Anti-Mage

Just over four hours earlier, Anton watched the President’s address and then went to find the last two submarines. It wasn’t all that hard with the use of Node in the Antarctic and the help of the intelligence officers the Admiral had placed down there. Anton had tracked down the last two submarines, given them the Admiral’s orders, and returned to the White House as the Notification appeared that Magical Density had increased to 5% at 9:01 a.m.

For the next two hours, the White House became a den of organized chaos. The President asked Anton to relay messages to people all over the United States who couldn’t be reached. There weren’t many, but a few had been either camping or on vacation with their phones off. Having someone appear out of nowhere and tell them to “Call the God Damn President Now!” seemed to have the desired effect.

The Magical Density reached 6% at 9:45 a.m., 7% at 10:10 a.m., 8% at 10:30 a.m., 9% at 10:45 a.m., and 10% at 10:55 a.m. None of the Notifications seemed to make any difference until the Magical Density reached 10% while Caitlyn, Felix, and he were having a conversation about the acceleration of the rate Magical Density was increasing in the meeting room under the White House.

“It’s accelerating,” Caitlyn said.

“We can see that,” Felix agreed

“Yes, it is,” Anton agreed also.

“So, what does that mean?” Caitlyn asked.

“No Idea,” Anton answered honestly, “but I would think that as the Magical Density increases, what magic can do will also increase.”

“What do you mean by that?” Felix asked.

“If there’s more magic present, more things can be done. Maybe the spells will be more powerful. Maybe more powerful spells will become available. Maybe more powerful magical creatures will appear. I don’t honestly know.” Anton said.

Their conversation was interrupted when Anton noticed that the President was looking at something behind Anton. Anton glanced over his shoulder. The only thing behind him was the wall and a couch where Mrs. Ellison had been sitting quietly with one of her aids. When he glanced back this time, her hands and fingers were moving in a very specific pattern as words that he couldn’t understand fell from her lips.

Anton turned in time to see her hold her hand out, palm up, toward him. She uttered a final syllable, and a glowing silver Mobius Strip expanded toward Caitlyn, Felix, and himself as Warning Notification scrolled through his vision.

Warning! Temporal Diversification Commencing.

216,000 to 1 Temporal Stasis Field Enabled.

Temporal Magic Resistance 80%

216,000 to 1 reduced to 43,200 to 1

Temporal Diversification has ended.

Anton was immune to magic. What did Mrs. Ellison think she was doing? This wasn’t going to affect him….

Anton’s thoughts were interrupted when, in the blink of an eye, everything around him changed. One moment, he was in one of the meeting rooms in the basement of the White House, on the outskirts of the various conversations that were taking place. The next moment, the room was dark and empty.

Before anything else could go wrong, Anton activated Specter as he dropped into what he thought of as his parallel dimension, where something odd appeared beside him. Two somethings. Beside him were two shadowy outlines, one of Felix, the other of Caitlyn. Both were frozen in place like statues at the moment the Mobius Strip had hit them. He could see the pearlescent white light that represented their souls glowing within the shadowy image.

What to do? Since he liked Caityln more, he went over and tried to touch Felix. His hand passed through Felix’s body like it wasn’t there. When his hand brushed up against the pearlescent octahedron that represented Felix’s soul, his hand stopped against what felt like a solid wall. Anton activated Analyze

Temporal Stasis Field

Temporal Stasis Field. Creatures affected by this spell are removed from the flow of time for a set amount of time. They are placed in stasis and reappear after a set amount of time has passed.

Maximum Duration: 2,160,000 Seconds (25 Days)

Magical Density substandard where spell cast.

This casting was only 10% effective.

Modified Maximum Duration 216,000 seconds (2 days, 12 Hours)

Time Remaining 172,770 seconds (1.99 Days.)

