Samantha stopped in her tracks, glancing over her shoulder. She assumed the attractive older woman who had called out to her was a teacher, given that she was visiting her old high school, but she couldn't for the life of herself place her. "Yes…?"

"Oh, I'm sorry! That's right, I would have looked much different when you were attending. I'm the drama teacher."

"Ms. Cariño?!"

"Well, not anymore technically, but yes! What are you doing back here?"

"Oh, I was visiting Mrs. Shimamoto. My college has a weirdly long winter break, and I heard that she's retiring soon so I came to say hello. How's the old improv club doing?"

"Wonderful, of course. Let's see, if memory serves you were one of Xavier Brock's friends, weren't you? And Paula? How is Paula doing these days, anyway?"

Paula was likely bored out of her mind at this point back in their shared apartment and dreaming up ways to torment Samantha when she finally headed back across the state, but Samantha didn't see any reason to share that. "She's doing well. She's been working as a hospital receptionist for the last year or so."

"And the rest of the gang? Did you keep in contact with Xavier? I was so worried when he missed most of his senior year, and I'm afraid I haven't heard from him since."

Samantha shrugged. Although she hadn't seen Xavier in a while, she was still in sporadic contact with his sister. "He's fine. I don't know exactly what happened, and he had to do some remedial work to get his high school diploma, but he got into college maybe a semester late. Do you remember Rachel? Rachel Blanchard? I think she came to improv a few times. Anyway, last I heard they're living together."

"Rachel, Rachel, I think I remember her. Kind of quiet? Blonde?"

"Yeah, that's her."

"What's she doing these days?" Ms. Cariño seemed more polite than interested.

That, at least, Samantha had a hard time forgetting. Victoria loved to bitch about Rachel. "She's studying to be a herpetologist and volunteers at the zoo a lot."

"Huh. You never know where life's going to take you, I guess. Well, it was good to talk to you, Samantha! Keep in touch now!"

Samantha waved, and headed for the exit.

Jill was out jogging. She couldn't wait to move out of her mother's house, but money was tight so until she found a job she was taking a lot of really long runs. She couldn't stay out forever, though, so with a sigh she headed back towards home.

As she ran past the street where the Brocks lived she spotted a familiar face. "Hey! Is that you, Vickie? I haven't seen you in forever!"

Victoria paused and plastered a smile on her face. One of Xavier's old friends. Joy. "Hey."

"You back from college?"

Victoria shrugged. "Winter break."

"Great, great. How is everyone? Xavier? Your mom? Rachel? Seamus?"

"Seamus? Weren't you going out?"

"Oh, that ended years ago."

"Huh. Well, Xavier and Rachel are great. Mom's…mom. Sorry, but I need to go."

"Oh, of course! Sorry to keep you! Tell everyone hello for me!"

Victoria waved and walked on.

Three blocks later, a black cat with a star-shaped yellow mark on its forehead and what looked like cotton balls on stalks emerging from behind its ears barreled out from underneath a bush and collided with Victoria's legs.

"What the—" said Victoria, stumbling.

The cat latched onto her pants with its front claws, pulling itself mostly upright. "Please help me, I beg you!" said the cat in an oddly deep voice. "The fate of the universe depends upon it!"

Victoria grinned.

E.O. Tenkey here! Thank you so much for reading Not A Manga! I hope you enjoyed the series, and if you are looking for more of my work, please do give my next serial novel a try: Mr. Familiar

If he'd had time to stop and think about it, this would have made him very nervous, but Xavier was maxed out on fear at the moment and not thinking that clearly.

As the max size of the centipedes started steadily rising, Xavier looked ahead and saw the cliff appear to collapse back away from them. As it did, granite pillars exploded out of the desert up and down the cliffside, rising vertically into the air in a shower of dirt and rocks and then slamming back down in a percussive set of impacts that made Xavier stumble.

"What the—" he began, but then he noticed that the pillars were angled at the top and connected to the rolling cliffside and his perspective shifted: they weren't granite pillars, they were legs.

"Now that is what I'd call a kami-level concentration of nima!" said Princess appreciatively. "Maybe a few hundred years away from great kami, but very impressive nonetheless! Its exterior is mostly solid rock, so far as I can tell, but still kicking!"

"Shit! Rachel!"

"I know! Keep running!"

"But we're running toward it!"

Rachel just dragged him onwards.

"Are…you…insane?!"

"We need a ride—there!" Rachel veered to the left, dragging Xavier inexorably along, and he realized she was angling for a centipede that was easily as large as the monstrosity that decimated the Sundlin soldiers back when he, Yukio, Sumiko, and Kahina were fleeing past the Oumukade Cliffs.

As they neared the monster, Xavier reflexively tried to pull out of Rachel's grasp, but her grip was a vise. The thing was careening toward them, and Xavier screamed and flinched.

Rachel finally let go of Xavier's arm, slipped past the monster's churning legs, and slapped it sharply on the side. The centipede collapsed like a puppet whose strings were just cut.

Xavier stared.

"Whoops," said Rachel, and ducked out under the thing's now-immobile legs. "Guess we laid that on a little thick." She snatched Xavier's forearm again and scanned the chaos around them. "There's another!"

And they were off, running toward a centipede that was even larger.

"No no no no no no no." Xavier realized he was chanting and shut up. He needed to save his breath, anyway. Rachel never appeared to get tired, but he was fast nearing his limit.

They intercepted the second centipede successfully, and this time Rachel dragged Xavier straight through the thing's legs, before once again slapping it on the side. Unlike the first one, this one just seized up and skidded to a halt, forcing Xavier and Rachel to duck under a leg. A different leg slammed into Xavier at an angle and would have sent him to the ground if Rachel hadn't bodily hauled him right back up. It felt like his shoulder was about to come out of its socket.

The next thing he knew, Rachel was pushing him up the side of the centipede, which stood quivering under him. He wasn't quite sure how, but the two made it up to the centipede's back, and under Rachel's urging he scooted forward towards the head until the two of them were sitting with their feet braced on the second or third pair of legs.

"Alright, we're off! Hold on!" said Rachel, and Xavier barely had a chance to grab her around the waist before the centipede surged forward again.

If he ever got another chance to ride on a giant bug, he was going to run as fast as he could the other direction. The thing moved in a sickening skittering motion that threatened to throw him off first one way and then the other, and there was absolutely no give in the exoskeleton where it collided with his bottom. He was going to be bruised for life, and possibly sick all down Rachel's back.

"Uh, don't look back," said Princess. Fortunately, Xavier wasn't able to. He wasn't sure he could speak without biting off his own tongue, so he kept his mouth grimly shut. "Wow, that's really a big one."

The earth shivered and bucked, tossing the centipede slightly into the air and for one horrifying moment Xavier was mid-air instead of sitting on its back. Then he slammed back down again, hugging himself to Rachel's back hard to keep from sliding off.

"Ooh, look at that. It's pretty slow compared to the little ones, but those are big steps. Guess that's what you get when you convert most of your exoskeleton to rock."

The ground was shaking in an irregular pattern, although thankfully there was sufficient time between the impacts for their current centipede to be able to keep its footing. Xavier tried to sneak a look backward, almost fell off, and desperately grabbed onto Rachel again. All he caught was a glimpse from his peripheral vision of a giant shadow within a huge dust cloud.

"Xavier!" yelled Rachel over her shoulder. "I'm going to need you to pass the mononoke forward, and then make sure I don't fall off! We're going to need its help to bring that thing down, so Sedgewick wants to cure it of its dependence now!"

"Princess, can you crawl up there?"

"Yeah, yeah, no need to shout. Look, Xavier, on the off chance this doesn't work, and we all die horribly to the oumukade…thanks. I love you."

"You'll be fine! Get up there!" Abject terror was doing nothing for Xavier's ability to process confessions of love from plants.

Princess patted him gently on the cheek, and then crawled over Rachel's shoulder and dropped into her lap, completely removing her vines from Xavier. Rachel bent over the mononoke, and Xavier held on as best he could.

If he ever got home, he was going to squish every centipede he met with extreme prejudice.

An indeterminable amount of time later, Rachel stretched her arms and Xavier snapped out of the horrible fugue state he'd fallen into. He hadn't vomited, thank goodness, but he hurt in places he didn't even know could feel pain, and he honestly wasn't sure how he'd managed to keep them both on top of the centipede.

Rachel glanced over her shoulder, and her eyes widened. "Huh, we lost most of our lead, looks like. Good thing Sedgewick's been juicing this thing up."

"Did it work?" Xavier managed to croak out. His lips and throat were so dry they hurt, but there had been no way to get at his water without falling off the damn undulating centipede.

"Oh, yes. Your mononoke is its own creature. I think we're going to have to change our approach here, though. There's no way we can beat that thing to the Deadlands. Here, hold onto the mononoke for me, it's a little out of it." Rachel passed a limp Princess to Xavier, who managed to stuff the mononoke down his shirt without actually letting go of Rachel with more than one hand at a time. He didn't think he'd be able to keep a grip on both Princess and Rachel at the same time. "Okay, hold on, Xavier. We're going to see if we can climb that thing."

Wait, climb what thing? He didn't like the sound of that at all.

Rachel didn't wait for him to try and work up enough saliva to comment, however. She leaned forward, planted her hands on the back of their centipede, and without any more warning than that the damn thing twisted around and started running at an angle toward the—oh shit, that was what was chasing them?!

Xavier stared. His body was having a hard time figuring out how to react, because the scale was just so crazily off. Although its body was still obscured by the sand and dirt that its legs were kicking up, Xavier finally caught a good look at the oumukade's head. It was hard to tell, but the thing had to be wider than a bus was long, and it appeared to be made almost entirely out of rock. A pair of jagged arm-ish fang things flanked the thing's maw, which was just…absurdly huge. Two stubs of antenna stuck out of the upper corners of its head, although they were both broken off so they didn't sweep out as far as a normal centipede's would relative to its body.

Xavier had thought he would be terrified because centipedes were kind of terrifying on their own, but the scary thing wasn't that it looked like an insect, it was that something that big was moving toward him.

Although as they drew nearer, he realized that the thing was slowing, the rhythmic shockwaves of its legs impacting the ground growing steadily slower.

"What's it doing?!" he called to Rachel.

"Sedgewick stopped dangling bait out for it! It should be a lot safer to get on top of it if it's not moving around, you know?"

"Bait?"

"Yeah, he's been tweaking the aura of our centipede to make the big one think it's the world snake. Doubt it would have stirred for much less."

"That makes no sense."

"Yeah, I don't really understand it, either. Can't argue with results, though!"

By this time, they'd closed with the monster, which loomed overhead like some sort of mountain that had reshaped itself into a piece of nightmare. The centipede they were riding didn't appear bothered at all: it simply raced forward, and started climbing directly up the nearest leg.

"Hang on!" shouted Rachel, and it was all Xavier could do to comply. It felt like the damn centipede was completely vertical, although that couldn't be the case or he was pretty sure he would have fallen already.

Then when they were most of the way up, the leg lifted, air whipped past Xavier's face, and the monster set it back down.

The jolt was so strong that even though he'd been expecting it, Xavier was thrown free. "Rachel!" he screamed.

She dove after him, their centipede jackknifing behind her because she'd still somehow managed to keep her legs locked to it even though she shouldn't have had the leverage. The centipede screamed, Rachel tackled Xavier in midair, her hands locked around his chest, and with an almighty crack! the exoskeleton where their centipede was bent broke, leaving them dangling in midair supported only by Rachel's grip with her legs around the limp top half of the centipede.

Xavier's arms were locked around her with a death grip as he swung mostly on his back in midair with her face crushed up against his chest.

"Xavier, keep a tight hold!" she said in a muffled voice, and then she began to swing them back and forth.

The exoskeleton of their centipede made some truly horrific-sounding cracking and popping noises, and Xavier realized he was whimpering, but he couldn't seem to stop. At last Rachel gave a heave and suddenly they were flying through the air until they slammed up against the stone leg they'd been climbing. Xavier was completely unsure how Rachel managed to secure a grip, but he found himself crushed up against the rock with her arms and legs on either side of him. Slightly below them, the centipede they had been riding peeled away and fell. After a single glimpse down, Xavier squeezed his eyes shut.

"Xavier?" said Rachel, sounding the most strained he'd ever heard her. "Can you shift your grip just a bit? Yes, there! Now don't let go." And she started dragging the two of them up the damn leg with sheer brute strength. Xavier clung to her and tried not to think about how long it had taken the centipede to fall before it hit the sand.

At long, long last they somehow made it to the top of the monster, and both of them collapsed onto their backs. The outer part of the creature's body was definitely made up of rock, but it wasn't smooth or even. There were huge dips, craters, and jagged pieces; the whole thing was wide enough that when they flopped down near the middle Xavier had absolutely no anxiety about falling off, despite the way the thing moved in huge swoops.

"Hand me the mononoke, would you Xavier?" Rachel was out of breath, but apparently still moving forward with whatever plan she and Sedgewick had come up with. "Then you should drink some water and relax a little, maybe move over to the shade. This will take a bit."

Xavier extracted a rather compressed Princess from his shirt. She limply gripped his hand with a vine, so at least she didn't seem to be badly hurt. Rachel sat up to take her, then casually ripped some nima out of a nearby rock, sending it disintegrating into dust, and shoved it into Princess.

The mononoke sat fully upright, vines flailing everywhere, but Rachel just batted them aside. "Yes, yes, I'm sure you feel like crap, just like the rest of us. But you're the only one who can get down closer to the core of this thing in a reasonable amount of time. Sedgewick wasn't counting on it having ossified quite so badly."

Princess cocked her flower at Rachel, but made no move to stick her vine up against her head. Xavier felt weirdly happy that she wasn't willing to talk to just anyone.

Rachel shrugged, and lightly tossed the mononoke to the rocky surface next to her. "Well, what are you waiting for? Get to it."

The plant made an indefinable gesture, and Xavier could almost hear the snarky comment that must have accompanied it, but then dug its vines downward and somehow began burrowing into the rock.

"Boy, Sedgewick, you were right about that one," Rachel commented to no one in particular. "That thing is way more efficient than we would be."

Xavier dragged his pack off himself, hunted down a canteen, and swallowed a dusty mouthful of water that tasted better than anything he had ever drunk. "What now?"

"Now we wait for a bit. Once the mononoke hits something resembling a nervous system, we'll see if Sedgewick can get our new mount moving in the right direction."

Judging by the sun, it ended up taking a good couple hours for Princess to worm her way sufficiently far into the oumukade for Sedgewick to be able to do…whatever it was he needed to do. Xavier spent the time trying and mostly failing to rest.

Eventually, though, Rachel forced herself back up, dragged her way over to the hole that Princess had dug, and began doing something with nima that Xavier had no good way to track. Soon after, the movement of the giant centipede, which had grown more and more erratic since they'd climbed it, began to pick up again. Its legs really did move slowly—Xavier counted and it took about three to five seconds for any given leg to travel through the air before hitting the grown again—but the monster was so huge that it covered ground fast. The sun hadn't quite made it to the horizon when Rachel sat back on her heels, heaved a sigh, and looked to Xavier. "We're here, Xavier. You ready to go home?"

"What, already? I thought we were days away from the Deadlands!"

"Yeah, if we were moving at our own speed. This thing is quite a bit faster."

"Okay, so what happens now?"

"First off, I need to wait for your mononoke to make its way back out." Rachel patted the rock near the whole where she'd been crouched for the past several hours. "Once it's free, Sedgewick and I will start tearing this thing apart. That big an influx of nima is going to kick up a real storm, so stay close to me, alright? When we get down to the desert, we should be pretty close to where we need to be, but we might need to run for the exact spot. Once we're there, Sedgewick and I will start the shaping that should tear a hole for you and me to go back to our reality, but we're going to need you to pull the nima away and keep it turning."

Rachel gestured, making a circular motion in front of her with both hands like she was trying to mimic a hurricane. "Sedgewick is pretty sure this will fail unless you can keep the nima flow around us steady, because too much all at once will destabilize the pattern."

"What are you even talking about?"

"Basically, I need you to stand near me and pull off as much nima as you can so that it curves around me rather than moving to me. But don't try to absorb it, alright! Let it go once you've got it moving past, and it should go around us in a circle on its own."

"Oookay."

"Don't worry, you've got this. You were doing something similar back when I met you in the Sundlin camp. If you didn't have the skill Sedgewick would have been training you instead of devoting so much of his attention to your mononoke."

"Glad at least one of us is confident," muttered Xavier.

A vine slapped down on the rock near Rachel's hand, and Princess dragged herself free of the hole.

"Oh, good, we can get started," said Rachel.

The mononoke moved sluggishly over to Xavier, who scooped her up out of habit as Rachel began making big scooping motions at the hole she'd come out of. Xavier couldn't quite tell what she was doing until nima suddenly blasted out of the centipede and shot up into the air.

He felt a now-familiar vine settle into place against his head.

"Well, Xavier, I think this is it," said Princess. "I heard a bit of what the world snake is planning, and I need to go to ground. If that crazy friend of yours actually succeeds in destabilizing this kami into a nima storm there's no way I'd survive on the surface."

"Oh. Uh. Right."

Princess crawled up his front, gripping the sides of his head with two vines and placing her flower right in front of his face. "Good-bye, Xavier. Thank you for giving me my self back. If the world snake fails you, I'll find you. "

"Thanks, Princess. Be safe."

She touched her flower lightly to his face, and then swung down to the back of the oumukade and boiled over the edge and out of sight in a mass of vines. Xavier watched until she was out of sight over the edge of the nearest leg.

Rachel carved her way through the back of the oumukade, and around them the nima storm built steadily in fury to the point where Xavier was barely able to keep himself up. At long last, Rachel reached down with both hands and made a giant flinging motion toward the sky. Cracks shattered outward in all directions and nima poured forth in a torrent.

Xavier had no memory of how they made it down. There was the sensation of falling, the feeling of Rachel's grip on his arm, the impact when the body of the oumukade hit the desert, and the pain of landing after being thrown across its rocky back. They must have scrambled down, or perhaps Rachel just carved her way through. There was so much nima in the air that he was having a hard time tracking.

The next thing that really made sense to him was Rachel leaning into his face and screaming at the top of her lungs. "This is it, Xavier! Keep the nima circling!"

He could barely hear her.

And Rachel—or maybe Sedgewick, the world snake—began. Xavier could barely track what exactly the two of them were doing, but nima came flying at them from every direction with much more violence than it had before. Xavier reached out desperately and pulled, and instead of colliding with Rachel, the bulk of the nima curved toward him. In sudden panic he let it go, dropping to the ground as it whistled over his head.

"Don't stop!" screamed Rachel, so he scrambled to his feet and did it again. And again. And again.

