Hunter was having a rough night. Miracle’s birthday was coming up in less than two weeks and he still hadn’t thought of a really amazing gift to get him to celebrate it. He just couldn’t figure out what you get someone whose whole life is going to change that drastically. His friend was going to go from an unintegrated minor with a later than mine bedtime, to a level one human adult, tasked with literally improving the entire planet’s standing in the eyes of uncountable numbers of aliens.

Ellie was an easier prospect, he figured. When she turned sixteen a couple months before him, Hunter planned to get her the loudest whistle, megaphone, and firecrackers anyone made in the greater Midwest area, for her to take to SysPol Academy somewhere in Virginia. That ought to show them for taking away one of his best friends.

So Hunter was awake, trying to get comfortable in his scratchy blankets, when his tablet started blaring the angry, mutated goose alarm from his bedside table. He grumbled a few choice words he could have gotten extra chores for and rolled over to shut it off, figuring he’d just set it wrong for the morning, but then he noticed the entire screen was also flashing a bright red light. He snatched up the tablet and sat up to read it with a frown.

Infra Temporary Emergency Warning At approximately 0003 hours this morning, there was a catastrophic transdimensional event centered on [Plano, TX]. This has been tentatively classed as a [Type-B Emergency Situation], and as such the following measures are being taken:

Temporary staging outposts are being portaled into the area

All sapient beings within a ten mile radius of the event must evacuate immediately, preferably to one of the outposts or beyond if your immediate survival is not in question

Anyone rated middle [Ascendant] combat-capable or above in a five hundred mile radius who is currently on the [Emergency Response Listing] will be mass-summoned from your designated rally point to the staging areas to form a response. If you are not currently on the [Listing] and would like to be, follow the link

All others within the five hundred mile radius should consider basic lockdown procedures, as the full extent of the event has not been calculated properly at this time Summons will start at 0030 hours on the following [schedule]. Infra thanks you for your quick response times, and further updates will follow when more information is known.

“Huh,” he muttered, then flicked the tablet to another page and searched the distance from Willard to Plano. “Less than five hundred miles. I wonder who’s going.”

Since he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get any more sleep right then, Hunter got up and pulled on his slippers, his stick bracelet, and a warm robe, and was about to slip out of his window when he heard muffled voices from another part of the house. Instead of going out to watch what kind of crowd formed, he crept toward his parents’ room and listened in.

“...didn’t even know you were on the Listing. And are you sure you’re mid-Ascendant?”

“I forgot that I was, dear. I must have checked the box, when it first came up, but I didn’t give it a second thought. And Henry, I could handle Ascendants ten years ago. I’ll be lucky if that’s all they want me to do.”

Hunter wanted to burst in as soon as he understood what the conversation was about, but he was too stunned to move for a while. He and his friends thought they knew all about his mom being a secretly good fighter, but her being that good was a definite surprise. He pushed open the door and scrambled in to get a hug see what was going on, but pulled up short when he got a good look at his parents.

His dad was just wearing an old shirt and pajama pants, looking both like he’d barely gotten out of bed, but Hunter had never seen the look on his face before. It wasn’t that it looked like he was about to cry that was shocking, it was how defeated Miracle’s dad he seemed, even though Mom was right there, still in the room.

His mom’s appearance was what really got him, though. Her fiery red hair was up in a bun ok normal, and she was wearing her tough gardening pants still fine, but on top of those she was wearing actual armor what the. At least, he thought that the long, thick sleeveless coat was armor, since it was a dull metallic gray, moved stiffly, and had a few of the seemingly useless pinpoint lights on the shoulders that were part of a lot of Infra tech. She paused while wrapping a plate of metal to the back of her forearm with leather straps, raising an eyebrow at Hunter before turning to his father.

“Henry, can you go wake up Jack? I want to say goodbye to him as well.”

“Mom? Umm,” Hunter mumbled as his dad slipped out, ruffling his hair on the way past.

“I suppose you received the message as well, on that clever tablet of yours,” his mom smiled at him as she talked, finishing one arm and moving to the next. “How can I put this simply without offending my bright boy? I have to go for a while, bump, and I’m very sorry about that. It’s a responsibility, though, and I wouldn’t be who I am today if I didn’t take my responsibilities as seriously as they deserve.

“Come sit, and I’ll tell you a little story while we have time,” she said, patting a spot next to her on the bed. Hunter sat down, leaned against her shoulder, and listened.

“I know that I tell you that the apocalypse was a terrible, dangerous time when it comes up in class, but I don’t know if I’ve given you the right impression. When you lay it out as a series of events, especially to children who have grown up in the world that followed, it can seem almost orderly in how it happened. It wasn’t, not at all. I need you to believe me utterly when I say that when things went bad the way they did, it was completely incomprehensible. Some people may have been able to scrape out a minimal amount of agency during that time, your father was one of them, but mostly simply tried their best to manage. I’ll let your dad tell you his story if he wants, but this is mine.

