They began a brisk pace away from the fires, picking their path towards denser wetnds. Just when Otter was getting used to walking on ground that didn’t immediately give way and sink two or three inches into mud.

  “First no credit for my daring pn, and now no loot? Aw man, arson sucks in this game.”

  “I’ll credit you that your pn was very dumb.”

  “That’s what they all say. No one recognizes my genius.”

  “Probably for good reason. First thing, I’m calling Sami and asking her how she put up with you for so long.”

  “No, there will be no colboration between my ex and my current girlfriend, that’s just disgustingly unfair.”

  “Uh huh.”

  One of Rua’s hands moved in front of her face in a suspicious manner. As if she were accessing her menu. Otter’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “You’re calling her right now, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, Sami, yeah. I need some advice. How do I shut up your ex?”

  Otter couldn’t see the conversation window. Only Rua would be able to. But still, she could all but see the smug smile on Sami’s face in her imagination. Finally, she shut her mouth and walked in silence, trying to ignore the quiet conversation going on. She busied herself with the Cuttings’ heart she acquired, trying to pull it apart with her hands while juggling the woodcutter’s axe.

  She tossed away the remains and swallowed the crystal, and chose to boost more strength. Will just kept refusing to show up, which was what she wanted to gear towards. But also… how much Will did a mindless creature have? Would she end up with no boosted stat if she picked that? It was supposed to be 10% of what the enemy killed had. Ten percent of zero was zero.

  Strength: 16 (17)

  Agility: 11 (12)

  Tenacity: 14 (15)

  Allure: 10 (11)

  Will: 15 (15.5)

  Fortune: 11 (13)

  Awareness: 10 (11)

  How had her stats gotten so skewed? She was supposed to be a caster. She always pyed a caster. And now she was all beefy. Her highest stat was Strength. Her third-highest was Tenacity, a tanking stat. The hell was this hybrid build?

  All-rounders rarely worked in games. You needed to pick a path and keep to it, optimize and min-max towards an end goal. But the problem was, she had no idea what that was. Rua had mentioned that Pacts evolved with time. But there was no telling how they’d evolve.

  Right now, Otter was a mid-range caster/fighter hybrid. Not something she was really accustomed to. She’d been drilled enough by Sami to know how to actually fight with weapons, but not on how to use whips. I mean, really, who fought with whips? So impractical.

  What’s worse was, these were magic whips, responding more to what she thought than how she swung her arms. That was more her alley, but at the same time, not. It was like spending all your days writing poetry, and then being asked to write an essay using a citation system you’d never seen before.

  She was doing okay. It didn’t hurt that she had an instinctual knowledge on how to use her Pact. But it wasn’t the same as experience. It was like she’d seen instructional videos on how to ride a bike, but never done it herself before. She was staying alive so far, but what she needed was practice. A lot of it.

  She needed Sami.

  There was no one more capable of kicking her ass into shape, no one who knew how to cut through her bullshit and make her get to work. No one who understood discipline and how to apply it to the mess that was Otter. No, the mess that was Mayumi.

  But she really didn’t want to.

  To say nothing of the fact that she didn’t want to retread old ground and go back to Sami, even for something like this, was awkward. Sure, she’d been pying along with teaming with Sami and Everett, but if Otter was being perfectly honest with herself, she’d only been pying. She hadn’t meant to actually entangle herself into that world again. This pce, Fell Champions, was supposed to be a second chance. A whole new life that’d st a literal lifetime, courtesy of the time dition portion of the game’s equipment.

  Her mind fuzzed a little, thinking about it.

  Man, it was a good thing the chair they’d put her in was comfortable. At least Ashes2 had that going for them as a developer. Comfy chairs to go along with murder games.

  Yeah. Just focus on the memory of the comfy chair. And try to ignore the feel of mud, the general unpleasant cold of their surroundings, and definitely the low hum of conversation between Rua and Sami.

  This was punishment, Otter knew. She’d probably scared Rua, heading off into battle while sending her to safety. And also all the fgrant arson. And the fact that she had set Rua’s home on fire. Okay. Yeah. She deserved a little punishment.

  Why was she like this? Always acting, without thinking. It’s not that she was stupid. Quite the opposite. She was smart. She just… didn’t always use it.

  How often had acting without thinking hurt the others around her? Too many times to count. Sami was probably telling Rua that now. Which, fair. Rua had every right to know what she was getting into, where a retionship with Otter was concerned.

  Sunny looked back from her spot on Rua’s shoulders, and gave a small smile. Otter smiled back, but her heart just wasn’t in it.

