Left—fast.
Right—strong.
Arnie repeated it in his head like a prayer.
Right pedal for uneven ground, when the snow went loose and hungry. Left for flat stretches, when he could afford a little speed—momentum for whatever came next.
He'd rather crawl the whole way. But he'd learned—sometimes the hard way—that a little saved momentum made climbs and soft patches easier, not harder.
Compared to a modern car, the electric sled was laughably simple: two handlebars linked to flat, ski-like steering blades, and two pedals. That was it.
And still, he kept it at a cautious pace—somewhere between a brisk walk and a jog. Part of him wondered why they'd bothered stealing the thing at all instead of walking.
Then he pictured the open snow, the way it swallowed legs and stole breath, and he stopped wondering.
Nero was seated behind him, his short hands gripping Arnie tightly. Or gripping as tightly as they could. Through the thick coat, Arnie could barely feel the boy at all—just a faint, steady pressure at his back.
The boy emperor was telling a story about his first encounter with Magister.
It was grand. An imperial palace. A feast.
Nero invited as the guest of honour—meant to be the main course instead. Emperor Claudius already replaced. Senators, too. Perfidious lizardmen wearing familiar faces. Nero to be next.
And then Magister arrived.
Bleeding gold—for Nero's sake.
It should have been distracting.
Instead, Arnie found it… soothing.
It made it easier to focus on the path ahead and not let his thoughts wander into all the places they wanted to go. Like what he would do if the mad science sled stopped working. Or broke through the ice. Or ran into a polar bear. Or something worse.
For all the exotic trappings of ancient Rome—and despite the inclusion of lizard men—the story felt familiar.
It echoed another story Arnie knew.
The same person. Or entity. Or god. The vampire hunter who had saved him before. The one who called himself Rin.
Different setting. Different language. Same shape.
In a strange way, it reminded Arnie of writing Hello, World in different programming languages. Python. Java. The syntax changed. The structure looked different.
But the function was the same.
Save people.
Realizing that—realizing that Rin, that Magister, had done the same thing for Nero—made Arnie feel a little better about what they were doing.
They passed the sixth tower.
Even with the sled to mind and Nero's storytelling filling the air, Arnie kept a careful count. He didn't know why. It wasn't as if he knew how many towers they were supposed to pass.
Nero hadn't said anything about numbers. Arnie assumed the boy Emperor didn't know either. Otherwise, surely, he would have mentioned it.
He could see the seventh tower in the distance.
But not the eighth.
Maybe it was just the distance. Or the snow.
Nero had just reached the part where Magister faced the false Emperor Claudius bare-handed, intercepting the blow meant for him, when Arnie decided it was close enough to be sure.
"There's no tower after this one," Arnie said, hesitantly, interrupting the story.
It was a pity. It had just been getting to the good part.
"Excellent, my friend. That means we are nearing our destination," Nero replied. "You see? Driving was not as fearsome as you imagined. In truth, you have managed your mechanical steed quite well, given the circumstances."
Warmth crept up Arnie's neck, trapped beneath the scarf. He wasn't sure it was even possible to blush in this cold, but somehow he managed it.
"It's the seventh," he said instead.
He wasn't sure whether he was asking for confirmation—or just giving his embarrassment somewhere else to go.
"That seems like a reasonable number," Nero added. "Considering the cult's hideout needed to be within walking distance of Tesla City—and how far apart the Tesla Towers are placed."
Tesla really did like naming things after himself. Arnie supposed that if he were a genius inventor, he'd probably do the same. He tried to imagine it—coding some app and calling it Arnie's Little Helper or something equally self-important.
His stomach clenched at the thought.
Then another, much more alarming part of Nero's explanation caught up with him.
"Cult?" he asked, his voice coming out a little too loud.
"You must understand, my friend," Nero replied, "that my knowledge of these events is secondhand. I know only what Tesla chose to announce publicly."
He paused, then spoke in a more grandiose tone. Almost sounded like a public broadcaster.
"He declared that certain citizens of Tesla City had fallen prey to a cult. That they hoarded resources. Food. Heat. He also announced that the tower project was being redirected—not toward new outposts, but toward their lair."
Nero hugged Arnie just a little tighter, as if they were about to hit a rough patch. Except snow-covered ground was even, just sloping a little downwards.
