I have worked on electronics before, but I am no electrician. Titus and I had assumed that the loss of radio signals had to do with the towers. We had no idea why walk-in talkies were broken, but had assumed it was a localized issue. It isn’t.

  The Denver government has not been in contact with anyone. Information all over the world is down and long distance travel is dangerous. That bone wyvern that our adventures took down would be able to wreck a whole convoy at night. Apparently sonar and radar are airborne signals that have been disabled. I knew we had it good in Greenriver, but more and more things are making me wonder if we can even survive.

  Day 94, Owen Landers

  “You feeling alright?” Silas asked after he closed the portal.

  Bella sniffled as she whipped a tear away, “Yeah, I keep thinking time will dull the pain, but it doesn’t. Every time I think of him it still hurts.”

  Silas nodded, “My mother once told me that the memories will always be painful until you have had time to grieve. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds right.”

  “When will I have time?” Bella sighed, “Even if we get home there are more monsters and even gods who can spawn them.”

  “Simple,” Silas answered, “We kill the monsters, the gods, and make everything safe again. I don’t know how long that will take, but I do know it's possible.”

  Bella snorted at that answer, the involuntary half laugh bringing her mood up, “Now you fancy yourself a godslayer.”

  “Why not?” Silas shrugged, “All powerful gods don’t need minions. If they have a limit, then I can kill them.”

  Bella gave him a strange look, but didn’t pursue the topic, “Do you need time to prepare or should we get going?”

  Silas glanced down at his armor and grimaced. He would likely need to spend the next week or so getting everyone’s gear back in working order. As much as it irritated him to be constantly repairing things, it was better for the bone sheets to take damage in his place.

  “It should be fine, I intend to play things a bit safer,” Silas said.

  He moved to the edge of the formation and leaned over the edge. A portal opened below him, suspended in empty air. The reverse side opened in the ceiling of the hideout they had initially attempted to get to. It proved to be a wise choice, as two horned faces snapped upwards.

  They immediately leapt through the portal, which Silas closed immediately. While it did not stop them from passing, it did mean they had a seventy foot fall. Silas used one of the spears to push their fall away from the wall and towards a certain fuzzy death machine.

  He wasn’t sure what the fuzzy rhino was called, but it was the most terrifying creature he had seen. Well apart from the kaiju and Nimrod. Its tail slashed one in half before it hit the dirt, and the other immediately scrambled to its feet and fled. The dragonkin was faster than the rhino, making its escape while its friend was eaten.

  “Let’s try that again,” Silas said once he was sure the dragonkin wasn’t coming back.

  Now that he had some time to examine the hideout, he could see that the dragonkin had torn away the thin wall of stone. He waited a few minutes before shouting into the portal. Nothing poked its head above the edge of the hole in the formation wall, so he closed the portal and reopened it above the formation that the hideout was set into.

  He had contemplated hopping into the hideout and taking a look around, but that would be exceptionally stupid. Any dragonkin could just fill the exposed hole with fire while he was stuck waiting on his portal cooldown. Silas chose to open a second one fifteen feet above the formation and only jump through if it was safe.

  It turned out to be a prudent decision. Ten dragonkin crowded the edge of the formation, waiting for someone to enter the hideout below. That was a lot of dragonkin, he was sure that the tribe had only been one to two hundred individuals strong. Silas had been hunting them incessantly for the last two months.

  He didn’t have exact numbers, but he was sure that the three of them had killed well over a hundred. With their rate of reproduction, Silas assumed there to only be around a hundred left. Ten was a massive portion of that force.

  Glancing back at Bella, he asked, “You think that I could just push the whole group off the edge?”

  She shook her head, “No, they would definitely hear you and swarm you. I do have a better idea, could you bring Aron and Batu back here?”

  Silas nodded. Bella explained her plan while his spirit recharged. Four minutes later Batu and Aron were standing uncertainly on the formation, looking up at a portal.

  “It's just a rock wall?” Batu said, “You want us to dig it out?

  “No it is a ceiling, and I want the four of you to work together to heat it up,” Silas said.