  It wasn’t too long before they stopped for camp. The trek had been arduous, with Rua breaking off and handing Sunny to Otter to check to make sure they weren’t followed numerous times, but so far it’d been uneventful. When they did stop, Rua got to the business of preparing food for them. No campfire was to be lit, no signal to Ashborne of their location.

  “It’ll only be a matter of time before he finds us,” Rua said. “The fire has him preoccupied. Most of his attention will be on stopping that.”

  “So, I did good?” Otter asked.

  “No, but we can use it.” Rua carefully measured out small helpings of nuts and dried fruit between three tin cups, before handing them out. “We can rest for an hour, but then we have to be moving again.”

  “Can I have a story?” Sunny asked. “I want to hear about the Dark Raider again.”

  “That’s not his name,” Otter said. “But sure. We can go over the parts with just him.”

  “Doesn’t she know everything you know?” Rua asked. “Why does she need one of your histories?”

  “I don’t know everything, mama. Just… pieces. Small pieces. Like, I know how to ride a soo-meng, but not how to call one. But I know that part is important. Or how to mod a game in Steam, but not what Steam is.”

  Rua grunted, and settled down on a rock to snack down on her nuts, making an effort to both not look at them, and gre at Sunny at the same time.

  “Okay, my Sunny girl,” Otter said, “This is the story of how the Dark Raider stormed the rebels’ snowy fortress.”

  Otter gave an exaggerated account of the movie, pying up the vilin’s portions far more than they’d ever been depicted. Sunny listened with rapt attention, flinching backwards as Otter described the Raider’s sword made of red light and how he struck down the poor defenseless rebels, basking in the sound effects of his boured breathing through the mask he was forced to wear.

  “Can I have a cape like Raider’s?” Sunny asked.

  “We’ll discuss it when we get to the mainnd. And when you stop growing. You are going to stop growing soon, right?”

  “Probably!”

  Sunny voraciously went through her supply of nuts, and looked forlornly at Otter’s cup, which was still half-full. Otter gdly handed it over. She doubted it’d put a dent in the kid’s stomach. She was probably using more calories than she was consuming at her rate of growth. Unless Pact Magic was ignoring the need for that.

  Otter was just getting to the part where the Dark Raider hired the fiercest bounty hunters the gaxy had ever seen to chase down the surviving rebels, describing each in detail, when Rua made a noise.

  “Do all your histories sound so… fanciful?”

  “Well, no. It’s just a movie.”

  “What’s a ‘movie’?”

  “You know, like a story we make up, and show with captured pictures on a device called a…” Otter trailed off as she saw Rua’s expression change from general annoyance to a slow dawn of horror.

  “You haven’t.”

  “Haven’t what?” Otter asked.

  “You’ve… you’ve been telling her a story?” She said the word with obvious distaste. Which made sense, given she always used words like ‘tales’ and ‘fables’ as if they were swear words.

  Wait. Why did she do that?

  “Uh oh,” Sunny said. “You’re in trouble.”

  “We need to get off this isnd now,” Rua said. “Bad enough Ashborne is after us, but you’ve been crafting tales?”

  “Well, retelling, sure. Poorly. Some nerds would really be mad at me if they heard how bad of a job I was doing.”

  Rua threw her tin cup back into her backpack, and snatched the other two from Sunny. “Strangers. Wayfarers from another world. Someone save me… all of you don’t know, do you? It must be different where you’re from.”

  “What do you mean?” Otter asked.

  “You don’t have Dreamers. Of course. That’s it. You don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” Otter asked, feeling more annoyed than anything.

  “You’ve been telling stories in a Dreamer’s domain! You’ve given her something to dream about! An idea, not something real.”

  “And that’s…. Bad?”

  “How do you think something like Ashborne is made? He was once a tale, told by some idiot to another idiot who didn’t shut them up! You just made another Ashborne, but worse, you made this unstoppable evil killing machine Dark Raider thing that likes to cut down innocents with a mythic sword of light!”

  “Oh.” Yeah. Okay. That sounded bad. “Oops?”

  Rua made a frustrated noise, and hauled them to their feet. “New pn. We get out of here, now, and hope Ashborne and this Dark Raider kill each other.”

  “Well, I mean, Raider is smart, really smart, but I guess–”

  “No, no more talking about him. Anything you add to his story that you genuinely believe will only make the problem worse. It will make him more real, more dangerous. Just stop.”

  Otter wanted to say something. To protest her innocence, her ignorance. Instead, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t know. I’m mad, but mostly at myself.” Rua leaned forward, and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. “First you scare me by doing something stupid when you should’ve known better, and now you scare me by doing something catastrophically stupid that I should’ve known better to warn you about.”

  Otter gave Rua a grateful look, then bent down to pick up Sunny. They started through the swamp once more, a new scourge driving them forward.