Blake rose with the sun and renewed purpose. Mason was alive. They’d find each other soon enough, he was sure of it, and then they’d take the world by the balls.

“Come on, underlings, we’re losing daylight!”

Hank stood without complaint, but Mona grimaced and kicked his foot. They made a fire and ate fish for the ninth time in a row, then made their way down the beach.

“North is what we told Mason,” Blake announced, “so North is where we’ll go.”

Walking on sand was better for vacations, as it turned out. When one actually had somewhere to be, and miles of the stuff to cross, it became something of a chore.

“Maybe we should move to the damn forest,” Hank complained after a few hours, but Blake refused to leave the shore. They kept on and got sand everywhere in their clothes, wary eyes on the water and the trees, mostly silent as they soldiered on in increasing misery. But they managed.

After what must have been several long, grueling hours of walking, Blake was ready to call for a rest.

“It must be evening soon,” he said and turned, and found Hank with a raised brow.

“It’s only been about two hours, kid. It’s not even noon.”

“What?” Blake wiped at the sweat dripping down his brow. “I’m exhausted. There’s no way that was two hours.”

Mona checked her broken watch and shrugged, and Blake sagged with a groan. Then he turned back and squinted, seeing some kind of strange, narrow cloud just down the beach wafting above a hill. Hank noticed his eyes and looked too, then hunched and lowered his voice.

“That’s smoke,” he said. “We have to be careful. That could be anyone or anything. Maybe we should move to the woods.”

“You and the damn woods.” Blake snorted, feeling an excitement in his chest. “Smoke means people. And I like people. Hell, it might even be Mason!”

Blake grinned and picked up his pace, ignoring the more skeptical looks of his less optimistic companions. Positive thinking changed one’s reality. Blake had sworn by the fact all his life. And after another long stretch of cruel, desert suffering, they saw a ring of perfectly nice looking people sitting around a fire, talking and laughing on the beach.

“We should be cautious,” Hank said for the thousandth time.

“I agree,” agreed Mona.

Blake rolled his eyes, despite knowing they were basically right. The thing was, he had magic mind powers, and that was on top of his charm.

And the reality was: life worked out for Blake so consistently, so frequently, that he wasn’t afraid of these people. Or really anything. He had a destiny. He was sure of it. And that destiny was not dying on this nameless beach.

“Stay here if you like,” he said. “But I’m going down to make new friends.”

He walked on without waiting to see what his companions would do. The party ahead spotted him about halfway, a few standing from the ring with weapons ranging from hammers to staves.

Blake just smiled and walked on, only one glance back to see if the others had followed. They had. He scanned the faces of the new people as he arrived, finding nothing terribly frightening or out of the ordinary.

“Hello, friends!” he called, and one or two of them kind of waved.

They were a mix of ages, ethnicities, genders. Most looked neutral to his appearance, or slightly friendly. A few dubious faces however watched him with unpleasant glares.

“Who are you?” said one such face, and Blake released a good chunk of mana to blast them all with friendly Mental Influence.

“Name’s Blake.” He tapped his chest. “The lovely lady over there is Mona, and the old stodger is Hank. We’ve just been walking the beach and found your fire.”

“I told you we shouldn’t have lit it,” said a middle aged looking East Asian.

“You’re not with a group? It’s just you three?” said a young, rather unfortunately large nosed woman.

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Blake watched their eyes, letting his intuition warn him of danger. He decided these people were afraid. They were prey, not predators.

“We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.” He smiled, reasonably certain that was Carl Sagan.

“You talk funny,” said a man Blake decided to call Sourpuss, but Blake didn’t drop his smile.

“I think in this case you mean the revered Carl Sagan talks funny, but I understand your meaning.” It was clear Sourpuss didn’t have a clue what he was saying, so he sighed and moved on. “Would you mind if we shared your fire?”

“More the merrier,” said a rather more friendly young man in a hoodie.

“Very kind of you.”

Blake took a seat next to his benefactor, letting loose another blast of friendly thoughts with Mental Influence into the most open minds. It would probably have been wiser to get more names and details first, but first impressions mattered quite a lot when one didn’t want to die. Anyway, he had half his mana left.

The group went around introducing themselves, and Blake forgot most of the names immediately. It was a shortcoming he’d always intended to work on, but he realized now with Mental Influence he would basically be able to bring up the name of anyone he was looking at and could target. The thought put him in a rather good mood.

“We came from a nearby tutorial,” he was telling Billy with the hoodie as Hank and Mona took their seats nearby.

