The tea his mother had made had woken Nate right up. After they transferred everything to the truck, he pulled out his notebook and started working on his meditative art. With basic ties backing him up, he felt like he was suddenly making more progress than before. He knew it was an illusion, as he was merely going over the parts he had already understood anyway.

The real test would come when he moved on to the new material, and he doubted it would help him actively understand any of it.

Regardless, once they were in the truck, had the trailer fully hooked up, and were on their way, he settled in to work on his own projects. Music thumped through his headphones as he concentrated, his eyes occasionally flicking to the passing sights outside the window. The wait at the wall was a few minutes longer this time than the week before.

The early hour was when most companies left on their weekend expeditions. Lone cultivators, and those simply performing their quota expeditions, tended to leave at a slightly later hour.

Nate kept working for as long as he could before the condition of the road began to deteriorate. At that point, he knew it was time to put the notebook away. He had created a list of potential new words for each of the red and yellow words in the first and second stanzas. The thesauruses were awesome in that regard. They made it easy to search for new, related words.

He would go through each of them later and test how they fit. It was lazy, but it worked, and it was faster than any other method he had thought of.

Storing the notebook, along with his headphones and music player, he stretched out his legs with a groan.

“How much longer?”

His mother turned around with a gentle smile curling her lips. “Our turnoff is roughly in another mile, after this bridge.”

“Bridge?” Nate leaned over and peered at where they were going. He didn’t remember there being a bridge of any note in this area. Not yet, at least. The closest major river should have still been a couple of hours away.

A minute later, a bridge came into view. It wasn’t extremely long, nor was it one going over a river. Instead, it jumped over multiple creeks and streams. It barely even deserved the name of being a bridge, in his opinion, but it still was one.

Shaking his head for getting so easily confused, he sat back and waited.

A few minutes later, his dad slowed the truck and turned off the main highway and onto an old road that led to a destroyed housing area.

Trees had long since begun to reclaim the land, with trees growing through the old houses. The asphalt had split apart in many places and was completely untraversable after a certain point. The constant trickle of rigs and trailers from expeditions had worn down much of the growth on the road itself. However, it was clear that no one was putting the effort into clearing away the trees that would be required to push past a certain point.

The truck and trailer pulled into a nearby roundabout and slowly turned back around. When they were facing the entrance and could easily leave when the time came, Niall set the brakes and turned everything off.

“Time to get suited up everyone,” He said as he hopped out of the tall driver’s seat.

Nate pulled out a mix of armor that he’d gotten from the dungeon and what he had worn the week before. He put on the dungeon armor first, as they had been fitted especially for him. After that, he strapped the more pedestrian armor on over them as a disguise.

His new kukris went on next. The quiver went next and was slung at an angle across his rear. Crossbow bolts were shorter than regular arrows. It had been easy for him to fold over the excess length of the leather quiver and secure it with a tie. The last item to come out was the new crossbow that he slung across his back.

With that done, he patted himself down, checked to make sure he had everything, and then hopped out.

His dad had finished pulling on his own armor and fiddling with the laces of his boots when Nate joined him outside the truck. “Looks like we aren’t the only ones who got some new items,” He said as he took in his son, reaching over to straighten his chest piece. “That one wasn’t quite hidden.” He told him with a wink before going back to playing with laces.

Nate nodded and double-checked the rest of his pieces. “Are we going to be alright bringing beasts into this old subdivision?”

Niall finished tucking in the laces of his finicky boot and straightened with a satisfying crack of his back. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.” He muttered with a quick twist of his waist that set off another round of pops and cracks. “Despite how this place looks, it’s one of the more popular locations for expeditions such as ours. The beasts tend to avoid the houses for the most part, preferring to go through the trees and the new underbrush instead.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Nate nodded, immediately seeing the advantage such actions would bring. It would make it much easier to track them and set up potential kill zones or something similar.

His mother joined them a moment later. Her new bow was in her hands and her usual quiver of arrows was already strapped to her hip. She had used a roll of dark tape to cover the runes and glyphs that covered the inside of the bow. It was a quick and easy fix that would last for now. When they got home, she would clean off all the sticky residue and do something else to cover everything.

Niall took the roll of tape from her and applied several strips of it to his new bladed tonfas. Hiding the runes on those was a little harder due to their odd shape, but he did what he could. With any luck, it wouldn’t matter anyway, but they all knew that would be asking for too much.

“Where to now?” Nate asked when they had finished disguising their equipment.

