Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 3 - Chapter 3

Autumn of the Thirteenth Year

Character Sheet

A slip of paper used to keep track of everything from HP and MP to consumable items. Oftentimes, these are used to note any experience awarded by the GM as well, and are effectively a diary of sorts to keep track of one’s adventure.

The importance of an experience tracker needs no explanation, but the scribblings in the “Notes” section can serve as a reminder of bygone adventures long after the campaign ends. Accounting for both in-game value and priceless sentimentality, these slips must be stored in safe locations.

Bountiful wheat adorned the land and cool breezes ruffled the golden stalks. It was the busiest season in the Empire, and the Harvest Goddess’s golden locks flourished as farmers prepared for reaping.

In rural cantons, agricultural families worked proudly to display the fruits of a year’s labor, celebrating the end of gentle summer and the beginning of stormless autumn. The fall months promised great reward for exhausting work; only at this time of year did every drop of sweat taste as sweet as nectar.

Carriages carrying taxed grains and produce went to and fro, and caravans peddled similar wares that they’d stocked in the countryside. Imperial guards patrolled the busy highways at all hours, and the lively sound of marching horses could be heard everywhere one went.

However, the hustle and bustle of autumn also invited the unscrupulous to push their luck in search of a big payday. On an unassuming street off of the main imperial highway leading to the capital, a group of men were poised at the ready. The path cut a valley through two gently sloped hills as the lone bit of level land, and the terrain made the location rife with blind spots.

The men were mercenaries by trade, but many people of the era believed that even the most heinous of crimes were fair game so long as they weren’t caught. Until there was no one left to spread word of their offenses, mercenaries could and did dip into less savory trade.

Every year, some canton or another went to their magistrate in the spring to report that bandits had sucked the town dry of food in order to ride out the previous winter, and tragically, they almost always managed to leave the empty husk of a town before imperial authorities arrived.

The thirty-odd members who made up this group were no different. While the road they set up on was tiny, there were a smattering of smaller cantons and towns that lay ahead. Naturally, they could expect a handful of wagons delivering taxes; moreover, the remote region was the perfect spot for ambitious merchants to peddle copious loads of exotic foods and wines to the partygoers at local harvest festivals.

Furthermore, patrolling guards had no choice but to watch over the most important highways connecting large towns. Developing regions and forgotten roads were rarely visited by trained soldiers, and the mercenaries had managed to cash in three times in this season alone.

Of their work this year, one had been a pack of buggies hauling yearly taxes, and the other two had been small merchant caravans. Their haul was already far more than it took to feed a group less than forty strong, but they still held out for more prey.

The taxable items had been boring: rye and animal feed. The first caravan had contained dried fish from the southern sea, but the men found these unpalatable. To their glee, the last had brought them a good deal of booze; unfortunately, most of it was gutter ale with a sour kick.

Furthermore, they found the lack of women to be disappointing. They’d seen a few in the carriages they’d assaulted, but all of them had been mages who’d fought to the bitter end, unfit to be taken captive.

Bored and sullen, the men caught sight of a pair of travelers. While the small figures were plainly dressed, the horses they rode were antithetically magnificent. One look at the black war horses sweating as they cut through the cool autumn winds was enough for the trained fighters to know their worth. They were clearly a prize too great to be commanded by a pair of children.

Of course, the horses would angrily huff and puff if asked whether the mercenaries were fit to ride them, but that was besides the point.

Although the stallions alone would have turned a fine profit, a closer inspection revealed that the riders were also quite well put together. Their travel wear was neat and free of stains: they were privileged enough to dedicate thought to their appearance.

One of the bandits spoke up: “Them’s gotta be a noble’s bastard kids.”

War horses spoke on behalf of a country’s military might, making it no easy feat to get one. To ride such beasts wearing clean clothes required considerable wealth. Judging from the absence of a carriage full of guards, the boys had money but little political power.

In other words, they were the perfect mark. The bandits curled their lips into sneers and cackled amongst themselves imagining the fat purses they’d soon be looting.

Driven by wretched greed, the men took their usual positions. A small party was to chase their targets into the valley, and the rest of the men would encircle them on the other side. Their plan had no ingenious twists to it, but the tactic was as strong as it was simple. People had changed little since their inception, and surrounding an enemy was a strategy they would never abandon.

The eight men hiding in the shadow of a large rock waited for the boys to pass and fired at them from behind. Their aim was to graze them without injuring the prized horses—that was all it took. Mortals loathed pain, and the threat of it almost always caused feeble mensch to flee or freeze. Even when caravans were accompanied by trained mercenaries or adventurers, few ever wanted to engage in a fight without good reason; the majority preferred retreat as their first option.

Suspicion of the bandits’ trap did little to help. Carriages had massive turning radii, and even the modest slope of the hill complicated things massively. The thieves had a cord of rope and several wooden stakes that they could use as an impromptu palisade, and their main forces were one flare away from rushing in from the other side.

What remained was the easy task of sinking their teeth into a helpless mark that had exposed its own rear. In many ways, the mercenaries preferred to be sniffed out. While their current victims were on horses unburdened by luggage, the scouting party was more than enough to catch a mere two people.

It was all too easy. As per usual, the arrows flew just close enough to be threatening, and the men grinned with satisfaction.

That was when things went awry. The arrows stopped in midair, and none of them knew why. Four of the projectiles froze like some otherworldly force had caught them, and the other four bounced off of an invisible screen, soaring off into tomorrow.

The sound of tongues clicking abounded. Every now and again, cautious magicians in caravans would use these obnoxious walls—they neither knew nor cared about the formal term being “barrier”—to block their initial strike. In all likelihood, one of the children was a mage. Still, that scarcely mattered: a miraculous save wouldn’t change the fact that scared children were liable to fall right into their trap.

However, this optimism quickly faded as both steeds veered off the beaten path. One flexed its glorious body to trot right up the hill; the other shakily retreated back the way it came, but the rider had clearly positioned himself to block the men’s sight of his fleeing companion. The rider’s hips floated above his horse as he headed straight for the scouting party.

There came another chorus of clicking tongues. The vice-captain spat on the ground, but commanded his seven squad members to make use of their good fortune: who were they to complain if their prey was coming to them? They just wanted the horse, so all they had to do was knock off the spare baggage riding it.

That is to say, these bandits had no interest in taking hostages. While the potential reward was sizable, ransoms were difficult to earn without expertise in the field. The process was a far cry from the simplicity of selling prisoners of war, and burying the proof of their misdeeds was the smart thing to do.

At the vice-captain’s order, seven arrows rained down on the foolhardy horseman. They sliced through the air at speeds unstoppable by a mere linen coat. Even with a mystic barrier, an average mage had no hope of blocking seven projectiles coming from all angles.

Yet he was no average mage. A flash of silver spilled forth from his hip, cutting down three arrows with ease. The remaining four had frozen in empty space and immediately turned back toward their origins, sinking into the limbs of those who’d fired them. Half of the advance squad was out of commission without knowing how the boy had done it.

Exactly how many managed to react to these breakneck developments was difficult to say. While everyone else was taken aback by the sputtering blood of their allies, the rider slipped his feet out of the stirrups and leapt off his steed. He then jumped again, while still airborne, cutting into the closest bandit he could find.

His fluid strike blurred the line between movement and attack, cleaving through the mercenary’s thumb and the bow it held. With another down, there were three left standing.

Two of the men managed to draw their swords in spite of the incomprehensible display before them—a feat worthy of endless praise. Their careers were more than mere puffery, and these professional killers had what it took to put down a novice mage.

Alas, the horseman—who ironically now stood on his own two legs—cared not for their skills. His swordplay was paradoxically complex and natural as he plucked the armaments right out of the bandits’ hands. A short yelp filled the air each time a thumb joined the blade it once held on a journey through the calm blue sky.

The vice-captain was the last man standing. The shock of seeing seven of his men felled in an instant had abandoned him; all he felt now was fear. Who on earth had he attacked?

From beneath the boy’s hood, the bandit could see a sharp, twinkling blue that sent shivers down his spine. The man’s instincts led him back to the ace in his sleeve that had saved his hide in countless battles: the crossbow dangling from his waist, always cranked to fire at a moment’s notice.

Its heft spoke to the might stored within, making it all the more reliable in the hand. Crossbows were known in war as knight-slayers for their stopping power, and they could tear through magic walls just as easily as they punched through armor.

Experience and intuition guided the man as he took aim and squeezed the trigger. With a bolt that accelerated far faster than anything fired from a standard bow, dodging a shot from this range was inconceivable. His enemy’s mind could register the threat, but their body had no hope of evading a projectile that flew faster than a soaring bird.

Unfortunately for the bandit, the boy defied all logic and pressed forward as if nothing had happened. He smashed the broad side of his sword straight into the man’s temple, causing the bandit to white out from the pain.

As his consciousness faded, the vice-captain convinced himself that he’d seen some kind of illusion. After all, his bolt had flown straight into a tear in the fabric of reality itself.

[Tips] Imperial law considers taxes lost to thieves to have been paid in full, expressly disallowing nobles from demanding additional payment from the cantons they oversee. As a result, there are additional bounties on bandits during harvest season.

Anxious from waiting without any signal from his other squad, the mercenary captain took his twenty-odd men down the road. Upon arriving at their post, he found nothing but the lingering scent of blood.

Are they dead? he wondered. Yet his fears were incredibly unlikely. Although he’d only assigned eight men to corral their victims, they were some of his best. His right-hand man leading the squad was a seasoned veteran who’d taken the heads of five generals, equally endowed in skill and wit. In what world could two sitting ducks wandering into the countryside best his vice-captain?

Still, the captain’s distaste for this truth did little to explain his vanished troops. Just as he began considering the unpalatable possibility that the worst had happened...a hail of arrows rained down on his vanguard.

The arrows drew wide arcs on their path down, though most bounced off of helmets and armor plates. Unlike those that appeared in the picture scrolls that told the tales of ancient heroes, real defensive equipment was capable of deflecting projectiles even when assisted by gravity. Otherwise, no one would bother donning such bulky clothing; if one was to be stabbed either way, then everyone would choose the lighter option.

A few cries of pain came from the unfortunate souls who’d been hit between plates or in spots only protected by leather padding. Despite taking a few casualties, the captain was quick to order a defensive formation. Clumping together and raising their shields in the direction of the arrows was sure to curb their losses.

Pondering what had happened was all well and good, but the first order of business was to put all their training to use. The mystery of how their surprise attack had been flipped on its head was compelling, but the men would need to be alive to solve it.

To that end, the captain was the epitome of calm. Over the course of his long history as a sellsword, he’d seen plenty of volatile skirmishes where the element of surprise was traded between two parties. Thus, his first thought was that the tantalizing prey that had wandered by had actually been bait.

Apparently, the group had enjoyed too much success. He’d once heard that the guard employed weak decoys to draw out bandits who avoided the main patrol paths. Imperial patrolmen were stupidly honest, but they were wily when it came to tactics like these. In fact, they were probably even better than regular soldiers when it came to sniffing out crime—perhaps obviously, as they spent every waking moment thinking about hunting bandits—and being on the receiving end of their efforts was hardly enjoyable.

That means... The captain ordered his men to prepare for a pincer attack, and his remaining subordinates readied another defensive line behind him. He knew his fair share of wartime strategy, and an attack on a pinned enemy was a matter of course.

Preemptive defenses would stem the bleeding. The fight ahead would surely be a struggle, but all they could hope for was to bide their time for a chance to break away from the enemy encirclement.

However, the mercenary’s expectations fell flat on their face. The attacker coming to cut them off was not a guard—it was the same mouthwatering mark they’d set out to catch.

Yet the sight that followed was utterly alien. Images came in through the man’s eyes, but his brain refused to believe them.

A lone boy was sprinting right toward them with a sword slung over his shoulder and six others floating beside him. The solitary figure closed the distance between them with great haste, and the hovering blades without a wielder to their name were strangely intimidating, as if each and every one was backed by a phantom warrior.

Forged in bloodstained battlefields, the mercenaries could tell that the dancing blades were more than a show of strength: each was capable of cutting them down. However, the men were already prepared to ward off an attack and raised their arms in spite of the mystifying spectacle.

As menacing as their attacker seemed, a floating sword was still a sword. Thought of as seven swordsmen, the boy was no match for their spears and shields. The phalanx was a tried and true formation that had survived millennia of use.

However, a few paces before entering striking distance, the lonesome figure extended his spare hand. The men chuckled, thinking this to be a fruitless attempt to shield his unprotected body.

They were wrong. In the next moment, the world flashed brighter than any bolt of lightning, and a thunderous sound tore apart their minds—the world shattered.

[Tips] Magic may cite the laws of reality, but it inherently aims to break them. Thus, it is possible to assign some physical properties absolute directionality that would otherwise be infeasible. Examples include one-way heat, vibrations, and even light.

The mercenaries could not comprehend what had happened. Deafening roars were common in battle: too often they’d heard sounds that split ears, violated the mind, and scratched at the roots of consciousness itself.

Mages would cast spells that exploded with piercing booms, and as of late even laymen could produce similar effects through the use of newfangled “cannons” used to bust open castle walls.

None of it could compare. This was not the low rumble of battle, but a shrill shriek that slashed at the brain. It robbed them of their vision and jostled the world itself. Everything around them swayed violently, until the ground leapt up to sock them in their faces.

Wait, hold on. Maybe I just fell? The disoriented captain attempted to turn his neck to see what the weight on his back was, but failed to accomplish even this. Regardless, with his eyes out of working order, he would have gained nothing for succeeding.

The blindness was orders of magnitude worse than stepping into broad daylight from a dark room, and no amount of blinking could rid him of the unwanted customer. His wandering mind mused that the people of the cantons and foreign states he’d set up in over the years must have felt the same way.

What else could he do? Logical thought had already abandoned him. The wobbling universe stirred up his guts and he coughed up a slurry of stolen goods, though it did nothing to cure his eyes and ears. The pain persisted as if to mock him, asking if he had ever been the type to hear out a plea for mercy.

Beyond the curtain of noise, he could hear a clash of swords. Maybe his subordinates were still struggling. The man made a mental note to ask them how they managed to withstand or avoid this awful sensation once all this was said and done.

Strangely, his functional sense of touch was also beginning to forsake him. Whatever wall—in truth, he had indeed fallen down, making this the ground—his face was planted in was covered in something akin to short grass, and it suddenly began to melt into a soupy quagmire. The earth softened, as if hundreds of men had marched through on a rainy day to pulverize it into mud.

The captain desperately tried to free his face to avoid drowning, but someone collapsed on top of him, slamming it back down. Buried in the bog, he could do nothing as a precise jolt of pain assaulted his thumb.

[Tips] As the cornerstone of grip, losing a thumb gives severe penalties to many stat checks. Using a spade or hoe may be possible with some effort, but wielding a sword to any acceptable degree is unthinkable. Furthermore, the powerful restorative abilities of the magia and bishops capable of regrowing a digit require permission from the College or corresponding church for use, respectively, making the medical operation a closely guarded state practice.

Running into a snag mid-quest is a trope as old as time. The GM, who art in heaven, hath rolled the dice, and my road event turned out to be a bust. I was on a mission without any bosses or grand goals; no one has ever asked for a wandering monster encounter on the path to a mere fetch quest. What if this jinxed me into some kind of climactic fight?

“Is one round trip without incident too much to ask for?” I groaned.

I flicked the blood off of Schutzwolfe and returned her to her sheath. With that, I dispelled the Unseen Hand and Farsight spells I’d used to turn each sword into a weapon of my own with Independent Processing.

Handling six appendages on top of my own had pushed my limits, and a throbbing pain assaulted the back of my skull. As methodologies went, it was far from fuel efficient. I could only utilize Enchanting Artistry and Hybrid Sword Arts with all my Hands at a level fit to be called a VIII: Master for five minutes at most. If I dumbed things down to simple swings or half-assed my Shortbow Marksmanship, I could hang in there for an hour or two, but alas.

The fatal flaw of my combo build exposed itself in its inability to fight a lengthy battle. If only mana stones had been written into the world as consumables that replenished mana...

“We’ll be here till winter if we keep getting held up like this,” I groaned.

“Erich, you just cut down over thirty men. Hearing you complain like we had to take a minor detour on the road is...honestly, it’s a bit freaky, even for me.”

I turned toward the gentle clopping of hooves to see Mika riding Castor, with Polydeukes in tow—the latter of the steeds had run off when I’d leapt off of him. My friend’s stunning features were as supremely androgynous as always; it was a wonder how even his most troubled expression remained suave.

However, I had a bone to pick with his accusatory tone.

“I could say the same to you,” I retorted. “You were the one that combined mutative and migratory magic to turn the ground into mortar so we could trap them in the dirt.”

I hadn’t been the only one to participate in this encounter. A shadow swooped down from the heavens and objected to my retort with a clamorous caw.

Don’t back talk my master, the raven seemed to say. He was a large specimen with a glistening black coat—as familiars went, he fit my old chum’s sensibilities to a tee.

Familiars were arcane life-forms other than demibeasts—hounds, birds, bugs, and the like—that had been modified to suit magia needs. Imbuing the creatures with supernatural abilities took many generations of acclimatization, so nowadays the labor-intensive industry was on a decline.

“Your familiar is so soft on you,” I said.

“Jealous, huh? My little Floki’s such a good boy.” Mika puffed up his chest with pride, and the raven seemed to smugly accept the praise, earning it a pat on the beak. Floki was a quintessential courier: it delivered messages both written and verbal, and even had a Vision Sharing spell built into its body. I could see why its owner was so keen on showing it off. A thoroughbred familiar like Mika’s was worth a fortune, and that his master had handed it down to him for free was proof of how much he was loved as a disciple.

That said, I couldn’t help but feel like Mika was forgetting something. Of course, I’d had no qualms when he’d found the bandits while giddily letting his new familiar take to the skies. But he had been the one to suggest we pass judgment on these evildoers; I’d been content to ride off the road to avoid them.

Admittedly, slaying bandits was a good-guy move that came with bonus loot; any sane player character would engage them without a second thought. I didn’t know if Mika had been taken by bloodlust or succumbed to that infernal mental disease that plagues children around the age of fourteen, but it stood that he had been the one most zealous about the fight. My contribution had been our plan of action—after he’d already scoped out their entire formation with Floki.

“Fine, fine,” I said. “On account of your esteemed familiar’s additional testimony, I hereby forfeit our ‘who’s scarier’ contest.”

“I don’t think there’s enough room for doubt for you to choose to lose...”

Two against one was bad odds. Besides, I wasn’t inclined to complain about my friend recognizing my strength. But just between you and me, Mika’s supportive magic would have been downright criminal in mass combat. If one were to encircle the enemy and prepare a unit of archers to attack at range, his spells would set up a horrifying beatdown.

That said, today’s pitiful victims were the petty thieves we’d cleaned up and not me, so I brushed the thought aside. I’d taken all of their thumbs to prevent any real resistance, and now the mortar was nice and dry, leaving them with no avenue for trickery. Mika had buried the first eight men all the way up to their necks, so we didn’t have to worry about them fleeing either.

Living up to the oikodomurge name, are we? Architectural magia primarily specialized in the creation of buildings, renovation of cities, and maintenance of sewer systems. Yet as soon as they nudged their talents toward combat, this horror was the result. It was no wonder that the Empire was willing to bestow titles and positions to keep its strongest magia bound to the nation.

Just as we settled down and prepared to call a patrol with Mika’s familiar, my acute ears picked up on a faint clink. The characteristic sound of metal betrayed a pent-up force being released.

Keeping our positions relative to the noise in mind, I cast a spell. Three sounds rang out in succession: the firing of an arrow, the splitting of air, and...the tearing of a hole in space.

“What?!”

I wheeled around and summoned a Hand to swipe a dagger from the nearest enemy, which I plunged into the crossbowman’s palm. It bit into the flesh between his bones, pinning it to the earth almost in reproach for his sorry attempt at revenge.

I’d been a bit careless. Crossbows needed thumbs to be aimed properly, but the bandit was crawling on the ground and only needed his index finger to pull the trigger. Next time, I swore I’d take two fingers instead of one. I’d have to tell the poor saps I crossed paths with in the future to send any complaints to this guy.

“That was close,” I said. “Mika, you all right? My bad, I should’ve been more thorough.”

“Y-Yeah, I’m fine... Sorry for the trouble, Erich.” As he spoke, he ran his hand across his chest as if to make sure it really hadn’t been shot. All the while, his eyes never left the gash in space.

Lo and behold, my answer to all my questions of growth: space-bending magic. Many nights ago, Lady Agrippina had sent me a message that detailed the inner workings of the craft—a craft which, might I remind you, was considered a technology as lost as it was forbidden. I’d nearly blown a gasket realizing that she’d sent it my way on a slip of paper, and followed through by questioning her the following day. Her response had been, “It isn’t as if the average person could parse this text anyhow.” Faced with such flagrant disregard, I’d simply given up on her.

I was soon made to know why space-bending magic was considered all but lost. The cost of acquisition was just absurd, even with Lady Agrippina teaching me. Fully mastering the art required enough experience points to max out more than a few skills or traits.

The underlying reason lay with the fact that the mere rupture of physical reality required unholy amounts of experience—acquiring this at Scale I had taken the lion’s share of my savings—and things like choosing a destination or connecting two points were considered add-ons. Perfecting the spell as a safe means of transport necessitated all sorts of expensive tweaks, not to mention that the size and duration of each tear scaled with mastery.

Opening a portal to who-knows-where wasn’t exactly the height of consistency one might hope to achieve. The whole point of space-bending magic was to teleport to distant lands in the blink of an eye.

However, a shift in perspective showed that this was fine in its own way: I had an absolute shield that could disappear even the most unstoppable attack to the far reaches of reality (or wherever it went, since I wasn’t really sure myself).

What Professor Leizniz had shown me led me to the formation of my first completed build. Knowing that I’d continue to rely on swords as my main weapon, I brought my Hybrid Sword Arts from Scale VI to the doorstep of IX: Divine. At this point, I could wield up to seven weapons (if I could get my hands on some) at once to deal with crowds. While I still had the option of using giant weapons like I had against Helga, I found the sight of six floating blades as skilled as me far more oppressive from the enemy’s perspective.

I’d also committed some resources to my Unseen Hands. Namely, the Iron Fist add-on transformed my ad-libbed shields into a barrier tough enough to proudly match up to any armor. Layering them together could create an impenetrable wall, and I could wrap them around my body for a low-cost force field that offered a full range of motion.

Sacrificing a Hand that could be swinging a sword for defensive means was unsatisfying, but this essentially meant I had an armor steroid that I could fit in as a minor action. I was quite pleased with how unsurmountable I’d become for any enemy that relied exclusively on physical attacks.

To that end, I blew a massive sum on upgrading Parallel Processing to Independent Processing. Despite the expense, I maintained that my heightened ability to multitask was worth it. My housework was faster than ever, and my Hands were no longer subconsciously linked to my body like they had been in my fight with Helga.

I wasn’t even using my new mental faculties to their fullest potential. I could probably use at least ten concurrent Hands without needing more brain power. Tacking on more Hands was getting relatively expensive, though, so I would only consider it if I had a ton of spare change.

Space-bending magic slotted in as my answer to anything that couldn’t be stopped by a measly physical barrier. Although the mana costs were steep, any attack that went through one of my space tears was gone for good; a universal counter to broken enemy moves was sure to pay dividends. I had one more secret weapon left, so I hoped to one day find the leeway to get all the add-ons needed for human teleportation.

“I guess I should hit them with another one,” I said, readying the parlor trick that I’d developed with the last of my experience.

Roughly 75,000 candelas of blinding light and 150 decibels of sheer noise spewed forth from my left hand, causing the fallen bandits to writhe in pain. Receiving a second dose so soon had likely ruined their eardrums, but they were slated for far worse once the imperial knights got their hands on them, so I had no need for guilt. Not even the thin fan-made booklets circulating Japanese geekdom could compare to the terrible fates they had in store.

My spell was simple: it was a mutation of powdered dolomite and ammonium salt—both readily available for purchase at various magus workshops in the capital—into magnesium and ammonium perchlorate. An initial ignition was all I needed to replicate the elements of a stun grenade with magic.

Additionally, I’d spent a good deal of time tweaking auxiliary spells to aim the light and sound so that I couldn’t even see the effects. The final product was a move that temporarily disabled enemies without resorting to lethal force.

Naturally, I’d been inspired by the films and games of my past life. Flashbangs were splendid tools that could be used in anything from hostage rescue to enemy suppression, and came with the perk of not totally destroying their environment. Although the arcane version wasn’t quite up to the standard of my memories, it was serviceable. Plus, it was mana efficient, easy, and fast enough to fit in between actions. I know I was the one who’d come up with the idea, but this was a stroke of genius.

I mean, sure, it was also a ripoff of the magus Professor Leizniz had shown me, but I’d expanded on his technique enough to say that my version was more of an homage. Acknowledging one’s own successes is important, okay?

“All right, I’ll look for some patrolmen. I’m sure they’ve got knights standing guard on the main highway at this time of year anyway.” Mika pulled out a sheet of paper and scribbled something down. He was going to tie a message onto his familiar’s leg like a carrier pigeon, no doubt.

I began wondering how much money we’d make from this. I’d heard that even the lowliest bandit grunts fetched a decent price during harvest season. Not too long ago, I’d seen a few who’d been publicly hanged at a few dozen librae a pop. Apparently, the living bandit chief had been bought by the crown for a whopping five drachmae.

What was more, no one would complain if we looted their belongings—though, obviously, the goods they’d stolen were to be returned—so we were sure to find a bit of money there. Their equipment seemed solid, and I suspected we’d earn a pretty penny if we got the state to buy it off of us. Carrying all this home was sure to be a hassle, but surely these vagrants had a freight carriage lying around somewhere that the Dioscuri could pull along.

Wait, I forgot about the bonus for live captures. We had a little over thirty breathing captives... Are we rich? Even after splitting the bounty in half, this would be enough to put my savings at a number that could realistically pay for Elisa’s tuition this year.

Life was good, God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world. Good triumphed over evil, and the heroes smiled as they celebrated their victory. Today’s Henderson reading was nice and low.

But, well, back-to-back fights with all my Unseen Hands working at full throttle and the use of space-rending shields had left me drained of mana. My headache was getting worse, and the desolation that accompanied it was unbearable.

“Hark, esteemed comrade of mine.”

“Huh? What’s with the act out of nowhere, Erich?”

My childish body was still ignorant of cost-effectiveness. As prompt as children are to regain their vigor, they also suffer from a shallower pool of stamina. Frankly, I was doing great for my age...right?

“I’m tired,” I said. “Can we take a break?”

So who could find fault with a reward of respite at the top of the hill?

[Tips] The patrolling guards of the Empire offer unparalleled safety on the roads. However, the unluckiest travelers still find themselves running into situations like these.

As I gazed at the unbounded skies, I was possessed by the sensation that I might fall upward into their refreshing abyss. I felt no fear—just an excitement that I might drown in that beautiful blue. A few thin autumn clouds rolled into view, and I could only dream of how they’d feel if I could hug them.

Speaking of hugs, I’d received a letter from Margit a week prior. She’d grabbed ahold of a merchant caravan due for a visit to the capital and entrusted them with mail addressed to me. Judging from her message, she’d sent it a short while before I reached Berylin myself, and it had taken some time to get to me.

