Epilogue
The heat was brutal, the sky glaring down like an overturned brass bowl. Below stretched a dried-up lakebed, cracked and endless, the horizon shimmering in the distance from the rising heat.
Two massive hadrosaurs trudged across the broken ground, their heavy heads swinging with each step as dried salt crunched beneath their feet. Behind them followed a ram, smaller but seemingly having no trouble keeping pace. Each animal carried a rider: Lance, Rhema, and C.
"Goddammit, just how big is this goddamn desert," Lance complained.
"Weren't you scolding me for complaining less than half an hour ago?"
"Yeah, well, now I am."
"Hypocrite," Rhema called. "At least put in some effort.
Try to look like C." That earned a surprised glance from the young man, clearly not expecting to be pulled into this.
"I haven't heard him complain once, not about us, not about how big this desert is, or how brutal, or how monotonous it is here. "
The wasteland they were crossing, and complaining about, was called Intiwana, a seemingly endless, empty stretch of land split into three distinct zones.
On the outer edge lay the Rochard, a dry scrubland of cracked red clay, where nothing grew except Iron-Spires, a tree native to the region, growing as low, thorny thickets oozing thick sap.
Further in, especially toward the western section, sat the Great Dunes, where the trees grew entirely underground, their massive trunks buried beneath the sand like sunken reefs, holding the shifting dunes in place.
It was there, out of nowhere, that the trio had stumbled onto one of Nazim's workshops less than two weeks ago, in what had turned out to be a buried forest disguised as desert, its true nature betrayed only by the occasional cluster of stiff black needles poking up through the sand.
Now the trio had reached the very heart of the region.
The Salt-Scour, C had told them, was Intiwana's harshest zone by far. Not even Iron-Spires grew here. The trees had died long ago, leaving behind a blinding white wasteland of jagged, petrified stumps.
"I do complain," C argued, then added, almost jokingly, "just mostly to the voice in my head."
Given what they all were, heroes, the joke landed with a certain dark familiarity rather than sounding demented.
They all had access to that voice, the aspect of the system known as the Personal Interface, functioning as a kind of assistant, though Lance's own history with his had left him seeing it less as an actual assistant and more as an envoy for the entity who had reincarnated them to this place.
"That's actually a smart way to use it," Rhema said, already trying it herself.
"Since we're on the topic," Lance said, turning to their more experienced comrade, whose survival know-how had repeatedly forced Lance to admit how much he still had to learn, "any suggestions for making better use of my own?
Mine mostly just tries to be encouraging.
Aside from cheering me on and giving useless advice like telling me to run when I'm already running, it hasn't done much for me. "
"Hm, let's see," C mused, then suggested, "Math, I'd say."
"Math?"
"Yeah. Personal Interfaces are excellent at math, so lean on them whenever a problem involves it. Say, figuring out whether a fall's going to break something. It can see your stats, so it can calculate exactly what your body can handle, as long as there's no unknown variable involved."
"He's right, boss," the voice in Lance's head chimed in. "I can be pretty useful used that way."
"I see. Anything else?"
"Try to actively involve it into your fights too. They tend to enjoy that, and sometimes suggest things you wouldn't have thought of."
"Like?"
"Things a human mind wouldn't naturally come up with."
"I see."
"You know, C," Rhema said, "I find it fascinating how experienced you are. Starting to doubt your backstory," she added, mostly in jest, though not entirely. "You're so knowledgeable it feels like you've been doing this for centuries, not just a little while, like Lance and me."
"Thanks," C replied, suspiciously, neither confirming nor denying the accusation.
Silence settled in after that, softened by the strange, singular melody of the Salt-Scour's wind.
Lance tried C's suggestion, redirecting his complaints toward his own Personal Interface, which tried its best to keep him entertained, but before long another complaint slipped out.
"Things are so boring, I'm starting to wish we'd run into monsters. "
"Hey, don't jinx us like that," Rhema scolded.
"Curse us? Isn't that literally why we're here?"
There were two reasons for them being out here.
One was avoiding civilization, or at least city-level civilization.
Small towns and villages were fine, just not settlements large enough to attract the attention of people they now knew were actively hunting down otherworldly heroes.
This region had no cities at all, just scattered small towns and villages, which made it ideal.
The other reason was that it was also crawling with monsters, perfect for hunting and grinding.
