Hana estimated that the journey to Orvale would take approximately a week on foot; Topher missed Tok's wagon. After a quiet dinner, the three of them drifted apart to sleep; Topher set up his bedroll and slumbered more peacefully than he'd done in some time. He dreamed no dreams at all.

The next morning, he awoke earlier than he'd ever done; the sun was still rising, and Hana was still curled up in her own bedroll while Zanasha kept watch with her Sentinel Skill. Topher, feeling a sudden need for physical improvement, rolled out of his bedroll and did a push-up, then regretted his actions when he proved unable to do a second; the half-orc merely gave him a nod of encouragement and a smile, but Topher's embarrassment was immediate and intense. For the next several days, he crept off to exercise on his own in the mornings.

Zanasha had described the series of exercises to him in sufficient detail that he'd been able to sketch them in his Ledger (although his pose depictions were no better than stick-figures), and he began doing as many as he could each day. He prioritized the push-ups first, though, and was frequently frustrated and disgusted with himself at how poor his physical performance was; he rarely got more than three push-ups out before having to collapse in a panting lather, and even that was an accomplishment compared to his sit-up maximum (currently zero). He was astonished to discover that he had somehow become even fatter over the past few weeks; he'd mostly subsisted on Created foods, almost entirely breads, and apparently they were just as calorically-rich as the standard variety. When he'd left Frostford, he'd been in the process of transitioning from 'pudgy' to 'skinny-fat', but all his progress had apparently been undone in the last few weeks.

For a day, he despaired; but the next morning, he discovered very quickly that his ability to cast Remove Fatigue meant that he could exercise to point of raw exhaustion, then spend 1 MP and immediately do it again. As a result, the damage proved almost as swift to reverse; by the third day, he could see his toes again, and by the fifth, he could do ten push-ups in a row.

"Why have you become so motivated to pursue physical fitness now, after so much time?" Hotaka's projection asked him one morning, watching him finish his fifth set of twenty squats. "I have never seen such drive from you, Bailey-sensei."

"Like you don't know," Topher puffed, gasping for air. He Created a large bottle of water and chugged it, then cast Remove Fatigue again and started a ninth set of push-ups. "Gets expensive, though. Spending a third of my MP a day on this stuff."

Hotaka observed quietly for a moment, then cocked his head. "And your viewpoint on the results?"

Topher finished his set and flopped onto his back, panting. "My back hurts less. That by itself is worth all this bullshit." Groaning, he tucked his hands under his buttocks and began a set of leg-lifts, trying to stretch his stamina to the limit before another casting. "Maybe I could even get my Attributes to rank up, like Makoto did."

Hotaka stiffened. "Such an endeavor would require much longer than a week," he commented, slightly reprovingly. "Have you given any thought to your course of action once you reach Orvale?"

"Nope." Topher wrung a last miserable lift from his wobbly, burning appendages and collapsed, then croaked out the runes for Remove Fatigue yet again and rolled onto all fours to begin a set of pike push-ups. "All I can do is... follow Hana's lead. My last plan -- huff! -- didn't work out so great."

"It may be prudent to refrain from trusting your new companions overmuch," Hotaka cautioned. "Much regarding their objectives and allegiances is still unclear."

"Maybe," Topher managed, straining to straighten his arms against gravity that seemed to have been tripled in the last eight seconds. "But my options... ngah! -- are basically nothing." He straightened out into a plank, then began a series of the balancing exercises (Zanasha had called them "eagle-wolves") the half-orc had taught him. "All I can do right now is follow along and work on my spells and my pathetic exercises. If something comes up, I'll deal with it then."

"If you think it wise," murmured Hotaka in a tone which clearly indicated that he did not, and vanished. Topher finished his set, rolled onto his back to perform a set of hip-bridges, and grumbled to himself about how bullshit it was that everybody expected him to do everything.

This was, of course, not remotely the case; Zanasha and Hana worked tirelessly each day and never asked anything of Topher, but he felt compelled to use his magic to reduce their workload -- lighting campfires with Flame Jet, Creating Food and Drink to conserve their rations, and even Conjuring a Shield to provide shade on one particularly hot afternoon as they marched. No monsters or even other travelers bothered them; when Topher asked, Zanasha informed him that they were crossing open country far away from any other roads or travel routes. "Most monsters avoid open plains," she informed him, adjusting her pack. "If this were a forest or ravine, however, it would be much more dangerous."

