Luke slowly returned to consciousness, his senses returning to him one at a time. He was laying face down, with his hands bound behind his back. He wasn’t wearing his robes anymore, just a shirt and pants. He felt the cold stone floor beneath him. The sharp tang of iron filled the air and he felt something dripping from his nose. His mouth tasted terrible and dry. There was the distant sound of rain hitting a window. The sounds of a conversation joined it.

  “You’ve got to make him understand. You hired me because I’m a professional. As a professional, I’m telling you that we need to kill him now. It’s the only way we can ensure this doesn’t end in titan shit,” a gruff voice was saying.

  A much younger sounding voice responded. “I told you why we’re waiting. The viscount wants to interrogate him and he’s busy until after the Shuffle. All you have to do is keep him under for another few hours. Besides, I don’t know why you’re scared. Even if he did wake up, there’s two of us. He’s got suppression cuffs on and I have his leg right here. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Are you trying to tempt fate? What if the goddess Mal?ojo was listening? Don’t say shit like that.”

  “Whatever.” There was the sound of something metal hitting the floor. “If you are so worried, hit him again with Knockout.”

  “Each time I use it, it becomes less effective. I need to save it for later if we are going to last until after the Shuffle winds down.”

  The young guy grunted in response and the conversation ended. There was the sound of chairs scraping across flooring. Luke was fully awake now. He felt panic rising, but did his best to shove it back down. The situation seemed grim, but dwelling on his emotions wouldn’t be helpful. He took long slow breaths. He needed to focus if he was going to get out of this alive.

  He vaguely remembered a class, “Dealing with the Unknown”. The three steps were Assess, Plan, and Execute. So, what did he know? He knew that Viscount Osifo was a speciesist bastard that wanted him dead. But he wanted to talk to him first. Probably to gloat or something. Luke had time, at least a few hours, to make his escape.

  He opened his eyes and carefully looked around the room. It was a small closet, with empty shelves. The door was closed, but there was a half inch gap on the bottom so they would hear if he moved around too much. There was a lever instead of a locking rune, so he should be able to open it with a simple push.

  His main obstacles to escape were the cuffs on his wrists, his missing leg, and those two guards. Once he overcame each of those hurdles, he would have to figure out where they were holding him and how to get to safety. He clearly wasn’t in jail or any type of holding facility. This abduction must have been planned last minute. There were bound to be holes in their defenses.

  After assessing his situation, Luke felt calmer. Now he just needed to come up with a plan. The first obstacle was his wrists bound in something they called suppression cuffs. They were large and bulky, reaching from his wrists up to halfway to his elbow. They probably blocked his magic, but just to be sure, he tried to create a Blink Ball in his palm.

  He felt his core charge up and started to send his mana out. As soon as the tendril of magic left his core, it was sucked up into the cuffs. Just as he thought. He tried again, this time trying to make the blink ball appear from his foot so it would avoid his hands. Predictably, that mana was absorbed into the suppression cuffs as well. A check of his stat screen showed that each time he attempted a skill, he lost mana. And it wasn’t regenerating.

  He slumped in defeat. He hadn’t even overcome the first hurdle and he was already stymied. The despair he was trying to hold back surged forward. He was trapped and he was going to die. All because some elvish jerk couldn’t handle a human doing well in a meaningless tournament.

  Damn.

  He felt the crushing weight of inevitability press down on him. What had he been thinking, coming to a new world and expecting things to just turn out well for him? He had known that war was on the horizon, he should never have come here.

  He wallowed in despair for a few minutes before a thought occurred to him. If he gave up, it would mean that Viscount Osifo won. There was no way he was going to let a man-baby like Osifo win. Luke was going to get out of this just to spite him.

  His number one asset right now was being awake. It wouldn’t be long before the guy with the Knockout skill reapplied it. Whatever Luke did, it would have to be soon. He wished he still had his leg so he could bond with it and gain the mental and physical stats that would help him escape.

  Although... maybe he could bond with something else. The suppression cuffs could be considered a machine, if you had an open mind.

  He craned his head to get a look at the restraints. Two large metal cuffs were connected by a central disc, one covered by a variety of runes. He recognized the ones for absorption and two different kinds of power capacitors. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine the rest of the runes had to do with absorbing mana. It was perfect. His mana wasn’t destroyed by the cuffs, it was taken by them.

