The van doors were ripped off their hinges, like an overzealous neckbeard had finally got a date home. Except this neckbeard was an eighteen-foot monstrosity. Kaelyn’s bracer glowed violet, but nothing happened. Her eyes opened wide. Then she went flying. Not metaphorically. She was yanked through the air with such force whilst still holding on to me that I went careening out of the van behind her, rolled onto the tarmac below, and came to rest against a bump in the road.

  The bump I had knocked into was one of the two officers who had brought me to the van. He had his face planted on the ground, eyes staring at me, tongue lolling. The other one was also on the ground, head resting on the first one’s legs. All around me was a similar scene. Officers on the ground or on car roofs or squished in between ruined vehicles - some with their arms or their legs or even their heads at unnatural angles, covered in glass, whilst blood seeped out of their wounds.

  I managed to struggle up, turn over, and extend my legs whilst I rested my head on the footrest at the base of the van doors. The flesh wounds on my shoulder and stomach had opened up a little more. My hands fell to my sides. I didn’t have much longer. I could feel it.

  So much death. So much carnage. But I couldn’t see the three who were important to me. In truth, I was glad I didn’t have to. Kaelyn’s words echoed in my mind. I didn’t even hope that she’d meant that they’d found a way to escape. They had escaped. Not the way that I would have wanted. Not the way they deserved.

  A few metres ahead of me was Melkarieth, holding Kaelyn in an outstretched hand.

  “I can’t let…you have…the…stone.” Her bracer glowed, and the knife at her waist suddenly appeared behind Melkarieth. The jagged blade seemed to detach from the hilt and burst towards the man, a barbed chain linking the two pieces. The blade arced through the air to Melkarieth’s right side, then turned and shot past the gap between the god and Kaelyn, before whipping around the back of his head and starting over. The chain followed its path, wrapping itself around the goat-man’s neck, serrated teeth trying to dig in, but even from where I was sitting, I could see it wasn’t even touching him.

  He laughed.

  “Little girl,” the half-goat, half-man said in a deep, booming voice. “You were the one who killed The Paradox? You managed a lucky strike, and you thought that made you special? That made you our equal?

  “You were hidden. You should have stayed hidden.”

  The chain tightened around Melkarieth’s neck. And simply snapped into pieces, falling to the floor like a broken pearl necklace. Then I heard another snap. Kaelyn’s neck, where Melkarieth had pressed one side of her head in an angle it wasn’t meant to go. He released his grip on her and she crumpled to the floor. He turned to me, yellow eyes glowing. He had a surprisingly human face, except for those colossal horns.

  [“Master Melkarieth. This is a violation of USPSM code 1.2.04. No Pantheon Member is allowed to be on the field of battle after System Initialisation, unless the ranking of the world is within the agreed parameters and either A) The Pantheon member has requested to join the battle beforehand or B) The Pantheon member was requested to join the battle by the aggressor.”]

  “Machine,” Melkarieth responded with disdain. “You work for us.”

  [“That is correct, and as has been made my duty by the Pantheon, I am to protect the integrity of the Universal Survival Protocol, even against the Pantheon. I must request you return.”]

  “The artifact cannot be allowed to remain in his possession. It belongs to the Pantheon.”

  [“It came to him fairly. No violations took place in its retrieval. The mana-stone is his.”]

  Melkarieth grunted, blinked out of existence, and blinked back into existence, standing over me. He watched as I moved my right arm as best as I could, using my hands to feel on the ground around me. Ah, there. I touched a rock. One small enough to grasp in my feeble hand. I used the last of what strength I could muster, wrapped my hand around the rock and hurled it with everything I had.

  It landed a few centimetres away near my knee.

  I looked at it, my lips pursed.

  The human-beast grinned at me with his sharpened yellow teeth. “Amusing,” he said, reaching out towards me. “It would be a travesty to leave the artifact in your hands.”

  [“System Integrity Protocol initiated. System Guardians deployed.”]

  Four beams of light appeared from the sky, at the corners of a square around the Pantheon member and coalesced into what seemed to be faceless angels, wings included. Almost as he grabbed me, the two beings closest to me put out their weapons and Melkarieth took a step back. The angels held halberds. Kind of like spears but with axe-heads instead of a pointy end.

  One of the angels furthest from me was thrown away like garbage, hurtling through the air and smashing into the brickwork on the second floor of a nearby house. The other three charged and engaged.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  [“USPSM 3.14 requests immediate Pantheon response to Pantheon threat on planet 666,666. Universal Survival Protocol Integrity compromised.”]

  I turned over onto my front, onto the floor, and slowly slithered away like my friends had earlier. I didn’t know where I was going, but anywhere away from the human-goat. It was a struggle, especially with the wound to my stomach. Every time I stretched my arms out, I was pulling at the tear.

  I could hear weapons clanging behind me, felt rushes of air flow over me like I was crawling through a wind-tunnel. I have to admit, I didn’t even know why I was trying to get away. I was dead. I knew I was dead. But it’s a very human thing, don’t you think? To not give in. To keep fighting. Fighting even when there’s no hope. Fighting to stay alive.

  Maybe it’s not a human thing. Maybe it’s just a me thing.

