WARNING: Spoilers abound throughout this section.
- Most of this book takes place during the climax weeks of the events in the Brigands, so Ashe and Avril do not appear in it.
- Ed Burnhelt and Harry Mang meet at the walls of Findenton, a walled frontier fortress city of the Holy Alliance on the edge of the Pale Desert. A horde of Hobgers is about to attack it because of the Holy Alliance’s prior incursions into their territory. The Hobger attack will spark off a larger war with the rest of west Jeea. Ed speeds over to the Hobger leader and convinces them to stand down for the time being after besting him in an unarmed duel. Harry and Ed part ways on tense but peaceful terms. Corsis as Svithe covertly witnesses this onsite, and decides to more fully involve Ed, Harry, and those linked to them in the Game.
- Corsis travels to the Unmaker Laboratory in the Stretch isthmus. He enlists the aid of the cruel Hekati, goddess of knowledge, who is aware of the Game and wishes to alter life on Trojis with her twisted designs. They pull Mary Night out of her torment in her personal hell, converting her soul into flesh. She is a Draqu who went on a killing spree a century earlier. She is scarred, emaciated, and harrowed by the experience. She desperately wishes to atone for the evil she inflicted on the world. Corsis and Hekati want no such thing, and coerce her to serve them, or they’ll send her back to her torment. Hekati uses fleshmancy to alter her appearance and Corsis gives her the identity of Candice Quentra. She reluctantly agrees to be an agent for them in the Holy Alliance’s Horrinshal assassin organization.
- Harry and his friends, Meve Harlander and Shelocke, are socializing after hours in his office in Findenton when Candice shows up. She tells him she’ll be working with him occasionally to investigate the black market in Findenton with a narcotic sweetener additive that’s flooded the city. Harry tentatively deems her likable, but he also distrusts her.
- Two years pass, which syncs the story with the events of the climax weeks of the second book, The Brigands. Ed is in a bar in New Grelland with Violet, a Skin Bot with whom he shares much romantic chemistry. His hyper powers allow him to see her soul, which thrills her. He parts company with her with a kiss. His inner circle, Fernallus of Fiomeli, Matt Burnhelt, and Faith Nyms, witness this from another table as he rejoins them. Fernallus is a young Dragon who’s usually shapeshifted into Human form and is adept at mancy. Matt is Ed’s older brother who possesses a keen strategic mind and has hyper powers that let him control, convert, and manipulate all forms of energy. Faith is Matt’s girlfriend and a key ops commander in the Grellish military.
- Fernallus encourages Ed to pursue things with Violet, but Matt warns him that the vendetta of their family’s unknown assailant makes such carefree affection dangerous. Matt presses that Ed needs to tell Violet the risks of being with him, just as Matt did when he and Faith started their romantic relationship. Ed is irritated by his brother’s over-protection and leaves. Faith catches up to him and implores him to be careful, just as she and Matt are being careful. Ed departs, intending to talk to Violet about it when she returns in a few weeks from her patrol rotation.
- In all scenes involving Matt, his tired behavior and bloodshot eyes are notable. He’s suffered from nightmares all of his life, which is a source of worry for Ed, Fern, and Faith.
- Harry later investigates a series of mutated horrors that have rampaged through the poorer sections of Findenton. He kills several of them, but finds that many more have already been slain. Candice leaves him a note saying she’ll meet him at night later, and that the one who killed more of them was Xax, the infamous robot. Harry finds a separate subtle communication from Xax, saying that he’ll visit both Harry and Candice soon.
- Bennet Burnhelt, Ed and Matt’s grandfather, later briefs his grandsons and Fernallus. Faith, as the ops commander, provides details concerning an attack by a Dirge ship on a Grellish patrol craft along the coast of the Stretch isthmus. Both crash into a rain forest farther from the shore. A team of Skin Bots is sent in to help. Violet is among them. The find that kliosts and fleshmancy mutated horrors are involved, but then lose contact. Ed, Matt, and Fernallus are sent to use their vast powers to assist. Faith and Vick Burnhelt, the brothers’ brilliant mechmancer father, will assist them remotely with hard energy constructs controlled from Vick’s lab annex.
- Ed, Fernallus, and Matt travel to the site of the patrol’s last known location in the rain forest and link up with Tamona and Een, two Chan’la warriors with whom they are close. Tamona is the boys’ childhood friend. She is blind and has a Perceptia hyper power that lets her perceive secrets and much that is otherwise unknowable. Een, who was bequeathed a less acute variation of Perceptia by Ed and Matt’s dying mother, has trained Ed often following their mother’s death years earlier. The Chan’la are searching for another of their number who also went missing in the stretch. They find some survivor Skin Bots, who point them to a pond with milky liquid and large purple kliost flowers, a kliost moat. Violet, who was unharmed, has already pressed toward this area as the source of the attacks.
