Leo spent the next few days holed up in that tiny cave, resting and letting his many injuries recover. Despite knowing that the deadly, poisonous wasteland was barely a dozen feet away, just outside that cave entrance, it was the first time he’d really gotten the chance to let his guard down and think about everything he had to do moving forward. He’d been so focused on survival and simply getting from one day to the next, that the absurd tasks he’d been given by his father, while always on the back of his mind, had been pushed temporarily to the wayside. Now, he had plenty of time to focus on what needed to be done.

  Which meant he had plenty of time to lament the fact that what he’d been asked to do was pretty much impossible.

  “Even if I find another colossal plane to move everyone to, how am I supposed to sneak a few million people off to safety under the Planar Lords’ noses?” Leo asked, groaning in frustration as he pressed his face into his hands. “My dad said I’d need this box in order to save anyone, and the Planar Lords’ agents who came for me mentioned it contained a unique gem, which is wild to think about. But I don’t know what it actually does! How am I supposed to plan if I don’t know every tool I’m working with?!”

  “Don’t plan,” the stranger shrugged, ripping a chunk off of some magical beast jerky that had been hanging along one wall of their cave. “Just kill.”

  “For the third time, Planar Lords aren’t an enemy I can ‘just kill,’” Leo drawled, shaking his head at the pointlessness of trying to explain anything to his odd savior. It hadn’t taken Leo very long after first waking up to discover that the person who had saved him was a bit…

  Off.

  For starters, they couldn’t even tell Leo their name. Leo was pretty certain he’d had a rather firm grasp on his own name long before he’d turned twelve, which meant either the stranger had somehow forgotten it during all their years of isolation, or the act of bonding their immature soul to a beast gem had in fact damaged them quite severely. For now, Leo had taken to calling them Taylor, as something of a practical joke. Whenever his savior wasn’t off hunting down magical beasts or harvesting their bodies for parts, they spent most of their free time repairing their eternally fraying clothing with a needle and thread, just like a tailor would. The newly-dubbed Taylor didn’t seem to mind, and quickly began responding to it when Leo used the name moving forward.

  It also helped that Taylor was gender-neutral, as Leo still hadn’t figured out if his mysterious savior was a man or a woman. He hadn’t wanted to ask and risk angering them back when he’d first been injured, and at this point, he felt as though too much time had passed to bring it up.

  And if not knowing their own name wasn’t bad enough, Taylor didn’t really understand… well, anything that happened beyond this one plane. They didn’t know about the Planar Lords. They didn’t know about the Nexus. They barely even seemed to grasp the concept of other planes of existence as a whole, which was beyond jarring to hear about. Ever since being shoved into this plane to survive the collapse of their own home plane, Taylor had chosen to make this one plane their entire planarverse.

  “I still don’t quite understand you,” Leo admitted after a few minutes of silence, watching Taylor as they skinned the hide of one of the giant cats. “You know about the rifts. Why didn’t you ever leave this plane? Not that this cave isn’t… homey, of course. But surely any plane that’s not filled with poison and deadly magical beasts would be more comfortable to live in than this, right?”

  “Was told to survive. Grow strong. Not to be comfortable,” Taylor said simply, not even looking up from their task. “Didn’t know where rifts led. Too risky.”

  Even after only a few days of chatting here and there, Taylor had already graduated from their usual one or two word grunts to speaking in almost full sentences. They were still a stranger of few words, but at least Leo felt like he was talking to an actual person now.

  “And you don’t remember anything about your home plane from before the collapse?” Leo repeated, having been trying to learn more about his savior these past few days. “Nothing at all?”

  “It was warm,” Taylor shrugged, not seeming put out about the fact that they couldn’t remember anything beyond the temperature of their old plane.

  “What about your friends? Your family? Whoever shoved a beast gem into your core and threw you in here?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Alright, let’s try a different line of questioning,” Leo sighed, shaking his head. “Am I really the first person you’ve spoken to after all these years? Yeah, this plane isn’t exactly the most traveler-friendly plane I’ve ever seen, but I still find it surprising that nobody has wandered through here before me.”

  “There were others,” Taylor said, and Leo opened his mouth to ask about them before they continued. “All dead.”

  “Seriously? You only ever came across dead bodies?”

  “Yep. Good for supplies. Like my sewing kit.”

  “Okay, that does at least answer that question,” Leo muttered, watching Taylor as they continued skinning the magical beast. He’d been curious where Taylor had obtained their beloved needle and thread in the first place, but he had so many questions that he was trying to prioritize the more important ones. “Do you know how big the plane is? I guess if it's on the larger size, that would explain why you’ve never run into more people.”

  “Twelve rifts in plane,” Taylor said matter of factly. “Plus five dead ones.”

  “What?” Leo asked, immediately forgetting his current line of thinking as he stared at Taylor. “What do you mean ‘five dead ones?’”

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  “Five dead rifts,” Taylor shrugged, as though it were obvious. “Don’t go anywhere. No more crack.”

  “Taylor, when a plane collapses, the rifts vanish,” Leo tried to explain. “The crack in the fabric of reality seals itself when it has nowhere to connect to. They’re gone for good. Are you saying you’ve been here long enough that five of the rifts you found have since vanished over the past few years? Because that would be a terrifying rate of planar collapse, and something I’d say we need to notify the Planar Lords of immediately if they weren’t all trying to find and potentially kill me.”

  “No. Found them like that,” Taylor said, finally peeling the last of the fur off the magical beast hide and setting it aside. “Already dead.”

