Albert was outside the hedge camp. It was time to move out, but before dismantling everything he needed to find a lead towards the energies he presumed were the originating from the Kirkesis core.

“Two approaches to power,” he mused in the meantime, knowing that only Jeff could hear him here. “Lina, who I made overpowered from the start. Her abilities are not supposed to be fair or balanced at all, and I’m pretty sure we will get to see some nice stuff in combat.”

And the opposite, Scrappy.

“Yes. Lina is powerful but she can’t easily grow on her own. She can train and get used to her abilities and in a sense grow stronger but… she has a hard cap. I’m not saying it’s impossible to overcome this power ceiling, not with the weird way magic and Doom have been acting as of late, but it is a hard cap. Scrappy on the other hand has been given a more-or-less complete system. Or at least the seeds to make one. A system that will hopefully be able to give her skills like the one I manually gave her: weak as shit but with the potential for unlimited growth.”

It will be interesting to witness how the two approaches behave in the world.

“They are tailored for the person I gave them to. I know for a fact that Scrappy is stubborn, but she is also very patient. Together they make the perfect traits for the system I gave her, once we complete it. Lina is the opposite, I think. She needed immediate power. Speaking of Scrappy though. We have some time before the scan is complete, pull up her status window, let’s see if we can help those seeds germinate a bit faster.”

***

Camp was unmade in short order. Now that Albert knew where the strange energies were strongest, they could move confidently through the mutated countryside. Here and there they found monsters, but nowhere near the immense amount of hostiles that were battling outside Bastion two days before. The mana and Doom miasma was still thick and dangerous, though, so the team kept a good distance from it. Better to be safe than sorry.

Lina’s voice was a break in the silence. “I really don’t know how to thank you, Albert.”

Lina had taken some time to process what had happened to her. Albert explained her skills to the best of his ability, but the rest she would have to discover herself. For now, she was barely holding back tears.

He opened his mouth to tell her not to worry about it, but she beat him to the punch and rushed to hug him. It only lasted a moment, and she released him quickly once she realized what she had done, all red-faced and awkward. He smiled at her antics, finding them very sweet. Especially if he compared what he was seeing now to the woman he met in the caves. It was only natural that she would show other parts of herself as she warmed up to him, but being natural didn’t make the process any less meaningful.

“Really,” she continued. “You changed my life. Again. I—I… it’s incredible. I can feel the power within me. I can feel it.”

“That’s good. That’s uh…” he did not know what to say, not really.

Fortunately he didn’t have to. Someone came to his rescue. “Do you think the Guild Master made it out alive?” Scrappy asked.

Albert chuckled. “The karmic cultivator bastard? I really hope not.”

The young girl – who was not that young and yet appeared as such – made a cute noise as she considered the options. Albert’s mind went back to an old conversation he had with her in the city, back when she claimed that her age was much more than her looks suggested due to cat-human years conversion. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps not.

To him, she was a girl and would remain as such as long as she behaved and looked like a young girl. Yep, that made sense.

“I hope he’s dead too!” She eventually said with surprising steel and resolve. “I wonder if the poison in the air killed him first, or the strange monsters did. What do you think, Sir?”

Albert frowned. “Can you please stop calling me sir?”

Lina also chimed in. “She’s also been calling me Lady Lina a lot. Why does she do that?”

Albert shrugged. “I don’t really know. It’s complicated, I think.” Then, reading Scrappy’s smug expression, he got the sensation that she was having a world of fun teasing them. “Ah, I don’t think we can get her to stop.”

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“Nope.” The girl in question said smugly.

“Fine.” Albert conceded. He wasn’t nearly as exasperated as his tone of voice and his long sigh would suggest, but he knew that she knew.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Lina hiding an amused expression.

Yeah, we made a good decision to save them, Jeff.

It was all you, Albert. I would have never saved them back then. Now, however, I understand why you did it.

Albert suppressed the urge to shake his head. He wondered, for a moment, about the true reason he saved the girls. Especially Scrappy. Lina had more or less happened to them by chance, but Scrappy?

No use overthinking.

***

It was a while before they reached a safe enough distance from Bastion that the sole fact the city was visible in the distance didn’t also mean that they were in danger of dying horribly. But when it finally happened, Albert took the time to shape the air into a magnifying lens for the whole team to take a good look at what was left of it.