- Ed and the others reach the white pond where a frantic battle erupts. They find that the other Chan’la has been mutated within a cocoon that’s spawning mutated clones of herself with slithering tentacle limbs. And a larger multi-headed hydra springs out of the kliost moat. And Violet is already fighting it. Vick’s energy construct also arrives on the scene to help while Faith uses an observing construct. While the others kill the clone daughters, Ed plunges into the hydra’s gnarled main body, plunging his swords into it, parting its flesh, and venting Flames of Tumult into its insides. The process requires all of his attention. And he’s unable to save Violet when more of its heads incinerate her to ashes as it dies, and the kliost moat evaporates during the fighting’s end. This wrecks Ed, and he wonders if this was part of their unknown assailant’s vendetta.
- Following the fight, Vick and Faith investigate the crashed Dirge ship and find that it is delivering kliost-laced sweetener narcotics to Lan Thedin, the megalopolis city-state ally of Grelland. The potable kliost derivatives will cause more people to mutate into myriad fleshmancy horrors. Once they regroup at the kliost moat, they’ll need to help their Lan Thedin allies.
- Harry meets with both Candice and Xax at night. Xax, who’s in his “Shades” Human holographic disguise, takes them to a hospice clinic run by Rebecca Jeem, the child-sized Snowl healer. She is treating dozens of Findenton people who are in the end stages of fleshmancy mutations. It’s caused by narcotic sweeteners that have flooded the black market. A surge of mutations suddenly occurs, breaking the restraints Rebecca applied. Harry, Candice, and Xax have to fight and kill them. Xax’s holographic disguise vanishes, revealing his lanky, silvery robot body with its ridiculously oversized grin. Candice says the kliost-laced sweeteners are coming from some place in Lan Thedin. Harry realizes he must stop the supply.
- Ed, Matt, Fernallus, Tamona, and Een regroup in a bivouac that the Grells set up near the evaporated kliost moat. Faith flies in from New Grelland in a hypersonic transport after picking up a local expert, Ramansa. The Sphinx lends her expertise to the fleshmancy autopsy of the mutated Chan’la. This is immediately before she supports Ashe and Avril in the Brigands’ climax. She tells them that this will spread in Lan Thedin like it did in the remote rain forest if Ed and the others can’t help. Vick, speaking to them remotely, tells them that this is Hekati’s doing, and she’s used kliost spore in the past, but this is a different variety in potable form.
- Harry and Meve take the Grey Jack armor and the Rig stealth aircraft from hiding. Years earlier, they had killed the murderous super genius with advanced weaponry, not wanting to use it until they absolutely had to. They meet up with Xax and Candice. She gives Harry a Demonic disguise to wear beneath this Grey Jack helmet and Xax uses his “Skred” Demon hologram disguise. She leads them into the Shade Lands to travel to Lan Thedin faster, and Meve will meet them there later in the stealth ship. After unnerving encounters with the Shade Lands’ ephemeral inhabitants, the trio arrives in Lan Thedin’s Under City. Candice takes them to her local contacts in the Dirge organization.
- Ed’s group arrives in the colossal megalopolis of Lan Thedin with its vast arrays of buildings and air traffic. Their hypersonic transport flies to the city’s periphery just as more grey-skinned fleshmancy horrors storm the streets of the sprawling surface. Matt remotely assaults the monstrosities by channeling both his and Ed’s hyper powers, assisting the city’s defense forces. A capital ship’s primary cannon destroys the last powerful creature. The ship, called the Crush, is commanded by Een’s old friend, Admiral Dell Marrs. He invites them to board his vessel after Een tells him they know what caused the attack of the fleshmancy horrors.
- After debriefing with Marrs aboard the Crush, Ed and Fern realize they have a way to track down where to find the distribution center of the kliost narcotics. A journalist named Cassandra Von Salvos has connections with the criminal world in Lan Thedin, and she’ll help them in exchange for an exit interview with them to supplement the documentary she made about them a few years earlier. It made them look dangerous. And many people inside and outside of New Grelland are uneasy around them after she released it.
- Candice saps the will of the local Dirge boss with her Draqu parasitic powers, though she doesn’t admit this to Harry and Xax. She compels her victim to take them to the main base of operations, the Roar nightclub, where they’ll meet the leader of the Lan Thedin operation, Dirker.
