"Little Troublemaker," I declared.
Vespera's eyes snapped to me. "Little? Who are you—"
I stood my ground. "You are my little troublemaker. You don't like it? Too bad, you gotta live with it."
"I…" she began, before cutting herself off with a sigh. "Fine, I guess I do deserve it. You'll come to regret this, though. Now that I'm officially a troublemaker…"
"…you will behave," Elyra warned her. "Or else."
The demon quirked an eyebrow at her. "Or else what, little cat-angel?"
"Or else, little troublemaker, we will just have to punish you."
Vespera stared at the angel with predatory eyes. "Oh no… woe is me."
I wanted to facepalm. Elyra had played right into Vespera's troublemaker-ness. But, a quick look at the angel told me that she probably knew it as well, and it had been intentional. Made me wonder just where did the shy angel I first met go.
◈◈◈
The next day, we went to collect some more money from my now-favorite dwarf. We finished moving the rest of the transmutated materials, which raised the level of my [Heavy Load Bearing] to two, and got our guild contract marked as completed ahead of time. After that, it was just a matter of returning to the guild, turning it in to the rude clerk who got us registered the other day, and then we could simply spend the rest of the day relaxing and exploring the city.
It wasn't a very good sight, but having money in our pockets meant that we could at least take it easy and afford some treats here and there. As long as we didn't act too out of line, we managed to blend well enough with the local population.
Then, finally, the third day of the tide was upon us. The guild was a flurry of activity, but we quickly managed to locate Vandril, the wrinkled man with a hawk who had rented a room underground.
"Looks like you were right to only book two days," I told him as a way to start a conversation, pointing at the BTNO meter in the middle of the room.
The man shrugged. "Don't be too hasty, kid. Something ain't right. We should already be in the single digits by now."
Instead, the meter showed 23%.
"Is it that bad?" I asked. "I'm new around here."
"Tides are changing, that's what it is. And not for the better."
It took until the early afternoon before the meter went down to the single digits. It made me wonder what all the fuss was about, and it turned out that after a tide, you need the meter to go below ten to be able to safely go outside. Even eleven percent doesn't guarantee safety, and a wild swing back to the high fifties and sixties wasn't unheard of.
It gave us time to go window shopping around and get rather depressed at the prices we saw.
"It's not like you need a weapon, Sol," Vespera teased me, noticing my distressed look after I saw how expensive swords were. "Besides, you'd break that needle blade with your Strength."
"Is it really that high?" I wondered.
"I asked around," she said. "It's not high now, but it will be in a few levels."
I paused. "You did what?"
She waved me off. "Relax. I talked to other sentient slaves. They really don't like their owners, tell you that."
Elyra looked torn between pride and panic. As a distraction, I decided to head inside the shop, walking around the rows upon rows of weapons and assorted pieces of armor. It was interesting to see that while they did sell full sets, they were actually the minority of the wares sold around. Most of the pieces, be it weapons or armor, were sold singularly.
The reason was quickly apparent. They all had some special property. Some of them were enchanted, others magical, coming from slain monsters or natural treasures people found after particularly strong tides. They sold for a fortune, all of them.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and saw that Elyra wanted to show me a chestplate she had found on sale.
"Damage redirection?" I muttered, reading the tag. "Absorbs 90% damage from teammates and redirects to wearer. A must have for tanks."
I blinked, reading its description again. Ninety, freaking, percent?
"I need to have it," I said.
Vespera, who had finished going around the shop and had circled back to us, chuckled. "Read the price tag, spaceboy."
I did and immediately deflated. Even while on sale, it was well beyond our budget. "Ah, well."
Her smile was savage. "You should see how much the cores they sell here cost. I saw a couple towards the back, over a hundred gold each. Do you know what that means?"
I knew what she was thinking, of course, so I chose to be obtuse. "That we are still broke?"
"Yes, but no! It means that we could be making a lot of money hunting!"
"Vespera," Elyra said in an exasperated tone. "Do you think you are the first to think that? There must be a reason cores are so expensive."
And there was. A simple question to the shopkeeper told us all we needed to know. The cores she saw belonged to a level 42 Tri-headed Mallow, a monster that required a full team of triple classers with double digit levels to take down.
"Well, when you put it that way…"
I shook my head. We left the shop with no weapons nor armor, but with directions to a shop where we could buy some healing potions without being ripped off. The basic ones went for ten silver each, and we were only able to afford two, but they were enough to give me peace of mind.
They even came with a label that warned us not to ingest more than one potion per day, lest we develop potion sickness. More expensive potions were not only stronger, they also had less side effects, but their prices were insane.
"Sol," Vespera whined after we were done. "Please tell me the tide is over. I feel like punching something."
