Today's Earth date: December 31, 1991

Apparently we aren't patrolling all the way to Bata like I thought. We hit a desert, stayed over in the town there, and turned back. Horcus wants us to do six more laps before we try the Cuts again. That sounds excessive, but I think I'm on board for it.

I might literally be the strongest person on this planet by a big margin, but this quest is supposed to challenge us all the way through the last demon on the planet. That's hard to remember when you're improving like we are.

These last few levels… We're all getting so much power, and it's become impossible to ignore how different we are from the normal people in this world.

NPCs, according to Horcus, but still people to me.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

"Oh my God, I wanted to punch him so badly," Wayne said, half-shouting so Fergus could hear him over the travelers pushing into the city for the festival.

"What are you going to do?"

"Probably piss on being righteous now that it benefits me," Wayne said, glumly.

"Feeling guilty already?"

"Shouldn't I? I was able to justify abandoning my values surprisingly quickly."

"Go on."

"My first rationalization was that I shouldn't expect another world to follow my values exactly. Then I thought about all the good I could do with a fart ability from Abe's Exodus. Lastly, I'll atone by donating the purse to charity, like a three legged dog sanctuary or some shit."

Fergus laughed. "You covered quite a bit of mental ground already."

"Yep. Record time. And watch it get me killed because I'm actually not strong enough to kill whatever 'Three Deaths' is."

"Would be a very literary conclusion."

Wayne stopped abruptly. "We're going back."

After a few hurried steps, Fergus caught back up. "Why are we going back?"

"If we find out I definitely can't win, I would have a good excuse to do the righteous thing."

After surveying several people milling about around the arena–with an emphasis on staff or vendors who would have been around for a lot of matches by now–Wayne determined that he could likely manage a fight with Three Deaths just fine.

The monster had a feline body with three heads: a lion, a goat, and a lizard. The lion head was packed with long teeth. The goat spit acid. The lizard breathed fire. The whole monster had an aggressive regeneration ability.

The previous eleven competitors were skilled monster hunters who voluntarily took on Three Deaths. A good few of them dealt significant damage in the fight but ultimately couldn't overcome the monster's ability to rapidly heal its own wounds. Wayne wouldn't describe himself as a monster hunter, but he had a good bit of experience, and he had the system. All of the other fighters were standard-issue humans.

If they were able to get close, he should be able to win handily.

That wasn't the easy escape from his moral dilemma he hoped for.

Still pondering, Wayne followed Fergus out the north gate. Door-to-door sales wasn't his favorite pastime, but Fergus assured him he already had a couple of good leads. When did Fergus have time to source leads in Iomallach?

He wouldn't say.

The view out of the northern end of the city was all farmland. Mountains bordered the outer edge of the wide, flat valley to either side, and they narrowed as they neared Iomallach. The sensation for Wayne was a bit like pushing through a pair of double doors, as if an entire world opened up to him.

Wayne and the Zeroes would take that road for themselves, eventually. The Chosen Heroes went that direction after they finished with the Earth Temple, but Wayne was in no particular hurry.

"There's a nightshade farm out this way," Fergus said. "Now that we're away from the traffic, mind if we ride Outlawson the rest of the way?"

Wayne did not mind one bit.

Riding on the back of their giant insect, they ventured maybe three miles outside of the city and turned down a lane that had a "Nightwish Farm" sign at the end.

"Isn't nightshade poisonous?" Wayne asked, looking out over fields of white flowers with soft accents of pink.

"It is."

"Really pretty for a field full of death."

"Alcohol is a poison, technically," Fergus said, "or would you rather continue being morose?"

"I'm listening."

"There are several medicinal uses for nightshade, but it has to be processed with a precise method. Nightwish is one of the few farms that does that, but they make most of their money in turning it into fertilizer."

"Huh?"

Fergus shrugged. "I don't know the science. Grinroot vouched for it, though. Apparently, they supply half the farms in the valley."

"If they have fertilizer that good, what would they want with Grinroot soil?"

"I've got a hunch we'll be fine."

Wayne shook his head. "It's already a done deal, isn't it?"

"Pretty much. The high-level of it all is that by removing the shipping costs we can sell that soil for less than usual but actually make more profit overall. Nightwish will turn around and sell it to their local customers and end up with a profit too."

"If you had this set up the whole time, why did you hide it?"

