The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. Before falling asleep, he made the same cuts as every other night, spent his fate, and marvelled at how much faster the exercise was becoming - even if there had been no noticeable improvement in efficacy.

When he woke, there was a buzz in the dormitory. Finally, they were going to be allowed to play outside. With Bir and Pa beside him, they lined up for breakfast ten minutes before the seven a.m. opening time. A massive line grew as everyone gathered behind them, excited to be allowed out of the orphanage. The anticipation had them all wiggling on the spot as they stood waiting.

Tom, of course, was looking forward to the opportunity to answer some of his societal questions. He wanted to understand the nature and size of the towns.

They ate breakfast in record time and then hurried out. Despite their efforts, including being up the front of the queue, a substantial number of the older children escaped to the outside earlier, as they had taken their food to go instead of sitting down to eat.

Standing at the exit was Dimitri. Little Ta recognised him. If any of the volunteers could be called their primary carer, it was him. He was a giant of a man – over seven feet tall, a thick body with no fat, and a prominent nose. He chattered happily with the older children ahead of them, but as the trio approached, he made a point of not looking at any of them.

“Have a good day?” He said in a gruff voice with a thick Russian accent. “Normal routines start after lunch. If you don’t present, automatons will be activated.”

His attitude toward them was at odds with how everyone else was treated. Tom understood why he was doing it, but Bir didn’t. She looked troubled, but that expression vanished the moment they got outside and the bright but weak early morning sunlight greeted them.

Tom blinked rapidly to try and acclimatise his eyes faster, and when his vision recovered, he glanced around. It was underwhelming. They had exited out of the gymnasium door like most kids, which put them on the side of the building, and they ended up standing on a small strip of grass. Thirty metres away from them there was a wall made from dark stone, and the sun was poking over the top of. It looked giant, but was probably only three metres high, which was way too much for them to get over - but something any semi-competent adult would have no problems with. Tom hoped there was magic built into the structure to prevent people casually jumping over the top, otherwise what was the point of it existing?

There was a stream of mostly teenagers heading towards a small gate and with the three of them holding hands with Bir in the middle they ran toward it. An older child passed them without difficulty, but they stayed ahead of everyone else and only slowed down when they reached the exit to true freedom.

Tom’s eyes examined everything that he could see as they moved. What they walked through was a garden, and it had been planted to have lots of green. He had been expecting orange tones, but either this area of Existentia was different to where he had first lived, or the green was an environment deliberately tailored to the city.

They reached the gap in the wall and spilled out into the town proper.

Tom this time stopped to stare. The view was unexpected.

The orphanage was surrounded by a significant cleared grassy area. The closest building was over a hundred metres away and it was more like three in the other two directions. Tom stared around in amazement. There were no trees here, only trimmed green grass, with the view broken up by massive constructions that he recognised instinctively as war machines. They were each the size of a double story house, and he could see the glint of lenses, metal etched runes and moveable parts in the massive weapons.

It didn’t take a lot of education to recognise that what he was looking at was the magical equivalent of anti-aircraft guns or maybe missile launchers. By the way they were formed, it was clear that they could be rotated to strike in every direction. He could only see a dozen of them, but they were all subtly different. One was like a classic cartoon laser with concentric crystal rings that got smaller and smaller, stretching up over five stories into the sky. He could imagine the energy travelling from layer to layer getting stronger and stronger with each step until it was powerful enough to punch through the scales, hide, or magical defences of terrible monsters.

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Bir didn’t care and dragged him forward, and he discovered the amount of grass was significantly less than he assumed. Spaced between them were paths inlaid with complicated metal swirls that formed geometric patterns; these seemed to create a funnel toward the nearest siege weapon. All the supposedly open space, Tom realised, had in fact been purposed to accumulate energy and support the defences. It was a breathtakingly complex construction effort, and each weapon must have taken years of dedicated effort to create - even with the help of magic.

As he crossed the field, he attempted to act like a four-year-old, but suspected he was failing.