"That's fair, but don't voi—"
"Lance's wish just came true," C reported, eyes still glued to his binoculars.
"It did," Lance frowned, pulling out his own and looking in the same direction as C.
There wasn't much visible at first, Iron-Spire needles jutting up, and several large rock formations that turned out, on second glance, to be the monsters C had been referring to. "Dune-Titans?"
"Yep. Left to right, level seventeen, level twenty-five, level fourteen, level fifteen, level seventeen," C reported, having appraised each of them on behalf of Rhema and Lance, neither of whom had the skill to do so without immediately drawing aggro.
"What's the level twenty-five crab look like?" Lance asked.
C gave them a detailed rundown of the creature's stats before asking, "So, what's the call? Engage, or avoid?"
Exchanging a look, Rhema and Lance both said, "Engage," almost in unison.
Their goal, after all, was to kill, harvest RU, grow stronger, harvest more, and hope that one day, however distant, the wishing system might finally grant them passage home.
Or, failing that, at least get strong enough that nobody could capture them.
Seven minutes was all it took the trio to take down the five giant crabs.
As expected, the level twenty-five put up the fiercest fight, but under a combined assault of magic and explosives, its shell finally gave out, and the twelve-meter creature collapsed its massive carapace onto the white salt flats.
[HARVEST WINDOW ACTIVE]
Congratulations. You have successfully harvested resources from an RU-wielding entity.
Mode: Assimilation
RU Harvested: 17,882
As always after a kill, the Common Interface popped up in the corner of Lance's vision, which he took as his cue. "Well fought, everyone," he said, "especially yo—"
He turned toward their great bow-wielding comrade, only to find C staring off into the distance instead.
"What's wrong?" Rhema asked, concern creeping into her voice.
"Something's watching us," he said, pointing at something in the distance.
Lance couldn't make anything out at first, not until it stopped hiding and turned out to be far closer than he'd assumed, barely a hundred meters off and fifty meters up. A man who, once visible, scoffed, "surprised you could sense me from up here."
"Smelled something foul," C replied. "Couldn't have been the crabs, or anything else I've smelled in this desert."
"C, who is that?"
At the question, their comrade of eight months, mask still on, gave them a look that sent a genuine chill down their spines as he answered, "Your death."
"What does that mean?" Lance asked.
"You know me?" the man asked, hovering ahead, his stance and haircut marking him as some kind of martial specialist. He looked genuinely surprised C recognized him.
"I do," C said, with real challenge in his voice. "You're Leylin. Leylin, killer of heroes, thief of skills and abilities. The hero, partially responsible for Zanoba city's fall."
"What?"
"Killer of heroes? A hero killing other heroes?"
Lance and Rhema shared the exact same reaction, horror and disbelief that a fellow hero would do such a thing, followed swiftly by the grim realization of exactly why this particular hero-killer was here now.
"How do you know that?! How do you know about my skill theft?" the man barked, clearly unnerved that C knew something he shouldn't have. "You... who are you?"
Lance and Rhema were wondering the exact same thing about C.
"I am C," he said, pulling off his mask, "the one sent to lure you here."
The man didn't seem to recognize C's face, but arrived at a conclusion of his own anyway. "That smile. I recognize it. You're with the lunatic from Zanoba."
"Zanoba? As in Zanoba city. The one wiped off the map?" Rhema echoed, arriving at the same grim conclusion, that C had somehow been involved in that tragedy too.
"I am," C said. "But unlike him, whose mission was to rid Tutoria of you, my mission was to lure the rat out. With bait."
Bait?
"Are you talking about Rhema and me?" Lance asked. The man didn't so much as glance their way.
"You," the hero-killer seethed, realization dawning, eyes darting around as if bracing for an ambush, which C only seemed to find amusing.
"Wrong. This is where you should be looking," he said, spreading his arms dramatically to allow what became, in Lance's century and a half of lived experience, the single most disturbing thing he had ever witnessed.
C's torso shuddered violently, ribs cracking outward with a wet, sickening crunch.
Beneath his skin, something massive and frantic churned, bubbling like boiling tar.
Lance watched, frozen in horror, as the man's flesh stretched into a translucent, paper-thin membrane, mapping out the desperate shapes of limbs trapped underneath.
Then it burst.