The world seemed to collapse around the God of Thunder as I stepped through the portal. He stood, in his human form, in the middle of the Desert Wind’s training room. In the training room. On Earth.

  I’d been too concerned with Ellen and Jessie to care, but now that we’d made it out of the Ghostmarket, the implications hit me.

  Eugene shouldn’t be here.

  He’d said he couldn’t enter Earth. And yet, here he was. A halo of warped space and Mana formed around him, and he stepped away from Ellen, who shivered on the ground. “Kid, get your healer.”

  I didn’t move. My hand tightened around Stormsong. An SS-Plus-Ranked monster, a Paragon, had just entered my world. He was bound by the same rules as every other monster—and Earth couldn’t stop him. But I’d still—

  “Put. It. Away. I have two minutes before I start doing irreversible damage here, and the shadow mage isn’t on my Path. I can’t heal her myself. If I could, I’d have brought her to my world and done it. Put the sword away and get your healer.”

  I didn’t put the sword away. Instead, I pushed Jessie’s chair with my free hand and slipped out the door, blade facing the ridiculously powerful monster. When she and I were both out, I pointed toward the gym door. “Jessie, can you—“

  “Kade, what the hell is going on?” Jeff asked from the hall. “Everything just went crazy. The candidates thought it was an earthquake, but I told them to sit tight.”

  “No time. We need Sophia.”

  “What do you need me for?” Sophia asked. She peeked around Jeff’s bulk, eyes wide.

  I cut off my groan. Now wasn’t the time to worry about what this would do to Sophia Walker. I needed to focus on Ellen Traynor. “A portal opened in the training room. We went in, and Ellen got hurt. Can you help her?”

  “Yes.” Sophia’s face went pale, but she pushed past Jeff and me, then opened the door. “What the…Kade, what happened in here?”

  “We’ll fix it later. Ellen.”

  Jessie coughed. Then she winced, coughed again, and started talking. “Kade, I need my laptop. It’s super-important. I can take what I learned from the Ghostmarket and—“

  “Not now.” I nodded at Jeff—and more importantly, at the group of E and D-Rankers behind him. She opened her mouth, then finally saw them and nodded slowly. “Jessie, why don’t you take fifteen, get yourself together, and help Jeff with the rest of these interviews? You know, since you’re the guild leader.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Jeff said quietly. “I know what team comp I want, but nailing the right people’s a lot harder than the right archetypes.”

  My sister stared at me. Then she cleared her throat. “Great. I’ll get right on that—but you owe me. Hi, I’m Jessica Gerald, and I’m the guild leader for the Desert Wind Guild. Let’s get back to the interviews. Jeff, maybe you can fill me in on what I’m missing and what you and Sophia were doing.”

  She wheeled herself out of the gym, and I tried to ignore the mud on her chair’s tires and her hands. Jeff followed her, and a half-dozen weapons sheathed as the assembled, low-rank delvers fell in and headed back toward the lobby. They’d been ready. That was a good sign for Jeff’s low-powered team.

  I turned and focused on the training room. Now that Jeff, Jessie, and the others were handled, the God of Thunder was once again the biggest, most immediate problem.

  But when I crashed through the door, he was gone.

  Sophia had her hands in Ellen’s wound, fingers literally inside her chest and stomach. She looked up at me, then nodded. “She’s going to be fine—two days to recover. The arrows weren’t poisoned or anything. Honestly, most of the team’s had worse—I’m surprised she couldn’t power through it.”

  “I’m not.” I hesitated. “Ellen’s pain management has always been a weak point.”

  Then I reached out to hold her hand.

  Before I could, Sophia slapped it away. “You’ll have plenty of time for that later. I know she looks like she’s suffering. That’s because she is. You’re connected to her, though, and I’m worried that if I heal her while you’re touching her, it’ll dilute it. She needs to be back on her feet in two days, Kade. She’s got a fight to win.”

  She was shaking a little, and I pulled my hand away, then put it on the healer’s shoulder. “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

  “You should be, Kade. You’ve been doing reckless stuff like this since I’ve known you, and I keep having to pick up the pieces. It’s only getting worse, too. Look around, and tell me what happened here.”

  I did.

  “Oh.”

  The room’s portal metal walls had warped as if a giant the size of my mountain in the White Tanks had twisted them with its hands. The floor had cracked—not small spiderwebs from a skill fired recklessly that’d fix themselves over time, but cracks so wide I could fit my fist in them. The room reeked of ozone and blood, and electrical scorch marks covered the walls and ceiling. Worse, it felt wrong. I pushed my aura out experimentally, but no matter what I tried, my own lightning couldn’t get close to the burn marks—or the crater in the center of the room where Ellen and Sophia were.

