They were 10 kilometers away from the kaiju when it first came into sight.

  No one was prepared for what they found.

  “What the fuck?” Derek whispered, over comms.

  It was a sentiment shared by everyone.

  Mark had barely any idea what sort of kaiju he was looking at, but the overall shape of it was easy enough to understand, and that shape started with the golden dust in the air. The kaiju was the source of that golden dust, and of the silver lights. But it was also about a thousand other things, wrought in pure mithril and frozen in time.

  The center was a sun, spilling out ejecta from the north and south poles, like some sort of ejected matter from a quasar, or some shit like that. Mark had seen an image of a very fast spinning star in one of the lecture series for Manawork, and then again in a Sci-Fi show several months ago that was outside of Curtain Protocol, and the spinning central orb of light looked exactly like that.

  The ejecta was all of the golden dust that invaded the entire layer.

  The rest of it was more complicated.

  Six silver pillars of ‘people’, each 250 meters tall, circled around that great golden light, with their backs to the light. Each great silver statue was twice the size of the light itself, and they were like silver Buddhist statues… almost. 3 floated in lotus position, wearing nothing more than a loincloth. 3 floated with their legs in a diamond shape, feet together, with simple draping robes. They alternated; lotus then diamond then lotus again, all the way around. The bodies were emaciated where they showed, faces sunken, bones practically exposed.

  Each of them made the same signs with their hands.

  Right hand up and out, palm forward; a stopping sigil, or a protecting sigil.

  And left hand vertical with the chest, with the thumb and forefinger curled into a circle over the center of the chest.

  In the space where the heart should have been, to the left side of the left hand, was a hole. A heart-hole. That heart-hole was filled with silver light. Mark wasn’t sure what he was seeing, there… Or rather, he wasn’t sure of the purpose of it all.

  Silver orb lights were gathered over the entire kilometers-wide structure, like reflected glimmers in the pure silver metal that made up every part of the giant statues. If Mark didn’t have Quark, then he was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have even noticed the silver lights nestled into the crevices of the giant silver statues.

  The statues’ eyes were closed, at least, so that seemed… reassuring. Maybe.

  But the silver statues, while massive and looking like monks, were made of smaller bodies. Normal-sized silver bodies. Many of those bodies were human-ish, sort of, but also birds and lizards and horses and all sorts of animals. Cranes, tigers, bears, fish. A million different silver bodies made up each larger monk’s body, and all of the smaller bodies were laying down on each other and praying at the same time. They did not look to be in distress, or in some sort of… evil positions. They looked like they were a part of the monks, and unified in purpose with the larger, overall structure.

  From afar the 250 meter tall monks looked solid. It was only from close up that you could tell they were made of smaller silver animals and people.

  Just a statue? Making Signs?

  Or…

  Or something else?

  Mark said, “The hand symbols; that’s Sigaldry for one of the ultimate, basic protection spells. The warding with the right hand and the funneling with the heart hand is all part of it… Tartu?”

  Tartu spoke up, “That’s… Yeah.” After a moment of silence, he realized that kinda answer wasn’t good enough, so he added, “This one looks like a specific variant of light construction— Wait. Wait…” Tartu’s vector was doing some weird shit— And then he gasped, or at least Mark thought he gasped; he was way down inside the ship, looking at screens with everyone else. Only Mark and Isoko were out in the open right now. Tartu said, “Those statues aren’t the kaiju. They’re a containment system. Old as… Old. Not sure how old. They’re mithril. I think they’re focusing the light of the kaiju in the middle and turning it into the obliteration dust and siphoning some away to make those silver orbs, which are not monsters or kaiju ecology at all— ahhh… The silver orbs might be the kaiju’s ecology. They’ve been tamed… or… I don’t know. Why are they resting on the statues?” Tartu finished with, “We should find a different target for Andria.”

  “I’m not ready to move on yet, and we’re not being attacked—” Mark asked, “Isoko. How are you handling the light?”

