Cathleen Averrett had spent a lifetime training her senses. So, she knew full well how poorly the battle was going. While she may not be able to ‘see’ everything that was happening, she could sense where the kobalds were and how broken the formation had become.

  Glancing to her right, she felt her blood boil at the thought of fighting actual planar invaders like these new kobalds that had arrived. She’d prefer to be over there testing her metal against them, but instead, she was stuck here fighting these weaklings.

  “But a Battle Leader’s place is wherever she is most needed,” she reminded herself in a whisper as she kicked away another kobald corpse before moving on.

  Temporarily tossing her short spear and shield into the small personal space she’d spent years developing, Cathleen swapped out her weapons for a 5-unit-tall bladed spear staff and a more aggressive stance. While most people might prefer a shorter weapon when fighting in close quarters like these, she was perfectly capable of using the press of bodies to her advantage. With the formation being overrun, now wasn’t the time to hold back.

  Her spear shot forward like a piston, narrowly avoiding the two wackos in front of her. It pierced a kobald who was in melee in its snout, reaping its life so quickly it couldn’t hope to understand how it had died. Pivoting slightly with her hips, she repeated her strike a little to the left, killing another kobald who was wailing away on one of her Wacko’s shields. She slid back and forth along the combat line behind the main fighters, her spear rapidly taking lives as she took full advantage of her spear’s reach.

  She couldn’t help but smirk at the fact that the Wackos weren’t allowing themselves to be caught off guard by their enemies randomly dying in front of them. They didn’t pause in shock or hesitate, they instead took advantage as best they could. When the kobald in front of them stopped fighting, they were already moving on to the next one.

  After a minute or two of reinforcing the lines, she allowed herself a moment to consider how the fight was going.

  Leaping up over several Wackos, she ran across armored shoulders without them even feeling her pass by. The shield above her had been abandoned by the mages, and she needed to be careful to avoid the few arrows that were raining down from above. While the kobald casters were holding back due to the likelihood of friendly fire, their stupid archers didn’t seem to mind killing their own troops on the off chance that they might wound a human or two.

  With the back of her hand, she swatted away another arrow as she looked around. Not even infused with essence, the arrows were nothing more than a distraction. She doubted they could even pierce a Wacko’s skin.

  The portal anchor allowed her to see how things were developing with its harsh red light. And while it didn’t look good, she couldn’t help but feel her entire center burning with excitement.

  ‘This is the type of fight I’ve been missing. An overwhelming enemy to overcome despite the odds, all for a cause worth fighting for,’ she thought to herself as she danced above the battle.

  She moved through the formation occasionally taking kobald lives where her soldiers looked to be hard-pressed to hold them back. She noted that the center of the formation was holding up well enough, and it looked like Blackwood had made it to the healers.

  While he wouldn’t be able to reinstate the command channel without gathering everyone up again, it was good to see him survive. She didn’t think they had any combat healers who could resuscitate people in the middle of all this fighting.

  ‘A skilled warrior is worth countless recruits,’ she noted absently as she dismissed him from her mind and checked in on how the fighting at the front was going.

  Most of their force's stronger warriors were engaged with the planar invaders directly, leaving the rest of the formation to handle the weaker terrestrial kobalds.

  Abusing the height advantage from running atop the battle, she was able to watch as her forces struggled to hold back the kobalds. Meanwhile, she could see that more and more were coming through the portal, calmly waiting their turn at the humans.

  They were worthy enemies, and if she survived, she’d have quite the story to tell. But, for that to happen, she knew she first had to figure out how to organize a retreat. Without a command channel, the likelihood of coordinating anything was too low. Yet, if they didn’t pull back soon, it would be too late.

  Arriving near the front, she dropped down behind Knight Angleton and shouted, “We need to pull back, start falling back to the throne room doors. If we can make it to one of the kobald buildings, we can begin setting up defenses for a prolonged siege and begin coming up with some options.”

