I stayed in the arena this time.

  Part of it was that Sarah Cullman, the Spark of Life and the tournament’s arbiter, was working her way down the chain, and there was only one way in or out of the forget-me-not cell.

  Mostly, though, I wanted to make sure Jeff was okay. I’d had to hit him pretty hard, and I couldn’t help but remember Ellen—and what Deborah Callahan had done to her. If I’d done the same thing to my friend, I’d sure as hell want to be there to make sure he was okay.

  Should I have held back?

  No. No, Jeff didn’t want me to hold back. He wanted me to fight like I had on the playground. The Fallen Delvers Tournament wasn’t a place for casual sparring with compliments and pointers being thrown around. It was a war zone. So, as Sarah Cullman pushed healing magic into Jeff and his eyes slowly opened, I stared at the damp stone floor and the seamless brick walls.

  My victory didn’t change anything. The tournament was still running, with a promised prize to the victor of the right to clear the portal we’d just sparred in. I’d either fight Ophelia St. Vrain—the Lonely Mage—or Deborah Callahan. Under almost every normal circumstance, I’d rather fight the mage. Sure, I couldn’t get to her without overwhelming her exclusion zone, but if there was one thing I knew, it was that I could do some serious damage. She’d also shown no signs of actually disrupting an enemy.

  Stormbreak into a combo as quickly as possible was my entire strategy for that fight. Overwhelm, recover, blitz. Simple and effective.

  But I’d spent the last couple of days in and out of the hospital, whiling away the hours with my recovering girlfriend and progression partner—and when I hadn’t been there, I’d been helping on the 303 Wall. The city was under siege, after all. And in that time, I’d realized something.

  I wasn’t scared of Deborah.

  And I wanted that fight.

  I had no idea how to beat her. She’d done something to maximize her power and overwhelm the Fallen Delvers portal’s rank-neutralizing effect, and I had no idea what. Until I figured that out, I couldn’t counter it. But not knowing how to beat an enemy was different from being scared of her.

  The three of us climbed up the tunnel back to the brilliant blue portal, stepped through, and took the stairs to the surface. Sarah nodded. “I’ll give you two a minute.” Then she disappeared out into the near-constant rain that covered Phoenix and the flowing rivers the streets had become.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Don’t say it,” Jeff said. I paused, and he kept going. “You’re going to apologize for beating me. Don’t. You did exactly what I asked you to, and I didn’t expect to lose that quickly, but you’re strong, Kade.”

  “I didn’t want to—“

  “I told you to stop holding back.” He touched the base of his chest, where Stormsong had slid through his armor, between his lowest ribs, and out his back less than ten minutes earlier.

  The silence stretched. Then Jeff shrugged. “Jessie got a hold of me. She’s got a prospective team for us to take into the next E or D-Rank portal that pops in Surprise. You’re going to need to start putting an A-Rank-capable team together, Kade.”

  “And you’re sure this is what you want?”

  “Yep. The tournament was all about seeing what I could have been. But that’s not who I am. If things had gone differently, I could have been on the A-Rank track. I chose differently.” He hesitated. “Want my advice?”

  “Sure.”

  “Grab the other people who’ve made it this far. Rob, Ophelia—hell, even Caleb—“

  “Not Caleb,” I said quickly.

  “Sure, not Caleb. But grab the independents and the people you can poach. You could build a pretty solid team with them. A weird team, sure, but a solid one. Spellblade, paladin, two mages, support, fighter or archer. It’s not my dream composition, but that’s okay. It’s not my team, either. I’ll build my dream team and clear Es and Ds, and maybe a few C-rank portals.”

  “If you’re sure,” I said.

  “We had a good run together, though.”

  “Yeah, we did.” I closed my eyes and remembered the playground brawls we’d gotten into, the portals we’d cleared—all the time we’d spent together. Jeff had been the guy who’d always had my back, and it felt a little weird to be leaving him behind forever.

  Not forever. Not even really leaving him behind. We’d be part of the same guild—he and I would keep working together, and we’d keep sparring. But our time clearing portals together was pretty much over. Same for Sophia. She’d kept me alive in plenty of low-ranking portals, even if she’d been a worry-wart and a mother hen about my—admittedly poor—choices. But it was time to move on for all three of us.

