8 - E-Rankers (1)
The bulletin hit my phone two days later. I got messages like it all the time, but most were requests for a single role, or for a high-ranked portal than I wanted to deal with.
But this one was perfect.
Governing Council Message:
Status: Urgent
An E-Rank portal opened two hours ago in the Peoria suburb of Phoenix. The Roadrunner Guild is currently unable to dedicate a team to it and has agreed to turn it ov...
2025-06-16 13:02:02 +0000 UTC
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7 - Stormsteel
Ten minutes in the shower to clean off the crusty, stinking, dry sweat that covered me. An hour to move the couch I’d accidentally crushed down ten flights of stairs in the Phoenix heat and throw the parts by the dumpster. Thirty seconds of that to regret showering first.
And then four hours—four glorious, uninterrupted hours—to explore the Stormsteel Core before the bus dropped Jessie off.
The nearest Governing...
2025-06-16 13:01:15 +0000 UTC
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6 - The First Step
I’d been wrong.
Jessie was sobbing. But they weren’t tears of joy. Sometime in the last four days—or the last two hours, she’d gone straight to pissed.
I grunted as her blows hit my chest and a nurse tried to—carefully—pull my sister off of me. Then, once I had room to breathe, I propped myself up on one elbow. “Hi, Jessie.”
She was small for a fifteen-year-old. Skinny—not thin, but skinny—people would th...
2025-06-16 13:00:12 +0000 UTC
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“… In other news, A and S-Rank delvers from the Coyote Guild report no changes in the ongoing portal break deep within Carlsbad Caverns. The Coyote and Iron Falcon Guilds continue their watch over the entrance to the compromised cave network, and seismographic equipment reports no new attempts to break out.”
The woman’s voice was agony; loud enough to beat against my shattered eardrums and impossible to tune out. Since my system had awakened a year ago, I’d tried to keep on to...
2025-06-15 20:30:49 +0000 UTC
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Jeff gritted his teeth as tree branches sheared off on his shield’s edge and rained down on his helmet. The shock from the Misbegotten Ogre’s roar had worn off, but the blow forced him onto one knee, then pushed him back hard enough for his kneepad to shoot up sparks against the stony ground.
The Governing Council had misdiagnosed this portal. But…it had presented itself as a D-Rank. This should have been a single, D-Ranked boss, and he’d built his team to kill a single, D-Ranke...
2025-06-14 21:54:13 +0000 UTC
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It took Jeff a minute to explain all the agreements that he’d made to get a full team together. He and the rest of his usuals had agreed to forfeit their chance at the core, but it’d be up for grabs between Erik and me. It felt like I’d done more to earn it so far, but Erik was a high E-Rank mage, and I had no doubt that he’d prove his value soon.
Not that any of that mattered. It’d be determined randomly—and Jeff had conveniently forgotten to mention that I’d get two<...
2025-06-13 00:11:57 +0000 UTC
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We were trapped.
Jeff and the archers pulled themselves together quickly. They started searching, just in case we’d gotten pushed away from it by the goblin swarm. But I knew what was happening, and so did they. There was no point in looking.
Sometimes, higher-ranked portals closed to the outside after a party went in. Other times, they never opened from the inside at all until the boss was dead. Trap portals. It was unusual for a D-Rank portal to be trapped, but not unheard of....
2025-06-10 22:12:17 +0000 UTC
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Hello patrons,
I've got something new cooking, tentatively titled Stormblade (though that may change as I figure out my marketing). Right now, I imagine it'll hit Royal Road sometime in the next two weeks or so. The first book is finished and in tuning passes, and I'm starting the second, so there's at least 150,000 words ready to go. I'm going to be putting a chapter here for paying patrons every day or two until I launch on Royal Road.
If you're at all interested, I'm curious wh...
2025-06-09 13:21:48 +0000 UTC
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It's bittersweet to say goodbye.
But this was always how things were going to end, and that's the Truth.
I hope you'll stick with me, or alternatively, give my Royal Road account an author follow or make sure you're following The Halcyon System there. I've got some new stuff I'm working on that I'm pretty excited for, and I'm hoping to launch it within a month to six weeks. I think I'll probably sneak preview it here on Patreon for people as well.
...
2025-06-06 12:50:46 +0000 UTC
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Alice is the smartest person I know.
Sora’s a genius.
And I’m willing to destroy the world if it means we can win.
The equation goes like this: if X is the number of different skills I need access to, and Y is the odds of something going wrong, then as X increases, Y approaches 100. X is my acceptable risk of things changing, and there’s no way to reduce it to acceptable limits.
I can get it down to three, though. The same sweet spot as the Truth Club, where peop...
