It was another day of basic brawny work, and Mark was sweating under the bright sun.

“Up here! Yup! Now a little to the left— Good!” said the small woman, who owned her own cargo hovervan, and who had way too many opinions about how to stack things and how to go about stacking things. Mark already knew about weight distribution and the boxes were clearly marked for fragility and special handling, thank you very much. And yet, the woman continued. “Now for the next one!” She rapidly added, “And thank you for not scratching my ship!”

… Little bit patronizing, but that was fine.

Mark didn’t know the woman’s name, for she was one of a hundred different people who had come and gone in the last week with their personal or larger cargo hovervans. She was nicer than most, but she was pretty faceless to him.

She just had to go and comment about the scratching, though, didn’t she.

With a practiced grip and crushing the tiny voice inside that told him he hated this, Mark kept his adamantium flat and wider than normal as he gently gripped the ship and lowered himself to the ground, just a single meter below the lip of the craft. He wasn’t even putting that much pressure on the cargo hold! But, as he moved things in and out… Well. Adamantium was a lot tougher than steel of any kind.

Mark had caused a bunch of minor damage here and there this last week, so yeah, that was on him.

The sun shone brightly beyond the auroras overhead, the steel floor of the cargo transfer station was already scratched to hell so Mark’s marks didn’t matter much, and there was only one more day to go—

“That one with the fragile markings on it, please!” said the small woman from the edge of her ship. “That one needs to go in the front, in the softstasis field. It’s VERY FRAGILE! Please… Please be careful!”

Also, the woman was probably smuggling something, but a lot of people were doing that, and it wasn’t Mark’s department.

“Yes ma’am! I’ll be super careful,” Mark grunted.

The woman moved to the front of her cargo hold and Mark spread his adamantium out into a good ten soft dollops for support, along with an entire net of wide adamantium to wrap around the fragile box. The signage on the box read 46 kilos, so Mark knew how much pressure it would take to lift the thing. Not much. With careful application, he gripped the box and held it lightly.

So lightly!

Floating it into the softstasis field at the front of the cargo hold, right where the woman wanted it to go, seemed simple enough. Or at least it would have been. The woman said ‘careful careful’ a few times too many, in Mark’s opinion. He picked it up just fine, and he was extra careful with it as he moved it toward the ship. He was good at this.

And yet…

Yeah.

Mark was pretty much the last person you’d want loading cargo ships.

Mark had thought he had been dexterous with his Adamantiumkinesis before the start of this cargo-moving ‘bitch work’, as Aurora had called it, but it turned out, in the beginning at least, that Mark was too heavy. He had always seen brawnies move shit like it didn’t matter what was inside, which was still true! But only for brawnies. Specifically, brawnies with Tactile Telekinesis.

Mark and all the other poor bastards who didn’t have TT needed to be careful as fuck, otherwise they broke shit all the damned time… More often than normal, anyway. The ‘normal amount of breaking’ was ‘absolutely none!’. Mark hadn’t broken anything, either, but there had been a few close calls in those first days of moving stuff. Luckily, or rather on purpose, they had put him on vegetable and perishable goods shipments at first, and that stuff could take a little bit of a beating.

Vials of mana crystals and other packaged monster parts could not take a beating at all.

Some things exploded when moved improperly. Mark hadn’t seen it happen here, but the old hands talked about horror stories all the time. They always rapidly added that things were much better in the settlement, though. Much less dangerous shit going through this port!

For now.

Anyway. All of the shipping boxes had markings that told how difficult they were to move, and how fragile they actually were. Everything Mark saw on this ‘obviously purposefully mislabeled’ box said that it was a 7 out of 10 on the fragile scale. A bunch of small crystal-shaped markings and some numbers and letters told Mark that this one was probably mana crystals.

Mana crystals wouldn’t break that easily. This thing could probably drop off of the back of the hovercar and land on solid rock and it was 50-50 odds that everything inside would survive just fine.

Mark wouldn’y say that the woman was overreacting, or that the box didn’t need that much care, or anything like that. He had done that once. In the beginning of his demerit work. The dressing down he had been given by the overseer of the shipping yard had been very unwelcome, but at least all the onlooking guys and girls on ‘basic work’, which is what most people called this, were all just grinning as Mark got yelled at.

