“It’s been too fucking long,” Reysha groaned. “Can something, please, fucking happen?”

“I would advise against such requests. Unexpected events on the Branches are typically the cause of death by Parasyte,” Aclysia stated, her even voice compromised for a moment when she spoke the name of the accursed ticks that skittered the radiant bark they all trod upon.

“She’s right that it has been forever though…,” Korith weighed in. “…are we going to get there soon?”

“Yes.” Apexus’ simple answer had the rest of his party hasten to catch up with him. They had worked out when his tone implied that elaboration was made unnecessary by what was before him.

The humanoid chimera stood on top of a little ridge on top of the groove in the titanic tree. From there, he gazed at the target of their journey.

After delivering the little group of eccentrics from Mayana to Tacuitos, they had gathered up a little intel and then set back out. Their journey had taken them to the nearby Hub Leaf, which served as a network point, and from there they had followed rumours to a new adventure. The needle of the compass that pointed towards the place where Maltos had said Apexus would find the masters to teach him the next set of Martial Arts a Monk should have access to narrowed their path. Beyond that, the party had just one goal.

They wanted something simple.

Exploring the Sleeping Empire, in whose borders they now technically moved, had sounded like too much of a potential hassle. Similarly, they did not want another mess like Herbaemayim to drag them down further. All of them agreed that they wanted a Leaf that they could travel and that they could act as actual adventurers on.

That was when they had heard about the Leaf of Alarshus. Crafted only a hundred years ago, Alarshus was just explored enough that the powerful adventurers that specialized in such endeavours had left. In their absence, the rank-and-file of the appropriate level went to the Leaf to fill out the gaps and tame the wild. Alarshus had been created without sapient people and so was a realm for adventurers and adventurers alone.

That was what they had been told and that was what they looked forward to on the horizon.

“Wow,” Korith mumbled.

“Couldn’t have put it better,” Reysha whispered, without a hint of sarcasm.

A Leaf always was a splendid sight — a dimension attached to the great silver Branches of the Omniverse. Even the smallest of them glinted with veins of raw mana spreading through the surface, tinted by the seasons common to that Leaf. Typically, the size difference between Leaves was small.

Not so with this one. Alarshus was gigantic. Distance was always difficult to gauge on the Branches that cut through the void, but this was close enough that Apexus could make out the sheer scale of it all. The visions of the new world that drifted over the facets of the Leaf were manifold and magnificent. Of all the Leaves that they had visited on their three month journey to this point, only the Hub World could have compared.

“If we hurry, we will get there before the end of the day,” Apexus said and resumed his walk.

An unspoken promise lay in those words. They had needed to sleep in the glowing argent of the Branches for many, many days and had eaten whatever rations they had bought at their pitstops. Whether they would be able to acquire food there was questionable, mostly due to a lack of funds. A place to sleep, however, the Change Mansion guaranteed them.

The rest of the journey was as uninteresting as the path there. Quick steps over silver bark. Occasionally, they would squish a skittering Parasyte under their feet.

Then the bark was replaced by hard light. Thousands of veins of mana shifted gently under a semi-translucent surface. The party advanced and advanced. Fragmented displays of the world they were entering were becoming clearer. Deserts and chaotic plains, jungles, forests, and vast spires that looked like termite hives. Gradually, all of that became distant. It moved behind the horizon.

Clear as anything else before their eyes was a city. Not a great city, just a city. A centre with buildings of stone surrounded by a sprawling, loose ring of outskirts primarily fashioned from wood, and sometimes even just from mudbrick. Tents were also numerous. It was as much a city as a military outpost and yet it was neither of those things.

“Great, our sleep cycle is out of whack,” Reysha groaned, blinking up at the midday sun. “I’m dead tired and it's bright as the Heavenly Canopy.”

“Reysha...” Aclysia sighed.

“Yes, yes, do not use the great dwelling of the gods in vain.” The redhead waved off. “Seriously though, this is going to suck to get back into whack.”

“Well, it's not like, uhm, we have to be on time for any job,” Korith said.

“We may have to visit shops within their regular opening hours, however,” Aclysia considered.

