A week after the bloody events of the stadium and five days after the impromptu decision to uproot themselves, Derek and Tim Moss stood below the towering form of Kharon and looked up at the massive sight with awe in both their expressions. They had heard the rumors and seen the pictures of the place, but to actually see an entire city crouching there above them… with emerald lights spiraling downward to float above the seething crowd of people waiting to get into the city…

However, some of the wonder was rubbed away by the loud group of people around them.

Because Derek was doing his best to hold onto Tim within the huge, jostling crowd that made the sights around them less important than actually staying together in the press of bodies. Kharon had now been stationary for over a week, enabling anyone curious and free enough to come to finally see the moving city of Randidly Ghosthound.

And they had come in droves. Derek and Tim had actually arrived last night but Derek had been unwilling to approach the huge mass of people without understanding what was going on. So they had camped out nearby and talked to a few people until they understand that literally everyone was here for the chance to enter Kharon.

And if Kharon itself wasn’t enough for you… Randidly Ghosthound himself was known to be on the mysterious, misty island that loomed above Kharon. Because he would be personally hosting his birthday celebration in a week’s time at a special venue in Kharon, to which all of Earth’s important individuals had been invited.

The birthday party had become the political event of the decade.

And if that wasn’t enough to draw you to the area, there was the possibility of interacting with the rapidly growing ogre settlement a few miles North of the spot that Kharon was currently located. There weren’t many amenities there, but there were a lot of rare monster parts and minerals that couldn’t be found anywhere else. Most of the merchants that were unwilling to wait in line were currently sniffing around there.

In addition to all those draws, there was also the fact that you could clearly see thousands of ogres a day walking out of the Ogre Gorge and heading North to settle the rugged mountain range that towered between Zones 11 and 7. And the ogre’s efficiency at clearing out monsters had meant that a few enterprising individuals had already started marketing the area as a safe vacation destination, where a family could view the majestic skyline without the worry of interference of monsters.

Derek personally had some doubts about how feasible a business that was, but he could definitely see how a lot of people who currently lived in the rolling grasslands of Zone 1 would be tempted to come up and see what all the fuss was about. Especially if the rumors were true that the ogres were currently shaping some high mountains to function as ski resorts.

“Well, I heard that the nominal Donny of Donnyton, one of the most powerful Classers in the world, unleashed a full-strength strike against his birthday invitation and was unable to leave a scratch,” A rather loud and overweight man was saying nearby.

Derek grimaced. For these people waiting in the queue, the talking never seemed to stop.

A nearby woman, who was carrying a backpack as large as she was, shook her head disdainfully. “Pah, you think that’s amazing? Since the reveal that Zone 7’s Xiang Le was actually three women running the Zone the entire time, you know how each of them has been under constant attacks? Well, I heard that even though the assassin caught the one woman completely off guard, she used the birthday invitation like a knife and sliced the assassin completely in half.”

“Were the edges of the invitation that sharp?” A thin man asked, clearly unconvinced. “I thought it was just a mystical metal that the Ghosthound himself invited. But why would he make the invitation sharp? It might hurt people. It’s just an invitation and it needs to be sharp to cut.”

“If it’s sufficiently hard, the invitation can easily cut through something,” The woman harrumphed. The overweight man shook his head and turned away to talk to a new group of people. The press of bodies shifted. More conversations about Kharon, about the Order Ducis, about the Nemesai, and of course about Randidly Ghosthound sprung up in every direction

The crowd shifted as the line moved forward a small amount. Derek gratefully led Tim a few steps away from the group that was still glancing away from their current conversations and glaring at the people who disagreed with them. But no matter where they went, Derek and Tim could still hear people talking excitedly about all the things that were happening in the world right now.

Obviously Derek hadn’t seen any proof of an ogre migration or ski resort, although there were monstrous humanoids that could only be ogres waiting patiently with the humans in the queue to enter Kharon. But such was the enthusiastic volume of the people around them that they couldn’t avoid slowly being brainwashed by the rumors. And honestly, Derek had quite like skiing when he was younger. He and Tim’s mother often went before Tim was born.

And the reason they had stopped was because of the fear of injury. But with the System...

“Dad,” Tim tugged at Derek’s sleeve with a confused expression on his face. “How can a birthday invitation be used as a weapon? It’s just a card right?”

“Well it is just a card, but…” Derek said tiredly. His initial enthusiasm to come here after the… strange interaction he had with Gertrude Collins had largely receded during the difficult journey North. Although there were trains that headed to the area in which Kharon had settled, tickets had been gobbled up by businesses desperate for the chance to get an advantage over the competition by trading directly with Kharon rather than relying on established channels.

The train station had been a circus that Derek had been only too happy to leave.

So when the passenger trains had been turned to freight, that meant that the only way to travel was to walk. And the System meant that the prospect wasn’t as impossible as it had been before, but it was still a far distance for a young kid. Still, Tim had seemed excited by the prospect of the adventure, so Derek hadn’t worried too much about it.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Then they traveled for three days, held back by a Tim whose education had still been rather soft, despite the presence of the System. The pace they could keep meant that it would take them almost a week to reach Kharon.

When they departed, Derek had figured the normal means of transportation would be available to them and didn’t pack much food. He was horrified to be forced to feed his own son the emergency military rations that he kept in his interspatial watch by the fourth day. It was a blow against his pride.

What made it somehow much worse was how much Tim had seemed to enjoy the experience camping. Tim tried to hide it, but Derek had noticed the plants around their sleeping spots rather quickly changing when left alone with Tim. But seeing how furtive his son was, Derek had just let the incidents pass; who knows, it might have just been a coincidence that every time Tim went to forage he came back with fresh vegetables while Derek had a hard time scraping up anything.