“Your uncle and I were bad kids. We spent a lot of our childhood getting into trouble like you wouldn’t believe. We didn’t get along with our parents, and at that point in our lives, we didn’t with hardly anyone else either. I was at college, but only barely hanging on, and Ernie had skipped it entirely to get some stupid job, I can’t even remember what it was anymore. We’d spent the weekend drinking and complaining about our lives halfway lost in one of the state parks outside our hometown, and when Monday came we just decided to stay instead of heading back to our lives. That’s when we found the Slide, out in the woods.

“It wasn’t a big one compared to some, maybe about eight or ten feet tall, but it was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. You’ve grown up in a town where people can literally do magic, bump, but we didn’t. No one did. This was a sphere in the middle of the forest that showed a picture of a street corner in the middle of a dark, apparently gothic city, and we decided to set up camp next to it and see what happened. I was nineteen, my brother was twenty, and I suppose we were idiots.”

She gave Hunter a sad half-smile at that, and continued, “Three days later, we were bored, and halfway through the week of supplies we’d brought out, when Infra made contact. After that we were scared, confused, a million other feelings. One thing most people don’t mention, and still isn’t common knowledge in fact, is that being that close to a Slide interferes in a lot of Infra functions. Not only was our radio out, but the message system wasn’t working either, so there wasn’t any coordination to guard against invasion on our end. Ernie and I figured we’d block this Slide on our own, since we couldn’t raise any help.

“One thing that’s absolutely true that anyone will tell you about those days is that when the Slides opened, bump, it was a disaster. I don’t know what we expected to face, your uncle with his old revolver, and me with my knife I was too unsettled to hold properly, but we weren’t lucky enough to even attempt it. The sphere flickered at some point, fortunately when we were both awake, and dark red smoke burst out, coalescing into snakes the size of my arms spread wide, fingertip to fingertip. We ran, and the snakes were between us suddenly, and we were separated.

“I didn’t see Ernie for maybe a year after that, and my Infra continued to malfunction, so I couldn’t even keep in touch with him. I ran, and I heard the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, before or since. That was Omaha collapsing into a smoking crater, it turns out, so I’m glad I ran the exact opposite direction of that roar. It felt like a day, but it was probably less than an hour, when I met my girls.

“There were six of them, huddled together, about your age and dressed in scout uniforms. They were even more scared than I was, dirty, and hungry. They’d been out on a day trip when everything happened a week earlier, had gotten spooked by a Slide opening, and ran themselves the exact opposite direction from anywhere safe. Their teacher was one of the Infra-incompatible, so she’d died frothing at the mouth and in agony in front of them, and none of the girls themselves were old enough to be contacted. They knew even less about what was going on than anyone else, and had been following a stream for drinking water, but it hadn’t led them anywhere safe in a week.

“I convinced them, somehow, to let me help. I had a little wilderness knowledge and the Emergency Protocols did a good job of supplementing it, and we managed to get the seven of us fed and relatively healthy in a reasonable span of time. I had to fight, a lot, from that point on, because I’d decided to protect the girls, and I couldn’t let myself shirk or run away anymore. We moved around a lot, for around nine months to a year, I don’t know how long exactly. I tried to drop the girls off at each tiny bastion of civilization we found, but they refused to stay without me, and I refused to stay without finding Ernie.”

His mom swallowed and took a deep, shuddering breath, and that little pause broke Hunter’s heart she cries like me, but he just hugged her until she could go on.

“We met up with him outside the Kansas City siege. I only had four of my girls left, by then, and your uncle said I was just on the edge of being feral with grief and exhaustion. If you and Jack weren’t boys, you’d be named Marta and Laurie, you know. I still miss them,” she sighed. “Anyway, Ernie and the adventuring group he’d formed led us to Willard, the safest redoubt nearby. By then, my Infra was fully functional so we could keep in touch, so the boys moved on, and the girls and I stayed. I met your father, the girls grew up into fine young women, and the rest of the story would probably embarrass you if I told it.”

“So, umm, you’re an adventurer? I thought you were a villager like Dad.”

“Neither, not really. The paths aren’t as rigid as some people say, arranged on either side of a hard line between producer and protector. Mine is more complicated, but as long as I’m protecting my loved ones, or teaching them to do it themselves, I progress. I haven’t stopped gaining levels somewhat steadily in sixteen years, bump, just not as fast as that first year out in the wilderness. That’s why I have to go, you see. I won’t be protecting our family or my girls’ lives directly, but I will be fighting for what makes all of our lives possible.”

Hunter stayed latched onto his mother in a hug while she explained her departure to his brother with a much shorter talk, and both boys remained comfortably close to her while they waited in the town center for the summoning to occur. He realized, after the faint alarm went off telling everyone to get into position, that the four younger women she went to stand with, the closest thing Willard had to a dedicated adventuring team, and his occasional babysitters growing up, were his mom’s girls from her story. He was so distracted that he only saw Ellie at the last moment, sobbing quietly and holding her parents’ hands on either side, before she and the crowd of Willard’s hundred or so best combatants vanished in a soft flash of light.

Hunter sat out on the bank of the river with Miracle, the evening after his friend’s subdued sixteenth birthday party, both boys idly picking at the grass. With a large portion of their parent’s friends from the early days of the redoubt and their shared best friend both missing, there wasn’t the raucous get-together they may have planned otherwise. No one felt like celebrating much when they were so worried about what was happening elsewhere.