  I struggled to make my way to the pavement, clearing shattered glass and ruptured metal from my path as I went. It was slow going, but as long as I could hear the battle behind me, I knew I was good. Well, not good exactly, but getting away. A crash to my left whipped my head around. One of the angels, one half of its wings torn off crashed into the brick wall ahead of me but immediately stood up and re-engaged.

  I looked left and right down the street. That wall stretched along the entire pavement. There was nowhere for me to hide. I hung my head. Life just finds a way to keep slapping you, no matter how hard you try. I struggled over to the wall, turned over and rested against it. I was no further than five or so metres from where I had been, a trail of blood marking my path, like the slime a snail leaves behind.

  I chuckled gently into my chest. All that effort to move as far as a five year old could in seconds.

  Not much else for me to do, except wait for the inevitable. Believe me, I would have loved to have continued crawling to freedom, but I just couldn’t. I really couldn’t. The most I could do right now was rest. My eyes fluttered open and closed. My breathing was shallow. I wondered whether I had the strength or the life for one final reset. I wondered if the range might stretch to my friends. I looked to the heavens.

  The gods answered.

  Three thunderstrikes, one atop the other. Boom, boom, boom.

  In the middle of the road, Melkarieth stood, and three others faced him. Two angels remained, the bodies of the other two were missing. I couldn’t see them anywhere. The remaining two were bathed in light and beamed away in the same manner that they had arrived.

  The right of the three towered over the rest. A true giant of a being, twice as tall as the others, and grey, with hard edges as if chiselled from rock. It was covered in gems, much the same as Melkarieth, interspersed with armour here and there. The other two were female, both standing taller than Melkarieth.

  The one on the left had purple skin, dotted with mana-stones, with gem-covered clothing wrapped around her torso and wearing what seemed to be the thinnest underwear I’d ever seen and gem-encrusted high heels. She was more BDSM than Kaelyn, but that wasn’t the part that made me stare. It was the tail that she had and the small black wings on her back.

  The one in the middle was the shortest of the three, and the most human. Porcelain white skin, long blonde hair to her waist, and mana-stone embedded gold armour covering her from shoulder to toes. The only thing that gave it away that she wasn’t human were the pointed ears. Well, that and the fact she was twenty feet tall and had appeared out of nowhere. Other than that, as human as they come.

  “Stand down, Melkarieth,” Blondie said, her voice as dreamlike as I was expecting. “This is a flagrant violation of the rules.”

  “The rules?” half-goat said. “The rules only work as long as we abide by them.”

  “That’s…” BDSM cut in, her voice as soft as Blondie’s and no less dreamlike, “…generally how rules work.”

  Melkarieth gave her a look that screamed “I’m not stupid.”

  “He is not part of us. He does not have to follow the rules.”

  The three of them looked at me the way you would at a bluebottle fly. An annoyance but not something to be overly concerned about. They turned back to Melkarieth.

  “Are you scared of him?” the rock spoke, his voice hoarse and rugged. “Look at him. He’s almost dead anyway.”

  “And when he dies, another will take it.”

  “As is the way,” Blondie said. “These are our rules.”

  “Rules made before one of us died,” Melkarieth replied. “Rules made before the unthinkable happened. Rules made whilst we controlled the Divine stones.”

  “Tiananmut’s death was unfortunate,” BDSM said. “But fair. Once we have dealt with the transgressors, there will be little threat to us, even with the Divine stone lost.”

  “Until this one becomes powerful enough to challenge us,” Melkarieth replied.

  “And we will deal with him then,” Blondie replied. “You know why the rules exist. Do not destroy two thousand millennia of peace and undo all of our hard work because you fear a child.”

  “I don’t fear him,” Melkarieth said. “I fear the stone in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing.”

  “Even if that were to happen, we will deal with it then.”

  “Isn’t that what we thought when Tiananmut accepted the challenge? And they didn’t have a Divine stone.”

  “And how long did it take? How many soldiers did they expend?” Blondie’s tone was calm. “It’s true it was unexpected. We miscalculated. We’ll make the changes we need to, to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Blondie turned to look at me. “It would have been better had they returned the stone for our safekeeping,” she turned back to Melkarieth, “but if you try to take it by force, we will be forced to end you. Think of the repercussions.”

  Melkarieth looked between the three of them as if he knew he was outmatched. Or maybe he was calculating his odds. BDSM came over to me and squatted down, legs wide open right in front me. Don’t forget, she was over twenty-feet tall. That was a gaping chasm that I didn’t need to see. I craned my neck as much as I could, more to not see what was directly in front of me, than to make sure I made eye contact.

  “I think we’re worrying too much,” she said, reaching out with slender fingers and long nails to cup my chin. With her other hand, she ran a finger down the side of my face, in a way that was reserved for Carmen, but I was a man nonetheless – even in my frail state. This woman knew what she was doing, her finger gliding softly along my skin with promises of better things to come. She smiled. “These humans are weak, but hungry for power. Amongst other things.” She let go of my face, her smile gone and walked back to the rest. “Whether it’s him or another of their kind, or someone else entirely – if they ever reach Mythic level, why couldn’t we offer them a spot in the Pantheon? We have a vacant space.”

  The gods looked amongst each other, when the System piped up.

  [“Masters, may I make a suggestion?”]