Even though he had no interest in crafting, he knew enough to understand the workmanship whose results he was running across. It was impressive, and he wanted to examine everything.

Embarrassed, he took a step back and let Little Ta control things, and was glad to see that his behaviour barely changed. His acting had been passably good, apparently. The freed-up mental focus allowed him to register another oddity. There were no adults in sight. For an event such as this, he would have expected ‘not parents’ to be lining up to see their kids. After all, they had been subjected to a forced separation for a week. However, there was not a single older person present, and these defences looked like they were supposed to be manned, which told Tom that this was another of the special arrangements that they enforced around the ritual.

All the children seemed to be flowing toward the same spot and soon Tom found himself on a road and lining up behind others to get into a store.

“Yay, magic sweets,” Bir said excitedly.

Her words enabled his memories to fill in the blanks. As far as Little Ta was concerned, there was no such thing as money. Adults would just give children things, and this was the best shop for that. There was an old woman who loved to sneak them special sweets and chocolates.

Tom allowed the mass of kids to carry him through and, very quickly, they ended up in the shop.

“Don’t dawdle, keep moving, one bag each.” An exasperated-sounding attendant ordered. She was the only adult present, and the old lady who was usually here was missing.

The store, however, was the same as always, and Tom absorbed all of it with wide eyes.

They were in a rations store that sold ready-made meal bars and also more substantial cooked alternatives. Each had an advertised buff associated with them.

Three non-magical ration bars cost a single credit. Tom didn’t have to ask to know that the currency here was auction credits. It was too convenient to not use them, as all adults had access to them and, if necessary, they could create them directly from experience at a one-to-one ratio. Providing you were doing anything, even minor tasks like low levelled crafting, exterminating vermin, or cleaning you would generate significantly more than one experience point per day, so everyone could at least afford to eat.

Then there were the options with actual buffs and escalating prices to match. The better meals, the ones locked behind glass windows, were being sold for substantially more. One had a price of a hundred and fifty, and was advertised as coming with a ten percent buff to all attributes which would last for an hour. Given that in the final trial they had been earning about a hundred thousand credits and four times that in experience per day, if you were an active adventurer, the best food in the shop might as well have been free. Then again, that trial had been an exceptional opportunity. But even if he had been hunting in the wild, that sort of cost would definitely have been affordable.

When they reached the front of the line, they were allowed to take a single bag which contained eight lollies in it. They were a variety of colours, but unmarked beyond that.

“Visit the wall? Look outside?” He asked. He would have preferred to push for them to explore more thoroughly, but knew it would be out of character and something the other two wouldn’t be interested in.

Bir groaned next to him:

“I want to play,” she pointed back the way they had come from and waved her bag of lollies. “There are two floaties!”

“I want to see the outside.” Tom repeated stubbornly. “We can climb wall, look out.”

She shook her head adamantly.

“A little exploring won’t hurt,” Pa said, finally swinging the vote in his favour. Rather than returning to the lawn surrounding the orphanage, they continued on down the road. It dipped down, and they passed a variety of shops. Most of them were shut. Both he and Pa seemed to have the same idea, so they left the main street and entered a residential one that sloped up.

When they reached the top, the three of them paused. Although the hill was the highest part of the town, it was not much higher than elsewhere. However, it was elevated, and, in most areas on Earth, it would have been the location of a couple of giant mansions which the rich and the powerful would have bought for the view.

Here that was not the case.

It was another park with five more of the magical artillery laid into it.

The closest one was a jumble of metal that looked very climbable. Bir squealed and ran toward it.

There was a blur, and a woman appeared in front of them. She held her hand up firmly in the very standard gesture to tell them to stop. “Sorry, kids, this is off limits.”

She was not anyone that Little Ta recognised, but he could appreciate the way she commanded her own body, the crisp firm movements and the uniform. A high ranked adventurer or soldier, competent and dangerous. She was also the first adult Tom had glimpsed that had a full fate pool.

The three of them looked at each other. None of them knew how to react.