“Can I get you folks something to drink?” Billy said with a conspiratorial grin and a little pride, and Blake made sure to react with high drama.

“You certainly can! Where the hell did you get this?”

“I’m a civilian,” said Billy, going a little pink. “A brewer, basically. Can make all kinds of things. Well, I could, if I had some more equipment.”

Blake took the young man’s hand and met his eyes with as much earnestness as he could summon. “Billy, I am exceptionally pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Billy turned closer to red but laughed, handing him a metal cup with something very strong.

“Enjoy it. Can’t make more without finding some things first.”

“I can imagine.” Blake sipped and did his best not to wince at the moonshine. “Now that’s good. The rest of you all players? Other civilians?”

The others mostly stared at the fire or acted like they hadn’t heard, so Blake sighed and went first.

“Mona and I are players. Hank there is a fisherman. He’s been keeping us well fed.”

The others perked up at that, and by the thin, somewhat sallow looks of the group he decided they hadn’t been eating very well.

“We have a mix,” said Billy. “About half and half.”

Blake smiled and nodded, deciding to leave it at that.

“You two don’t talk much,” said Braden the sourpuss in Mona and Hank’s direction.

They exchanged a look, then Hank shrugged.

“Blake talks enough for everyone,” he said with a wink.

“I take that as a compliment.” Blake grinned.

“You take everything as a compliment,” Hank said, and the group laughed, Blake included.

“I find life is better that way.” Blake took another swig of moonshine and felt himself relaxing a little. “It makes us all friends.”

“I’m not your friend,” said Sourpuss in a tone that shattered Blake’s relaxing mood. Several others in the group rolled their eyes, which comforted him, but still.

Self-deprecation was good. A little group jesting was good. But he couldn’t allow too much disrespect if he was going to dominate these people. Banter was fine, challenge was not. If it got violent, he decided, the others wouldn’t interfere, and Mona would protect him. Probably.

“You see?” Blake similarly lowered his tone. “Another compliment. Because I wouldn’t want to be friends with an idiot like you.”

No one laughed or said a word. Blake met the man’s eyes and held them, ready with Telekinesis to throw away his enemy’s sword before he could grab it.

“But let’s not do anything rash,” Blake added with a friendlier tone. “We’ve only just met.”

Sourpuss rose to his feet, and Billy held up a hand for calm.

“Oh sit down, Braden,” he said. “What’s the point of this? It’s a dangerous world and they’ve got a damn fisherman we could really use.”

“Go ahead,” Mona said in a low voice, her javelin resting against her arm. “See what happens.”

Sourpuss, aka Braden, didn’t back down, and every civilian around the fire started to back away. Billy tried one more time in something approaching a whine. “Can we please just enjoy a drink by the fire?”

They stared, and stared.

Braden moved first.

He reached for his sword, and Blake tossed it flying away into the sand with Telekinesis. As the older man stared in confusion, Mona leapt over the fire, twirled in the air, and smashed him with a spinning swing straight to the head with the shaft of her javelin.

He doubled over and groaned, clutching his head on the sand.

“Oh, he’ll be alright.” Blake grinned. “Now if we’re all finished measuring our dicks could we possibly just…”

He stopped speaking as he saw a strange orange light in the woods nearby. Then there was two, three, wait four…all clustered together, sort of floating from a little patch of…

The lights launched out from the trees at high speed, flying drunkenly, like orange willowisps as they streaked across the sand, straight at the group around their fire.

“Look out!”

Blake hurled himself away as the flying balls struck. Only the players were hit.

The smell of burning hair and flesh filled the air as the orbs exploded into flame. People were crying out and screaming in alarm. At least two struck Mona.

Her clothes and hair lit on fire, and Blake stared in something like shock before he lost sight of her in the flashes and chaos. People were running and shouting about ‘ambush’ and ‘betrayal’ and saying ‘run for your lives!”

Mona collapsed next to Blake with two arrows in her chest, her eyes open. He stared at her, mind still blank, as Hank leapt onto him and seemed to cover him with his body.

“Don’t move, kid,” he whispered. “It’s players. They can’t hurt me. Maybe you can talk your way out.”

Blake forced his mind back to reality. He gave Hank an affectionate pat, looking away from the almost certainly dead Mona with a sad sigh.

From a strictly cold, tactical perspective, she’d been a pleasant distraction, and a useful ally. And she certainly hadn’t deserved to die in the sand for no damn reason at all.

But now it was time to focus. To survive.

Blake Meditated, and waited for the killing to stop.