"A garden at the bottom of a cave?" I said, when I saw that we had indeed emerged into just that, "we have to have gone through a portal of some kind at some point, right?"

Bruzigan nodded. "This place is almost certainly a pocket dimension. As you can also see, the Herlisian Tree isn't the only feature here. We'll take everything, it's just that the rest isn't worth fighting through the dungeon for, most of the time."

"That includes the boss' scales, right? A material that resistant to attack has gotta be valuable," said Anna.

"It'll be difficult to strip down, but if any of us can, it's a good idea."

"I believe Anna and I have appropriate tools for the job," said Ri'legh, "rare monster parts are the specialty of my House in this place, and Anna has recently been supporting a team for Shumba dedicated to the same."

"After the garden, then," said Bruzigan, "the aperture to it will disappear for the rest of this Floor cycle after we return though it."

Before we got down to the happy business that was looting, though, none of us could take our eyes off of the magnificent tree in the epicenter of the garden. It was small—not bonsai small, but Bruzigan was taller than it. It was silver in color, and seemed to emanate its own light. It held no leaves, and most of its branches were short and stubby. In fact, were it not for the one branch that was not, the object might not have been identifiable as a tree.

Hanging heavily on that top branch was a perfectly shaped silver apple the size of a grapefruit. It seemed to stretch toward us, as though begging to be picked.

Reverentially, Bruzigan did so.

"So, what's the Federation's take of the rest of the loot then?"

I had been going to ask that, but Arvallei beat me to it. Bruzigan grinned as he stored the Apple. "We keep it all. Traditionally, the survivors of the dungeon run split everything except the Herlisian Apple, as well as receiving a slice. Such a strong incentive is needed for such a dangerous mission."

"Woah, awesome!" said Mewi, "There are tons of Alchemy materials here. I'll take smaller shares on the rest for more of those."

For the next few hours, similar happy negotiations took place as we picked the garden, and the carcass of the Midas Drake, clean. I had been feeling Serayne's impatience for quite a while by the time we finally made our way back to the surface. She had agreed to act as our lookout, since there was still a large disparity in Attribute numbers between her and me, or indeed her and the rest of the team. She’d contacted me through the Fire Guardian’s Bracelet several times, but she knew I wasn’t too able to hurry things along any more than we already were.

That disparity in our numbers was slowly decreasing even though I wasn't really earning any more AP lately. It seemed as though the more we fought together, the stronger she was getting. We'd tried to solicit for information about what the mechanics of her Attributes actually were, but so far we hadn't met with success and I wasn't optimistic about that changing, at least not in Area 1. Maybe higher in the Tower, Familiars wouldn't be so unheard of.

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Bruzigan still accompanied us until we made it back to the "safer" portions of Federation 7th Floor territory. We weren't worrying as much about avoiding monsters now, so we made much faster time than the trip to the hidden dungeon. Once we were back among Federation personnel, we separated back toward our own individual factions once again.

The year finished out with no further uses of the emergency communicator, by Bruzigan or anyone else, so I had to think no news was good news. We stuck together leaving the Exit, both to await word on the Herlisian Apple and to see the results of Bruzigan’s evolution, which had now finished, for ourselves.

He was low-key about it, but he had always been the strongest of us. Sure, I could straightforwardly deal damage faster than him, and Ri’legh slightly outstripped him there too, but though his primary role on the team was that of tank, he spoke loudly and carried a big morningstar, and so was able to deal plenty of damage on his own. Even after my own evolution, my record in spars against him included 0 wins. Now, he had gotten just as dramatic an increase in overall battle power as I had. Most likely, if the whole rest of the team took him on 5v1, he'd wipe us out.

Of course, that didn't mean he was still even near the level of the sort of power that Varstithon had showed to me, but it was still an incredible boost to our team's overall strength.

Instead of going straight back to the fleets, Bruzigan insisted we stay together and enjoy ourselves, at least for a short while. Certainly, the Liberation Fleets were strong enough now that they could operate without us for just one day, but we all knew that this was a cover for awaiting our slices of the Erlisian Apple to be prepared.

It was a very enjoyable cover, though. Before we left the Pantheon, Bruzigan told us to meet at the Celestial at a time that would be roughly 12 hours from now. After duly informing Grosstin about the delay in returning to our Liberation Fleets, Mewi and I took the opportunity to at last have a brief Satslik holiday. Mostly, we just explored around the vast city surrounding the Pantheon. Mostly, what we found were overpriced tourist traps, but we still had fun.

That is, until the paparazzi got wind of us. We returned to Grosstin's headquarters at that point, since the Pantheon was closer to Restaurant Celestial than the facility where we'd undergone training before the Sanctuaries fell—the other Grosstin controlled location we knew of. There were about four hours until we'd need to leave for the rendezvous, so we plugged back in to the virtual space for a marathon gaming session.

Serayne was curious about video games, and tried to learn to play in her humanoid form. She wasn't as quick to pick up on things as Anna had been, but refused to give up on the activity. By the time we left, she was at least starting to get the hang of the same co-op game we'd first taught Anna.

There were no cameras ambushing us on our approach to Celestial. The others had already arrived, and fortunately the establishment's automated systems guided us to their dining room with no trouble. Over the dinner, Bruzigan took the chance to tell us about the 20 different possible effects we could expect.

He'd expected that we'd return to the Pantheon to get our slices, but after the main course was cleared, the restaurants automated voice, instead of asking for our bill, told us to "please stand by for your special desserts, compliments of an anonymous patron."

A minute later, the six Herlisian Apple Slices were on the table in front of each of us, on comically small plates. “I know this place has a rep for anonymity and neutrality, but I wouldn’t have thought the Federation would have trusted them for this.”

“Neither did I,” admitted Bruzigan, “there’s probably some political gamesmanship going on. Someone’s idea of letting rumors begin in a somewhat controlled way, or maybe they thought it was less of a risk than having us return to the Pantheon again instead of returning to the Liberation Fleets after dinner.”

Bruzigan rubbed his hands together. “So, who wants to go first?”