“Be careful about taking this trash,” Reed said as we observed the monumental bags in the cans. “It’ll make your Inventory smell.”

Uh…what?

Really? Would it? I never noticed any of my items smelling particularly odd or anything…but then again, they pretty much all came from the ground, so universally they smelled like the same dirt. Or fish offal.

Still—same difference, right? I’m feral, I tune out garbage smells.

If I had space for the garbage, I would take it. But I wasn’t willing to sacrifice Chora’s emergency teleportation thing, nor the emergency golden sword that made my head spin. Man, I was dying for an Inventory upgrade.

So I simply backed away from the garbage, and left it to Reed.

She put a hand to her chin, studying it all…clearly balancing the pros and cons of making an Inventory smelly. Wait a second, why would anyone be able to smell a pocket dimension anyway??

“Well, I guess it’s okay,” she reflected. “The Spells have nice scents, and I have several of them. And I could add in some pine needles. That’s practically air freshener.”

…Her train of thought was getting more and more concerning.

She turned to me. “I was thinking of dragging the trash myself to this big ravine at the Kaugs,” she said, “and throwing it down there.”

I stared at her. You’re just throwing it into some hole?

A mini-movie of that played in my head. Y’know, I had expected Vencians to be hyperconscious eco-warriors who would never litter, not even leaving a single plastic wrapper, but…somehow this felt like a fall from grace. I hung my head.

“If we could use this trash, we would,” she said, “trust me. On the brighter side, maybe we can unload it faster and in a more useful manner if we come across some racc—”

“Maow!”

“Oh!” She slapped a hand over her mouth. “That’s right, you don’t get along with raccoons. Are they your natural enemies?”

“Maow…”

Anyway, she grabbed each trash bag and flung it backward over her shoulder. Right as they approached her back, they suddenly, jarringly disappeared. Smokeless Inventories: no mess, no fuss.

Onward!

We were headed southwest this time. I had officially distanced myself enough from my first attempt to go that way that now I was nothing but excited about the place. Plus, I was on my second trip with Reed!

And as a matter of fact…

image [https://imgur.com/ppx7QsR.png]

image [https://imgur.com/JPfQRcE.png]

Treasure Location: ??? (S.A5)

Right, I’d forgotten about that Treasure lying directly in our path, right at the end of our journey. And it was probably some artifact of ultimate destiny or something. Go figure!

“Have you been to the Kaugs before?” she asked as I strolled beside her.

“Mah.”

“I think you’ll like them. The Kaugs are the biggest mountains I’ve ever seen.”

An image flashed upon my mind of the tall, wizard-hat peaks surrounded by gloomy clouds. Yes, I’d like them. I knew I’d like them. Not to live in, though.

“They’re not just tall,” said Reed. “They zigzag. And from afar, they look so neat, like they were drawn into being.” She was demonstrating with her finger, making slow, massive peaks.

She hadn’t said “tall,” she’d said “big”…so now I was wondering if they were massively wide, too. A vast landscape of pencil-jag points.

“And the forestry even looks gray from afar many of the plants that grow there are as dull and gray as the rock. Until just a couple of centuries ago, those mountains were still covered in eons of smoke and ash…”

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Her voice trembled on that last note.

“Meow?”

“You mean why?”

I nodded.

“There were dragons here, a lot of them. And they died long ago, but they had lived for so long breathing their fire breath that the ash and the mountains became one and the same. Some of it actually seeped into the rock—there was a famous study about it.” She grinned. “The place kind of scared me, to be honest, for the longest. As a kid, I thought the Kaugs must all be haunted, since they were steeped in the ashes of the dead. But there’s a remarkable lack of ghost stories there. Now I figure that the souls of dead dragons must have better things to do than hang around a backwater like Vencia. And besides,” she said, “all of nature is covered in corpses!”

“Meow! (…?!)”

“But the biggest change is”—she flung her arm back and pulled out her favorite sword—“I’m stronger and wiser now. The last time I checked, Attack was my highest Stat, followed by Defense and Wisdom.”

They did have Stats?! “Meow?”

Reed chuckled. Keeping the sword in her hand, lackadaisically swinging it as we walked, she said, “I guess that sounded like nonsense to you, huh? Maybe spirits don’t quantify Stats the way mathematical, engineer humans do!”

No, they totally did. “Meow,” I said with a head-shake.

She blinked. “Is it the same?”

I half-nodded. Sadly, Reed took this as a cue that the conversation was over.

