The Habitat.

Earthfriend Jozsi was urging his slow-moving, nailless fingers to continue working the balm. He'd been exhausted after days and nights of kneading, after being reprimanded for his part in the accidental release of Friend Rikard with the Alchemist who’d vanished. The sweat beading on his forearms was cooling down. The sun was beginning to set. Soon, an offshore breeze would be whipped up as the air from the steppes rushed out to the sea. He wondered whether his remaining strength would be enough to resist being blown away. Maybe that would be nice, being whisked off and dunked in the harbour.

“Excuse me.”

Joszi felt a finger prodding his side. Its owner was an Offworlder in novice gear. They must’ve been an initiate who’d been delayed by the curse.

Earthfriend Jozsi’s mind had been so frazzled that it only now registered that the Offworlder had been struggling to get his attention for a while.

“Sorry. How can I help?"

“That's alright; I'm an expert at handling delays. Do you know where Archfriend Nagy is? I have a letter to give her.”

The initiate held up a sealed envelope, smiling in a way that was entirely out of touch with the sombreness of the situation.

Jozsi strained to lift his arm in the direction of a patient table surrounded by a squad of guards. “She...ages ago.”

“Oh, who’s managing The Society then?”

Missing the initiate's hand tensing around the envelope, Jozsi swung his arm around to point out an Earthfriend with translucent, star-speckled flesh, who was handing a cup of ice water to another dog-tired assistant.

“Duke Franco was willing to take over. I wish I possessed half his—“

The recruit did a half turn and sped away, mumbling to himself crazily about remembering a hat.

Jozsi was too tired to ponder the odd behaviour further.

Henry scrunched the letter into a ball.

He supposed this was punishment for taking it easy and not investigating The Empire's scheme thoroughly.

It was natural that they would replace The Society’s leadership with their goons. This would both make enacting the assassination easier and help them catch ‘Dr Iskander’ if he attempted to rat them out. Ramiro’s minions were probably positioned all around The Slums with orders to kidnap any unrecognisable NPC Scholars.

Archfriend Nagy should’ve been conscious, the curse taking longer to affect higher-level Earthfriends. However, if she were naive enough to drink something given to her by The Empire's lackeys, the symptoms could be reproduced easily by mixing an Immunaffliction System suppressor, like the balm, with a sedative to knock her out.

Back at the forested area, Donkey Bro was napping amongst the bloody remnants of monsters that must’ve attacked it. When Henry arrived, he used his ring to swap identities, activated a Communication Stone, and spoke to it in a drowsy, feeble voice.

“Dhaka_Sniper_1351, hello, can you hear me?”

“You’re coming in clear, Dr Iskander.” An announcer in the background was introducing a duellist, followed by a roar from the crowd. “How was your nap?”

“Rejuvenating. Tell me, are you able to put me in contact with King Ramiro?”

Henry had grown so fed up he was going to just blackmail The Empire into ending the scheme. It may not be a satisfying conclusion, but he had more productive uses of his hours than playing tic-tac-toe with pre-schoolers.

“It says he’s logged off in my friend’s list.”

“Ask a guildmate of his when he’ll be back.”

While she was making the inquiry, Henry killed a random Duskwalker Harpy that dropped down on him from a tree above.

“They said he’s having dinner,” Sniper eventually replied. “You’ll have to wait an hour. He doesn’t answer calls during meals.”

By an hour, Sniper meant a real-life hour, which would translate to four in-game with the time-dilation.

Henry closed his eyes, his body convulsing a little.

Four hours...

“Hello? Hello? Dr Iskander?”

The Cap...

A master of everything...

What's another four hours relative to 19 years...

No matter how much he consoled himself, though, he couldn’t block out a rising irritation. It seemed to even be infecting his senses. He felt his parched lips. he felt the sweat glueing his collar to his neck. He smelt the odour of the dead Harpy which, despite being level 5, had not yielded any EXP because he hadn't specialised yet precisely due to the Slum Empire's antics.

As if intending to push him past the edge, a blowfly landed on his cheek. He tried to strike it, but, with his abysmal reaction speed, it zipped away too quickly and he ended up slapping himself pointlessly in his own face.

Henry snapped.

God dam it! F-word!

Maybe after using The Cap, he would become like a Buddhist monk capable of sitting calmly while being engulfed by flames, but the key issue was he hadn’t used The Cap yet. For the moment, he was still, deep down, the person who’d landed at Suchi’s docks this morning.

And, right now, that person was super annoyed!

This whole day, he’d been charitably ignoring The Empire's misdeeds. When they put a mole inside his organisation and cornered him to uncover his identity, he’d reasoned that he used moles, too, that he also insisted on inspecting suspicious characters. When they set about assassinating his trainers, he’d thought who hadn’t ordered a couple pragmatic hits? When they tried scamming him of the gold he’d put up for producing the cure, that hadn’t stirred much ill-will because, frankly, he would earn more than the cost of the gala riding back to it from here.

