“Just say it, and we can move on.” Naea’s voice in my ear was sweet like a cloying corpse. I could feel the anticipation through our bond and it only made me more stubborn. She didn’t mind, because not only did she know she was right, she knew me. I would break and give her what she wanted and she knew it.

After another mile or two of hopeful sprinting, I had to stop and sigh. Talking past the bile in my throat, I choke out the two words that would free us from the spiral we were in. “We’re lost,” I moaned quietly.

“WE?!” Naea burst into energy, full of excitement to bully me. “What’s this ‘we’ nonsense? As I recall, you told me you knew exactly what you were doing and which way to go, that it would be easy and that I was being silly.” I winced. I had been making light of her advice, but I’d also been joking. An excuse which would only leave me more roasted than I already was.

“Alright,” I told her after she seemingly ran out of steam, “focus up. Go, check the sky.” I had been forced to endure over ten minutes of constant ribbing about getting the pair of us lost but released the fairy to get a vantage. I had put her off due to being hard-headed, but if I got us any more turned around we’d never get home.

I wasn’t completely stupid, though I would take my welts about this blunder. I had consulted a map, and had a compass with me that Luke had been kind enough to lend me. Unfortunately, it seemed like just about anything could have a magnetic pull strong enough to make it useless. The first time I had been turned around by the compass, my heart dropped. The third time was not long before my final admission of guilt.

Although tempted to smash the useless thing, I stowed the compass and waited for Naea to return. I lazily climbed into the branches of a nearby tree, admiring how magic looked on the countryside. As far as I could tell, the whole world was getting bigger and that increase wasn’t limited to just the landmasses. It wasn’t just humans and animals on the path of power and I smiled as I felt the tree beneath me cycling its mana.

It was almost painfully slow, and the amount was miniscule to the point of near non-existence, but it was there. Even with such a small amount, the tree was massive and clearly fighting for dominance in this fairly compact little forest. I realised that was actually the common layout we had passed, and I had taken little notice. I patted the tree, and on a whim tried to feed it some mana.

I almost jumped when the chunk of energy I had carelessly waved towards the plant was immediately absorbed. I felt as though I’d just done a pre-System marathon and I looked at my hand with a mixture of chagrin and surprise. “You sneaky thing,” I murmured at the thieving tree. Naea returned just as I was weighing up whether to uproot the thing for its unintended insolence. I decided to leave it and focused on the fairy. Stupid tree could have the stupid mana. “Well?”

“We’re lost,” Naea said, nodding like she was solemn and wise. I resisted the urge to swat her out of the air, knowing she felt my desire to do so was enough. She grinned at me and carried on. “So, I’m pretty sure - as in, much more sure than you were - that if we go back that way we’ll find Home Base. I had to go pretty high, though, so I couldn’t see that well. Plus! A fucking bird tried to eat me!”

“Did you kill it?”

“Killed it good.”

“Good,” I nodded. No need to take disrespect, and anything stupid enough to attack Naea deserved it. She was a higher level than myself, after all. “Sounds like maybe you saw something else, too?”

“I did!” Naea exclaimed, drawing out the “I” sound. “If we went that way instead, we’d reach an actual human city. I could see buildings. Considering that’s why we’re out here, I thought we might as well go.” Naea looked proud of herself, and I knew she was excited to meet more humans and see what was left of our world from before.

Still, my heart rate increased. Other humans, and they were fairly close to the area I had claimed. “Awesome,” I lied, dropping out of the tree. I gave its bark a glare, and with a few swipes of my finger, carved its trunk a little. I wrote the word ‘Cherry’ and nodded. It was an oak, so I felt the insult was appropriately meted out.

“You can kill trees like that, you know.” Naea chastised me as we moved on, while I explained that it had stolen my mana and that, yes, I knew it wasn’t a cherry tree, that was the point. We bantered back and forth about the importance of names as we made our way to the town. I wasn’t planning on making an appearance today, but it was the first real landmark we’d found in the new world.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

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Naea flitted through the air, careful not to hit any of the humans wandering around. There were just so many! None of them could see her, of course. Her invisibility wasn’t even second nature, it was first, so avoiding the senses of these low level humans was genuinely as simple as breathing. Grant was staying out of the city for now because unlike Naea, he was not blessed with the incredible powers of the fae.

Maybe he could learn, though. He may have lacked when it came to natural prowess but Grant more than made up for it with his terrifying ability to claim his potential. Naea was happy that at least he was pushing her along with him. After almost flying into a particularly clean window due to her distraction, Naea was glad that Grant had warned her about the pesky, near-invisible barriers.

