“Can we all just please calm down,” Darius said, infuriatingly calm as always. “There are rules in pce for exactly these sorts of jurisdictional matters.”

  “There are, but I do not recognize your authority,” Lwyn said coolly. “This man is not a valid death that you can collect on. He is a unique supplicant and a person of significant interest. You will have to return when he dies a natural, final death.”

  Lucas was amused by her sudden change. She was obviously no great fan of Thrzaelwick, but she’d humored him for the better part of an hour. That sort of treatment had left Lucas with the belief that she could endure nearly anything with pleasant passivity, but apparently, that was not the case.

  “Your radiance, you might find it interesting to split hairs, but Lucas Sharpe belongs to us, as does his rehabilitation,” as the angels approached Lucas to the extent that the armored cordon would allow it, they appeared to look right through him the way Thrzaelwick had several times already. Although Lucas did not feel himself unravel under their gaze, he knew that they were reading more into him than he would ever want them to.

  “From what I can see, it’s clear he’s made absolutely no attempt to change,” Darius said with a shake of his head. “Even with all that time we spent together discussing the root of his problems, he’s still poisoning the lives of others with narcotics.”

  “If you don’t see any other changes in that soul since he’s arrived in our world, then perhaps he should never be returned to your care,” the elven Goddess snapped, emphasizing that st word acidly. “Return to your realm, and leave us to ours.”

  “We will,” the other angel agreed, “As soon as we have our charge. Though you might think we’d consider a single soul to be worth the notice of the entire host, we will not hesitate to call them should we need to do so.”

  At those words, the line of armed and armored elven spirits leveled their weapons at the angels and snapped their shields together. As they did that, the angels’ clothing started to shimmer, transforming from business casual into silvery breastptes.

  A moment ago, Darius had been holding a pen and a clipboard, but as Lucas watched, those mundane implements transformed into a sword and shield. An epic knockdown, drag-out fight was getting ready to happen right here, and for some reason, he felt pretty bad about that.

  “Woah, woah, woah!” he yelled, raising his hands. To him, it looked like the angles would get sughtered, but he didn’t even want those assholes’ blood on his hands at this point. “Can we all just calm the fuck down, please?”

  “Certainly,” Darius said, his face now hidden behind a full helm that had come from nowhere. “Simply surrender yourself to us, and we will not have to summon the thousands of angels necessary to reduce this tree to a stump.”

  Lwyn stood then, and her eyes crackled with fury. “You think to threaten me in my home! What would ten thousand angels be against a million elves with bows, let alone ten thousand archmages? I will annihite any force you send. I could send my armies to your heaven and burn—”

  “Yo! Thraz!” Lucas said, “They mentioned rules before. What are the rules to handle this situation before it becomes a bloodbath?”

  “Ah, yes, rules!” the gnome cried out. He was apparently so eager to avoid what was about to happen next that he was suddenly holding a thick, leather-bound tome that was titled Interworld Conflict Protocols that he'd conjured from nothing. “Let’s see, translocated soul disputes and jurisdictional conflicts, where is that again…”

  As the gnome looked up the rules, everyone else stood there frozen, two seconds from conflict. While they did that, Lucas hazarded a gnce at Lwyn. She stared murder at him for a moment but quickly regained her composure and offered him the smallest of smiles.

  I hope that means she’s not going to murder me for talking over her, he thought with only a little desperation.

  She’d been pretty patient with him so far, but in their st encounter, she’d mentioned how easy it would be to snuff out a mortal soul, and Thrzaelwick had almost killed him once with sheer overeagerness to understand how he’d unraveled so many alchemical secrets so quickly. He was definitely out of his depth here, but there wasn’t really shit he could do about it.

  When the Gnomish God finally got to the correct section, he began to read it aloud. “Transubstantiated souls shall belong to the world that they have migrated to for the length of their lives, natural or unnatural, at which time—”

  “Which he has,” the second angel interrupted.

  The God of Alchemy gave him an annoyed look but continued reading. “At which time their lives shall be evaluated, and they may be returned two criteria: they are not likely to be resurrected in cases where such magic exists and—”

  “But he is about to be resurrected,” Lwyn protested. “He—”

  “My dy,” Thrzealwick said with the utmost deference. “This next bit will expin it if you would just allow me a moment to finish.”

  Through all of this, Lucas and Darius stood there facing each other calmly, waiting to get to the bottom of this riddle. Lucas didn’t believe the angel was a bad guy or anything. He was just a prick that didn’t know how to live and let live. His companion seemed far more bloodthirsty, and Lwyn, well, Lucas was pretty sure she just didn’t like having her toes stepped on, though with this anger, he wouldn’t be surprised if there was more to whatever this was in her eyes.