“So,” Hunter said softly, stopped, and then started again, “what’s it like?”

“It’s weird, Schmidt. I’ve been thinking about how I could explain it since I woke up this morning with it. I didn’t want to leave you hanging.”

“It’s okay if you, like, can’t?”

“No, no, I got this. It’s like I grew an extra limb, but it’s in my brain. I can move it around, and feel it like it’s always been there, but it obviously hasn’t.”

“Is it distracting? It seems like it would be, like if I got my tablet glued to my head.”

“It can be. You know that thing when adults are talking to you, then they take a tiny pause and their eyes twitch, but they just keep going? I think that’s when they’re accessing something. It’s never in the way, it won’t ever block anything, but you can still focus on it too much maybe.”

“Oh man, that sounds so weird,” Hunter mumbled, crossing his arms on his knees and resting his head on them. “Every time I think it’s fine and it happens to everyone, something always freaks me out.”

“Yeah, I get it. I signed up for that Emergency Listing, by the way. I don’t know if it was a good idea or anything though.”

“It’s definitely good and bad. I mean, I’m proud, really proud of my mom for going. But, yeah, I’m really scared too. I miss her. I think, if you ever need to go somewhere like that, the people close to you are going to feel the same kinds of things. But, umm, you know The Bears? In town?”

“Oh, those adventurers? Ellie was borderline obsessed with them for a little while, sure,” Miracle said with a nod, then a faint frown.

“Yeah. They’re great, right? My mom told me a little about them, I guess. She’s known them forever, or at least since the apocalypse, and now she’s on a team with them down in Plano, she said. It’s like, when you do those kinds of good, important things for other people, they notice. If you ever get called somewhere for an emergency, I know you’ll be doing your best to help people, and I don’t think there’s a lot that’s more important than that. I don’t know, man.”

Miracle nodded and put his head down too, both boys just watching the moonlight sparkle on the river for a while. Hunter had too many thoughts going through his brain, sure that if he said any more it would come out as even more confusing babble, so he just worked on his breathing and relaxed.

After a while, he broke the silence again. “Hey, is it rude, umm, if I ask if you got any magic powers?”

“Nah, but I didn’t get much. One active that I’m not allowed to use until we figure it out in training, a passive that’s pretty useful but you can’t see, and then a weird one.” Miracle held his hand out and a big metal hammer suddenly appeared in his grip.

“Whoa, like my wizard stick!” Hunter grinned, his eyes wide.

“Oh, yeah it really is, huh. When I get more levels, I’ll be able to store more than just the one. It’s weird, I can’t even fit the fancy mace my dad gave me in it, but I should be able to later.” He shook his hand out, the hammer disappearing just as suddenly. “Plus there’s no bracelet to go with it, they just go somewhere else. In me, I guess? It’s weird.”

“That is weird,” Hunter nodded in return, then reached into the small satchel he’d begun carrying his tablet in at all times and pulled out a box about the size of his fist, tied with twine, then handed it over. “Here, umm. I got you a present.”

“Oh, Schmidt. Hey, that’s really cool of you. I wasn’t expecting anything, not with all this going on,” Miracle said softly as he untied the gift. He opened it to find a silvery ring rattling around in the bottom, and lifted a questioning eyebrow at his friend.

“Ernie helped me pick it out. It’s a beacon ring. I don’t know how you’re supposed to use it, but he said it’s pretty easy with Infra. It makes some kinda beam of light that you attach a message to, and people can read it when they look over. He says a lot of defenders have started using them, for emergencies or rally points or whatever.”

“That’s so cool, Schmidt. Thank you!” Miracle put the ring on and then grinned wider after a brief pause. “Yeah, it doesn’t seem too hard to use.”

“That’s great! Oh, and almost the best part? It got delivered by a parrot.” Hunter fumbled with his necklace until it projected a little hologram of a brightly colored bird dropping the giftbox into his hands, then flying away. They watched it, over and over, and then a few other weird things the necklace had managed to capture.

After a while, both boys stretched out to look up at the stars as they came out, too worn out from the past two weeks to worry about much else.

School was closed while Hunter’s mom was gone, Miracle spent most days training and learning about all his new responsibilities, and Ellie was gone, so the redhead found himself bored most days. Mr. Jenkins had been working on a new version of his farmbot, and since there wasn’t much for them to do in the winter, Hunter was out in the west fields quite a lot, weaving between three encircling robots and trying to not get shocked. He was nearing some kind of wall with how confident he felt, though, and so a week after Miracle’s birthday, Hunter sat on Jenkins’ porch with his tablet, doing math instead of fighting.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he grumbled. “They’re fast, but they’re not faster than me.” He had specifically tested that one day, with a series of foot races against the bots and then a game he invented on the spot that involved dumping pebbles on the ground and grabbing specific colors. He was pretty sure that whatever metric Infra scored someone’s agility on, his was higher than any farmbot. That meant that he’d screwed up somewhere else on the equation he’d found on the tablet.

