I

Her teammates were sitting in a circle with several other people. There were shards in front of each of them and a small pile of shards in the middle. One by one, they tossed a set of dice to the elation or misery of the thrower.

“Damn it!” she heard Jia say when it became obvious that Jakov was the winner.

“Oh, hey,” Marie said when she saw Eva. “Want to join us? One Basic Shard▲ per toss.”

Normally, she would have eschewed gambling, knowing it was a waste of money. However, she had a rather bloody mess to get out of her mind.

“Sure.”

Eva sat down next to Marie and placed a shard in the middle.

“So what’re the rules?”

“Highest total pips wins. Ties split the pot evenly—or at least as evenly as can be done. Here, why don’t you roll first?”

She took the dice from Marie and looked them over. Someone had made them from bone with the common six faces. Observe★ told her that they’d been turned into an item called Set of Dice✦, with the self repair enhancement. It was an interesting use of the crafting system, and something she’d not considered.

Eva rolled the dice in her hand and tossed them on the ground. They bounced across the soil before rebounding off of the pile of shards and coming to rest as a four and five, for a total of nine. She scooped them up and passed them off to the next person in line.

She watched each person in turn as they threw the dice. Most people used a technique similar to her’s, though a couple of them dropped them from a foot up and let them bounce. There was one person who tried to cheat, but she was caught and had to reroll to everyone's satisfaction. Most of the players ended up with lower scores than she did, but one man on the other side got eleven to win the pot.

Eva played a handful of rounds before she excused herself to grab dinner. She won one of the pots, earning her an extra three shards from where she’d started. An ok and rather inexpensive way to pass the time.

Dinner, as with most days, was some kind of vegetable and meat mush in a wrap. The lack of plates and bowls really made things more difficult as to what kinds of food could be served. Without bread, there were no sourdough soup bowls as an alternative either!

She sat down to eat at the edge of where there were people by the firepit on the side opposite the gate. She bit into the wrap and carefully chewed and swallowed the contents. It was meaty with a hint of spice and a bit of added texture from the overcooked vegetables.

While she ate, Eva noticed a group of leaders with armbands gathering on the other side of the firepit. They had two bound and hooded people with them. When she was nearly done eating, they turned to face everyone else.

“May I have your attention please!” called one of the leaders.

It took several attempts before most people were paying attention to them.

“Thank you,” the leader said. “I’ll only be taking a moment of your time tonight.”

The man paused as the two figures were brought forward by three other leaders each.

“These two have committed offenses grave enough to warrant long prison sentences. However, because this is the Tutorial and there are no prisons, we have decided that the death penalty is appropriate.”

There was a roar from the crowd at the absurdity of the claim. Eva considered her feelings. If they truly did wrong, she wasn’t opposed to it. Outside of the Tutorial, prison would be preferable, to give them a chance to reform and be better, if it were possible.

“The first,” he said once the crowd had quieted enough, ”murdered a forseli merchant.”

Many in the crowd, Eva included, voiced their distaste. Killing an alien wasn’t something wrong. That was their duty as humans of Earth after all. The aliens came in order to destroy humanity, so killing them wasn’t murder. Right?

“The second,” the leader yelled over the crowd, “was caught raping a sixteen year old!”

That sucked all the energy from the crowd. That was something they all could agree on. Just the thought of what they’d done refocused her anger against them.

The leader nodded towards the other leaders. One from each group grabbed their spears while the remaining two held their quarry tightly so they were unable to escape. The ones with spears Pierced the hearts of the criminals while they were held until they bled out.

“Fuck the aliens,” came the muffled dying words of the woman who had killed the merchant.

Eva only picked it up because of her hearing. People close by would have been able to hear, but most of the crowd wouldn’t have been able to. The rapist’s windpipe had been hit instead of their heart when they’d struggled to get free so only gurgling could be heard as they drowned in their own blood. A fitting end.

“Justice has been served,” the leader said when the two had finally died a couple minutes later.

She shook her head and got up before tossing the last few bites of her wrap to the side. There was no way she could eat after such a gruesome display. It was one thing to kill monsters and aliens, or to kill a person in self defense. It was something wholly different to witness an execution. She figured she’d walk around to clear her head.

II

Eva left the town and walked to the forest’s edge before turning parallel to the walls and making a big circle. While she walked, she thought about what had happened. Despite having killed hundreds of landwalkers and humans who were rotten to the core, she was shocked by the brutality in an ostensibly safe place.

She had been shocked by the merchant’s grasp of a human tongue. Despite the difficulty that came with the accent, there hadn’t been anything wrong with the alien—despite her dislike of them being alien—so she was left frozen when the woman had killed it right in front of her.

Maybe the merchant had done something wrong to draw the ire of the woman, she couldn’t say. All she knew is that in spite of all the damage the landwalkers had done to her, she felt guilt for not stepping in to help. She knew she was strong; strong enough that she could have saved the alien if she’d wanted to. On the other hand, it was aliens that had killed Hideki, and she would do all she could to prevent that from happening again to someone else.

She shook her head to rid herself of the ambiguity. What had happened, happened, and there was nothing she could do about it now. She would stay the course and take the dungeon for herself and push the aliens out of it. That would give humans a better shot to be strong before the Tutorial ended. She decided that it was the right way.

After her loop round the town, she went to where the shelters were and lay down. Her companions were off doing their own thing, and that was fine by her. She’d pushed all the negativity from her mind and Meditated✦ away her quickly-beating heart enough to fall asleep.