Topher frowned. "Come to think of it, all the monsters in Frostford were either in the forest or near it, too. Why do monsters like trees so much?"

"It's not the trees, Bailey-san," replied Hana from the front of the formation. "It's the darkness. Monsters don't like sunlight, so they congregate in the shade of trees or rocks, or underground. Nobody knows why."

They traveled unhurriedly, typically only marching for two stretches of three to four hours each; Topher got the impression the other two were making allowances for his age and frailty, which both embarrassed and further motivated him. In the evenings, he studied his Ledger and his grimoire by Conjured light; as he'd suspected, his Ledger's page count was increasing as a function of his Level, and he now had well over a thousand pages in it despite it still appearing to be a slender volume.

Discovering that he was now high enough Level to attempt casting Amanuensis, he quickly mastered it and copied the entirety of his grimoire into his Ledger; now he was at significantly less risk of losing his hard-earned arcane knowledge. Reviewing the new spell's runes, he confirmed what he had suspected from previous spells -- the majority of the hard work was in understanding the runic structures and ideas themselves, with most of the higher-Level spells gated off entirely artificially by the Jhu-Palz-Mij transform he now knew merely applied the caster's Level as a transform to the spell's parameters. That didn't mean he could just reverse the transform and cast high-Level spells without it, though (at least, not always) -- most spells seemed to have a "minimum force" that required the transform to produce, although he could use his wand-spinning hack to cast a few of those (like he'd done with Unbar Way). There were definitely spells that were exceptions, though -- Alter Self, despite being technically castable for him at Level 35, required an entire class of runic transforms he couldn't even identify, much less understand or replicate, and Dimensional Hop, despite being fairly straightforward in its construction and casting, broke every single rule for his transforms he could identify (including weird stuff like reverse-factoring negative numbers). Contemplating these quandaries and constructing potential runic sequences for Minor Illusion castings that let him check his math occupied his mind for most of each day's march, and as a result he barely spoke to his traveling companions despite his many incentives to do so.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Eventually, however, the final day of traveling arrived. "We'll be entering the city in the morning, Bailey-san," Hana confided in him as they set up camp. "Do you have any supplies you need to replenish?" Behind her, Zanasha departed to gather more firewood -- they had enough kindling to get the blaze started, but not enough to keep it burning until dawn.

Topher shook his head. "I can summon most of what I need," he demurred. "One of the very few upsides of being a mage."

"I see." The young Japanese woman banked the campfire with careful precision; Topher wondered where she'd learned that. "What about equipment? You don't seem to have a weapon."

Topher chuckled. "I used to. I got rid of it when it became obvious that I was more of a danger to myself with it than to any monster." He shrugged. "Just easier to rely on spells, I guess."

"But what will you do if you encounter a monster that resists magic, Bailey-sensei?" Her wavy, fulsome hair obscured her eyes as she bent to retrieve her cooking supplies from her pack. "I understand that some of them do exist."

"Die, probably," admitted Topher. "My chances of survival with a weapon against a creature like that are basically zero anyway. I'd rather only have one tool to use so I don't reach for the wrong one in a pinch."

Hana paused, then nodded. "I understand."

"Is that why you have that dagger?" Topher asked, pointing to the weapon sheathed on her hip. "You carry it around, but I've never seen you use it."

"I suppose you could call it a last resort; I mostly use it as a tool, to be honest." Hana drew the weapon, turning it slightly to make the firelight dance off it. As she did so, a small window appeared above it:

Chaos Weapon: Flux Blade

Topher blinked. "Chaos Weapon: Flux Blade? What the heck is that?"

Hana flinched, then sobered. "Of course. I had forgotten that you unlocked the Detect Status Skill recently." She sheathed the dagger, then looked away. "As you can imagine, the Hostess Class is not skilled at physical combat; but a weapon which can shift its form -- such as from a dagger into a halberd -- can provide a crucial element of surprise in desperate straits. I am... not proud of how I obtained it."

Topher whistled. "That's got to be useful, at least."