  Isoko said, “Okay, well… The sky is clearer this close to the… ‘Grand Siphon’, if you wanna call it that. Not a single silver orb has entered this airspace yet. We’re not being pulled in, in any case. We feel safe. I can feel the sky shifting toward the statues, pulling into those hands on the chests… but not really? I think the pull is a side effect of the light moving. I can tell you that most of the air is flowing around the statues, and shooting up and down alongside the sun’s ejecta like in that movie we saw. I’m not even sure the siphons are working, at all… Something is wrong, here?”

  “Andria,” Mark said, “Got any Prosperity hints for us?”

  Andria said, “Not really, but… Eliot. What do you think when you look at this thing? Because I’m getting a very specific vibe and I want to know if you’re getting the same vibe.”

  Mark felt down toward Andria and Eliot, and while Andria had an inkling of some sort of phenomenon happening in her vector, Eliot had almost nothing.

  Eliot tried anyway, saying, “It looks like 6 guys standing around a fire, guarding the fire.”

  Andria hummed in the comms, then said, “The siphon in the hands are sucking up the light, but then why are they pointed away from the light?”

  “Oh!” Isoko exclaimed. “I see it now!”

  Suddenly something clicked for Eliot, and Eliot exclaimed, “Oh shit? Is the system… broken— No. Not broken. The little silver orbs are the ecology of the light— They tried to stop us when they saw us, and they got worse as we got closer to the kaiju, which means they’re trying to... protect the kaiju? And look at these images right here.”

  Some images filtered into Mark’s Quark-supported vision, as he looked at the statues.

  The silverlight orbs were kinda ‘at rest’ on the silver statues. They puddled in the folds of robes, and in the spaces between fingers, and in the eye sockets, and in the ears. They held on to the saddles of horses and they gripped on the wings of silver cranes. Anywhere that there was a crevice, and there were a lot of crevices, there was an orb. And they were kinda… not evenly filling those crevices. They were all humped in one direction, like water droplets almost hanging off of a faucet nozzle. That one direction was to the left.

  Every single ‘silverlight slime’ —because that’s absolutely what they were, slimes— was angled one each statue in the same direction; to the left. Well… ‘to the left’ based on the statue’s center line. The ones on the other sides of the statues, invisible from this side, were probably also pulling left.

  Meaning the lights were pulling the statues in a clockwise direction?

  … Really?

  Mark wasn’t sure about that.

  But what he was sure of, absolutely, was that the heart hole of every statue was absolutely gummed up with silverlight orbs.

  The backsides of the mithril statues had intricate, yet simple magical runework, like spiraling vortices, circling out of the backsides of those heart-holes. The light of the interior kaiju was bouncing off of those spiraling vortices, while silverlight orbs continually jockeyed to fill those heart-holes up completely.

  What little motes of golden light that did filter through the curled left hands of the statues, on their front, slammed into that blocked heart-hole, and then… nothing?

  The system was blocked.

  Obviously, the system was blocked.

  Mark asked, “The kaiju is controlling its ecology to turn the statues around, because otherwise the statues would be siphoning from it?”

  Andria exclaimed, “Yes!” She said, “So I think Isoko can kill the orbs in the holes… or we can lure them away, actually. Probably shouldn’t get too close with too many people. If we kill enough of the silver orbs then the mithril statues might turn back around on their own and truly siphon the light away into… into something? I don’t understand what the heart siphon is supposed to do. Tartu? Can you read the whirlpool on the backs of the mithril statues?”

  Tartu said, “Looks like Construction, which is a type of Manawork. Eliot should be more familiar with that than me, and you too, Andria? Quark has a bunch of languages available, too?”

  Eliot said, “Ah… pass. I’ve been busy.”

  Andria said, “Not my expertise.”

  “Quark?” Mark asked.

  Quark provided, “I recognize the arrangement of the Sigaldry and the spiral siphon, which is Construction, which is a type of Manawork, but the languages used are unknown to me.”