All these blunders were, honestly, forgivable for him - except one. Perhaps it would be a small issue for others, but, for him, it was a violation of his most sacred, sancrosact resource...

His time.

Don't waste his time.

Yes, no matter his tireless efforts to be carefree, old habits died hard and, to his core, he was an obsessive clock-watcher who monitored and rationed his minutes like a traveller lost in a desert taking sips from an increasingly-light canteen. And, throughout this lengthy day, these slum orangutans had dragged their knuckles up to him and demanded again and again a swill of his drink, expecting him to just wait—that vile word, wait—in the joy-sapping Suchi heat.

From the very start, they'd ruined his schedule! What happened shortly after stepping ashore? He'd been made to waste twenty minutes—or, more precisely, twenty one minutes, 19 seconds—before the greedy Togavian Merchant they’d hired to smuggle arms from his kingdom using his ships was brought into custody. From there, the delays had grown exponentially worse. On and on and on it’d gone, and now, again, The Empire was back, requesting a hearty gulp of four more precious hours.

Four hours...

“I guess he’s fallen asleep again," the Communication Stone buzzed. "Rest well, Doc.”

Four hours!

Fine, he would give them their four, plus a bit more. But, in exchange, they were now paying his consultation fee. And it was not cheap.

In his Mental Library, every document he owned on The Slums was already flying off the shelves.

Half an in-game hour later, when he opened his eyes, the sun had set and the forest was steeped in darkness.

The last fragment he’d seen before returning to the open world was a panorama of an absurdly-long flowchart split into six phases. ‘Late Fees. The Decline and Fall of The Slum Empire. Oliver Speared. Corporate restructuring. Legendary brainwashing bait. Good bloody game.'

Late Fees.

Approximately 3.6 in-game hours until the assassination of The Society; 5 until The Empire’s deadline for producing the cure.

The Slums. The ‘Kingdom’ of North America. Montana Village.

Above the entrance fluttered a flag with a grizzly bear wrestling a skeleton T-Rex. Inside, a 50-man squad of Returnees, high-level Villagers who came back to Suchi between their adventures abroad, were relaxing by watching a movie on a projector.

At that moment, a Villager wearing a padded leather cap strolled in. None of them recognised the newcomer, but this didn’t invoke any great suspicion. Random visitors were a regular part of slum life.

“Howdy ya’ll,” chirped the newcomer. “Ya’ll mind if I climb that big thang right there?”

He pointed to the Achievement Pillar situated in the middle of their Village. At almost 150 metres high, it testified to this round of recruit’s outstanding performance in The Empire’s community events.

“Why?” asked a Proximicanist, a melee-spec Arcanist, who’d been spinning a halberd around himself in practice.

“Got me a hang-glider in need of testing," the newcomer answered.

A female Accompanist lowered a book that she’d been reading, the latest Silver Wolf novel. “Use your own?”

The sight of the book caused a look of jealous hatred to flash briefly across the newcomer's face. “But y'all's is a heck of a lot taller!”

The Proximicanist squinted, then snorted.

“What’s so funny?” asked another.

In their Village group chat, the Proximicanist told them to check out his armband. Doing so, they all recognised the red fist on a blue backdrop at once.

“Go ahead, friend,” said the Accompanist, hiding a cackle in her clenched jaw. “Good luck!”

“No luck necessary. I’ve got,” Henry put on the stupidest grin he could muster and punched his fist into the sky, “The Might of the Crimson Sky-Piercing Fist!”

Suppressing the desire to vomit, Henry went up to the base of their Achievement Pillar.

It was made up of uniform cubes of wood stacked one on top of the other. They weren’t too large, each edge being about 1.5 metres, so the stability of the structure had to be provided by Constructionist magic. Each cube was carved with the title of a Community Event, the Village’s placing, and the participants’ names. Following an event, someone would have the ‘honour’ of strapping a block to their back and lugging it to the top.

“Wait,” said a Miracleworker, “just in case...” They cast on him, which would buff his Vitality.

With them watching and waiting for his screw-up, Henry grabbed a hand-hold and began the ascent.

Due to how thin the structure was, he felt a vertigo-like sensation that it would topple over at any moment, although it thankfully didn't.

The higher he climbed, the more the vista of The Slums opened up before him. In the centre stood the towering clay walls of the Central City. On the northern edge, a wood monstrosity was nearing completion - that was the arena he’d commissioned for tournament practice. Close by, on the eastern edge, the gala grounds were lit up with life, the music being carried to him on the wind.

