On the southern edge of The Horny Boar Fields, where the offshoot of Suchi's one river flowed.

A reed-boat carrying three figures came around the bend, its sail billowing despite the lack of external wind. Hugging the prow was a man in a giraffe-mask muttering a prayer. Along the deck, a woman in a tiger mask was jousting with imaginary enemies, her steps at times graceful, at others, faltering.

At the stern, Henry was steering the rudder and observing the dry lands spreading before them as the Grey-Wolf Forest faded to their rear, the over-sized beast cremated with its minions.

Ahead, herds of boars were frolicking along the fields with noobs trying to kill them for experience points. A dense congregation of people had gathered at the military encampment where King Leon and his bannermen were preparing for the hunt, oblivious to their target having already been snatched up.

Caramel cancelled a thrust. “Bob...it's a bit...wearing that mask after all that...”

Henry, throwing away the monkey mask, had swapped to a wolf one. They would need to enter the military encampment to complete the ritual for this part of the lesson, and the process would be smoother if they went unrecognised.

“I guess,” he replied, “but I've expended my others already. Want to swap?”

"Heck no. Gives me the heebie-jeebies."

As they arrived at a spot where several other boats were banked, he ground their vessel alongside them. The footprints of the trainers who'd preceded them split off in several directions, most of them avoiding the camp, not wanting to get signed up for another of The Empire's suicidal schemes.

As Henry made to disembark, he heard a splash behind him and suddenly found himself falling forward, his slow reaction speed once again preventing him from correcting the mistake. The second before he ate dirt, he spun around to identify what had caused this mishap, only to be rewarded with a tiger’s mouth pressing against his own.

By strange circumstances, he and his guildmate had fallen off together and kissed.

Caramel smiled at a note of revulsion in his flat gaze. “Just close your eyes and imagine I'm Silver."

Slipping both their masks up, she pretended to go in for a proper round.

He quickly blocked her with his hand, feeling the bristles of her avatar's moustache on his palm. “It’s not that. Did you get a notification, too?”

Before The Ring of a Thousand Souls, all lesser artefacts must bow! Worldpiercer gives Emperor Wisguh as an offering.

In an instant, a glittering stream of soul lights had swum from the rapier in her hand, up to her mouth, to his mouth, and then down to the rusty ring.

“The sword can steal souls?" she wondered. "It didn’t say that in the description.”

“Hidden feature, I guess," Henry said flatly.

CRUNCH!

He peeked over Caramel's shoulder.

The giant fish from earlier, failing to eat this boat as well, coughed up a tuft of reeds. It seemed to have been taking damage ever since it had entered fresh water, and swallowing this inedible matter depleted the last of its health reserves, causing it to croak, flip onto its side, and sink.

"Weird," said Caramel.

"Off me, please."

“Sorry." She sprang to her feet and helped him up.

“Didn’t you notice when you dealt the deathblow?”

“To be honest," she paused, wondering if he'd get pissed at her for her negligence, "stabbing was so repetitive that I started browsing the forums.”

Despite her level, she'd had to stab the giant wolf many, many times, the creature having the inflated healthpool of a 5,000-man boss.

Henry didn't get angry.

He rubbed the back of his head, feeling mud caked all along it.

He'd refused to absorb the slain wolf's soul, in one final act of resistance against this convoluted tutorial. But, no, it seemed he was 'destined' to fight it out until the very end.

The exact role of the monster souls continued to be an enigma to him.

“Oh well," he said with resignation. "Let's continue.”

'Fate' still had one big bad beast in store for him. Henry was a bit less worried about the next one than before. Since the over-sized wolf had only turned out to be a 5,000-man boss, a leap in difficulty of merely ten times from the boar, the next shouldn't be impossible.

The three of them, the bald-trailer still trailing silently behind, headed to the military encampment, made their way through the bustling crowd of armed noobs.

Inside, the bald trainer’s friend was pacing nervously in front of a tent. When he saw them approaching, he sprinted forward and embraced Instructor Apari, pressing his face against the latter's shoulder and soaking it with tears.

From what Henry'd deduced, this ‘friend’ was actually the bald trainer’s husband. In the notes he'd commissioned this morning, it was stated the Instructor had fled to Suchi from his homeland to evade persecution for homosexuality. The local culture was quite welcoming in this respect; in fact, the religious cult that governed the region’s NPC faction, the Ibanpita or 'Skypeople', happened to be composed exclusively of gay people selected from amongst the Claypeople caste. This practice had a tangled history, tracing back through a hermaphroditic god who’d once been influential in the region onto even more ancient eunuch scientists.

Caramel nodded at the two. “How cute."

Henry groaned. "It’s hard for me to get into it.”

“Why?”

“That bald guy tried to cheat me out of the over-sized boar corpse. He also sabotaged my plans.”

Henry’d noticed in the bunker that the guy had not met Caramel before. During the boat ride, he’d reviewed footage of their interactions and discovered the Instructor allowing himself to be caught by the Slum Empire when they were organising the assault force to enter the Grey-Wolf Forest.

