Tyler stood at the entrance of what used to be an old but grand tent. Now it looked more like an abandoned carnival tent, left to ruin in the elements. Flaps of fabric rippled in the breeze as the internal structure poked out from within.

  Tyler took a moment, looking back at Seshka, who was methodically pulling goblins from the area and piling them up off to the side. He shook his head and stepped inside the tent.

  Calling it an inside was being generous. The canvas had been shredded, not torn cleanly but hacked at and clawed through. Large strips of the heavy fabric hung down like dead skin.

  One of the giant upright support beams lay snapped in two. How could that have even happened? It must have been four feet thick. How had goblins, with their size, been able to snap a piece of wood that thick? The ground was all churned up. Footprints could be seen — small, bootless, and chaotic — as if they’d run in every direction at once.

  Tyler ducked beneath a sagging flap of the tent and stepped in carefully. He was quietly confident that all the goblins had left, but he didn’t want to take any chances, keeping his eyes peeled and his senses heightened. The smell hit him first. When he’d been in earlier with Malek, it had smelled of nothing — sterile, even. Only Malek’s mushrooms, with their sweet smell, lingered in his memory.

  Now it was damp earth, stale blood, and something sour underneath it all, like old meat left too long in the heat. Tyler scrunched his nose and held his breath for a moment, letting the first wave of stench wash over him. It was always the initial shock — you could get used to a smell after a while.

  The interior had been ransacked with a lot of enthusiasm and very little planning, as if the first protocol was smash and the second loot. Trunks were overturned, bedding shredded, books ripped apart and scattered in soggy clumps. Teeth marks were everywhere, some of them still glistening with goblin saliva.

  Tyler looked through the doorway on his left, the room that had once been Malek’s bedroom with the grand four poster bed. Two greenish legs stuck out from beneath the collapsed frame, severed at just below the knee. To the back of the room the rest of the goblin sat upright, his head turned to a bedside cabinet, that had been chewed and bitten.

  Had the goblin really amputated its own legs just to crawl to the other side of the room and start munching on a wooden bedside table? The blood on the cabinet and the splinter in the goblin’s mouth would suggest so. What troubled Tyler more was that the goblin — now obviously dead — also seemed to be smiling, as if it had been having fun. A blade lay nearby.

  Tyler swallowed, remembering the debuff he had seen using Insight on the goblin:

  Status: Kobolding — Active

  Was this a racial thing, an infection? Did they know they had this status? What troubled him more was whether it was the reason they acted like they did. Was it why they would happily die without a moment’s care, as long as they got to cause carnage like this? Could Tyler himself be affected? He hoped it was a racial thing.

  Tyler pushed himself to leave the room and move on. There was nothing of use left in there anyway.

  The far side of the tent had been less thoroughly destroyed, either because the goblins had been interrupted or because they’d simply lost interest. The latter sounded more realistic. Tyler had seen how easily they switched their focus, and he doubted anything else had been in the tent to interrupt them.

  A low shelf still stood, crooked, as one side had been pulled off. Most of its contents were on the floor, but some items remained and looked unbroken. Tyler knelt and began sorting through it, pushing aside broken glass and scraps of parchment.

  A small sack was on the lower shelf, no bigger than a loaf of bread, made from dark leather stitched with faint silver thread. It looked old, but also clean and unblemished. Like those one you use to be able to buy offline, new but made to look old.

  Tyler picked the bag up, rotating it in his hands, then went to open it to look inside — when what looked like a large blacked-out room opened in his mind. The room was filled with barrels and casks, along with a few other random items.

  Tyler instantly knew what was in the barrels and casks. It was various foods and drinks. The same was true for the other items. He knew one was a cloak, another a key, and the last a book that looked like it was bursting at the seams from having too many pages in it.

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  Tyler mentally went to close the bag — which he never actually opened — and the space in his head disappeared, as if it had never been there before. He repeated the process a few more times, and each time the room in his head appeared and disappeared in exactly the same way.

  He picked up a bottle from the floor. It had a large crack through it, so it wasn’t much good. He tried to put the bottle in the bag, but before he could complete the action, the bottle disappeared from his hand, showing up in the mental projection of the room in his mind.

  “Oh! Oh, that’s a good one,” Al said immediately, voice bright with interest. “That’s a very polite bag.”

  “A polite bag.”

  “Yes. It doesn’t scream. Or leak. Or eat things you put in it. You’d be surprised how many do.”

  “Where does everything go? I see it in my mind when I try and open the bag. I even just put something in it, but when I close it, it disappears.”

