"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 wouldn't answer me. Tallas's Dueling Blade surged to life in my hand. "Answer me!"

"I'm not here to help you throw away your potential, kid. I'm here to help you reach it. You made some mistakes. You screwed up. Pushed yourself too hard. And now, you need even more. That's not how cores work. What you're building is a long-term investment, not something like your friend. You don't want to burn bright and flame out. Do you?" Eugene asked, his voice even more infuriating.

"I can survive it," I said. "I know I can."

"Kade Noelstra, I have seen thousands try to walk the Stormsteel Path. I remember every single one. Eidetic memory, remember? You fought Tallas at C-Rank when you were an E. It was very, very impressive. And not many of my pupils could have survived the C-Rank trial I put you through. You've earned that Paragon title. But when I say you cannot reach B-Rank right now, I don't mean that I won't let you. I mean that you can't."

"Because I don't have the skill ranks? Or because I don't have the cores?"

Eugene snorted. It felt almost dismissive, and rage filled me. "Ranks. Cores. They don't matter. They're tools, but tools can be substituted for. You have what you need to reach B-Rank, if you're willing to risk losing those tools. But your core will not survive the trial. I promise you that."

"And if I say I can hold it together?"

"Then you're lying to yourself, kid."

"What can you do?" I asked. Tallas's Dueling Blade was inches from the dragon's face; I'd been walking toward him and didn't realize it. "You have to be able to do something!"

The God of Thunder pondered my sword tip with one open eye, the other closed. Then he nodded. "I can."

"What can you do?" I asked.

"I can keep you safe here until the fighting is over. When the portal opens, I can keep you here until your S-Rank friends enter it and clear it. Then I can deposit you back inside the safe portal world, and you can rejoin them."

"And my friends? Ellen? Jeff? What about them?" I asked.

"They don't walk the Stormsteel Path. I have no need to save them."

Rage. So much rage. I struck out at Eugene's eye.

He shifted forms instantly. The knight—the one with Dad's face—met my blow with his spear. Tallas's Dueling Blade flickered and vanished as the parry ripped it out of my hand. "I'll forgive that, kid. I know you care about them, especially that shadow mage girl. But you can't save them, and like I said, I have no need to."

"Ellen is my Dual Skill Progression partner," I said. "You need to save her—"

"Or what? You'll be stuck? Kade Noelstra, that will be one more problem for you to fight your way through. You brought that on yourself, though. She was a useful tool. But you don't need Dual Skill Progression to reach your potential. Not if you let me save you."

No. No, that couldn't be it. There had to be something I could do. Otherwise…

I'd promised too many people I'd survive this.

Ellen and Jeff, Yasmin and Sophia. I'd promised them the moment we stepped into the portal and realized we were stuck. 'I know this is bad, but we're going to get through this. I promise.'

Ellen. That I'd be with her for the long haul. Twice.

Jessie. The night before I'd left, when she'd been nervous about me going and leaving her with only Tara to check in. 'I promise. If you're not sure you can handle two weeks without me, I can talk to Jeff.'

And Dad. He'd asked me to take care of my sister and to make him proud. 'I will. No matter what.'

I squared up, faced the God of Thunder, and said, "If you won't help me, I'll find a different way. I made too many promises for there not to be a way. Send me back."

"I cannot condone this," Eugene said. Then the dragon nodded slowly. "But I won't stop it, either, kid. I'll study your downfall. That way, I can warn your successors against this kind of hubris."

The golden portal opened, and I stepped through it without a look back at the lightning dragon.

I sat with Ellen's head on my leg. She couldn't stop shivering, but she hadn't Mana Burned herself as badly as I had with Stormbreak. I stroked her hair as she shivered and twitched. "I'm sorry," I said.

"For what?" she whispered back.

I couldn't answer. Putting into words how screwed we were would only make it more real, and I hadn't given up. Not yet. But if I had to pick a promise to keep, I'd have to pick the ones to Jessie and to Dad. I'd have to. And that was why I was putting off that choice.

The rest of the team's condition was dire.

Sophia's magic had saved Jeff's life, but her healing was split between Carrol, Jeff, and Ellen in equal measure to keep them all stabilized. Every time she got enough Mana to heal, she pushed Touch of Warmth into one of them until she was out again. Unlike Ellen, she couldn't risk Mana Burn. Going all-in to fix one person could mean the other two didn't make it.

