“You’d think a tower this big would have more doors,” Roland commented, about one mile into their walk around the base of the impossibly wide tower.

  He had dismissed his bike. Raven said they might miss the opening if they zipped by it at the insane speeds Roland was getting used to.

  “No one is meant to enter a Tower from the ground floor. The bottom rung is for refuse and those who dwell among it. Undesirables. Like cockroaches and tax collectors.”

  “Hey, now you sound just like Bob.”

  “Ravens are all libertarians at heart. Small-l libertarians, though. We know enough to render unto Caesar and all that.”

  “Render unto Caesar or Caesar will send his legions to break your legs,” Roland agreed. “Wait, I think I see something.”

  The weird purplish-gray light and the cloud-ridden horizon made everything blurry at a distance, but Roland spotted movement, maybe a hundred yards ahead. The shadows began to resolve into shapes: riders, although they and their mounts remained hard to distinguish.

  “No friends, but foes,” Raven said. “Desolate Reavers.”

  “Is that their Class or species?” Roland asked. Josh had gotten a Reaver Class, and its description wasn’t flattering. Perfect for a weasel like him, though.

  “Just a name, here, where System Classes hold no sway. But names have power in this place.”

  “As long as guns and naginatas have power in this place, I’m golden,” Roland said, calling Executioner's Gun to his hands.

  He had worried that his inventory might not work, but the gun showed up normally – System normal, that was – just as the nearest Reavers came into focus. Roland saw cloth-swaddled figures riding what appeared to be skeletal dinosaurs. Although it was hard to tell by the bone structure. Maybe they were skeletal emus with teeth.

  A System nameplate came up over them, although it crackled in and out of sight, as if it was fighting static. The lettering was messed up, too.

  D*#$3l0te Reaver$ (Undead *3@tro#3#)

  F-E-?? Grade *&@@

  Health 150 Mana 120 Endurance n/a

  Roland wanted to use Analyze on the Reavers, but they were getting close and they had ranged weapons. One of the lead riders had a firearm, a long-barreled, skinny rifle or musket with a flintlock action. Another had a bow made of the horns of some animals and was drawing the string to the ear in the universal sign for ‘Ima shoot you full of arrows.’

  Roland shot first. Just like Han Solo, and fuck you, George.

  Due to his target’s high Health total, he spent ten Mana to add fifty points of Death damage, and ten Endurance to guarantee a critical hit with Deadshot, hoping that if the gun found the target guilty the stacked critical effects would count for something.

  They did. The slug hit the archer in the neck. The swaddled head of the Reaver flew off, free at last. There was no gusher of blood from its neck, though, just a puff of dust that told Roland he was dealing with the drier kind of Undead, like mummies or old British actors.

  The Reaver with a rifle returned fire, but Roland was on the move, running toward the dozen or so riders as he replaced the gun with his naginata. The musket’s shot sounded more like a sharp pop than the normal crack of gunfire. There was a loud boom behind Roland, right where he had been a moment before, and he felt hot wind and bits of bone hitting his back, doing no actual damage.

  Explosive rounds? Fireball bullets? Let’s loot their corpses and find out.

  He closed the distance with shocking speed; the skeletal mounts weren’t as fast as his bike, or even him at a full run, but they were faster than regular horses.

  Reaper’s Dash didn’t make him intangible here; he had discovered that earlier, when an experiment led to him crashing into a bone tree.

  Instead, he used I’m the Juggernaut and made a beeline toward rifle boy, leading with his shoulder.

  In a sane universe, ramming into a horse would have resulted in a battered horse and a human dead or in traction for a good long while. Roland’s charge crunched into the skeletal dino-bird and knocked all three people and things involved to the ground in a tangle of limbs.

  Roland was unhurt. The dino-skell was down eighty hit points, and the rider was missing his gun and a measly thirteen Health.

  A moment later, the Reaver’s Health total took a dive when Roland landed a Death-infused double-strike with Benkei’s Naginata. The Reaver had struggled to its knees when it saw the blade swooping down at it. It managed to raise an arm defensively, for all the good it did. The naginata sheared off the limb as if it was a bamboo pole and went on to chop into its swaddled head. More dust puffed up from the mortal wounds.

  The impromptu vivisection (or dissection, since it was already dead before he disassembled it) revealed more details about the Desolate Reavers.

  They were mostly skeletons covered with leathery skin, filled with either sawdust or more bone meal. They and their mounts weighed more than actual skeletons (which were shockingly light) but still less than normal living things. Roland’s charge had overwhelmed them easily.

  More Reavers were riding around his position. One tried to slash him with a long saber as it rode past, but Roland sidestepped the swing and sliced off the dino-skell’s rear legs before it got out of range. As mount and rider went down, another I’m the Juggernaut charge sent a third Rider into a pinwheel tumble.