"No further explanation was given. But considering what followed… Tesla clearly found something there."
Arnie didn't know what to think about that.
So he didn't.
Think about it.
Instead, he focused on the seventh tower, which had drawn much closer during their conversation. Soon, they'd need to stop and dismount the mechanized sled.
There was just one tiny problem.
"Where are the brakes?" Arnie asked.
"Brakes?" Nero replied. "It is a sled. Why would it have brakes?"
"Then how do I stop?" Arnie asked, his voice coming out a little louder than intended.
He eased off the pedal completely—but the ground sloped downward, and the sled didn't slow. If anything, it began to gain speed.
"Like you would stop a sled," Nero said calmly.
That calm helped. A little.
Let it coast to a stop? No. Not on this slope. Not before they overshot the tower by a wide margin, and Arnie wasn't keen on marching back through the snow.
Crash gently into a snowbank? Also no. There wasn't one.
What there was—unfortunately—was a jagged outcrop near the base of the seventh tower, jutting up like a broken fang, as if the mountain beneath the snow were biting back.
That left one option.
A U-turn.
But he couldn't yet.
Doing it too soon would be as bad as doing it too late.
For a moment, Arnie considered taking a deep breath to calm himself down. Then he remembered the cold. A deep breath sounded like a very bad idea.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
The sled was moving so slowly. Not that he wanted it to go faster.
The tower loomed.
Just a little more. Just a little.
And then he saw it.
A pit.
A massive pit gouged into the snow.
Instinct took over.
Arnie yanked the handlebars hard to the right.
The sled wasn't a car.
It tipped, skidding sideways, the runners screaming as they lost their grip. Snow sprayed up as it slid downhill toward the edge. Nero's grip tightened at his back.
For a moment, Arnie thought he was experiencing the world in slow motion. Like in the movies, when everything stretched out in a crisis. Bullet time.
But this wasn't that.
The sled wasn't moving fast.
It was moving inevitably.
Slowly—but without mercy—toward the rim of the pit.
Just fast enough to give Arnie time to fully experience the disaster of his own making.
And there was nothing to do but wait. He was pushing right as hard as he could. Activating the motor would only make things worse.
Just wait.
And maybe pray.
But to whom? Not to God. He'd never answered Arnie's prayers before. And Arnie was a degenerate sinner—at least according to the hometown preacher.
He could try a god instead. The one Nero prayed to. That had worked.
Glancing left at the oncoming pit, he tried—too hard—to remember how Nero's prayer had gone. Something about bargains. Formal words. Structure.
He couldn't remember any of it.
So he improvised.
"Rin," he said aloud, voice tight, "if we miss this pit, I'll owe you one. So please help. I know whatever I owe you probably won't mean much—but please."
Then he was elsewhere.
A city unlike any he had ever seen. A city of vast, impossible towers—each so tall they made skyscrapers look like children's toys. And color. So much color. Vibrant, alive.
It lasted only a moment.
Then the vision shattered, leaving Arnie staring at snow.
No pit.
He looked ahead. He looked right. Then, finally, he looked back.
There it was.
The pit. And the tracks.
He had missed it by a handspan.
Had that been a vision? Rin's intervention? Or just a stress-born hallucination?
The sled was slowing now, moving uphill. Momentum bleeding away. Then it hesitated—began to slide back, inch by inch, toward the pit.
But Arnie knew what to do.
He pressed the pedal.
The motor answered with the same electric whine.
Arnie pressed the pedal and kept turning right—carefully, steadily—forcing the sled into a wide, grinding arc. The runners bit into their own tracks, snow shrieking beneath them as the machine fought its own momentum.
The turn was slow. Painfully slow.
Halfway around, the sled crossed its previous path, angled sideways to the pit. Another meter. Then another half.
Finally, it stopped.
Perpendicular to the drop. Safe.
Completely.
"That prayer may have been a touch informal, my suddenly pious friend," Nero said from behind him, voice calm and approving, "but I believe it was your sincerity that made up for the lack of proper protocol."
Instead of answering, Arnie finally let go of the handlebars. His fingers were buzzing—numb and prickling from gripping the bars too hard. He wiggled them inside the gloves, trying to bring them back to life.