III

By the following morning, the events of the previous day were out of her mind completely. She’d woken up, had breakfast with the crew, and chatted about the coming day. The bodies were gone, and even the blood from the execution had been cleaned up. It was as if it had never happened—perfectly fine as far as she was concerned.

The dungeon run that morning was straight forward. With all five working as a team, the Novice level of the dungeon was completed in about an hour. Eva contributed mostly with her Fireball to keep out of the way of the frontline fighters. They worked surprisingly well after a couple of rooms of practice, to the point where the boss took no more time than any of the rooms. She wasn’t even able to figure out what its new ability was! Afterwards, they had lunch behind the walls and awaited the monster wave that would come a couple of hours later.

Eva decided, while she ate, that she would go see the forseli town when the wave was over. If they were set up like the landwalkers had been, she would be able to steal their dungeon without much fuss, securing yet more resources for team human.

She smiled at the thought of sticking it to the aliens again before laying down outside the gate and waiting for the notification.

There are 16 days remaining

3742/10000 are still alive

New Quest: Defeat a monster wave. 0/428 killed

Eva stood up and stretched. She pulled her sword from its sheath and put her shield on her arm and waited for the monsters to appear.

Out from the woods came a motley crew of orcs. They were of the Japanese pig-orc variety, rather than the twisted elves she pictured in her mind. Though they had armor and weapons, they were disorganized in the extreme. They operated more like a few hundred individuals than a unit of a few hundred individuals. That made it all the more easy for her to weave her way through their ranks, leaving freshly butchered pork behind. Her Fireballs✦ were less effective, with all of them spread out, but that just meant she’d have more space to work with instead of the possibility of being surrounded and overwhelmed.

The elites were not much more of a challenge than the baseline orcs. The elites were only level 18, while the regular ones were level 13—not a challenge for her. In fact, the only damage she received was from an errant arrow shot by someone up on the wall! In the end, it was an exercise in butchery rather than anything approaching a challenge.

“Nice work again,” Marie said when the fighting was over. “Any plans for when we get back to town?”

“Actually, I had something I wanted to take care of on the way. I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

Marie nodded before leaving with the others. Eva turned and headed east towards the forseli town.

IV

The woods gave way to grassland over several miles, such that trees were a distant memory by the time she could see the walls of the town in the distance. The closer she got, the more impressed she was with what they’d made. Unlike the landwalkers, whose town was primarily a military installation with some afterthought for civilian life, the forseli town looked to be made with trading in mind.

The gates were open, and there was a small army of people butchering the orc corpses out in the fields. What surprised Eva the most was that there were humans working with them! She shook her head at the thought. Why would humans want to work with alien invaders? She’d try to find out when she was inside—if she could get inside. She approached the open gate that was flanked by a total of four forseli dressed in metal armor with long pikes as weapons.

The guards nodded at her as she passed. They hadn’t tried to stop her entrance! She wondered if that had to do with the treaty between the towns, or whether they considered one person to not be too much of a threat overall.

Eva dropped that line of thinking as soon as she saw the town inside. The forseli had built an impressive amount of buildings in only around two weeks’ time. The quality was suspect, but the volume served its purpose. There were buildings for eating, crafting, accommodation, and every other function one would expect to find in a town. They’d even built a few fountains that flowed with water where anyone could get a drink!

The thing that had the biggest impression on her was the vast market square a couple blocks into the town. There were at least thirty stalls hawking their wares to the mostly forseli crowd. There were a handful of humans here and there as well.

Farther inside the town—past the market and towards the center—was what looked like a ruin of a Greek or Roman temple. It was surrounded by a fence and guarded heavily. There was a stream of aliens going in and out of a gate in the fence. Eva had a feeling that the ruin was the dungeon.

When she approached the gate, she was stopped by one of the guards.

“Sorry, ye'r nae allowed 'ere,” the guard said.

“Why not?”

“This is forseli land. Na folk.”

She shook her head and walked away. There was no sense getting into a fight with one of the guards with no preparation. Even though there was much left unsaid, she got the gist of what was going on. The forseli had tight control over their dungeon, despite also getting part of the human one, too. That made her blood boil! They were definitely taking advantage of the situation to screw over the humans. Merchants or not, she was definitely going to claw back the dungeon for the humans!

Eva decided to take a look through the market before she made the trek back to where she was staying. The market square was very crowded. Every stall had a line of people waiting to trade with just as many people milling about between the stalls.

She looked through the stalls with Observe★, looking for anything that caught her eye. There were a few things that looked impressive—like an interestingly shaped sword—but the details didn’t back up what she hoped to see. Since she could see the quality of an item if she wanted, she knew that her own system-made sword was superior to what the forseli were selling.

Eventually, she happened upon a well-made set of clothes that looked to be roughly her size. The furs she was using as replacements were irritating to say the least, and having something more comfortable would be an excellent pickup for her. She went to the back of the line and awaited her turn.

“Whit kin ah dae fur ye?” the merchant asked.

“I’d like to get those clothes,” she replied, pointing at them. “What’s the cost?”

“Ten Basic Shards▲ or twa Novice Shards✦.”

“I’ll take it.”

Eva handed over ten shards from her Shard Ring✹, representing all but two of her stash. The alien passed her the clothes, which she stuffed into her backpack—she’d change when she got back to town.

With the sun marching towards the horizon, she used the last of her shards to buy five sticks of meat. They tasted similar to teriyaki. That made them well worth the expense in shards.

She ate while she walked. She took it easy, using the time to decompress a little bit from the constant demands she’d placed on herself. Her old self—a month and a half in the past—would have revolted at the stress. Her stats took the edge off and her relative success buoyed her spirits. Though the journey had been a lot, she was happy with the progress she’d made.