Chris Huisjen posts
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Stormblade 3 C38: Guild Work (3)
38 - Guild Work (3)Jessie sat in a comfy chair, curled into a ball, her phone on speaker in her lap. No one else was around in the Desert Wind’s library—or the rest of the building, for that matter—and she could be as loud as she wanted. She couldn’t say what she wanted until she got off this stupid call, but it wasn’t like some GC rep was going to come down on her if she talked too loudly.“Yes, I understand that my guild members violated both direct orders to stand down and standing protocol about…Look, I know I sound sixteen. It...
Stormblade 3 C37: Guild Work (2)
37 - Guild Work (2)“Construct portal?” Ellen asked as we poked around the brass-and-silk machines outside the 303 Wall’s west gate.There were almost certainly more of them. The group was too small to break through, and where there were a few monsters, there were always more. I kept my sword at the ready. Stormsong felt light in my hand, and my Mana surged inside of me. So did the battle trance I hadn’t quite shaken off; I wanted to fight something else.“You’re not sure?” Yasmin asked.“No, I’m not sure at all. I’ve never seen...
Stormblade 3 C36: Guild Work (1)
36 - Guild Work (1)Ellen’s match was the next morning.I watched the screen, along with hundreds of other people. My attention was all on Ellen as she navigated a three-dimensional maze of Lithic platforms over a field of lava, searching for the archer. Meanwhile, arrows rained down on her, and she had to use Shadestep and Black Hole—a new, B-Rank spell—to warp the volleys away from her.I wasn’t nervous for Ellen—but I was concerned about the Lithic portal they were fighting in, and how Ellen would handle it.Sennie Quintana was a C-Ran...
Stormblade 3 C35: Logan Fritch
35 - Logan FritchWhen the Fallen Delver’s Tournament started, all I could do was watch outside. The portal—and the arena built inside—were space-limited. Three GC delvers stood guard around the edges of the steel room. The Spark of Life, Sarah Cullman, watched from the edge of the sparring room. And then there were the two combatants.Six people in at a time. That was all.Jeff, Ellen, and I sat in Deimos, a hundred yards from the stairs leading down to the underground portal. The courtyard around the memorial was packed, even this early in...
Stormblade 3 C34: Politics is a Continuation of War by Other Means
34 - Politics is a Continuation of War by Other MeansWhile her brother, Ellen, and Jeff spent time studying their first-round opponents’ fighting styles, skills, and tendencies—not to mention sparring in the Desert Wind Guild’s training room—Jessie had other things on her mind. School, for one.Her recent brush with Phoenix’s civilian government had given her a new appreciation for her Civics class. She still didn’t believe that the mayor or City Council had any actual power. The GC’s to-secret archives were crammed full of evidenc...
Stormblade 3 C33: Registration
33 - RegistrationThe Fallen Delvers Memorial threw blue light up into the evening air as Ellen, Jeff, and I opened Deimos’s doors. The clean-up and restoration of our new headquarters was taking longer than expected, and the three of us needed to sign up now or lose our chance at signing up at all. Yasmin and Jessie were back at base, making sure the cleanup finished on schedule. The deep-cleaners, especially, seemed frustrated by their lack of progress, and I could only feel for them.Apparently, they’d been held up by a stink in the sparri...
Stormblade 3 C32: Home (2)
32 - Home (2)Ellen wasn’t planning on spending much time in her own room.But it was still her room. Not the one she’d grown up in at the Traynor manor. Not the hotel room she’d rented, or Kade’s couch or bed at his apartment. Her space. No one else’s. Just hers.It wasn’t as dusty as she’d expected, either, although it was empty. That was fine. She’d spent far too much money on furnishings in the last few hours, in between driving Jessie and Kade around and helping them with their errands.Even just driving Deimos was different. S...