It was supposed to be simple, really. You took the robot’s attack skill, which Mr. Jenkins said couldn’t be higher than thirteen with how he built them, and added their agility, which had to be less than eight, because that was the maximum that Hunter’s could be at his age. Then you added the average attack roll, which was probably negligible since they were originally non-combatants. That all got multiplied by the multiple attacker modifier, and then compared to Hunter’s skill, agility, and roll, and from that he should have been able to guess how often he’d get hit, and what his skill in dodging and parrying was. It just wasn’t working, though.

“You’ve got the modifier wrong, son,” Mr. Jenkins muttered as he sat down, handing Hunter a glass of water. “Combat paths get reduced penalties, and you’re just a kid. You’d need to hit around a hundred ten, hundred twenty or so to have a chance on three bots, I’d reckon. Don’t rightly think that’s goin’ to happen at twelve.”

“Almost thirteen,” Hunter tried to argue, but his heart wasn’t really in it.

“You should keep practicin’, though. I hear tell that the one thing that really sets fightin’ folk apart from each other is how good they are without all them numbers. You can tell who really knows their stuff, compared to who’s just ridin’ the Infra ratings boost, mostly by who ends up on the ground at the end.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” he replied. Hunter went out in the yard and gave it a few more tries, but he just couldn’t avoid getting shocked into submission every time he was ganged up on. He walked home dejectedly soon after, paging through the news functions on his tablet, looking for any updates on Plano. The Bears had been passing messages from his mom for the most part, since it turned out that whatever caused the massive Slide-related accident down there screwed up part of her Infra again. There weren’t any updates, and Hunter ended up relaxing the rest of the afternoon and evening, looking after his getting less annoying little brother.

After he put Jack to bed, though, he gathered up his things and headed out again. He knew that strictly speaking, he was too young, it was too late, and there was a lightly suggested lockdown in place, all reasons he shouldn’t be heading out of the redoubt, but that didn’t stop him. A while past sunset seemed to be the only time Miracle could get free, and they had sort of an unspoken agreement to meet out at the river in the evenings.

“Hey,” Hunter mumbled as he shrugged out of his satchel and sat.

“Hey, Schmidt.”

“How was training? Learn anything new?”

“Nah, just more drills. It’s looking like a lot of those until the guy I was supposed to apprentice to comes back,” Miracle muttered, shaking his head, eyes down.

“That’s not so bad. Mom says the basics are everything, and I mean, she’s had me doing those for five years now. It probably can’t hurt to go a little while longer before things get scary.”

“Yeah, you’re probably-” Miracle stopped talking at the same moment that Hunter’s ears popped uncomfortably, then he frowned. “Hey, I just got a weird notice. Can you check your tablet to see if you did, too?”

Hunter took a look in his bag, but there was nothing new on his screen. “What did it say?”

“Just that there was unusual Slide activity detected. Then it asked if I wanted to investigate,” his friend said, pushing himself to his feet. “I said yes. Want to come?”

The two friends walked along the bank of the river, their steps careful but not entirely quiet. Miracle was gripping the mace his father made him tightly, and had one of his mother’s old shields strapped to his left arm, and Hunter thought he looked pretty awesome, or at least he would have if he wasn’t wearing overalls and beat up canvas shoes too. Of course, his own torn pants and pullover sweater didn’t make him look like a hero either, and neither did using his staff as a walking stick when they started climbing over the old rubble leading to the bridge.

“It’s under there?” Hunter was peering dubiously at the ramshackle bridge, built precariously on top of the ruins of the old one. He pointed at a particularly dark cavern between the chunks of concrete and steel, just past the first support. He was just glad it was still on the shore, and that they wouldn’t have to swim out and under the bridge to check it out, but it was still a very nope, just nope ominous looking proposition.

“Yeah. I don’t think it’s too far in, at least. But, umm,” Miracle trailed off as both boys watched a shape emerge from the cave into the dim light. Hunter squinted as he tried to get a better look, and frowned, not sure he liked what he was seeing.

His first thought, before he registered anything else, was that it waddled, and it somehow waddled run, back to the walls wrong. After that brief twinge of instinct, though, he started to take in details. What came out of the dark under the bridge seemed to be some kind of upright lizard person, but shaped irregularly, at best. It was about three feet tall, and just as wide, its torso draped in rags and making up most of its size. Its exposed limbs, head, and tail were all thick and short, covered in knobby brown scales, and it dragged a metal pipe more than twice as long as it was tall behind it as it made its way out onto the riverbank.

“Infra says it’s a Lizard Puppet Commoner, whatever that is. They’re strong, but they’re not tough, and they’re not really alive? I don’t get it,” Miracle mumbled as he looked at the being. “But, umm, Schmidt? It’s level forty-three. I’m level two. Maybe we should run.”

“Hey, maybe it’s nice. Not everything that comes out of a Slide is a murderous killbeast,” Hunter whispered. He started to say. “We can try to talk-” but was quickly interrupted when the lizard caught sight of the boys, opened its mouth wide too wide and screeched out a horrible noise like metal tearing. It flipped the pipe around to face them and did something Hunter couldn’t comprehend, and then the end pointed their direction was spewing a gout of green flame as the puppet monster waddled menacingly toward them.