Apexus listened to their talk and scanned the plaza they were descending on. It was mostly dirt with a few roads of cobblestone leading into the surrounding city. To the humanoid slime’s mild approval, they were not approached as they walked on the proper ground. There was no welcoming committee or tariff collector. In terms of organized military presence, there was only a pair of dark elven guards that flanked the entrance to an embassy of some kind. The flag of the Sleeping Empire, an elven face with closed eyes, dark grey on a white background, fluttered in the soft winds of Spring.

The Sleeping Empire had expanded right up until the next Leaf over, the one the party had visited last. On this one, they only kept a token presence. The world was too untamed yet to take it off the hands of adventurers. To do so would have only upset the Adventurer’s Guild and forced the empire to expend its own treasury to assure some kind of peace for only a little bit of farmland in return.

It would take hundreds of years before Alarshus was tame, if it ever was. There was no incentive for any nation to bring its law here. Only the Adventurer’s Guild cared to put down roots in such a place. Them and the various guilds that moved in their wake, be it merchants, crafters, or colonists, all of them ready to keep the adventurers clothed, fed, and supplied, and pick up land and profit in return.

“Adventurers are like a plough, followed by those that scatter the seeds,” Apexus said.

“That’s a pretty normal Apexusism,” Korith said.

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“That doesn’t even qualify as an Apexusism, that’s just wisdom-babble-monk-speech.” Reysha stretched. “Do we bother taking a look around or do we lie down immediately?” she asked.

Apexus was still busy scanning the environment. It was loud. Everyone was busy getting somewhere. There was no order, either. A pair of piss drunk adventurers were drunkenly pissing against a house wall. The craftsman the house belonged to shook his head, but decided it was less trouble to just let them do it. A society governed by young, adventurous people had the coherency of a psychopath’s moral compass.

“Let’s find a remote spot to put the door up,” Apexus answered. He picked a direction at random.

The crowd was beyond colourful. With no local population to set a baseline, all that had come here to colonize and explore were the mix of people that adventurers always were made up of. There was a slight tinge towards humans, courtesy of being the most numerous race around, and dark elves, courtesy of being the ruling class of the nearby empire, but neither was so overbearing that it made the crowd anything besides diverse.

Trade in this city was straightforward. Exports were monster parts, enchanted items crafted with those monster parts, and other rare objects from Dungeon runs. Imports were ale, metal ingots, and leather. Food was largely locally sustainable. Trade came and went in waves, carefully calculated by the merchants based on local liquor consumption. Once the adventurers were about to run dry and the traders would get their best prices, they went out.

It happened with astounding frequency.

The party marched past the, by far, largest building complex in the city. Several stone buildings encapsulated a massive courtyard, all of them interconnected by roads, tunnels, and gardens. It was the local Adventurer’s Guild outpost, the beating heart of the operations of this world. A map of Alarshus was displayed next to the entrance. The massive size of the interconnected landmasses was separated into many areas, none of which quite made sense to the party.

image [https://i.imgur.com/evH3v2B.png]

“Any idea what U-I-O means?” Korith asked.

“Too tired, ask tomorrow,” Reysha yawned. “Or maybe tonight would be more accurate.”

That found general agreement and they continued to the outskirts of the city. Stone was swiftly replaced by wood and canvas. Here and there were remains of the forest that had been chopped down to make space.

The party decided to make one of those forests the space to put down the entrance of the Change Mansion.

The space inside did not live up to the name. A singular room with a singular, albeit large, bed of hay, a bookshelf, some other small furniture, a fireplace and cooking utensils, and a window to the outside weather. The weather, specifically, as the window otherwise just displayed a generic, non-existent landscape.

Aclysia walked over and pulled the curtain closed, dimming the light in the room to a soft level. Korith leapt straight into the sheet-covered hay bed at the other end of the room, landing in the pillows they had acquired over time.

“Softness!” the blonde kobold squeaked.

Reysha chased after her, putting her red head between the shortstack’s tits the moment the breastplate was off. “Softness!” she exclaimed with even greater enthusiasm.

A little smile showed on Apexus’ stoic face once he remembered to show it. With the door behind them closed, their privacy was absolute. All of them were tired from the long journey and there was much to enjoy in this little space. Water replenished itself within the containers that the Mobile Estate provided on its own, firewood was similarly available, and the bed was still as firm as the day they had first lain in it, the hay remaking itself while they were out and about.

