The wandering cloud lotus had three seeds currently. He dug carefully, tearing the chunk of rotten wood it was growing from up and pulling the whole thing into his mystic bag. Nic didn’t know if killing the lotus would ruin its magic, or simply prevent it from growing new seeds, but he didn’t intend to find out the hard way.

This was exactly the treasure he needed. A way to quickly leap between locations, without spending hours wandering to-and-fro. If he considered the time he’d spend traveling back time saved, this would actually double the range he could explore in a day without camping in the field.

It didn’t make him stronger directly, but it would help him grow.

Satisfied, he let the snake free of the adhesive in a show of mercy and watched the terrified beast retreat. Inkspur yelled threats from his shoulder as it quickly slithered back into the leaves.

But Nic was satisfied with his gains. No need to pick on the weak.

If anything, his next stop was a mission of mercy.

He headed back through the forest, following the wolf’s directions and moving cautiously. His danger sense wasn’t warning him of any traps, but he’d already learned that could be deceptive; his foot came to a stop just above a construction of sharpened wooden stakes shaped like an open set of jaws. Curious, he stepped back and prodded it with a branch. Nothing happened. There was no mechanical power or spring to trigger the trap.

It was almost definitely based in rune-magic.

As he walked there were numerous more traps just like it. Snares formed from barbed wire. Hollow tubes of bamboo filled with poison needles and aimed across the natural walkways of the forest. He was navigating a bristling fortress of traps.

And honestly?

He was impressed.

The fastest way he found through was to navigate through the heights of the trees, leaping from one to the next with sticky hands. Unfortunately, the trap-maker hadn’t quite adjusted their mindset to the vertical realities of living in a forest.

At the core of the trap-field was a small clearing. A pleasant stream ran between the moss-covered roots of enormous trees, and an enormous tortoiseshell made a kind of hut along the river. A young boy was playing in the dirt, scratching out runeworks with his finger, but Nic didn’t see...

He carefully stepped out of the brush. Slowly, so as not to provoke a hasty trigger finger. He raised his arm and waved to Shane.

Moira appeared out of the jungle. She’d always been there, but her skin had blended in so well she was impossible to see. Even his danger sense had only been able to locate her vague aura rather than her actual body.

“Oh.” She mumbled. She was scratched up, scarred, and clearly suffering from her time in the wilds. “The little pink one…”

“NAK!” Shane dove forward, wrapping Nic into a hug. He had the appearance of a feral child with tufted hair and dirty cheeks, but Nic could tell Moira was doing her best to keep the grime from really piling up on him.

“Small child, I also deserve ATTENTION. And scratches under the neck.” Inkspur lazily leapt onto Shane’s shoulders.

Shane’s eyes were very wide. “Are you a dragon?”

“Yesss, a most vicious and terrible dragon.” Inkspur lied.

“Inkspur, tell him you’re a wyvern.” Nic tutted. But Inkspur, oddly enough, chose not to translate that. “Inkspur…”

Moira was looming over the little group and watching Nic carefully. She had her hands on her crossbow still, although she’d lowered it a little.

“Inkspur, why don’t you tell her my name is Nicolas.”

She paused. Her finger edged slowly away from the trigger. “Nicolas? Like a human? Are you seriously a human trapped in that weird pink body?”

“Kind of? It’s a complicated story.” Nic chose not to tell her that all monsters were that way. Not now, not with Shane around to hear.

The boy was happily admiring Inkspur and petting his scaly head, laughing as Inkspur blew rings of poison smog and spat little darts of venom through them. Clearly, being a child had sheltered him from some of the horror descending on his world. All he knew was that he was camping in the woods and the world was full of magic now.

“Your traps are pretty good.” Nic complimented.

“Yeah? How’d you get past ‘em then?” She replied, her voice sour.

“By being really good.” Nic grinned. But then, relenting, he added, “And you forgot to trap the treetops.”

“Damn.” The way that one mistake made her entire face go white with stress told Nic everything. If Matteos was too kind for this new world, Moira was too paranoid. She was too fixated on the chance of death and trying to cut off every road to disaster.

“I can help you make some more.” Nic said comfortingly. He had to get Inkspur’s attention before the wyvern would translate- the tiny drake was happily telling Shane gory war stories, deeply exaggerated from Nic’s actual exploits.

“I- thanks.” She mumbled, wiping the hair from where sweat had stuck little loose threads of blonde to her cheeks. “I could use the help.”

---

An hour later Nic and Moira sat together, weaving traps out of wooden stakes, lengths of woven grass, and runes drawn in mud. Nic was learning a surprising amount. Moira’s trapmaking glyphs were largely of the same type as his Totemic Petroglyphs, close enough for the two to be combined. She had an assortment of triggering mechanisms, ranging from touch to motion, and including a simple warning glyph that could set out an alarm whenever a living being passed by. The rest of her assortment were limited to basic mechanical forces to make the traps tick.

The main benefit was that all her designs were stealthy, durable, and cheap. Considering even Nic’s danger sense couldn’t detect them, the traps had amazing potential for growth- and Nic was glad to learn as many new glyph-forms as he could.

