The next day the mongrels took another full basket down to Moots and spent an hour giving him ten fruits over and over, completing his quest time and time again.

Judging by the ravenous way the skinny monster attacked the oversweet things, he must have had few if any other ways to relieve his seemingly endless hunger. And the positively fruit-stuffed orchard would imply it had been quite a while since anyone else had popped by to fetch him any.

Poor old guy. Mongrels had a rotten lot in life, but at least they never went hungry. The zone had plenty of little birds and frogs and critters so at least when they were inevitably slaughtered, it was usually on a full stomach. Had Moots tried eating birds or frogs or critters?

Perhaps due to the benefits of his recently boosted Intellect, Shh suspected that Moots either had tried them or couldn’t for some reason. Either way, he had plenty of fruit to eat now.

That day’s trip only yielded a single level, rather meager gains compared to the full five they’d gained from their first efforts. But that was okay. Diminishing returns were a thing, right? If anyone could level endlessly just by snagging a few thousand fruits, the zone probably wouldn’t have been quite so abandoned.

Quests naturally gave less and less experience in proportion to your Level. Eventually they’d reach a point where Ol’ Moots would no longer give out any Experience regardless of how many fruits were involved.

Shh only hoped they’d reach their goal before then.

Either way spirits were still incredibly high and continued to be high the day after, even though they hadn’t yet hit Level Seven. That took another full day of grinding to obtain. Hm. Three days for one level. So how many would it be for the next?

Well. No reason to be a tail tucker about it. Shh had absolutely no doubts that Level Eight was within reach. As for Level Nine…they’d have to see.

Maybe this was taking too long.

Dropping another fruit into the basket, Shh decided to take another glance at his Status Screen.

“Status,” he carefully intoned, more than a little pleased at only needing a single attempt. Maybe it was the increased stats, maybe it was just practice but the mongrel was quite proud with how far his pronunciation had come. It sounded more and more like real monster talk.

Attempts at sentences still sounded like they were being violently murdered within his throat though. Those things were tricky.

Alright. Where had he landed after hitting Level Seven again?

———————

Str: 5

Agi: 6

Tgh: 6

Int: 7

Wis: 7

Prs: 8

———————

Right. Just the one point in Presence.

And his sheet was still practically barren; at some point between Level Six and Seven it had occurred to him that there should be more. Skills. Traits. Proficiencies. It made sense that a Level One Mongrel wouldn’t have any of those but he’d left that in the dust by now, hadn’t he?

Ugh. At this point, Shh wanted his Status Screen to say he could do cool stuff almost more than he wanted to actually succeed. Come on, World. Even one Fireball hurled ineffectually at an outpost monster would have sent him to the afterlife as one happy pup. Be reasonable.

“Gert, did your stats go up?”

“Uh-huh.” The big female shoved her armload of fruits into the basket. “Just Strength. Eight.”

“Eight Strength!” Mo-Mo gasped in admiration. “The monsters can’t have more than that, can they?”

“I have no idea. Maybe?” Shh shrugged. “What about you, Mo-Mo?”

“My Toughness and Wisdom, yeah. Six and Seven.” She carefully lifted a caterpillar from the fruit she’d just plucked. Extending her finger, she helped it crawl back onto the branch. “My Strength’s still only a Four.”

Shh considered that. “You know, that’s how much Strength Gert used to have.”

“Yeah, when she was Level One.” Mo-Mo stuck out her tongue amiably. “We were so little then!”

“Sure, but…you know who’s still Level One, right? And is definitely weaker than Gert was? Hi-Hi.”

Mo-Mo clearly had not considered that. “You mean…I’m stronger than Hi-Hi.”

“Absolutely.”

“And if I wanted to, I could…beat him up? A bunch?”

“For sure.”

“Hm.” The little female gave her fruit an experimental squeeze, slowly lifting an eyebrow as a bit of juice ran between her fingers. “Could we maybe take a break and go visit the cave really quick?”

“...Maybe after Level Eight. Make the little guy wait, I say.”

Mo-Mo agreed, but the gleam in her eye was unmistakable. Shh liked to think that whatever else Hi-Hi was doing, he shuddered at that very moment. The would-be Boss simply couldn’t conceive of the small, fluffy reckoning that was on the horizon.