The letter primarily touched on how things were going back home, and just as I’d predicted, Heinz had already managed to fill Miss Mina’s belly. My sister-in-law was skinny, and the bulge in her stomach was noticeable after two months. Rumors of her pregnancy had spread across the canton like wildfire, especially since the couple were now the second fastest to conceive after marriage in local history; the old man who told us tall tales of the fey coin in our youth retained his throne, as he’d knocked up his wife in a mere month back in the day.

I was now an uncle, and delighted to be one too. While I’d experienced this feeling once before in a distant world, I never tired of celebrating my family’s good fortune.

All things said, the continuation of my bloodline was cause for joy. This little bandit episode of mine would bring in some cash, so I would need to open up my light wallet to prepare some kind of birthday celebration for my nephew or niece, as paltry as it would be. Such gifts meant nothing to the newborn baby, but to learn that there had been people so excited for their birth at a later age was sure to make them happy.

...Still, I wonder why I’m thinking about these sorts of things from atop my friend’s lap?

“How are you feeling?” Mika asked.

Fine and dandy, I thought, peering up to meet the handsome boy’s gaze.

I looked him over like he was an alien life-form, his cool expression as androgynous as ever. Confused by my analytical glare, he cocked his head and smiled; with a bit of ingenuity, he could make a living off that smile alone.

The autumn breeze gently blew at his wavy black hair, giving me the full scope of his shapely nose and girlish lips. The amber gemstones he had for eyes alone reinforced my confidence that, in a few years, all the well-to-do dames of the world would toss their lives to the wayside for a chance at his hand. Hell, I could see men straying off the beaten path for a shot at that.

I wasn’t about to fuss about getting a front-row seat to the sort of face that healed headaches via sheer aesthetic appeal. Still, this seating arrangement of ours wasn’t without its problems.

Sure, I had been the one to suggest we take a break, and sure, I’d wanted to lay down to alleviate my splitting headache and mana exhaustion. But I failed to see how Mika managed to come to the conclusion that he ought to lend me his lap.

So why did I say yes? Well, his legs looked like they’d make a better pillow than my arm, and I’d laid my head down before I knew it. Troublingly enough, I’d been right: my long years of training had given me a good bit of hardened muscle, where Mika’s legs retained a comfortable bounce to them. It was a bit strange how little muscle he’d put on, considering we’d been going on longer rides lately.

Come to think of it, this was my first time laying in someone’s lap as Erich. I hadn’t been able to ask Margit, since she physically didn’t have a lap to sleep on.

“Boy, it’s even longer than before... Your hair sure does grow fast.” Mika cut off my meandering thoughts and picked up a lock of my hair. I felt a gentle tug on my scalp. Ah, drat...he’s toying with me.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Come on, my hands are empty and I like how your hair feels.”

I couldn’t see, but judging by feel, he was carefully tying my hair into a braid. Now that it had grown to reach well past my neck, I had to make sure to push my bangs back so that I could see. Still, the feminine do he was styling was hard to swallow.

“Can you turn over some? I can’t reach this bit,” Mika said.

“Uh, sure?”

Why am I letting this—hey, wait, stop picking flowers. Hold it, don’t put it in my hair! What’s wrong with your sense of fashion? This sort of hair is meant for Elisa. Styling me like a princess is just going to end with someone pouring cold water on me and the flower garden on my head.

“Done,” he said. “You’ll need to get up for the finishing touches. Come on, lift your head.”

I wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse after all his ergonomic support. As I engaged my abs to hoist my upper half, I felt him take one of the braids he’d made from my bangs and loop it behind my head.

What was this called again? A crown braid? Whatever it was, the arrangement was trending in urban centers, and I’d seen a fair number of women wearing the style in daily life, which beckoned the question: why was I wearing it?

“Mika, if you want to play with hair so badly, why don’t you grow out your own?”

“Hm? No, I’m good. Short hair suits me. When it gets longer, the curls get way out of hand.” As he spoke, my friend continued to litter my head with white clovers.

...Did I do something to you?

At any rate, my headache was almost gone, so I prepared myself to slowly unravel his work. The patrolmen would soon arrive, and I didn’t want them to see me looking—

“Oh, it looks like they’re here,” Mika said.

Dammit. All is wrong with the world...

[Tips] Gods do not directly smite mortals for blasphemous behavior. At most, they send an apostle in their stead. Offhand jokes and mockery are everyday occurrences; the ensuing fights between the sinner and holy men do not fall under the realm of divine punishment.

“So, you’re telling me you boys came across these bandits on an errand and decided you were going to arrest them yourselves?”

“Yes, sir, that’s about right.”

Henrik von Runingen was a decorated imperial knight, having patrolled the bustling tradeways for sixteen years. He was a unigenerational noble—meaning his title and the stipend it afforded could not be passed down to a son or daughter—without territory, but the wanting honors did nothing to stymie his unfettered loyalty to the Empire. All his life, he’d offered his blade in battle to protect the streets of his nation...but on this day, he experienced something he’d never seen before.

Runingen had been leading a unit of seven men on an unpopular byway when a raven came swooping down with a message tied to its leg. This was all part of a day’s work: mages routinely employed all manners of familiar beasts to ask the closest patrol for help or rescue.

However, the knight’s expectations were off. The letter was not a plea for help, but a request that he come to take a handful of captured bandits off the mage’s hands. While a tad atypical, this too was a situation he’d encountered before. Whether it was a sorcerous adventurer or a magus with a strong moral compass, about once a year Runingen had to help powerful spellcasters process disproportionately large numbers of apprehended criminals.

Even with that in mind, he hadn’t imagined that he’d be greeted by two pretty boys that clearly weren’t of age. One of the children could only be identified as a boy from his clothing, whereas the other had a head full of white clovers like the fair princess of a flower bed. Runingen was at a loss for words.

If they had said something cute like, “We saw a thief!” then he would have figured they’d spotted a crime while they were playing and thought to report it. In that case, he would’ve patted their heads and rewarded their good work with a copper coin to let them buy some candy.

What was an adult meant to do when two children showed up with a whole crew of neutralized bandits? Not even the longtime veteran had a ready answer for times like these.

“Um...Sir Runingen? We found the twenty-four men they mentioned over this way, and...they’re trapped in some kind of hardened paste. It seems they’re all alive.”

“Er, sir? I found eight men buried from the neck down on my end.”

The cherry on top was that the bandits had been captured in manners so pitiful that Runingen almost felt sorry for them. This was clearly not the work of an average person: they had to be either mages, magia, or straight up alfar to do something like this.

“The two of us have ties to the Imperial College, and have some trifling knowledge of magic,” the blond boy said.

“I am enrolled as an official student, and my friend here is a mage serving a professor,” the raven-haired boy added. “Thus, we have some small amount of practical skill, as meager as it may be.”

Trifling? Meager? How can you utter these words so shamelessly?

These two boys were claiming that they’d rounded up some thirty full-grown men. Judging from the marks left on the scene, they’d confronted the crooks head-on. Upon further inspection, Runingen found that the bandits squirming around in the dirt were all missing their thumbs. Are you telling me this is how you subdued them?

Everything about the situation was strange. Yet when Runingen requested to see proof of their citizenship, the boys obediently pulled out a pair of slates, and his authenticating counterpart glowed blue (as opposed to the red that appeared for counterfeits) to confirm their identities.

“Sir! We’ve discovered what we believe to be a large campsite with a stolen imperial carriage on the premises!”

“There were traces of shallow graves too. Your orders, captain?”

Runingen had a duty to lead his men, all of whom were equally as perplexed as himself. He rubbed his temples for a brief moment and shifted gears: it would be much easier to treat the bandit-slayers like adults if he simply thought of them as ghastly things instead of children.

“Understood,” he said. “You two wait here. I’ll pen you a letter of referral after I survey the scene myself.”

Regardless of his mental struggles, he had a job to do. He needed to ascertain whether the bandits matched the descriptions of wanted criminals and take a headcount; otherwise, the little monsters wouldn’t be able to claim their reward from the state.

A part of his brain clung to common sense, whispering how the bounty would be too great a sum for mere children, or how he ought to lecture them about not taking such enormous risks, but he pushed those thoughts to the side and focused on his work.

Common sense was important, but there was a time and a place for it. This was neither the time nor the place.

Besides, the world was full of people whom it was better not to dwell on. Wholly legitimate stories abounded of outliers who cut down enemy generals on their first battle, and dragon slayers who had only just come of age. Wiping out a band of ne’er-do-wells at the age of twelve or so was cute in comparison.

Runingen suppressed his rebellious heart and mind, and made off to look over the captured hooligans covered in dried mortar, like any good patrolman was wont to do.

[Tips] Bandit bounties are not paid immediately. Such matters require thorough investigation, and rewards are usually handed out a month after the initial capture.

The patrolmen were chewing on all sorts of emotions as they bound up the criminals and marched them along. And, well, I could see why. I would question my sanity too if a pair of brats showed up with this many captives, especially if one of them looked like a total moron.

“Wow, I’m looking forward to when they finish processing everything,” Mika said, with the patrolman’s letter in hand.

I was frantically picking out all the flowers he’d planted with my Hands, and couldn’t help but wonder how he remained unabashed seeing me so desperate to undo it all. However, I had to concede that he’d done a good job with the braid, and having my annoying hair out of the way had honestly been pleasant enough that I’d almost agree to have it done up again in the future.

“Paying the bills is going to be so much easier,” he went on, happily flapping the slip of paper. Suddenly, his brow scrunched up. “But are you sure you want to split it evenly?”

“Duh, I’m sure,” I said. “You pulled your fair share of the load.”

I was the one who’d suggested this distribution in the first place. Although I’d been alone on the front lines, Mika had been the one to find the bandits so we wouldn’t fall into their trap—prior knowledge was the only reason we’d dealt with their initial volley so easily. On top of that, as a longtime solo player, having a backline ally to debuff enemies in battle was cause for thanks.

Another massive contribution had been his ability to round up all the goons after the fight had ended. Left in my hands, it would’ve been backbreaking work. I didn’t have enough rope on me to tie them all up or enough mana to keep them stunned until help arrived. And obviously, I wasn’t barbaric enough to want to ruin all of their legs...

Basically, I’m trying to say that I was incredibly grateful for Mika’s assistance. Combat was about more than brandishing one’s bladework in the enemy’s face: mopping up after the win was similarly integral. What moron would refuse to compensate a friend who smoothed over the most tedious part? I didn’t plan on joining the ranks of the exile-happy fools that had been so common in the fiction of my past life.

Still, he seemed legitimately torn up over splitting the reward in half, so I tried to take some weight off his shoulders with banter.

“What,” I said, “do you not take imperial bounties as payment for your pillow services?”

“All right, you got me.” His usual smile returned, and I reaffirmed that beauty was ideally appreciated at its best. “Just so you know, my establishment doesn’t deal in change.”

“No worry. Consider it a tip,” I concluded with flourish. “Anyway, let’s get going. I want to get there before sundown. Three nights of camping out might be good on the wallet, but I miss taking real baths.”

“Sure, let’s pick up the pace.”

We loaded up our measly loot, hopped onto the horses, and left our detour stop behind us. As an aside, we relinquished all but one sword to the patrolmen. While we could’ve taken a carriage and sold the goods ourselves, imperial knights offered reliable rates mandated by law. They were a bit lower than market prices, but adding the value of the bandits’ possessions to our bounty was far more convenient than trying to haul all their stuff to sell with our own two hands.

Thus, I’d picked out just one sword to bring along. Picking up a slew of weapons was well and good, but carrying them around was out of the question. Not even Polydeukes could lug a load like that. Instead, I chose to keep only the bandit captain’s well-maintained blade. There had been others of good make that I would have loved to snatch up, but it wasn’t meant to be.

With this matter behind us, it’s time I unveiled the details of our assignment: our little errand had been requested by none other than Lady Agrippina herself. The reward she’d promised was a whopping drachma—sure to warp my perception of money for when I became an adventurer, no doubt—and she’d given me ten librae of funds to complete my mission. What’s more, the silver pieces were ours to keep if we had any left over, leading us to promptly begin cutting corners.

Mika and I had camped out on the road for days to arrive at a town called Wustrow. It was a small city that lay just outside the Empire’s most arctic region in the northwest. Developed around the local magistrate’s castle, it was the capital of the surrounding cantons and a hub for material goods—just like every other rural city.

Their main contributions were in agriculture and livestock, though sometimes they allocated parts of the latter resource for leatherwork. With a population of eight thousand, the urban center was slightly below the median for the Empire.

However, the town was also home to what Lady Agrippina described as an acclaimed scrivener, known for his masterful transcriptions of various texts. The story went that he’d lived in Berylin long ago, but grew weary of the bustling crowds and orders for extravagant books in his old age. Sick of the capital, he retired to his hometown of Wustrow.

Transcribing arcane tomes was a skill-intensive process, and copies of mystic texts were almost exclusively made by the hands of needy students—unsuccessful researchers and professors sometimes joined their ranks—over many sleepless nights. Factoring in the professional designers and bookbinders needed to finish the product, the rarity of academic literature needed little further explanation.

However, career scriveners had various means of generating the mana needed to produce accurate, high-quality tomes. I was to visit Sir Marius von Feige, a man who was said to pen copies indistinguishable from the original. Of note was the fact that Lady Agrippina—the Lady Agrippina—had uttered his full name off the tip of her tongue.

The madam had also described him as extraordinarily obstinate, so I was ready for a difficult negotiation. But the reward was good for a fetch quest, and above all else, trying to convince a stubborn quest NPC was so very appropriate.

Mika’s master had coincidentally just been roped into supervising tax allocation from the fall harvest (a palpable reminder that the Trialist Empire treated its magia as political entities), so I invited him along during his spell of leisure.

At long last, we were nearing our destination. We’d hit a hiccup on the way, but now that we were here, our job was practically done. All that remained was to do my best to earn Elisa’s tuition. I wonder what kind of souvenir she’ll like?

[Tips] Transcription is the process of copying a sheepskin book by hand and hiring a local artisan to bind the finished sheets together. Some arcane tomes lose all meaning if the scribe’s handwriting does not conform to specific mystic protocols. As a result, well-made copies can equal the value of an original text; the rarest are prized on the same level as noble titles.

We arrived a bit past evening. Unlike the towering fortifications of major cities like Berylin, we strode up to a gate surrounded by simple walls no higher than three meters. Though the urban planning had clearly followed imperial guidelines, the town would crumble in half a month under siege.

Of course, being a mere two days’ ride from Berylin for a hurried messenger, the people of Wustrow had no need to invest heavily in their defenses. Rhine would be in dire straits for a city this close to the capital to fall; at that point, the Empire would be busy relocating the crown or risking the fate of the nation on a decisive battle, not caring for a minor town.

After passing through a fittingly casual identity check at the front gate, we paid our fifty assarii of entrance dues—I’d initially been shocked, but I suppose this was in place of a toll for using the highways—and entered the city. Of course, our first order of business was to head straight for...

“All right, let’s find an inn.”

“Yeah, let’s.”

...lodging. The quest could wait.

Seeking somebody out at suppertime defied common sense. This was doubly true for anyone Agrippina du Stahl, known bearer of many girthy sticks up her ass, considered to be obstinate. I presumed that meant Sir Feige was quite a character, and no amount of caution could be too much. At worst, by my figuring he would resort to force as soon as we knocked on his door; preparing with that in mind was best for my mental and physical health.

To combat this, I’d prepared a gift of confections from the capital. I’m sure my master’s ample allowance was in part a subtle hint that I was to give this sort of diplomacy some thought.

“Excuse me, may I have a moment?” I asked.

“Hm? What do you need?”

Regardless, the main act would have to wait for tomorrow. I stopped an idle guard and asked him if he knew any cheap motels in the area. He obliged, and I gave him a copper coin for his troubles. This too had also taken me some time to get used to: seeing rural officers readily accept “thanks” was always a bit strange.

We thanked him and walked through town. Houses lined the street at sparse intervals, and though the main road was neatly packed with cobblestone, all the minor avenues were simply flattened dirt. The street lights illuminating the capital were nowhere to be found, and the area felt like the truest representation of idyllic pastoralism.

The motel—to clarify, these were inns that only rented rooms and served no meals—was located in a laborers’ district near the outer walls, and we rented a room for ten assarii. The building had a small tilt to it that betrayed its age, but the interior was surprisingly well put together. Fortunately, it seemed the guard we’d asked was not in bed with the innkeepers.

I bought Castor and Polydeukes their spots at a nearby stable which serviced all of the lodgings in the area. Again, the location had evidently worn down with time, but the father and sons keeping the stables seemed to be earnest folk. Despite the fact that we were underage, they referred to us respectfully as “Misters,” which inspired some confidence in their devotion to good service.

They supplied water and hay, charging fifteen assarii per day per horse, or twenty-five for two. While it felt odd to pay more for them than I had for myself, beasts of burden required far more upkeep. Plus, the Dioscuri were our dear partners on this adventure of ours, and I wasn’t going to complain about them resting up in a nice place. I added a five-assarii tip and asked the stablehands to feed them plenty of fodder.

Next, Mika and I were off to fill up our own bellies.

“Now then, what do you want to eat?” I asked.

“Hm,” he said, “I don’t see that many food stalls around.”

I hadn’t realized until he mentioned it, but he was right. Frankly, the capital was aberrant in how it housed an eatery or stall at every street corner. Back in Kongistuhl, we had one pub and one restaurant, and they were only open during seasons where travelers and caravans were common. The only stalls I’d seen back home were the ones visiting merchants set up during the spring and fall.

“Crap,” I groaned, scratching my head. “We should’ve asked that guard about food too.”

In fact, I could’ve asked the stable boys just moments ago. With how genial they’d been, surely they would’ve been willing to fill us in on the dining situation around town. Maybe I should head back and—

“How about there, Erich?” Mika tugged on my sleeve and pointed at a pub. “They’ve got a lot of foot traffic. Maybe they’re good?”

I turned to see yet another ragged building, but there were indeed quite a few customers geared up for travel passing through the entrance. A handful of patrons seemed to be adventurers or mercenaries, judging from the light padding on their chests and arms.

To digress for a moment, Wustrow was the same as the capital in the sense that only the city guard, nobility, and bodyguards for the former party had the privilege of carrying weapons. I surmised that the arms ban was standard throughout the Empire. Municipal governments weren’t exactly eager to see chance encounters between their citizens end in bloodshed.

Schutzwolfe, the looted sword, and my set of armor were all stowed away at our inn. The only combat-ready equipment I had on my person were my gloves, the cowl wrapped around my neck, the fey knife in my sleeve, and my lunar ring. Granted, having a mystic catalyst on hand made me capable of doing whatever I wanted to if I were so inclined.

Thinking about it more deeply, perhaps the reason ring-shaped catalysts had gone out of style had more to do with state policy than a modern trend toward stronger staffs. If, say, the Empire had secretly spread propaganda against the rings, I could see why. The materials needed to make them may have been rare, but the things were absolute menaces. It was terrifying to think a piece of jewelry was far better suited to assassination than any dagger, and far easier to sneak into any location to boot.

Putting my awful imagination to rest, Mika and I headed into the tavern. The space indoors was abundant, but the close-packed tables full of customers left little breathing room in the dining hall. The choking odor of liquor and crowds of mensch hit us in a wave, mixing with the smell of food to forge the pinnacle of sensory chaos.

Clinking mugs and vulgar laughs filled the air, and those playing cards or board games aired their joys and sorrows. The place was the spitting image of a frontier bar.

This right here—this is it! This is how it’s meant to be! A traditional fantasy scene like this was a welcome sight after a lifetime of ludicrous twists.

That said, the appearance of two children didn’t draw in the classic trope of a faux tough guy telling us to go home to drink our mommas’ milk. Caravans employed indentured servants around my age, and I could pick out a few among the customers tonight.

“Hey there!” a waitress said energetically. “Gimme a minute, okay? It’s busy, but we’ve still got space for you!”

The girl’s collar cut deep into her chest—a telltale feature of north Rhinian folk garb. Her dirty blonde hair was fashioned into a thick braid, and her freckled cheeks dimpled into a cheery, heliacal smile. She was the archetypal countryside waitress in every way.

She led us to a pair of open counter seats in back. A few men were playing cards right beside us, copper and silver pieces flashing between them after each hand.

Local bars were ordinarily the ideal spot to gather intel, but I had no mind to talk to our fellow patrons. A tavern near the inns was sure to attract mainly travelers and businessmen who likely knew little about Sir Feige.

“Now, what’ll it be, big guys?” the waitress asked. “We just butchered some sheep, so the stew’s really tasty tonight!”

Mutton? I thought. This was a bit peculiar, as the signature Rhinian protein was pork. Sheep needed grazing pasture, making them more difficult to raise—although on second thought, perhaps that was exactly why they were kept out here. With harsh cold came the challenge of overwintering livestock, and sheep held up well in the bitterest months.

“Wow, I haven’t had that in ages,” Mika said. “I’ll take the mutton stew.”

I’d almost forgotten that my friend hailed from around these parts. He probably knew what he was doing, so I followed in his footsteps and ordered another portion of the same.

“Boy, I can’t believe I get to have mutton again. I’m excited. No one ever serves it in the capital, you know.”

The Trialist Empire was a densely wooded nation without the real estate for ruminants. Any flat plots that would have made for good pastures were converted into cropland instead. In place of cows or sheep, Rhinians raised hogs, since they could be left to live off acorns or what have you largely unsupervised.

Land-to-beef output ratios were so high that only the nobility could afford to savor the markedly scarce commodity. We commoners were so far removed from these meats that we’d never get a shot at them even if we could cough up the cash. All this must have left Mika starving for a taste of home.

Speaking of which, it had been a long time since I’d eaten rice. I’d grown used to my diet of bread and pork as an imperial citizen, but I pined for the flavors that were etched into my being. Miso soup was another example. I hadn’t had a drop of it for an entire lifetime, and still the taste remained unforgettable. I suppose rice and dashi were simply indispensable to the Japanese soul; their flavors were stamped onto my identity itself, never to be lost.

I’d once heard that some southern region bordering the ocean was partial to rice, but I doubted their crops were anything like the Japonica rice that had gone through countless generations of selective breeding to get to where it was. Centuries of blood, sweat, and tears had gone into developing a staple grain that was tasty by itself, and it was of incomparably higher quality than its forefathers. Of course, such ancestral rice could very well be delicious on its own merit, but the flavors in my memory were a long way away...

“I’m happy for you... Eat up tonight!” Taken by nostalgia, I grabbed my friend by the shoulder and spoke with great passion. He eyed me like I’d lost my mind, but I was feeling too sentimental to care.

Incidentally, when our stews arrived at eight assarii a pop, Mika told me that it wasn’t quite the same as back home. Too much ginger, apparently.

It tasted great, for what it was worth. The ginger counteracted the gamey smell, and the long stewing process had left the meat relatively tender. To be picky, I would have liked some pepper—either classic black peppercorns or the Japanese variant—or perhaps a side dish.

After finishing up our exotic meal, the two of us temporarily parted ways. Despite the petty differences, Mika had been pleased with the nostalgic dish, and said he was guaranteed sweet dreams if he slept now. He walked back to our motel, and I headed in the other direction to the public bathhouse to scrub off a few days’ grime.

The bathhouse sat slightly beyond the city walls, beside a small brook used to flush away waste. It looked just as dinky as the rest of the city, but the citizenry had clearly stayed loyal to the location over the years; the facility was well-kept, and there were a decent number of customers.

I paid my entrance fee and stepped inside. The interior confirmed my suspicions; the simple baths were solidly built. They had the typical cold, lukewarm, and hot baths—oh? To my excitement, they even had a steam bath.

“Nice. It’s been a while, so I guess I’ll start there,” I merrily said to myself. The free saunas in the capital were kind of, well, lukewarm. Urbanites and country kids evidently had different interpretations of suitable temperature, so I hoped that a bathhouse this out of the way would trend toward the tastes of the latter.

“Wow, I have the place all to myself.”

As expected, the stove in the middle of the room was scorching hot. Water instantly vaporized on contact with a sizzling flourish, and the resulting smell and sensation sent me back in time. Every pail of water created more and more snow-white steam that raised the heat to a comfortable level, drawing out sweat from my pores.

Ahh, this is what a steam bath is all about.

I reminisced on the baths we used to take back home on our days of rest. Had I still been in Konigstuhl, this definitely would’ve been the year I shook Margit’s invitations off to join the adult men’s group. Looking back, I’d sort of let it slide because we were all so young, but letting all the children bathe together had been a questionable decision in the first place.

I continued relishing my one-man relaxation room for a few minutes until another guest came in. Of course, I wasn’t boorish enough to complain about having to share the space; enjoying a bath with another person was wonderful in its own way.

The newcomer trudged through the clouds and sat next to me, leaving a comfortable space between us. I nodded my head as etiquette mandated, and I could tell from his foggy silhouette that he’d turned to face me.

“Ain’t seen you ’round ’fore.”

The man’s imperial tongue had a unique rhythm to it—some northern dialect, perhaps. With the capital full of people speaking the prettiest language, I hadn’t heard an accent like this before. Still, I was keeping up.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m here on a little errand.”

“Aye? Tough task for a youngin. How old’re ya, kid?”

“I turned thirteen this autumn.”

“Where from? Come this way all ’lone?”

The man’s creaky tenor was tinged with the subdued sobriety of an old man. He was likely a local retiree getting along in his years. Oh, he’s the perfect person to ask. A longtime resident was likely to know something about this von Feige character I was pursuing.

“No, sir,” I said. “I came with a friend. I find camping by myself lonely, you see.”

“Mm, good t’hear. Roads ain’t safe this time o’ year. But I gots to say, should’a grabbed a car’van to be real safe. Still, yer a clever lad,” he said, reaching out beyond the veil of steam to pat me on the head. His touch was gentle, but it was altogether different from the sensation of my parents’ hands, or the occasional pet from Lady Agrippina. The jagged texture rubbing against my hair wasn’t flesh—it was bark. To elaborate, it had the same qualities as the wood of an old, dried-up tree.

“Um, may I ask you a question?”

“What’s it?” he asked.

Entering my fifth decade of total mental life, my wisdom wasn’t just for show. I was well aware of how important preparation was to accomplishing any task. I wasn’t the type to run into a monster den with blade swinging, unaware that a skeleton horde awaited me, uncowed by mere steel, more than once. Only once.

I’d done my research on the man I was to find. He was a talented scrivener who crafted brilliant transcriptions. He loved sweets. He exploded in fury when his work was interrupted. He was considered stubborn by every single person I’d asked. But most pertinently...

“I take it you are the esteemed Sir Feige. Am I mistaken?”

...he was an elderly treant. The fellow sitting by me was unmistakably a wooden man of considerable age. His limbs were knotted with twining branches and leaves, and his face was similarly adorned with what looked to be a large tree root curling onto itself to form his features. From between the gaps, his eyes shone through the steam like a set of glimmering scarabs.

His eyes opened wide—merely a figure of speech to liken his wooden expressions to my own—and looked me over from head to toe. Then he nodded magnanimously and his rustic speech morphed into a pristine palatial dialect.

“Indeed I am. Now then, little one, what business might you have with a withered old stump like myself?”

