It took Midday a few minutes of walking to traverse the complete perimeter of the pond—such was the incredible size of the elephant atop which it was located—and, by the time he arrived at the base of the tree where he had started, everything below his shins was doused in a thick layer of mud.

He didn’t bother trying to get the grime off his body, for the heavy downpour had already converted most of the soil on Jugrim’s back to a knee-deep sludge Midday deemed inescapable. All cleaning himself off would do, he imagined, was make it all that much more frustrating when he inevitably got covered in filth again. It was true that the wide array of grasses, shrubs, and small trees that dug their roots into the soil surrounding the pond helped to keep the mud in place, but the benefit they could provide when faced with such unprecedented rainfall was negligible at best.

Midday sighed. If not for his time spent in the squalor of Slave Quarter #344, he imagined that he would have been thoroughly disgusted with the state of things, but his standards were low enough nowadays that he found himself mostly unbothered by the inhospitable surroundings. Having a roof over his head would be nice, but he was in no rush to build one. The other group members were better suited to that task anyways and, moreso than that, Midday had something else he needed to do before worrying about anything like that: he took out the Elvanerean Ring and put it on.

“Effect Added. Elvanerean Ring: Accelerates growth of any plant the user points at by one year. Can be used 3 times per day.”

Owing to the fact that Solomon supposedly had an Elvanerean Ring of his own—something Midday still wasn’t sure what to make of—Midday had made sure to look out for special-grade plants like Devil Peppercorn during his walk but, possibly due to the heavy fog, nothing of interest had turned up during the search.

As such, Midday decided to take matters into his own hands. He pulled one of the Devil Peppercorn beads he had brought along for the journey with him out of his pocket, buried it at the base of a willow tree growing just inches from the pond, and pointed his finger at it.

The ring started glowing its familiar green hue, steadily building in intensity for the ten-second charge-up period, until a bolt of green light shot out of his fingertip and toward the buried peppercorn seed.

A slender tendril of green vine crawled out of the mud shortly after that, wagging around aimlessly in search of something to cling onto. It took a while but, after ten more seconds of growth, the tendril found the tree and started wrapping itself around its trunk. The remaining growth from the first charge saw the vine split into its familiar double helix pattern around the trunk and wrap around it a few times, climbing a foot or two up the tree in doing so. He was happy to see this, but couldn’t help but take note of the fact the growth was noticeably slower than the first time he had used the Elvanerean Ring to create a Devil Peppercorn vine. Midday reckoned that it had something to do with the growing conditions being less hospitable for the plant than before, but he wasn’t sure.

In any case, the remaining two charges brought the plant up to a decent size. Three years of growth, after all, was nothing to scoff at—and the vines had thoroughly colonized the willow tree by the time he was done for the day. Tomorrow, after a few more charges, the vines would bear their first fruit.

He nodded in approval. Midday still had enough Devil Peppercorn beads in his pocket to cover him for any meals before the vines bore their first fruit and, on the whole, he felt pretty good about the food situation. Combining the energy-dense Valley Algae native to the old growth with the nutrient-enhancing capabilities of Devil Peppercorn seemed like a perfect cure for his malnourished physique.

With his plant now well-situated on the willow tree, Midday took the ring off and walked away. Jenjo and the others would be arriving soon, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near the Devil Peppercorn vine when they showed up.

♦

Siempre Elvanera had never piloted a yacht before—or any vehicle besides a horse, for that matter—and now that he was trying it for the first time, he realized that there was far more to the process than he had imagined. Siempre had managed to get the engine turned on and make the boat move, albeit slowly, but he had gotten the vessel wedged between some trees almost immediately after doing so.

It had been a few minutes since that had happened and, while there hadn’t been any severe damage to the vessel insofar as he could discern, he nonetheless found himself somewhat frustrated at his incompetence. More frustrating still was the current predicament involving the horde of zombies that had climbed onto the boat and were doing everything in their power to break into the cockpit in which he was currently standing. Should they succeed in doing so, he expected, there was a high probability that the zombies would be able to overwhelm him—thereby resulting in his demise.

If he had been a lesser man, Siempre believed, the situation would have been a terrifying ordeal. The sounds of essentially unkillable fists banging on the door behind him, trying to break it down, and the sight of mutated corpses, very lively in their fanatism for killing him, assailing the windows in front of him were both quite worrisome. He wanted to consult his Truthseeker Dice to ask how long it would be before the zombies made it into the cockpit, but there were still five minutes left on his cooldown.

Giving up on piloting the yacht, he sat down in the captain’s chair and started formulating a plan. Siempre had three Abilities, and at least one of them, he anticipated, would prove successful in getting him out of the situation. He combed through his options.