“Okay yeah we definitely need to run,” the taller boy started to say as he pushed his friend back with his shield arm.

“Wait,” Hunter moved to the side, settling into a comfortable stance with his staff, and did some quick math in his head, the quickest math of his life so far. “Forty-three, commoner, two opponents, low agility,” he said under his breath, slowly but carefully retreating. “We can take it. We just have to not give it a chance to attack.”

“What?” his friend almost shouted, looking over at Hunter like he’d never seen him before. Miracle was always a strong kid, though, and now he was an adult, a Redoubt Defender, and after a brief bout of indecision, he squared up to face the approaching lizard. “So you have some kind of plan?”

“Yeah,” he replied, stepping forward and turning to the side, his wizard stick raised over his head as he stretched out into adjusting the lamp pose. He was a little closer to the lizard person than Miracle was, the boys about ten feet apart, and he cheered inwardly as the waddling creature veered in his direction. He controlled his breathing, watching the very poor footwork it was displaying, and then at the last moment before he had to worry about the flame being jabbed at him, he struck.

He’d spent days practicing this particular move, even if it looked so silly that it made Mr. Jenkins laugh every time he watched. He slid his left foot out from behind while keeping his weight on the right, and kept his grip tight on the end of his staff as he brought it down in front of him. He swung downward as hard as he could, dropping into a squat on just his right leg, the left extended out in front. There was a loud clang as his wooden staff crashed against the metal pipe in the middle of his successful silly way to chop wood, and then a sputtering, hissing noise as the length of green flame futilely tried to burn the packed dirt a full two feet to his right, the lizard’s pipe slammed to the ground.

Miracle was mumbling something over to the side, but the noise of the fire between them drowned out everything he said before shouting, “...Bullrush!” Hunter had barely started to move his weight from the back to the front to put more leverage into holding the lizard’s pipe to the ground, when his friend blurred so fast in from the side, only coming into focus as his shield slammed into the lizard’s face with a burst of air that blew his hair back. Miracle stepped in as the puppet thing stumbled back, keeping his shield forward as he swung his mace repeatedly, glancing blows off its head and raised arm and staying inside its guard.

Hunter got over his surprise at how quickly that attack happened and stepped in to help, staying at a comfortable distance to his friend’s left and walking forward as they pushed the monster back. He spent most of his effort swinging and flicking his staff, transitioning between make room on the shelves, chop wood regularly, catch that door and other positions he’d found worked well on the robots he practiced with. He aimed each blow at the metal pipe or the arm holding it, keeping that dangerous looking flame pointed well away from himself or his friend, and leaving Miracle with just the lizard’s free arm defending against his hammering attacks.

“Schmidt,” he managed in between strikes, “I don’t think we’re hurting it much.”

“Alright,” he replied. He’d noticed it too, that the first heavy blow with the shield seemed to crumple the thing’s weird face a little, but the subsequent hits with the mace weren’t doing anything similar. “We need more bonuses.”

After a moment, he disappeared his staff and immediately ducked down low to the ground as the lizard tried to swing its pipe at him. He stood up, barely wincing as he flipped the handkerchief and banged the back of his hand against the heavy metal, sending it up and out and seeming to unbalance his opponent. He darted forward, arms tucked in to his sides as he spun, only reaching out and summoning his wizard stick at the last moment of scything the wheat.

There was a crunch like old wood snapping, Hunter’s arms went numb as his blow collided with the lizard’s right knee, and his staff went flipping out of his hands at the same moment the thing’s leg crumpled and it fell backward. He stepped on the pipe, pinning it to the ground, as Miracle leapt onto the monster, his knees slamming into its middle before he started raining down pummeling blows straight into its face.

There were a few more disgusting noises, someone stomping on thick eggshells, or chewing hard candy loudly, before the heat singing his leg went away and Miracle rolled off the body, gasping. Hunter stepped forward to peer down at the mess of the puppet’s face, but there wasn’t much to it, just a dark hollow where the top and front of its head used to be. Satisfied it wasn’t going to get up again and attack, he let himself drop to the ground as well, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“So that could have gone better,” he mumbled, ready to apologize.

“Are you kidding me, Schmidt? I got ten levels! That’s insane,” Miracle panted, lying on his back on the ground. “I don’t know how I’m gonna explain it, but it’s still great.”

“Well, huh,” Hunter said after a few minutes of thinking. He got up, retrieved his stick and made it go away, and then picked up the surprisingly heavy and not really a pipe the lizard dropped. Then he wedged it under the body and rolled the hollow corpse down the riverbank and into the water, nodding as it floated away, slowly sinking as it filled up. “Now you can just say you did a quest out here, investigated that Slide or something.”

Miracle gave him another odd look, then shrugged and pointed the hand with his ring on it toward the cavern, and after a moment a soft, white beam of light appeared, stretching from the ground to as high as Hunter could see. “Neat,” they both whispered, then looked at each other and laughed before trudging back home.

