“Rejecting that,” I muttered under my breath as I gathered my thoughts.

So that’s how Deities offered sponsorships outside of the Dungeon. Without any aplomb or decorum. I didn’t even recognise the name. Absalom. It had to be a minor god. Or a foreign god. Either way, it was likely Anon123. There were no other Deities that had shown any interest in sponsoring someone from our party. But why had this one chosen me? What had I done that had interested them?

I guess none of that mattered since I wouldn’t be accepting their sponsorship. We already had one weaker god tied to Wren-Makris and I wasn’t about to make that same mistake. Without any information exchanged or knowing what this Absalom could do for me, I wasn’t trusting my life to a stranger, albeit an all-powerful one, if I could avoid it.

Rejected.

“Ouch, though I appreciate the candidness,” Axel replied. “I never usually get the vibe wrong.” As I wondered what vibe I’d been giving off, he paused and then asked, “Or are you not allowed to kiss?”

The sponsorship request disappeared from my window, and Axel’s query rammed into my grey matter.

I stared, sure I was hearing things. “What?”

“Is it okay for asexuals to kiss people?”

My eyeballs nearly exploded out of their sockets.

“It’s not a fucking cult, Axel. I haven’t been sworn to a vow of celibacy.” I took a breath and let the anger cool. I had no right to be mad about this. He was asking out of ignorance. The general knowledge people had about asexuality was quite low. Still. You’d think if you thought your best friend and crush was aro, you’d have at least googled it once or twice. I pulled my thoughts together. Then, feeling like a school teacher, I explained, “There’s a wide gamut of people under the a-spec umbrella. Not everyone feels the same way about everything. It’s an identity, not a covenant. So what I’d be comfortable with could be completely different to someone else with the same label. Making out, sex, masturbation; it all depends on the person. So for some asexual people, yes, kissing is okay for them.”

He mulled this over for a moment. “And how do you feel about it? Kissing?”

Of course he would press about this. It was Axel, after all. I let out a long sigh. Whatever. If he really wanted this, wanted me, we’d have to talk about it sooner or later. He deserved to know my feelings about this topic if he wanted to pursue us any further. And it was better to get it over now while we still had relative privacy. Gigi was walking along with Wren, and it appeared both of them were animatedly discussing something, but I couldn’t hear them. That meant Axel and I couldn’t be eavesdropped on.

I steeled myself.

“Kissing or kissing?” I queried.

“The latter.”

It would be, if it were Axel, wouldn’t it? Not that I was judging. Just that, historically, Axel was… well, quite an avid player in the field. Still, if I was rejecting his, I figured I’d properly give him an honest answer.

“Generally, not in favour.”

“Generally?” he asked.

Deity Absalom offers Player Lee Bastion Castillo a sponsorship. Accept | Reject

Insistent bastard. I rejected it again.

“I don’t…” I tried to find the words. “I don’t get anything out of it.”

The blond’s head tilted, obviously not really understanding. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

How did I describe this so he’d get it?

Taking a breath, I began, “Well, for me, making out is just wet, and it has a weird taste and texture, and the logistics of it are just awkward.” I paused, and then struck by inspiration I continued, “You know what it feels like? Like mixing raw minced beef to make meatballs. Just warmer and wetter. And in my mouth.”

He made a face. “Have you been kissing the right people?”

I shot him a look that could’ve flayed skin.

“Are you hearing yourself right now?”

He chuckled a little, abashed. “All right, you got me there. But I’m just trying to understand what we can–” He held out his hands to stop the severe amount of fury that he no doubt could see lighting my eyes. “I know you’re still figuring things out, how you feel or don’t feel about me, but I'd like to…” He frowned. “...convince you.”

“Convince me?” I echoed, wondering what manner of acephobic micro-aggression would next spill from his lips.

“To love me back.”

Huh.

That was worse. I felt a migraine coming on and pinched at the bridge of my nose. “That’s not the way it works.”

“I’m very persuasive.”

“Well, you sound insane.”

“I might be. I probably am.” There was a very brief dip into that murky grief, and my concern peaked, but then he winked. “Crazy about you.”

I groaned. “Congratulations, I took ten psychic damage from that.”

Stoically, he nodded, running a hand over his chin in consideration. “Yeah, me too. As I was saying it, I was regretting it.”

Deity Absalom offers Player Lee Bastion Castillo a sponsorship. Accept | Reject

Come on. Fuck off!

“Corny line aside,” Axel said, and he lifted our hands up between us. His earnest gaze held mine captive. “I want to do what you want. Anything you’re comfortable with. If holding hands is the only thing you ever want, my hand will always be open for you.”

The tenderness in his slight smile held too much weight.

