They ran.

  The wheat closed around Leo like water filling a hole. Stalks pressed in from every side, thick as fence posts, their swollen grain heads brushing against his face and shoulders. Golden dust shook loose and stuck to his skin.

  Mike was ahead, breaking trail, snapping stalks and shouldering through the gaps he made. Arthur was somewhere behind, his breathing wet and ragged.

  The cutting sound followed them.

  A long, patient rasp of metal through dry fiber, followed by a pause, followed by another rasp. Steady as a metronome. Each stroke closer than the last.

  They moved as fast as they could. But it was closing in.

  Leo crashed through a row of stalks and hit the next one. The wheat grew thicker here. Each stalk was wider, the spacing tighter. He turned sideways to squeeze between two stems and the grain heads dragged across his back, heavy and warm, leaving smears of golden dust on his robes.

  The amber sky gave no direction. The light fell evenly from everywhere, warm and diffuse, and shadows simply did not exist. Every row looked the same. The golden field stretched endlessly in every direction.

  The stalks were packed so tight that Leo had to grip them and pull himself through, hand over hand. The grain heads above formed a canopy, blocking the sky, turning the world into a dim golden tunnel. Fibers snagged his robes and held. He ripped free and kept moving.

  Mike had slowed. Leo could hear him grunting, shoving, getting nowhere. The Foundation Establishment cultivator was strong enough to crack stone, and yet the wheat held him like a fly in amber.

  The cutting sound was right behind them.

  Leo could feel each stroke through the ground. Each swing of the scythe rattled his body. The field itself conducted the rhythm. Every stalk around them trembled in time with the blade.

  The cutting stopped.

  The wheat stopped moving. Every stalk stood rigid. The heavy grain heads, which had been swaying and bobbing since the moment they arrived, hung motionless. The wind was gone. The air sat dead and warm against Leo's skin. The golden dust settled to the ground in a fine sheet and stayed there.

  Leo could hear his own heartbeat. Arthur's lungs working behind him. Beyond that, nothing.

  Every thought Leo had vanished. A single understanding remained. Something divine stood above him. His mind echoed with a name, foreign yet perfectly comprehensible, transcending language itself.

  Monarch Scattered Straw.

  The knowledge pressed into a place inside him he visited only rarely at night. A room at the bottom of his mind where the walls were very thin, and on the other side of those walls something was looking in.

  Kneeling was correct. Kneeling was the only sane response. He was a mere mortal in front of the great divine.

  Leo forced himself to remain upright. The effort consumed everything. He had no attention left for anything else.

  Around him, the wheat obeyed.

  Every stalk within sight bowed. Thick stems bent at their midpoints and the fat grain heads lowered toward the earth. A spreading wave of submission rolled outward in every direction.

  Three humans stood tall.

  Arthur's legs were spread wide, knees slightly bent, one hand braced on his thigh. His teeth were bared. The tendons in his neck stood out like cables.

  Mike was standing too. His face was pale, eyes fixed straight ahead. His hands hung at his sides with the fingers curled into fists.

  Something lit up in Leo's chest. A small, stupid ember of pride. The rational part of his mind screamed that kneeling was correct, that the lesser should worship the greater.

  But if Arthur and Mike could stand, he could stand.

  It moved.

  Broad across the shoulders. A wide brim sitting low where a head should have been. One step at a time through the bowing wheat.

  The arms hung impossibly long, past the waist. Bundled. Braided. Woven together from thick cables of straw twisted in patterns that repeated at every scale.

  The scythe hung from one hand. Curved dark metal, pitted and ancient, the edge bright where it had been used. The handle was bone. Old and yellow, polished smooth by centuries of grip.

  Holes pocked the body. Gaps in the weave where the straw had rotted away, leaving dark openings into the interior. Patches of newer material covered some of them, struggling to hold their shape.

  The hat brim tilted up.

  There was no face. A rough sphere of compacted straw sat on a thick neck. Featureless. Two points of amber light burned where eyes might have been.

  Leo watched it come. He could do nothing else. His heart began to beat in time with the footfalls, synchronizing with the terror that had been walking this field since before any of them were born.

  The scythe moved.

  The blade went through Leo's legs just below the kneecap. First pressure. Then heat.

  He fell. The ground hit his stumps and the pain doubled. His vision whited out. Two heavy impacts beside him.

  Leo was gripped and lifted off the ground.

  No hand touched him. The divine sense of a Deity Transformation entity pressed into his body from all sides, an invisible grip that found every thread of his being. The pressure tightened.

  Then the wringing began.

