“Mr. Two-step, I have a few listener-submitted questions here that I PROMISED I would ask you, so let’s start with the most popular one. Is it true that you are single, and if so, WHY?"

  "Well, Mr. Kerner, I suppose technically I am single, though I’m not a lonely man, if you catch my meaning. Honestly though, my favorite relationships have always been the ones where there was something of a power balance between us. It’s just more exciting if you think there’s a chance your lover can off you if you fuck it up. Makes it a lot easier to stay faithful, too."

  (both laugh)

  - DJ Demophon Kerner, with guest Two-step on K-RAD LA, April 2nd, System Year 453

  Block walked past me out into the middle of the road. “He’s right. You could smash this entire thing to rubble, and in a few weeks or so it would look exactly like this again.”

  He held out his hands and a massive warhammer appeared in them. Block raised the impractically-large weapon overhead in a shockingly fluid movement, then brought it whistling down. The hammer impacted the center of one of the yellow strips with a thunderous BANG, blasting a crater easily as big around as my torso into the road. Pieces of dark rock flew out with such force that I actually saw Hassan’s barrier flare as it deflected a piece of debris, earning the tank a withering glare.

  Wow, that looks – really fucking fun. Too bad I can’t do that… I looked over at the red sign. STOP. Waste that shit, the last thing I’m going to do now is stop!

  I couldn’t resist. Moving a few yards further from the sign, I summoned my gun from my Inventory. Elin glared at me as I waved for her to move back, but I was immune to her disapproval. Her best attempt to look stern was completely ineffective on someone who’d spent the last few years intermittently pissing off Sister Mercy.

  BOOM! ping

  The sound of my shot striking the sign was surprisingly pure and absolutely worth every mana. Also, it was pretty funny watching the other recruits jump at the massive noise of my shot. Honestly, shooting it out in the open wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been in the cave in the Tutorial. Babies.

  Curious, I walked over to the sign to check it out. My shot had splattered over an area almost a foot wide. The pellets had dented the red sign, but it didn’t look like anything went all the way through the relatively thin metal. Hassan wandered over, looking at the sign over my shoulder.

  “A lot of sound, not as much damage. I can see why you struggled with the armor on the scorpion.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what I would have done if there was more than one of them… but I’ve got something new I want to try that might just work!”

  I concentrated on my new Spell, Force. I’d needed hours and hours to master each of the Cantrips I knew, but that was learning them the ‘natural’ way, with lots of trial and error. In contrast, the Spell gem I’d found had dumped everything into my brain in a moment. It was shockingly easy to trace the new rune in my mind and it flowed into my shotgun.

  After backing up to a safe distance, I fired another shot at the damaged sign. As the shot fired I felt my mana pulled into the shell more forcefully than when I’d infused the Cantrips in the Tutorial. My shot crashed into the sign with exactly the same, satisfying, sound as the first one, but the effect was dramatically different.

  The sign was slammed backwards as if it’d been hit with Block’s warhammer instead of small metal pellets, the wooden post holding it up cracked slightly a couple of feet above the ground. After the echo of the shot faded, the sign remained tilted at a slight angle, now with its face towards the sky. I let out a whoop of excitement and high fived a willing Raylan and a bemused Zaire, but when I looked at Elin she had her arms crossed and a scowl on her face.

  That was fucking impressive! Who needs ammo with more penetration now? I can just -

  My celebration was interrupted by Hassan. “Before you get too excited, go look at the sign.”

  He walked over with me for a closer look at the damage. I scowled when I realized the sign, while more beat-up than after the first shot, still didn’t have any actual holes in it. Even with the infusion of Force, my shots hadn’t penetrated the remnant metal.

  “Is this some kind of ancient super metal?” I asked in frustration.

  Hassan laughed, then pulled an arrow from his quiver. Without bothering to use his bow, he slammed the arrow through the sign barehanded. The broadhead punched right through the metal with a squeal as I gaped. Shit, he must really be in Tier 3! I don’t know how many points an Archer gets in Strength, but that’s impressive…

  I looked closely at his bow, my eyes widening as I realized the stave was easily twice the thickness of any bow I’d ever tried to shoot. Fuck, it looks like someone bent a quarterstaff into a curve and threw a string on it!

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  “It’s not a special metal,” he commented, wrenching his arrow free and returning it to his quiver. “Infusing Force into projectiles simply doesn’t work the way most expect. The Spell does not add to the speed or penetration of the projectile. Instead, the force is applied to anything the projectile hits, but across some area.”

  He held up his hands, making a circle five or six inches across.

  “If I use that rune with an arrow, the force gets distributed in an area like this. With your shotgun, I would guess that each projectile – you said they’re called pellets?” I nodded, and he went on. “Each pellet likely delivers a portion of the force across a smaller area. I imagine the end result would be something like getting hit with a blow from a shield.”

