In the morning, we broke camp and went our separate ways after Riena gave us each a flare gun. The new portal entrance could be anywhere around us, and the local fauna weren’t so dangerous as to require our full party to be safe. Derek and Nyla went ‘north’ while Casimir and Riena explored ‘south-east’. There was some grumbling about my insistence that I could travel alone, but they eventually relented to the wisdom of a named hero. I’ll have to be careful pulling that card too often, but we could die here.

  After gathering a bagful of the Frost Giant’s ashes—a uniquely contradictory material—I trekked ‘west’ to see where the sun went last night. Riena reported that today’s yellow sun had formed from a distant star. There was mystery here that may or may not be related to our quest, but it couldn’t hurt to look.

  Coincidentally, the direction I traveled was also where the Frost Giant had come from. In his wake, large snowdrifts had accumulated around babbling brooks and atop pine-needle covered branches. My steps were light so as not to disturb the mounds above me nor to lure the attention of any prowling predators. Fighting alone—while fun—wouldn’t help my team. Though, a few dire wolf bones would go a long way to new weapons.

  Despite my care, I moved through the forest quickly, since I was no stranger to a taiga biome. The details were different—animal trails had different prints, their droppings smelled different, and the smaller plants varied wildly in appearance and function—but the same techniques mostly applied. My mouth was still numb from testing a bushel of berries on my gums. The extremely poisonous fruit rested in my satchel as I pondered my failings.

  Riena had to cover me for both the shelter and flares. My previous antipathy with Frost Giants turned a casually destructive encounter into a fight for survival. Our team wasn’t ready for tier 5 monsters, no matter how much I needed them to be ready. I endangered my team while not pulling my weight as a Crafter. To my exacting standards, I had already failed this portal excursion.

  A loud snort drew my attention to a bear buried in her cave with her cubs. Their meat had ran out and the snow was too thick for her to easily dig free of. I really shouldn’t… Against my better judgment, I jumped over the stream and gathered wood to build a fire over the sealing snow. Flint and steel provided the initial spark I needed to manipulate the flame into a greater conflagration. The task wasn’t beyond my mundane fire starting talents, but if you had magic armor, you should find every reason to use it.

  Within minutes, the mamma bear burst from her icy prison to growl at her den’s most recent intruder. The ursine monster was three times my height from paw to shoulder. I tossed two of my heat knives at her eyes. In the span of the throw, they glowed from red to orange to bright white before burying themselves in her eyes.

  The bear howled and thrashed, smacking herself around and pawing at her face. The blades had already cauterized themselves in place and resisted all attempts to dislodge them as they boiled her brain. Sensing her doom, the creature sniffed for me, but I had already hidden myself in a snowdrift and used my aura to keep my scent close

  Rather than die fruitlessly, the bear charged in a random direction to slay me. By a stroke of luck, she had selected the exact pile of snow I hid myself in. As the ground shook from the intense weight of monster flesh barreling down on me, I tensed and waited for my moment.

  When the creature was close enough, I leapt and flipped over the bear’s skull while grabbing my knives and ripping them out only to immediately reinsert them into her ears. The fight left the creature without another sense. She swiped ineffectually a couple times before settling into a final slumber and relieving her bowels.

  The three cubs were bearly larger than me. They stumbled out of the cave, eyes uncomprehending what I had wrought.

  “Don’t worry little things. An icy tomb and starvation isn’t your fate.” My lilting tones were gentle. I always had a soft spot for monsters that looked like one of Earth’s original species. They felt little pain as I lobotomized them with my blade. The third cub mewed in terror after watching his siblings die, but it was a short fear.

  With four fresh corpses, I repurposed my fire for alchemy before skinning and butchering my kills. The creatures’ organs were truly alien and didn’t map to the standard patterns of Earth’s species, leaving me to guess at their uses. Within the mother were actual eggs, meaning the cubs were hatched. Their blood was purple and their stomachs seemed to double as a heart, pumping semi-digested nutrients directly to their muscles and organs. The lung equivalent were filters that directly absorbed oxygen into the blood and directly squeezed carbon dioxide from it. At least, I assumed that was the gas we were breathing. A hero’s aura would very efficiently alter minor inconsistencies while in a portal, leading to questions if shade infestations cause portals or if the portals brought the shades.