Caramel blinked a few times. "Should I...you know?”

Henry shook his head. "I don't care. Everything that passes today has just happened to a lowly, anonymous retiree."

The bald-trainer's actions were probably another product of 'fate' manipulating his circumstances.

Henry yelled out. “Hey, bald trainer's friend, hate to break up the reunion, but where’s the donkey?”

The friend looked around in confusion. “Sorry, I was...it must have wandered off while I was distracted.”

Henry wondered if this was another part of the plot. The donkey had been kind of weird, too, now that he thought about it.

As luck would have it, while Henry’d yelled, his voice had been overheard by someone passing by with a boar draped over his shirtless shoulders.

The meathead stopped. “Peculiar...the mask is different...HOWEVER,” he pushed his glasses up his nose, “the height and the build are the same! Big Brother! Big Brother!”

“What’s that?" asked another meathead. "Huh? Hey, Big Bro!”

“Big Bro!”

Henry pretended not to hear them.

If he hadn’t had to kill the Wolf Emperor, he would have been gone long before their return.

Caramel's left eyebrow raised high at the sight of twenty or so shirtless dudes bowling through the crowd. “Yo, those dudes seem to be calling out to you.”

“Doubt it. Bald guy, let's skedaddle.”

As he made to leave, Caramel, much faster than him, slipped forward, twirled him around, and held him in place.

The meatheads grinned stupidly, arriving as a tribe of muscle and shirtless testosterone - the Russian girl seemed to have used her death to finally escape.

Dan raised a handsome hand. "Hi, Big Bro."

"Dan." Henry nodded.

He didn't give any further acknowledgement. As side characters who'd already fulfilled their narrative purpose in his story, they should rightly have vanished in the previous episode, and it was best not to engage further with them.

The Battleaxe Meathead stepped forward, flexing his bicep. “Big Bro, I can still feel that super strength coursing through my muscles! You got any more of it?”

“All out I’m afraid," Henry lied, Scholars being able to make Stat Scrolls on command.

“That’s unfortunate.”

Henry felt a teasing nudge to his side. "Don't say it," he whispered.

“Don't say what, Big Bro?” Caramel exaggerated with a different voice, imitating someone.

Henry grimaced in disgust.

While his guildmate continued with the private banter, the meatheads reenacted their heroic deeds during the wolf attack. Arriving at the present, they had finished farming boars and were awaiting the final hunt for The Wolf Emperor.

“Since you guys are here,” said Henry when they'd settled down, “we were about to undergo the next ritual for the tutorial. If anyone wants in, make sure to absorb the XP from your wolves quickly if you haven't already.”

Initially, he was going to pay some strangers to sit in. Six players minimum were needed, but five of these could be randoms of any level. The main requirement was possessing the bodies of five wolves from the same pack, which he happened to have collected with the first pack he’d slain riding on the donkey. With the meatheads here now, though, he might as well let them level up, too. Maybe 'fate' wanted him to utilise them for the next boss monster rather than ditching them with the bald trainer and forcing them to restart the tutorial from scratch.

Dan raised a handsome hand of questioning. “What wolves, Big Bro?”

Henry guessed he'd been wrong - he might be doing this last one solo. “You mean you guys slew all those wolves without picking any up?”

“Were we supposed to?”

Henry and Caramel shared a look of disgust.

Noobs...

“Well," said Henry, "that sucks for you guys. You, you, you, you, and you, mind helping me?”

“Sure, Big Bro!”

“Sweet as!”

The others, lacking anything better to do, wanted to tag along to watch.

Henry became serious all of a sudden. “Listen, for you bros, there’s a much more important task. One of our own, you may know him by the name of Donkey Bro, has gone missing.”

They gasped.

Henry nodded gravely. "Now, it's your job to track his whereabouts. We don't want a bro to get eaten by the giant wolf bro, bros."

After sending them away, he and the others went inside the tent, where a boiling pot of herbs had been prepared.

For the ritual, a pentagram formation was inscribed with a wolf at each point, then the group sat in the middle and held hands.

When the bald trainer chanted the ancient words and his friend anointed them, they once again relived the monster memories. As a pack, they chased a figure on a zooming donkey, unable to catch him as he worked them down one by one with arrows. Whenever the health of a packmate reached zero, they felt their psyches being merged with the ailing wolf, experiencing its pain, fear, and rage.

Caramel, indifferent to this noob stuff, summoned a sofa to lie on and logged onto the official Suchi forums with an anonymous ID. In the Slum Empire’s thread for hunting The Wolf Emperor, she pretended to be tracking the monster. Eventually, she got banned when a mod realised the coordinates she'd been giving drew a bear strumming a guitar, an ironic meme in 2050.

While Henry and some of the bros were doing the ritual, Dan outside in his handsome search had stumbled across two unusual furballs in a bush. After much chin rubbing, he grabbed them and decided to ask Big Bro for advice.