It felt good to have pants again. Ones that were snug in all the right places. Sure, it was a weird thing to miss, but Mel enjoyed being warm. And snug.

It was satisfying wearing the armored hide of a monster Mel slayed.

She fingered one of the many holes in her coat.

Unfortunately, her coat had seen better days. After just a day of battle, she had worn several holes and rips in it. Despite the Mist affinity it gained, that was the only magical aspect it had.

It did not repair itself, no matter how much mana she pumped into it.

She didn’t have any tools to fix it. Even if Mel did, she didn’t know how. Stitching was probably involved, maybe something more?

I’d probably just stab myself with the needle, anyway.

It would eventually need to be replaced. It was only Common rarity anyway, which was considerably weaker than her pants and gloves.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Mel slept like the dead, and though nobody woke her up for her turn to keep watch, she didn’t get upset.

It was a kind gesture, if a little foolish. One of the perks of grouping with other people was that she didn’t wake up with a monster snarling right in her face. With nobody else on watch, that might have happened.

Even though the fire seemed to scare away most monsters.

Maddie had gone out with Nathan to forage, returning with a meager meal for all of them once Mel woke up.

It was nothing special, but it was food. Mel hadn’t counted on being so hungry all the time. Fighting and walking constantly built up an appetite. She had learned firsthand just how debilitating hunger could be.

“First thing first,” Mel said. “Do all of you have [Wayward Traveler]?”

One by one, everybody nodded as they checked their status. Something that Mel had taught them before going to bed.

“Then why are you carrying your weapons around like a bunch of goobers?” Mel asked.

Nathan furrowed his brow. “What do you–oh.”

“Yeah.”

Holding her hand out, Mel summoned and desummoned her weapon in a swirl of silver ash. “Lesson one: focus on desummoning and summoning your weapon. It shouldn’t take more than a focused thought.”

Mel hadn’t expected them to take so long to master such simple magic, but she took it in stride and tried to be encouraging. What was most interesting wasn’t how long it took them to catch on.

It was that every person had a different color associated with their summoning magic.

No two people had the same color.

At first, Mel suspected it might have to do with the classes they picked, but she wasn’t so sure.

In some indefinable way, Mel felt it was a reflection of their personalities.

She decided to keep that theory to herself for now. No two people were the same class. Travis had been a Mystic, which made Mel wonder if the system was trying to create groups to better weather the competition.

Yet another theory she pushed aside, because that would mean the system knew Travis would die well before anybody else did. And once you started going down that road, your sanity would be the first thing left by the wayside.

Besides, she didn’t like to think of herself as replacing Travis, and certainly didn’t want to plant that seed in anybody’s mind.

The rest of the day was spent on simple survival training. Maddie was a great help. She knew certain herbs and folk remedies that Mel had never heard of.

At first she was doubtful, but when she found [Green Spirit Herba], Mel stopped being so skeptical.

[Green Spirit Herba]

(Copper Rank, Item)

(Common)

A bunch of fresh, vivid green herba filled with Green chromatic energies and invigorating mana. A core component in stamina potions.

Imprint: When eaten raw, increases stamina recovery speed.

They picked as many as they could find. Unfortunately, that only amounted to a few leaves per person.

It wasn’t until the sun began to dip below the horizon that Mel finished her quest.

Quest Complete: Teacher, Teacher

Additional Objective: Teach survival basics to (5) people (5/5).

Reward: (1) [Small Health Potion]

With room in her inventory, Mel’s lone health potion was directly deposited through the system’s beautiful streams of light.

“What was that?” Sabrina asked.

“I completed a quest,” Mel explained. “That line of light was a reward going into my inventory.”

“How do we get inventory?”

“Mine comes from a ring I found.” Mel shrugged. “Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine. Have you completed any quests?”

They all nodded. “We wouldn’t have gotten our [Soul Kilns] otherwise,” Maddie said. “At first I was skeptical, but quests are…kind of fun.”