The place was… surprisingly intact. The only element that suggested something had happened was the lack of activity, at least inside the walls. There was no smoke coming from the many chimneys, no lights in the houses and towers, no line of people outside of the grand gates. Here and there, in the fields around the fortified city, shadows and shapes moved in the gloom of the coming night. But not much more.

Outside was different. It was what was left of a battlefield: torn and broken land.

Gone were the hulking Lithoids, gone back to the north under the control of someone Albert was very eager to meet. Indeed, it was their scent they had following for the whole day, but the team was getting tired and it was time to make camp. The scent of the strange magic was faint, but now that Albert was locked in on it, he wouldn’t lose it.

They all plopped down heavily on their padded wooden stumps, sitting in the very same circle of hedges as before, around a crackling campfire.

“It looks just like the other camp you made.” Scrappy said with a frown. “No, it is the same.”

Albert smiled. “It is the same. Good. You pay attention.”

The girl beamed.

“Is it because of how your power works?” Lina asked.

Albert hummed noncommittally. Was it? Making a whole new camp would probably cost the same in terms of Power, but he would have to create it from scratch using his imagination. Using the same template twice saved him the mental effort.

In the end, all he could say was: “I guess it is.”

Food was cooking, and a delicious smell filled the air from a grill placed by the fire on some red-hot embers. Albert was tending to the meat, although he was very conscious of the fact that he was kind of cheating with his Power. He was nowhere near a good enough cook to prepare something that smelled so divine as what was cooking right now, but a subtle application of reality-ignoring magic was an easy fix.

Already his cooking had improved by leaps and bounds thanks to Jeff, who had taken to educating his master about the art of food with a passion. Strange thing for an AI to do, but who was Albert to judge?

“You know,” Albert said after a while. The hedges parted with a wave of his hand, revealing a small rotund window into the night. Bastion hung alone on a hill in the middle of the plains in the distance. “I know we need to move out, but… now that I can kinda access my inventory I really wanted to use a nuclear weapon on Bastion! I’ve been hyping myself for days thinking about it!”

It does seem like an irresponsible waste of time and resources, Albert. Jeff typed out, and Albert got the image of a mildly disappointed professor watching their pupil play with dangerous toys in the lab.

“What’s a nuclear weapon?” Scrappy asked.

Albert narrowed his eyes at her. “Where’s your speech quirk?”

“My what?” She asked, pouting.

Albert cocked his head. “…that I do… this I think, that I that… you know?”

“…no?”

She was feigning ignorance, Albert was sure of that. What was it with her today, why was she teasing him this much? Did it have to do with what she told him before he gave power to Lina, that she was about to have a breakthrough with her class and such?

“No, no, he’s right.” Lina said, having waited until her mouth was empty to speak. “You did have a quirk.”

Scrappy looked at her, and if looks could kill…

“On a second thought, never mind.”

“Lina!” Albert threw his hands up. “Tu quoque?”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, whatever.” He turned to the young girl. “A nuclear bomb you ask? It’s the power of the universe, Scrappy. We humans have managed to tap into the raw power of reality itself, the bonding energies that hold the universe together long before we even had access to magic at a large scale. A nuclear bomb, the crown jewel of destructive devices in the pre-magic era… the creation that came to be hated and feared even by its creator, and by the world as a whole. A device more potent than siege magic, capable of unleashing destruction by harnessing the power of the forces of nature itself.”

He inhaled. Slowly. “I have many such devices tucked away safely. They are not toys, no matter how silly I was looking earlier in my musings. You will see them in action soon enough, I fear. But not today.”

With that, the mood turned somber. Albert regretted his outburst, but what was done was done, and thinking about bombs and science reminded him of what he had lost, and all his cheeriness evaporated. Albert glanced at the ticking clock in his HUD, telling him that 38 weeks remained before the world became uninhabitable. Perhaps not fatally so for him, but surely for everyone else, the girls included.

He had plans and contingencies to use in the event he needed them, but they all relied on him becoming so powerful that they wouldn’t even be necessary in the first place. Better plans were… still in the works.

Tomorrow they would pick up the pace. They needed to check out this lead, find out if the core he was seeking was on this side of the planet, and if not then he needed to move on and return to Sitea as soon as possible.