Noctarus glanced down at his brother's head again and stiffened with renewed anger. "You couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? You have to push and interfere and make impossible breakthroughs look easy!"

"So that's what's bothering you? My fast advancement?"

Noctarus growled, "You must understand how infuriating it is to see your meteoric rise in power and not understand how it can be done."

"Understanding comes with trust."

"As if you trust me. You sent a team to spy on me. You expected to murder me tonight."

"Only if I had to. Don't try to deflect your own blame, though. Tell me the truth. You were planning to attack us once you got everything you could out of us?"

"Of course." Noctarus shrugged and actually sounded sorrowful when he continued. "I wish it could be different, but our world needs us, and to save it, we must be strong."

"And you get a huge bonus if you kill us all and prevent us from climbing to stage 3."

"How did you know that?"

"You're not my only source of info about the game and the multiverse. You probably get a bigger bonus if we're higher leveled, which is why you've been helping everyone hunt."

"Indeed. It amounts to a substantial sum. I should not be surprised. You are far more resourceful than I ever anticipated. You insufferable human. You learned my hard-won secrets with laughable ease. Now it is time to pay me back for my tutelage."

"You mean your lies, your murders, and your plans to sacrifice all my people and our entire world."

As we talked, I triggered Spellseer's Gaze again. Not surprising, mana was building around him as he prepared a powerful spell. I started pushing more mana into my protective full-body shield, ready to trigger my own spell as soon as he moved. I didn't strike first, though. I wanted to see where the conversation went.

"You are planning to do the same thing to my world! You've already killed my brother, and now you plot to murder me too. Neither of us can succeed while the other lives."

"Still lame. So tell me the truth. Why pretend to be nice? Why train me? What were you hoping to gain by those scans of my soul?"

His calm facade cracked with anger again and he snarled, "The truth is simple, child. I need to understand how you, a barely-integrated baby, can develop a soul so powerful? That is a convergence mana shield you are using right now. Yet another impossibility. How can you learn so fast? What is the secret? I need souls as strong as yours to save my people."

"All you had to do was ask. The answer is simple. I keep my word."

Noctarus barked a laugh. "Not hardly. You have deceived me as much as I have deceived you."

I opened my mouth to argue, but the old dude had a point. We'd entered the arrangement hoping to grab every advantage we could until the inevitable fight to the death ensued.

So I shrugged. "Neither of us trusted each other, so we ended up forcing a confrontation we might have avoided otherwise."

"I do not see how it could be avoided. I ran the numbers hundreds of times, looking for a way out, but every calculation resulted in the same result." He sighed. "And thus we have reached the inevitable conclusion to our pact. Now we proceed with the hard way."

He unleashed all that built-up mana in a single huge black laser beam of pure death mana. It shot out of his heart and struck at mine. I flared my shield even more and cast Mana Desert for the first time. The spell I'd taken from Alpha would help me kill his brother. Seemed poetic.

"Mana Desert. Level 3. Rare. Create a wave of suppression out to 3 yards per level that snuffs out all active spells and mana-based abilities for 30 seconds."

Power rushed out of me, snuffing out my own mana shield before rolling forth to consume Noctarus's death beam then wash over him. Noctarus gasped and stumbled back all the way to his thronelike chair, clutching his chest like he was having a heart attack.

He was still in the range of Mana Desert, but right on the fringe. I followed slowly, Scalebiter dropping into my hand. "Remember that spell? Was it you who gave it to Alpha?"

"That's cheating," Noctarus wheezed.

I had to laugh at the absurdity of that statement. He'd lied and manipulated from the first moment. He'd empowered Alpha with his best rune shield that could have easily killed me. Yeah, I'd lied to him too, but his account was a lot redder than mine.

"You're a piece of work, Noctarus. Here's what we're going to do. You're going to unlock that gate and release my friends. Then we're going to leave. If you behave yourself, I might let you live."

"No you won't," he said simply.

I shrugged. We had just reached a milestone where we now told each other the truth. Felt kind of liberating, actually. We were past all the games and could get to the simple, straight-forward process of killing each other.

"No, I won't."

"How about option 2." He suddenly sat up straighter and slammed a fist onto the arm of his chair. A dome of shimmering white light appeared around it, somehow pushing back my Mana Desert.

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"What was that you said about cheating?" I demanded, advancing more.

He smiled, a cold movement of his deathly pale lips. He now looked confident and spoke in a conversational tone. "One final lesson to my most apt and most supremely annoying student. When I accepted the position as boss on this game world as the last gamble to win the power to save my own, I bargained to bring a few tokens from our home world, including the tier-1 rune matrix I just activated."

That's how it defeated Mana Desert. Tier-1 runes were an entire magnitude stronger. Stinking cheater!

"You're pretty clever," I said, barely 5 long paces away.

He watched me approach with calm confidence. "Did you know that Mana Desert was a tier-1 spell too? Constrained to tier-0 while on Arasha, but fundamentally more powerful than other tier-0 spells, which is why it could snuff out all other tier-0 mana."

"Very informational. Thanks. I'm still going to kill you."

His cold smile widened. "No, foolish child. Now you die. I will thoroughly enjoy dissecting your brain and body to push my research forward."

I resisted the urge to lunge, banking on what I expected him to do next. Sure enough, with a triumphant smile, he triggered his connection to the distant energy crystal I'd swapped out. Way to be predictable, buddy.

A wave of power like a brilliant orange laser beam shot down through the ceiling and drove into his head and his smile widened into a grin.

"Wait for it."

A single heartbeat later, he collapsed back against his throne, dead eyes widening in shock as he got a rotten egg instead of the golden goose he'd been expecting.

