“You must be joking.”

  Isaac couldn’t blame Savage for being skeptical of intervening in a sovereign-scale conflict, even if the raptor had been at least tangentially aware of all the practice Isaac had been putting in. In a fight between titanic forces like Mechaniacal and Great King Zys, there wasn’t much of a difference they could make if they were to move directly. The larger drones seemed far more dangerous than the little ones in Star City or that had followed them after they left Borealis, and even Savage’s heavier weapons might not do much to one.

  But Isaac wasn’t planning to try and take down the swarm one by one, or charge up to the tower and take on Mechaniacal himself. After even just a week of testing, he was certain that he could make a difference if he leaned into manipulating the fight itself. There was no guarantee that he could make it stop, but he had to at least give it a shot.

  “We just need to get involved enough that I can get ahold of the fight’s inertia,” Isaac said. “If I suck everything out of it, then any attempt to make the fighting stop should have an outsized effect.”

  “That’s not as coherent a plan as I’d like,” Sarah said, her disguise mimicking how she shifted atop Astoria’s saddle to look at him. “But it does make sense. And honestly, if Mechaniacal is after us then teleporting somewhere else is only going to delay the inevitable anyway. Gratin found us, he found us, and for all we know Star Central is close behind. Stopping a big fight isn’t exactly sovereign level stuff, but…”

  “Have to start somewhere, and might give everyone more pause than just running again. If they can tell it’s me, anyway.” They could still teleport out later if things didn’t improve, and Isaac was starting to get tired of running away. It was true that there were many forces that outclassed him, but Great King Zys had a point that if he never pushed back, he’d never know which ones he could oppose.

  “Just by being here we should be involved yes,” Gratin muttered, then whistled something to himself that the bracelet didn’t translate and pointed toward the outer defensive wall. “Using a turret might be enough perhaps?”

  “Worth a try,” Isaac said, waving his hand out in front of him in the back-and-forth gesture he’d been using to practice adjusting intangibles, but couldn’t get a handle on anything useful. He had developed a small sense during his practice for when he was affecting something, even if the total amount he was doing still remained elusive. Though he was beginning to think that was at least in part because metaphysical inertia was constantly changing anyway, and wasn’t as controlled as the physical version.

  Gratin’s scales shifted back to the purple-dominated hues of Zys’s people as they rode toward one of the emplacements, which was already crewed by a number of ikiski. The bulk of them were at a series of panel controls, humming, chirping, and singing to control the long turret, but there were some of the smaller types carrying what seemed to be physical shells from a basement. They were shimmering spheres with what looked to be fire frozen inside, caught mid-flicker and packed into munitions.

  “Fetch and carry,” Gratin said, waving at the munitions carriers. Isaac found it amusing that despite having teleporters and spatial distortion crystal-tech, they still defaulted to the human porter – or ikiski porter – method of carrying items. Admittedly, Star City did that too, since in a crisis it was impossible to know whether any given bit of infrastructure would work.

  None of the ikiski already doing the job complained or questioned a few more joining the chain, even if their disguises were green-scaled rather than purple-scaled. Isaac and Sarah scurried down into the munitions bunker, were handed a surprisingly heavy orb each, and toted it back up a ramp to the dull thump-thump-thump of the turret firing. While he’d never been a munitions carrier before, the general feel of cooperative help was so familiar he had to remind himself of the real reason that he was there.

  Part of him expected to feel the metaphysical involvement slowly build, as he entered the fringes of the fight, but it seemed that contact was contact. Just as it didn’t matter if he was just touching an object or holding onto it for dear life, so long as he had any involvement that was enough to achieve metaphysical touch. It clicked in suddenly enough that he nearly stumbled as he toted the sphere up the ramp, a subtle feeling that was so abstract it couldn’t be described as anything like a physical sensation. The closest he could think to describe it was the ping of understanding when he figured out a math or logic problem back when he was in school.

  “Got it,” he muttered into the comms pin he’d still had stuck in his collar. At some point they would run out of juice, but for the moment they functioned and so he’d take advantage of them. “Have to keep working though.” After all, he had to stay involved to use his power, which was oddly reassuring. He didn’t like the idea of sitting back as some kind of distant puppetmaster, which was the kind of thing that made people supervillains.

