TS6 - Chapter 45

Kat reversed gravity, launching herself into the air with a thought.  Ten to fifteen gozzlam heads tracked her squawking hatred at Kat’s rising form.  Before Kat could get more than ten paces off of the floor of the swamp they took to the air as well in a flurry of anger and feathers.

Mana drained out of Kat as she activated Improved Laser.  The beam of coherent light pulsed to light as it chopped downward, meeting one of the rising geese.

It squawked in anger, mud covered feathers warring with the force of the spell and Kat’s eyes widened.  She hadn’t expected her magic to instantly kill the gozzlam, but the brilliant beam of light didn’t seem to do much more than singe and burn the angry animal’s wing.

She pushed more power into the spell and it finally punched through the demonic goose’s feathers.  The spell cut sideways, cutting slowly through the monster’s defenses as Kat did her best to clip its wings, all while soaring higher and dodging the other gozzlam that rushed past her target and sought to latch onto her with their cobra-like mouths.

Kat drew her knife, warding off one of the angrily squawking geese with it while Improved Laser continued its work, slowly cutting her first target apart from a distance.  Finally, after almost five seconds of frantic dodging and knife play, her laser cut through the goose’s neck.  The spell winked out, its duration elapsing.

Before Kat could take any solace in the monster’s death, a rainbow light flashed below her, illuminated the grass and murk of the swamp for a moment before another gozzlam’s head popped up.  It hissed angrily at Kat before it too took flight in an avalanche of disturbed feathers and wrathful squawking.

She swore under her breath, willing a Pseudopod into existence even as she used her gravity domain to strafe sideways toward the giant stump in the center of the swamp.  The geese could respawn.  Perfect.

Kat veered downward, letting an angry gozzlam flap indignantly overhead.  Her Pseudopod darted upward on its own, burying a knife in the creature’s stomach.  Unsurprisingly, the blow didn’t skill the monster on its own, but the act of her spell ripping the blade down the animal’s stomach, cutting it open from stomach to rectum, managed to do the trick.

Another flash of light in the swamp below signalled the arrival of a new pursuer.

Air rushed past Kat as she dove toward the swamp, a trail of angry geese squawking unhappily after her.  She leveled off just before hitting the grass, unwilling to risk the uncertain and watery footing of the swamp as she accelerated toward the island at the center of the marsh, thoughts whirring.

It was possible that there was a finite number of gozzlam.  Theoretically, they could stop spawning after a certain point, but that didn’t seem like the most efficient usage of Kat’s time.  She pressed outward with her domain, using gravity to slow her pursuers while she pulled further away from them.

Fighting and killing the gozzlam was pointless.  The ones on this floor were much more resilient than those she had fought previously.  Their speed and reactions were just as absurd, and she had no desire to test the strength of their venom.  A battle with a half dozen of them would probably need her full party if she wanted to win without injury.

Against ten?  She snorted, yanking her body to the side like a ragdoll as one of the geese flashed red, flapping its wings with the sound of a thunderclap as it rocketed toward her.  Part of her mind refused to process the gozzlam’s acceleration.  It shouldn’t have been possible.  The goose had just ignored something like ten times Earth’s gravity, powering through her domain like it didn’t even exist.

Ten was a death sentence.  Especially if they could use skills.  Mr. Jackson could suffer in the mud and fight his way through all of that.  He might even make it.  As for Kat?  Speed had saved her once, and if it wasn’t broke she wasn’t-

There was no time to finish the thought.  A pair of jaws exploded from the swamp, snapping upward toward Kat as a massive crocodile leapt into the air.

Her Pseudopod lashed outward, planting a knife in the top of the crocodile’s mouth and using it as a pivot point to whip her body in a semicircle around the best.  The spell yanked her spare knife free, spattering the flock of gozzlam with violet blood.

The crocodile fell back into the swamp, plashing brackish water everywhere as Kat pushed more mana into her domain.  Energy crackled through the air around her as she shored up the barrier of gravity she had built behind her, slowing the gozzlam even more despite the frequent pulses of red and surges of strength that marked the monsters using skills.