Everyone got the ‘respect the tags on the boxes!’ speech at least once.

Mark set the box into the softstasis field, and with the box in place the woman flicked a switch and the softstasis field turned on; a gentle blue light wrapping the box and holding it tight.

The woman who owned the cargocraft had been nervous all this time, her vector strongly pointed directly at the box that Mark had just placed. But now she relaxed.

She didn’t seem to care about how Mark loaded any of the other boxes; oh sure, she pretended, but her vector told the truth.

Ten minutes later and the woman was signing papers with Carl.

Mark liked Carl. Yesterday Mark’s partner had been some guy named James, and the day before it had been a woman who Mark forgot already, but today it was Carl, the Bomber who had shared fried chicken strips with Mark, Eliot, Isoko, and Sally, on the Grey Whale, when they were en route to the settlement. While Mark hung out, sitting on a chair he made out of his own adamantium, in Union with everyone in the nearest 200 meters of the shipping yard, Carl went through paperwork with the woman.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

After tapping through a few screens on Carl’s tablet and then signing her name a few times, the woman hopped into her cargo craft and Carl sent off an ‘affirmative’ to the traffic control tower. Traffic control was a big tower in the center of the field that had eyes and sensors on everything and everyone in the area. It flickered with laserlights, shining down on the cargocraft, and then it painted a line of light in the air for the cargocraft to follow. Like she had done it a thousand times before, though never from here, the woman guided her cargocraft into the air, down the illuminated path, to get clear of the field… and then go right back down onto a different field, a kilometer away.

A bunch of ships were over on that field. Some were as large as a mansion but at least 40 more were sized like big vans, or tram-sized. The woman would sit and wait there with a bunch of other people, and all of them would leave together. Maybe. Some people caravaned when they moved stuff around the world. Some people, like the woman Mark had just loaded up, had ships that could turn invisible and zoom away from practically everything out there. She was probably going to get something else to smuggle out of here, though whatever it was Mark had no idea.

“Do we have smuggling laws here?” Mark asked.

Carl snorted. “That box was mislabeled to hell and back, but the woman had the Seal of Empire on her paperwork. If she forged those documents then that is a bigger problem than you or I can handle.”

Mark hummed, nodding. “Why is she staying, then?”

“She’s getting something unique from…” Carl looked at his tablet. “Ah! From House Umbral. From Lord Cedric Umbral himself. So yeah. She’s a big deal.”

Lord Cedric Umbral was Shadowstrike, on the kaiju team. Mark hadn’t met the guy yet, except in passing. He was busy all the time, as far as Mark knew.

“What’s Shadowstrike shipping that he can’t trust to label properly?”

Carl smiled as he tapped at his tablet, saying, “No idea! Not my department.”

“No idea what was in the box at all?”

“It was approved as a specialty package, and not to be Tactile Telekinesis’d; that’s all I knew.”

Mark thought back to what he had seen on the box. “… It wasn’t marked as ‘NO TT’?

Carl shrugged, and then he looked up and away, nodding and waving at the next vehicle coming through the air. He didn’t answer Mark’s concern, because there was another shipping job to be done, and this one was unloading.

The hovercraft parked. The door opened.

Some guy was already standing there, yelling, “Now be CAREFUL with these ones!”

Mark didn’t roll his eyes. This time. He had been called out for that sort of ‘disrespect’ three times already, and he didn’t care to be called out a fourth time, and especially not by some stranger who was also just doing their job.

Mark merely said, “Sir yes sir,” as he disassembled his adamantium chair and got to work—

“Dear GODS you’re that boy, aren’t you?” asked the delivery guy, his vector suddenly focusing.

Mark lied, “This is dark iron, sir, but I can—”

“Ahh…” The delivery guy frowned. He mostly stopped caring about Mark. “You get that a lot, I guess? Well. Uh. Be careful.”

Mark nodded. “Of course, sir.”

Mark had been recognized a few times already. Lying was easier than telling the truth. Some people didn’t accept Mark’s easy lie, but most did!