"I wanted you to feel worse about doubting me when this was all wrapped up."

Sighing, Wayne asked, "They're going to buy all of it?"

Another voice answered, "We intend to." A husband and wife duo came out of the largest barn. They looked significantly older than Fergus, and their skin was dark from working outside for decades, but they were still spry. They waved as they approached.

"Mr. and Mrs. Wish?" I presume, Fergus asked.

"You arrived faster than Lady Grinroot said."

"Hope good service doesn't upset you then."

"That was so cheesy," Wayne said to Fergus telepathically.

"Stop messing with my mojo."

The old couple giggled. "No problem at all," Mrs. Wish said. "Lady Grinroot wrote that we would need to transport it from the gate to the farm. Is that still the case?"

"That is still the case," Fergus answered. "It'll make sense when you see why."

The why that Fergus did not want to explain was that his best friend had an interdimensional storage ability that came in two varieties, room temperature and cold, and though it could break the laws of space and time, it could not be accessed outside of a town. As for how that ability came to be, well, that was a whole other explanation about broken Diaries getting system access through advertisements from another world.

"Would it be okay if we planned to do the exchange tomorrow?" Mrs. Wish asked. "I'm afraid our farm hands are busy at the moment."

"The day and time is up to you. If tomorrow is too much trouble, another day is fine. It's no problem on our side to wait."

"We appreciate the flexibility. We can give you your gold then as well, but if you forgive me for being rude, Lady Grinroot mentioned that you both had Diaries, like the Chosen Heroes."

Mr. Wish coughed on behalf of his wife. "A couple of gossips those two are."

She lightly smacked her husband's arm. "I only ask because we need your help."

"What is it?" Wayne asked.

"Friends of ours, just a few farms north, are having a hell of a time with ratmen. Is there something you can do about that?"

After a bit more discussion and friendly small talk, Wayne and Fergus departed Nightwish Farms and went up the way to see about the rat problem. This next farm was more of a family operation, growing a variety of crops as well as raising pigs instead of specializing like the Wishes. They had about as much land as the Wishes as well, but it wasn't nearly as developed. Where Nightwish Farms ran from the road all the way to the foot of the mountains, the back half of this farm was overgrown, thick with scrub trees and tall briars.

The ratmen were coming from that growth, somewhere, but that wasn't the entire story. When they spoke to the family, they learned that some of the ratmen were wereratsharks and other varieties of aquatic creatures. These were the drowned ratmen the party encountered previously, but the farmers insisted they had watched them turn when the sun set.

Separately, Wayne and Fergus talked for some time about how best to acknowledge the were-influence where neither forms were human. "Wererratshark" was where they landed, and they didn't feel good about it. Wereratshark was too bulky, too unwieldy.

As was wereratpiranha, wereratgoldfish, and disturbingly, a new monster they hadn't fought before but were warned about: the wereratdolphin.

The family was worried they would sound crazy if they tried to explain what they saw to their neighbors, so they held those details back until now. Hearing that Wayne and Fergus had seen those varieties of ratmen before was a strange comfort.

The duo didn't share that the wererat part of that story was new to them, however. They had fought the strange hybrids at night, but it never occurred to them that the ratmen were transforming under moonlight.

And that pissed Wayne off. He said as much as he and Fergus walked to the opposite end of the farm to survey the area while the sun was still up. "They're only supposed to change under a full moon," he whined.

"According to…?"

"...Earth fiction."

"Let me make sure I understand," Fergus said. "You believe it makes more sense that a creature with the were-shape affliction is only affected by a full moon, but no other moonlight counts?"

"I don't think it's about the volume of moonlight. It's more like a cycle thing."

"More like sloppy storytelling."

Ridding a farm of a monster infestation made Wayne oddly nostalgic for the early days of his adventure, clearing ratlin and goblin nests south of the Capital when he was in single digit levels. That wasn't that long ago, all things considered, but Wayne had done a great deal of living since then.

"Don't think I can't tell what you're doing," Wayne said as he inspected a trail of rat footprints.

"I don't know what you mean."

"You're stalling because you don't want to go back to the Blackwell's aren't you?"

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Fergus grabbed his heart, wounded by the betrayal. "How could you accuse me of such an offense? I didn't send the rats out here."

"You were very quick to volunteer. Are you stalling or not?"

"I can't answer that without breaking my promise to not complain."