She let her gravity carry her higher, unwilling to fly low to the ground where another hidden danger might jump out at her.  In the distance a pillar of rainbow light descended from the heavens, striking the ground and leaving a humanoid shape in its wake.  A half second later, a dozen or so flashes of light around him marked the Tower summoning monsters.

Kat didn’t have the spare focus to look closely, but it seemed obvious that Mr. Jackson had made it through the first floor.  She had no idea how he had managed to clear the trapped hallway so quickly, but that wasn’t going to save him here.  Kat was over halfway to the hill and moving faster through the air than anyone could manage on foot even if they were running on dry and stable ground.  The marsh would slow Mr. Jackson, giving Kat a massive head start on the final floor of the ziggurat.

“Stop.”  The word was barely a whisper given how far away Mr. Jackson was, but Kat felt her body freezing up.  Around her, the gozzlam began falling from the sky, unable to flap their wings as a dull violet light surrounded them.

Kat reached out with her mind, willing more mana into her domain.  Her body might be motionless, but nothing about Mr. Jackson’s ability interfered with her ability to think.  She rocketed toward the center of the swamp even as she spiked the remaining monsters into the water below.

For one agonizing second after another Kat fought to free herself, a prisoner inside her own body.  No matter how she struggled, her face, hands and feet were all stuck in the same position, eyes watering as she was unable to blink despite the heavy wind created by her ‘falling’ rapidly toward the tree stump.

Her bones seemed to creak as Kat put every erg of effort into moving her arm.  Nothing happened as she sailed toward the hill.

She narrowed her focus, instead trying to move her hand.  Sweat began to bead on her brow as Kat put everything into her effort.  Muscles strained against each other, Mr. Jackson’s ability fighting back with equal force against Kat’s attempts.

Kat’s vision narrowed.  She could feel herself drawing nearer and nearer to the portal out of the second floor.  She could hear a new flock of gozzlam popping into existence and taking off after her.

All of that slipped away.  Instead, Kat’s entire world became her right index finger.

She pushed.  A headache began to build as Kat threw her entire being at the finger.  Veins popped out on her forehead, threatening to burst even as Kat dug deeper, looking for the one final burst of energy that would put her over the edge.

Her finger curled slightly.  Without Kat’s enhanced senses, she wouldn’t have even noticed as it moved.

Then the spell shattered and she was in full control of her body once again.  Kat closed her eyes and blinked furiously, tears streaming down the side of her face.  Her arms and legs screamed with agony and exhaustion, threatening to cramp like she’d just run ten leagues on a hot summer day without drinking any water.

Kat forced her eyes open, redirecting herself toward the glowing portal.  Wooden golems, monsters made of dark sticks and bark, pulled themselves free from the sides of the stump and created a barrier of woven wood over her target, but Kat didn’t pay them any mind, instead investing more mana into her domain in order to expand and strengthen it.

The second the outer edge of her domain touched the first golem, she grabbed hold of it with her mind and yanked upward, her mana inducing almost fifteen Earth gravities worth of force as it sent the monsters flying skyward.

Their feet rapidly grew roots, questing tentacles of wood that darted downward and tried to connect themselves to the stump, but Kat’s ability worked too quickly.  In barely a second, all three golems were well out of sight and the barrier protecting the portal was rotting and fading.

She crossed her hands in front of her chest and slammed into the wood.  It crumbled, almost dislocating her shoulders from the force of the blow, and an eyeblink later, Kat hit the portal, her world dissolving into a swirl of rainbow light.

A wall slammed into her, knocking the wind out of Kat as she bounced off.  She lay on her back for a second, processing what had happened on the second floor before sitting up with a groan.

At least one broken rib and basically everything else had taken a fairly severe beating.  Apparently her momentum had carried over from before the teleportation, an interesting fact obviously meant to punish people like Kat that had tried to ignore the floor’s challenges by simply running past them.  Quietly, she began casting Cure Wounds while she thought over what had happened.

