My expectation is that we’d arrive instantly back in town. I was wrong. There was a little bit of travel time. We flew through the darkness of the space between spaces in a translucent purple prism created by Shamura the Elf. She was a little taller than I was, with long black hair and brown eyes. She wore a simple tunic with an old, frayed shawl that may have once been brightly colored with gold trim.

 Lights flashed by the prism, which was kind of like a spaceship that Shamura was steering with her hands. It looked like we were going warp speed, like in a sci-fi movie. Everyone in the group was incredibly quiet. The excitement of battle had worn off, and all that was left was injury and recovery. 

I slumped against the wall, sitting and thinking about everything that had happened. I’d done the impossible, and yet it wasn’t enough. I had defeated the Giga Mecharex, but it was just the start of things to come.

Angeknight, or Orion, according to my Analytical skill, was checking on the others in the group. Shamura was standing in the center steering the prism through the darkness. I had time, so I opened my menu. I still had to fuse traits, but it wasn’t nearly as many as I thought it would be. Turns out that at higher levels you had to absorb more and more Dragonforce to get stronger.

As I stared at my list of traits, debating on what to fuse, my eyes grew tired. I decided I didn’t want to select anything that could fundamentally alter my strengths, so I chose conservatively. After ten minutes of debate, I picked my first two.

 

Your Blessed Strikes trait and Charger trait have fused together to become Blessed Charge! When charging in a straight line you deal additional Light damage based on distance and speed!

 

As I scrolled through the list again and again, unable to make a choice on what to fuse next, I succumbed to my tiredness. I drifted to sleep, to endless dreams of battle as my mind processed everything that had happened. It was the same dream, over and over, shifting uncomfortably in my sleep hour after hour. I didn’t remember much of it when I woke up.

It was dark. Beside me was a crackling fire and a looming shadow. Orion was sitting nearby on the edge of the firelight. I sat up to ask where we were, but he answered before I could speak.

“We’re safe. For now,” he said, turning and handing me a cup of water. It was a simple stone cup, and the water was clean. The Analytical skill identified both of them. “You’ve been asleep for most of the day. It’s nearly dawn, now.”

“Where is safe?” I took a sip of water and saw my notification icon was blinking. I ignored it for now. Most of the day? At least I was safe. 

“This would be Astoria,” he waved his hand around, “but it’s nothing but a ruin now. Everything’s gone, but I still sense my sister in the distance. 

“Orianna, right?”

Notice: You have resisted Thought Detection skill!

 

He was reading my mind, or trying. Would I know if he was successful? Should I be offended? He had helped me out before, both with information and skills. I might not have gotten this far if not for him. 

“You don’t have to read my mind, you know.”

“Sorry.”

The female Dwarf, Angie, who had been sleeping against a log on the edge of the firelight moved closer to the warm glow of the fire. I hadn’t even noticed her there. 

“What do you know of my sister?” Orion asked, turning to make uncomfortably direct eye contact.

“Uh, well, she and some others are in a city in the Forbidden Zone,” I replied, turning away quickly to sip my water. “I was only there for a day or two

“A new city? So they weren’t captured or killed?” Angie chimed in, rubbing her hands to the fire and wiping the sleep from her eyes. “I’ll tell ya, everyone’s feeling grim with what we’ve seen here today, but you’ve also given them hope.”

“Me?” I pointed to myself.

“You killed the Giga Mecharex. That damn thing’s been lording over us forever, preventing us from escaping. It’s the reason we were captured!” She paused for a short yawn before continuing, “It’s barely left that office since the day we were captured. To see it thrown around and ultimately defeated was beyond satisfying. That, and the news of a new city should lift the group’s spirit.”

“Valerie, words cannot express the gratitude we owe to you. For everything.” Orion paused, and his tone became more grim. “ But sadly, Tyrannus won't stop here. It won't be long until the other Mecharex is no longer a juvenile and is fully combat-ready. We won't ask you to fight on our behalf, but speaking for myself, I would stand beside you when the time comes to battle.”

“Many of the others feel the same, myself included,” Angie said, staring into the firelight. “Took everything we ever had. Twice.” She tossed a piece of rubble into the fire. 

“Honestly? I’m going to take down the Dragons and destroy this system of slavery and oppression they’ve forced us into, with or without help. I’ll admit I was hoping you’d want to help. I’ve been messing everything up on my own lately. Or at least it feels that way,” I said. 

“With great power, comes great mistakes, but also great deeds,” Orion said. “You just need to hone your skills. You have a lot of them, but none are of a high skill level.”

