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.
<... 2025-10-03 13:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post7 - 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 worrie...
2025-10-02 13:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post6 - 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,...
2025-10-01 13:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post5 - 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...
2025-09-30 13:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post4 - 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...
2025-09-29 13:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post3 - 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...
2025-09-26 13:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post2 - 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 diffe...
2025-09-25 13:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post1 - 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 Monst...
2025-09-24 13:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post59 - 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’...
2025-09-23 13:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post58 - 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...
2025-09-22 13:00:19 +0000 UTC View Post57 - 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...
2025-09-19 13:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post56 - 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 ...
2025-09-18 13:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post55 - 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
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 Man...
2025-09-16 13:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post53 - 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 wou...
2025-09-15 13:00:16 +0000 UTC View Post52 - 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 a...
2025-09-12 13:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post51 - 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 ch...
2025-09-11 13:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post50 - 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 ...
2025-09-10 13:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post49 - 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 borde...
2025-09-09 13:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post48 - 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 take...
2025-09-08 13:00:18 +0000 UTC View Post47 - 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 s...
2025-09-05 13:01:31 +0000 UTC View Post46 - 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 e...
2025-09-04 13:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post45 - 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...
2025-09-03 13:00:12 +0000 UTC View PostHello, 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 Apocalyp...
2025-09-02 14:02:58 +0000 UTC View Post44 - 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 investm...
2025-09-02 13:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostReposted 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.
Ho...
2025-09-01 13:00:27 +0000 UTC View PostRepublished 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...
2025-08-29 13:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostRepublished 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 ...
2025-08-28 13:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post40 - 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. Bo...
2025-08-27 13:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post39 - 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 th...
2025-08-26 13:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post