He dismounted from the electric sled, a bit unsteady now that he was standing after so long straddling it. The snow did not help. Here, it was pristine—pure and powdery. It crumbled and shifted under his boots, making his already wobbling legs wobble a little more.
Once he regained his balance, Arnie offered his hand to help Nero down. The boy accepted it with theatrical grace. Arnie imagined there was a grateful smile under the scarf, but naturally, he couldn't see it.
Nero led him first to the edge of the pit, then along its rim.
Up close, Arnie could see it clearly now. The pit wasn't natural. It was too circular. Too precise. Tool marks scored the walls—clean, methodical cuts that only became visible when you stood right at the edge.
For a moment, he wondered why anyone would dig such a pit at all.
Then he looked down into the center, and the answer became obvious.
"So this is the trash heap," he said, his voice landing somewhere between a statement and a question. "But… why go through all this trouble just to dispose of clothes?"
"Those are not clothes, my friend," Nero said. "Not merely clothes."
His tone gentled, as if speaking to a skittish animal.
"Tesla declared graveyards a waste of both space and building material. There was no time for superstitious rituals in such an emergency. And the cold would preserve the bodies—should some use for them be found later."
Arnie swallowed.
Each time he thought he was growing numb to the horrors of this world, another one surfaced.
He did not want to imagine what use Tesla might find for frozen corpses. But his mind refused to cooperate. Images rose unbidden—stitched-together monsters, like something out of Frankenstein. Then something worse. Something practical. Efficient.
Emergency rations.
Soylent blue.
Made of people. For the people.
Another thought followed, sharp and immediate.
He had nearly driven into this pit.
He'd missed it by a handspan.
Arnie shuddered—not from the cold.
"But hauling bodies any real distance would waste time—and effort," Nero continued. "So the entrance must be close."
Besides the pit, there were only two things of note: the tower and the rock.
The tower was taller, but not by much. The rock formation, on the other hand, was broader—its bulk crouching against the snow like something half-buried and patient.
Arnie dismissed the tower almost immediately. Any kind of lair hidden inside a structure that slender would be… optimistic, at best.
Instead, he turned his attention to the rock.
He squinted through his goggles. They made everything dimmer and flatter, but he wasn't about to expose his eyes to the biting cold just to be sure.
"Here," Arnie said, pointing. "I think I see something."
A shadow. A break in the rock's outline. It might have been a cave entrance—or just a trick of the light. That was why he said it immediately, before he could talk himself out of it.
He could be wrong.
But saying nothing felt worse.
And Nero didn't seem like the sort to mock someone for seeing threats in shadows.
Probably.
"You have sharp eyes, my friend," the boy emperor said, already moving toward it.
As they left the pit behind and drew closer to the rock, Nero added, almost conversationally, "You are likely correct. There is a slight depression in the snow here."
He gestured with a gloved hand.
"Equipment in. Bodies out."
Arnie didn't like thinking about bodies, so he latched onto a different worry.
"Shouldn't we sneak?" he asked. "Or… something. In case someone's watching the approach?"
"Guards?" Nero replied, waving a gloved hand dismissively. "Against whom? The nearest people outside Tesla City are those living in the coal mine—and they are more than a day away on foot. They took refuge there when the cold came. We trade food and a few other necessities for coal."
He shook his head.
"And even if Tesla had posted guards, they would be farther in. Not out here. Not in this cold."
It sounded logical.
It still wasn't enough.
Not enough to quiet the whispering dread crawling at the back of Arnie's thoughts.
"We're in the open," Arnie said. "How can you be sure?"
"Magister guided me along the Path of Stars," Nero said. Then, as if that answered everything, he continued, "This body is young. Untrained. But I retain enough of the Subtle Arts to feel people when they are nearby. And there is none here but you. I will warn you before we encounter anyone."
That explanation… wasn't really an explanation. But it was delivered with such certainty that Arnie found himself unwilling to question further. Even if his curiosity itched as much as his back.
As they drew closer, Arnie saw that he'd been right.
It was the entrance to a cave.
Jagged stone rose out of the snow—far larger than it had first appeared. A massive formation, broad and slanted, like the exposed crown of something enormous buried beneath the ice. Only a small section of it had been opened.
