A few more days passed as they travelled. Keldryn dragged Mikayla along with him to hunt every low-level Kaiju they came across - after all, he still hadn’t quite met his quota of Kaiju Pearls harvested.

  Mikayla was still unenthused about snuffing out the innocent(?) monsters, and reaching Level 16 as a result of their hunting was only a minor balm to her conscience.

  Soon, it had been ten days since Mikayla and Keldryn had started travelling together, and on that tenth day, at long last, they found one of the most important indicators of civilization.

  A road.

  “This is part of the main trade route that connects Cliffwatch to the larger town of Topwater,” Keldryn explained as they hiked down it. Mikayla’s aching legs were relieved beyond measure. Today there would be no scrabbling through weeds and tripping over roots. This was a road. A genuine, glorious road! Sure, it was only gravel, but still! Roooooooad!

  Keldryn kept talking, but Mikayla had been distracted by her praise of all things roadly. “Sorry, what was that? Fog in my ears,”

  Keldryn chuckled, acknowledging her efforts to internalise the Kaiju Coast euphemisms. “I said that the road is even more dangerous than the wilderness, because Kaijus often figure out that this is a surefire place to find -“

  Something massive burst out of the trees.

  In the seconds she had to process, Mikayla observed that it was some kind of snake, with black and brown patterning that had camouflaged it against the forest on either side of the road and was now suddenly bearing down on her with fangs that looked like they belonged on heavy construction equipment.

  Mikayla froze.

  Keldryn reacted.

  His orange mana coaxed a huge green arm and leg into existence, propelling him into the air, and he drove the blade integrated on Skyward Grasscutter’s arm into the serpent’s throat. The snake hissed in panic and tried to retreat as the rest of his armour formed and sized-up around him, but Keldryn grabbed its upper jaw and lifted its head into the air, then cleanly decapitated it.

  With eyes wide and bile bubbling up in Mikayla’s throat, she watched as Keldryn started shredding the corpse of the snake into bloody chunks, casual as could be, until he finally found the creature’s Kaiju Pearl and ripped it from what was left of its intestines. He cleaned it off by trimming ribbons of flesh from it with his blade, then dropped it into his rucksack and shrunk back down. As Skyward Grasscutter faded away, Keldryn rejoined Mikayla and motioned to continue walking. “You froze. Again. We’ll keep working on it,”

  “I thought the roads would be safe!” she burst out.

  “I was literally just telling you that roads are the most dangerous places in the Kaiju Coast, and it’s suicide to travel without a Goliath Guardsman for protection,” Keldryn finally finished.

  “Not my fault that thing didn’t let you finish your sentence,” Mikayla mumbled, looking down. Not that she felt ashamed, she just needed to watch her footing in order to pick a path through the bloody chunks of giant snake.

  A gurgle in her throat was the only warning before she involuntarily started dry heaving.

  Once she’d recovered and they’d cleared the scene of the crime, Keldryn rolled his eyes and commented, “You’re much too squeamish to live out here in the Kaiju Coast,”

  Mikayla’s face fell, and she pursed her lips as her stride slowed minutely. “I‘ll . . work on that, I guess,”

  Keldryn’s ears pricked up. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Not really. Sorry. The past two weeks has all been one thing after another. If I wasn’t fighting for my life, I’ve been,” she wrung her hands, “trying to make an Engraving Table work, or sneaking through a Burrow Zone. I’ve had, like, no time to stop and think. So, I guess . . it kinda just suddenly hit me that . . I’m probably going to be here for a while,”

  Keldryn cast her a sympathetic yet mute look, not knowing what to say.