As she worked, Xavier began to believe that he could see a shape in the nima behind her, like a snake's head growing steadily larger, but he couldn't focus on it. Whatever she was building appeared to be a sort of lattice of nima that stretched about his own height and double his width.

For an interminable amount of time Rachel built and Xavier frantically pulled, until all at once everything seemed to pause.

Farewell, little hungry ones Xavier thought he heard, and then Rachel was grabbing his arm and shoving him into the space where she'd been working a moment before as nima came cascading toward them from all directions in much greater quantities than before. It hit so hard and fast that Rachel stumbled for just a second and a gust lifted her feet off the ground. Time seemed to slow, her eyes widening, and as she released his arm, Xavier screamed "Rachel!", stretched his awareness of nima to his utmost and ripped it savagely towards him.

Rachel violently collided with him, smack dead in the center of her nima working, which flared incandescent as nima poured into it from all over the Deadlands.

There was a soundless implosion, and the air instantly stilled. Midway across the Deadlands, what remained of the corpse of a giant centipede collapsed in on itself, rock and legs sloughing off as the head gradually shifted, growing more and more to resemble a giant snake. Elsewhere, a small shower of sand plumed into the air as green vines pulled what appeared to be a small flower to the surface, which shook itself and began gamely trekking towards the center.

Otherwise, the sand lay empty and still, with no sign that any humans had ever sullied its surface. And the narrative stopped.

It had been almost a month since they'd fled up the valley ahead of Sundlin scouts—if he never saw another lizard or one of those weird desert rat-things that Rachel and Sedgewick thought constituted food, he'd die happy at this point—and despite trying to convince Rachel that there had to be a better way, he hadn't been able to come up with a good alternative source of large quantities of nima. Evidently Sumiko had told Rachel about the Mukade Cliffs at some point in their brief acquaintance, and they were going to need a massive influx of nima to jump start the process of getting home.

That wouldn't have been so bad if Rachel were the one who needed to go wading through youkai centipedes to try and tempt out one of the really big ones, but he and Princess had been roped into that task because evidently they would be able to get much farther without being detected. One of the few upsides to his voracious appetite for nima was evidently that creatures that relied on sensing nima to find prey were liable to overlook him. Normally that would make him happy, since avoiding being categorized as "prey" was always high on his list of priorities. Today, though, not so much.

On the plus side, he did have Princess. Rachel—or maybe more accurately Sedgewick—had been studying her on and off for the entire trip, and believed that she could be modified to prevent her absurd nima draw from turning into a mindless parasite. That was great news for both Princess and Xavier, but Sedgewick had refused to actually complete the modification because without her grounding the nima that she gathered into Xavier, she would be unable to approach the Mukade Cliffs with him and Rachel wasn't willing to send him into danger completely without backup.

So here the two of them were, advancing towards his least favorite place in this entire world, unwinding a trail of woven plant fiber behind them. Rachel had evidently squirreled away one of the Sundlin artifacts into her pack before they'd quit the camp, and they'd rigged up a way to allow her to detonate it remotely.

Xavier had serious questions about his life choices, that they'd lead him to trying to sneak past a horde of murderous giant centipedes in order to plant a bomb in hopes of luring out even bigger murderous centipedes.

"You know, I wasn't all that worried about this plan originally, but I've changed my mind," said Princess conversationally. "No, don't respond! We don't actually know that these things only hunt based on nima, and there's uh, a few of them around."

Xavier glared at Princess where she was perched at his waist helping feed out their fragile plant-fiber fuse from a pack secured to his belt. That was absolutely not helping. His nima senses were a lot better than the last time he'd been here, but he couldn't distinguish much beyond the fact that there was more nima around him than was normal for the desert.

"Steer clear of that clump of rocks ahead, would you?"

Xavier carefully began working his way further around the unassuming clump of rocks than he had previously been planning on. He remembered all too well what had happened when he'd gotten close to a rock outcrop with Kahina, Sumiko, and Yukio.

Twenty minutes later, they were getting increasingly close to the cliffs and Princess was running out of fuse. Xavier couldn't believe they'd made it so far, but perhaps it helped that they had waited until the hottest part of the day. He was guzzling the water he'd brought with him at a prodigious rate, but at least the desert remained quiet.

"Okay, hold up," said Princess and Xavier froze. Sweat dripped down his face. The sunlight felt like a weight sitting on his head and shoulders. "Yeah, I think this is about as far as we can go. I don't see any clear path through those rocks ahead." They were so close to the feet of the cliffs that the sand had mostly given way to rocks, and evidently there were some impressive swarms of centipedes sheltering under or around them. Strangely, Xavier wasn't able to spot any of the little monsters on the cliffs themselves. He recalled the last time when it looked like the cliff was red because of the centipedes, but this close it all looked basically like rough, red rock. Maybe there were a lot of holes sheltering the horrible things. They'd certainly come nowhere near this close last time.

"Alright, I think we have enough of this rope that if you lob the artifact up over those big rocks Rachel will still be able to reach it. Plus that will definitely stir things up a lot more than if we just let it go off in the sand here."

Xavier risked a whisper. "You're sure? The fuse won't break?"

"Nah, Rachel and Sedgewick really did a number on this part of it. I know those bits at the other end that you worked on would probably fall apart in a stiff breeze, but this bit's crazy strong."

Xavier shrugged, and pulled the artifact out of the bag, hefting it in his hand while he considered the throw. The thing was wrapped around with the vine-like ropes they'd created and tied up into a tight little bundle. It was pretty awkwardly weighted; it felt like one side of it had a lot more of the vines knotted than the other.

Nothing for it, he supposed. Throwing his arm out, he hurled it as far as he could. The artifact sailed over the rocks and he heard it hit the ground with a soft clatter, the fuse trailing behind it.

"Uh, we should head back. Maybe move a little quicker than you did getting here? But step softly. Yeah, that would be good."

Xavier immediately checked to ensure the fuse wasn't looped around him or still trailing out of the bag or anything, and when it was clear they were free of it he began speed walking back the way they'd come.

Princess climbed up to his shoulder and stared back behind him. "Yeah, that definitely riled a few up, but it looks like they haven't noticed you. Let's just keep moving, though."

Xavier didn't look back. He frankly didn't want to know.

At last they made it back to Rachel, who was kneeling in the sand with her hands on the fuse and her eyes closed.

"See?" said Princess. "No problem. We didn't even have to run from that big one that was sniffing around after we tossed the artifact."

"Everything good?" asked Xavier. "Because I am absolutely never doing that again."

"I think so," said Rachel, eyes still closed. "Yeah, I agree, Sedgewick. That makes sense." She finally opened her eyes, and looked up at Xavier. "You ready, Xavier? Things are going to get a little hectic when Sedgewick kicks things off."

"Wait a moment while I get my pack sorted." He undid the bag at his waist, and went to tuck it into his pack. "So we're going home today, then? Should you do whatever it is you're planning to do for Princess first?"

"No, we have to draw whatever kami we're able to attract to the Deadlands."

"Wait, what? You never said anything about that! You just said you needed a big influx of nima!"

"Oh, yeah. Sedgewick thinks that the place where you and I both entered the world has a thinner barrier between this and other realities. He's pretty sure that's where the great kami tree you told me about once stood."

"But that's days away! And you haven't seen those centipedes, they're crazy fast! How are we supposed to lead a pack of them all that way?!"

Rachel sat back on her heels. "Sedgewick doesn't think we'll have to lead anything. His plan is to ride one."

Xavier found himself utterly at a loss for words. "Ride…are you insane?"

"See, I knew he wouldn't like it," Rachel commented, evidently not to Xavier. "We'll be fine, Xavier. These things may be big, but they're still bugs. Sedgewick is reasonably certain that he can tweak their nervous system and make them think they're chasing us even if we're riding on their back."

Xavier stared at her. "Reasonably certain. He's reasonably certain. You do think that we're going to get home, right? I really don't want to get eaten by a giant centipede. They're…I can't describe it. I still sometimes have nightmares about the day that we ran into them."

"It'll be fine, Xavier. Trust me. You've got your pack in order? Good, let's get this party started." And she planted both hands on the fuse, shutting her eyes once more.

The fuse swelled under her hands, and then the swollen section rocketed away, the vines disintegrating behind it.

"What the…" began Xavier when the sand around them seemed to jump as chunks of rock went flying skyward near where he'd left the artifact. "What the hell did you do?! The explosions you caused in the Sundlin camp weren't anywhere near that big!"

"We've been working on our technique," said Rachel smugly. "Sedgewick figured out a way to basically make the artifact take on aspects of his original nima signature, so aside from exploding pretty spectacularly that should really draw the youkai in if they're as desperate for nima as your stories made them seem."

"That's great, Rachel, but we need to run, right now."

"Well, things certainly seem stirred up over there, but…"

"No, you don't understand, the last time I was here something exploded near the cliffs, but it was a lot less strong and it drew out a centipede that could probably swallow me in one bite. We need to go now!"

The dust was clearing from where Sedgewick had set off his nima bomb, and from this distance the desert surface there seemed to be boiling. Xavier desperately tried not to imagine why it would look that way. "Rachel…"

"Don't worry, Xavier, we're—oh. Oh, now, I admittedly wasn't expecting that."

Xavier's focus snapped back to the cliffs, which were…shivering? Flexing? It was like when that monster rose up off the top of the cliffs last time, except it was the whole cliffside.

Rachel grabbed Xavier's arm and started dragging him…toward the centipedes?! "The hell are you doing?!"

"We need our ride! Can't wait for it to come to us anymore!"

Rock cracked and fell as multiple inhuman screams rent the air.

Rachel charged toward the centipedes, Xavier reluctantly in tow, and the centipedes charged right back at them.

Something poked him in the cheek. "Ask her!" said Princess. "You've been procrastinating all day!"

Fine, fine. He batted her vine away and looked over toward Rachel, but she was just a dark bump on the ground as far as he could tell. She'd given him space all day and he'd been first too pre-occupied, and then too nervous, to break the silence. Princess snuck a vine in around the back of his head and poked him on the other cheek.

"Rachel, you still awake?"

"Yeah. What's up, Xavier?"

Oh man, hearing his name pronounced properly was still enough to make him happy. He wondered how long it would take him to get used to that—not to mention hearing English spoken outside of his own head. "I had something I needed to ask you."

"Fire away."

"So, the thing is, Princess—she's the mononoke—is literally unable to think and control her own behavior without me siphoning off nima."

"What? Really? Sedgewick have you…huh, now that you mention it, you're right." Rachel sat up and Xavier caught a glint from her eyes. That was seriously freaky; he really wished the kami or whatever it was that was possessing her wouldn't mess with her eyeballs. "It's really sucking in the nima, isn't it? So what, like that overloads its ability to process?"

"Uh, I guess?" He hadn't ever really noticed that Princess pulled in nima, despite all her work getting him to sense the stuff. "That's why she's always in physical contact with me. If she's not touching me for too long, she starts to lose the ability to think properly, and then she just acts on instinct and tries to parasitize whatever animal is nearest."

"Excuse me, I do not parasitize things!" exclaimed Princess. "I'll have you know our relationship is entirely symbiotic."

"Yeah, yeah, symbiotic, excuse me. Didn't you say that things you bond with tend to go crazy because of all the nima you pump into them?"

"…well, more or less."

"So if I'm understanding correctly, the mononoke draws in excess nima, bonds with a host, and then shares the excess with the host animal?" said Rachel.

"That's pretty much what she's described to me."

"Huh. Sedgewick says that makes no sense. With draw like he's seeing, your mononoke should have ascended to kami itself a long while ago."

"Tell her it doesn't work that way," chimed in Princess. "That's not how mother made us."

"Princess told me once that she's basically the child of a great kami called Yggdrasil, way back in the day, so that's not how it works for her."

"Ah, Sedgewick says that explains it. Hm, if the mononoke is a construct he thinks he might actually be able to do something about it, but he's going to have to observe it a bit. Might need to have it cut contact with you for a little while so he can see how the nima build up affects it, and what happens when you siphon it down again."

"Oh, I really don't like the sound of that. But I'll do it if the great kami thinks it can help me."

"Princess doesn't like that idea, but she'll do it."

"Great, that should give us something to do besides hunt for food and avoid Sundlin soldiers on the way back."

"Yeah. Right. That sounds like fun. What are we going to eat, by the way?"

"Sedgewick and I can come up with something. Don't worry about it."

"Uh, I saw what's in your pack, Rachel, and we don't have any food."

"Sedgewick is really good at scaring up a meal, Xavier, trust me. We kept three people fed on the way down here, and I can certainly keep you and I fed. Once he figured out that humans can't just eat their body weight in one meal and then fast for a week, things were smooth sailing."

"I'm so anxious right now, you don't even know. And that's not helping."

Rachel laughed and lay back down.

Xavier cast around for something else to say. He was bone tired from all the walking through sand, but not quite ready to go to sleep. It had been so long since he'd actually had a chance to talk to someone who spoke his language, much less a friend from his original world. Darkness had settled around him, bringing with it the cool of night near the edge of the desert proper. Even with Princess cuddled up to him and the invisible presence of the great kami—Sedgewick, he supposed, although how on earth he came by that name, he was dying to know—it felt like the two of them were alone in the desert.

"Why did you come?" Crap, that wasn't what he meant to ask. "Uh, I mean I know sometimes isekai like to pull classmates in along with the protagonist, but my dad must have known to watch out for that kind of thing, and—"

"Xavier," Rachel broke in before his brain could catch up with his tongue. "I'm in love with you, idiot."

"What? No, you're not." Oof, he was on a roll tonight, but seriously, what?

"See, that's why I said you're an idiot." He could hear the smile in her voice, though. "You can't have it both ways, you know. It's unfair to fight against your genre as hard as you do, but then turn around and deny the things people feel for you simply because you think they're part of a narrative."

"Yeah, okay, but, um…lo—I mean, why would you even like me?" This was so embarrassing he was going to die. Maybe he could sneak off into the desert and become a hermit, because he just had to fall face-first into a horrifically embarrassing conversation on the first night they'd set out alone together. Well. Mostly alone. The only mammals, anyway. He flashed back to seeing Rachel—but NOPE, not going there! He refused to let the genre play with his—

"Maybe you don't remember, but a couple weeks after I moved in with you guys, I overheard you and your mom talking. Hana told you she was thinking about asking me to stay even though the Doyles were back in town, but wanted to know if you were okay with it. And you said you wanted me to stay."

Xavier vaguely remembered that conversation, though he didn't think he'd put things quite like that.

"I've told you, I always get passed around. One house after another, and not a lot of people would stick up for me. I was always a stranger. And maybe the genre at the time was nudging me that direction, but what you said still meant a lot to me. I didn't like distancing myself from you when you were busy driving your pseudo-harem off, but at that point I had a pretty good idea that something was going on—I'm pretty sure I was a side character in a previous manga plot-line—and you seemed like you needed it so badly I couldn't say no. But that genre ended, and my feelings didn't." He heard her roll over, likely to face his way. "Look, I'm not expecting anything from you right now, you know? But you did ask. And we're going to talk about this when we get back to Earth, because I'm sick of rolling over backward for everyone around me, and I really hate the way you've been avoiding me."

"Uh, right. Um. Okay."

"Just—look, Xavier. You've been stuck in several manga plotlines now, which totally sucks. I get that. But you're not alone, you know? Your family's been here for you all this time, I've been here for you all this time, and whether you ask for it or not we're going to help you when you need it. Now go to sleep, we've got a long stint of walking ahead of us, and a throw-down with a giant centipede kami at the end of it."

"Yeah, uh, good ni—wait what was that last bit?"

Problem?

It is time to depart. The Sundlin forces made an early start of things, it seems.

She looked around. Xavier was missing, but with a moment's focus she thought she could sense the mononoke that he kept with him to the south-west. It seemed like it was moving her way, though, so probably not worth worrying over. She stepped over to Sumiko and nudged her awake with her toe. «Rise and shine, Sumiko.»

The racoon woman rolled over, growled something unintelligible, and glared up at her.

«Sundlin's on the move, so we don't have much time to pack. You coming with us, or heading back to civilization?»

Sumiko crawled out of her bedding, stuffed it into a nearby backpack, and shoved it over toward Rachel. «I don't know why you're asking, when you convinced me to go back last night. Where's Zabi-kun?»

Rachel waved to the south-west. «Headed this way, far as I can tell. Sedgewick says the Sundlin forces are trying to loop around from the north, so if you head back the way Xavier is coming, that will be your best chance to bypass them. Not sure how you're going to get past their camp, though.»

«I can always backtrack and go over the cliffs.»

Rachel shrugged, and didn't offer any commentary. She couldn't think of any better ideas, and Sedgewick seemed to think that Sumiko would be perfectly capable of dealing with or evading the lesser kami that were lurking around near the upper edges of the canyon. She kind of hoped Sumiko did run into Bafubani. They were quite different, but she had a feeling they'd get along really well.

«Sumiko-san, Rachel, wake up, there's—oh.» Xavier stumbled up at a partial run.

Rachel shouldered the larger of the bags they'd liberated from the Sundlin army. «Ready to go, Xavier?»

«Uh, yes. I guess. Uh, Sumiko-san?»

Sumiko walked up to him, and before he could react pulled him into a hug. «I guess this is good-bye, Zabi-kun.» She pushed him back to arm's length. «If things don't work out, come back to the Confederate States. I'll make sure you have a place in the Society for Progress.»

«Right. Uh. Thank you. Look, Sumiko-san, can you—» Xavier appeared to be having trouble forming a complete sentence.

«I'll let everyone know what happened, and why you're heading back to the Tachigare.»

«Thanks. Thank you for everything. Look—I'll miss you. Tell Kahina-san and Yukio-san thanks, too. And good-bye.»

Sumiko smiled at him. «I will. Now you'd better get a move on. You do not have a fun trip ahead of you.»

«Yeah. Right.» Xavier backed up, located his bag, and started somewhat frantically trying to jam his blanket into it.

«Sumiko,» said Rachel. «A human named Malken and a bakuhito named Bafubani accompanied me out of the desert. If you happen to find them, please tell them good-bye for me, too. I don't know what this Society you two have been talking about is, but they're a very capable pair, and they're going to need somewhere to live.»

Sumiko eyed her. «I will keep that in mind.» She grabbed the small pack that she'd prepped the night before from some of the Sundlin supplies. «I should go. Zabi-kun—keep warm at night.» She waved, and started across the sand to the south-east.

Xavier raised his hand like he wanted to stop her, but then let it drop when she didn't turn around. «Good-bye, Sumiko-san! I'll miss you!» he called. She raised a hand in acknowledgement, but kept moving.