“So…” Moira eventually said. “You’ve got a story.”

“Honestly? I won a lottery.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“He UNDERSELLS the MAGNIFICENCE OF THE JOURNEY. Across STARS! Through COSMIC SEAS! A thousand worlds between his own and yours!”

“Relax.” She reached over to scratch Inkspur, making him purr as her fingers dug in to the sweet spot behind his horns. “You’re way too cute for the ‘fight me in a Denny’s parking lot’ attitude.”

Nic just grinned.

“So really, you’re human- but from another world?”

“Well, I was one-eighth devil, but-” She seemed skeptical, raising an eyebrow. “But yeah. I won a lottery to come here, and uh, take over your world?”

She sighed slowly. “It’s hard to believe this is- in some fucked up cosmic sense- normal. I woke up one day and my apartment block had been cut in half like a slice of cake. You could see into all the apartments. Then a bunch of buzzing insects started pouring in and we all had to run. Everyone packed into the halls… It was chaos…

“Shane’s parents have been missing from the first. I think they were in the wrong half of the apartment- and who knows where that went. We ended up in a jungle. There were about forty of us at the start, but when you travel in big numbers, I guess the slow get picked off quick…”

“What class did he get?” Nic asked.

Her lips squeezed into a frown. “Priest.”

Nic froze. The thought of Shane being claimed by Pathos and Logos made his fist curl.

“Yeah.” Moira noted, voice bleak. “I don’t like it either. He’s got some kind of rune magic that gets stronger every time it gets used, and something he calls a ‘guardian angel’ whispering in his ear. Sometimes I see a shadow with wings floating behind him…”

Nic nodded. Very, very slowly. Shane probably thought this was an imaginary friend. Certainly, he was too young to understand it was a predatory System trying to get its hooks into him while he was still young.

He’d have to do something about that.

But for now, Nic would work on Moira. “So, wanna learn how to combine the abilities from your Shards?”

“I’ve been trying! The damn things are like oil and water.” She complained.

“C’mon. Show me.”

Sighing, Moira stood up and loaded a bolt into her crossbow. She’d ran out of the System-made ones, Nic noticed. Her handcarved ammunition was crude and tipped with sharpened wooden points instead of proper metal heads.

She braced, aimed at a tree, and fired. The bolt split into three and two of the copies sailed off to the side while the middle one thudded into the trunk. She wiped sweat from her brow- her aura was weak enough that even a single shot was an exertion.

“See? I tried to switch it but…”

Nic nodded. She’d actually lost control of the aura inside the shot immediately after firing. Nic paused to puzzle out why and had her shoot two more times, alternating skills. Both times she fed aura into the skill but immediately lost control after.

And Nic got why.

She was thinking of the Shards as part of the System. She was using the skills as if they were separate, distinct things, molds that she poured energy into rather than a part of her like a muscle she could flex.

“Moira. I’ve got an idea. You know how the energy in your body feels, when you push it into the bolts?”

“Suuure. Like I’m burning in a good way.” She flexed her hand.

“Push it into your fingertips, but hold onto it. Then, move it to your feet. Try to rotate it through your entire body, slowly, over time.” He instructed. He could feel the aura shift around her as her Essence began to move, slowly, churning through her veins. Unlike the clean, untainted meridians of Nic’s week old body, Moira clearly had trouble circulating Essence. There were turbulences and violent disruptions as she pushed it from hand to foot and back again.

“Now… Try to focus on getting stronger. On the idea of your own strength growing…”

He watched as the cloud of aura around her tightened, focusing down. That one image in her mind was resonating through the whole of her cultivation. Her fist clenched as the scattered, loose field of energy shrank to a nearly skin-tight glow.

Nic grinned. “Hold onto that feeling. Do you see how the energy changed? Like, how it’s reacting to your thoughts? It does what you want. When you fire a bolt you need to push your will and your desire into the energy, to leave it, I dunno, imprinted with the idea of what you want.”

She turned back to him, eyebrow raised. “But that’s nonsense. That’s like, murder-yoga.”

“Yep. Didn’t say it made sense.” Nic just shrugged with an easy smile. “Cultivation is weird. It’s one-half eating everything you find and one-half spiritual mumbo jumbo. It’s ridiculous, but it’s the closest thing to magic we’ve got.”

“And you’re good at it.”

Nic paused to think. He’d never thought of himself as very good at cultivation, but the truth was, since becoming a monster he’d progressed easily. The System helped of course- but Nic was able to control his aura and Essence in a way that came far more naturally to him than it did to Moira. His cultivation path had been relatively smooth.

“Sofia? Am I good at this?”

“Yes, Nicolas. You have somehow just noticed you are good at this.”

“And who’s Sofia?”

“Oh, my like, pocket person. She lives in my head. It’s a whole thing.” He waved it off. “She’s like a schoolteacher who breaks into your home to make you learn how to cultivate.”

For the first time-

Maybe just because of how absurd that statement was-

Moira laughed.