Lillene

Enjoy!

The MANIC device didn’t make any sense. 

Human tilted it at someone else in the crowded area and got yet another nonsensical result. This time, it said Tier Three but she could immediately tell that the woman was only Tier One and definitely wasn’t masking her aura.

She wasn’t at all certain that it did what she thought it did. She’d assumed it detected a person’s aura, since that was by far the easiest way to detect their Tier, but that obviously wasn’t what it did. At the same time, it did seem to do something and Human wanted to know what that was. There had to be a reason the people who abducted her trusted it.

She aimed it at someone else and tried again. Surely she’d be able to figure out what it was doing if she kept trying. The one thing she was certain of so far was that it tended to over-report the target’s Tier. Sometimes it was right, though that was unusual, and she’d even seen one time where it was too low. 

Instead of showing a result, the MANIC buzzed a little and the display went black. She tried hitting the button on the side the way she’d found worked in the past; something did come up, but it wasn’t the usual MANIC screen. Instead, it was mostly black with an odd symbol she didn’t recognize. It looked sort of like a white box, taller than it was wide, with rounded corners and something white sitting on top of it. The bottom part of the box was the only real color; it was filled with red. After a few seconds, the display went black again.

She was going to have to ask for help, wasn’t she?

Human didn’t like that, but she’d long since gotten used to it. At least she could get help when she asked; she’d always been able to.

She was in a large indoor market; that made it easy to decide where to go. The best place to start was obviously somewhere that sold things like this; they’d know what that symbol meant and how to deal with it. All she had to do was find the right enchanter’s shop and she’d be good. She knew she’d seen one; they had an entire display of things that looked like the MANIC, both larger and smaller. 

Human retraced her steps until she got back to the shop. It was strange; it was clearly a high-end place, because there wasn’t much on display and most of what was there was very similar, even though each display was clearly set up to showcase an individual item. The weird thing was that the displays themselves were clearly old. Other than one that was clearly displaying a premium product, larger and more obvious than the others even though the item was not any bigger, every single display Human could see was scuffed or damaged in some way.

Maybe it had once been a high end shop?

Well, either way, they should know what was going on.

Human walked into the shop; it was empty other than her, a couple of people that clearly worked there, and one person who was clearly a customer; she was paying for a purchase of some sort. 

The man who wasn’t taking the payment walked up to Human. He was dressed in blue and white and wore a nametag that said William. He was also clearly faking his smile; he felt more bored than anything else. Human saw that a lot. “How can I help you today?” 

Human held the MANIC out to William. “This doesn't work anymore. If I push the button, an odd symbol appears.”

Human pushed the button to demonstrate. She was about to ask for more help, but the wave of sadness, almost despair, from the man made her pause. She’d definitely just asked something he expected her to already know.

“It’s out of power,” William told her. “Do you have the charger?”

Human didn’t know what that was, but clearly it had something to do with how the device worked. She already knew it didn’t take mana and didn’t have a spot for a monster core; he must be talking about whatever it used instead of those. She’d seen things like that before, on other worlds, but wasn’t really familiar with them. They were less common than monster cores for anything enchanted.

Of course, this thing also didn’t seem to be enchanted, even though it was doing things that normally took an enchantment. It was confusing.

The one thing Human knew for sure was that she definitely didn’t have “the charger,” whatever that was. She only had the MANIC itself. She shook her head.

William didn’t seem surprised. “Do you know which type it needs?”

Human shook her head again. There was more than one kind? Why?

William held her hand out, clearly asking for the MANIC so that he could examine it. Human didn’t really want to let go of it, but she had to if she wanted to get whatever this charger thing was, so she let him take it.

William gave the MANIC a quick look; she noticed he paid a lot of attention to the sides for some reason. After a moment, he handed it back to her, then walked over to one of the two vertical displays, almost like a tree with a lot of things on it. They weren’t nearly as prominent as the big displays she’d noticed earlier; she hadn’t cared about them since they didn’t look like the MANIC.

He pulled an odd partly-clear box off the display and walked back to her. “This is the one you need. Is that all you need here today?”

Human nodded, then followed William over to the counter; for some reason, all of the shops on this planet had non-enchanted devices that they used when you bought something. It was not the strangest thing Human had seen humans do by a long shot, but having it be so consistent was in itself kind of weird. 