  We headed out the door and into the soaking streets of Phoenix, Arizona.

  Phoenix got about seven inches of rain a year.

  It had gotten at least four in the last day, and a pretty similar amount every day since the siege started. The streets were all flooded, and water was piling up in the arroyos and canals that wove their way between the 303 Wall’s borders. The Fallen Delvers Courtyard was pretty empty despite the semi-final fight between Jeff and me; everyone was sick of the constant downpour. Only the constant evaporation was keeping the roads from being impassible.

  And, over the falling rain, the gray snow-globe-like surface of steaming mist overshadowed the city. It had been that way since the siege’s explosive first day.

  Yasmin’s oversized truck vomited smog into the sky to meet the gray dome as it chugged toward the Desert Wind Guild’s headquarters against the Surprise section of the Wall. “Good fight, Kade,” she said after a minute. Then she focused on Jeff, who was riding shotgun.

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  I let her baby him. It was unusual; their relationship was as much about snide remarks as it was about the sensitive stuff. Yasmin just wasn’t a soft person.

  We splashed through a puddle almost eight inches deep and climbed into the parking garage, and the massive truck rolled to a stop next to a beautiful, cutting-edge sports car—Deimos. Ellen’s AI-driven ride. It couldn’t handle the depth of water, and it was getting too hard to route around all the puddles. Not impossible, but tough.

  Then Jeff and Yasmin were gone, and I walked slowly across the skybridge between the parking structure and my new home.

  Ellen was waiting.

  I hurried to the elevator before my sister could track me down and pressed the fifth floor button. Then I waited for the door to open.

  “Took you long enough,” Ellen said. Her white-blonde hair was a mess of tangles that sprawled across my pillow, and she had a tablet in her hand as she sat up in my bed. She was still officially on bed rest, but when she stood up and walked over, I knew better than to protest. It’d been days since Deborah’s sword had sliced through her throat and veins all the way to her spine. She was fine.

  She leaned against me, and I held her for a moment. “See, I told you,” I said.

  “You did, but I was still worried.” Her voice was still a little raspy. “I watched everything, though. Jeff was right. You were holding back.”

  “I was.”

  “You were still holding back at the end, though.”

  I shook my head slowly. “No, I wasn’t. He asked for it, and I gave him everything I had at the end.”

  Ellen shook her head. “I hope not. If you did, Deborah’s going to be too much for you.”

  “You’re acting like she’s going to beat Ophelia.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and patted a spot next to her. I sat down, and she put a hand on my leg just above my knee. “She’s going to beat Ophelia. The Lonely Mage is good, but Deborah’s on a whole other level. I still haven’t figured out how she cheated, but I know she did. There’s no way I’d lose that quickly if she hadn’t.”

  I wrapped an arm around her and pulled her in. “I’m going to beat her.”

  A pause. Not a long one, but long enough. “I know,” she said after a minute.

  “How are you feeling?” I changed the subject. She was right, of course. I didn’t know how to beat someone like Deborah—especially not with whatever she’d done. But I needed to focus on what I could control, not on my opponent.

  “I’m fine. I’ll be ready to fight again in a couple of days. I tried to clear a D-Rank portal yesterday with Jeff and Sophia, just to stretch out, but the damned Spark of Life put a hold on me until at least tomorrow. The GC guy wouldn’t let me in. Can you believe it?”

  “Yes, I can. The reason I ask is that I’m ready to push Thunderbolt Forms to A-Rank, and I wanted your honest opinion of whether you feel up to being here for it.”

  “Please don’t kick me out for this,” she said. I caught the edge of pain in her voice. Some of it was her injury. Most of it was something else—something inside her psyche that was broken. Not irreparably, but damaged for sure.

  I nodded. “If you’re sure. I could use your help.”

  “Not sure what I can do.”

  I stood up and held out a hand, then helped her to the floor. “Just be here while I do this,” I said.

  She nodded, and I started learning my first A-Rank Law.

  Ellen’s presence was almost immediate this time. And unlike my previous Laws, it wasn’t just that her influence was changing the world. That was still happening, but it was more than that.

  The mountain—the lightning-carved, teetering, impossible pinnacle of stone I sat on—was completely overshadowed. The clouds overhead were so dark they were almost black. Dark green lightning rippled between the thunderheads.

