One day, as I was fighting a gold-category space, I noticed a door. I absorbed it.

As I absorbed it, I was thinking about the prophecy, specifically the line, “The man who walks between worlds shall absorb the door.” I knew it was the door, so I just found the monsters holding together, killed them, and killed the other monsters. I went back to the branch to study them.

***

Josh walked over to the boxes. In the spaces, he had been told, strange silver objects had been appearing, and they could awaken the power. The New York City and Los Angeles branches had two each, while Chicago and San Francisco had one each.

NATO had two more, with one in London and one in Paris. Moscow had two and the Pyongyang branch had two, because they received less funding. Seoul had two even though it had lower magic than Pyongyang, as it got more funding. Mumbai had one and Chennai and Delhi both had someone who could fight one with their mastery over their powers. Cape Town, São Paulo, and Sydney had one, because of the rule that each continent must get one.

He pulled out the item. It was hard, silver, and cold to the touch. He kept it wrapped in the cloth, because of the warning that if he touched it, he would be killed by blue magic electricity.

Josh opened the box and looked inside. There was a white ball of pulsating light, immersed with pure power. He opened the switch.

Out of the box shot an insanely fit, naked man, but that was fine because he had nothing to hide, as his diamond category made him just pure body parts that aren’t obscene on the outside. Some clothes flew off a hanger on the other side of the room so quickly that Josh’s silver-category eyes couldn’t follow. He was magnificent, eight feet tall with a beard that had appeared while his clothes were flying on. He had no fat and as much muscle as a dinosaur, with gleaming gray-blue eyes. He had a long, black beard and a full crop of blonde hair that hadn’t been there a second ago.

He looked crippled, as if he’d been sitting in an ostrich egg for the last month or so. “Here,” Josh said. “Your core.” He presented the item to the man, who grabbed it. On a normal person,or even a silver-category, the lightning was going to kill you. A gold-category could survive for a few seconds and supercharge an ability, but they would promptly faint, and would die if they held it for a minute. Diamond-category was where it got useful. A diamond-category could use it to recover their mana or even heal.

Jack Jones, the diamond-category, was healing his magic starvation. The way it works is, a bronze-category or higher takes in a bit of magic from the ambient magic to survive. It couldn’t kill a silver-category without absolutely no magic, but that would kill a gold-category. They only needed a small bit of magic to survive. At diamond-category, you need at least iron-category or a sustaining source to survive. These transcendent cores were a sustaining source.

They had magical lungs. They could take in a lot of magic at once, and store it in their magical lungs and use it over time. This was probably the most efficient way for a low category to kill a gold-category or higher.

Jones was taking in a lot of magic at once. The blue lightning seemed to be insanely powerful.

Josh stumbled as Jones put the core back in the cloth.

Jones pushed Josh away. Josh stumbled again. Jones jumped onto the roof, first creating a rock barrier, then blasting himself in the direction of Kaunas.

***