Stormblade 3 C31: Home (1)
31 - Home (1)Deimos cruised toward a fortress of concrete and steel on the west side of Phoenix, Ellen’s hands on the wheel. She swerved, and the car swerved with her, around a city bus. Then she braked. I gripped the panic handle tightly. “Daddy…Bob…never let me drive Deimos. It was always autopilot. Now I see why,” she said as we drifted into a parking spot outside of the Portal Tyrant’s building.The towering castle faced north, into the Wickenberg Portal Break and Surprise. We stepped inside, Ellen’s purse banging on her hip an...
Stormblade 3 C30: Dividends (4)
30 - Dividends (4)Kade: Hi, Sophia. Can I talk to Ellen?Sophia: Doesn’t she have her phone?Kade: Not tonight. Hand me over.Sophia: Hi, Kade. It’s Ellen. Did it work?Kade: It worked. I’m on my way. We’re on our way.Sophia’s room didn’t have a TV. The healer’s phone was internet-disabled—a condition the hospital she was in imposed on all phones in its rooms. She could text, and she could call, but that was it. The idea was that she was supposed to focus on herself, not on everyone—and everything—else.Ellen could see how that m...
Stormblade 3 C29: Dividends (3)
Author's Note (Statistical Oopsie): Hello. There is a very reasonable chance that, in the "Aura" chapters, I accidentally depowered Kade's skills from C-Rank to D-Rank in his stat block. This was 100% unintentional, and they should have moved in the other direction. That has been corrected in the master text file. Oopsie. 29 - Dividends (3)Ellen hated the plan.Partially, she hated it because, for all that it put Bob in check, it wasn’t final. He had moves he could make. Ways to maneuver himself out of Kade’s sister’s trap....
Stormblade 3 C28: Dividends (2)
28 - Dividends (2)Jessie hated to admit it, but Kade had been right.If she’d had it her way, she’d have dropped out of school the second she got her GC rep job. She didn’t need it. It was a waste of her time, and she knew how the world really worked thanks to her trip into the GC’s inner archives. It’d be better for her to climb the Governing Council’s ranks, take a seat on their council, and gain power that way. Or, even better, to run her own guild. That was attainable.Civics had felt like the biggest waste of time out of every cl...
Stormblade 3 C27: Dividends (1)
27 - Dividends (1)Ophelia St. Vrain didn’t understand people. She never had. It had always been a weakness of hers. They were just so confusing. Saying one thing, doing another. Not like her. She was always honest. If she told someone she’d lie for them, she’d lie for them. If she told someone she’d tell the truth, she’d tell the truth. Somehow, though, that hadn’t made her many friends.She definitely didn’t understand her employer or his daughter. They both claimed to hate the other one, or to view each other as tools and obstacl...
Stormblade 3 C26: Spellcraft
26 - Spellcraft“Think she’ll be okay?” Ellen asked.Deimos was idling outside the GC Headquarters building. We’d just dropped Sophia off there; she’d burned herself down to nothing trying to save the first team’s survivors. There’d been three—half the team. Two of them were in the same hospital Jessie had therapy at, while the last one had been airlifted to the GC’s own facility here at the headquarters. A-Rank healers had him under control now.But Sophia had broken. That night, she’d collapsed on my couch and been absolutely...
Stormblade 3 C25: Aura (4)
25 - Aura (4)Jeff was happy for Kade.He wouldn’t lie to his best friend. Not about that.But he was also frustrated. He’d had a long talk with his mom and dad, then another, and then dinner with them. And they’d—very, very gently—told him that he’d chosen this consequence. That he’d known what he was getting into. That they loved him, and they forgave him.It was at that dinner—a chicken salad drowning in raspberry vinaigrette, toasted garlic bread, and a light red sauce over noodles—that Jeff finally started snapping out of it....
Stormblade 3 C24: Aura (3)
24 - Aura (3)Two days later, Ellen, Jeff, and the rest of our team stood outside of a red, B-Rank portal, waiting. We’d gotten there second, and that made us the backup team. The initial team had done something we’d never thought about, though, and it was brilliant. They’d sent a member out after confirming that it wasn’t a trap to tell the GC what type of portal they were up against. That meant we knew what to expect, more or less. And what to expect was a Lithic world.It was such a basic move, and I’d never even considered it. Thirt...