After Miracle reported in that night, the redoubt went on a proper, enforced lockdown. The usual procedure for an open Slide discharging hostile entities, especially one so close, was for the Redoubt Defenders to go out, purge the invasive presence, and then shut down the slide. However, the shards needed to do that were more of a trade good than a staple for a town without easy access to a Source, and so no one had any on hand. Instead, the council decided that the best option would be to bring everyone inside the walls and wait it out.

It wasn’t the worst idea, Hunter thought, for another month or so. He wondered what kind of fuss his dad would raise when it got closer to planting season and he wasn’t allowed out to do it. But redoubts like Willard were built just for this kind of occasion, and so everyone was locked in until the crisis down south wrapped up, their higher level people could come back, and someone could get their hands on enough shards to shut down the slide.

Hunter spent his days practicing his forms with the staff he took from the dead lizard person, getting used to its weight and length. After the first session, he knew it was going to be a process, because seven feet of solid metal, no matter how narrow, was a pain to swing around. Miracle had identified it as a Weighted Metal Channeling Rod, so they both figured the spitting fire trick was one of the puppet’s abilities, and not something Hunter could replicate. He still tried every so often, just in case.

It only took Hunter three days of practicing, watching Miracle drill, and taking care of his little brother before he got intensely bored and decided to break lockdown. It wasn’t his first time, although it would be the first time he did it when it wasn’t just a drill, so he gave himself a day to prepare and decide if it was just a passing whim.

The trick to leaving Willard when all the adults would rather you stay in was to have a plan and stick to it, and Hunter and his friends each had their own methods. Miracle was an expert bluffer and could usually walk straight out the front gate no matter what the situation. None of the guards were really going to stop the first kid born in town, especially when he said his dad needed supplies to work on the wall he’d had a big part in building. Ellie used to use distractions, sometimes a bit mean spirited, but not often. He still remembered the time she’d managed to convince an entire guard shift to go round up lost chickens and the three of them had simply wandered out.

Hunter was more worried about word of anything he did getting back to his parents, so when he escaped, he had a different approach. That afternoon, when he knew his dad would be out of the house, he took his new staff from where he’d stashed it behind the house and brought it up to his room, along with one of the picks his dad kept around for digging rocks out of the field. Then he sat around the rest of the day, working on homework on his tablet, and making sure to project a faint disgruntled teenage aura every time he saw his father, and not the desperate, clawing to get out feeling he actually had inside.

After dark, he found his old knit cap and pulled it down low enough that it would be hard to see any incriminating red hair from a distance, then wrapped his hands with bandages to protect the new callouses the metal pipe’s irregular surface was giving him. He bundled up the new staff and the pick in one of his blankets and slung it over his shoulder, pulling his satchel over it to keep it secure. He opened his window slowly, paused to listen for any signs anyone was still awake in the house, and then slipped out and to the side, immediately wedging himself between the house and the wall.

Hunter shimmied up slowly to the roof, back against the building, feet on the wall, until he could tug himself up with a grunt, then took a break to catch his breath on the bumpy tiles. He waited until he saw the light from the patrolling guard’s lantern pass by twice before making his next move. His house, being so close to the wall, was a dedicated emergency exit, in case things really went wrong in Willard. If a mass evacuation was needed, people in town could come in the front door, head up to the second floor and then into the attic, and pop out the trapdoor on the roof, right in front of the ladder Hunter propped up against the wall. He went up the outside of the building simply because the attic access was creaky and much too close to his parents’ bedroom.

He snuck up onto the wall, then quickly here’s the hard part flipped over the outside edge and used the pick to make his way down the thirty feet to the ground. Luckily, his part of town was one of the first sections erected, and the old telephone poles making up part of this section of the wall were fairly easy to climb. He dropped down from the wall and into a crouch, stowing the pick and blanket, then waited for the lights to pass again before he headed toward the river on his own.

That night, he returned without incident, and his second and third trips out to the area around the bridge were calm as well. If he hadn’t seen and fought the puppet creature himself, he probably wouldn’t have believed there were any out there. The fourth night, though, he found them.

Hunter hid behind the tree, the same one he thought that they had his tenth birthday at, trying not to hyperventilate. There were four of the monsters on the riverbank, three identical to the one that first night, and the last one at least a foot taller, carrying a sword he thought looked too large to handle, but also looked too sharp to rely on that guess. From what he could tell with quick peeks around the tree trunk, the larger lizard was just watching the other three as they stood at the edge of the water and poked down into it with their channeling rods.

He knew some of the defenders had been making raids out here during the day, trying to exterminate as many of the aggressive commoners as possible, but he hadn’t heard any gossip about the larger guards. The Slide had only been open for a week, and that wasn’t nearly enough time unusual Slide activity for it to get larger, transdimensional event unless things were weird lately. He bit his lip hard to keep from cursing, trying to estimate how quietly he could run fast compared to how quickly he could move silently. He came to the same conclusion as the last four times, though, that he was stuck for now.