Wayne laughed. "According to Probe, looks like they're all together right now. Unless there's a secret dungeon entrance back here, this nest should be manageable with just the two of us."

"It may behoove us to capture a ratman alive to definitively confirm the were-transformation. The difference between monster parts stitched together and a ratman that can transform into another kind of monster seems significant."

That was indeed significant, Wayne agreed. "And after it turns? What do we do then?"

"Euthanize it, I assume."

"Great. Just great."

The nest was surrounded by a natural fortification of briars and brambles that had grown to be several feet taller than Wayne. The plants were packed tightly enough that he couldn't see more than a few feet in, and the long thorns discouraged him from charging down one of the low paths the rats used to go to and from their nest. The rats seemed to run on all fours, leaving low tunnels that they could swiftly navigate but would force a human to crawl on their hands and knees.

Wayne had enough hitpoints that a few thorns wouldn't be a risk, but they would still hurt. Fergus proposed simply burning the briar patch down. It didn't take much arguing to convince the old scholar why that was a bad idea in the middle of farm country.

Skycat could take potshots at rats as they left the nest, in theory. Scouting with the Camera ability, however, revealed that most of the entrance was hidden, and any rat they didn't kill immediately would disappear beneath the cover of plantlife.

The sun wasn't setting yet, but it dipped toward the horizon. Soon, the sky would be filled with reds and oranges. Preferring to fight by daylight, they put their most viable plan into action.

Fergus summoned an Earth Elemental and sent the walking pile of dirt charging into the briars, stomping a path straight to the entrance of the nest.

While the Earth Elemental pushed through the thick growth, Skycat used Nee to plug up as many of the visible side paths as possible. That wasn't likely to be completely effective, Wayne believed, but corralling even a few rats in the right direction would make this project easier.

The Earth Elemental was thirty yards away from the nest when the rats sounded the alarm. The dense blob of red Wayne saw on Probe scattered into dozens of individual enemies as they poured out of the nest. Far too many of those dots spread away from the Earth Elemental, putting neighboring farms in danger of the overflow.

Wayne's plan accounted for this possibility. He commanded Skycat to patrol one side of the property while Fergus used the ability of his staff to borrow the Skycat spell for himself. A second fighter jet soared overhead and took to patrolling the other side of the briar patch.

While Fergus followed behind the Earth Elemental at a distance, Wayne Blitzed into the sky, firing Missiles whenever he had anything close to a clear shot. Several ratmen fell the moment their heads emerged from the burrow, but several more scampered by. A minute later, ratmen burst from the briars on either side of the Earth Elemental, clawing it to pieces in an instantaneous swarm.

The Earth Elemental's path gave Fergus a relatively clear line of sight, but Wayne spotted rustling in the overgrowth to either side of the wizard. Wayne cast Defense on Fergus, and when he saw that rustling closing in, he used Castling to surround the scholar with fortifications.

The rats slammed into the masonry.

Fergus popped over the top of the walls and cast Freeze Please to both sides of the path, coating ratmen and plants in ice.

"You may need to fall back," Wayne said. He heard both fighter planes firing Missile with a steady rhythm.

"I'm fine."

"Okay. I'm sealing the nest."

A stick of Dynamite materialized from Wayne's body and twirled into the now mostly visible entrance. Blowing the nest from the start was an earlier consideration, but the pair worried it would start a fire and that the burrow might be deep enough for many of the monsters to survive a partial collapse. Now that their numbers increased rapidly, Wayne found those risks acceptable.

The ground shook, but the ongoing flow of new enemies suggested the explosion had not sealed the entrance.

On his HUD, Wayne saw more reds closing in on Fergus. He Blitzed back to the wizard and found that a wide circle around the remains of the Castle walls had been stamped down or blown away, making it look like Fergus stood in the middle of a rapidly growing crop circle.

Linebacker.

Running Back.

The first robot drew aggro from the nearest rats while Running Back sprinted toward the nest, drawing the more distant rats to the robot instead of Fergus.

The cooldown for Fergus' Earth Elemental expired, and a fresh summon soon resumed the charge of its fallen brother, stomping toward the nest, slowly following behind Running Back bot.

As the battle destroyed more of the briars, Wayne's use of Nee grew increasingly less effective. There was simply too much open space to manage now.

