Apexus stayed in the forest. His job was to search for something edible. Something edible for Reysha, to be more exact, since he could subsist on just about anything organic. The tiger girl would accompany Aclysia in her effort to gather information about the Long Way. In order to find each other later, Apexus marked a peculiar looking formation of dead trees with his pheromones.

Although that lent some reason as to why Reysha tagged along, Aclysia still asked, “Why did you want to come with me?”

“Ya don’t want me to?” the redhead returned a question of her own.

Aclysia shook her head in denial, “If such were the case, I would have raised my protests before we left. No, I simply find myself wondering about your reasoning. You’re usually much happier to hunt than you are to engage in contact with civilization.” Glancing over her shoulder, Aclysia took one last look at the meeting spot. “Your nose will be helpful in locating our darling but I would be able to find this spot without you. Your company isn’t required.”

“I guess you got me there,” Reysha hummed and folded her hands behind her head as the two of them marched across the green plain. Their target was a road in the distance. Following it eastwards would lead them to their goal. Humming some more, the tiger girl suddenly started to giggle. “I’ve no clue,” she finally responded, “I just decided I’ll do it, so I did.”

Aclysia sighed and then smiled, “That is just like you. Truthfully, I should tell you to head back. I’m conspicuous enough on my lonesome.”

“I mean, I could make up a reason on the spot,” Reysha offered. “Just so you won’t feel too bad.”

“If you would humour that pedantically logical part of my brain, I would be much obliged,” Aclysia responded. Regardless of whether or not the reason was good, she wouldn’t actually send Reysha back. Even if the two of them hadn’t always seen eye to eye on issues and would certainly clash again over their differing viewpoints in the future, they did like each other. Having Reysha’s company was soothing, be it only for the conversations.

“If we need to deal with some unsavoury individuals, you’ll suck at talking to them,” the redhead presented the made-up reason. “Your overblown way of speaking will just piss them off and you won’t get the jargon. Better to have me around to reply in kind.”

“Hmm,” Aclysia tilted her head as she thought about it. “The insult to my choice of vocabulary aside, that is a sound reason.”

“Maybe I just want to be around other people again,” Reysha hummed a more personal rationale. “Not really sure. Has been so long since I went anywhere by daylight.”

“As it stands, that won’t change today,” Aclysia asserted, with an eye on the quickly approaching sunset.

“You shouldn’t stare directly at the sun, it’ll give you eye problems,” Reysha joked.

“I am quite certain that this doesn’t apply to angels made of metal,” Aclysia responded.

“You say that as if there are other angels.”

“I think there are,” the metal fairy responded. Their conversation came to a momentary halt when they decided to take opposite paths around a large tree. When they converged again on the other side, Aclysia noticed Reysha’s questioning gaze. “The details of this have been removed from my memories, but it appears logical to me that different gods craft their ambassadors in different ways. In the end, this body,” she touched her chest at the collarbone to emphasize, “is just a shell my immortal soul inhabits. A form made from flesh, wood or water is just as feasible as one made from metal. It is in the hands of the gods.”

“I guess,” Reysha was unable to come up with any counter-arguments. Even if she had, it would have been purely for the sake of continuing the conversation. Instead, there was a moment of silence as she kicked a pebble down the road.

“Might I ask something dark?” Aclysia asked. The silence of grass was exchanged for the crunching of dirt, as they stepped onto the basic road.

“Sure,” Reysha felt the last rays of sunlight vanish off her face, as the shining star reached the end of this circle.

Even with that confirmation, it took the white-haired woman several moments to gather the words. “Do you think we have hope?” she looked down on the ground in front of her. “Our current situation appears too dire to have any good outcome. I… I try to keep myself from thinking too much about it…”

“That must be pure torture, given how much of an overthinker you are,” Reysha joked and knew she had taken the situation too lightly when Aclysia shot her an annoyed glance. “Sorry, you know how I am with serious moods. Go on, I’ll try to be a helpful cunt, if nothing else.”

“…It simply feels as if I will get drawn into a bottomless pit if I analyse our situation within the purely pragmatic parameters,” she sighed and continued to look at her feet. One after the other, they set forwards. “We have been progressing immensely these past few days. Yet, I fear it is not enough. What do you think? Do we have hope?”

“No clue,” Reysha responded immediately in a chirpy tone. Before Aclysia could get angry, she put an arm around the metal fairy’s shoulder. “Look, you may be totally right. Maybe we’ll die tomorrow, but if we do, there is no use breaking our heads over it today. It’s that simple. If I’m despairing because of what I did, I know you’ll drag me back up, so, if you feel like you’re reasoning yourself into a dark corner, I’ll give you some basic bitch advice and we’ll just keep moving. Push comes to shove; you just cuddle our slime-man for half an hour. Afterwards you’ll do your best anyway.”

