As the others drifted off Swift hung awake reading throughout the night. It was a situation he knew was going to be bad for him as his tiredness was sure to ravage him in the morning he would have to force himself through. Yet he could not put down the book. It was an odd situation he felt as an ingrained habit.

notification

backend defragmentation inhibited.

mental coherence decreased

Chance of delusion increased

temperature regulation decreased

mental statistic lowered 2 points. (7, base 9)

sleep required to regain base stats.

"Aaah," Swift wearily looked over at his companions, they were asleep by the fire. He stoked the fire a bit more and went back to reading. He was starting a new book, 'the heretic mage'.

Swift read the synopsis, 'He was a danger to the kingdoms, a man of pure horror. Hugo the maleficent, experimenter and killer. Having carried out experiments on countless people he developed magic too strong and evil to comprehend. A blue-green fire would circle around him as he strode onto battlefields. Exiled to the dark zone for the crimes he had committed. The dark sorcerer, a historic evil or mythical horror, decide for yourself.

Swift had enough and put down the book. He needed some rest and felt the morning sun coming on. He went over and kicked Adil.

"You're up,"

Adil stirred awake and rubbed his eyes. "Sure, yeah I've got it." Then Swift went down to sleep for the rest of the night.

The next day they moved further into the maze, abandoning their camp. Further along the path, the horizon revealed a distant black mountain, ashy clouds hovering overhead clashing against the baron red landscape.

They had come far enough that ash drifted in, covering the red rock with a thin layer of grey. Adil and Swift tried to find their way back to spawn, but the maze-like land and similar-looking formations seemed to confuse them, some of the land seeming as though it had changed from before. They resigned themselves from finding it, with the knowledge it was intentionally hidden they thought it could have been impossible anyway.

Eventually, they saw tracks. There was a trail of footsteps left in a layer of ash over the floor.

Seras bent over to the ground and rubbed ash onto her fingertips, inspecting the ground to see how thick the layer was and how long it took for another layer of sediment to cover the ground. Adil saw the image of a small humanoid creature slightly hunched over appear above the tracks. It looked like a goblin.

“The hunt is on.” she said, concluding that they must be nearby.

"Two seconds," Adil announced, then he pulled out his bow and shot, careful calculations in a moments notice. He saw the arrows slide through the sky and pierce what appeared to be a dirty rabbit.

"Let's eat first," he announced.

Just then Adil realized how different he had become. Shooting a rabbit as though it was nothing just for a source of food. He wondered if he could hunt and kill a living thing. He wondered what the past him would think about what he had become after only a few days. He looked around at all the tracks seeing the outlines of animals and goblins. In one part the outline of goblins fighting in dust appeared, he could some sort of story as he noticed the scuffle spread through the difference in tracks, eventually, the fight seemed to stop both goblins getting up and walking with each other along the tracks. It was like a story of children messing with each other.