  A pair of arrows went by him with angry swooshing sounds, like oversized mosquitoes. They had been well-aimed, but he instinctively ducked, his body shifting positions without moving his feet. Once again, it felt like Walk Between the Raindrops was borrowing from his Subtle Sidestep Technique. There was a vague ache near where his middle Dantian used to be.

  He badly wanted to study what was happening, but another Reaver was riding straight at him, a lance couched under one arm.

  Surely you joust, he thought irrelevantly as he stepped toward the mummified rider, spinning the naginata in a deceptively loose pattern. When the lance’s point was less than a foot away from him, he pivoted out the way and cleaved the Reaver at the waist.

  The lance-wielding top half flipped forward as the still-clutched lance hit the ground and served as a fulcrum for the detached torso. The lower half remained seated as the skell mount kept going and disappeared into the grayness.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  He finished off the upper half of the mummy and turned in time to spot another rifle-wielding Reaver who had stopped its mount and was aiming at him.

  Before he could do anything, a bird the size of a Cessna dropped on the Undead like an organic JDAM bomb.

  Roland had seen videos on X that showed peregrine falcons killing small animals. One moment, a rabbit is minding its own business. A moment later, there is a bird looking up from a little puddle of furry roadkill. That was what happened to the Reaver and its dino-ride, turned up to eleven.

  Raven?

  The bird, bigger that anything that ever flew on Earth, looked at him and croaked gleefully.

  R@v3n (@^a74&)

  F-Grade Peak 80$$

  Health 740 Mana 1,320 Endurance 780

  Roland tried to Analyze his ‘familiar’ and got a sizzle.

  He looked for the other Reavers. After losing four members, the survivors apparently decided to relocate to real estate that wasn’t occupied by a maniac and his giant bird.

  “Want to chase them down?” Raven asked, sounding like he was having a grand old time. “You can catch up on them on foot, let alone on your metal horse.”

  “Nah,” Roland said, watching the riders vanish into the gloom. “I want to get this over with.”

  He looked at the bodies. No loot bags appeared over them, and he didn’t get a System notification about gold or Essence.

  “Great, not even Essence rewards,” he grumbled. “And if I want their loot, I’m going to have to go through their pockets.”

  Raven landed on top of a dead dino skeleton. He had shrunk back to his regular size.

  “Essence is still gathered around those bodies,” the bird told him. “You only have to take it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Look. Focus your senses. You System-Bound let that infernal engine do too much of the work for you. Even cultivators. Make an effort, and you will gain more.”

  “Fine,” Roland said, closing his eyes.

  He still knew the Third Eye Dao, even if he couldn’t use its Techniques. After relaxing his body and mind, he cycled Mana through the Head Dantian and focused on sharpening his senses. After about a minute, he felt a tingling behind his eyes. He opened them.

  The world around him didn’t change much – same colors, same faded quality – but he could see more. Above the bodies of both Reavers and their mounts, there was a glowing aura. It wasn’t Mana; he had observed Essence at work enough times to tell the difference between them. This was the good stuff, the stuff he still wanted to call XP, even though it was so much more.

  Roland extended his hand towards the nearest body.

  You Keep What You Kill. The Dao was still there. They had taken his Dantian away, but he was still a cultivator.

  Essence flowed into his body; he didn’t need to use a Technique, but had a feeling there was a Technique there, one he could learn after he recovered.

  There was no notification, but he watched his Unbound Essence rise from 2,770 to 2,793. Twenty-three Essence from one kill. That seemed like a nice bump just for having to take the Essence himself. Maybe the System was taking a cut every time it handed out rewards.

  The System is like a Vegas casino, the IRS, or the mob. The house always wins. On top of killing billions of people even if I do everything right. Not a fan.

  Setting aside thoughts of an eventual reckoning, Roland repeated the process on every critter he had killed. Raven’s kills (besides the squished Reaver, there was another body that had been pecked to pieces) didn’t give him any Essence, which seemed like a violation of the Familiar relationship.

  On the other hand, they were out of the System’s jurisdiction and Raven’s stats no longer reflected his Familiar status.

  Good thing I’m not a rules lawyer like Barton.

  All in all, he got ninety-three Essence for killing those randos. He rifled through their bodies and the stuff the runners had left behind. He found seven Common and Uncommon melee and ranged weapons, everything from sabers to spears and knives. The one intact gun he got was a single-shot muzzle loader that used Elemental Powder. It delivered explosive pellets that did forty points of damage in a ten-foot radius.

  He threw everything into his inventory. The weapons would help future recruits, if nothing else.

  “Let’s find a door,” Roland told the bird. “I’m more than ready to get the eff out of here.”

  * * *

  Going by his jacket’s Significance recovery, it took them almost three hours to find a door. Or rather, an entrance.