  “Won’t that burn our hands?” Batu asked, “I can triple something’s temperature, but doing that twice will light our hands on fire.”

  Silas nodded, “Good question, and no, so long as you participated in creating the heat you will be able to resist it,” He held up a palm to forestall the objections, “I don’t really understand, but there is some strange soul protection that stops your sigils from causing self harm. At least that’s the working theory.”

  Aron spoke up, “You want us to heat up the stone to over eight thousand degrees? Stone melts at a third of that.”

  “Actually it is a bit more than that,” Silas shrugged, “Bella and Saantha’s greater sigils are multiples of four instead of multiples of three.”

  “Fourteen thousand degrees, that’s nearly half again hotter than the sun!” Aron protested.

  “Awesome,” Samantha whispered.

  Silas agreed, “So you’re saying we might melt the whole formation.”

  “No! We might cause nuclear fusion, I don’t know exactly when that occurs, but it will still be dangerous,” Aron was starting to hyperventilate.

  Silas frowned at the kid, who was clearly not cut out for high intensity situations. All he heard was that they might be able to nuke the dragonkin with the power of the sun. Samantha was correct, that was awesome.

  “It's fine, we’ll be two miles away from any explosion you make,” Silas responded, disregarding Aron’s objections.

  The father and son stared uncertainly at the portal. It had started releasing smoke, as if the interior of the room was filled with fire. Silas was unsure how much that naturally raised the temperature of the stone, but even a few degrees would make a massive difference when multiplied by one hundred forty-four times.

  “What is that?” Batu asked.

  “The dragonkin likely heard Aron’s high pitched complaints and filled the inside of the hideout with fire,” Silas shrugged, “better get started. I won’t be resistant to the heat so don’t panic if I move away.”

  Despite saying that, Silas didn’t intend to move. He wouldn’t come across an incrementally increasing heat like this. It would be the perfect way to stress his Flesh Lord. Getting cooked like a rotisserie chicken had to give the sigil a major workout.

  The four people placed both palms on the edge of the portal. Aron complained the whole time, but despite his concerns about potential nuclear fusion, he was still a follower. The stone immediately started glowing a dull red as its temperature rocketed past a thousand degrees. It continued to brighten until it was glowing like a sun.

  Silas was reminded of the Bible story where three men were thrown into a furnace. It had been so hot that the soldiers tossing them in had died. That fire was cool compared to the temperatures in play before Silas. His resolve to stay stationary was discarded when a glowing mist surrounded the four people at around the five minute mark.

  He was strong, exceptionally so when it came to his high vitality. A cloud of superheated dust was a bit beyond him. Coughing came from the cloud forcing Silas to close the portal. He couldn’t risk them asphyxiating on aerosolized glowing dust particles. Fortunately, the heat rapidly dissipated into the environment, raising the ambient temperature by a few dozen degrees.

  The coughing continued for a few more minutes before Aron started laughing, “I just melted granite with my bear hands!”

  “Dude, it took four of us,” Samantha retorted. She leaned over and spat out some glowing stone that had dripped into her mouth.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  “Is everyone all right,” Silas called from the edge of the formation, “No one has pneumonia with lava?”

  “I think we’re all good,” Bella called out between bouts of coughing, “Just give us time to get out of our new boots.”

  Not all the stone had been vaporized, much of it had flowed through the aperture and pooled around their feet before drying. There was also a second issue, one that Silas had not considered. They may have been resistant to the heat they produced, but their clothes weren’t. The bone armor was much tougher than cloth, but it could not withstand lava.

  Silas sighed, he was going to be busy making clothes over the next few days. He still had some prototype items and a few extra things that Samantha had bugged him to make, so nudity wouldn’t be an issue. Well, Batu and Aron might look a bit weird in Samantha’s extra stretchy bone crafted yoga pants.

  While making a quick jump back to the home base, he wondered how many times they could stack sigils. If all four had greater sigils, the temperature multiplier would have been two hundred fifty-six instead of one hundred forty-four. A fifth person would have pushed it over a thousand. There had to be a limit somewhere.