  Luke centered his mind and focused with everything he had. He slowly drew the rune for machine bond on his core and then reached out. The tendril of mana automatically got sucked up to the suppression cuffs. The hard part was getting that mana to cycle back to his core so the bond would complete.

  The first two attempts were failures. He took a deep breath and tried again. He could do this. He was great at runework, this was just another application. The third time succeeded. The bond immediately did two things. First, it boosted his every stat as the class buff activated. Secondly, it solidified the connection between the cuffs and his core.

  More and more mana was sucked out of him and into the cuffs. Luke commanded the cuffs to open and hastily took his hands out. A check showed that he only had ten points of mana left. Not a lot to work with.

  “Welp. Sounds like the human is waking up. He’s moving around in there. Cover me while I go in,” the gruff voice said.

  “Haven’t you passed your sixth threshold? You are stronger and faster than this guy, quit acting like a gloryless culler.”

  A series of insults followed from the older elf.

  Luke only had a few seconds to come up with a plan. He flipped over onto his back and flailed his stub in the air. He blinked his eyes like he was still waking up. As the door slid into the wall, he mumbled nonsense words.

  “Let’s get you back to sleep, shall we?” the older guy said.

  Now that he could see them, it was the same two burly elves from before. The one with the Knockout touch was reaching for him and the other was leaning up against the wall with a bored look on his face. Luke waited for the first guy to get close and whipped his right arm around, revealing that he was free. He held a Blink Ball in his hand and threw it as fast as he could.

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  It wasn’t fast enough to catch the older thug. His reflexes were just as fast as when he captured Luke in the first place. He dodged out of the way of the gray and violet ball and slammed against the doorway. The spell missed him by inches.

  Exactly as planned. Luke hadn’t been aiming for him, he needed to take the unknown out of the equation first. The Blink Ball hit the young thug in the chest and teleported him twenty feet in a random direction. Which in a building like this one meant that he was out of sight a room or two away. That gave Luke time to take care of Mr. Sandman.

  While the older thug was still getting up from his sudden dodge, Luke threw the suppression cuffs at him. Mr. Sandman dodged instinctively again, perfectly avoiding the thrown bit of runic machinery. Luke suspected now that his reflexes were from a skill or something because he hurt himself by slamming into the wall once more.

  Luke followed it up with a second Blink Ball. This time he aimed it even closer to the guy, on his left side in case the skill automatically made him dodge again. To his delight, it did. Mr. Sandman slammed himself into the wall again and Luke was teleported behind him. He was still on the floor and looked back to see his captor.

  The older thug swore and stepped into the closet, waving his hands near the ground. He must have assumed Luke had turned invisible. A smile blossomed on Luke’s face. Finally, a bit of luck. He reached out with his right hand and slid the door closed. Mr. Sandman whirled around at the sound, a shocked look on his face. He jumped forward just in time to shove his foot in front of the door before it latched.

  He grinned in triumph, having avoided getting locked in the closet. Luke grinned right on back and slammed a Blink Ball onto his foot. The thug’s skill tried to make him dodge, but his foot was trapped between the door and the doorframe. The skill connected and the guy disappeared before he realized what had happened.

  Luke heard a faint shout and looked out a nearby window to see him fall past it. There wasn’t the sound of impact, so they must be fairly high up. Either that or the sound of the mana storm covered it. Rain was coming down in sheets across the crystalline window. Wind blew hard, changing directions often. Multicolored lightning flashed often, not with booming thunder, but with a sharp crack of a whip. The sky was dark so the vibrant display stood out even more.

  He turned away from the window. He needed to get out of here. He searched the ground under the chairs, hoping that they had been lazy. He was fairly sure he had heard the young thug playing with his prosthetic leg. There was a large bag under each chair and his metal leg stuck out from behind one of them. With a sigh of relief, Luke scooched over and grabbed it. The stump sock had been torn and the ankle joint looked broken. They must have had trouble getting it off him after they knocked him out.

  He donned the leg anyway. He seated the prosthetic as best as he could and spun up a machine bond. This time it connected easily and he felt the rush of his buff more than doubling his physical stats. He felt so much better as he hopped up and grabbed his clothes from the bag. It looked like they had torn them in a few places, maybe looking for hidden pockets.