Mr. Jackson was some sort of high level Psi user capable of mind control.  That was the only conclusion she could come to.  That would explain why he managed to reach the second level so quickly.  All he needed to do was take control of each of the monsters when they appeared and use them to disarm the traps in front of him.  He might not be able to fly as quickly as Kat did through the level, but she’d be surprised if he ever needed to slow down from a jog.

Then, on the second floor he was strong enough to take control of all the gozzlam at once.  She hissed as her spell began to heal the bruising from her encounter with the wall.

It wasn’t fair.  Kat knew she was a massive hypocrite for complaining given the absurd power of her domain, but she wasn’t in the mood to be charitable.  Mind control on that level was almost unbeatable.

Sure, she’d managed to break herself free near the end, but that had taken almost five seconds.  In the middle of a fight, that was enough time to kill someone ten times over.  Of course, that didn’t mean that Mr. Jackson could kill her with impunity.  Evidently her domain worked just fine despite Kat being unable to control her body.  That was something she could use, but at the same time it didn’t fill her with confidence.

What was to stop him from simply commanding her to slit her own throat?  Maybe such commands used up too much stamina.  It was also possible that there was some other limitation on the spell, but Kat wasn’t particularly interested in testing those theories.  If she was going to fight Mr. Jackson, it was going to need to be fast and dirty.  She needed him dead before he had a chance to completely seize control of her body.

Her thoughts arranged, Kat finally looked around herself.  Once again she was in a corridor, but this time she was clearly in a maze or labyrinth.  Above her was the featureless but well lit sky that she’d come to associate with her draconic benefactors.  The only thing visible as Kat looked upward was a cone made of white rock that culminated with a small platform where the rainbow bell she’d seen on the ziggurat stood all on its own.

Kat reversed gravity, drifting upward while she continued to heal herself.  The second she reached the top of the labyrinth’s walls a static shot went through her, stopping Kat dead in her tracks.

She smiled wryly.  Evidently the Ascension ritual had grown sick of her abusing her powers of flight.

Mana flowed through her body, creating a new webwork, one she rarely had the need to use.  After almost two seconds of concentration, X-Ray Sight activated.

Kat blinked once.  She could still see the walls around her, but they were misty, and mostly translucent, allowing her to quickly figure out her path through the maze.  For a couple of minutes, she made steady progress toward the bell at the center of the labyrinth and Kat let herself hope that she might be able to finish the floor without confronting Mr. Jackson.  Then another pillar of rainbow light landed in the maze about four hundred paces to the right.

Her mouth set itself in a grim line.  Even if she beat Mr. Jackson to the endpoint, there wasn’t any way for her to climb the mountain that the bell sat atop.  He would see her and use his mind control in a second.

Theoretically, the barrier that stopped Kat from flying above the maze might stop his Psi ability, but she wasn’t going to bet her life on that.  No.  Her only real option was to use her tools and set an ambush.  As difficult as fighting Mr. Jackson might be, a dead man couldn’t stab her in the back.

She turned and focused her X-Ray Sight in the general direction where she’d seen the rainbow light land.  It took a couple of seconds for her to peer through almost a dozen layers of walls, but before long she could vaguely make out Mr. Jackson beginning to pick his way through the maze despite the heavy mist created by the thick walls.

Kat began walking toward him, casting Pseudopod as she moved.  A hundred and one battle plans flashed through her head, all cut short by the simple fact that unless she could kill the man instantly, she would no longer be in control of her body.  It was unsurprising how many battle plans could be short circuited by that little wrinkle.

Finally, she dismissed them all.  Kat didn’t even know for sure what abilities Mr. Jackson would have beyond mind control.  Putting together an insanely complex plan only for him to turn into stone or something when she attacked him was foolish.  The best she could put together was “surprise him and try to kill him before he could react and improvise from there.”