  Still fighting, he didn’t have time to speak with her directly, so instead just replied without turning around.

  “That will only buy us some time. We don’t have any reinforcements to wait for. We need to close that portal. Where is Lord Walker?” he asked grimly while parrying another attack from the kobald in front of him.

  While shooting the tip of her spear between the fighting into the armpit of one of the kobalds, Cathleen replied evenly, “I haven’t seen him. Most likely, he’s off causing trouble on his own. You know as well as I do that he isn’t the type to follow orders.”

  “You think he’s fallen?” the knight asked, his tone tinged with worry.

  Laughing uproariously as she stabbed a kobald through its throat from behind the safety of the combat line, she replied, “Fallen? I doubt it. He’s harder to kill than an essence-mutated cockroach. Trust me, I’ve seen him rebuild his own heart from scratch during training mid-fight. All the while he was cursing me out for my ‘insane training’ regime and threatening me with a lawsuit. I’m more worried about the rest of us.”

  Sounding stubborn and determined, Knight Angleton replied, “We’ll be fine. We just need to hold as long as we can. There is no point in falling back and regrouping. We came here to stop the threat of this portal, and that’s what we’re going to do. But, the longer this goes on, the less likely our chances of success become. You should know as well as I do that retreat has never been a realistic option.”

  Mentally scoffing at the man’s overly rigid mindset, she was about to explain how a temporary retreat was their only choice when the entire situation changed completely.

  She along with everyone else froze in confusion as the ether pulled taught around them. The normally chaotic essence flows stopped moving, making it seem as if the entire world around them was about to shatter into a million pieces, killing them all along with it.

  Cathleen felt herself gripped tight by the world, held in place as if some deity was holding her in place while deciding her fate. Considering how everyone around her looked the same, she could only assume she wasn’t the only one feeling it.

  Seconds passed as her eyes danced around trying to understand what was happening. She couldn’t move. It was a struggle simply to turn her head at all. Above her, she saw an arrow, mid-flight, slowly falling as if all of its momentum had been ripped away. Was this a spell? How was this possible?

  Then, in a non-physical blast of essence so strong that it rocked her center, she felt the world start up again. Stumbling back from the shock of feeling the sound around her return to normal, she watched in awe as the portal simply vanished. Behind it, the back of the chamber was just… gone.

  In its place was a mountain of kobald bodies and rubble. The chamber had expanded drastically, ruining the smooth walls and turning the entire area into a cavern. For the first time in a long time, she hesitated. What she was seeing made absolutely no sense. Even the ether around her felt confused… uncertain.

  The entire battle had come to an abrupt stop, no one having the strength of mind to overcome the shock and keep fighting. The light from the portal was gone, leaving the entire chamber in shadow. What few fires were burning were not near enough to provide enough light for everyone to see.

  Recovering faster than most, she was about to start taking advantage of the situation when everything incomprehensibly changed all over again.

  Explosions erupted all over the place, filling the air with kobald invader’s bodies being blown apart with what looked like tactical spells from a skilled warmage. Had reinforcements come after all?

  “What in all the hells below is happening?!?” she muttered in a hiss as she ducked under a kobald torso that was flying past her, covering her in gore.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  —--

  Nero’s wide, panicked eyes stared at the cloud of memories hovering over him. He couldn’t bring himself to stand up in the face of their growing pressure. With a fist gripping the chest of his armor, he tried to hold back tears as his center burned deep inside him.

  He felt like he was dying. It was a struggle to even think.

  He needed a way forward… a plan.

  Falling back on his training from his two… count them TWO… management training seminars he’d attended on the company’s dime, he tried to take a breath and put his situation in terms he could understand.

  First, he needed to isolate the problem.

  That was easy… he was dying.

  Mumbling to himself, he noted, “Not the time to be a flippant asshole. Think, man!”

