Fortunately, if Axel and I pushed on the wagon at the same time, we managed to keep it at a walking pace, even with just ten strength.

  It was much harder getting the wagon over hills, which were slowing our progress, but after a lot of trial and error we figured out how to move up the dunes diagonally, so that the cart wouldn’t roll back down when we stopped pushing.

  It was hard, and slow, but we could do it.

  Junior stumbled, clinging onto his sister’s white robe for support. “Rooooossseee I’m cold!”

  “What am I supposed to do about that?" Rose snapped, blowing out a puff of steam. “We’re all cold.”

  Unlike the last reset, we were heading into the storm at an earlier time. That turned out to be a bad idea, as the early morning had some horrendous chills mixed in with the unusually stifling air. If the chill wasn’t enough, there was heavy rain, mudding our steps and further slowing the pace of the wagon.

  “It’s raaaaaiiinnning and I’m soooo cold!” Junior whined. “I’m turning into a goblin popsicle! A popsicle, Rose!”

  “I always thought popsicles were quieter,” she chuckled.

  Her brother let out a low, whimpering noise, hugging his arms to his chest. “Come’on Lesser Grind, help me out here.”

  “Don’t call him that!” Rose barked, jabbing her brother. “You may refer to him as Grind or Sir.”

  “He hates being called Sir and you know it!” Junior barked back. “And look at him, he’s smirking! He named me Better Grind, after all.”

  “You named yourself that, only to forget it,” she corrected.

  “But of course he likes Lesser Grind! It’s an intelligent and witty play on words.”

  “Much like your personality is an intelligent and witty play on a sane being.”

  I suppressed a chuckle, checking if Axel and Sern were alright. Sern kept close to Axel, burrowed into his hairy side. She was probably cold. Axel, however, seemed just fine. If anything, the drop in temperature was a welcome change.

  “Axxxeeeeeeeeeellll,” Axel yawned. He gave a grunt and the wagon shuddered, pushing over a sudden incline in the sand.

  “It’ll only get easier to move the longer we have it around,” I said, bracing against the back as we moved over to the other side. “Of course, that doesn’t mean it's easy now…”

  “Axel.”

  I let out a sigh. “One of these days I’ve got to figure out the language you’re speaking.”

  “Language?” Junior perked up, scuttling over next to me. “Oh, it’s quite simple. Just imagine what you think he’d say and you’re probably right.”

  “You don’t actually know what he’s saying?” I asked.

  “They’re all very educated guesses.”

  “Axxelllll.”

  Axel blew his hair out of his face, grunting to himself.

  “I think you just insulted his culture,” I sighed.

  Junior cackled, grabbing my arm. “Grind, are we there yet?”

  “No. Go watch the clouds or something.”

  His eyes flickered white, before he blinked hard, ignoring the hint of a command and huffing under his breath. “The clouds are boring.”

  The sky was a swirling sea of arcing lightning, mixed with the prismatic shimmer of rain, coming down in steady beats, like a sputtering old engine. Purple, pinks and blues mixed together in plumes, curling around sullen shapes high in the atmosphere. Whatever creatures lived within the storm, they must not attack players, or the union would be more careful about the actual journey between areas.

  “How could this possibly be boring?” I whispered.

  Junior scoffed. “You sound like an old man.”

  “And you sound like a snotty little kid.”

  “I am a snotty little kid,” Junior said. He sniffed haughtily. “And I’m proud of it.”

  Something crunched under his foot.

  “Eh?”

  Dotted around the ground, there were plumes of multicolored rock.

  I took a piece.

  {Sand Coral}

  [This is an explosive growth single-celled organism.]

  [this piece is dead.]

  Interesting.

  Rose gasped, pointing ahead. “I see it!”

  She ran.

  “Rose—ROSE WAIT UP!” the junior shouted, sprinting after his sister.

  “Shall we join them?” I asked.

  Axel huffed, digging his heels into the sand. There was a sudden lurching and he sprinted forward, gouging deep tracks into the sand. I followed behind him, pushing forward, and we pierced through the endless sea of clouds, into the second area.

  “Wow,” Rose whispered, staring into the far, far distance.

  There was sand as far as the eye could see.

  “Since when is it night?” Junior asked. “We can’t have been walking that long, could we?”

  “The wagon made things much slower, and you’re too hungry to realize it yet,” I said. “But as long as we had the water, we were fine.”

