Stormblade [Skill Merge Portal Break] (B1 Complete)

We had a lot to do, from the moment the portal opened and vomited us—and to my surprise, the half-dozen surviving humans—out into Roswell's streets.

Sophia and Yasmin were close to tapped out. Both of them had worked together to triage and stabilize the former prisoners, but their work wasn't done yet. They couldn't leave the unranked, foreign-to-our-world people in a hostile Roswell by themselves, and we couldn't leave our healer and support alone, either.

So, after some discussion, we left Ellen there to cover them. She'd regenerated enough Mana to fight, and with the group holed up on the second floor of the office building we'd cut through and the doors and windows barricaded, they were more or less out of the way. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it did let Jeff and me head for the tractor cab. He was the only one who could drive it, and I didn't feel comfortable sending him across Roswell by himself.

"Thanks," Jeff said as we walked back through the streets and alleys toward the highway.

I looked at him. "For what?"

"For keeping me from barreling through that portal world. We're pretty solid, but I can feel my limits approaching. C-Rank, maybe some B-Ranks, but nothing more than that. Anything higher's going to shred me." He groaned as he shifted in his armor. "I've got bruises on my bruises."

Jeff looked tired, and he moved more stiffly than I'd expected him to. Then again, we'd been fighting, driving, or looking for fights for the better part of three days. That had to have an impact on him.

"It's not like I'm not feeling it," I said.

'Yeah, but you're not the punching bag, and you're moving a lot better than me. I didn't think I was getting old already. I'm not even twenty. But when I look at you and Ellen, I feel old. Or out of shape. Something. I knew it'd be like this, but I didn't know it'd be like this."

I shrugged. "I'm not abandoning you at C-Rank when I hit B, and it's not like I'm going to hit it anytime soon. My growth feels slow. I'm not even close to halfway to B-Rank, and my core's still in danger of falling apart. Every fight we get in reminds me that it's unstable. When this is over, I'll need some time with Jessie. She'll have to teach me how to really meditate, because I'm not making enough progress by myself."

"Right," Jeff said. He went quiet, and the two of us cut through a single stray suit of armor without much trouble on our way to the truck.

He climbed in, started the diesel engine, and waved. "I'll see you in a few hours, Kade."

"Safe travels, Jeff," I said.

And then he was gone, leaving a cloud of diesel exhaust behind him.

I hadn't thought much about what Jeff's experience would be like as I kept growing stronger. In my mind, he'd made a choice, and he was content with it. But the difference between Ellen, me, and him was already apparent; he could put out damage, and he could take it, but he didn't have the sheer variety of tools we did. That put him at risk; he couldn't react to new threats as effectively as we could. And that left him taking damage he didn't need to take, even though his armor mitigated it.

There was nothing I could do for him, though. He'd made a choice. And it had been the right choice for him. It'd suck to, eventually, have to leave him behind.

But that wasn't an issue yet. It wouldn't be an issue for a while, judging by the shape my core was in.

We had a lot to do, and most of it was to hurry up and wait, so I headed back to the girls right away. A few D-Rank armors patrolled a nearby street, but with Cheddar in the air, I avoided them rather than fighting.

Something crashed inside the barricaded office as I knocked on the only unblocked door. Then Ellen cursed. "Kade, that you?"

"Yep."

"Great. Come on in. The prisoners are over in the corner. Yasmin's been trying to talk to them, but they're really, really hard to figure out. Half of their language is sounds my mouth won't make, and a good chunk of it looks gesture-based."

"I'm making progress," Yasmin said from a wheeled office chair. She gulped from a water bottle. "They're almost not deathly afraid of me—or at least they weren't before you got back, Kade. Now, they just look like they'd rather die and get it over with. You got Jeff out of here alright?"

"Yeah. The truck's got plenty of fuel, and it's a straight shot. The convoy should be coming this way, too. All we need to do is bunker down and wait. He'll bring them to the radio tower when he gets back. Soph, how are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm tired."

"That's it?" I asked.