Finally, he heard the sound of flat, clawed feet stomping through river muck, and peeked once again to see the large lizard leading two of the smaller ones back to the cavern under the bridge. He waited until they were long gone before he weighed his options. On one hand, he was exhausted from four days running on half sleep and swinging the weighted pole around, and he was really feeling out of sorts from nearly blundering into an encounter he couldn’t win. On the other hand, he’d spent all that effort for this exact kind of situation, a lone lizard puppet that he was pretty sure he could take on. If he thought about it too hard, Hunter wasn’t exactly sure why he had been coming out here, but at least he knew for what.

He came out from behind the tree and crept toward the puppet, making sure he took every step carefully so he’d be as quiet as possible. Somehow he made it into range without being heard, shifted his grip on the staff to near the end, and stepped fully into slam that door now. He liked this position because he could feel how every muscle in his body contributed to the same movement, from his back leg pushing off the ground, his torso twisting in concert with his step, to his arms shoving out, it was all one steady line of force.

He’d aimed low with the pole for safety, but it made a satisfying crunch as the end collided with the middle of the monster’s back. He hit it so hard that the lizard thing flailed its stubby arms and slammed face first into the muck at the side of the river, without even having time to screech so lucky. Hunter followed up by repeatedly slamming his staff into the puppet’s back and shoulders, keeping it pinned down and occasionally cracking more of its shell-like torso, until it stopped twitching. Afterwards, he didn’t even give himself a moment of satisfaction, instead he just grabbed the thing’s channeling rod and ran home.

Hunter spent another week or so like that, his nightly excursions rotating between boredom, terror, and exhaustion. The night he brought home his third looted staff, he was running on empty as he came in the back door, and didn’t notice the lights were on in the living room until much too late.

“Hunter,” his dad called out, “we need to talk.”

He did a quick self-assessment, realized he had no plausible deniability, and so instead went with the default Midwestern politeness he’d been taught. He took off his muddy shoes and set them on the stand next to the door, then put his cap on the rack, before walking sheepishly in to probably get in a whole heap of trouble. His father was sitting in one of the old, comfortable armchairs, and Hunter made the effort to not drag his feet as he walked to the other and sat.

“I broke through and ascended, not too long ago.”

“What?” Hunter started, confused. “I mean, hey, that’s great!”

“It’s not that much of an accomplishment, really. A hundred and two levels in about sixteen years? But it’s progress. I’m only bringing it up because it’s an easy excuse for why I won’t need you on the farm this year, or at all if you prefer.”

“You know, umm, I don’t mind,” he stammered. “But how? Or, why?”

“Don’t tell your mother, but I took a look at her stats a few months back, completely by accident. She’s a transcendent, probably since not that long after Jack was born. She’s going to live a long time, Hunter, and that got me to thinking.”

“I don’t understand,” he mumbled in reply, “I hope she is, too, but I don’t get it.”

“Mmm, no. It’s a guarantee, actually. Transcendents aren’t actually technically human any longer, or whatever race they transcended from. They’re the same people, absolutely, don’t get me wrong, but apparently if you cut one open, it’s all essence channels and crystalline formations. Once you’re up to that level, you live for centuries, at least.”

“Wow,” Hunter breathed. “I didn’t know.”

“No one talks about it much, that’s all,” his dad said as he shook his head with a chuckle. “Got some ideas why, but it doesn’t matter. Point is, I went twenty years without knowing your mother, just about, and they weren’t nearly as great as the years with her. I don’t know what’s after this life, if anything, so I’ve got to make this one count.”

Hunter nodded with a faint smile, before asking, “But, you’d still need help on the farm.”

“Right. Except, well, best to just show you,” his father said, glancing around the room before gesturing vaguely at the coffee table. A shimmering white mist seemed to seep out of the floorboards, coalescing after a brief moment into a ghostly hand the size of Hunter, if not bigger. The hand deftly picked up the table, lifted it up near the ceiling and turned it fully around before setting back on the ground.

“What or, wow.”

“After I had that epiphany, I did some soul searching, which these days translates to being given an essence patron by Infra. You’re looking at a devout follower of the Ghosts of the Earth. Once I got myself used to directing these guys-”

“There’s more than one?” Hunter practically shouted, interrupting.

“Yes, yes there are,” his dad just nodded patiently as he continued, “Well, everything seemed to fall into place. But, as I was saying, planting season’s going to start soon, and you’ll be freed up to do what you’d really like to do. With some ground rules.”

Hunter was staring at the hand the farmhand, ugh dad joke while his dad spoke, but he turned back and quickly replied, “Two, no, three things. First, please tell me you’re going to have a spooky ghost pumpkin patch this year.”

His father looked at him, head tilted, for what seemed like a very long moment to Hunter, before bursting into a short bout of laughter and nodding. “That’s perfect, I just might. What else?”

“I still want to work in the garden. I know on the farm you just got me carrying things all day, but I think I do good stuff with the vegetables.”

“I think you do, too.”

“Last, umm,” Hunter’s face felt hot as he spoke, “I’m sorry. I’ve been out doing something, umm, stupid. I thought I was helping, but I don’t know if I was.”

“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, Hunter,” his dad sighed. “Look, I get it. If you asked me what I’d be doing now when I was your age, it wouldn’t be this. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t give up our family for anything, but I can see how life in Willard isn’t really ideal for kids. Look, huh. Can I tell you another secret, and you make sure this one doesn’t get back to your mother either?”