“Your total is $32.47,” William told her. 

Human pulled some paper bills out of her pocket. She was glad she’d managed to find someone willing to exchange Etherium for cash. It was always a good idea to have local currency; Etherium was far too valuable to spend on small purchases, at least on low-Tier planets like Earth. 

Not that Tier Four was bad; it wasn’t. It was a bit below the norm for human-settled planets, but that just meant it was a good planet to raise children on. 

William finished the purchase and gave her the receipt; as far as she could tell, making the receipt was the primary reason for the enchanted device. It didn’t seem that much of an improvement over just writing it out. “Do you need help using the charger?”

Human smiled brightly at William. He hadn’t had to ask that. She’d have figured it out eventually. If she could skip some of the trial and error, though, it would be useful. “Yes, please.”

Mapping out the larger ley lines to confirm Serenity’s suspicions required him to travel across the entire area and confirm the ley line locations. There were other methods, but they were all slower, more difficult, or both. Serenity had faith that other people would map the lines over the coming years when they realized everything that could be done with a ley line, but it hadn’t happened yet.

As far as he knew, the tools for it didn’t exist yet, either. Oh, he could put together a ritual, but that took time and a lot of energy. It was useful for smaller areas but not for mapping the entire area this ritual seemed to cover. It was much faster to simply cross the landscape; he could sense ley lines at highway speeds, after all. 

As Janice drove him around New England, Serenity took the time to stop at dungeons. They had to pass them anyway, so he wanted to see if he had the same problem in them that he did in Aki’s dungeon.

He did. If anything, it was worse; most of the dungeon cores flat-out denied his requests to fight their monsters. Some of them weren’t able to explain why; the ones that could were rarely able to express more than “it feels wrong to fight you.”

It was clear that Serenity wouldn’t be able to advance his Path in dungeons on Earth. He’d test other planets’ dungeons when he got the chance; he still had some hope that they wouldn’t be so friendly. It would be a pain to have to travel to planets he didn’t control to fight, but it was definitely doable.

It was also definitely a good thing that his latest Paths weren’t exclusively combat Paths. Incarnate of Death sounded like it could be almost anything, and all of the Skills definitely had combat applications, but Serenity still didn’t think it was a combat Path. It simply revolved around Death, and Death was easy to turn to combat applications. 

He ought to be able to move forward on the Path by better comprehending what being an Incarnate meant. That probably wouldn’t be easy; he didn’t like the idea of tying his Path to someone else, even Death, and wasn’t that kind of what being an Incarnate was?

He hoped he was wrong about that. Maybe all he had to do was use his Affinity. He kind of doubted it would be that easy.

Death would probably know. She was the one who built the Path, after all. He still couldn’t believe that he had a custom-built Path, built by someone other than the Voice. 

Serenity tried not to think about it. What would come would come; he’d just have to see what happened and keep trying new things. That approach had always worked out for him in the past; he’d never spent more than about a century and a half on a single Path before he became the Final Reaper, and that particular Path was the one he had when he invented the runescript he preferred to use to this day. He’d completed the Path the same day he was finally confident he’d fully defined the symbol set.

After the sixth dungeon, Serenity gave up on dungeons. It was clear he wasn’t going to get what he wanted and he also wasn’t going to get better answers. It was a decision that helped him realize why he was able to handle Earth’s lower mana levels better now: he’d recently been in a dungeon. A couple of hours wasn’t a problem now, but after about four hours he started bleeding mana again. 

A strong enough nexus refilled his mana, but spending time in a dungeon reset the timer. It was almost like he had an extra level of protection that only spending time in a dungeon would heal. Once he realized that, he made sure to add dungeon stops back to his route so that he could visit at least two a day; three or even four was better, but it didn’t always work out. He might enter only to stop and talk to the dungeon, but it made the travel far less uncomfortable.

During his travel, Serenity passed far too many small tributaries to the ley lines. He’d already known they were shattered, but he hadn’t paid it too much attention. At first, it didn’t seem that important, but he decided to add them to the map anyway. He couldn’t get anywhere near all of them, but he could at least find where they intersected the main lines.

Lillene

Poor Human. No idea what she’s getting herself into … before you know it, she’s going to have her own smartphone and not know how she ever lived without it.