She stared at me. Her robe was covered in drying blood, and her eyes had gigantic black bags under them. Then she nodded. "Yeah. That's it. I saved them all, though. I saved them all."

I smiled at her and put a hand on her shoulder. "Right. Good work. Okay, Sophia, Ellen, take a nap. Yasmin and I will stay up and make sure everyone stays safe. We'll wake you up when it's our turn."

Ellen yawned. "You don't have to tell me twice."

Nine Years Ago:

"Have you been reading that book?" Roger asked his stepson.

"Yes."

He nodded approvingly. The two of them sat on Kade's bed, the superheroes on his blanket staring up at them. "And what have you learned?"

"That there are some battles that shouldn't be fought," Kade said.

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"Are there?" Roger asked, feigning surprise. "You learned that?"

Kade glared. The bruise under his right eye from his most recent schoolyard brawl shone in the bedroom's ceiling light.

"Okay, okay. What kinds of battles?"

"The kind where your enemy's desperate. Where they can't get away. Or where you haven't picked the fighting ground. Or if your people are tired, and theirs are fresh. Stuff like that."

"And how does that apply to what I do?" Roger asked.

The nine-year-old's glare hit him like a truck. Then the glare softened as Kade thought, tongue sticking out a little between his newly grown adult front teeth. "Okay, so, the enemy's always desperate. They can't leave the portal world. They can't retreat. And you can't pick the fighting ground. You have to fight them on their own turf. Always. So, according to this book, you shouldn't fight that battle, right?"

"Right. Sun Tzu's idea of war is a lot different than delving, Kade. His enemies were other men. They fought like men, got scared like men, and gave up like men. A powerful enough force or a bad enough situation, and they'd give up. They weren't cowards, but they had limits. So do the boys you keep fighting at school. You need to remember that.

"And those limits apply to you, too. I'm going to have you start meditating with Jessie."

"Dad, no!" Kade said.

Roger laughed. Then he nodded thoughtfully. "Kade, yes. Your sister's a great example of someone up against their limits, who's desperate. She's the kind of person you don't pick a fight with, Kade. Not under any circumstances. But she's also the kind of person you can learn from to find your own limits—and to push past them. So you're going to spend time with her, learning to breathe and let your mind stop racing. Three times a week."

"Twice? Please, please, just twice?"

"Fine. Twice."

"Once?"

"Twice."

Kade sat still for a minute. Then he nodded. "Fine, twice."

"And keep reading that book. It's got a lot of insights that might help you when you're up against those limits, or when you're trying to figure out how to push others to theirs."

I woke up to Ellen shaking my shoulder. "Kade, the convoy's in short-range radio contact. Twenty miles out—maybe an hour. They want us to do a once-over of the area around the radio tower and make sure it's clear. Soph and Yazzy—"

"Don't call me that!"

Ellen ignored Yazmin. "—say they need to stay here with the, uh, visitors from another world. The two of us should be able to sweep the courtyard and the buildings around it just fine, and they'll be close."

"And it'll be safe for the two of them?" I asked.

Yasmin nodded. "I seeded the whole area with traps. I'll take them down once you get back so the convoy doesn't trigger them, but for now, we're all safe here."

"Alright. Give me a minute." I pushed myself off the floor and looked around at our little fortress.

The, as Ellen said, 'visitors from another world' hadn't moved from their corner between two decaying cubicles. I eyed them with a raised eyebrow; one of the men made eye contact with me, then looked down at his wool-wrapped feet. The rest only shot quick glances, and the boy wouldn't even look our way. They were obviously terrified of us, and I understood.

I was never comfortable in other worlds, either, and now they were trapped in ours. For all they knew, we were portal monsters every bit as horrifying as the Dark Citadel ones. They'd been pushed beyond their limits, and that was when people were at their most dangerous.

After a moment, I looked away. "Alright, Ellen. Let's go."

I led the way into the twilight outside our makeshift fort, then past the half-collapsed tower. The sun was setting a red-orange over the desert to the west, and the dark Roswell streets around us were almost completely dark, but Ellen's shadow magic formed an area of un-darkness—not light, but the lack of shadow—around us.

