After a few minutes, we stood in the center of a main road that was about a hundred meters away from the church. The dragon continued to fly overhead, roaring and periodically vomiting fire from its gullet. My concerns were confirmed, of course. The dragon’s worst instincts had been activated, and it now viewed all of Etron as its domain. In its mind, we were all intruders who had to be eliminated.

  I continued to draw geometric shapes on the five barrels sitting in the center of the street. Once I finished marking one side, I marked the other side, creating a two-tiered transmutation matrix. Such a matrix would be necessary for the type of transmutation I wished to undertake.

  “Next step,” I said to myself, activating a mnemonic pattern that naturally pushed my thoughts to the next stage of my plan’s chain. “Kinro, Beltane, I want you two to go look for the King. You guys are the fastest, and the King has already met Beltane once.”

  “Are you sure?” Beltane asked.

  “Yes. Now, hurry,” I said, gesturing for my two companions to move quickly.

  Kinro and Beltane swiftly left the scene, their departure proclaimed by the sound of cracking masonry and esoteric incantations.

  “Will this really work?” David said once the two others were gone. “Black dragons breathe fire, so they’re resistant to it.”

  For a moment, I considered going into a long explanation of explosives and the nature of fire resistance. Instead, I decided to keep it short. “The shockwave and shrapnel will kill it, not the fire.”

  As I spoke, I finished inscribing the arcane circles, and I moved on to the transmutation process. I pressed one hand to each arcane circle, and they both began to glow a bright silver color.

  One circle broke the water molecules contained within the barrel into hydrogen and oxygen, while the other circle combined all of the elements within into trinitrotoluene. I visualized the benzene ring and the four complex compounds branching off from that central structure.

  Theoretically, I could have drawn the oxygen and hydrogen from the air, but that would have taken much longer. Gas is significantly less dense than solids or liquids, so deriving those elements from the air would have taken hours. The only element I had to draw from the air was nitrogen, and that was abundant.

  Once I was done transmuting the first barrel into powdered dynamite, I turned and said, “Eadric, please take my sister back to the front of the church. Stay near the front doors. If we need to be healed, we’ll go to you.”

  Eadric looked over to the church. Its front doors were still visible from where we were standing. “As you command, my lord.”

  “Please be careful, Thale,” Miriam said.

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  “I’m the safest person in town,” I said with a confident smile that was contrary to the anxiety boiling in my chest. “A blast from that dragon wouldn’t harm a hair on my head.”

  Eadric and Miriam walked back to the church and were soon out of earshot. For the first time, we three visitors to this world were alone.

  “You’re from Earth?” Haydith asked in English, turning to David.

  “New York specifically,” David said with a smile. He seemed happy to speak of the old world. “Actually, I was a boxer before…”

  “We can catch up later,” I said in the common tongue of humans on Ferrum. “My plan is to use Haydith’s talent to catch the dragon off guard. Haydith, how long can you hold [Time Stop]?”

  “Fifteen seconds, I think,” Haydith said, wrinkling her nose.

  “You can stop time?” David said, blinking and looking over at the white-haired Princess of Etronia. “Oh! Haydith! Your brother Erasmus told me about you!”

  “Oh?” Haydith’s eyes widened. “How is he?”

  David chuckled. “He’s doing well, really well. They want to promote him to lord general, but they can’t since he’s a… you know.”

  “Yes, I know. Officially, he’s a bastard,” Haydith said.

  “The King’s bastard,” I said, briefly locking eyes with David. Muted surprise appeared on his face.

  “You two know the truth, then?” David asked. “Not even kings are immune to the weakness of the flesh, apparently.”

  “He has a lot of kids, and most of them want to be the next sovereign. You can imagine what will happen when he dies,” I said as I began transmuting another barrel of wet charcoal into dynamite.

  “War. Yeah, Erasmus told me,” David said.

  “A global war,” I said. “If we don’t stop the war, there will be a cascade of suffering, tragedy, and loss. Etronia will fall into civil war, Mitrikova will invade, Etronia will begin using undead en masse to fight back, Sondrith will invade Etronia due to their use of undead, and Yomotsu will attack Sondrith due to their weakness.”

  With my focus still on the transmutation process, I continued speaking. “With the world powers weakened, there will be no one to defend the villages from monster attacks, and nearly every farming village will be wiped off the face of the planet within two years. This will cause a major world-wide famine. Even those who survived the monster attacks will die of starvation in droves. As a result, seven-in-ten people will die globally.”

  “What? No, that’s impossible,” Haydith said, and I could hear the horror in her voice.

  “In total, more than one hundred million people will die. This worldwide suffering and mass death will empower the demons living in this world. The King of Demons will appear on Ferrum, drawn from the depths of Hell itself by our suffering. All of this will happen if King Theophrastus dies.”

  As I spoke, I finished transmuting the last barrel. I rose to my feet and finished my speech with a gesture to the world around us.

  “How do you know this?” David asked.

  “That’s all the prologue to an MMO that I used to play,” I said. “We just happen to be living in that prologue. Maybe we can stop it from happening that way.”