Darn! I didn’t know how to ask what I wanted to ask—what kind of Stat information she had, how she got it, and whether she could Level it Up the way I could!

We were going southwest, with the emphasis on the “south.” That meant we were coming up on Taipha’s Tree, which I fully expected to be vandalized to death by raccoons.

Suddenly, Reed stopped and quietly yelped (yes, quiet yelping was possible). “I-I’ve never seen a tree like that!” she said, voice and body shaking.

Through patchy leaves, I was seeing the same thing she was. My old home was in worse and more unbelievable shape than any nightmare. It looked so bedraggled by the weight of so many lounging raccoon families that it had practically transformed from a regular old maple to a weeping willow. Raccoons hung and swung like cackling cocoons off every spare branch space, and then, when they were all gone, off other raccoons’ tails. The trunk was not only scratched, but pounded down in places—the constant traffic of raccoon feet had paved raccoon roads. The air was loud with their shouts. The leaves were shaking with their movement—a constant rocking like a steady wind.

They were hard partiers.

Reed sighed with relief. “At least they have somewhere to go,” she said.

Reed! Come on! Five seconds ago you were paralyzed with fright! Now you’re acting like your babies have really gone places in the world, when nothing could be further from the truth!

A dark impulse boiled in my chest. I wanted revenge on these animals so badly, even if this tree no longer gave me any fuzzy or protective feelings, even if I knew I stood no chance against a posse this large. Regardless, in the hypothetical situation where I found some random strange animals and they were acting like this, I would still feel enraged. In these moments, I live to break up fratty parties.

But that wasn’t an option.

“Friend,” Reed said, “I think we should give them the trash.”

A trash gift? A trash peace offering? An accidental invitation for the raccoons to officially stampede and kill us both? Or, simply put, a convenient way to get rid of the cabin junk until we found something, anything better?

I couldn’t say, but it wasn’t my place to say.

But in my heart of hearts, I did have one request: that Reed give them the trash when I was far away, if not safely indoors. She would give them the trash alone. I wasn’t gonna set one foot closer, for fear of extremely swift retribution.

She summoned her trash bags.

Then she pushed them next to each other, teetering though they were. She squatted in front of them and extended her arms. Eegh, no… I could already foresee what she was gonna do and it was a disaster in the making. (At least she wasn’t going to stack them…)

Stretching her arms as wide as they could go, she crammed both bags into her loving embrace. Then, with a long, low groan of pure might, she rose inch by inch, second by second, until finally she’d come back into a standing position. The trash was just any weight at the gym—or, to use a less Chora-like metaphor, it was just any…any.....lumberjack log in the woods?

The main difference was that the bags covered her face and entire range of vision. I worried as she marched past the wall of leaves shielding us from them and vice-versa, and headed into the danger zone. Without moving—yet, at least—I kept a close eye on her. If things went bad, my Air Cutter could do something. Or, better yet, a fresh Fire Spell…

Reed plopped the trash on the ground.

Then she came sprinting out, screaming, “Run!”

As the raccoons sprang and swung off the tree and pelted the trash with their hungry bodies, becoming an army of snarling buzz-saws spitting hot magic, I was more than happy to join her.

I was also happy to note that I was a lot faster now than the first time I’d run with her! As we went run-jumping over tiny hills and valleys, I quickly pulled ahead—

And almost missed the moment when she stopped completely, exhausted and starving for breath.

I stopped, skidding in leaves. Behind me, a ways off, Reed was leaning forward with her arms flopped in front. A trickle of a brook sparkled below her.

I scampered back. Suddenly it hadn’t felt fair of me to just keep going like that, trapped in my own speed paradise. Or, okay, maybe it was fair, according to the rules of the game in my head, but it wasn’t really nice.

Besides, her Attack Stat had to be higher than mine, and I didn’t even give her any congratulations for showing it off! Maybe an Attack competition was in our future?

An impulse bloomed in my brain. I could try to comfort her, the way she might try to comfort me. Instead of just stopping for her, I could reach forward and hug her…Morph for a moment and make it happen.

But it seemed too awkward. Even now, I was shrinking from the thought. So I did what came more naturally, looped around her shin, and rubbed her leg.

Technically this meant I was marking territory, but hardly anyone on Vencia knew what a cat was, so she wouldn’t pick up on that part. All she did, still flopped forward, was move a hand toward me, tentatively. I rubbed my face against it. Then her hand withdrew.

But the important part was done. She had provisional permission to give scritches.