Level Eight took a full seven days to reach, and by now Shh was certain they weren’t going to make it.

Math was still a bit advanced for him, but he had to figure Level Nine would take at least twice as long to hit. Right? And what about after that? Would Moots be giving them any Experience at all any more?

Not that it mattered. The Big Moon would come and go before they hit Level Nine, let alone Ten. And Hi-Hi would have led the rest of the pack to their death by then.

Even if three three of them helped, Shh had a sinking suspicion that even at the vaunted heights of Level Eight they were well below the concern of the outpost monsters.

There was always the option of just going back and throwing some weight around. Putting a stop to the whole business. At this point Shh and Mo-Mo were Bigger than two mongrels put together and Gert was at least three. And working as one? The pack would do anything they said. No question.

Which would have worked. For a while. Shh had considered this exact scenario. Why not just go back and tell everyone ‘Look, we’re not gonna mess with the outpost anymore, okay? Getting shot with arrows sucks’ or something?

Because it was a flawed premise. Sure, mongrels invited death a bit more freely than was strictly recommended. But it wasn’t as if the outpost monsters would just leave them alone if they decided not to be pests.

Eventually they would get bored, they would march out from behind their walls, they would find the cave and they would murder everyone.

Shh remembered the ‘camouflage’ that was set up around the hideout: a bunch of piled up leaves and an uprooted bush, dumped in front of a very large hole. It didn’t even cover the whole thing up.

Ugh. he could still recall so clearly thinking that the ruse was perfect. What a dummy. It needed at least three more bushes. And so many more leaves.

The way Shh saw it, there were only three real options:

Go back to the cave and pointlessly lead the others to certain slaughter Go back to the cave and try to hide, also leading to certain slaughter Abandon the rest of the pack

That last one was obviously out of the question. And the other two, frankly, sucked and Shh hated them. He hated that they had come this far and accomplished this much and still they’d share the same fate as every other mongrel.

One glance at Gert and Mo-Mo as they chatted companionably, the pack’s biggest and the one time runt as close as two mongrels had ever been and he hated it even more. He wouldn’t tell them.

Not right now. He couldn’t.

One more day. He’d give himself one more day. Maybe Shh was wrong! Maybe they would make it in time or there was some aspect of the system that he simply didn’t understand. He would give it another day, just in case.

Maybe another day after that. Two, max. Three days.

And sure, obviously he was just delaying the inevitable. Ignoring a problem in the cowardly hope that it would solve itself. A fundamental betrayal of both the trust Gert and Mo-Mo gave when they followed his plan and the bonds that had formed between them.

Shit. For the first time, Shh regretted those increases to Intelligence. Wisdom, too. Just being all Presence would have absolutely been less complicated right now.

He had to tell them. It’s what they deserved. And who knew? Just because he couldn’t see a way through this didn’t mean neither of them would, either. Their little group had three minds, not one. Use every resource before tucking tail, right?

Shh squeezed the last fruit into the basket, stepping back to allow Gert to effortlessly hoist it up. He’d tell them after today’s delivery. The things were already so sugary and ripe; they had maybe an hour window after being picked before they started to go bad. They needed to turn them in to Moots before any sort of long, devastating conversation.

Bad news stunk enough without being paired with rotting fruit.

“Shh, what’s wrong?”

Blah. Shh should have known he wouldn’t be able to hide his concerns from Mo-Mo. The little female was entirely too perceptive to be fooled for long.

“We’ll talk about it later, okay?”

Gert furrowed her brow. “We can’t talk about it now? It’s that bad?”

Great, they could both read him like a book apparently. So much for ever having a secret.

Fine, whatever; may as well get it over with. “It’s…fine, okay.” He steadied himself with a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking it over, you know, about the plan and our levels and–”

“Stop.”

Shh swallowed the rest of his entirely unnecessary prelude, tilting his head at Gert’s sudden interruption. “What?”

“Don’t you hear that?”

Hrm. The mongrel cocked an ear, an uneasy silence falling over him and his companions. “...Yeah. Is that coming from…?

“The camp, yes. Moots.”

No one came to see Moots. This didn’t feel right.

Shh held a paw to his mouth, then pointed meaningfully down to the ground. When Mo-Mo and Gert nodded he turned and slowly crept towards the brushland separating the forest from Moots’s camp, just barely poking his head out to see what was going on.