Stormblade 3 C23: Aura (2)
23 - Aura (2)Compared to my C-Rank consolidation—the grinding, five-Laws-and-a-consolidation push that had started my core’s fracturing—this was going well.Really well.I felt great, and even as I dropped into my lotus position and closed my eyes, my core wasn’t sending pain signals. Five Laws—plus the two I’d already consolidated to get this far—and there was hardly any pressure. The reforged core wasn’t just doing as well as my original one. It was outperforming it on every level.There wasn’t time for a status check, though, ...
Stormblade 3 C22: Aura (1)
22 - Aura (1)“Why’d you just give up?” Jessie asked me from her blanket nest.I stared at her. “What do you mean? That was Deborah Callahan. The real question isn’t why I gave up. It’s why she was even there. She shouldn’t have been anywhere near that portal.”“You think she was there for you?” Jessie asked. “I don’t know. That seems far-fetched. It’s a high-rank portal breaking in the middle of Phoenix, near her guild’s territory. Of course she’s going to be interested. Why do you think she was there for you?”“B...
Stormblade 3 C21: Annuities (3)
21 - Annuities (3)Jessie was a hundred yards from the portal when it broke.Time-out breaks were uncommon, but the Governing Council still had a procedure for them. Her training took over. As the red portal began to spin and vibrate, Jessie ran. She needed to be at least two hundred yards away in the next minute and twenty-three seconds, because they had exactly that long before monsters started appearing.The first monsters would be any that were near the portal. Breaks always prioritized those ones. But after that, it’d start grabbing monster...
Stormblade 3 C20: Annuities (2)
20 - Annuities (2)Shit was fucked.As leader of the Roadrunners, Deborah Callahan got reports on every upper-Rank portal that appeared in Phoenix, in addition to sitting on the Inner Council. Every B-Rank, A-Rank, or God forbid, S-Rank portal came in on her phone and the computer screen in front of her.So did the teams delving into them.And so, three hours forty-five minutes ago, Deborah Callahan had received a message that told her, beyond any possibility of denial, that shit was definitely fucked.Kade Noelstra was C-Rank again. And he was insi...
Stormblade 3 C19: Annuities (1)
19 - Annuities (1)Eighteen years ago, Eleanor Traynor had been a toddler, and the Traynor Corporation had been a newborn idea in Robert Traynor’s head.He’d invested his life savings into both of his girls, into making sure his daughter had exactly the education she’d need to keep his company alive, and into making sure the company would be worth inheriting when the time came.It had started with construction and demolition. After the Portal Blitz, Phoenix was in ruins. The rubble of the city needed to be taken away and put into massive sto...
Stormblade 3 C18: Alias (2)
18 - Alias (2)As Ellen and I sprinted out the front door, I searched for the portal. If we could find it, we could get inside and start clearing it—or at least securing it for a proper team. The sooner it went down, the sooner the situation outside could clear out.I didn’t expect to find it, and I wasn’t disappointed. I did find Carter, though. He stood next to Deimos, staring at the car as it idled on the sidewalk where Ellen had summoned it. “This yours?”“Yes,” Ellen ground out between clenched teeth.“Will it get us to the bre...
Stormblade 3 C17: Alias (1)
17 - Alias (1)Power surged through Ellen as she started casting Shadow Shapes. Her mind cranked into overdrive. Details pushed into her thoughts, then were discarded.Kade had shoved her to the side and jolted the wheelchair. Jessie was awake; her head pivoted around as she tried to get her bearings. The hooded figure stood behind Ellen’s favorite chair. Everything else in the apartment was the way it always was. But the intruder was inside.Kade moved. A handful of air darts filled his hand.The man in the apartment didn’t move. He stood ther...
Stormblade 3 C16: Family Matters
16 - Family MattersGoing public with what we knew about core breaks was one thing. I was all for that. It was probably the right thing to do; the information was buried in the public GC archives, but while some delvers were aware of it, it wasn’t common knowledge. Most delvers never advanced even close to fast enough to get the warning. But the risk was there, and delvers needed to know about it—especially the Traynor delvers.But Ellen didn’t want to stop there. She wanted to implicate Bob—not the Traynor Corporation, but Bob—in a cov...
