The next day, those with parents started trying to convince them that fleeing was the right decision.

Sallia had the easiest time of it. Her parents were aware of my existence, since both of us lived in the slums and there was no reason to keep our friendship hidden. When Sallia mentioned that Verne had lost fort Branzo, her parents got very twitchy. A big loss on the front lines probably meant that the army recruiters would be more desperate than before to get fresh blood into the army and help stabilize the front lines, and Sallia’s father was only a little out of the age range for being dragged into the army again after his initial mandatory years of service. He was a factory worker for a gun factory, which would normally save him from being called back to the army - but if the army got desperate enough, it was hard to say whether they would still call him back in.

When Sallia mentioned that I was fleeing the city with my ‘parents’ and my little brother, they seemed more than happy to tag along with us. Of course, Sallia’s parents seemed to expect that they would return to the city after the war was settled. They seemed to believe that given Verne’s industrial prowess, it was unlikely to lose the war - things would just get dangerous for a while. I didn’t know how strong each country’s army was, so I didn’t have a strong opinion about who would win the war - I just didn’t want to get dragged into the conflict somehow. But when Sallia mentioned her parent’s assumptions, I did start thinking about where I wanted to go after leaving the city. And that brought me to a surprising conclusion.

I was actually kind of interested in leaving the country. I intended to ask Old Mo where he was heading after we left the city, and then possibly follow along if he had some sort of organized plan. I currently suspected he was a spy for another country, or possibly a retired spy for our own country. If he had a contact that could help us settle down in a new city, I would be happy to try living somewhere else.

If we returned to this city, life would probably continue in much the same way it always had. I would return to being a slums kid, barely scraping by from one week to the next and thinking about money. When I got a little older, I would have the ability to start working as a shady healer, which would earn me some more money, and probably a good amount of influence achievement from healing people. But ultimately, my Achievement gains - and more importantly, the entirety of my life - would probably never amount to much in this world. Becoming a shady healer wasn’t my idea of an ‘ideal future,’ even if it was ‘good enough’ to get by. But I wanted more out of life, and at least in this city, pulling myself up in the world was incredibly hard. With Old Mo’s help, or with a fresh start away from the prying eyes of Verne’s military, I would have an easier time becoming something more.

When I mentioned this to Felix, Sallia, and Anise, they were mostly in favor of the idea. Felix was in much the same position I was, and Sallia and her family were also scraping by in this city.

Anise herself didn’t seem to mind the idea of moving. However, her parents proved to be a bigger stumbling block.

Shortly after she went to have a talk with her parents, she returned to the communication bracelets. Her mental voice sounded glum when she spoke with us.

she said.

I frowned. I had somewhat anticipated someone’s family not being willing to leave. After all, our families had lives outside of us. Even if the four of us were in favor of fleeing the city before the army arrived, others might not be willing to leave behind everything they had built up here.

Anise’s family was also the wealthiest one among the four of us. They had the most to lose, so it made sense they were the most reluctant to leave.

I asked.

said Anise, sounding a little sad.

said Felix. Felix sounded a bit uncertain about what we would even do if we wanted to ‘figure something out,’ but he sounded like he was trying to comfort Anise.

That left me.

I said. I said. I resisted the urge to grimace at the mention of that conversation.

I had been thinking about what to do with my mother for a while.

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My mother needed an intervention. She seemed to have little control over her actions, and she was so lost in a blissed out haze most of the time that she wasn’t really capable of planning for the future. But I was also aware that just trying to knock someone unconscious and force them to cut back on a drug habit wasn’t a very productive method of making them quit. If that happened, my mother was more likely to violently hate my guts and then run right back into the arms of her drugs than to actually quit, especially given how much she seemed to be against quitting.

At the same time, this couldn’t go on. I loved my mother, but she just… wasn’t trying to get better, and I didn’t know what to do about it. But at the very least, I needed to get her out of the city before the army came. I didn’t know exactly what Old Mo meant when he said that the town captured by the army had been treated poorly, but I had a few good guesses that I wasn’t willing to test out. No matter how much my mother had left me frustrated and disappointed over the years, I wasn’t going to just leave her behind and hope for the best.