  “At which time their lives shall be evaluated, and they may be returned two criteria: they are not likely to be resurrected in cases where such magic exists, and that they have made substantial contributions to the world they are currently located in, such that it would irrevocably change events if they were withdrawn,” the Gnomish God continued. “If the soul in question is deemed unlikely to be returned to life, they may be returned to their realm of origin. If they are likely to be returned to life, then that opportunity may only be overlooked if they are deemed unimportant.”

  The words were humbling to Lucas but not as humbling as everything that followed. Though the two sides backed away from bloodshed by a matter of inches, they spent the next twenty minutes arguing how important or unimportant Lucas was.

  Lwyn argued that he was of paramount importance both because he was currently the fulcrum by which the fate of an entire human nation would be decided, and because of his achievements in coming here at all. “No human has ever arrived at my court before in this manner,” she insisted. “That’s historic. Only a handful of non-elves has ever made it this far, and most of those were half-elves.”

  Wait, the Goddess of Elves doesn’t consider half-elves to be elves? He thought. That’s fucked up!

  While Lucas had not been the kindest to the elves of his new world, it was because they’d been pricks to him, not because he was racist or a specialist or whatever the fuck this was. Still, she was on his side, so he said nothing.

  “While that may well be the case,” Darius argued, “Your world uses levels for these things, does it not?”

  “It does,” Lwyn conceded grudgingly, obviously aware of where this was going, even if Lucas was groping in the dark a few steps behind her.

  His angel minder nodded and said, “Alright. So then it should be easy enough to solve. If Lucas is a high enough level to be important, then we should be able to check that and solve this right away. Exactly what level is our escaped soul?”

  Lwyn didn’t answer. She just gred for a long moment before she said, “I’m not sure if we can quantify all of one man’s achievements, not even someone as simple as a human with a single number.”

  She then proceeded to expin to everyone how the numbers only applied to a very narrow range of their experience and measured specific traits and destinies. She expined how any number of heroic figures were low-level when they saved the world. It was then that the God of Alchemy betrayed Lucas.

  “Lwyn, my dearest Goddess, you know I would do anything for you, but in this, I disagree,” Thrzaelwick said with a shake of his head. “This soul is only level one. “While it is fair to say that low-level souls can be important, it’s impossible to say a soul at level one can ever be important. It's an indication that he’s utterly failed to embrace his destiny in any meaningful way.”

  Apparently, the angels agreed with that argument because they sheathed their fming sword, which disappeared as soon as they were pced in their scabbards. Then Darius said, “I think that is well put. Perhaps if he were a few levels higher, then we could find our way to agreeing with your point of view, but as it stands, it’s an open-and-shut case, even according to your own allies.”

  The angel’s armor melted away as he started to walk toward the enemy soldiers, who had rexed their posture only slightly. “You would never have agreed with the rules should they have turned against you,” Lwyn procimed as her guards stood aside and let the angels approach Lucas.

  “That’s hurtful,” the second angel said, “We are bound to uphold the ws of the universe in all ways and in all things.”

  Lucas stood there for a long moment, paralyzed. Is she really going to give me up? He wondered. Is this how I go out? He was still asking himself that question when he noticed that she was giving him a meaningful look. Her face still looked frustrated, but her eyes twinkled with mischief.

  Me? He asked himself. What is it I’m supposed to do about all of this? Until now, he’d stayed out of it. He’d thought that these two gods had his back, but now, what was he supposed to do, run? He didn’t exactly see another corpse to take a swan dive into.

  As Darius reached for him, he tried hard to think about this. His level was the question at hand. Is there something I can do about that? He asked himself. It didn’t seem very likely, but he couldn’t figure out any other reason why she was giving him that look.

  When Darius reached for him, he said, “Wait, there’s one thing that none of you pricks are considering.” He wasn’t sure what that was, but he was stalling for time and grasping at straws here.

  “Oh? And what’s that?” Darius asked with a look of mild amusement. He probably expected Lucas to run again, but he already knew that there was no point.

  Why was he even level one? Well, that was easy. It was because he didn’t experience from anything but doing alchemy, and his talent or system or whatever the fuck it was didn’t recognize what he was doing as real alchemy because it deviated too far from the sensibilities of Heisenburgle, Thrzealwick, and every other stuck up alchemist that thought there was only one way to do something.

  If they’d counted all the actual alchemy I did instead of the handful of the recipes I read and the handful of orthodox potions I happened to make, then there’s no way I’d be… His thoughts trailed off as he figured out what it was she was apparently hinting at.

  “All of you have based your decision on something that I’ve been short-changed by,” Lucas expined, “and I demand a recount.”