She pointed at a brown building with cracked paint, shattered windows, and a sand drift that reached all the way to the second floor against its western side. "Let's check that building first. There were a few knights around it when we first came in."

"Sure," I said, and pushed through the door.

Inside were racks of hangars, sun-rotten clothes, and a single check-out desk. One of the few shirts intact enough to read said something about Roswell, 'The Alien Capitol of the World.' I snorted. We had six people from another world upstairs and across the street; suddenly, the goofy aliens in the windows and posed as statues didn't seem as weird.

A path of destruction led to the back of the store. Broken hangar racks, their sharp edges unrusted. Clothes whose more colorful side had recently been flipped to the top and that hadn't had time to fade. Blood—and not red blood, but dry, dark blue-green splatters of the stuff.

A shield that looked a lot like a walking suit of armor's.

"I think we might have company here," I said. "Or maybe not. That blood's not fresh. But something happened. Let's check it out.

"Alright." Ellen followed behind me, tension radiating off of her. It was more than I expected for a few C-Rank portal monsters, even without backup. Then she stopped. "Kade, I need to know something. You said the God of Thunder was upset at you for not merging your last set of skills, but there's usually not a good reason to do it. You lose too much specificity, and you can't gain it back in power later. So, what's his endgame? What's he trying to get?"

"I think it's you," I said. "I told you about the deviation from the Stormsteel Path, right? I think he wants me to use you to follow that deviation to its logical conclusion, and I need the extra skill to do it. You bled into my C-Rank trial, and we've bled into each other's skill merges, too. It's the only thing I can think of."

Ellen went quiet as we pushed further inside the old clothes store. "And what do you think that looks like? For you, I mean. And for us."

"Uh, I think I need to merge my skills and then try to learn a skill with you, or something like that, but I'm not sure on the specifics of how. Eugene was pretty vague."

"That sounds like I need to merge my skills, too."

"Yeah. Good thing we got that core, right? And we've got a leftover from the other C-Rank clears."

Ellen snorted. She didn't say anything, though. Not for a while. And when she did start, she sounded hesitant and uncertain. "I have an idea. I've been digging into it for a while, but it's hard to describe, and it'll be easier if…"

"If what?" I asked, turning to look at her.

She didn't answer. Instead, she pointed behind me. "What's that?"

The shadows shifted overhead, growing brighter around an off-white, almost skeletally-thin figure. It sat in the corner of the store, a halberd shoved completely through its chest and another left in its neck. Surrounding it were three piles of portal metal armor, with a fourth a few feet away. I poked at it with the unignited portal metal blade of my sword.

It didn't move.

I relaxed. "I think it's one of the monsters from the attack on the convoy near the White Sands."

"But this body's got to be a couple of weeks old. And that means…"

I took up Ellen's train of thought. "It means that we're not out of that portal's range yet."

The day drifted by slowly, and Jessie resisted the urge to check her phone and tablet more than she had to. It was Tuesday, and that meant school—and worse, therapy—instead of work. But on the other hand, Kade wasn't home. And that meant Stephen was coming over for movie night.

It'd be a blast if she had the energy for it.

Tara had, of course, been checking up, but those were phone calls or texts, not visits. She was pretty sure they'd have the entire evening to themselves. And Stephen was due to come over in just under half an hour. Jessie had gotten herself all dolled up in the dress she and Ellen had picked out. It was green—a light green, and silk-shiny. Mid-calf in length. Ellen had insisted that classy women didn't show too much leg on dates, and Jessie agreed. Comfortable, loose where it had to be and tight where Ellen would let it be.

And she'd put on makeup and gotten her hair in a bun that managed to look both messy and refined at the same time, too.

All in all, it was going to be a good date.

Her tablet pinged.

She stared at the message for a moment. Had she given out her work line to Caleb Richter? She must have—maybe on the bus, when she'd grilled him on all his portal adventures. Either way, she was off-duty, and the delver's question could just as easily be handled by other GC reps as by her.

And she had other things to do, anyway.