"She has the right idea," said Rachel. Boy did it ever feel good to fall back into English. "We need to get a move on."

"Yeah," said Xavier, still watching after Sumiko. "Yeah, I guess we should."

While she walked, Rachel went over her assets; it was pretty obvious Xavier wasn't going to be much for conversation for a while. They'd scored blankets, and enough water containers to last them a day, maybe a day and a half without refilling. That wouldn't have been nearly enough when she'd first set out from Henka, but the river made for an easily accessible source of potable water, and she'd had a month of practicing with Sedgewick. If they needed, deriving enough water to drink from plants would not be a problem. It would just slow them down a little. They hadn't been able to find much in the way of food, but again with Sedgewick's help she was confident that was a manageable issue. Depending on Xavier's physical capabilities, and how soon they could shake off pursuit by the Sundlin forces, they could probably make pretty decent time, particularly because she'd just traveled this whole stupid valley going the other direction and had a very good idea of what areas the Sundlin troops were occupying. Perhaps if the main bulk of the army headed back down this way they could be caught in the middle, but unless they arrived within the next day or two she and Xavier could just loop around out in the desert proper. The cliff walls should be much more navigable as they got further from where the valley gave out into the Confederate States.

As for what the narrative might throw at them, she was honestly unsure. At this point, they were in uncharted territory as far any of the reference material she'd read and Bill's speculation went. An army marching right into their face certainly would be the most likely way to mix things up. Or maybe an attack by some of the kami in the desert? Neither of those seemed like problems she and Xavier couldn't surmount, though, and the main things tying Xavier to this place were back in the Confederate States—excepting his mononoke, of course. And Sedgewick, for her, she supposed.

Which reminded her…Sedgewick, you're really fine with helping us get back to my world?

Of course. I would have enjoyed coexisting with you longer, but by my best estimate separating from you will require quite a lot of my excess nima so I may in fact be able to exist on the surface of the world without issue once you are gone. This has been a profitable partnership.

Wonderful.

That was a load off, at least. She'd have to pick Xavier's brains about the mononoke, though. She'd noticed that it was constantly in physical contact with him, which could mean any number of things. None of them good.

Perhaps tonight. She had a feeling there was a lingering problem there; he and the mononoke had been quite far off from the camp when she'd woken up in the morning.

In the meantime, she paused and looked back. Dust hung in the distance where a chunk of Sundlin soldiers were scouring the valley for them, but she didn't think they would catch up. Sedgewick had laid a few false nima trails out into the desert when they'd started, and by stirring up a slight breeze behind them was erasing most physical signs of their passage. Not that there was anywhere for them to go but up the valley at this point, but it couldn't hurt. Xavier also appeared to be doing alright, although at the moment he was slogging through the sand with his head down. She'd have to suggest a break soon. It had become increasingly clear as she traveled with Bafubani and Malken that Sedgewick was slowly increasing her physical capabilities. She'd have asked him to stop, except it was so damn useful. She wondered idly if the changes would persist once they were back in their own reality. That could be fun.

The sun rose higher, the sand heated up, and Xavier and Rachel walked on.

"Wha…Princess?"

"Finally, I've been prodding at you forever. Come on rise and shine, we need to talk."

He sat up. Although the sky was brightening, it was still mostly dark. Rachel and Sumiko were two indistinct bundles a pace or two away; although the temperature wasn't as bitterly cold here on the edge of the desert, it was still quite chilly.

"What do you want?" he asked quietly, fending off her vine. "Stop tapping me!"

"I don't know when the other two will wake up. I let you sleep as long as I could, but we really need to talk. Come on, you can go feed a plant while we do it."

As euphemisms for going to the bathroom went, "feeding a plant" was pretty high up on the list of things Xavier would never, ever tell people about, but Princess though it was hilarious. "Ugh, fine. Seriously stop tapping me! I'm going, I'm going!"

A little while later, they were alone and the local plants had been fed. Xavier sat down on a rock and huddled around himself. He'd brought his blanket with him, but it had lost basically all of his body heat while he'd been stumbling around in the dark. He was mainly just thankful they'd found blankets in their mad scramble to pilfer the Sundlin army's supplies. Sleeping under a pile of clothing would have been awful. "So spill, what is it you wanted to talk about?"

Princess took a moment to climb down his shoulder and perch next to him on the rock. Xavier pulled the blanket in more closely; she'd let the cold air in. "I think I believe you about the narrative thing at this point," she finally said. "But Xavier, I'm conflicted."

"Oh?"

"I know you want to return to your old world, and I understand that. And if this narrative or whatever is messing with your life will go with you, I'd really like that. But Xavier…you can't leave." Her vine, which he usually didn't even notice anymore, tightened around his ear possessively. "If you go, I—I won't be me anymore. I'll just be a mindless mononoke, cutting a swathe through the desert animal life again. Xavier, I don't know what to do."

Well, shit. Xavier watched Princess's flower tremble slightly and realized that when Rachel had told him he could go home and he'd thought about staying it was because of Sumiko, Yukio, and Kahina. He felt guilty and sad about leaving them with no explanation, but Princess's situation hadn't even crossed his mind. Sumiko and the rest would doubtless be hurt by his abrupt departure, but Princess relied on him to function as a sentient creature at all.

"Oh Princess," he breathed, gathering the mononoke up in his cupped hands and brushing her flower to his forehead. "I'm so, so sorry. I didn't think."

"Well," said Princess, an odd burr accompanying the voice in his head. "Well. That's what I wanted to talk about. I thought about—but it doesn't matter. It wouldn't have worked."

Xavier lowered his hands and considered. "You know this is another hold the narrative is using to try and keep me here."

Princess's voice was faint. "But it's still my life."

"I know. Ugh, that sounded horrible. I'm sorry." He stopped talking before he dug himself any more holes. What was he going to do about this?

…There wasn't anything he could do, was there? All he was capable of was relying on others, just like he'd relied on Princess countless times; well, that and siphon off any spare nima that was lying around. He couldn't talk his way out of the fact that she needed to maintain physical contact in order to be able to think at all.

But at the same time, he couldn't stay. He absolutely couldn't stay. Could he? What would he tell Rachel? Hell, what would happen to Rachel if they didn't return to their own reality? She was already like a completely different person; whatever weird melding she'd done with that greater kami was clearly affecting her strongly.

"I don't know what to do, either," he admitted. "I'd send you back with Sumiko-san, but…"

"No. She would be safe from me, but no one and nothing else would. And I don't trust the Society of Progress without you to keep my wits around me."

"Yeah. I don't know what they'd do, either."

"So…?"

"We're going to need help. The only thing I can think of is asking Rachel if that great kami she's combined with can help us. Do you know anything about it? What could you sense?"

"Help us…no, I don't know much. The world snake was more active back when—before we became mononoke, but I never came into direct contact with it. Most people who did just ended up eaten. It wasn't really much in for socializing. I think the closest I ever got was returning to Yggdrasil once when the world snake was way up in its branches sunbathing or something."

"That doesn't sound like something that's likely to even be capable of a helping mood."

"No."

"Though…you know, I've been noticing that Rachel's behavior is a lot different than in our world, and I think at least some of that must be the world snake's influence. Do you think that might go both ways?"

"You think your friend could influence the world snake? I seriously doubt that, but I suppose it's possible. Admittedly, I was surprised at the restraint she showed back in the Sundlin camp."

"If that's restraint, I really don't want to be around if she really lets loose."

"Great kami are natural disasters. I know that you've got a ridiculous appetite for nima, but I'm frankly shocked that she was able to contain a great kami without exploding or something."

Xavier set Princess down, and snugged his blanket closer. "What a lovely image. It sounds like all bets are off, though, so it can't hurt to ask her."

"I think you're right."

"Good. Well, we've got a plan, such as it is. We'll talk to Rachel about it today. I think with her help we can find a way to get what we both need."

"I hope so," said Princess quietly, before perking up. "Now that's out of the way, you should probably run back and wake up Sumiko and Rachel, because there's a big ol' pack of Sundlin soldiers doing a quick march in our direction."

"What?! Why didn't you say so earlier?!" Xavier jumped up, scooped Princess onto his shoulder, and sprinted for their makeshift campsite.

"Our talk was more important," said Princess, as she swung herself around to her preferred perch on his shoulder. "Besides, you've got a great kami on your side. It's not like the end of the world if they'd caught up to us." She cocked her flower and considered for a moment. "Well, for us. Guess that might let you see what happens when your friend lets her kami off the leash a little earlier than otherwise, though."

That has been the most miserable walk through the dark he'd ever experienced. The only light was from the moon, which although reasonably full didn't do much more than make the dips and hollows in the sand even more difficult to spot. He was fairly certain he'd twisted an ankle, but he hurt so much all over it was hard to tell the difference. Rachel appeared to be able to see in the dark, and he'd always suspected that Sumiko had far better night vision than he did. Now he'd definitively proven it.

Nearby, Sumiko and Rachel were talking quietly, like the whole trek had been no big deal. Damn them.

«Alright, Sumiko, what exactly is it that you're looking for? If you're planning to head back to the Confederacy, then this is about as far as you should go. That Sundlin camp is going to be more stirred up than a hornet's nest, so you'll want to go around through the desert proper to get past them, and that's not going to be easy. Especially with all the lesser kami out there.»

«I'm not worried about the Sundas. I'm worried about you.»

«Sedgewick thinks that's bullshit and so do I. If I were an out-of-control kami you and most of that camp would be dead. Look, I think Xavier passed out, so just spill. What is it you want, anyway?»

He wasn't passed out! But he was also completely unable to move. Would probably never move again. It wasn't worth correcting her, in any case. That would probably require moving. Princess had crawled up onto his chest and was sitting upright, flower turned toward the two women. Evidently she was interested, as well.

There was silence for a bit, and Xavier was just about ready to pass out for real when Sumiko spoke up.

«I feel responsible for Zabi-kun. When he arrived, he barely spoke a word of our language, and I helped him learn. Then he ran afoul of that mononoke, and well—I guess maybe I saw myself in him, a little bit. A mononoke infested me when I was younger before it jumped to—but that's really none of your business. In any case, ever since he arrived he's been leaning on me, and I suppose somewhere I started thinking of him like family. I—miss that. We've got a lot in common. We're both transplants, both have suffered because of mononoke. And then he offered me a way out of the desert. And I want that.»

She was quite for a few moments, before continuing almost too quiet for Xavier to hear. «He's a good kit. He shouldn't be haring back off into the desert with no supplies and a greater kami for company. So. That's my story, or as much of it as you're getting. What do you want?»

«Has Xavier ever told you where he's from? No, didn't think so. We're from a completely different world—different reality. That's why he's got that crazy nima deficiency. I did, too, before Sedgewick asked me to consume him. Oh, don't give me that look. See, it doesn't matter whether you believe me or not. The important thing is that I can get him home.»

«To a different world.»

«See, that's why he didn't mention it. Go ask the flower if you want a second opinion. I'll bet it figured out there was something weird about Xavier pretty quick.»

«You're not making a very good case for why I should trust you.»

«The thing is, Miss Racoon, I don't actually care if you trust me. Xavier and I are going home, and there's not much you can do about that. If you're so worried, I suppose you can tag along, but we're headed for the middle of this damn desert, and somehow I doubt that's somewhere you want to end up being stranded. Or, alternately, I can share with you what I know about the Sundlin army that's camped out over there, and you can head back to the Confederacy and whatever obligations you abandoned when you chased after Xavier.»

«I don't much like either of those choices,» Sumiko muttered. If Rachel responded, Xavier couldn't hear it. «Alright, say I leave you two alone. How exactly are you planning to travel to a completely different world?»

«Admittedly, that's a bit of a work in progress. Xavier and I both popped into your world in the middle of the area you call the Deadlands, and Sedgewick believes it occurred at the place where a greater kami tree used to live. Evidently reality is a little…thinner there, I guess. He's fairly certain he and I can tear a hole big enough to shove Xavier and I back to our original reality, but it's going to take a really big external source of nima to kickstart the process. So our two challenges are getting to the Deadlands in the first place, and then locating a big chunk of nima somewhere. I figure worst case scenario we'll have to try and wrangle up a bunch of the lesser kami out there, although getting enough juice from them is going to be a trick.»

«So you do have a plan, then.»

«Enough to go on. The narrative may fight us initially, but I suspect we can force it around.»

«Narrative?»

«Don't worry about it. There, I've been frank with you. Now return the favor already. Do I need to babysit you, or are you going to suck it up, say goodbye like a big girl, and head back while you can?»

Man, when did Rachel get so harsh? Xavier was feeling a larger and larger sense of disconnect. Granted, he hadn't seen her in months, and she'd apparently assimilated some sort of crazy powerful kami in the meantime—actually, nevermind, he supposed going from background character to OP isekai heroine probably explained quite a lot.

«I don't see that I have much choice.»

«Nope, you don't. So you want to know about the Sundlins?»

«Yes.»

«I was traveling with a former Sundlin priest named Malken—by the way, if you happen to run into him, I would really appreciate if you told him good-bye for me. We were traveling with a bunny woman named Bafubani, too. You'd like her, she's prickly. Anyway, according to him the big state religion in the Sundlin Empire is the Children of Man, which basically preaches that kami are evil. They've been steadily losing power over the last century or so, but then Sedgewick sensed Xavier's entry into your world, and went looking for him. The world snake being on the move was enough to give them a solid political boost, and they organized a small army to come try and take him down. Since the easiest route to the central Tachigare is up the Keikoku Valley here, they stormed through every bakuhito settlement on their way, and left this force here as their primary rear-guard. I suppose they might have designs on the Confederacy eventually, but honestly, Sedgewick has no interest in them and would probably crush them if they managed to force a confrontation, anyway. I suspect they'll run out of steam sooner rather than later, especially since I doubt they can detect him when he's not making massive waves by traveling around in the center of the planet. That enough for you?»

«That will work. I'd love more detail, though.»

«Like I said, Malken and Bafubani were trying to slip around the Sundlin army while I raised a ruckus inside. See if you can find them, and you'll have all the info you want.»

«I'll do that. You really plan to bring Xavier home? And you need a large nima source to do so?»

«I have absolutely no reason to lie to you.»

«Very well. I might have an idea about that…»

Of course, she also had a point. "You believe me that we're in a narrative?" Xavier muttered under his breath. Sumiko shot him a quelling glare.

"Let's just say we're going to have a good long talk on the subject when we next get the chance," temporized Princess. "Right now, I'm more interested in hearing if you have any predictions."

Xavier gave it some thought as he followed after Rachel and Sumiko with what he hoped was a purposeful walk. It had been smooth sailing so far, but now Princess brought it up, of course they weren't going to be allowed to just walk out of camp. Unless running into Rachel had for some reason completely upset the genre, conflict was basically guaranteed. "Shit, we're definitely going to run into trouble." He picked up his pace slightly, intended to warn Rachel.

He was too slow.

«Animal! Animal infiltrator in the camp!» screamed a nearby soldier, pointing straight at Sumiko.

"You just had to say it!" yelled Xavier at Princess as she hoisted herself out of the satchel and into the crook of his arm at double speed and everything went to hell.

Sumiko ducked and rolled under the slash of a nearby soldier's sword. Rachel moved inhumanly fast toward the soldier who had yelled, there was a small spike of nima, and he crumpled into a heap. Xavier felt nima suddenly building behind them and spun just in time to yank a spike of nima away from Sumiko where she was coming out of her roll. Unfortunately, he over-reached himself and staggered off balance, so the nima traced a parabola around him to shoot straight at Rachel, who grabbed it out of the air and did—something with it. He wasn't able to track quite what. Xavier felt nima quickly building off at another angle, and rather than wait to see what sort of trouble that particular artifact was about to unleash he opted to sprint after Sumiko as she high-tailed it toward a stack of luggage near a pair of tents.

The two dove behind the luggage just as the artifact that had been prepping behind them sent out a screaming flash of nima. Fortunately, the shot went wide, although it blew the tent nearby completely apart. For a camp that had seemed quite disciplined, they certainly weren't shy about firing off ordinance toward their fellow soldiers.

A moment later, Rachel slid smoothly around the edge of the luggage and dropped into place next to Xavier.

«Sedgewick thinks it would be safe for the two of us to go all out,» she said conversationally. «But I'm hoping you have a better plan, because I honestly don't have that strong a grudge against these people.»

Xavier looked at her askance. «Just what is—nevermind. Princess and I can handle the artifacts, if they're stupid enough to keep firing at us, but neither of us can do anything about swords.»

«I'll take point, you support, and Xavier is in the rear where the mononoke can help him neutralize incoming nima,» snapped Sumiko. «And nothing flashy, kami! You'll draw the whole camp down on us. Sunda hate kami.»

Rachel looked thoughtful. «That explains some things. Let's go.»

The three took off running and ran straight into a group of soldiers who had been trying to flank them. Sumiko ducked under the swing of the foremost, shoved him off balance, and then cannoned through the rest of their ranks like a fuzzy pinball. Rachel simply slapped soldiers aside whenever they got closer to her or Xavier, and Xavier scurried in her wake, tried not to gibber, and strained his senses for incoming nima.

This was the first time Xavier had faced off against human antagonists, and he didn't like it one bit. It was, quite frankly, a nightmare.

A sword whistled through the air and bounced off Rachel's exposed neck before he could shout. Her arm whipped out, grabbed the suddenly off-balance forearm of the soldier who had attacked her, broke it with a sharp twist and a crack, and then tossed the now-screaming soldier one-handed into a pair who had been pelting towards Xavier. Sumiko disappeared into a small clump of soldiers for a moment, and Xavier almost fell over in panic before she emerged with blood on her teeth and a feral look in her eye that Xavier had never seen before. A pair of soldiers executed a perfect pincer attack on Rachel, but before Sumiko or he could even try to assist the two fell back in a spray of blood.

No one seemed able to get close to Xavier. He followed in the wake of Sumiko and Rachel, and together they parted the oncoming soldiers like wheat. When at last their opponents started to get a little more organized and began leaving openings so that their fellows could fire on the three invaders from behind, Xavier finally started feeling like he was contributing. He pulled nima out of the air with reckless abandon.

At last they reached the supplies, and they dropped behind one of the piles, having momentarily outpaced the information that there were invaders in camp. Rachel immediately started digging through the stack behind them, homing in on something. «Sumiko, Xavier, grab a couple of bags and as much food and drink as you can stuff into them. This isn't going to hold them back long.»

The two jumped to work, although Xavier honestly wasn't sure what all he'd stuffed in his sack by the time he was done. While they'd been busy, Rachel had been spending her time lobbing small artifacts over toward the oncoming soldiers, where they explosively vented their nima. Xavier was fairly certain they weren't supposed to do that.