“That would work,” Aclysia mumbled and looked back to the jungle with loving eyes. “I miss my darling already.”

___________________________________________________________________________

They spent the night in the open field and reached the city early the next day. Early enough that the streets weren’t quite busy, but the first shops were already open. The perfect time to ask around while being seen by as few people as possible. The two of them slowly circled around the streets.

“So, how do we do this?” Reysha wondered.

“…I honestly do not know.” Looking around, Aclysia was hoping for some convenient way that simply answered the questions she had, like a blackboard or such. All information she and Reysha had gathered so far had stemmed from side mentions and other such things. Snippets of conversations caught in passing. Now that they had something specific to ask about, they had to make a specific inquiry. Something that Aclysia wasn’t sure how to approach. ‘Perhaps we should go to the Adventurer’s Guild…? No, even a one percent chance that they know of us is too high for us to take that risk. We should have asked Nudru before leaving… that would have been the best opportunity.’

While multiple ways to approach or avoid any sort of conversation went through Aclysia’s head, Reysha looked at the stores that were already open. There were two kinds, from what she could see. One was the inns, taverns and bakeries of the city, providing people with the necessary stuff for their breakfast and the other were normal shops of any kind that were simply open quite early.

The former were largely within houses that had their doors open and were busy with preparations. A bad target to approach. Reysha instead picked out one of the outdoor shops and looked for the person that looked the easiest to talk to. After just a few seconds of looking around like that, she had found someone and Aclysia’s train of thought came to a sudden end when she heard her partner say, “Yo.”

The casually addressed person was a young man who was barely out of the adolescent stage of his life. He had the look of a youth that didn’t really care for being presentable, but at least did the bare minimum to avoid his parent’s scolding. Barely kempt black hair, mostly sitting clothes and bags under his eyes that spoke of having had one sip too much last night, it all fit the stereotype. Only the pointy ears, the kind created when an elf mixed with a human, stood out.

He was a young man that would one day inherit this shop from his father. A task he was supposed to get eased into by serving at the least busy hours of the day, while the actual owner kept his energy for the hours around noon. He was a young man, half wood elf or not, with a secure social circle but limited success with the other sex. Like most young men like that, he became very self-aware of his looks when he was addressed by a gorgeous, exotic redhead.

By clearing his throat, he managed to prevent a stammer. “Hello, how may I help you?” Using the typical phrases helped suppress any sort of embarrassment. This became especially necessary once the equally good-looking Aclysia joined them at the wooden stand.

“I’d like to chat a little bit, if you don’t mind,” Reysha said and smirked. It was just the usual grin, but to a young man it invoked the impression of interest. Although the tiger girl wasn’t aiming to come across as flirtatious, she knew exactly what kind of thoughts the young shopkeeper was having. On Ragressia, knowing how to attract the rare male was a skill engrained even into those girls that swore they would leave at the first opportunity.

“No, of course not,” he was hasty to answer and very obviously looked at Reysha’s butt when she leaned her side against the desk top covered with arrows and other hunting equipment. His eyes darted back up before it could get awkward and then he got stuck on her eyes. The blue held him like the brass of a mousetrap snaps on a rodent.

“Fantastic, see, we’re a bit uninformed. We’ve been occupied for a little bit and have a little question about this dungeon… the Long Way, it’s called, ever heard of it?”

The young man nodded, “Everybody born on Azenia-Ra has, pretty hard to not know all of the dungeons on a Leaf if you can count them on both hands. What about it?”

“Is it true that there is some sort of portal at the end of it?”

“I can’t absolutely confirm that, I’ve never been there,” the young half-elf tried to crack a little joke and Reysha giggled. Not because it was particularly funny but because she was easily amused like that. “Anyway, yeah, story is that, if you defeat every boss in every other dungeon on Azenia-Ra, a portal will open to allow people to jump somewhere else. It’s written on the Stone of Guidance.”

“That the Divine Marker of this world?” Reysha wondered and got a nod in return. A Divine Marker was a place, usually a landmark or otherwise easy to find location, that the creator god of a Leaf used to communicate what mysteries they had left on the world. Sometimes it was straightforward, other times it was a riddle and, quite often, there just was none. Much like the initial handout for Aclysia’s Divine Quest, the portal had been made public knowledge by choice of the god.

Trying to get that information to spread would have been quite difficult otherwise. What group would find and step through the portal only to backtrack across many Branches of the Omniverse?

