The "One Relic" Job

Nobody robs the High Overlord. No, it's not a rule; just a simple observation about every fool who tried.Professor Vantine True'son has invented a magic that lets him walk through solid matter - walls, vaults, armies, the settled laws of Syridian physics. His colleagues at the Eternum responded like tenured academic staff tend to when their research is questioned: throwing lightning at him across the lecture hall and banishing him from the institute.So he's taken a job.The plan is simple. Slip into Towerne, the interdimensional fortress of High Overlord Chaos, and steal one relic.Just one.Enough to prove his theory is real and make every scholar who laughed at him choke on it.His crew: a jailbroken robot carrying a rifle built for starships, a masked mercenary whose real name is too embarrassing to say out loud, and a self-declared doctor from the cursed Eversea whose entire career is a lie he happens to be very good at telling.Their target commands an endless army of immortals with fearsome names like Shrimp Maniac Minion and Geometric Shape Enthusiast Minion. He is also, at this precise moment, playing golf on a lazy river.He won't need to put down his drink, but he might.And the one person in all the Verses who might stop him has just stepped through a portal... around ten thousand years old, entirely unbothered, wearing frog pajamas.The "One-Relic" Job is a comedy about ambition and a heist about hubris, as well as a question about exactly what a man will trade to get his name into a textbook.Illustrated throughout by Akiro. A standalone novella of the Holy Verses.