Anton withdrew his hand and quickly checked on Caitlyn. She was also in a Stasis Field that was going to last another 1.99 days. With an effective intelligence of 236 and a Wisdom of 192, his mind processed what had happened. She’d used a Time Grenade on him. That was insidious. If you can’t handle something, what better way to allow yourself to prepare for it? Cast a spell that removes what you can’t handle from the timeline, and then come back and take care of it when the stasis field drops. Using time this way also had no chance of causing a paradox or pissing off any being that might want to prevent time travel to change the past. This didn’t change the past. It just paused the now for whoever was hit by the spell.

Which meant…If she’d seen him as a threat and wanted to remove him from the equation…Shit!

Anton ghosted up through the ceiling of the building and looked down on the White House from one thousand feet above. The first thing he noticed was that it was nighttime with no trace of the sunset, so it was sometime after 9 p.m. The second thing he noticed was that an army of people surrounded the White House and the surrounding streets.

Anton quickly scouted out the area within two blocks of the White House and considered what he saw. A lot of U.S. Military and invaders were sprawled out everywhere, dead. He looked closer and saw that the fighting had stopped, for the most part, near the White House.

As he flew back and forth as a Specter, he noticed that the soldiers, who didn’t look like members of the U.S. Military, had fortified the White House grounds and taken up defensive positions around the fence. Some soldiers were collecting bodies and moving them to a pile where items were removed before they were taken to a pile. Invader bodies from the pile were then thrown into a box that looked like a narrow coffin that could only hold one body. U.S. Soldiers were left where they lay in the piles that had been created.

Anton moved closer to the box the invaders were being thrown into, he realized it must be some portal or extradimensional storage. As he moved closer to the pile of bodies, he realized that a giant circle had been burnt down to the soil where the lawn had been. Just North of the pile, Mrs. Ellison stood talking to a group of soldiers who were sending off other soldiers to convey her orders. As he moved into position beside Mrs. Ellison, he noticed two things.

The first thing he noticed was that there was another individual in stasis near the President. The second thing he noticed was that the U.S. President was hanging on a cross behind Mrs. Ellison, crucified. Since there wasn’t any trace of the President’s soul in the body, Anton was sure he was dead.

Anton went from someone who was interested in what was happening to someone who was filled with red-hot rage in an instant and was going to make these fuckers pay. If these assholes wanted to intimidate by leaving messages, well then, he would do so in kind.

Anton looked around until he saw one of the commando-looking men who was walking from the south gate toward Mrs. Ellison, obviously ready to report. Anton intercepted him, reached out, touched the octahedron of his soul, and activated Possess.

Anton shuffled his feet as he became used to controlling the body and stopped in front of Mrs. Ellison. She looked at him warily as it seemed that she had picked up that something was odd about the man in front of her. Anton had his host body smile as he looked at Mrs. Ellison and said, “Hello, Mrs. Ellison,” in English.

Mrs. Ellison looked at him confusedly for a moment before she realized he’d spoken in English and said, “What, Who?”

Anton patted the combat vest of the body he was in as he said, “Oh, me? This isn’t my body. You tried to get rid of me with a temporal loop spell but failed to consider that some of us are not so easily brushed aside,” Anton said as he released the body from possession.

Anton watched as the man he’d just released mouthed a question, Mrs. Ellison mouthed a question, and the others around the commando he’d just left drew their guns and pointed them at his previous host. His previous host started to raise his hands in supplication when the grenades hanging in the front of his combat vest exploded.

Each grenade had sat in a loose fishnet pocket in the combat vest, which was designed to hold the safety lever in place in case the safety pin ever came free. That had worked in Anton’s favor this time. When he’d patted his chest, he willed the safety pin and safety lever into his Personal Storage just before he released the body and returned to “his” dimension in his Specter form.

Seven seconds later, BOOM!

Anton watched as the soldier wearing the vest was obliterated, as were the four other soldiers standing beside him. They weren’t as mangled as the guy at ground zero, but they were shredded nonetheless. Mrs. Ellison, on the other hand, must have had protective spells in place because the only thing the explosion did was push her back toward the cross where the U.S. President hung.