“There’s been a lot going on, I just haven’t had the time to stop and just focus on training.” It was true and not true. I was kind of trying to relax and enjoy life in town before the punching machine and the explosion. Maybe I’d been a little hasty on my plan of action, but it was too late now. 

“I can train you in swords,” Orion volunteered. “I see your Blade of Vengeance trait gives you a bonus for them.”

“Blade of what?” I opened my menu and two notifications hit me. I hadn’t gotten to fusing my traits within the time limit! The system had done it for me. I focused on the notifications.

 

Your Swordsman and Vengeance Delivered traits have fused together to become Blade of Vengeance! 

Blade of Vengeance III You deal additional damage when using Swords, and cannot have your Spirit reduced by enemies. Indulge your vengeance to gain more power!

 

Your Ovipositor and Angelic traits have fused to become Divine Conceptor!

 

Divine Conceptor You can breed with both male and female monsters. Any offspring you produce will inheret your Element: Light trait and one random Light skill of yours.

 

Damn, they autoselected, I thought, staring at the two traits. I hadn’t really thought about my Ovipositor trait in a minute, nor had an opportunity to test it out. What would I say? Hey, wanna let me breed you to increase my power level? I wasn’t going to brute force it, either or get somebody intoxicated. I wouldn’t do what had been done to me so many times to anyone else.

Blade of Vengeance was the first trait I had encountered that was upgraded. I had thought only skills could be upgraded. It was upgraded to Blade of Vengeance three. I focused on the skill to get more information. Draconis and the Giga Mecharex counted as Blade of Vengeance kills, and had upgraded it retroactively. 

“That’s new,” I said. “I forgot to fuse my traits manually and they did it automatically.”

Angie and Orion exchanged confused looks and turned back to me. Orion was the first to speak. “What do you mean, choose? It was always random for us, or me at least.”

“Same,” Angie nodded.

“It’s the mark that Orianna gave me, or fixed. Upgraded? My mark was disabled when I fought my first Dragon, but she reactivated it and said it had new features,” I explained.

“That woulda been nice back in the day,” Angie said, leaning back against the log and sighing. “Lost a few good skills to the Dragonforce fusions. The new ones are nice, but there are some that just don’t need to change.”

“I agree,” I said, looking against at the two new skills I received. The boost from Sword of Vengeance wasn’t quite as good as Swordsman, but it was the first upgradeable trait I’d seen, so it could get better. Then I changed the subject. “So what's the plan?”

“There are a couple floating around,” Orion said.

“I say we should just go with mine. Take Shamura to the city, let her teleport back and get us,” Angie said.

“We’d be defenseless,” Orion argued. “As it stands, Valerie and the two other Metahumans are the only ones whose marks aren’t blocked in some way, and she’s also the only one who knows where the city is,” he motioned to me.

“I have no idea where we are,” I admitted. “I have a map if you guys know where we are.”

I reached into my inventory and pulled the map Orianna had given me out of thin air. Orion and Angie moved in closer. I pointed out the locations I knew. The city was in the forbidden zone and where it was in relation to the Dragon’s Capital in the valley.

“Interesting,” Orion was tracing different lines across the map with his finger, then looking away towards the east, then back at the map. “During our time, we didn’t have maps, but I can sense the direction she is in..”

“That’s mildly useful. Oh, hey!” I put my finger on the map, on a crescent moon-shaped mountain. “I recognize this one! Not from here, but that was close to where I was enslaved. I left a case of supplies I took with me, but was too heavy and cumbersome to manage. That was before I had this nifty inventory thing going on.”

“What level is she?” Angie asked Orion.

“Sixty-six. Why?” I said, wondering why she didn’t ask me.

“Curious is all, thought it would be higher actually with how you handled yourself.”

“I’ve only been here a couple months, I’ve only fought a handful of Dragons. I accidentally killed a Great Dragon while blowing up Tyrannus’ stupid mountain-side monument,” I mimicked exploding gestures with my hands.

“The Grand Magistra?” Angie asked. “There are only a handful of Great Dragons left, and she frequented Tyrannus’s office with designs and schematics.”

“I have no idea,” I shrugged, “it just said ‘Great Dragon’ when I got the notification and a ton of XP.”

“XP?” Orion asked.

“Experience. Sorry, it’s a term from my homeworld”

“Your homeworld was like this one?” Angie asked.

“No, but we were able to create virtual worlds oddly similar to this one, with similar plot lines. I feel like I’m in a terribly written RPG sometimes,” I said.

Again they exchanged looks, but neither Angie nor Orion said anything for a long moment. 

