Roswell was, by far, the creepiest place I'd ever been.

We stopped the truck on the highway that ran through it; Jeff didn't want to risk getting it stuck in one of the side roads, and we all wanted to be able to move and protect ourselves. But by the time he found a spot he felt good about and we piled out onto the dirt-caked asphalt, we'd already seen over a dozen things that could have been portal monsters.

Could have been, but weren't.

Some of them were statues. Others were decayed rubber blow-up balloons. And still others stared at us with wide, vacant eyes from behind cracked and dust-covered windows. They came in grays and greens that reminded me of the goblinoids we'd fought. Sophia shivered.

Jeff laughed. "Yeah, Roswell. Aliens from outer space. Government conspiracies. We're after a radio tower. Shouldn't be too hard to find one here."

I summoned Tallas's Dueling Blade, then added Cheddar to the team. As she pulled herself out of the truck, Ellen did the same thing; Pepperoni appeared in a burst of thunder and lightning.

As for Cheddar…

I hadn't gotten the chance to see how he'd changed at C-Rank. The skill that empowered him had shifted from Sunbeam Bond to Stormlight Bond, and I was hoping that'd bring him closer to what Pepperoni was. She was a winged serpent made of thunder, storm clouds, and wind—a perfect match for me.

Cheddar was, too, in a way. His body seemed to have clouded over—the hostile, outright aggressive black clouds of a dry thunderstorm. Every scale was a gray darker than portal metal, but the membranes between his wings' bones glowed an almost incandescent white. That same bright white light poured from between his jaws as he opened them, screaming at Pepperoni, who howled back.

Lightning sparked from his eyes. He glared at her and screamed again. I rolled my eyes. "Sorry about that, Ellen."

"It's fine. Pets are like that."

I sent Cheddar a mental wave of emotions. First, that Pepperoni was a friend. Then, that he needed to protect her, and she'd do the same for him. And then, finally, an image of the fallen radio tower from Capitan, accompanied by overwhelming curiosity.

Cheddar screeched a third time, then took off. Light trailed behind him for a moment as he rocketed upward, Pepperoni following. "Okay, scouts deployed," I said. "Let's get moving ourselves."

We pushed into the city, following the direction Cheddar had taken off. I'd expected Roswell to be a small town—or at least to feel that way—but it didn't. It certainly wasn't Phoenix, or even Tucson, but it sprawled in its own dusty, decaying way. Buildings towered overhead. Not skyscrapers, sure, but respectably-sized apartments and offices.

And aliens. Dozens and dozens of them. Painted on the walls, hanging from windows, and standing watch over roundabouts. They were everywhere. I hated it, and I wasn't the only one. I could smell the stress sweat coming off Sophia.

The first monster was a black-armored knight, covered in Scripts. The moment I saw him, I relaxed. His presence meant that every alien in Roswell was no longer a threat. We weren't after thin, gray men. We were after medieval soldiers.

Dark Citadel Vanguard: C-Rank

Not that he'd been an easy target—especially backed up by a half-dozen of the Guardian suits of armor we'd fought in the portal where Carter had ambushed us.

I had a moment to think as the knights charged, halberds and shields at the ready. What was Carter up to? I'd half expected him to be here, with the convoy expedition. Instead, he hadn't showed, and Deborah was effectively alone. That wasn't like her. And it hadn't been like him, either.

He'd been many things. Treacherous, vengeful, angry, and confused. But the few times I'd talked to him, he'd seemed…loyal? Loyal to the people he considered to be his. It wasn't like him to bail on his teammates, even if it meant working with someone like Deborah. And he was perfect for her. I'd said that they'd poison each other. But if he wasn't here, then I'd been wrong.

And then the Dark Citadel knights hit us, and I didn't have time to think about anything except fighting.

Jeff taunted the knights as I worked on flanking the big, C-Ranked one. The dueling blade lashed out; the last time I'd cut into one of these, its armor had held. This time, it didn't part like butter, but it did part—a little. On a long enough time scale, I'd win without my Charge powers, and a single electrical orb revolved around the blade's tip. I followed up my slash with a quick thrust—enough to punch a thin hole in the plate.