  Mark nodded. And then he asked, “So… Preliminary plan: Lure the silverlight orbs away, kill them, let the statues… do we want to let the statues turn around and siphon the big light?”

  Silence. Unsurety.

  Andria said, “I think we should. I feel like whatever kaiju is contained in there has compromised its ancient containment system, and what we’re seeing is a process that has been happening for eons, and eventually if we don’t let the siphons work and kill the monster inside, then the monster can get out. There has to be a reason that the monster was contained instead of killed, so… I think we should kill it…” Andria was unsure there, at the end. “… Maybe.”

  “Is that your Prosperity talking?” Mark asked, as he looked up and around, at ‘schools’ of silverlight orbs, flowing on the drafts of the main eruptions of golden motes, pouring out from the top and bottom of the structure. They weren’t coming this way. In fact, they seemed unwilling to come closer at all. There were no golden motes around here, so maybe they only lived in the motes? Mark added, “Or just a gut feeling?”

  “Gut feeling,” Andria said.

  Mark said, “Well… we’re not destroying any of the silver statues, at all. Not sure what would happen if we tried that, but that seems like a very, very foolish idea—”

  “Damn right,” Tartu muttered.

  “—But we are driving away the silverlight orbs. I’m headed out to kill some. See what happens. Isoko; you’re on Dreadnought protection.”

  Isoko snapped a sarcastic salute, “Aye aye, captain!”

  Mark grinned as he slammed his gear into an adamantium spike again and he drilled it into the Dreadnought before he took off, into the air, crashing through the Dreadnought’s shield and into the glittering sky. The motes of golden light out here were pretty thin, but they still existed. They didn’t bother Mark at all as he crashed through whole drifts of them, the motes twisting on magnetic forces far beyond Mark’s ability to sense.

  But he could see the actions of magnetic forces, a little bit.

  Each siphoning mithril statue was like a shockwave buffer against the overwhelming pressure of the mote-generating ‘sun’ that they surrounded. Forces curled the golden motes on unseen patterns, trying to swirl motes into clogged hearts.

  Mark made a plan of attack on the nearest mithril statue’s heart-hole, approaching fast, prepared to turn silverlight slimes into scattered explosions.

  The lights saw him instantly.

  A hundred silverlight slimes far overhead, enjoying a swirl through the magnetic winds or whatever, rapidly curved through the sky. They began bouncing off of each other, aiming for Mark, long before they got anywhere near him—

  Mark barely switched to Alacrity/Slowness in time. Apparently a hundred bouncing lightspeed slimes could charge up a lot faster than a 20-ish.

  For a moment, Mark was in a tunnel of hard light, and then the light passed and Mark was still in a tunnel of light, but now the tunnel was smaller and almost all of Mark’s hovering adamantium was pushed far out of feeling. Mark hadn’t felt the strikes to his body, but he felt them now, as his head was inches to the left, his legs were bent out of shape, and his chest was dented. He was not actually injured at all, but the light orbs had actually managed to hurt him.

  Mark flowed in the light.

  A shift of adamantium becoming whole, becoming edged.

  The tunnel of light constricting.

  Mark twisted into blades, reforming into weapons, sticking edged fingers into streams of laserlight to spill flaming light into the golden sky. He was a child sticking his hand out of the window of his father’s truck. The wind couldn’t hurt him at all when he was ready for it.

  His chest bounced back. His legs became whole. Mark killed the light with black fingers, and the light died easily.

  Then the light passed by and Mark beheld a sparkling cathedral of enemies lifting off of several mithril statues, as the contained sun kaiju called into the sky like a whaling god.

  The world seemed to crash down to one vector that mattered.

  The golden sun yelled at Mark. Wordless, hateful.

  Mark roared back. Wordless, strong, adamantine.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Quark flashed a warning in Mark’s vision.

  Suspected Category 7.

  What did that matter, though? Nothing at all.

