Five days later, they left Petra.

  Roland spent the time working on integrating his newfound Techniques with his fighting style. Sparring bouts with Rashid’s bodyguards showed him that he could often overwhelm even experienced Peak Tins.

  When fighting Coppers, his Title helped a lot, but victory or defeat depended almost exclusively on the cultivator’s pattern Quality. Roland’s stats were higher than a normal Basic cultivator all the way to Copper 5 and he could defeat them with some effort. Against cultivators with Rare or better Patterns, things got much trickier.

  Without his Titles, most Coppers would beat him nine times out of ten. Their attacks were fifty percent more effective, and Roland’s attacks and defenses were halved. Roland couldn’t help being grateful to Trixie and her cold-blooded gambling. It had helped him stay alive.

  “Do not get overconfident, grasshopper,” Raven reminded him after he beat an Early Copper. “Remember that there is a lot of variation within Ranks. Most of Rashid’s men have Common to Rare Patterns with two or three active Dantians. You won’t find many with Epic or better cultivation serving anyone, except in a large Sect.”

  “I won’t forget that, especially after that backstab incident at the Chapel.”

  A part of him wished he could stay longer and keep training against higher-tier enemies.

  A surly bodyguard by the name of Hasan had helped Roland refine his fighting style, but five days wasn’t enough to do much. If only he could spend a month or, better yet, a year, he would see real progress. Mixing training with going out into the Dread Lands to hunt monsters would do wonders for him. His Skills and Techniques would reach Apprentice, the next step up from Beginner.

  It was time to go, however. He had too many things to do on Earth and this Realm was beginning to kill him.

  “Go with God, Roland Webb,” were Rashid’s parting words. “When your world integrates into the System, expect the Danse Macabre Order to come knocking. The treatment you receive will be dictated by its Grandmaster. The one I knew in life was a reasonable man, but others have been less so.”

  Something else to worry about, Roland thought as he left Petra behind and rode the Pale Horse through the Dread Lands.

  “This System Pylon shouldn’t take too long to reach,” Raven said once they were underway. “Your acclimation to the Dread Lands will help move things along.”

  “We’re not going to the one we landed next to?”

  “No. This one is better. We just need to hurry.”

  The bird was in his small size, perched between the bike’s handlebars, and looked intently ahead. There was a tone of worry in his words that concerned Roland.

  “Anything I need to know?”

  “What you need to know would fill the Library of Babel, grasshopper. In this case, you need to know that your restored cultivation makes you stand out even in this realm of death. Your aura is a beacon, and beacons attract things.”

  “Got it.”

  The Realm was rated SSS, which meant that ‘things’ included creatures that could snuff them out by looking at them. Raven insisted the high-powered entities stuck to the tops of the towers, but you didn’t need a Triple-S to ruin your day. An S or an A – anything above D to be honest – would do it.

  He glanced briefly at the sky and spotted two cloud faces above him. They appeared to be engaging in a furious argument while the other clouds moved in a wide circle around them. After that, he decided to keep his eyes firmly fixed on the ground ahead.

  Looking at clouds wasn’t good for you. They might look back.

  Roland rode at full speed in the direction Raven indicated and didn’t stop for anything. A few bands of Desolate Reavers tried to give chase and only managed to eat his dust.

  There were towers visible over the horizon, but they didn’t seem to be getting any bigger. Raven fell quiet, which Roland had learned to recognize as a bad sign.

  After some time, their route took them through a noticeable dip in the land. At the bottom, Roland saw the first body of water he’d encountered in the Dread Lands. It was a lake, long and narrow, its dark waters so still that they reflected the wild skies above with mirror-like perfection.

  “Lake Styx,” Raven said. “We go around.”

  “Wait, isn’t the Styx supposed to be a river?” Roland asked.

  “It is, elsewhere. Here it is a lake, and you don’t want to go skinny-dipping in there. We go around.”

  And around the lake they went, staying a good distance from the still lake’s shores. Once, Roland thought he saw a boat near the center of the lake, pushed along by a hooded figure, but it was gone an eyeblink later.

  Leaving the silent lake behind, Roland found himself navigating half a dozen pyramids, imposing structures covered in reflective white stone and capped with golden points. Their exterior was so smooth that, like the lake before them, they reflected the cloud cover so well that their sloping sides almost looked like giant screens, all tuned in to the Weird Weather Channel.

