“Well, what’s your impression so far, son?” The world of the vision paused, and Zora’s voice rolled from the sky above like a clap of thunder.

  “I think these are interesting people,” James said, speaking off the top of his head without much thought. “The Panther Queen is ruthlessly effective and clearly intelligent. I think that if she wasn’t probably targeting us next, I would like her.”

  “Can you defeat her, though?” she asked. “Forgetting about admiring our enemy for a minute. Can you beat her?”

  “Mom, since the System first appeared, I’ve never seen an opponent I couldn’t kill,” James said. “If her heart beats, I can stop it. If she has a throat, I can cut it. There is nothing in this vision so far that persuades me that she could beat me in a fight. I haven’t seen much of what she’s capable of, of course. But now that I know who I’m fighting, she’s at a disadvantage. And if she makes the mistake of coming onto my territory to fight me, she’d have to have a death wish.”

  He spoke confidently, though he genuinely knew very little about what the Panther Queen could do. What he did know was that she had not single-handedly ended the siege of the law firm building before it had begun. At the very least, she was not a full tier above him in power or the equivalent. So he should be able to figure something out.

  Maybe my thought process here is a little bit influenced by the fact that I’ve never really lost a fight, though. I mean, my first battle with Rostov’s cult hardly counts. That was really more of a practice-match-slash-rescue-mission. I wasn’t the one who wanted things to escalate to violence.

  “What about her army?” his mother asked.

  “Without her, they would collapse,” James said instantly.

  It was a doubt he’d entertained about his own army before. Would they be able to accomplish a serious mission without him present?

  He now had hope that they could, which was why he had dispatched them as an invasion force. But he did not believe that the Panther Queen fostered the same kind of independence in her subordinates that James took for granted in his own.

  “If you’re that confident,” Zora said in a skeptical voice, “I guess you could just run over to wherever she is, snap the boss’s neck, tell the army they’ve been warned, and go about your day. Do make sure to bring back the corpse. I’m sure the Panther Queen would make a tremendous undead.”

  “Okay, I’m not that confident,” James replied. “This is probably mostly projection. I don’t really know what she or her army are capable of. So far, they’re doing mostly the kinds of things my army could definitely do, but that’s because Dean’s choosing not to meet them in the open field. He knows he would get slaughtered. Which is probably what would happen if he and his guys faced my army too. Or even just my wolf pack. Dean’s people are really out of their league facing any organized force, at least as far as I’ve seen so far.”

  Unfortunately reminds me of the Patriots in the Revolutionary War… Doomed to failure without some large-scale help from outside.

  “Let’s continue, then,” his mother said. “Maybe you’ll see something useful.”

  In his mind, James raised an eyebrow. All he imagined he would see was the gradual, grinding destruction of his old law firm’s building, followed by the swift massacre of its occupants. But he supposed his mother had already watched this show before him. She wouldn’t have bothered sharing if there wasn’t anything of value.

  The first-person point of view movie resumed.

  The scout followed the Panther Queen into a thicket of trees, and over the next few minutes, several other fairly stealthy Pantherfolk joined them—including the scout’s mate, the female James had witnessed the scout with in previous days.

  I guess these are all scouts? Maybe they’re the only ones capable of sneaking around effectively enough for whatever the Queen has in mind.

  The stealthy squad emerged at the opposite side of the building from which the Panther Army had begun their frontal assault earlier in the day. As they stepped out from behind cover, there was a loud noise of objects colliding that James recognized as projectiles striking the force field from earlier.

  That’s smart.

  The Queen had apparently coordinated her group’s approach so that it coincided with the loud and distracting attacks from the other side.

  As the sound of the collision began to fade, the handful of Pantherfolk sprinted to the side of the building, minimizing the extent to which their bodies could be seen from the windows. James wondered what they planned to do next, but he needn’t have. The plan was obvious—if it could truly be called a plan, rather than some product of bestial instinct.

  The Pantherfolk extended their claws and dug them into the stone wall of the building. The little blades went in like they were sculpting clay. Then the Pantherfolk were wall-crawling.

  I hope they don’t manage to get into the building this easily, James thought. I won’t learn a thing—

  He cut his thought process short as he felt something different about the Panther Scout’s body. The specific change was hard to identify for a moment, but he finally decided that the aura around it—the aura that marked a piece of the Panther Queen’s territory or property—had thickened in the last minute or so. She was using some ability, perhaps to strengthen her subjects, maybe to enhance the specific Skills they were employing, or alternatively simply to control them.