“We don’t have typical attributes,” Shane said. “Most games I’ve played have simple numbers and levels. I have no idea what a rank or grade is. Not that I have any aspects.” He looked at Mel. “How rare are aspects?”

“I’ve fought over thirty monsters so far,” she said, turning to look out over the plateau. The sky was painted with rays of gold. “From all that, only one monster gave me an aspect. The other came from a quest. So, best case scenario, one out of thirty-ish? Not a bad ratio really.”

Shane chuckled. “If you’ve ever played Runescape, you’d know that’s nothing.”

“Runescape?” Nathan scoffed.

“Except there’s no respawning here,” Sabrina whispered. “We don’t have endless chances against monsters.”

“There isn’t in iron man Runescape either,” Shane muttered under his breath.

“I swear, Shane, sometimes…” Sabrina trailed off.

Mel chose to ignore him. “Sabrina is right. Tomorrow, we’ll start your training.”

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“What do you mean?” Maddie asked. “Can’t we just stay here until this whole nightmare is over?”

“No. If we do, eventually a monster or person that’s stronger than us will be a problem. Listen, I know you all just want to survive, but in order to do that, you need to get stronger. Without aspects, your stats aren’t going to change from Mundane.”

“Which is no different from what they were on Earth,” Sabrina guessed.

“That’s my understanding,” Mel agreed. “You already have knowledge and training from the system for your weapons. Now you need to familiarize yourselves with them. You have combat arts, and you work well in a team. Use that and you’ll be unstoppable. Any bandits that we encounter are likely to be too suspicious of each other to work properly as a unit. We can exploit that.”

Sitting around the embers of the fire, Sabrina pulled her knees up to her chest. Her long Mage robes flowed down to her ankles. “You make it sound like any moment some band of murderers and thieves will jump out and try to kill us.”

“Because they might, Sabrina.”

“You don’t know that. We saw other groups. They weren’t trying to kill each other.”

Mel leaned forward. “Then why aren’t you still with them?”

“Because they were shady,” Shane said. “Don’t look at me like that, Sabrina! It’s true. Some of them were okay, but you know that one group with the white-haired guy and his rat-faced servant? There was no way they weren’t planning some shit.”

Nathan shook his head. “Shane’s right, that guy gave me the willies.”

Sabrina shook out her blonde hair and tilted her chin up. “Well, excuse me for believing there is some good in the world. Even though Earth is gone, I choose to believe that people will band together for safety. Some might seek to exploit that, but most will form small groups that turn into towns, and those towns into villages.”

Mel wanted to roll her eyes so hard that they fell out of her head. Before she had the chance to, Sabrina turned to her with a wide smile. “That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?! You want to make a village!”

“No–”

“Then you want us to be strong enough to fight monsters so we can find a village,” Sabrina continued, completely undaunted.

Mel looked at the rest of the group. “Is she always like this?”

“Brina could find the silver lining in a mushroom cloud,” Shane said with a shake of his head.

“Excuse me for looking on the bright side! We have magical powers. I, for one, am not going to believe people will kill each other for sport just because society has had a little hiccup.”

“A hiccup?” Bernard said. “Society is gone , Sabrina. It’s every man and woman for themselves. This is some sick game for somebody’s enjoyment, only we’re not told who.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sabrina asked. “Then where are all the kids? Where are the old people? The sick and infirm? If the system is so bad, why aren’t there people who were in the ER with stab wounds bleeding out all over the place? You heard that one guy talking when we first woke up here! He had cancer and now it’s just gone. He was in hospice, for crying out loud!”

Mel had wondered about that, but she assumed something altogether a bit darker. Even though it didn’t affect her in any real way, she felt relieved to hear that the system wasn’t cold and cruel.

There was something else they weren’t considering. This was a competition. One that ended in about two months.

What would happen then? Mel didn’t know. However, it didn’t matter much at the moment. That was a problem for future Mel, not present Mel.

What they did now was all that mattered. What happened after was immaterial. They had to survive first.