A hint of a smile crept onto her face.  Whip wouldn’t like it, but that was a little closer to how most of her old infiltration ops worked.  It might not be the smoothest or smartest strategy, but at the end of the day, it worked.

Well, thought, pausing in front of a stretch of brick wall, she sure hoped it worked.

She took a deep breath, pouring almost ten percent of her mana into her domain, transforming it from something translucent into an angry storm of flickering sparks and latent power.  With a shove, the wall in front of her shattered, twenty two gravities worth of force slamming into it like a wrecking ball.

Mr. Jackson had a moment to look surprised before Kat’s domain pinned him to the far wall followed a fraction of a second later by the bricks she’d torn free from the first.  They hit him with the force of an out of control semi and Kat thought she heard the sound of ribs snapping.

She flew through the air after him, toning down the force of her gravity domain slightly.  The last thing she needed was for her attacks to blow through so many of the maze’s walls that Mr. Jackson was able to break free and regroup.

This time, he hit the wall and stayed put.  Kat could barely see him through the pile of bricks, but her gravity pulled her inexorably toward her struggling target.

Red light enveloped her hand and arm as she activated Penetrate stabbing her knife through the gap created by some broken brickwork and deep into Mr. Jackson’s shoulder.  He hissed in pain and his entire body ignited with purple light.

One second Kat was kneeling on his chest, raising her glowing knife for a second strike and the next she was hurtling back through the hole she’d blown in the maze’s wall.  She gasped for breath like a beached fish, her solar plexus spasming from the force of the blow.

Kat locked her gaze on Mr. Jackson as she rushed away from him.  His ability had launched the brick and rock that covered her free and he was standing unsteadily next to the crater she’d made with his body.  Blood flowed freely from the stab wound in his shoulder, accompanying the smaller trickles that came from his nose and ears.

She designated him as ‘down,’ and her domain began rapidly slowing Kat’s flight.  Mr. Jackson was still disoriented and seriously injured, but her attacks hadn’t been fatal yet.  His chain hauberk glimmered with the last vestiges of a powerful enchantment, luckily the magic that had let him survive her initial strike.

“Stop.”

The word echoed through the partially destroyed maze like a gunshot.

Kat’s body froze solid once again, and she cut her control over her domain, letting herself fall gracelessly to the rubble and ruined brick.

“Stop casting spells,” Mr. Jackson continued, his footsteps crunching on the bits of stone and debris as he walked toward her.  “Do not make eye contact with me.  Do not activate any of your skills.”

One by one his words, each backed by an avalanche of Psi energy washed over her, binding her body with purple chains as the restrictions layered themselves, one atop the other.  Kat could feel their control slipping slightly.  Breaking free of Mr. Jackson’s power the first time had apparently given her some resistance to the ability, but it was nowhere near enough to free her in time.  Maybe if she had half a minute, Kat would be able to do something, but for now she was stuck, laying on her stomach and helpless.

“This is only our second time meeting face to face, isn’t it Erinyes?”  He asked, his voice smooth and without any emotion.  “You’re a hard woman to meet.”

A flash of hope ran through Kat as she struggled against his control.  Maybe if she could keep Mr. Jackson talking, it would give her the tim she needed.  All she needed from him was a little overconfidence.  For him to underestimate her just a little bit.

“Regardless,” he drawled.  “Kill yourself.”

Kat felt the hand with her knife raising itself toward her throat, but she also felt something else.  Mr. Jackson had walked too close.

Her attention split itself into two.  Part of Kat focused on the hand moving toward her throat.  It slowed fractionally, the blade of her knife trembling as she threw her entire being into stopping its movement.

The other part of her will grabbed hold of her empowered domain and yanked toward her with all her strength.  Mr. Jackson went from walking slowly to jerking through the air with enough speed to smash the air from his lungs.

Kat’s knife slowed even more.  Apparently without Mr. Jackson’s active focus, his abilities lost some of their strength.  Regardless, that half second of hesitation was all it took.  His prohibition on casting spells or using skills didn’t apply to abilities that were already in use like her domain.