The cave entrance itself was narrow by comparison. Tall enough for two men standing one atop the other, and barely wide enough for three to pass side by side.
Near the entrance lay two low shapes half-swallowed by snow. At first glance, they looked almost like guard dogs curled up in the cold.
They weren't.
They were sleds.
Two resonance sleds, similar to the one they'd ridden, covered with tarps and left long enough for snow to gather and disguise their outlines.
That settled it. This was the place they were looking for.
Nero didn't hesitate. He marched straight toward the opening.
Arnie swallowed and followed.
Inside, darkness pressed in immediately. It was broken only by small resonators set into the tunnel walls at regular intervals—the same kind of devices he'd seen on the sled. Their bluish glow pushed back the gloom just enough to see by, never enough to feel safe.
The passage narrowed quickly, winding and sloping steeply downward. They moved carefully. Snow clung slickly to the stone underfoot, and the incline made every step feel tentative, deliberate.
The walls were natural rock, rough and uneven.
But they weren't bare.
Markings ran along them. Many of them. Some shallow, some deep—cut, scratched, or burned into the stone.
Between the poor light and the blur of his goggles, Arnie could barely make out the words carved into the stone—but one of them repeated. Again and again.
"Elysium," Arnie read aloud. "Do you know what it means?"
"A place for the virtuous dead," Nero replied. His voice sounded distant now, turned inward.
Then, sharper, and in a lower volume. Almost a whisper: "But we must be quieter now."
He slowed, nearly stopping, edging along the tunnel wall as they approached the bend.
"I can feel men ahead. Just beyond this bend. One of them is almost certainly Tesla."
A pause.
"This will be the first time I stand in his presence since my memories awoke. Yet it can be no one else."
Nero's voice dropped, reverent and wary at once.
"After all—who else could feel like bottled lightning?"
For a moment, Arnie thought it was a question meant for him to answer. Then he realized it was rhetorical.
He'd always been bad at telling the difference.
Whenever he answered questions like that, his father would snap that only stupid people answered rhetorical questions. And when he didn't answer, his father would bark at him for ignoring what he'd been asked.
Arnie had never figured out which mistake he was supposed to avoid.
Shaking out unwanted recollection, Arnie followed Nero, creeping along the wall, until the boy suddenly stopped. He had reached the edge of the bend. Nero turned and tugged at Arnie's hand.
It took a few moments for Arnie to understand what the boy wanted, but then he leaned over him, his boots staying where they were as his upper body stretched past the curve, careful not to expose either of them. Arnie could see it now—or thought he could. The tunnel curved again, then opened into something larger.
The curve hid them from view. Necessary. Because it wasn't empty.
Shapes first. Too many. About half a dozen, maybe.
They were dressed like Arnie and Nero—winter layers, bulk, straps—but wrong in the details. Cylinders on their backs. Metal. Machine. A bluish glow—like resonators.
And in their hands: gun-shaped things that didn't sit right in his head. Not guns. Not not guns.
They looked strange and old at the same time. Retro. Like ray guns from black-and-white sci-fi films he'd half-forgotten.
Props, his mind supplied.
His gut disagreed.
Wires linked the gun-things to the cylinders on the men's backs.
A bigger machine in the centre. A drill? A cannon? Damaged. Parts melted. One man frantically working on it.
But even that paled compared to what lay on the opposite wall of the cave.
A door.
Though the word door didn't quite fit. Portal. Gate.
It was a marvel of engineering—gears, pipes, articulated metal arranged with deliberate precision. And yet, despite all that brutal machinery, it was… compelling.
Striking.
It reminded Arnie of modern art. Not the kind that existed solely so rich people could dodge taxes—but the rare kind that actually worked. The kind that made you stop and look. The kind that stayed in your head.
Even that construction paled beside what lay beyond it.
The gate stood open, but there was no tunnel beyond it. No cave. No throat of stone.
Instead, the opening was filled with mist.
Slow-moving. Dense. Saturated with color.
Some of those colors Arnie could name. Some he recognized without knowing their names. And many—far too many—were colors his mind simply refused to process.
When he tried, it was like hitting a 404 error in his brain. No result found.
Or corrupted output—his thoughts reaching for metaphors instead of meaning.
The color of a bottomless abyss. The color of nostalgia for a golden age that had never existed.