Axel, whose moans of pleasure overlapping with another’s I’d heard through our shared apartment walls, was really just okay holding hands for the rest of his life? It beggared belief. I could accept that not all his touches were sexual or expectant, but he was not made the same way as me. It wasn’t just that he desired sex, he liked to be desired too. Yes, maybe this Axel was different to the Axel I’d lived with, he’d changed, whatever, but this was simply unimaginable.

“Why?”

“Because I love you, you idiot,” he growled. “Fucking hell.” He let the frustration on his face fade, but his tone was still irate. “How do I get this through your thick skull? Making you happy makes me happy and when I’m feeling good I want to make you feel good.” He was glaring at me now, not even embarrassed with how he’d managed to quintessentially boil down his feelings towards me into one sentence.

The worst part was it had made sense.

Was it really so simple as that? Because, yes, I preferred it when he was happy too. But could he be happy with me? He seemed sure of it. Could I be okay with knowing that was enough for him? I didn’t know. It was our conversation outside of Tentworld all over again. The always looming question of what Axel would be losing to be with me, to make me happy.

Though maybe in the end that was what every relationship was, regardless of its lean. Asking yourself again and again, every day, if you could make another happy. Perhaps there was no final answer. If Axel was fine, content, with holding my hand, and it didn’t lead to anything else, then…

I sighed. “You don’t have to ask.”

“What?”

“Next time you want to hold hands. You don't have to ask.”

His brows shot up, a delighted smile curling his lips. He really was too damn pretty. If I was honest with myself, seeing that I’d elicited this joy caused a warmth to spread through me. This expression on him… It hurt seeing him upset, seeing him broken down, and I wanted to stop those emotions from overcoming him, but deeper down, just like Axel had said, making him happy made me happy. The feeling reached my face, and I found myself smiling back against my will.

Axel’s eyes sparkled. “See? I am winning you over.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

Deity Absalom offers Player Lee Bastion Castillo a sponsorship. Accept | Reject

Deity Absalom offers Player Lee Bastion Castillo a sponsorship. Accept | Reject

Deity Absalom offers Player Lee Bastion Castillo a sponsorship. Accept | Reject

Deity Absalom offers Player Lee Bastion Castillo a sponsorship. Accept | Reject

Deity Absalom offers Player Lee Bastion Castillo a sponsorship. Accept | Reject

“Jesus fucking christ,” I exclaimed, pulling my hands free to clutch my head in an attempt to deal with the bombardment of the notifications. Slowly I went through and rejected them all. Was the Deity bad at taking a no?

“You good?”

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Unable to ignore the god anymore, with a groan, I raised my voice and called out, “Any of you familiar with the name Absalom?”

The party stopped in their tracks and turned to face Axel and me, confusion etched on their faces. It was a bit out of the blue, so I wasn’t anticipating any resounding answers, but their vacant stares did not fill me with reassurance.

“Hello? ‘Absalom’? Ringing any bells?”

From far up ahead, Tam shouted back, “Sounds Jewish to me, sunshine.” Well, at least she’d answered. It was more than I was expecting. Not that I hadn’t been able to pick that myself. Better than nothing, though. Perhaps she really was warming up to the crew. Yeah, and pigs were flying.

Wren added, “Makris says it’s a pretty dated name.”

Again, nothing I didn’t know. I glanced at Gigi, but xe shook xir head. Not a god from the world of the Linnikians, at least. Which meant it might be a minor god from some mythology unknown to me.

“Absalom. You fully sure?” Jye asked, surprisingly, thought bending their brow.

“Yeah, no mistaking it.” I’d read it about a million times now. “You know it?”

They nodded. “I think its from the Tanakh.” This earned them blank expressions party round. The redhead crossed their buff arms. They guffawed. “You guys don’t read much, huh? It’s the Hebrew Bible. Though I guess technically Absalom is Old Testament too.”

“I thought that was called the Torah?” I replied. Raised as Christian until my father finally gave up on attending Sunday church since it was a decent drive from our property, and now agnostic, I was about as familiar with the Hebrew holy texts as I was with the one I’d been christened under.

The giant let out a disappointed huff. “Dude, the Torah is just one scripture of the Tanakh. But… I don’t remember much about Absalom. The word count is high.” They pursed their lips in reflection. “I think Absalom was, like, a prince that swore revenge on the man who,” their gaze flicked momentarily over to Wren, and perhaps remembering my warning about her being too young for some topics, continued with, “uh, mistreated his sister and ended up losing hardcore after attempting a coup. Why the sudden interest?”

Bizarre for someone from Judaism to appear as a Deity. So far it’d been, well, we only knew of Nabu, but everything seemed like it was more mythology related. Using a currently practised religion was very odd. Then again, maybe the name was just a coincidence. Sometimes there were two etymological roots for a word that started off in entirely different places. Absalom’s name could be just like that. And considering that the Deity Commentary was “translated and localised,” maybe even god's names were too?