It also didn’t apply to the Pseudopod that was wrapped around her waist.

The tentacle of water whipped upward, secondary blade clutched in its grip and positioned itself directly in front of Mr. Jackson, knife angled slightly upward so it would punch through his chest just under his sternum and up into the other warrior’s heart and lungs.

He hit with a sickening squelch, the force of the contact easily dispelling Kat’s Pseudopod as he blasted straight through it, her knife lodged safely in his chest.  Her hand and body went slack, slumping to the rubble as his Psi abilities disappeared in a flash.  Behind her there was a heavy thump as Mr. Jackson smashed into the labyrinth wall, shattering most of his bones and driving Kat’s knife irrevocably home.

Kat just lay there for a second, letting her stress transform into relief before she slowly stood up with a groan.  She limped over to the body, turning it over with her toe.

His avatar was dead.  She could barely recognize him through the blood and shattered bone.  Only the smallest length of her knife’s hilt was still visible in his chest.  Between all of his injuries it was hard to tell what the killing blow was.

She looked down on him impassively.  This man had wrought so much destruction in her life and threatened to inflict so much more, and here he was.  Gone.  The Sword of Damocles over her head?  Gone.  Her greatest rival?  Gone.  The man who had-

Kat stopped, her placid expression changing to a snarl.  She leaned over, spitting on the bloody mess that had been the man’s chest before leaning down and drawing her primary knife across his throat in one clean swipe.

She wiped the blade off on one of the few clean parts of his armor before standing up and nodding in satisfaction.  Kat turned her attention toward the tower and the rainbow bell in front of her.

There was still an Ascension Ritual to complete, a class evolution to earn, and a planet to save.

“That was for Exe,” she said without turning around.  “I hope it hurt.”

Epilogue

Paperwork.  Being a shareholder had meant an absurd amount of it, but as a planetary ruler, it was hard to fathom how many people wanted her review and approval on everything from the most vitally important developments to petty changes and rule revisions.  It was like Kat was swimming in the stuff.  As soon as he signed off on one proposal, lobbyists started a knife fight in the hallway outside her office trying to draw her attention to the next.

At some point she had abandoned her smart panel.  It might have been quicker, but the idea of spending four to five hours at a time sitting in an overly plush office chair staring blankly off into space as electronic page after electronic page turned in front of her eyes wasn’t terribly appetizing.

The compromise she’d come to with Emma and Whippoorwill was the tabletop that sat in front of her.  Its entire surface was glass and some of the technology they’d bought from the lokkel allowed it to seamlessly display a dozen documents at once all while projecting a three dimensional image of any figures, stats or graphs that were relevant to her work.

Kat tapped the table, shifting half of the documents from the right side to the left as more documents popped up.  A frown found itself onto her face and she shook her head.  It was a list of the losses and projected reconstruction time associated with the Millennium attack on her compound.

She sighed.  Millennium was completely deconstructed.  Within days of having access to lokkel scanning technology, Kat had managed to locate every human member of the organization other than Mr. Jackson.  It only took a couple days after that for Jaalin’s ship to break the encryption and find Mr. Jackson and his personal associates.

Unsurprisingly, one of his companions had turned out to be a cloned body with a stallesp mind implanted into its chest.  The body had been using cyberware far above anything on Earth, and that had been the source of the absurd level of information asymmetry that had plagued their little game of cat and mouse.

Now they were all dead.  Kat didn’t bother with any talks about rehabilitation or imprisonment.  Mr. Jackson was simply too dangerous to survive, so he didn’t.

Kat poked one of the electronic sheets in front of her, calling the report up onto the three d projector.  Lieutenant Wil Turner, Grocorp asset protection.

She had only seen him face to face once, barely five minutes of time during the battle to protect the compound.  Despite straining her memory to see if there was anything she recalled about him was the look of concern on his face as she ordered him to fight a delaying action, nothing came to mind.

