“So, according to Bonnie, Krists are getting eaten, and following an exponential increase of [Krist consumers], everything that depends on daylight to live will begin an unstoppable death cycle in…fifty years. But it won’t be noticeable until forty-five years. The swarms will reach trillions at that point, so, it will be much too late then. Seems like our elf is correct.”

“Fuuuuck…” The discontent in Gaëlle’s voice was slightly fake. Probably because she was happily floating in the giant pool of warm, purified water.

Now, there was a large part of the wall and container missing, but it was filled with rainwater, and the whole apparatus had stayed mostly intact despite Henry’s massive attack on it when he brought the reservoir down on the plaza. The success of Gaëlle’s [Move] skill had been resounding. She had said “[Move]: all the water in the container go into the smaller of the two bathtubs.” And it had done exactly that. A giant bubble broke the laws of Earth 1 physics as it floated around until it gently laid down in the least massive of the two bathtubs. Then she had repeated the skill’s name and asked for the water to vibrate extremely fast until it reached forty degrees Celsius (104°F). It had partly worked, the water only getting slightly warmer. But after ten more consecutive tries, it had reached the demanded temperature.

A few [Purify] to be sure the water would not inadvertently kill us, and we had ourselves the perfect holiday spa.

The opened wall was even giving us a magnificent view of the shining Upperseas, which was a definite plus.

The sight of my own floating boobs had been disconcerting though, which was why I had decided to bother my sister with discouraging facts.

“I didn’t come here to save the world…Don’t tell me we need to help her.” She begged.

“It’s not urgent but…well... Let’s save the kids and see what we do after that? Maybe she’ll convince this Hope city that they need to act, and we won’t even need to involve ourselves?”

“…How much do you want to bet on that?”

I grimaced. “Nothing?”

“I figured as much.”

I stopped bumming her out and tried to force myself to look down at what was, really, my body now.

After a few minutes, Elle’s voice echoed in the room.

“Are you ogling at yourself?”

“…Trying to get used to it.”

“You took plenty of showers.”

“Not for long, and I could look at you.”

“Pervert.”

“Fuck off, you’re the last person in existence who can say that.”

“…You okay?”

“I’ll be fine. It’s not the worst scene in existence.” My voice wasn’t as categorical as my words.

“You can definitely say that.”

“You’re insufferable.”

She laughed joyously.

“…Gaëlle?” I had a sudden thought pop into my mind.

“Yeah?”

“How are we supposed to get rid of all the water when we’re done? It’s all purified, right?”

“…”

The next morning, the old granny I still couldn’t get the name of came to tell us that Vi had invited us for breakfast down on the plaza.

She was the perfect host, giving us a tour of the market. People were happy, and as Gaëlle had predicted, coins were exchanged in abundance. The beautiful elf bought us tarts, but I had no idea what the fruit in it was, and the crust was free of sugar. Despite the culinary novelty, I enjoyed it tremendously. She also showed her usefulness when she taught us that simply adding impure water in the bathtub would de-[Purify] everything, letting us rewarm it and re-[Purify] it to clean it, although you still needed to change the water every so often.

The rest of the day was less pleasant.

“We need to ask them to repair the container so we can use the large pool.” Gaëlle told me, pure greed in her eyes. “Also, Vi is definitely into us. See how she asked to be invited to bathe? A girl’s outing my ass. I think you’ve got a better chance than me though. I’ll let you have her. I’m more in a dicking mood.”

“Oh my FUCKING GOD, L!” I shouted in absolute horror. “I did NOT want to know!”

“Shh.” Rik stared at me in utter confusion, not able to understand what we were talking about with our translation skill deactivated.

“Sorry…” I pinched my nose. Screaming in the middle of the forest hadn’t been my most brilliant idea.

We were currently being guided back to the dimensional door, so we could begin the production of plastic explosives.

Rik was very interested in the generator and lights in the [Ground Drake]’s lair. He asked plenty of questions, which I all shut down.

“Rik, I understand this seems magical, but don’t forget, our technology, if it falls into bad hands, would mean doom to your world.”

“But those are just lights!”

“And what fuels them is worse than fire, it can kill all living things.”

Technically not a lie. The electricity was generated by a black hole, after all.

That made him gulp down. “Should you have brought it here, then?” He asked.

“We didn’t. Don’t worry.”

“…What about the oil you bring?” Rik questioned.