«Alright, that'll have to be enough. Time to run again.»

And they were off.

Fortunately, despite their pause at the supplies, they were able to keep mostly ahead of the information that there were intruders trying to flee the camp by the eastern border, so most of their close altercations were small clumps of soldiers who took umbrage at a trio of people obviously up to no good. After the last of these, they finally broke through the camp border, scrambled through the ditch lined it, and took off into the desert with a last few shots of nima trailing them.

Princess climbed up and perched on the top of Xavier's head, watching backwards as he followed Rachel and Sumiko as fast as he could with his flagging endurance. "We're going to have pursuit soon for sure."

"Wonderful," gasped Xavier. «Rachel, Sumiko-san, what are we going to do when they follow us?»

«We'll worry about that soon enough,» replied Rachel. «Just keep going for now, Xavier.»

She wasn't even out of breath. Just what the hell had happened to her since she'd arrived in this world?

"It's going to be a tall order, but your best friend is speed," Bill Brock had told her during one of their late night planning sessions. "Non-reincarnation isekai all follow the same basic pattern. The protagonist gets thrown in over their head, they get embroiled in some big conflict, and they pick up a few bosom pals. Then after enough time has passed that they've integrated into their new world, they might be given an opportunity to come home but they decide to stay of their own volition. You'll be in equal danger of that, of course, if things take too long, but Xavier's been there for longer than you, and if he's got protagonist status then the hooks will be a lot deeper. As soon as you find him, you need to disrupt his status quo and get him out of there as fast as humanly possible."

Bill had frowned, staring into the distance. "Honestly, Rachel, I don't think you have very good odds. This is one of those genres where you're not fighting just genre conventions, you're fighting a whole 'nother world. You sure you want to try this?"

"Yes. I—I have to try."

He'd looked away, eyes moistening. "Well. You've got the best shot of any of us."

Later that night, Hana Brock had drifted up to the doorway of the upstairs bathroom in that spooky way of hers while Rachel was brushing her teeth. "Rachel, we want you to know: if you manage to find Xavier and he cannot or will not return, but you have found a way to bridge our worlds…come back to us. You are a part of this family, too."

Feeling as if she were about to choke on her toothbrush, Rachel hadn't been able to do anything but nod. Hana patted her on the shoulder and glided back into the darkness of the hall.

She'd sworn then that she would find Xavier and bring him back or die trying.

Now here she was, facing those critical first moments that Bill had warned her about, and she could see the indecision in Xavier's face. He wanted to stay, and her stomach took a dive for her feet. He clearly had more friends than just this racoon girl holding him back, and the plant-thing was in constant physical contact with him; she hated to think what that meant. She held her breath, wondering frantically what she would do if he found some excuse to stay just a little longer, but then—

"I'm not a protagonist."

Sweet relief; she'd done it. She didn't even catch what he said next to the racoon; her mind was already calculating the quickest way out of camp. Should she try and find Bafubani and Malken? But no, that was a distraction. She felt awful about abandoning them, but they had good odds of making it past the camp and over to the Confederacy where they'd presumably be safer. They'd helped her, she'd helped them, and there wasn't any need to try and balance those scales further. She needed to get Xavier out of this tent, back to the Sundlin supplies, load up as much as they could, and then head back up the valley before the chaos died down.

The racoon was a problem, but—

«I'm coming with you,» said the woman—Sumiko, Rachel recalled.

Xavier blinked, obviously blind-sided. «What? Sumiko-san, no, you've got to let Yukio-san and Kahina-san know I've gone. And I'm sure we could at least help you make it to the command tent, couldn't we Rachel? I'm going home, but you still need to pass the Society's test.»

«I don't trust this friend of yours.» Sumiko waved toward Rachel. «I can duck into the command tent on the way, if necessary, but I'm going with you for at least a few days so I can be sure this kami doesn't want to simply eat your mononoke and leave you for dead.»

Rachel cocked her head. «You're being awfully blithe about that. If you think I'm so dangerous, why would you say something like that to my face?»

«I believe I know what you are,» said Sumiko, angry but more respectful than she'd been earlier. «Frank honesty is the policy that is most likely to keep me alive.»

Well, she's not wrong about that, said Sedgewick with amusement. For a snake who had been threatening the racoon girl moments before, he seemed oddly taken with her now. She has dealt with reasonably powerful kami before, I expect. We can usually tell when someone is lying, and so many people do it to save their own skins that frank hostility is worth leaving alone merely for the novelty.

Not now, thought Rachel in irritation.

Xavier had been trying to argue with Sumiko, but Rachel cut him off. «Fine, Sumiko can tag along until she's satisfied that I'm not going to snack on you or something. Look, we need to go; my distraction out there is dying down already.» This was unfortunately true. She'd been monitoring the nima flow, and it was obvious that the lesser kami were being pushed back out of the camp, and order was generally restoring. «Why do you want to visit the commander's tent, anyway?»

«We need to find out why the Sundlin Army is camped out here,» said Sumiko. Xavier appeared to still be processing the fact that Rachel was alright with Sumiko coming along.

Rachel shrugged. «I can tell you that; I've been traveling with an ex-Sundlin for the better part of a month. Let's go. We need to get out of here before Sedgewick is forced to cause a scene.»

Sumiko visibly paled. Huh. Rachel wouldn't have bet on that even being noticeable, given the fine layer of fur she was sporting across most of her face. «We don't want that. Lead on.»

Rachel had thought she'd never ask. Sedgewick?

Yes, I think it is about time for a final "diversion" as you like to call them. We should do this again sometime. It has been too long since I got to enjoy so many interesting reactions in such a short period of time. Sedgewick reached out through their feet, located the thin strand of nima that he'd woven to connect them to the other artifacts that she'd planted, and with Rachel's help send a burst of nima through that destroyed the connection but resulted in a satisfying series of whump sounds on each border of the camp.

«What the hell did you just do?» asked Xavier, staring at Rachel in consternation.

She shrugged. «Secured our ticket out of here. Let's go.»

The three of them ducked out of the tent, and advanced through the suddenly-expanded chaos.

«Please don't attack one another!» said Xavier in a frantic whisper. «Sumiko, this is Rachel and she—»

Sumiko swiped two fingers in the vicinity of her mouth. It had taken him a while when he'd first gotten to know her, but Xavier had finally figured out the gesture meant "shush." «You be quiet, Zabi-kun. What are you, girl? You can't be a Sunda. You're not human.»

«I'm human,» said Rachel calmly. «I just have…a little extra help. In any case, if you keep your hands to yourself, I have absolutely no quarrel with you.» She looked to Xavier, her expression noticeably softening. "Xavier, what are you doing here? I thought for sure I was going to have to try and track you down in this Confederacy or whatever it's called, but here you are! I would have walked right past you if—"

Sumiko broke in. «Speak a language I understand.»

«Ah, sorry Sumiko-san!» said Xavier hurriedly. «Look, I didn't get a chance to say, but this is Rachel. She's someone I knew from before I—came here. I really don't think she was trying to threaten us. Rachel, what are you even doing here? What happened?»

«What happened?» Rachel broke into a grin. «Your parents bought a new mattress, and after we'd planned things out as best we could, we stuck it on your bed frame and I slept there until I got transported into the middle of this god-forsaken desert. Not that our planning came to much, since all my supplies got lost when Sedgewick showed up, but things worked out in the end.»

«Are you fighting for the Sundlin army?»

«What? No, they've been chasing us around whenever they catch sight of us. Why would I be working for them?»

That was a load off; when he'd taken a moment to think, Xavier had been pretty worried about that Sundlin uniform since multiple transfers into the same world almost inevitably ended up on different sides of whatever conflict was running.

"You're asking the wrong things," said Princess. "Who is Sedgewick?"

That was a good catch. Xavier repeated the question.

«Oh, uh, I guess I didn't really explain that, did I? It's just what I call him, he doesn't actually have a name. I think Bafubani called him the world snake? He's helping me out until we can get home.»

That grabbed Xavier's attention. «Do you know a way—»

But Sumiko interrupted him. Almost faster than he could track, she quick-stepped around the Sundlin officer, and grabbed Xavier's arm. «We need to go, Zabi-kun. Right now. We'll head straight for the northern border of the camp, signal Kahina-san and Yukio-kun, and get out.» She nodded to Rachel, who was watching her warily, that strangely hostile look back on her face. «You can come with us, if you want.»

«What? Sumiko-san, why—»

«Xavier is not going with you, racoon,» hissed Rachel, and Xavier froze. That did not sound like Rachel. Her eyes glinted strangely in the darkness, and Xavier felt as if someone had drawn a finger down his spine.

Sumiko didn't budge, though her grip tightened on Xavier's arm. «Let us go, great kami. We have no quarrel with you or your vessel. We will exit this camp—help you exit the camp, if you wish—and you never need see us again.»

«What? Sumiko-san? No, Rachel—»

«That is not the friend you once knew anymore, Zabi-kun. Now be quiet.»

Xavier was at a loss. The things Rachel had said…could it be true that she'd done something irrevocable when she arrived? Was she really not the person he'd known?

«Talk to your partner, little plant,» said Rachel—or whatever Rachel had become. «What is it that you sense?»

Wait, she knew about Princess?

The mononoke in question slid herself out of his satchel, whipping a few vines around his chest and shoulder to pull herself up to rest next to his head. She turned her flower toward Rachel, and tilted it back and forth twice. "I think Sumiko is making a wrong assumption, Xavier," she finally said. "I've never seen anything like this; as far as I can tell, the great kami is contained inside your friend, but they're working together in concert."

Sumiko gave his arm a tug. «What did the mononoke say?»

«She thinks you're wrong about Rachel, Sumiko-san. She's still my friend, but with something else, too. Inside her? I don't really get what Princess is trying to say.»

«Hm.» Sumiko finally relinquished his arm, dropping back onto her heels. The tent was short enough that crouching was far more comfortable than trying to stand. «What is it you want, great kami, or whatever you're calling yourself?»

Rachel's eyes flattened out in the gloom, losing their shine as she returned her focus to Xavier. Evidently she didn't feel the need to answer Sumiko. «Xavier, Sedgewick thinks he's figured out a way for us to get home. What are you waiting for?»

Well, that completely changed the math. Xavier was surprised; he would have thought if someone showed up with a way home, he'd jump on it, but his first instinct was the feeling that he needed to see through his current mission, make sure his new friends were able to get into the Society of Progress, and then maybe…but this was the trap protagonists fell into, wasn't it? They made new friends. Formed new bonds. Gained new powers. And their old family and friends faded, like those old sepia photographs, so that when push came to shove they always chose to stay in their new, fantastic world rather than return to their ordinary lives.

Maybe he could make a difference here. Maybe his weird, uncomfortable partnership with Princess could lead him to discover some crazy power to directly affect the world that he would never gain in his non-magical reality. His parents, his friends; they'd already lost him. It wasn't like they could lose him more. All he had to do was refuse to leave just yet, help Sumiko and the rest out, and there would definitely be something that kept him just a little longer after that and a little longer again, until years and homesickness passed and he truly could imagine living nowhere else.

It was surprisingly tempting. But… "I'm not a protagonist." He never wanted to be a protagonist, he just wanted to be himself. To hug his mom and dad again. Go to school and learn as much as he could about crazy, non-magical magic in his own world. Fall in love with someone who didn't have animal ears. He'd made new connections here, but this world was sand and pain and struggle, and all of it was plot, not his life, damn it!

«I'm sorry Sumiko-san. I want—I need to go home.»

But Rachel had to admit it: she was having a great time. Unlike their first run-in with Sundlin soldiers, not only were Rachel and Sedgewick able to plan out their approach beforehand, but they'd had a month to acclimate to one another. Rachel was getting better at manipulating nima directly, and Sedgewick was much more confident in his memory of her actual body, which allowed them to work in tandem with both supplementing the other's strengths.

And it was a lot of fun. They'd slid into the river, which was surprisingly cold right up until Sedgewick tweaked her metabolism and then it just felt like another temperature. Not comfortable, exactly, but not inimical the way drastic temperature differences typically felt. As she swam downstream, Rachel barely had to come up for air since Sedgewick was pulling oxygen directly out of the water in small quantities, making her initial deep breath last much, much longer than she'd expected. Then they'd worked their way out, located a stash of unused uniforms in a tent near the river's edge that was clearly being used by the support staff who were managing the logistics of providing for a group of this size, and walked straight into the area full of supplies without being challenged.

At that point, the real fun began. Rachel carefully selected a group of devices that were small enough to conceal, but packed so full of nima that they were guaranteed to set off a nice reaction, and through a combination of walking as if she belonged and carefully slipping through the cracks in attention of the camp's denizens, she successfully planted them at the base of several watchtowers along the northern edge of the camp.

At that point, it was simply a matter of overloading one of them from a distance, and watching the tower explode outward in a raging blast of nima. Of course, soldiers came pouring out of the woodwork, but they never paid any attention to Rachel. Some of them were even kind enough to escort her away from the location under "attack". She took the opportunity to saunter over to a watchtower on the southern side of camp, plant another device, and happily exploded that one, too.

Chaos reigned. Evidently no one was having any luck figuring out how their watchtowers were being destroyed, and it kicked off a massive hunt for burrowing youkai, which Sedgewick thought was hilarious. He liked it even more when a pack of actual youkai descended the cliff where Rachel had set off her secondary distraction and punched through into the interior of the camp through the hole she'd left in its defenses.

As soldiers rushed every which way, Rachel walked westward, confident that Bafubani and Malken were even then creeping past the northern edge of the camp in the dark. She and Sedgewick both kept their senses peeled for artifact usage to the north, but the fortuitous youkai invasion evidently was enough to keep sentries on both sides of the camp sufficiently panicked that Rachel didn't even need to overload any more of the artifacts she was carrying.

It wasn't until she was halfway across the camp that Sedgewick commented, What a strange creature. I wonder what on earth a Sundlin is doing with it? and Rachel turned and found herself face-to-face with Xavier.

Xavier was hurrying through the enemy camp, hoping against hope that no soldiers noticed how poorly fitting his uniform was and desperate not to lose track of Sumiko, when a Sundlin staff member who had been hurrying the other way grabbed his arm, and said in disbelief, "Xavier?"

He froze. He hadn't heard his name—his actual name—since he'd gone to sleep in his own world. His eyes snapped to the face of the woman who had stopped him, and he almost didn't recognize her. She was tanned, dirty, hair brutally tied back in a dingy blob, and more than anything she just didn't belong there. It took him several seconds before his disbelieving brain could catch up to what his eyes were seeing. "Rachel? Wait, seriously, Rachel?!"

Her face changed before his eyes. The corners of her eyes crinkled up, her mouth turned up in a huge smile, and his doubts fell away. It was undeniably Rachel. "I found you!" she said, and bear-hugged him. He was so surprised he hugged her back without thinking.

"Ack! What are you doing?!" cried Princess, squirming where the satchel she was riding in had gotten caught between their hips. "Enemy camp, remember!"

Someone else felt the same way. «Zabi-kun, you idiot! What are you thinking?!» snapped Sumiko, and bodily dragged the two of them aside into the shadow of a nearby tent. She grabbed both their shoulders and forced them apart. «Who is this? What the hell are you doing?» This last was directed at Rachel.

«Ah, sorry! Sumiko-san, this is—» Xavier froze. He hadn't seen her move, but Rachel had a hand gripping Sumiko's forearm and an expression on her face like nothing Xavier had ever seen.

«Release us,» hissed Rachel.

"That can't be…" muttered Princess, but Xavier barely noticed.

«Uh, Rachel, Sumiko-san? Could you two please let go of one another? Look, Sumiko-san, this is Rachel, she's someone I know. She's not a threat, okay?» Wait, us? Oh, he had a very bad feeling about this.

Sumiko ignored him. «What are you?» she demanded through gritted teeth.

Rachel pushed upward, forcing Sumiko's hand off her shoulder. Sumiko's arm briefly shook from the strain of resisting, but as soon as she started to try to pull her arm back toward herself, Rachel released it. Sumiko went for the knife at her waste, and Xavier dove in between the two. «Stop it! Damn it, Rachel, Sumiko-san is a friend! Rachel, what do you mean—»

«Just what is going on here?» demanded a strident voice.

Xavier glanced over his shoulder to find a Sundlin officer staring at them in anger. "Shit."

He was looking the wrong way, so all he saw was the look on the officer's face shift toward surprise and alarm, and then Rachel had whipped past him, slapped a hand against the man's chest, and with a burst of nima the man collapsed like a rag-doll. Sumiko whipped past on Xavier's other side, caught the officer mid-fall, and dragged him quickly backward into the tent behind them after a cursory peek through the door.

Rachel stepped after the two, pulling Xavier along. "Inside, now. We can talk things over once we're out of sight."

"Xavier," said Princess as he started to follow Rachel into the tent. "You know this woman? She's from your original reality?"

"Yeah, she's a—classmate, I guess."

"Hmm," said the mononoke, and lapsed into silence.

Xavier had the sudden irrational impulse to run the other way. He just knew he was not going to enjoy whatever confrontation he was walking into, and they still hadn't found any evidence to show what the Sundlin army was up to.

And to run into Rachel. Here of all places, and wearing a Sundlin uniform. The narrative this time around was too cruel.

The old bakuhito man who attempted to convince Sumiko of that last one had a surprising number of details to back up his story, but Sumiko had assured Xavier that even if crickets developed into youkai—or kami, as Orion insisted on calling them—that they wouldn't develop a hive mind and attempt to take over the world through a puppet state. They'd just eat their way through anything in their way.

Xavier honestly didn't feel that last bit was as comforting as Sumiko evidently thought it should be.

Thanks to the lack of useful information, the group had eventually decided that they had no choice but to try and infiltrate the Sundlin encampment and see what they could find.

This was easier said than done. Yukio, Sumiko, and even Kahina spent several days scouting out the camp, but it evidently had well defined borders, not a lot of options for cover on the approach, and  primitive watch-towers spaced around the edges. Sumiko had a route that could get them most of the way, but was unsure if they would actually be able to penetrate the border of the camp. And of course if they did, they would need disguises, because even in the dead of night a camp this large had a fair amount of activity and was reasonably well-lit: soldiers keeping odd hours, since they had very little to do; people heading to the latrine pits that were dug a ways outside of the main borders; people working on preparing food for the next day.

To Xavier's surprise, when they discussed who should infiltrate the camp, he was on the short list. Aside from his humanity providing him with a basic built-in disguise, his status as a null might actually come in handy if there were any artifact-based security measures. The others may or may not be able to detect such things, but none of them had safe ways to disable them. After much debate, they settled on only Sumiko and Xavier making the first attempt to scout a way into the camp, since they were the two who would most likely be able to pass as Sundlins if they could get their hands on some uniforms. Meanwhile Yukio and Kahina would be overlooking the camp from the edge of the canyon in hopes that they could provide support if Sumiko and Xavier needed to suddenly make a run for it.