  Putting that out of my mind, I set up an experiment to mix Frost Giant ashes with each kind of organ through six of the seven alchemical steps, since I didn’t have time for fermentation. My efforts yielded 3 berserker potions, 2 fortify health potions, a water breathing elixir, and eighteen minor poisons.

  While I fought off the effects of testing the failures, I cleaned the cave and gave it a nice fur rug, bed, and curtain door. After the mother’s pelt was left to cure, I set up traps around four locations where I smoked the remaining meat. That should catch a few more critters for me.

  Setting up a temporary camp had taken most of the morning, leaving only half a day to keep exploring. I had wasted time, but slaying a few monsters had drastically lifted my mood, improving outcomes for future efforts.

  “You know, we could talk if you want to. No one is around to hear us,” Coatlie whispered as I continued west.

  “The monsters could hear us,” I whispered back. “Besides, I am used to the solitude of travel. Long roads are seldom walked with company, and I have journeyed far.”

  “Sure, but we could talk about why you isolate yourself at the first sign of difficulty.”

  “That’s no great mystery. In an unexpected situation such as this, my teammates are more likely to die. I would rather reduce the overall risk through solo efforts than be personally there to watch it happen.”

  Coatlie squeezed my neck a little tighter. “You nascent species have it so hard. One day, I hope you can properly join the multiverse. That reduces the individual burden greatly.”

  “Tell me more of your stories, Coatlie.” If she had to talk, it might as well be more insights into demon culture rather than whatever cryptic nonsense she was spouting.

  “Well, there are a few unpublished tales in the Sky Princess saga that I could recite from memory. Let’s see… Ah!” She coughed and took on a storytelling candor. “The following are excerpts from the Princess’s journal during her time in the valleys of the wingless…”

  The story was a different kind of soothing than monster slaying as I ran toward the horizon. The part of my mind that processed language and visualized listened to Coatlie while the more instinctual sense of self-preservation guided me forward around other hunters until I reached the valley at the end of the world.

  As I suspected, the suns of this planet were very small and fell through a large hole in the ground. Though, ‘hole’ might not be the right word. For the other side was as blue as the sky above me. At some line in the several miles wide gap, my gaze went from downward to upward. Rather than toroidal, this world was annular, as in a ring with two sides.

  That didn’t explain where the suns went to create night, but the metallic structure built at the lip of the hole could provide some answers. A Frost Giant’s melting ice castle rested above the building. The melting snow between there and here revealed a series of glass steps built into the hill. Fortunately, this side had such a convenient pathway and wasn’t one of the sheer mountain face drops that lined most of the ridge.

  My aura prevented me from slipping off the wet glass as I descended to the entrance of the ancient structure. Two purple metal double doors stood closed next to each other and besides a series of small levers in the wall that were surrounded by large groove marks. The Frost Giant must have tried to open it despite having no way to enter the complex.

  After a few minutes of flipping levers, I lit up a series of lights and the doors slid open with a grinding wail that could be heard across the valley.

  “The people who made this place must have wanted anyone with basic sapience to access it,” Coatlie commented.

  “Sapient and small enough,” I replied.

  Coatlie poked the side of my helmet with her nose. “Let me out.”

  “It could be dangerous,” I warned as I removed my helm rather than forcing her to stay safe. Sure, if Coatlie died, then orc assassins would hunt me the rest of my days. That would make lesser heroes overly protective, but I found the prospect a unique challenge. Besides, keeping Coatlie around required making her happy, so this course was actually optimal.

  The snake fluttered around the hall of rime-covered walls with ringed ceiling lights. A distant panel flickered to life and projected a three dimensional script that interlocked with other segments. Coatlie flew and examined the display as quickly as possible. “Ooh, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an Akashic ruin.”

  I leaned over her, but I couldn’t make sense of the alien script. “I have not heard of the Akashic. What kind of people are they?”

  “You would consider them extinct since they left our reality behind. They predated the collision caused by the over-proliferation of possibilities, but they did not predate the obelisk builders, if those were made by people at all.” She hummed thoughtfully while twisting around the word sculpture. “Their ruins speak of a people inclined to find synthesis between all contradictory ideas until there was one truth.”

  “Oh, and what mysteries did this place seek to answer?”

  “I don’t know. This is a doorknob. You need to squeeze the data cube to open the door; the metaphor being that you have to seize knowledge to progress.”

  Retraining an eye-roll, I opened the next door. “That much was obvious. Demons that blend science and magic tend to love their abstractions and poetry.”

