The silence was broken by one almost inaudibly meek voice asking “Crime?” The Street Tough who hazarded the question was punched in the shoulder by his neighbor.

Feeling returned to my joints, never quickly enough. Chasing the wave of tinglies from each leg felt like squeezing out a sponge soaked in tar. Before too long, though, I could take a step, and another. I went to my human, the object of the crowd’s… what? Hate? Envy?

Commander Zideo clasped the prize belt around his waist, cinching it tight with some mechanism behind its golden plates. Wreathed in the glory of shining belt, he looked the part of the victorious luchador, grim and exultant in victory, despite one black eye and the bloody red triangle from his nose to his collarbones.

“The mayor is dead,” said one of the Street Toughs, and I had the sense that he was more showing his work than appraising the situation, like a child who reads out loud or talks himself through an addition problem. “Long live… the Mayor?”

“Mayor?” a chant asked permission to begin, tenuous and tremulous. “Mayor?”

“Not Mayor,” said Zideo, his voice confident if not booming like his predecessor’s. “Player.”

“Player,” said another, and another. The word made its way exploratorily around the ring of watching brutes. “Player.” Whatever it was, it was decided. “Player! Player!”

“Player!” a few voices called, separately.

“Player!” they shouted, scattered but converging.

“Player!” rose the chant, as one. “Player! Player! Player!”

Fists raised. Whips cracked. Knives dropped. Protest signs were pulled down and hastily rewritten. “I WAS WRONG ABOUT PLAYERS” read one, and another “R.I.P. MAYOR BO 'DA CHAMP' DUCHAMP, 19∞9 - 20♫4.”

“But what about City Hall?” asked a voice in the crowd. “Where will he rule from?”

“It’s fine,” said Zideo. “I’m not staying long.”

The chanting halted. “You’re leaving us?” said the woman who had whipped me previously. My pride stung more than my skin, and her allegiance had clearly shifted, so I let it slide. “But you gotta rule us.”

“Yeah, rule us!”

“Yeah!”

“No, actually I have to go save my friends.”

“But who will rule us?” one of them pressed. There was an echo among the roving crowd of Street Toughs, as though the message was repeated like a beacon from one brain to the next. I nursed a theory that their amoebic mass shared a mental resource, and was stingy in distributing it across the individuals. We might be witnessing the organs of the organism sending the message around in real-time.

“I don’t know,” said Zideo, annoyed that the conversation was taking this long. He wanted to be done with them, probably to absorb their Radian into his secret place of storage along with the other, but did not want to lose whatever worshipful feeling they had for him. “Can one of you do it? Just vote for a new mayor from your ranks, or like a Street Tough Queen or something.”

The laughter that followed was nearly a riot. They rolled and pushed one another. Someone kicked over a (fake) car in his mirth. Another literally pulled out all his hair, great bleached locks coming away as he bellowed with laughter.

One of them, in torn jeans, mastered himself enough to say, “Good one Boss!” and clapped Zideo on the back. This gesture halted the laughter, and every eye locked onto him, unsure whether to treat him as an assailant. He flushed bright red, and shrank away.

“Oh, no, hell no,” said Zideo. “I am not a Boss. I’m nobody’s Boss. Nothing like that.” A gleam came into my human’s eye, and he decided to use his moment of fleeting authority to our advantage. He asked for medical attention, and was lead by the crowd to the wall-less plywood facade marked HOSPITIL [sic]. We did not go inside. Instead, a few toughs rolled out a couple of barrels–heavy drums of dark-colored steel, possibly. Set upright, they were offered in silence as though Zideo would know what to do with them. He did not, and a Street Tough struck the barrel, shucking its jagged halves into oblivion. There stood a full turkey dinner, steaming hot.

Neither Zideo nor I understood what this had to with healing wounds, I think. But we ate graciously, and the blood vanished from his face and neck. His black eye returned to normal as well. He tried to exclaim something but his mouth was full, and he pet the fur of my back where my bruises and lacerations were. I tensed, bracing for pain, but only felt the comforting fingernail-scritches of my human. He then touched his own face, tentatively, and understood. In that way, we used one another as a mirror, and knew that the turkey dinner had filled more than our bellies. For truly we were reflections, the only two real, physical beings for perhaps infinite leagues in any direction.

Street Toughs are not the best givers of directions, either. From a few disjointed and disagreeing advisors, he gleaned the rough direction of the Trackin’ Fields. It was some distance, but I suspected that once we got out of this out-of-place remnant where critical path seemed not to work, we would find our way and make good progress. After all, Zideo was not the only one who could run and jump through the obstacles of this Shard.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The Street Toughs saw us off in a tearful farewell. They blew their noses with great sonorant honks against one another’s denim vests, and wept openly. They were ugly criers, un-self-conscious like children. Zideo didn’t seem to feel too bad about it, but he also couldn’t quite detach from them. So we tarried long enough for him to give them a farewell address.

“Nobody rules the Street Toughs,” he said. “You’re your own thing. You have that whole riot energy, and that’s fine, because that’s you. Never accept another Boss. You’re punks. You’re thugs. You’re hooligans. You’re not part of an army, you don't do authority. Right? Go break shit and kick shit. Maybe go do something that pisses off the Empire of Sorrow, huh? Maybe bust up the next Sorrow Transport you see and stomp the next battalion of Sorrow Troopers that tries to make you do their dirty work?” The wisdom in this address resonated greatly with them. “OH. And also, be nice to animals. Bye!”

