Luca DR

Edge 168

168 – Unending

The reunion with his family had been bittersweet. No matter what, some differences took time to come to terms with. Albert was not the same person he was when he left the present, he had grown and aged together with his team and his significant other. That had not been ea...

Edge 167

167 – Epilogue III

This time, the place they arrived in was the right version of Temalas city. Or at least it looked like it. The ‘smell’ of the air – which was an intuitive way Albert used to indicate the quantum signature of the reality he was in – seemed right. Besides,

Edge 166

166 – Epilogue II

Albert stepped through the portal. Portal travel was not always the same, and the experience was hardly uniform across the many ways it could happen. Even with this in mind, he could not help but be surprised when he stepped into the portal… only to suddenly find him...

Edge 165

165 – Epilogue I

Time passed. The city around them crumbled to dust. War, battles, the incessant erosion of existence itself. It all took a toll.

After the first few months, all that could be seen when looking out and through the shimmering shield around Sitea was a wall of solid ...

Edge 164

164 – Power gap

“Stay here,” Albert said, after deploying a shield to make sure his allies couldn’t be detected. “I need to see how strong those things are.”

“You are not going to fight them alone, are you?” Elle said a little bit more forcefully than Albert expected...

Edge 163

163 – Sitea

Portal travel was… jarring. Most of the discomfort came from having to punch through what – to most people – amounted to an impenetrable defense: Sitea’s shield. Fortunately for them, Albert was not most people, and he made short work of the defensive dome of energy....

Edge 162

162 – Moving in and on

They kissed and kissed and kissed. It was long, and passionate, and full of emotion. There was a well of emotions behind it, pent-up desire on one side and reciprocation on the other, and in moments it went from platonic to desperate, revealing a need that both of...

Edge 161

161 – Reunion

The village had changed in the thousands of years since Albert had last seen it. Now it was more like a sprawling metropolis, with no trace of the squat buildings that even in Albert’s time were already remnants from the past. Instead it had grown organically around a si...

Edge 160

160 – Elven blood

“Sir Albert?” Scrappy said after they were done eating. “What happened to you? Why are you so different now? I can see that you are trying to be normal, that I do, but you are changed.”

Albert inhaled loudly, turning to stare up at the far away stars. Her...

Edge 159

159 – Power up

Just as the world began moving for the first time after so long, Albert made it so that it suddenly stopped yet again. But this time it was only the world that had stopped, not him. He was free to move. His eyes moved first, scanning the room even though he knew it down t...

Edge 158

158 – Frozen time

Time stretched on. The attacks converging on Albert hung frozen in the air, mere meters away from him. He stood still, suspended in the liminal space between instants stretched into eternity by means of dilated time, an effect made possible by compounding two facets of...

Edge 157

157 – Help II

“Help!”

A high-pitched whine filled the room, like the cry of a mother who had lost her child, a wail so loud as to be deafening. Albert’s heart thumped as his mind filled with panic and worry. He looked around, lost, eyes swivelling here and there but seeing n...

Edge 156

156 – Help

Albert grinned as he pulled a fat block of C4 from his inventory. Truth be told, he did not have nearly enough of it stored to blow up the room and make sure that whatever hid under the water was truly dead, but converting some of the energy contained in a nuclear weapon into...

Edge 155

155 – First rule of warfare

Albert perked up. “Oh, oh oh oh! This Alignment Bio-Lab do be hiding all sorts of goodies!”

He didn’t realize that he was speaking quite loudly until Scrappy got up and joined him. Albert felt bad like that time he had woken up his cat, and seeing...

Edge 154

154 – Gore

Albert stared at the sign painted on the concrete wall. The letters were quite well-preserved, which went against what he believed would have happened after so much time had passed. It didn’t matter much, but his brain seemed to fixate on the tiny detail for longer than it ...

Edge 153

153 – Break-in

“Interesting,” Albert said, stopping for a moment to look around. He licked a finger and measured the air. “I am reading a faint electrical energy signature hidden by all the other mess. I wonder how any generator could have survived all these years.”

Traili...

Edge 152

152 – Scent of portals

Morning was a slower affair than Albert would have liked. He was hyped up after having found one of the core fragments last night, but the same couldn’t be said for the girls. Scrappy was being rebellious just for the sake of it, at least Albert hoped it was the...

Edge 151

151 – Four-way split

“Alright. Just a few more moments in the shadows, Scrappy, then you can come out okay?”

A muffled hum came from a space beyond the material realm.

Albert surveyed the terrain while he finished preparing and laying out the items for the ritual in a sm...

Edge 150

150 – Dead mage

“We are quite lucky, girls.” Albert said after gathering the trio back together. “There is one survivor, and they look badly wounded. Looks like interrogation time!”

Lina’s blood grew cold. Who could ever survive such power? How? How could she hope to def...

Edge 149

149 – Nuclear weaponry

Three figures sneaked across the open field under the cover of night. Two of them were cloaked to appear completely invisible in the dark, the light itself bending as to not touch them in the slightest. To anyone who could see it, which only amounted to one person...

Edge 148

148 – Catching up

As they made their way towards the source of the magical signature Albert was able to feel, the group began to come across the first signs of activity. It was only the last few stragglers at first, the slowest of the zombies who had been damaged too badly by the battle...

Edge 147

147 – Following scents

Albert was outside the hedge camp. It was time to move out, but before dismantling everything he needed to find a lead towards the energies he presumed were the originating from the Kirkesis core.

“Two approaches to power,” he mused in the meantime, know...

Edge 146

146 – Ritual

With the important talks out of the way, it was finally time to proceed with giving Lina back some semblance of power. It didn’t sit well with Albert to see her so diminished, and even though she was hiding her emotions on the matter it was evident that she was very uncom...

Edge 145

145 – Talks

“…I might.” The girl said in a small voice. “But I would like to have some more time to think about it, Sir. That I do.”

Albert smiled. “Oh? And why would that be? Are you on the cusp of something?”

“It’s strange. Hard to explain… that it is�...

Edge 144

144 – Night stalking

It was on the way back from hunting, sporting a decent collection of cores in his pocket both for his own consumption as well as for the girls, that Jeff gave Albert an update.

Albert. I have an update on the concentration of Doom energy. According to ...