2025-06-02 13:37:45 +0000 UTC
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I’ve only survived a double disconnect in Knights of the Apocalypse ranked play one time.
I was playing Sunburst. The only person who didn’t disconnect was on Cobra Kyra. And, for some reason, that combination was all but invincible against the specific boss we were up against. It was the final boss of the Abattoir of the Immortals—a slow, low melee damage boss with huge amounts of area of effect damage.
The Cobra Kyra player was fantastic. She avoided almost every ...
2025-05-30 13:03:26 +0000 UTC
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My final merge started at 11:48 AM on the West End High soccer field, in the middle of my big sister’s valedictorian speech.
It’s going to end a little over a month later, one way or another. Alice won’t be there—she’s got her own fight to fight. She’s a liar, but that’s okay. She knows the truth now, and that’s enough.
There won’t be a maroon glow in the midnight sky after this. No stink of roses and oil, no humming in my ear. I won’t taste the electrical tang...
2025-05-26 13:31:06 +0000 UTC
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Before she was into architecture, Sora wanted to be a marine biologist.
On my trip to Ucluelet, I bought her this plastic orca, about as long as my arm. She loved that stupid killer whale, even though the pieces were all chipped after just a few weeks. So did I, but I didn’t love it because it was a whale, or because it was cute, or anything like that.
No. I loved it because it was a puzzle. A three-dimensional puzzle. A funny-looking frame for its back, and a few dozen pieces t...
2025-05-23 13:08:05 +0000 UTC
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Sidney fought with all his might.
But the system—not the Halcyon System, but the vague echo of it that he’d brought to life for only a handful of seconds—pushed every computer and microprocessor in his network into the red zone within only a handful of seconds. He couldn’t keep his systems cool enough, no matter what he tried—and he had barely enough power to maintain the system’s passive state, to say nothing of actively trying to assign powers or award Inquiries.
Not...
2025-05-19 13:54:48 +0000 UTC
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Mrs. Lightsen insisted that we read The Canterbury Tales.
That it was a ‘great classic,’ and that we’d ‘get a lot of understanding of both the medieval and timeless human experiences’ out of it.
What I got out of it is that Merriam and Webster are the two greatest non-mathematicians of all time. Formalizing language to make it…readable, at least…was an achievement on par with reaching the moon or figuring out gravity, and students—especially students whose teachers...
2025-05-16 13:06:38 +0000 UTC
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I hate putting together teams.
It’s too much like group work.
And, being completely honest, while I want everyone to be happy and get along, I’m not good at making that happen. If the Beni Lux player doesn’t want to heal the team comp I’ve put together in Knights of the Apocalypse, I’ll usually give her the middle finger and find someone else, even though it’d be one quick spec change to make it viable for our run.
But it’s too much work to make sure e...
2025-05-12 13:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Candyland. Monopoly—the junior version. Checkers. Chutes and Ladders.
We used to play a lot of games. I don’t remember the specifics, but it’d just be Alice, Mom, Dad, and me. Sometimes, they’d let me play by myself, with Mom watching over my shoulder to make sure I did it right. Other times, I’d sit in Dad’s lap and we’d share a hand of cards. He’d ask me what we should do, and we’d play as a team.
We played a lot of games. A couple of times a week, we’d sit a...
2025-05-09 13:05:26 +0000 UTC
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James had been expecting it for almost half an hour.
So when it finally happened, he wasn’t surprised.
He’d come to terms with it almost instantly. The data was pretty clear; he knew exactly what the Pendletons were trying to hide from him. The second bomb with Alice. The fact that they hadn’t even attempted to unpack it or set it up. The timer on the first bomb.
He even knew what the target was for the second bomb. Which reality, which entity. Everything.
Self-p...
2025-05-05 13:19:32 +0000 UTC
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I know now that it couldn’t have been okay.
But it took a long time—and literally reliving it—to realize that truth.
To get there, I had to struggle for a decade with what it was. I had to hold the maroon sun, the buzzing, electric sound and smell, and the monsters that killed Mom in my mind, because no one else would let me share that pain with them. I had to deal with it every time I tried to convince Alice that I wasn’t lying, every time the principal or counse...
2025-05-02 12:54:27 +0000 UTC
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James’s route was less than ideal for everyone except James.
He hadn’t wanted to send Claire and her sister on a wild goose chase through a pile of realities. It wouldn’t help them at all, and even though he was breaking through the encryptions SHOCKS had put on every black sector file at a good rate, he hadn’t found anything that contradicted what he knew the mission to be. The mission, as far as he was concerned, was a positive.
And the few head-scratch...
2025-04-28 13:08:35 +0000 UTC
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The wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round, all through the town.