  He had foreign essences with their own identities floating around in his soul space. How they got there, and what they would do to him wasn’t important at the moment. What was important was that none of them should be there, and he needed to deal with them.

  How to deal with them?

  Just like a toxic employee ruining the team dynamic, he either needed to bring them under control or fire them. So, he either needed to figure out a way to incorporate the essence or get rid of it.

  Were either of those possible? Probably… maybe… had to be, right?

  Nero had enough experience with his soul space to generally understand how it all worked. The memories were his experiences that hadn’t been fully incorporated into his soul. By reviewing and understanding them, they would reinforce his center and help him ‘grow’. Could he somehow use foreign experiences the same way without changing who he was at a fundamental level?

  If he could, then how would he go about doing that?

  The answer was… he had absolutely no bloody idea.

  ‘Moving on!’ he said to himself.

  Option two, getting rid of them. The memories found their way in, so there should be a path through his soul space where he could spit them back out. Of course, doing so would require him to figure out the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of how they had gotten there in the first place.

  Reaching out with his senses, he tried to see past the memories and look at the rest of his soul space. There was likely some ingress point or place where his soul connected to the outside world. His panicked searches showed him nothing, as he could barely sense anything other than the cloud of memories that hung over the entire area in a fog.

  ‘This is pointless. Assuming there is some release valve or soul-anus is just wishful thinking,’ he thought to himself.

  He couldn’t stop his mind from focusing on the question of how they had gotten there. Yes, he realized where they had come from and what they were. But that didn’t help him understand what in the hell they were doing here… inside him.

  Cringing at the wording of his thoughts, Nero panted in pain as he curled up into a ball on the floor of his soul.

  He felt his center buckling under the growing pressure. It felt like his entire being was being pressed down on by the weight of the memories begging him to look at them. They were all demanding his attention, poking at him and shouting for him to acknowledge them.

  Mumbling to himself as he thought out loud, he said, “OK. So, obviously, these are the essence signatures from stuff from the other plane. They came from the soul stuff I filtered through my center and used to power my spells. So, can I just ‘reverse cast’ or something to get rid of them? No, of course not, because that’s not a thing.”

  The problem was that they were no longer essence streams out in the ether. They were already inside his center, or at least close enough for that distinction not to matter. It was too late to treat them like free-floating essence balls and instead had to treat them like what they were… memories and identities all of their own.

  His clenched eyes opened wide as he shouted, “Enchanting!”

  Nero remembered his one singular lesson on enchanting that Archmage Jennings had once given him. The lesson had actually been about delving, but Nero skillfully ignored that unimportant detail.

  From what he remembered, enchanting was using one’s center to overwrite a thing’s identity with one that the enchanter created. A skilled enchanter could create something out of raw essence, creating an identity out of nothing. Following that, Nero assumed that the potential used during the process came from the enchanter’s center, with the essence providing the material.

  Well, Nero didn’t need to create anything. All he needed to do was overwrite the essence signature or identity of the memories with his own. He needed to do the opposite of what it was doing to him. He needed to imbue them with ‘Nero’ the same way they were trying to imbue him with ‘Them’.

  Still curled up in a ball, he weakly held up a hand toward the cloud and called forth one of the smaller memories. As it drifted out of the cloud, he struggled not to actually connect with it. He didn’t want to see it, he just wanted to touch it.

  Cupping it with his hand, he brought it to his chest and stared at it. He held it in front of him like a football, seemingly protecting it from the rest of the could hovering all around him.

  Trying to focus, he consciously wrapped it up in some of his center, delicately pulling it out of his body like threads coming off a ball of yarn.

  It took a great deal of effort, and all the while he could feel himself weakening. The more he pulled out of his center, the more indistinct and weaker he felt. It felt like he was disappearing, becoming ‘less’ than he was before.

  His thoughts slowed, whatever passed for his body in this place cooled, and he couldn’t stop his eyes from closing as he curled tighter into a ball like a spider dying from a douchebag kid spraying it with pesticide.