  Mikayla picked up on his helplessness. “Hah. Sorry. It’s dumb, but . . I guess I kept thinking, like, if we could just get out of the forest and back to civilisation, then going home would just be a hop, skip and a jump away. But it’s not. I’m no closer than before. All it means, is that I won’t have to fight Kaijus for a bit,”

  “Not everyone is cut out to be a Goliath Guard. There are lots of people native to this world who would have just died going through the things you survived. It’s okay if you don’t want this to be your life,” Keldryn tilted his head thoughtfully. “You could sell some of those antiques from the Spear, buy passage down south towards Guili or head west to the Termanian Union. Start a new life as a farmer or baker or something. There’s nothing keeping you here,”

  “Except that the Kaiju Coast is the only place in the world that gets spatial anomalies like the one that brought me here. Isn’t it?” Mikayla countered. “If I ran away to some peaceful peasant life . . I’d be giving up on ever going home,” She shook her head. She wasn’t that far gone yet. Sure, this world of magic and monsters was strange and awe-inspiring . . and if there was some way to jump between worlds on the regular, that would be appealing . . but she missed her family and friends.

  “Oh yeah,” Keldryn considered that, and Mikayla’s eye twitched as she realised that he’d either forgotten her goal or written it off as impossible. “Then I guess you should join the Goliath Guard. I know there’s a research division that focuses on figuring out how the Kaijus and the spatial anomalies all work. Cliffwatch is only a small branch, so I’ve only heard about the research division second-hand, but I’m sure Lahlee will know where you need to go,”

  Mikayla nodded. “Alright. That. That’s a plan, that sounds like a good next step,” It was strange, almost; she’d have expected herself to be a blubbering mess. She’d certainly cried more for less in the past. Like when she’d gotten her ninth-grade exams back. But, reaching inside herself, she could feel an iron determination to keep going, to strive ever onwards and reach her goal. When had that become a part of her personality?

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  In response to her silent question, a small blue box popped up in her vision. [WILLPOWER: 17]

  “Hah. Knew all those points were good for something,” she murmured under her breath.

  “What was that?” Keldryn raised his vulpine ears to their full height, which was still a quite impressive sight.

  “Doesn’t matter. You said Lahlee was your boss?”

  “The branch head,” he corrected her. “I’ll be reporting straight to her when we’re back in town. Just tag along with me and you’ll get a chance to talk to her,”

  “Alright. Thanks,” Mikayla nodded.

  The conversation lapsed, and they continued jogging in silence for a few minutes.

  Not long after that, Mikayla heard something in the distance, a throaty roar that was getting closer. But it didn’t trigger her instincts in the way the roar of a monster would, because this was a familiar roar. It was the roar of cruising down the highway, the roar one heard when pressing the pedal to the metal, a noise so ingrained in her psyche from a young age that it barely even registered, merely background noise. She didn’t even register that Keldryn had pricked his ears up and was searching for the source of the sound.

  For a moment, Mikayla had been transported back to her home. To walking down the street on the way back from school and watching the cars pass. So she wasn’t at all surprised when a bright green sports car rocketed down the road, ignoring the two weary travellers, and left a cloud of dust in its wake. The only response she could muster was a mumble about how much she hated hoons.

  “That was a strange sort of carriage,” Keldryn observed.

  The penny dropped, and Mikayla started. “Wait! That was a car!”

  “Oh, is that something from your world?”

  “You saw it too? I wasn’t hallucinating from exhaustion?!”

  “No, that wheeled beast was quite real. I thought it was a Kaiju when I heard it roar, but I suppose not. Some kind of high-speed transportation Core I suppose. You recognised it?”

  “Yes! It’s something that shouldn’t exist around here!” Mikayla nodded, already starting after the vehicle. “Wait, no, what am I saying. We have personal giant robots that run on magic. But - have you invented internal combustion engines? Or rubber tyres?”

  “I don’t know what either of those things are,” Keldryn denied. “I mean. I know what rubber is, but how does it get tired?”

  Mikayla could only shake her head. “This world’s tech tree is so out of whack. Whatever. That car looked like something from my world!”

  “You mean -“

  “Yeah! We need to find that driver! They might be Stranded too!”

  Keldryn shrugged. “Okay. But don’t get your hopes up . . too high . .” he lamely finished, realising that Mikayla was already gone, sprinting after the car.