  Leo's body twisted. The invisible grip rotated, slow and constant, and Leo felt his body contort. His flesh separated along lines he didn't know he had. His skin peeled away in long strips that curled as they dried.

  He was still conscious. He felt the twist tighten. His body elongated, thinned, compressed into a single golden thread.

  Beside him, two other threads spun in the air. Arthur and Mike, twisted into golden fibers. The three of them hung alongside bundles of harvested wheat, all gathered by the same divine sense, indistinguishable.

  The Monarch sat down in the field.

  It crossed its legs and laid the scythe across its lap. Dozens of threads floated up from the cut stalks and the three humans alike, drifting into the space between its open palms. Its fingers began to work. Sorting. Pairing. Laying wheat against human fiber.

  Leo felt himself being handled. Folded. His thread bent at precise angles and tucked between wheat fibers. Seven points. A star shape. The Monarch's fingers wove wheat and human together in alternating layers, pulling each thread taut, locking it against the next.

  The pain was constant. He was a flat piece of woven material in the hands of a dead divine, and some of the threads pressing against him were Arthur and some were Mike and some were wheat that had been here before them.

  The patch was finished. The Monarch lifted it, turned it, inspected it.

  Then the Monarch pressed the patch against its own torso.

  Leo felt the gap. A hole in the weave. Cold air leaked through from inside. The Monarch pushed the patch into place and pressed the edges down.

  The inside of Monarch Scattered Straw was hollow. A vast, dark cavity filled with nothing. Golden mist drifted through the interior like fog in an empty warehouse.

  ---

  [14:59:59]

  Leo gasped and jerked in the VR pod, his hands clutching at his own knees.

  Still there.

  He squeezed. Bone under skin under fabric. He pulled his hands up and looked at them. Fingers. Five on each. Flat, normal, human fingers.

  His phone was ringing.

  Leo fumbled it out of his pocket. Arthur's name filled the screen. Group call.

  Leo picked up.

  For a moment, nobody spoke. Leo listened to Mike breathing on the other end. Slow, deliberate breaths.

  Arthur broke the silence.

  "I'm going to burn that straw-brained son of a bitch to the goddamn ground."

  Leo opened his mouth. He didn't know what to say. He closed it.

  "You hear me? Fields of wheat, a sky the color of piss, and some scarecrow looking reject from a Spirit Halloween store just turned me into arts and crafts. Me. Arthur Higgins. Who survived Khe Sanh. Who has been audited by the IRS four separate times."

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Mike's breathing continued. Steady. In. Out.

  "That thing sat down and started knitting. Knitting! Like my grandmother making a quilt for the church raffle. Except the quilt was me. And you. And Mike. And a bunch of wheat. Do you understand how disrespectful that is?"

  Leo leaned back in the pod.

  "I have killed men who showed me less disrespect than that scarecrow. I have repossessed vehicles from people who showed me more courtesy. At least they had the decency to curse at me first. This straw-stuffed, hat-wearing, scythe-carrying arts and crafts project didn't even have the common manners to look at me with a face."

  Something in Leo's chest loosened. Just a fraction.

  "Arthur," Mike said.

  "Don't 'Arthur' me. I felt it, Mike. I felt the inside of that thing. You know what's in there? Nothing. Air and gold fog. The thing is hollow. It's falling apart. It's patching itself with people because it's too stupid to die. It's a scarecrow with a god complex and a sewing hobby, and I am going to set it on fire."

  "It's a Deity Transformation profundity," Mike said. "Our swords are Gold Core power. We'd need..."

  "Three days."

  "What?"

  "I'm going back in three days. You two rest up. Touch grass. Do whatever you need to do to get your heads right. I am going to spend seventy-two hours in the library getting the young ones to teach me the internet. When I come back, I will have a plan to burn that field to ash."

  "Arthur, you can't just..."

  "Fire, Mike. The answer is fire. You saw what that thing is made of. Straw. Woven straw. You know what straw does? It burns. It has burned since the first caveman dropped a torch in a hayfield. Everything burns!"

  Leo lay in his pod with the phone pressed to his ear, his free hand still resting on one knee. Arthur's gravelly confidence. Mike's reluctant expertise. Two men who had just been woven into a dead god's skin, plotting their revenge over a group call.

  Leo smiled.

  He didn't have anything to add.

  Throughout his time post transmigration, the only thing Leo had was volume and repetition.

  He wasn't sure he was the combat genius others were starting to think he was. But he knew one thing.

  He was going back in fifteen hours.

  ---

  The second time was less terrifying than the first.

  Leo respawned at their forward camp, fifteen hours after the Monarch had woven him into a patch. The fog wall stood where they'd left it. Arthur's groove still marked the stone floor of the ravine. The X at the entry point glowed faint orange under the grey sky.

