Todd’s eyes blur. He yawns. In his vigil, he barely registers that a faint fluttering sound overtakes the breeze in the branches. He scratches his neck and stretches.

  The sound grows louder.

  Now the noise is like the flapping of hundreds of wings. Closer. Louder. Now a black cloud blots out the sky. Now hundreds of tiny leathery pterosaurs burst through the tree cover, dive bombing the humans below.

  “Randall!” screams Candra.

  There’s a heartbeat of delay. A flying lizard lands on Todd’s head, its claws scratch his scalp. Another lands on his back and bites at his gorget. He rips them off.

  Then there is a great gout of flame that flares overhead. Little bodies drop to the ground in droves. Plop, plop, plop. The charred monsters make a carpet over the ground.

  There are survivors, of course there are. They wheel off and fly up above the treetops.

  Todd stomps on a fallen beast and its long hollow bones crunch. He lifts his foot in revulsion, but then reminds himself that it tried to eat him. The little varmint got what it deserved.

  The others likewise deal with remaining pterosaurs. Sue Ann has one caught in her hair. She screams until the thing is killed and removed. Her head and collar is left sticky with the creature’s blood. She shudders in despair.

  Randall and Todd are tasked with picking up the winged lizards. The smell of burnt meat is ever-present. They stack the creatures on their ruined tent and drag them all at once. It’s a thankless task.

  “Did you level up at least?”

  Randall pauses. “…Only once. It’s not fair. I got like forty of them.”

  “What did you stat?”

  “Dexterity and endurance.”

  “Smart. It’s a good thing to have more survivability. How about you, are you doing okay?”

  “I’m great! I just killed, like, fifty enemies. Why? How are you?”

  “Fine. I’m just thinking that extreme difficulty hasn’t seemed extreme so far.”

  “You don’t think this is extreme? We’ve been fighting, like, constantly!”

  Todd makes a non-committal noise in his throat. The two of them change subject and start talking about which superhero name they’ll take once they return to the real world.

  Randall is thinking of calling himself ‘Scorch’. Todd laughs. It sounds like a villain’s name.

  After they return there’s a debate about whether to schedule sleep shifts during the night or to wait until morning. Certain beasts are more active under the stars, and the visibility is low. It might be safer to wait until daylight.

  But in the end, Joe needs sleep the worst. His rest was fitful and multiply interrupted. He heads into the tent and leaves his sword for the group.

  The first part of the night goes well. A crow-leopard comes to investigate their camp, stalking towards Randall. But Todd hits it with a [water spear] and it quickly realizes it is outnumbered. It runs away into the night, taking little leading bursts and turning back around. It dares them to chase afterwards. They ignore it. They prognosticate. Will it come back with its friends? Will it try to surprise them if they’re alone? They keep the threat in mind and maintain their lines.

  A camel-ostrich charges them later on. Todd finds himself staring down a hundred eighty pounds of beast, rushing him with its gawky, pumping legs. He readies his ixwa, but the thing leaps and kicks him in the shield. The blocky wooden object knocks back as his arm twists. It hits him in the chest and he’s thrown off his feet.

  “Augh!” he cries. His arm blazes. He lands on the crunchy dirt, just a few feet from the fire. The beast raises a leg and tries to stamp on him. He rolls over and over, away as the creature chases him with its dangerous foot. But the camel-ostrich can’t last either. Randall swings for its legs from behind and cuts it down. Candra thumps it in the rump and keeps it down. Sue Ann slices at its neck and opens its throat.

  “I need to do something about my arm,” Todd says after they’ve caught their breath.

  Candra sighs. “Take a blood weaving pill and cultivate. We’ve got this for a while.”

  Todd thanks her and takes a place by the fire. He slips a pill into his mouth and a metallic and bitter herbal aroma fills his nose. The medicine slides into his stomach and starts to dissolve, flooding his body with energy that stimulates his natural recovery to an extraordinary degree. Sitting in a cultivating position, he tries to guide the energy, to direct it towards his arm. But it’s like picking up wet sand through open fingers: little effect for great effort. Todd focuses on cultivating instead. The process is slow, particularly his level gains. He recognizes that he’ll have to advance to the next step of the cultivation manual in order to make much progress again.

  His session lasts a half hour before it’s interrupted. The crow-leopard has come back, and this time it bolts directly at him. He doesn’t have a chance to wind down before the beast slips through his friends and barrels into him.

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  The cosmic energy in his body goes awry, twisting in its channels. At the seat of his energy patterns, the beat of his heart is interrupted by the sudden shock. His body convulses as he rolls with beast on top of him.

  The others are there fast. Candra vaults over the fire and bashes the creature in the neck. Randall kicks the beast in the side to disentangle it from Todd. Sue Ann lets loose a [phantom maul] before she gets close enough to strike.

  Todd gasps as his heart resumes its responsibility with a stutter. He lies on the ground for a half second, just recovering. But his friends are in combat, so he drags himself up. His circulatory system flutters and vertigo addles his mind.