Xavier thought it was a terrible plan, but wasn't sure what else to suggest. He still hadn't been able to think up any good alternatives to seeking the help of the Society for Progress, and Guujin was watching. Besides, he didn't think failure was likely to result in anyone dying, at least. He was pretty sure if it were that kind of plot he'd have seen a casualty by now.

As Xavier carefully followed in Sumiko's wake as she stealthily approached the lit sand that signified the border at which the watchtowers would have the best visibility he found himself trying very hard to convince himself that this was definitely the case. His head was convinced; his nerves, not so much.

She paused in the shadow of a prickly-looking bush that rose slightly above Xavier's waist. Xavier crouched down next to her.

«This is the last of the good cover I was able to locate,» Sumiko breathed in the lowest voice she could without whispering. Evidently whispering carried farther. «We'll have to go one at a time for the next bit, unless I wave you on and then you run for me as fast and low as you can. Got it?»

Xavier swallowed. It didn't help. «Got it.»

Sumiko nodded and turned her attention to the nearest watchtower. They waited there for what seemed an eternity, before she suddenly launched herself out at a crouching, fast walk until she reached a low mound of rock that she lay alongside. She held up her palm in a clear signal for Xavier to wait, then rolled out from the rock and crawled to a bush much like the one he was hiding behind, but far smaller.

She stayed crouching behind the bush for several seconds, before waving at him. "This is awful," Xavier muttered to himself, and then did his best to replicate her fast walk to the rocks before throwing himself down behind them. His heart was hammering and he felt like he should be booking it away from here as fast as possible. He was not a stealthy person, damn it! Also, this was not a normal way to use your legs!

"You're doing great," Princess assured him. "I'm watching the Sundlins, too, and they're barely glancing this way. Sumiko came up with a smart approach."

They kept going moving in starts and stops, zig-zagging across the landscape until in a last heart-pounding moment Sumiko gestured urgently and Xavier found himself chasing after her and into a ditch that lay near the base of one of the watchtowers.

They had to step carefully once they were in the ditch, thanks to the intermittent wooden stakes. If Sumiko hadn't been there to catch him, Xavier was fairly certain he would have impaled himself on one in his mad dash after her.

They lay in the shadow of the ditch, Xavier breathing hard. Can't they hear us? he mouthed at Sumiko, but she just put a hand to his lips and shook her head. He wasn't sure if she'd actually understood or not.

"If they could hear you, there'd be a commotion right about now, don't you think?" asked Princess.

He supposed that was true.

They'd been lying in the ditch for long enough that both their breathing had evened out, and Xavier was starting to wonder if Sumiko would ever decide to move further, when the first whumpf of a distant explosion sounded, and debris fountained into the air farther up the valley.

"Well, that's as good an invitation as you're likely to get," remarked Princess, and then Sumiko had hold of Xavier's hand and was pulling him in a mad scramble up the ditch and into the camp proper.

There was no way he wasn't going to regret this.

«Well, this is a problem,» said Rachel.

«Is it?» replied Bafubani. She was joking. Probably. They'd had several close calls with Sundlin soldiers on their month-long trip down the valley, and Bafubani hadn't tried to murder a single one yet. Rachel guessed if there was anything that was going to cause a relapse, though, the small army that lay between them and their goal was it.

The encampment didn't stretch all the way to the canyon walls, but had obviously been there long enough to build basic fortifications, so the simple watch towers overlooking the edges would make slipping past without detection difficult, if not impossible given the lack of any real cover. Using the river wasn't an option, either; at this point it wended straight through the center of the camp.

«We're so close!» griped Rachel.

«We dodged those Sundlin patrols and escaped the bakuhito search party,» said Malken affably. «You'll find a way around this obstacle.»

Rachel glared at him. Malken had been unforgivably blasé about facing any sort of danger ever since she and Sedgewick had dealt with the nest of kami vipers they'd stumbled into while desperately trying to avoid being tracked down by that pack of bakuhito.

Bafubani, on the other hand… «Let's cause some havoc and slip through in the chaos.»

Rachel had evidently convinced her throwing her life away was a waste, but she was still didn't have a risk-averse bone in her body.

«And how—»

«Look, I think that's the bulk of their supplies over near the far eastern edge of the camp. That's right near the river. We float in under cover of darkness, find something that will go boom, and we've got a perfect distraction to hop into some soldier's uniforms and "patrol" our way straight through to the other side.»

Sedgewick?

I do not know how deep the river flows here. If it is sufficient to hide our presence, though, getting in and causing a distraction would be possible. The rabbit is correct that there are a good number of nima-rich artifacts concentrated in that area.

«Well,» said Rachel. «Lovely. We'll just send Malken in to do the deed, I suppose?»

Bafubani snorted, but otherwise didn't rise to the bait. She and Malken had reached an uneasy truce over the course of the first couple weeks of their journey through the desert, but the rabbit woman still didn't like him much, or think highly of his skills.

«Malken, do you think Bafubani's plan would work? Minus sending you in alone, of course.»

The former priest squinted down the valley. His eyesight wasn't anywhere near as good as Bafubani's, much less Rachel's which was currently enhanced by Sedgewick. «I think Bafubani is likely correct about the supplies being on the eastern edge, and if so there should definitely be something in there that would cause a big distraction if you got your hands on it. Whether we could walk through the camp afterward, though…hmm. I expect those nearby will rush to secure the supplies, but those further away should immediately try to reinforce the perimeter. We could likely get quite far through the camp posing as messengers, but the trick would be getting out the other side without being spotted or taken as deserters. I still think we would be better off back-tracking and trying for the top of the canyon.»

«That plan was how we ended up in this particular mess,» snapped Bafubani. There was some truth to that. Bafubani had spied the ledge from further along the valley, and they'd hoped that it would prove a midway staging point to climbing up to the top of the canyon wall. Unfortunately, the nearby cliff was incredibly steep and without a lot of good handholds. Sedgewick thought he could get Rachel up it, gave even odds to Bafubani, and was certain Malken would end up taking the quickest way back down to the valley floor. Rachel had learned to trust Sedgewick's appraisals, so the three had been resting prior to their descent, taking advantage of the much-improved view the ledge provided them of the Sundlin camp in the meantime.

As the other two lapsed into silence, Rachel chewed on her lip and pondered. When she came right down to it, she was sick and tired of sneaking through the desert. The last month or so had been one long, horrible slog despite their proximity to the river. They'd been forced to loop around into the desert proper more than once, climbing the increasingly-steep valley walls to avoid bakuhito towns. Thanks to Sedgewick, water and food were never much of an issue—his ability to locate small prey animals and pull potable water out of just about anything was a godsend—but at this point, she would kill for a bath.

Of course, if they waltzed into the middle of the Sundlin camp, she might end up literally killing on her way to a bath, and once again these people hadn't done anything to her. Although she was certain they would happily chase her around the desert like their brethren to the east if given half a chance.

Climbing the cliffs was not a good option. Aside from the safety issues, she was certain there would be lesser kami up there drawn by the Sundlin's camp. Just about every time they'd pushed further into the desert near a settlement they'd run afoul of something, even if despite being ill-equipped most of the lesser kami were ridiculously easy for them to kill or scare off. She didn't doubt they could push through whatever might be lurking up there, but it was sure to be noisy and then they'd draw Sundlin attention anyway.

Sneaking by on the periphery just didn't seem likely. The terrain offered little to no cover, and the Sundlin's vantage on their watch towers was incredibly problematic. They could backtrack and go up the cliff a day's travel up the canyon, but dammit she wanted that bath.

What would make sense from a narrative perspective? Well, that was easy enough to answer. A known hostile force in their way, horrible odds, and a plan the "just might work with a little luck"? It was obviously where they were supposed to go for the greatest dramatic impact. Come to that, she doubted the plot would allow them to sneak past unawares even if they went for it. Not enough conflict or explosions.

Hm, explosions. She eyed the watch towers that stood at intervals along the far edges of the camp. That might do the trick.

«I think I've got an idea, but we're going to need to get off this cliff and wait until dark.»

Malken eyed her glumly. «I'm going to get stuck with the baggage again, aren't I.»

Rachel patted his shoulder. «Cheer up! I'll be off doing my best to explode stuff.»

«I like where this is going already,» said Bafubani with a grin.

As a result, the next morning he found himself once more on a train, though admittedly this time heading along a much different set of tracks. And of course their party had grown by one. Guujin tucked himself into the corner of the train car as soon as they got on it, and was all but completely lost in the voluminous cloak that he was wearing. Xavier presumed he wore it to reduce the likelihood of attracting attention, although in the current heat the cloak attracted attention of a different sort. Xavier declined to ask him about it directly. He and Princess were still feeling pretty distrustful toward the robot.

One positive aspect of Guujin accompanying them was that Orion had evidently decided that he was part of the judging group with Guujin, and had left Xavier alone so far. Without Orion monopolizing his time, that meant Xavier was actually able to spend time with Yukio and Sumiko. Yukio, in particular, had avoided Orion like a cat avoids water on their previous train trip.

Another positive aspect of being officially funded by the Society—and heading east along a larger rail line—was that the train car was much more comfortable than most of their accommodations on their initial trip to Takaharu. Where those trains were mostly intended for freight, with passengers largely an afterthought, this line was intended solely for passengers. It wasn't exactly a sleeper car from his old world, but at least sleeping in these seats was unlikely to give him splinters.

Xavier settled in for the long haul.

Three days later, Xavier and everyone except for possibly Guujin was going completely stir crazy and they boiled out of the train doors like—well, honestly, what came to mind were those horrible centipedes, but Xavier wasn't going there. No way, no how.

Guujin walked off rather more casually and leaned against a nearby pillar while Yukio chased Xavier around in a circle and Kahina did something to her back that made a sound like a rapid-fire gunshot. Even Orion was walking briskly about the platform, luggage abandoned near the station wall.

At long last everyone got over their burst of hyperactivity, and the six headed out of town. Through some mysterious means, Guujin had managed to get word ahead of them and there was a wagon with a driver waiting. Xavier was not looking forward to a conveyance even more uncomfortable than a train, and the creature pulling the thing appeared to be a bog-standard horse, to boot, instead of something fancy like a giant lizard or miniature dragon. He supposed it beat having to haul his gear, though, and since the interior of the wagon was partially covered, Princess was able to finally stretch her roots without needing to worry about the driver spotting her. That certainly made her happy; although Xavier had been able to track down a bag that hung off his shoulder and provide her a bit more room, she still hated being cooped up inside "dead animal hide."

While Princess had her own little romping session, Xavier focused on his companions. «So, Guujin-san, what will we be doing once we reach this Sundlin encampment?»

«That will be for you to plan and execute, and me to observe.»

Lovely. Xavier had been holding out some small hope that Guujin would finally break his days-long silence about the exact nature of their mission, but evidently not. «Can you at least tell us a little more about what we're looking for?»

«I have already outlined this for you. Your goal is to determine the purpose of the Sundlin encampment past Sanzumachi. How you go about doing so is up to you.»

So much for help from on high. Xavier looked around at his other companions. «Any ideas?»

«We should find a wayhouse as soon as we can in Sanzumachi,» said Sumiko. «That will get us off the streets, although not ahead of the gossip. Yukio and I are best suited to digging up the rumors about the purpose of the encampment. It is impossible that a large presence of Sundas nearby will not have made itself known in Sanzumachi in some way or another.»

«I could feel out who is hiring mercenaries, and why,» rumbled Kahina. «You would probably be most useful with me, Zabi-san. A human tagging along with the bakuhito is likely to make it more difficult for them to get straight answers. Though at least one of them is unlikely to get any straight answers either way.» She gave Yukio a nod.

Yukio shrugged. «Not a problem. As long as I don't run into any other cats, I'll be fine. And people will tell me different things than they would Sumiko, anyway.»

Xavier wanted to ask what would happen if he did run into any other cats, but supposed this was not the time. «So once we've gathered a bit of intelligence?»

Yukio grinned. «We meet back at the wayhouse and figure out if we need to flee into the desert or not! And then we can make actual plans for infiltrating or observing the encampment.»

«Flee into the desert?»

Sumiko nodded. «An army that close is going to put a lot of pressure on the town. It's very likely that there will be some who would inform the Sundas about any strangers poking around after them. Given Sanzumachi's close ties with the Confederacy, that's not a huge risk, but if there are people who are too interested in us, we may need to be careful about staying in one place for too long. For that reason, Guujin-san, I would like to request you remain in the Wayhouse. You would be a dangerous sort of novelty for a bakuhito town under threat from the Sundas.»

Guujin nodded. «Of course. Orion and I will ensure the safety of your belongings and lodgings while you are out.»

Sumiko bowed slightly.

"Well!" remarked Princess, who had finally quit scurrying around and curled around Xavier's ankle—he barely noticed the vine she kept in contact with is head snaking up and around his side anymore. "This certainly sounds like loads of fun! And I expect I'll be trapped in that damn cow sack, hm? Just wonderful."

When they'd finished eating, Kahina led them back to their rooms where Xavier spent a restless night.

The next morning, after being invited by Hinata to break their fast in the same guest room they had eaten the previous evening, he led them to the room they originally encountered Guujin where they found the sentient artifact waiting. This time, however, some drapes had been tastefully pulled across the displayed weapons, and a selection of chairs were provided in a semi-circle. Kahina was there, as well, occupying a larger-than-typical chair to Guujin's right.

«Welcome,» said Guujin. «Please, take a seat. The senior members of this chapter house and I have debated your admittance. We have decided to offer you some temporary benefits of membership, but require a further test prior to extending full acceptance. As we have been unable to reach consensus on an acceptable method of testing within the bounds of the chapter house, we have opted for the atypical step of combining your first field mission with your final admittance test.»

«What does that mean?» asked Yukio. «What's a field mission?»

«Under normal circumstances, members of the Society for Progress are vetted over an extended period of time. Once they are admitted to the Society, they typically are sent on a field mission within the first year or two, often to other chapter houses. This encourages building wider bonds across the society, helps broaden views constrained by past geography, and serves as a further evaluation for which members are most suited to long-term field work as opposed to internal research. Based on the feedback from Orion and Kahina, you are uniquely suited to fulfilling a field mission for which we were only recently contracted, which will serve also as your final admittance evaluation.»

«What does this field mission involve?» asked Xavier. «And who will be coming with us?»

«To answer your second question first, Orion, Kahina, and myself will accompany you, although I will mainly be present in an advisory capacity.»

Princess grumbled something unintelligible, shifted on Xavier's shoulder, then subsided.

«The mission itself involves traveling east to an area just within the border of the Tachigare Desert, past the bakuhito trading post at Sanzumachi. A semi-permanent Sundlin encampment has been established there, and numerous interested parties have approached the Society in an effort to lease our services to determine the exact purpose of this staging ground. Additionally, we have numerous parties within the Society itself who wish to investigate the nima readings that indicate activity on the part of one of the great kami. Given some abnormalities surrounding Zabi's abilities and relationship to this mononoke, we wonder if he may be uniquely suited to those aspects of the investigation.»

Everyone tensed up at that. Xavier felt like kind of an idiot, but… «What is this greater kami?»

Guujin tilted its head. «Kahina tells me you have encountered lesser kami several times. The centipedes you fought when fleeing the Tachigare, for instance.»

«I thought those were youkai?»

«An inaccurate term. Youkai is merely a synonym for kami with a human value judgement attached. Useless for scientific discourse. Nima manipulation falls into two broad categories: channelers take nima into their bodies and manipulate it directly to various effect, often changing their physical makeup. The bakuhito are almost universally channelers, and Kahina's size is the result of ancient, permanent channeling techniques now lost. Artificers manipulate nima using external tools. A kami is a channeler that has greatly exceeded its normal capacity for holding nima, to the point that it is no longer recognizably the same creature. A greater kami holds several orders of magnitude more nima than other kami, and is incredibly dangerous.»

«You remember, Zabi-kun,» rumbled Kahina. «Orion met us because he was looking for me due to a widespread recall of Society members thanks to the movements we had detected being made by the Great Worm.»

That's right, Xavier did vaguely recall Orion-san saying something along those lines.

Guujin nodded. «Indeed. The 'Great Worm', as it is colloquially called, is an exceptionally old greater kami that many believed to have died or grown quiescent many years ago. When we detected that it was moving toward the Tachigare there was a great deal of worry.»

«And I can help with this why?»

«Scholars generally believe that mononoke—such as the one on your shoulder—are intimately related to an extinct greater kami known as Yggdrasil.»

«Oh, yes, that's true. Princess says she is something like a child of Yggdrasil.»

Guujin leaned forward. «Fascinating. The creature lived that long ago? The historians will pay anything for access to you.»

«Uh...»

Evidently noticing Xavier's distress, Guujin sat back. «In any case, you may be uniquely suited to any attempt to communicate or derive meaning from the greater kami's actions, in the unlikely event arise that we run into it. If nothing else, this mononoke could perhaps grant us insight into its movements, should need arise. This is a very unlikely scenario, you understand. We have not had any readings to indicate movement on the part of the greater kami in nearly a month. I merely mention it for completeness sake.»

«And if we do this, we will be accepted into the Society?» asked Sumiko quietly.

«Pending a review of your performance on the mission, yes.»

«May we talk about it? Maybe with Kahina present for the first part so we can ask her questions?» asked Xavier.

«Of course. I will give you the day to consider this, and we will meet again in the evening after you feed.» The artifact stood, nodded to them, and exited the room.

It presumably did not need to "feed" in quite the same way.

Looking right, he discovered that the next door down had been cracked open and Sumiko's head was poking out in a mirror to his own. She grinned as their eyes met. «I see I'm not the only one who is curious about what sort of trouble we've landed ourselves in.»

Xavier stepped into the hallway with a rueful smile. «Yeah, I was thinking about exploring a little. I'm not a huge fan of just sitting around waiting for someone to decide my fate.»

The door across the hall flew open, and Yukio bounded out. «Hey, what's going on? Is that Sumiko-san I hear? Oh hey, Zabi-kun!»

«We were considering doing a little exploring,» said Sumiko. «You want to join us?»

Yukio frowned. «I don't know, guys, I don't think we should.»

Xavier and Sumiko both stared at Yukio, non-plussed. «Uh, Yukio-san?» said Xavier. «You are Yukio-san, right? You're not feeling sick or anything?»

«You're hilarious,» grumbled Yukio. «Look, I was the last one who got called out for single combat against that crazy mobile artifact, and Kahina-san and I had a few moments alone beforehand. She explicitly warned me to follow any instructions I was given to the letter today. I get the feeling that curiosity is highly desired once you're part of the Society, but they're not too forgiving of outsiders snooping into their business.»

