It would have been nice if everything had gone perfectly, and it had only taken us a few days to slap the airship together. The most obvious roadblock was extruding the titanium and aluminum tubing; if Kurt had worked on it alone, it would have taken weeks. With ten metal-shaping minions, it could have been done in under three days.

Unfortunately, as anyone who’s ever worked on a group project can confirm, nothing ever goes that smoothly.

For one thing, the Medieval Militia wasn’t putting in the work every waking hour. Everyone spent at least four hours outside killing monsters and earning Points. Much as it chafed, that included us. The Mandatory Trial had made it clear that there were penalties to falling behind.

We had a much bigger problem as well. We’d spoken with a hot air balloon pilot when we’d picked up the envelopes we’d planned to modify, and she’d told us that the temperature differential between the balloon envelope and outside air was higher than we’d feared.

“Engine fires a flame that’s... eh… maybe five, six feet high. A bit over a thousand degrees.”

“How often does that fire?” Byron asked.

She shrugged. “Depends on the weather. You gotta get a feel for it. Burn for a second or so every eight seconds, ten seconds. No more than fifteen.”

One look at Byron’s face was enough to tell me we’d underestimated the task.

So he wasn’t helping us build, instead spending all day every day outside earning Points. It was lucky he was so well-suited to taking down the third “monster” of the week, which broke the pattern by not being a singular monster, but a swarm of aggressive insects. With Kurt on metal-extrusion duty, Davi, John, and I alternated between working on the propulsion system and desperately trying to negotiate for the use of Points Siphons for Byron.

In our first discussion with Kirtland leadership, Kurt had tried to convince the colonel we should all be gifted with Points Siphon access, but the colonel hadn’t been moved.

“Look, son. We’ll let you take metal from the planes and requisition the balloon envelopes. They’re just so much junk as far as we’re concerned. I’ll assign a driver to cart you around in-town and divert a portion of our manufacturing base as an investment. But we have people out there starving to death. I’m not going to pull resources away from them so that you can get home a few days faster.”

“Our families-”

The colonel cut him off. “Everyone has families. I’m sorry.”

None of us liked hearing that, but what could we say? “Our families are more important because they’re ours?” It was convincing to me, but probably not to anyone else.

So, instead we were negotiating with people in outlying areas, places where the Points Siphons hadn’t yet been fully ceded over to the military. We were able to make a few deals, forking over boatloads of Money and uses of the Minor Matter Replicator. Unfortunately, travel to and from those Siphons took more time, and the Siphons themselves weren’t nearly as valuable as they used to be. The exact total varied slightly, but Points Siphons tended to give out 16,000 or 17,000 points. That was enough to take someone from a single ability to seven abilities, but not even enough to take someone from eight abilities to nine.

The fourth twelveday concluded with a second mandatory trial. We’d gotten to know our Medieval Militia helpers and some of their friends fairly well at that point, and Heather graciously agreed to accompany Davi, John, and Byron, while two Medieval Militia, a man named Damon and a woman named Leah, tagged along with Kurt and me.

We’d told the military about our actions during the first trial, and I knew they’d have a team of elites taking on all the foes and gathering samples, so there wasn’t much reason for us to push ourselves. Whatever the best Blueprints were, the Kirtland elites would grab several and spread them through Albuquerque’s Shops, and my crown made Money a non-issue. I’d be able to get what I needed later.

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This meant my team and I mowed through some wostrich, slimes, and clouds of insects. Two out of the three were difficult for me to take down, but Leah’s ability setup was similar to Byron’s, and she could take them down with ease. I was disappointed that we didn’t spot any pavemimics, but grilled wostrich was still a huge step up from basic rations. We earned a Blueprint that let us pay 10 Money a gallon for some flavored water, which was awfully lame. Still, one of the military teams got a “Common Spear” blueprint. The fact that it cost twice what a Basic Spear did wasn’t an issue for me, and my acquisition soothed the ache of not being able to put our Titan’s Heart toward an Initiate’s Spear. Testing showed the “Common” weapons were a step below “Initiate” weapons, but stronger than the “Basic” ones.

The Challenge that popped up at the end of the week only endangered one person I knew: our military liaison, Marcus Hutto. He’d gone back to his regular duties after we’d gotten settled in, but I’d made him my follower. Since I’d heard he was Challenge-eligible, I kept an eye on my Ruler Interface while he was gone. I didn’t know the man well - not a tenth as well as I’d gotten to know Twinkles - but I knew him.

Three hours later, I couldn’t help but stiffen.

“What’s wrong?” Davi asked.

“My Ruler interface. Hutto isn’t on my subjects list anymore.”

“He… he was at the Challenge,” Davi said.

“And he died?” Kurt asked. “How? He seemed smart! He seemed tough.”

“And Twinkles didn’t?” Davi snapped.

Kurt raised his hands. “It doesn’t make sense to me that he didn’t make it back either. Both of them were strong, nice guys. They wouldn’t have started a fight to the death, and I don’t think they would have lost to a monster. So it just… I don’t know. Maybe Hutto was trying to protect someone? Like Vince was with Rina?”

It took until that evening to get more information, when our assigned driver stopped by to be sure we didn’t need anything.

“Airman Hutto? Didn’t know him personally, but only four locals that went to the Challenge made it home.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Four?! Out of how many?”

The driver shook her head. “Hundred-odd people, I think? It’s a disaster. More people died today than we’ve lost since the Titans appeared, and a lot of the people we lost were leaders. Elites.”

“Do we know what happened?

“I don’t know all the details, just what’s made it through the rumor mill. It sounds like it was some kind of war scenario with four teams, and two of the other teams joined forces immediately.”

“A war scenario? They made people fight each other?”

The driver shrugged helplessly. “That’s what I hear.”

The news shook all of us. It had been a relief not to worry about the Challenge the past two twelvedays, but we all knew that when we got the airship flying, things would likely change.

“Do we still want to go through with this?” Davi asked.

“I do,” I said. “Any method of getting across the country is likely to rake in Novelty, and this is the fastest and thus the lowest-risk.”

Kurt nodded.

John looked serious. “I need to get home and see my wife.”

“It’s a risk, but worth it to me, since we’ll be able to stop and check in on my grandma and grandpa and cousins on the way over,” Byron said.

Davi shivered. “Okay. Fine.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to come. It would be hard, but I’m sure we can find someone else to do your job.”

Davi shook her head. “No one goes off by themselves. Not after… No. I’m not staying here by myself, and I can’t let you idiots get killed without me.”

I was tensed for something new and awful to appear. Maybe a speedy flyer or the horrible screaming mantis-monster from the Trial, but the first threat of the new twelveday wasn’t anything too noteworthy, a large monster with a vaguely feline appearance. As a ground-based monster, it wouldn’t do anything to disrupt our flight plans. We rushed to finish the airship, planning a test flight for the afternoon after the next monster appeared.

But the third morning brought nothing with it.

No new monster.

Nothing new at all.