There were new faces in the crowd, which was larger than the initial group that had surrounded us during the fight that dethroned DuChamp. Somehow their numbers had grown, though I was certain I had thinned their ranks at least by a small margin.

They waved as one, exuding a confused mix of emotions, as we struck out into the rustic, autumnal beauty of the Golden Plains once more, beneath bowers of variegated trees and floating land-chunks. Out of the influence of the parking lot foundation beneath New Rampage City, we once again found that we knew where to go, even if we were uncertain where we were headed.

Once we had trekked well out of sight of New Rampage City, Zideo detached the belt with a click. Triggering some mechanism in its narrow inner workings, the flat of the buckle slid to either side like Addrion’s helmet. A golden hour came over the countryside around us, light like the rise of either sunrise or sunset seen through the bowers of trees or peeking between the sheer flanks of mountains. He retracted it into the invisible holding place he called his “inventory,” and the world around us returned to a more modest and pastoral fall.

“Up for a run?” he asked. Of course the answer was an unqualified “ARF!” (Which, in this context, means “yes.”)

I had been afforded little, if any, time to run by the side of my human during this excursion. It felt good. Joggers speak of a “runner’s high,” at which I may roll my canine eyes. The thought that the top animal intellect on the planet has rediscovered fleeing from danger is endlessly entertaining, but there is certainly truth in it for dogs. For us, it is a chance to exercise our morphologies and instincts that even human’s genetic meddling has not bred out, an outlet for our most primal ya-yas. Even in Airy Zone, I was typically on a leash when next to Zideo, and we ran side by side only rarely. For example: the time we were at the far end of the neighborhood and he remembered that he had something called “tryouts,” which in my observation was no more than the usual tinkering in front of the medium glowing desk rectangle, but with more tension.

Soon we were in the zone, as it were, lost in a flow state of running together. He was my pack, and I his. We jogged, sprinted, jumped, ducked, slid. Sometimes he Air Dashed, and I would push forward to catch up, or I might race ahead while he wall jumped. He paused when we saw coins spinning in trees’ knots or between their bifurcating trunks, perhaps in an unguarded nest. But he laughed and said, “Not today!” and continued on.

I knew we were in the zone’s highlands, as we had put in some uphill legwork and the air felt thinner to me. Not as thin as the mountains in Blue Frost, but noticeable.

Cresting a ridge, Zideo shouted “Whoa!” and halted. My first thought was that someone had run an incalculably large paint roller across the Golden Plains and turned it green. A verdant hillscape, lush with hundreds of shrubs and bushes, grasses and greenery loped up and down as far as the eye could see. There were few mountains here, and paths through gardens and lawns, soft hillsides and cozy dells beckoned to us.

I took a step forward and felt the temperature climb significantly. I am no judge of these things, but it must have been thirty degrees’ difference, one footfall to the next. Wondering how this might be, I turned back and walked a few feet back into the last sparse trees of the Golden Plains. The difference was night and day, as they say. A cool breeze dried the instant sweat that had accumulated in my fur. Another step forward and it was hot once more.

“Well this sure isn’t the Trackin’ Fields,” said Zideo. “I’m guessing we went the wrong way, and this must be the Rolling Green. Hey book, where–oh, right.” Embarrassment clouded his brow.

The land was teeming with activity. We saw the purposeful back-and-forth of black ants patrolling distant paths–but no, they were not ants.

“Ohmpressors,” said Zideo. The Rolling Green was fraught with them. Whether they had been sent to scour the land for us, or this was merely an indication that we were closer to a more highly guarded territory, I could not say for sure, nor would my bestial canine mouth allow me to speculate out loud to Zideo.

“Well, I don’t know how much time we’ve lost,” he reasoned out loud. “We can only hope they didn’t kill Addrion and Helmgarth and Nereus. They might not have. They take prisoners–these things are proof.” He waved toward the Ohmpressors milling across the land. “And if they didn’t, then they probably took them that way.” On the horizon, stubby black spired stood between volcanic hills where plumes of smoke mixed with clouds. “That’s probably the Armory we saw from the Overworld map. Wish I could skip right to it, but maybe we can cut them off if we hurry.” He looked at me, as though I had replied. “I know, fat chance.” He sighed. “Well, fortune favors those who grind. So let’s grind, huh?”

He tensed, and leaped into the air to begin the next leg of our journey with a bang. Flames burst from him once more, and he was a burning streak in the air. In a sputter of sparks, he bounced off of something I could not see, robbed of his momentum and drifting to the ground like a bug against the windshield of a Honda Micro-Commuter EV.

“Owwww,” he said, rubbing his head. “Oh my gosh. OH. That hurt. What the… what did I hit?”

He gathered himself and walked forward. I followed. We found another invisible wall, and my hackles rose immediately. But on further experimentation–Zideo pressing his hands against it, then slamming his fists against it–it was completely stationary, although just as impossible to see and pass through as the wall force from the other side of the zone.

Zideo halted mid-pound and mid-swear, and slowly turned to me. “How many Radians did it say we had to have to get through Rolling Green? Three?” He put his hands on his head. “Oh crap. Oh fuckity fuuuuuuuuuck. Nereus has the one from the Purple Deeps. We only have two.”

“Radians?” came a voice on the hill beside us. “Who’s got Radians?” A shape in an unseasonable trenchcoat emerged from behind one of the trees on the top of the steep hill. “You’ve got Radians?” asked the master merchant, Kriegsgewinnler, from beneath his leather hood and mask.