“I don’t remember much of my homeworld,” Angie said. “And if the Grand Magistra is dead, we won't be going back.”

“Oh no,” I said. My heart sank. I didn’t know what a Grand Magistra was, but if they were who we needed to get off this rock, it was indeed a little sad. 

“It’s not all bad,” Orion said. “It means they can’t bring anyone else here. We gave up hope of leaving when we eliminated the last Grand Magister. Or so we’d thought.”

There was another minute of silence, but then we turned back to the map. “If we could fortify the area and guarantee our safety, I would send Valerie with Shamura. If we can’t, we need enough supplies to move as a group in that direction.”

“There are seventeen people! We’ll be gathering supplies for weeks, and traveling at a snail’s pace. One Dragon sighting out in the open and we’re toast,” Angie said.

“What about the two other monsters?” I asked. “I thought there were nineteen in total?”

“The Pegasus and the Griffon flew off once they were conscious and well enough,” Orion replied. “We wouldn’t force them to stay.”

“That’s fair,” I said. 

Orion and Angie went back and forth, arguing the same points over and over again. It wasn’t safe to travel long distances with seventeen people. It wasn’t safe to send their best chance at survival away. Finally, somebody interrupted the two of them.

“Yo, boss?” A voice came from the shadows, and a pale-skinned man walked into the firelight. His skin gleamed the faintest blue against the flickering firelight and I saw his information: Datto, Vampphire, level 54. 

“Datto? What is it?” Orion asked. “Has something happened?”

“Nah, it’s not like that,” he put his hands up, palms out. “It’s all good, I was just overhearing ya’ll while I was trying to sleep, and I heard the plans. Gotta say it’s a dangerous world out there. Less is more, ya know?”

“You have a solution, or an idea to contribute, then?” Orion asked.

“I do. I know where Herb’s secret bunker is. We can take cover there. Crazy Dwarf has quite the setup down in there! The walls are still intact. Food’s good. Water and everything.”

“What!? He never told me about anything like that!” Angie stood. She was an older Dwarf with greying hair and bright green eyes. She was a little shorter than me. “I want to see it. Now!”

We followed Datto through the maze of campfires and sleeping bags. The entire city was a ruin. Stone and wood debris was strewn everywhere. The streets were cracked with huge footprints. The Giga Mecharex. No buildings stood with more than two walls intact. 

The most unnerving thing was the pile of bodies that were neatly placed in the center square. So many people. It made me mad, and also frustrated. I’d put the new city in the same danger by potentially revealing its location to the Dragons.

“This is our old house,” Angie said disapprovingly. “If it were here, I’d know.”

“Then prepare to be surprised, yeah?” Datto led us beneath the fallen roof leaning against the only standing wall and into the basement below. It was a mess of cobwebs and dust, and everything was on the floor. Tools. Rubble. Nails and bolts. Wood of all different lengths and sizes. One of the walls had a huge crack in it. “This is how I found it,” he pointed through the crack.

It was incredibly thin and hard to see through, but with my enhanced senses I could make out another room behind the wall. 

“I don’t see anything,” Angie said. “It’s just a crack in the wall.”

“Nah, you’re wrong. There’s a mirror in that room, and in that mirror, there is a door. Ya just gotta follow that information over here,” Datto motioned further into the basement where larger tools and devices were stored. Oddly enough, there was only one tool hanging on the wall in the entire basement. 

Datto grabbed the pick with both hands, pulled it an inch away from the wall, turned it clockwise, and pushed it back in. There was a click and the plain stone basement wall split apart to reveal another room.

“You’re joking.” Angie stormed inside, slamming open cupboards and drawers. Clothes. Food. Barrels of water. Some of it had been dislodged by the battle but was mostly intact. 

The food was surprisingly fresh and edible according to my Analytical skill. Something was preserving it, that much was obvious, even if I couldn’t tell what it was. Two more doors led off into a fully functional bathing room with functional plumbing, albeit cold, and the other into a large bedroom. The wardrobe was dominated by Dwarven clothing and artwork, with carpet and wood-paneled walls. Very homely.

“This might work,” Orion finally said after touring the place. “The preservation magic hasn’t worn off, and there’s food for months.”

“See? My plan is the best plan,” Angie said.

“We’re lucky Datto found this,” Orion said. “Thank you, Datto.”

“No probs, boss. The sooner Shamura and Valerie go, the sooner we get back to civilization and get our powers back, yeah?” Datto said.

“We all want to get back, but let's not act without considering all the details. We’ve yet to even run the plan by Shamura,” Orion said.

