“Are we lost again?” Lily asked tiredly. It wasn't the first time.

  “No! No, I’m sure there was supposed to be an intersection here,” he replied, barely managing to suppress his frustration. This shit just didn’t make any sense.

  Their path back to the fort got weirder the further they went away from the church. It was bad enough that basically all of the buildings got replaced by poorly made identical placeholders, with some just outright missing. He could deal with that, he perfectly memorized the whole map. The fact that all of the signs were just blank, with zero way to figure out on what street they actually were was also fine. He memorized the whole fucking map! He could deal with that, he could just trace the exact path they took, count the buildings, count the turns. There was no way for them to get lost!

  They were lost again.

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “Let’s trace our steps back a little bit. My map is outdated, apparently.”

  Something was wrong with the city layout. The streets were wrong, the number of houses on them was wrong, and it’s not like he had a lot of points of reference to figure out where they were. The best he could do is to point in the general direction of the fort and hope to reach it that way.

  “Maybe we should follow the river?” Lily proposed. “If we just move east, there’s no way we will miss it. And then we’ll reach the fort if we go downstream.”

  “If we won’t find it, we will get really lost,” Dennis pointed out.

  “But it goes through half the city! If we won’t find it, it means we were lost from the very beginning. But even then, if we miss it, there’s no way we will miss the ocean, right? The ocean has to be there.”

  “So does the river.”

  “Well, yes, but I mean–”

  “I get it,” he said. “It’s as good a plan as any at this point. Quick question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Where’s east?” he asked, looking at the pure whiteness of the sky.

  “Fuck.”

  “The only point of reference we have is the church,” he said, thinking out loud. “I’m pretty sure that the entrance was facing south, so we could use that, but the problem is that it wasn’t directly south, but at an angle, and I’m also not confident that I can figure out which direction we are facing now after all those turns. I mean, east is probably there,” he pointed to their left. “But if I fucked up the angle too much there’s a chance we will walk along the river instead of towards it.”

  “We could try climbing somewhere high to look for it,” she said, before looking around. “Which is… probably just the church again. Why did all multi-story buildings disappear? Ugh. I don’t want to go all the way back there.”

  Dennis was glad that during the last half an hour Lily’s probably magical cheerfulness got reduced from ‘I’m doing drugs’ to something resembling a normal mood. He never understood what toxic positivity meant before he had to spend time listening to the endless chattering of the always happy girl. It was exhausting.

  “If everything is on the same level, we could see pretty far away from the roof, I think,” he said. “If we find a way to climb it. I don’t exactly see any way up there or ladders lying around.”

  They’ve decided to start with investigating the insides of a random house nearby, in hope of finding a way up on the roof. It didn’t matter which one they picked, they were all the same. The insides were as bland as the outsides. Not even as ‘the most typical’ insides of a house, but as ‘the most typical house impression’. One kitchen, one living room. No toilet for some ungodly reason. The blandest table ever in the kitchen with two chairs. One couch and a tv in the living room. No bedroom, no running water, though that was usually the same in the normal world. He hoped there would be an attic but no luck there either. Every item around them oozed meaninglessness. Like an inversion of his magical senses, instead of telling him things, everything was obviously dead to the world.

  “I for sure hope that we don’t need to eat or drink anymore,” he mumbled while looking into the empty fridge. “Cuz otherwise we’re dead in, like, a few days.”

  “We could get water in the river,” Lily said while looking at the only painting on the wall. It depicted nothing. “I don’t think we even have to boil the water, there’s probably no microbes and stuff. Check this out.”

  Lily was… scrubbing the wall? He watched as flakes of dust fell down, disappearing before they touched the ground. An impressively large chunk of the wall was just gone where she touched it.

  Huh.

  He walked to the door and kicked it. The thing fell to the floor, shattering into bits. He tried punching the wall, and that made a hole through it. He didn’t even feel much of an impact. To be fair, that was also usual for the walls in the normal world.

  “Everything is made of sand or something?” he asked out loud. “Weird. But cool, I’ve always wanted to bust a door like that. Oh! You can climb to the roof by making holes in the wall!”

  “Why won’t you climb the roof?”

  “I don’t want to fall from it, obviously.”

  “Me neither!”

  “But you weigh less,” he pointed out. “So there's less chance of the roof collapsing under you. And if it does, I’ll catch you. Just fall somewhere reachable.”

  Lily prepared for another retort before stopping herself.

  “You promise?” she asked quietly.

  “Sure. It’s not even that high. I bet you could survive the fall if it happened. Try not to fall on your neck?”

  They went outside and picked a spot that seemed the most climbable. Lily was looking at the wall nervously, glancing at him from time to time. He gave her a thumbs up.

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  She sighed, and started carving chunks out of the wall with her bare hands. It was a weird sight. Thankfully, climbing up didn’t take her that long, and despite her apparent fear nothing happened.

  “You see anything?” he shouted.

  “I see the church!” she shouted back, before looking around. “And the fort! And a big statue!”