That made me pause. “It…it’s risky, I’m not going to lie. But your village needs it right now. As long as it is kept secret from everyone, it’ll be fine.”

Gaëlle slapped him on the back. He jumped slightly in the air.

“Don’t worry. Your village will survive. We won’t let what happened to your clan happen again.”

He half-smiled at that. “Thank you, Elle.”

“No problem pretty boy.”

Oh no. I pulled my sister away from the [Wood Elf], said my goodbyes, and began leaving for the space station.

“Let us meet again in two days.” He bowed slightly.

“See you soon!” Elle winked at him.

I grabbed the rope of the door and saw the lights of the Quiescent station turn on and brighten the giant dimensional Door rooms. Behind us, the door to System World 5 was being carried away by the lift.

“What was that about?” I asked my sister.

“What? He’s cute. Sure he’s not exactly what I’m looking for right now, but you know, if we ever go back to Canvas one day, I’d like a cute hunter boy to wait for me.”

“Urgh, you’re the worst.” I rolled my eyes up.

“Nah, you know what’s the worst?”

We teleported to the main room, the sight of the black hole and the lights orbiting it stopping my thoughts for a short second.

“I’ll never get used to it.” I said out loud.

“Difficult to beat, I agree. But as I was saying, the worst is the two days of explosives making we’re going to have to do. I hope we won’t get poisoned by all the chemicals Bonnie gives us. I’m sure sulfuric acid fumes are bad for your lungs.”

“Wear your mask and goggles.”

“Yeah, yeah. Maybe we should make heroin and sell it in other worlds? You know, trans-dimensional drug dealers?”

I didn’t even deign answering that.

Two days passed, with the only break being a few hours on Earth 1 buying a bigger bed and nice house decorations. It didn’t feel as weird sleeping with my sister now that we didn’t actually have to snuggle anymore. L still wasn’t able to sleep without contact, though. But I knew she was slowly getting better. At this rate, it would take years, but I believed that was already great progress, and I told her often. I didn’t want her to feel doubts or feel obligated to move away faster than she could really handle.

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The decorations were a nice poster of Pink Floyd, a laptop for Nielle with some gaming equipment and a desk, and a library with a few books. It was pretty empty right now, but we had all the time in the world to fill it.

That was our break time. The rest was us fiddling with things we barely understood, not knowing if adding a millilitre too much of some basic solution would kill us both in seconds or not.

But we managed without wounds, although we did fail a few batches of explosives.

When we reappeared in System World 5, two days later, our bags contained fifty charges each. I expected one to easily kill a normal [Tooth-Bear]. Plenty enough for three weeks, I thought.

I was wrong.

The first two days when we started helping Kan with the defences of the village, not much happened. We had set up “Oil perimeters” where soldiers could drag in monsters they couldn’t handle. We didn’t have much to do, just wait and blow it up when we were told to. Two charges were used like that, killing a [Tooth-Bear] and a [Potti Monki], which according to Rik were the two most common monsters in the Redwood area. We didn’t even get close to the monsters, and I still had no idea what a [Potti Monki] looked like. It was slightly anticlimactic.

Still we gained a nice double experience bonus from the blue monster. Almost nothing from the [Tooth-Bear] though, as the non-bonus experience was shared between a lot of people and wasn’t much to begin with. We discovered how ‘normal’ people levelled up, as each night we successfully participated and protected the village, we gained a ‘you have completed a job prompt’ and gained a thousand or so experience. People levelled by making goals, and the system rewarded you for completing it.

“It’s like you can write your own quests and the System rewards you for it!” Gaëlle loved to discover new things about what the people of this world called the Blue. “Still, the rewards are a bit shitty.” She concluded.

During the day, when we didn’t sleep to recuperate our lost hours, we asked a lot of questions to Vi and Rik whenever we met with them, verifying that our assumptions about the System were correct (we had done a good job on that), what kind of classes there were (apparently, only nine classes existed), what the value of coins was (five coins was a piece of bread), and so on and so on.