Meanwhile, Carl was there, saying, “If you’ll come over here I have paperwork—”

“Right right right right!” said the delivery guy.

It was a pretty normal day of ‘Basic Work’, which was a term Mark appreciated much more than ‘bitch work’, because this was exactly the sort of work that the guys who made Basic Income would do all the time. The people who worked for Basic Income got paid good money for their efforts. Yeah, it was backbreaking, but only for a normal person. For any Tutorial-taker on Earth, which usually resulted in a brawny, it was pretty much ‘move here, pick this up, move it over there, put it down’, and brawnies never ran out of power. Mostly. Using TT too much could weaken a brawny, but not too much, and not for long.

Mark could go all day long, too, if all he had to use was his physical strength. Healthy Body might not have a multiplier of any kind, but it was still Healthy Body, and brawny bodies of all kinds almost never stopped.

As Mark moved more shit from here to there or back again, he thought about how this could have been his life.

If he hadn’t gotten involved with Addashield.

In that sort of world he would have been using his physical body, while being stingy with his Tactile Telekinesis so he wouldn’t run out of juice. Here, he was using his astral body almost exclusively, what with the kinesis and Union and all, but he also had Union to keep himself and the nearest hundred others all going strong, too.

Mom and Dad would still be alive.

Addashield would have fully Fallen.

Maybe they’d all be dead, anyway.

Maybe this was the only way for Mark to survive.

Maybe this was the good outcome for the world.

A lot of people seemed to believe that.

… Anyway, this sort of work was worth 330 goldleaf for a day of work, which was only 4 hours long. That was a lot more money than what Dad or Mom used to make fishing or cleaning and editing, but not by much. 330 a day was a whole lot less than what Dad made on a good day, though. There were reasons that Dad’s employees, Trace and Devon, worked for him, even though they were brawnies…

Mark paused, standing there holding onto a box that weighed 210 kilos, as he thought about Dad’s employees. This was the first time he had thought about Trace and Devon in a while. How were they doing? Were they alive? They had never responded to Mark’s attempts to reach out, so he had stopped doing that months ago. He was pretty sure they were alive, but they wanted nothing to do with Mark. A lot of Orange City was like that. The world might like Mark, but Orange City did not…

… Mark kept moving boxes.

He’d be glad when he didn’t have to do this anymore.

Basic work was only 4 hours a day and there was plenty of time left for other things, but… it was too close to what Mark could have been, his old fate, and he didn’t want to think about doing something like this for the rest of his life...

He didn’t want to think about how this… was okay.

Because it was okay, and he hated that. Moving shit? Getting paid well? It was okay. Mark still had most of the day left to kill monsters, too. Dad hauled fish in all the time, and that always did look fun…

Oh gods.

Mark breathed, shuddering—

“You okay?” Carl asked, looking at Mark.

Mark blinked and looked away, putting on a smile. “I’m good.” A breath of purity/impurity and Mark turned back, and he knew his face wasn’t red and his eyes weren’t puffy at all. “I musta… musta gotten something in my eye.”

Carl raised an eyebrow… And then he said, “Uh, so… Did you catch the football game? Crytalis versus Nook? You look like a sports guy, yeah?”

Mark grinned a little, and this time it was a real grin. “I was on the—”

He was on the rugby team in high school, but that was pre-Tutorial. He never kept up with any of that because a lot of guys dropped out to focus on the Tutorial, and then Mark had been in a coma, and then he never checked on his old teammates because they never checked on him during the coma, which was either petty of him or wrong of them, or something like that, and then, when Addavein happened, Mark never checked on them because he didn’t want to know how many of his classmates were dead, either from Tutorial, or from Addavein.

Mark blinked from the deluge of those sudden, terrible thoughts, and then he tried to be pleasant, saying, “I was on the rugby team in high school. It was fun. Kind of lost track of all sports teams, though.”

“Rugby always seemed like a lot of fun! It’s not much different from football, yeah?”

Mark found it pretty easy, actually, to talk about rugby, saying, “Not really different, yeah, but you can’t pass the ball forward in rugby. You have to run the ball, and...”