The mist shifted, and shapes moved within it—fractured geometry, half-formed patterns. Some looked solid. Others seemed to have too many dimensions. Or dimensions that weren't rational numbers at all.
The kind of thing that would make his geometry professor either break down in tears…
…or start a cult.
The shapes, the colors… they were not new. It was not the first time Arnie had seen something like this. They were the same as his brief vision.
Now he simply had a better, longer look.
Sudden pain in his shin. Arnie barely stifled a cry. Looking down, he saw that Nero had kicked him. Quite hard.
"Don't look at the gate," Nero frantically whispered. The boy's eyes were hidden behind goggles, his face by scarf—but from his tone and jerky body movements, so unlike the theatrical poise from before, Arnie could see the boy was scared. For him.
It brought a mixed sensation to his gut—both warm and cold.
"It's not safe. Magister, in His mercy, veiled the land beyond with mist—but it's still not safe."
Arnie gulped and nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak out loud. Not with those men so near.
"Though it is strange," Nero continued whispering, his tone more even now, his body language smoother. "Tesla and his men are a touch too composed for being in the Gate's presence for long. No matter—it is safer for you, my friend, not to look at it directly. Or listen to any sound originating from it. I would also advise not smelling it either—but we are a bit too far for that."
So those were Tesla and his men in the cave ahead. Arnie thought it was so, but it was nice to have unambiguous confirmation. For a moment, he wondered which one was Tesla. Because all of them were dressed the same. Important people dressed differently, in his experience.
"But this is not the time to ponder such mysteries, for I have found what has sent me here to retrieve," Nero whispered. "Look not at the gate, but just in front of it."
Arnie obeyed instinct, though it proved difficult. The Gate was in the upper corner of his vision, seeming to almost have gravity to it. Drawing his attention upward to it.
"Now, move your gaze to Tesla's machine," Nero instructed. "And in the same line, pass it. Can you see it? It should be there."
Arnie almost answered that he could not. Especially since he wasn't quite sure what he was looking for on the cave ground, cast in the dim bluish light of the resonators and the dancing shadows thrown by the Gate.
But then he finally noticed it. A glint. Something small—crystal and red.
"You have good eyes," Arnie murmured back. "Even with you pointing it out, I can barely see it."
Hopefully, it would not be the same to the touch.
But Arnie noticed a more urgent practical problem.
"How are we going to get it? There is no cover. I mean, no one is looking in our direction right now. But it would take just one glance. One sound."
"Carefully," Nero whispered back, though he sounded less sure. "Maybe the dagger you were gifted could help, my friend?"
"It seems that you could use a distraction," a new, soft purring voice added. "One I would be happy to provide."
Arnie nearly jumped out of his skin. He turned in the direction from which the voice came. Just a little above Nero's head.
At first, there was nothing there. No—not nothing. Something very small and impossible.
A mouth. A cat's mouth, hanging in the air. Just the mouth.
Arnie blinked under his goggles. Several times, trying to chase away what looked like a hallucination. Between two blinks, the mouth was joined by a head. Between the next two, the body. And finally, the tail.
A whole cat, perched on the boy emperor's head. It was like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
"Should you be grinning?" someone said in a quiet murmur. It took a moment for Arnie to realize it was his own voice. He didn't mean to say it. Especially not out loud. It just slipped.
"Cheshire might grin," the cat said in a soft purring voice. "But I am an Egyptian Mau. A more dignified breed."
"It is impolite to sit on one's head without at least first introducing oneself," Nero added in a murmur.
Arnie was not sure what he had expected from Nero in this weird situation, but a comment about manners was not it. Was that even proper etiquette for teleporting, talking cats?
"Not for a cat," the cat replied.
"But you are not a cat, my supposedly feline friend. Thus, I must insist," Nero countered, his tone almost like liturgy. Or exorcism. "In Magister's name, I compel you to name yourself truthfully."
"Master had not granted you authority over me, little priest," the cat returned, "Besides, your command is impossible. There is no name I could give that would not be a lie."
So it wasn't about politeness after all. It was ritual. Rules. Rules Arnie didn't really understand—but could feel the shape of, like the outline of a machine hidden behind a panel.
Except it hadn't worked.