I knew how she felt. The city was stifling, and seeing how expensive things were had even me yearning for something to hunt. Sure, our deal with Ted was rather lucrative, but what were a few gold when the price of gear that could save your life was measured in the dozens?
I took out my guild token. "The meter is at 9%, I think—"
"Finally!" the demon cried. "Let's go!"
She almost dragged me to the main gates, but Elyra quickly scolded her and forced her to behave. She did, but not before extorting a promise to fight something as soon as we could.
Unfortunately, soon was a rather loose definition, because the line to get out of the city was insane. For some reason, the guards were only allowing people through the tiny door near the main gates, but even that was slower than usual.
The reason became clear when we got close enough to see beyond the mess of adventurers. Sorry, workers. The door was damaged, and a whole section of the lithos block was sporting cracks and fissures through which we could see outside. There were splatters of goo and pieces of monster bodies scattered around, with crews of workers using their magic to repair and clean everything up.
I spotted Buck among them, using some sort of water power to wash the grime off the floors.
"Going outside?" he asked us, taking a break from his work.
"Yeah," I replied. "What happened here?"
"They almost got in, that's what happened. It was the last wave before they retreated. The whole block was evacuated this morning."
We hadn't even noticed, but then again we had been shopping near the other side of the city.
"What about you? I didn't take you for a janitor type."
"Fuck you," the man rumbled, then laughed. "Stupid me for responding to the guild summons when the monsters cracked the walls. Good money, I figured, why not? Lesson learned, no taking jobs while drunk."
I was surprised. "You fought?"
"That's right. Sucked ass, and you don't get to keep the spoils. Too messy. But the money!"
The cleanup was a separate job, it turned out, which he had taken just to have an excuse to rest and not head out after the long fight. We chatted a bit more, and then he went back to cleaning while we finally managed to get out of the city.
"See?" I told the girls. "Buck isn't too bad."
"When he is sober," Elyra said. "He is very annoying when he drinks."
"Plus, he ate his doggy," Vespera added. "It was an ugly dog and I'm not a dog person, but come on! Eating your dog for a class?"
I was inclined to agree.
"So, what's the plan for the day?" she asked. "Do we find something big to hunt?"
Elyra looked at her. "Slimes."
"Slimes," the demon girl repeated, deadpan.
"Slimes," the angel confirmed.
"And, pray tell, why slimes?"
"Well, little troublemaker," Elyra said with a smirk, counting with her fingers as she explained all the reasons. "First, we do not have any gear save for two healing potions."
"We do not need it," Vespera interrupted.
"I need it," I said.
Elyra glared at both of us. "Second, we do not have any cores in case Sol levels up."
"But killing a strong monster would get us a core anyway!"
Elyra wasn't having it. "It is too risky, both because of the danger of the fight and the danger of leveling up without spare cores. Better to be safe than sorry."
Unfortunately for Vespera, I agreed with Elyra. We hadn't trained much at all, and by we I meant they. I still had no weapons and was barely the team's packrat with my oversized backpack.
As we walked, I was a little distracted by something. By the time we crested the hill near the city, I turned around and saw the damage the tide had caused to the lithos blocks that made up Perseverance's End. Even the walls were cracked in many points, with a whole section almost crumbling to pieces. The fields around the city were a mess of trampled grass and mud, gradually fading into pristine grasslands, trees and hills.
The transition was smooth enough that I had missed it at first. But once I saw it, it finally clicked, and I couldn't unsee it. There was simply no trace of the damage from the tide anywhere but in the near vicinity of the city. In fact, as we passed a tree, I distinctly remembered it having been felled by a workers right before the tide hit! Now it was back, standing proud and tall. In fact, it looked taller and wider than before, as if it had aged five or ten years.
When I told the girls, they too noticed. "This world is strange Sol," Vespera said simply. "We better get used to it."
"This world?" I asked.
A wave of emotion flooded the bond, coming from the demon. Alienation, maybe. The feeling of utter loneliness. It washed over me and Elyra both, and we paused without saying a word. Vespera didn't notice immediately, taking another couple of steps before regarding us with confusion.
"Hey," I said, taking her hands into mine.
"Sol? What's up?"
I looked at her deep, red eyes. "You are not alone in this world anymore."
"I…" she began, before noticing that Elyra had wrapped her in a hug from behind. Her wings were brushing against her face, curving around us. "I just don't feel like I belong, that's all."
"Neither do I," Elyra said.
"Nor I. But what does it matter? We have each other."
She blinked back tears. "You two…" she muttered, sniffling.
When we broke apart, she stomped over towards the slime fields. "Let's just punch something, okay?"