  Coatlie guided us through a few hallways and glanced at several maps before we entered a room with several white consoles wrapped in holographic script that flowed like waterfalls to the floor. While she examined the writing, I glanced out the window and took in the sight of the giant hole through the plane between the two halves of the world. A boulder fell from the other side and hit the middle. Rather than getting stuck in the middle, a slight curve pulled the stone to one of the sides. It slammed into one of the mechanical ring segments to no effect. Whatever steel made this place could resist the passage of time well.

  “Ah!” Coatlie exclaimed. “This station was created to artificially bore portals between worlds. The force of doing so once nearly tore this world to pieces and destroyed the sun. Rather than leave the planet to die, the Akashic set this station to draw down a star each night to act as the sun before it is consumed to power drawing in another one.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “If they could do that, then why not pull a star into proper orbit?”

  “Fusion breaks down within close proximity to this station after what they did, so the nightly sacrifices are the only thing keeping this cold world going.”

  The implication was obvious to me. “We could use this station to portal back to our world.”

  “Yes, but that would destroy this reality.”

  “So? Such outcomes are fairly standard for quests in degenerate universes.” I stared intently at the script. “Without your linguistic skill, I doubt we could parse the instructions and would be forced to portal to a random world. This must be one of the ways to close a portal without returning.”

  Coatlie poked a few of the holograms with her tail. “Good news, I changed the targeting for when you activate these ruins from a wonderful slime society to your mud ball. Bad news, in doing so, I triggered the automated defenses, and they are coming this way to ‘neutralize’ us.”

  “Liar.” I swung open the door. “That’s good news and good news!”

  By the time I shut the door behind me, the first drone/golems crawled towards me. They had clear crystal upside-down triangular pyramid bodies with three other tetrahedrons for legs. A fist sized sphere rested on its body’s flat surface between it and another smaller triangular pyramid for a head. Within all the pieces pulsed organic machinery blended in tandem with more mechanical components. Chiming steps grew in strength as more swarmed either end of the hall.

  I laughed and drank a berserker potion before slamming my helmet back on. Beneath my armor, every vein glowed red as a deep incoherent rage absorbed me. A berserking warrior could fight with the strength of ten heroes, but tended to kill friend and foe alike. While I didn’t have the same problem, I did tend to avoid drinking such potions in polite company.

  “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT!?” I dodged several lasers from the creatures’ heads before chucking my blade in a spinning throw at one of them. It cleaved through three of the creatures before wedging itself in a fourth. “ARGH! LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!”

  I crossed the distance in a single bound and latched onto one of the monsters. In three quick movements, I ripped off the legs and threw them through other drones. “SHITASS MONSTERS, LIVING IN MY UNIVERSE. NO GODDAMN RESPECT!” I’m told my berserker rage is unflattering, but everything I said always seemed like it made sense at the time.

  A kick sent the remaining body into the other approaching horde of monsters. I dodged most of the lasers until I tried to bite one that got too close. The beam nearly punched through my armor. “DUMBASSES, LASERS ARE FIRE!”

  Through indignant effort, I pushed my armor’s Fire Manipulation ability to bend the lasers over the surface of the metal in a kaleidoscopic flex of fury enhanced endurance. “OH OH OH, YOU’RE IN FOR IT NOW!”

  I retrieved my blade and relaxed it into a chain so that I could wrap it around both fists like brass knuckles. “LET ME APPLY SOME EYE SHADOW FOR YOU, HON!” My opponents’ lack of orbitals did not stop this taunt from sounding amazing in my mind. I then leapt for them and punched through their heads while screaming obscenities.

  After an hour, the hall was riddled with corpses, and Coatlie wouldn’t speak to me. “Mari, I tolerate a lot of cultural differences, but a lot of that was WAY over the line. Give me a moment.”

  I gathered the largest crystal fragments I could find and any semi-intact organs before we left, Coatlie flying by my side. Today’s sun was nearing, and I didn’t want to be here as it passed through or in the aftermath with shadow creatures. Instead, I retreated to my camp and shot my flare to let the others know that I ‘found’ our gate.

  Before settling in for the night, I checked my traps. Most had failed to capture or kill prey, letting the bear meat get stolen, but a few horned rabbits fell victim to my snares. They were each as big as my torso. After preparing my kills, I carved a larger pot out of stone with my hands and filled it with snow over a fire. As that melted, I gathered local roots, berries, herbs, and mushrooms that I had determined safe during my hike. Those went into the stew with the rabbit meat.