  He followed the groove alone.

  The fog swallowed him. His boots found the scored path in the rock and he walked with one foot dragging along the groove, feeling the shallow channel. The echoes came wrong again, but he'd expected that. He kept walking.

  The fog thinned. The golden field opened up. The amber sky pressed down.

  The wheat stood waiting.

  Leo stepped into the field and the stalks closed behind him. The cutting sound began almost immediately. That patient rasp, metal through dry fiber, steady as breathing. The stalks around him shuddered and bowed.

  The divine pressure hit. Monarch Scattered Straw. The name carved itself into his skull. His legs wanted to fold.

  He was able to stay upright. That part was getting easier.

  Everything after that was the same.

  The scythe took his legs. The invisible grip wrung him dry. He became a golden thread, folded into a seven-point star, pressed into a gap in the Monarch's torso. He felt the hollow interior, the cold leak of dying divinity, and then he gasped awake in his VR pod.

  The third time, Leo followed the fog wall along the edge of the field. He kept one hand near the boundary, tracing its curve, counting his steps. After maybe two miles the path bent back to the X Arthur had scratched into the stone at the original exit point. The field and the fog were featureless the entire way.

  The fourth time, he tried speed. He drew Moonrider the instant he cleared the fog and launched into a lightning-bolt trajectory. Moonrider froze as soon as he entered the field. Leo's momentum kept going. He pitched forward face-first into the wheat below.

  At least the landing was soft.

  The Monarch's wringing was the same as the first time. That part never got easier.

  The fifth time, he tried going low. He crawled on his belly between the stalks. The divine sense of the Monarch found him in under a minute.

  Same scythe. Same wringing. Same patch.

  Each death hurt. The twisting was bad. The desiccation was worse. Feeling his body dry out and compress, his flesh turning brittle and gold.

  As painful as it was, Leo had experienced worse. He had spent three weeks in Dr. Reyes' variable gravity resistance platform at Yale, locked into a harness that spun him at forces designed to train his body's g-force endurance.

  The Monarch's wringing lasted maybe forty seconds. Reyes' machine lasted until she decided to go home for the day.

  The problem was that Leo couldn't make any progress. Each training session usually provided a small degree of improvement. Here, in front of the divine, Leo was just being senselessly slaughtered.

  As soon as the Monarch's divine domain caught him, everything became irrelevant. Qi Refining against Deity Transformation was a rounding error. His divine sense, which let him fight above his weight class against Gold Core opponents, meant nothing here.

  The professors at Yale had explained it as pure dimensional suppression. He was being attacked on the divinity front. Without forming the divine infant at the Nascent Soul stage, he was defenseless.

  ---

  On the morning of his sixth attempt, Leo logged in and found Arthur and Mike already at the forward camp.

  Arthur was squatting beside a fire, stirring something in a ceramic pot. The liquid inside was a murky brown, and the vinegar smell hit Leo's eyes before it hit his nose. Arthur had reading glasses perched on his nose. Leo had never seen him wear glasses before.

  Mike sat against the ravine wall with his arms crossed, watching the pot with an expression that suggested he had just lost another argument.

  "Kid," Arthur said without looking up. "Sit down. I've got something."

  Leo sat on the stone across from him. "What is that?"

  "Progress." Arthur tapped the pot with a wooden spoon. "I spent three days at the local library. Paid a twelve year old to use the computer for me."

  "He researched herbicide," Mike said.

  Arthur pointed the spoon at Mike. "Which is more than you did. Three days, Mike. I had to talk to a twelve year old for three days. What did you do?"

  Mike shifted uncomfortably. "I was also researching."

  "Researching what?"

  Mike reached behind him and pulled out a rolled blueprint. He spread it across his knees. The schematic showed a large sniper rifle.

  "T3 military-grade sniper rifle," Mike said. "Fires T3 incendiary rounds. I have a T4 version too. But since we'd need to commission the Ammo Sect to forge it, we have to settle for the Gold Core version."

  Arthur stared at the blueprint. Then at Mike.

  "A sniper rifle."

  "Incendiary rounds, Arthur. The Monarch is made of straw. A high-velocity T3 incendiary projectile hits the torso, the straw catches fire. We burn it from the inside out."

  "A dinky little sniper rifle," Arthur said, "against a Deity Transformation Monarch."

  "The barrel alone is four feet long."

  "Mike. The thing froze our swords the second we entered the field. It wrung all three of us into thread with its divine sense. It didn't even stand up to do it. And your answer is a gun?"

  "The gun and bullets work on mechanical power, even without Qi!"

