“What spells do you have?” Vivian asked conversationally.

“Um… fire, wind, ice. The basics,” Noah said.

Vivian raised his eyebrows. “You’re planning to be a generalist, not an elemental specialist?”

Noah bristled. “So what? I can’t afford to join a party. I need to be able to do it all on my own!”

“No Mage has ever survived as a solo climber,” Vivian pointed out.

“They have. Nguyen Duy retired last year, and I hear he made it to the seventeenth floor as a solo climber. And Amahle Cele is still climbing, and she’s past floor twenty,” Noah argued.

Vivian blinked. Huh? I don’t know any of those names. Did that part of my memory get wiped, too? “Okay. So Mages have been solo climbers. Still, the point is, it’s rare. Most solo climbers are melee or mid-range fighters, especially fighters that don’t have to rely on SP. You’ll need to party up eventually.”

“I can’t afford to,” Noah said.

“You said that. I don’t understand it,” Vivian said.

“Parties cost money to join. There’s a joining fee. You have to pay for Tower insurance and a party license and base gear and stuff. Everyone knows that,” Noah said.

“That’s some bullshit. I’ve never paid to join a party,” Vivian said boldly, not remembering a single thing about joining a party. None of that sounds familiar. Wonder if it all came about after I became an NPC.

Noah squinted at him. “You’re an NPC.”

“Oh… yeah. Anyways. The point I was getting at before you distracted me with that solo climber business—”

“You’re the one who brought it up!”

“—is that you should spam spells as you walk. Use them until you’re out of SP, wait for your SP to refill, and blast them again.”

Noah looked at his tome. He licked his lips. “Is that safe?”

“You were just planning to attack the Lost Ones as a level three generalist Mage,” Vivian returned.

“But—”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Vivian asked.

Noah hesitated. “I can’t level up this way. What am I doing? Wasting my SP?”

Vivian shook his head. “Listen. Do you want to use the System, or do you want the System to use you?”

“Use… the System, obviously,” Noah said.

Vivian nodded. “What you need to do right now is acclimatize yourself to using magic. Get used to casting. The feel of the spell, the time it takes to cast, how exhausted repeatedly casting makes you. Cast until you can cast in your sleep, that’s what you need to do right now. And besides, you’ll probably level up once or twice. Kill some bugs by accident or something.”

Noah nodded. He raised his tome, words already on his lips.

“Wait!”

“What?” Noah asked, annoyed.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“No fire,” Vivian said sternly, narrowing his eyes.

“Why not?”

Vivian gestured around them at the leafy hedges, the heady roses bobbing in the fog, the fallen, brittle-dry branches and papery beheaded roses beneath the hedges.

“Oh,” Noah said.

“No fire in my precious garden,” he muttered under his breath. One hand closed around his clippers, almost instinctively.

A moment later, he turned and beamed at Noah. “Go on, have at it.”

“What, just… go on my own?” Noah asked, concerned. He looked at the dark Garden and shuddered.

“I need to train, too, and unlike some dumb kid, I can’t just walk around and fire off spells all day. I need room to actually practice,” Vivian said. A vague memory welled up in his head of an open space deep in the hedge maze, with enough room to toss the rake and the clippers around. Something blurry stood in the space’s center, but the image wouldn’t come to mind. Probably nothing important.

“But I…”

“The Lost Ones don’t attack during the day, and you need to learn the Garden. I don’t.” Hazy memories welled up, shifting around as if floating in a layer of filthy water. Hedges. Roses. Bodies. Fog. Vivian shoved them back down. Not now. He made a grabby gesture at Noah’s tome.

Noah hesitated, then handed it over.

Vivian flicked the tome open. Wincing, he slit his thumb on a nearby rose’s thorn and scribbled a rudimentary map on one of the tome’s insert pages. “If you follow this, no matter where you are, you’ll end up at the place I’m going.” He tossed it back to Noah with the same wanton carelessness as a celebrity who’d just signed a photo.

Noah blinked. He looked at the tome, then back at Vivian. “Why…”

“Why does it work like that? Magic, or something,” Vivian said, waving as he walked off.

“Why did you scribble in my tome? I have paper… and a pen…”

Pretending not to have heard him, Vivian continued. “The Garden is one of the Tower’s little mysteries. The world may never know. Anyways, if you get too tired to continue, or it gets dark, come find me. Especially if it gets dark. Lost Ones get nasty after dark.”

Noah looked at the map slowly bleeding into his pages, then back up. “What if I can’t—”

He faced an empty hedge. Vivian was nowhere in sight.

Noah scowled, then shut his tome with a snap. “Fine. I don’t get how this helps, though. Shouldn’t I focus on leveling? What does an NPC know about getting stronger, anyways?”

He glanced after Vivian, then sighed. Shaking his head, he wandered off through the hedges. The sun glowed equally bright as the roses’ dim phosphorescence, leaving him in a greenish twilight. In a few moments, the fog swallowed his slender figure, and the Garden stood empty, as if no one had passed through at all.

Up on Belltower Heights, four figures sat atop a cliff, looking down at the Garden from above. One of the women nodded, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Bells jingled on her wrists. “He’s entered.”

“I have eyes,” a gruff, bulky man rebuffed her. He hulked where he sat, perched atop a lump of rubble that had once been a chimney in the burned-out husk they occupied.

“Peace, Lewis. For now, all we need is patience. That gear he stole will be back in our hands just as soon as we enter the Garden, and he’ll be back enchanting in no time,” another man stated. He had a gawky, awkward frame, and moved jerkily, as if he wasn’t familiar with his own body.

“I still think we should just gank him,” another woman said, resting her chin on a calloused hand.

“But if he gets the flower, then we have the flower and the gear, and we make a profit,” the awkward man said, shrugging.

“You think he’ll succeed?” the muscular woman said, snorting.

“I didn’t say that. But if he fails, then our work has been done for us, and we’re not criminals by any stretch of the law. It’s a win-win scenario,” the awkward man said. He shrugged again. “Plus, we don’t lose our baby money tree. Win-win-win.”

“What about that merc or whatever he hired?” the muscular woman asked.

“NPC,” Lewis grunted.

“Huh?”

The slender woman nodded. “He’s an NPC. Might be part of some quest, or maybe a hidden recruitable. It’s a good idea, but he won’t be enough against us. He’s just an NPC, after all. Predictable, at best.”

“Huh,” the muscular woman said, twisting her lips. After a moment, she slapped her thighs and hefted herself up. “Well, whatever. If you need me, I’m gonna be farming goblins over there.”

“Jane, wait up,” the slender woman called, bells jangling as she stood. She jogged after the muscular woman, hurrying off toward the goblin-infested village.

The awkward man sighed. “Renee, Jane… what about you, Lewis?”

Lewis shrugged, then stretched. “I’d rather farm goblins than watch the Garden. You’re on your own, Kors.”

“So it seems.” Humming to himself, the awkward man put his hands in his pockets. He stared down at the garden as though he could see through the dense fog to wherever their quarry had escaped.

Lewis paused. He looked over his shoulder at Kors, then shook his head. Rubbing the back of his neck, he walked on.

Kors’ eyes narrowed, and he smiled to himself. “Running into the Garden? Tsk, tsk. What a fool, little Noah. You won’t get very far in a dead end like this.”