Hey everyone, there are 4 more chapters after this one until the end of this book. Then I'll be posting the synopsis for the previous book, and starting book 4.

  I'm really sorry for the wait. Honestly, I feel like shit about it. The sun just came out a bit, and it's like the difference between night and day (no pun intended).

  My goal is to get everything out today, but I might just pass out on my desk. If that happens, the next few chapters will be up tomorrow.

  I'm really sorry again. I hate that this happens every year, and it's unpredictable.

  This month I was also supposed to post 2 books of Inheritance of the Fallen. That didn't happen. Sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

  Trust me, nobody is more annoyed than me, because most of the money I make for the year is in book sales. The fact I let some of you guys down, despite my previous tough talk on the matter, also bothers me.

  Anyway, I'll stop posting useless stuff now and just paste the chapter so I can start editing the next one...

  But in good news, I'm really happy how the ending turned out. :) It took me three tries.

  -BC

  ------------

  Max stood atop the corpse of a monstrous creature that resembled a giant Komodo dragon. It had a massive scorpion tail and four arms ending in human-looking hands instead of the usual lizard limbs. He looked down at Momo and sighed. "Well, this boss is down. As always, thanks for the assist.”

  Momo stood among a pile of dead monsters, all similar, but smaller and weaker creatures as the boss Max had just slain. She saluted with one of her throwing daggers. "All the minions are dead too," she said.

  The two of them were in the middle of a large housing development, where the monster had made its lair. The area was on the border between Canada and the United States.

  Max had been busy so far, killing boss monsters, prioritizing and targeting the least powerful or easiest to kill creatures in North America that would do the most good to kill. So far, this was number ten. In only a few days, he, Momo, Lance, and members of both the Patriot Guild and the Trifecta Guild had been curb-stomping monsters relentlessly.

  He stretched and remarked, "This one wasn't even very powerful. Why in the hell did nobody take this one out beforehand?"

  Momo shrugged. "Pretty simple explanation there. This monster was smart enough to keep civilians around, so Challengers couldn't bomb it from the air. And it was in a really awkward place. I think that this lizard thing had an agreement with the monster we killed yesterday about fifty miles away. Like a truce of some kind."

  "Oh, that's right," said Max. The briefings were starting to blur together in his mind. It felt like he'd gotten a massive crash course on all the monsters around North America a short while ago, cramming in one night before going out to actually kill the things.

  Luckily, most of the boss monsters were weaker than the Ape King had been, and Max could feel himself growing stronger, too. His abilities were becoming more refined, and he was gaining confidence and experience in using his different talents to synergize with each other. If he had to fight the Ape King all over again, he knew he would do a much better job than before.

  He glanced around, trying to find Lance, and spotted his dusky-skinned friend on top of a distant house, striking a pose for the cameras. Max chuckled and shook his head. He still found the showmanship goofy but understood its importance in this new world.

  While Max didn't put much importance on image and showmanship, the rest of the world did. Regular people supporting the Challengers was powerful, especially from the perspective of new people becoming Challengers naturally on Earth, learning a skill or talent, and discovering they had the aptitude for it.

  The public loved Lance, and despite all the video and such out now, they still only respected Max. He didn’t give them the sound bytes or videos they wanted.

  But he didn’t really care about that. Max had a job to do. He definitely thought about what might happen a year from now, though.

  Eventually, if the monsters were beaten back to just their portals, Earth would have its own decision to make: whether to shut down all the portals completely or farm them like some of the worlds Max had heard about in the Quartet. But if the world shud down all the portals, ended the monster threat for good, humanity would have to decide what to do with itself. There would be oodles of superpowered soldiers left and nobody to fight.

  But that was a decision for the future for sure. In the present, they all still needed to survive.

  Momo approached Max slowly, surveying the carnage she'd wrought with her throwing knives. One of the distant monsters twitched, and with a flick of her wrist, she sent two of her throwing knives screaming towards the beast, hitting it with enough impact to send it skittering a few feet along the ground, blown into two separate pieces.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  The scene was gnarly, not least of which by how casually she dismembered enemies.

  Max silently whistled. Momo was a very powerful Challenger now, and he felt proud of her. She was close now, and the sweat on her neck actually reminded him of their training time in the Quarted.

  A lot of time had passed for her, and she’d still apparently kept a spark for him.

