We’d been excited about nothing. The ‘railgun’ wasn’t assembled, for ease of transport. Judging by the various parts, it also differed from the image I had in my head, that of a sleek two-pronged cannon mounted on a tripod. Instead it looked like any old modern tank gun, although the internals, supposedly the interesting bits, resembled particularly crude clockwork. I couldn’t decipher them. When asked how it worked, Breathless simply responded with “magic”. Still, it was cause for celebration, so we had a party.

  Lacking a proper pub, we held it outdoors. The collected tables and chairs caused natural cliques to form. Alas, Elias wanted more teambuilding nonsense. As a result, he and Jill were rearranging things so our squad could sit together. Meanwhile I interrupted the nerds’ conversation.

  “Who gives a shit about the ethics of killing Errant?”

  “Just for the sake of argument, we are killing a whole lot of them,” Breathless said.

  “So? They kill each other too.”

  “Well yes, but when they do it, they seem to grow and evolve, or perhaps accumulate. In essence, they are their own food source. When we do it they get turned into resources, or better tools to kill them with, or our food.”

  “Eh, survival of the fittest I say. Nature endures because of struggle not despite it, ‘tis a rough environment out there so winner takes all.”

  “We struggle a lot more than they do, from an adaptational perspective they’re much more suited for the surroundings than we are. While they seem primitive to us, there’s a good chance we’re just primitive to the ways of magic. The only reason we’re keeping up is because of the System.”

  “So we won the evolutionary lottery? Sounds like it’s settled, then. Anyway, we can do it like we did before and worry about them once they’re on the edge of extinction, then we’ll have time for ethics.”

  “Wow, that’s just…”

  “Look, Breathless. If they wanted to live, they shouldn’t have been made of money. That’s the trait which ended up costing them. Few things can stand up to human greed.”

  “In that, you are correct. But only that.”

  They ignored me afterwards, continuing on with their silly debate. Noah finished laying out a massive square of shots on the table with a smile on his face, his usually silent demeanor dispelled by the spell of alcohol.

  “Let’s play a game,” he said, “we go clockwise around the table and take turns. The goal is to describe a useless aspect of your System powers. If you succeed, everyone but you takes a shot. If you fail, you drink two. We vote on close calls. I laid out the drinks, so I go last. We stop once no one can think of anything. To start it off, we all take a shot. Jill, you are first.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said, “I got rid of my useless skills.”

  “Try anyway, or take two shots, your choice,” Noah encouraged.

  She thought for a second. “Fine, my transfer skill allows me to boost objects, but does nothing because my weapon is dragonsteel, it already wrecks everything.”

  “Hah, the irony! Everyone drink. Elias, you’re next.”

  This ought to be interesting, dude doesn’t like talking about his powers but now there’s no choice.

  “Mine is a chain of consequences involving multiple skills, how does that work with the rules?”

  “You can wager more shots, or earn an exemption from the next round.”

  “I will take exemptions and drink at my own pace. My infest ability allows me to override control and decay matter. I also have a persist skill, allowing delayed activation, along with the same transfer skill Jill has. Originally, I thought to spread infest far and wide, but there was an unforeseen obstacle,” he paused for dramatic effect, “the randomness of airflow. Transfer was useless without persist, and persist was effectively useless by itself as well. I had to select ‘current’ from wind magic to achieve the aura effect, yet it is still difficult to use.”

  “Wait, how many does that count as?” I asked.

  “Three, since it forced his hand with low magic and still didn’t work out,” Carlos suggested. No one disagreed, except for me.

  “No way, two and a half.”

  “You want him to take half a shot once we catch up?” Noah said, “That’s no way to drink.”

  “Flip a coin then.”

  “Does anyone have a coin?” No one did, the crystal ones didn’t have sides.

  “We can play rock paper scissors,” Elias said. I lost. He continued, “Can I earn a bonus for humiliating Gabriel?” Everyone agreed. “One of my cantrips is premonition. It allows me to understand the chain of causality for an instant, but only when the possibilities are extremely limited.”

  “That’s fucking cheating. But I’ll take it, was wondering how you kept up against the icemonk.”

  “Brilliant!” Noah said, “Kim, your turn.”

  “Easy, infusing my ability to shape my haven with decoys does literally nothing by itself. The false shaping doesn’t fool or even confuse the Errant. They’re often liable to ignore fake barriers too because they prefer to smash through them. My detect skill doesn’t benefit either.”