Reaching the highest block, he climbed on top of it and summoned a telescope.

“What’s that for?!” bellowed a Villager below.

“Studying the wind!” he shouted back.

His reply caused their laughter to finally be unleashed. Their glee, in addition to the ludicrous Village he’d pretended to be from, stemmed from technological limitations preventing hang-gliders from operating correctly. It was a failed experiment that many had tried. They basically became clunky kites without strings.

In truth, Henry was using the Achievement Pillar's height to map the layout of a nearby military compound being patrolled by two platoons of sand-coloured NPC guards. This was a catchment for The Empire’s possessions. There were several dotted around The Slums, but this one happened to contain the Alchemy ingredients that’d been bulk purchased for the cure.

One step of his plan involved stealing the ingredients back. To carry this out, he needed to find out where they were stored exactly.

There were twelve main warehouses and five smaller ones, any of which might contain the herbs. Studying the ground leading up to the door of each, he eventually discovered before one a network of deep, fresh wheel tracks. Zooming closer, he recognised an Alchemist’s pouch crushed in a track, which must’ve fallen off the back of a wagon.

Knowing the warehouse alone wasn’t enough, though. He needed the precise location.

A hang-glider emerged from his Spatial Bracelet with a light balsa-like frame and a sail made of fortified paper. As would be expected of a Slumcraftsman original creation, its construction was dangerously shoddy.

Hang-gliders may have been uncontrollable, but that didn’t make them completely useless.

After he strapped himself to it with rope, blue harpoons appeared in his irises. In his vision, arrows were generated in the air around him indicating the direction of the wind currents.

This was the skill from the Waterworker Civilian class.

Waterworkers were the aquatic analogue to Landworkers. They had skills for harvesting ocean-resources via fishing, exploring the oceans via sailing and diving, and tending aquatic Monster Killing Grounds. Back when Henry was sailing the reed boat he'd crafted, it was a Waterworker skill, , that he’d used to put wind into its sail - unfortunately, that skill was unavailable without a ship.

, though, could be used anywhere. It allowed a player to visualise the direction of the wind and the paths one could take through it to reach their destination. The skill was essential to perform high-intensity sailing manoeuvres, such as evading a Kraken’s falling tentacle or weaving through reefs to shake off pirates.

For the destination, Henry selected a large section of air above the warehouse containing the ingredients. Four circles then appeared around the block he was standing on highlighting viable launching points.

In each circle, a ghost projection of himself was performing a leap, with count-down timers indicating when the action needed to be executed. If the journey were impossible, nothing would be displayed, but he’d selected this Village knowing it was directly upwind of the compound.

Choosing a launch, he mimicked the action by positioning himself backwards near the edge. After the timer hit zero, he jumped and a gust swept him up.

“It’s out of control!” he screamed. “Help me! Get me down!”

Pretending to be alarmed, he was carried off and away. The laughter below rose and then began to fade with the distance.

The wind battered him around randomly, so, even though he was yelling in distress, he didn’t budge to avoid disrupting the projected path.

Right before flying over the compound's walls, a voice boomed at him, amplified by a Peopleworker skill. "Stop immediately, or we'll shoot you down!"

“How?! I can’t control it! Help me! Save me!”

Henry knew for a fact that he was too high for their attacks to hurt him.

Guards rushed out of a barracks in formation with their weapons drawn. When they saw the screaming Offworlder being tossed about like a garbage bag in a clothes dryer, though, their panic melted away.

As the wind blew Henry into the space above the warehouse, he reached into the pocket of his trousers and grabbed a leaf that was fuzzy like wool. His irises began to glow with conical flasks, and, crooking his head down, he could see a splotch of red highlighting a section of the warehouse roof.

This indicator came from , an Alchemy skill that visualised the location of nearby herbs.

The size and density of the splotch suggested about ten sacks worth of Basindi Lamb’s Beard, the ingredient in his pocket. The amount was almost the entire region's supply.

"Let go at once, Offworlder!”

“I can’t! I’m tied to it!”

He rummaged around in his pocket for another leaf and reactivated the skill. The marking for this one appeared in the same area of the warehouse. Repeating with two more herbs, he learned that all the ingredients were housed in one giant room.

Grouping them together was negligent on the part of The Empire. Due to regulations by the Central City’s rulers, buildings in The Slums had to be constructed of materials that would combust during the monthly Cleansing. Thus, arson was always a significant risk.

Nevertheless, he wouldn’t complain now, since the clumping up of the ingredients would simplify their theft.

Crashing into a watchtower, he and his hang-glider were crumpled into a dumpling with him as the centre meat.

The guards, when they cut him free from the wreckage, dragged him out of the compound and sent him packing with a half-hearted warning.