  But Mark’s roar had mattered. The caged sun spun a little bit differently, the 6 mithril sages groaning in that difference. One of the heart holes of the sages suddenly buckled, all of the brightspeed slimes suddenly dislodged from that hole and spun through the vortex in the back of the mithril sage. The slimes shredded in that spin and the mithril sage slowly, inexorably, began to turn back toward the sun. The slimes on its surface tried to stop the turning sage, but they could do nothing but sacrifice themselves to plug up the heart hole again. They failed.

  Far below Mark, where the lightspeed slimes had passed him by, those slimes curved on magnetic lines in the sky, right into the turning mithril sage. Soon, the hole was plugged up, and the flying slimes were pulling on magnetic forces to turn the giant statue fully away from the caged sun.

  But the sun was still caged; it could not be uncaged without outside help.

  It roared again, not only because its cage was tightening, but also because it knew Mark was out here.

  Inaudible words flooded the golden-mote layer. Words more felt than heard.

  BEG.

  Mark roared back, “NO.”

  THEN DIE.

  The contained sun spun and twisted its entire cage, the mithril statues groaning as they shifted ever so slightly, trying to turn back toward the sun, but the lightspeed slimes would not have it. The sun especially would not have it. From its fountaining north and south poles came millions of brightspeed slimes. They twisted and slammed into the mithril sages, striking them and doing nothing at all, except to cover them like gum in gears.

  Layers of lightspeed slimes collected on the statues faster than Mark realized they could gather. Within seconds every single 250 meter tall mithril sage was covered in multiple layers of lightspeed slimes, and the mithril sages poured on the power, somehow. Their own suction through their vertical hand, through their fires, and through their heart-hole and back, turned absolutely voracious. They shredded slimes, producing power, each of them beginning to turn, like rusted hinges that were now freshly oiled.

  The sun didn’t care… yet.

  Fire blossomed in every direction, the sun seeming to explode within its cage, and golden motes spilled like an ocean unleashed in every direction. There was no dodging this attack.

  But if Isoko could do it, Mark could do it, too.

  Mark Unioned with Light and Dark, turning incandescent as he blotted out a very small part of the sky with absolute black, keeping the light contained completely. Then the golden wave slammed into Mark, and Mark drank in the light—

  Sandblasting. That’s what it was.

  Mark was a fool to take it on directly.

  Parts of Mark’s body peeled away like hammerscale from forging metal.

  So Mark Unioned with ‘healing’ Light and ‘disintegrating’ Darkness. Adamantium flaked less, and Mark became a rock in a river to divert that river away from the Dreadnought, which was somewhere behind him. Blindness took Mark but Quark had more than enough eyes and types of eyes, and he provided wireframe models over Mark’s sight, showing that Isoko was doing the same thing, way, way back there. Both of them were getting pushed back, and soon Eliot signaled for a retreat and Mark let the river of gold take him, right before millions of lightspeed slimes began to coalesce out of the light, flowing in the golden river right toward Mark and the Dreadnought.

  Most of the hull had holes in it by the time Mark got there—

  “Take us toward a softer land, Mark!” Andria called out, her vector more serious than she usually felt.

  Mark had no trouble agreeing with that suggestion, so he reinforced the whole ship with a Purpose toward a softer land. Eliot was already turning on the brightspeed and soon the Dreadnought sailed into the dreamlands, into the much more calm churn of figments and unreality. Usually the dreamlands were worse than the layers, by far, but not this time.

  Reality turned suggestive instead of real.

  Behind them, the lightspeed slimes and the golden motes died when they left their layer; like sparks hitting water.

  Eliot called out, "Where are we headed, Mark?”

  Mark said, “Toward a softer land… And I don’t know what that looks like, exactly. But that’s where we’re going.”

  “It’s the right choice,” Andria said, still feeling strongly in her vector.

  Soon —much faster than Mark expected— the dreamlands churned and flowed behind them and the Dreadnought burst through a cloud, into a new layer.