  And she was here, too. She sat on the mountaintop along with me.

  That was different. It had only happened when we’d advanced our Dual Skill—Shadowstorm Battery. If she was here for one of my normal skills, what did that mean for the Stormsteel Path, and for the deviation from it that I’d been on since I’d hit C-Rank?

  Before I could answer any of those questions, the storm overhead opened up. I’d seen storms like this over Phoenix. They shook the windows and turned the night into a black and white, strobe-light mockery of day. Lightning poured out of the sky like rain, dozens of bolts per second, coming so quickly that the green-black influence of Ellen’s presence couldn’t keep up and blue-white lightning overran the shadow. It was almost horrifying. It was definitely terrifying.

  It was beautiful.

  I spent a minute watching the sky as it seemed to decide the entire desert around us was unclean and displeasing. It almost felt like it wanted everything to burn, melt, or fry under its wrathful eye. And it only accelerated as time ticked by.

  And, after a minute, I focused on my inner self.

  We were in my core. The goal was to learn what this megastorm had to teach me.

  The Laws of the Thunderhead. First, that control is chaos. Second, that chaos is predictable. Third, that the storm’s reach is everywhere. The third Law applied to this. The storm overhead was reaching everywhere. But I already knew that Law. I’d already internalized it and consolidated it into a complete Law, ranked up with it, and grown stronger for it.

  No, there was something else.

  I focused, not on the storm as a whole, but on the individual bolts. My mind accelerated—or maybe my internal mental space slowed to accommodate the sheer number of strikes I was trying to watch and predict. Chaos was predictable. There was a pattern here, and if I could find it, I’d be able to make sense of the chaos, take control, and start learning.

  Where were the strikes landing? What was the storm ‘looking’ for?

  The desert around my mountain churned as the storm’s power coursed through it. I concentrated on a single negative space in the sky and the positive one under it, right beneath a flowering sagebrush. Lightning surged from the sky a moment later, and the plant disintegrated under a hail of white-hot electricity, leaving only a burning spot on the desert floor.

  A Saguaro cactus went next.

  Then a Palo Verde tree.

  One after another, the plants that graced the desert burst into flames, and for a moment, I thought I’d found the pattern. Was it hunting plants?

  Then a bolt hit a stone that stood out in the middle of the sands, and I had to throw that out. It wasn’t hunting plants, or life, or anything like that. Lightning surged across the ridges all around me, and in the bottom of a dry stream bed. The pattern made no sense. It didn’t follow any rules like real lightning.

  Then Ellen breathed in sharply.

  And I understood.

  She disappeared. The green-black bolts in the clouds vanished, and everything grew lighter—and as it did, the storm’s strength dwindled. It had been hunting something. There’d been a pattern. And the pattern had been Ellen. The storm had been targeting every shadow it could find, the spaces below rocks and boulders, the trees and cactus plants—everything that threw an unnaturally dark shadow across my mental space.

  I closed my eyes. The lightning hadn’t just been targeting the shadows. It had found them unerringly. It had always found its target.

  Always.

  Law Learned: Last Law of the Thunderhead

  Thunderbolt Forms: Rank B to A

  Inevitability isn’t a threat. It is a promise. The storm keeps its promises, finds its path forward, and hunts its enemy relentlessly. Not anger, but fury. Not rage, but wrath. The strike will come in its time, but it will come, and it will find its target. By accepting the storm’s hot anger and forging it into something cold and deliberate, Kade Noelstra, you have taken a step down the Stormsteel Path: thunder’s wrath finds its mark.

  Howling Blade upgrades to Cutting Storm: Consume Wind Charges to add cleaving, stunning damage to melee attacks.

  When I opened my eyes, Ellen’s were closed. She breathed heavily from where she stood, staring out at the rain outside. “Sorry. I was messing it up, and I had to leave.”

  “You weren’t. The storm reacted to your presence, but it didn’t stop me from learning the Law,” I said as I stood up and walked over to her.

  “Then you got it?”

  “I did. My first A-Rank skill. If I can get one more before the final round, that might be enough to even the odds against Deborah.”

  I hoped that was true, but I didn’t know for sure. The Roadrunner’s tank was strong—and I had no idea whether she’d stopped growing, or if she was getting stronger just like me.

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