The ride from Ten Mile Point to Albert Head was only like fifteen miles. It shouldn’t have taken over an hour. But it did. Every. Single. Day.
And every. Single. Day. Alice and I got on that bus and rode it across Victoria to go to school where she wanted, so she could play soccer on the team she wanted to be on. I hated her for it—not as much as I could have, because Sora ended up going to West End...
2025-04-25 13:20:37 +0000 UTC
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We never traveled much as a family.
When I was little, we did—a little bit. It wasn’t affordable then, but Mom insisted on getting back to eastern Canada. She was from Ontario, so we visited family there a couple of times. That was the only trip we took, and I remember taking it…once? Twice? I’m not sure; I was pretty young the first time.
But after Mom died? Nothing. The most exciting trip was to Ucluelet, where the octopus was. And that was a school trip, not a family on...
2025-04-21 13:17:25 +0000 UTC
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No plan survives contact with the rest of a group project.
That’s the Truth.
Capital T.
I hated group projects in school. Even when Sora and I worked together, there was always someone else, and they were always one of two kinds of people. The deadbeats were hard enough. They’d just sit around and do nothing, or worse, tell me they were working on something, provide a quarter-assed piece of shit a day before the deadline, and then I’d be up all night ...
2025-04-18 12:54:46 +0000 UTC
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Victoria, British Columbia - June 22, 2043, 3:40 PM
- - - - -
Watching Claire murder her way through packs of anomalous whatever-they-were wasn’t exactly exciting.
Sidney couldn’t do anything to help. Not that she needed it. James already had a briefing for anything dangerous enough to be a threat. Anything not dangerous enough…just died.
Claire wasn’t the same girl that SHOCKS had become aware of a month ago, hiding in a bathroom and ...
2025-04-14 13:09:33 +0000 UTC
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SHOCKS Olympia Administrative Wing, Washington, USA - June 22, 2043, 6:13 AM
- - - - -
It’s not as easy as simply syncing Sidney and the JAMES Unit.
For one thing, Sidney exists in James’s processing loops—and possibly in my Mindscape. Neither of those places are ideal for connecting to the JAMES Unit in the black sector. Obviously, I don’t want to let James in there, and even though I sit down all night with all the researchers I can muster...
2025-04-11 13:31:23 +0000 UTC
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Almost every Knight in Knights of the Apocalypse Three uses a weapon. Swords, spears, axes, guns, bows, or more exotic stuff. Stuff I only see in really bad movies.
But a couple of them don’t even carry backup swords.
They’re pure casters.
And it’s not like they don’t wear armor. Bulwark is the most heavily armored Tank in the game. She can’t even move if she’s not casting her spells. But she’s also disgustingly strong as a mage—so much so that most groups tr...
2025-04-07 13:00:10 +0000 UTC
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Thank you all for your patience. It's been a good month, overall. I'm not quite 'on pace' for 2/week posting, but since I have a pretty decent backlog now, I think we can make it work until the series ends. I appreciate you all for sticking with me. It means a lot.
In terms of where I'm at, I'm enjoying the writing a lot more. I have a bad habit of pushing myself past burn-out with anything I do, and it's hard for me to recognize it until it's too late to do much about it. ...
2025-04-03 13:25:54 +0000 UTC
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“They’re a bunch of Mages,” Calvin said. Power swelled around us as Voril prepared to teleport us to three different places at the same time—even at her power level, magic like that took time to cast. Not much, but some. “They like fire spells, and they’re well-organized. Someone in their leadership is ex-military. Maybe current. Find the head, cut it off, hope the rest buckle. You sure you’ve got this?”
I finished checking over my gear and nodded. “You two’ll be oka...
2025-03-21 12:54:59 +0000 UTC
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My vision—my senses—all returned in a rush. When they did, I was no longer in the boss’s room in the Seared Wilds Tower. I stared at the fading afterimage of the words I’d been reading, hoping they’d change. Hoping they’d say something about the dungeon being cleared, or the massive, impending dungeon break being stopped. Anything. I only saw a blue and green orb, hovering in space.
Earth. I could see Earth—the whole thing. It took up the entire center screen in a wall fil...
2025-03-20 12:53:20 +0000 UTC
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The Tower Guardian didn’t dash into battle. She obviously could; her body looked strong and fast, even with all the armor. But she didn’t. She simply walked toward me, staff glowing so brightly the rest of the empty room felt dark. It reminded me of the Eyes of Perfection, but with a less hypnotic pattern.
Then the lasers started.
The Eyes of Perfection’s massive barrage had been nothing compared to the tsunami of lasers crashing into us. I braced myself behind my hammer and...
2025-03-19 13:12:06 +0000 UTC
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