  By now the one hundred gallon container had dropped to eighty. At this pace, so long as we rationed the rest, we should have enough to last a week. That should get us to a city.

  Assuming we could find one.

  In the blackness of night it was next to impossible to see beyond the dunes and lanky silhouettes of monsters in the distant background.

  Junior shrunk back. “Grind? What was that?”

  “Monsters,” I said. “We should get moving.”

  According to my loose sense of time, Kizota would be passing somewhere in the north in twenty something hours. We could wait that long, then board on, but honestly, I already know Kizota has a cultist problem. It would be better to go somewhere safer, even if that requires a bit of wandering around the desert.

  As for where to go, I just had to use my brain.

  There are no union officials around the border to the area, which implies that the journey here isn’t notably risky. That, in turn, implies that a city is close enough that any adventurer with a half-decent amount of preparation would stumble across it.

  So I might as well just go forward. If we walked in a straight line, we’d be bound to come across something.

  It took less than an hour before we spotted a rundown little shack in the distance, stationed by a grumpy old man in the Union’s uniform, sitting on a cruddy metal chair.

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  Once he saw the five of us, he rolled his eyes, holding a hand in the air.

  “HALT!” He shouted, and my party stopped in their tracks, white eyed. Only I could move freely.

  The guard glanced at me, nodded, then scribbled something down on his paper. “Any other servants, pets, or companions?”

  I frowned. “Who are you?”

  He barely spared a glance. “Answer the question.”

  “Answer mine.”

  He let out a groan, pulling a badge from his pocket. “Lead, union official, ‘at your service.’”

  “I don’t have anyone else with me,” I stated.

  “And legendary items?”

  I opened my hand, summoning Crapshoveler.

  “Odd, for a rookie,” he grunted. “Welcome to Duosis, Copper.”

  “Copper?—”

  The man cut me off, shoving a coppery ticket into my hand.

  Since when was I a copper?

  My status screen pulled back up.

  {Grind}

  [Copper : 78.85%]

  [Next tier [Iron] in : 21.15%]

  Right. I had a lot of Exp in my system. That would be good to know for the future, but it would also mean that if I wanted to keep leveling up Rose and Junior, I would be weakening myself.

  Which meant I’d have to dungeons in this area that I could actually fight.

  My party unfroze, with Rose and Junior holding onto their heads.

  “What kind of a command was that?” Junior groaned. “Whatever he said kept ringing around in my ears.”

  “Same,” Rose sighed. “Grind? Are you okay?”

  “Hold on a second,” I said, flexing my hand.

  At first there was a barrier pushing against me. Then I pushed back, and it blew apart like cobwebs.

  {Grind}

  //150 Hp 132 Str//

  The man in the booth fell out of his chair.

  Energy sparked within my veins, and I let out a sigh of relief as my body felt an order of magnitude lighter, and stronger.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I’ll be fine.”

  “WHOA!” Junior squealed. “When did that happen?”

  “It’s not even that much,” I stated. “I have way more in the first area.”

  “No, pipsqueaks got a point,” the man grumbled, picking himself off the floor. “You shouldn’t be able to just increase your stat cap at will. It’s weird.”

  “Axel,” Axel stated. He brushed sweaty hair out of his face, grunting about something or another. “Axel Axel AAAAAxxEl.”

  Junior cleared his throat. “Axel has noticed a certain mental pressure radiating from your body. If we could suppress your stats, you could appear much stronger than you really are.”

  Rose blinked. “I thought you were making his words up.”

  “It’s a gift,” Junior admitted.

  “Either way, we’re still hopelessly lost,” I said, glancing down at the little ticket in my hand. “And I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m supposed to do with this.”

  The man at the booth rolled his eyes. “You’re going to want to take one of these,” He said, holding out some sort of paper pamphlet. “Next time, ask for a map.”

  On it, there were over a hundred names, each connecting to a tiny dot in a sea of desert. The desert billowed out on one side, wrapping around like a tear drop. It matched another tear-shaped object, except this one was covered in rock and mountain. The two lands spun around each other, like yin and yang, connecting into a massive city enveloping the center.

  “Capital,” I said, reading the name.

  “They called a city ‘capital?’” Junior asked.

  “It’s better than the ‘unnamed area,’” I said. “At least somebody made an attempt.”

  “Wasn’t much of an attempt.”