And there was something deeply disconcerting about the perfectly glossy back fur of that non-cat. It made Arnie's hand itch to pet it.
Of course, he didn't.
For one thing, that would mean taking off his gloves, which would be stupid in this cold. For another, petting a talking cat without asking felt… creepy.
But asking would somehow make it worse. Weirdly intimate. Almost sexual.
And for some people, a cat might be fine, too... but Arnie was definitely not one of them.
"So," Nero said quietly, "what will your assistance cost, nameless friend?"
The question yanked Arnie's mind out of a very uncomfortable place and dropped it squarely into a very anxious one.
"Nothing at all," the cat replied. "We serve the same Master."
It paused, tail flicking lazily.
"Besides, it's something I would have done anyway. Tesla is nearly finished fixing his toy. Which means it's time to break it again. Just be ready."
And in the same manner it had appeared, it began to fade.
Tail first. Then paws. Body. Ears. Head.
Leaving only the mouth, floating in the air.
And then that, too, was gone.
"Can we trust it?" Arnie whispered, once it was just the two of them again.
"I do not think we have much choice," Nero replied.
"What now?" Arnie asked.
"The dagger, my friend," Nero replied. "I think it time for you to use what has been gifted to you."
Thinking back on the instruction that came with the dagger—draw it and ask—Arnie found it simple in theory and rather vague in practice, now that he had to do it.
He drew it and looked at the matte black blade that almost seemed to drink light. "Okay. Um. You're supposed to… work. Please?"
He waited for something to happen, and when nothing did, he added, "I don't think this is working?"
"But you are wrong, my humble friend," Nero added. "Look down."
Arnie did.
Shadows were shifting around his legs like friendly, eager puppies, slowly climbing upward. It did not actually make him invisible, but in the dim light of the cave, he was blurred enough to remind him of the Predator from old sci-fi movies.
Now he only had to wait for the promised distraction. And that took no time at all. It was as if the cat had been waiting for Arnie to be ready.
"I offered much. Food. Fuel. Even freshly picked strawberries. So soft and juicy."
The voice came from the Gate. It was not the same voice as the cat's, but it felt the same.
A man dressed in a sharp Victorian suit. The kind one might wear to the opera, not in a cave with subzero temperatures, stepped through the mist.
Arnie had tried not to look, remembering Nero's warnings—but the voice drew his eyes.
Although saying stepped was wrong.
It was almost like impossible, unreal colors had coalesced into a human-like figure.
Tapping his cane on the floor, the man from the Gate continued, "And I asked so little. Only that you do nothing. Don't make the situation worse. Just wait a little. And yet you still refuse to be reasonable, Nikola Tesla. Still, you continue to tinker with the device, as if it had not already created such trouble."
A firm grip on his hand. Nero reminded him that this distraction was meant to be used, not gotten caught in.
Slow step by step, Arnie moved forward, toward the glint. He was not sure how much the shadows would help if anyone actually looked in his direction. But no one did.
All the armed men were turned fully toward the Gate, and the man who came from it. Who was probably also that cat.
Even the man working on the device stopped. He froze, his hands hovering over a tangle of copper wires, and then straightened up.
"Stop? Wait?" The words didn't drawl; they snapped like static discharge. "That would require trust. Trust that you are not lying. Trust that you are not wrong. And worst of all—trust that you know what is best."
That must be Tesla.
"If I were one to wait for others to act, I and everyone else would already be corpses," Tesla continued, his voice rising in pitch. "I did not wait for the government. I did not wait for God. I built. I acted."
Inch by agonizing inch, Arnie arrived. Slowly, he knelt by the glint, and could see it now.
A necklace. A heavy golden chain holding a large, uncut ruby. It was etched with symbols that looked vaguely occult.
But Arnie had no experience with real occult symbols—just what he had seen in RPGs. Pentagrams? Runes? It was all Greek—or Latin—to him.
He picked it up. He could barely feel it through his thick gloves, but there was no sensation. No warmth. No burning. No vibrating power.
To him, it seemed like just a necklace.
"And what has that gotten you?" the man from the Gate replied, his voice like silk—spider silk, catching a butterfly. So tender. So constrictive.
"Despair breeds like black mold among your men. Many see you as mad. And what has your latest bout of genius done but turn your pride—your great city—strange and alien?"
