Allayeth went through the portal arch, leaving Jason’s soul realm. Jason and his companions all looked at one another.

“Do you think she bought it?” Belinda asked.

“Bought what?” Humphrey asked.

Sophie patted him on the arm.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told him.

“Don’t worry about what?”

“Belinda’s question,” Rufus said, “related to our ‘plucky group of adventurers caught up in something crazy’ routine. Essentially, whether she believed that we were a quirky group forced into challenges beyond us by circumstance.”

“That was a routine?” Humphrey asked. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Because your mind would be constantly churning over the idea that you’re faking something,” Jason said. “And we weren’t faking. We were just playing up our natural proclivities a little.”

“That doesn’t explain why you wouldn’t tell me.”

“Humphrey,” Jason said, “you’re as much a liar as I am a modest and humble churchgoer. You’re one of those people who, when told to act natural, turns into a robot.”

“What’s a robot?” Humphrey asked.

"Basically, an overcomplicated golem," Farrah said.

“Shouldn’t she have been able to read our emotions anyway?” Humphrey asked.

“Not here,” Jason said. “In this place, I can limit her senses. But she’s got more life experience than all of us put together. I doubt she needs her perception powers to read our body language. We just played up our natural inclinations so they didn’t come across as false. But Hump, you trying to act natural would have been a massive red flag.”

“How she chooses to react to what she encountered here will play a big part in how things go for us from here,” Rufus said. “If she supports us, things get a lot easier. The other diamond-ranker will stop pressuring Jason and the Adventure Society will be more accommodating. If she decides that Jason needs to be stopped before he becomes so powerful that’s not an option, things get a lot harder.”

“Do we think that’s likely?” Gary asked.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Jason said. “While it is possible that she was fooling me, I picked up enough of her emotions to think that she’s going to support us.”

“She didn’t seem hostile,” Sophie said. “The opposite, if anything.”

“I think that I’ve accomplished something with her that I’ve failed to do many times in the past, to my cost,” Jason said.

“What’s that?” Rufus asked.

“Impart the magnitude of the powers and events he’s at the centre of,” Farrah said. “On Earth, the various factions only ever saw enough to covet. They never understood what he was doing or the price everyone would pay if they stopped him.”

“That was on me,” Jason said. “I never explained things properly. I was always angry or bitter. I never took the time to truly show people what I was doing or why. Sometimes that was necessary to avoid them trying to exploit me, but a lot of times I was just too burned out. Honestly, I’d reached a point where I didn’t feel the world deserved an explanation. It was my chance to be the bigger man, but my small-mindedness only made things worse.”

He looked over at the portal arch.

“I may be in danger of doing that again. I think I should sit down with the Adventure Society director, and some of the power players from Yaresh. Explain it all from my perspective. Maybe then we can work together the way we should have from the start.”

Jason turned to look at Humphrey.

“It might be time to stop trying to do everything myself, and show a little trust.”

***

Allayeth emerged from Jason’s portal arch and it closed behind her, sinking into the ground without a trace. She surveyed the area and saw that the outpost the Adventure Society was building had developed at a startling pace. She was in an outskirt area used mostly for storage, now filled with massive wooden crates reinforced by metal.

She levitated into the air using her aura, a trick any silver-ranker could do. She contrasted it with what Jason and the messengers could do and it fell significantly short. Even at diamond rank, she could only affect herself and the levitation was still quite easy to disrupt. After seeing the inside of Jason’s soul realm, it made an apt metaphor for her own position.

She was powerful. One of the most powerful beings on the planet, but so much of what she found herself involved with was not from her planet. The Builder invasion, the messenger invasion. She was ostensibly at the end of her path to power and found herself poorly equipped to face it. Jason was far weaker, yet he was a part of that wider reality. Part of a cosmic community that she was not.

Those who were like her didn’t see it. She and Charist had long ago become content to be large fish in a small pond, leaving Soramir Rimaros and his ilk to explore the realms beyond their world. She had put a box around her mind and was unable to clearly see anything outside that box. The Adventure Society was like her in this regard, their considerations limited by the constraints they unconsciously placed on themselves.

Seeing Jason Asano’s soul from the inside had broken that box. Now she was able to see what Soramir Rimaros, Dawn and even the gods had seen from the beginning: Jason belonged to a wider world. For the first time in a long time, Allayeth found herself running into her limits and becoming dissatisfied with them.

Diamond rank was the end of the path. Not only was this an absolute that had been taught to her from the beginning, but the very idea of reaching it was a dream few adventurers could reach. When she did, she had been satisfied. She had no need to roam out into the cosmos, placing herself at the bottom of a new ladder she had no idea how to climb. She had achieved every goal she had ever set for herself, and it had always been enough.

But now, the cosmos she had declined to explore was intruding on her world, and in Jason Asano, she had caught a glimpse of how the climb might work. There was a man so far below her, yet also, so far above. He had a long way to go, but he would not so much as slow down at her level, let alone stop.

Allayeth looked at the outpost being built. The ragged hole that had been blasted outward was already covered in foundations that moved inward and down like a sunken theatre. Mostly it was prepared ground; sealed foundation waiting for buildings to be placed atop it. Some buildings were already in place, though, and Allayeth watched as more were formed in just minutes through magic.