  He stepped back onto the formation with the clothes slung over one arm. The sound of retching met him. Silas went on high alert, scanning the environment for threats. He wasn’t sure what he expected, what kind of monster would cause such immediate sickness?

  All four of his companions were on the ground coughing their lungs out. Aron was curled on his side with his arms wrapped around his knees. Bella was on all fours, with a string of drool connecting her lips to the formation. Samantha had actually gone as far as vomiting.

  “What the hell is going on?” Silas muttered.

  He wasn’t sure what to do with a bunch of sick people. Vitality should make it impossible for Bella and Samantha to get sick. Was this from breathing in that dust cloud? It couldn’t be, the temperature couldn’t hurt them and they hadn’t been in the dust cloud long enough to be reduced to this state. Silas had been in some nasty dust storms, but none had been bad enough to cause symptoms like this.

  Silas staggered through the sticky stone, his newly healed feet blistering in the heat. He went for Bella first. Samantha would have been first if she had an interface to tell him what was going on. Kneeling, Silas placed a hand on Bella’s back and asked his question again.

  Bella took a few moments to get the current round of coughing out before answering, “I don’t know. It felt like my sigil snapped.”

  Silas had no idea what that meant. He had to resist asking Bella what she meant, there was simply no way for her to know what was happening. They needed to get to a safe location before doing some testing to figure out the issue.

  “Uh, so evidently mixing souls is a very bad idea,” Bella said, her gaze was distant.

  Silas frowned, “What do you mean mixing souls?”

  “Well, you know how you guessed that sigils were the physical expressions of an intangible soul?” Bella said. Silas nodded and she continued, “I just got a warning saying that I have damaged thermal cultivator by using it with foreign souls. The sigil won’t work for the next few hours.”

  Silas frowned, “You used it with Samantha, was it causing problems then?”

  “No,” Bella finally had the presence of mind to take the offered clothes, “I think Samantha is similar because she is my daughter.”

  Silas frowned, that could be right. However, it couldn’t be the whole truth. The first notification that started everything had been caused by Commune Inc. attempting to do something called a ‘spirit tap.’ Something had stepped in and done something to the world to link it to this hell like plane.

  He went back to the backlog of notifications. It took a bit to get all the way to the first ones. Every time he took a bite of food he got a notice about resisting contaminants from Flesh Lord. It was a bit odd that the interface felt the need to catalogue every single bite that he took.

  “Hey Bella, did the warning sound like this?” Silas read off the error notice that everyone presumably got, “Error: You (Commune Inc.) have attempted to place a foreign object into your spirit. Spirits cannot be claimed by others. You (Commune Inc) will be purged with all future oversight given to the host.”

  Bella nodded, “Yeah, though it was a warning, not an error. It says ‘Warning: you (Arabella Baker) have attempted to link a foreign entity to your spirit. Greater Thermal Cultivator will be disabled until foreign influence is purged. Further activity may damage Greater Thermal Cultivator. Approximate time until recovery: 6 hours.”

  Silas grimaced, he had been hoping that multinational companies with globe spanning resources would be the only ones who could harm people on such a deep level. No, evidently they could screw themselves up just as easily. Why couldn’t the interface have come with a manual or at least warnings? Well, he supposed it did give a warning, but only after the problem occurred.

  Another thought crossed, if Bella was hit this hard, what about Batu and Aron, they had lesser sigils? Silas wanted to get Samantha some clothing before dealing with them. The girl was still recovering from retching, but still had the presence of mind to take the offered clothes.

  Now to Aron and Batu. Silas looked between the two men before deciding that Aron was more likely to give understandable answers. After delivering the pants to Batu, Silas knelt by Aron. The young man was not doing well, his face was pale and his breathing ragged.

  “You doing alright,” Silas asked as he helped Aron up. He had noticed with the women, but helping Aron up drove some of the changes home. The man felt light, almost fragile. Silas knew that his two in body was nothing impressive, Rheka had the same but lacked the self destructive exercise regime he had.

  Aron made a gagging noise, then swallowed the bile before talking, “No. It feels like my heart is burning and I feel dirty.”