- Ed and Fernallus have separate video-call interviews with Cassandra. With Ed, she makes it know that she found out about the circumstances of his mother’s death years earlier when Kindra Shalai died protecting him from a Demon named Heathren. Cassandra also suggests Kindra’s last word, “Vengeance”, compels him to track down and kill Heathren. He isn’t sure. She doesn’t believe him and calls him dangerous. Cassandra implies he’s too powerful to be trusted. Ed says he was trained to be better and falls back to the Burnhelt family motto: “Do what is hard.” Following the interview’s conclusion, Cassandra provides the location in the Under City and the name of her contact who would know how to find the distribution center of the kliost-laced narcotics.
- Ed’s group goes to the Under City with Marrs’s clearance and one of his marine subordinates, Slader. They establish a safe house near the location of Cassandra’s contact. Fernallus, Tamona, and Een approach it, while Ed, Matt, Faith, and Slader stay in reserve at the safe house. Fernallus coerces the contact into joining him just as more grey, slithering Kliost horrors press on them from all adjoining streets. Ed and Matt suddenly collapse before they can help, drained of vitality as more horrors creep toward them and Slader has to hold them off, while Faith attends to them. Faith is actually a traitor agent of Corsis in their midst and a Draqu.
- But before she can act further, both she and Ed experience a time dilated vision with Tamona pairing her Perceptia hyper power with Ed’s accelerated senses. The vision reveals all of Faith’s duplicity throughout the story and prior to it, including her emergence from Matt’s mind through a mirror years ago, and her mother implanting her as an ectoplasmic larva in Matt’s sleeping head as a child. Faith emerges from the stupor, with Ed’s speed fast wearing off from her. She knows she’ll be unable to fend off all of them, so she withdraws to link up with Corsis and Hekati’s agents in the Dirge, and vows that she will reunite with Matt, whether he wants it or not. Ed recovers after she leaves, and the remainder of the team takes the contact from the hostilities. They retreat to the Crush to figure out what to do next.
- Harry and Xax have an initiation tournament fight in their Demon disguises with Candice vouching for them to Dirker. After winning, they gain access to the Roar. In a private suite, Xax determines that the three of them now trust each other enough and he invokes the Unsaid Rule. He tells them of Corsis and the Game’s Rules. All of their current problems are part of it. Candice reveals Corsis and Hekati coerced her into working with them, but says she’s switching sides. Xax accepts this and tells Harry he needs to decide where he stands with the Alliance, because all of them suspect the empire intentionally colluded to release the kliost narcotics in Findenton. With Corsis’s influence.
- In a private room on the Crush, Tamona also invokes the Unsaid Rule, and also reveals the Game’s Rules. She learned of the Game on her own from sensing it from others’ thoughts with her Perceptia. Corsis is the unknown assailant with the vendetta against Burnhelt romances. She thinks Faith has been working with Corsis the whole time. Cassandra’s contact reveals the hub of the kliost distribution is in the Roar. Ed’s group joins Marrs’s marine teams and the admiral himself in a robot suit, as they prepare to raid the Roar.
- Candice meets with Faith, her sister by the same Draqu mother, Crimsa, under the pretense of being on Corsis’s side. While she does this, Harry and Xax are coerced into attending a banquet at the below-ground, lowest level of the Roar. At Corsis and Hekati’s direction, Dirker intends to have Harry eat much of the kliost-laced entrees. This sets off Xax, who is done playing along with the charade. He starts a massive brawl, where Harry kills Dirker and takes the dead boss’s whip that feels strangely familiar in his grasp. Ed’s group shows up in the marines’ vanguard just as Corsis as Svithe and Garland also enter the scene along with Faith and a powerful fleshmancy avatar of Hekati.
- Corsis as Svithe creates a time hole around him and Garland that ensnares Ed, Harry, and Matt. They engage in a tense and opaque conversation about the Game and Corsis’s plans for them in it. He also reveals that Harry is the Arms Master, and he’s surprised Xax didn’t already tell him that. Ed and Matt attack their adversaries. Matt gets Corsis into an energy-exchange stalemate while Garland breaks Ed’s leg. Harry fends off Garland with his whip, which can inflict agony on anyone it strikes, regardless of their armor or innate durability. Before the situation can devolve further, Xax penetrates into the Time Hole with his own depleted Irreality attacks and brings it back into the time stream. The combined factions of Ed and Harry’s groups retreat out of the Roar. Meve, who’s been communicating with Harry the whole time, tells them he’ll meet them in the Rig outside the complex. Meve had already navigated through the corridors from the surface level.
- In the wake of Ed and Harry’s teams’ retreat, Svithe and Garland must withdraw to deal with the escalating situation in Sufrinzon with the second book’s climax. Corsis’s Lizard Proxym will take the active role in the events already unfolding in Findenton, while Faith and Hekati’s avatar pursue the retreating New Players.