  On a whim, in the heat of the moment, he suddenly reached out, putting an arm around her narrow waist and pulled her in for a kiss. Her inhuman eyes widened as big as saucers for a split second before they closed, and she melted against him.

  Even as Max kissed her and felt the intensity of her return kiss, he knew he’d just crossed a line. He wouldn't be able to avoid dealing with Momo's feelings anymore. And he found himself not really caring. The entire time Max had known Momo, she'd been worthy of respect, and over the last few days, she'd proven that she was one of the only people in the entire world who could keep up with him. To continue ignoring her feelings would not only be foolish, it would be cowardice.

  The cameras overhead, various magical and technological drones, seemed to whir into a frenzy, bumping into each other trying to get the best angles as they recorded Max kissing Momo. He couldn't turn off the analytical part of his brain as he kissed the pretty Neusapian woman. Max could just guess that somebody somewhere was making a great deal of money from recording what should have been a private moment.

  Ever since Momo had been seen in public, various news sources and independent talking heads had been speculating who and what she was almost non-stop until someone had run an old interview with Lance discussing his Summoner School days.

  At around the same time, a camera had caught audio of Lance calling Momo by name. After that, the public quickly discovered that Momo was one of Max and Lance's friends from the Summoner Academy. Speculation was currently running rampant about how in the hell she'd come to Earth.

  Max finally broke the kiss, pulled back, and winked at Momo, the gesture obviously being a promise to talk more about everything later. At the moment, he thought it was a good idea to check all the monster bodies first and make sure they were dead. Some of them, like the one Momo had just killed, needed a little encouragement before shuffling off this mortal coil.

  “Should we split up?” asked Momo.

  “Yes. We can get done faster that way.”

  Momo grinned. “Getting done faster is good. After all, then we will leave. And then we will be on a…” She searched for the term. “Private jet. Private jets are nice. Maybe…things could happen.”

  “Maybe…things indeed,” agreed Max with a grin. Then they’d both shared a smile and wandered off to check bodies.

  Checking dead bodies wasn’t exactly glamorous, and it wasn’t very pleasant work, but now he had something to look forward to later. It felt like most of himself was still held back, more from habit than anything. He figured it might take some time to unthaw all the way. As he pondered this new ground he was metaphorically exploring now, he casually flicked a hand and sent a blade of mana at a monster that was still playing dead, beheading it.

  He rounded a house in the development, moving down one of the streets that he and Momo had just come down a few minutes ago while slaughtering monsters.

  Then, all at once, he felt a premonition and heard Anansi and Lavinia shrieking at the same time in his head. With the experience of a seasoned Blade Sorcerer greater than his years, Max gathered power and defended himself while simultaneously detonating a burst of pure mana in every direction from his body.

  The effort was massively wasteful of his mana resources, but also one of the most effective actions to take while being ambushed.

  At the same time Max acted, Daliko was apparently on top of things too. Ulike max, some of his spirits could see the attack. Daliko generated an armor plate directly on Max's body right before he was hit by a burst of powerful crimson magic, stronger than anything he'd experienced so far in this lifetime.

  The blast lifted Max off his feet and threw him through the adjacent house, broken glass and powdered drywall following him in a corona of destruction.

  His inhumanly tough body, protected half-assed as it was, held together through the worst of the concussion and secondary damage from being thrown through a house…but only just. In a cloud of dust, everything on his body hurting, Max skidded across the ground and hit a small urban drainage pond with an explosive splash.

  As he lay there stunned under the water, his spirits were already exerting themselves. Lavinia covered his body in armor at the same time as Daliko did the same. A strange bubble of air under a web, no doubt courtesy of Anansi, over his face allowed him to breathe normally.

  Max's bell was rung, but his warrior instincts kicked in. He erupted from the water with a burst of mana, sending thousands of gallons misting through the air as he rose like a winged specter of hell.

  Another crimson attack lanced towards him, and Max deflected it with a perfectly timed shield of mana, even as he dodges to one side. The next ball of incendiary, explosive energy struck at him, and using precise aim and control, he flung a mana projectile at it, destroying the enemy spell in midair.

  “He is not going to go down easily,” said a voice. “Pity.”

  Still somewhat disoriented, Max sprang back, focusing on movement. Then he saw his attackers and his heart dropped.