  Cut and battered, the beast turns to flee again. This time though, Todd reaches out. He stokes his turbulent cosmic energy and it ricochets inside of him. But his skill still activates, spraying the crow-leopard in its hind leg. It tumbles, and the others are able to run it down. They cripple its thin limbs first, and then proceed to hack it apart. They make a terrible mess.

  Todd rubs his chest and makes a foul expression. His arm feels much better, but the inside of his body feels like all his veins are knocked crooked. The flow jangles and knocks instead of running smooth. His heart is sore in his chest, and his breathing is short.

  The others take one look at him and ask Todd if he’s alright. He answers honestly.

  “I don’t know,” he says. He leaves it at that.

  When the next beast arrives, Todd avoids using his skill. He tries to channel his cosmic energy gently through his body, but when even that hurts he stops and merely uses the strength of his stats.

  After, he wipes his bloody ixwa against the fur of the slain goat beast, then grabs its leg and starts to drag.

  When Joe wakes up, he looks much refreshed. Not quite in top shape, but much better off. Candra and Sue Ann go next. They share the cramped tent while Todd takes over watching the fire. He stares into the night, light-blinded and aching.

  Flashing eyes pass by through the trees. Something circles them.

  Joe puts himself between the beasts and the fire. He slaps the flat of his sword against the rim of Candra’s shield.

  The beasts linger for a while and then vanish.

  “They’re waiting for us to go to sleep,” Todd suggests.

  “Or to make a mistake. We can’t be going off alone anymore, that’s for sure,” Joe says.

  Todd sits down and looks internally. He senses ruptured pathways in his system. Taking quick sessions to go under, he works at smoothing over the worst of the damage. Unfortunately, his progress is minimal, as he doesn’t want to risk a full cultivation session. He keeps alert instead, surfacing every few seconds. Impatient and frustrated, he does this for a good twenty minutes before he gives up and decides to wait until the girls are awake.

  The thin trickle of beasts continues. Another owl-headed bear finds them and the three young men are pushed to their limits to face it. With every charge it makes they fall back. They attack its sides and haunches every time it turns. When it rears on its hind legs, they give it space. It swipes at them and tears at their shields. It pummels and punches, snaps and bites. Joe dances in front of the beast, light on his feet and quick to avoid its reach. He lashes out at its paw and nose when the bear overextends, his every action calculated to keep the creature angry and occupied.

  Todd curses under his breath as he sees the opening. Forcing himself to stop thinking and take the plunge, he leaps onto the back of the bear and hugs it tight. He straddles it and then plunges his ixwa into its side.

  The bear surges to fling him off, but he locks his legs around its belly. It rears up, and he grips his spear embedded into its side. It falls backwards to crush him and all the air rushes out of his body. His ribs creak and his head bashes into the dirt.

  “Todd!” cries Randall.

  His friends strike with renewed urgency. They batter at the paws of the animal, trying to get at its soft belly.

  Todd groans from underneath the burden and works his weary arm, stabbing over and over again.

  When the bear rolls off of Todd, it does so bloodied and broken. Its feet barely hold up its weight and its beak hangs open as it pants. It bites at Todd. He rolls to his feet and avoids it. The bear rises up one more time onto its hind legs and Randall lays into it from behind. He severs something critical, and the beast collapses onto the ground. It heaves, its face planted into the soil.

  “Who wants it?” Joe asks.

  “I’ll take it!” Randall shouts eagerly.

  Todd hesitates. Randall won’t kill it cleanly. He doesn’t follow through with all his strength. Todd says nothing. After all, his friend could use the levels.

  Randall brings his cutlass down on its neck once, twice, three times.

  Todd winces in sympathy for the creature.

  The boys wake the girls after another hour or two. Candra wakes with a start and bolts upright. Sue Ann lifts up calmly and wipes the sleep from her eyes.

  Todd asks the others if he could cultivate for a bit instead of sleeping right away. He tells them about his deviation and warns them about the danger of being interrupted.

  They guard him for a half hour while he fixes his damaged channels. Twinges of pain accompany each small adjustment as if he is massaging bruises inside himself. He knows little of what to do but to try to recreate the lines of the [root of the limitless promise] manual so that’s what he does. At the end of his effort, there’s still more to do. The harm had been extensive, and his body is refusing to recover faster than his vitality allows it to.

  Besides all that, it’s not fair for him to monopolize their rest time. He gets up and joins Randall in the sleeping tent, careful not to wake the other young man.

  His mind races as he lies awake, and he nearly jumps as the sounds of a fight breaks out outside. Heart racing, he stays down. Trusting in his friends to take care of the threat, he closes his eyes and thinks about ice cream and dogs – anything to keep his mind off of the new world he’s on.

  There is a thud and some choice whispered curses. The dark grows quiet except for the crackling fire.

  Time takes us all into the arms of oblivion. Todd falls into slumber. Thus ends the second night.