8 - Silk-String (2)
The rest of the team was across the way, outside of another warehouse. Ellen and I joined them; I concealed the ledger as best I could in my pocket. Explaining it would just be a gigantic pain in the butt for everyone, and I didn’t want to spend the time on it. Not here.
But as we looked inside the warehouse, I stopped worrying about that.
“We were chasing a straggler down, and he ducked in here,” the tank with the shaved head said,...
2025-10-03 13:00:09 +0000 UTC
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7 - Silk-String (1)
I needed to know.
To know that my core was working again, and what it was capable of. To put it under some pressure and see what would happen. To get out there and fight like I hadn’t been able to in three weeks.
But Jeff was…off. He seemed purposeless, and when I asked him to join me, he didn’t respond. Yasmin was too worried about him to disappear into a portal. And Sophia was still out, working through everything she’d...
2025-10-02 13:00:06 +0000 UTC
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6 - Kintsugi (3)
The hungering void finished consuming all the excess Mana in my core, and I forced the Law of the Hungering Abyss to stop. It resisted; it still hungered. It would always be hungry. That pressure wouldn’t go away. But now wasn’t the time. What was left in my core was necessary to restart it.
“Perfect, kid. I lost contact for a while there, but you’re back on track, and you’re moving in the right direction. Just perfect.” Eugen...
2025-10-01 13:00:14 +0000 UTC
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5 - Kintsugi (2)
Something was…not wrong. But different. Deviant.
The God of Thunder pondered it as Kade Noelstra maneuvered the needles into his body and toward his core. The very nature of them—the magic the God of Thunder had imbued them with, and the energy they currently held from Yalerox—allowed them supernatural sharpness; they’d parted Kade’s flesh only the bare minimum necessary to make contact with his physical core.
Up until the moment t...
2025-09-30 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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4 - Kintsugi (1)
In the two weeks Jeff had been crashing on my couch, I’d learned a few things.
First, that Jeff was almost as broken as I was, but in a totally different way. While I couldn’t delve, he seemed unable to. I’d agreed to let him sleep at my place for a little while so he could figure out what to do now that his life’s goal was complete. When I had, I’d figured he’d be here for a day or two before he found somewhere to live. Inste...
2025-09-29 13:00:15 +0000 UTC
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3 - Promises
When I opened the door, Jessie was nose-deep in her Governing Council tablet.
She smelled faintly of decontamination mist and more strongly of therapy exercise, and she barely glanced up at me as I walked in. “Hi, Kade.”
“Hi, Jessie.”
Then she dove back into her…whatever she was doing. I let her sit in the comfy armchair that Ellen claimed whenever she was over and focused on the mess in the kitchen. Cereal bowls, some at least a...
2025-09-26 13:00:12 +0000 UTC
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2 - Under the Lens
I’d been to the Governing Council’s headquarters before.
That time, I’d been dragged up to Councilwoman Myers’s private office and into a meeting with both her and Angelo Lawrence. It had been…tense. I’d thought I was in serious trouble, and that they’d fire Jessie and exile me from the city for hunting Paragons.
This was different. I wasn’t in an office; I was in a conference room. A half-dozen councilmembers—including M...
2025-09-25 13:00:09 +0000 UTC
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1 - Homecoming
The convoy rolled through Phoenix’s eastern gate, Deborah Callahan at its head. She hadn’t lost a single truck—or a single delver, much to her annoyance—on the way home. In fact, the Hurricane Break had almost certainly made that trip easier by eliminating everything near Carlsbad as it besieged the fortress. She hadn’t encountered the crazy Monster Eaters, either.
It had been the least eventful convoy crossing in the last four years—may...
2025-09-24 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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59 - A Friend of Jeff's
Kent. Lamar. Amanda. Angelina. Nevaeh. Turner. Nicholas.
Jeff Carlton had put every ounce of his time and energy into C-Rank to find that list of people. To recover the friendships he’d had growing up with them before the Carlsbad Portal Break had driven a six-hundred-mile-wide wedge between them. He’d sacrificed so much. Every cent he’d earned delving had gone into more power to delve more quickly, the C-Rank armor and weapons he’d...
2025-09-23 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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58 - Fallout
It took two days.
Two long days. Days of dumping Mana into the injured delvers. Sleepless nights of research in an attempt to figure out the best cures for each of the four. Hours of yelling at the med center’s staff for their inefficient layouts, at the guild leaders’ constant questions about when the kid would be ready to talk, and at the delvers’ teammates for not leaving them the hell alone!
But eventually, Sarah Cullman’s e...