Sallia seemed to notice my long, painful silence, so instead of leaving me to stew in my thoughts, she broke the silence after a few moments.

she said. said Sallia.

I frowned at Sallia’s words. It was an incredibly thin chance. My mother often spent months lost in a drug-induced haze and rarely interacted with the world around her. I wasn’t sure just what Fizz did to the human mind, but it was obvious that it left the user in a near-coma like state for very, very long periods of time every time they used it.

But it was the best idea I had for now. So I nodded along, prepared for a week of buying supplies, and hoped that things would work out.

* * *

For the rest of the week, I converted every arling and sterling I had into supplies, and then stuffed everything I thought we could use into my backpack. I didn’t have much of a savings, but I at least had a few Arlings laying around. Sallia’s noodle bowl was also returned to her so that she could dematerialize it and carry it along. I would be a bit hungrier this week, but it was manageable, at least.

The fact that we had a dimensional backpack meant that packing up and moving was much easier than it should have been. I packed efood, water, a few very basic tents that Felix and I knocked together using bits of scrap metal and some bolts of cloth, blankets… and basically everything else we could think of. The only thing we really skimped on was medicine and potions - with me here, there was no real need for either. Felix still carried a few in his own backpack, in case I somehow died during the trip and left the others without my healing services. But with our various perception abilities and healing abilities, any of us dying seemed unlikely, at least.

Felix also managed to put together two more guns. We still didn't have a way to make bullets, so we were entirely reliant on the bullets we had stolen from the soldiers all those years ago - but while they didn’t exactly have generous ammunition reserves, they were fine for a couple short fights. In any case, the four of us all had some form of magical attack that we could use before resorting to bullets. Anise still hadn’t figured out what was up with her orb, but she had her magic missiles to rely on, Felix and Sallia had their metal control, and I had extinguish. Bullets would only be used if something went horribly wrong.

Anise’s parents, luckily, changed their mind after four days. News started trickling into the city through more mainstream channels, such as the daily papers.

And the news that Anise shared with us about the conquered town was quite horrifying.

Apparently, the coalition army had quite the dislike for Verne’s citizens. They had dragged away most of the people in the first town they had conquered, and then forced them into labor camps where they were beaten and overworked routinely. Meanwhile, the soldiers had also looted every single item of note in the town - from food to money. The factory workers weren’t being fed much, and given what else I had heard about the conquered town, it was unlikely that the townspeople would live more than a few weeks, at most. There were also a few hints at even worse treatment for the conquered town, although the newspapers never stated exactly what had happened. I wasn’t sure what to make of those ‘darker hints,’ since it really wasn’t easy to sort out what the newspapers were alluding to. It almost felt like the newspapers Anise had found were trying to play off of the imagination of the reader.

Of course, I also wasn’t sure how much of the news was exaggerated, since it came from Verne’s national newspaper. This country didn’t have anything like freedom of press, so the treatment of the town might have been greatly exaggerated in the newspaper. The government could be trying to rally patriotic fervor against the enemy or something - I wasn’t really sure. But Old Mo had mentioned the town was treated poorly, so I imagined that at least some of it was true.

In any case, Anise’s parents made up their mind and also decided to flee with us, meaning that everyone except for my mother was on board.

On the day of our flight, my mother was in a blissed-out haze as usual. I hadn’t managed to ask her what she wanted to do, or talk with her about the situation, because she hadn’t been lucid enough to talk yet. I hesitated, wondering if it was really the right choice to just take her along… but if the stories about the invading army were true, I didn’t think my mother would survive if the city got taken. I didn’t want to leave her to be abused and die.

I grabbed her stash of Fizz and tossed it into my backpack, in case there was some sort of withdrawal effect that she would be subjected to if she just suddenly cut herself off. I hoped this might turn into an opportunity for my mother to get clean, but I also had no idea how to fix my mother’s addiction. Maybe Old Mo would have some advice for me - I would ask him later. But I wasn’t just going to leave my mother to potentially die in this city.

Sallia came to meet me that morning, and using her exceptional strength, she easily lifted my mother up and helped carry her along to the meeting spot with Old Mo.

It was time to leave this city.