The Zero Hero switched tactics and dropped to the ground as close to the burrow as he could, hitting Brake right before his Altimeter zeroed out. He Blitzed from rat to rat, hacking and slashing as he went. He used Upsidaisy and Wink-Wing to juggle the rats that were out of range, yanking them around the battlefield or tossing them into the air to momentarily take them out of the fight.

Running Back bot sped toward Wayne and the burrow entrance, a dozen frenzied ratmen in pursuit. Wayne cast En Passant when he side-stepped the football robot and Blitzed into the mass of enemies.

The spell had a one minute cooldown, and it applied to a single use of Blitz only. Any ratman within reach of Wayne's sword to either side of the dash was sliced by an ethereal blade, as if a ghost ran with the Zero Hero, holding two swords out like it was slapping hands with lines of cheerleaders at the start of a football game.

The cuts didn't instantly kill the ratmen. The damage dealt seemed equivalent to what Wayne would have delivered if he had swung at the monsters himself, which was still substantial. Blood sprayed from the mass and the horde shrieked. When Wayne's Blitz ended, the rats continued their pursuit of Running Back bot.

Wayne Fired a Broadside into the mass, punching through a dozen of the rats with one cannonball. Fergus' Earth Elemental finished clearing a path to the nest and then turned back, striking ratmen who dared to target the wizard. Between the summon and spells like Tsu and Freeze Please, Fergus managed the numbers just fine and didn't appear to be in danger.

Risking a glance at his HUD, it appeared that the Skycats were doing a reasonable job of containing any potential escapees, and the volume of red seemed to be thinning overall.

Then a chorus of unearthly screeches went up around the battlefield. Wayne recognized those noises. They were the same rapid chirps he heard in the jungle before the Mudsville attack.

In seconds, the ratmen mutated, sprouting shark, piranha, and goldfish heads. The barest hint of a rising moon was visible, but that was enough. Thankfully, the ratmen hadn't fought with their were-perks in mind, so several of the magic-capable goldfish variety were close to Wayne while many of the more vicious sharks and piranhas were some distance away.

Skulduggery.

-50 Gold.

Skulduggery.

-50 Gold.

Skulduggery.

-50 Gold.

Three of the wereratsharks turned on their allies, shredding them into bloody bits.

"I need an Exit," Fergus said. The were-versions of ratmen moved more quickly, and they were gaining the positional advantage.

Exit was another ability combo Wayne had distilled down to a single, easy to remember name.

"2… 1…"

Following Wayne's count, Fergus cast Fly Me to shoot into the air, but he faced toward the farm rather than toward the nest. Three Wink-Wing casts in a row sped Fergus thirty feet away, where he landed outside of the swarm.

With darkness falling and the rats still coming, Wayne made the call to take more risks for the sake of winning the battle. In other words, fire-based magic was now fair game.

Fergus ignited his nearest enemies with Gifoi from Phantasy Star II while he sniped the more distant rats with Flame from Ultima III. Meanwhile, Wayne Blitzed straight into the sky to take himself out of melee range and cast Tyris-Flare Fire Magic (3 Pots). His clothing disappeared, replaced by a white and red bikini, and two burning spectres sped down to consume enemies with their flames.

A high-pitched chirping, like a sneaker squeaking on a basket court over and over, echoed out of the nest. More chirps joined it, coming from the less-damaged overgrowth still around the edges of the battlefield.

Wayne saw dorsal fins briefly emerge from the briars and then sink down. That motion repeated, three of the unseen monsters seeming to target the wizard.

Wereratdolphins.

Holy shit they were fast.

They burst from the brush, bounding across the ground on all fours like lions on the hunt, their bottlenose beaks chirping the whole way.

"Exit!" Wayne yelled.

"Can't!"

The cooldown for Fly Me hadn't expired, which was also true of Wayne's Castling ability. Wayne cycled through his options for protecting Fergus. He couldn't Blitz to Fergus in time. The Skycats were too far away. The Defense spell would only last a few more blows.

Hrglut-Hrglut-Hrglut.

The spell hit the wereratdolphins, but despite their projectile reaction, they didn't slow.

Wayne saw one more option, and the description of the spell flashed through his mind:

Sak – Very special magic with which you offer your own life to save a comrade's.

The risk was worth it.

Sak.

-155 hitpoints.

Pain coursed through Wayne's veins as if he had just grabbed a downed powerline, and his hitpoints instantly dropped to 92. That number, 155, seemed familiar, but that thought was a distant concern, like a flower petal in the middle of a raging storm.