  Tall, rocky pillars, absolutely covered in greenery, like millions of differently-sized craggy-fingers lifting up from deep waters down below. Rainbow birds flew between the pillars, nesting on the outcroppings. Fish flowed in the waters. Little beaches collected at the bases of most of the pillars, and some of those beaches became islands that joined pillar to pillar. Plants of all sorts grew everywhere, and the sky was filled with white fluffy clouds that also resembled pillars, bent and sausage-like, standing vertically in the sky over the pillars in the water down below.

  The sky was blue and full of normal light.

  No kaiju anywhere.

  Not even a hint of kaiju call, either.

  Far, far away, past the edge of the layer, was the golden sun layer and its 6 mithril statues. That layer flowed through the sky of this layer like a yellow river dotted with silverfish. Gods damn, Mark thought, looking up at the sun kaiju, still pouring out power across his entire layer. The only thing unaffected were the silver statues around the sun kaiju.

  … And now that Mark was looking at this layer, he saw those bent and green-covered pillars, floating in the water, were actually statues between 20 meters tall, and 400 meters tall. The bent clouds in the sky were even taller ‘statues’ made of cloudstuff. Just mist and vapor, according to Quark’s scans, but they had to be more than that. Mark recognized that those clouds were the shape of statues. Less distinct, but… that one had arms, that one had a ‘Buddhist’ robe, that one had a crown, and those ones over there had arms curled in prayer… Mark just stared at everything, in wonder.

  From the vectors of his people, they were doing the same.

  “Wow,” Isoko said.

  Andria got back on track faster than anyone, saying, “Okay. I think I know what we did wrong last time, and I know what I want to do for the next attempt—”

  “You cannot be serious,” Tartu said, “We should find you another—”

  “No. I’m going after that one, because I know —I know!— what needs to be done.” Andria’s vector pointed upward, at the golden dot of a sun in the sky, as she said, “That looked like a cage, but it was not a cage. It didn’t ask to be released, right? It told Mark to ‘BEG’. Mark, of course, was never going to beg, but I absolutely will. I want to go back and speak to it and see what happens.”

  Mark instantly, loudly said that that was foolish. Every single person on the ship said the same thing, their voices overlapping.

  Derek spoke with the most expertise, though, saying, “I have seen a LOT of shit in the Two Worlds, Andria, and the scanners returned that thing as a Cat 7. That’s a threat to the very existence of humanity, or any other people. Cat 7s can barely get out of the Crossings, and when they do they go right back up… or at least that’s the theorized way in which they have been ‘seen’. No one has ever seen one dip its toes onto the Two Worlds and survived. The mere IDEA of going back to that thing and begging, or talking, or touching it at all, is crazy.” Derek added, “I will absolutely go up there and kill a few of my selves to talk to it, but you should not go.”

  Andria was ready to argue, and she began with, “You can be back up.”

  “We can’t risk it getting loose,” Tartu said, almost like he was bargaining.

  “It won’t get loose! I know it won’t,” Andria said. “Mark! Did it seem like it wanted to fight? Or just push you away?”

  Mark honestly said, “I think it wanted to be left alone. Violently.” Mark further extrapolated, “The entire layer was empty except for those golden motes of destructive light, and the lightspeed slimes, all of which came from the sun kaiju. The only thing out of place were the statues surrounding the sun kaiju…” Mark looked across the calm land. The ‘softer land’, which Andria wanted them to go to. Mark said, “Mithril statues still standing after all these years, surrounding a sun that overlooks this ‘softer land’, which Andria wanted us to find… Or rather, that was your Prosperity speaking, yes, Andria?”

  “Exactly! There’s… there’s something here— No. Not something here. It’s still the sun in the sky, which is a paired layer with this one. I don’t know what any of this is, but… Yes. I have a Prosperity Itch right now.” Andria’s focus went back into the sky, to the statue-surrounded sun, as she said, “The lightspeed slimes are flowing back into the sun. You can see the silver leaving the gold.”