2025-09-22 13:00:19 +0000 UTC
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57 - Hurricane Force (2)
Skill Learned: Stormbreak
The shattered core within you offers power, if you can contain it. Burn mana from all sources in range, creating positive and negative zones around all targets. After burning the targets’ mana, equalize the zones. With lightning. Lots of lightning.
Stormsteel Effects:
1. Each rank allows you to exclude up to one additional target from Stormbreak’s Mana burn a...
2025-09-19 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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56 - Hurricane Force (1)
Queen Mother Yalerox, Paragon of the Hurricane: A-Rank
Rage.
And fury.
The kind I’d felt on the playground the first time I’d hit a bully.
Not pain. Not despair. Just anger. I shouldn’t have felt like this. Why did I feel like this? Power flowed through me, even though my core was broken. It ripped at my veins and nerves, but my body was holding together. And even better, I’d learned some...
2025-09-18 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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55 - Corestorm (3)
Pain.
Agony.
Burning deep inside me. The storm broke through my core’s last barriers. Lightning rippled through my veins. Every cell screamed in torment, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My broken core hemorrhaged Stamina and Mana uncontrollably. My skills wouldn’t fire. I couldn’t Flashstep or Mistform the pain. Couldn’t Saltspray to counter ...
2025-09-17 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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54 - Corestorm (2)
I followed Ellen along the path, my thin hoodie and shorts almost comical next to her dress and heels. We stopped at a second sign, and more Mana flowed out of my shaking core and into hers. I started drawing on Cheddar—who was, in theory, still sitting in my lap. That Mana vanished into Ellen’s insatiable core, too.
And with every drop of Mana that poured into her, my grip on her mental world grew weaker. By the time we finished the second ...
2025-09-16 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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53 - Corestorm (1)
“What do you mean, no?” I asked.
Fury built inside of me. I knew Eugene had a solution. I knew it. He could hold my core together. He could train me in the skill levels I needed. He could even fill the missing skill I still hadn’t learned.
Why. Wouldn’t. He. Help?
I had to find out. And the god damn dragon wouldn’t answer me. Tallas’s Dueling Blade surged to life in my hand. “Answer me!”
...
2025-09-15 13:00:16 +0000 UTC
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52 - Port in the Storm (3)
My words were empty and tasted like ash. All the bravado in the world didn’t hide the fact that we were outmatched.
We were down our A-Ranker. I was the highest-ranked person on our team, at high C-Rank. Ellen was right behind me. And Tathrix, Hurricane Warlord, was an A-Ranker. Not like the A-Ranker I’d helped kill. No. It was named and titled—a true monster of a monster.
The strategy was simple. We had to—
Tathrix a...
2025-09-12 13:00:09 +0000 UTC
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51 - Port in the Storm (2)
Something was in Queen Mother Yalerox’s newest tower.
Maybe multiple somethings. A slightly higher than normal number of her youngest children were dying. That wasn’t out of the ordinary by itself. Her children were always dying. Even when she wasn’t at war, they were being born and dying like background noise.
But her older children—the ones she relied on for war—didn’t usually drop dead in the nursery tower. The C and...
2025-09-11 13:00:07 +0000 UTC
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50 - Port in the Storm (1)
As I looked around for the portal, two thoughts warred in my mind.
First, that this was impossible. There was, undeniably, a Paragon attached to this portal. The strength of the storm and the metallic glow on the portal itself had been proof of that. The portal had to be here. Trap portals and Paragon portals were mutually exclusive. They didn’t happen together. They couldn’t. I breathed, as much to push radioactive...
2025-09-10 13:00:11 +0000 UTC
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49 - Dawn's Light, Midnight's Depth
It was impossible.
She was Queen Mother Yalerox. Mother of millions, Paragon of the Hurricane. Her forces had breached the fortress’s walls, killed all they could find, and sated the voice in her head—for now. The fortress would help form her stronghold in this world. Once she tore its walls down and lined her portal’s borders with its metal and stone, she could focus on fighting the wars ahead of her. On eradicating the S...
2025-09-09 13:00:11 +0000 UTC
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48 - A New Day
“We can’t just leave,” Jeff growled as we left the bunker’s portal metal door and stepped back into Carlsbad’s fake streets. “I only found two of the people on my list. There have to be more out there. Amanda and Kent can’t be the only ones.”
Yasmin put a hand on his arm, and he shivered a little.
I glanced at Carrol. He’d taken the lead, and he was moving fast. Most of me thought he was right. We could spend hours—or even ...
2025-09-08 13:00:18 +0000 UTC
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47 - Pack Bonding (7)
One hour wasn’t much time.