When Wayne opened his eyes, he now stood in Fergus' place. Three wereratdolphins were airborne, hurtling toward him with their long snouts full of tiny sharp teeth.

He smashed Fire to wrap himself with orbiting flames and then spammed Easy Out to escape being surrounded. One of the dolphin beaks caught his arm.

-23 hitpoints.

Poisoned!

Wayne had never seen that alert before, and since when were dolphins venomous?

-1 hitpoint.

-1 hitpoint.

-1 hitpoint.

Armond, their cleric, was on the other side of the city. Neither Wayne nor Fergus knew healing magic, and their overconfidence sent them into battle without potions on hand.

A second dolphin nose sped toward Wayne's face. As his head drifted into the monster's maw, time slowed.

Guard the net! flashed across Wayne's HUD.

Blocking a Dunk from Pat Riley Basketball had activated.

Block-Block-Block-Block-Block-Block.

Moving on its own and faster than he knew to be possible, Wayne's sword appeared between him and the wereratdolphin. The force of its pounce combined with Wayne's own strength sliced the dolphin-head in half. An invisible crowd cheered.

-1 hitpoint.

"I'm poisoned. Retreat to the farm."

"There's only a few more!"

Wayne slashed at the remaining two dolphin monsters, their speed and the effects of poison making them difficult to hit.

-1 hitpoint.

"Get the fuck back!" Wayne yelled, mentally.

-1 hitpoint.

While he did his best to avoid the snapping dolphin jaws, Wayne took manual control of his Skycat and blanketed the battlefield with Dynamite, augmented by the Super ability to hurl the sticks in rapid succession.

-1 hitpoint.

Easy Out. Blitz.

-1 hitpoint.

Blitz-Blitz-Blitz-Blitz.

-1 hitpoint.

Wayne threw himself toward the city limits, soaring over farmland as quickly as the system would allow. Skycat pelted the wereratdolphins with Missile and then Fergus finished them off with the sky laser from Tsu.

-1 hitpoint.

Still zooming toward Iomallach, Wayne pointed Skycat at the nest and nosedived through the burrow entrance. The moment lasted less than a second, but he used Camera to steer the fighterplane as deep as he could. Right before it crashed into a tunnel wall, Wayne triggered Dynamite and Fire Bracelet simultaneously.

-1 hitpoint.

He heard the explosion in the distance behind him, but his hitpoints were fading.

-1 hitpoint.

He checked his stats. 47 hitpoints left. He should make it.

-1 hitpoint.

-1 hitpoint.

-1 hitpoint.

-1 hitpoint.

Wayne landed near the Iomallach wall, well away from the northern gate.

-1 hitpoint.

Goods Storage.

He ran into the interdimensional storage.

-1 hitpoint.

He uncapped a Cure Poison potion, chugged it, and then did the same with one of Grinroot's Greater Healing Potions.

The poison alert disappeared from his system menu, and his hitpoints sat at 142 out of 249.

"Are you okay?" Wayne asked.

"Took care of the stragglers. I think we got them all. More importantly, are you okay?"

"Yes. We got complacent. Having Armond around all the time and always being close to a wagon full of supplies spoiled us. We need to carry emergency potions everywhere we go from now on."

"Agreed. Thank you for saving my life. I'm grateful."

Slumped in Goods Storage, leaning against one of their reference shelves, Wayne thought back to Sak and the 155 hitpoints he lost switching places with Fergus. A few flips through his system menu and he remembered where he had seen that number before.

155 was Fergus' total hitpoints. Sak took that much health from Wayne to activate the switch. The spell wasn't a life-for-a-life as he feared, but that was still dangerous. Accidentally zeroing out his own health was only a few mental clicks away, so he needed to be careful.

"Could use your Sword of Water back here. We've got a few fires."

"Coming."

On his trip back to the farm, Wayne saw he unlocked a new spell from Spellcasting 101.

Emverdoo – Create organizational chart.

He didn't have the brainpower to guess at what that meant. The other unlock, this one from Super Monaco GP, seemed more straightforward:

Firenze V12 - Note that the higher the max speed, the poorer the acceleration will become, so choose wisely.

Then again, his Blitz didn't feel any different, so maybe it wasn't so straightforward after all.

Regardless, he and Fergus had survived. That's the only thing that really mattered.

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