We laughed as she threw herself at the monsters with glee, happy to notice that she had finally gotten her retractable claws to work.
◈◈◈
When night finally came, we could choose to either go back to the city and sleep at the inn, or spend the night outside with no pelts, no tent and only some dried rations. Plus the possibility of monster attacks, of course.
I glanced at the guild token. The tide meter was at 7%. I looked at the girls.
It was an easy decision to make. There were little groves of trees everywhere, along the grassy fields before the real deep forests that crawled up the sides of the mountains, with plenty of dead wood to make a fire. While the girls worked on that, I walked the perimeter of the grove, placing a device on the ground every ten meters or so. They were small pieces of paper with a rune drawn on them, sold for cheap at a store close to the guild, and they could detect movement in a five meters radius around them. They would alert us should any monster try to sneak up on us—an indispensable tool in any adventurer's arsenal.
I was surprised when the guy who sold us the motion detectors used the word adventurers and not workers, but he claimed that any worker willing to brave the nights outside was worthy of being called an adventurer. The interaction had been rather strange. Up until that moment I was convinced that most people did sleep outside whenever they could, but according to him it wasn't the case.
I also got scolded when he learned that we had slept several nights outside without any protection or motion sensors. Whoops.
When I returned, the gentle crackling of the fire was already spreading warmth around the little glade at the center of the grove. I sat on the ground, watching the hypnotic flames and slowly getting lost inside them.
"What you thinking?" Vespera asked me, staring into the fire herself.
"About the stars," I said, not looking away from the dancing colors.
Elyra joined us soon after. "How did they look? From space, I mean."
"They were beautiful. And strange. There is this thing called General Relativity and it did all sorts of strange things when I approached the speed of light."
The mention of light had the angel suddenly interested. "Is it a kind of magic?"
"Even better," I said, now staring into her deep brown eyes that were full of stars. "It's a law of the universe. The speed of light is an impassable limit, and when you get close to it, the light coming from the stars begins to bend around you. I would look at the starfield as it shifted and changed from my cot, there was a little window there with special glass that filtered out the harsher wavelengths of light."
Vespera grabbed my hand. "Tell us more! What did you see?"
"Well, at slow speeds all I could see was the fusion flame of my engine. A big plume of white-hot fire accelerating my ship into the great void. I would go to cryo-sleep before the acceleration got too bad, though. High g's can kill you."
"And then?"
"Then there were the routine wake-ups to check the state of the ship. The first one was already at relativistic speed—meaning close to the speed of light. Already the stars around me had changed. It was like they had all moved to the front of the ship, somehow overtaking me and always ahead of me."
"How is that possible?"
"Physics," I said. "It's called the aberration of light, I think. I'm not too good at these things, but every hauler knew the basics of course. We'd see the physics in action every day, after all. At close to the speed of light, all the universe was compressed into a tiny pinprick of violent, deadly light right in front of the ship."
A gust of wind ruffled the leaves, making them tremble and whisper. Elyra was the first to huddle close to me, seeking to restore the warmth that the cold had stolen from her, pulling the soft plastic of her strangely modern jacket tight around herself. The bond told me that she was considering doing something else, and the way her hands moved listlessly confirmed it.
"Such a strange life you have lived, Sol."
I chuckled. It wasn't nearly as strange as this one, but I knew I was biased.
Elyra finally gathered her courage, and she lifted her plastic raincoat jacket and pulled me close, wrapping us both in it. Vespera clapped her hands, breaking the little spell.
"I wondered how long you were going to take," she said.
The angel glared at her, and she stuck out her tongue before going back to warming her feet near the fire, ignoring us with an amused expression on her distracted face. She wiggled her toes, stretching her legs and sometimes feeding a new stick to the fire with her feet.
I was pretty sure she was doing it on purpose, but then noticed the look of concentration on her face. No, I realized, she really was trying to grab the sticks with her toes. Worryingly, she was getting good rather quickly, lifting the smaller sticks by sticking them between the digits and the bigger ones by curling the toes inwards against the bottom of the foot. Crazy. But then again, she went around barefoot all the time, so I guess her mind-muscle connection was better than mine, at least feet-wise.
A giggle from Elyra told me that she must have felt my thoughts, or the general impressions and emotions that the bond managed to transmit.
Chapter 27.5 (NSFW)
While Vespera did her things, I felt Elyra's hand on my legs begin to move. She inched closer to my pants, then above them, until she finally slid below and began to touch me through my underwear. Her clumsy movements reminded me that she had never actually touched me down there—only Vespera. Still, what she lacked in experience she made up in enthusiasm, touching and exploring me everywhere with her little soft fingers that sent shivers through my body.
She traced the shape of my growing erection, grabbing my...
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