- In a momentary lull, Ed’s leg fast heals. He then has an intense first meeting with Candice where he see’s her tattered soul with his hyper powers, and she knows he saw it. They have no time to sort that out before Hekati’s avatar and Faith emerge from the shelled out Roar.
- In the ensuing two-way fight, Matt confronts Faith and disintegrates her into dust, but instead of dying, her immaterial spirit returns to her spawning ground, his mind. This completely wrecks Matt. He’s unable to think straight with rattling around his thoughts. Ed fights Hekati to a standstill with Xax, Harry, and Meve on the Rig. They burn off the front of her head. She unleashes a final attack at Harry, which he dodges, but destroys the Rig and kills Meve. The dispirited Harry needs to get back to Findenton to find out what’s happening without Meve’s comlink to Shelocke. Candice takes Harry and Xax back through the Shade Lands fast travel route while the rest of Ed’s group has a debriefing with Marrs that’s full of half truths. They need to get Matt help, then meet up with Harry’s group in Findenton.
- Een stays with Matt aboard a Grellish sky cit, the Argot, and uses a combination of her Perceptia and Al’laan to help Matt fend off Faith’s encroachment in his mind. Ed, Fernallus, and Tamona take the hypersonic transport to go help Harry’s group in Findenton, knowing they’re on their own, as the Grells won’t be able to join them without risking a hostile response from the local defenders. They arrive and encounter the Hobger army, which is merely watching the chaos unfold within Findenton. They do not intend to intervene.
- Harry reunites with Shelocke, who’s been rallying the defenders with Rebecca Jeem serving as a medic. Ed’s group joins them. They learn that the Holy Alliance plans to kill half the population of Findenton, and use the resulting ethereal life force energy to tear open a permanent Realm Gate connected to Sufrinzon, where a partnering army will use Findenton as a beachhead to assist in the invasion of west Jeea. Half of Findenton’s population has not yet died, but the combined New Players must act quickly. Ed, Xax, and Tamona perform reconnaissance on the site where the portal is open to light, but not yet to matter. Harry and the rest must stage a counterattack to protect the rest city and beat back the grey-skinned fleshmancy horrors.
- Tamona provides Xax and Ed with Perceptia-based intelligence and they encounter Corsis as the Lizard. Following another antagonistic discussion, Ed fights the Lizard while Xax disrupts the Realm Gate. Corsis burns much of Ed’s body, but Ed punctures him with his sword, which ruptures the Irreality within him. Ed shoves the Lizard into the Realm Gate’s borders as he claws the side of Ed’s face. The Irreal Flare annihilates the Lizard and goes off on the Sufrinzon side. Ed fast heals the burn damage to his skin, but the scar from the Lizard’s claws remains on his cheek and burns when he uses his hyper powers.
- Ed, Xax, and Tamona head back to Harry, Fernallus, Shelocke, Candice, and their harried security forces. Hekati, who arrived on the scene in person in a gold-plated cyborg body, has shredded through much of their defenses and severely damages Harry’s Grey Jack armor. After a series of combination attacks from Ed and Harry, Candice lands the killing blow and absorbs Hekati’s life force. The Draqu plucks out one of the goddess’s eyes and popping like a cocktail cherry as Hekati crumbles to dust, which unnerves all present.
- The fleshmancy horrors still remain, and the collected New Players are too spent to mount a defense to take back the city. Harry has Ed take him to the Hobger leader. Harry surrenders the city to the Hobgers if they agree to root out all remaining transformed citizens. The Hobgers agree, and Harry officially defects from the Holy Alliance to the Free Jeea Coalition, and specifically to Ed’s group.
- Xax tells Harry that he is indeed the new Arms Master of Vurg, God of Protection. Xax was friends with the prior Arms Master a century earlier. Candice tells Ed that she’ll help his brother, but he must first promise to “save her”. She doesn’t specify from who or what. Ed is both cautious and bemused, but he ultimately agrees. Candice shows Matt how to use his powers to trap her in a Realm of Thought crystalline material: quazium. Matt freezes Faith in a block of it. He can now recover, but he must be careful she doesn’t find a way to escape.
- The book ends as the New Players gird themselves from the looming invasion from the Holy Alliance. And Bennet also lets them know that its leader, Czar Balpors, is also a Proxym of Corsis. And Hekati respawns in a cloning vat as Corsis returns from Sufrinzon and his loss to Ashe and Avril in the Brigands. Hekati tells him to put aside the Svithe identity, and she gives him new black-and-gold attire. They both intend to torment all the Players who tread in Trojis.
Want to read more recaps? Tap here for the Book 3.5: The New Players: Origins Recap.