  Up close, the tower appeared to be made of irregular blocks of black stone, thin glowing reddish lines showing their shapes where they fitted other stones. The design reminded him of pictures he’d seen of Incan ruins, where, without using mortar, stones were fitted so closely you couldn’t get a knife between them.

  Here, instead of mortar, the fitted stones appeared to be glued by some kind of red energy. Using his Third Eye Dao revealed that the red lines were a mix of Essence and Mana. Roland also got a strong feeling that trying to play games with the energy ‘mortar’ would be a quick way to an early grave.

  Looking up only showed more of the same wall, rising toward the sky until you couldn’t see anymore. Clouds swirled in a rough circle that appeared to be centered on the tower, although from his position he couldn’t be sure. The base was wider than any structure he had seen or heard of, other than the Great Wall of China. The tower had appeared to be circular from a distance, but near its base it looked like a straight wall.

  Thinking about the weight those polished rocks were supporting gave him the warms and fuzzies. He had tried Analyze on one of the walls and got some info about them:

  Stone Block (Celestial Quality, SSS-Grade Item)

  Construction Material. Cannot be damaged or altered by any force below Divine Grade or Empyreal Rank.

  It sounded like it would take more energy to crack one of those blocks than to blow up Earth. The realization didn’t do much for his self-esteem.

  And it made him feel even worse when they came upon the hole in the wall.

  The door wasn’t a door, and it wasn’t ajar, either. Something or someone had melted an opening through the nearly-indestructible material. The ensuing twelve-foot-tall, jagged hole led to a pitch-black tunnel.

  “Finally, the entrance,” Raven said, setting down a few steps away. “I was worried someone might have closed it since the last time I was here.”

  “I thought there’d be a door. What would we have done if that hole was closed?”

  “Found another way in, of course. It would have taken more work.”

  “I have questions.”

  Raven looked him up and down. “I will answer two, and then I’m going into that hole, and you can follow or stay.”

  Roland thought about it. “First question. Why didn’t you take us closer than four hundred miles from the entrance?”

  “Towers don’t like dimensional intrusions near their perimeter, and I couldn’t link that pathetic F-Grade portal to the inside of the Tower. If we had arrived any closer than we did, we wouldn’t have lived to regret it. Next question.”

  “Who in the actual hell are we here to see?”

  “We are going to see the Shade of a man. In life, he was a Gold-ranked Cultivator. His name is Rashid ad-Din Sinan, which I’m sure means nothing to you.”

  “Sounds middle eastern; that’s about it, yeah,” Roland said. “A Shade? Is that like a Revenant?”

  “A Revenant is an echo of a soul. A Shade is an entire soul, a dweller of one of the Underworlds. There are a few of those. The Dread Lands, for example.”

  “A nicely specific example,” Roland said, peering into the hole as they approached. “Is that why I have to keep Reaper’s Dance activated?”

  “You are correct, sir,” Raven said in that TV announcer tone he liked to affect. “And that’s more than two questions.”

  “I refuse to abide by stupid rules.”

  “Nice. Fine, I’ll play along, Captain Death. For all intents and purposes, you are currently a Shade. If you turned off your Skill, you would be ejected from the Dread Lands.”

  “Is that how I get back? Become corporeal again?”

  “Well, some of you would come back, but the rest would be smeared all the way between the Dread Lands and your world. Like a teaspoon of raspberry jam spread over a piece of toast the size of a football field.”

  “So that’s a no.”

  “That is indeed a no.”

  Roland shrugged and stepped closer to the hole in the wall, which was wide enough to fit a two-lane road.

  The normally indestructible stone blocks, none of them smaller than a Humvee, had been turned into puddles of obsidian-like crystal or carelessly cast aside like so many Legos. The opening went on for a while; Roland couldn’t see the end of it from the entrance.

  “That’s a thick wall. That hole could be as long as the Lincoln Tunnel.”

  “Six times as long, to be precise,” Raven said. “A tad under nine miles.”

  “Who built this thing?” Roland asked as he started to walk in, naginata in hand.

  “That I do not know. The Towers were old when I was chirping for my breakfast in the warm comfort of my parents’ nest. They are older than the first iteration of your System.”

  “It’s not really my system,” Roland said absently, most of his attention on his surroundings.

  There was no illumination; the tunnel should be pitch black, but he could see well enough for about fifty-odd feet before the darkness closed in. The floor was covered with melted stone, as smooth and slippery as ice. Luckily, his Roach-Stomper Boots had enough traction to keep him from making a fool of himself.

  Here and there, he spotted solid blocks of stone that had dropped from the ceiling. That made him think about the impossibly massive tower shifting a little and burying him under more tons of indestructible rock than the galaxy had stars. Warm thoughts to keep the chill of death away.

  Something clicked up ahead.

  Great. Another rando encounter, he thought, gripping the naginata.