«Hmm,» said Xavier. That was problematic. A direct injunction against exploring from Kahina changed the potential risk versus reward a lot. On the one hand, he was tempted to do it anyway; the random coincidence that lead to him learning about it smacked of manga narrative. On the other, this wasn't his home with a supportive family to back him up and protect him from the consequences of his mistakes. «Damn it. Well, do you two want to talk in one of our rooms, at least? I really don't feel like sitting around staring at a wall until dinner.»

«Now that I can do!»

«What, you? Talk?» said Sumiko in mock shock.

Yukio grumbled good-naturedly and herded them all back into Xavier's room.

«Alright, spill it,» said Xavier once they were seated in a loose semi-circle on the floor, the bed being the only other real seating in the space. «What was up with Guujin-san? I didn't know that sort of thing was even possible.»

Yukio held up his hands. «Don't look at me! I just about had a heart attack when I walked through the door and that thing attacked me. I have no idea what it is.»

«I think I'd heard about it before,» said Sumiko softly. «This was many years ago, but my family's trade route took us near the Confederacy every few years, and there were some crazy rumors about a living artifact that looked like a human which I'm guessing were about Guujin-sama. I didn't take it very seriously at the time, but now I wonder how much of what we were told was true.»

«Well, don't hold out on us!» exclaimed Yukio. «What were the rumors?»

Sumiko looked apologetic. «I honestly don't remember very much; I was very. I think the story was something like an eccentric genius in Sunda had invented a living artifact, but it went on a rampage, killed its creator, and fled to the Confederacy.»

Yukio stared at her in clear disappointment. «That's it? Come on, that's way too vague. I get you heard this as a kid, but they didn't have any good stories about it? There's no way.»

Sumiko shrugged. «None of the other Araiguma Traders thought it was anything but a tall tale. And we never dealt much in artifacts, so it's not like it had anything to do with us.»

Yukio sighed. «You usually tell such good stories, Sumiko-san, but you clearly lack a poet's soul.»

«Well excuse me, most poetic of cats,» teased Sumiko back.

Xavier frowned, though not at Yukio and Sumiko's back and forth. «So you don't think there could be other artifacts like Guujin-san?»

«Well, that was the one thing that my family really cared about, actually,» said Sumiko. «The follow-up to the story was that a few months afterward when one of the surviving assistants tried to recreate his late master's masterwork, he was found dead in his lab, with the artifact he'd been working on completely destroyed, and his notes destroyed or missing. Word was there were enough similar instances that it was risky even to trade certain materials that the original inventor had been making extensive use of. I forget what the components were—I was too young to really care at the time—but I do remember some of the adults taking it seriously.»

«Agh, see there you go again! The proper way to tell that would be more like: several of the genius's assistants tried to recreate their master's accomplishment, but each time they were found dead in their labs, their creations in pieces around them. And every time the original artifact would be missing for several weeks to a month at a time right around when—»

Sumiko interrupted him with a lightning-fast smack upside the head, and Yukio fell back laughing.

Xavier privately wondered how far off the mark Yukio had been, though. Having a high-placed individual with a murderous hidden agenda would certainly be a classic manga plotline…not that it mattered much to him at the moment. He'd have to chalk this one down to foreshadowing, and point it out to Princess the next time they were alone.

«Did Guujin-san fight both of you?» Xavier asked. «He attacked me as soon as I walked through the door, although thankfully the practice I've been doing with Princess allowed me to stop him pretty quick. We were halfway convinced he was going to try and kill us regardless afterward, though. He said some stuff about us being a threat to him that was kind of disturbing.»

«Yeah, he attacked me straight in the door, too,» said Yukio. «Kind of freaked me out, honestly. I sure wasn't expecting to face some sort of golem or whatever he is, so I froze up for a few seconds. Dodged his first swing, though, and managed to get my hands on a spear that let me keep him off me after that. We traded a few blows back and forth, then he sped up, disarmed me, and sent me on my way. Freakiest thing that's happened to me in a long while. What about you, Sumiko-san?»

«He tried to attack me, as well.»

Xavier blinked. «Tried?»

Sumiko shrugged. «I avoided him, and once I'd maneuvered him into a position from which I could successfully escape out the door I'd come in he stopped attacking.»

Yukio gave Sumiko a hard look. «You were absolutely wasted in that wayhouse, Sumiko-san.»

Sumiko merely smiled at him without offering a rejoinder.

«So what did Guujin-san say to you two? Did he let you into the Society?»

Yukio-san shook his head. «No such luck. Said he'd need to consider things.»

«The same for me.»

«Huh, I got the same spiel. I wonder if that's just part of his standard test procedure.»

Yukio nodded. «It's possible. That might explain why Kahina-san decided to warn me against exploring.»

Sumiko gave him a wry look. «Or she just knows you.»

«Hey! Who was it who tried to sneak off and get themselves into trouble, huh? You two are just lucky I have good hearing and caught you yakking out there in the hall.»

Xavier laughed. It was good to finally be able to talk with his two friends in private again. He wasn't sure why he felt more at home with the bakuhito than with many of the actual humans he'd run into, but despite the current uncertainty of what would happen to them all just having them here in his room with him was making his anxiety subside.

Although come to think of it, the main character relying more on demi-humans than humans was pretty damn common in isekai. Shit, he'd absolutely fallen into that trope head-first.

As soon as the door was shut behind him, Xavier flung his pack down in a corner and collapsed on the bed, Princess crawling off his shoulder to sit nearby. It was possibly the first time he'd been alone—to the extent that he was ever alone, given Princess's insistence on being in physical contact at all times—in over a month.

"What the hell is up with this place?"

He'd meant it rhetorically—he was talking to himself—but Princess answered. "It is certainly not what I expected. I would not have believed an artifact could gain sentience if I hadn't seen it myself, much less lead a group of non-artificial beings."

Xavier flopped his head over to look at Princess. "I was more talking about the whole 'trial by combat' thing, but yeah finding a robot in charge was unexpected."

Princess tilted her flower. "Robot?"

"Uh, machine? Artificial human?"

"These must be concepts from your original reality."

"Yeah, sorry. Anyway, I'm really curious if there are other creatures like this Guujin-san running around. Or is he unique? I thought I had a bead on the genre when I ran into a cat person, but maybe we're in for a robot uprising?"

"Ah, right, your assertion that we are characters manipulated by an external agency. Any predictions about where the Society for Progress will fit into this plot?"

Xavier threw his arm over his eyes and addressed the colored lights that danced on the insides of his eyelids. "I don't know. I feel like I've wandered off the edge of the isekai map. I would have expected to get thrust into some sort of national-level emergency at this point, but maybe we avoided that when we fled the Sundlin army? Then again, it would be pretty classic isekai to have an initial brush with an evil army of some sort, then run into them again after regrouping and gaining abilities…which, I guess I kind of have. Huh. That's not so good."

Xavier sat up and scooted so he was leaning up against the wall that ran along the far edge of the bed. Princess had her flower pointed his way again, watching him, he supposed, through whatever senses she used. He'd never been able to get a coherent description of how she experienced the world. "So you expect a large-scale conflict to break out in the near future. Fair enough. What about short-term? What will happen with this audition?"

Xavier shrugged. "Like I said, I don't really have a lot to work with. I didn't get any over-powered abilities when I was sent to this world, which means I have a lot fewer stories to draw on for figuring out tropes. Also, I'm not sure to what extent I've been able to force the genre to shift by avoiding some of the obvious conflicts."

"Well, put it another way, then: what do you want to happen? And will you get what you want?"

"I want to have Guujin-san accept us into the Society for Progress so that I can maybe get some actual work done figuring out how to get home. But now that I think about it…shit, that's not going to happen that easily, is it?"

"Why not?"

"It's too convenient. There's two main paths isekai characters walk: either they get tossed into big conflicts they don't understand, and through shared adversity and being total ass-kickers come to appreciate their new life more than their old one, or they leave the world to its devices, settle down, and slice-of-life it up until they're so attached to their new life, neighbors, love interest, or what-have-you that they don't really want to go home. There's some variation, I suppose, but the important thing is that right when they arrive in the new world and have the highest likely motivation to find a way out, they don't have any good chance to look for one."

"And you think it's too early for you."

"It's definitely too early." Xavier looked away. "I'm homesick every day. There's no way that Guujin-san will simply let us in."

Princess crawled up into Xavier's lap and leaned up against his stomach. It wasn't as nice as having a cat curl up in his lap, but he supposed it would do. He gently ruffled some of her outer leaves. "So you're predicting Guujin-san will not simply allow us to stay. Noted. I am still not fully convinced about the idea of some predictable plot driving our lives, but your accuracy so far has been unexpectedly high. What will we do, then?"

Xavier smiled. "We" indeed. "I think we still need the help of the Society for Progress, so we'll have to see what Guujin-san says. I'm guessing there will be at least one more trial before they'll actually throw any resources behind us, though, so we'll have to play that by ear. If we're lucky, whatever it is will allow us to stay in the chapter house, since we can at least get a feeling for the people and resources here in that case. On the plus side, it didn't sound like he was going to do any more trials by combat, though I suppose you never know. We'll just have to rise to the challenge, I guess." Xavier sighed. He was getting sick of rising to the challenge.

"Well, whatever comes, at least being on edge like this means that it's safer for me on your shoulder than in that damn sack!"

Xavier laughed. "Always looking on the bright side, huh?"

"You know it! So, are we actually going to laze around in this room, or does your narrative allow you to explore?"

"That's—a really good question. I can't really think of any applicable tropes, but curiosity is almost always rewarded, far as I can recall."

"Well, then!" Princess clambered back up to Xavier's shoulder, and swung a vine toward the door. "After you."

The robot or golem or whatever it was simply adjusted its course. Xavier was really bad at split second movements in combat situations, evidently, and had dodged too early.

Then again, although the thing had taken him by surprise, this fight had been won as soon as he walked in the room and saw the absurd glow of nima flowing through the construct. As he sidestepped yet again in a futile effort to put space between him and the rapidly advancing mobile artifact, Xavier stretched out his hand, grabbed at the air in front of him, and pulled. He still didn't have a good way to describe the sensation, even after training at it with Princess for hours on their trip south. It was like there was a campfire a step or two ahead of him, but instead of huddling up close to it himself, he grabbed it with his mind.

The mechanical person skidded to a halt, throwing up an arm, and nima absolutely cascaded out of it, slamming into Xavier in such a torrent that he stumbled slightly. The thing's arm, suddenly devoid of nima, collapsed downward to hang uselessly at its side. Princess's vines quivered, but she made no move to lash out; the creature was still just outside of her strike zone.

«Enough,» said the machine person in a surprisingly expressive voice, raising its remaining hand palm outward. «This is clearly my loss. What a fascinating ability you possess.»

It stilled, eyes dilating slightly as its gaze tracked across Princess and Xavier.

«What are you?» asked Xavier, not rising from the partial crouch he'd fallen into as he stabilized his position. «Who are you? Why did you attack me?»

«I am Guujin. I am the leader of this chapter of the Society for Progress. I attack every potential entrant when I first meet them.»

«Why the hell would you do that?»

The thing—Guujin-sama, he supposed, based on what Kahina had said—cocked its head at him. «Organics tend to react on base instinct under threat. It is useful data, and provides me some insight into the unconscious thought processes underlying their more complex behavioral patterns. It also permits me to eliminate the occasional threat to myself.» It took a step forward.

"Tell him no closer!" snapped Princess, and Xavier reflexively dropped back into the crouch he'd been straightening out of.

«Stop there!»

Guujin stilled, glancing between Princess—who had never dropped her vines—and Xavier. «Is that creature infesting you?»

«No.» Given Princess's hostile attitude, Xavier was reticent to prove the point, however. «You can verify with Orion-san, Kahina-san, or either of my other companions. But she doesn't trust you, and I'm not sure I should, either.»

«Intelligent and with an accurate grasp of non-human psychology. More interesting still.» Guujin abruptly swiveled on its heel, walked across the room, and pulled a chair that Xavier had not previously noticed away from the wall, sitting down. «Come. Approach me as close as you are comfortable. You represent an existential threat to my well-being, but I will not attempt to terminate you.»

"What did he just say?" Xavier muttered.

"He believes we're a threat to his life, but he's not going to kill us."

Right. Because that certainly made him less nervous. "What do you think?"

Princess slowly lowered her vines, but instead of wrapping themselves up near her body as per usual, she draped them over Xavier's shoulders, clearly ready to move at a moment's notice. "I've never seen an artifact capable of speech. From a nima composition standpoint, that thing is drastically more complicated than a human. I haven't seen that sort of nima manipulation outside of the occasional kami. I am unsure if seeking help from the Society of Progress is worth the risk of staying near that thing, particularly since we are uniquely suited to destroy it."

"Do you think it can attack at range?"

"I am unsure what it can do. It was definitely not moving at full speed just now. Based on how the nima was flowing, maybe it could move twice as fast if it wanted?"

"Faster than you?"

"Possibly. I would prefer you stand out of arm's reach, but within range of my vines and with the arm of that chair between it and us."

"Understood." Xavier advanced, looping around slightly so that he was at Guujin's side with the arm of the chair between them. Guujin didn't move, except to turn its head to track him.

«Caution. Tactical thinking. Oral communication in a language I have no record of hearing before. Mental responses. Teamwork. Willingness to extend temporary trust in the face of potential threat.»

«You're still evaluating me?» said Xavier in surprise.

«I am constantly evaluating everything,» said Guujin.

«Why?»

Guujin cocked its head again. Xavier wasn't sure how to read into that. The complete lack of normal expressions or body language was making him jittery, though he thought the gesture was intended to convey interest or surprise. «I am what you might call a very advanced artifact. I do not have millennia of instinctual responses encoded in my basic behavior and thus must operate differently than organics.»

Shit, he'd been right about it being a robot. And based on the way it was interacting with him, it was a far more advanced robot than anything his reality had been able to create.

«So what's your conclusion about me? Are you willing to give me a place to live, help me out?»

«Our interaction has been inconclusive.» Guujin shifted and Princess tensed, but the robot simply settled back against the back of the chair. «Orion was right that you possess many traits which would benefit the Society, and which interest me personally. I am curious about your origin and the language you were speaking to the mononoke. However, I am personally not a threat to you. Orion failed to convey that, or I would have observed you under an alternate source of threat. I am not certain whether you represent long-term gain for the society or long-term danger to me. What are your plans, mononoke?»

"I go where Xavier goes," said Princess, and Xavier relayed that.

«Very well. I will interview your companions, deliberate with the senior members, and provide you further intelligence tomorrow.» Guujin made a slight humming sound, and Xavier saw the nima deep in his chest swirl against its normal current and do—something. He had no idea what.

«Please exit out the door you entered,» said Guujin. «I will remain here to allay your fears, and Hinata will show you to a guest room where you may rest and refresh yourself.»

Well, that wasn't quite as good as he'd hoped, but it was better than having the thing attack him again or throw him out on his ear. «Thank you.» It took a bit of an effort, but Xavier took a deep breath and turned his back on Guujin as he walked to the door at the far side of the room. Princess swiveled her stalk to keep the robot in sight the entire way, though, which made him feel better.

He really hoped he would get a chance to track down Kahina and interrogate her about this whole weird setup. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but the leader of the chapter house being a robot was definitely not it.

Kahina completely ignored the southern gate, leading them down the hill along the east side of the building. At the corner where the street on intersected with the street at the northern edge of the compound, there was a large staircase leading up to a pair of double doors underneath a tasteful sign covered in several symbols that Xavier found impossible to parse. Wonderful. Looked like the written language used pictographs similar to Japanese kanji characters, except these didn't look like any kanji that Xavier had ever learned; the lines were all wrong, for one thing. Kanji were often built from common smaller shapes, but this admittedly small sample had nothing in it that Xavier recognized. They almost looked more like overly-complicated Arabic characters than Japanese kanji.

"I don't suppose you can read?" he wondered under his breath to Princess.

"You know many plants that bother with writing stuff down?"

Yeah, that was about what he'd figured.

Kahina led the group up the stairs and into a small lobby. A young man stood behind a three-sided wraparound desk near the center of the room, with two doorways behind him; presumably entries into the hallways that stretched to the south and west from here. The walls were mostly obscured by drapes so deeply maroon they were almost black, although here and there were nooks with chairs or small benches. Two large windows filled with partially opaque decorative glass flanked the doors they entered; Xavier wasn't able to detect any images, though the leading and glass was arranged sort of like a stained-glass window without any stain.

«Kahina-san!» said the young man with evident warmth. «Welcome home.» His smile faded slightly as he took in her left arm, still lightly holding Xavier's hand. «I see your search was not entirely successful.»

«Not entirely,» agreed Kahina. «Though not a waste of time, either. Everyone, this is Hinata-san.»

«It is good to meet all of you,» said Hinata, bowing slightly to each of them. «Orion-san gave me a brief description. Zabi-san, Yukio-san, and Sumiko-san, correct? Wonderful. I know you just arrived, but Guujin-sama wishes to see you as soon as possible. If Yukio-san and Sumiko-san would please have a seat here, I will take Zabi-san to see Guujin-sama now. Kahina-san, would you be willing to wait here for a short while? I will fetch Chikao to help me when I return, but Guujin-sama was very insistent that we begin the interview process at once after he'd talked to Orion-san and I'm sure our bakuhito friends would prefer not to wait alone. Thank you. Now, Zabi-san, right this way.»

Xavier shot a panicked look at Yukio and Sumiko as Kahina let go of his hand and gave him a gentle push toward Hinata.

«Go on, Zabi-san,» she said. «You'll be fine.»

Right. Of course he would. Xavier tried desperately to work through his feelings of panic. Even though she'd warned them, he still was surprised by how fast things were moving now they'd finally arrived in Takaharu.

As he followed Hinata through the right-most door and down the hall, Xavier took a deep breath and forced himself to think about what Kahina had said. She'd all but flat-out told him this interview would involve combat, but he'd never gained any real proficiency with a weapon. Then again, Kahina knew that but was still oddly confident in him.

Hmm. Given the amount of artifact use he'd seen in the Confederacy so far, it was a good bet that most combat revolved around artifacts, similar to the way the Sundlin soldiers had almost exclusively attacked from range. And if that were the case, then he had a big advantage, which could explain why Kahina wasn't stressed about putting him in harm's way.

If that were indeed the case…Xavier slid one arm out and pulled his pack partway around to his front, then worked open the side pocket that Princess was currently crammed into. "Come on out, Princess. I think we're going to both need to be a bit more agile than we can manage with you in that pack."

