Even if monsters were able to enter the Oasis and dominate the wildlife present with their superior capabilities, they were still rare existences. It took an hour after the water elementals had left before creatures began to venture forth once more, but death was simply part of life in the harsh desert environment. The dead camels represented days worth of food for smaller scavengers and they went at it with a will, gorging themselves on meat until they could barely walk before stumbling away to digest their feast. Soon only the bones and offal were left as a marker to what had occurred, and Kairen figured that even they would vanish beneath the quickly growing carpet of plant life that had taken root.

Even if he personally didn’t have anything to fear from Monsters, Kairen still found himself unable to sleep that night. The Oasis was his domain and it had been violated today. While a part of his mind argued that what they had done to the camels was no worse than the killing that the hawks or foxes had done, his heart wasn’t in it. At a spiritual level something wrong had occurred, even if he was unable to pin down why he felt that way. Perhaps it was his intuition that the elementals had taken more than they ought to from the camels. More than blood and water were needed to create new life and something that was part of the camels had been perverted into the creation of twenty-seven new monsters. Regardless of the cause, Kairen was unsettled and spent the night watching for any other intruders. Even if he could not act as a protector, he could still perform the role of a witness and give meaning to otherwise senseless violence by letting it shape his future actions and growth.

Dawn arrived far too slowly for Kairen’s state of mind, and with it the anticipated screens once more appeared. The middle and right windows were greyed out as Kairen had expected, but the left option, the creation of a ward against monsters, was also unable to be selected. It had taken on a greyish hue as well, even if it was a shade far closer to blue than either of the other choices. Unable to make a selection, Kairen helplessly sat down to wait. It was a slow process, but after an hour of waiting and watching his surroundings from his peripheral vision Kairen came to the conclusion that the left window was slowly turning blue. He assumed that once it was fully blue, he would be able to select it and spend something on creating the barrier that it promised. Alternatively, he could hold off on selecting it and wait. If he could see one option changing color then it made sense that the others were as well, even if it was taking a lot more time. Two or three details made Kairen hesitant to test it out quite yet. The first was that he didn’t know how long it would take before he could select an upgrade to the spring or the wildlife. If it was only a couple of days it was one thing, but it might be months or even years. Kairen didn’t have any experience with Oases growing, but he figured he would have heard if it was something that happened quickly and easily. Instead, the major cities had annual festivals dedicated to their Oases. If it took a month or more, then taking a day to get a defensive barrier wouldn’t delay it all that much.

The second major reason Kairen didn’t want to wait was the presence of monsters. Both previous upgrades had been able to be selected immediately at dawn, and he had had the ability to choose the barrier option at those times as well. It wasn’t hard to tie his inability to do so this morning to the attack of the water elementals. The ill-seated unease he felt might be because they took something from him besides his bountiful water. It also provided a better reason for the presence of the barrier. You didn’t need defenses against something that couldn’t hurt you, so having monsters in his Oasis was probably bad for him in some manner or other. Keeping monsters out would prevent him from losing any more of whatever it was the elementals took and might end up getting him those upgrades faster once that was taken into account.

The final reason for taking the barrier as soon as it was available was somewhat petty, but Kairen was getting tired of having the screens blocking his vision. He wanted them gone and wasn’t able to select an option to make them vanish like he had previously. They weren’t tied to a location like the Judgement stones, so he wasn’t able to simply walk away from them. In irritation he swiped his hand through the screen, only to blink when they dispersed.

He panicked a little at that, not wanting to wait till the next dawn to get his barrier when a monster could attack at any moment and set him back further. Random arm movements didn’t seem to do anything, and just made Kairen feel silly and glad that no one else could see him. He had a feeling that he looked stupid enough that even the animals present would judge him if they could. Speaking took a lot longer to test, and Kairen unsuccessfully exhausted all the magical words he could remember with no success to show for it.

“What does it take to get you to appear?” He grumbled in frustration, before staring. “That’s it? All I had to do was ask?!”

Kairen desperately wanted to hit something and was irked that his incorporeality prevented him from properly venting his frustration. Fortunately, it seemed that the delay in getting the window back had allowed him to accumulate enough stuff to choose the monster barrier, and Kairen selected the upgrade with a closed fist, enjoying the momentary feedback as the window shattered and vanished.

A semisolid dome immediately formed around the Oasis, and Kairen knew instinctively that on some level it was on the same plane of existence as he was. The animals seemed to be unable to notice it as they freely entered and exited, but Kairen knew and confirmed that he would find it solid to the touch. Before he had been tethered to this spot, but now he was truly walled in.

More confirmation of the barrier’s effectiveness was given when a spot of sand outside the barrier began to quiver, before a buried water elemental emerged from its hiding spot. Not needing to breathe or truly worry about being crushed it had hidden underground during the day to avoid the sun’s dry rays of heat and would likely have revisited the oasis once dusk arrived to once again feed and spawn. Its future plans were obviously foiled by the barrier, which not only prevented it from entering, but actively forced it away, driving it out into the Sands where it would slowly evaporate. It might have been vindictive, but Kairen felt a smile creep onto his face as he imagined the water elemental slowly shrinking down to nothingness.