Anton was disappointed. She’d lived through the explosion. Okay then, It was time to see just how powerful this bitch was. Anton reached out, touched her soul node, and activated Possess. He was immediately aware that this woman's mentality was much more powerful than anyone else he had possessed thus far. Even so, his Will pushed her will aside as if it wasn’t there.

Anton looked out of Mrs. Ellison’s eyes as soldiers rushed over and forcibly escorted her into the White House and down into one of the secure basement offices.

“Supreme Commander! Supreme Commander!” one of the soldiers beside Anton called out as if from a long way away. Anton realized her hearing must have been damaged by being so close to the grenades when they went off. Even so, he could still hear what was being said, so he made the body he was controlling motion for the soldier to go on.

“Are you all right, Ma’am?” The soldier asked.

Anton glared at the soldier.

The soldier audibly gulped and then began speaking rapidly.

“No offense meant, Supreme Commander,” The soldier said hesitantly before he continued in a more authoritative voice, “This building and those surrounding it, out to two blocks, have been cleared. Preliminary numbers indicate that we lost approximately 4,000 soldiers during the attack. Most were from the man you placed in stasis two hours ago. The three individuals who were placed in Stasis in the other office should still be in stasis for the next 48 hours. Once we’ve secured the area, we’ll begin enclosing their locations with cages. As soon as your Stasis Spell drops, we’ll have them.”

“Very good,” Anton said as the Supreme Commander, “And the traitor outside?”

“We will investigate the incident thoroughly,” the soldier answered.

“Very well, post guards and leave me,”

The guards only hesitated for a moment before they filed out of the room and left Anton alone inside the Supreme Commander's body. Once he was alone, he had time to think. If what that soldier had said was true, that meant that Mrs. Ellison was able to cast time-based spells. That also meant that this piece of shit he was riding was incredibly dangerous. Before he took on the rest of the army, he was going to have to take care of her because Time-based magic was one of the magics that could still affect him. He didn’t need that complication. First things first, he needed to declaw this bitch.

Anton removed all of her jewelry and transferred it to his Personal Storage. This included both nipple rings and another piercing she had in a sensitive area. While he could place things into his inventory, for some reason, neither his Analyze nor Identify Psychic Skills worked while he was using possession. He didn’t understand why, but that was okay. Anything this woman was wearing could potentially be a problem so it would probably be best to place them in his Personal Storage until he had time to properly look them over.

The question then became how to kill this woman who could probably cast a spell to travel through time or timestop her enemies so she could change what was happening. He could try to do something while in her body, like teleport her into space while he controlled her. But, then she wouldn’t know what was happening to her until she was already dead and gone. That would not be a satisfactory income for him. Then he had an idea.

There was a scene from Man on Fire when Denzel Washington went medieval on one of the men who had kidnapped his charge. Brian Lumley also had a similar scene in his book Necroscope: The Lost Years Volume 1. Or was it Volume 2? It didn’t matter. He thought about inserting a bomb inside her and then decided that was a bit of overkill and might not work if something came loose.

Maybe a booby-trap—something she was wearing, turn it into a suicide vest, without her knowing that she was wearing it? The word booby-trap resonated in his mind and gave him an idea. He patted his/her chest to make sure. Yes, she was wearing a bra. Booby-trap indeed, he thought with an evil chuckle.

Anton pulled some C4 and the detonators from his Inventory. He’d picked up this C4 a long time ago and this would be a really good use for it. 132 grams of C4, or 4.6 ounces, was almost equivalent to one stick of dynamite. Anton created a thin strand of C4, which he placed along the underwire of her bra, and connected the detonator, which was attached to the back of the bra where someone wearing it might not notice it right away.

Anton made sure everything was connected and then connected the detonator before he put the bra back on and then shifted it a bit until it was comfortable and he couldn’t feel the detonator against his skin. Next, he set the signaler for the detonator out of sight on a chair at the opposite end of the table where he was going to sit Mrs. Ellison down before he left her body. He walked back to her seat, sat down, and wrote out a note in common. When he was done, he placed the note directly in front of where she would find herself when he released her and double-checked it.