  One of the cloud reflections changed into a doglike face as Roland rode past. No, not a dog, he realized. More like a black-furred jackal with eyes that glowed with a million stars. Eyes that stared directly at him.

  “You might want to pick up the pace,” Raven said.

  Roland was already going at max speed, but maybe he could goose it up a little. His Art was already active and enveloping the bike. Now he concentrated on Reaper’s Dash, except instead of moving him, he made the Skill grab his aura and the bike and bird inside it. And he focused his will into keeping the effect going.

  He shot forward at impossible speed; shooting between two pyramids, both filled with the face of the jackal-headed god. The twin mouths were open in a snarl.

  Anubis. That’s the guy. I wonder what I did to piss him off.

  The speedometer of the Pale Horse went up to 240 mph, which Roland didn’t think was standard on most, if any, motorcycles.

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  The needle hit 240 and then did three revolutions before coming to rest at 220. Too busy to do math in his head, Roland concluded that they were going pretty darn fast. He was also consuming twelve Mana a second; he decided to keep it going for ten seconds just to be safe.

  The pyramids and the angry god were soon left behind.

  For the first time, Roland could see the towers getting closer. He was pretty sure they were breaking the speed of sound with room to spare. If that was what it took to make the towers grow noticeably, the distance to the closest of them was beyond wonky. Wherever Raven was taking them, it wasn’t a shortcut.

  He turned Reaper’s Dash off and was beginning to relax minutely when a horned woman clad in leopard furs appeared in his path, left hand extended palm out like she was some kind of Paleolithic traffic cop.

  The Pale Horse came to a complete stop thirty feet away from the woman, its momentum killed by the hand gesture.

  Roland looked up at the stranger. And looked up some more, because she was at least twelve feet tall, an African goddess with buffalo horns protruding from the sides of her headdress (not her head as he originally thought), leaning on a massive sword she held with her right hand.

  Three necklaces made with a variety of human and animal bones decorated her chest, which was otherwise bare to the waist. A skirt made of some leather that Roland somehow knew was made from human skin hung over strong, muscular legs. Tiny lightning bolts danced around her head.

  “Oya,” Raven said.

  “Scavenger,” the woman replied. Neither word nor tone were complimentary.

  Oy vey, Roland thought.

  “I would love to stay and catch up, Lady Oya, but we are in a bit of a hurry,” Raven told her.

  “He has trespassed on the lands of the dead,” she said, pointing her empty hand at Roland.

  The weight of her aura almost crushed him into the ground, and she was restraining herself. Roland knew the latter because he wasn’t a smear on the plain of bones. Not yet.

  “We were visiting, for reasons I deemed to be good. Besides, if you don’t know that he has a right to be there, you haven’t taken a good look at the boy.”

  Roland was getting all too familiar with the feeling of having his body and soul scanned by super-powerful entities. Rashid and Raven had a much lighter touch than Oya, whoever she was. By the time she was done, he felt wrung out and dazed.

  “I see,” she said finally. “I believe I was misinformed. Someone thought I would act in haste and destroy an alleged intruder before ascertaining his identity.”

  “I would like to know the name of the deceiver.”

  “I will extract my price from them, but I will not engage in gossip with you, scavenger. Besides, I am sure you will learn their name in due time, if you don’t already know.”

  “You interrupted our journey and nearly took a life you were not entitled to. Mere words would seem to be an insufficient recompense.”

  Oya laughed briefly. “You are shameless, scavenger.”

  “Shame requires that I value the opinions of others.”

  “Yes, you never did. Very well. Here is a small token. Use it well, little cousin.”

  One of the bones from her necklace flew toward Roland at fastball speeds. He acted by reflex and caught it in his hand. A cold shock ran from his palm all the way into his Class Core. When he looked at his hand, he caught a brief glimpse of a tiny lightning bolt before it vanished; there was no trace of the bone the goddess had thrown at him.

  “Huh,” he started to say as he looked up and discovered he and Raven were alone on the Plain of Bones. “What was that about?”

  “That was a murder attempt. I hate it when it happens.”

  “I think we’re a few crows short of a murder,” Roland replied.

  Raven laughed at the joke for the next hour. That was punishment enough.

  * * *

  You are back in the System’s sphere of authority.

  A Pylon is 24.7 subjective miles from you.

  Proceed to the Pylon for status updates and portal access.