Faint wails echoed through the chamber, as if hints of the captured Essence Wights and Spectral Maulers remained within the power of the energy crystal and started attacking Noctarus's core. His pure black mana began flowing back up that orange conduit as the corrupted crystal started drinking in his soul like it had those monsters.

"How?" Noctarus gasped, staggering to his feet, his shock replaced by renewed rage.

"Thanks for figuring out how to kickstart that old crystal of mine. I thought I'd totally wrecked it."

"Give it back!" Noctarus screamed, stumbling toward me, anger and terror warring for dominance on his face. "I need my crystal to escape this world."

"Should have thought of that before planning to murder me and all my people."

Noctarus stepped through his protective barrier and that snapped off the conduit with my distant mana crystal as he returned to the area affected by Mana Desert. Too bad. It would have been so much easier for his soul to get sucked into the crystal once and for all.

A distant rumble shook the castle all the way down to the basement. Dust drifted down from the white-washed ceiling and the entire structure groaned.

I cocked my head, listening. "Sounds like that crystal detonated. Not surprised. It was pretty beat up."

That last influx of power must have pushed it past the final threshold. Good. Hopefully the blast injured those franken-monsters. My platform should be high enough to avoid the worst of the blast, and the nearly indestructible item would protect my team.

Noctarus straightened, new strength flowing through him now that he'd escaped my corrupted crystal trap. He couldn't wield spells in the Mana Desert and didn't throw out another tier-1 rune. Instead he drew a black-bladed dagger from his robes and lunged. The serrated, jagged edge emitted a truly scary aura. Getting stabbed by that thing would be bad. Probably a one-way ticket to zombie land.

I wasn't about to trust the Mana Desert to block its powers. It might have a tier-1 ability. With his mana pool intact and under his control, Noctarus was terrifying. With a blade, he was just an old dude with way too much Intelligence and not nearly enough Agility.

I jumped back from his clumsy attack, dumped Scalebiter back into my inventory, replacing it with a zombie laser rifle, and shot Noctarus in the left eye. He froze, his entire body stiffening just long enough to make it easy to shoot him in the other black eye too.

That was enough to make his head explode, and Noctarus dropped like a sack of dead meat. I spun the rifle around and blew an imaginary whiff of smoke from the end of the barrel. Perfect poetic justice, killing him with one of his own rifles.

"That was easier than it should have been."

Except, I didn't get a kill notice. I did get a very different announcement, that wasn't nearly as much fun, though.

"Congratulations, Lucas! For freeing Noctarus from his limiting humanoid form, you've opened the path for him to step into his ultimate evolution. You receive a platinum Lich King loot box."

"Well, Beethoven." Had that wily old guy tricked me into killing his weak old body? Who did that? Duh . . . Necromancer. Ultimate evolution sounded bad.

"Hey, if just dying lets Noctarus take up a stronger body, why hasn't he killed himself before?"

"Few would bother asking that question, but it's vital," Cyrus answered at once. "Noctarus is sacrificing a lot to take on his next form."

"Like what?"

"And ruin the surprise?" Cyrus chuckled.

That didn't bode well. I spun, scanning the huge room again. I didn't spot any monsters or zombies yet, but they'd be coming. Despite the lack of kill notice, I still tried to trigger Loot.

Got nothing, so I dropped to a knee and checked his pockets. All he had on him was the nasty dagger, which I tossed into my inventory to study later. I didn't really want the creepy thing, but if I left it behind a zombie or some other monster might pick it up.

A text from Ruby made me pause long enough to send a reply.

Ruby: "Ah, Lucas. Does that huge explosion mean we're rolling to plan B?"

Lucas: "Yup. I killed Noctarus, or his current body. Unfortunately, that seems to have allowed him to take an evolved form. Keep your eyes peeled for whatever that might be and warn Tony to put Lake Town on full alert. Expect an attack. I'm going to try to free Burns and get out of here."

Whatever shape Noctarus's evolved form took, it would be tough. I didn't want to face him in that basement, or alone. So I raced to the forcefield wall and studied the complex runes on the door. They were super complicated, and as I approached, they started to move, lines of script flowing around each other in dizzying patterns.

"That's cheating," I growled, giving the door an experimental push. I had insane amounts of strength and a couple really good smashing weapons, but could I simply break down the door without killing Burns and everyone inside? Probably not.

So that meant figuring out how to open it, but it was solid, no handle. Just a key hole. I needed a key.

"Ha!" I shouted, diving into my inventory for an item I'd totally forgotten about until that moment.

"Gate key. It opens a gate."

I'd gotten the strange key, shaped like a miniature human skull and made out of shiny black metal, way back when Ruby and I ambushed those zombies on stage 1. The heavy key thrummed far stronger against my hand than it had when I first got it.

"Vivaldi," I cursed when I looked from the key to the key hole. It didn't look like the right fit, but I jammed the key forward anyway to vent my frustration. I was running out of time.

The key hole gaped open and swallowed the heavy key. The entire door rang with a loud chime. The runes stopped swirling, flashed once, then faded into the door. The door didn't open, but the force wall stretching out to either side disappeared.

"I can't believe that worked," I laughed, running around the door to the far side of the room.

Burns and his small squad of 4 had dropped to the ground and were looking around in confusion. Burns spotted me and his face lit up with a grin. "Lucas? What happened?"

"Do you remember getting captured?"

He frowned, glancing to his companions, then said, "Kind of. It's all fuzzy."

"Are you up for getting the Handel out of here?"

"Absolutely! Let's go."

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