  The magnetic cell phone case had been cracked and torn open. The phone inside had been broken and crunched into several pieces. Luke bit back a groan. He had everything on that, and now it was ruined. He dropped it back into the bag and turned his attention to his leg. He needed to be able to walk if he wanted to get out of here.

  Armor Repair would be perfect if he could convince the skill that his prosthetic was armor. He tilted his head to the side. He wouldn’t have to convince it of anything. It was armor, in the exact same way his power armor was. He even used the same pistons and runes on both when he had made them.

  The skill didn’t want to believe him, but his faith in the definition was unshakable. He pushed hard on the skill with every bit of his buffed mental stats and forced it to repair that ankle joint.

  He sighed in satisfaction when Armor Repair finally saw reason.

  Fighting for his life and stretching his skill to do new things was very profitable for skill advancement. This skill up took the last of his mana, but at least he was back in fighting shape.

  The only question was, should he fight?

  The architecture around him seemed to indicate that he hadn’t left the capital castle. A quick check out the window verified it. If he wanted to, he could stroll downstairs and link up with Lord Momoh, tell him about the abduction and attempted murder.

  He shook his head.

  He wasn't sure if he could trust Momoh. Luke had been missing for hours and Momoh hadn't rescued him. Maybe he had been in on the abduction. Even if Momoh was on his side, things weren't looking good for Luke. Kalibutan justice wouldn’t favor the human, even if it wasn’t a corrupt way to steal glory from the weak. No, he wouldn’t be going to the authorities. In fact, this incident marked the end of his patience with elves altogether. He was done with this city. He was going to collect Jinx and go home. He was tempted to fight Viscount Osifo on the way out, but he knew he needed to double his levels at least before he attempted that.

  His mind made up, Luke grabbed both bags and strode down the hallway. He dropped the one bag once he verified there was nothing useful inside. He cursed himself for not getting an SD card and keeping everything on internal storage. The second bag was smaller than the first, clearly one of the thug’s personal bags. The biggest thing inside was a hollow baton with lightning runes on the tip. A stun baton. He moved it aside to see a few coins, a judicial enforcer ID, a health potion, and a mana potion. There were also three empty bottles. Apparently it had cost a lot of mana to keep him under for hours.

  Luke immediately downed the mana potion. He sighed in relief as the liquid quickly made its way from his belly into his core. He shouldered the bag and started looking around. There was a floor to ceiling window behind him, a door on either side of the hallway, and a short hallway that ended in a T. He walked to the end of the hallway and looked in both directions. One direction was a dead end and the other was a long hallway. There were a half-dozen boring looking doors and at the end of the hallway was another intersection and past that was a railing and a large empty space.

  As soon as Luke identified the way out, three men rounded the corner. One of them was the young thug from before, leading two people in royal livery holding chakrams and spears. The thug shouted and pointed at Luke.

  He ducked back just in time to avoid being hit by a thrown steel ring. It embedded itself in the wall and the sounds of running boots filled the hallway. Luke started running himself, but there wasn’t far to go. There were only two doors on this offshoot, the closet he had been in before and a door opposite it. He had just enough time to duck into that room and hope that it had something that would help him.

  He ignored it and ran right past. He lowered his shoulder and barreled into the floor-length window at full speed.

  And bounced off.

  The crystalline window had shrugged off his enhanced strength like it was nothing. In retrospect, of course the castle would have strong windows. He picked himself up and dug into the bag with his right hand. His left shoulder was bruised and the bone cracked. It hurt to move.

  He found what he was looking for and placed it up against the window. The three men slowly came around the corner then, knowing he was trapped but wary of an attack. Luke fired the stun baton.

  Instead of a weak electric current, Luke used Variable Ammunition to send a fracture spell down the tube. It hit the window point blank and shattered it. An explosion of crystal blasted outwards, some of it blown back in from the heavy storm outside. Rain pelted Luke’s face as he slowly opened his eyes again.

  “Don’t jump!” one of the royal guards shouted. “We’re hundreds of feet above the ground.”

  “Oh good, I wouldn’t try this if we weren’t,” Luke said and stepped off the edge into nothingness.