Shaking his head, Derek focused on Tim’s question. “It might just be a card, but if the material is sufficiently hard and the user is sufficiently strong, it could still be a weapon. A card should be pretty thin…”

“How does he do it?” Tim asked as he turned to look at the city that was looming above them. Although most of what they could see was the stone and metal base, from their angle it was possible to see the edges of a few buildings over the edge. Mostly it was the emerald energy, the noise, and the size of the city that dominated the impression. “How is he so strong?”

“Images,” Derek said grimly. His gaze went up toward Kharon as well. And it was because of Randidly Ghosthound’s insistence on images that Derek had followed through with his rather quickly hatched scheme to move even when faced with adversity. Because if he wanted Tim to grow up as best as he could, this was the place where it could happen.

That strange hug with Gertrude… while nice was just… two people bonding. Derek flushed at the memory.

“Images were actually invented by Randidly Ghosthound,” Someone in front of them twisted around to say, interrupting his brief daydream. Derek ignored the man and looked at the ground in front of him. The System is the source of all these powers… Randidly Ghosthound is just the man who hasn’t let the way Earth used to be keep him from seeing how we need to behave now.

A few minutes passed and the crowd shuffled forward once more. Derek stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck to look forward to the people in front of them. There were a few ogres that blocked him from having an excellent view, but they probably had gone halfway through the line during their four-hour weight. He settled onto his heels with a sigh.

He was just turning to Tim to ask him what he thought about the rule changes to football after the incident at the stadium when he heard a voice call his name.

“Derek Moss? Is that you? What are you doing here?”

Derek twisted around and saw a familiar man floating the above the vast crowd on one of those platforms wreathed in the emerald energy of Kharon. Very quickly, he recognized the slim Indian man as Dinesh. As the previously chatty crowd around them fell ominously silent, Derek smiled awkwardly up at Dinesh. “We… well, we believe we want to relocate to Kharon-”

“Ah, I see,” Dinesh glanced at Tim and then gave Derek a knowing look. Then Dinesh waved his hand. “Hop on up. This line is for the trader and visitors' entrance. I can move you to the other line.”

But I was told that we had to enter as visitors to apply for citizenship… Derek’s eyes twitched. He opened his mouth to ask about that, but Tim had already hopped upward, grabbed the platform with his hands. As his son wrestled with the edge of the platform and repeatedly told Dinesh that he was ‘fine’ in his struggles, Derek decided not to make a scene here. The gossipy overweight man and the woman with a backpack as large as she was were practically drooling as they looked from Derek up to Dinesh.

Instead, he leapt upward to land onto the platform and watched his son take a further five seconds to manage to do the same himself. Then they began to float quickly forward to the left, over some rugged hills as they traveled the circumference of Kharon.

“What are these things?” Tim said curiously. Several motes of emerald energy had been gathering around him since he struggled to get onto the platform so that now he seemed to be wearing a cape of them that trailed after him in the air. The effect looked positively heroic.

Dinesh smiled. “Those are moss spirits. They are the energy that drives Kharon. It seems like they like you. Which is good, because if you make friends with them, it will make your life much easier.”

After that, Tim was content to play with the moss spirits while they accelerated around the side of the moving city. Which just served to emphasize how large Kharon really was. Derek had just worked up the nerve to ask where they were going when they slowed down and descended to hover only a few feet above the rocky ground.

Dinesh pointed to a ladder that dangled from a tunnel in the side of Kharon to a meter above the ground. “This is the entrance you want. I’ll take Tim to show him the town while you go through the interview. Don’t worry about it too much, just be honest. Good luck.”

Rather stunned, Derek allowed Dinesh to shoo him off the platform and then watched the other man fly up and over the edge of Kharon with his son. It was only a few seconds later that he realized that aside from going through the fighting in the stadium together, he had literally given his son away to a stranger.

Red in the face, Derek had no choice but to try and calm himself and head up the ladder. Within was a low ceilinged passage with no doors, so Derek continued to walk forward despite his growing unease. Eventually, he arrived at a metal door and slowed down. Two people were standing in line in front of it.

One was a muscular man with a shaved head and the other was a petite woman with dark hair and grey eyes. The man frowned when he arrived but said nothing. The woman smiled and blew a kiss at Derek.

Derek’s Skills told him that both were dangerous, the woman more so than the man. With the atmosphere as tense as it was, he was content just to scan them and join them in waiting; neither seemed to want to converse with him. After a few minutes, the door opened and the muscular man walked through.

Around ten minutes later, the door opened again and the woman walked forward, stubbing her toe painfully on the door frame while she did so. Swearing quietly, she closed the door behind her and left Derek alone.

What the hell am I doing…? Derek wondered. He almost considered leaving and trying to find Dinesh, but the prospect of waiting in the regular line again to get into the city… and he would need to walk back to that location…

Plus those bastards are probably gossiping about us as we speak… Derek held his head in his hands and sighed sorrowfully.

Then the door opened again and a man beckoned him through. Rather stiffly, Derek followed. Inside was a young man sitting at a desk and another man leaning casually against the wall. Both were even more dangerous than the two people who had been waiting in front of Derek to enter the door. From a quick look, there appeared to be no other entrances or exits to the room.

But the real reason that Derek allowed himself glide mechanically forward and settle into the chair in front of the desk was that he recognized the man sitting behind the desk.

Naffur Suite looked forward and considered Derek with a serious expression. “So, why do you believe you would be an asset to the Order Ducis?”