SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

SKYLAND

Kimi-Lim was up already by the time Sarah got up the next morning. She blinked blearily in the diffuse light filtering through the green fabric of the tent material. Sarah rubbed at her face, forgetting about her left hand and surprising herself with the feeling of the artificial fingers rubbing at her eyes. She jerked her hands away and rolled out of the sleeping bag Kimi-Lim had provided. It was weird, if Sarah hadn’t known it was from another world, the sleeping bag could’ve been a well-used, slightly musty, but high-quality product from Earth. It made her feel strangely homesick.

Kimi-Lim called out, “I hear you moving around in the tent, sleepyhead! I let you sleep until you woke up on your own today, but from here on out, we get up with the Sun.”

Sarah poked her head out of the tent and saw the Kimi-Lim was seated out on the dusty ground with a small, dark red carpet under them. They had their shirt off with their back to the tent. Their long, snow-white hair was loose from its braids and the golden highlights shimmered in the morning light. It was hard to tell in the full light of the sun, but there was a definite, faint luminescent quality to the elf’s skin. They stretched languorously in the sun and sighed happily, strangely inhuman muscle groupings bunching and shifting over their back when they did. Kimi-Lim shrugged back into their kimono-like top and tied it up.

“I know I’m beautiful, Sarah,” Kimi-Lim called back over their shoulder, “but you don’t have to stare so obviously!”

“When I see what I like…” Sarah said, laughing. “So what’s the plan? What was so complicated that it had to wait?”

Kimi-Lim stood up, still fiddling with the ties on their top. They held their hand to the side and their Silverstaff appeared in it. “I need to resummon Sunspot first. He took quite the beating yesterday and we’re going to need him if we’re going to yank Entresis’s brain out. Oh, and we need to get you properly equipped.”

The day had dawned hot and bright. The cold of the night had entirely dissipated by the time Sarah got out of the tent and already she was dripping with sweat. Her Starting Tunic was stained and hanging in tatters and one of her Grippy Slippers had sprung the heel and it flapped every time she took a step. The boulders surrounding their clearing had begun to heat up, radiating their warmth. The jungle ahead of them teemed and shrieked with life. Kimi-Lim rolled up their little rug and popped it into their tiny Inventory.

“That sounds… unlikely,” Sarah said. “I already got the Prize right? I mean, it turned out to be a shit prize, but I didn’t exactly see any treasure chests brimming with cool gear to loot.” She started going through the stretches and warm-up exercises she’d started every day for the last eight years with since coming to the Tutorial Realm. It had become an ingrained habit that the elf didn’t comment on. Kimi-Lim didn’t say anything for a while, just going through the process of breaking camp.

Eventually, the exercises began to warm Sarah up. She was having to adjust to the strangely animate dead weight on her left arm. The cybernetic Power Arm was incredibly responsive; it moved with precision and was immensely strong. Sarah had to account for its increased weight and its unfamiliar properties. It was going to take more than a morning of warm-up exercises to get used to the thing, and Sarah wasn’t even sure that she wanted to get used to the thing. Not that she had any real choice. It’s not like there was any way to give up a graft.

“You’re going to have to adjust your way of thinking about the way things are,” Kimi-Lim said, interrupting Sarah with a tea cup and saucer placed in her hand as she was progressing through a slow dance-like series of movements that resembled Tai Chi.

Kimi-Lim had chosen to give Sarah her tea while she was holding herself up with her cybernetic arm and slowly extending her legs into a full split. The balance had taken ages to get right with her natural left arm; the Power Arm automatically rebalanced her weight, making it almost a trivial thing to accomplish the otherwise difficult maneuver. Sarah managed to pull out of the splits and lithely get to her feet without spilling the tea. Despite what she’d said last night, she had to admit that she felt good, being able to do these kinds of things again. She’d nearly forgotten what it had been like to have her body respond like this once more—it was like when she was competing in gymnastics tournaments again. She felt at her peak form now, and that was despite losing her arm.

She sipped her tea and found it to be heavily sweetened and floral. It was like drinking a cup of hot honeysuckle nectar. “Where did you get tea out here?” Sarah asked, shaking her head and taking another sip, “I mean, I don’t know if you could even call this tea.” It was a brilliant shade of vermillion that Sarah had never seen outside of cartoons.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. You’re still operating with the wrong paradigm, even though you’ve been here for years. I blame the Tutorial Realm. The way it loops time like that… it has a lot of weird side effects on living people.” Kimi-Lim shook their head, “No, I’m not going to get distracted! Here’s the point: in your Earth, maybe there weren’t useful treasures lying around or collected by monsters, but here on Nolm, that’s the way things are.” The elf thought for a moment and seemed to conclude, “I have a feeling that your history must be fairly… limited in scope.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Sarah asked, arching an eyebrow.

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“You know what treasure is, so that means that the concept of such things exists in your world,” Kimi-Lim said patiently.

Sarah rolled her eyes, “Yeah, we have treasure. Though that’s kind of a juvenile, reductive word. And it’s not just lying around. Unless you count like old shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea or lost Amazonian civilizations from ages ago. But they’re still not context-free treasure just popping up out of nowhere.”

“Exactly!” Kimi-Lim said, eyes sparkling. “That’s exactly what I mean! These treasures that we’re picking up are the valuables of the countless civilizations that came before us. They’re not just ‘laying around’, either. Remember what I said about monsters?”