  Silas looked at the man covered in flecks of cooled lava and dust, “You are dirty.”

  “Not physically, I’m filthy inside,” Aron said, wrapping his arms around himself and shuddering, “like I filled my veins with a cold jelly.”

  That was a disturbing picture. Silas asked Aron to check his interface, and they found the same warning with one crucial difference. Lesser Thermal Cultivator would be disabled for the next nine days. That was a long time that they would be unable to grow that sigil.

  A part of Silas‘s mind went to work trying to figure out what was going on. An answer came surprisingly fast, likely due to his higher wisdom or memory. While two data points weren’t much to go off of nine days was two hundred sixteen hours or six hours cubed. If anyone in his group had the standard thermal cultivator sigil, he would bet that it would be down for thirty-six hours.

  It was a good thing he had given Aron’s sister thermal cultivator as well or they would be getting short on water. When he got back to earth he needed to find a murderer or some other horrible person to see whether or not multiple instances of stressing thermal cultivator could break the sigil. More importantly, if a sigil was broken, could it be replaced by a different one? He could see a case where replacing sturdy gatherer with pack guardian would do much more for Bella.

  “It says my soul is contaminated, “Aron said his voice charged with panic.

  “It also says that the contaminant will be purged, “Silas answered, “it does answer my question on infinite scaling though.”

  It answered one and raised another. Why were Aaron and Batu a contaminant to Bella, but not Samantha? Maybe souls were hereditary like genes. Silas shook his head to remove the tangent. His sigils were not the type that could mix, and he doubted there would be another portal person on earth for him to even attempt mixing with.

  All those things were problems for future Silas. For now, he needed to get all of them back to their home base to rest. Once they were all on their feet, Silas opened a portal directly inside the cramped cave they called home. Mandy was still seated where she had been when they left, eyes staring blankly at the far wall.

  Her arm was regrowing, but it was a slow process. It was not bloody or gross, the bone would slowly deform the skin from within the stump as it grew. However, before it could break the skin, muscle and more skin would grow to extend the arm. Silas would compare it to how a lizard regrew its tail after dropping it. Aron rushed over to take care of his sister, despite his rough state while their father staggered over to a cubby and flopped inside to sleep.

  The room‘s other occupant stared at the portal with wide eyes as the portal opened onto an obsidian hell scape and four half naked people staggered through. She had a sigil in one hand and a bone stylus in another. A stack of bone tablets sat next to her with markings scratched into them.

  Silas opened his mouth to explain, but realized something awkward, “Uh, sorry, I don’t think I got your name.”

  The Indian woman blinked, “I am Lehka.”

  “It’s nice to officially meet you, Lehka,” Silas smiled. Then he explained what happened. It was a surprisingly short tale, as he had yet to check in on the destruction caused by their experiment. After he was done explaining, he asked, “So, have you found anything with the sigils?”

  Lehka nodded, “I have found much. The sigil, Visionary Interpreter, you gave makes it easy to find the lesser abilities in these sigils.”

  “Only the lesser ones?” Silas asked, a bit disappointed.

  “I believe it is because these can only give lesser sigils, unless you find a way to absorb a fourth. That or it is due to my sigil only being of lesser quality,” Lehka explained.

  Silas remembered killing the weird glass monster Lehka’s sigil had been sourced from. It had been easy, as the creature's glass body would have sliced any normal human up, it was less effective when that same human wore thick armor. Bell had shattered its head with her war club. Since then, they had found no others, meaning it was unlikely they would find another before they escaped.

  Lehka did not see Silas’s brooding expression, instead, she picked up a tablet and a sigil, “This one from a turtle allows a person to mold stone with their hands. Can you imagine how valuable this one is? One could purchase flawed jewels and fix them.”

  Silas nodded. That one would have melded well with his talent. Sculpting had been a good if odd talent to have, he hadn’t asked the others about what they had and it didn’t matter. Talent was simply a multiplier on work ethic, good to have, but not necessary.