[Tips] Treants are technically humanfolk, but at heart they are nearer to spirits. They boast high magical competence as a result, and use their innate ties to nature to bolster their strength.

The bathing places of the Trialist Empire were minor amusement parks, of sorts. They had beds where one could order a massage, benches where friends could sit and chat, and even small exercise areas where patrons could enjoy a bout of wrestling.

Sir Feige and I left the sauna and found a bench near the cold water bath to cool off on. Seeing him in full, the peculiarity of the treant form struck me with renewed intensity. His face and limbs looked like gnarled bark that had happened to twist into the shape of a man. Without the twinkle in his eyes, his features could be written off as the effects of pareidolia manifesting on an old bit of timber.

Silver leaves adorned his crown like a head of hair, and the derricking of his branches evoked the image of an ancient tree. In this way, treants failed to differ from mensch: his body quietly told the tale of his age.

“As I’ve gotten up in years, all the water’s left my body. I come by the bathhouse to soak my dried lumber,” he said, waving over a waterboy—vendors dealing in food and drink were common sights to extend a visitor’s stay.

“Aye, ol’ man,” the waterboy said. “Here ’gain? Y’sure don’t tire o’ the place.”

“Baths’re all’s welcome,” Sir Feige responded. “Be here till I wilt. Ah, pour me yer finest.”

The old treant was apparently acquainted with the waterboy, who dutifully poured out a cup of refreshingly tart-smelling water into a glass.

“Give ’im one too,” Sir Feige added, treating me to a cupful. A bit of citrus and bark had been steeped in the icy beverage. “Feel free to drink up. Water that follows the drowning of steam—”

“—Is sweeter still than nectar?”

I blurted out the end to the familiar poem and took a swig, letting the reinvigorating moisture soak through my dehydrated body.

“Oh?” Sir Feige stroked the gray moss on his chin like a beard. “Familiar with the classics?”

“Bernkastel, yes? The great master of prose poetry?”

The line that we’d quoted came from a pastoralist song dating back to before the foundation of the Empire. This region had a long history of arrhythmic, emotionally muscular poetry, popularized in part thanks to its transmissibility amongst the uneducated. On a night long ago in woods far away, Margit and I had played a game that had evolved from this linguistic tradition.

At one point in my youth, I’d shut myself up in my local church’s library, reading through everything I could get my hands on. Theological works were a given, but the collection amassed by several generations of bishops included many anthologies of poems that spoke to peasant sensibilities. Rural bishops were ultimately rural people, and their tastes naturally reflected this.

“Indeed,” Sir Feige confirmed. “Quite fine work. He doesn’t need to affect some rarefied dialect to achieve elegance. The joy of life glows in every word, and the lingering impressions they leave are marvelous.”

“I completely agree. When I read his songs, they really do make me want to take a bath or go on a walk.”

Bernkastel was shrouded in mystery, and even his pen name was merely his place of birth. The existence of the original manuscripts he’d published—as opposed to mere transcriptions—suggested he wasn’t a commoner, but the passionate affection for prosaic life that pervaded his work was a far cry from the lifestyle enjoyed by the upper class. Modern Rhinian historians suspected him to have been either a lay poet with a noble patron, or a bastard child not wholly abandoned by his family.

As popular as he was, the contemporary sphere of aristocratic literature placed a great deal of worth on the technical mastery of language. Metrical poetry with clearly defined verses made such craftsmanship far more transparent, making them the preferred form for song. I hadn’t expected a master scrivener who’d built his name creating copies of works like these to have a fondness for prose poetry.

“Not many lads your age grasp his genius. I’m impressed.” The treant happily knocked back his water and ordered another glass each for both of us.

I knew exactly how he felt: purse strings were always looser when finding another to share one’s hobby with. I recalled how, when a new recruit who played tabletop games had joined my company, I’d become terribly philanthropic—though I could no longer even remember his name.

“Youths nowadays only talk about Verlaine this and Heinrich that. All they want is to be told the most obvious things as elaborately as possible. What they don’t know is...”

What followed was a lengthy explanation—a rant, really—that I carefully absorbed while we hopped between hot water and steam to not let ourselves get cold.

I now saw why a man of his personality could be called difficult. He was as prideful as he was intelligent, and his craftsmanship was extraordinary enough for him to ascend from the common class. Yet from his long spiel, I gathered that he hadn’t had the talent to birth his own beloved sagas; transcription was merely his attempt to remain close to them, whatever form they might take. To his dismay, those that sought his skills only asked him to copy famous tales or rare tomes, which were the furthest thing from his pure hobbyist’s palate.

Had Sir Feige been an unremarkable scrivener, he would have likely been able to endure his work. Rather, such scribes were almost exclusively charged with manuscripts for disposable sagas and poems, so the man would have been happy to scribble away. It was evident from his rant that he appreciated the subtle differences in the way works affected him when read on different occasions.

Unfortunately, the treant was too skilled. His first mistake had been when he’d accepted a highly paid job to transcribe a novella—a “novel” commentary on a short article, as what constituted a novel on Earth was generally referred to as a story or legend—in an attempt to pay his bills. The requests had then come flooding in for novels and political opinion pieces, evolving into arcane tomes and historical documents. On the rare occasion he received a contract involving poetry, it never failed to conform to the tastes of high society... It was no wonder his clients dubbed him narrow-minded, given how motivationally unfit he was for his work.

The tragedy of Marius von Feige was that he had the skills to sustain his trade. The gulf between that which he excelled in and that which he loved was heartbreaking.

Overbathing had made me thoroughly woozy by the time Sir Feige finished his soliloquy. Not that I regretted hearing out the whole thing, mind you: his depth of knowledge was a thing of beauty, and he’d taught me so many new things that I gained experience just by listening. A dizzy spell was a small price to pay.

“I’m sorry, little one,” Sir Feige said, “I got a bit carried away. Forgive me; it’s an old tree’s bad habit.”

“No need to apologize,” I said. “I was enthralled from start to finish.”

We stepped outside the bathhouse, and the cool autumn breeze restored my mental faculties. Looking up into the sky, the familiar white moon hid behind the sparse clouds as She prepared to emerge in full. On the other hand, the sick black moon was almost entirely out of sight.

“Now then, I don’t recall hearing what you needed me for. What brings you to a withering shrub like me?”

Sir Feige benevolently offered me a chance to complete my main objective, and I decided to oblige. Had I been an adult, I would have followed proper etiquette and visited him in a more becoming manner on another day; however, children were at their best when innocently honest.

“Well, sir, my master has bid me to come and request the Compendium of Forgotten Divine Rites that you once transcribed.”

I bowed as deeply as I could, and the treant’s brow jumped high, revealing that his scarab eyes were now glowing red.

As you can see, Lady Agrippina’s task was not for me to place a new order with this scrivener. Sir Feige had already completed the transcription for the work in question, and had failed to hand it off to his client after a massive falling-out.

I’d done some research in hopes of finding out what I was supposed to procure, but I hadn’t been able to find so much as a summary. “Forgotten” could be taken literally to mean that a god’s name had been lost, but I hadn’t come across the term in any of the theological texts I’d read thus far. Clearly, knowledge on the subject was considered highly forbidden.

If nothing else, I was sure that a book venerating such entities was anything but kosher. In the event that I successfully negotiated for the thing, I would send it straight to Lady Agrippina without so much as opening the cover.

I had no plans of turning back to lose what I held dear, like Orpheus before me. My forefathers had graciously shown what terrible fates could await me; to avoid their footprints was the best way to honor their memory.

“Do you still have the tome in question in your possession?” I asked, still bowing. A discomforting creaking accompanied the sound of flocks of birds flying out of the nearby trees.

“Very well,” he said. “This isn’t something to speak of in public. Come along.”

At the edge of my vision, I saw Sir Feige’s feet turn away. Raising my head, I hurried after him.

[Tips] Throughout the annals of history, some gods have disappeared from a lack of faith or have reinvented themselves as the beliefs of their followers evolved.

Sir Feige led me to the base of a massive, awe-inspiring evergreen near the city walls. He explained that the tree was both his mother as a treant and his current abode.

Birth among treants was rather anomalous relative to the other sentient races: forsaking sexual reproduction, their kind arose from spirits housed in trees that eventually formed a self-concept. Once the treant broke away from their mother tree, they were said to live by its side until the day came that they found someplace they wanted to go.

“Come in.”

“Wow... This is incredible.” The hollow he’d invited me into was far larger than the physical exterior had suggested, and I failed to hold in my amazement when I saw the massive collection of books that decorated the room.

A dignified, caramel-brown work desk presided over the room’s center; its make was every bit as impressive as the treant sitting at it. The dark chair, the back of which towered behind him, sang praises to the majesty of the space.

Bookshelves turned toward this centerpiece from every angle, each carefully lined with countless beautifully bound books. The texts had been meticulously sorted in order of author, and I recognized a handful of titles. Those I found familiar were the kinds of stories handled by cheap libraries—which rented works at a handful of assarii per day per book—and haphazardly bound. Yet here they were, polished with all the same care a dictionary or treatise might receive.

Everything about Sir Feige’s room screamed a hobbyist’s passion: “This is what I like! Have a problem with it?!” I had no doubt that the books on display here had been transcribed by the man himself, with the cost of binding coming out of his own pocket. These were truly made for him, and him alone.

“I know this saga!” I exclaimed. “Wait, I’ve seen this author’s romances performed at the festival! There’s a whole collection of his poems?!”

In some ways, this was a treasure trove. Although it was invaluable to a lover of legend, anyone more interested in power or rarity wouldn’t so much as glance its way. Wow, I guess fanatics really do exist everywhere.

“Oh, you like them, do you? Would you like to take one home?”

“Really?!” I reflexively leapt at the scrivener’s unexpected offer, only to immediately blush at my own shallow nature. Using my childishness as a weapon was fine, but I didn’t actually want to be a kid. “E-Excuse my rudeness. I couldn’t take something so valuable.”

“No, I rarely have any visitors as excited about my collection as you are. Everything they bring me is downright boring, and they refuse anytime I suggest a saga, like they’re too good for these tales. I got so sick of it that I left my workshop in the capital to come home. Leaving those nuisances behind and surrounding myself with my favorite legends is so refreshing.” Sir Feige seemed at peace. “Still...there is a stain on my sanctuary.”

The man unlocked a drawer on his desk and pulled out a single tome, which he tossed onto the table. Bound in black leather and extravagant bone ornamentation, one look was enough to know that it was one of those items. Specifically, a brainless attempt to open it was the kind of action that prompted a 1D100 roll and a wicked, wicked smile lurking behind the GM’s screen.

Unconsciously, I’d taken a step back. Its appearance was imposing on its own, and I was further unnerved that I could plainly see an ominous power seep from it with my own novice second sight. I didn’t want to so much as touch the thing.

Don’t just leave this thing sitting around like a normal book! Seriously, chain it up or something. At the very least, add a lock so no one can open it!

“This is the Compendium of Forgotten Divine Rites your master seeks.”

I swallowed back the nausea that accompanied my unspeakable discomfort, unable to break my gaze from the book’s event horizon. This was not the same gruesome urge that compelled one to watch a horror movie through: I didn’t want to look because it was scary, or because I needed to know what came next. The impulse was more malicious, more evil.

“The original request asked me to translate the ancient text to Rhinian as faithfully as I could. It’s full of annotations to make sure that the original intent remains clear.”

Which means I can read the thing if I open it. As soon as I made the connection, something in the back of my brain whispered, read it.

No, no, no, no way, absolutely not. While I was almost guaranteed to unlock some new skill for doing so, it was certainly the kind of skill I was meant to never touch. Any contact was sure to leave me equally touched in the head.

The presence of such a transparently foreign idea in my train of thought was proof enough that I was facing a malign relic. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if this would begin a long campaign that would only end when the thing was tossed into a volcano.

Branchy fingers slid across the cover, but there was no affection in Sir Feige’s touch. As the creator of this terror, he knew how profoundly dangerous it was; contact was his way of confirming that it had yet to lose its awesome power.

“Little one, how much do you know about the divine?”

“The divine?” I repeated. “I was a regular churchgoer back home; I know the gods they bother to talk about in the lay texts, the sermons, and folklore.”

“Then I’m sure you know that the gods we worship are at war with other deities.”

I nodded. From what I understood, gods on this planet only held power here, and fought amongst themselves to secure mortal followers. History books explained that at some point, the divine abandoned direct combat, ending the Age of Gods. The Age of Antiquity that followed saw proxy wars waged via the faithful. Whether in the past or present, those that lost both battle and believers had a handful of possible fates ahead of them.

“Do you know what happens to a fallen god?” Sir Feige asked.

“I do. Any defeated god robbed of their followers...”

First, they could quietly be forgotten, melting into the void.

Second, they could be appropriated by whatever pantheon stripped them of their power. Reduced to a lesser divine entity or mythical beast, their eventual demise would come at the hands of mortals.

This method was easy to digest: the famously successful Abrahamic religions of my past world employed the same tactic. Alien gods had been converted into messengers of the devil trying to corrupt pious souls, and the occasional triumph of their foreign cultures attributed to fictitious saints. Holy wars varied little between worlds, it seemed.

Third and last, the conquered god could join another pantheon and reinvent themselves as a new being. This hit close to home, as the Trialist Empire’s large flock of deities had been built over a long history of following this route. In fact, some of the main pillars of our faith had originally been heretical gods.

Prior to the Empire’s founding, the Day God and Night Goddess ruled the pantheon native to this region. They moved their respective celestial bodies to rule over the concept of time.

When it came to our creation myth—all competing groups of deities claimed to have given shape to the world, though we would never know who was telling the truth—it posited that the world was originally in flux, with but a single god that embodied all that was good.

God wandered the boundless expanse of idle sand that covered the planet for eons. A long eternity later, it came to the edge of the world—the threshold of nothingness. What awaited it was another god: the embodiment of all that was evil.

Polar opposites, the deities instantly recognized their incompatibility and attempted to end the other. They exchanged blows, strangled one another, and picked up wayside rocks with which to arm themselves. As time went on, they fashioned swords and spears to use in their feverish battle.

Their struggle continued for what we temporal beings would consider forever; to the powers above, it was no longer than the fluttering of an eyelid. Spilt blood, severed flesh, broken weapons, and the sparks that flew from their clashing blades colored the landscape with new divinity who would join the front line of battle.

Amidst their never-ending quarrel, the god of good and the god of evil had an epiphany: neither infallible good nor unerring evil could sustain the world alone. The two of them had yearned for one another all along.

Upon realizing their inseparable nature, the gods each dealt themselves a fatal wound, splitting their souls in two. Taking a half from each of the original beings, the Day God and Night Goddess were born; from two perfect yet isolated beings came the flawed harmony that gave birth to the world as we knew it.

Thus the Day God lit the midday sky with the warmth to cultivate food, only to torture those beneath Him with sweltering drought. And although the Night Goddess heralded the unbearable chill of dark, She brought a time of sleep and respite with Her.

While the cycle of life and death gave rise to the world full of Their children, some gods arising from the mythical battle had been blown to the far reaches of the planet. Distant kin forgot their origins and carved out a place for themselves as gods in their own right.

It followed that there were various sects and cults dotting the globe: they were lost lambs, ignorant of their true selves. Yet the Mother and Father never forgot, and always accepted Their wayward children after a crusade; Her tender embrace and His unwavering hand were where they were meant to be.

Now that I’d neatly reorganized the whole thing with a cynical eye—knowing that things existed beyond this planet and all—it was clearly just less hassle to peacefully tweak conquered objects of worship to fit the greater values of a pantheon. Romans and Greeks had done the same. To uproot a faith entirely was a mountainous task, so reconciling heathen beliefs with the canon without an uprising was far more preferable.

“Impressive,” Sir Feige said. “You’re well learned.”

“I’m delighted to please you, sir.” I bowed at his undue praise.

“However,” he said, lifting the accursed book with a furrowed brow, “what would you say if I told you there is a fourth possibility?”

Another one? I cocked my head in confusion. The treant turned his chair to the side and crossed his legs, staring off into space.

“There were gods who experienced a different fate. Those whom man had deemed unfit to be part of Creation and buried under the mortal hands of will.”

I had trouble believing him, considering we lived in a world with observable higher beings, wherein those higher beings enjoyed verifiable authority over reality. For the sentient races to consign a heavenly power to the grave was a radical idea.

Of course, the fictional works of the twenty-first century had been full of god-slayers freeing the universe from divine grips. Some TRPGs had included stats for them to be bested in combat, giving rise to a favorite phrase modeled after a famous series with a garden full of sinners: I’ll kill God if the numbers say I can.

But information-era Earth had seen a relative decline in the preeminence of religion; I would have never expected to hear a similar sentiment in a world so dominated by godly reverence.

I hadn’t been familiar with every cultural tradition, so there was a chance I’d missed some counterexamples, but even the most cruel gods of ancient Earth had been punished only by their peers... At the very least, I’d never heard of a mythmaker so brazen as to suggest a pure-blooded human could judge the heavens.

Tales of god-slayers existed, but they were either demigods themselves or chosen heroes equipped with the arms and blessings of competing deities. My original homeland had produced a tale of a mortal retribution for a god, but only with the caveat that the hero’s ancestors had descended from the heavens themselves.

Even the infamous messiah who’d given his life to shoulder all the sins of humanity hadn’t experienced a true death. His had been a part of the miracles he’d wrought, and even the final centurion had been a predestined part of salvation—far from the essence of deicide.

Although twenty-first-century fiction had reduced the heavens to no more than a final boss to be conquered, the denizens of more faithful eras balked at the hubris needed to claim superiority over the gods.

Yet here I was, in a world with real, confirmed deities whom we’d robbed of their names—of their very being. The weight of this action was unknowable.

An awful shiver ran down my spine, much like the one that had accompanied my first look at the tome. It bore only a passing resemblance to the pleasant tingle my cute childhood friend gave me and left a lingering discomfort that I couldn’t shake off. Once again, I was faced with knowledge that threatened to rob me of the sanity needed to continue living in this world.

“Now that you know...” Sir Feige fiddled with the fate of the world with all the gravitas of someone turning over a pebble. “What price does your master name for this volume?”

Gods dammit, that monster in methuselah skin! One drachma to ferry this thing around?! I would’ve refused for double! Lady Agrippina had known exactly what awaited me, and I could already imagine her infuriatingly perfect smile as she laughed at my despair. How the hell can you live with making someone deal with this sort of thing for fun?! Curse you!

Despite just having taken a bath, I was frozen to my core. Sir Feige lifted the chilling item and turned to me, his face utterly grim.

[Tips] Among arcane tomes, there are many that have effects on any that view them—some even influence their surroundings just by existing. The College’s deepest book vaults are considered forbidden for good reason.

Staring at the obviously heinous tome, I could feel the armor of my sanity being whittled away, revealing an underlying urge to flee. I was well acquainted with tabletop systems that included confounded texts like these. The heroes of those games had been even frailer than mensch, and the scenarios they were made for littered with mental landmines that would ruin a psyche with one misstep. My dubiously helpful comrades and I had spent many an hour discussing whether we ought to pick up the occasional mind-rotting spell or one-trick wonder weapon.

While our tales in those worlds had been just as entertaining as any other, most had ended with exactly zero hope of salvation. Anything that resembled a happy end came with the asterisk of a mountain of NPC corpses.

Systems like those categorized mere death as a lucky fate, and the book in Sir Feige’s hand was surely the greater implied evil. It was pure bane, questioning the insolence of those who’d sought to surmount the gods.

I didn’t know where it originally came from, or if it involved outer gods from beyond our realm, but I was positive nothing good would come of it. At best it would annihilate a person’s psyche, and at worst I could see it bringing our very world to its knees.

It went without saying that the apocalypse would be an inconvenient development, but I’d also personally experienced the frustration of having my character sheet confiscated to walk back into the scene as an NPC. I hardly wanted to look at the damned book, let alone involve myself with it; Lady Agrippina wanted me to take it home? Please, this is no time for jokes.

“Hm... A tad too provocative for a young soul.”

Sir Feige did me the favor of shutting the dread thing away. My oppressive desire to flee the scene released me as soon as it left my view. Either the book’s power wasn’t actually all that notable, or the desk was a special containment unit. Of course, classic story beats demanded the truth be the latter.

“Now then,” he resumed, “what price has your master named in exchange for this tome?”

My heart throbbed to the point of pain, but I threw myself into negotiations. I took a few deep breaths, desperately recollecting my frayed thoughts. The horrid sensation of having my brain sanded down refused to leave me, but I needed to power through for Elisa’s future.

Get a hold of yourself. Stop trembling, and don’t let your spirit crumble. Who do you think you are? You’re the cool brother that’s going to save the day, aren’t you?

I reminded myself of my inalienable purpose, dragging up my sunken spirits to ready myself for a round of bartering. As with purpose, bargaining also revolved around the nonnegotiable values that bookended a deal. If the other party’s offer was far from my absolute maximum, I could just let things ride out, but I would need to push back if the final price veered too close to my upper limit. Keeping this one detail in mind was the key to successful negotiation.

However, there was a slight—nay, a gargantuan problem with this line of thinking: my client had told me to buy the item for “whatever the asking price may be.” Sure, I’d wished for my corporate overlords of the past to give me a budget with more leeway, but not this much.

Lady Agrippina making that offer in person would have been fine. Trusting the seller’s discretion with a blank check was a bold move, but she was the one supplying the money. But when all of the decision-making laid with me, it suddenly turned into a test of my business acumen.

Turning off the lights upstairs and blurting out, “Whatever price you ask for!” would be all too easy. Yet that would reduce this to a literal child’s errand. The GM was sure to scribble down a neutered experience number on my character sheet with a disappointed grimace, if he bothered giving me any at all.

I couldn’t throw my smarts out the window just because I’d been given the freedom to do as I pleased. With my authority came the expectation of equal effort.

Thus, I readied myself to give Lady Agrippina a real shock. The methuselah topped my People I Want to Get Even With list, and exceeding her expectations was a sure sign that I was growing closer to my goals—and with them, my independence.

“We are prepared to offer equitable compensation in return for the good,” I said. “Whether it be money or alternative payment, we are ready to meet any needs you may have.”

“Hm...”

Giving someone a blank check invariably encouraged them to add extra zeros on the end of whatever price they initially thought was fair. The move here was to first goad Sir Feige into giving me an estimate of what he valued the book at. I could accept a fair price on the spot, and anything unreasonably high would still make for a foothold I could use in our discussion.

What was more, he was the one in the seller’s seat, not me. As a buyer, I had the privilege of asking what it would take for him to part with it. Any attempt to put the onus back on me implied he didn’t value it very highly, and I could justify offering a low price.

“Frankly,” he said, “I’d be fine with using the blasted thing to fuel a fireplace. The book bored me even more than the other rarities coming through my doors, and I have no interest in an account of a god the clergymen of ancient times considered blasphemous. My devotion to the gods of today doesn’t amount to much, anyhow.”

The treant snapped his fingers, causing a chair to float up from the corner of the room. Apparently, he employed Unseen Hands for common chores too. The chair came down in the middle of the room, signaling that he was ready for a proper discussion.

“Take a seat. You seem drained.”

“Thank you kindly.” Sitting in the presence of a nobleman was improper, but so was refusing his hospitality. My legs were still trembling no matter how much energy I tried to muster, so I took him up on his offer.

Sir Feige nodded, seemingly pleased with how I hadn’t put up a front. He continued, “Most importantly, nothing about the book sits right with me. I’ll admit that some of the rhetorical devices piqued a tiny bit of literary interest, but I can’t understand why anyone would want to dive deeper into such appalling history. Not only that, but the original buyer was so obnoxious about the make of its bindings that we’d been a hair’s breadth away from all-out battle before I canceled his accounts and sent him away.”

I couldn’t help but feel like I’d heard something incredibly unpalatable. I had a sinking feeling that the make involved resources of human origin: the cosmic horror settings I knew of tossed around long pig dust jackets like they were A4 sheets of paper, after all...

From Sir Feige’s wording, I surmised that he hadn’t used such materials to craft the black book of terror he’d shown me, but who was to say what the original had been like? Just thinking about it gave me the jitters.

The concepts I was dealing with were undoubtedly fantasy, but my wish had been for gleaming, heroic dreams, not the dealings of Kadath and Yuggoth. I very much would have preferred if my encounters didn’t skirt the dividing line between these subgenres.

“With all that said, let me make you a deal,” Sir Feige said. “I don’t want to negotiate with your master...but with you. What do you say?”

My mind was still stuck in a slog of unhappy realities, so it took me a moment to process his proposal. I logically knew what he’d said: he was willing to trade the book not for a monetary sum supplied by Lady Agrippina, but for something that I could produce. Since I would be completing my task either way, it had no real bearing on my quest. Still, that meant his interest in me outweighed the deep pockets of an active magus in his mind.

“From what I can see, you have quite the intriguing...presence about you.”

“Ah... Yes, I suppose.” He wasn’t wrong. A black and green alf each and an irredeemably demented wraith haunted my being.

“I happen to love stories from young travelers like you. I might not have had the talent to write my own tales, but hearing those of others will never get old.”

The treant’s love of his hobby was painfully evident from the overflowing bookshelves littering the room. There were more legends of slain dragons than I could count, and sensual romances lined up beside them. Anthologies of tragedies befalling young leads were placed at convenient heights too; it was fairly easy to get a grasp of the man’s taste.

“And so,” he said, “I’d like to send you on a little adventure.”

“What?” I said, perplexed. “An adventure?”

“You heard me right,” he said with a meaningful nod.

Sir Feige pulled out a map of the local area. The precise topographical lines that outlined the contour of the region meant this chart had to be some kind of military secret. He’d opened it up without any fanfare, but in a foreign land, this diagram of the middle of nowhere would be worth a small mountain of the largest coins in circulation—the kind that only big merchants and state diplomats used.

“Well, when you get to my standing, these sorts of things find their way to you.”

He spoke playfully, but this wasn’t a laughing matter. Capital punishment would be a light sentence if this ever fell into foreign hands. Casually making a copy for personal use was absolutely not okay, but the scrivener didn’t seem to notice my trembling as he pointed his branchy finger to a forest north of Wustrow.

“These woods don’t have much in them, save for an occasional bear.”

Uh, that’s pretty major. Bears were less dangerous than demibeasts and the like, but they could still manhandle a person. Forget crossbow bolts, the things could shrug off 5.56mm rounds to the dome; facing one armed with a stick of sharpened metal was a bloodcurdling idea. I preferred my odds of downing a tank with a single molotov cocktail.

“It’s about a day’s walk,” he said.

“...A long way on a child’s legs,” I said.

“Hah, but no challenge to the sort of boy to be sent all this way on his master’s order, I’m sure?”

I didn’t have any real counterpoint, so the conversation carried on. Had my subconscious recognition of the bandits as a wandering encounter caused a climax to spawn for this session? I know there are certain plot beats you’ve got to hit, but wasn’t this a bit too soon?

“You see,” he went on, “an eccentric adventurer built a hideaway in these woods, but...”

“But there hasn’t been any word from him?”

“That’s right. I remember hearing he’d moved in a while before I left for the capital, so I’m sure he either left or died long ago.”