"In many ways." The young woman nodded, then drew the blade again; she concentrated, and it flickered through a variety of shapes -- a garden spade, a watering can, and a fishing rod -- before becoming a simple dagger once more, and she sheathed it again. "But to a mage, I imagine it is not impressive."

Topher groaned. "Lady, you have a very skewed opinion of me and my capabilities. I don't understand anything about this world, much less about how my Class Skills work. I'm a newbie who got lucky with a few high-Level monster kills and the minimum Class Skills to cast any magic at all."

"Nevertheless." Hana looked over Topher's head, past him to the lights of the nearby city. "Most F-Rankers have no MP regardless of Class or Level. You are much more fortunate than you know."

Topher shrugged. "Maybe. But that doesn't mean I understand anything about the environment my spells interact with." He turned away too, putting his hands on his hips; his frustration, only lightly covered at the best of times, boiled over again. "Nothing about this place makes sense, Hana. Chickens and slimes that reappear when you look away. Goblins that sometimes hit with orders of magnitude more newtons of force than others."

"I see." The girl tucked her feet under herself and sat down, placing her hands primly on her thighs. "Would you like to know the reasons?"

Topher whirled, staring. "You're kidding. You're not kidding? You know what's going on?"

"Not everything," she smiled. "But at least a few things that seem to concern you." She shifted again, then grew solemn. "The first thing I know for certain is that this world functions according to a set of rules -- different rules than our world, but rules just the same. For example, monsters and resources reappear only when unobserved, as you may have already surmised -- this is not a trick, but rather a function of a rule by which this world operates." She raised a finger. "'What Is Consumed Shall Be Replenished', is one way I have heard it stated."

Topher's eyes bulged. "And people accept this?"

"Why shouldn't they?" Hana looked up at Topher with a calm expression. "To them, it is as natural as gravity or chemistry in our world. I suspect that most people are unaware of it in general, in much the same way that most people of our world are unaware of prions or Special Relativity." She shrugged. "As for the force exerted by monster attacks, I too have observed such discrepancies -- but I understand the mechanism by which they operate."

Topher crossed his arms. "Well, don't keep me in suspense."

"It is HP," the young woman continued, eyes downcast. "A blow dealing 10 damage against a creature with 15 HP will deliver crushing force, but the same blow against a creature with 100 HP will feel only a light impact. Such effects, translated into physical forces, will appear capricious in a vacuum; but once the variables are known, it is not difficult to understand."

With a groan, Topher got it -- the reason why the goblins had seemed so strong and tough to him because he had been weak, not because they had been strong. It also explained how they managed to be simultaneously strong enough to smash through trees and weak enough to be unable to climb out of watery holes; his own presence in the system of interaction had altered all the variables. "That's so dumb. Why is this world so nonsensical?"

Hana smiled, still looking downwards. "I suspect the reasons, if we knew them and all the topics they address, would be equally rational." Shifting her feet out from under her, she relaxed and looked back up at the sky. "But I find it is enough. This world can be harsh and confusing, but it has its charms."

Topher crossed his arms and grumped. "If you say so."

Hana frowned slightly and gestured around them. "Bailey-san, this world has no global warming. No looming financial crises. No pandemics, no homelessness, no starvation. Even the poorest of peoples are fed, sheltered, and employed."

"And edible to monsters," Topher pointed out. "And there's a Demon Lord, too. That's got to be bad for local real estate prices."

"I wonder," Hana murmured. "Bailey-san, have you ever seen any proof of the Demon Lord's forces? Any compelling evidence of his evil, or even his existence?"

"Nope," Topher shrugged. "But the S-Rank kids back at the castle in Strathmore seemed pretty convinced; and I don't think they were taking it entirely on faith, either." He winced slightly as he recalled his conversation with Sugimoto; The Demon Lord's forces are not like Earth armies, Bailey-san. They will require exceptional effort to defeat, even with all of the power we can bring to bear. "If he's half as powerful as they think he is, he's not somebody I'd want in my zip code."

Hana was silent for a few seconds, then sighed. "I suppose. In ten years, I have seen no evidence of such a threat; but neither have I ranged far afield from the civilized lands of Sheonn. It may be that I am being foolish, for not believing in that which is not directly in front of me."

"Don't worry, kid." Topher followed her gaze to the silent city beyond. "When I figure out how to believe in something, I'll let you know."