“Yeah, you said they collected treasure a moment ago. But so what? I mean, what even is a treasure to a monster?” Sarah exclaimed, laughing a little incredulously.

“Paradigm-prejudice again. You have no idea what treasure is to a monster and so you automatically assume that there is nothing that a monster could want from it,” Kimi-Lim pulled out one of the stakes they’d hammered into the rock-like earth last night with a quick flick and surge of tensa. “Monsters don’t just want ambiguous ‘treasure’. They want tensa, they need it; it’s part of their biology. And they can’t process the raw tensa that’s available everywhere because they don’t have an anima. That’s something only people have—all people, not just Reborn like the Empire might suggest—and it’s what allows us to use tensa at all. Monsters are born with the need for refined tensa with the only way to get it is to consume it.”

“So what, they collect this treasure and they…eat it? Suck the tensa out?” Sarah asked, picturing the manticore greedily gnawing on a pile of moldering junk, unable to get the picture out of her head despite Kimi-Lim’s eye roll and shake of their head.

“It’s different for each monster type. And besides, all living things contain refined tensa, so monsters tend to go after people first—Reborn in particular. Our tensa pool is like a beacon to them.” Sarah went over and started helping pull stakes out of the ground. “It’s why the first thing any Reborn learns is how to use their anima to hide their tensa pool. Reborn who become lax at their anima discipline don’t live very long.”

“And so we expect to… what, hunt monsters and pick through the treasures they’ve collected? What’s to say that any monster would even have any treasure?”

“Any monster with a lair has collected at least something. They need to. It’s not like there’s a lack of infused artifacts scattered throughout the world. There are so many layers of civilizations piled on top of one another, all wiped out by one Cataclysm or another, that you could plunder those ruins for millions of years and never come up dry.”

“Well, that’s a relief. So that’s what we’re going to do? Hunt monsters for loot? How does that play into your plans for Entresis?”

Kimi-Lim folded the tent and put it into their BOTI (Bigger On The Inside) bag, being careful that nothing sharp scratched the material of the bag. Rupturing dimensional spell infusions was a great way to be sucked into an alternate universe. The camp, such as it was, was broken down. All that remained were the two lawn chairs that Kimi-Lim hadn’t yet put away. Kimi-Lim sat down in one of the chairs and gestured for Sarah to sit down, too.

When she did, the elf leaned forward, an intense look in their eyes. “I know how to find the location of the AI brain that powers this entire Tutorial Realm—including the Skyland. We’re going to go there, pull its brain out of its skull, and then we’re going to leave this place with the prize: a pristine AI core module capable of forming a stable time loop.”

“Something tells me that it isn’t going to be that easy,” Sarah said.

“You’re right. Which is why we need to get you geared up! See, Entresis the Eternal is going to be there… sort of. It’s a bit hard to explain, but rest assured that the guardian will be there and I’m going to need you to hold it off while I disconnect the AI module from the main computer. It’s going to take time and Entresis is not going to be happy about what I’m doing. I’ll need you to keep it off my back.”

Sarah blinked, “Why me?” She asked. “I mean, I’m flattered I guess, but why should I be the one to fight Entresis? Why can’t we both do it?”

“Two reasons: the first reason is that I’m the only one in this little group who knows how to extract the module without harming it. The other reason is that Entresis itself is bound by its own rules. It will never rise above a challenge that it detects based on your System profile. I don’t have a System profile, so it would just try to wipe me out like I was a monster. You do have a System profile, so Entresis will be adapting to your rank profile to determine how much it should hold back.” Kimi-Lim smiled, clapped their hands, and sprang to their feet. “It’ll be perfect!”

“Wait,” Sarah said, holding up a finger, “hang on just a second. Why would Entresis hold back anything?”

“Entresis is a Tutorial Realm Guardian,” Kimi-Lim explained animatedly. “These kinds of entities are System-generated approximations of Boss monsters. They’ll adapt their abilities, their fighting prowess, even what powers they use to the rank of whoever faces them!”

“Which means…” Sarah prodded.

“Which means that they’ll be a challenge, but not impossible. It’s supposed to give privileged Imperials a sense of accomplishment when they win out against seemingly impossible odds, but it gives us our in.” Kimi-Lim smiled lopsidedly, and it looked charmingly, goofily rakish. “We sneak into Entresis’ secret brain headquarters and you distract the entity with your incredible combat expertise while I use my incredible data and light manipulation skills to rip the brain right out. Then, when everything’s going to shit, you accept your Quest with my little coded addition and we both get out, popping into existence in the San Tristobel Mountains right when you originally left. Easy.”

“Something tells me it’s not going to be all that easy,” Sarah pointed out. “Entresis sounds like kind of a badass.”

Kimi-Lim rolled their eyes and gestured to the jungle, “That’s why we need to gear you up! We need to get you into the right kind of state to face ol’ Entresis or it won’t take you seriously. Now come on, we need to get moving so we can get you equipped!”

Sarah helped the elf pack up the last two lawn chairs, popping them into her unlimited Inventory space rather than trying to shove them into Kimi-Lim’s BOTI bag, where they’d been straining the edges before. They left the campsite a minute later, delving back into the jungle with Sarah feeling both more and less in control of her life than she had in a very long time. “I just wish I knew how Griffin was doing,” she muttered as she followed Kimi-Lim into the jungle.