READ ME!!!

Do NOT Move or Cast a spell!

He was pretty sure she’d disregard the message and try to cast a spell at him, probably another Stasis bubble or some temporal escape spell. Unfortunately, the bomb she was wearing would be on a double trigger once he activated it. It could be detonated remotely, or the Deadman’s switch would activate it. The Deadman switch he’d added to this detonator was simple. The Detonator was transmitting a signal. If the bomb moved out of range of the detonator after it was activated, it would explode 10 seconds later if the connection wasn’t reestablished.

Now that everything was ready, Anton released Mrs. Ellison from Possession. Anton remained as a Specter and kept his eyes on Mrs. Ellison as he moved over to the side of the table with the detonator. He activated Spectral Hand. He made sure to keep his hand out of her line of sight under the table and activated the detonator. Mrs. Ellison's eyes fell onto the note in front of her, which she appeared to be reading. A moment later, she looked up and around quickly.

Anton watched as she tried to figure out what had happened. She looked around and searched for the bomb. She also checked her fingers, nipples, and even put her hand between her legs, as she searched for the items he’d removed from her body. He’d been right; they were probably magical in nature, which he’d have to check once he had a moment. She carefully reached down and checked under her chair and even looked under the table before she froze. Anton shifted his point of view to the detonator and saw her looking right at it. Of course, she’d know what a detonator was.

Anton activated Manifest beside the detonator and locked eyes with Mrs. Ellison under the table before he waved at her. If he were a betting man, he would have won that bet. She sat up and cast another Mobius strip at him. The spell passed through his Manifested image harmlessly as he wagged a finger at her in admonishment. Anton watched as she moved her mouth, probably saying something profound, and then began casting a spell.

As Anton reached out with his Spectral Hand and touched the detonator, a second, Mrs. Ellison appeared out of nowhere and tried to grab for the detonator. She lost the race, and Anton transferred the detonator to his personal storage. Mrs. Ellison altered her target and grabbed onto his solid hand, which had manifested physically. Anton realized that he couldn’t disengage his arm while it was being held by someone else and braced for what he knew was coming. Without the detonator present, his improvised suicide vest was going to go off.

Mrs. Ellison was blown in half, shredding his right forearm and hand, which automatically ended Spectral Hand. Losing a limb was old hat for him. It hurt, but not as much as someone might expect. He also noticed that while he was in his Specter form, he wasn’t bleeding. So, he waited for his forearm and hand to reform and heal as he watched the Octahedron of Mrs. Ellison's Soul reshape into a semblance of what she’d looked like and then fade to nothing. The energy that was her soul didn’t move in any direction, but Anton could swear that it moved further away from him, like there was an axis that he couldn’t see. A moment later, her soul was gone.

Anton thought about the spell she must have used to try to get to the detonator. It must have been based on time. It had looked like the spell had allowed her to reappear within the same moment, or in this case, Combat Turn. The C4 had done precisely what it was supposed to. It had cut her in half just below her breast. Unfortunately, she’d been holding onto his hand at the same level, and the blast had caught his arm. One good thing that had come from his arm being hurt. He now knew it could be, which meant that whatever he was trying to do with Spectral Hand could be blocked if someone reacted quickly enough. So now he knew to be more careful.

Anton brought his thoughts back to the spell. The spell she’d cast had allowed her to move sideways in time and appear somewhere else within range at the exact moment she cast the spell. Technically, she wouldn’t cause a paradox as long as she didn’t affect herself in that moment. Luckily, the C4 didn’t go off until 10 seconds after the detonator disappeared into his Personal Storage. Because she had time-traveled to get the detonator and then moved into the future when compared to her old timeline before she exploded, nothing that she’d tried to do had changed the outcome of the Deadman switch activating.

His thoughts were interrupted again as notifications scrolled through his line of sight.

