"So how does it do it?" Medy asked, fascinated. "I didn't see any signs of an eldritch power or anything. Are you sure it worked?"

  Wade felt his body slam back under his control, the System letting go.

  "The movements are strange." Bael said. "A sword in hand couldn't be held like so in a roll. The blade should've caught ground. Or the crossguard should be digging into the mud."

  There was no imprint left in the mud at all. And now that Wade considered Leon's sword here, the crossguard didn't have any mud on it either, like it had never touched land.

  "You held it as if it were nailed into your palm." Bael paused. "I couldn't see anything else. No mana, nothing."

  "Least that makes me feel a little less crazy about all this." Medy nodded.

  "Or we are equally mad walking the same delusion, just as likely. I've stopped being surprised. Saves time."

  "Well, you're both going to love this then." Wade lifted the sword and aimed it at Eri next. Ten seconds to go for this.

  The skeleton brought forth the sacrifice. In his closed fist was a squirming fat beetle, currently chewing at his ski gloves. Those had already been half-torn in just about every direction, exposing the bone in his fingers, so the beetle wasn't doing much more of an impact.

  Whisks of black motes were floating around the carapace, languid and untroubled. The insect continued to struggle in vain out of passive instinct, unaware the execution looming over it.

  The flat part of Leon's sword tapped the top of the beetle, delivering a small low-damage hit, which was followed by an electric crackle that outright sliced the insect in half.

  Blackrot squirmed in the air for a half second, caught off guard as its host body simply died and became unlivable. The motes of scrambling darkness vanishing away moments later, unable to find anything to latch onto with the skeleton, and too far away to grab hold of Wade.

  "See? Twenty five percent damage from my main hand weapon, which is this sword. Easy enough to crush any bug already."

  "Yeah but how?" Medy asked, still staring. "It just doesn't make sense. Shouldn't there be some small wave of power or at least some free magic left in the air?"

  Bael grunted. "Call it a System, call it primordial will, does it matter? Whatever this force is, it bends the world without asking permission. Trying to understand it is like asking that beetle to understand the blade that killed it. How could it even begin? We are like the beetle, and we only see and feel as far as the blade's tip touching into our world."

  Bael knew better than to go prodding into things that were out of his scope.

  How mad that beetle would have become to understand the scale of a blade, it's use and history, and then the beings who wielded it or why?

  Wade… was on the complete other end of that spectrum. Completely happy to poke and prod at the limits of what the System was or could do, even down to getting a nice chat with it again in the future, if he could.

  It had been about an hour since their highly productive discussion, and Wade Industries was now officially kickstarting off with both Azdrial forged enchanted trinkets, and an entire new alchemy division working in parallel dedicated to research and development.

  Medy had been on a small rollercoaster of emotions, particularly interested in the entire field of chemistry, and equally amazed at how in depth humanity had managed with just 'mirrors, light, and metallurgy.'

  The idea of a computer still didn't make sense to either of them, although they could see the result on Wade's smartphone.

  It was magic to them, and probably would stay being magic for a good few months until they normalized to it.

  Some things were understandable. Mechanical gears existed in Azrial, although hyper-detailed gears found in wristwatches was too difficult to forge. But the idea of gears moving a wheel, and being powered by steam or explosions made some sense to them when Wade explained it.

  They had vehicles in Azdrial, only it was all powered by the operator and ran into the same limits everything else did - the longer someone used mana, the more it was toxic to them.

  Caravans pulled by beasts were oddly more efficient overall, given a long distance, but quick speed could be reached on enchanted metal vehicles. The limits of the operator caused a lot of technology to veer away from those paths unless it involved a team of mages working together - which quickly ballooned up the costs.

  Medieval technology was still around because it was simply more efficient and did the job the people needed. There wasn't time to innovate when simple survival was already pressing.

  One thing led to another and Wade eventually begun to explain more about his adventures and run-ins. Market, Play, not-Zinny, and his compatriots. The System. What video games were - and his failure to fully explain that, so he went with Dungeons and Dragons, just using the phone to sort through the annoying dice rolls and calculate the results for everyone instead.

  Which led to discussing his current gear and abilities. They could understand guns in a way - explosion forces a small bit of metal forward at super speeds and it'll deal some good damage.

  It worked quite well against the blackrotten wolves and boars that came after them during the hike forward, and they were largely dealt with the same way Wade had handled everything thus far.

  None of them were high enough level to even begin to offer a challenge gauntlet, and they equally didn't take much fighting to get them down to an execution range for a mag dump.

  Wade had plenty of bullets since he'd come into this world with three guns, although they would be running low soon.

  Play was quite happy with that prospect. If they ran out of bullets, that means they'd gotten the maximum experience out of this run possible. Fighting things down here without guns made everything far more dangerous.

  It would be better to run into higher level enemies to get a coin and a stat point out of them, but there was always that chance the higher levels had something that would instamurder Wade with.

