“Well, okay then!” Steward announced, sounding like the perfect blend of pitious and impatient. “What did our dear Number Twenty-One choose? What future spoke loudest to you?”

  “I choose…” Jack said, hesitating for only one moment.

  His mind flashed through a collage of moments and memories.

  Jane, holding her phone as she waited for him to pick up.

  Tony, looming over him with brass knuckles raised.

  The orcs.

  The kraken.

  The red knights.

  Olric.

  Jack’s voice faltered.

  “Well?!” Steward demanded, his Cheshire smile turning predatory.

  “In another life, I would’ve chosen peace,” Jack responded, his eyes focused on his hands. “I would’ve chosen to spend my days building. Creating. If I’d been like the other Banishers—surrounded with armies and assistants—I would’ve chosen Fractal Wright in a heartbeat. It’s who I want to be.”

  “So, is that your final choice?” Steward asked, and his body contorted until it loomed unnaturally over Jack. “You wouldn’t be the first Banisher to choose a noncombatant class, you know. In fact, Ken was quite the—”

  “That class isn’t who I need to be,” Jack continued, ignoring his unnerving host. “Sometimes…”

  Jack lifted his eyes from his hands.

  “Sometimes we have to break something to fix it.” He met Steward’s gaze. “I choose Cinder Sovereign.”

  If anything, the creature’s smile only widened. But, if Jack wasn’t mistaken, there was just the barest hint of trepidation in those glinty orbs of his.

  What does this powerful creature have to fear from me? Jack wondered.

  “Alright. Cinder Sovereign, it is.”

  Steward waved his hand, and golden tendrils shot up from the floor and started to slither up Jack’s legs, his torso, and then his neck. They snapped taut, and soon every appendage of his was stretched out.

  “Hey! What the hell?” Jack yelled.

  But it was no use.

  “You know, I was kind of hoping you’d choose Fractal Wright,” Steward whispered, even as the golden tendrils continued to cocoon Jack. At least that way, you might’ve had a tiny bit of peace before you all died. It’s a shame, really. Unless you wanted to die as quickly as possible. If that’s the case, you chose perfectly! Well done, Twenty-One!”

  “I hate you,” Jack groaned just as another golden tendril covered his mouth.

  “Oh, I know,” Steward grinned back. “Give it up for our wonderful guest! The soon-to-be dead Banisher, everyone!”

  There was a deafening chorus of laughter and applause just before the tendrils finished weaving over his face, and everything went silent.

  Jack hung there. Suspended. Waiting. Furious.

  It started as an itch. He felt tiny prickles of heat brush against the skin of his feet. They moved slowly up his ankles, calves, and then thighs. The heat started to move from a simmer to an all-out boil. The fire swept inside his veins, coursing throughout his entire body within seconds. He felt it everywhere.

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  He was that flame, even as it consumed him.

  Jack screamed. There was nothing else to do. He couldn’t fight, couldn’t resist this indomitable power.

  He felt it begin to change him, plucking him apart piece by cellular piece, only to substitute something significantly more substantial in its place. It was akin to carving out a single brick, only to replace it with a steel block. But each brick was one of his cells, and it was happening all over his body near-instantaneously.

  A distant, dull part of himself wondered if this was what happened to everyone who chose a class. Perhaps this was why there were so few people with classes on Aethros. If this is what you had to go through to get one, he could sympathize with how few wanted to go through with it.

  As if in answer to his pain-blind mind, the agony disappeared all at once.

  And in the stillness, he heard that same voice he’d heard when fighting the Kraken.

  You are not alone in this fight, Jack.

  It was gone as quickly as it had arrived, and it left him feeling both impossibly warm and entirely hollow. Still, even in its absence, the pain didn’t return. He could feel the metamorphosis continue across his cells, but it no longer drove him mad with agony.

  Time passed.

  At least, he thought it did. It was impossible to tell up from down in this strange place, much less if time was behaving as it should. Still, at some point, he could feel the transformation draw to a close. And with that comforting thought, light burst across his vision, and he knew.

  He knew with utter certainty that magic was real.

  He knew it because he was it. He was filled with the raw power of suns and the first dawn. He was fire. He was an inferno of life and light.

  He was…

  “Dammit, Jack! Wake up!” Olric’s voice said.

  Olric? Olric’s here? He thought blearily.

  He was being shaken. Why was someone shaking him in his golden cocoon?

  “WAKE UP!” Olric bellowed.

  Slowly, like a turtle sluggishly emerging from its shell, Jack’s consciousness returned. He was back in his room at the farm. It was morning, given the light coming from the window. Olric was yelling and shaking him, an unfamiliar panic filling his brown eyes. His graying manbun was all disheveled, too.

  “Focus, Jack!” he was screaming.

  Focus? Focus on what? Jack wondered, sitting up. Olric jumped back.

  Jack looked down.

  “Oh,” was all he managed to say.

  He was on fire.

  Steward leaned back on his throne, dismissing the illusions of his old companions. It hurt to see them each time he hosted a new class selection, but it was better to hurt and remember than grow numb and forget. He sighed, letting the pain return from where he’d sequestered it. In a flash, the poison rotting away at his magical veins redoubled its effort.

  It was getting harder and harder to keep it at bay.

  He winced, wishing not for the first time that things were different. He could fill all the libraries on his planet on that subject. He wished he’d never been poisoned by that bastard. He wished he’d known more before agreeing to this accursed deal. He wished that damned coward, Number Twenty, had done his job like he was supposed to.

  Most of all, he wished to die.

  At least that way, the shame would end, along with the pain.

  Steward’s fingernails gripped the wooden armrests of the throne until they cracked and bled under the strain. The throne was unharmed, as usual. Such was the issue with Seats of Power. They absolutely refused to bend to his melodrama.

  “Well, at least I won’t have to wait long now,” Steward said, sighing.

  The other fractions of his awareness had told him that Flakerash, as well as several other of the Blight King’s generals, were just ordered to continue with their advance. His people would die. And once all of their souls ventured beyond the Terminus, he would die too.

  Steward grinned. “Have fun, Twenty-One. You won’t have that power for long, so enjoy it while it lasts.”

  His grin widened as he recalled negating the pain-dampeners on Twenty-One’s transformation process. His screams had been delectable. He might’ve enjoyed them more if not for that stupid mortal’s benefactor hijacking the controls from him, reinstating the numbing effects of the class selection.

  “I don’t know what you’re planning, old man, but you’d best do it quickly. I doubt you want to see them die either, but I’m fresh out of tricks,” Steward said to the air, who he knew was listening.

  It didn’t answer. It never did these days.

  That was fine.

  “You got him that legendary class. Let’s see how well he can control it before the world ends,” Steward said as he leaned back in his chair.

  However this played out, Steward couldn’t wait. It would make for a wonderful distraction before he died.

  "It has been said, never bring a knife to a gunfight, but what happens when you bring a gun to a sword fight?"

  Ozzy Irman had always considered himself something of an explorer. Never in all of his wildest dreams however did he think he'd end up in another world. Hell, he still hadn't made it to Yellowstone.

  But when the unthinkable happens, and he finds himself face down cheeks up in a swamp full of monsters he knows something has gone terribly wrong with life. Armed with nothing save his rapidly fraying wits and *cough* an arsenal of magical firearms *cough* he must eke out a place for himself in a world full of magic, corruption, and Gods.

  ?? Great for readers who enjoyed He Who Fights With Monsters, Vigil's Wrath, The Ten Realms Series, and other isekai/flintlock fantasy stories.