Stormblade 3 C15: Investment (3)
15 - Investment (3)“Yeah, it’s fine,” Ophelia said. She stared past us at the two suited delvers, eyes empty. Completely empty. The lie came out perfectly, emotionless and without any tells—or anything else. It was just words.The Fritch twins looked at Ellen, then at me. I had Tallas’s Dueling Blade in one hand and armor on. Ellen was obviously mid-cast. And Ophelia had definitely just used her magic. Things were not fine in the hallway.But before I could make a move, Ophelia kept talking. “Eleanor, you don’t want this scene. Not ...
Stormblade 3 C14: Investment (2)
14 - Investment (2)There was a storm outside—a rare Phoenix rainstorm. The thunder was a low rumble through the Traynor building’s walls and the thick glass window, but the rain ran down the glass diagonally from the wind. It almost matched the storm inside my core.I stared at Bob from across the desk as he stood up and pushed his chair in. “Let’s move somewhere more comfortable. We have a lot to discuss about your futures.”Before I could stop her, Ellen was also standing and moving toward the twin couches. I got to my feet and grabbe...
Stormblade 3 C13: Investment (1)
13 - Investment (1)Ellen had garbed herself for battle.Light blue dress—a touch more formal than expected at a ‘casual’ cocktail party like this, but not black-tie formal, either—to hide her shorts and workout top below. A necklace and bracelet with quick releases, non-dangling earrings, and flats, not heels. And her hip pouch, where she carried the few items she’d need for delving.She wasn’t here, at the Traynor Corporation Headquarters, to delve. But she hadn’t been invited to this party, and neither had Kade, Jessie, and Stephe...
Stormblade 3 C12: Breaking the Storm
12 - Breaking the StormI was so back.And Ellen was so strong. She hadn’t broken a sweat the whole time we’d been working out. Even as a mage, C-Rank weights and my maximum speed didn’t push her the way she wanted to be. And then there’d been the sparring. I hadn’t won a single time. Her rank was just too high for me to compete; it felt like fighting the hobgoblins back when I’d been an E-Rank support. Granted, I had a lot more options, but trying to get close to Ellen was all but impossible.The shadow mage’s aura was an ace in the...
Stormblade 3 C11: Guild (2)
11 - Guild (2)I’d said Carter Richards was poison. That he’d rot Deborah Callahan from the inside.But I’d been wrong. He was poison. A mess of a person. Dangerous to everyone he touched because of his ambition and his self-importance. I read through his letter for the seventh time as I rode the bus out to the Portal Tyrants’ main guild hall. But he’d figured out a way to redirect his poison away from Deborah and back toward me.The letter was very clear about what he’d done. It laid out everything Caleb Richter had done in excruciati...
Stormblade 3 C10: Guild (1)
10 - Guild (1)The next morning—or as close to it as we could get—the five of us sat around my living room. Jeff had cleared off his couch, and he and Yasmin had occupied it. Ellen had her chair secured. And Jessie and I had pulled up blankets and a kitchen stool, respectively.Jessie started us off. “Before we get into…whatever happened last night, I’ve got more important stuff to say. Three things, actually. First, the ledger you two brought back from that portal world is impossible to translate. I know. I’ve tried.”“You’re al...
Stormblade 3 C9: Coat-Tails
9 - Coat-tailsI stood in front of a mirror in the fanciest bathroom I’d ever set foot in. The shower and tub were separate, and in separate rooms from the sink and toilet. I stared at myself, and I didn’t recognize who I saw.A gray—Ellen insisted it was charcoal—suit jacket. Pants somewhere between khaki and brown, mismatched with the jacket in a way she said was cool. A button-up dress shirt and a thin, striped tie. Leather shoes that clicked softly against the floor when I walked. Everything fit perfectly; a few minutes with the tailo...