  “That doesn’t… If they were dead, you wouldn’t be able to find them in the first place!” Leo snapped, growing frustrated. As much as he appreciated Taylor taking him in and watching over him while he recovered from his injuries, something about how Taylor so calmly refuted known facts about the planarverse and how it worked rubbed him the wrong way. His parents had spent years teaching him all this. He knew it wasn’t Taylor’s intention, but a small part of him couldn’t help but feel as though Taylor was personally attacking his father’s memory.

  “Need to open your soul,” Taylor said, staring at him with those dark black eyes that Leo swore belonged to that of a feral magical beast half the time. Tapping their own chest, Taylor then turned and pointed at Leo’s. “Feel rifts.”

  “Open my… What are you talking about?”

  For what might have been the first time since meeting them, Taylor seemed to grow frustrated, scrunching up their face as though struggling to find the right words to convey what they were trying to say. “How… strong, is your soul? Maybe too weak?”

  “Rank 6,” Leo said, rolling his eyes at the blank expression on Taylor’s face. “Of course you don’t know what that means… How strong is yours?”

  “Peak soul,” Taylor said, pounding a fist against their chest as they grinned. “Can’t grow stronger.”

  “Alright, so you’re probably at rank 11 then. This is a tier 10 plane, which means it would be incredibly difficult to get higher than rank 11 with only Grade 10 beast gems. You’d have to go to a new plane to get stronger.”

  Taylor’s grin rapidly fell from their face, morphing into a confused frown as they lowered their fist. “What do you mean? Peak soul, can’t grow stronger.”

  “Can’t grow stronger here,” Leo said, shaking his head. “You at least know how numbers work, right? You’re only rank 11. Rank 12 at the very max, though unlikely. Souls go all the way up to rank 50. If you left this plane, you could become much, much stronger.”

  For the first time, Taylor stared at him in shock, the stranger’s piercing black eyes wide as they took in this information. Leo tried not to laugh at the new expression, but he couldn’t quite stop himself completely. He supposed if he’d thought he’d reached the pinnacle of human strength years ago, only to later discover that he wasn’t even a quarter of the way there, he’d probably react somewhat similarly.

  “Didn’t know,” Taylor finally managed after a few seconds, sitting down heavily on the cave floor as they stared at their hands. “Soul stopped growing. Thought that meant peak.”

  “I can see how you’d think that, not knowing any better,” Leo said gently, trying to reassure Taylor with his words. “The good news is you’re still young! You’ve got plenty of time to hit the new peak!” In fact, Leo still didn’t have any idea how old Taylor actually was, but it seemed like the right thing to say. Despite their wiry muscles and hard features, the stranger was short, and all the dirt and blood covering them made guessing an age pretty much pointless. Leo’s best guess was somewhere between eighteen and twenty four, but that was a pretty wide range.

  It seemed like he’d at least guessed right that those words were what Taylor needed to hear, because just as he’d hoped, Taylor’s pained gaze instantly turned into one filled with determination and fire. With a grin, Taylor nodded, pounding their chest again. “Yes! Will hit new peak! Grow even stronger!”

  “That’s the spirit!” Leo said, returning the stranger’s grin with one of his own. “If you managed to survive in this horrible place for all these years, I doubt there’s any plane capable of taking you down.”

  “Need to prepare,” Taylor muttered, as though only just then realizing what leaving their plane behind would actually entail. “Gather food… Sharpen tools… Refill soul…”

  “Yeah, that-wait, refill soul?”

  Taylor ignored his question, however, instead snatching up one of their skinning knives and using the gleaming tip to point at Leo. “Join you?”

  “Join me?” Leo blinked, staring down the point of the rather sharp knife. “Why would you want to come with me? Have you already forgotten that the Planar Lords, the strongest people to have ever existed, are all after my head?”

  Leo realized as soon as the words left his mouth that they would probably have the opposite effect of what he’d intended, and he was absolutely right. Hearing just how strong the people after him were, Taylor’s grin only grew wider, practically feral as they nodded eagerly.

  “Fight strong enemies. Best way to grow stronger. You also know things. Things I do not. Help each other. Work together.”

  “I mean, if you’re sure…” Leo certainly wasn’t in any position to turn down someone offering their help to his seemingly impossible mission. Especially not from someone as strong as Taylor seemed to be. “Alright, I’d be happy for the company. But you have to actually listen to what I say when we go to a new plane, understand? You’re strong, far stronger than me, there’s no question there. But I spent my entire life learning about the different magical beasts and hazards that the planarverse holds. I don’t want you running headfirst into certain death.”

  “Will listen. Probably,” Taylor said, still nodding as they finally lowered the knife. But rather than put it down, they stabbed it into the cat’s skinned flesh, shoving their hand in the wound and plucking out its gem. To Leo’s horror, Taylor popped the entire bloody thing into their mouth without hesitation and swallowed, eating the magical beast gem. Before Leo could shout at them to throw it up before it exploded within their stomach and killed them from the inside out, Taylor grabbed a centipede they’d killed earlier that morning, punching through its hard carapace and ripping out its gem as well.

  “Here,” Taylor said, tossing it toward Leo, who barely managed to catch it in his shock. Not only was eating a magical beast gem supposed to be suicidal, Taylor had just plucked out the gems of two separate beasts without even looking, as though they’d somehow known exactly where they were within the large bodies. Sure, someone with a far higher soul rank would be able to detect them, but that shouldn’t be possible for someone with only a rank 11 soul.

  “Use that, work on soul,” Taylor ordered, turning and lifting the cave flap. Looking back one last time, they grinned. “Once you’re healed and at old peak, we begin.”

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