  Kwame butted in, “Elias case is interesting, but infusions affect too much at once and should only be counted once, and I say that as the only other pure mage.”

  “I don’t care either way. I’m here to drink,” Kim said, punctuating his statement with an unnecessary shot.

  “Excellent!” Noah beamed, “You’re up, Kwame.”

  “My high-magic is terrible. The infusions are great but the default spray of acid has no range or coherence. I had to choose pressurize from the meta-magic category as my low-magic to make it effective. It took all the fun out of the many options available.”

  “The troubles of vocalization, eh? What about you Gabriel?”

  “Before I go, one thing has been bugging me,” I turned to Kwame, “How the hell did you get the blood out of your dreads? I expected you to cut them off or something.”

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  “What? I have the cleanse cantrip.”

  “Wait, you have the fucking laundry cantrip? And it works on people?”

  “Yeah?”

  “For fucks sake man, why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been floating down and bathing in ice cold water for weeks. It takes like an hour to get the smell out of my clothes.”

  “You never asked. And it was funny.” Suddenly the whole table broke out in tipsy laughter.

  “You all fucking knew?”

  “Of course we did,” Cleo said, “You didn’t think it was suspicious that no one else bothered?”

  “I thought you all just didn’t give a shit about hygiene.”

  “You can’t smell it, can you? It’s all the smoking,” she said, “must’ve been nice during the exodus.”

  “If it works on people, why didn’t you use it back then?” Jill asked Kwame.

  “I didn’t know yet, it has no description.”

  “Same as my mending then. At first I thought it only worked on clothes, only tested it on myself out of desperation early on. Now I’m pretty sure it’s meant for people.”

  “Ladies, gentlemen, we’re getting sidetracked,” Noah said, “Go ahead Gabriel.”

  “Sure. My control skill didn’t do jack for a long time besides help me aim at longer range, but it was too slow to actually use it for that and couldn’t keep up while I ran, had to upgrade it and up my physical power before I got any use out of it.”

  Carlos kept it laconic, “All one of my cantrips does is this.” He tapped the table and left a red dot the size of a beer coaster on it. “It disappears after an hour unless I spend more energy and the color is variable, but that’s it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out a use for it someday,” Noah said, “but I can’t think of anything right now! Cleo?”

  She downed a double, “All my skills are fantastic. The free point made everything even better. I have defense, offence, speed, everything.”

  “No weakness to magic?” Carlos asked.

  “Nope! I have a guard skill. It triggers a full-body version of my shield ability which protects against magical damage by default.”

  “Was your point not in power? You are quick, I will admit, but I do not understand how,” Elias said.

  “It’s another skill - a two part one, store and release. The description is vague, but impacts blocked by my ability power it. As long as I get hit regularly, I’ll have bursts of speed. The knife fighting is messy, so I get hit a lot.”

  “That makes it my turn then! I wager extra shots,” Noah said, “Ah, what a list it is. I have a conversion skill from trying for something like the boost ability. It is indeed similar, but lets me redistribute my physical speed for one second, including to magical stats, two of which are completely useless! But that’s not all. I also have a reverberation skill,” he looked at me, “you know the one, Gabriel. Barry has it as well. I thought to leverage it, I won’t bore you with the details but I’ve practiced a stick-fighting martial art for a long time. But it only lets me re-use my ability on the same object and does not work on myself like my ability does! Then I embraced my inner Loki and thought to twin the effect, but the System played a trick on me instead. The combination became too complicated to keep up with my speed. To keep it fair, let’s count it as three shots, eh?”

  We grumbled at his rigged game but forced down the booze anyway. By this point the conversation derailed completely because everyone was getting far too drunk to stay on track and the evening turned into a hazy blur. Come morning, Noah returned to his usual stoic self, which was probably for the better all things considered.

  With the festivities now over, the mission beckoned and we wrestled our way through the rocky crevasse towards the second-to-last objective. The half-sphere no doubt housed an ungodly amount of maxed out bunnycrabs. Yet our plan for dealing with it was surprisingly simple. We’d been waiting for the nerds before tackling this one since they were all pure mages. We were going to blow it the fuck up. Well, sort of.

  “You’re not going to go crazy again, are you?” I asked Breathless.

  “It’s why you and Noah are here. Just knock us out if the megalomania strikes, although Ascension seems to have deadened the effect to some extent. The relative differences are also getting smaller. It’s likely a mix of both factors. Regardless, this particular combination is experimental but we see no reason why it shouldn’t function as predicted.”