Then I waited. I shifted stances as the big knight turned away from Jeff. He had half a dozen of the weaker ones already; every time they smashed into his shield, he backstepped to reduce the impact.

I recognized what he was doing. Buying me space. And I was going to use it. As the Vanguard's halberd cut toward me, I brought my blade up for a parry. The haldberd seemed to shimmer and split, and my sword blocked the mirrored image of the armor's weapon.

The other one cut into my side, deep enough to send massive waves of pain even through my Stamina. I braced myself for the slow, slow healing process.

Then Sophia's hand was on my side. Her fingers dug into my kidney, and I felt it repair in a fresh wave of unmitigatable agony. But it was on the way to recovery.

As thanks, I shoved her. Violently.

She hit the ground ten feet away, rolled, and stared at the halberd that was stuck in the asphalt where she'd been standing. My danger sense had flared, and I'd done the only thing I could. Her arm was bleeding where the road had shredded it.

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I didn't care. I was too busy parrying again—this time, the correct halberd and not the shadow one.

Then I shifted back to Thunderbolt Forms. The knight reached into a pouch and grabbed something. A sheet of paper. A Script.

Before he could use it, I launched into a series of lunges. The first consumed both Lightning Charges to accelerate me with Thunderblade. My second attack followed almost instantly, a Rain-Slicked Blade that punched through the knight's breastplate and out the other side. Then a third and fourth, all in the time it took the Script to hit the ground next to him.

But it did hit the ground. And it did activate. Darkness fell across the battlefield; he'd laid a trap, and I'd been too close to avoid it. I couldn't see.

He could, though.

My danger sense lit up in front of me, and I threw myself backward as the halberd's spear-tip punched through the space my skull had just been in. Then I rolled. The axe blade sliced into the street, and I tried to land a cut. I hit something, but the angle was bad, and electricity sparked across the knight's plate. Blow after blow rained down around me, and it was all I could do to stay intact when I couldn't see my enemy.

Desperation filled me. My build wasn't designed for this; other than the danger sense part of Mistwalk Forms, I had nothing to help me if I couldn't see. The knight had no such problem. I took cuts that stung and burned as I backpedaled, but I couldn't get out of the trap. And I couldn't see. I couldn't see.

Then, suddenly, the trap was gone.

In its place was a beam of almost liquid light. Lightning crackled around the edges of the sunbeam as it poured down from above. A split-second later, it went black and cloudy, and then Cheddar appeared.

I hadn't realized it, but he'd gotten bigger. He'd always been long, but he'd put on an extra couple of feet, and almost two inches in diameter at his widest point. And all six feet of snake and beating, sun-drenched wings were wrapped around the knight's weapon arm.

As Cheddar attacked, the knight struggled. His jaws ripped into the suit of armor; the plate tore free under his sunlit jaws. He screeched as a pauldron came loose.

And I redoubled my attacks on the armor. Three lunges to the exposed shoulder, then a re-use of Thunderblade, and then another six. The armor stopped. It shook as it turned to try to swing again. And its arm fell off.

A moment later, it was a pile of blackened steel and dark leather straps.

I breathed, then turned to the rest of the fight. But there was no rest of the fight. Ellen and Jeff had handled the D-Rank armors with no problems; a half-dozen piles of steel were all that was left.

"Well, that was fun to watch," Yasmin said. She stuck out a hand and helped Sophia to her feet. The healer shook a little as her scrapes slowly healed. She stared at me, and Yasmin laughed. "Kade's a monster. I was never worried."

I snorted. But I'd been worried, even if our support hadn't been.

Pepperoni wasn't as fast as Cheddar, so she'd continued scouting during our fight. And according to Ellen, she'd found something. We followed her—the mage, not the familiar—as she used her emotional bond to close in on Pepperoni. For all that Cheddar was a combat beast now, I had a feeling that Ellen's bond with her familiar was stronger than mine with the Stormlight Serpent.