The mononoke wasted no time, scurrying up Xavier's arm to his shoulder and luxuriantly stretching across the entirety of his upper back. "Aaaaaah, finally! Freedom!"

«Here we—» began Hinata, before cutting himself short as he did a double-take at the sight of Princess. «Ah…that is to say, we've arrived. If you'll just go through this door, I will await your results here. You may leave your pack with me, if you wish.»

«Thank you, I will.» Xavier handed the pack across and rolled his shoulders, making Princess clamp down more tightly. "Shall we, Princess?"

"Let's rock this thing."

He shook his head. He still hadn't figured out whether she really was using turns of phrase specific to his world, or if there was just some weird translation going on since she was technically communicating directly into his brain.

Before he had a chance to work himself back up into a panic, Xavier pulled the door open and walked in.

Inside was a plain room without the draperies on the walls that he'd become accustomed to in the foyer and hallway. The only furniture, such as it were, was a row of shelves and hooks along one wall from which dangled a number of melee weapons. Xavier noticed at least two swords, a medium-sized axe, and what he thought was a coiled whip on his quick inspection of the room. He didn't notice much beyond that however, because he was distracted by the robot.

Xavier stopped dead, the door behind him almost hitting him in the back as it swung closed. "That's a robot."

"A what?" asked Princess.

It was a robot. There was no question about it. It was humanoid, and slightly shorter than Xavier, with a body made out of some sort of matte, off-white, plastic-looking substance. Its limbs were slim, the joints showing exposed balls like an artist's manikin. In fact, the whole thing was vaguely reminiscent of the little manikins that Xavier had used in the one art class he took in middle school, although the proportions and sizes were off.

Its head was completely different, as well. While the shape was again reminiscent of a manikin, the robot had what appeared to be a working mouth and eyes, although no actual nose; just a protrusion that gave it a more human look without any actual holes in it. Its eyes were dark holes surrounded by interlocking plates like a camera shutter.

Xavier didn't have any more time to study the thing, however. Almost as soon as the door was shut, its head swiveled his way, the plates around its eyes tightening in focus, and then it was springing toward him with hands held out from its sides and fingers in a wedge shape that looked downright knife-like.

Unfortunately, he didn't have long to gawk at the more picturesque residential areas; their train pulled aside as it approached the city proper and circled into a more industrial area near a large river. A plethora of train tracks snaked hither and yon, while hulking warehouses and other large buildings without much ornamentation going for them spread out nearby.

What was odd was that everything was so clean. Xavier hadn't spent much time in similar areas in his hometown, but Alburn did have an industrial area that he'd driven through on occasion, and he recalled it being very grungy and smoggy. However, while the buildings weren't by any definition pristine, they looked more weather-worn than dirtied by coal or oil.

He assumed everything was powered by nima, though he was intensely curious how that actually functioned. Kahina didn't care, Yukio and Sumiko were as baffled as he was, and Orion went off into technical jargon when he asked that was so dense he only understood about one word in three. There had to be a way to store and extract nima from things other than the pumice-like rocks that they'd used in the desert to create heat, but that had resulted in the rock crumbling into sand or dust. Surely there had to be some sort of byproduct from converting nima into motion for such a large and heavy train. And was there someone up there channeling nima out of rocks or something and into a machine? How did that work exactly? Thanks to Princess's insistent tutelage on their trip through the desert he was getting pretty good at sensing nima when it was being manipulated around him, and he'd never witnessed anyone transfer much more than was required to heat up a blanket from one object to another. Orion never seemed to bother channeling nima at all; he relied on his various artifacts, but whatever was going on in them was too subtle for Xavier to make out.

He'd finally tried asking Princess, but she wasn't interested and freely admitted that she'd never had any curiosity over artifacts. She'd then grumbled strenuously about him keeping her bundled up in his pack. One of the first things he was going to need to do would be to find a proper bag or backpack for Princess, since Orion has warned him to absolutely never leave any of her exposed beyond what he needed to keep in physical contact. Evidently mononoke were so rare they were little more than legends to most people, but were incredibly desired by high powered channelers and artificers, making her a tempting target for theft. Knowing that such a theft would more than likely result in a dead or rampaging thief, Xavier took the warning to heart. Princess was not amused.

In any case, how nima was used to power large machinery was a mystery, and one he had a feeling he was going to need to figure out sooner rather than later. He was certain that moving between realities required quite a chunk of energy, and given his inability to work nima himself—aside from redirecting and consuming it, that is—he was definitely going to need the help of some serious artifacts to gain the nima necessary to return home.

Before he could worry about that, however, he needed to make it through an interview with the head of the Society for Progress's Takaharu chapter house. He'd been a little nervous when he'd learned that the first thing he would be doing after arriving would be interviewing with some muckety-muck, but things got a lot worse when they disembarked the train.

«Kahina-chan, take care of the animals and Zabi-kun, would you?» shouted Orion over their heads as they stepped out on the cramped excuse for a passenger platform that existed in this train yard. It was blindingly obvious that these trains were meant almost exclusively for freight rather than passengers. «I'll go ahead to the chapter house and make sure they're ready for us.»

«Yes, sir,» Kahina rumbled.

Once everyone had sorted themselves and their baggage out, Kahina herded them all away from the platform and into the surrounding street where she grabbed Xavier's hand—about halfway through the trip through the Tachigare her discomfort the nima imbalance in her small arm finally outweighed her nervousness over Princess and she'd started getting physical with Xavier once again every chance she got—and led the group down the dirt street. Xavier really, really missed cars, but didn't get much of a chance to wonder what sort of transportation was used in Takaharu because Kahina immediately started talking.

«I think Orion-sensei mentioned this already, but you will all need to undergo an admittance interview before you will be allowed the option of joining the Society for Progress. Even if you decide against joining, as long as you s—that is to say, you will be allowed a few days of lodging either way.»

"She just stopped herself from saying 'as long as you survive', right? I'm not mishearing because you've stuffed me in a damn sack, am I?"

Princess raised a good point. «Kahina-san, is this interview dangerous?»

«You'll do fine.»

That didn't answer the question. Or, well, actually it kind of did. Sumiko was giving Kahina a flat stare, though Yukio didn't seem particularly flustered.

«What aren't you telling us, Kahina-san?» asked Sumiko.

«Just—keep your wits about you. And you might want to make sure any weapons you're carrying aren't buried in your packs. Orion-sensei and I would love to give you a day to rest up, but the chair of our chapter is a bit…idiosyncratic. New arrivals always interview first thing without exception.» She raised her full size hand palm out. «I'm really sorry, but I can't tell you any details. I'll be in a lot of trouble if they know I even told you that much, but well…» She trailed off, and gave Xavier's hand a gentle squeeze.

He concentrated, and gave a gentle tug at the nima in her arm, briefly pulling it in faster than his typical passive draw. Kahina jumped. «I'm not totally helpless, you know.»

She smiled at him, and shrugged one shoulder.

Yukio sped up until he was walking even with the two, although he was now basically in the middle of the street. «Needing to fight for your life for a place to sleep? Sounds fun! Kind of makes me nostalgic, really.»

«Nostalgic?» said Xavier.

«That's right, you haven't met any other neko bakuhito, have you, Zabi-kun?» said Sumiko.

«He's not missing anything,» said Yukio, with a dismissive wave. «I'm the best.»

«Because you're the least likely to murder him in his sleep.»

«Don't worry, Zabi-kun,» chimed in Kahina. «The Takaharu chapter chair isn't a neko.»

«You three are doing nothing to put me at ease here,» Xavier noted.

Kahina gave his hand another squeeze. «You'll do great. Guujin-sama loves a novelty, and you certainly apply.»

"I feel better already," grumbled Princess.

It was also thanks to Orion that Xavier finally gained a bit more grounding in the world at large.

«Alright, boy,» said Orion from where he sat across from Xavier. The group had just emerged from a scraggly excuse for a forest that bordered the edge of the Tachigare and were currently riding a train into what Orion referred to as "civilized parts". Xavier wasn't sure how the thing operated—the whole thing looked a lot like an old-timey steam engine, except without a coal car, and no apparent smoke—and he wished he could be off exploring it with one of the bakuhito rather than getting grilled once again by Orion. «We're almost back to civilization, so let's make sure you aren't going to out yourself as a total yokel right off the bat. What are the Confederate States?»

Yeesh, they were starting really basic, then. Orion must be bored; he hadn't quizzed Xavier on this stuff since he'd first explained it way back on their second day of travel together.

«The Confederate States are a group of loosely affiliated states running primarily to the west and south of the Tachigare Desert, and are one of the two main political powers on the continent. They were formed around 150 years ago in response to a period of aggressive expansionism on the part of the Sundlin Empire, and although the original driving force was military in nature, the Confederacy has evolved into a legal bureaucracy that mediates between individual states, controls minting and distributing money, and oversees shared infrastructure.»

«Good,» grunted Orion. «Better retention than I'd expected, since I explained all that a month ago. Alright, what about the Society for Progress?»

«The Society is an organization not directly affiliated with any particular state or political power that is focused primarily on nima research. It's mercenary in nature, and obtains funding through research grants from various other individuals and institutions. Because the Society legally retains all rights to discoveries made on behalf of its clients barring a period of exclusivity, it is one of the most technologically advanced organizations on the continent and boasts political and military power to rival some states.»

«Good enough.» Orion shrugged, and seemed to lose interest. «You've got a decent memory, so go ahead and get back to your nima training or whatever.»

Xavier had been spending quite a bit of the trip training with Princess in order to enhance his awareness of nima and ability to manipulate it, but at the moment he was much more interested in staring out of the window as Sumiko and Yukio had been doing since they first boarded.

The town where they had embarked hadn't been all that much different from any of the bakuhito towns they had traveled through. A little larger, a little more organized, and with a few more plants growing here and there, but by and large the only difference was that the population was almost entirely human. They'd been lucky enough to arrive only a day in advance of the train coming through, and at this point in its route the few passenger cars were almost entirely empty.

As they traveled west, however, both the land and the architecture in the towns they passed drastically changed. At this point, although the climate was still warm, he would never have guessed that they were a mere few hundred miles away from an incredibly harsh desert. Cultivated fields and orchards extended miles beyond every town they passed, with scrub-land and occasional woods interspersed between.

«The Confederacy is amazing,» said Sumiko softly. She was sitting next to Xavier, and looking out the same window where another large cultivated field was passing by. «So much water. I knew they were rich here, but I guess I never really understood how rich.»

«Rich? These provincials?» Orion snorted. «We've got a few hundred miles to go before we properly get out of the boonies.»

Sumiko ignored him, which Xavier had observed was her default approach when it came to Orion.

«What are your plans, now that you're here?» Xavier asked. He'd been wondering for some time what the bakuhito were planning to do now that they were out of the desert, but hadn't found a good opportunity beforehand to ask.

«I will see what this Society has to offer. But if that doesn't work out, I may make my way back this way.»

«What would you do in this area?» asked Xavier in surprise. «It seems pretty heavily agricultural.»

«Haven't you noticed? There are bakuhito working many of these fields. I do not think this area of the Confederacy is quite so segregated as Orion-san has made it seem, and even if bakuhito are rare…well, I am skilled at running a hostel, and I imagine a large enough town should have an inn or similar where a bakuhito hostess would increase their custom.»

«That certainly sounds like an achievable goal. Though I admit, I'm hoping the Society is interested in hiring you. I would love to have some friendly faces beyond Kahina-san and Orion-san.» Xavier looked down the car where Yukio and Kahina were seated near the entrance. They had learned early on that leaving Orion and Yukio in close proximity was a recipe for disaster. «I wonder what Yukio-san's plans are.»

«Yukio?» Sumiko laughed quietly. «He's probably asking Kahina where the best fighting rings are.»

«Fighting rings,» muttered Orion. «Barbarian animals.»

Xavier just smiled. «That sounds about right.»

Outside, the train banked into a turn and the fields opened up to reveal a large township rushing their way.

Orion stared out the window glumly. «I swear this train ride was faster when I was going the other direction.»

«Speaking of Yukio-san, I think I'll go see how he and Kahina-san are doing,» said Xavier. Orion had certainly been a fount of information, and had made their trip immeasurably simpler thanks to the power of money…but he drove Xavier nuts.

As they limped along, Rachel's shoulder wedged under Bafubani's good arm, Bafubani spoke up. «I don't understand you. You're the world snake, right? Why are you begging me for help? You could have left me with the Sundas and just eaten anything that got in your way.»

Rachel pondered for the space of a few steps. Aside from when they first met, this might have been the first time Bafubani had actually started a conversation with her, and she didn't want to waste it.

«I'm not the world snake. I just…have the world snake inside of me. He can save my life in a pinch, but our connection is a little more tenuous than you seem to think. We're both still new to this relationship, so drawing on Sedge—the snake's help too often puts us both at risk. He's only able to stay here away from the core of the world because of me, and obviously I don't want to permanently turn into a giant snake, so it's in both our interests to lay low.»

Is sharing this with the prey wise? interrupted Sedgewick.

Trust goes both ways; given how hostile she's been since you stopped her from flattening us when we first met, I suspect showing a little vulnerability will make her more likely to help us.

Bafubani grunted, though Rachel had a hard time interpreting what that meant exactly. Maybe she'd jarred her injured arm. «What is it you're after, anyway? You said you were looking for someone, right?»

«Yes. This may be a little hard to believe, but I'm not actually from this world. My friend was pulled into your world, and I followed to bring him back.»

«Like I'd have trouble believing any crazy thing you say,» Bafubani grumbled. «You swallowed the world snake. You think that sort of thing has ever happened before? Great kami like that are beyond natural disasters. They either ignore you, or you die. You don't eat them.»

«Well. I didn't have a lot of options at the time.»

Bafubani snorted. «If you say so.»

Rachel let the conversation lapse as she scanned the horizon and adjusted their path to take them a little closer to Henka. She wasn't actually sure where Malken might be, but she figured they would need to get closer for Sedgewick to detect him. Once she was happy with their course, she turned her focus back to Bafubani.

«What about you? What is it you want, Bafubani?»

Bafubani eyed her. «That's asking a lot.»

«You don't have to tell me your life story. I just want to know what it is you're living for. I want your help because it will make it easier for me to get through the desert and find my friend, and because I thought it would be a total waste of your talents to see you commit suicide by army.»

Bafubani grunted again. «Suicide by army. Well, maybe that's not wholly off the mark.»

She fell silent, and Rachel kept her peace. Unlike most of their previous interactions, it didn't seem like Bafubani was silent because she wanted to shut her out this time.

«I want to kill as many Sundas as I can reach with my hammer,» she finally said quietly. «And I guess I did that, thanks to you and the world snake. But here you are, dragging me out of a cage and away from long term imprisonment or execution, and my hammer…I don't know. What do you want from me, anyway?» She practically snarled the last question. There was the Bafubani Rachel knew.

«I don't know what your story is, and you're under no obligation to tell it to me. But back where I come from, I never really had a family. I was constantly getting passed between more and more distant relations. It wasn't a hard life, especially compared to trying to get by in this damn desert, but I think to stay anchored people have to be needed by others. When you don't have anyone who needs you, it's so easy to just—drift off in unhealthy directions.» Rachel stopped walking, and turned her head to Bafubani. «I need you, Bafubani. I need your help finding someone who I need in my life. And maybe once you've done that you'll have a chance to go find whoever it is that you need. Or if that turns out to be heading back here to kill off more Sundas…well, at least you'll have decided on that with a cooler head.»

Bafubani had averted her gaze, and looked extremely uncomfortable. «Fine, okay. I already said I'd help you out. Can we get moving, maybe?»

«Yes, we should. It's about time we made our way back to Henka so I can see about finding Malken. I really hope he was able to find a well. And avoid getting killed.»

The two lapsed into silence as they drew closer to the edge of Henka. Following Sedgewick's instructions, Rachel left Bafubani in one of the near-ruined buildings and took a quick walk through the edge of the town to try and cross paths with Malken.

Stop, said Sedgewick after Rachel had wended her way around several. The ramshackle way in which buildings were laid out made it really difficult to keep an even distance from the desert.

Rachel came to a stop, and turned slowly in place. There, ahead and to the right, Sedgewick directed, and when Rachel investigated the building he'd directed her to she found a shivering and disheveled Malken inside.

«Finally!» he grumbled. «I see you didn't find the rabbit. Well, at least I managed to get water, although let me tell you—»

Rachel cut in before he could really get going. «Actually, I did find Bafubani. She's holed up in a house a little way west. Do you think we should sleep through some of the day?»

«As much as I hate to say it, no. No I do not. I was almost caught three times by those damn animals, and I overheard a pair saying the last time they'd wait until light to track me down. I really don't think we should stick around any longer than possible.»

«Damn. I was afraid of that.» Sedgewick, are you doing something to keep me alert? I don't feel nearly as exhausted as I should after staying up all night, but these two are dead on their feet.

I am passively cycling your nima to allow you to function for slightly longer without sleep, yes. I do not believe we could safely help your human or rabbit friends, unfortunately.

«We'll just have to push through,» said Rachel. «Here, give me most of the water. I'm feeling a lot better than you at the moment, and if what you overheard is right, we need to get out of here as soon as we can.»

Malken climbed to his feet and began redistributing the canteens and jugs in and attached to his pack. «Very well. I have another few hours in me.»

«You're not the one I'm most worried about,» Rachel muttered.

After redistributing Malken's load, the two tracked down Bafubani, woke her up from the doze she'd fallen into, and the three trudged off through the sand toward the valley that ran away from Henka to the south-west, the sky lightening behind them.

It also didn't hurt that many of them were carrying actual torches.

Rachel had worried she'd need to go crawling around or scaling sheer walls or something, but she just strolled along and kept her eyes up.

Things got a little bit trickier as she drew closer to the main Sundlin camp, because the whole thing was so packed with people and artifacts that it polluted the air around it with heat and light to the extent that individual sentries were more difficult to notice. Thankfully, Henka's slapdash layout of buildings made staying out of sight straight-forward. There simply weren't enough sight lines for the sentries to completely cover their border.

When she'd made it past the outer cordon, Rachel discovered the interior of the camp was going to be more difficult.

The bulk of the army was evidently camped out just outside of the south-western corner of town, although they were also making use of buildings within the town proper. It appeared the animal people had been trying to push the Sundlins out of the town completely, but with limited success. Mostly the clash seemed to have reduced a number of buildings to rubble without shifting the army much at all.

Rachel crouched in a partially destroyed building at the very inside edge of the area that looked to have suffered the most in the fighting and surveyed the camp beyond. While the bulk of the army appeared to be sleeping or bedding down in neatly arranged rows of tents, there were still soldiers and non-combatants up and about—mostly clearing bodies away to the south—in addition to the sentries and occasional patrol of soldiers who entered the camp from the town proper.