  Lehka read the contents of each tablet before handing them to Silas. He used bone crafter to change them from a clay like consistency to their natural bone one. There were some interesting things to see. First of all, not all sigils from a creature gave the same ability. The rubber monkeys had the most variation. Most of them gave the body rubber like properties, however one out of ten increased coordination with hands and feet. The one rubber gorilla they had killed, gave energy resistance. Silas assumed electricity, as getting impact and fire resistance would be overpowered.

  The final sigil was the most frustrating. It was from a man sized dog like monster. The beast looked like a cross between a Pomeranian and a squid, with its whole head being a fuzzy squid. The thing had died so fast that Silas hadn’t seen its abilities. Healing. The stupid thing had healing. Silas could have given Aron healing, fixed his sister, and likely gotten Bella a new hand. He seriously considered trying to break the boy’s thermal cultivator to replace it with this one.

  “Set this one aside,” Silas handed the healing sigil back, “if anyone else is found we’ll have a healer.”

  Lehka nodded, “That would be good.”

  They finished up categorizing the sigils and Silas quickly went over his to-do list. It was more tedious than long, primarily the part where he needed to make four sets of new clothes and eight new sets of armor. That was a lot, even with the eight hours every night he had.

  First, he needed to check in on the hideout they likely melted. A minute later he was on the top of the formation which had turned to obsidian. While he waited, he checked the surroundings. To his displeasure, more dragonkin were attempting to approach the formation.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised that they were so dedicated to his death with their god giving them an order to hunt him. Still, it was irritating. He was well aware that an enemy willing to die to take him down was dangerous. It was part of the reason terrorists were so difficult to stop.

  Currently, the group of ten dragonkin were handily beating the daylights out of the fluffy rhino. A few dozen sharpened bones were stabbed into it like spears. None were instantly lethal, but the rhino was unable to move freely without running the risk of driving one of the spears deeper.

  Silas backed away before any of the dragonkin spotted him. While swarming him would certainly break their formation and the rhino would kill one or two, most would reach him. Silas had struggled with two fighters. Going up against eight was far past his abilities.

  He opened a portal with the entrance facing the sky. The opposite opening looked down on the formation that their hideout had been dug into. Well, that was his goal. The portal opened sixty feet over a pile of half melted rubble. The surrounding formations stood, but there were blackened chunks of stone embedded in them.

  Silas was no science major, though a cursory glance led him to believe the formation had been shattered like warm after in a cold glass. Ten thousand degrees was a bit beyond Silas’s ability to comprehend, and that heat had been applied in less than thirty seconds.

  The formation had shattered and the area immediately around the portal had been liquified. It was solid now and several bodies struggled to free themselves from the stone. A minute later they went still. Silas’s eyes widened, the dragonkin who had been atop the formation were now in a death cycle as they revived only to suffocate.

  Silas would have gone to finish them off if a pack of the corgi sized Asian dragons hadn’t moved in to eat them. He supposed he should be glad that Bella couldn’t scale Thermal Cultivator any further. A circle of ten people could raise something to a bit more than one hundred million degrees. He didn’t know what that could do to a planet, but he didn’t want Earth to look like this.

  At least that was a dozen fewer dragonkin he needed to worry about. That didn’t mean he was done with his inspection. He had a few other hideouts to check out. He portaled to a nearby formation, one that didn’t have pieces of the destroyed formation lodged in it. His next stop was a second hideout.

  The portal opened a good twenty feet above the formation. He looked down in distress as several dragonkin were crawling all over the sides and top of the formation. They were on all fours with their faces near the stone. Silas frowned, he had seen bomb dogs do something similar. Were they trying to smell the hideout?

  That shouldn’t be possible, they portaled directly to it. They would need a strong scent to get anywhere near the hideout. Blood might have worked, but they had cauterized Mandy’s stump and fire shouldn’t be enough to draw them. So what had changed from the last month of wanton dragonkin slaughter? The thought of Mandy reminded him of how he had found them.

  They had been feeding a giant pile of caustic plastic into a chemical fire. Then there was the lead dragonkin’s smirk when he was escaping, it had known what it was doing.

  “Shit,” Silas cursed as he was forced to wait on his spirit to open a portal. He needed to evacuate the base camp and he needed to do it now.