“Yeah, umm, sure?”

“I caught the tail end of what your mom talked to you about, the other night. It wasn’t exactly the whole truth, about when she came to town.”

“What, really?”

“She didn’t really come to town, meet me, and settle down, you know. Back then, we were both struggling with things way over our heads. I was in college, before, for civil engineering and agriculture management, and somehow that turned into being a farm boss here. When everything happened, and the only options seemed to be run, fight, or die, all I wanted to do was help make a little town that worked and stayed around, and I guess we succeeded.

“But your mom, well. You’re a lot like her, Hunter. She came to town and she was the most vibrant, alive person I’d ever met. That’s all true,” he trailed off as he spoke for a moment. “But she never really settled down, not that I could tell. You’re a smart kid, you probably figured out that her girls are The Bears. They all came of age a little while after you were born, and she would take them out for days at a time to train them, or let them experience the world. Times were bad, then, really bad, and she always brought those kids back. That wasn’t something you could count on, but I could count on your mother. I’m just glad you’ll never have to go through any of that, to be honest.

“The important thing was that she did all that carefully, and she did it right. I haven’t met that many adventurers in my life, but I will say this: there is no one better suited to being out in the wild and coming out unscathed than your mother, or your Uncle Ernie. So I’m going to make you a deal. You stop this sneaking out nonsense, please, and you pay extra attention to her lessons in the morning for the next three years, and I’ll convince her to let you go work with Ernie in the city for a while when you integrate. There’s a lot he can probably teach you about how things work these days.

“I can’t lose you, I just can’t. You be careful, you be safe, and I’ll be happy. Just listen to your mother, she knows what she’s talking about, and I doubt she told you to go do what you’ve been doing.”

A few weeks after Hunter’s thirteenth birthday, Infra gave the all clear regarding the Plano event. His mother came home, her girls came home, but not everyone was so lucky. For weeks, he couldn’t walk through town without seeing someone’s stoic, simmering anger or worse, sadness. But none of that mattered to Hunter, because Ellie didn’t come back. The new Pol assigned to the town said her parents were fine, they were just transferred somewhere else because of all the work they did down south, but she didn’t come home.

He and Miracle both kept up with her, messaging back and forth nearly every night, but it wasn’t the same. Worse, now that most of the defenders were back in the redoubt, Miracle spent even more days out with them. At first, he wasn’t far, just fighting back the infestation from the Slide under supervision, but once they’d shut it down, each trip out seemed to be longer and farther away. Hunter found himself spending a lot of afternoons alone, doing homework, gardening, and babysitting.

But he’d made a promise to his father, the first one he could really remember, and he did his best not to go out and do stupid things on his own anymore. It helped that morning exercises were getting more intense by the week, somehow more exhausting even though each form seemed to be shorter, more precise movements. He stumbled upstairs to his room one night in early summer, worn down from an after dinner practice session, and booted up his tablet to find a weird message.

You have an Incoming Transversal Message from [Veras ef Omen-Wanderer]. Would you like to accept? (Y/N)

Hello, child. You should receive this some time after the dimensional catastrophe, but it’s impossible to know just when. You have my sincerest condolences for any losses you may have suffered.

If you haven’t gathered, and I will not take any offense if that is the case, we have met before, if briefly. I plied my trade as a fortune-teller at a Festival to celebrate your planet’s progression as an Infra member, and I read your future path, as best I could. I also took upon myself a debt to provide you with certain information, and I hope to discharge that debt now, however poorly I have managed to do it in a timely manner.

I feel now that I can safely and accurately confirm that the [Overlord] assigned to your [Earth] is acting both in an honorable manner and toward an admirable goal. His machinations, while appropriately subtle and fairly creative as would be expected for someone as young as he, seem to be in line with similar circumstances that have occurred in the past. To answer your question quite literally, [Crushes-Valiant] is helping by fostering an environment in which [Humanity] can strive for greatness.

However, and this is the reason I am contacting you, child, he is failing. There has not yet been a [Divinity] enlightened on [Earth], although there are a handful of [Humans] who have reached that level elsewhere. Until that happens, for whatever reason it hasn’t, I fear these “broken Slide” events will continue in some form or another. There are both simple and complex reasons for this, but I am restricted from informing you of any of them.

Suffice it to say, I wish you luck and as much advice that is mine to give as I can. Feel free but not obligated to contact me in the future, if you’d like to hear from an old woman that fancies she can see what fate has to offer.

Hunter jammed his finger on the [Save as New Contact] button and rolled over in bed, suddenly fidgety and nervous. He wasn’t sure what most of that had meant, but he knew it made him vaguely anxious. For the first time in a while, he pulled his burrower card out from under his mattress and thought about what it meant to him. Whatever the bug’s pose signified for real, he had the weirdest feeling whenever he tried to puzzle it out. He was considering immediately messaging Veras back when exhaustion claimed him and he slept.

He only wondered much later if his inability to focus and retain his thoughts when he stared at the innocuous card meant anything at all, but by then it was too late to do much about it either way.