“Challenged?” Alvin said, huffing along behind the others. “By solid objects?”

  “I think it means we’ll bash into them. Dragged through them,” Tom said. “And I think them is probably miles of stone in this case.”

  “The hole is our only chance,” Grace said. “Now stop talking and focus on running. It’s going to be close.”

  Keeping track of the exact passage of time was a tricky thing. There was a display of system universal time in one of normal status screens, but looking at it took away attention from running without bumping into the others. When the hole drew near again, Clayton had no idea how much time they had left. He just knew it wasn’t much.

  “Going in,” he yelled, trying to sound hopeful. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  He was in front. Being the brave one was his job. He dove, praying that the others would follow. For a bit, he found the hole was acting a lot like a normal hole should. It was an empty space. He fell through it. All was as expected.

  When he got to about the same point the rock had vanished, that changed. The air which had been rushing around him suddenly stopped moving, In the black, colors started to appear, swirling and mixing before resolving into a solid, static block of blue and white.

  Clayton’s senses were a bit scrambled from the experience, and though what he was looking at looked familiar enough it took another person’s voice to clue him into why.

  “Is that the sky?” Alvin asked. “I had almost forgotten what it looked like.”

  “I think it is.” Clayton’s hands dropped to his sides and gripped down on grass and soil. He had a sudden lurch in perception as he realized his own positioning was ninety degrees off from what he had expected. “Grace? Tom? Did you get through?”

  “We did. Although that’s a ride I’d rather not go on again.” Clayton heard a clank as Tom’s shield clinked his armor. “I hated every bit of that.”

  “We shouldn’t complain.” Grace groaned. “We’re alive. And supposedly, we should have some loot.”

  The loot. How could I have forgotten?

  Clayton snapped up into a sitting position and brought up his status screen, hitting the button for the loot drop as fast as he could. A small, nondescript crystal fell out of the air into his lap. It wasn’t the same as Grace’s amplification crystal, which was a good sign. The fact that he could read the description and didn’t have to hand the pointy, potentially spearhead shaped object to Alvin for inspection was a worse one. They had done very well on material drops, last time. He could have stood to see more of them.

  “No known uses? That’s some bullshit.” Clayton almost chucked the thing, then thought better of it. He handed it off to Alvin, who looked at it more thoughtfully. “Why give us something useless?”

  “No known uses is not quite the same thing as no uses at all.” Alvin turned the crystal over in his hands, looking at it from several angles. “I can think of a couple things that could make the description say that, besides actual uselessness.”

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  “Like?”

  “The worst case scenario is it has a use, and people have tried to find it, but despite the crystal being interesting, nobody could. That’s pretty hopeless for us. Grace is a good mage and I’m a good smith, but we aren’t legends. If this was a thing that had been around for a long time, legends would have eventually got around to trying to figure it out.”

  “Right. So it might have a use, but we’d never find it.” Grace nodded. “There are materials like that.”

  “What’s the second thing?” Tom reached out and grabbed the crystal. “I hope it’s better than that.”

  “The second thing would be if this was new. Not new to us, not new to the outside world. Generally new. If the system just invented it. Think about it. Have you ever heard of a Chronale?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t have anyways.” Clayton looked at their light mage, who was the most likely to know things of all of them. “Grace? Chronales?”

  “I’ve never seen them. Or read about them in any books. I’ve read a lot of books, so it’s at least possible that they’re new. Not that it means we would be able to discover a use for this, even so.”

  A sudden twinge told Clayton the time to talk about the crystal had passed. He stood and turned around, identifying the source of his intuition right away. In the distance, another party was approaching.

  “Heads up, guys. Store the crystal. Weapons at the ready, but don’t pull them.”

  “It’s other people?” Alvin tilted his head to the side. “Why is that dangerous?”

  “Because my skill tells me it is. There’s no law out here, Alvin. If they are stronger than us, there’s nothing keeping them from doing whatever they want.”

  The group held still and kept alert as the other party approached them. There was no question of hiding. The motion of the other group only made sense if they knew what they were headed towards, and at no point did they deviate from moving directly towards Clayton and his crew. The space they were in was also pretty open, if not the sprawling uniformity the prairie had been. There were trees and the terrain had some texture to it, but there were no obvious places to hide. Without any better options, they held their ground and hoped for the best.