Ellen and I went after Jeff first. He was still searching the rows of people, trying to track down anyone who might know his old friends—but it wasn’t going well.
“I don’t remember their last names,” he said when we finally found him. “There’s only, what, 500 people here?”
“Less,” I said.
“Four hundred,” Ellen said.
“Right. Four hundred people. It shouldn’t be th...
2025-09-05 13:01:31 +0000 UTC
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46 - The Fortress (3)
I didn’t take a steel rod to the chest.
It did take five minutes for the mage to confirm that I was, in fact, not a portal monster. Questions and answers—all about trivia that anyone living in Phoenix would be at least slightly aware of—shot back and forth before he finally nodded. When he did, the tower opened, and three B-Rank delvers emerged, the mage included. “Right. You said you’re from Phoenix?”
“That’s what I’v...
2025-09-04 13:00:08 +0000 UTC
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45 - The Fortress (2)
The A-Ranked, named and titled monster appeared two more times. Both times, it watched us, almost daring us to attack it.
The first time was a block down the street.
A flaming wall of wood, concrete rubble, and portal metal blocked the road. The wind had whipped the fire into the nearby buildings, ripping through them like a chainsaw, but only in one direction. I pointed at the other side, where a door hung open. “Let’s go there! Ge...
2025-09-03 13:00:12 +0000 UTC
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Hello, Patrons,
Today, Voltsmith, the first book of the Apocalypse Engineering series, is out on Kindle/KU. Voltsmith is a story about a man from Nebraska who finds himself working at a mechanic’s shop in Chicago when the world ends. The System that takes over sends him into a hardcore tutorial, and when he comes out, he’s got a unique crafting class. From there, LitRPG Apocalypse stuff happens. It was a fun story to write, and it was my first attempt at writing more typical L...
2025-09-02 14:02:58 +0000 UTC
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44 - The Fortress (1)
There shouldn’t have been a hurricane in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. It defied physics. And no hurricane had ever been small enough—or focused enough—to sit on top of a city so accurately.
A Paragon had to be leading them. A Paragon tied to the Stormsteel Path. I wanted that core. I needed that core; it’d be an investment in the future. And Eugene would want me to go get it.
Instead, the truck’s wheels slid o...
2025-09-02 13:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Reposted for Free Members
43 - Rolling Thunder
Queen Mother Yalerox stared at the walls of the fortress that should have been hers. She’d battered it with storm after storm, ripping them up from the south and dumping entire lakes’ worth of water into the clouds. The defenders in the walls should have drowned by now. Their walls should have fallen apart.
How dare they resist her? She wanted that fortress. It belonged to her. This world belonged to her. Sh...
2025-09-01 13:00:27 +0000 UTC
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Republished for Free Members
42 - Dual (2)
As the C-Rank core cracked, I had a moment to wonder why Energy Font and Brendan’s Hymnal hadn’t pushed to C-Rank. They were both on the cusp of it, their energy thrumming with anticipation, and there was no Law-learning process to slow them down. They’d ranked up from E to D-Rank with no pause, and I didn’t really understand why the C-Rank push might be different.
...
2025-08-29 13:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Republished for Free Members
41 - Dual (1)
Two hours later, the convoy was circled up, and I found myself face-to-face with Deborah.
And Angelo Lawrence. And Terrel Young. And most of the rest of the convoy’s command structure.
The only good news was that Sarah Cullman had taken one look at the unranked, homespun wool-clad humans and announced that it was a wonder they weren’t all dead from Earth’s diseases or malnutrition or the various infectio...
2025-08-28 13:00:08 +0000 UTC
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40 - Aliens (4) We had a lot to do, from the moment the portal opened and vomited us—and to my surprise, the half-dozen surviving humans—out
40 - Aliens (4)
We had a lot to do, from the moment the portal opened and vomited us—and to my surprise, the half-dozen surviving humans—out into Roswell’s streets.
Sophia and Yasmin were close to tapped out. Both of them had worked together to triage and stabilize the former prisoners, but their work wasn’t...
2025-08-27 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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39 - Aliens (3) I abandoned any pretense of stealth or subtlety. The sooner we were out of here, the sooner we could link up with Angelo and
39 - Aliens (3)
I abandoned any pretense of stealth or subtlety.
The sooner we were out of here, the sooner we could link up with Angelo and the rest of the convoy. I had a lot to tell him—things only he, Terrel, and the GC’s leaders could hear.
So, the next armor we fought got multiple stabs to the chest. The...
2025-08-26 13:00:09 +0000 UTC
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