Gaëlle was quite disappointed when she learned that although adventurers existed, they were usually bandits and didn’t have a guild or anything like it. That was because people actively hunting monsters to level up were seen negatively, as they behaved just like monsters. The creatures created by Krist shards were pushed by two urges: levelling and reproduction. In that order. Now it was slightly more complicated than that, some monsters not actively attacking settlements and only living close to them, but according to Rik and Vi, they were all immensely attracted to places or things that could give them lots of experience and killing wasn’t enough for them. The way they gained experience was by devouring the animal or Sapiens whole. It explained why our meat baits hadn’t worked on anything else than animals, except when the crow had appeared. The [Tooth-Bear] had been following the crow, and only when it lost the bird’s trail had it been intrigued by our trap and the dead falloon. That was the name of the balloon rabbit thing we had killed, according to Rik.

So, all in all, the first two days were rich of new discoveries and little experience, in exchange for a bit of sleep.

Then things got really bad.

The monsters weren’t high levelled, but every night, five or more monsters couldn’t be handled by the soldiers, which forced us to stay awake the whole time, as each hour, someone would wake us up to warn us that they needed us.

Soon, we just adopted a diurnal sleep cycle.

We had to run to our explosion spots to restock it in explosives during the night, sometimes putting an explosive on still warm and smoky ground. The experience we gained was mediocre, as monsters double our levels were rare, and only triple bonuses were truly interesting for us.

We saw Vi much less, as we were sleeping all day, and so was she. We crossed paths around the northern entry once, and she accompanied us one entire night as she was charged to escort us. Kan, Louis or Rik were the others that usually served as our bodyguards. I thought it was a waste, as we never got attacked, but I understood we were too precious to the old elf [Soldier] to be risked in any way. Everyone involved in the village’s defences were being taught the [Soldier] class. Even Vi, as her [Assassin] class was maxed out and Kan had decided that every bit of potential help would help. From what I had collected though, she was much stronger than she appeared. According to the old [Soldier] it could take between two weeks and a month to teach a skill, if it was successfully taught in the first place, which meant that out of the twenty guards and twenty young farmers of the village that followed Kan’s daytime lessons, only ten would get the [Soldier] class. At level one, of course.

The situation was dire.

We obviously couldn’t charge anyone else with the explosives, as it would make our lie obvious, and the potential consequences much worse than just a village being destroyed. But it had a price. The last night of the first week, me and Gaëlle had to separate to get to opposite sides of the village faster, but that was the last time they asked us to do it, as my sister came back a shivering mess, and we had to go back to the tower for her to recuperate.

Fortunately, the day wasn’t far away, and the remaining explosives had been enough to hold on. My sister sobbing in my arms, I had looked at the horizon to see the mirror light signals tell me when I was supposed to ask Bonnie to blow things up.

One week passed, two to go, and we only had fifty explosive charges left.

We would not hold on at that rate, and during one of Kan’s lessons at the Plaza, me and my sister came down from the tower to talk to him about it.

Vi was a bit of an intruder, the only woman sparring amongst all the men, and I must admit I stared a bit at her athletic body in her tight-fitting clothes.

“Elle, Nielle? What is it? Shouldn’t you two be sleeping?”

“Hu, hum!” Gaëlle cleared her throat, and I refocused on the [Wood Elf] in front of me.

“Oh yeah, sorry. Uhm, hi Kan.”

“…Good day to you, Miss Nielle.”

I gave him an embarrassed smile. “Sorry, but we have bad news. Me and my sister verified, but at the rate we’re going, if the monsters continue to arrive like this, we’ll be out of oil in five, six days at most.”

Kan looked at his student, then back at us. “Let’s move to the side.”

He brought us inside the tower. Only the torch of the first floor corridor and the Linus of Krists peering through the interstices of the wood door were lighting us.

“I was afraid of that.” The Elf exclaimed lowly.

“But we can still make more, it’ll be short if we want to be back before dark, but if we leave tomorrow early then…” Elle began.

“No. Rik…Rik has spotted a new [Ground Drake] in the area of woods beyond the Siumi river.”

That was the name of the inverted river between Canvas village and our trans-dimensional door.

“So? Doesn’t it only hunt at night?” I asked.

“It does, but it would get your scent, and follow you back to the village. I cannot lure a [Ground Drake] towards the oil… I know of no ways to control its movements. With the increase of monsters and without an experienced Ascensus…I think he would break through the walls. Can you…teleport back to your world and come back here?”

“…Our passageway doesn’t stay long enough, it’s basically a one-way ticket. We’ll have to pass through the [Ground Drake]’s territory at least once.” I provided him.

“…If you use the permanent door in the lair, maybe it would lose your scent…” Kan thought deeply.