  A few other fires were set out for alchemy experiments and to banish the encroaching shadows as night set. Yellow eyes glowed in the dark and stared into my soul while I guarded the mouth of the cave. Each night-monster that met my eyes nodded in recognition before deciding to hunt elsewhere.

  “Does it not worry you that such ephemeral creatures of darkness see you as one of their own?” Coatlie asked after I gave her a bowl of stew. She slurped a bit after asking her question. “What the hell? This is delicious. Normally, I hate earthy gamy flavors, but the herbs blend it together well.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Only well? Hmmm, your palate must be very different from humans.” My food was second only to those with dedicated cooking abilities, and even those had to master their trade before surpassing me.

  “Please, I’ve dined in the finest palaces across the multiverse at the tables of the best chefs reality can produce. This is good, not sublime.” She still gobbled a few more mouthfuls before continuing. “You ignored my question.”

  “This isn’t the first time something like that has happened. Monsters come in all varieties and shapes. Perhaps the shadow creatures respect hearth and home. Their nods could be in recognition of hospitality rites from the dead culture that produced them. I can’t truly know their minds. Furthermore, friendship and praise can be used by an enemy to destroy you. I’ve been on both sides of such a tactic.”

  Coatlie finished her bowl and gestured for another one. “I think that Gabriel kid is coming around. He looks at you with less hate every sparring class.”

  I obliged her demand and topped off my own portion. “I didn’t mean him. The conflicts between humans are not significant compared to the struggle for survival against monsters.”

  “What about the traitor?”

  “Axel is probably a suicidal child that accepted a self-destructive madness to cope with the impulse. Yes, we’ll stop him, but I’m not going to kill the lad nor do I hate him. To get this far, he had to have saved far more humans than he’s ever threatened. On the grand scale, he deserves our mercy, and if we are short on that, our pity.”

  Coatlie stared at me. “If you catch him, your peers will kill him. Does that bother you?”

  “Not at all. I don’t kill humans as a matter of principle. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the necessity of it. Well… if it were up to me, I would only break Axel’s hands and feet until we could talk him out of his delusions.”

  My companion kept further counsel that night with her stew. I alternated between managing my alchemy stations, taking meditative rests, and making a greatbow from the mama dire bear’s femur and stringing it with gut from an Akashic golem. Before I could set about enchanting the weapon, my necrotic elemental offered a suggestion from their prison.

  “A rot tool would help you ferment, and then you would complain about not being able to do that less.”

  I pulled the twenty sided crystal from my bag. “That’s a wonderful and complicated suggestion. Have you decided on a name?”

  “Hunter.”

  “Ah, a deadname. Fitting for your kind.”

  “I thought so.” He seemed quite pleased with himself.

  “I’m not going to ask how you figured it out.”

  “Reanimation is my natural talent.”

  The name did make dealing with him feel like handling a corpse, but I still loaded him in my imbuer and converted one of the smaller bones into a Decay, Rot, and Putrefaction rod. The three abilities pushed all the effects to tier 3.

  Along with that bit of Crafting, I completed 3 haste potions, 3 jumping potions, and a fear bomb from the rabbit organs and my remaining Frost Giant ashes before my team started to arrive at my dwelling.

  Derek and Nyla looked like hell. Nyla ignored my greetings and collapsed into my fur bed. Derek sat with a sigh of relief, his own uniform riddled with tears over freshly healed wounds. After lounging, he said, “We were attacked all night and couldn’t get any sleep.”

  “Did you have a wood fire?” I asked.

  Nyla groaned and rolled deeper into the covers. “We should have been fine. My flames are good enough.”

  I didn’t press the issue and offered the two leftover stew. We enjoyed a relaxing silence until Casimir and Riena arrived on illusionary horses. Riena hopped off and immediately began examining my alchemical equipment made from locally sourced rock and wood.

  “Fascinating. Such materials would corrupt the potion with the natural magics of this world and make the potions slightly more toxic, but that’s drastically mitigated by performing more alchemical steps, making it worth it.” Riena looked over my setup with the same impressed look that I would give a rat if it cobbled together a prosthetic leg from junk. Impressed, but not dazzled. “Wow, you had a lot of spare time yesterday.”