  Mark looked and Quark helped, and yeah, the silver was leaving the gold, or rather, flowing back into the sun, leaving behind statues turned away from the sun. The sun kaiju was quieting.

  Andria said, “If I approach peacefully, then… then I think I can do it. I can talk to them.”

  Mark said, “Enough of those silver slimes can deform me with their punches. Even if I could protect you, which I can’t, you won’t even know you had died, Andria. You’ll just be gone.”

  Andria seemed more sure than ever as she said, “Please trust me.”

  Mark was silent, thinking.

  Eliot said, “I need an hour for basic repairs… and I don’t think the ship can handle another wave like that. It’s a cat 7.” Eliot softly said, “We cannot handle that. We simply cannot.”

  Andria was less sure, now.

  Mark made a decision. “This land is safe. Isoko is capable of taking the Dreadnought through the layers if I should fall with Andria. So you all stay here. I’ll take Andria up there myself and she can… talk to it. And then we’ll come back.”

  “You might be fine, Mark but…” Sally rapidly said, “Andria. You will die.”

  Isoko added, “Can you get there, Mark? Without the ship moving you? There ain’t no air out there.”

  Andria said, “Travel through the layers isn’t based on anything but Purpose, and we can get there fast and then come back.”

  “Mark,” Lola said, quietly, desperately. And that was all she said.

  Mark said, “I know, Lola. And thank you for your care and concern, but that sun kaiju can talk and this entire layer is filled with statues like that one up there, though they are very old and fully covered in green. This place is old. Everything about this trip is more than the sum of its parts and I feel that when we talk to that thing up there, it might… Well. It’ll probably wash away everything with motes of golden light again—”

  “Mark,” Lola said, “You are… I think you’re starting to experience the symptoms of Dragon Wake. They all get loopy when they’re awake long enough, and you’ve been awake for weeks now. Weeks. I don’t care if you’re adamantium and you don’t feel tired, but… You’re loopy.”

  “Maybe.” Mark agreed, “Probably, actually. Still gonna do it, if Andria wants to do it.”

  “I do,” Andria said, solidly. She opened the hatch to the deck and hovered her cutting-orb personal ship back onto the deck. It looked like it had a hole in it, but that hole had been repaired with mithril. “My personal orb is ready. I’m ready. I need to do this.”

  Isoko hovered nearby, vector full of worry.

  Sally stepped out of the main castle way down there, alongside Eliot and Tartu.

  Lola was down in the main command center, unwilling to move. David was near her. Lola’s vector was pulled inward and worried.

  Derek climbed out of the cargo hold where Andria’s ship had come out. He said nothing. He just wanted to watch.

  Tartu said, “When you get back, Andria, I want a proper Prosperity prognostication for communing with Verdago, for the Chosen System.”

  Andria’s vector soared. “When I get back I will happily do that, Tartu.” And then she hovered her orb-ship into the air, the ring of blades vertical and still. “Ready when you are, Mark!”

  Mark stepped onto the ship and Andria braced some systems inside the ship to hold his weight, nervously chuckling about an unexpected 4.4 metric tons.

  Andria pressed the small orb-ship into the sky and Mark Union’d with purpose, the two of them leaving behind the Dreadnought.

  The ship was still full of holes down there, but Eliot would be repairing it soon—

  A message appeared from Isoko, in Mark’s vision, lit up by Quark.

  ‘If she’s another Kardi then kill her fast.’

  Mark just nodded. Quark sent back for him, ‘Yup.’

  Andria had been solidly sure about everything, but now she was a bit nervous for some reason.

  Mark tried not to be paranoid. Mark smirked and said, “Don’t wimp out on me already, Andria!”

  Andria focused. “I’m ready.”

  They breached the layer’s edge and just like that, they were back in the golden-mote layer.

  Round 2, begin.