She smiled, thinking back to their meeting in the dungeon and how the Rules had worked in Grant’s favour. What was new and exciting for the people of Earth was, for a dungeon-born creature like herself, something intrinsic. It was as understood by Naea as her own wings or hair. The Rules were a set of “truths” given to a System-born creature like herself. In the case of a dungeon fairy, the Rules of the Fae were in place. By shouting out a promise to a fairy, he had triggered the Rules of The System.

These Rules were often portrayed in myth and legends upon those worlds not yet infused with power. For thousands of years beforehand, the System would trickle fractured information into the minds of dreamers and poets. Then, when the System inevitably arrived, and the monsters with it, people would be able to fight back with the methods that made most sense to them. Fae could be hurt badly with “cold iron” and salt, two of the most common items to be found on most worlds, for example.

It was a lot of power. Far too much for a greedy thing like Grant to learn about, so best to let him figure things out as he would. Naea wasn’t in the business of spoon feeding him any answers, especially not ones which could potentially rip the world in two. If he knew that wording things correctly could cause the System itself to react, he would get obsessed. Naea decided to cast it from her mind until it came up again.

Better to give him something fun, and less apocalyptic to play with, like other humans.

The buildings were quite nice, Naea decided. They weren’t as lovely as Home Base or the guildhall, but then, these were mundane brick and mortar. The design of the System-built mansion was wonderful, but Naea found herself surprised and entranced by the purely physical creation of a massive building. Looking at its stone walls, reaching upwards to the sky, she shivered, surprised to feel very small in the face of a new unknown.

She floated inside the building which she had nearly crashed into, purely on a whim. She didn’t have a specific mission, just scouting. Naea would argue this technically counted. “Grant? What is this place?” With more control than her partner, the fairy threw her question down their bond along with what she was seeing. It would take him a moment to understand the message and then even longer to form an answer. Fine with her, staring with wide eyes at the building around me.

Upon entering, Naea was in a small foyer. It smelled of cloves and lavender, the pair of scents trampled into the carpet over what must have been years of use. Beyond this room was another space, a second room with very high ceilings. Someone walked in, touching a bowl of water to the side of the door before making a gesture across their chest and then entering. She shrugged, quickly copying the man’s movements with the water. Water, forehead, belly, left shoulder, right shoulder. With a tiny gasp, she slipped inside before the closing door after the man.

Row after row of long wooden benches were lined up in this big main room, facing a gorgeous altar adorned with marble, gold and, far more importantly, statues. Naea didn’t personally see the difference between gold, silver, brass or anything when it came to decoration. Gold had been given its value by dragons and then everyone else copied them, but she supposed she could admit the humans had used it well here.

“It’s called a church,” Grant’s slow and careful reply found her at last, “please, be respectful. It’s a holy place for some.” His voice was slurred when they spoke through the familiar bond, the poor thing. He was still such a baby when it came to his magic. A baby suneater, maybe, but an untrained thing regardless of his destructive capability. It was quite sweet, Naea decided.

“Ohhhhh, temples!” She replied to Grant simply. Naea knew all about temples. Mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras, pagodas and that stuff. The information was there in her mind already, but only unlocked as she interacted and learned what she was seeing. “So, this is a church,” the invisible fairy whispered. Not quiet enough, it seemed. The acoustics in here were devilish. As one of the seated threw a glance in her direction, it took all of Naea’s willpower not to appear before them for a moment and then vanish, which was always a good trick.

Instead she did as Grant asked and tried to be respectful. Flitting around, Naea gave the tall handsome sculpture on the cross a once over. This was their god, right? He was quite buff, and she was a particular fan of the crown of thorns, though she might have put them on a little more gently. He was cool-looking, and right there, Naea thought she understood why humans were religious.

Still dumb, she decided.

Pretty building, but ultimately boring. Anything which doesn’t change is bo-RING. That’s why Grant was so much fun. Every day was different and new, or if not novel then at least… more. There was always another level to go after, another layer of power to add to his already monstrous strength. It was exhilarating. To that end, Naea had already decided that the most important thing to do was find the strongest person in the city. Grant could beat them up if he wanted. He always enjoyed that.

It wasn’t hard to find them.

After ten minutes of flying around the city at high speeds, Naea felt a pulse of energy. In a fairly large building which reminded me a little of the guildhall, there were three bundles of power. They weren’t quite Dao yet, but their concepts were firm. The weakest one she sensed was a nearly silent melody in the air, while another was… fuzzy, like fur or mist but she wasn’t sure which. The strongest was like a small campfire, heat and energy. Naea liked that one, so she went to figure out who it was.

Except, she froze. The world around her seemed to still, a sucking breath before -

There was a scream, somewhere far off. Naea only heard it because it came with the filthiest surge of rotten Dao she had sensed since the broodmother in the dungeon. That thing was an abomination, a mutation of pure Dao into something monstrous.

So what the fuck was making a similar feeling in the city?