  “Well shit, I thought I had a solution to dealing with armored enemies…” I saw Mason start to open his mouth, and remembering his earlier comment, I hurried on. “But I am sure there are tons of ways to use this. I could probably knock over an enemy so that Raylan or Mage Zaire could finish them off. Or maybe knock them over a cliff or into a pit or something.”

  Mason was about to speak when he was interrupted.

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  I watched in awe as Block destroyed several more sections of road, somehow using the momentum from each strike to catapult himself forward before dramatically leaping into the air and crashing down with a final strike that blew out a crater twice the size of the others. He stood easily, the warhammer disappearing back into his Inventory, and shrugged at the looks he was getting.

  “What?” he asked with a smile. “I felt like it! Not like anyone cares, this shit will repair itself anyway. You’re always too serious, Mason, you should try indulging in a spot of random destruction once in a while! It’s good for the soul. She gets it,” he added, pointing at me.

  Mason hit Block with a glare that looked like it would have knocked Sister Mercy flat on her ass, yet the tank seemed unbothered. Then he turned the death stare towards me, and I immediately jumped behind Hassan.

  “Kid,” I heard Mason’s voice rumbling, “what exactly are you doing?”

  I popped my head out with my best innocent smile. “I’m practicing my tactical repositioning!”

  Block immediately started laughing while Raylan snickered and Vale cracked a grin. Mason didn’t smile, but the ferocity of his scowl decreased by at least 50%. He let out the kind of sigh that I’d heard too many times from Sist– from Hazel, and looked back and forth between us.

  “Hassan,” he declared, “ let’s keep these two from spending any more time together than absolutely necessary.”

  He turned and strode off, starting down the slope on the far side of the remnant road. Hassan let out a snort and followed. I walked towards the side of the blisteringly hot road, slowing as I realized that once I’d walked down that hill I’d be out of sight of Sunland for the first time. I paused for a moment to take in the view.

  Looking back to the north-west, the mostly-orderly rows of yucca plants stretched out for at least half a mile before giving way to the greener fields of other crops closer to town. Beyond the greenery, I could barely make out the smudge of grey that was the town walls, several miles distant.

  To the north, running far off into the distance to both the east and west, loomed the Angel’s Spine mountains. The mountains’ slopes were a rippling mix of green, grey, and brown. Patches of trees alternated with drier areas covered in scrub, exposed dirt, and solid stone. Higher up – miles above where we stood – the lofty, brutal peaks of the mountains were covered year-round in snow.

  The snowline dipped here and there into valleys, then rose with the hills until it nearly reached the peaks in some places, creating a sight eerily similar to a half-mile high, hundreds-of-miles long spinal column, stripped of flesh and bleached white in the sun, lying along a massive granite ridge.

  I knew little about what was up there, just that people rarely ventured past even the lower foothills. The further up the mountains you went, I’d learned in school, the more intense the mana usually was and the higher Tier monsters you’d find. That was the main reason Gleason was happy to farm the dungeon that supported Sunland – safe access to an endless supply of high quality wood.

  To the south, much closer to where I stood, were the Shadow Hills, a smaller, drier range of mountains, usually free of snow but not of monsters. Occasionally hunters would pass through Sunland on their way to or from the northern slopes of the Shadow Hills. Hazel had always kept me too busy to get a chance to talk to them. Anyway, they probably wouldn’t have been interested in answering any of my million questions about what it was like going up into the hills looking for monsters.

  Finally, looking to the east I examined the direction we were heading. The small ridge we were on seemed to mark the edge of the farms, and on the other side of it was untamed wilderness stretching as far as I could see along the valley between the two mountain ranges. It looked… dusty. Varying shades of brown dotted with occasional tough plants. The rough road we’d been following, faded into the distance. There were a few wagon ruts here and there, baked into the dirt by the scorching sun after the last time it had rained a month or more ago.

  And, scattered throughout the area as far as I could see, were the mounds of dirt and occasional straight ridges in the ground that marked the ruins of pre-System civilization. One of the few interesting things we’d done in school was to visit one of the mounds closest to town. Farmers tended to gather up anything they could move and shove it all into one big pile, though their fields still had to part around the really stubborn stuff.

  The teachers had let us dig around in the dirt to see what we could find. Mostly it had been pieces of glass and plastic, worn smooth by time, some bearing the scorch marks of ancient fires. There had been chunks of a grey rock called ‘concrete’ – with pieces of rusty metal stuck through them – which was what people had used to build shit out of before they had Earth Mages. Anything really interesting had long since decayed or been looted. It was hard for me to comprehend that the entire area used to be one huge town, but the teachers insisted it was true.

  Now, closer up, I could see that the ruins stretched throughout the valley. I shivered. There are definitely monsters out there… I wonder how often we’ll be attacked. Or will they be scared off by how powerful Mason and Hassan are? I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t about to be left behind for anything. I followed the others down the hill, into the wilds.

  Block

  Vale