Sir Feige seemed rather nonchalant about all this, but how long ago was he talking about? Personally, it felt like a past so distant that thinking about it would overwhelm my mensch senses. I hadn’t ever come across any estimates for treant life spans, but that couldn’t be because no one had ever seen one die...right?

“At any rate,” he said, “I want you to go there and find me a certain book.”

Despite calling it a “book,” what Sir Feige wanted wasn’t a shady tome or rare historical account. To begin with, something of the sort would have never piqued this man’s interest; had he been the type to enjoy such things, he would still be servicing long lines of aristocrats in the capital.

He wanted the diary he was sure the late adventurer had kept. The fellow had made quite a name for himself in Sir Feige’s youth, and was famed for keeping a detailed log of all his journeys.

“And if that journal is still there,” the treant said with a weighty pause, “wouldn’t that make your heart dance?”

“Well...” It seemed I had a great deal in common with this woody gentleman. “Yes, it certainly would.”

Come on, it sounded like so much fun. The diary of a notorious adventurer was basically a TRPG player’s replay. No fan of both adventure and tabletop games could ever hope to contain their excitement in a situation like this.

“Personally,” Sir Feige said, “I will be happy if you bring me the diary. If it isn’t there, I would also be content with hearing the tale of your own journey.”

Basically, he wanted to say that there was no reason not to try. I wasn’t about to refuse or anything, but couldn’t help but wonder why all the long-lived beings of this world were so adamant on using the rushed lives of mensch as story fodder.

Of course, this gentleman’s tasteful quest was so thoroughly reasonable that it would be an offense to compare his interests to the debauchery I’d already witnessed. Taking a trip to the woods was far, far more agreeable than having my sister taken hostage for household chores or engaging in a barely consensual cosplay event.

“Besides,” he added, “in any event, I can’t let go of this bedeviled book without preparing it for travel.”

I felt like Sir Feige had seen through my eagerness as he anxiously stroked his mossy beard. I definitely didn’t want to touch that cursed tome with my bare hands, and haphazardly throwing it into a knapsack felt like playing with fire. The offer to ready some means of containment was a very welcome one.

“It will take two or three days for this hollowed-out old log to get everything together without my workshop and connections. Think of this as a way to kill some time.”

While his quest was a tad hazardous for an idle amusement, the occasional bear could be avoided with proper precautions. If the adventurer had lived in some ancient ruin, I would gear up and call my fey friends to prepare for a full session of hacking and slashing, but a residence in the woods’ shallow reaches was perfect for a subquest.

“But if going out is too much of a bother, I’ll sell you the book for twenty-five drachmae.”

Twenty-five drachmae... That was as much as the large gold coins that merchants used for dealings between companies, and would take an average farming household five years of starvation and tax evasion to earn. To use that money on a single book was luxury itself. Elisa could pay for room, board, and tuition for a full year and then some with that kind of cash.

“I don’t intend to take more than the cost of production. I’ve been meaning to use this drawer for something else, anyhow.”

I nearly fell out of my chair. Hold on, it took twenty-five drachmae to make the thing? What the hell is it made from?!

If my earlier hypothesis refuting the possibility of “manmade” materials was correct, then that only made me more concerned as to how the book had been crafted. Was I going to be okay? Leaving all the cosmic mumbo jumbo aside, I felt like the gods would smite me for daring to touch the thing with my dirty plebeian hands.

Seeing me and my rural values thrown into disarray made Sir Feige chuckle, his majestic shoulders bouncing up and down. Why did every single surprise have to come with two or three friends hidden just out of view?

[Tips] Adventurers regularly demand extra pay from their employers to account for various complications encountered on any given job. Those who roll dice for these drifters seem to feel no remorse even when negotiations turn to bloodshed.

After receiving a much more adventure-like quest than my original cursed errand, I headed back to the inn under the veil of night. I entered the motel still dazed from the attack on my fiscal values to find that my travel buddy had already dozed off.

I’d forgotten all about the (approximate) taste of home he’d had, and how he’d told me he was going to bed. We’d been cutting corners on travel expenses—he had been as eager to earn an extra dime as I’d been—so his first night in a bed in days was sure to blend with our meal for a wonderful dream.

Inviting him along for this woodland adventure would have to wait for morning. We weren’t in a rush; I saw no need to wake him up.

Getting to my own bed, I noticed that Mika had already cast Clean on it. Magic was a wonderful way of ridding bedding of pesky lice and fleas, though it admittedly did nothing to thicken the paltry sheets. Regardless, it was orders of magnitude better than sleeping on the ground.

I silently thanked my thoughtful friend and opened the covers. As an aside, his hair looked comparable in health to mine, even though I’d taken a bath earlier in the day. He’d warned me not to tell any women about my neglected follicular health, but he was no less a scoundrel on this front.

Thin as my blanket was, a long day of travel, a nice warm bath, and post-combat fatigue made my mattress feel like the clouds dotting the heavens. I didn’t have any pajamas—which were only a thing in certain upper class circles anyway—so I crawled into bed in my travel clothes and instantly clocked out.

I slept so soundly that I didn’t even dream, but out of the blue, a strange discomfort grabbed hold of me. My ego slowly drifted from sleep to wakefulness, and in a surreal state of half awareness, I realized the source of my annoyance came from my lower half. I knew this feeling all too well...I’d wet the bed.

This was rather embarrassing to admit, but from the time I’d awoken in this body at age five, it had taken me a whole two years to get over my bed-wetting troubles. This had little to do with my habits, as I’d made an effort to take care of my needs and refuse water at night; I couldn’t have done anything about the physical state of my bladder.

I hurriedly sat up and the dismayingly familiar cold dampness made itself known downstairs.

“Gods, I know I made fun of you today, but isn’t this a bit much?”

Perhaps this was my punishment for mocking the divine in a world where they were active participants. I shed a single tear at how unfathomably petty their retribution was.

Alternatively, this could have been caused by the lingering stress I’d taken on from seeing the traumatic tome and listening to an uncalled-for cosmological history lecture. Whatever the case, the shame made me want to go dig a grave for myself—I was physically thirteen, and this was just a miserable state of affairs.

I eyed the other bed anxiously to find that Mika was not there. His belongings had been left behind, so I took it that he’d managed to get up in time. Lucky him.

At any rate, I needed to clean up after myself. I slipped out of bed, using my incomplete mana reserves to cast Clean on the bed—which hadn’t been stained, but this was a matter of principle—and taking off my soiled pants.

The first order of business was—hm? Oh... I see.

After undressing myself, I realized that my blunder had been of a different variety. As tasteless as the comparison was, had I been a girl, this incident would have introduced me to a whole new realm of hygiene products.

“Ah... Well, I guess I am thirteen now. Shouldn’t be a surprise...”

It seemed I was even more pathetic than I’d thought...but I supposed this sort of bed-wetting was also in the cards in the wake of life-threatening danger.

Having gone through the ropes of reaching male adulthood once before, I had a solid grasp of this side of life in both theory and practice. However, such urges got in the way of other endeavors, and I hadn’t bothered proactively pursuing them when I’d reincarnated in a prepubescent body.

Of course, some of the skills and traits available to me had been the likes found only in eroge, and I recognized the fact that I might one day waste resources on them. Still, without the physical drivers needed to pull me in, I’d been perfectly content to ignore fleshly pleasures. The mind was, without exception, tied to the body that housed it.

All that said, this was just pitiful. I couldn’t remember having any dreams of the sort, so this was the result of my own failed management. I’m such a moron.

Even worse, I could hardly bear the thought of repeating my teenage years, so swayed by hormonal impulses. Having to endure the idiocy of youth for a second time was nothing to look forward to.

My first time around had been full of stupid episodes: attempting five shots in succession, spending my limited funds on worthless things—I could go on at length outlining my ill-advised efforts in pursuit of Cool Guy status. No one in this world knew of my dark past, but it clung to my brain with an unshakable grip. I swore to not repeat my mistakes again.

Anyway, that was enough negativity; there were some positives to this situation. This was observable proof of my hormonal shift, meaning my body would soon begin to grow into the strength of an adult man; I’d be ready to sell my might as a proper adventurer.

I got myself together and headed out to the well behind our inn to get clean before Mika returned. Naturally, I’d cast Clean on myself, but the feeling of filth was far from gone. I wouldn’t dare to question the almighty Clean after using it for months, but there was something to be said about the psychological effects of real washing.

Concealing my presence, I made my way to the backyard. The penniless used the well here to wash themselves, so it was sandwiched between the inn, the outer wall, and a grove of trees for privacy’s sake.

There, I stumbled across something that truly caught me off guard: my friend, bathing. Quite some time ago, he’d explained that he wasn’t fond of sharing baths with other people; perhaps that was why he’d gone through the trouble of magically boiling well water just to clean himself at night.

I opened my mouth to greet him...only to stop in disbelief. He was missing some anatomy I’d expected—but not in the classic, “You were a girl?!” way that I’d mused about so long ago.

Mika didn’t have anything. The concepts of man and woman were distinctions derived mainly from the one organ that Mika completely lacked. Shimmering moonlight lit his snow-white body: the contour of his featureless chest continued unbroken to his lower half.

Mika didn’t have anything: the reproductive features that life as we knew it took for granted were simply absent. Yet his form was far from disturbing; under the lunar spotlight, he was more akin to some chaste figure carved from marble, standing confidently in a museum hall long after doors closed for the day. He needed not another’s praise, nor did he pride himself for his appearance—his very being laid bare that beauty existed all for its own sake...

“Who’s there?!”

Oops.

I’d made sure to minimize my presence, but hadn’t expected anyone to be at the well. I’d marched right into the grove without any pretense of stealth—a fact I only realized when Mika shouted at me. He’d been washing his hair, but spotted me instantly after he rinsed off and looked up.

“E-Erich?”

Mika’s vicious glare shifted into a distressed frown as soon as he realized the voyeur he’d imagined was me. His wretched expression was exactly that of someone who had something to hide.

“Mika...”

“Wait, no, wait! Erich, you’re wrong, I’m—I’m not—”

“You...” Oh, of course. Mika, my friend, how could I not see? “You’re an angel.”

“...What?” My candid opinion was met with an expression that I had never, ever seen before.

[Tips] “Angels” in this world refer to a specific race far to the west of Rhine who devote themselves to a one-true-god. Few in the Trialist Empire are aware of their existence, and divine messengers are referred to as apostles or heavenly kinsmen instead. These messengers are lowly gods whose visits to the mortal realm are only temporary.

Our awkward scene came to a close when Mika sneezed at a chilly autumn breeze. I convinced him to dress himself and we headed back inside, each sitting on our own beds. The air between us was...strained.

Look, I know, I know, but come on! Can anyone really fault me for having remembered the Abrahamic traditions of Earth?!

The silence took on the weight of lead, threatening to crush us under the pressure. At long last, Mika spoke, eyes still fixed on the floor.

“My clan comes from the northernmost lands.”

His lineage’s tale was a heavy one. They’d lived for generations on an island right beside the planet’s pole known as Nifleyja. The name meant “the gloomy isle” in an ancient tongue, and life there always got by on the slimmest of margins.

Winter robbed the land of sunlight, and the abundant rays of summer ironically made agriculture an impossibility. Yet in these remote reaches outside the Harvest Goddess’s sphere, life had taken its hold.

Alas, the extreme conditions meant that any minor shift in the environment spelled death. An extended lack of fish quickly starved fisherfolk, and an outbreak of disease among what little sheep could be kept snapped whole families faster than a wilting flower. And even an island as treasureless as theirs was raided by pirates from the northern archipelago.

Only a handful of specialized demihumans and humanfolk could withstand the harsh environment. Selchies endured the frigid oceans’ churn with their seal-like coats and blubber. Callistoi in this region were better adapted to the cold than their cousins, who’d taken after woodland bears in the eastern half of our continent’s western reach, but retained their powerful builds. It was plain to see that these peoples were supremely suited for life in the bitter icelands, and they had the might to fight off invaders.

Much like the others, mensch had also evolved to make use of their greatest strength in order to scrape by in the arctic environment. These humanfolk had overcome the catastrophic flaw in our excellent reproductive capabilities: an imbalanced ratio of males to females could decimate a population in just one generation.

“I’m...a tivisco,” Mika spat, utterly ashamed of his heritage.

Described as mensch who blurred the line between sexes, one might first suspect them to be hermaphroditic. However, their version of duality involved a shift from one sex to another.

Mensch spawned at an astonishing rate, but the wintery deserts of the north spat in the face of our racial specialty. Evolved to patch up the holes in population caused by the lopsided deaths of either men or women, tivisco were totally asexual until sexual maturity.

Once their bodies were fully developed, they morphed into one of the two sexes at regular intervals. They spent one moon genderless and then gained a set of reproductive organs; a month later they returned to their neuter state, and after another they shifted to the opposite sex from their last cycle. In the event that their population skewed, individuals could consciously override their oscillating cycle to repeat a sex after a fallow month.

This sexual fluidity allowed tivisco to maintain a balanced population at all times to make constant use of menschkind’s greatest evolutionary advantage.

I found the whole affair remarkably effective. Apparently, mothers retained their feminine features for a short while following childbirth—until the baby was weaned—and fathers did the same, putting on characteristically masculine muscle to guard the flock. Had their distinguishing features not required such harsh conditions to arise, I could have seen them becoming the dominant humanfolk on the mainland.

“I...I didn’t mean to trick you...”

Unfortunately, the mensch of the Empire had not given their kind a warm welcome.

Mika’s clan had moved to the Trialist Empire three generations ago, no longer able to bear the constant threat of cold and violence—a lesson that survival alone was insufficient. Imperial citizens were used to immigrants, and the tivisco had clung to the hope that the national acceptance of foreign peoples would offer them safe haven as they began the long trek south.

Yet they were too similar. The local mensch failed to see them as exotic travelers seeking a new home: mankind feared the unknown, to be sure, but that which bore an uncanny resemblance to the familiar was exponentially more frightful. Between the never-ending source of trouble I worked for and the fashion-loving vitality glorifier I sometimes indulged, I was far more disturbed by the latter, as it terrified me to think that a former mensch could be so degenerate.

This knee-jerk uncanny reaction forced the tivisco to remain on the fringes of society. While the imperial people were not so unaccepting as to totally ostracize them, they hesitated before greeting a tivisco in the street. They lived as perpetual foreigners, unable to truly enjoy a festival day.

Mika came to the College’s doorstep determined to clear the tivisco name. If he returned to his ancestral homeland as an oikodomurge capable of making the whole region habitable, no one would ever deride his people again.

His parents worked like mad to scrape together the funds to send him to his local magistrate’s school, where he studied with similar desperation to catch his teachers’ eyes. Combined with the task of currying favor with his magistrate, there was no doubt he’d put in effort incomparable to the average aspiring magus. How much willpower had it taken for him to approach those castle doors?

“I knew... I knew I needed to tell you at some point, but... I just...” Mika’s choking voice wavered. Moonlight spilling in from the window shone on a glistening tear trapped on his long lashes. “I didn’t want you to hate me.”

Wringing out the words, my friend told me the tale of his first attempt at friendship.

Initially, Mika had thought the new environment of the College would be altogether different, and had honestly explained his origins to his fellow First Light students.

They’d found Mika interesting and trampled past his personal boundaries in an attempt to understand him better. Tragically, their overzealous curiosity had turned them into people that he could no longer want to call friends. In good ways and bad, children of our age were naive.

As young scholars, they were pursuers of knowledge unable to suppress their curiosity for the unknown. They didn’t know that people held secrets meant to stay forever buried, and the cruelty born from that innocence was the crux of Mika’s sad story.

Following that incident, he refrained from socializing with his intra-cadre peers, devoting himself entirely to the lonesome act of study.

Yet in a stroke of luck, I had appeared: an indentured servant without relations to the aforementioned students. Perhaps, he’d thought, I can actually get along with him. His refreshing demeanor hadn’t been natural, but a concerted effort to become friends with me.

Mika had hidden the circumstances of his birth and acted the part of an average mensch boy, but he’d meant to tell me the truth eventually. Yet every time he tried to muster the will to do so, the memories of his hometown and the classroom nipped at his heels.

“I just... I didn’t want my first friend—I didn’t want you to hate me. I didn’t want you to look at me like some sideshow attraction either. When I imagined that, I couldn’t bring myself to say it...”

Blurted between sobs, Mika’s confession took on the colors of penitence. For him, his ancestry had become a sin in and of itself—one that had reared its ugly head to ruin the fun of his first long journey with a friend.

I could not imagine how deep this emotional wound reached. For better or for worse, I was and had been an ordinary man. In my past life, the only major issue I’d faced had been my early demise, and the entirety of my new life had been spent in a familiar mensch shell.

There was no way for me to truly comprehend his pain, and even claiming otherwise was morally reprehensible. In a world painted with colorful arrays of peoples that were so close, yet so far, I could think of no greater crime than for an outsider to don the veil of empathy without the cultural heritage to substantiate it. I’d come from a species that had warred among itself; how could I claim to understand another?

I wouldn’t console Mika with cheap words—I couldn’t. I refused to heinously make light of his lifelong struggle by turning it into an easily digestible topic.

“Huh?”

So I said nothing as I embraced my friend. I took him into my arms to stop him from wounding his own heart any further with the daggered words spilling from his lips.

[Tips] Tivisco are a humanfolk race native the extreme regions of the northern pole. Their default form is that of their mensch relatives missing reproductive organs, and they transform monthly to one of two sexes. During this period, their physiognomies are indistinguishable from standard mensch save for a two-day period in which their organs and skeletal structures rearrange themselves. Adolescents remain wholly neuter until puberty, generally observed somewhere between the ages of thirteen to fifteen.

Their striking resemblance to mensch paired with their short history in the Empire has caused the average imperial citizen to regard them as outsiders.

Pressure was a vital part of stemming bleeding in medical emergencies, and I believed the same principle applied in terms of emotional wounds.

When times were tough, there was nothing in the world that soothed me more than a good hug. In my past life, my parents and sister had doted on me in childhood; my parents in Konigstuhl had done the same. When I passed on the gentle embrace to Elisa, she always stopped crying, just as I had once done. I was sure that the warmth of another was the ultimate bandage for a cut on the soul.

“...Erich?”

I kept Mika close and said what needed to be said. I had to show him that this warmth would remain steadfast no matter what happened.

“Mika, who are you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Who are you, Mika?” I repeated. “A student at the Imperial College? A tivisco immigrant?”

In the same vein, the ultimate question hovered between the lines: did his race, or the gender that his situation hid, affect our friendship?

I didn’t think so. I acknowledged that it was an important part of him: much in the same way that I would soon change from boy to man, he would begin taking on masculine and feminine characteristics depending on his transformative cycle.

However, Mika remained Mika regardless of how he changed. The self that governed the body would not yield, and I knew he would stay the same friend that I’d shared the joys of childhood with.

“You’re all of those things and more, Mika. You’re you, no matter the details... You’re my beloved friend—my best friend. Am I wrong?”

Perhaps his personality would shift with his body, but at his crux, he would remain the same. And I’d become friends with him because I’d wanted to be close to the person he was.

I let go of him for a moment and looked straight into his eyes. He was in a state of shock, unable to process the swirling emotions inside of him.

“I chose to be your friend because you were a joy to be with. I invited you along because it was fun to spend time with you. If I considered you a superficial acquaintance, I would’ve come here alone.”

While solo journeys were rife with inconvenience, I was not the type to invite someone I wasn’t even fond of on a long expedition, nor was I philanthropic enough to share a bedroom with them. Most of all, I liked to think I wasn’t careless enough to camp in the great outdoors with someone I couldn’t trust.

I’d brought Mika along because I had faith in him—because I knew to share this adventure together would be fun. I grabbed him by the shoulders and pressed my nose into his; a blink would brush my lashes across his.

“Am I alone? Why did you join me? Why did you fight at my side? Am I some nominal friend, only here to fill the void of your loneliness? Or maybe I’m just a nameless mensch to take advantage of, and the person Erich doesn’t exist to you?”

Mika’s teary eyes blinked once and he pleaded, in a hoarse voice, “No, Erich! Anything but that!”

With another blink, he let his tears fall away to return my gaze. Swallowing back the urge to cry, he at last gave verbal form to his resolution.

“I think of you as a friend too. At first, it was because I thought it’d be easier to talk to someone new to the area, but not anymore... I’m not scared of losing a friend—I’m scared of losing you.”

Mika’s limp body suddenly reanimated as his hands clasped over my shoulders. His hands grabbed onto me with force, as if in an attempt to convince me of his sincerity.

“I know, Mika,” I said. “What am I to you?”

“...A friend, Erich,” came his response. “My friend.”

“That’s right, old chum. And isn’t that enough?”

Both he and I held great respect for the other’s stature. However, not once had I ever thought of his future success as a magus before thinking of him as a person; I was sure that my connections to powerful researchers and professors was of little importance to him as well.

“We’re friends, Mika. Bound in all but blood.”

“Oh, thank you, Erich... Thank you...”

“Friendship isn’t something to be thanked for, old chum.”

“I know. But still...thank you, old pal.”

I hugged my sobbing friend once more and gently patted him on the back. My sister had taught me that this was the best way to soothe a weary soul. Although my body creaked at his iron embrace, it didn’t matter; I kept my hand moving until he was sound asleep.

[Tips] The imperial mantra of solidarity with and tolerance for foreign races has roots in Rhine’s bloody history. Centuries of fighting to establish and protect the country shoulder to shoulder with the alien peoples that the Empire swallowed whole made them develop the camaraderie needed to transform a state of scattered cultures into a nation-state. Any band of people with the collective will to integrate is certain to find itself a true part of the Empire with time.

I awoke in the morning after our melodramatic moment to great embarrassment. This was not the first time I’d buried my face in a pillow out of shame: whenever I got too in character, listening to recordings of my sessions filled me with dread. Hot blood and pure hearts couldn’t wash away the cringe that lingered after what was basically a confession of historic proportions...

“Good morning, old pal,” Mika said.

...And that was all the more true when I shared a room with the person in question.

“Yeah, good morning,” I said back. “Hey, Mika... Uh, about yesterday...”

Delayed as it was, I was incredibly embarrassed. This reaffirmed to me that the humors of night never brought about anything decent. A lifetime ago, most of the scenarios I’d penned past sundown had gone straight to the garbage bin when I’d reread them in the morning—come to think of it, that had applied to workplace documents too.

Everything I’d said to Mika came from the bottom of my heart, but, I mean, come on! What was that?! I’m a grown adult inside! There had to be a better way of putting it!

“Say no more, cherished comrade,” Mika said. “I understand. Nothing would make me happier than to hear those words again, but they aren’t something to throw around so lightly, are they?”

Uh... Mika misinterpreted my concerns in a strange way. I felt like his thought patterns had, at some point, taken a turn for the theatrical. Our verbal game of role-playing the characters of a saga was fine, but I for one didn’t have the acting chops to touch on our nighttime conversation without breaking my cool facade. At this point I had no doubt he’d turn into the sort of player who’d nonchalantly steal hearts with romantic turns of phrase.

“Come on, breakfast awaits,” Mika said, leading me by the hand.

As close as we’d been up until this point, Mika’s step was half a step closer than usual as we walked to the same restaurant we’d visited last evening. I was surprised to see the place so lifeless, but we’d woken up rather late. With how simple imperial breakfasts tended to be—many chose to have nothing but tea and cheese—it was only natural for an eatery to be empty.

The same waitress with the beaming smile and freckles brought us our breakfast for five assarii each: one cut of black bread, a fat white wurst, some small dairy items, and an apricot. It was a respectable portion for what we paid.

We spent an extra couple of assarii for a pot of red tea to share—though this was made with roasted dandelions instead of chicory—and took our time enjoying our peaceful meal. Fall was a busy season for merchants, and none of them had the time to stick around and disturb us late wakers.

“Oh,” I said. “By the way, Mika, I have a little proposition for you.”

“Hm? What is it, o esteemed friend? Ask away: at this point, I’d be happy even to share a tub with you, old pal.”

Then let’s—wait, that’s not the point! Mika was so over the moon that I wanted someone to immortalize his blissful smile in a portrait, but I had to keep his joy in check in order to invite him on my journey to the woods.

“Hmm,” he mused. “The diary of an adventurer, huh?”

Mika took a bite of his sausage and chewed on both it and my proposal. Originally, our job had been to come to this town for one drachma; taking on extra work was his own decision. That said, I felt a bit guilty about asking him now, of all times...

“Sounds fun! I’ll tag along.”

Mika’s mood was so positively superb that I imagined he’d even entertain a request to see him naked again. When I tried to warn him about the possibility we’d run into a bear, he flashed me a gallant smile and said, “All the more reason I can’t let you run off by yourself.”

How long would it take for him to simmer down? However long it ended up taking, the responsibility was mine to think through anything I asked of him for the time being. Otherwise I risked encountering colorful events that would one day become dark, embarrassing memories—his, not mine, mind you. Even if it didn’t, I would never want to take advantage of him when he was so excited about our reaffirmed friendship.

I washed down my worries and the last of breakfast with a swig of tea. With our meal finished, we set out to prepare for our journey. That said, a day’s walk was mere hours on horseback; we’d come prepared to camp out for days on end, so all we needed was a little extra water and food.

“Hmm,” Mika murmured, “everything’s so pricey.”

“’Tis the season, after all,” I said.

The marketplace near the workmen’s district was chock-full of fresh produce and the distinctive merriment of autumn. However, the increased demand for goods always drove up prices around this time.

Merchant caravans with bodyguards and mercenaries in tow hopped from town to town, buying up packaged foods wherever they went. Common folk needed to procure nonperishables to weather the cold winter months, only adding to the number of buyers. The only exceptions to this need were farmers who could stock their own pantries and mages that could prevent rot (and the caravans that employed the latter).

The overwhelming demand meant that sellers could mark foodstuffs up and they’d still sell. Furthermore, this prevented hoarders from buying everything for themselves, so nearly every stall sold goods for two or three assarii more than what was standard.

“How much do we have left?” I asked.

“Uhh,” Mika answered, “we’ll need to set aside this much for the motel, and this much for the exit tax at the gates...”

“So that leaves us with...this much for food. Well, we have to get some jerky, right?”

“Personally, I don’t think I can let go of dried apples and apricots, but they’re looking a bit steep...”

The two of us counted the copper coins in our joint purse—we didn’t plan on using the silver pieces anytime soon and had hidden them in our shoes—and discussed our budget. Then, the jenkin in charge of a nearby preserved food stall let out a massive sigh.

“S’ppose I can’t let’a pair o’ brats go hungr’n,” he said. “C’m’ere, I’ll cut’cha wee o’ the top.”

The man’s thick northern dialect was appended by the sound of his chittering front teeth. His intonation was so far removed from palatial speech and what I’d heard in the southern parts of the Empire that I couldn’t quite catch all he’d said. Still, it was clear that he was taking pity on us after seeing our empty wallet.

“Aye, fer truly?!”

However, the real surprise was seeing my friend fluently respond in the exact same tongue.

“Wee, y’hear?” the shopkeeper said. “Nurly a tad. Can’t do naught’s ’bout’cha if y’don’t have the cash.”

“Thank y’kindly!”

“Go on, go on, take w’e’er ya need.”