  But, he persevered. By sheer force of will, he held on.

  More and more of his center slipped into the memory, coloring it. The last sight he saw before his eyes closed was the cloud of memories becoming more and more like a hardened ball of golden candy.

  Eventually, his thoughts failed… and there was nothing left… just darkness and quiet.

  Nero came to with a start.

  Instead of seeing with his eyes, his senses were spread out in a 360-degree field all around him. He’d felt something like this before. It was like he was having another out-of-body experience. It was a situation he was growing more and more comfortable finding himself in.

  The cloud of memories was still just as oppressive as before, but now there was an addition to his soul space.

  In front of him, he saw the hazy shape of a body sitting there in front of him. It was fading quickly, seemingly disappearing right in front of him.

  ‘What the hell am I doing outside of my body?’ he wondered before hurling himself at the indistinct shape that was curled around itself like a child who’d died from the cold during a snowstorm.

  Coming to with a gasp, Nero felt his connection with his body reestablish itself. A sudden understanding of what happened slammed into his mind like a shroom-induced epiphany.

  ‘I took over the memory!’ he thought to himself in glee.

  Somehow, he’d poured everything he was into the memory, successfully overwriting it. He could even feel the remnants of what the memory used to be hovering in the background of his mind. Rather than the memory being a memory, it was more like a half-forgotten movie he’d watched but not really paid attention to.

  The memory he’d taken over was one from a helmet. He could sort of remember at one time being forged. The asshole kobalds kept reheating him and pounding on him until he eventually took the shape that they’d wanted. Rather than remembering what the helmet had felt about what had been happening to it at the time, Nero recalled how ‘he’ would have felt about experiencing what it had gone through. But, even then, the memory was hazy and more like a dream or maybe a thought experiment.

  It had in no way affected him as a person. If anything, the added experience made him feel as if he was more himself than ever. He was almost positive that his center had grown stronger… or maybe bigger.

  ‘That hazy image of my body must have been my former connection to my body that I had abandoned while I poured everything in my center into the memory. This time, I didn’t just body-jack someone, I soul-jacked them! Well, it wasn’t a person, it was a helmet… but for a first attempt, it wasn’t too shabby,’ he thought to himself with a grin.

  While the experience was in no way pleasant, and he still felt like he was being pressed into the ground by all the memories waiting for their turn, Nero finally felt like he had a way through this debacle. All he had to do was continually kill himself by taking over the memories one after another until they were all ‘Nero’ and he was all that was left.

  The memories themselves had no will, no ego. They were nothing more than life experiences waiting for him to incorporate into his center. It would take time, but he could do it.

  Looking around, he thought of the perfect quote for the situation he’d found himself in…’I’m not locked in here with them. They’re locked in here with me!’

  “Better start with the smaller ones before I try to tackle anything too big,” he muttered to himself.

  He could already imagine a scenario where he tried to take over an identity stronger than himself and ending up failing to take control of it, thereby likely killing himself in the attempt. But, he doubted it would be a problem. There were a lot of weak-willed crap memories from helmets and rocks floating around he could deal with before he got to the kobalds that were probably out there waiting for him somewhere in the cloud.

  Who knows… this might all end up growing his center enough to earn him a few levels by the time he was finished cleaning up the place.

  ‘Wait… will I have a memory of THIS experience to later review and incorporate into my center? How would that work? Seems a little reductive? ‘Reductive’ is the right word, right? Maybe ‘circular’?... Not the time! Focus, man. Semantics and word choice aside, now is the time for soul-eating! Embrace your inner demon!’ he said to himself while attempting to concentrate.

  Firming his resolve, he forced himself up into a seated position before reaching out for his next identity fraud victim.

  Muttering grandly to himself, he said, “The Nero is all, and all shall be Nero! Resistance is futile.”

  Chuckling madly at how clever and funny he was, he began wrapping his center around the small cloud of memories in his hands.