“And he’s probably dead!” I heard Kurt shout.

Immobilized by the transportation medium, I couldn’t speak, but I could see Kurt standing in the middle of a pile of monster corpses. A trail of blood coming from the ear nearest me made it clear that he hadn’t left until after the giant monster had roared.

“No! Look!” Davi’s face lit up as she pointed toward me. “He made it out!”

Kurt turned. The expression on his face made me feel guilty. He really had thought I was a goner. As I finished reappearing and the casing released me, dropping me to the ground, his shoulders visibly slumped with relief… though he still looked shaken. And angry. “You… you… This is going on your next performance review!”

I lifted a hand in acknowledgement from where I lay on my back, too tired to stand. “Sorry. But I did learn a lot. And I got away.” I blinked at Davi. “You… all safe?”

“Yes.”

“No big injuries.”

“No…”

“Good,” I said, then closed my eyes and fell asleep, exhausted by the heals I’d chained on the way out.

…

I awoke several hours later, feeling much better… confused that there was no rumble of the truck beneath my back. “We’re not moving?”

“Well, look who decided to wake up,” Davi said. “No. Kurt filled us in on the monsters he saw you fight, then Byron wore himself out freezing all the corpses. The rest of us spent some time trying to get them insulated so that it wouldn’t be so much work for him to keep them that way. With you and him both exhausted, it didn’t really make sense for us to hit the road. If anything happened, it’d just be me, Kurt, and John dealing with it.” She made a face. “Instead, Kurt and John are taking naps too, while I’m on sentry duty. Just in case.”

I frowned. “He froze all the meat? Kurt didn’t try to Cleanse any?”

Davi raised an eyebrow. “The… meat? You mean the corpses? Cleanse it of what? Wait. Vince. Tell me you didn’t put us through all that just so you could try alien barbecue.”

“No! Definitely not!”

Davi stared at me flatly.

“...It is a side benefit,” I admitted. “If Kurt Cleansed away everything bad to eat, there’s no risk in seeing what it tastes like. I want to dissect the corpses and stuff, but it's not like we have a lab to do molecular analysis. Rough anatomy is probably our limit, and we're not going to need to destroy the muscle fiber to get a good idea of that, so we can totally cook it afterward. It’s kind of a shame that Byron froze it all first. Meat never tastes as good after it’s been frozen.”

“You’re unbelievable,” Davi muttered. “You realize the rest of us were back here for like 15 minutes having panic attacks while we waited for you two? Not to mention how badly you scared Kurt.”

I pushed myself up into a sitting position, holding my hands out placatingly. “Side benefit. Seriously! Kurt must have told you how badly that crab thing hurt me, and how hard it was to take down.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“...He did.”

“I feel like an embarrassment to hundreds of generations of Italians. Do you know how many crab legs I ate at my Nonna’s house every Christmas? Do you?”

“Those were regular crabs, Vince.”

“So? It’s still my… rightful prey! My birthright!” I made a fist, hamming it up. I was joking. Mostly. “That’s one monster where having a corpse is going to be absolutely invaluable. I bludgeoned it to death, but my spear was absolutely destroyed in a single strike that barely scratched its shell. There have to be weak points or something.”

“Well, I think we should wait before we take the monsters apart, so Byron probably needed to freeze them anyway. I know there’s an ability called ‘Analyze’ that someone from Walsenburg had. I bet not many people thought to bring the corpses out, so we either need to find someone with the ability or take it ourselves before we dissect them.”

I frowned. “I guess. As long as we find someone quickly. We'll get a new set of monsters in another couple days. I'd bet half a jar of seasoned salt that we'll be fighting at least some of the stuff from the Trial in the real world next week."

"No bet," Davi said. "I'm sure we will."

I nodded. "Right. So, if it's the crabs... I don’t want to grapple one of those things to death again. It was not an effective way to kill it.”

“Maybe we just need better weapons.”

I snorted. “And how are we going to get them? Make Kurt take another metal-shaping ability? Not a lot of ancient castles to raid in America.”

Davi blinked. “Oh! That’s right. You fell asleep right away, so you don’t know. Kurt said he got a Blueprint for something called an Alternative Ration. Did you get that too?”

I checked my interface. “Yeah. And you guys?”

“All three of us got Blueprints for something called a Basic Dagger. If you and Kurt got the same thing, it might have to do with the portals we exited through. You guys took the path with the first three monsters, right?”

“Didn’t you?”

She shook her head. “When we saw the spacedogs and rams, we figured there were probably pavemimics too. Without you to spot them for us, that seemed like a hassle. We went out through the path with the wostriches. They’re really easy when they’re not in a pack.”

“What’s the dagger like?”

“We don’t know yet. It seemed like the kind of thing we should be able to register at a Shop, so we’re holding off. That way, we can buy multiples and make them available for other people to buy too. You know we’re not the only ones having trouble finding decent weapons.”

I nodded. Most people were using sledgehammers, crowbars, hatchets, the occasional fireman’s axe or machete, and tons and tons of kitchen knives. The remainder were often using jury-rigged weapons like mine.

The only exceptions we’d seen had been in cities. Medieval weaponry was hardly something every household had, and even the people who owned it usually didn’t travel with it. Two people in Pueblo had threatened us with katanas, and a handful of people in Walsenburg had real swords. I’d pulled an arrow out the side of Frank’s trailer once, but I’d never seen the person that fired it.

“Makes sense,” I said aloud. “It won’t take too long to find another Shop. Although… I don’t know how much a great dagger will help us. Damn! The crabs and bugdeer were hard to take down, but we could totally have left through the snake exit if we’d realized. If wostriches were daggers, maybe snakes were a sword or a spear!”

“If our theory is right at all,” Byron mumbled hazily.

“You’re awake!” Davi said.

“You’re loud. Anyway, yeah, I’m up. But five people is a pretty crap sample size. Yeah, it’s likely the exit portal is correlated with the rewarded Blueprint, but we can’t say for sure.”

“Well, we won’t find the answers sitting here,” Davi said. “If you’re up, I’ll wake John and Kurt and we can hit the road.