?

  “Yep, that's been done with a reaction blade for sure.” Said Ji-ho who was presently crouching down to inspect the metal vines and branches that had been cut and melted. Ha-Rin let out a little whistle, and I quickly read an explanation that Diaochan summoned into my vision.

  [Reaction Blade: A class of industrial cutters and melee weapons. Utilizing super-heated plasma trapped in the blade, it causes a reaction when swung that….You aren’t going to understand this. Ummm, it is like a little sun trapped in a sword, and both cuts and melts with even greater effectiveness than an energy blade like your spear.]

  “You can customize these little message boxes so I understand them better?” I asked quietly.

  “Now I can.” Came her voice in my head. “I needed to spend some time analysing your memories first. Since I have completed my preliminary memory scan, I can”

  I raised a hand, and she instantly stopped speaking. Good, that meant she had definitely learned a thing or two from my memories of the real Diaochan.

  “Good,” I said aloud this time. “ Keep changing them.”

  While I had been speaking with Diaochan, the siblings had been having their own conversation about the path that had been cut through the metal jungle.

  “I’m thinking rich kids in evolution suits,” Ha-Rin said to her brother with obvious agitation. “ There are two people from around here who use reaction blades, and I can’t imagine anything here would matter to them.” Ji-Ho nodded in reply to his sister’s words.

  “Sadly, I concur, if we encounter some raindrops, we will just try and back out before they notice us, like we always do.”

  Tilting my head, I quietly ordered Diaochan to clarify what they were saying.

  [Evolution Suit: Extremely expensive…uhh wargear, I guess. A suit of armor and weapons that drastically enhances the physical abilities of its wearer. Of particular note, they grow alongside the wearer, unlocking more devastating abilities depending on the user’s personal level.]

  The description was accompanied by a little window demonstrating people using these ‘evolution suits’. The suits seemed to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and were shown conveying entirely separate abilities and attributes depending on the design.

  I think I understood the idea. If you were wealthy and powerful, you could buy one of these things to give your child a massive boost over people who were also low-level. That gap closed a bit as levels and power went up, but the suit would in theory, still keep the wearer a step ahead of unsuited competition.

  “And raindrops?”

  [Raindrops: lower-tier slang for wealthier citizens from the city tiers exposed to the sky. In particular, this term refers to wealthy people who choose to enter the lower tiers to hunt Over-Surge created monsters, either to fill their Soul Expansion Gauge or for entertainment purposes.]

  “Are you hens done clucking?” I asked while walking over to interrupt the siblings.

  They both stopped and slowly turned their heads to give me a near-identical glare, which naturally made me smirk. There isn’t much point in being rude if your disrespect isn’t registered.

  “Alright, good,unless you want me to go somewhere else, I’ll be heading towards where you marked before.” While I made good on my claim, it wasn’t as though I went dashing off out of their view. It took them a few moments, but soon enough, the pair of siblings and their ‘Custom Build Carrier-Drone’ as the metal yaogui was marked in my HUD.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Pressing on through the ever-thickening overgrowth was made a lot easier by the path that had been cut before we arrived, but it was a concern that these wealthy hunters had seemingly followed the same route we were. In particular, this was true since Ji-Ho and Ha-Rin had already voiced their desire to avoid conflict with the group if we did encounter them.

  “What exactly is waiting for us at this ‘waypoint’ you sent?” I demanded of Ji-Ho. Obviously, I was powerful enough to defeat whatever or whomever we encountered, though I still wanted to have some kind of idea what I was marching towards.

  I could see from a little map that Diaochan brought up in front of my vision that it was a large circular room, but beyond that, I was essentially working blind.

  “It's the bottom of a grounding tower,” replied the silver-haired man. “They are built to redirect the energy of an Over-Surge on the sky-tiers down here. Which is why we get about thirty surges down on the lower tiers for every one that actually affects a sky-tier.”

  Well, that made sense to me. If I were among the lords of this city, I would have done the same if the option were available. I could easily imagine myself saying something like, ‘Better down there with the poor people than up here where all my stuff is.’

  “We are going there because the beasts that this ‘Over-Surge’ created and that we now hunt tend to stay near the place of their birth?”

  While Ji-Ho answered my grunted question, his sister moved towards the thickly overgrown walls that closed in our sides. I turned and watched her as she began using the metal vines to scale the wall, headed for a series of small balconies that came out from what was listed by my HUD as [Physco’s Budget Apartments 200-285]

  They didn’t look like apartments to me, so much as a series of untended hanging gardens sticking from dark, cavelike, and even more overgrown entrances up in the air.

  “Not quite.” Said Ji-Ho as his sister pulled herself onto one of the terraces, and began to hop from balcony to balcony following our progress from above.

  “In this case, the grounding tower is also near a broken clean-up vent from a nearby highway. So there tends to be a lot of scrap that turns up there, and if there is one thing green over-surge drones love, it's scrap.”

  I nodded as though I had any idea at all what he was talking about and pushed onwards. Drawing close to the circular room that was our objective, Diaochan piped up within my ears.

  “I’m concerned with Ha-Rin’s choice to cover us from above, while it will provide her with an excellent field of fire, the apartments behind her are unscouted and-”

  “No one asked for your tactical analysis,” I growled at her. The audacity of Diaochan to think I would ever need advice on warfare from a woman, not even a woman. An invisible ghost pretending to be a woman.

  Honestly, I kind of wished I were the one leaping easily from balcony to balcony. It was a maneuver I could have done in my sleep, even in this weakling’s body. Instead, I was down here trudging my way through increasingly thick metal overgrowth, as we rounded the last corner, the circular room which my HUD listed as [Rose Oasis Courtyard].

  I'm not sure I have ever encountered such an inaccurately named location. I want you to keep in mind that I come from a land where people will call a place things like ‘the divine plateau of heavenly bounty,’ and when you arrive, it has two peach trees and a single field of rice. That is how inaccurately named this supposed oasis was.

  Dominating the center of the circular courtyard was a blocky tower of dark metal and torn wires that ran up into a ceiling high above. The room itself was large enough that four or five wagons could have sat side by side, and absolutely all of that area was covered in one of two things. The metal plants and vines, or garbage. As Ji-Ho had described, there was a large hole in one of the courtyard’s walls, from which a perpetual gust of wind poured, accompanied every few moments by flying chunks of twisted and distorted metal.

  The scrap was all shredded metal, but that was the only similarity any of it bore to each others. Some were covered in the bright paints I saw so often in this city, others bore scorch marks or signs of heat warping. The eclectic pieces of metal were scattered everywhere to the point that I was confident the enslaved yaogui the siblings called Mule would be unable to traverse the courtyard, no matter what modules Ha-Rin had installed in it. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I had gathered from context that installing meant adding the ability to its HUD. That was what seemed to happen each time Diaochan informed me she was doing the same to me.

  It seemed Mule agreed with my assessment, as the gangly-legged metal beast chose to wait further back, where the path carved by whoever had passed this was before us allowed it to move freely.

  “ So what exactly is the plan? Should we conceal ourselves and await these drones in ambush?” The last few words of my sentence were basically inaudible due to a loud bang coming from the direction of Ha-Rin’s overlooking terrace. The explosive sound was followed by the sound of ripping air as a projectile traveling so fast I could only barely see it, surged past my head, and slammed into what I had thought was simply a scrap pile. The thing is, though, I might not know much about this ridiculous afterlife, but I remained confident even here, piles of scrap didn’t surge to their feet when attacked.