Though, what Jye had said about Absalom’s sister… It struck a little too close to home. It could be the reason why Anon123 became interested in me in the first place, if that was actually his history. Maybe he felt kinship towards me after hearing we’d been through something similar?

“Why the hell do you know anything about Judaism?” Axel asked, baffled enough for the rest of us.

It was a reasonable question. It didn’t seem a very Jye thing to do, this was true. For someone whose first thought of an all-powerful wish was to scrub the world of all religion, it wasn’t really on brand. I spoke for all of us when I say we were waiting on bated breath for the redhead’s response.

“Dude, I’d like to see you cut off your family and not do a little soul searching,” the giant replied. “I ended up finding it elsewhere, but that didn’t stop me having a peep at others’ solutions.”

“How many religions was that?” Wren inquired, probably on behalf of Makris.

Jye’s green eyes narrowed in thought. “Pretty much all of them.”

“Well, truss me up and fill me with stuffing, Sasquatch,” Tam said, walking over. “I didn’t even think you had a soul.” She slapped a hand onto redhead’s back, her frame comically dwarfed by Jye’s. “At least you have some use to us.”

The giant visibly stiffened from her words. She was referring to their inability to level up in the crudest way possible. Of course she’d noticed. We’d never explained Jye’s glitches to her, but only an idiot wouldn’t have seen Jye’s level remain stagnant. Selfish as she was, she was taking her frustrations about being forced to party with us out on Jye. Well, it was time to do my job as our party’s social lubricant. I repressed the sigh that wanted to leak out of me and redirected the conversation.

“A Deity called Absalom keeps trying to sponsor me. That’s why I asked.”

There was a brief exchange about what that meant, and everyone voiced their opinions.

Gigi outright said xe didn’t recognise the name nor had xe ever heard the tale Jye shared. Xir advice was to continue rejecting the sponsorship. The Linnikian went on to say that if the Deity especially wanted to sponsor me, they’d be able to send requests in upcoming Dungeons that might grant me more information.

Wren was much more gung ho about it, still of the opinion that a sponsorship early was better than none, even after our conversation about Nabu. Perhaps it was Makris convincing her of this. But maybe it came from the perspective of further protecting her. I hoped so.

Tam said, “No comment.” And then waited until we finished because we’d stopped around a block or two from the Queen Street Mall, and we had previously discussed attempting to sneak in behind the Gate area. She didn’t want to go solo when there was a high likelihood of a large party lying in wait.

Jye surprisingly said that they’d recommend taking the sponsorship. They explained that they pitied Absalom, and his story, to Jye at least, was tragic. Not only that, but apparently, if Jye’s memory was to be believed, Absalom had his fair share of good qualities. The redhead said they thought that even without the clout of a big name, it was an impressive enough sponsor—doomed ending aside.

Axel flat out said I shouldn’t take it and wouldn’t elaborate. He then took my hand. This earned him a glare, and several confused glances from the party, but I didn’t comment. I’d given him permission, after all. I was good for my word.

I decided to put the whole sponsorship thing on the backburner since Absalom had seemingly given up with his assault of notifications. Maybe all he had wanted to be was noticed. I was glad for his silence because we needed to focus on our approach.

Even though it was only for a short time until we got closer to the CBD Dungeon, I found myself enjoying the comfort of Axel's hand in mine.

It turned out that Carrie had severely munted her description of the people surrounding the Queen Street Mall Gate. She’d called them a group of upstarts. Unless in the past few days since she’d last been given intel they’d grown twice in size and organisation skills, then perhaps her ability to understate things was a fun little quirk of her personality I wasn’t aware of.

Suffice to say, as we crept down the sidewalk of one of the walkways, keeping to the walls as close as our bodies could cling, there were a dozen people milling about the black hole of the Gate. Worst yet, they appeared to be armed in one way or another. Some wielded baseball bats, others crowbars.

The smallest consolation was that none of them seemed to have any ranged weapons. I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Carrie where she’d gotten a shotgun from, but somehow I imagined she probably had her licence and a membership at a gun range somewhere. Inwardly, I was thankful for Australia’s stricter gun laws.

The six of us watched in silence as the crew took turns patrolling the area, walking at certain intervals into each of the four laneways of the outside mall's intersection before turning heel and walking back. They'd put up high steel construction fences surrounding the Gate, held together with thick metal chains and chunky padlocks. Only one such connection wasn't locked shut. Probably the joint they hinged open to let paying customers through. There was also makeshift barbed wire stretched out horizontally over the top of the Gate, forming a lattice roof of spikes. Clearly, they were trying to prevent all types of approaches.