  He reached out with his power and started pulling the resistance to change out of the fight. He tried to focus on reducing the resistance to the fight stopping, rather than just change in general. The latter was dangerous; it might mean that someone was going to win and he couldn’t control that even slightly. For all he knew, Mechaniacal would be the victor and he didn’t want that.

  The first time he climbed the ramp and deposited his sphere on the small pile next to the crystaltech turret, there was no difference he could see. Great King Zys had obtained a massive, building-sized blade from somewhere, a huge slab of silver metal with a subtle curve and a chisel point, and was parrying darkly luminous bolts coming from parabolic antennae deployed from the surface of Mechaniacal’s skyscraper. His amethyst armor poured a wildly strobing set of beams in all directions; shielding, attacking, healing, all kind of effects that controlled the battlefield.

  Isaac took another trip down to the armory to retrieve a second sphere, pulling on the fight all the while. Shifting its resistance to change was a constant battle with the ever-shifting nature of a dynamic system. It wasn’t like a physical object at all, where it was a single static thing, and felt more like he was trying to bail out a tub with the tap wide open.

  Yet by the time he returned to the artillery, the fight seemed to have stalled out, the battlefield quieted. There were a few desultory detonations here and there, but the massive swarm of drones on one side was simply hovering in the air, while on the other side Great King Zys held his sword and an energy shield as tall as he was. It seemed to be a stalemate, or at least both sides were considering exactly how they wanted to resolve things.

  “That’s kind of impressive,” Sarah muttered from next to him, depositing her own artillery sphere in the trays next to the guns.

  “Well, I can only make it easier. They had to want to stop, in the end,” Isaac muttered back. “Gratin, can we slip out of here now?” He reversed his efforts, throwing power into the stalled-out situation to make it harder to change away from it. At the same time he edged back toward their raptor mounts, Sarah at his side.

  “No, seriously,” Sarah persisted. “I’ve changed my mind, seeing this. You managed to stop a fight between sovereigns. Without even confronting them directly!”

  “Huh,” Isaac said. He hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. All he’d been worried about was the fight itself, and what it might mean for all the various ikiski who were involved. Not what it might look like from the outside. “Well, good to know I can affect things at that scale. Too bad I can’t really control things.”

  “Who can?” Sarah muttered, stopping at Astoria and rubbing the dinosaur’s snout.

  “If Mechaniacal is pursuing you, then someone will have to confront him,” Lia said, speaking for the first time since they’d broken her out of stasis. “He seems to come by his sovereign status honestly. The royals spent no small fortune on his lunar prison, and that clearly wasn’t good enough.” Isaac spent a fraction of a second wondering about a dishonest sovereign before focusing on the problem at hand.

  “I need to find out what he actually wants from me,” Isaac said after a moment. “If he wants to lock me in a basement to do alterations, not much to be done besides a flat-out fight.” Which he would have to foist off on one of the Great Kings or on Star Central, who were at odds with Mechaniacal anyway. “If he just needs a small favor, it might be worthwhile to get him off our backs.”

  “Supervillains never just need small favors,” Sarah said, mounting back up on Astoria while Isaac climbed up to Shay’s saddle. “That’s just how they get their claws on you.”

  “Things were easier when I was just a janitor,” Isaac lamented, but he wasn’t about to stop now. He couldn’t go back to what he had been before, and he couldn’t just stop and let someone like Mechaniacal, or for that matter, Star Central control him. The only thing he could do was to keep moving, keep going in the direction he’d chosen.

  “Okay, if he’s here for me, maybe we can send a message before we teleport out,” he said into the comm pin as Gratin steered them away from the artillery emplacement. Isaac hoped the ikiski there didn’t think too badly of them for such desultory assistance but, despite his normal urge to finish a job properly, they couldn’t stay. “Should keep him from continuing to attack.”

  “He might know anyway,” Savage pointed out in his synthetic voice. “He tracked us here, after all. And likely not in the same way that Gratin did.”