“Have you checked out the Emporium yet?” Mel asked, as much to change the subject as to teach them how to access the shop.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t even know what that was.

Mel explained, including how to access it. She had no idea how they managed to stay alive as long as they did. Given their doe-eyed stares, even surviving a few hours was an achievement.

“Oh my god, I can buy things!” Sabrina said excitedly. “I have just enough to buy a [Fallen Realm Seed]. I don’t know what it is, but it sounds cool.”

“It should tell you what it does,” Mel said, trying hard to keep the judgment from her voice.

“Oh, so it does! I’m so pumped I must have missed it.”

Mel deliberated on what to purchase from the Emporium herself. She had more Battle Points than before, but still not enough to buy the [Aspect Seeker Scroll].

No one else in the group had enough either, which wasn’t surprising.

That 1,000 BP was a steep price tag.

“We can’t pool our BP together to buy something, can we?” Sabrina asked.

“Give it a whirl,” Mel told her distractedly. She wouldn’t hold her breath, but it would be better if Sabrina learned firsthand.

Mel was beginning to understand that Sabrina was the type of person who would argue with you until her face turned blue, if given half a chance. Not out of spite, but because she clearly had some deeply held beliefs.

The best way to help her learn the realities of this new world was to show her them. Only an idiot argued with facts.

Getting another aspect would be incredibly valuable, but so would becoming stronger with one of those branches, Mel thought.

Then again, binding another aspect lifted a stat up to Copper rank, so it was kind of the same thing.

Except she couldn’t afford that scroll yet, whereas she could get a branch. One she could gain the benefit of sooner rather than later.

Mel mulled this over while studying the magical plateaus. There would definitely be aspects out there. Chances are the environment will offer clues as to what kind of aspects I could find.

The scroll would give no such guidance. It would direct Mel to any random aspect in the area. While she doubted there was such a thing as a weak aspect, she wasn’t particularly crazy about the possibility of finding something ordinary like Wood or gross like Fungus aspect.

She shivered in revulsion at the thought of Fungus aspect. Shroom colony digging around in my brain, no thanks. This isn’t the Last of Us.

With just over 300 BP, Mel decided to buy up a few [Fallen Realm Seeds]. High recovery meant she could spend less time healing and more time fighting. That gave her something that neither the branches nor the scroll could.

Perhaps if she had gotten the seeds sooner, she wouldn’t have needed to take most of the competition’s second day to recover back to full.

Resting by a fire and eating were the only two ways Mel knew how to speed up her health recovery. It was clear that you couldn’t chug a magical elixir and suddenly be hale and healthy. Rest was necessary. Anything that minimized that necessary downtime would be invaluable.

As soon as Mel purchased her first [Fallen Realm Seed], she noticed something had changed.

Son of a bitch, each seed is more expensive than the last!

The first seed had been 100 BP, but the second was 200.

Screw it, I still have enough points.

(2) [Fallen Realm Seeds] have been stored in your inventory.

Mel pulled them out and gave them a quick look over to make sure their information was the same.

[Fallen Realm Seed]

(Mundane Rank, Item)

(Rare)

Darkly glowing desiccated vines tangled around a seed of dwindling energy, which fell from a higher realm of power in the multiverse.

Imprint: Use to permanently enhance restoration and recovery-based effects from items and food by 1 tier, limited to a maximum of 5 tiers at Mundane Rank.

Mel immediately used one after the other. A dull golden glow suffused her body, matching the setting sun perfectly.

She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she could feel the difference already.

They didn’t increase her native regeneration, but Mel could still tell something was different. As the sun began to set, Mel got an idea.

“Since we’re already awake from sleeping all day,” Mel said, “we should go out hunting at night. Most people will be trying to shelter or huddle around a fire. With my vision and mist, we can ambush other monsters that are out prowling at night.”

“But aren’t there usually predators at night?” Sabrina asked.

Mel gave her a vicious grin. “Exactly. Get yourselves ready. As soon as the sun goes down, we’re going hunting.”