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“Did you literally just fuck Peth’s memory back into place?” Bexley exclaimed from the other side of Titan Chimera’s open hatch door.

Locke quickly readjusted his magesuit as Peth restored her short, witchy dress—what little there was of it, anyway. Until a few minutes ago, he’d been tossed in the throes of hot nasty psy magic sex with a resurrected Precursor witch inside the cockpit of his giant robot.

Like most experiences of his past nine months on the world of Haven, it’d been fucking awesome, but amazing as the sex had been, it wasn’t the most amazing part of this evening.

That had been when Peth convulsed on top of him and then said:

“I remember. Everything.”

“Well, it’s been firmly established that my dick has incredible talents,” Locke said as he rounded the hatch door.

He found the four women of his crew gathered on his titan’s scaffold in the Blue Heron’s hangar, as if hesitant to fully violate his and Peth’s privacy, even though the reason they’d come to the hangar in the first place was to investigate—and perhaps join in on—the noise. They were still docked at Edgewater, after all, which left all the ladies of the Blue Heron with more free time than usual.

The buxom, blonde pixie-haired Bexley just shrugged and nodded in agreement, as did the elegant Captain Alyssa and cute catgirl Sloan. His fellow titan mage Ember was the one hold out.

“I agree that your dick is talented, but dick-restored memory is a bit of a stretch.”

Locke turned back to Peth, who was following behind him.

“Was that part of your design?” he asked. “That sleeping with me would restore your memories?”

“If that had been the case, I wouldn’t have waited!” Peth laughed. “It was simply glorious timing.”

“Glorious …” Locke repeated.

The timing wasn’t the only thing about his situation that was glorious. Nine months ago, he’d been a regular nobody in … well, who he’d been back on Earth was largely irrelevant now, and anyone who wanted to know his full story knew where to look. Especially now that his true origin was on record with the Arcane Index as a consequence of … everything that had happened in the past few days.

The important part was this: Peth had been a lost Precursor consciousness trapped inside Titan Chimera’s magical core. She’d brought him to Haven so he could use his rare and powerful void mage talents to pull her out into a new body, and the entire time he’d known her, memories of her old life had only emerged in fragments. Which was unfortunate, considering the thing that threatened them now was the very thing that had destroyed the Precursors a thousand years ago.

In the meantime, she’d granted him an incredible life, pulling him into a hot, capable new body and a ship full of women who made regular, vigorous use of it. Not to mention his giant mech—Titan Chimera—which circumstances had forced him to upgrade into a badass big stompy robot, because present circumstances indeed demanded Big Stomps.

And now, with her returned memories, Peth could provide valuable insight into where those big stomps needed to go.

The situation was this:

Locke had already saved the world once. Sort of. Maybe?

In truth, his last significant battle had only just ended, it had revealed several twists and surprises that he wasn’t sure how to make sense of, and the Arcane Index’s wider investigation into the matter had only just begun.

All Locke knew was that a force named Avarice was stirring in the Crystal Moon and the Endpoint City Arcane Index Director, Pious Pemberton, had used research conducted by moon cultists to turn himself and his followers into potential vessels for the thing. What Avarice was exactly—an intelligent alien, a hungry monster, a literal fucking cosmic horror god—Locke didn’t know. All he knew for sure was that Avarice was responsible for the meteorfall, shadow dregs, and dark specters that had plagued Haven for centuries.

And, oh, Pious had shot his disembodied soul into the moon using a Precursor psy satellite dish. As one does.

Also, he’d kidnapped Sloan.

It was all totally villain behavior on Pious’ part, but that was where the situation became  complex. Because Locke wasn’t entirely sure that Pious was a villain. Oh, turning even willing cultists into vessels for a gooey moon god was suspect, no doubt, but Sloan trusted Pious like a good surrogate father, and Pious had treated his operation like he was acting on the least terrible of two terrible options:

They could allow Avarice to destroy Haven wildly, or they could try to wield its power for themselves, to guide the magic it would inevitably unleash to productive uses. Both would result in the end of their world, but Pious’ expenditure of the magic, so he said, would have been wielded to create a better tomorrow—a world to rival that of the Precursors.

Locke understood the logic, but he didn’t understand why Pious wouldn’t just want to destroy the thing, to end its cycle completely. Maybe Pious wanted to wield that power, either for his own selfish ends or for the noble end he claimed. But with his body dead and some part of him beamed up to the moon, it wasn’t like Locke could ask him.

Even that was uncertain, though. Locke couldn’t tell if Pious’ use of the satellite dish had succeeded. The ethereal light that poured off the dish as the spell enacted had flickered unstably, and there was no clear sign of what had actually happened. At least not as clear as, say, the moon laughing evilly as it adopted Pious’ likeness.

Well, it still wore that creepy shadow grin stretched across its lower hemisphere. But, notably, it was no longer sending down meteors. All the meteorfall had ceased within an hour of Pious’ dying.

Locke wanted to think that was a result of Pious’ influence—that he actually projected his soul into the moon in the same way Peth had pulled Locke to Haven, and that he was now fighting Avarice from the inside.

Alone, Locke reflected, and shivered at the thought. If Pious was indeed a good man, that was fucking heroic, and he didn’t deserve to be doing it by himself.

But with their present level of information, all they had were conjectures, and how could one even make an educated guess about the results of psy-magicking one’s soul into the moon? It wasn’t like that sort of thing was a common occurrence, even on Haven.

But now—

Locke looked into Peth’s blue eyes, faintly glowing with more eager understanding than he’d ever seen. She could very well hold all the secrets they needed to defeat this destructive moon god and save their world.

Locke stepped aside and gestured to let her go first.