  “I followed your trail and asked around, yes,” Gratin said, head swiveling around as the raptors carried them across paved stones that were now nearly empty, heading around the mountain in the opposite direction of Great King Zys. The sight of thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of drones all poised and waiting but motionless was profoundly disturbing, but nothing and nobody actually stopped them.

  Instead, they stopped of their own accord as a thunderous rumble presaged the appearance of a second Great King, striding through the jungle so fast that splinters of wood flew into the air, bursting into flame from the friction of the impact. In the inverted sphere of the Deep Kingdoms, they could simply look up and see the path being blazed through the forest, like some great landbound comet. The kaiju himself appeared in an effect like some animation from an action cartoon, moving so fast that there was nothing to see but a long blur until he suddenly stopped.

  The new Great King was, most improbably, carrying a giant mecha, princess-style. It was leaps and bounds the most ridiculous thing that Isaac had seen in his life, and he couldn’t help staring as the green Great King deposited the mecha – which Isaac recognized as Endymion’s, thanks to all the licensed merchandise at MetaFiCon – on its feet before striding toward Mechaniacal’s tower.

  “Great King Iy!” Gratin said, half in shock and half in excitement.

  “Star Central,” Sarah noted, even if Endymion was part of the Isle of Leaves and not the Five City Alliance. But of course, without someone like Glorybeam, Star Central would have had to borrow a sovereign super from somewhere.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise that others would show up when Mechaniacal made his move, regardless. Especially when it was so overt, like transporting a giant tower from, presumably, Star City down thousands of miles. Every time something big went down in the Five City Alliance or even the nearby polities, heroes would always rush over within minutes. The Deep Kingdoms were a bit farther, but it wasn’t like they were traveling to the moon.

  “Looks like we’re not leaving just yet,” Isaac said, reaching for his power again. He couldn’t do much directly, but with any luck he could stop the clash of sovereigns from degenerating into all-out war.

  ***

  Professor Mechaniacal sat at the control console at the center of his tower, working the massive array of dials, levers, buttons, and knobs that directed his drones. They had a certain level of mechanical intelligence of their own, of course, to dodge attacks and target of their own accord, but he was the ultimate maestro behind their actions. Though he’d dabbled with true artificial intelligence, his experiments had proven to be too potentially dangerous to follow through.

  Thousands of his drones had already been destroyed, but that was just the price of combat. He found he rather enjoyed sparring with the Great King. Very few people could really strain the limits of what his ingenuity could provide without it degenerating into some reality-shattering conflict. Besides which, crystalline technology was just different enough from human-style technology to be interesting, without crossing into the realm of arbitrary nonsense that was magic.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  His fingers played across the control console almost of their own accord as he countered the harmonics of the kaiju’s energy blasts, rendering the tremendous power packed into the breath weapon completely harmless. At the same time, drones pelted the amethyst mountain with diffractor beams, temporarily disabling the resonant frequencies that the crystaltech used to function. Getting the amount of force just right was his goal; enough to be threatening, but not so much as to cause widespread devastation that would inspire an escalation to something he’d need to take seriously.

  Oddly enough, there were some aspects that did not react like his sensors suggested. Anomalies in the defenses where his weapons were rendered strangely ineffective, in a way that seemed quite familiar. The Hartson boy’s work, rather like the reinforcement that had been lent to the embassy. Similar, yet still different from what had been done to his old laboratory. The alterations there were interesting, but mostly physical. When it came to the floating walls, his sensors found no good reason they should be so robust.

  Proof that he was right in his assumption that the surfacers would stick together, at least. The dimensional resonance of the shadow-reality dinosaur was nearby, and while locating it precisely would require more information than he currently had, now that he had the general area his drones could finish the search. Or, more likely, they would appear of their own accord under the pressure Mechaniacal was providing.

  A soft pinging interrupted his battle with the Great King, and he glanced to one side to see what the alert could be. His eyebrows climbed as he found it was his probability matrix, a mechanism he had put together to alert him when someone nearby was manipulating luck or fate. Nothing so crude as flipping coins or the like; it performed constant analysis of events from Mechaniacal’s sensors, projecting likely actions and outcomes.