  James did not have access to the scout’s inner monologue during this flashback, which was frustrating, because he doubted that Whisper was experiencing this enhancement or control or whatever without some commentary on it in his mind—unless he was now being directly controlled, which would also tell James something useful.

  The Pantherfolk reached the roof of the building in less than a minute of climbing. It was not a particularly tall building, but it was impressive that they had done so quietly as well as quickly.

  The Pantherfolk stepped onto the roof and began padding lightly forward, their steps almost but not quite in unison. That detail suggested to James that the Panther Queen was not, in fact, actually directing everyone’s movements at the moment. She might be enhancing them, but she was probably not controlling them.

  They approached a hatch on the roof, which James had never actually seen back when he worked at the firm—since he had never gone up to the attic, let alone to the roof.

  The shell of the Panther Queen’s aura around her body visibly intensified, and the talon that was where her index finger would be if she was human suddenly extended until it was a foot long.

  That’s a nice thing to be able to do on command, James thought.

  Without speaking another word, the Panther Queen jammed her long claw into the space between the hatch and the little door—and it bounced off a small force field, a miniature version of the ones that had deflected the larger projectiles at the front of the building.

  She frowned and tried again, but to the same result.

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  “All right, let’s all go at once,” she said aloud.

  The other Pantherfolk extended their claws, and they began attacking various spots on the roof, trying to claw a hole through the stone of the building—or at least break through the force field.

  James guessed that the Queen must have sent a similar message to the visible members of the besieging force, because out in front of the building, both the drumming and the bombardment intensified.

  And James noticed what he had seen earlier in the day.

  There were many claw strikes all over the roof, to the point that it noticeably shook the forcefield, and these were accompanied by a great escalation in the ground level attacks. As the number of forceful blows increased, the stability of the defense seemed to diminish. James would see the invisible forcefield become visible for a fraction of a second with each time it was invoked. That meant he could see the magic protecting Dean’s fortification growing weaker in real time, as it responded to an overwhelming number and intensity of attackers.

  I thought she was going to win this with attrition, but it’s just the brute force approach. Then again, I guess she kept up the bombardment for hours and then opened up another front and also kept up that damned drumming, because she wanted to wear down whatever Mage is responsible for this forcefield. That’s attrition. And it worked. I was just expecting it to take longer.

  After a minute of this, James realized he had actually underestimated both the Panther Queen and Dean. There was something more going on than just randomly stabbing at the forcefield. It was subtle, which was why it had taken a little time for him to notice, but there was a distinct change happening every time a claw strike made contact with the forcefield.

  Each time, as the claw withdrew, it would pull a small chunk of Mana away with it.

  The barrier isn’t just weakening little by little on its own, he thought. It’s being torn to pieces by those claws…

  James sensed that this effect all had something to do with the Panther Queen’s enhancement, which ultimately traced back to her Dominion and the power she wielded within the places and living beings that she had marked as her territory. He didn’t believe for a second that all of these scouts and the Queen just happened to share a Mana-draining Skill of some sort.

  No, this was all the Queen’s doing, and the others were basically just acting as her appendages. Which meant that when her army fought in close quarters with a force that was actually willing to stand up to them in a face to face fight…

  Hmm. Would they all be able to do this? He could envision his army being attacked and slowly losing energy with every exchange of blows, without understanding why. The thought was scary. But does she have the ability to enhance every soldier under her command this way at the same time, or would that be too much of a strain for her?

  As James contemplated the key question, the forcefield finally died, not with some epic collapse but with the battle equivalent of a whimper.

  The fateful moment came when the Panther Queen’s claw suddenly sheared through the space where the barrier had been, only to collide with empty air. The claw continued forward, unobstructed, and hacked through a corner of the hatch and on into the stone of the roof. The blade left a short gouge where her claw had traced its path.

  The Queen immediately called a halt to the other attacks on random bits of the roof. James thought this was almost certainly because she wanted to keep the building itself as intact as possible for her own future use. Even for someone who liked to be mobile, as the Panther Queen clearly did, a fortification under your control had obvious value.

  As the others in her small squad watched, the Queen raised a paw to swipe down once again at the hatch—she would force their entry into the building once and for all—only for the hatch to pop open with her claws still hanging, ready, inches above.

  Dean was holding onto a ladder below the opening. In the hand he was not using to hold the ladder, he held a t-shirt that he had tied to a short, wooden stick.

