 15:00:16 +0000 UTC
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A warning rang through James’s mind.
He frowned.
That’s from the wyverns that went with Alan and the Electricity Commission. Are they having some problems?
“Everything all right, skapi?” Mina asked.
James tried to force a smile, then gave up. Mina would know he was faking it.
“I felt something from the wyverns,” he said quietly. “I think Alan and the others with him are in danger.”
“What can we do?” she asked, reaching over and ...
2025-06-20 01:46:07 +0000 UTC
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Jesus…
An enormous centipede wound itself around a skyscraper as if claiming its territory.
Multi-colored lizards the size of men skittered along the street below, following one single giant lizard that seemed to Alan to rival the former Alligator Monarch, Samuel, in size.
Pigeons the size of steroid-abusing eagles streaked across the sky, flying in a tight formation until they reached the tallest building still standing, where they perched and proceeded to walk a...
2025-06-19 02:45:15 +0000 UTC
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The severed hand monster twitched in Zora’s pocket, and she quickly drew it out.
Its small mouth opened. The creature sucked in a tiny breath and then began to speak.
“The Panther Army arrived, but the Fisher King defeated them singlehandedly, forcing their Ruler to sue for peace.”
Zora grinned. It couldn’t have gone any other way.
There was a sound at the opening to the small makeshift hut, and she automatically turned to see who was there. Alice step...
2025-06-12 03:04:24 +0000 UTC
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Adon and Rosslyn’s lips met, and the butterfly was taken more off guard than he had been since perhaps the moment of his birth into this world.
He had been kneeling, leaning in toward Rosslyn, and his balance was such that he could not easily pull back even if he had wanted to—and he did not want to pull away, or at least he was too hesitant and uncertain of everything to precisely want that, whether he would have with more time to think or not.
So the Princess’s kiss landed...
2025-06-11 13:00:07 +0000 UTC
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