  It wasn’t even trying to predict the future, just determine what events were more or less likely to happen. Heroes were always able to do the improbable, but as unlikely occurrences stacked up, so did the likelihood someone had their thumb on the scales. Such as now.

  The effect was a subtle one, but all across the front small choices had been made, by him, by Zys, by the programming weights of his drones and the defending ikiski, that were winding down the conflict. A pause and reassessment, though there was no one obvious reason to do so.

  “Fascinating,” Mechaniacal muttered. Now that he recognized it was happening, he could have forced his drones to push harder once again. The effect was clearly not mind control as such, but altering probabilities just slightly over a large region had much the same effect, with thousands of compounding decisions being tweaked just so. Instead, he let it be, more interested in what the goal of such manipulation was, or if the goal was simply what he was seeing. A cessation of hostilities, which was no small thing, even if the truce was a fragile and unspoken thing.

  He was watching the situation, letting his drones analyze everyone within view in hopes of catching the super involved in the manipulation, when another set of alarms went off. A breach was highly unlikely given his defenses, but he was already operating under a schema where the unlikely became probable. Perhaps it was the probability manipulation, or perhaps it was simply the natural interference of the crystalline veins that ran throughout the hollow earth, but someone had breached through the defenses in his tower.

  A toggle of a button showed it was exactly who he suspected: Blacktime. That transporter of his had an astounding ability, poorly utilized, and utterly wasted as Blacktime’s personal chauffeur, but such was the nature of supervillains. Most of those who went the villain route had certain fundamental flaws that kept them from realizing their full potential or even working properly without strict oversight, which was one of many reasons he rarely collaborated with others.

  The main one being that few people could measure up to his genius.

  Mechaniacal’s temporal anchors and dimensional stabilizers came online, powerful engines whining as they pushed back against Blacktime’s powers and only partially succeeded. Depowerment did little; the man’s existence was smeared across every place he’d ever been. Cut out one part of it and he’d simply pop up in an earlier state. The only means Mechaniacal had ever thought of to deal with him permanently would wreak havoc across the man's entire spatiotemporal world-line — and so probably destroy the world in the process.

  Assuming the method even worked, which was not guaranteed. Men like Blacktime accumulated magical artifacts and technology specifically to thwart whatever corner cases existed in what their power didn’t cover. Being almost invincible was never enough.

  Mechaniacal rose from his control console, readying his cane and personal defenses. The small, cog-themed pin at his lapel, his dark grey suit and hat, the clockwork ticking away where his heart once was. He was a man like Blacktime, after all, and being almost invincible was never enough.

  The time-power supervillain swept upward from where he’d arrived in one of the many factory floors — essentially all the floors of the tower save for where Mechaniacal himself lived. The man committed relatively little collateral damage as he went — possibly because he realized how pointless it would be, but possibly because he was only fixated on Mechaniacal. In both his original timeline and this one, the man had a tendency to become obsessive. Probably a necessary adaptation, when he could accelerate time and put in a hundred of hours of work when a normal person could only manage a few.

  Flipping a few levers, Mechaniacal opened several of the doors between him and the freight elevator that Blacktime was using. Clearly the man’s surveillance had been more extensive than Mechaniacal had anticipated, as he knew the precise route to Freight Lift 17-A, the only one that happened to go all the way to Mechaniacal’s personal quarters. A reminder that despite all his advantages, Mechanical was not omniscient.

  Blacktime appeared in a blue-tinted bubble of accelerated time, bursting through the final door into Mechaniacal’s office. A touch of a button stowed the control panel, the organ-like apparatus of buttons, dials, levers, and stops folding up and away. Leaving such a thing out during a battle was a mistake he’d only needed to make once to ensure it didn’t happen again.

  “Blacktime.” He greeted his fellow supervillain with a tip of the hat, planting his cane in front of him as he smiled urbanely at the irate man that had so rudely burst into his office. While Mechaniacal had never liked Blacktime, he had to at least admit the man was, when properly constrained, fairly intelligent and tasteful. The armored suit was a bit too new-style and bland for Mechaniacal’s preferences, but it was better than some of the monstrosities he saw out of Star Central or lesser supervillains.