“We have no particular goal this time around, unlike last week. So now we simply choose a direction and start walking, while remembering to mark our trail, of course.” His mother told him as she spread out the map on the hood of the truck. “This is where we are, and here is the structure that now surrounds the portal in the middle of the dimensional zone. Where do you think we should go?”

He took in the expanse of space on the map with a critical eye. “I don’t know. You said before that all we need to do this time around is get a couple of kills in the trailer, right?” She nodded. “In that case, we probably shouldn’t wander too far, as that would simply increase the distance we have to haul the bodies back.”

He nibbled at a dry spot on his lower lip for a moment while he thought before shaking his head. “I have no idea where we should go. Unless there is some method they haven’t covered in one of the classes yet, it all looks the same to me.”

“There is a method,” His father said with a grin. “But it’s mostly common-sense stuff, nothing magical like what you are probably thinking. Though there are a few energy skills that can help you find enemies, they come with their own limitations.”

Nina rolled her eyes and bumped her hip against her husband’s. “What I was trying to do was make sure you knew it was okay to always lean on the knowledge of the locals. Anyone who would make fun of you for not knowing the information they took years to learn, or worse, keep it from you, is not worth working with. If at all possible, end your ties with them immediately.

“We’ve had the displeasure of working with both types in the past. One is a moron at worst and a bully with an inflated ego at best. The other is suspicious of everyone and believes that their information is somehow superior to everyone else’s. They are the type to stab you in the back if given a chance. Neither is worth associating with in the long-term. You can trust us on that one.”

Nate nodded in understanding and waited for them to choose a direction. His raised brows and slight nods toward the map giving them the reminder they needed.

“Right, I wasn’t joking before when I said, now we simply choose a direction and start walking. As long as it is in the general direction of the inner dimensional zone, we’ll be fine.” Nina said after a moment.

Well, that was really only one direction they could go then. However, there was a significant variance in the degrees at which they could travel.

Nate pulled out a crossbow bolt and pushed his index finger into a circular indent near the trigger. The bows began to stretch as some of his qi was taken to power the rapid cocking feature. He slipped the bolt into place and pointed. “That way then.”

They shrugged willingly. “That’s as good a direction as any.” His mother handed the map to him. “Keep track of where we are going, and don’t forget to mark the trees so we can find our way back.”

He took the laminated map from her in surprise. They hadn’t talked about doing this before or anything. His parents were simply throwing him into the deep end of the pool while they could still watch over him. It was not something he particularly enjoyed, but you know what they say. There was no better time than the present.

The saying was probably a lie. In fact, he knew it was, but it did bring a small measure of comfort to him at the moment.

Nate folded the map up and put it in his pocket as they started walking. He slung the crossbow across his back and pulled out a kukri to start marking up the trees as they passed.

His parents hadn’t been joking. This really was a popular area for expeditions. The trees were riddled with old marks that had begun to scar over or fill in with moss if they were facing the right direction. Seeing so many of the marks allowed Nate to quickly get the proper distance down between new marks. He didn’t want to put them down constantly, and if they were too far apart, then there was a chance you might lose the path.

Between fifteen and twenty feet seemed to be the sweet spot, at least for him. His parents, with their higher cultivation, had higher perception and abilities and would have been able to use far greater distances.

They had been walking for nearly twenty minutes when they came across their first beast of the day. It was a boar that was using its large tusks to dig up the ground it was currently snuffling around.

In a moment, Nate had his crossbow off his shoulder and in position. Next to him, his mother had her new bow at the ready, while by her side, Niall had his finger on the trigger of his new tonfas. They were as ready as they were going to be.

Nate carefully dropped to a kneeling position for better stability while he aimed down the iron sights of the crossbow. Breathing out, he squeezed the trigger. The crossbow jerked against his shoulder at the sudden release of power. The cheap bolt pierced the hide of the boar and entered up to the fletchings.

He hadn’t switched out the cheap bolts meant for practice, which he had never done with the real, more expensive bolts.

As soon as she saw the bolt fly, Nina let her own arrow fly, deciding not to use any of the bow’s enhancements just yet. Her arrow entered the densely muscled rear-haunch of the beast and kept ongoing, passing entirely through it in one go.

It dropped to the ground in a bugling scream of pain.

Beside her, Niall pulled the trigger on his bladed tonfas. The front portion of his tonfas shot forward on a chain and took out its throat. He squeezed the trigger again to retract the chain and bring the blade back into position.