  “I’m sure whoever came up with that name thought they were being very clever.”

  “They were not.”

  “I know that,” I said. “And you know that, but they might not know that, so we don’t have to rub it in.”

  The man at the booth started scowling at us. “What are you waiting for? Pick a place!”

  “Well?” I asked, turning the map toward the rest of my party. “Where are we going?”

  “What do you want to do?” Rose asked. “Different places have a lot of different things.” She emphasized this by pointing to various little symbols spread around the map, such as the ones for hairdressing or eating.

  While bigger cities had a mix of different symbols, some places were smothered in them, illustrating their specialty. The only exception was the massive area in the center, which had a ton of everything.

  “There are two things I need to do,” I started. “First, I need to get strong enough to take Sern home.”

  Sern perked up at that, shuffling toward the map.

  “But before I do that,” I continued. “I should drop the three of you off somewhere safe, in one of the nature preserves.”

  Junior huffed, crossing his arms. “I don’t want to go to a stupid preserve.”

  Rose took a deep breath. “Sir, while I’m sure you have the best intentions, I would like to do a little living in the city before I go into hiding in some part of the forest.”

  The old man chuckled. “Miss, preserves ain’t for tourism.” He pointed to areas with skulls on the map. “They’re places too volatile to send anybody in, so they put walls around and leave ‘em be. There’s also something with a monster cap, but I ain’t a guide.”

  “Relax,” I said with a smile, patting Junior and Rose on the shoulder. “I don’t plan to send you anywhere for the moment. We’ll get you leveled up first. But after that, I’ll need to leave you behind.” I looked to Axel, then Junior, then finally to Rose. “There’s a point you won’t be able to keep up.”

  Rose looked down. “Are you…sure?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I haven’t told you how my power works yet, have I?”

  The three shook their heads.

  “For now, it should be sufficient to say that I grow stronger much faster than a normal person would.”

  Junior sighed. “And if you keep us around, you’ll be holding yourself back?”

  “Yes. While I care for you, I’m not caring for someone else. But I’ll care for you as best as I can for as long as I can, until I am no longer necessary.”

  “That’s not very fun.”

  “I’ll be back,” I promised, looking Junior in the eye. “Once I’ve beaten this game, I’ll be taking all of you with me.”

  Junior crouched on the ground. “Will it take long?”

  “Who knows? For you, it might be a week.”

  Rose took the map from my hands, glossing over various cities. “Well Sir, if you want to beat the game and help as many people as possible, then you really just need more power. If there’s one universal rule in this game, it’s that the more power you have the more you can do with it. I’d recommend the capital.”

  “I’m good with that,” I said, glancing down at my ticket. “Capital.”

  Nothing happened.

  Junior nudged me in the side. “What’re you doing?”

  “Trying a hunch,” I said. “I’d expect the Union’s system to be similar to the game’s. Capital.”

  The ticket vanished in a plume of dust.

  We waited for a couple minutes, hearing nothing.

  Then the ground started shaking.

  A massive bus-sized centipede crawled out from the sand, chirping with enthusiasm.

  The centipede made a crunching sound, and a part of its shell lifted up, revealing a cushioned interior, complete with gold-trimmed seating and a little box in the corner that radiated cool energy.

  “I’m not getting in that,” Junior shuddered, taking several steps back.

  Rose hunched down beside him, grinning. “What? Scared?”

  Junior sat down inside.

  His sister smiled to herself. “Works every time.”

  The rest of us joined him inside, sighing in relief at the sudden change in temperature. Other plates opened up, creating windows, with tight mesh screens, so neither the desert heat nor the sand was able to pass through.

  “The seats are so soft,” Junior said, running his hand over one of the cushions. He lifted one up, revealing the centipede’s internal organs.

  Junior put the cushion down, walked to a conveniently located trash can, and started throwing up.

  “There must be a lot of magic going through this thing,” Rose whistled. “How do you even make something like this? I’ve never heard of animals created by players.”

  “Axel. Axel Axxxxeeeellll Axel Axelll Axxxxeelll,” Axel said, clasping his hands together.

  Rose looked at him. “You know I don’t understand a word you say, right?”

  Axel grumbled to himself, pulling his long white hair over his eyes. “Axel Axel.”

  Sern leaned onto him, and he seemed to relax.

  The windows shut, one after the other, and the centipede burrowed back into the sand.

  // {Notice} //

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