"- bring him ten o' those fruits he smells over yonder, why, he'd SURE'N be grateful!"

“Ugh seriously? A fuckin’ fetch quest, dude? Fuck you.”

Shh fell backwards as his legs gave out, the mongrel’s body desperately scrabbling him backwards before his fear-locked brain could reboot. They were back; They were finally back to take him it was happening They were back shit shit shit.

The Players were back.

Gert had pulled him up from the ground and was saying something and Mo-Mo must have peeked through the bushes as well because her fur was standing on end. But Shh couldn’t process anything until he reckoned with the fact that the two Players rummaging around Ol’ Moots’s camp looked exactly like the one from his past and exactly like one another.

Same hair, dark brown with a weird spit-curl in front. Same big, deeply-dimpled chin. Same absurd cheeks. Same overly wide frog mouth. The eyes were the worst. Too small. Too far apart.

Why did they look like that?

Why. Did. They. Look. Like. That.

Shh somehow managed to wrench himself from Gert’s paws, stumbling forward to numbly stare at the two nightmares.

“Seriously dude, I told you we should’ve stayed in Quercus,” Groused the one in robes, their clothes being their only distinguishing features, “The free trial’s almost up and I didn’t even get to see those elf tiddies.”

“God you’re such a whiny bitch, bro.” The Player in leathers snatched the pot off of Moots’s head, rudely prodding the old monster in the chest with it. “You were right, though. This place blows.”

Ol’ Moots, for his part, stayed as still as possible.

Leathers’s unbearable face stretched into a sneer as he peevishly dropped the pot onto the ground. “What do we even have to get for this guy?”

“Uh,” Robes flicked through his Screen, “Ten ploms.”

“Ten ‘ploms’?!” Something in that set Leathers off. “This game is such fucking nerd bullshit. ‘Oh, our fancy magical realm doesn’t have plums! We have ploms!’ This is just like that burger place in Magica City, bro. What’d they call them again?”

Robes snickered. “Frikadelle.”

“Stupid fucking weeb nonsense words. Ugh.” Leathers ran a hand through his hair, the spit curl immediately bringing back into place. “Whatever. Let’s just do it. Where are these fucking ‘ploms’ at, bro?”

“Orchard’s somewhere deeper into the forest.” Robes squinted at his invisible screen, rubbing at his disgusting chin. “Weird. Hey dude, it says there’re some closer, too.”

Shit shit shit

Shh snatched the basket of fruit up from where Gert had left it, rushing the stuffed container back to their hiding spot. Then, with every muscle in his body tensed near to the point of snapping, he shoved it out of the bushes as quietly as he could manage.

“It looks like its…uh? Oh, dude! Over there!”

Someone’s claws were digging hard enough into Shh’s arm to draw blood but the three mongrels were huddled together so tightly that it was impossible to tell whose. Honestly, they could have been his own claws.

All he knew for certain in that moment–as the Player stood directly before them with his toad-like lips and too-wide eyes–was that if he exhaled or blinked or thought too hard he was definitely going to die.

The half minute it took Robes to gather up ten ploms from the basket was without question the longest of Shh’s life. Even when the Player turned back towards Moots with his cargo, the mongrel was convinced that this must be some sort of cruel trick. That at any moment he’d whirl back around and shriek ‘Surprise!’ and then he and Gert and Mo-Mo would be dead.

But he didn’t turn around. He wandered back towards Moots and scornfully dropped the fruits at the old monster’s feet, a familiar >ding< signaling the quest completed.

Leathers spat on the ground, barely missing Moots’s bald head. “Did you get any Experience from that, bro?”

“Nah.” Robes shook his head. “Not even Magicadian rep, dude.”

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.” Leathers roughly shoved a finger under Moots’s chin, forcing the old monster to look him in his horrible face. “You wasted the last goddamn hour of my free trial, you piece of shit bot.”

Robes yawned. “Let’s just port back, dude. You’re still keyed to Bon Vivant, yeah? Might as well get blasted.”

“Sure, bro. Whatever.”

Hope clawed its way through Shh’s chest. They were leaving? Really?

They were actually going to survive?

And then Leathers curled his fingers around Moots’s throat, drawing a dagger from his side. “Right after I show this bot what happens to fuckin’ time wasters.”