  A makeshift white flag, James thought, disheartened. This was all you had, then, Dean?

  “We would like to humbly accept your terms, leader of the panthers,” Dean said in a serious voice. “Please forgive our recalcitrance from earlier—or, if you cannot, please place the blame squarely on my shoulders. My people—”

  “Come on out here and submit properly,” the Panther Queen said.

  James heard a note of arrogant triumph in her voice, but there was something more. He was witnessing all of this from the point of view of the Panther Scout, standing several feet back from the opening into the building, so he could not see the expression of the Queen, who had her back to him, or of his former boss.

  But he could see Dean’s frame poking out from the hatch, and the movements were just off. Inexplicably strange.

  As Dean stepped out onto the roof, James had a direct line of sight at his expression. The man’s eyes looked dead. Not in the sense that he had merely given up hope.

  He’s being mind-controlled, James thought. The Panther Queen has some kind of Skill that can bend people to her Will. Probably required eye contact, like Compulsion, or at least close proximity, or she would have used it when he came out of the building earlier.

  “How do I properly submit?” Dean asked dully.

  “It’s my preference that men kneel when they surrender to me,” the Panther Queen replied. James still could not see her expression, but he could hear a grin in her voice.

  Dean dutifully knelt.

  “We give up,” he said tonelessly. “Please spare my people. We would be happy to join your faction.”

  “Tell me what you can about the powers to your South,” the Queen said. “Give me something I can use, and your people can enjoy the same status as the other non-Pantherfolk who have joined my glorious forces.”

  James felt a strong intuition that the status Dean and his people would experience as the Queen’s servants would be roughly the same as the others who served her, but also that the Panther Queen viewed everyone other than herself as essentially her slave, toys for her to amuse herself with.

  Dean looked noticeably reluctant, even through the haze that had taken hold of him.

  “Please, I don’t,” he murmured, his words almost slurred. “I don’t, I really don’t want to hurt anyone else.”

  “What if you might help them by getting them to surrender to me?” the Queen asked sweetly. “Think about that. If there is some force you are familiar with, they would do well to surrender without fighting, so that I can treat them as gently as I will treat you and yours.”

  Dean’s eyes watered slightly, his lower lip quivered, and he looked like he was going to break down in some distressing way.

  Then he said, “There is a person who calls himself the Fisher King…”

  He told the Panther Queen everything he knew about James post-System-initiation. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. He knew that James had the powers of a Ruler, that James at least had thousands of followers, and that James had his base of operations in the direction that the Panther Queen was curious about—because James had left Dean’s place, leading thousands of Goblins, Mole People, and humans in that very direction, not thinking he would need to misdirect Dean about where the Fisher Kingdom was.

  “Very good,” the Panther Queen said as Dean finished. The man swayed slightly, as if he was exhausted. James wondered if he had been resisting giving more information than he absolutely had to. Considering that there seemed to be mind control at play, he was inclined to say, Yes.

  The Queen turned her head slightly and said, “Whisper, you and Forest will go, set out first thing tomorrow morning to find this Fisher King and his territory. Report back to me once you do. He is likely directly in our path as we seek to reclaim our birthright. It sounds as if he has a large force at his command. Multiple Races, like ours. We might as well know as much as we can before we fight him.” She turned to another member of their squad. “Stone, take our new friend back inside. I will join you momentarily.”

  Dean’s body suddenly jerked and spasmed, as if he was coming out of a trance or entering a seizure.

  “We—we are not just your pawns,” he said with an obvious effort. “You’d better treat us—treat me and my people well. If you mistreat us, we have just as much guts as your Panther—”

  His eyes rolled back in his head slightly, and he stopped talking, mouth still hanging open, motionless.

  Then his expression returned to the same dull look as before.

  “This one might prove difficult to control, Your Keenness,” said one of the squad members who stood near her in a meek tone. “Perhaps we ought to deal with him more permanently, and you can accept the surrender from one of the other—”

  The Queen cut him off with a short, barking laugh.

  “A barking dog never bites,” she said. “It’s the people who most vehemently argue about their rights and how independent they are who you can count on to be the easiest to control. If he was really so determined to keep his independence, he’d have either run or fought, not holed up inside his little fortress and then surrendered as soon as the barrier was down.” She shook her head. “No, mark my words, this one will be easy to control.”

  Then the vision was fading, the world all around James dissolving, until he lay back in his own bed once again.