“Wait a minute,” Mom says, putting her hand against my shoulder and stopping me from passing by, “why were you just laying on the ground?”

“Yeah, we’d like to know too,” Kat says, and Marissa nods her agreement.

Sammy thumbs towards their direction. “I’m with them on this one, Wyatt.”

“It’s nothing to worry about. I just got a lot stronger, and it comes with a few drawbacks when you do it in large quantities…” Well, actually, Jimmy never experienced anything when he got the Primordial race and the bonus attributes. “If you’re a Player,” I add.

“How?” they all ask, pinning me in place with their collective will and feminine scowls.

“I saved some people when I came back from helping Sammy,” I start to explain, waving towards my sister. Then I gesture towards Mom. “That’s probably when you saw me on the television. After that, I came in here, decided to save a few people, and took them under my care.”

“Do you have the resources for that?” Sammy asks, looking behind her towards the front entrance. She’s done her research, so she likely knows about the weekly tax per person that Players pay. “Seems pretty risky, considering tomorrow’s the first tax day.”

“I can’t help it,” I say with a shrug. “They need someone to take care of them.”

“But…”

“I’ve got until the end of tomorrow. It’s fine.” I assuage their concerns as they state their grievances. Once done, I eye Mom’s hand. “We can walk and talk. I’ll let you meet your worker bees.”

Mom looks between Sammy and I, trying to gauge our shared look. “What’s that supposed to mean? This isn’t like what you did when you were younger, right, Wyatt? You’re not getting into gangs or cults, are you?”

“I love you, Mom,” I say, turning to her and fixing her with a steely gaze backed by an expressionless glower, “but I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d stop bringing that up.”

“I am your mother! I’m concerned for you and want to make sure you’re taking care of yourself and not wrapped up in any craziness!” she says, frantic.

Giving Sammy a look, I take a deep breath and sigh. “If you’re here to genuinely help, then that’s fine. However, if you’re going to keep bringing up the past, please leave. I have far too much to take care of and no time to deal with this.” I gesture towards Sammy. “I thought she told you everything?”

Sammy scoots closer to me and uses her hand to cover part of her mouth to stop Mom from hearing. “I told her, but she wanted to see everything for herself. Don’t give her such a hard time, Wyatt. This is a lot to take in, and they’re getting old.”

“I don’t care. Neither one of you can act like this isn’t the first, fifth, or fiftieth time we’ve had this conversation,” I grunt, shrugging Mom’s hand off my shoulder. “I have things to take care of so all of us don’t die tomorrow, so if you would so kindly get out of my way, I have things to do.”

“Wyatt…” Mom’s face falls, and she looks like she might cry.

Kat pats my mom on the shoulder and looks my way. “Aren’t you being a bit too harsh? She came and got all of us because she was concerned.”

A headache is starting to form. “Okay, I get that, but is this something we really have to do right now? I have things to take care of that are time sensitive. Standing around here and talking about things that can wait for later isn’t going to help anything. And I don’t see what the big issue is. We can talk once I’m finished.”

“We want to help you, Wyatt,” Kat explains, spreading her arms out to include Mom, Sammy, and Marissa. “We all want to be a part of this, even if it takes time to adjust to. We want to help and not just be a burden to you.”

Huh. They want to help? “Perfect. Like I said before, come meet your worker bees. I’m sure they’ll like working with all of you a lot more than me.”

To be fair, they did watch me slaughter dozens of Numbered. Can’t imagine that doesn’t leave an impression on someone, even if the slaughtering was in lieu of trying to save them.

Initially.

Won’t go around telling people what happened though. Probably not a good idea, seeing as most people still haven’t gotten used to the kill or be killed mindset required to thrive in the Towers.

Never had the luxury, even long before the Towers.

I push the thought aside and gesture for all of my concerned dependents to follow. “Let’s go meet the crew. I’ll be putting all of you in charge.”

“Even her?” Sammy asks, glowering towards Marissa.

“Be nice,” both Mom and I say. She smiles, and I awkwardly look ahead, paying no more attention to them.

We make our way out of the market and to the front, where I find Jimmy has split the remaining Numberless into multiple groups. Those who didn’t want to stay are long gone, which doesn't surprise me much. Naptime did run long today, after all.

“Let’s get started.”

The next few hours are a flurry of motion. At first, I get with Jimmy and figure out how he’s broken each group up. It’s quite simple.

With the idea of settling the area around the quarry as an encampment under my rule, Jimmy split the groups into tree huggers, rock smackers, city nerds, those who touch grass, and lastly, a protection force.

Which he volunteers to spearhead.

Since he diligently took care of all the executive work and split everything so aptly, I designate a “leader” of each group, one of my Designated Representatives. They’ll act as an in between for those groups and myself, behaving as a liaison for all the needs of each task force.

Once that’s taken care of, I take out all the equipment and skill books to pore over them. Once they’re all identified, I’m left with choosing what goes where… Except not really. I have people for that now, ones I can hand over all the necessary equipment to without worry.

The only thing left for me to do after that is… suffering.

Apply Racial Trait 2?

Turns out I only paid the price for the first six dependents I had when I slotted the Primordial race. Of all of my current dependents, only six qualify. Dad isn’t here to accept, and Jimmy isn’t under my purview now.