As far as I could see, there wasn’t an apparent chain of command either, which made it difficult if we wanted to avoid the more challenging whole party wipe and instead figure out who we could even single out to cut the head off the snake. It was a gruesome analogy, and as I detachedly realised I’d coldly considered killing the lot of them, I felt a little ill.

Beckoning with my finger, I signalled for the others to follow me back out.

Once we’d made enough distance, I opened the floor to suggestions.

“Wait until the cover of night and wipe them out,” Tam remarked casually.

I gave her a look. “What did we say about killing?”

“Hey now, brown cow, I do believe the exception was if someone was actively between us and the object of our desires. So, if that ain’t reason enough, I don’t know what is,” she replied.

It was the worst when Tam’s opinion made sense.

“Could we try talking to them?” Wren suggested, her small brows furrowed in thought. For once, this felt like a genuinely Wren idea with no Makris input. She was a much more forgiving person than anyone else in our party, Markis definitely included.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good–”

“Short stuff’s got a point. They are accepting payment for entry. Maybe the easiest solution is to just give them what they want,” Axel said, cutting me off. I tightened my grip painfully on his hand as revenge, and his eyes flicked toward me. Misunderstanding my intent, he squeezed back, as if we were playing a game, before continuing, “We’re pretty much rolling in valuable stuff right now. Diplomacy might actually be the go.”

Even though I was irritated that he’d spoken over me, and completely ignored it, I instead focused on his argument. Curiously, his response was a little out of character. The Axel I’d seen so far had been pretty zealous about throwing himself into the thick of it; from being ready to kill Tam to Test Name to the Minotaur. But this group was the largest we’d come up against so far. Maybe the number was deterring him…

Still, should we end up following his suggestion and try to hash it out with the gate guard, I’d be volunteering myself as spokesman. The rest of the party were, let’s just say, unique communicators. Axel, for example, might be able to talk his way out of mistakes, but he was just as liable to talk his way into them. And that was not what we needed.

Jye did some squats on the street, clearly unimpressed by the level of exercise we’d been putting them through on our hour-long walk. As they came back up with a grunt, they said, “They’ve got, like, double the number on us. Not to be a downer, but our chances if things go tits up during peace talks aren’t exactly great.”

Counselling caution, Gigi remarked, “Perhaps it would be better to get more information.” Xir expression was grave, xir mouth pulled into a single flat line. “I understand we are bound by the deadline threatened by the Deities, but, I say this with the utmost concern, it has been mostly luck that our previous altercations ended with all of us surviving. Should we push any further, I fear we will meet our fate.”

The party sat on xir words quietly, a grim weight sinking into us.

It was true that whenever we’d gone into battle, we’d known nothing about our opponents. We’d been ambushed two, no, three times, and almost each and every time one of us had ended up in dire circumstances. Gigi was correct. It was sheer chance one of us wasn’t dead already. If we had the opportunity to gather proper intel, we should take it. It was better than risking our lives unnecessarily. But the ever approaching danger of the culling was at the forefront of my mind… We had to make a choice. One that might doom us, either way.

I shared my thoughts with the others, and then added, “They say knowledge is power. I think Gigi might be right this time ‘round. All those in agreement that we hunker down for a few nights to surveil longer, raise your hands.”

Axel lifted our joined hands above our heads with a cheeky smile, followed by Gigi, Jye, and then, shockingly, Tam. Wren’s hand did not join ours.

“You a no, Wren?” I asked, softly.

“Makris says it’s stupid to waste time, especially with this party as it is.”

Was that a general insult at all of us or another jab at Jye? In the corner of my eye, I watched their lips curl down slightly.

I frowned, annoyed by the man in her mind. “But what do you think?”

She glanced at her feet, wringing her hands. Looking up shyly, Wren said, “I think… I would like to sleep in a bed for once.”

Laughing, I nodded. “We’ll see what we can do.”

At the very least, this gave me some time to start working on the foundations of something I’d been considering since we first entered the Dungeon; a base of our own.

If we were going to survive this, we needed a headquarters for operation, much like one that Killian and Carrie had built. But we needed to think further in the long term too. Their group’s base was mostly reactive and had solid planning for the current situation. But since the world had stopped operating as we knew it, famine would soon sweep the populations of every import-based country, which was almost all the developed ones. And given it was hard to tell if the Australian government still existed and what they were doing, we had to assume no aid would be coming. The marketplace didn’t look to sell food either, based on the browse I’d had earlier.

Thus, regardless of how fast we pushed for levels, if we had nowhere to rest and recover, and nothing to eat and drink, we would doom ourselves, the culling and tutorial termination be damned.

So while we did recon, we needed to start sowing some seeds, metaphorically and literally.

It was time to plant a goddamn garden.