They eloquently went back and forth, and Mika ended up buying the goods at no more than standard price. His usual speech never strayed from the male standard of palatial dialects, but it made perfect sense for him to be a master of northern accents. Sir Feige had easily switched between the two as well, and my old coworkers from western Japan had sounded completely different when we’d gone out to drink.

I watched Mika intently as he jovially took the bag full of dried rations. Noticing my gaze, he suddenly blushed and hid himself behind the groceries.

“Uh, um, I mean, I used to talk like this before I learned the palatial tongue, so... Is it really that weird?”

Seeing him so bashful at his unique way of speaking was, well...cute. Alas, I truly must have been a self-indulgent man for these sorts of thoughts to come forth the instant I recognized him as not wholly sharing my gender. Er, well, I’d already danced with similar thoughts prior to this point, but the current lack of stops in my brain were giving me a fair bit of pause.

“No,” I said, “I’m always impressed when I hear people speaking in ways I’m not used to.”

“Impressed? Really?”

“Yeah, you’re incredible. You two were practically using a foreign language to me.”

Modern Rhinian was, for the most part, an easy language to learn once one had a solid command of its grammar. It wasn’t a complicated tonal language by any means, as evidenced by the skill tree: acquiring the palatial tongue had taken quite a bit, but the foundational parts were all dirt cheap.

On the other hand, the sub-branches on my character sheet offering to let me learn regional dialects all went for whistle-inducing costs. The Trialist Empire had once been a smattering of unrelated nations inhabited by all kinds of cultures, after all. Local communities often employed peculiar figures of speech and perpetuated the use of all kinds of words that the general populace considered archaic.

Therefore, without studying the vernacular itself, these so-called dialects could sound very much like exotic languages. I’d encountered something similar in Japan: whether they came from the northeast or the southwest, people with heavy accents had been nigh unintelligible to me. Learning to decipher their words later in life had been like interpreting a foreign language that just so happened to follow the same grammar rules as my own.

“Northern dialects do have a ton of archaisms,” Mika noted. “I can understand Ancient Northern and the archipelagic languages too, and all three share a ton of vocabulary. There are a few differences in spelling, and the emphasis rests on different syllables, but you can mostly hold a conversation between all three languages. Weird, huh?”

“Interesting, I’d say. I’m sure a trip to the far north would be a breeze with you by my side.”

My linguistically gifted companion and I continued strolling around the rural streets, but my mind drifted further north. Truth be told, I knew nothing about the lands beyond the Empire. All I’d learned about this world had come from the Konigstuhl church, explanations from the adults in my life, and the historic tales that poets sung.

The Konigstuhl church was obviously never meant to keep impartial records on foreign countries, so all of the accounts in its library had been from the Empire’s point of view. While they’d been far less partisan than I’d expected them to be, they remained markedly biased to imperial activity and only mentioned other states on the scarce occasions that they were relevant to domestic history. The College’s vault likely had better material, but I spent all of my time in that library studying magic, leaving me with no time to dedicate to the humanities.

However, perhaps that was fine. Exploring a land I hadn’t even read of before with nothing but my blade and my wits was sure to make for a riveting tale. Diving into a new setting without reading through its mechanics was risky, but always incredibly fun. Surely, a trip like that would make me exclaim, This is what it means to adventure!

“Then let’s go together sometime,” Mika said. “I know a bunch of beautiful places. You can walk across the northern sea in the winter, and the auroras shimmering in the sky will steal your breath away. Oh, and there’s this massive waterfall that freezes solid—it’s a bit far from my homeland, but that one’s a treat. I think everyone should go see it at least once in their life.”

Mika happily listed off the marvels of the north. They say that locals never visit their own landmarks, but it appeared he’d made the time to check them all out. As he gave form to his nostalgia, I could see a hint of pride leaking through in his expression.

“Those all sound like beautiful places,” I said. “I’d love to see them.”

Despite how pained he’d been while talking about his heritage, it was clear that he loved it. Why else would he want to make a name for himself just to win honors for his parents’ place of birth? If he didn’t love his family’s history, he would just bring them all to the capital after earning the title of magus.

“Then...I’ll take you to my hometown one day, Erich. Even though it’s just ice and snow—oh, plus the sheep and reindeer.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

We each gave our word for a distant promise: that we’d explore the northern reaches together, and that when we did, he would restore his homeland to glory. And the first step to seeing our oath through was to clean up the little adventure that lay ahead.

[Tips] Modern Rhinian arose as an artificial amalgamation of the tongues of the founding member states of the Empire.

“Woods” is a fairly broad term. Collections of trees can differ greatly in a variety of metrics, and it is hardly novel to expect one thing and find another. Maps may show the cartographical outline of where a forest begins and ends, but rarely ever involve the third dimension of height.

After hearing that our destination could contain bears, I’d prepared myself for a large thicket...but Sir Feige’s request exceeded my every expectation.

“These are ‘woods’?” Mika said in awe. “All I see is an endless ocean of trees.”

“What a coincidence, old chum. I’m seeing the same thing.”

The two of us stared at the forest, agape, to the point that my neck started hurting from looking up at the canopy. I was filled with dread at how plainly the impenetrable wall of trees refuted the idea of human entry.

This was not on the scale of a “little” adventure. These were the sort of deep woods an ancient witch would call home, only meant to be disturbed for a climactic fight or a request to craft long-lost medicines.

Hemlocks, firs, oaks—the forest was a chaotic mix of coniferous and deciduous, making it all the more alien to someone who’d only ever explored the woodlands of Berylin and Konigstuhl. Those well-kept groves were full of oaks and cypress used for woodworking; if they were posh schools for the gentry, then we were knocking on the door of a run-down juvenile detention center.

Here, wood grew freely until it decided on its own terms that it would stop, and the colossal roots breaching from the soil were well hidden beneath a thick carpet of fallen leaves. These trees did not lay out hospitality assuming that someone would come to care for them; they proactively warded off outsiders from entering.

Our quick little journey had turned into a labyrinthian open-air dungeon in no time flat. Had I lacked experience navigating wooded areas, I would have instantly turned around to hire a ranger or scout for safety’s sake. Every TRPG player knows that dungeon diving without a pathfinder is suicide.

Lightly armored, with a few days’ food in our bags, Mika and I felt like we’d been punched in the gut by the sheer magnitude of the woods—but that was no reason to stop. This sort of terrain might have significantly hampered the average party, but the same did not hold true for us.

As an oikodomurge-in-training, Mika was no stranger to dirt, rocks, and wood. Although he wasn’t tuned for harmony with all things natural like the priests who could commune with spirits, he was more than fit to cut open a path for us.

After a short preparation, he cast a cantrip—oikodomurges were better versed in hedge magic, as their work inherently demanded permanence—that made the soil pack itself into a shoulder-width walkway. The earthen serpent advanced straight into the depths, graciously covering all the massive roots and bumps we might trip on.

“Sorry, this is the best I can do without using too much mana,” Mika said.

“What do you mean? This is incredible.”

The dirt path was perfectly level, and was easily traversable despite its slimness. Furthermore, its unerring straightness meant that we were sure to avoid the typical directional confusion that accompanied forest adventures. Neither graph paper nor bread crumbs would get a chance to shine on this trip.

“You think? Well, I didn’t want to mess up and harm the forest. Who knows how much trouble we’d get in if we did...”

I lightly slapped Mika on the shoulder to dispel his worries, and after a short pause, he slapped me back like always. Then, we started on his newly made path with the same close steps as usual.

Even at midday, the woods were dimly lit, and the lichens clinging to every tree contributed to a hair-raising atmosphere. However, the place itself was surprisingly peaceful. I didn’t know if we could chalk it up to a series of cooperative dice rolls, but we didn’t encounter any angry boars, bears, or bandits.

To be fair, leaving the animals aside, there wasn’t any reason to expect a group of ruffians to set up camp here. The people of this world lacked the gusto of the common mobs who popped up in every dungeon and volcano where the dice mandated their presence.

Who exactly would a hypothetical bandit camp even rob in this remote forest? Even if they wanted to exclusively prey on travelers while evading the eyes of imperial patrols, there were plenty of woodlands with foot traffic, closer to towns.

Unaccosted by the irrationality of random encounters, we sauntered through the serene forest, stopping to pick up the occasional useful item. The undisturbed old growth had left plenty of herbs that were worth a coin or two laying around, and the tough competition with the innumerable trees meant that only the finest plants survived. Herbs of this quality would go for a decent sum.

“Look, Erich, acorns! Look at all of these!”

Mika collected a giant pile of acorns from the forest floor with a huge grin. He wasn’t childishly playing around, mind you: acorns were a staple food his people had eaten for generations.

“We used to gather a ton of these in the fall to stock up for winter. If you crush them into a powder and add some water, they’re not too shabby.” As he filled up his bag, he added, “I’ll make some myself when we get home.”

Despite being a staple food in the north, denizens of the capital considered acorns to be pauper food meant to be fed to pigs, not people. Regardless, the mutton we’d eaten yesterday had opened the floodgates for Mika’s desire for home cooking.

“If you extract the bitter parts, you can use it in bread and cookies, and you can steep it to make tea too. Personally, my favorite is when we slowly boil it into a paste, but I haven’t seen it anywhere since I left for the south.”

Our walk went on much like this for a while, with minor detours every so often. Around the time our knapsacks were starting to get heavy with herbs and fruits, I felt something jostle around in my waist pouch—the one with Ursula’s rose.

“What’s wrong?” Mika asked.

I’d stopped in the middle of the road, much to my companion’s perplexion. I asked him to wait for a moment and pulled out the rose. Although I could faintly make out Ursula’s presence from the slight trembling, she didn’t appear from the bud like she’d done before.

Epiphany struck: tonight would have a full moon. Alfar powers ebbed and flowed with the False Moon, so the fully realized form of the Night Goddess naturally indicated a period of weakness for them. If it had taken a new moon for Ursula to appear at the size of a mensch, I doubted she could even take form today.

In essence, I was without my fey backup. Thank God I didn’t invest too much in fey traits. If I had, someone with anti-Erich tech could’ve clobbered me on any new False Moon with my combat value halved.

Jokes aside, it seemed that my current ability to communicate with Ursula only went one way. Without the ability to speak, oscillating in my pouch had been the best warning she could give.

However, that told me nothing about what she was trying to tell me. Omission of critical information was dramatic and all, but it wasn’t very helpful. It couldn’t be that I’d actually spawned a boss fight, right? Personally, I felt that my heartfelt conversation with Mika had been plenty climactic.

“Stay on your toes,” I said weightily. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“Just a hunch? Don’t worry, pal, I’ve got you.” Without a shred of doubt, Mika waved his wand and a hole appeared in the dirt. “We should be light on our feet, shouldn’t we? Let’s bury our stuff here.”

Not only had he dug a hole, but he’d also neatly packed the crevice with rocks to prevent any curious wildlife from burrowing into it. I surmised that he’d used some kind of stone-paving cantrip, since those were indispensable to oikodomurges. Mika was showing off all his tricks today, and I finally understood why all those caravans had been so grateful to the mages that accompanied them.

Freed from all our luggage except the bare minimum amount of food and water, I used my meager sneaking skills to lead the way. Mika followed at a distance in order to avoid both of us getting caught up in a potential sneak attack. That left our squishy backline mage all alone if someone snuck up on us from behind, but he had a familiar to watch his back. At the very least, he could cover his six better than I could.

Out of nowhere, a breeze carrying a fetid odor assaulted my nostrils. I knew this smell all too well. I had never wanted it to become familiar to me, but so it went. This was the vile sweetness of rot mingled with the stench of excrement—the smell of death.

Death awaited at every corner of this land, and not only because mensch were comically suited for the act. Exemplary punishments were carried out all across the Empire.

I hadn’t seen many in the canton, but every middling city held public executions multiple times a year, stringing up criminal corpses on their castle walls like Christmas lights. On major roads, one could see bandit lackeys and the like participating in the revolutionary new workout method of being hanged by their ankles. Desensitization wasn’t a choice, but a necessity.

The heads of the most heinous offenders were preserved in amber and marched across the Empire in a gruesome cross-country tour. Imperial units had even marched through my hometown to show the fates of great villains and insurrectionists, so butchering livestock was far from my only exposure to horrific gore...and the smell had always been the same.

I raised my fist, and Mika recognized our predetermined hand sign, stopping in his tracks. Quietly, I advanced into the thicket; the smell came a ways away from Mika’s path. I carefully walked forward so as to not scatter any leaves or twigs—all while fighting the urge to dump points into my Stealth skill—and made my way to the source.

Finding it was far easier than one might expect. I came across the figure of a man standing tall in the middle of the trees without any intention to hide. From behind, I could plainly see his dirty clothes, unkempt hair, mud-stained skin, and most damning of all, his missing left arm: he was undead.

Oh, I should’ve known. The stench of humanfolk decay was unmistakable; something in my senses could immediately identify this scent as the putridity of mensch flesh.

I’d figured this might be the case, and it felt as of late that all my worst predictions were the ones that turned out to be true. Still, as well-read as I was, this was the first time I’d seen this kind of undead in person.

In this world where the existence of souls was common fact, there were a handful of different ways a being could become undying. A setting that employed geists and wraiths but no zombies would be half-baked, and the sculptors of this universe hadn’t skimped on adding horror elements to their creation. I think my grimacing face was proof enough of how grateful I was.

As far as the different categories of undead went, the first contained all of the races that lacked an upper bound on their life span. The humanfolk methuselah and demonfolk vampires were the most famous examples, but as the potential victims of murder, few considered them truly undead. Mainly, the classification had been something of a moniker born out of fear of their awesome regenerative powers. In fact, I’d read that most of these peoples considered the title a misnomer and preferred not to be grouped up in this way.

The second type were those who’d been stripped of—or otherwise lost—their ability to die. What few theological texts I’d read contained passages about divine punishment sometimes depriving us mortals of entitlements we’d thought to be inviolable. Sleep, consumption, and emotion could be taken from us, but the greatest sinners lost the right to die.

Those who’d been bereft of sweet release were paired with the more consensually immortal Lady Leizniz and her ilk as the second class of undead...but the man in front of me was clearly neither.

No, he was a case of the third and final type: an empty husk, reanimated without his soul. Magic bent the world to its knees, and there were infinite ways to string up a fleshy puppet to move. Long ago, I’d found a skill tree for summoning undead creatures that could move independently of me and thought, This is strong! However, I’d swiftly abandoned the idea when I realized it would probably turn me into a public enemy.

My definition of strength did not make concessions in the role-playing half of an adventure, so that had been an easy option to drop. It didn’t matter how big my numbers got if I had to twiddle my thumbs outside the city gates every time my party went to town.

However, someone must have disagreed, because the figure in front of me had been resurrected with that sort of power. If not, then a stray geist or excess ichor must have made its way into a forgotten body—his movements were too devoid of higher intelligence to put in the same caste as Lady Leizniz.

Suddenly, the dead man’s neck turned at an impossible angle to face me. His shriveled left eyeball had popped out of its socket, the inertia of his movement swinging it on a fibrous nerve. His right eye was totally missing, having been replaced with mud. As he stared my way with his sightless gaze, his teeth chomped at empty air in unquenchable hunger.

Taken by the appalling sight, a pathetic squeak escaped my throat. Hold on, how does he even know I’m—wait! Come to think of it, undead beings could sniff out the presence of souls with some kind of non-physical sensory system, just like alfar.

The man whirled around far more nimbly than the word “zombie” would suggest and sprinted toward me as fast as any full-grown living mensch. His remaining outstretched hand and the clattering castanets of his teeth were fit for a big-budget horror flick—no editing or FX required.

I faced him head-on—but only for a moment. In the next, I took half a step forward. I’d long since drawn Schutzwolfe as a precaution for this very situation, and one swing was enough to lop off the zombie’s head. His speed had certainly caught me off guard, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. Rather, his brainless simplicity had made him an easy mark.

Besides, the entertainment of my past life had trained me for a run-in with aggressive zombies. My clubmates and I had gotten quite caught up in blowing through hordes of infected as a foursome for a time.

The zombie tumbled forward with full momentum, and his head bounced off a nearby tree to roll to my feet. A clean strike, if I do say so myself. I’d dealt a fatal wound with pinpoint precision.

This was the part where, had I been a whooping jock, I’d get hit for some kind of unpreventable bonus damage and die in a cutscene. But even though I wasn’t, this was still a concerning situation. Undead spelled bad news: there could be a nefarious mage hiding out in these woods, or enough ichor to reanimate a corpse, or even—

Hm? I felt something brush my foot. I looked down curiously, only to meet eyes with the head I’d just severed. And behind me, I heard the crunchy sound of someone trampling leaves and branches...

“Whoa?!” I squealed.

I remembered now: these sorts of enemies always resisted physical damage, and critical hits didn’t even register!

[Tips] Slashing attacks are less effective against enemies without vitals.

Question: What is the difference between fantasy zombies and modern horror zombies?

Answer: Why they keep going.

“Waaaah!” I screamed like a little baby and punted the disembodied head trying to gnaw on my boots with all the force in my body. It was almost beautiful how far it soared before it disappeared into the forest.

Zombies in modern horror movies arose from viruses, parasites, or genetic mutations, and usually stopped once their head was gone. Sometimes, they’d even go dark if they lost their heart. Outside of a few exceptions that literally could not die, the danger a standard zombie posed ended when their head splattered from a critical shot.

If one were to consider why they stopped when their head was removed, then naturally the answer would be that their head was the control center for their body. Whether the cause stemmed from a parasite that overtook the nervous system, a virus that attacked the brain stem and cerebellum, or a general madness that incited senseless violence, it always required a brain to make the rest of the human act.

Working backward, if one assumed the command center was anywhere else, then a zombie could have their head reduced to puree by a shotgun slug and all they’d lose is their main camera-slash-weapon. That didn’t stop them in any real sense.

Exhibit A.

Clumsy as it was, the body pushed itself up on its only arm and lunged for me. Knowing Schutzwolfe was too long a blade to swing freely at this range, I flipped her around, grabbing onto the edge with my gloved left hand. After juking the zombie’s grab, I used my entire body to slam my sword’s handle into its gut.

I felt bones crack and flesh split, but the body only staggered backward without collapsing. A living mensch would be gasping for air and hurling up their lunch, but the thing didn’t even seem fazed.

I’d expected as much. If the body didn’t need a head to move, then breathing lungs and a beating heart were hardly any more important. I could crush its diaphragm whole, but it simply didn’t have the faculties to register its own discomfort.

Extending a Hand to a nearby rock, I applied a few more thorough beatings to be safe. Eons ago, this had probably been the first melee weapon my ancestors had used. The trusty stone continued to dish out plenty of damage to this day...but still the zombie did not die.

This was the horror of fantasy undeath. Animated by mystic or spiritual means, they had no weak point to disable them and none of the reactions to injury of a living organism. While I didn’t risk “turning” due to a stray bite or scratch, the thing easily had enough raw strength to pull off a limb, making the silver lining rather gray.

Living mensch flinched when cut, lost their orientation when blinded or deafened, and crumpled in agony when their guts spilled out of their stomach. Some took one look at my childish frame and let their guard down. While the strength of people varied wildly, across the board, they were one of my best matchups.

Yet none of those weaknesses applied to a corpse. The spells I’d developed to disrupt the senses meant nothing against them, and pain would never prevent their advance. I’d tailored my build to produce crit after crit, but here it was all for naught... I’d been attacked by a hard counter that I wasn’t yet ready for.

“What do I do now?” I mused, overlooking the wriggling zombie. I was keeping it pinned, but it’d been physically strengthened upon revival. Despite having grips on its back, hand, and knees with my new and improved Unseen Hands, it was clear that the base weakness of the spell was becoming a problem.

This was my greatest weakness post-power spike: I wasn’t suited for fights against those that were significantly bigger or stronger than a normal person.

My skill with the blade and my magical endeavors were a mean combo, but a sword was still a sword. The best I could do was cut a narrow segment of flesh—corresponding to the bit near the blade’s tip that was especially suitable for slicing. I didn’t have the reach to pierce the heavens nor the area-of-effect to part a sea.

Even though the limits of swordplay in this magical world weren’t too different from Earth, there were unfortunately many beings that naturally surpassed the level of a mensch combatant. Entities like the undead that broke all the rules were everywhere, and sooner or later, my emphasis on cutting down humanoids on the battlefield would hit a wall.

I would have liked a skill that let me send shock waves with every slice, but alas, reality did not conform to the logic of weekly shonen manga. No, this planet preferred the grittiness of monthly seinen magazines instead.

That wasn’t to say my swordsmanship was ineffective, mind you. My blade was sharp, and a good swing would part armor and scales alike. I was plenty capable of felling giants so long as I chained together critical hits, but severing their girthy limbs or necks was impossible no matter what I tried. Such was the ceiling of swordplay: it offered a chance at victory, but I wasn’t about to chop off a monstrous tail before it slammed into my party-mates or anything.

When faced with an enemy that literally didn’t have a critical weakness, my own weakness became readily apparent. As I pondered this difficult dilemma, I sensed a spell being cast from behind.

Then, a gray sludge hurtled through the air, splattering onto the squirming body. As soon as it landed, it began to harden from paste to solid.

“Are you all right?!” The dependable oikodomurge at my side had blasted the zombie with quick-drying cement. Enhanced with hedge magic, the viscous liquid lost moisture faster than a sponge in a desert. Not even an undead could overcome hardened concrete, and the small bit of its limbs that remained exposed could do nothing but flail helplessly.

“Thanks, Mika. I didn’t really know what to do.”

I put a hand on his shoulder as a show of thanks and his worried expression finally loosened up. He’d probably rushed over as soon as he’d heard my pathetic shriek.

“You, at a loss in combat?” Mika asked. “I wouldn’t have guessed it with how gallant you look whenever you draw your sword.”

Receiving such excessive praise directly after screaming like a newborn babe was, well, embarrassing enough to wish for death myself—a fact that escaped my old chum. Besides, I wasn’t without my fears, and there were plenty of enemies I’d lose to solo. If someone told me to go take Lady Agrippina’s head, the most damage I could do would probably be to cop a feel while she was sleeping (and naturally, she’d kill me the very next instant). If my mark were Lady Leizniz instead, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Wait... Am I just surrounded by outright monsters? Ah, but their presence helped keep my ego in check so I didn’t go and get myself killed in a fit of hubris. Yes, of course, I was lucky to have them around! Humility was an eternal challenge to maintain, after all.

“Come on, magus,” I teased. “You should know better than me that a lone sword only gets you so far. All a blade’s good for is killing people.”

Faced with an inhuman abomination, I had renewed gratitude for the simplicity of organisms that died when they lost their heads.

“Fair enough. Then I guess that’s all the more reason for me to tag along.”

Mika proudly puffed up his chest. The concrete had already completely hardened without a single crack or bubble. What a workaholic.

...Oh. I guess he’s an answer to the undead.

Reanimated beings with physical bodies were blessed with great tenacity and regenerative capabilities. This random reanimated traveler that had attacked me had kept moving after dozens of attacks, and could survive being turned into a pin cushion of spears and arrows.

They were an ideal frontline tank, but a movement debuff rendered them helpless. This was the zombie equivalent of locking a vampire in a stone coffin and tossing them into a pool of holy water: Oh, I can’t kill them? Well, then I won’t bother!

With his oikodomurge training, Mika was the perfect counter to zombies. He could cover them in concrete like he’d just done, drop them in a pit, or even cover them in concrete after dropping them in a pit to seal them away forever. His finishers were all so brutal. I was once again reminded of how exemplary a debuffer my travel buddy was.

“But, boy,” Mika said, squatting down by the undead’s feet, “zombies are so rare. I wonder where he came from?”

“Pigskin boots and...flaxen clothes,” I noted, joining him in observation. “Hey, look at his heel...”

“He must have had spurs. It probably got hooked on a root or something and flew off.”

Spurs made some noise and got in the way, so they were usually removable and could be kept on a belt. It went without saying that I’d done so with my own for stealth’s sake, but the zombie appeared to have wandered the forest with his still attached, judging from the broken bit on his boot.

From that, we could deduce that he was well-off enough to afford regular travel on horseback. What someone of his stature was doing zombified deep in the woods was a mystery.

I’d booted his head off into the distance, but it was probably best to go recover it to mourn him properly. Although I wasn’t quite sure how exactly I was meant to put him to rest.

The undead—especially those spawned from ichor overload or geistly possession—may have been an affront to nature, but their fleshy forms gave them resilience to the world’s attempts to end them. Unlike an average arcane oddity, these would continue to roam about until they ran out of mana entirely unless somebody stopped them.

If these zombies had been revived with a spell, that was fine. Much like the other mystic oddities mentioned above, they’d have a limited supply of mana that would run dry eventually. However, geists and ichor hotspots were far less cooperative, and undead of that sort would stick around indefinitely.

Sadly, two laymen were not sufficient to figure out the root cause, leaving Mika and I with nothing we could do despite our passing grasp of the subject. An amateur mycologist might know that only one of two similar mushrooms is poisonous, but it takes an expert to determine which is which, after all. We could rack our brains all day, but we’d just end up thinking that either could be plausible.

Considered sacrilegious creations that spat in the face of divine providence, undead could be purified with miracles. Even without heavenly help, especially powerful alfar and spirits could return these beings to their righteous form.

Too bad that neither of us could do that. Keeping a priest in every party truly was sagacious advice.

Once, my tabletop group had ventured forth on a campaign where we’d forgone the gods of man for lore reasons. The priestless campaign that followed had been hell. Every nick had gone untreated, and we’d steeled ourselves for death at the slightest wound. Our party had despondently sipped at the herbal teas our ranger had made, and the lack of proper medicine had been horrifically similar to the great wars of early modernity.

Mika and I were faced with a different flavor of priestless troubles, and the same thought crossed both of our minds. We locked eyes and wordlessly nodded: Let’s go home. This is bad news.

Had we been a full party of adventurers, we would’ve giddily readied up for a session of loot and plunder in a newly discovered dungeon. Regrettably, an arcane swordsman (with an emphasis on swordsman) and a mage specialized for a support role did not make the cut. We weren’t trained for this, we hadn’t prepared, and worst of all, this was not a dungeon-diving composition.

I had no idea what living hell awaited in the depths, but the presence of zombies meant that it certainly wasn’t pleasant. This was above the pay grade of kids on a “little” adventure.

The best we could do was report what we’d found and leave it to the professionals. Exploring with reckless abandon was all well and good, but this was a tad much for a pair of brats without a single coin to their name.

Although those who didn’t share Sir Feige’s hobbies considered him a stubborn bit of bark, he wasn’t unreasonable enough to force this ridiculous task onto us. I was sure he’d give me a new quest if I returned.

I absolutely refused to play with fire. I didn’t have the luxury of asking for a new character sheet; besides, I didn’t want a third one. Pushing myself too hard on the gamble that I might be afforded a third chance was absurd.

Scanning the scene for something we could use as proof, my eyes stopped on the zombie’s helplessly flailing hand. If we lopped it off, surely an expert would be able to tell that it’d come from an unusual corpse. With that, we’d be able to avoid being written off as a couple of kids trying to—

“Hey, Erich? I think I heard something move.”

My train of thought was derailed by Mika’s foreboding remark. I’d been so wrapped up in what we needed to do that I hadn’t paid much attention to our surroundings. I cupped my ear to listen, but the forest was silent.