She could see that this was not crude stone-shaping. The expert construction combined rituals, essence abilities and expert design knowledge. Charist was right to be angry that this level of industriousness had been pulled away from the reconstruction of the city.

The rapidly-forming outpost was an edifice to the opportunism of those with ambitions of power. They lacked the expansiveness of Allayeth's new perspective, seeing only the old squabbles. They didn't realise that power and the balance thereof had fundamentally changed. The Builder invasion had not been an isolated incident; it was an event that brought their world into a larger reality.

Although many of the people bustling about had seen her in the sky, they respected that her aura presence was undetectable, taking the hint and staying away. Only Charist had the perception to notice her aura and had set off in her direction the moment he had. It took him only moments to arrive, and when he did, he moved to float in the air beside her.

“You went through Asano’s portal,” he said in lieu of a greeting.

“Yes.”

“Did you figure out how he could even produce a portal that you could use?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find out what power is backing him?”

“Yes.”

Charist rolled his eyes.

“Do you have any interest in giving an answer longer than one word?”

“The problem, Charist, is that the questions you’re asking don’t matter.”

“Then what does matter?”

“If Jason Asano and whatever he has going on is good for us or bad for us.”

“And?”

“It’s definitely bad for the messengers.”

“Tell me everything.”

“No.”

“No?”

“His secrets don’t hurt us.”

“And you expect me to take your word for that?”

“It will be a little hurtful if you don’t. But I understand how some unknown agent of unknown power could potentially compromise even a diamond-ranker, so we should make sure that hasn’t happened.”

“How? There’s no church of Purity to check if you’ve been affected by something.”

“The church of Liberty. They can tell you if my free will has been compromised.”

Charist nodded.

“Agreed,” he said. “Let’s return to Yaresh and we’ll head straight for the temple.”

***

Vidal Ladiv was not good at driving the flying skimmer he used to approach Jason’s cloud palace, currently a series of tree houses linked by rope bridges. Out on an open balcony, Travis Noble was working on a device the size of a transit van. It was a clear mix of magical and technological elements, most prominently a protruding shaft of metal. A cloud of gemstones floated around the shaft as if held in place by magnets.

Travis looked up at the approaching skimmer, watching curiously as it arrived unsteadily at the edge of the balcony. Vidal left it floating next to the rail and awkwardly hopped from the vehicle to the balcony.

“You don’t seem great at that,” Travis said. “No offence.”

“Not at all,” Vidal said. “I hate this thing. Back in Rimaros, my water powers were more than enough to get me around. But this far inland, there aren’t enough waterways to get me where I need to go. Mr Asano moving to a treehouse in the middle of nowhere certainly doesn’t help.”

“Are you sure you should be driving that?” Travis asked. “It’s a flying car and you get around in it like a nervous kid in driver’s ed. It seems like there should be regulations or something against that. Aren’t people worried you’ll crash it into some lady’s stroller and kill adorable twin girls?”

“That’s oddly specific,” Vidal said, looking at the massive device Travis was working on. “What’s this?”

“Right now? Annoying. If I can solve the cyclical alignment issues, it’ll be a rotary beam cannon.”

“Some kind of weapon? I thought you were working on a communication device.”

“It’s more of a comprehensive communication grid. Also, that’s work. This is more of a hobby.”

Vidal looked over the monstrous and complex device.

“A hobby?”

“Yeah. Something to do for fun.”

“You’re building a weapon the size of a trade wagon for fun?”

“If you can’t have some fun with a rotary beam cannon, I don’t think you can have fun at all. What brings you here, Mr Ladiv? Is it something to do with that giant explosion this morning? I saw the cloud getting sucked up into the air.”

“Indirectly. Has Mr Asano returned yet?”

“Nope. Last I saw, they were all headed for the cloud. I don’t even know what happened.”

“Altered messengers broke out from deep underground.”

“That was the explosion?”

“Yes.”

"That seems weird. They dug all the way up to the surface and then made a big explosion for the last bit? Setting off something like that while underground with it is a terrible idea."

“The messengers were far from in their right minds.”

"I won't blame them for that. I'm building a giant Gatling laser in a tree house in alternate-universe Brazil. I'm not entirely convinced that I’m in my right mind. For all I know, I’m in an asylum somewhere staring into the distance and yelling ‘pew pew pew’ over and over.”

“Uh, alright. I need to talk to Asano.”

“They aren’t back yet.”

“You don’t seem worried about that.”

“Jason once got stuck with a bunch of his gold-rank enemies in a dimensional space that was on the verge of ripping a hole in the side of the universe and wiping out our planet. The one gold-ranker that manage to survive ran away and hid until Jason left that universe. As for the dimensional space, Jason turned it into a magic city that his clan lives in now. It kills anyone who tries to get near it with ill intentions, and it’s kind of a temple to himself. And that was before he had his team with him so, no: I’m not worried that a bunch of second-rate angels with mental health issues will do them in.”

“I really need to get a look at Asano’s unredacted Adventure Society record.”

“Oh, that was back in my universe. It won’t be in there. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I should be telling you this stuff.”

Travis looked at Vidal thoughtfully, then at the device he was working on.

“Can you go stand in front of that long metal bit?” Travis asked.

“No,” Vidal said.