Oh, how Horus longed all the same to tap into that same power, to be freed by it!

“You heartless carrion crow!” Chris Alan blasted Edwin with the full force of Prophecy at Need. “You wouldn’t even allow the poor mortals here the time to heal and regroup.”

“Smash the nail while you have the hammer in hand, I say,” Edwin replied with a short laugh – even as he was reminded that just letting the Undying Singer *speak* was putting Edwin and his whole team in mortal danger.

“Enough talk! Are you all ready to die?”

“You’re nothing but a bitter coward,” Autumn retorted. “*We* have hope in the Lord beyond this Realm, whether we win or lose – and we didn’t come here to lose.”

“If I can’t have the White Hand, then no one will,” Edwin shouted. “Even your baby will die, and then that blasted clone.”

“You’d really dare to try that?” Chris Alan asked almost dryly.

“Oh, Lightchild, I dare, all right; I dare with every fiber of my being.”

Chris Alan smiled mirthlessly as he read Edwin’s and Aggie’s minds, thanking the Lord silently for that unexpected insight. Truly, Edwin hadn’t learned a thing of any real consequence from their last encounter. By contrast, Chris Alan had a lot more respect for Aggie as a thinker; she obviously learned from her mistakes.

“Just *daring* won’t do you any good,” Chris Alan laughed, and for a moment his laugh encouraged his friends and disheartened his foes. “Unless the Lord allows it, you can’t even beat me to a draw, not on *any* level – and neither can your lady teammate over there.”

Before Edwin could respond with some sarcastic retort, Aggie paled in shock. Thanks to her own Evelight insight and intelligence, she realized what Chris Alan was saying and why he was saying it.

“Edwin!” she interrupted. “Has that game you showed us been solved?”

Edwin turned at the seemingly irrelevant question. “*Solved?*”

“When a game is ‘solved’,” Aggie explained, “a computer of sufficient sophistication can be programmed for the game so that it can be beaten to a draw at best. That ‘chess’ you showed us looks like” – she applied her Evelight brand of intelligence to the problem for a long moment – “it has an incredible number of possible moves within a single game: one of over a hundred digits. No known natural created intelligence, mortal or immortal, should be able to ‘solve’ this game.”