But Gaëlle shook her head with a grimace. “And then there will be another [Ground Drake] inside the grotto, blocking our passage to the village almost permanently. We’d be unable to make new oil, and we definitely won’t be able to make enough for one full week in half a day.”

Not to say that rushing into making explosives really felt like a particularly bad idea. But I kept that comment for myself.

“So, we’ll have to spare what we have.” Kan nodded. “We’ll keep the explosives for blue monsters or higher. Everything else we’ll take care of.”

“…Will that be okay?” I asked.

“Yes, we’ll manage.” I saw in his stare that he was expecting people to die.

As he left us in the dark corridor, I looked at my sister. “Is there nothing we can do?”

She hesitated, then finally told me what she was thinking about.

“…We can fight.”

“He’ll never agree to that.” I responded.

“He’ll agree if there is no other choice.”

Five days later, I was still too low-levelled to use the Ascensus skills, but we couldn’t wait anymore.

In the reunion chamber on the second floor, Rik gave us the bad news.

He had identified the [Ground Drake] but worse than its level 461 was the fact that he had spotted it much closer to the village. It was with a heavy tone that he announced that he believed the monster had caught his scent.

“I didn’t expect to find it sleeping next to the road. I wasn’t careful enough.” Rik bowed his head deeply.

The farmer Jonas, who had unlocked the [Soldier] class the day before, shook his head and sighed. But his words were simple and recomforting. “If it came this close to the village, it would have found us anyway. At least now we can prepare.”

“I don’t know if we can, it being purple and its high level…it is old. I’ve never seen a monster so big. Even with…Henry’s presence would not have changed a thing. “

Kan took a long breath. “So it's bad news piling up. We’ll try to trap it, pull it away from the village.”

“Shouldn’t we evacuate?” Vi asked.

“No use. If it manages to enter the palisade, it will have all our scents. If that happens well…let’s say that the village is done for.”

That was when me and my sister asked to help with the fight, and Kan had no choice but to accept.

After everyone had left the room, Vi came to talk to us in private on the floor above. Except for our room, everything had been stripped to its bone, so it was with quite the echo that I heard Vi call out to us.

“Nielle! Elle, wait. Sorry to disturb your much needed rest. Especially with what is to come tonight.” She stepped closer to us. I couldn’t help admiring her stride.

She looked to the side, down, then back to me.

“Give me some of your special oil. I will be able to get close enough to the [Ground Drake] undetected to put it on him.”

I shook my head.

“We can’t do that.”

“But…”

“You don’t understand the consequences of what such an action could bring…”

“Hold on. Hold on. Listen to me. I understand very well that you’re doing everything you can to avoid a catastrophe. That’s what I want too. But if we die, if I die without warning the Sea of Hope, this world is doomed. I know you don’t believe me but…”

“Wait a second.” I sighed, I hadn’t thought about that. “What do you think, L?” I asked my sister in English.

“I think your girlfriend is right.” She was grimacing despite her attempt at teasing me, also having turned off her translation skill.

“That’s quite weak, L. I’m not in high school anymore.”

“I know. Sorry. It just pisses me off. We said we wouldn’t be fucking responsible for some grandiose quest, and here we are. Instead of just killing the bad guy and saving the kids, we’re being pulled into the fucking ‘save the world’ trope. At least it’s not nuclear holocaust, that would have been too many cliches for me.”

“I get you.” I nodded slowly, then looked back at Vi.

“Speech on. Vi, you’re right.”

The elf’s body shook, hard. “What?”

“You need to tell your story; this world is doomed if nothing is done.”

“You…you believe me?”

“It’s not a question of believing you or not. We had ways to verify your claims, and so we did exactly that. You were right, the [Krist Consumers] will end this world in fifty years, more or less.”

“Fif…fifty years?” She gasped. “I was right. I was right!?” Her expression was an impossible mixture of absolute horror and immense relief.

“We’ll give you some of our oil. Except it isn’t oil, it’s plastic. It’s a solid form of explosive, you will even be able to stick it to the [Ground Drake], with a bit of luck. We’ll need to coordinate because we’re the only ones who can make it go off. Now, it contains technology that could break this world. You have to promise me to never, ever reveal it to anyone.”

“I…Yes, I understand. But, what do you mean it’s plastic? What’s plastic? A solid form?”

“Let us show you.” Gaëlle told her. “But don’t think we’ll explain it all. The less you know, the safer it is.”