Which means I have to channel enough energy for sixty-eight new dependents to receive the bonuses of the race…

“Damn, this sucks.”

Then I accept the prompt. Contrary to my expectation, I don’t immediately blackout while writhing in agony. Confused, I take out my EID to check what’s going on.

The buzzing of energy is definitely there, bursting through my fingertips and outward to my retinue, but not to the point of making me want to burn up to ashy crisps and embrace eternal darkness.

And my status has the answer. Each second that passes by, I’m losing sixty-eight arcana. However, I have a lot of arcana these days. Enough to make the energy payment not immediately damning.

Ten seconds later, the process ends.

Stamina: 288/351 | Arcana: 0/617

Continuing to watch, my arcana starts to tick up one point every four seconds. Stamina steadily rises at one point every six seconds.

“Huh, that’s ridiculous,” I mutter, surprised but happy I didn’t have to go through an entire blackout episode again. “I guess it’s time for me to go get the signet then.”

Looking around, I double check to make sure I’m not needed. Since everyone has been introduced to their groups, they look more than happy to spend time acquainting themselves, allowing me to sneak away without concern.

*

Tina Randall couldn’t make sense of today, but then again, the past week had been one long string of what after but… gah?

First, the aggressive ‘recruitment offers’ all but strong arming them into this unspecified ‘workforce’. Sure, there was nonsense exchanged about having bought out their employment contracts from the office, but Tina thought the chances of something like that going through any channel other than ‘threats and bribery’ on such a quick time frame was unlikely at best.

Besides, she’d agreed to answer telephones and manage the company database, not… whatever all this was.

Watching people die to monsters had been terrifying. Watching people die to other people was shocking to the point of numbness. Everything after that had taken on a surreal cast, a nightmare cadence that built to a blood-soaked crescendo.

Followed by said blood-soaked madman turning around to offer to buy out their already secondhand employment.

A week ago, if anyone had told Tina she’d be signing her soul over to a mass murderer so she could pick flowers in some kind of magical alternate dimension tower, she’d have laughed in their faces.

Today, it seemed about par for the course.

Honestly, compared to being thrown at manual labor en masse, picking flowers wasn’t that bad. Sure, it still felt surreal. The occasional shout of warning, the security team rushing off to fight off monsters, the steady chopping of amateur woodsmen as they struggled to fell trees…

And through it all, Tina looked for glowing flowers and stuffed them in a basket.

If this was going to be the rest of her life, well, at least for the next few weeks she wouldn’t complain.

“This job sucks,” complained the man nearest her. 

“You’d rather be back in your cubicle?”

“I want to be out killing monsters, not picking flowers.” He kicked at one of the plants, only for Tina to dive at it and snatch it away before he could sully it. 

“These flowers are going to pay for your continued existence,” she hissed. “If you want to go and die, be my guest, but don’t intentionally make things harder for the rest of us.”

She didn’t know where the courage came from. Normally she wasn’t the assertive type, but today had taken all the constructs of politeness and social obligation she ordinarily adhered to so rigidly, twisted them up, crushed them down, and left their bloody ashes scattered across the dirt.

“Yeah, be good,” the girl in charge of them ordered happily, pausing to collect the contents of their baskets, scribbling notes on a clipboard before poofing the valuable plants away in the usual magic way.

“Miss Marissa, I’d like to request a transfer—”

“Nope! You’re behind quota, Mr. Lockfeld! If you can’t even handle gathering herbs, how do you expect us to trust you with a sword?”

“This isn’t my—”

“See you in another half hour, do better!” Marissa skipped away, clipboard tucked under her arm, hair flying in the indoor sunlight.

“This isn’t what I signed up for.”

Tina moved to the next glowing patch of flowers. The fact that their overseer looked about eight years old was just one more thing in a long line of things.

*

Tippy tap, tippy tap.

“No, no, that’s not how you chop a tree. I could do better and I’ve never touched a hatchet before today.”

“Oh? Why don’t you show me, then?” He leaned against the tree, flipping the hatchet and smirking.

Kat barely held her rigid smile at the tone in the man’s voice. “I understand that you prefer watching me to working, but if you weren’t paying attention to the demonstration that’s on you.”

“But that demonstration was so… impersonal. Distant, y’know? I do better with one-on-one instruction.”

“I’m sure you’d like to believe that.”

The man frowned.

Before he could decide how to respond, Kat clapped her hands sharply. “Come on, back to work. And no more of that girly tippy tapping. I want to hear proper thuds.”

“Would that make you happy?”

Ugh. She strongly resisted the urge to try out some of her new combat skills. Though there was a part of her that insisted the world would be a better place once this man had his ego deflated a bit, she knew that more than likely it would only lead to escalation and further idiocy.

So she kept her businesslike smile, gave him some verbal pointers on how to adjust his sloppy stance, then ignored his protests as she strode away to check on the others.

But despite the irritation of the moment, a deep glow of happiness buoyed her steps. Finally, she had something properly helpful to do. Something that truly needed to be done, not just frivolous superficial stuff like ‘make the kitchen a little cleaner a little sooner’. 

Finally she could start repaying a tiny fraction of what she’d been given for so long.

And if it meant putting up with idiots who couldn’t see past her chest, that was a small price to pay.