  I closed my eyes and rubbed the heels of my hands against them. “I’ll explain what happened, but not until the team’s together and Ellen’s fixed enough to hear it. Then we, as a guild, need to decide what to do about it.”

  “If we ignore it for a day, will it bite us in the butts?” Sophia asked.

  “No. We can even come back to it after the tournament,” I said. I was even reasonably sure I was telling the truth. The God of Thunder hadn’t entered Earth until now, and he’d stayed less than two minutes. His power was ridiculous; if he wanted to feast on my world, I couldn’t realistically stop him. That left me with one option.

  I’d have to trust that he wanted to keep his word and not enter Earth, and that he’d only done it to save Ellen’s life.

  And that opened up dozens of new questions—questions I didn’t have the answers to. Why had he lied to me? Why hadn’t he stepped in during our assault on Yalerox’s hive castle? Were my people safe from him?

  I couldn’t trust him. But I had to. It was a contradiction, and there was only one way to solve it.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  I had to get even stronger—strong enough to fight the God of Thunder and win. And he’d given me my next step.

  “Do you need help moving her? She can take my bed,” I asked Sophia.

  She shook her head, still pumping Mana into my girlfriend’s injuries. Ellen looked up and me and tried to say something, but Sophia shook her head a second time. “No, Kade. I’ll have Yasmin help me when she’s back. You just take care of yourself, okay? You look like you’re ready to kill something.”

  I took a long, deep breath to steady myself. Then I nodded. “I’m not. Not yet. But I will be.”

  The time I’d spent with the God of Thunder in the Crone’s woods had been enlightening. I’d learned a lot about Stormbreak—its limits, strengths, weaknesses, and how to use it not just as a dungeon-finisher, but as a core part of my toolkit. We’d talked about the C-Rank push, and how many of my other skills had first started truly changing at C-Rank. Eugene couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me what Stormbreak’s change would be, but he’d implied that a major one was on its way.

  And it was ready.

  I could push it to C-Rank right now.

  There was only one reason not to, and that was the tight knot in the pit of my stomach that remembered Stormbreak not as a tool, but as a promise of mutually assured destruction.

  I swallowed it down, closed my eyes, and dropped into a lotus position on my suite’s bare floor. The truth was that I’d lied to myself. It hadn’t been intentional. When I’d learned the First Law of the Unbroken Storm and tried to embrace the storm within, I’d done it. But something hadn’t clicked for me. If it had, Stormbreak wouldn’t bother me so much to use. I wanted to fix that.

  The white-blue bolts overhead, high above my mountaintop, were evidence of that. They lit up the sky in bursts of light that seemed to echo across the clouds, and their thunder bounced off the mountainsides all around me. But no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t find any patterns in the storm overhead.

  Chaos was supposed to be predictable, but the storm overhead was anything but.

  So, after an eternity of trying and failing, I stopped.

  When I’d learned that chaos was predictable, I’d fought against the storm—but that was the wrong Law. I needed to embrace it, not fight it. To let it in, not to hold it at arm’s length. I’d been doing that for a long time. The moment my system had awakened, I’d embraced Stormbreak, but I’d never done it again. It had always been my last resort. It had never been a truly controllable weapon.

  It never would be, either. I’d never be able to wield it like a rapier. It’d never hit exactly where I wanted it to and nowhere else. The God of Thunder had that power—he’d demonstrated it in my D-Rank trial—but I didn’t.

  I stared at the angry sky and brilliantly bright lightning for a long time. And then, a thought occurred to me.

  Why didn’t I have that power? Why couldn’t I?

  Setting aside how I felt about Stormbreak, the answer became entirely about power—at least on the surface. Eugene was simply so much more powerful than I was that even the least controllable storm had to bow before the Stormsteel Paragon. He was strong enough to bend the Laws of the Stormsteel Path to his will—and he was powerful enough to maintain control over them.

  But under the surface was something else.

  And that something else gave me hope that I could bend those same Laws myself—or even that Eugene wasn’t bending them at all, but working entirely within them.

  I went back to watching the dark clouds overhead. The lightning burned my eyes, but I didn’t blink. High above them, the portal metal bands of my core hung in the air, electricity rippling across them as the storm slowly leaked from their gaps.

  And, for the first time, I thought about what the God of Thunder had done in my D-Rank trial.

  Stormbreak was about both positive and negative spaces. In every use, I’d been one or the other—contributing to the skill or receiving the storm’s wrath. I played back my fight against Yalerox in my head. The blooming flowers of electricity had formed around each of us, lightning arcing out in petals that had hung in the air over her sandstone castle. But…

  I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but I thought I saw something I could use.