That was almost the worst part.  There were plenty of people close to Kat that had taken bullets or plasma fire for her.  Xander was dead.  Baker, the nondescript head of the 3445 had lost an arm during the rushed and botched raid in the Amazon.  Belle was shot.  Heather was shot.

The rest were just names on a personnel file.  Lieutenant Wil Turner.  Deceased.  Next of kin a brother and one surviving parent.  There were hundreds like it and all of them were so impersonal.  Poor folk that just wanted to earn a couple credits and live a decent life that got caught in the middle during Kat’s clash with Millennium.

“Knock knock,” Whippoorwill’s voice called out from the doorway as she flowed into the room, her pink hair floating and streaming behind her like a river due to a regional antigravity field generated by some absurdly expensive Consensus technology built into her shirt’s collar.

Kat tapped a quick response out, waiving all claims against those killed in action for breach of contract due to dying without company authorization, and dismissed Lieutenant Turner’s file before turning the entire table off.

“I see you like the shirt Kaleek got you,” She said, turning to face her girlfriend, the tension that had previously troubled her gone and replaced with an easy smile.

“Don’t tell him that,” Whip replied with a wink, spinning in a quick circle and letting her hair form a halo around her.  “I didn’t really expect him to get me a present after I helped him set up his little aquaculture business.”

Kat chuckled as she walked toward Whippoorwill, reaching her hand through the field of suspended gravity to brush the other woman’s hair away, revealing a bright smile and eyes twinkling with mischief.

“His little side hustle is producing almost as much money as the direct investment in our economy from Clan Ahn,” Kat said.  “We’ve already built two casinos geared toward aliens, and Nina is running a half dozen grey market gambling dens.  Already there are rumors spreading around our sector about how ‘excitingly lawless’ we are, and I have a hundred or so marketing specialists working full time to turn that into a brand.  We’re making plans to have samurai get into staged ‘fights’ and ‘shoot outs’ with each other near the new hotels and resorts.  Something to give them an aura of danger while never actually putting any of our guests at risk.  Give it a couple of years and we’re going to be a tourism hot spot for every wealthy alien that wants to gamble and do quasi legal drugs.”

“Give it a couple years after that,” she continued, “and the technology and training we’re buying from Clan Ahn will really start to pay off.  We got enough money from the stallesp to modernize a good chunk of our industry, but for now we’re focusing on entertainment and racing skiffs.  Kaleek convinced me that our guests would want to bet on single person high performance spacecraft races, and given everything I’ve seen, he’s probably right.”

“Speaking about that,” Whip replied, cocking her head slightly to the side.  “Exactly how much money did we get from the stallesp?  I know its ‘a lot’ but I have no idea how to contextualize ‘a lot.’  Is it enough to buy a spaceship?  Two spaceships?”

Kat chuckled, a flash of predatory glee glinting in her eyes.

“They had to turn over all cash on hand and put two star systems up for auction,” she responded.  “Now neither of the star systems had a habitable world, but both had space stations and fairly extensive mining and refueling networks.  Dorrik says that it wouldn’t be enough to buy a solar system like ours outright, but it’s pretty close.  Their corporations are hurting pretty badly right now and there are some talks of civil war.”

“Couldn’t happen to better people,” Whip said with a sweet smile.  “Now, if you’re done running the world for the day, I wanted to talk to you about wedding plans.  We need to beat Jaalin and Dorrik to the punch now that they’ve found a bearer and a rearer for their quad.  Plus, you are a queen or something now.  We can’t just elope.  Everything needs to be regal, otherwise Emma will find us and kill us both.”

Kat winced.  “Are you sure we can’t just elope?” she asked hopefully.  “As you said, I’m the Queen of Earth, at least until we come up with a better title for all of this.  I’m pretty sure that I can just declare the two of us married and that will be the end of it.”

Whippoorwill just rolled her eyes, walking past Kat to tap some commands into her work console.  A pair of wedding dresses popped up, white and covered in ornate lace.  The only nods toward functionality was that neither of them had a train and they didn’t come down below the calf.