“I don’t—”

As soon as I spoke, I heard the sound of displaced grass. It was south of us: the direction we’d come from. I shut up and turned my ear only to hear another sound. Actually, I heard two, no, three sounds. And once I activated Presence Detection...

“Uh,” Mika said. “Old pal? What’s—”

“Mika, check your shoelaces,” I ordered, doing the same myself. I returned Schutzwolfe back to her sheath; I knew she’d just get in the way of a full speed sprint.

“Huh? Okay...”

I was intensely grateful that my friend dutifully obeyed despite his confusion. While he fixed the knot on his shoes, I pulled out the fey karambit—it may have just been me, but its colors seemed more muted than usual—and collected rocks and sticks to use as subweapons with my Unseen Hands.

Argh, I should’ve known. No one has ever been scared of a lone zombie.

“Eek?!” Mika peeped.

The thicket stirred and trees swayed as undead crawled through the barricade of branches in the dim sunlight. Two, three, four—the members of the amassing crowd were each unique in their own way, but none were intact. They were all unified by the same awful thing: the eternal hunger that drove undead to prey on the living.

“Book it!” I shouted.

How had I forgotten that their ilk always came in a mob? They’d held a place on screens big and small for half a century, and even in the ancient days of black-and-white, they’d been the first monsters to grace the screen in numbers.

I grabbed hold of Mika’s hand and ran, determined to escape the legion of the dead.

[Tips] Those who employ divine miracles have strict limits on what they may borrow godly power to do. Gods of war refuse to confer healing miracles; gods of childbirth do not show their power in military might; and gods of tranquility disallow destruction.

However, all the keepers of the world equally share their ability to right the wrongs that blight the planet. Should the situation call for it, they will share this power with anyone, at any strength.

There were five or six zombies already dashing straight for us; I wasn’t sure exactly how many there were out here, but it was clear that the number was on a one-way fluctuation upward. Enemy reinforcements jumped out at us at every turn.

If only these had been classic Romero zombies, we would’ve had such an easy time. Instead, we were faced with utter menaces that sprinted at full speed and packed a punch to boot. While I could subdue any single one by methodically removing its limbs, we were woefully short on time.

“Hey, Erich, wait!” I’d practically been dragging Mika across the forest floor, and he finally managed to regain his footing by using his wand as a crutch. “Can’t we slow down a bit?!”

“No way! They’re close! We’re almost surrounded!”

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to take it easy and care for his comfort. New additions to the ever increasing chorus of footsteps were perfectly placed in the most obnoxious spots to encircle us without hope of leaving the woods.

We would’ve been fine if they’d come in a straight line. In that case, Mika could have just summoned a quagmire to trap our pursuers like he’d done to the bandits from the previous day. Being attacked on all fronts made that an impossibility if we hoped to maintain a path home.

Above all else, enveloping ourselves in a defensive structure was the perfect way to lose to classic zombie tactics. If there were enough of them to use their fallen comrades as a footbridge, we’d be completely cornered.

That said, one could argue that fleeing from the impending tide of the dead wasn’t any better: at the end of the day, we were running into the woods.

I’d led us deeper into the sea of trees out of sheer instinct; not only did this fail to get us out of harm’s way, but it actively delivered us to more danger. This was the epitome of a fruitless endeavor; my inexperience was on full display.

“Whoa, look out!” Mika screamed.

My companion’s panic brought me out of my private self-loathing; I saw a new zombie jump out from behind a tree I’d been trying to dodge around. A branch had been jammed into his thigh to prop him up in place of his missing leg, and his armor—as light as it was—made it clear he’d been an adventurer or mercenary before passing.

However, I didn’t have the time to get a good look. I smashed two Handfuls of rocks into his face, causing him to tumble backward. With another Hand, I jabbed a fallen twig into his exposed stomach. His tattered armor failed to cover his spongy, rotten flesh, and the branch pinned his body to the floor, keeping him off our tail for the time being.

I could no longer remember how long we’d been running. Mika and I fought off undead attacks twice, and then took turns tripping and covering for each other. At another point he lost grip on his wand, and I cut down a reanimated body to buy him time to pick it up. When I planted my face in the dirt after my foot got caught on a root, he summoned a wall to protect me.

It felt as though our struggle had gone on for ages, but under the dense canopy it was equally possible that mere minutes had passed. There were only two things that were certain: our exhaustion and the unceasing growth of the sound of footsteps.

Hold on a second. This is ridiculous. This forest is out on the frontier, so there shouldn’t be enough people coming and dying here to summon an army this big. Where are they even—

“They’re—” Mika wheezed, “they’re coming!”

“Oh, damn it all!”

Perhaps my opening set of dice rolls had been too good, and the unceasing torrent of bad luck was my fortune evening out the statistical anomaly. Gods dammit, I swear I’m cursed... Can’t I at least have a moment to cuss out the absurdity of my situation?

Mika cast a spell—too hastily to live up to his usual standard—to cut off the path we’d come from with a small puddle of mud. Meanwhile, I feverishly beat back the zombies in front of us to cut a path forward.

As we continued this game of chase, a suspicion took hold of my mind: were we being led somewhere?

My revelation may have come too late. I say that because we tore through a gap in the trees to a clearing lit by unfiltered sunlight, only to be greeted by the entrance to a labyrinth, its door wide open.

The building seemed to be an abandoned house, but was better described as some sort of avant-garde architectural exhibit: wooden structures stacked on top of one another like building blocks, chaotically sprawling in every direction like a child’s drawing. On closer inspection, each segment looked like it had been copied and pasted from one normal house to create this monstrosity.

Just looking at it was enough to tell it was bad news. Under any other circumstance, we wouldn’t get anywhere close, let alone jump in the open front door. Had I been sitting at a table with a character sheet, I’m sure my PC would have set the place ablaze, no questions asked. But nothing this sinister could bring about anything good, and I would be surprised if the thing could catch fire at all; a GM would have to be truly insane to introduce a place this menacing without accounting for the basic counters.

Regretfully, we didn’t quite have a choice.

“Run for it!” I shouted.

“You bet!”

We leapt out of the thicket and an uncountable swarm of the undead leapt out with us. I was at a loss for how a horde of this size had managed to stay hidden for so long.

I scurried inside gasping for air and tackled the door behind us shut, and Mika pressed his wand to the frame. He muttered a chant under his breath and spawned a lock, then another, then yet another, finishing his work off with a bar that spanned the doorway. With our defenses in place, the hungry zombies’ violent banging did little more than rustle the wood.

We leaned back against the door and slid down to the floor in unison. Our shoulders heaved up and down as we wolfed down air in an attempt to fill our empty lungs; our hearts were still pounding in a frenzy.

“But you know...” I said.

“Yeah, I know...” Mika echoed.

“We’re in a bind,” we said together. I sighed, and Mika put a hand to his forehead in sympathy. Once again, we’d leapt from the frying pan to the fire.

“I’m sorry,” I panted. “I screwed up. I should’ve led us back the way we came...”

“Come on, old pal, it’s not your fault,” Mika said between labored breaths. “We didn’t have a choice. Besides, I think they were corralling us here. I bet there were another two or three packs of zombies waiting near the entrance to the woods.”

He handed me our waterskin. I took a swig, soaking up the sensation as moisture returned to my weathered flesh. We passed the drink around a handful of times, and the much-needed hydration helped me finally regain my cool.

Mika was right to say that we’d been led here, and the assumption that more obstacles had been waiting to block our path back out was reasonable. That then begged the question of how someone had managed to amass this many undead, and how they’d placed them so perfectly to fence us in. However, trying to answer those questions only brought more of their kind, so I decided to put that train of thought to the side. Our main priority was determining how we’d turn the tables.

“Mika, can you get in touch with your familiar?” I asked.

His raven had played a crucial role during the chase, scoping out the paths with the fewest zombies lying in wait. Even though he couldn’t speak any languages, it wasn’t a stretch to think we could at least use him to call for help.

Yet after a few moments of closing his eyes in concentration, Mika let out a loud sigh and shook his head.

“No good,” he said. “I can’t feel anything from Floki’s end—something’s getting in the way. I’m pretty sure he’s alive, but I can’t send him any orders or tap into his vision.”

“That’s a shame. We’re out of options, huh?”

Our only means of contacting the outside world was unavailable. Even if I were to acquire Thought Transfer on the spot, I doubted I could overcome whatever barrier had blocked Mika. Besides, I would have needed to prepare by entrusting Lady Agrippina with a mystic tool to pinpoint the destination of my telepathy.

“So,” Mika said, “does this mean...”

“...We’re on our own,” I concluded.

The probability of rescue was minimal. My overpowered allies were at the faraway capital, the fey help I kept in my back pocket would need several nights’ time to regain their strength, and Sir Feige was unlikely to realize we were in trouble for at least a few days.

It went without saying that no one came to this overgrown wilderness for fun, but even if someone were to come, they’d certainly be comparable to us. The odds of a visitor being on the level of my master or that unhinged wraith approached mathematical impossibility.

Boiling everything down, the only people we could count on to solve our predicament were ourselves.

“I knew I jinxed it...” I mumbled.

“Jinxed what?”

I slouched over, too upset to even explain what I meant to my confused friend. I’d foolishly spoken about our bandit run-in as a wandering encounter, and lo and behold, a main quest complete with a full-on dungeon had spawned in to give our session some direction. There was no doubt in my mind that a climactic boss fight awaited at the end... This may have all been my brain connecting dots that weren’t there, but I swore to avoid foreshadowing statements going forward.

“Going forward,” huh? Ah... I still had a future to worry about: kicking the bucket here wasn’t an option.

I rose to my feet and looked myself over. As tired as I was, I didn’t have any injuries. Mika was much the same.

On the magical front, I’d only used Unseen Hands and hadn’t done any complex maneuvers with them, so I remained pretty much topped off. However, Mika had used a lot of spells to slow down the mob. No matter how exemplary a mage he was, I didn’t want to push him too hard.

I unhooked the lantern I’d brought just in case and ignited it with a small mystic flame. The interior of the building was lit only with what little sunshine made it through the cracks in the ceiling. My Cat Eyes prevented total blindness, but I sorely lacked true darkvision.

“All right,” I said. “Ready to head in?”

“Sure thing. I can handle the light.”

Handing Mika the lantern, we slowly made our way forward. Our situation was desperate as is, and the only way out was to follow the path set out for us and win our freedom through a trail of blood. Although I’d yet to come across any evidence that the creators of this world knew anything about level design, our situation wasn’t completely hopeless. At any rate, I wasn’t willing to give up while my body was still physically intact.

The floorboards in the hallway creaked no matter how carefully I made my steps, and we walked by a number of doors. Looking closely, I noticed that every door was exactly the same. Taking even more time to scrutinize, I could see that the hallway had been made of a recurring pattern, and each instance of the hallway had been very poorly stitched together. It felt as though we were walking in a half-assed indie game with terrible textures, which threw my sense of scale and direction out the window.

We went around opening doors that led to nowhere—literally, since the things opened to reveal a wall—and carved X-marks into the ones we’d checked. Suddenly, Mika spoke up in a moment of epiphany.

“You know, I think this is what they call an ichor maze. I’ve only ever read about it in passing, but...”

With his short disclaimer out of the way, the College student shared his knowledge. According to him, cursed lands brimming with ichor or other arcane emissions eventually morphed into what we saw now. Ichor was a distorting force, and high concentrations bent the laws of physics to create these sorts of labyrinthian structures. The result of this so-called mazification process gave birth to what we knew as ichor mazes.

Oh, now it all clicks. The presence of a corrupted monolith like this explained how this ocean of greenery in the middle of nowhere had become a garden of death.

Yet for all the logical sense that it made, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of ungodly luck was needed for me to stumble across something like this in the middle of a child’s adventure. My character sheet didn’t include a LUK stat, but if it was recorded as an invisible value, I was certain it’d be crawling near the bottom of the chart. It might not be my place to say this, but the consistency of my misfortune was getting out of hand.

This sort of grand dungeon ought to have been scaled for an experienced party, not us. I cursed the bad luck that had followed me between lives and cracked open another door. Immediately, a pungent stench sent a cold sweat down my back. I’d grown all too used to it during our stint in the woods: the smell of rotting mensch.

“Erich...”

“I know... Let’s do this.”

There were bound to be enemies inside this tomb, but that was nothing new in this dreary chapter of the book of my youth. I swallowed back the lump in my throat and entered the room.

Broken furniture littered the interior, and the smell of wood mingled with decay. A lone zombie stood in the center. Though his travel wear and oversized cloak were stained black with blood, it was clear enough that he’d been an experienced wayfarer in his day—which made it all the more a shame that his head, full of memories of distant lands, had been chopped clean off.

In his right hand, he held an exotic sword: its blade was skinnier near the handle and gained breadth nearer to the tip. Falchions like these were relatively similar to broad-bladed knives, giving them popularity among ignoble people as both a worker’s tool and simple weapon. Of course, the zombie’s sword bore traces of its use toward more violent ends.

He was alone. The dimensions of the room each measured a few meters—plenty for a good fight. To top it all off, all of the reanimated corpses we’d encountered so far had been missing a part of their bodies. I couldn’t say for sure, but I had a feeling I understood what the aim of this ichor maze was. Our esteemed adventurer friend had left us a rather distasteful parting gift.

“Mika, save your energy,” I said, stepping in front of my companion with Schutzwolfe in hand. “Single combat is my specialty.”

Right as I finished speaking, the zombie slashed at me more quickly than any corpse had a right to move. Despite swinging short, he made good use of his top-heavy blade to offset his lack of windup. Although his attack didn’t want for technique, I parried it and stepped forward to counterattack.

However, the rotting man matched my footwork and deftly turned his wrist in order to regain control of his falchion and prepare for my advance.

...This zombie can dance.

As impressed as I was, I wasted no time reworking my strike into a stab. I thrust my upper half as my foot landed—the force generated from my body weight convened on a single point would be enough to pierce all but the sturdiest defense.

Yet in place of blocking, the corpse leaped back. Once my attack failed to connect, he struck my extended sword with his own, knocking my arms away. His style was perfectly sound, and it was clear he had a grasp of his unique weapon’s strengths and weaknesses. Falchions were ill-suited for blocking and parrying, so instead he’d waited for the moment I’d used up my forward momentum and knocked my weapon to the side. This was the conduct of a thinking person making use of their battlefield experiences.

With Schutzwolfe no longer covering the space between us, the zombie took a nimble step forward and swung his blade overhead—aiming not for my head, but my shoulder. I may have had armor on, but taking the brunt of the impact head-on would undoubtedly shatter two or three bones at least.

Of course, I was too experienced and too skilled to let such a fate befall me. As soon as he batted Schutzwolfe away, I delicately shifted my right hand to roll her into a backhand grip; my left hand let go of the handle entirely, sliding down to grab the middle of the blade. He hadn’t hit my sword away so much as I’d let him hit it in just the right way to use the inertia to rework my hand positions.

I caught his blade between Schutzwolfe’s handle and handguard with a metallic clang. Although his sword dug into the wood, the steel tang buried within did a fine job of stopping it.

My hands were shaking after the collision, but I immediately regained control. The zombie attempted to push through, and I countered by swiveling my sword; the torque afforded from having a hand on the blade allowed me to free my handle from his falchion while positioning my blade right beneath his armpit.

Naturally, pushing a blade flat onto an enemy is hardly a good way to pierce skin. However, he’d been using all his force to try and push through my defenses a fraction of a second earlier, and by using his own downward force against him, Schutzwolfe’s razored edge was enough to make a clean cut.

The weight behind his own swing let me slice straight through, severing his right arm. It flew off with the foreign sword still in hand, and the body left behind toppled forward in a sorry state.

Our battle had lasted but an instant, and a handful of microinteractions had determined the victor. This was what made swordplay so lovely: for all its intricacies, it was so very simple.

Showered in blood, I swung into the corpse’s left shoulder as he collapsed. The pointed edge of my blade cleaved straight through his garments to send his remaining arm after the first. After removing both legs and hollowing out the fleshy tendons near the joints, all the undead creature could do was writhe around helplessly.

Steadying my breathing from a slight pant, I flung the blood off Schutzwolfe. The trusty blade would not crack so easily from the savage necessity of dismemberment, but I hardly wanted her to remain covered in grime.

As the black sludge splattered onto the floor, I thought to myself, That could have been the warm blood still flowing through my veins.

This zombie had been strong. I’d only endured a few of his attacks, but each one had threatened certain death. Each strike had been technically perfect, and the trained plan of action he’d employed was a rarity among even the living. From what I’d seen, I estimated his ability to equate to something like V: Adept, at the very least. Had someone from the Konigstuhl Watch been here to face him, I suspected that they’d only barely win—that is, if they survived at all.

The sound of my own deep breath was masked by creaking wood. I turned to see the door in the back of the room had opened all on its own.

Well, well, well. I knew it’d turn out like this.

[Tips] Zombies are capable of wildly different things depending on the quality of the spells—or geists—that resurrect them. Some even retain all of their skills from when they were alive.

Bunkering down is a classic staple of zombie flicks. Then what of dungeon diving? Common tropes include dastardly villains hiding in crypts, treasure laying in wait, and moments of reprieve during an unexpectedly long exploration. Everyone has their favorite, but there are two that are absolutely essential: locks and trap-laden puzzles.

“All right, what’s it say?”

“Let me see... Ugh, I can’t read this bloody handwriting...”

After defeating the first zombie, Mika and I had walked through a series of hallways until we’d come across a mysterious sign. It was placed between two doors and read: I am your lifelong friend, waiting in the room beyond. We take arms together, eat together, bathe together, and sleep together. I alone am worthy of your respect and friendship. Find me and the truth shall follow.

“It’s a riddle,” I said.

“So we’re supposed to go to the door that corresponds to the answer?” Mika asked. “I wonder what happens if we get it wrong?”

“I’d rather not think about that...”

The bloody scrawl was unmistakably the classic sort of brain teaser meant to lead a party to the correct path. Taking a step back, this was the sort of thing that might cause a player to smile to themselves and think, Aww, the GM must have been really excited about this.

“I think I might know this one,” I said.

“Funnily enough, so do I,” Mika said.

We counted to three and both pointed to the right door. The “lifelong companion” was a metaphor for our corporeal forms that served us until death, but nothing about weaponry, food, bathing, or sleep implied anything substantial about direction.

However, respect and friendship were epitomized by handshakes, which were traditionally done with the right hand. Going up the social ladder, aristocratic pleasantries included bowing with one’s right hand covering the right breast. It was a show of good faith that one was willing to preoccupy their dominant hand, and all four-limbed races in the Empire followed this etiquette.

Whoever ran this labyrinth was clearly a fan of classic dungeon design with little taste for twists. Judging from how the first room had opened its doors after the inhabitant zombie was defeated, I doubted we’d run into a riddle with no solution or a punishment for answering too confidently.

Still, it didn’t hurt to be cautious, so I had Mika wait at a safe distance and slowly leaned against the door with three layers of hardened Unseen Hands to shield me. With my ear on the wood, I quietly listened for activity...and heard nothing. I jiggled the knob for a moment and felt nothing more than the resistance of rust. Upon turning it all the way, the latch opened with a normal click without any extraneous adjustments.

Finally, I opened the door to find another hallway indistinguishable from the one we were already in. I extended my strengthened Hands to feel out the floor, but found no evidence of pitfalls or pressure plates to activate spike traps.

I’d been right: both about the riddle and the dungeon keeper’s tastes.

“All clear, Mika. Looks safe. Let’s keep going.”

“Gotcha. Boy, I was really sweating, but you sure seem used to this. How much do you know about maze traps?”

“Just the basics. I can’t match up to a professional.”

I shrugged off his praise, and then realized I didn’t even know a professional when it came to this sort of thing. Margit was unmatched in the great outdoors, but I doubted she knew anything about lockpicking or trap disarmament. Going forward, I’d need to work out the details myself or hire an actual specialist.

Well, as it was a Dexterous activity, I could probably handle even the most intricate machinations. I’d consider it whenever I got more experience points to play with.

As we continued down the hallway, a scrap of paper on the floor caught my eye. I picked up the cheap stationery to find someone had penned a diary entry on it with charcoal. There were traces of someone having bound the left hand side with string, so it must have originated from a full journal.

“No way...”

“Is that the diary we’re supposed to find?” Mika asked, bringing the lantern closer.

Deciphering the chicken scratch, the date at the top indicated the memo had been written nearly sixty years ago. It touched on the weather, the adventurer’s progress on his most recent job, and the interesting bits of the accompanying journey. This page in particular recounted an episode where the goblin who acted as his party’s scout had bungled the seasoning on dinner one night, and how they’d all laughed about watering down their beef stew to make the excess salt manageable.

The dots were connecting. At this point, I was fairly certain I knew who’d spawned this ichor maze.

Creaking wood interrupted our reading time. We looked up in a panic to find that the door forward had opened up, as if to hurry us along. Inside, I could see two shadows waiting in the wings.

“Well, well. Aren’t we eager?” I quipped in an attempt to distract myself from the fear that accompanied a battle with the undead.

“Hey, we might bite, but this kind of hospitality isn’t very popular with the ladies, you know?” Mika added on more banter, easing my mind further.

All right, it’d be rude to keep them waiting. We advanced.

[Tips] An ichor maze is a reflection of its master’s personality.

What is harder to come by than a good friend? One who cares for you—who will draw his blade and lay his life on the line in your hour of need? Nothing is rarer than a true friend.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

Even when he shouted expletives that he would never stoop to on a normal day, mine was dazzling as he danced a waltz of steel perfected through years of practice. Erich of Konigstuhl was beautiful: he’d called me his friend, and he’d let me call him mine.

His flashing blade swung down. Although he’d started his strike later than one of the zombies, it was the undead soul who lost both the exchange and its sword hand. Erich avoided the splattering blood with a flick of his neck, only to gracefully land a kick on the zombie he’d disarmed. All the while, his movements had put him in the perfect place to elbow the zombie that had been trying to jump him from behind in the mouth.

Bolstered with hard leather and metal tacks, Erich’s arm dislodged the creature’s jaw, and it tumbled backward. The one he’d kicked in the gut had collapsed onto its back.

Readying my wand, I recited the incantation I was usually too lazy to chant. Spells and cantrips alike took slightly less mana if the caster carefully tried to convince the world they followed more of the rules than they did. It was a humiliating bit of pageantry by Rhinian standards, but that was a burden I was willing to bear for my best friend.

“Pillars rise from bedrock at every turn; yet their support alone shall not suffice. I ask for a guardian—for ever-watchful eyes.”

I squeezed out my mana, using my ad-libbed incantation to give the cantrip structure. One of the zombies had retreated to the wall, and my magic caused a nearby column of wood to reach out and entangle it.

Many considered oikodomurges to be burdens in direct combat, but there were plenty of crafty ways for me to contribute. By fidgeting with the composition of the wood that made up columns and beams in houses, I could bend the building itself to my will—a favorite trick from the oikodomurge handbook. Personally, I thought our ability to trip up enemies made us relatively helpful in battle, especially indoors.

“Light your pipe and boil your tea—your shift of guardianship shall never end!”

My magical words painted the unliving sacrifice as a true part of the pillar, strengthening the wood’s hold. Undead beings had little resistance to arcane concepts, since they weren’t technically alive, and the zombie quickly melted into the column.

“Thanks, Mika!”

“No problem! I’ve got your back!”

Despite its best efforts, the zombie was almost completely swallowed, taking it out of the equation. More importantly, I was ecstatic to see Erich smile so gratefully at what little assistance I could provide.

This was the third room with zombies in it thus far. Erich had handily conquered the first, and the second room’s three foes hadn’t posed much of a challenge for him either. The way he’d managed to brush off their attacks while rerouting them to hit other enemies was astonishing.

Between each combat trial, we’d worked together to solve a puzzle. I wouldn’t say I’d been amazing, but I think I’d been a real help. The second one, where we had to use four keys in four locks in the right order, had been pretty hard, and the latest one had involved higher arithmetic that made Erich dizzy. Thankfully, my coursework involved a lot of math. I doubted I’d ever forget the wide-eyed praise he’d given me when I’d solved it.

Now, as if to make up for not being able to help on the arithmetic problem, he was showing off his polished swordplay in spades. The number of zombies had increased to five, and they’d been carefully set to surround us as we entered, but he’d instantly cleaned up two of them. I’d summoned a fence to block off a few and tried my hand at binding them when I could, but there was no honor worthy enough to describe the skill needed to do what Erich was doing.

He was risking his life at every moment, all to shield me from harm. My support wasn’t much to speak of in comparison, but the least I could do was keep away the extra zombies...even if that meant enduring the awful headache that came with mana depletion.

Look, he’s done it again! Parrying a spear with a sword was supposed to be extremely difficult, yet time after time Erich stopped enemy thrusts without so much as batting the things away. After bringing a zombie’s spear to a gentle stop with his sword, he locked it in place and dashed forward, slicing through the reanimated corpse’s underarm with the knife in his left hand.

It was truly a sight to behold: his steps flowed like a dancer’s and never stopped until his foes were vanquished.

The zombie’s arm went limp, and Erich lightly pressed the tip of his sword into its left armpit as well. Simultaneously, he summoned an Unseen Hand to recover the spear it’d dropped. What was ordinarily a household spell morphed into a martial spectacle under his command, composed of a beautiful arcane formula.

His Hand lifted the spear high and quivered for a moment before plunging the weapon into its previous master. It pierced the headless warrior’s armor with great force, pinning the zombie to the wall. The cadaver tried to free itself, but Erich simply bent the spear’s shaft to a right angle. Seeing his discretion from an ally’s perspective inspired endless confidence.

At long last, he walked over and dismembered the zombie he’d kicked to the floor with all the dispassion of a butcher readying a hog. With that, we’d managed to successfully surmount another room.

“Phew,” he gasped. “Five... That’s five.”

Erich was the pinnacle of reliability in battle. Although his movements were refined and graceful, they were not flashy; rather, the beauty lay in the fact that every action was perfectly suited for the act of killing.

Unlike the heroes of our favorite sagas, he couldn’t reduce his foes to shreds with a single glorious strike. Bit by bit, he strung together honest attacks to protect me from the enemies he bested. There was something about the way he kept their blades from reaching me that spoke to an image of sincerity personified.

Oh, Erich, my dearest friend. How kind can you be? To call me a friend, to let me do the same for you, and to risk your life so that we might go home together...even though I’m starting to become dead weight for you to carry.

“Mika, you’re not looking so good. Here, have some water.”

“But Erich, we’re almost out...”

“Don’t worry about it. Worst case, we can extract some moisture from the air. Drink up. A little lost water’s better than having you faint on me.”

I knew Erich was tired. He’d been fighting all this time, and I doubted his sword and armor could be considered light. I was sure he was tired, and even surer he was thirsty.

Yet you choose to give it to me...

I indulged in his goodwill and took a single swig from our waterskin, but he waited, encouraging me to drink more. I knocked back another mouthful, and something snapped inside of me—I couldn’t stop. I took a third swig, then a fourth, and by the time I regained control of myself, the pouch felt significantly lighter.

I didn’t mean to... My fatigue was all magical; I shouldn’t have been too tired, physically speaking.

“You didn’t have to leave me any, you know? But thanks.”