Congratulations. You have Killed a level 40 Master Mage

You have earned 102,500 XP

You have earned 40 Gold

You have Completed a Hidden Quest, Leader of Many

You have destroyed the leader of an integrated Army during the SYSTEM Transition. 100,000 Bonus X.P. Awarded.

As his vision cleared, he watched men and women rush into the meeting room and begin scanning for threats. Anton watched for a moment before he floated up through the ceiling. If he wanted to end all of these assholes and give the U.S. Military a chance against them, he needed to remove their ability to continue fighting, which meant he needed to find their weapons and ammo and remove them.

Anton started in the White House and then made his way to the East Wing, where he found what he was looking for. One of the basement rooms was set up as the de facto armory. There was only one guard in the room, which was locked from the inside.

While the soldiers outside the room were rushing around looking for whoever had killed their Commander, Anton watched one of the soldiers in charge assign two guards to the door into the Armory. Once he was sure no one else was being sent this way, Anton ghosted into the Armory.

It was almost unfair how easy the next part went. Anton used Possess on the single guard in the room and then began transferring weapons, armor, and ammo into his Personal Storage. Right after he possessed the guard, he checked his Personal Storage and was pleasantly surprised with the changes to his Personal Storage and Maggen’s Exceptional Storage skills.

Before the SYSTEM change, the storage locations had a weight limit. Not anymore. Before, he could only store up to 30 cubic feet in his Personal Storage dimensional location and an additional 30 cubic feet with the same weight limit in his Maggen’s Exceptional Storage dimensional location. That had been increased quite a bit.

For both storage locations, the weight limit had been removed. The cubic area that he could store increased with each skill level. At skill level 46, each storage location was a 93.5 cube, or approximately 817,400 cubic feet, twice. That was plenty of room to hold everything he was looking at in their armory.

So Anton walked around the Armory inside the guard he’d possessed and moved items he touched into his Personal Storage. There were a lot of individual items, which did slow him down a bit, but luckily, ammunition and cases with multiple items in them only counted as one item.

Psychic energy-wise, the body he was in was doing a fine job of meeting the upkeep cost. Storing items in his Personal Storage while possessing someone else required him to spend one point of his Psychic Energy each time he did so. Since he wasn’t using his body's stamina to take actions, he was limited to one action per combat turn or six per minute. Luckily, it didn’t sound like anyone was heading down to check on the Armory while they were going crazy in the conference room where the Commander had exploded.

After 10 minutes, he transferred 30 weapons and 30 ammo cases. 10 minutes after that, he’d also moved 30 sets of battle armor and 30 cases of explosives into his Personal Storage. That had cost him 120 Psychic Energy. Anton activated Battle Meditation and started regenerating 20 Psychic Energies per combat turn. In one minute, his Psychic Energy was full again.

Anton continued like this for the next two hours. Every 20 minutes, he transferred 120 items into his Personal Storage and then took a one-minute break. After two and a half hours, he’d moved more than 840 items out of the room. He hadn’t picked up everything, though. There were some rations and copies of communications gear and even more ammo and weapons he could pick up.

But he didn’t. Instead, he made sure to grab at least four of every different technological item he saw, if there were four, and decided that two and a half hours was long enough. Anton used Battle Meditation one more time and then pulled out a brick of C4 and a timed detonator. He set the detonator for 10 minutes and placed it under a pile of equipment and ammunition before he walked out of the room.

He didn’t rush or hurry; he had every right to walk around, and he did so. It was a simple thing for him to walk upstairs and over to the East gate. Then he walked across the street to the Treasury Building. While the White House behind him was abuzz with people running all over the place, the area before him was pretty quiet. He walked into and through the Treasury building until he was looking out the East Entrance onto an empty street. One block away, he could see that 14th Street Northwest had been barricaded, and soldiers were shooting at anything that moved further east.

There were still many soldiers along the barricade. Where the hell had they all come from? Anton knew the answer to the question before he asked it. These bastards had killed the President of the United States. Now, it was time for him to sow some chaos. Anton walked toward the barricade until he was about 10 feet from the person in charge, who looked over at him.