  Ten minutes later he caught up to her, regarding her unsympathetically as she huffed and wheezed. Running was not a skill that Mikayla had nurtured back on Earth. “Hah . . ah . . how much further is it to Cliffwatch again?”

  “Four hours,”

  “Oh, great,”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll catch up to whoever that was. And, honestly, you shouldn’t assume that was a person from your world, just because they had some kind of high-speed transport Core that resembled something from a world like yours. I know that sometimes Stranded people decide to stay here rather than go home, and share their knowledge to help in the fight against the Kaijus. That ‘car’ may have been made based on that knowledge, but we can’t assume the person driving it isn’t just a courier who got issued a Car Core,”

  Mikayla turned that over in her mind. “I guess that makes sense. Damnit. But still, that means someone in this world knows what a car is and how to make them, so if I ask around the Goliath Guard leadership enough, eventually I’ll find them. That’s something. Right?”

  “Yeah, it sure is,” Keldryn didn’t seem convinced, but nodded regardless.

  “Alright. Same plan, new objective. The next stop is Branch Master Lahlee,”

  <=====}—o

  Branch Master Lahlee fumed as she shut off the Pearl of Sports Car and re-entered Cliffwatch, a package gripped in her arms.

  Just because she’d confiscated Anza Black’s Core Controller and Cores, including the brand-new transportation Core that fetched a hefty price on the market, didn’t mean she was suddenly obligated to play courier! So that damn blue snob needed more materials to build his project underground. And sure, she was the only one with the Mana pool to make the trip - who wasn’t otherwise occupied, at least.

  Waving the guards over, she dumped the strange machine that looked like an oven into their arms. “Take this to the pit. Now!”

  “A-aye, aye, ma’am!”

  She gritted her teeth and forced herself to let go of her emotions. It was for the greater good. Her nerves were raw because, ever since Anza had been captured, she’d been counting the minutes until Wujing or someone in league with him sent a task force to investigate. Lahlee and her new friends were good, but if the Goliath Guard brought its full might to bear they would be crushed, no ifs, ands or buts about it.

  The sooner the Regressors finished their work, the sooner she could leave behind the office that felt more and more like a prison by the day. So if whatever this strange thing she’d been sent to fetch helped with that, then she would swallow her pride and do grunt work.

  <=====}—o

  “Keldie, please tell me that’s it,” Mikayla pleaded.

  “That’s it,” Keldryn confirmed.

  They could finally see, in the distance, a village built into the side of a cliff, with a large structure at its base and smaller buildings stacked on top of one another, growing up the cliffside like vines.

  “Cliffwatch. Finally. Civilisation at long last,”

  They drew closer, and Mikayla was already fantasising about being able to sleep in a bed, with four solid walls around her, and eat food that had been cooked properly and wasn’t just Kaiju meat seasoned with whatever berries and herbs they’d scrounged up.

  “Huh, that’s odd,” Keldryn suddenly murmured.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just tried to check my Global Map, but it didn’t work,” He paused, backtracking. “You remember that message, the one about functionalities being unavailable because we’re outside the range of Ataraxia Nodes?”

  “Of course, why?”

  “There’s a Node in Cliffwatch. We should be within range by now. Actually, we should have been in range for the past two hours. There must be something wrong with the Node,” Keldeyn frowned.

  Mikayla rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “I have a weird feeling like you just pulled a Chekov’s gun on us,”

  “What happened to ‘no more making references I don’t understand?” Keldryn’s tone was as dull as ever, but Mikayla suspected he might have been trying to tease her.

  “Alright, what’s your vernacular for a situation where someone observes something that’s probably going to be trouble later?”

  Keldryn’s ears pricked up as he considered the request. “A good reason to turn around and walk away,”

  A sigh escaped her throat. “Well, I’m not going back to the Spear after coming this far. Bring it on,” Mikayla determined.

  Time to begin the fourth arc of the story. We're past the halfway point of Book 1!

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