  “The gate is not too far, and it isn’t what we thought.” I bundled the leather and other materials to my back into a bulk that would crush a regular spine. Riena offered to help, but I waved her off. “This will be motivation to master spatial enchantments as soon as possible.”

  Our team followed my lead to the Akashic research station. Casimir mumbled a quick count of the destroyed robots as we navigated to the control room, his tone growing more impressed and worried as the number climbed higher.

  “So, the intended path of this quest was to open a random portal here and flee this crumbling world to a new one, closing the portal in our world and leaving us lost forever.” My audience didn’t like the sound of this plan. “But, a friendly translator helped me recalibrate the destination to our world. I don’t trust myself to operate this device by myself, so I’d rather she directly help in this endeavor.”

  Derek pinched the bridge of his nose while Riena looked nervous and said, “Are you sure that is a good idea?”

  Nyla looked between us, “Are we talking about Mari’s story snake?”

  Casimir blinked. “Her what?”

  I tilted my head. “You knew?”

  Nyla shrugged. “I’m up at all hours between meditation sessions. I heard her reading you bedtime stories.”

  “I see… I thought you would be more upset about it.”

  “Nah, Crafters have to deal with monsters. My old man would…” She looked away. “Never mind. I don’t see the issue with it.”

  Casimir was far more reluctant, but with the bond expressing everyone’s feelings on the matter to him, he relented. “It would be a little hypocritical for a summoner to be adamantly against this, even if my summons aren’t real.”

  Coatlie wiggled out from underneath my helmet and spread her wings. “Yay! I can finally be the sixth member of the team.”

  “Whoa, I don’t know about that.” Casimir raised his hands.

  “It’s either that or you are all my supplicants.”

  Confusion radiated down the bond, so I explained, “Coatlie claims to be a god.”

  Nyla laughed. “That would be neat, but then I would have to kill her.” Everyone but Riena implicitly understood the desire to wreak terrible vengeance on any god responsible for all of this.

  Coatlie hissed at her. “I’m not the architect of your woes, mortal, but I could be a very good friend.”

  Derek scoffed, “More like a cookie-stealing bookworm.”

  “Hey that’s… I’m not a worm...” Coatlie sniffed and turned back to me.

  I pulled her close and gently stroked her scales, “She’s very sensitive about her lack of arms.”

  “Am not!” She blew her nose on my armor, producing a mysterious yellow goo.

  “How about we head home and Derek makes you a fresh batch of apology cookies?”

  “Okay…” Coatlie floated to the nearest console like a limp noodle and gave me a wink that only Nyla and I could see. Nyla giggled at her act.

  Derek rubbed the back of his head as he struggled to decide if he should feel guilty or not. He didn’t have long to choose because after pressing one button, a gate began to form in the center of the large hole outside.

  “Done!” The snake cheered. “Now, all you need to do is enter the cannons upstairs and launch yourself to the portal before it shuts and destroys this universe.”

  You did not mention that before! I grabbed Coatlie and punched a path upstairs, summoning more robots. Riena shouted, “Hold them off while Mari and I calibrate the cannons!”

  She quickly found the dial that controlled the magnitude of the gravitational acceleration. We then test launched three different sized rocks and estimated the right setting for each of our team members. Apparently, Riena couldn’t tell their exact weights by feel, so my main contribution to the effort was picking up the rocks and our teammates to get those measurements.

  After a few minutes of fighting, we loaded ourselves up and blasted toward the portal home. I undershot due to fudging my weight a little bit when telling Riena. That was not the time to be bashful! Rather than continue to beat myself up, I gathered half my Akashic crystals and tossed them behind me with enough force to get me into the portal home.

  Our team successfully crashed through back to Aspiration at terminal velocities. In the instant before impact, I expanded my aura and drastically increased all collision times with all my strength until I blacked out.

  When I returned to consciousness, I concluded that my efforts had reduced the damage of the fall enough to save our lives. A haggard looking Casimir was feeding me a potion while transferring my vitality to restore the others of their broken bones and concussions. “Sorry,” he said. “These are most effective on you, and I need to do a lot of healing.”

  “How many did you feed me?”

  “Only five.”

  I nodded. “Have your Professors covered how to treat potion toxicity yet?”

  “Briefly, but you should be well under the maximum li—”

  I coughed blood. “Good, because those were tier 1 potions…” The edges of my vision turned green as those goblins got their final posthumous revenge on me.