“Adept Caver, what are you doing out here?” the soldier before him called out.

Anton walked over, holding his ear as if he couldn’t hear what the man had said, just as the C4 exploded in the White House behind him. He’d only set one brick of C4, and it had been below ground, but there had been other munitions there. While the Treasury building was between him and the explosion, it was loud enough to make his ears ring, which worked in Anton’s favor. The soldier he was walking up to looked up over the Treasury building as Anton had the body he possessed pull two grenades from his combat vest and activate them simultaneously. Granted, there was a steep stamina cost for performing multiple actions above what a body normally could, but it wasn’t like this soldier was going to need to worry about a low stamina condition ever again.

The soldier in front of him looked back down to see the grenades falling from Caver’s hands and tried to react. Anton didn’t stick around and released the body from Possession and watched as the two grenades went off at Caver’s feet. Caver died, as did the soldier right in front of him. Others nearby were also hurt. As Anton looked on in satisfaction, he couldn’t help but think, Stage one of Bring the Chaos, complete. Commencing Stage 2.

Anton moved north, pulled a grenade from his Personal Storage, and used Spectral Hand to place the grenade at the feet of a different soldier before he moved on to the next soldier and repeated the process. After his first attack with Caver, Anton didn’t stick around to watch what happened when the grenades went off. He placed the grenade, ended Spectral Hand, and moved to his next target one after another. No one could detect him, and he made sure that each target was at least 150 feet apart. Anton worked his way counterclockwise around the makeshift barricade surrounding the White House that the invaders had created.

Once he was sure he’d drawn their attention to a possible attack outside the White House, he shifted his attention to the Pentagon, where he found that the entire area looked like it had been bombed repeatedly. The Pentagon, if it could even be called that anymore, was a smoldering ruin. It looked like bombs had created craters all over and around the Pentagon. As far as he could tell, no one was moving in the area.

Anton changed course and flew toward Andrews to the southeast, where he could see flashes on the horizon. In a straight line, the Pentagon was just over 10 miles from Andrews AFB. As he flew southeast, he increased his altitude until he was just under the clouds, where he realized what was going on. He just happened to be at the right level and the right angle to see a portal open into Node room in Antarctica.

That’s not what surprised him. Through the portal, he saw a makeshift slide that had been rolled up to the edge of the portal where soldiers, like the ones he had just killed, were tilting a bomb on a curved table up to about 75 degrees so it could be slid down and through the portal toward the ground below. Once the bomb was through the portal, it vanished, and 20 seconds later, he saw another bomb appear in the sky a little farther away, though, this time, the portal didn’t open toward him. The invaders had found a bomb supply and were using the Node in Antarctica to drop bombs on Washington—those bastards.

Anton activated the Planar Shift and appeared in the Node room. None of the personnel the Admiral had brought to Antarctica were in the room. Anton did a quick recon of the barracks area of the base and found the personnel. The men had been taken to a room with a pillar and been shot. They were all lying on the ground as a group of soldiers tried to penetrate the transparent floor, most likely trying to drop the bodies down the shaft. The few women that had been captured were being used as entertainment in the barracks.

When he made his way back to the Node room, he sat and watched as the individuals came into the room, stood next to the adjustable slide that moved from parallel to the ground to about a 75-degree angle, which slid the bomb that had been put on the slide through the portal. That wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was how they placed the bombs on the sled. Instead of loading them from a stockpile in the room, which he’d planned on blowing up to shut them down, people were coming in a line and pulling the bombs from their inventory.

There were a total of 10 loaders. After five bomb drops, a portal opens to a new location where five people on the other side of the portal swapped with five people on this side. Through the portal, Anton could see rows and rows of bombs, which gave him an idea. There was a skill he’d picked up, but he hadn’t found an opportunity to use it; then he reread it and sighed.