Perhaps it would have been faster if Arnie turned around and ran. But he did not dare turn his back to so many armed men.
Instead, he began to shuffle backward—awkward, silent, and terrified.
"I can fix that. I would have already fixed that—if you would stop interrupting me!" Tesla snapped.
The device next to the mad scientist began to hum—a rising, dentist-drill whine. Sparks spat from the copper coils, angry and blue.
"But it won't work again. I have solved that problem of interference," Tesla continued. Arnie could imagine the mad, triumphant look on the other man's face.
Not that he could see it.
First, Tesla's back was to Arnie, not his face. And second, even if Tesla turned toward Arnie, he would still be unable to see his face. After all, save for the man from the Gate, everyone here—Tesla, Tesla's men, Nero, and Arnie himself—had their faces covered.
Lightning erupted.
The shadows—Arnie's only cover—fled instantly. For a brief moment, the whole cave was bathed in stark, blinding violet light.
Coiled electricity lashed out from the machine, weaving together, snapping into geometry. It formed a perfect sphere with Tesla at the center. It looked like a plasma-ball novelty lamp Arnie had bought once from a mall kiosk because it looked cool—scaled up to lethal proportions.
Did Tesla fry himself?
No. As the blinding flash faded, the sphere remained—a humming barrier of translucent blue energy. Tesla stood inside, untouched, remnants of static playing along his unscorched coat.
A force field. A literal sci-fi force field.
The sight was so impossible—so undeniably cool—that Arnie sucked in a sharp, involuntary breath.
Someone gasped.
And to his horror, Arnie realized it was him.
For a moment that felt like forever, Arnie was balanced between the hope that no one had heard it and the fear that someone had, like the time he tried to use two chairs to reach a light fixture.
And like that time, one of the chairs slipped.
It was the chair labeled Hope.
One man, the leftmost, turned and aimed the ray gun at Arnie, shouting, "Intruder!"
For less than a second, Arnie was paralysed. But that part of the second was enough.
An electric whine hit a painful crescendo. A beam of blinding white light erupted from the barrel straight at Arnie.
And then the man from the Gate was right next to Arnie. How? Did he move faster than the eye could see? Did he teleport? Or something stranger? Arnie did not know.
But what Arnie did know was that the man from the Gate intercepted the beam with a cane. The beam did not stop. It shattered. It struck the ebony wood and splintered into a hundred coiling snakes of white fire. The man drove the tip of the cane into the stone floor, grounding the brunt of the strike.
But not all of it. The beam bent, whipping around, as if tethered to the cane now.
Arnie looked at the man and saw that electricity was crawling all over him, singeing his pristine suit. His eyes were drawn to the man's face.
It was impossibly handsome. Like someone had thrown Tom Hiddleston, Cillian Murphy, and Lee Pace into a genetic blender and poured out a flawless, cheekboned smoothie.
His expression was one of beatific suffering. The kind Renaissance masters tried to capture when painting martyrs.
Or perhaps the face of a very committed actor in an electrostimulation porno.
"Run, you fool," the man from the Gate ordered.
He did not scream. He did not hiss through clenched teeth. Despite the lightning crawling over his skin, his voice remained terrifyingly calm. Absolute.
It was not a suggestion. It was a command written in the imperative code of the universe.
Arnie's body obeyed before his mind even processed the words.
He spun on his heel and bolted toward the entrance, where Nero waited.
As he ran, another electric whine joined the first. Then another. And another.
The cave erupted into a chorus of lethal buzzing.
And just as he moved through the bend, just as he passed Nero, there was an ominous silence.
And then Tesla's voice followed, like thunder after lightning, "He saved the cultist? Why? He must be important. Bring him to me. Alive if practical. If not, bring me everything he has on him."
Arnie glanced to the side as he kept running, checking if Nero was keeping up. Despite his shorter legs, the boy emperor was not only keeping Arnie's pace but seemed less winded as well.
"I am not a cultist," Arnie said, because he needed to say something. To take his mind off the man, or the cat, or whatever it was that had sacrificed itself for Arnie.
"My friend, Tesla is a genius capable of swiftly reaching conclusions from scarce information. Almost always correct ones," Nero replied, his voice steady despite running in heavy gear. "Which means that when he makes an incorrect deduction, it is next to impossible to convince him of that. So, I would suggest not getting caught."