  Three of them faced each other in what looked suspiciously much like a low effort summoning circle. It wasn’t a System thing, merely an aid to help them position correctly. Jill already had her halberhammeraxe jammed through the vinebranchbushrootwall, ready to tear open a doorway upon request. As expected, the nerds coordinated their low-magics to maximize synergies. It was both crucial for their weapons research and full of wild potential.

  Like Carlos, they all had ritual magic although it was a different sub-category – combination casting. The name implied the gist of it, allowing them to combine aspects of their System powers, making a sum greater than just its parts. After pestering Breathless enough, he explained the railgun worked in the same way. Grabbing some levels here was meant to increase the effect, adding some final oomph to an already recklessly destructive weapon.

  They also stole Jen’s storing-gem from her, misappropriating my gift as a keystone piece. Even though she didn’t mind, I sure did – fancy jewelry wasn’t exactly in high supply over here. Basically, they needed four specific effects but were limited to mixing three. Of course, it only mattered for the specific thing they were trying to achieve with the cannon, in this case the constraints didn’t bother them at all.

  The girly nerd had a cool as shit flamethrower spell. I’d never actually seen it but it sounded awesome. The other, who’d nearly blown himself up once upon a time, had some lame tornado crap. Combining those two already promised quite the spectacle, but Breathless happily piled on to the experimental madness. His time magic drawbacks lessened in a three-person show, mitigated by the amount of participants. In this case, his addition was hilariously simple - persist. At first I thought he could only copy high magic stuff, but no, he could reproduce pretty much anything.

  To cap matters off, they all had a ridiculous amount of charges stored since none of them used their big spells after the lakeside shenanigans during the early phases of the eclipse.

  “Jill, you can start, please ensure proper width to enable wide coverage, we’ll keep going for a while.”

  She tore into the wall, cutting massive slices and knocking entire chunks out of it like someone had given her a light saber and she couldn’t restrain her inner demolitionist. As usual, the System failed with the theatrical side of things, at least until tornado nerd, who faced the opening while the other two faced him, motioned a push with his hand and things suddenly got very hot.

  Not for us, friendly fire immunity and all that, but the muddy ground was immediately baked into cracked clay while the edges of the mixed plant wall charred into tiny chips. Jill even stopped her landscaping, which turned out to be entirely unnecessary. The flaming whirlwind expanded as it went, growing to the size of a three story house as it twisted and twirled into the blue forest, vaporizing a clueless stray crab-bunny along the way - named as such since it was maxed out.

  Kim hid us from any potential reprisals while the previously bandaged nerd motioned a flip with his still extended hand, turning the fiery vortex upside down to widen the base. Then another followed, and another, and another. Some carved straight lines through the woods, others traced slight curves, a few zigzagged, a couple spiraled, two followed the walls and calm clear air was soon replaced by a blurry heat haze while the nerds smiled wide-toothed like villains succeeding at their evil plot.

  They even squealed, “Ahahahaha! Glorious!”

  “It’s working! I’m leveling like mad.”

  “We are the Gods of the new world!” I almost punched out Breathless but he backtracked just in time, “no wait! I’m not crazy. But we’re probably done on this side.”

  Thus we had breakfast while the natural barrier closed up unnaturally. We moved along it for a couple of hours to repeat the same thing over and over across the entire half-dome, until we’d circled the entire thing. It took until evening even though we hurried along at best possible speed. The nerds had a finale in mind, sending one last mega firestorm through, intended to reach the center. Once they were done, I clapped Breathless on the shoulder to congratulate him.

  “Well done man, you’ve finally managed to create some proper fucking entertainment. That was amazing.”

  “You have the strangest takes. But I have to admit, I’m proud of this one.”

  “You should be. Shame about all the crab meat though.”

  “Crab meat?”

  “Yeah, you can cut up the stingers and the insides are edible. Guess I didn’t mention that before, huh?”

  He looked slightly concerned, “Is there anything else you left out?”

  “Hmm, well some of the giant trees are Errant too, never fought one though. Really big fuckers, I think they’re nocturnal like the bricks. When I first chopped my way out of here, I heard massive crashing in the distance.”

  The ground shook slightly. “Gabriel…” he said, as the trembling increased, followed by a massive sinewy tree branch tearing through the dome in the distance.

  “Yeah, I get it. My bad,” I turned towards the rest of the crew, already walking towards us, “Slayers! Assemble!”

  I think saying that physically hurt them.