Erich took the nearly empty waterskin and downed the remaining mouthful or so of water without so much as a gripe. Without knowing how much longer we had to go, mana was a commodity more precious than gold coins; yet he then cast a spell to refill our reserves with airborne moisture without a moment’s hesitation.

I had to pull my own weight. My headache was still on the lighter side, and rehydrating had definitely helped. So long as I cushioned my mana costs with proper incantations, I would be able to persist.

If you’re going to put your life on the line for me, then I’ll do the same for you. Isn’t that what friends are for?

[Tips] The effects of mana depletion are generally thought of in five stages. First, a light dizziness. Second, a stinging headache. Third, an unbearable migraine. Fourth, bleeding from either the nose or ears. Fifth, inevitable brain death.

For whatever reason, I felt as though Mika’s gaze had become rather fiery since entering the dungeon. This may have all been in my head, but something about the way he’d been watching my back was different from usual—not that I could verbalize what was off, but it was different all the same.

Perhaps it was the heat of combat. The rushing blood of battle degraded my vocabulary—I wouldn’t dare repeat the things I’d been shouting here in front of my parents—so I could understand where he was coming from. I could count the times I’d flirted with death on one hand, but the thrill of the fight was already stamped on my soul. This was Mika’s first time in a dungeon and his first time fighting in close quarters; no wonder the excitement was taking hold of him.

“All right,” I said, “let’s get moving.”

“Sure thing. What do you think will be next?”

That sounded vaguely jinx-worthy to me—maybe I’d heard a similar line in a film or novel—but Mika seemed to be raring to go. I opened the next door and instantly groaned.

Three tables were lined up in the middle of the room. Each had a pile of small wooden knickknacks piled on top.

“Um...” Mika looked the handicrafts over. “Looks like a set of pieces for a wooden puzzle.”

“Yeah,” I said dejectedly. “It’s one of those silhouette puzzles...”

I’d been quick to realize that the dungeon keeper had a penchant for riddles, but seeing this made me want to bury my head in my hands and ignore the challenge.

The rules were simple: we were to combine wooden triangles and squares to match the provided image, which, in this case, had been drawn directly on the table. It hadn’t been a very popular board game in Japan, save for the occasional traditional inn that kept a set in their lobby.

However, it was cheap and easy, making it second only to ehrengarde in the Trialist Empire. All one needed to play were simple wooden cutouts and the creativity to think up new images to make, making it an inexpensive pastime. My brothers and I had spent many a winter day cooped up indoors trying to come up with new shapes.

Each table in this room demanded one image: from right to left, they were a sword, shield, and staff. Annoyingly, the riddle introduced nonstandard rules. Usual sets were composed of five large triangles, five small triangles, a square, and a parallelogram. All the tables had double that, and there was a cheeky hourglass waiting for us to suggest we were on a time limit.

Up until this point, all the challenges had been related to skills that I could see an adventurer needing, but come on! Thinking back, there had been a guy in my old tabletop crew who’d filled his dungeons with handmade puzzles for us to solve out of universe with a real INT or EDU check. Whenever we failed, he’d mist us with poison gas so we’d have to enter the boss fight with debuffs, and it looked like this ichor maze intended on doing the same.

“Seriously?” I said. “These look legitimately hard. What kind of adventurer needs to solve wooden puzzles?”

“Maybe it helps when exploring ruins,” Mika suggested. “They say that ancient lithography slates sell for a ton if you can find all the pieces to put them together.”

I groaned again. Chipped bits of stone that came from antique tablets in games did often come with checks for Dexterity or prior knowledge to put them back together. Even if a quest only involved picking up the pieces for a historian, the adventurer still needed to know which parts were important enough to warrant bringing back. Sadly, this puzzle was actually relevant.

By the way, the particular session that sprang to mind had ended in disaster when I’d rolled to apply my archaeological knowledge to the broken relic. My dice had done their duty, causing the slate to crumble to dust, and the whole party had sat in silence for quite some time... Regardless, there was no getting around the task at hand.

“Ready?” Mika asked.

“Yeah, flip it.”

Mika started the hourglass and we began building. The sword was just four pointed tips, so it wasn’t all that difficult. We still had two-thirds of the sand left—the whole thing felt like about half an hour—by the time we were finished. The only hard part had been making sure every piece had been accounted for.

Working in a pair makes this so easy, I thought. However, my hubris was brought to heel immediately.

“All right, that’s the shield done too, so now—”

“Wait a second! Erich, we still have another piece! Look, one of the small triangles is still out!”

“What the—you’ve got to be kidding! How are we supposed to fit this in?!”

“I think that means it’s all wrong! Argh, this is so hard...”

The rule forbidding leftover pieces was the true challenge. One unused shape indicated a fundamental mistake, meaning we’d need to start all over. As the panic set in, the last grains of sand fell from the top of the hourglass to the bottom...and by the time I noticed, our punishment had already begun.

A door squeaked open and six zombies spilled into the room. Although they were all unarmed, their armor was in better condition than any of the others we’d seen, making this fight far from trivial. Our punishment wasn’t quite as bad as instant death, but this wasn’t anything to be grateful for.

“Dammit... Mika, are you good to go?”

“Y-Yeah, I can fight.”

My wingman’s response was less than ideal; I needed to take care of this, and fast. Going full throttle was exhausting, but it was better than getting hurt. Mana recovered with rest, but lost blood, broken bones, and eaten flesh were harder problems to fix. Neither of us knew much about body-enhancing magic either.

“Heed my call, o loyal blades—my armed champions...”

Imperial magia did not chant out spells. Doing so was flowery, lame, and suggested that the caster needed crutches to bend the world to their will; basically, magia were like high schoolers acting cooler than younger kids. However, I was amateur enough to actually need all the help I could get. Dredging up my real embarrassing memories from my time in middle school was a small price to pay for a bit of efficiency.

“Stand, stand tall before me. Take your swords into your unflinching hands.”

My words reached the bundled-up rags that had slowly piled up with every room. It unfurled itself to reveal my trophies of war—weapons coated with the blood I’d shed from a minor nick—which then floated into the air.

“Go forth and bring me their heads!”

I summoned all the Hands I could muster and equipped each with armaments I’d picked up throughout the labyrinth. A bent spear pierced the zombie vanguard’s neck, driving him into the wall. Not an instant later, a dagger, longsword, and falchion whizzed over to rob him of all his limbs. Fetid blood spewed out with hideous giblets, yet the undying man could not let go of life, and he clattered his teeth in frustration.

The five behind him quickly followed, and I meticulously dismembered them as fast as my technique allowed. Whether they were mensch, floresiensis, cynocephalus, or anything else, the bipedal body plan varied little. A blade stuck in the soft flesh of their joints reduced them to little more than smelly meat.

“Eat dirt, assholes!”

It hadn’t taken long for me to clean up the whole crowd...but the strain on my mana reserves was intense. Going all-out was incredibly exhausting, even with the help of a voiced incantation. I could only unleash my full suite one more time—maybe two. The dungeon was doing a good job of whittling away my stamina.

“Erich, don’t strain yourself like that,” Mika said, running over to me with our nearly empty waterskin in hand. “You could’ve let me help.”

“Who’s the one really straining themselves? I can tell your headache is already setting in.” I glanced up pointedly from on my hands and knees, and he grunted, knowing I’d gotten him.

Looking back at the table, the pieces for the puzzle we’d failed had disappeared. Apparently, the person in charge was willing to let us off if we won in combat. The compassion I felt from the dungeon keeper ironically made me wonder what on earth was wrong with the crazed GMs who insisted on assigning the same puzzle again and again until the party got it right.

“Fair enough,” Mika said. “But you take a break, Erich.”

Just as I tried to get up to go to the final table, Mika pushed me back down by the shoulders. He went and got the hourglass and wooden parts from the table and laid them out on the ground. Then he grabbed my shoulders one more time and forced my head onto his lap.

“Leave the rest to me.”

Stop, you’re making me blush.

Possessed by a bottomless well of determination, Mika’s expression was worryingly grim as he shifted the pieces. In the end, he solved the deformed staff that had looked to be the most difficult of the three images with more than half the hourglass’s sand to spare.

[Tips] Jigsaw puzzles with round teeth only arose in modernity, but the idea of playing with wooden shapes has been around for all of history.

I’m so glad I carry around the bare necessities at all times.

“Ahh,” Mika sighed. “It’s good to get some rest.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “How’s your headache?”

“A bit better.”

Time felt nebulous inside of the ichor maze, but our progress was more certain. We’d just finished another pair of rooms. While the combat hadn’t changed from the original pattern of facing off against skillful armed zombies, the mental exercises were evolving at an unprecedented rate.

Here was the riddle in the room we’d just finished: Hope resides in one of five boxes. Yet hope is fleeting, and oft rolls from side to side. It moves once every day, and so too can you only check a single box once every day. Will you be able to take hold of hope? If so, when shall your paths converge?

Tricky as this question seemed, Mika had crushed it in seconds. I’d still been trying to wrap my mind around all the conditions when he’d answered, “We can find hope, and it’ll be on the sixth day or earlier.”

According to him, moving from “side to side” meant that hope could only move to the boxes closest to its left or right. Therefore, one could determine how long it took to find hope (barring any lucky guesses) by simply numbering the boxes.

How exactly did that process work, you ask? Well, I’d asked him the same question and he’d put a finger to his lips and said, “Try and work it out yourself.”

Damn it all.

Whatever, I wasn’t about to complain when we managed to get through unscathed. The bigger concern was the door that we’d unlocked. It was a large set of double doors that had a different air about it than any of the passageways we’d come across so far—the sort of gateway that usually came with a message that read Are you sure you want to continue?

Our sense of time was totally out of whack and we were unsure of how far we’d even walked, so we decided to rest up for what seemed to be the finale. We traded precious mana for water and boiled it in a metal cup, and I pulled my perpetual travel buddy out of my pouch: crushed-up red tea.

The result was more powdery than the usual stuff, but it served to soothe our weary bodies as we passed the cup back and forth.

Afterwards, we decided to take turns napping, since mana recovered fastest while sleeping. Besides, the physical fatigue was starting to pile up too. Although we couldn’t see outside, we’d picked our fair share of flowers in the corners of some of the rooms, so the time we’d spent here was far more than a couple of hours. Breaks were imperative; any lapse in concentration could lead to a fatal mistake.

Nothing seemed to suggest we had to begin the final encounter right away, so taking this time to rest was the smart thing to do. Mika’s mana issues were worse than mine on account of all the magic he’d cast to help in the combat rooms, so I lent him my lap and offered to let him sleep first.

All things considered, we lived under a pretty poorly defined system of time where a day began when one woke up and ended when one slept, making this a very long day. Not even the corporate slavery of my past life had been this bad. I would have much preferred working until sunrise because of a sudden change in project specifications, even if that also involved going around in the morning apologizing to everyone that was even remotely affected by the changes.

At least that had been work. My coworkers and I had worked those terrible nights out of a shared sense of responsibility—a sentiment that allowed us to clink our beers after everything had been said and done with weary grins, laugh, and cry out at once, “To hell with it! Cheers!”

But this time? This time, I—

“Old pal?”

As I sank into the limitless depths of remorse, a cold hand on my cheek interrupted my thoughts. I looked down to see my pal’s sleepy eyes staring back at me. Even when on the brink of exhaustion, his beauty remained radiant.

“Don’t regret a thing,” Mika said.

My eyes opened wide. How had he known?

Truth be told, I was overcome with guilt for having dragged him with me to this hell. I’d meant for this to be a little adventure. Yet we opened the lid on our journey to unveil a frenzied dance of death accompanied by zombies and gore.

We were marching on a path, unsure if there was a destination at all. Who knew if we could make it out alive?

Had Mika been a fellow adventurer, ready to lay down his life in the name of exploration, I wouldn’t belittle him with this kind of concern. But he wasn’t—he was just my friend. He’d joined me because we’d sworn an oath of friendship the night before, and I’d taken advantage of his excitement to drag him along.

Bringing my kindhearted companion to wade through this river of blood hurt my heart so badly that I wanted to carve it out of my chest. As meaningless as it was, I would have done so in a heartbeat if it meant he’d get home safe.

“I don’t regret a thing, you know,” Mika said. “I mean, I managed to stop you from running into this hellhole alone, didn’t I?”

He flashed me a smile of pure compassion, trying to convince me not to worry because he himself was free of grief. How virtuous must one’s soul be to care so deeply for another, knee deep in the dead? How could he still want to follow me into this ordeal? I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d cried out, damning me with every breath... In fact, some part of me wanted him to.

“So smile, Erich. A smile suits you so much better than a frown.”

“...Yeah,” I finally said. “You’re right.”

I couldn’t refuse a request from my best friend, so I pulled back my lips into a clumsy grin.

Content, Mika closed his eyes and dozed off. I brushed his bangs aside and stared at his weary features before covering him with my cloak.

Gods, I truly have found a lifelong friend.

[Tips] Ichor mazes can warp the flow of time, leading to temporal discrepancies between the inside and outside.

“Shall we?”

“Yep. I’m good to go.”

After a short nap each, we sated our hunger with what little food we had and were then as ready as we’d ever be. The doors ahead announced the presence of a climactic encounter, but we were determined to see this through. We advanced toward home no matter what the world threw our way, prepared to cut down anyone or anything that stood in our path.

The great min-maxers of old had declared that God Himself could be struck down if the numbers allowed. So what was an insurmountable task or two to us? We had no fear of roadblocks; all that remained was to clobber our way past.

Mika and I struggled to push the weighty doors open, but when we did, the world opened up to a vast space pasted together out of scaled-up rooms, their adjoining walls omitted. Despite all the willpower I’d mustered, I could feel my courage shrivel when I laid eyes on the seven zombies lined up to greet us. I’ve had my fill, thank you.

Had these undead monsters been the sort of forgettable mobs who needed numbers to count as a proper unit, I wouldn’t have minded. Those sorts of weaklings were only placed as fodder to prevent players from advancing directly into the backline; they were damage sponges meant to eat hits for the boss.

However, the zombies of this ichor maze were a different breed altogether: they were all strong enough to hold their own. Get your shit together, GM. We have two people in our party!

Taking a closer look, all of the reanimated soldiers before us were fully equipped. While some still lacked a limb or head, their deficiencies had been shored up with the addition of a prosthetic. What was more, their weapons and armor weren’t as shabby as those we’d run into prior.

Every room thus far had introduced more foes or harder riddles. The uninterrupted ascension in difficulty made it impossible not to realize the purpose this labyrinth served: it was a test of skill.

I had long since quit asking myself the questions of who and why. On our way here, we’d picked up a handful of diary scraps detailing the writer’s life with his “beloved sword.” The text made it amply clear that the blade was anything but morally sound.

While the motive remained less obvious, there was no mistaking the blatant trials of strength and wit. We were being observed to see how far we’d make it, and could only hope that we amounted to more than trapped rats in a lab; I prayed this game of chess had any concept of mate.

Anyone who set up an unwinnable game was the scum of the earth. I’d spent all my tabletop career readying campaigns so they wouldn’t require psychic powers to clear...but sadly, this universe hadn’t gotten the memo, because every single enemy I’d come across was out to end my run.

A GM’s job, simply put, was to lose with style. They weren’t too dissimilar to the baddies that a certain bread-faced hero from children’s programming fought off on a weekly basis.

Villains pushed the hero into the corner, stressed them to their limits, and even eked out minor victories after especially excruciating fights—but at the end of it all, they were to cry about their demise as they were sent flying into the stars. The GM had infinite resources, so they obviously could win at any moment, but why would they?

Admittedly, balancing fights on paper-thin margins could lead to close calls that were fun, win or lose. Yet I personally believed that this judgment was one only the players had a right to make, and the GM’s goal remained to be conquered. We who wove the foundations of stories wrote our scenarios to give our players a chance to play a role and enjoy our worlds.

Alas, Rhine and the globe it laid on was full of tryhards without a shred of showmanship. If I hadn’t been an unbalanced character myself, I wouldn’t have lasted two minutes with the kidnapper-mage or the daemons prowling that lakeside manor. Stopping to think about Helga’s strength by any real metric was mind-boggling too. Even my recent run-in with the bandits on our way to Wustrow had been objectively hardcore; they’d been strong enough to hunt down caravans with professional bodyguards. I was convinced the zombies of this maze had all once been top-of-the-line warriors who’d lost their final battle to join their rotting brethren.

And how could they be anything but? They weren’t NPCs being puppeted by an actor behind a screen, but players who considered themselves the protagonists of the world. They had no incentive to pull punches, and that went for whoever—or whatever—gave birth to this pit of ichor.

“Ha ha,” I chuckled dejectedly. “This is...grand.”

“Yeah, it really is,” Mika agreed. “I think I can hear my heart sinking.”

Six of the zombies took their places as unliving ornaments, raising their weapons in two rows to decorate the path to the back of the hall. Although there was no universal theme in their sexes, armors, or weapons, a glance was all I needed to tell that each commanded immense skill.

At the very end of their formation, the last of their ilk sat alone on a chair, resting all his weight on a sword. The man with withered bark for skin and a great white beard adorning his decaying face was the very adventurer we had come in search of. For all the tattered rags on his person, it was apparent that his light plate armor was as well-made as it was well-worn. But more importantly, the blade he cradled in his arms was utterly damned.

The tip had been stabbed into the floor. Its black metal gleamed impossibly in the darkness, loudly announcing a presence that ought not to be. With a blade well over a meter in length, the word that came to mind was zweihander.

By this point, I knew better than to ask what a sixteenth-century weapon was doing here. I’d realized European historical knowledge amounted to nothing in combat when I’d seen Sir Lambert throw his might around. What was more important was how alien the sword was. Its onyx luster and the discomforting engravings on its hilt summoned a pit in my stomach.

Every detail of its make spoke to inherent evil; so much so that I would be eternally indecisive if forced to choose between the sword and yesterday’s tome.

“That’s the root of it all... It’s him.” Mika spoke not to deliver me this obvious truth, but to remind himself that this was the final barrier to our freedom.

The zombie was so particular, so uniquely cursed, that I could see how it had warped space and time to generate this unholy deathtrap. I didn’t want to entertain the idea that he could be just another pawn on the way to the boss.

“I’d rather not imagine anything worse than that,” I said. “Not that I can rule the possibility out.”

Of course, some dungeons brought back minor bosses as fodder for the final encounter, so it was difficult to speak with certainty.

“Come on,” Mika said, “would it hurt you to be less pessimistic?”

“You can’t lower your guard just because the goal’s in sight,” I quipped.

We exchanged our final bout of banter and stepped forward. All at once, the six undead soldiers waiting on their lord turned toward us, their weapons at the ready.

The climax had begun. I’d said what I needed to say, so all I could do was to shut up and win—I doubted I’d get a third sheet if I didn’t.

[Tips] To diffuse an ichor maze, one must destroy or plunder the core upholding it.

Getting to stack buffs like someone reading off a sutra before wiping the floor with an enemy is so incredibly fun. It’s too bad it feels proportionately bad to be on the receiving end.

TRPGs often included a pre-combat phase where combatants could take small preparatory actions. This could range from applying minor buffs to light repositioning—rarely, someone could start things off with an all-in sucker punch—but nothing complicated enough to take too much time.

Regardless of the details, the point remained: the climax had begun with the advantage firmly in the enemy’s grasp. I was possessed by dizziness before I could even raise my sword, and the world around me distorted. By the time I caught my bearings, the two rows of three zombies had shifted into a combat formation.

Plenty of systems included skills to readjust party position before an encounter to start on the right foot, but the zombies’ use of this mechanic was purely poor sportsmanship. The hall was longer than it was wide, and two lightly armored vanguards blocked us off, with heavy swordsmen ready to pounce behind them...

“H-How’d they get behind us?!” Mika shouted.

...And two of their squad had managed to wrap around to encircle us. This was getting out of hand.

“Mika, you’re going to have to break your own fall!”

“What are you—whoa?!”

I immediately used a Hand to grab my partner by the nape and flung him to our left, figuring that splitting up would be preferable to enduring attacks from all sides. Mika could create walls out of typical building materials, but household timber was not meant to withstand a flurry of full-power sword swings. Removing him from the melee would make him less of a target and safer in the long run.

Besides, it seemed like the crowd was keen on clashing blades with me.

“Glub glub...” Less rotten than her peers, likely due to being a more recent inclusion in their forces, a woman whose good looks had yet to decay bolted toward me from her position on the front line. Sickly black blood sputtered from her lips, and she stayed low to the ground as she readied a dagger. Her physical beauty only made the scene more morbid, and her command of all her limbs was offset by a massive gash in her thin neck.

She lunged at lightning speeds. By stretching her frame as she stepped, she made use not just of her arms, but her whole upper body, giving her short blade unbelievable reach. She’d conquered the dagger’s greatest shortcoming to turn a common, handy weapon into a virtuoso’s tool.

As she approached, a floresiensis used her shoulder as a springboard. Half skeletonized, the fellow was even lighter than his already small brethren—though perhaps that was racial insensitivity on my part—letting him float through the air like a feather. Deftly handling his curved shotel, he swung down on me from above.

From behind, I could hear the clattering of armor. The duo flanking me had a spear and greatsword, and I had no doubt they were coming straight for me; I was just grateful that Mika wasn’t their mark, with his whopping zero years of close combat experience.

The situation was rough: I was outflanked on all sides and short on mana and stamina. On paper, I was all but doomed.

But you know, I can’t help but feel a bit underestimated.

“No point in holding back now!” I yelled.

If the enemy was going to set up to their heart’s content, then I’d expend major and minor actions alike to do the same. Lightning Reflexes and Insight made it trivial to discern which attacks were the quickest or most fatal.

On top of that, I had four times as many arms as the average mensch. I would have no recourse if they came at me with truly overwhelming numbers, but this assortment of honest warriors? How could I not oblige by giving them everything I had?

“Blub...”

I began by using a Hand to hammer the knee of the woman leading the charge, and adding another to slam her face into the ground once she lost her balance. While an individual Unseen Hand didn’t have the strength to tear off a mensch’s limbs, it was more than enough to tip someone with a wonky center of gravity.

“Grargh?!” The zombie yelped as her forward momentum turned into a passionate kiss with the floor. The impact left her head attached by a patch of skin. I’d gotten a bit lucky, but the undead categorized lost heads as light wounds; I still needed to finish her off later.

More urgently, I summoned a Hand to catch me mid-leap to intercept the incoming floresiensis. Taking his strike head-on would let him slice my neck or wrists using the curvature of his blade, so I instead knocked it away with the karambit in my offhand.

Letting go of Schutzwolfe, I grabbed his fleshless neck with my newly freed right hand. The force generated from our opposing velocities alone was enough to crack his spine; I ignored the audible splinter and hiss of pulverized bone and pushed through. I dismissed my first invisible foothold and spawned another with a twirl, flinging the floresiensis directly at the spearman’s pointed weapon.

“Bull’s-eye!”

The small zombie landed exactly where I’d aimed. No matter how light he was, the weight of a person was enough to push back the spear and its wielder. Furthermore, the floresiensis’s struggling prevented the spearman from dislodging his ally effectively, causing the tiny fellow to slide deeper and deeper down the shaft. Nice work. Keep it up.

I dismissed the Hand holding me up, planting my heels on the lower back of the woman who’d been sprawled out on the floor like a splattered frog. Innumerable crackles accompanied the satisfying tactile feedback of trampling a tough object into dust. Demolishing her hips robbed her of her body’s fulcrum, taking her out of the equation for the time being.

“Up, down, left, and right. Blend every angle together...” I heard Mika begin to chant in between coughs—I might have knocked the wind out of him with that throw. I felt bad, but apologies could wait: the two heavy infantry had realized we’d broken through the encirclement, and they were starting to move. I needed to deal with the others, and fast.

I’d left Schutzwolfe hanging in the air, so I recalled her for a couple of quick slices to sever the woman’s fingers. The digits squirmed like caterpillars as they finally unhanded the dagger they’d so desperately kept a grip on, offering me another sidearm for my collection.

“See this brambled steel, the symbol of denial,” Mika sang. “From here to there is hither; from there to beyond is yonder...”

Listening to my friend’s verse, I picked up the dropped dagger with an Unseen Hand as I always did. With this, I had three—er, four weapons, counting the fey knife in my left hand. For whatever reason, the karambit felt far weaker than usual.

Sensory illusion aside, I turned to face the zombie wielding the two-handed sword. He had been the only one to avoid my initial trickery, and he engaged with a cautious prod, perhaps to reduce the odds of friendly fire. I gently brushed his sword away with the blunt of my own, sliding into a blade-locked position.

“Urgh!” He was ridiculously strong. Our clashing blades creaked as if he had the raw power to crush steel. My bones threatened to bend and my flesh cried out in protest at the burden; the fact that he could ignore such pain was patently unfair.

Still, I wasn’t about to let this become a contest of might. I only had a bit more Strength than the average person, and I wasn’t even fully grown. I didn’t stand a chance. I had to fight smarter: I wasn’t just any old swordsman, after all.

A dull thunk rang out. I didn’t need to look to know it was the sound of two knives barely piercing the thin underarmor of his left armpit and right knee, because I’d been the one to send them there. No matter how herculean this zombie was, he required tendons to control his muscles, and without them, I could feel his overpowering strength ease up...

Or so I thought, only for him to lean his entire body into the back of his blade. Despite being down an arm and a leg, his thirst for victory made him willing to sacrifice himself to take me down. Are you really dead?!

Being squashed under the load of an adult mensch in full plate didn’t tickle my fancy, so I instantly abandoned the idea of catching him. Instead, I cheated my weight to one side and pivoted around him. Although I staggered a bit, I managed to escape my predicament and left the zombie—

Oww?!

Just as I thought I’d gotten out of harm’s way, a sharp pain took hold of my back. The stabbing sensation had likely come from the point of a spear. My armor had eaten the brunt of the impact, but it hurt all the same. And what was more...

“Clack clack...”

The teeth-chattering bastard had stabbed me with the floresiensis still on his spear!

I felt the small zombie bend its arms at an ungodly angle to grab hold of my collar. As the spearman pulled back his weapon, the floresiensis was freed, and he did his best to latch onto my back. His little hands scrambled for my neck, and I realized he was searching for an opening to bite into my vitals. So this is what it feels like to star in a zombie flick.

“You little—I’m not that easy!” I yelled.

“We are hither; you are yonder! None shall cross this fence!”

Mika completed his Mother Goose-grade singsong incantation. It paired horribly with the dreary atmosphere; I made a note to hear him sing again in a sunny field one day...and to live to do so, I needed to get rid of the stowaway angling for a free ride.

I backpedaled at full speed, sandwiching the floresiensis against a wall. Even fully matured, his kind only grew to be about a meter tall, with a structurally weak skeleton. Zombies gained strength upon resurrection—I had no clue why, but they did—but that didn’t make their bones any denser. This man was already halfway to being a skeleton, and his frame was as weak as a normal floresiensis, if not weaker.

Slamming him between muscle-backed armor and a solid wall was more than enough to get some damage in. I could feel the revolting sensation of bones mashing together with rancid flesh all across my back. The hands around my neck lost their grip, and the pancaked meat slid off me, leaving only a trail of putrid blood.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a fence rise from the ground. The wooden barricade, wrapped in barbed wire, stopped the two armored zombies in their tracks before they could get to me. The fence came to life, entangling the pair in thorny steel.