  “Stay there. Hands off your weapons. Wait.”

  The man speaking was twice Clayton’s size and cobalt blue. After he finished speaking, his chain mailed arm swept down, dragging a huge war club down with it and embedding it in the soil. It was a clear threat. Behind him, the staff of the other party’s mage lit up with red energy, while the two other members brandished swords. Nobody else made an open show of force, but they didn’t need to. Their equipment made the threat for them.

  “Veterans. No chance,” Grace whispered. “Negotiate.”

  “Light burst?” Clayton asked.

  “No. That’s a shield mage.”

  Clayton didn’t know what a shield mage was, but he believed Grace when she implied they could nullify her all-out attack. Outside of her gear, the woman mage on the other side looked like she could have been a schoolteacher or a housewife. It wasn’t clear to Clayton how someone like her got there, but that didn’t make her or her group less of a threat. She stood still while one of the men with swords moved forward and examined them more closely.

  “Nothing good for armor. The spear is good, but we don’t use spears.” The man looked back at the other swordsman questioningly. “How are we doing on food?”

  “Still more than I want to store.”

  “That staff is good.” The mage pointed at Grace’s new weapon with a glint in her bespectacled eye. “It’s the best thing here.”

  “How good?” the big blue man asked. “Better than what you have?”

  “I can’t tell for sure. But I want it,” the mage said greedily.

  “That’s not a surprise, Deborah. You want everything.”

  The big man put his club on his shoulder. Clayton’s Fate Sense was screaming, but there was nothing he could do about it. It wasn’t hard to figure out what the man was thinking. If he decided it was worth the risk, or even just worth the trouble, they’d be dead.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Deborah, you’ll have to wait. You lot, I’m throwing you back into the river. Make sure you get big and strong. I don’t do it twice, and I want to see better loot next time we run into each other.”

  The team held their breath as Deborah turned and glared daggers in the blue man. Eventually, she sighed and shook her head. It wasn’t worth arguing about, it appeared. The two bored swordsmen and the mage turned to follow the blue man as Clayton and his group watched them move off. It was five minutes before they were truly out of sight in the distance and they were finally able to take a breath.

  “That was too close.” Grace shuddered. “That shield mage would have stopped everything I could do. No question. They are built to break builds like mine.”

  “We still could have fought. It might have…”

  “It wouldn’t, Clayton. I couldn’t block that big blue one,” Tom said. “I’m not sure what race he is, but I have a pretty good idea of the kinds of attacks I can stop. The first hit from his club would have sent me flying. Then it would be you and Alvin against three of them, and Alvin can’t fight. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Alvin looked contrite about the whole thing. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry. About taking a whole quarter of your party.”

  “We wouldn’t be any better off if you didn’t, Al.” Clayton clapped his shoulder. “We’d be worse off, in fact. These weapons are you, remember?”

  “Yeah, I guess. So what do we do, then? We need to survive groups like that somehow.”

  “We get stronger, fast. Make sure it’s not worth their while to fight with us, or that we can fight them off if they decide to.” Grace tapped the butt of her staff on the ground and leaned on it like a walking stick. “It’s the only way. And we have to do it before we have something worth stealing.”

  The group didn’t waste much time moving on, after that. Their direction of travel was clear. They wanted to be in exactly the opposite direction from where the other group had gone. They moved away at a brisk jog, eager to put miles between them and the people who had nearly killed them.

  If it wasn’t for all the imminent death, the place they found themselves would have seemed pretty nice. It was a healthy place filled with plants and water, intercut every few miles with a creek or river of some kind. Plants were growing everywhere, and fish were jumping from the water trying to get at bugs. It was the kind of place he expected someone would settle eventually, if it wasn’t slated for demolition the next time the magic of the far lands got bored.

  They walked for miles and miles before stopping to make camp for the night, selecting the top of a hill for the campsite. Alvin did his best to fortify the location with big blocks of stone, although any fortifications he put up would only be a minor inconvenience to any attackers. Once he was done, they sat in the dark eating rations that didn’t require cooking to consume, afraid to signal their location by lighting a fire.