  “Mechanical,” Blacktime said with a scowl. Normally the man used his power to cloak his identity, but either he was too irate – unlikely – or felt it unnecessary at the moment. Considering that Mechaniacal had made it amply plain that he knew Blacktime’s civilian identity, more likely the latter. “Where is he?”

  “That is an interesting question,” Mechaniacal replied, tapping his fingers against the handle of his cane. “Somewhere in the mountain, I believe. If my readings are accurate, he is using his power on us at the very moment.”

  “On us?” Blacktime’s fingers went to a jeweled watch, likely a defensive charm of some kind. “Is he a sovereign class power, then?”

  “I should think not,” Mechaniacal said judiciously. “It takes time and efforts to reach such heights, even if the potential is there. As you well know.” A bit of honest flattery never hurt, but Blacktime’s power had always been sovereign level. He’d taken it even further in Mechaniacal’s timeline, to the point of being able to swamp the entire globe, but his wide-area time manipulation and personally unkillable nature meant he’d never been truly weak.

  “And you intend to secure his talents before then,” Blacktime said, not really as a question.

  “In truth, I only have a need to study what he can do,” Mechaniacal said modestly. “I have never found it worth my time to work with subordinates for very long. Something about my style and approach does not inspire loyalty.” It wasn’t that he couldn’t get along with people, but rather that he made for a very poor employer.

  “I looked up your records,” Blacktime said, standing at the entrance to the room, one hand tucked inside his jacket. Likely touching the knife that he carried with him, a nasty piece of work that was definitely new to this timeline. Of course, Mechaniacal’s version of Blacktime had grown considerably more aggressive and brutal with his power, simply killing by allowing a person’s body to age at an advanced rate while their head stayed in stasis. “You rarely bother with anyone else at all, so I have to imagine this Hartson person really is something special.”

  “Unusual, perhaps, but special? All powers are to those with the wit to wield them.” Mechaniacal shook his head. “Unfortunately, I do not have knowledge of all of time and space, so I cannot derive the secrets of arbitrary powers from first principles, only observe, measure, and extrapolate from what is there. I am, necessarily, dependent on the wit of others to discover interesting interactions such as the one affecting us now.”

  Monologuing was an occupational habit. He wasn’t certain whether it was some compulsive need to make others understand, a personality quirk that supervillains tended toward, or simply a lack of conversational partners, but it was a constant across very many in the profession. Those who didn’t were the ones who ended up dead, the monsters who needed to be put down by either heroes or other villains because they were too dangerous to suffer to live.

  Blacktime, alas, didn’t seem to be much enamored of Mechaniacal’s meanderings. Instead he frowned, the tendons in his wrist shifting subtly as he no doubt tapped a finger against the hilt of his knife. A nervous tic more than a tell, but Mechaniacal nevertheless shifted his finger on one of the controls of his cane.

  “You talk a lot,” Blacktime said, almost rudely. “But now I’m convinced that you don’t have him yet, and it’s better not to let you acquire such a useful talent.” He took a step forward; aggressive, combat stance, not just movement. The black shroud went up, shielding him from sight.

  Mechaniacal was almost disappointed. But he’d always expected Blacktime to attack; the man’s personal invulnerability meant that his version of risk was different from everyone else’s. Barring some existential threat from the outside, the two of them would never cooperate. While Mechaniacal didn’t take Blacktime’s attacks personally, the man had lost a number of his subordinates to Mechaniacal’s defenses in the past week.

  The hum of temporal anchors spiked to a protesting squeal as they tried and failed to counteract Blacktime’s personal abilities, but that wasn’t Mechaniacal’s primary defense anyway. Instead he simply pressed a stud on his cane and certain delicate gears, wrought in a manner and direction that most people could not name or describe, clicked forward one step. Blacktime vanished for an instant, cast forward in time by exactly one second.

  More than that would be difficult, given the man’s temporal weight, but Mechaniacal wasn’t intending to actually stop Blacktime. He was intending to annoy him. There was a peculiar vulnerability the long-lived, nigh-invulnerable types had: inconvenience or humiliation. They were some of the few ways he had of influencing the actions of extraordinarily powerful beings, and one of the reasons he’d ended up adopting a policy of indirect coercion. If nothing else, it was amusing.