  “No it doesn’t!”

  “It does. I just did it. Look, it’s closed now and I cannot see anything, and the bag looks empty to me,” Tyler said as he once again imagined closing the bag.

  “What was that woman fighting with earlier? What did she use to kill all those creatures?”

  “You mean Seshka? Well, she was using a spear, but what has that got to do with this?”

  “Where was that information before I asked? Was it gone? Was it always there, that you could see it all the time? Or was it somewhere you just couldn’t see until you asked for it? Same with the bag.”

  Tyler thought about this for a moment and realised the AI was actually right. Where were memories stored in the brain? They were there all the time, but you just never saw them or used them until asked about them, or thought about them. Did they go somewhere else?

  He blew his cheeks out, as if thinking any more on it might make his head pop. Still, something to ponder later.

  “I concede, but you have to admit, having something vanish from in front of you and reappear is pretty unusual. I mean, does it go in the bag, or my head, or…?”

  “Oh, it’s the bag. Some spatial manipulation, I think. Definitely not in your head — if that was the case, it would just go pop.”

  Tyler sighed softly and focused. He had a skill he could use to maybe get a more straightforward answer. He let his Insight settle over the item.

  Spatial Sack — Rare

  Capacity: Moderate

  Properties:

  – Internal space larger than exterior volume

  – Contents preserved in stable condition

  – Organic matter decay significantly reduced

  – Owner access only

  Status: Unbound

  “…Malek used this as a fridge, didn’t he,” Tyler muttered. That’s why it had such a large amount of food in it. At one time it was probably full, bringing all he needed onto the Intertwining Path event with him.

  “Do not underestimate the power of snacks,” Al replied solemnly. “Many great tragedies could have been avoided with proper lunch planning.”

  Tyler slung the sack over his right shoulder, feeling pretty happy at his first find. He’d been thinking he might have to go boar hunting again, but with the amount of food he now had access to, well… he’d be well fed for quite a while.

  He continued searching, next looking into the library, which looked totally destroyed. Nearly all the books either had pages torn out, spines ripped off, or had been eaten in a frenzy of chopping teeth. Goblins either hated knowledge or found it very tasty — Tyler wasn’t sure which.

  He did find a few books under the mess:

  – Mana Affinities: A Practical Guide

  – Elandra and the Frozen Spire

  – On the Doctrine of the Unending Accord

  – A thin journal, handwritten, its cover cracked with age

  He flipped through the doctrine book briefly, eyes catching phrases like interlinked sovereignty, non-hostile divergence, and system arbitration thresholds.

  “Heavy stuff. Political?” Tyler said.

  He never checked the rest, instead expertly placing them all inside his new spatial sack and continuing back out to the main area of the tent.

  There was nothing left of Malek’s experiments. Even the equipment was in pieces. Tyler mentally crossed his fingers as he headed to Malek’s bathroom setup, praying the goblins had left his basic shower arrangement still working.

  The fighting he’d gotten used to surprisingly quickly, but the constant blood — the feeling like you’d just spent a whole week working at a butchers without a wash — was a little harder to get used to. He almost smiled when he saw the cork still holding in some water.

  He immediately stripped, not bothering to care if Seshka walked in, and drained every drop of water getting himself clean. Only afterwards did he feel a little bad that he’d left none for Seshka to wash with.

  He’d lost a boot during the fight with the goblins, which he had no doubt they would have eaten. His pants were still usable, but he decided to rummage through Malek’s clothes to see if he could find anything a bit better.

  He found some heavy green corded pants that fit with a little rope tied around the waist, along with a green shirt similar to the black one he’d taken earlier. He took a few other items, putting them straight into the spatial sack. A spare pair of pants and two shirts along with a long heavy cloak. He thought the latter might be good as a blanket rather than wearing it for daily use. He also found a pair of leather boots that looked like they would fit. He left the sandals he found — he doubted he’d ever wear them.

  He got dressed while still wet, but feeling a lot better, he always did after a shower and slipped on the boots. A notification appeared:

  Traveller’s Boots +1 Dexterity — Requires Level 5

  Do you wish to equip?

  That felt a little strange, as he was already wearing the boots, was the system asking him to authorise ownership. The spatial sack never asked such a question. He mentally selected yes anyway, his curiosity wining out. The boots flashed a low silver, and he felt a physical increase in himself. Had the boots given him some sort of boost, it did mention +1 to dexterity

  He decided to check his stats menus — for the first time since entering the system event — and instantly felt stupid for not doing it earlier.