  And speaking of the menace, the Demons oddly enough had nothing to say about Play.

  "Can't say I'm surprised there exists a goddess of stories and games." Bael huffed. "There's divinity for every useless thing mortals care about. Likely she's a lesser or minor one at best. Mortals pick gods that matter when things get desperate. She won't have much pull. Survival requires attunement with the strong."

  See, that's why I was starving in the other world. And the weaker you get, the harder everything is. Lost my last follower watching her get thrown in a jail and starve, had an itty-bitty mental breakdown after that

  ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌

  "She says she's a mentally stunted and traumatized couch-potato who relies on her demonic contracted butler to handle everything for her." Wade translated for the demons.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Does she now?" Bael asked.

  "Naw, not really, but I'm never missing a moment to throw a dig at her."

  "And she has a demon summoned to be a butler for her? That part true, or are you just enjoying yourself?"

  "That part's true..." Nothing came out of Wade's mouth next, so even though he planned to not mention Zin's name directly, other details were being triggered and forced his mouth shut. Likely Zin hadn't planned on keeping his demonic race hidden from other demons, but his name or any other details was on the chopping block. "...I can't say more since I'm under contract. He has confirmed there isn't a pull to the mithril sea anymore on his end. Why's a demon butler serving a goddess surprising? Seems pretty stereotypical."

  "Gods generally don't like us." Medy shrugged. "At best they're... ambivalent? Like, we can't really worship any or become followers, there's nothing to gain from us. Hmm, oh! I know how to explain it. So, hell was kind of like the trash can for anything they didn't care for, right? We'd be the bugs inside the trash."

  "I would imagine one who's domain involves games would actively hate us for more reasonable reasons." Bael said.

  Medy looked confused. "Really? What's the reasonable reasons?"

  "We can sense emotions out of mortals. Playing against mortals in games of gambling makes it trivial. That's not a fair game. Only theft with extra steps."

  "Oh. Ohhhh! So that's why only demons asked me to play cards." Medy hummed, "Always thought mortals just didn't play cards at all for some reason. You know, it seems really obvious in hindsight."

  "You never knew?"

  "Well, I uh, didn't really play a lot of games in the first place? Maybe a few moments of downtime while decompressing inside the Coffin. I think I died once while midway through some cards when it imploded on us all."

  "I don't even know what you two are talking about now." Wade said. "Market's translation boon isn't really giving me any info on that. Why are you in a coffin, and why is there enough space to play a game of cards in there?"

  "Mana mining term. Gallows humor to call it that." Bael said. "The Coffin is the mining base, where workers return to deposit their haul, eat, rest, and prepare for the next excursion out. The only relative safe place in the Arcane Realm."

  "She just said it imploded on her and she died. That doesn't sound safe."

  Bael laughed, "Then you know why it's called the Coffin. The Coffin kills you sometimes. Everything else kills you always. That's why I say relative safe space. That should tell you enough about the rest of that Realm. Mana mining is for the desperate, like the majority of our kind."

  Wade decided not to push further on what the hell they were talking about, it seemed the topic depressed them, and Medy was clearly trying not to think about it too much.

  He swapped topics back to games, and video games of Earth.

  Medy and Bael could understand the idea of a health-bar. And the idea that once it was depleted, the enemy would just die even if it had no business dying.

  And that led into how his guns were slaughtering the blackrot so effectively, despite all the bodies being perfectly whole, with necks unsnapped or everything on fire.

  They also didn't understand why guns were so lethal outside of the System, and well used among humankind. "Can't you… simply heal it off?" Medy asked. " If it's only small metal shards punching holes inside the body, it shouldn't be fatal at all. Demons can do that without any mana, but most mortal warriors know basic healing. I can see getting wounded in the head would be a problem, but shield spells are far more focused on the chest and head in the first place."

  "He claims there is no healing in his world, at all." Bael said. "And there are no wards against destruction. No divine protection spells, nor arcane ones. Their greatest defence is to put a sheet of metal in front of them."

  "Thick metal." Wade corrected. "Battleships have something like sixteen inches in size."

  "That's so backwards." The demoness looked down at the mud, hand on her chin in thought. "For a civilization that has all… well, that. How is it that their best defense is to hide behind a wall?"

  Wade shrugged. "That's where you two come into it all. Whatever you craft or discover in alchemy on Earth is going to be the best in the world. Only problem will be getting mana. There's nothing we have back home like it."

  "Is Earth older than Azdrial?" Medy asked.

  "Could be." Bael said. "They've got one race left standing. Sounds like they had and then won their version of the divine war and kept going. Long enough for whatever mana their world held to dry up completely. So they're left with metal sheets and their current weapons."

  "I'm pretty sure we never had mana to begin with." Wade said. "Archeologists and historians have a pretty accurate record of all our past, beyond several thousand years or so. The bits of magic mentioned are all just superstition. No records of it actually working."

  Or at least, that's what Wade thought. But he was standing in the middle of another world with magic. "Wait, hang on, what do you mean mana dries up?"