  Blacktime popped into existence again, staggering slightly as the feedback hit him. Mechaniacal had no idea what the subjective experience was, but knowing that Blacktime’s existence was a single extended temporal line, he could surmise that having a gap in that line must be extremely bizarre. So Mechaniacal depressed the stud again, and the gears clicked. Blacktime vanished, then reappeared, listing in the other direction.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  “Would you stop that?” Blacktime exploded, blackness exploding out to wrap around him as if to stop the time displacement with his own temporal freeze.

  “Certainly,” Mechaniacal said equably, since just by yielding enough to make the request – or by losing his temper enough to shout – Blacktime had already conceded the fight. Such as it was. The man reached up to rub his head, at least by the appearance of his suit, which was all that was visible with the darkness effect up. “If you are quite done, I would like to point out that not only have neither of us yet to actually find this individual, but we have quite a few facts working against us. That, among other things,” he finished, pointing at the viewscreen with his cane.

  Great King Zys still stood with his oversized sword, but two other kaiju-sized figures had joined them. Another Great King, and Endymion’s mecha. ALICE-07, if he remembered the numbering correctly. Which presented a third side to the combat — or a fourth, if Blacktime was to be considered. Personally, Mechaniacal didn’t. For all that he was a sovereign, Blacktime’s power was more applicable to the world above, not the brute physical prowess of the Deep Kingdoms.

  “If this escalates too far, no one will have the chance to find Mister Hartson and, shall we say, persuade him to lend a hand.” It was important to keep the greater picture in mind, and not get lost in this, that, or the other spat, altercation, or feud.

  “What are they doing here?” Blacktime said aloud, but not to Mechaniacal. In fact, most people wouldn’t have heard it.

  “They are, if anything, late. I expected them to beat me here, in fact,” Mechaniacal admitted. “It makes the situation rather more complex.” If he’d been able to seize everyone’s attention immediately, there was no risk of the Great Kings fighting each other and threatening to destabilize the Deep Kingdoms.

  “Complex for you, perhaps,” Blacktime said, eyeing the viewscreen. “But this is hardly my fight. And if Endymion and Star Central are focused on you, then I’ll be free to move without interference.” Once again the man activated his power, but instead of being aimed at Mechaniacal, he vanished from where he stood, sensors indicated he had reappeared back where he’d first arrived within the tower. That incredible reversion ability was just unfair.

  Mechaniacal didn’t even try to restrain the man. He was risking temporal anomalies just providing enough power to slow down the acceleration ability, and if Blacktime wanted to do the spadework of finding Hartson while Mechaniacal was otherwise occupied, let him. Surely Mechaniacal could tempt the boy away, should Blacktime actually manage to lay hands on him. Instead, he simply rotated the gear pin on his lapel to signal the control panel back to its deployed position, and keyed his microphone to once again broadcast aloud.

  “Gentlemen!” His voice boomed out over the temporary truce. “It seems we are an impasse! All of us want to employ the services of a certain lad, one who is at this moment influencing the battlefield. Yet if we are to clash over that opportunity, we risk harming the very person we’re interested in. I suggest we pause with our hostilities before any of us resort to more extreme measures.”

  He flipped a series of red-colored switches on his control panel, the swarm of drones floating in the air unlimbering an entirely different set of weapons than they had been using earlier. No longer did they wield sonic disruptors and stun-beams, but a wide variety of more advanced weaponry. Thick, short-barreled plasma projectors, the spindly feathers of invertron emitters, and even the fractal antennae of phlogisten lances, glowing eerily as they separated combustible aether from the surroundings.

  “Now,” Mechaniacal said, twirling his cane as he watched the viewscreen. “Are we going to be civilized?”

  Patreon or

  available on Amazon! Audiobooks are available for all of them!

  Blue Core series is also available on Amazon, available as ebook or audiobook!.

  Chasing Sunlight is available as ebook and audiobook!

  The Systema Delenda Est series is available in ebook and audiobook formats!