Jeff couldn't move. Tathrix's blow had severed his spine, and while Sophia's healing had stabilized him, he was days from recovery. He was awake, though. Barely. He kept drifting off between healing doses, and when he was conscious and aware, he didn't have much to say that wasn't beating himself up.

And as for Carrol? He hadn't woken up, but Sophia swore she could feel a pulse.

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We wouldn't survive the boss. Not like this.

I touched Ellen's shoulder. "Ellen, I need to get stronger. But I can't. The God of Thunder won't help me. I don't know what to do, and no one's going to bail us out. What do I do?"

She weaved a hand into mine. "I…I don't…know. There might be a way, but it'll hurt. It'll hurt us both. I'm ready to push to B-Rank. But…"

"But you're Mana Burned," I finished, ignoring that she was—somehow—ahead of me. Without Mana, Ellen couldn't push to B-Rank. Without a stable core, I couldn't do it either. That wasn't a way forward.

"Yeah. I…I can't do it alone. But…"

"But…Pepperoni could feed you Mana," I finished.

"Not enough. I'd need hundreds. I'm close to eight hundred Mana right now, and I'd need it all. She's not strong enough to feed that kind of Mana into me. I'd…I'd need a second battery. Someone to get…my core started again, and to keep it running." Ellen hesitated.

"And I have Mana."

"You do. And we already have a connection thanks to Dual Skill progression. Shadowstorm Battery lets us shift Mana from one person to the other. If I let Pepperoni feed me, you let Cheddar feed you, and then you feed me, we might have enough to push me to B-Rank and out-Mana the Mana Burn." Ellen tried to push herself up, then fell back to the ground. "You'll need to be present inside my Trial, though. That's going to suck. I'll have to manifest my full mental space instead of focusing on the Laws. And I don't know what that'll mean for your core—or for mine."

It sounded like a lot of risk. Ellen's core wasn't in much better shape than mine—Yasmin, her, and I had all pushed too hard to get to C-Rank and help Jeff. She didn't have the Core Instability Alert or Warning, but that didn't mean it'd be easy for her to hit B-Rank. And adding extra pressure from manifesting her full mental space—I assumed something like my mountain—and keeping linked to me as a battery? There were too many points of failure.

But we had no other options. It was this or nothing. Someone needed to be stronger if we wanted a chance of surviving this. And it couldn't be anyone but Ellen.

I helped her sit up. Then I nodded. "I'll do it. It's our only shot at getting out of this, right?"

"Right. Let's get these familiars going," Ellen said.

We summoned Cheddar and Pepperoni. The Shadowstorm serpent looked like hell, but his severed wing had scabbed over and was slowly regenerating as…something…as his monstrous Health pool kicked in. Sophia threw a tiny bit of Mana his way. "That's all I can spare. Sorry." Then she went right back to healing Carrol.

I nodded in thanks. Then I sat down, familiar in my lap and back against Ellen's. "So, I just need to feed Mana, right?" I asked.

Ellen nodded. "That's…it. Feed Mana and keep your core together. I don't know what this'll do to you, but it'll be less painful than trying to advance yourself."

My fingers meshed with hers. "Ready."

"Here we go."

My job was simple.

All I had to do was act as a battery. Feed energy into Ellen, and stay here, hand meshed in hers, as she went through the painful process of consolidating her C-Rank Laws. I'd never been in her head, though—not like this.

It was dark in the desert. A spotlight glowed, pointing up into the sky to illuminate the façade of a towering white mansion. Around it, the silhouettes of Palo Verde trees threw shadows onto the building, and the walls that ran around the desert garden we stood in. The shadows writhed like a windstorm was howling overhead, but it was shockingly still inside.

The path was dark. So was the gravel, and all the plants. The singular spotlight was the only source of brightness, and it only made the writhing shadows longer.

Ellen tugged on my hand. She tried to say something. Nothing came out. Ellen's mental world was silent. It was black and white. Light and shadow.

She leaned against me, wobbling a little, and I looked at her for the first time. She wore a blue velvet cocktail dress, her hair was up in an ornate bun held in place with a silver ornament, and her heels would have clicked on the sandstone slabs if there'd been sound. She blushed, gave an embarrassed shrug, then looked away and started walking through the shadowy world.