His favorite Ability was Highroller—which was the one that enabled his Truthseeker Dice Opus—and it gave him the potential to develop various dice-related powers. The only combat-related power he had used this Ability to create, however, was called Muscle Roulette. It allowed him to bet his physical strength on the result of a dice roll. If the 6-sided die he used for the power landed on anything above 1, his physical prowess would be doubled for 5 minutes. Moreover, the effect was multiplicative: multiple good rolls in a row would result in an exponential boost to his power. The tradeoff was that, should he get unlucky and roll a 1, he would lose all of his physical strength for several days at the minimum, with the total time the resulting complete body paralysis lasted scaling with the number of good rolls preceding it. As such, he treated Muscle Roulette as a last resort.

His second Ability, Marionette, allowed him to turn things into puppets. In his youth, he had been able to use it on any inanimate object—which would have been helpful in this situation—but he had long ago chosen to sacrifice this capability in exchange for a boost to his power to reanimate corpses. He was skilled enough with it that even a regular human corpse could reach parity—albeit only in terms of physical strength—with what one might expect from a level 20 individual. The issue, however, was that all the corpses around him had already been reanimated; Marionette only worked on inanimate objects, so he couldn’t use it on them.

His third Ability—and by far his most potent one—was called Mutagen. It gave him the power to induce mutations in any living organism he touched with his right hand. If the situation called for it, he had the option of using it on himself to transform into an inhuman monstrosity of some sort but, once again, he considered that a last resort. He couldn’t use it on the zombies either because they were technically already dead.

The zombies continued the assault, slamming their malformed bodies against the cockpit walls with no regard for their safety. Siempre frowned at the sound of one headbutting the reinforced glass window of the cockpit with such force that its skull shattered, killing the zombie in question.

The fact that Weathermaker could create such fiendish creatures on such a large scale was an astonishing thing indeed. Siempre watched as the zombie who had just died slamming its head against the glass regenerated, this time with a reformed skull of such thickness that its face became buried under a mass of exposed bone. With this new body, the regenerated zombie resumed its headbutts. The increased mass of its cranium meant that it hit harder, and small cracks began to form along the glass.

Siempre sighed. Combat wasn’t his specialty, and the best thing he could think to do was use Muscle Roulette. With the physical might gained from just one successful roll, the horde would no longer pose any threat. He also had the option of just using his raw physical strength—he was level 33, after all—but, truth be told, he didn’t know the last time he had exercised. His life aboard the airship had been a sedentary one and, owing to the lack of living test subjects, he had been experimenting on his own body for quite some time. Many of those experiments had been detrimental to his health, resulting in his body being quite fragile for a man of his level. As such, Muscle Roulette was the only way to guarantee a successful escape. He took the six-sided die he had crafted from human bones out of his breast pocket—one of the conditions of Muscle Roulette was that it only worked with this specific die—and threw it up in the air.

It landed on 3.

He nodded in approval as he felt a surge of power course through his body. Standing up, he walked over to the window and threw a punch. The glass shattered immediately and, with that, he stepped out onto the deck. Dozens of zombies lunged at him, but he sidestepped all of them. Siempre walked unperturbed through the horde, sending any zombie that got in his way flying off into the fog with what to him felt like nothing more than a light push.

In hindsight, he realized that he had underestimated his baseline capabilities. The dice roll had been unnecessary. He hated unnecessary risks, so this revelation annoyed him. Regardless, he made his way out toward the tree he had crashed into earlier—making sure not to kill any zombies along the way to avoid making them any more dangerous than they already were—and jumped a good twenty feet upwards or so.

He landed gracefully atop a branch and, with a frown on his face, disappeared into the forest. Siempre had not planned to lose access to the yacht so early, but these zombies had already far surpassed expectations.

Siempre wondered if the chairwoman and Weathermaker had secretly known they would be this powerful and were actively trying to ensure that he and everyone else currently in Neighborhood 8 would be dead by the end of the month, but he found such a thing unlikely. His Abilities were useful to the chairwoman. That was why he had been inducted into Elvanera Group despite not actually being an Elvanerean in the true sense of the term. Moreover, if the chairwoman had wanted him dead, she could have just killed him herself—or sent someone like Mulberry to do it for her. As such, he believed that the most likely scenario was that Weathermaker had genuinely not expected this Opus to be so powerful and had been mistaken in sharing their estimates with the chairwoman.

As he jumped from tree to tree, trying to make the most of the five minutes he had before the boost from playing Muscle Roulette expired, Siempre decided to look for survivors. Human or otherwise.