  Roland’s display gained focus, becoming more solid and real than it had been for the past month and change.

  Another month of my life, spent in a different world. To Mandy, it’s been five days since she saw me. To Elle, it’s been three. If I never have to deal with this Rip Van Winkle crap, it will still be too soon.

  He revved up the Pale Horse and followed the System arrow, which pointed to one of the nearer towers, assuming ‘near’ had any meaning here.

  “Short of a murder,” Raven said, and croaked his version of laughter again. “Pure gold.”

  “I’ve been trying to ask who’s trying to kill me and you’ve been too busy laughing at a pun I’ll regret making for the rest of my life.”

  “Who wants you dead? It’s a long list, grasshopper. As to who has the means and opportunity to sic an avatar of the Yoruba goddess of lightning and death on you? Well, it’s a shorter list.”

  “Let’s hear some names.”

  “Patience, grasshopper. Most of those names would mean nothing to you, and telling you the wrong ones might lead to more trouble down the line. The goal here is to winnow down the list, not make it longer.”

  “If I didn’t owe you big for fixing my Dantian, I’d be annoyed enough to do something stupid.”

  “And it would be truly stupid. If you weren’t so amusing, I’d be annoyed enough to pick you up and drop you on one of the upper floors of a tower.”

  “I don’t like being kept in the dark.”

  “Nobody does. We are here, by the way.”

  ‘Here’ meant the tower they’d been heading to, now close enough that Roland could no longer see where its sides ended. He’d never been able to see where the top of the towers ended. Outer space, from the looks of it.

  Unlike their previous tower, this one had an open entrance, one wide enough to let in two or three elephants side by side. The doorway’s edges were lined with some golden metal he had never seen before. Analyze identified it as S-Grade Golden Orichalcum, whatever that meant.

  A pair of steampunk mecha stood by the gate, twenty-foot-tall humanoid constructs seemingly made of dark bronze, with lots of rivets and clockwork gears. Instead of hands, they had hammers the size of pickup trucks at the end of their four arms.

  Their stats were not very informative:

  Arkano-Droid Guardian (Soul-Hardened Ectoplasmic Construct)

  A-Grade World Boss

  Health ?????? Mana ?????? Endurance n/a

  I’m guessing neither of those guys took an arrow to the knee and retired from adventuring, Roland thought.

  From their looks, it would probably take a tactical nuke to the face to make them even think about retirement.

  They advanced toward the gate and its paired guardians. When they got close enough for the Arkano-Droids to loom over them, the golden metal gates slid aside, which Roland took as an invitation to proceed. Neither of the massive Guardians asked to see ID or tickets or anything as they went inside.

  What is this place? Roland asked as they went through a long corridor. The black stone blocks had been replaced with a smooth yellowish substance, sort of like stucco but with an almost plastic finish.

  We are in a Tower the System has assimilated by setting a Pylon inside its base and infecting the area with its rules.

  It can do that? The System?

  Yes. It can take an ancient place of power and turn it into another resource to feed its appetites. This Tower has been turned into an ascending Dungeon. The works of an ancient race that predated humankind by eons are now used as little more than an amusement park.

  An amusement park that kills people, Roland corrected.

  It is more amusing that way. And, of course, some bits of ancient wisdom can be found in those Towers and repurposed in ways that may surprise even the System.

  They left the miles-long tunnel that traversed the Tower’s outside wall, and Roland saw what Raven meant by a Pylon.

  The area within the walls was filled with a pillar of solid light that shimmered in hundreds of colors, some of which Roland had no words to describe. The pillar had to be several miles wide, and it extended upward for what seemed like forever. Tendrils of the same material or energy protruded from the central pillar and dug into the stone blocks that made up the walls. Roland could see where melted black stone had formed around the tendrils like dried blood.

  “The System made that,” Roland said.

  Yes. Pylons are one of the larger manifestations of the System’s power. They are reserved for places such as this, where enormous power can be harvested.

  As he walked onto the ground floor, Roland realized that Reaper’s Dance had started draining him of its usual twelve Mana per second. And that Raven had switched to his telepathic voice.

  “This isn’t a land of the dead anymore, is it?”

  No. This Tower has been partially restored to its original state and repurposed to serve the System.

  “Okay. Good. I was getting tired of the Dread Lands.”

  As Roland spoke, notifications began to light up in his display. Time to start collecting his rewards and look into getting the hell out of there.