Her mental space reeked of Bob. Of control. Of manipulation. I'd never met the man, but his touch was everywhere. In Ellen's outfit. In the mansion. All over the garden. Anger welled inside of me—or maybe it hadn't stopped building since my conversation with the God of Thunder. This mental space wasn't healthy. Ellen had built it in the image of her father. And that was wrong. It should have been hers, not his.

Something tugged on my core. I breathed, pushed the anger away, and opened my core up to let Mana flow.

It drained almost instantly. Ellen's thirst for Mana was insatiable. Even as Shadowstorm Battery kicked in and started refilling it from Cheddar's reserves, and the accelerated regeneration from having low Mana kicked in, the drain was all but overwhelming, and my core shook. I ignored that except to clamp down on it and try to keep it stable. My job was to provide Mana. That was all I had to do.

Ellen stopped in front of a small metal sign next to a cactus. I couldn't read it, and the cactus itself was shrouded in darkness. But she acted like she could read it. We stood there for a long time. The shadowy tendrils around us closed in overhead. She was starting to consolidate her Laws.

My core roiled. Pain ripped through my body. I gritted my teeth and held on as my Mana ticked up to three, and then right back down to zero.

As the next wave of pain ripped through me, Ellen's hand squeezed against mine, and her face tightened in agony. She was feeling it, too. I could only hope we had enough to make it through.

"It's been a while, Representative Gerald," Caleb Richter said.

Jessie looked up from her tablet. She hadn't slept the night before. With Kade out of communications, she'd been relying on the GC's connection to Carlsbad and their single line of communications to let her know that her brother was safe. But that wasn't enough. And worse, there'd been no new message from the convoy in almost eighteen hours.

So she hadn't slept. She blinked, feeling like an owl. Slowly, she shut the tablet's screen off and stared at Caleb Richter across the GC center's desk, ignoring her sore wrists as best she could. "How can I help you today?" she asked.

"I have a story. It'll help explain what I need from you." Caleb looked at the wall. He wouldn't make eye contact with Jessie—and that annoyed her for some reason.

But she was a GC rep. It was her job to help delvers out, and Caleb Richter had been a consistent face in the Peoria GC center over the last month. "Alright. Shoot."

"Okay. Imagine the following. You're an up-and-coming delver. A guild has picked you up for your Unique skill. An A-Ranker has taken a special interest in you and is giving you all the support you could possibly want. You have a team—a hand-picked team of guild delvers whose skills perfectly complement each other's and yours. The road to A-Rank is open to you. All you have to do is follow instructions."

Jessie sighed. "Let me guess? And then they send you into the California desert?"

"Wrong!" Caleb stared at the wall. Was he shaking? Jessie couldn't tell, and he shifted his leather jacket to cover it if he was. "Very wrong! The A-Ranker gives you advice. Go find E-Rank portals. Get your skills leveled up. She'll provide all the D-Rank cores you need to rank up from there—and all you have to do is keep following instructions. So you do it. You show up at a portal, and there's this group of three. Mage, tank, and striker. They've claimed the portal, but—"

It hit her. She'd heard this story before. Kade had told her about it when it happened. The Lithic portal world. The Roadrunners. But how could Caleb know this story? How was that possible?

"—you don't care. It's your portal, by virtue of strength. Only—"

"Only you're not as strong as they are. They clear the boss before you can get there," Jessie finished.

"Exactly."

Jessie's hand crept down to the panic button. One push, and a portal metal barrier would go down over the desk while the B-Ranker on duty responded. A B-Ranker could handle Caleb Richter. All she'd have to do was take cover and wait it out. Something felt wrong about him. The panic button was the right call. But…

But he was still talking, and while his frustration was heavy in the air, he was still in control. Jessie held off.

"Your boss is unhappy with that result. She sends you into another portal—a Dark Citadel, full of traps. You lose people. And that same group—this time, a full team—beats you to the boss. Then they ambush you, clobber your team, and leave you alive. But they call you poison. And that gets in your head. It sits there for weeks. Festers. Rots. Until you get an opportunity to be someone else. And even then, it won't go away."

"You're not Caleb Richter at all, are you?" Jessie asked. "How do you know about all of this?"

"No." His hand snaked out, grabbing her wrist and pulling it away from the panic button before she could push it. "No, I'm not. I have a message for your brother. You're going to deliver it. Think of it as a re-gift. Poison for poison. And tell him Carter Richards has the antidote. No rush. He'll listen when it's time. But we both have to move forward, and this is the only way for me."

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