Snatch

At your current skill level, you may choose 1 item or 1 stack of identical items that weigh no more than a pound. Alternatively, you can select one coin type and will receive up to 100 coins of that type, +10 coins per skill level. If credits are chosen, a contest of wills will determine what percentage of credits you will receive from the target. The minimum amount that will be transferred is 100 credits + 10 credits per skill level or all credits if the target has less than this minimum.

He was currently only level 1 with the skill. Even if he’d been level 100, he wouldn’t have been able to pick up one of the bombs they were dropping, so he’d go with plan B. What was Plan B? He possessed the first person in line after they dropped their bomb, waited for the portal to open to the munitions supply, and stepped through, where he promptly ended the possession.

He watched where they were getting their bombs from, then went to the back of the room out of sight and used Spectral Hand to pull twenty 500-pound bombs into his Maggen’s Exceptional Storage. Then he pulled out a brick of C4, placed it behind one of the 500-pound bombs he hadn’t picked up and waited.

The loaders had cycled through a few times and even traded out with others when Anton made his way back and waited by the first person in line. When the portal appeared, Anton passed through it, moved over to the person controlling the Node, and possessed him. He’d noticed that while the loaders swapped out, the controller took his hand off the Node to get a drink or take a bite of something. So, when he possessed the individual, the portal to the munitions dump remained open.

Anton continued chewing the sandwich in his host's hand as he stepped over to the portal and peeked through, like he was curious about what was going on in the munitions storage area. While he did that, he summoned the remote detonator for the C4 he’d placed into his hand and activated it. Less than a second later, the C4 pack blew, which caused the four 500-pound bombs next to it to explode and ignited a chain reaction that ignited over one hundred 500-pound bombs in the storage bunker.

Anton was pretty sure that the number of bombs stored in that bunker was well above the safety limit for that bunker because the soldiers had moved them inside and hadn’t even closed the outer door, which he’d noticed while he was there.

Anton’s thoughts were shattered when the body he inhabited was vaporized along with everyone directly in front of the portal. Those off to the side were a little lucky for only about a second longer. The heat and shockwave flooded through the portal and filled the room. Everyone in the room not killed by the initial blast was battered, pulped, and burnt to cinder. The facility withstood the damage just fine, which he’d expected.

With the room filled with smoke and heat, Anton thought it was the perfect time to use Battle Meditation to recover his resource pools. Two minutes later, he floated through the portal and went vertical to see what kind of damage he’d done to the munitions area and try to get an idea of where it was. The walls and ceiling of the storage area he’d been in were gone, and there was a crater that spread out to other bunkers around it. Those that were still sealed had weathered the explosion. Those that had been opened and emptied had lost their doors or had them mangled so bad they would never close again.

Anton ignored everyone running around on the ground and flew to the outline of the city off to the east of the bunker he’d just risen above. He made his way over to the edge of town until he could make out a city limits sign that read “Chambersburg, PA.” So, if his memory served right, he was somewhere northwest of Washington.

Anton made his way back to the bunker through the portal and back into the facility in Antarctica. He went and checked the edges of the blast area where soldiers that were still alive had gathered and were waiting for the heat to dissipate before they made their way back into the Node room. Anton was glad to see there were only 20 or so. The three females that had survived being entertained were locked in the barracks room, chained to the wall there.

All of the men in front of him were looking down the hall, trying to figure out what was going on, and talking amongst themselves when Anton appeared 50 feet behind them and activated a skill he hadn’t used since Minnesota. He activated Psychic Scream and watched all 20 men and women fall to the ground with blood leaking from the nose, mouth, eyes and ears; Dead.

Anton checked his Combat Log. No one had taken less than 680 points of damage. Some had taken more. Since that Skill was based on his Willpower, which was now sitting at 714, and based the damage done on the difference between his and their willpower, that meant that not one of them had a willpower higher than 34.

As he looked at the mess at the end of the hallway, where he could feel the heat radiating from still, a stray thought crossed his mind: Maybe he should have started with Psychic Scream?