“I suppose you’re adventurers looking for a way around the Infestation, then?” the young man asked, trying to keep the conversation with the dangerously beautiful woman going.

“Yes. Right, while we’re on that, is that still going on?” Reysha wondered. “Or have the angels come around by now?”

“Well, if they have, news hasn’t reached us yet,” the shopkeered shrugged. Fundamentally, he should have been deadly afraid of the knowledge that a Parasyte was currently growing next to the world he lived on, but to the average person, such news was simply too grand to properly worry about. He had never left this world, didn’t plan to, and had therefore never seen a Parasyte. The conflict between divine protectors and devoid creatures was something he only ever heard about when going to the church. “If anyone, Reverend Khaloi could have heard of it. He has a Distance Feather.”

‘Which means we absolutely cannot go there and ask him,’ Reysha though. A Distance Feather was a device only operable by Scribes and one of the more widespread ways to get messages across huge distances. Two feathers were synchronized and, if set up correctly, would both move whenever a Scribe used one of them. The range of the connection depended on the Scribe using them, so a pair could be made by a relatively weak person, but only a truly powerful Scribe could transcribe messages across worlds. This somewhat limited the effectiveness of this method, along with other issues such as having no way to know for certain if the feather was even set up correctly on the other side. Safe for having Scribes capable of communication on both sides, which still required a pre-agreed timetable.

If it hadn’t been the easiest available method, everyone would have ditched it for something easier to set-up and maintain, but it was the way it was.

Reysha continued to coerce little bits of information from the young man for a little while. The most popular routes to any cities, information about monsters in certain areas, what destitute parts of the Leaf there were and other such things. When she had heard everything she thought she could use, she knocked on the table once and pushed herself off. “Well, that was an enlightening chat, thank you,” she winked and got a wave in response.

Young men were simple. He knew that he wouldn’t have any chance with her the second she mentioned she was an adventurer, but even a wink and the talk at large was good recompense for an otherwise boring morning. He would talk to his friends about it in the pub in the evening and he wouldn’t even have to exaggerate the descriptions of their beauty in the process.

Something that Aclysia realized as well. The two of them stepped through the now crowded streets. Breakfast time had ended and now it was the morning rush of people getting to wherever they would work or otherwise spend most of their day. “That young man will remember us for eternity,” she whispered half a complaint. Avoiding leaving any impression on anyone was impossible, she knew that. It was more about having a conversation to vent those feelings. When the tiger girl didn’t immediately return the banter, Aclysia looked over with befuddlement, only to find a person with glassy eyes barely trotting along.

It had happened suddenly. Reysha hadn’t expected the crowd and in one moment, she was an unfeeling, hurting wreck laying on cobblestone of Heralry’s plaza. Around her, people were forced by brutal demons to draw with their bodies the lines for the ritual that would kill all of them. A fate she had doomed them all too, all because she hadn’t thought about the consequences of her revenge. She was barely even looking. Her senses were sharp, but the mind guiding them inactive. The sounds, those were carved into her. The panicked whispering, the weeping, the desperate screams of the few brave enough to resist. The brave who were also the poor fools who then got torn limb from limb by creatures so far above their power, they should have never even existed next to each other. The screams were so loud.

The silence was deafening.

“R…” a dull sound at the edge of her consciousness. “…sha…R…” it repeated over and over again. On her shoulder manifested a feeling that wasn’t part of the memory. “REYSHA!” Aclysia shouted and the tiger girl snapped out of it just as suddenly as she had been drawn away.

Bowing over, the redhead just barely managed to shove Aclysia to the side before emptying her stomach. What almost hit the skirt of the angel’s dress instead only hit the already dirty pavement of the alleyway the white-haired woman had dragged her companion into. “Water,” the Rogue croaked, as a second, much smaller, shiver went through her and she spat out the bile. The waterskin was quickly handed over and Reysha took a sip of the water. There was a mildly disgusting taste to it, Noir tainting whatever little pieces of leather entered her mouth along with the water, but it was still a better taste and a much better feeling than vomit. “There goes my breakfast,” she joked.

Aclysia rubbed the tiger girls back, “You will find something else,” she smiled. It surprised neither of them that Reysha still had episodes like this. There was much progress made, but the road to healing wasn’t one of sudden success. Many steps, large and small, only brought one to the point where the nightmares went from daily, to weekly, to annually and, eventually, faded almost entirely. “Do you require some more time?”

“No,” Reysha took a deep breath and straightened up. Her knees felt weak and her throat ached, but she could walk. “Let’s head back. I don’t want to be two days without seeing Apexus.”