“Last I saw she was off with Chadius, out by the old boat house. Or what’s left of it,” Angie said.

Chadius was the name of the Deviknight, I remembered. He buffed me with Devil Might to help take out the Giga Mecharex. “Is a Deviknight related to an Angeknight?” I asked Orion.

“They are our opposite. Before coming here, we would have jumped at the chance to kill each other. It’s in our blood. Our very nature. But here? Some might retain their innate hatred, but Chadius and I have grown past that,” Orion revealed a tattoo-like mark on his right hand, a mix of purple in gold in the shape of a purple moon eclipsing a golden sun. “We now share an unbreakable bond of companionship.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “So where’s that boat house?”

The first rays of the sun were popping up over the treeline and I got my first really good glimpse of what was left of Astoria. It was a ruin for sure.

No building had more than one good wall standing, and most had none at all. It was a maze of weathered foundations and debris piles. The trees around the town were thinner than in the Forbidden Zone, and you could easily see the sky through the canopy because of the smaller trees.

The boat house was north of town, past most of the ruins. It was surprisingly intact except for the docks. It was a small building that sat on top of a steep bank with stairs leading down to a garage-like building that sat on the edge of the slow-moving river. It was probably more like a stream to a Dragon. Many of the fish within at their smallest were my size. 

I landed on the deck that wrapped around the outside of the top building and took a look through the nearest broken window. I immediately ducked out of sight, taking cover between the window and the door.

Plap! Plap! Plap!

Chadius, the level 89 Deviknight, and Shamura, the level 66 Elf were going at it inside. Shamura was bent over a flipped rowboat and Chadius was lifting her left leg high in the air while plowing into her.

Now that I was close I could feel their movements with Vapor Sense and my Keen Senses made me very aware of every sound and movement. It was a little awkward.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I focused on not listening to or sensing them at all. Instead, I tried to focus on everything else around me. I’d just wait until they were done. I focused on the water, the wind in the trees. The level 13 Beetle off in the distance, twice the size of a horse, stomping around through the foliage. I could hear the flutter of wings above in the trees..

Bam!

The wall I was leaning up against shuddered and I recoiled away with my back against the railing of the deck. Surprised, I refocused on the boat house.

Shluck! Shluck! Shluck!

Chadius had Shamura pinned up against the wall I had been sitting against and was thrusting into her forcefully. I could see the durability of the wall going down with each thrust, each time she pressed against the wall, and that bar was dropping fast.

Shluck! Crack! Shluck! Crash!

The wall gave way and the two of them fell through in a tumble! Shamura and a bunch of wood debris landed on me, and Chadius fell head-first over Shamura, me, and the deck railing. He fell down the first flight of stairs, then off the ledge and down the steep river bank. Down, down, down, until you couldn’t see him through the underbrush and longer.

Just my luck, I thought. I was prone with a naked Elf on top of me. It didn’t hurt, but I was more uncomfortable than I was before.

“Ooof! Oh my god! I’m so sorry!” Shamura gasped for breath, looking at the destroyed wall, the window, then at me. “Were you watching us?”

“No, not on purpose, I was told to come find you,” I said. 

Shamura sat up and was sitting on my lap essentially, brushing the wood chunks off herself.. My back was against the railing, but it felt like it was about to give out at any moment.

I too was covered in wood debris and another, sticky liquid substance. I didn’t need my Analytical skill to tell me what it was. It was also pooling around my waist and dripping down my battle skirt, where Shamura was sitting on top of me.

“You’re getting me wet,” I said, gesturing to her sitting on me.

“Oh, am I?” Shamura reached down and put her hand up my skirt.

I blushed, immediately grabbing her arm, but it was too late. “Not like… that…” I shuddered. I was a little sensitive, and a little turned on. 

I felt my Divine Conceptor trait activate and a bulge began to form right where she was sitting. It felt the same as the Ovipositor trait, but the tentacle-like appendage was glowing a bright golden color and was noticeably thicker than I remembered.

Shamura felt the thing pulse and she gave me a confused look that slowly turned to recognition, that then turned to mischievous. “Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Her hand ran along the engorged, pulsating tentacle beneath my layers of clothing and armor.

“A trait I just got,” I said, my thoughts becoming more and more like a whirlwind. I couldn’t focus on anything except Shamura. “This, isn’t weird, is it?”

“You did save my life,” Shamura put the back of her forehead and made a melodramatic woe-is-me gesture, “the least I could do is help you test out your new trait.”

“Fair enough, but what about Chadius?” 

“Oh, don’t worry. He’ll be back.”