The blood-red experience orb hung in the air a few feet away, but I didn’t move to touch it right away. It had been one thing to kill Eddie—he’d threatened Tori, and I knew he’d follow through on it. That was like threatening my sister. I couldn’t let him leave the dungeon, and I knew I’d solved that problem the only way I could.

  But taking his experience and gear? The thought made me sick.

  Everyone would drop experience orbs, and it was only a matter of time before someone else figured that out—someone who wouldn’t mind killing. The Consortium wanted us to ‘advance and uplift,’ and while I didn’t know what uplifting meant, the meaning of ‘advance’ was pretty clear. Gain levels. Increase your power. Move up.

  Monsters were one thing, but I knew I couldn’t kill people just to grow stronger. I couldn’t say the same about other people, though. Had the Consortium emptied out the prisons? What about people who’d only been held in check by society’s pressure? And that was without even getting into the men and women who ran the big corporations. Mom and Dad had been resisting being bought out by a corporate farm for years; they’d done everything they legally could to drive my parents off their land.

  Eddie was right about one thing, though. The Captain wouldn’t be happy, and he wouldn’t be forgiving. He’d come for my friends and me if he found out.

  When he found out. I couldn’t kill the bikers I’d taken prisoner—not now that they were helpless.

  Besides, he’d taken Brian’s experience.

  I reached out to touch Eddie’s experience orb. I couldn’t make this a habit, but I’d need the levels to solve my next problem, The Three Bodies, and the one after that.

  Level Up! Thirty to Thirty-Three.

  Three levels. He’d been worth three levels. I wanted to be sick, but I held it together as I assigned one point to Body to patch up my wounds a little, two to Awareness, and three to Charge.

  Then I turned my attention to Eddie’s dropped gear, which all filled me with disappointment—even the blue-glowing rare piece.

  Belt of the Forest (Common, Charge 10)

  +3 Body, +1 Awareness

  You cannot equip this item.

  Wolverine’s Fury (Common, Charge 20)

  The wearer of this ring gains temporary Body points as they take damage.

  You cannot equip this item.

  Jetty Bumper (Rare, Charge 5)

  +3 Body

  The wielder of this thrusting shield may cast Bulwark once every thirty seconds.

  Bulwark: Deflects the next attack directed toward the shield’s wielder.

  You cannot equip this item.

  That Bulwark spell seemed extremely good, and I glared at the blue pillar of light as it faded and the text appeared in front of me. I couldn’t equip any of the loot I’d gotten—they’d been bound to Eddie. The only good news was that it wouldn’t incentivize people to kill each other like the experience did.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. The gear had value to me, but not in its current form.

  I pulled the Trip-Hammer out of my inventory; acrid smoke poured from the motor, but when I looked at it, the magical circuits were fine. The problem wasn’t the Charge circuiting or the amount of power I’d given it. It was the battered, crushed motor. It had just been through too much.

  I’d been pushing it this whole dungeon, and after the fight with Eddie, it was clear that the table saw motor was done. Just to be sure, I triggered the Trip-Hammer. It roared and screamed. The ratchet wheels engaged. But the twin sledgehammers stopped halfway around their arc with a jerk that ripped the weapon from my hand and sent it clattering across the darkened floor.

  That pretty much ended my hopes of repairing the Trip-Hammer. I needed to design something new if I wanted to beat The Three Bodies, whatever that was.

  The next half-hour was all taking the weapon apart and letting the Voltsmith’s Grasp slowly recharge. The sledgehammers were still solid, and so were the ratchet-wheels. I salvaged some of the gears from inside the motor, too, but not enough to rebuild it—not here, at least. As I worked, I spread the parts along the floor—and I kept an unmodified hammer nearby, just in case one of Eddie’s gangers got loose. I didn’t expect them to make a play, but the insurance felt nice.

  The moment I disconnected the battery from the Trip-Hammer’s remains, it started spewing Charge into the air in a cloud of lightning and sparks. I watched in horror as the battery drained in just a few seconds. I’d lost fifteen Charge almost instantly—there hadn’t been a warning about that in the System.

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  Luckily, I had several pieces of magical gear to decharge.

  Before I did that, though, I laid out the parts I’d looted so far. The big highlights were the emitter, the refiner, and the mana coil—plus the freshly-drained battery.

  I needed something punchy like the Trip-Hammer for melee fights, but if I had the parts left when I was done, I also wanted to upgrade the Taser launchers. They were cool, but both unpredictable and a little underpowered compared to what I could make. The Jetty Bumper was the key; I drained it and tore it apart, revealing a second emitter and battery.

  ?Charge - 7/34 (10 Used)

  The sharp blade at the end of the shield wasn’t magical, but it was the best weapon I’d found so far, and as I set it aside, the blueprint built itself in faint orange lines overlaid on my vision. The end result was going to be closer to the Weed Whacker than the Trip-Hammer, but different from either—more like an axe than a trimmer.

  I drained the ring, too—I’d lose three possible Charge, but I needed a full tank for what I had in mind.