  "Oh boy, mechanical power. My mistake. I'm sure the Deity Transformation profundity will be very impressed by your big gun." Arthur jabbed the spoon toward the blueprint. "You just wanted to play with a new toy."

  "That's not true."

  "You saw the words 'military-grade sniper rifle' in a catalog and your brain turned off."

  Mike rolled the blueprint back up with care. "The incendiary component is sound logic. You said it yourself. The thing is made of straw. Straw burns."

  "If you did think that fire is the answer, you should have been on the internet researching how to make napalm instead of dreaming about your next big toy."

  Mike tucked the blueprint behind himself and crossed his arms again.

  Arthur turned to Leo. "You see what I'm working with here?"

  Mike gestured for him to continue.

  "I spent three days working on this, and I figured out how I'm going to do it."

  Arthur paused for dramatic effect.

  "What is the Monarch made of?" Arthur asked. "Straw. What does the Monarch use to repair itself? More straw. And what do you do when you've got a crop you want gone?"

  Arthur reached into the pot and pulled out the spoon. The dark brown liquid dripped from the end in thick, viscous strands.

  "You poison it."

  Mike unfolded his arms. "Herbicide."

  "Herbicide." Arthur grinned. "Underneath all those formations, that wheat is still cellulose. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. It still grows in dirt, still has roots, still pulls water from the soil. Mortal chemistry."

  He picked up a pouch of white powder. "Salt. Osmotic stress. Pulls moisture right out of the root cells."

  He pointed to a jar of dark liquid. "Vinegar concentrate. Burns through plant tissue on contact."

  A second container joined the lineup. Brown powder, coarse-grained. "Borax. Shuts down photosynthesis. The plant starves."

  He stirred the pot. All three compounds mixed together, reduced and concentrated over low heat.

  "Every defense the Karma Severing Sect ever built was meant to stop cultivators. You can ward a field against spiritual attacks." Arthur grinned. "You cannot ward against salt water soaking into dirt."

  Leo looked at the pot. "Will it work?"

  "Only one way to find out." Arthur grinned. "I'm going to try 'Agent Orange,' and if that doesn't work, I'm going to ask my friends how to make the real thing."

  ---

  They stood at the edge of the sea of wheat.

  The fog wall hung behind them. Ahead, the wheat stretched to the horizon under that permanent amber sky, every stalk tall and fat and swaying in slow unison. The cutting sound hadn't started yet. The Monarch was somewhere deep in the field, reaping and patching its decaying body.

  Arthur knelt at the border where bare earth met the first row of stalks. He had four ceramic jugs lined up beside him, each one sealed with wax.

  Leo and Mike hung back at the fog's edge, hoping to stretch the time before the field swallowed them.

  Arthur cracked the jug open and the vinegar hit them all at once. Their eyes watered despite the distance.

  The murky brown liquid spilled across the soil in a slow, thick ribbon. It soaked into the dirt at the base of the nearest stalks, darkening the earth in a spreading stain. Arthur moved the pour along the row, giving each stalk a generous dose, working methodically from left to right.

  "How long until we see results?" Mike asked.

  "Depends on root depth and soil absorption. If this were normal vegetation, twelve to twenty-four hours for the salt to start pulling moisture from the roots. The acid works faster on surface tissue. Could see wilting in the stems within a few hours." Arthur came back to join them.

  Then they waited.

  The wheat swayed. The amber light fell even and warm. The soil around the treated stalks was dark and wet, the vinegar smell sharp enough to taste.

  Ten minutes. The stalks swayed.

  Fifteen minutes. Leo checked the base of the nearest stalk where the concentration was heaviest. The soil was still wet. The stem showed no discoloration. The grain head bobbed fat and golden above him, heavy with spiritual qi, completely indifferent.

  Thirty minutes. The wheat looked exactly the same as when they'd arrived. Every stalk stood straight and tall. The golden color was unchanged.

  If anything, the stalks nearest the pour looked fatter, their grain heads heavier, as if the soil had simply absorbed Arthur's concoction and fed it to the roots like fertilizer.

  "Give it time," Arthur said. His voice was a shade less certain than before.

  Mike looked at the stalks. Looked at Arthur. Said nothing.

  "I'm going back in," Leo said.

  Arthur turned. "Into the field?"

  "Coach Williams wants to meet with me, so I can't wait around. Maybe the herbicide needs more time. But I'm not going to stand here wondering if I'm getting used to the smell or if the herbicide doesn't work. I'm going to take another crack at adapting to the divine domain."

  "I got to check on my kid too."

  "Guys, we just got here."

  "Let us know if it works then."