  "Mana is constantly leaking out into the Arcane Realm, and isn't replenished in any way that we can see." Bael said. "It is a natural process, eventually all mana will be drained from the mortal realm."

  "All right, so what exactly is this Arcane Realm? Other than hearing that's where people get their mana crystals from, and that it's a dangerous spot in the world, I don't really know what it actually is?"

  His quest was offering him seven storefront coins to grab a mana crystal from this realm and bring it back to Earth. This run was already starting to wind down on the hours, he needed to bring back more wins. So maybe a quick trip over there if he could, grab more loot, and then extract in peace.

  The two demons shared a look, Bael grunted and seemed to win some kind of imaginary dispute between the two of them.

  Medy shrugged and talked while she walked behind.

  "So… I take it there isn't- actually it does sorta make sense? I mean why would they have an Arcane Realm in the first place, right Bael?"

  "You're rambling." Bael said. "Say it again, clearly."

  "Oh. Oh, right, sorry. Uh, I mean if Wade doesn't know what an arcane realm is, or any kind of realm at all, then either there was mana and it all sank into the arcane and they never discovered how to go there, or it's like Wade said - there never was mana in the first place, and there'd be no arcane for it to sink into at all then right?"

  "I'm not really following at all?" Wade said, "Why is mana sinking into the arcane realm?"

  Both Medy and Bael shared a look and shrugged. "It just is." Bael said.

  "Always been that way." Medy added. "There's only a limited amount of mana in the world and it'll eventually all get sucked into the arcane realm."

  Wade could somewhat start to get a picture. If mana was sinking into this arcane realm thing, then no wonder that's where people went to bring back mana crystals from. "How's mana even mined from over there?"

  "Do you know what an arcanonaut is?" Medy followed up.

  "Nope."

  "Okay. Well." She hummed. "How do I even begin with this one? All right, so, just like hell, the mortal realms got these rifts… wait, nevermind that doesn't really fit. Bael, nobody can actually follow inside a mana sinkhole right? They wouldn't be like hell's rifts. Or maybe that's why they're called sinkholes and not rifts?"

  Bael snorted, turning to Wade. "What you need to know is that if you even stepped foot inside the arcane realm, the mana pressure would kill you. Don't travel there. You need equipment to survive the pressure."

  "Like this Coffin thing? Oh, that's what you meant by implode." It sounded to Wade a lot like a diving bell of some kind.

  "Yep," Medy said, "Mana condenses from a gas to a liquid, and then into a solid."

  "And by solids… you mean mana crystals." Wade said, realizing where all this was going. So the System wanted him to travel into this realm filled with so much mana it condenses into mana crystals. And then pickaxe a few of those toxic rocks and bring them back with him for his future gift shop plans.

  "So that's what an arcanonaut does? Dive into this and mine crystals?"

  Medy shook her head, "No, miners do that. Arcanonaut is just the general term for everyone who works in the arcane realm. You got a lot of roles, anywhere from guards, Coffin mechanics, cooks - if you're part of a richer expedition. Lot more specialists than you think, takes an entire crew."

  Okay, so maybe this seven coin quest really was more difficult than it sounded. Hence the seven coins. "We still need to figure out a way to get mana into Earth though." Wade said. "Otherwise, we're stuck ferrying crystals back home with my boon."

  "Maybe you start an arcane mining corp on Earth? Assuming there might be an arcane realm there at all? We'd need to bring some reagents and a ritual pattern back with us, but I know how to make one of those. You're already a necromancer with Eri so mining should be a breeze, and your ability to return to life on Earth after, you might be able to mine things by yourself without even a crew? Though it would be easier with more demons working."

  Bael grunted. "Hundreds of demons would sign up without a second of hesitation to that."

  "What? Really, I don't know a single one that lik- oh." Medy knocked her head with a hand a few times, "Right, sorry, I'm dumb. There's no mithril sea over on Earth is there?"

  "Uh, not that I know of. No hell or heaven either." Wade said. "Where you die is where you'll respawn according to the only other demon I know that lives there right now. The butler I mean."

  Medy nodded, "Can't believe I'm saying this, but mining might even be... fun? If I didn't have to worry about permanently dying by accidentally ending up running into the second circle of hell. There's quite a lot of really interesting organisms that adapted to survive in extreme environments like that. Plants and animals there are so fundamentally unique, they offer a completely different set of options for alchemy. I mean, if we get a suit puncture, we just go back to the Coffin, die there and reset back in perfect saft- hey, is that… another human?"

  Wade looked up, at their current path forward. In the distance, he really did see someone else jogging forward, in their direction.

  "Holy shit, it really is." Wade said, staring. "That's not just anyone, it's Leon! Wow, he's loaded too."

  The Russian must have had a great round so far. Because he was armed to the teeth - full demonic leather and plate armor, a bandolier of potions, tools at his belt.

  And one longsword already drawn out in his hand.