Roswell continued to be a mess. After twenty years, buildings had come down. Not all of them, but enough to block streets. We found ourselves funneled along a roundabout path that led us toward Pepperoni, but just as often forced us away from the circling familiar. Even when I asked Cheddar to look for quicker routes, it didn't help. The city was too much of a mess for him to decipher from the air. And worse, there were other bands of knights.

The second encounter with them played out like the first, but much more smoothly. We were all ready for the two C-Ranked Vanguards to do their things, and we'd talked about strategies to beat them quickly. It all came down to Ellen's shadow magic; it didn't counter the darkness Scripts, but it did take advantage of them. Two vaporized suits of armor later, we were on our way.

After that, they were little more than increasingly frequent speed bumps.

"So, strategically, the knights must be protecting their portal, right?" Jeff asked as we mopped up our fifth patrol.

"Yes, but that's not what Pepperoni's seeing. She's got a visual on the radio tower—or what's left of it," Ellen said. "It's down, just like the other one, and the whole area around it's crawling with knights and packed full of Scripts. From what I'm seeing, it's not looking good."

"Do we back off, then?" Yasmin asked. "We've figured out what we need to know—there's only C-Rank monsters here, and the convoy should be good to move in."

"Yes," Sophia said.

"No," I said at the same time.

She stared at me. So did Yasmin. After a second, the support's stare shifted into a scowl. "Kade, you're always looking for another fight, but even so, we're a scout party, not a clearing team. All we have to do is tell the strike team what's here, and they can pull up and clear the city out quickly enough for the convoy to be safe. That's all we have to do."

"You're right, Yasmin," I said. "But I don't think this is all that's going on. We're not done with our investigation. Not yet. I want to see that radio tower with my own eyes, and then I want to confirm that the C-Rank portal is C-Rank, and that it's a Dark Citadel world, not something else."

"They're Dark Citadel knights, using scripts. What else would they be?" Yasmin asked.

"Something about them is rubbing me the wrong way. I don't know what it is. Just call it a hunch."

Yasmin's glare only intensified. Then she threw her hands up. "Fine. Fine, we'll poke around and see what we can find. But there's not going to be anything else here, Kade."

"I hope you're right," I muttered.

We cut through an office building, fought a single D-Ranked knight, and emerged—finally—into a wide, open courtyard. A four-legged metal tower stood in the center, its top ripped off and shattered on the weed-infested patch of what had once been grass. It had flattened a gazebo on its way down.

I peered out into the almost-empty field. Then, a pair of the C-Ranked knights walked by, dragging something behind them. It took me almost fifteen seconds to figure out what it was—and Ellen beat me to it. Her hand pressed on my shoulder as I tensed.

"That's one of the monsters that attacked the convoy," she whispered.

The walking suits of armor stopped. One of them looked around for a moment, and I dragged Ellen down behind the overgrown sagebrush. Then we waited until the monsters started moving again.

Both suits of armor moved with purpose, while the monster they were dragging didn't move at all. It looked shredded, crushed, and broken; I had no idea what they were doing with it.

They disappeared after a moment, into a yawning building that had once been a car dealership or something. A faint reddish glow came from inside the shadowy entrance.

"That's their portal," I said. "And they've got a B-Rank—or higher—corpse. What are they up to?"

"I have no idea," Yasmin said, "and I still think we should leave this to the strike team."

"I don't," Jeff said.

"Really?"

"Yes, Yazzy, really," Jeff said.

"And not just because—"

"No, not just because. We've got a C-Rank portal that's broken in the path of our convoy. If we go in and clear it, that's less risk the convoy has to take on. Ellen, do you still have radio coverage?" Jeff asked.

Ellen flicked the switch on her walkie-talkie, then shook her head. "No. I think the comm system used the towers, and we're out of range of any that are still upright and too far for a direct link."

"That's what I figured." Jeff stared at the car dealership. It was across the weed-choked courtyard, with a group of D-Rank armor monsters outside of it, and even from here, I spotted a handful of Scripts they'd laid out. Jeff watched for a minute. Then he pointed further down the road. "Let's go that way. We might be able to find a back door."

I took off, leading the way and staying low—and hoping that none of the portal monsters would see us as we started our approach. And overhead, two winged serpents circled the ruined radio tower.

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