They burst from the tunnel mouth, the sudden brightness of the snow blinding after the gloom.
Arnie glanced at the tarp-covered enemy sleds near the entrance. An idea sparked through the panic.
"Should we sabotage them?" he panted, gesturing vaguely. "Cut a wire or something?"
"No time!" Nero replied, not even breaking stride.
The deep snow outside made running a nightmare. Inside the cave, the floor had been slick but hard; here, the powder grabbed at Arnie's boots, turning every step into a high-knee lunge. His lungs burned in the freezing air.
To his right, the massive pit loomed.
He tried not to look at it, but he couldn't help it. It was a constant, grim reminder of what awaited them if they were caught.
Fortunately, their sled was just where they had left it. And unlike the others, it was unpacked and ready for use.
But just as they reached the sled, Arnie heard that dreadful sound again.
The rising electric whine of Tesla's ray guns charging up.
He turned.
Tesla's men had emerged from the cave mouth. They had a clear line of sight to both of them. There were no winding tunnels here to protect them. Just open, white snow.
He glanced at Nero, desperately hoping the boy had done the sensible thing: dropped to the ground, or even better, dived for cover.
But Nero had done no such thing. He had stopped, standing defiant against the white backdrop.
In his hand was a sword, the red blade he had received as a gift at the same time Arnie had gotten his dagger.
Arnie had no idea what the boy intended to do with it.
This wasn't Star Wars. Did he hope to parry a concentrated beam of electricity with a piece of metal? Physics did not work like that.
Except it had.
It had worked for the Man from the Gate. He had stopped the lightning with a wooden cane.
No.
The thought hit Arnie like a physical blow. It couldn't be happening again.
Nero was going to sacrifice himself. For Arnie.
Arnie didn't know if he could bear it. He couldn't watch another savior die for a coward.
But before Arnie could shout, before he could lunge to stop him, the electric whine hit its peak.
And just a moment before the ray guns fired, Nero swung the blade.
It wasn't a strike. It was a flourish. A conductor signaling the crescendo.
Where the blade moved, a crimson trail lingered in the air behind it.
Then, the trail shattered.
A sudden, impossible cloud of red rose petals exploded, filling the space between them and Tesla's men.
The crimson cloud did not behave as petals should.
At first glance, that was what Arnie's panicking mind insisted on calling them, petals, light and delicate, bursting outward in a theatrical spray. The color was right. The shape was right. Even the motion carried the familiar, drifting chaos of something organic caught in the air.
But then the beams hit.
The first ray gun discharged with a shriek of compressed energy, a lance of white-blue lightning screaming across the open snow. It struck the cloud head-on and shattered.
Not deflected. Not absorbed.
Broken.
The beam fractured into dozens of smaller arcs, snapping wildly from fragment to fragment, each tendril seeking a path that refused to stay singular. The second gun fired, then the third, and the air filled with a violent chorus of electrical discharge as every shot dissolved into chaos the moment it entered the red storm.
The "petals" rang.
Not audibly, not in any way Arnie could hear over the screaming weapons, but his bones felt it, a subtle vibration that traveled through the snow and up his legs. These were not leaves or silk or anything living.
They were metal.
Each fragment spun and tumbled through the air with deliberate wrongness, its edges catching the light for an instant before vanishing again. They moved too fast. Fell too heavily. And where the lightning touched them, it didn't burn, it split, crawled, and leapt, redirected again and again as if the air itself had been seeded with hooks.
Chaff.
The realization struck Arnie with a clarity that cut through the panic. Not decoration. Not illusion.
Countermeasures.
The sword had not created petals in any poetic sense. It had shed them, without becoming any smaller for it, exploding outward into hundreds of razor-thin metallic fragments, each one forged from the same strange red material as the blade itself. Iron, yes, but not the dull, passive iron of tools and nails. This was something tuned. Resonant. Hungry for energy.
The lightning loved it.
Too much.
The beams lost coherence almost instantly, dispersing into a writhing net of electrical filaments that burned themselves out against the storm of spinning metal. What should have been lethal precision degraded into useless spectacle, light without purpose, fury without direction.