  I thought back to my other fights—the summoner in the trap portal, the puppeteer in the Arboreal world, and the dozens of wolves in the Crone’s woods. Yes. Yes, it was there. Every single time, the storm had started with me. It didn’t matter if I was negatively or positively charged. The lightning blooms weren’t centered on my enemies. They were centered on me.

  Positive. Negative. Everything had a charge. Every enemy had a charge, no matter what kind of monster it was. So did every delver. And I’d always had one, too.

  But what if I didn’t?

  I focused in on my core—not on the one overhead that dominated my inner space, but the one inside of me. It was the key. Instead of trying to wrestle with the lightning, I’d make myself unattractive to it. Positive and negative charges balanced themselves out as I slowly exerted more and more control over what my core was doing. Sweat broke out on my brow and dripped into my closed eye, and I struggled to keep them shut and stay focused.

  And then, when I was confident that I’d balanced the scales, I used Stormbreak.

  Positive. Negative. Zones erupted all around me, and the sheer wrath of the storm overhead set my hair standing straight up. Mana roiled in the air. The storm wanted to break. It needed to break. But it couldn’t. I wouldn’t let it.

  It hurt. Pain filled me. But I counted up slowly. One second. Three. Four. At five, I couldn’t resist it anymore. The storm broke through my will, and a brilliant flower of blue-white lightning bloomed.

  I gasped in pain and in understanding.

  I’d given everything I had to the storm. And the storm had given back.

  Law Learned: Second Law of the Unbroken Storm

  Stormbreak: Rank D to Rank C

  The Stormsteel Path demands commitment, Kade Noelstra. You have embraced the storm, even held it inside of you, but that is not enough. The storm will not be satisfied with a part of you—it will demand everything you have to give. Become one with the storm, Kade Noelstra, and control how it unleashes its wrath on the world.

  Your control over the storm within you increases.

  User: Kade Noelstra

  Reforged Core, B-Rank

  Stamina: 460/460, Mana: 575/590 (+10)

  Skills:

  1. Stormsteel Core (B-06 to B-08, Unique, Merged, God-Touched)

  2. Thunderbolt Forms (B-06 to B-09, Altered, Merged)

  3. Mistwalk Forms (B-05 to B-08, Altered, Merged)

  4. Cyclone Forms (B-05 to B-07, Altered, Merged)

  5. Stormlight Bond (B-03, Altered, Merged)

  6. Shadowstorm Battery (C-02, Altered, Merged, Dual)

  7. Stormbreak (D-03 to C-01, Unique)

  Path: Stormsteel Path

  Aura: Negative Space

  Laws: First Law of the Stormcore, Law of the Shadowed Storm, First Law of Darkened Lightning, Third Law of the Sirocco, Second Law of the Stormlight, Second Law of the Unbroken Storm

  I lay on the floor for a long time. The heat rippled off my body, and sweat poured down my skin. I’d never felt it this humid before; the steam cloud hadn’t stopped pouring rain down on Phoenix in days, and it felt like being trapped in a fish tank. I reeked of sweat and ozone, and my ears rang from the point-blank thunder that had existed only in my core and mind.

  But I’d done it.

  My core skills were approaching A-Rank. Stormbreak was at C-Rank and ready to grow—and I could exclude my allies and pick its timing now. It was finally more than a bomb I could detonate; it wasn’t a rapier or even a sledgehammer, but it was slowly becoming the asymmetrical weapon I needed it to be. I was even…looking forward to using it in battle. That was surprising. I’d never wanted to use Stormbreak before, but now, I wanted to embrace it, give everything I had to using it, and push it to its limits.

  As my ears slowly recovered, the elevator’s hum took over from the tinnitus. I rolled onto my side and pushed myself to my feet, still dripping wet. The door opened, and Yasmin, of all people, stepped through.

  She took one look at me—shirtless, panting, and sweaty—and looked away. “I can come back later, but I thought you needed to hear this.”

  “No, it’s fine.” I reached for my shirt and pulled it on quickly. “How’d you get up the elevator, though. Only Ellen and Jessie have keys.”

  “I interrupted an interview and got one from your sister,” Yasmin said. She turned to face me, face serious. “The tournament’s back on. Next round is tomorrow and the day after, and you’re the first match. Are you ready?”

  I took a deep breath. In all the chaos, I’d forgotten about my match with Rob, and even pushed the tournament itself to the back of my mind. Lightning sparked in my core, and I let it course through my body. Then I nodded. “Yes. Will Ellen be ready for her fight?”

  Yasmin stared at me, eyebrow raised. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

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