“You can tell your mom, your sister, and Emma that we aren’t having a formal marriage if you want,” she said with a snort.  “I plan on playing it safe.  Plus, once we pick out the dresses and the venues we can pay a couple event planners to handle everything else.  We both know that Emma will jump on the opportunity to figure everything out.  You just need to put her in charge of ‘intelligence and security’ surrounding the wedding and she’ll go to town.”

Kat sighed theatrically, but it did nothing to conceal the wide smile that was planted across her face.  Things had been touch and go for a long while there, and not everyone made it across the finish line, but it was finally over.  Earth was consolidated under her rule with Grocorp managing everything that was too much of a headache for her to deal with, and her friends were there beside her.

Somehow, against all logic, that number even included Belle Donnst.  There was no way that the young runner Kat once was could've predicted a tenth of what happened to her.  Even now when she looked back the pain, the loss, the victories, and the exhilaration all almost seemed like it happened to someone else, not Katherine Debs of Schaum Tower.

But it had happened to her.  Clawing, screaming and stabbing, she’d worked her way through everything and emerged on top of the rusting scrapheap that was the corporate world.  Now, for her trouble, she was tasked with fixing everything so that the next teenage girl trying to find purpose in life wouldn’t hit the same walls and barriers that she had.

It was a good problem to have.

She shook her head, pointing at the left dress.  “I like that one,” Kat said, trying to keep her voice firm and definitive.

“No you don’t,” Whip replied, crossing her arms.  “You barely looked at either dress.  You’re just picking one at random because you want to be done with the process.  Don’t try to pull that on me Kat.  I know you better than that.”

“Come on,” Kat said, putting up both of her hands as she tried to deflect Whippoorwill’s ire.  The fact that Whip was completely right didn’t make it any easier.  “I like the lacy swirly things on the side.  They look really, uh-”

“Sure,” Whippoorwill said, arching a single eyebrow at her as she tapped the console, turning off the hovering images of both of the dresses.  “Let’s play this game.  Tell me exactly what the features were that drew you to the dress.  I know how high your attributes are.  If you paid attention when I displayed them, you easily would’ve memorized them both by now.”

Kat took a step backward, opening her mouth to object to Whip’s entirely correct accusations.

There was something perfect about the moment.  A crystallization of everything that had brought her to this point.  A petty little fight over nothing as a capstone to a seemingly endless list of life or death battles.

If this is what the future was going to look like, Kat was excited to experience it, level after level, floor after floor until she reached the top.

Life was good.

Afterward

Hoo boy.  Six books.  Just under 3000 pages.  Something like 4 years of my life writing (alongside other things).  It’s strange how much of myself went into this series.  Now here I am, coming out the other end and it feels like the end of an era.  This isn’t the first series I’ve finished, but this is the longest series by a fair margin.

I just wanted to pull back the curtain a bit to thank all of you for sticking with me through all of this.  There have been delays and periods of silence that I’m not entirely proud of while I struggled with my health and the health of my family, but I don’t want that to detract from the fact that I care about all of you and I want you to enjoy my story.

This book, like a lot of my others, started as something that I wrote for me.  It was a cool idea, one that I liked and I just wanted to tell a cool story about a cyberpunk girl having magical adventures with her alien friends.  From there it grew in scope and length and almost took on a life of its own.  At times it feels amazing to me that there are so many people that wanted to hear it through to the end, but at the same time, I’m not sure it would’ve made it to an ending without you.  The thought of making sure that the ending was something that all of you could enjoy, something you could walk away from with a feeling of satisfaction, that is a large part of what kept me going.

So, from the bottom of my heart.  Thank you for putting up with me for so long and thank you for taking this journey with me.  I couldn’t have done it without my wife.  I couldn’t have done it without the team at Mountaindale.  I couldn’t have done it without the wonderful Andrea Parsnau.

Most importantly, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Thank you, and I hope my next book brings you as much entertainment as this series did.

-Cale Plamann