Apexus pulled at the cord that kept his grey robe closed. The fabric glided off his naked chest and he hung it from a hook on a nearby wall. His loose pants soon followed. The rest of the party stripped out of their equipment. Wanton gazes wandered about, but their wish to be entangled erotically was third after the desire to be clean and to sleep.

Reysha moved her dark-skinned curves to the water basin first. The stripes of a darker, brown shade covered the redheaded tiger woman with a bare hint of symmetry. Only the two stripes around her eyes were perfectly mirrored, surrounding the black of her sclera like warpaint. The slit, blue eyes within were, without a doubt, the most lecherous of those around. Medium-sized breasts and toned, long legs trembled sinfully with every step she took.

Aclysia was next to her swiftly, handing over a washcloth with one of her pale, slender-fingered hands. The metal fairy appeared as if she had never seen a hint of the sun, so total was the snow-white of her skin. Her long, straight hair was of a similar, silvery-white. Her figure was bottom-heavy, her petite chest and narrow midriff contrasted delightfully by the plumpness of her ass and thighs. Green eyes clung mostly to her darling, but she paid plenty of attention to the others. “Let me aid you,” she offered, once the last of the three females approached.

Korith was as short and stacked as ever. Standing as tall as Apexus’ crotch, the four-horned, blonde kobold was blushing incredibly at the sight of her tall lover and party leader. Enormous breasts swayed with every little squirm. Her figure was that of a squished hourglass. Her head was relatively large, courtesy of her shortness, but nothing about her height made her curvaceous body any less womanly. Arms and legs ended in red-scaled claws. A tail grew from above her round derriere.

“Th-thanks,” the shortstack mumbled and let the pointy-eared angel rub the washcloth over her back. The Warrior of the party had more muscles under all that squish than one might anticipate and had trouble reaching those spots.

Korith was tiny, Reysha and Aclysia were tall for women, but Apexus was giant. Over two metres tall and, in line with his male sex, of much broader and muscular build, he towered over the three of them even once he was squatting. He loosened the low ponytail he kept his long, black hair in and put the ribbon he used to that end to the side. Emerald eagle wings on his back atrophied so he could move about a little easier in this confined space. The long, smooth tail of the Deathhound was easier to keep around.

“I need the cleaning least of us,” Apexus reminded Reysha when the redhead started to wipe off his chest. His membrane wasn’t as thin as it used to be, allowing more dust and dirt to gather on him. Even with that, his lack of bodily functions such as sweating or shedding skin, meant that he was always relatively clean.

“I am using whatever excuse to touch those pecs that I can get,” Reysha purred, then hissed complainingly when he pushed her back.

“In the morning,” he promised her.

All of them continued to wipe themselves off with washcloths in relative silence. They talked every day, bantered about this and that, shared almost all experiences, and thus there was little to actually discuss in moments of quiet like this. They shared the quiet with the occasional compliment thrown in here and there.

One important discussion needed to be had before they went to bed though.

“We do not have any notable funds left,” Aclysia reported.

The party had gathered up a bit of wealth before leaving Tacuitos. Those funds had minorly diminished in Herbaeyanim. It was the travel to this new Leaf that had majorly bit into their savings. Between the buying of information, passage through the portals of the Hub Leaf, and the occasional meal, they were down to just a few silver.

“Such a sorry, sorry state of affairs,” Korith whined.

“Indeed. Similarly, our equipment remains notably subpar for our level, with some ultimately minor exceptions,” Aclysia stated.

“Come morning, we will look for Quests,” Apexus stated.

It was a new idea for the party, yet the backbone of adventuring life as much as dungeon runs were. The rewards from dungeons were often enough to keep adventurers financially afloat, but to truly get ahead and thrive, one had to supply what people in the larger economy wanted. Whether that was eccentric rich people desiring some kind of trophy or a collective of farmers pooling resources to request monster corpses that made for exceptional fertilizer hardly mattered. Quests were how adventurers got not only money but connections.

Knowing someone was often more important than having money, especially for the specialized goods each Class of adventurer often needed.

To this party, the idea of going on Quests was still alien. It had been well over a year since they stopped avoiding other people, but they still maintained a degree of general distance.

“Now is the time to come out of our shell,” Apexus addressed the general thought in the room. Nods all around. Confused, the humanoid chimera tilted his head. “No comment on Apexusisms on that one?”

“It’s a common phrase, darling,” Aclysia informed him.

‘Language is so confusing,’ he thought.