  ?Charge - 24/34 (10 Used)

  The remains of the Trip-Hammer’s handle sat just below the blade. I resisted the urge to weld them together, though. Instead, I attached the mana coil to the shield’s blade, slicing the spring in two to support it in two places. Two wires ran along the spring, one going in and one going out in a circuit. I used the Voltsmith’s Grasp to weld both batteries together and attached the wires, forming a circuit. Then, I charged the batteries and activated the prototype.

  ?Charge - 3/34 (28 Used)

  The blade bounced and skipped across the floor for a few seconds, and I dodged its ricochet. “Damn, that’s punchy!”

  So, the concept was sound. Now, I needed a frame to hold it all together.

  It took another twenty minutes, and with every second, I worried more and more that the bikers had gotten loose, but eventually, I finished my new main weapon.

  Charge Blade, by Hal Riley (Created Item, Charge 20)

  The Charge Blade is an oscillating blade that applies Charge damage as it cuts through lightly armored targets. First created by Hal Riley of Earth.

  With only four Charge remaining, I couldn’t upgrade the tasers, but I did reload them. I had a plan, but it’d take at least six more Charge and a Voltsmith’s Grasp upgrade, and I wanted to keep spreading my points out a little. The Voltsmith class was pushing me into Charge, and I wasn’t sure I liked that. I’d seen what happened to single-stat glass cannons like Tori if they didn’t diversify, and she was right—it was a stat synergy game. I could cheat a little by building mechanical advantage into my weapons, but my Body points were still doing the heavy lifting.

  I finished by disassembling the ring. It had no parts, but the metal was Charge-conductive, and if I got a few more, I had some ideas. Then, after I packed everything back into my inventory, I headed toward the center of the starmaze.

  The moment I saw the Three Bodies hovering in the middle of the planetarium’s dome, I knew exactly what was happening.

  A pair of huge stars, one red and one blue, orbited around a tiny black point no bigger than my thumbnail. Jets of gas siphoned off each star and swirled around the pen-point dot, disappearing into it. All around it, pinprick stars covered the planetarium’s ceiling.

  The Three Bodies was a black hole. The whole galaxy of stars and planets was orbiting it like one of those Sun/Moon/Earth orbiter simulators from middle school.

  And I had to destroy it.

  The Three Bodies: Level Forty Dungeon Boss

  Current Difficulty: Extreme

  Sometimes, the universe really does orbit around one entity. The Three Bodies sits in the center of the Void, but its welcoming arms don’t offer comfort. It sees all. It destroys all. It consumes all. Accept the embrace of the Void.

  Invulnerable - This boss has no weak points and cannot be damaged.

  Insatiable - This boss will feed on any viable energy sources within its range.

  This was a puzzle, not a fight. I ran through the Insatiable—that was the key. I just had to figure out how this worked.

  I stepped into the planetarium, working my way past the curved rows of seats.

  The moment I felt the black hole’s gravity start pulling on my armor, I stopped. The planetarium’s walls fell away, and the whole galaxy of stars and planets began glowing, lighting up the void in a red, blue, and yellow neon mosaic.

  The black hole spun. I couldn’t see it move, but the two stars orbiting it rotated, spinning faster and faster until they blurred into a disk around the central point. They shrunk, their light fading as they poured themselves into the Three Bodies. Then they were gone—pale shadows of what they’d been.

  Energy—pure white energy—started to form as the black hole grew slightly. Then it lashed out in two straight lines—one right at me, the other directly behind it. I ran, and it spun around the room, following me. It sliced through the chairs, through the maze’s floor, and through the planets and stars. If it could catch fire, it did; the seats in the domed room all burned as I fled into the maze.

  And the whole time, the black hole grew. It was the size of a baseball, and both stars had almost completely disappeared, but some of the closer supergiants were feeding the Three Bodies now, and a half-dozen planets stretched and bent as they spun toward it. I couldn’t attack it, and it was growing; was there enough energy in the orbiting stars and planets for it to consume the whole room? What if things reappeared like they had been?

  I didn’t know. But I did know there were three surviving members of the biker gang, and their lives were on the line, too.

  Another planet loomed in front of me, drifting toward the center of the room. Its Saturn-like ring came apart, half flying toward me and the other half toward the black hole. In the moment before it spagettified, I saw a yellow-green orb in the planet’s center.

  That one had died. It wouldn’t be coming back.

  And black holes faded to nothing when they ran out of fuel to feed on, right? I could only hope, because I didn’t see another way to win this fight.

  I pulled the Charge Blade out and aimed at the nearest planet—a small, Mars-like one. My Taser launcher fired, and the weighted wire slammed into it; reddish-brown chunks went flying, and I scooped up the experience orb before it could get sucked in. It wasn’t enough to level, but I hadn’t expected it to be.

  The Three Bodies’s energy beams ripped across the room, and I ran as more and more stars fed into it. Another planet zoomed toward me. I swung the Charge Blade. It hummed and crackled as energy coursed along its vibrating, sawing edge. The blade bit into the planet, cutting deeper and deeper with every moment.

  The planet split in two, and I ran right into the orb it left behind as it disintegrated. Then another. But the black hole was growing. It was almost half of the planetarium now, and dozens of swirling lines of energy fed it.

  I could destroy planets all day, and it wouldn’t make a difference—not when the black hole was feeding on stars.

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