The zombies attempted to rip themselves free, but the wire only unspooled and coiled around them further. The prickly strands grew more numerous by the second, and the enemies were reduced to metal cocoons in the blink of an eye. They wouldn’t be doing anything until the mana overwriting the laws of reality ran its course.

“Damn, that’s scary,” I mumbled. Friends as we were, I couldn’t help but be disturbed by how malicious Mika’s magic was. This spell was a frontliner’s worst nightmare; how on earth had he come up with something that was one failed magic resistance check away from certain death?

I understood that it had only worked this perfectly because the undead were enemies of the world’s own sacred order, leaving them weak to magic. But personally, the thought of being on the receiving end was terrifying, even if I could reasonably escape. I was fairly certain I’d seen something like this in a death-game thriller film.

My shudder-inducing imagination was cut short by a heavy thud. I turned to see my friend had fainted and collapsed.

“Mika?!”

No response. After parrying an attack from the remaining spearman, I saw Mika weakly wave his hand in the air. He was on his side and couldn’t even open his eyes from his mana consumption migraine, but he delivered the message that he was still kicking.

His headache had to be awful: he’d conjured up the fence and wire out of scant few materials, and bound the two heavies so tightly that they couldn’t move. It went without saying that using true magic to accomplish something like this was mind-bogglingly complex, and the requisite mana to execute the spell was sure to be a massive load. Mystic trump cards were not to be thrown around lightly, no matter the situation. And yet, Mika had paid the brutal price of mana exhaustion to pull out the best in his deck.

I knew how it felt to run totally dry. Once, I’d asked Lady Agrippina to watch over me as I tested my limits. Headaches had set in around the time I felt like I’d gone through half my resources, and the pain had been nigh unbearable when I’d had a quarter left. I’d stopped there, but judging from how it felt, I imagined that I would black out with a sixth or so of my total mana pool remaining.

The death that loomed at the end of total mana depletion was similar to that of the blood flowing through our veins. One couldn’t simply drain all but the last drop and be fine. Magia and mages staked their very lives to fight.

Huh, putting it this way makes it sound like mahjong. Despite the irrelevant thoughts bouncing around my brain, I managed to kick up the fallen floresiensis’s shotel toward the final active zombie. He instinctively batted it away, and I used the opening to sever his hands.

These zombies were strong, but they had a weakness: namely, their reflexes compelled them to act like living foes. Had they ignored the threat of damage in favor of dedicating everything to the attack, I would have had a much tougher time.

Dissecting a lone, disarmed zombie was as trivial as butchering a downed bird. Neither offered any resistance—though it might be fairer to say I didn’t give the former any chance to try.

“All right... Time for the main dish.” I flicked the blood off of Schutzwolfe, and the trusty blade gleamed back at me to say she could still go on.

The final zombie had been patiently watching the brawl from the back of the room, but finally rose in response to my words. He took the cradled sword into his hands and swung it. He handled the blade like its weight was imaginary, and the noise that followed implied that he had split the air so finely and swiftly that no gust of wind followed.

Uh... Wait a second. Is it just me, or is he stronger than me?

Cold sweat ran down my forehead. A mere two warm-up swings was all it took for me to recognize his transcendent skill. I may have been inexperienced, but my eyes were honed enough to gauge an opponent’s abilities.

All my powers of observation agreed: he was strong. As strong as Sir Lambert—no, stronger? The captain of the Konigstuhl Watch was ludicrously adept, but I’d never felt this sense of utter despair facing him. No, no, no, that couldn’t be the case. Sir Lambert hadn’t ever seriously tried to kill me, and the living always induced less dread than the unliving...right?

His overpowering aura nearly shattered my soul, but I gritted my teeth and squeezed down on my father’s sword to piece it back together. This damnable labyrinth was a patchwork of mistakes without a shred of level design or balance to its name, so what did I care that a busted enemy spawned at the tail end?

I’d already known that this wasn’t the kind of dungeon two preteen PCs were meant to get tossed into. My psyche had snapped in two long ago. The least I could do was pick up the scraps and use them as bludgeons.

The final husk approached with confidence; I could feel his will with every step. He pressed his broad blade to his forehead in prayer, in pity, and in solace.

Fine, then.

I readied myself to control this character I called myself with a hearty shout. “Bring it the fuck on!”

Killer GMs, be they accidental or willful, were like old friends to me—literally. What more was I to do than shout daggered expletives and roll the dice with spite?

Everything was going to be fine. It was like we’d always said: all I have to do is crit.

[Tips] Critical successes are miracles baked into the systems that make up a world. The numbers vary: a twelve for a 2D6, one through five for 1D100, etc. When these rare occurrences rear their heads, camels may pass through the eyes of needles. These miraculous odds only grace those who pray for them with all their hearts.

A vision of an old friend sitting across from me at a table flashed back in my mind. “Acting first doesn’t mean anything on its own,” he’d scoffed.

I wondered: if he experienced what I was going through now, would he dare to make light of initiative again?

Our blades collided, the clang echoing around us; the flying sparks splashed our dimly lit battleground with vivid brilliance. The zombie threw around the heft of his steel with no more effort than I would with a tree branch. As I slid back from the force of our clash, I saw that he had not relaxed his guard even as I retreated.

Would it kill you to go easy on me?

Many tabletop games included an initiative system, where character initiative values determined who moved in what order, and only that. TRPGs had to be either incredibly intricate or incredibly garbage to allow more than one move per turn, and advanced content could rarely be cleaned up in a single round, sidelining the mechanic as a whole. Thinking back, that old tablemate of mine hadn’t come to many of our higher-level sessions, but he had enjoyed games with revival features like those of pro wrestling.

On the other hand, in situations where a single hit spelled certain death—like now, for example—speed was menacing in and of itself.

The deceased adventurer had beelined for me as soon as I’d shouted at him. He’d taken a normal step just like any other, but then transitioned into a slash that sent me flying.

I hadn’t seen his approach—he was just too fast, and his strike too heavy. My successful block was no coincidence, however. The crackling itch of bloodlust spilled out in spades, caressing my spine with shivers that had informed me of an impending attack. I bet that the visibly cursed sword that embodied all the evils of the world was to blame.

Forewarning in mind, I’d managed to shake off his attack by flinging myself back and dispelling most of the force in the air. Had I been a moment late or had Schutzwolfe been any old chunk of iron, my upper and lower body would have shared a teary farewell as my guts hit the floor; my backward momentum would have let my disemboweled corpse take a full tour of the entire room. Ironically, this blade that had been pried from the hands of her first master now served as my trusty defender.

Summoning a few layers of Hands to break my fall, I landed still holding Schutzwolfe close to my frame. I knew now that I couldn’t spare any time holding back, so I began weaving spells at full throttle.

I mustered up all the mana I could to fully equip my Hands with add-ons. Reckless abandon exposed the bottom of my arcane tank: my vision flickered a dull red, some otherworldly force squeezed the front of my brain, and the dull throbbing in the back of my skull felt like I’d been kicked by a horse.

I didn’t need a clear head to know my mind was complaining about overexpenditure. The body is a device that applies pain to prevent its squishy master from pushing it too hard, and we, the egos in charge, lack the grit to fight its influence. The delicious flavors of food and the ecstatic rapture of discharge all traced back to this will preceding self.

But I didn’t need that right now. I stamped down the pain through sheer grit and screamed my unconscious inhibitions back into their place to finish casting my spell. Six invisible arms recovered weapons short of masters, wielding each with the proper Hybrid Sword Arts technique.

A sword, greatsword, spear, dagger, and shotel turned on the liege they once served. It was all too ironic: these weapons had been used by literal corpses, only to be brought to life once more to cut down an undead foe. I wouldn’t have any retort if they were to file an overwork complaint.

Although the spear required two Hands, I’d still sextupled my forces. I could have smugly laughed about how much of an advantage this gave me against any normal opponent...but the final zombie instantaneously shifted into another attack, leaving me no time for optimism.

His takeoff tore a hole in the floor, and his landing left a crater as he sprinted toward me. I could hardly believe that this bag of skin and bones could bat away seven blades with a single powerful strike, but he did so to open a path to me.

Although the accursed zweihander was visibly unwieldy, it rushed at me like the winds of a tempest. The adventurer came down with a cross-shoulder slash, using the angular momentum to make a full turn and follow up with an uppercut. He continued his circular movements with professional precision. With every turn, he blocked my omnidirectional attacks with plates of his armor, assuming he didn’t parry or dodge them outright. The mastery he’d attained over a lifetime was palpable.

Heavy weapons were held back by their mass, but this man had managed to tame the centrifugal force that came with weight. He’d quite literally dedicated his life to this specific blade. I’d known he was an infamous adventurer, but this technique was unliving proof. No one but an eccentric daredevil would need this style of combat. This was not the work of a soldier fighting wars between two battalions; this was a lone warrior’s way of crushing any enemy, no matter how many he faced—to think I’d get a lesson from my elders in the depths of hell!

The black sword came down from above like a clap of thunder. Knowing Schutzwolfe alone would not suffice, I supplemented my defense with the other two swords, locking his weapon in place with three of my own. This should have given me ample leeway to hit his exposed body with the spear and shotel, but he pivoted around the point of contact to stop both with the blunt of his blade. Even worse, the dagger that had been slinking around the floor to nip his ankles had snapped like a candy bar with an earth-shattering stomp.

You can’t seriously be this strong! How many times are you going to dodge my guaranteed finishers?!

I let go of all my borrowed weapons, using all six freed Hands to shove him in the chest. I managed to push him back far enough to regain my footing before rebuilding my defensive wall of blades.

Meanwhile, the zombie had landed and swung his sword leisurely through empty air. He’d flung off the chipped fragments of my own, weaker steel that had been clinging to it, filling the air with a dreamy glimmer.

Glancing over at the flock of weapons that had shielded me countless times in this fight, I realized that most of their edges had been reduced to the miserable zigzag pattern of a wood saw.

The adventurer’s sword was heavy, sharp, and impervious to wear; I admit that I was jealous of its stats. Of course, I wouldn’t dare pick it up even if it dropped. No matter how strong that thing was, there was no doubt that the accompanying demerits would be too great to endure. I didn’t want every friend or lover I had to be cut down by a cursed blade like a certain prince from a faraway land—though I supposed that was only something I could worry about if I won.

I took a moment to compose my unruly breathing and tightened my grip on Schutzwolfe. Even my deepest breaths made my shoulders sway, and my headache was only getting worse. I tasted blood with each inhalation. As I ran my tongue across my chapped lips to wet them, I was met with the disgusting sensation of slime.

Oh, dammit. The side effects of my spellcasting had triggered a nosebleed. Is this as far as I go?

The opposing death knight was utterly undisturbed. He did not run out of breath; he did not sway with fatigue; he was a stark machine whose sole purpose was to wield his blade. As a mensch, no amount of envy would let me attain the same kind of Exhaustion Immunity skill he had.

“Cut me some slack... This is so unfair.”

Here he comes. The untiring monster was on his way to subjugate this pitiful mortal with the brutality of overwhelming stats. His rapid rotations rained down a flurry of swings more numerous than the droplets in a rainstorm.

I dodged an overhead strike by batting away the broad side of his blade. I redirected an uppercut by blocking with the spear’s handle and shifting the angle of attack. I intercepted a full-power cross slash with a bundle of swords to make space for me to get to safety.

I was still alive, but barely. Perilous blows were followed by formidable strikes, and fatal threats always came just as I ran out of breath. Every slice nicked my skin and the muscles beneath, causing red blobs to ooze from countless minor wounds. Despite it all, I couldn’t help but be thankful for the blood dripping from my cheek into my mouth.

I know, I thought to myself, I’ll drink some water. Once I put this guy down, I’m going to drink all the water I can. Water already tastes great after exercise, so I bet it’ll be the best thing I’ve ever had after I survive this.

The spear broke: unable to withstand the innumerable cuts, it bent like a used toothpick when I tried to thrust it forward.

The greatsword cracked: abused as a shield for its large size, it had been crushed into an unusably crinkled mass.

The shotel snapped in two. The dagger shattered. The longsword lost its blade. At long last, the dependable legion of armaments I’d used the last of my mana to animate had all fallen.

In a poetic turn of fate, all that remained was the lonely sword in my hand. I doubted my tired, numb fingers could wield her properly, but she was all I had left.

My father’s pride and joy alone had remained intact, free from fatal damage. Schutzwolfe’s presence emboldened me, as if to say that this would not be enough to stop me—that I had a home to return to.

How long had this dance gone on? I liked to think I did my best. Even through all the cuts to the point where I could no longer tell where from where I was bleeding, I managed to land a handful of hits. None caused any damage, though, as the best I’d done was chip at his rags and armor.

Man, soloing bosses really is a fool’s errand.

The zombie primed his sword slowly to let me see his every move. He’d taken this exact stance many times before: this was how he prepared the exquisite cross slash he was so fond of. As I watched him rest his blade on his shoulder, ready to make his centrifugal swing, I felt a phantom pain run from my shoulder to my hip.

I see. So this is where you’re aiming. If I didn’t stop him, I would die.

I’d used up all my tricks and was at the end of my line, but I felt mysteriously clearheaded. My body was shot and I was bleeding for lack of mana, but it felt like I could see the world perfectly as it was—though maybe just because I’d used the last of my magic to wipe my face clean with a Hand.

Please, I haven’t seen one all this time... Give me a crit. Let me see the beautiful miracle of those six little dots...because otherwise, my journey ends here.

I heard the sound of clattering dice, but it had to be a hallucination. I wouldn’t be able to handle the thought of someone playing craps outside. Shut up, it’s my turn. Sit still and watch.

I know it all rides on me. Just give me a crit. Please, just one crit...

...Ah. Damn. I’m going to die.

Comically enough, my prayer was answered not by two sixes, but by the red stare of snake eyes. In a catastrophic fumble, I slipped on my own spilled blood. As the soles of my boots lost grip, my all-in gamble of trying to take the zombie’s wrists from below before he could strike had failed before I could get a chance to try.

I could scramble for balance, but in another instant, the massive blade would tear right through me. I wondered how it would feel to be cut by that sword: judging from its appearance and the fate of its owner, I reserved any expectation of a pleasant outcome.

Gods dammit, I don’t care if you call me an opportunist—give me some kind of miracle!

Alas, I was the kind of unlucky soul who fumbled at the most crucial moments. In the end, my dice had landed with the unfortunate sides up.

“I’ll protect you...old pal.”

Just before I could close my eyes in resignation, I heard Mika’s voice.

The zombie had cut air itself with his speed, so why was his sword yet to reach me? What was the faint shimmer wrapping around his blade?

I had no time to search for answers. A slower strike was enough to turn certain death into a chance at life: I maintained the upward acceleration of my arm, but reversed my grip on Schutzwolfe. What had started as an uppercut became me hoisting her up at an angle, redirecting the incoming attack toward the ground beside me.

Both the slip and the impact had left me off balance, but I couldn’t let my split second of hope go. I gave everything I had to secure my footing and thrust the fey knife into the dead man’s right shoulder.

No matter how colorless the new False Moon made the karambit, its razored edge retained its physically unstoppable properties. I cut through muscle and scored bone to totally thrash the corpse’s withered shoulder. I didn’t sever it, but I didn’t need to. The undead lacked our mental faculties, but they still relied on the same physical components to move their bodies.

The adventurer’s joint could not withstand the brunt of his own attack, and the weakly connected arm gave way. The hideous sword went with it, magnificently tumbling across the room.

In a voice somewhere between snapping dried twigs and rubbing glass together, the undead adventurer uttered his final word: “Splen...did.”

[Tips] Fumbles are absolute failures baked into the systems that make up a world. The numbers vary: a two for a 2D6, ninety-six to a hundred for 1D100, etc. When these catastrophic values rear their heads, even the simplest tasks become hopeless: whether that be reciting a familiar poem, tossing trash into a wastebasket from afar, or even breathing. But who knows? Perhaps a fumble may lead to a miracle yet unseen...

My master had a saying: “You may walk along the edge of impossibility, but never cross beyond.”

The reasoning went that we magia were expected to push ourselves to the brink. We caused apples to fall up out of trees; we prevented round objects from rolling on wet flooring; we froze papers that were already ablaze. To push the boundaries of what reality considered possible was the nature of our work.

However, to go further than that was considered improper. Bend the laws of existence too much, and the world would hit us with recoil, not to mention the potential of divine apostles being sent to hunt us down.

Furthermore, crossing that boundary to bring about magical change that exceeded one’s limits brought about a countereffect on the body that could not be endured. Whether it was to cast a spell beyond one’s skill or to tap into mana not available for use, such tasks were considered too dangerous to do...

But personally, I thought that it was fine, depending on what was to be gained. In fact, I believed that some situations came with an obligation to step over that line.

“I’ll protect you...old pal,” I muttered.

Terrible headaches hounded my psyche, but I pulled my jumbled thoughts and last dregs of mana together into a spell. My vision was totally red, and I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. My blood vessels were probably popping under the strain. The obnoxious sounds of liquid bouncing around my empty head likely meant my ears were bleeding too.

Despite all I’d given up for this spell, it did little to affect the world. I hadn’t even amplified my magic with an incantation, so the change I could bring about with my dwindling life force was bound to be minuscule.

The best I could do was to make the myriad of spiderwebs drooping from the walls and ceiling several times thicker for a brief moment.

Spiderwebs were known throughout the Empire as the basis for the strongest wires that money could buy. Thread woven by nest-building arachne made the steel cables used in bridge construction look softer than silk, and clothes sewn from arachne webs were akin to armor.

So, if nothing else, these fragile webs should be able to slow down a single strike. They were just hanging off the ceiling, so I couldn’t expect them to stop the sword entirely. That dark blade was sharp enough to blow away other weapons too, so I didn’t know how well my plan would work. Still, I thought it was worth a try—enough that I was willing to bet my life and future on it.

Clatter. I heard something roll across wood.

Beyond the veil of blood seeping into my eyes, I saw...that my friend had won.

Gods, he’s so cool. Erich was bloody and tattered, but he hadn’t given up despite it all. Seeing him stand tall was inspiring. I wanted to keep watching, but my time was up. My vision swirled, as if someone had tied a rope to my head and was swinging me around.

But no matter what the cost, I was truly happy that he won.

[Tips] At times, a mage can offload the costs of a spell on their body and mind in place of using mana. Naturally, this risks damage to those very faculties.

I’d loved those battles where the whole party had used everything in the tank, all my friends were throwing for death saves, and the victor came down to one decisive roll of the dice.

Those encounters never failed to get my heart pounding, and the high of victory had always lasted long after everything had been packed up. Whenever the GM did their job of being vanquished one step shy of checkmate, I’d always been so giddy to keep going—or even to write up a whole new campaign.

But this time, my first thought after winning was I’m never doing this again.

I propped myself up with Schutzwolfe to overlook the remains of the final zombie. Not wanting to let him reclaim his weapon, I’d used all my remaining strength to follow up on my big opening and had just finished dismembering him.

Sweat and blood mixed together on my chin before dripping to the floor. My body whined from being worked like there was no tomorrow, and a grating headache let me know that I had indeed bottomed out on mana. Someone had set up an ironworks factory in my brain, and they refused to turn off the rumbling engines of pain.

Had my PCs always felt this way after a battle? I’d traditionally dealt with the aftermath using a simple scene change, but now I felt guilty for glossing over their struggle.

“Mika...”

I trudged over to my unconscious friend at a snail’s pace. He’d saved my life: I didn’t know what exactly he’d done, but I was sure he had been the one to buy me that extra moment. Blood seeped from his every crevice—proof he’d fought alongside me all the way to the finale.

After a long struggle, I made my way to his side. I knelt down in prayer as I checked on him, and thankfully found him still breathing. His breaths ranged from shallow to deep, but I didn’t hear the worrying sound of water when I put my ear to his chest, so his lungs had been spared from any injury or leakage.

I was more nervous about his head, but...fixing that was out of my league. Restorative magic was ludicrously expensive, and without any understanding of the basics, I couldn’t unlock it if I tried. That then begged the question of whether it was finally time to implore the gods for their assistance, but unfortunately healing miracles did not mend wounds caused by overcasting spells.

Maybe things would have been different if we had a God of Magic to pray to, but alas, mages were nuisances who illegally modified divine source code. We were naturally at odds with the system admins in the heavens, leaving us with no deity to preside over the realm of the arcane.

I wiped him clean with a spare cloth and pressed our waterskin to his lips. I was relieved to see him drink, albeit without much vigor. While he appeared terribly pained, it didn’t look like he was in any immediate danger of dying. Still, I wanted to get him to a proper iatrurge—a specialist who made their living off the back of mystic medical treatment—to be safe. If he turned out to be slowly bleeding into his own skull, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

That said...I was out of gas myself. I slumped onto my rear beside my sleeping companion and chugged the last of our water, just as I’d promised myself in the heat of battle. I’d expected great things from this prize, but never imagined that the water would taste this good. The flavor was so superb that I was instantly overwhelmed with gratitude for living to experience this moment.

I guzzled it down faster than I could breathe air, only regaining my composure after I’d wrung out and savored every last drop. Whatever energy had been propping me up abandoned me, and I felt like I’d been fully stuffed with fluffy cotton. I’d need to rest before I could get anything done.

Oh, I know. I decided to make a stretcher once I recovered. Using my woodworking skills, I could probably fashion one out of nearby branches and rags. That way, I would be able to carry Mika back without rocking his head too much. Adventures were as much about the trip home as they were about the actual quest.

...But man, what was I going to do with that sword? The defeated black blade lay lifeless on the floor, right where it had fallen. It neither stirred nor cried; it was as inert as any other old sword.

However, the ichor maze was still standing. Was it still plotting something? Maybe it would go in search of a new wielder—wait. The word “jinx” once again made itself known in my mind.

Murphy’s Law clearly states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” The adage was awfully pessimistic, but unflinchingly true.

The sword suddenly began to tremble, only to float off the ground all by itself. It continued shivering midair, and then...it unleashed concentrated idea.

Transmission of powerful thoughts was not new: Lady Agrippina did so whenever she couldn’t be bothered to flap her lips, and the words of gods that sometimes graced the sermons I’d attended were similar. Yet the raw emotion pounding into my brain was too grand, too hideous to describe in words.

The closest thing to the gut-wrenching feeling it radiated would probably be “love.” The sword erupted, spewing the kind of affection that destroyed mortal minds as it took flight—toward me, of course.

I’d thought my throat to be unusable at this point, but I let out a deafening shriek as I rushed out a mystic countermeasure. My nothing of a mana pool dried up, and I cobbled together a spell at the cost of having my brain sanded down into raw agony.

Reality warped. The blade darting toward me at lethal speeds disappeared not into my body, but into an empty hole that led to who-knows-where. The absolute defense of space-bending magic swallowed the sword, sending it to what I imagined was an infinite nowhere.

O-Oh gods, that was close...

I leaned back against a wall and thanked the heavens that my knee-jerk response had saved me. Looking back, the sword had plunged toward me with the tip facing away from me. Had it been trying to get me to use it because I’d been the one to best its former master?

Give me a break. My childhood friend offered all the clingy love I could handle; I was not taking in a yandere cursed item. I wasn’t greedy enough to ask for a holy sword of legend or one that could take human form with a personality of its own, but, I mean...couldn’t I ask for something a teensy bit more heroic?!

Getting mentally worked up kicked in the delayed aftereffects of the spell. My brain was in a mincer, carefully being ground up for the rest of eternity. Apparently, casting costly space-bending magic when I was already totally spent had crossed the line.

The world spun around and around, as if reality was melting—wait, no, this wasn’t a hallucination. The ichor maze was dissipating: the wall I’d been resting on fizzled away, and I could feel myself falling. I landed with my nose stuck on something soft that smelled of iron.

Amidst the discordant grating of everything falling apart, I could hear something else: a heartbeat. The gentle thumps came quietly, but with certainty. Mika was the only one here besides me, meaning I was using my injured friend’s chest as a pillow.

Not that I could do anything about it. I couldn’t so much as twitch my fingers, and my mind was too preoccupied with the sensation of being churned up from the inside to think straight.

Augh... Jeez, it’s been a rough adventure.

[Tips] Upon losing its core, an ichor maze will return to its original form. As the world corrects its distorted features, it takes the abnormalities the labyrinth caused with it. All that remains are the heroes who conquered the trials within.

“I don’t recognize this ceiling.” As hackneyed as the trope was, I couldn’t help but indulge myself with these words when I awoke. Aches of both the muscle and head varieties held the reins, but I whipped myself into sitting up anyway.

Looking around, I found myself in a small hut. The cabin’s wood was crumbling in a way that betrayed its age, and the plainness of the abandoned bed, stove, and desk spoke to the prior inhabitant’s frugality.

It appeared my assumptions about the dungeon had been correct: the ichor maze had been a distortion of the adventurer’s forest hideaway, and the core had been the atrocious sword he’d held so dear. That meant the mummified man who’d been cradling the obsidian blade had been the owner of this shack, and more pertinently, the author of the weathered memoirs scattered on top of the writing desk.

“...But there’s something else I have to do first.”

Pressing a hand to my throbbing temple, I glanced over at my comatose friend. Mika showed no signs of waking anytime soon, and I figured he’d be better off borrowing the bed until he did. The cot was ancient, but it didn’t seem to pose any risk of collapsing, and the sheets were free of rot.

Fortunately, it didn’t seem like there were any enemies around. We weren’t in the kind of game that constantly threw Tokyo into peril, refusing to deliver its heroes from hell just because the boss had fallen. Perhaps the lesser zombies had been caught up in the structural collapse of the ichor maze, because I didn’t sense a thing.

Whatever the case, I was happy to have a moment to rest. I scooped Mika up into my arms—there wasn’t a chance I had enough energy to use an Unseen Hand—and laid him out on the bed. He was shockingly light, but I pushed my recurring surprise at his fragility out of my mind along with the desire to lay down and sleep next to him.

Instead, I pulled out the chair by the desk and sat down. I didn’t sense anything around us, but that was no guarantee the zombies weren’t still out there. I had to remain vigilant until the very end—or at least until Mika woke up to trade shifts with me.

Until then...the quest objective was right here. Who had the right to deny me a period of rest to sample the fruits of our labor before turning it all in?

I picked up the timeworn stack of sheets. The weight in my hand felt like an unspeakable measure of achievement given physical form.

We had won: we’d finished our quest and lived to tell the tale. One day, this might become just another past session, buried in our memories to the point where we could no longer remember what we’d gained from the experience.

And yet the fulfillment I felt now was real. I’d just finished saying I would never do this again, but curiously enough, this contentment made me think it might not be so bad. We mortals truly did abandon prayer as soon as we washed onto shore—going so far as to forget what we left behind in the treacherous ocean.

Well, whatever. Even the Buddha had taken the time to be pleased with his own accomplishments. I was but a pauper steeped in worldly desire; letting myself indulge in my own triumphs every now and again was hardly going to make me stray off the path of an upstanding human.

Let me have this moment. If scars were prized honors, then the pain I felt now was worthy of a glorious toast.

[Tips] Whether caused by eons of accumulating evil or triggered by a powerful curse, the site of a corrected ichor maze will regain its original form.