As she scanned the area, carefully creeping about the in the shadow of the half-destroyed house she was lurking in, she consulted with Sedgewick. Any ideas for locating Bafubani?

Try south. They are taking the dead in that direction, and I suspect they are more likely to house prisoners near corpses than soldiers.

That made a certain sort of sense. And of course if Bafubani hadn't survived the fight that was likely where she needed to start, regardless.

Rachel dashed from her hiding place to the next closest cover, quickly looked around for watching soldiers, and then hurried to the next, staying as low as she could. Sedgewick grumbled wordlessly, evidently disgusted with the human body's inability to properly slither.

She made it to the south-western edge of the town successfully, though progress slowed painfully as she got closer to the main bulk of the army and had to be more judicious about dodging the people carting corpses out. There was a large lit space just beyond the edge of town that was serving as a staging ground. Bodies were carried in, stripped of equipment and most of their outer clothes by a group of individuals wearing clothes vaguely similar to those Malken had worn when she first discovered him under his wagon, and then were dragged off on crude sledges constructed of fabric and rope into the darkness. Beyond the crude pavilion under which the corpse-looting was going on, Rachel caught sight of a number of large cages. Bingo. Now she just had to figure out how to get over there without being spotted.

In the end, she had to work her way south of the charnel pits the army had dug, slipping through the sentries to come up on the cages from the south-west. The area was simply too heavily trafficked.

By the time she took cover behind the outer cages, Rachel was getting worried about running out of time. It had taken the better part of two hours to creep around the southern edge of the camp, and she wasn't sure how much longer the darkness would last.

Fortunately, there weren't a lot of prisoners and no guards to speak of, and Rachel found Bafubani in one of the central cages after prowling through them for a few short minutes.

The rabbit woman was in pretty awful shape. Blood matted her hair, and the skin on her chest and stomach was red and irritated as if she'd suffered some sort of burn. Numerous small cuts were scabbing over on her legs, and her left arm was clutched tightly to her body with a rough cloth bandage tied around her fore-arm that was stained dark red. Rachel could see the edges of the cut it was securing, and it give how far it spanned her arm it had to be quite deep. Her hammer was nowhere in sight.

Rachel stood as high as she dared—the cages only came up approximately to her chest—and looked carefully around. The traffic of Sundlin soldiers clearing corpses had died down to nothing in the time she was circling their camp, and although it was a little hard to tell from the glow being thrown off by the prisoners scattered through the cages she didn't think there were any sentries nearby.

«Bafubani,» said Rachel quietly. When the rabbit woman didn't so much as stir, Rachel strained to reach through the bars of the cage and shook her leg. «Bafubani!» Still nothing.

One moment, said Sedgewick, and Rachel tried to relax as he briefly took control of her body, lifted one arm to the lock on the cage and sucked a bit of nima out, sending it spiraling through her body and into Bafubani. «Wake.»

The rabbit woman jolted in place, moaned, and her eyes fluttered open. She looked around in apparent confusion before her gaze locked onto Rachel. «Who's there?»

Oh, right. The only actual light was moonlight and residual glow from the main camp behind her and a few dying torches near where the army had been sorting corpses.

«Not so loud.» Rachel withdrew her arm, and Bafubani struggled to sit up, shoving herself up against the far side of the cage while she did.

«You! What are you doing here?»

«I came to find you, obviously. We need you, Bafubani. The other animal people are—not exactly friendly towards random humans in Sundlin uniforms.»

Bafubani shifted, suppressing a groan as she did so. «Bring me my hammer, and we can talk.»

Rachel's stomach sank. The deranged rabbit could barely move, and she clearly wanted nothing more than another shot at the Sundlin army. «I have no idea where it is, and there's no time!» Damn it, she still found Bafubani nearly impossible to read, and she didn't think debating about the rabbit's weapon was going to do either of them any favors. Time to try her only gambit. «Listen, Bafubani. I'm going to open this cage. I'm going to pull you out of it. And then you have a choice to make: will you come with me, help me find my way out of this damn desert, and live? Or will you go crawling after your hammer and die pointlessly trying to kill Sundlin soldiers?»

Bafubani opened her mouth, but Rachel cut her off. «Before you decide, though, I want you to answer me one question: what would Mani want you to do?»

Rachel held her breath. She had no idea who Mani was, but she remembered Bafubani mentioning the name when they first met, and she'd caught it again a couple of times when the rabbit woman grumbled things to herself on their trip across the desert. That was an awful lot of repetition for someone not present, and given Bafubani's fixation on killing Sundlin soldiers coupled with Malken talking around the fact that it sounded like the army had razed its way across the desert from the Sundlin empire…Rachel had some suppositions about what had probably happened to this Mani.

Bafubani froze, the muscles in her arms and legs suddenly standing out in sharp relief. «Damn it,» she whispered. «Damn it, damn it, damn it!» She crawled across the cage, and thrust her face up close to the bars. «You never mention Mani again! You know nothing! Damn it!»

Rachel watched her, trying her best to seem implacable.

«Fine!» snarled Bafubani. «Get me out of here, and I'll take you south. You and that damned Sunda! But first we find my damn hammer—»

«I already told you, I have no idea where it is, and anyway I can carry you, or I can carry your hammer.» She leaned forward, forehead gently coming to rest on her hand where she held to the bars as some of the stress bled out of her. «And the hammer can be replaced. You can't.»

«Damn it.» Bafubani sounded closer to crying than Rachel had ever witnessed.

Sedgewick? The lock?

As her hand moved of its own volition to the lock, ripping nima out and transferring it into the nearby sand as heat while the mechanism inside disintegrated into dust, Rachel looked back to Bafubani where she now slumped at the front of the cage. «Come out,» she said gently. «We have a long way to go yet.»

As they waited, Rachel pondered. Every indication she had come across so far was that Xavier had headed south. That meant traveling through quite a lot of country controlled by animal people. Unfortunately, from what Malken had said on their trip out of the Deadlands it sounded like the Sundlin army had razed its way up the easiest route from Henka to the south-western lands of the nearby Confederacy. Which in turn meant that a pair of humans was likely to find a lot of welcomes like the one she and Malken had just received on the streets of Henka.

That was a major problem. Sedgewick was leery of taking control of her body too often, and to be honest she wasn't a big fan of that idea, either. She hadn't been offered much chance to worry about it initially, but the idea of some sort of snake god controlling her was kind of freaking her out. In any case, relying on Sedgewick to force their way through a large amount of desert seemed like a great way to lose parts of herself she couldn't recover.

Any way she sliced it, they needed Bafubani. The rabbit woman was angry, ornery, and way too quick to go swinging her giant hammer around, but Rachel was certain she would prove a powerful deterrent to being randomly attacked by random animal people. She'd been thinking about how to get the rabbit woman to listen to her, going over everything she remembered her saying with a fine-tooth comb, and Rachel at least had an idea for how to make her listen. Assuming the woman was still alive and in a position Rachel could help her.

Sedgewick, thought Rachel. Do you think Bafubani is likely to survive her little attempted suicide-by-army just now?

Sedgewick was silent a moment, though Rachel felt him turning the thought over. From the little that I have observed her in combat, I would give her even odds. Against individuals such as those we fought, she would be a formidable opponent. Given enough numbers, and without a large external distraction such as ourselves, however…I doubt the rabbit would retreat when outmatched.

Even odds, huh? That was better than Rachel herself had assumed, though now she thought of it Bafubani did successfully fight her way out of the center of the Sundlin army when Sedgewick tossed her over toward the weapon they were readying on the top of that dune. It was possible Rachel's perception was skewed by how quickly Bafubani backed down when Sedgewick first asserted himself. With that in mind, and given that she was what Bill would have called a "named character"…yeah, Rachel was willing to bet Bafubani was alive. Alive, and definitely in trouble.

If I could get her to open up to us, I think Bafubani could make our trip south a lot smoother. Do you think we could sneak over where the Sundlin were fighting and look for her without needing to fight ourselves?

Sedgewick coiled uneasily. Perhaps. If we cooperate, hmmm. Yes, I think we could make that work. The human would slow us down, however.

Right, Malken. Where did he fit into the little narrative Rachel was trying to build? She already knew he wanted to accompany her to the Confederacy; they'd talked about that on the way to Henka. If nothing else, it would provide him with a land largely populated by humans in which to find a new life. So, she took him with her, he blew her cover, and they had a massive fight on their hands. She left him here…yeah, he'd be found for sure. She wasn't sure where things would go from there; maybe he'd end up coming to her aid when the soldiers mistook him for one of their own. Maybe he'd be imprisoned and in need of rescuing himself. It was a risk either way. And if she encouraged him to make his way through town and try to meet him on the other side…well, same risks, except that he might find water on the way, which was something she was unlikely to be in a good position to accomplish herself.

Rachel felt around until she encountered Malken, then slid up next to him so she could speak in as quiet a tone of voice as she could manage. «Malken, I'm going to see if I can find Bafubani. We need a beast person if we're going to get safely down the valley, and she's our best bet. Can you take the canteens and try to find a well, then meet us on the south side of Henka?»

«That is risky, but I will try.»

«Thanks.» Rachel patted his shoulder and moved back to her pack, finding the empty canteens and water jug she had been hefting with herself by feel and passing them to Malken as quietly as she could. Wait. This was a world without cell phones or GPS.

Sedgewick, how will we find Malken?

Place your hand on the human's arm again.

Rachel moved back over to Malken, doing as Sedgewick had asked. «I'll find you whether I locate Bafubani or not.»

«How?»

Sedgewick uncoiled slightly within her mind, and Rachel sensed the steady nima of Malken's upper arm shift and warp slightly. He sucked in a breath.

«What did you just do? That felt—strange.»

Sedgewick? «I—evidently marked you. It won't do any harm, and will dissipate within a day, but I'll be able to find you. That shoulder might be a little numb, though. Sorry.» Really? There are snakes who can track prey they've bitten based on their venom?

I have assimilated such before, yes.

And this isn't going to harm Malken?

Beyond a temporary localized numbness, no.

Good enough. She sensed more than saw Malken moving his arm about, and she could imagine the grimace on his face.

Alright, she couldn't think of anything else she needed to do to prepare, and the night was wasting. How are we going to do this, Sedgewick?

Hold still a moment, and I will adjust your senses. You humans are useless in the dark.

A few breaths later, and the darkness around her shimmered, flexed, and then broke. Although she couldn't tell for sure, Rachel was certain color had just fled her world. However, she could see the outlines of the walls, and Malken was shining brightly with one of those non-colors that she was certain were nima or heat. Or maybe a combination of both.

She looked directly at him, and Malken started then stilled. «I'm going. See you soon.»

«Ah, uh, yes. Good luck.»

Rachel turned and left, Malken's whispered words trailing after her. She was nervous, but whatever Sedgewick had done to her senses appeared to have drawn them closer together and his feelings of anticipation of a hunt were bleeding into her own emotions.

Luck? Who needed luck? She had a giant snake.

Rachel slid out the door of the building they'd sheltered in, and stalked into the night.

At this point, Rachel was wondering if perhaps she should simply bid the ornery woman good-bye in Henka, and good riddance.

Both Malken and Bafubani seemed to think that moment was fast approaching. They'd evidently gotten slightly lost—not surprising, given the complete lack of landmarks—and eventually had to fall back on following Sedgewick's guidance toward what he called the greatest locus of nima in the vicinity.

Rachel really hoped they weren't headed straight back into the arms of the Sundlin army, as she'd gleaned it was actually called through conversations with Malken.

She'd had a chance to chat with Sedgewick during the endless walking of the last few days, and the snake had urged her not to rely on his intervention, particularly when a little caution ahead of time could prevent them coming into conflict with armed soldiers. Rachel had told Malken she would like to avoid the army, to his whole-hearted agreement. Bafubani hadn't been interested in discussing it.

As the sun sank in the sky, a haze that had been sitting on the horizon ahead of them for some time at last resolved into a dilapidated line of buildings. It seemed they had reached Henka at last.

By unvoiced agreement, all three picked up the pace, slogging their way through the wending small dunes with renewed vigor. The sky had darkened considerably by the time they finally drew close enough to Henka to make out any details, and when they did, what greeted them was not promising.

The closer they had drawn to the town and the darker it had gotten, the more pronounced had grown a blue-white glow from somewhere within the town. As they drew close enough to the leading edge of houses to see the disrepair and in some cases utter ruin that afflicted the buildings, sounds of shouts, screams, and explosions made it to their ears.

They'd made it to Henka, but it seemed the Sundlin army—or at least some part of it—was there, as well.

As it became increasingly obvious that the noise from within Henka was due to fighting, Bafubani's ears perked up more and more. At last, she whipped herself around to face Rachel.

«Alright, I got you to Henka. Time to part ways, Miss Snake.» She was practically bouncing on the balls of her feet in her apparent eagerness to rush off towards the fighting.

«Ah, yeah,» said Rachel, feeling awkward and off-balance. «You're sure you don't want to keep traveling with us?» It would be undeniably useful to have someone native to the desert along. Malken had admitted his lack of knowledge of the animal-people's lands between here and the south himself.

«You feel like helping me kill off those Sundas?» Bafubani shot back.

«No. But—»

«Then that's all we have to say to one another.» Before Rachel could gather her thoughts, Bafubani gripped her hammer, crouched, and hurled herself through the air toward the border of the town.

"Shit!" said Rachel. What would a manga protagonist do here? Probably rush off into action after Bafubani, who was likely supposed to be some form of dere personality; Rachel could never bring herself to care enough to remember the various prefixes. Getting embroiled in the vendetta of a short-term companion without even knowing what the vendetta was about definitely sounded right for the various isekai she'd read at Bill's insistence.

But she doubted that would get her any closer to Xavier.

Malken timidly stepped closer. «What would you like to do?»

Rachel turned away from where Bafubani had disappeared into the town. «Come on, we need to get under cover. I have no interest in fighting your former compatriots today.»

The town seemed fairly deserted, the buildings in a poor state of repair even as they penetrated their way deeper in. Darkness continued to fall as Rachel and Malken carefully made their way from street to street, peering between houses before crossing any intersection. It was nerve-wracking, not least because the whole town was laid out so randomly that there were no proper roads. It was rare that Rachel could see more than the lengths of one or two buildings.

Knowing that there was active fighting, she would have preferred to avoid the town entirely, but they needed water. She only hoped they could find a well or similar that was unguarded.

They were passing by the doorway of yet another seemingly empty home, when a sudden, «Hsst!» made Rachel and Malken both jump. «This way, hurry! The Sundas don't patrol out here often, but they could be along at any moment!»

Rachel and Malken shared a glance, and then Rachel ducked through the door, stepping aside to avoid leaving a silhouette in the doorway. «Who—» she began, but was interrupted.

«No time! Just follow me, and stay quiet!»

The two slunk after the indistinct shape in the gloom, which lead them through a pair of rooms to the back of the house where a window had been enlarged enough to slip through. Outside, the figure stood on a ledge just outside the window and hoisted themselves onto the roof.

When Rachel and Malken followed, they found their mysterious benefactor maneuvering a wide board into place to cross to the roof of the next building over. Malken stepped forward to help, but with a grunt and a slight rush of nima through his arms and legs, the stranger swung the board to bridge the gap. He placed his hands at its base, holding it steady. «Go, go! I'll be across after you.»

The two carefully made their way across the board. It was nerve-wracking. The space between the buildings wasn't terribly large—just big enough to be impossible to jump—but the board still swayed and bent alarmingly. Rachel found herself crossing crouched down, practically on all fours.

Once Malken and Rachel were both across, the stranger retracted the board and stashed it, before leaping across the gap in a move reminiscent of Bafubani, right down to the powerful surge of nima Rachel could sense cycling through his legs.

«Right, next—» he said quietly, turning their way and stopping dead. The twilight was less deep on the roof out of the shadows of the buildings, and Rachel could see that their benefactor was another animal person; this one maybe part sheep? Or perhaps a goat, judging by the horns. His tone of voice completely changed, going hostile in an instant. «Wait, you're human.»

Off the roof. Now!

Rachel didn't bother trying to process what Sedgewick was sensing. She just turned, shoved Malken backward, sending him stumbling, grabbed the edge of the roof, rolled her legs over the edge, and dropped.

She landed hard and awkward, stumbling to the side and almost colliding with the wall of the building. There was a hiss of something slicing through the air above, and then Malken was tumbling backwards off the room, landing hard on his huge pack with a cry before rolling over and gasping for air. Rachel grabbed his shoulder, hauled him up through sheer adrenaline, and forced him to scurry down the street along with her.

Behind and above them, she heard the animal person curse, and soft thumps as he retreated across the roof away from them.

«Come on come on come on,» she muttered to Malken, who was stumbling along with difficulty. «We have to go!»

The two hurried between buildings in the dark, caution thrown to the wind as Rachel desperately tried to put distance between them and their erstwhile benefactor. She wasn't sure what it was she'd heard, but from what she could pick up from Sedgewick it had probably been some sort of weapon. Things were bad if she was going to get attacked simply for being human. Damn Bafubani for abandoning them, anyway.

Keeping an eye behind her, Rachel led the two towards the glow that seemed to be originating near the center of town. She was reasonably sure the Sundlin soldiers would attack on sight, as well, but given how invested the animal person had been in getting away from them, she figured they were less likely to be pursued in this direction.

After several twists and turns, and with the sound of fighting growing ever nearer, Rachel finally stopped in front of a seemingly-abandoned building. Sedgewick, you think anyone is inside?

One moment.

Briefly her vision twisted, as Sedgewick borrowed her senses, but it passed quickly.

I believe the building is empty.

Good enough. Rachel dragged Malken through the door, and shoved him down to the side before crouching down next to him.

«Malken, are you hurt?»

«No,» he murmured, out of breath. «At least, I don't think so. That akuma would have taken my head off if you hadn't pushed me, but I don't think I'm bleeding.»

«Good.» Rachel stood, and leaned over just far enough to peek out the small slit of a window that was nearby. Nothing was moving outside that she could see. «What do you say to staying here for a bit and trying to get through town once whatever fighting is going on over there dies down?»

«That seems sensical,» said Malken faintly.

Rachel forced herself away from the window. She was just as likely to give away their hiding place as she was to see anyone coming. «Let's move a little deeper inside, if you can.»

«I'm…alright.» Malken laboriously climbed to his feet. She couldn't be certain in the gloom, but Rachel thought his jacket was hanging strangely. He'd better not be lying about being injured.

Nothing she could do about that just at the moment, though. Frustration and fear coursing through her in roughly equal measure, Rachel led the way further into the darkness.