  He gave himself a congratulatory fist bump.

  “What statue?!”

  “The one they had in the town center!”

  “Okay, now climb back down!”

  The statue at the town center was another historical landmark, giving more credence to his theory that this town-replica was made of what essentially was important things, surrounded by meaningless things. He had no idea what to do with that knowledge. Was the church also one of the important buildings? Probably, yeah. Their best bet at going home would be to check places like that and hope to find another portal. Or at least he assumed that those cracks were a portal.

  He heard a loud crunch, snapping him from his thoughts. It felt like the world slowed down.

  Ah no, he just got faster. A glance was enough to see that Lily was falling down from the roof. It would take her some time to do that, probably a few seconds, so he didn’t hurry too much. Should’ve guessed that a way down would be harder than up.

  He walked lazily towards the spot where she would fall.

  It was curious that his skill activated without his conscious input. He didn’t will it to work, he honestly needed a moment after it activated to figure out what was even happening. It was both worrying and a good thing. Did he activate it subconsciously? Did the skill activate itself? Was the trigger the sound that he heard, or the fact that Lily was falling down? There was a scrying component to this power, he knew that already, so he wondered if it was possible that the skill activated itself because it knew about Lily falling before even Dennis did.

  Nothing in the skill description said how it activated, and Dennis always assumed that, well, he did it by willing. But he didn’t will it now, did he? It was so easy to remember things and make connections in this state, when his Mind was buffed. He remembered Lily telling him once that she believed that her skill worked constantly, even when she didn’t feed it mana, like in some kind of low power mode. Was this the case here? Could it be that Dennis actually had his skill turned on the whole time, it just didn’t work because he didn’t fulfill the requirements?

  If that was true, and the skill knew stuff that Dennis didn’t, it would make sense that he got the buff the moment Lily got in danger. He was, after all, vaguely aiming to catch her in case she fell. The target was there already, so the moment the conditions were right it turned on.

  Lily was halfway down. He reached his arms out to catch her.

  Was there a way to abuse it? It was a thought that was simmering at the back of his head for some time already. The skill worked at a distance so he supposed it could be used as some kind of warning system, but it would require him to have a good idea of where the target was. Not too useful, honestly. He also knew that it was possible to somehow loosen the restrictions or make the effect of the skill stronger, the thing told him that personally, in a way. Was it possible to make the targeting better? And if yes, then in what way? Would he need to try to convince it to work better after he leveled it up, or was there some sort of threshold where–

  Lily fell into his arms, knocking him down on the ground. Her elbow hit him in the face, and it hurt.

  “You alive?” he rasped from underneath her. His ribs hurt. How did he hurt his ribs?

  “I don’t wanna climb on the roofs anymore.”

  The fort was surprisingly closer than it was supposed to be. What should have been a two hour walk from the church became at most half an hour, and apparently they would’ve already reached it if they weren’t lost. To his dismay, if they continued on the path that he was leading them they would’ve missed the thing. The changed layout of the town was maddening, and the maze of identical houses was horrifyingly easy to get lost in. Whole streets just evaporated, and roads went straight when they were supposed to curve.

  “I mean, I think it makes sense with the replica-town analogy?” Lily mused on the way. “If you have a little toy town, you won’t have it exactly the same. There will be less houses, and you will skip the smaller streets altogether, no?”

  He guessed she was right. Still, it annoyed him that he couldn’t show off his map knowledge anymore.

  The fort was… weird. For one, all of the gates and drawbridges were open. There were no traces of battle, and the familiar slight smell of rotten meat was missing. It was completely empty inside, and everything people have done to the place since settling was undone. The place was different from the copy-paste houses, but still felt… cheap. Incomplete? It wasn’t the fort as he knew it, but the replica of it, albeit a better quality one than the houses in town. The walls didn’t crumble so much, it took a bit more effort to carve dusty chunks out of them, but it was still possible. The place had a weak aura to it, that very vaguely resembled the one in the church. Like it had a ‘fort’ stat, it wasn’t meaningless, but the stat was so weak that it might as well not exist. It was impossible to discern anything it said to him, its voice too quiet to properly hear no matter how much he flexed his spiritual muscles.

  He and Lily were methodically checking out the place, one room at a time, in hopes of finding the source of the aura.

  “Are you sure it even has a source?” Lily asked after they checked another room. It was a dud again, aside from the fact that they’ve found a flask that seemed to be made sometime around the world war. He wasn’t sure which one. It still crumbled to dust when he applied a bit of pressure on it.

  “I’m pretty sure it was an altar in the church, right?” he said.

  “Or the cracks.”

  “Or the cracks,” he agreed. “But the cracks weren’t screaming ‘church’ at us, and the aura got stronger near the altar. It’s a pretty good bet that the altar was the source, and that means that there should be the source of this ‘fort’ feeling, no matter how weak it is. Maybe at some symbolic location? What’s a symbolic location for the old military fort? John’s office? Did he take a commander’s room as his office? I totally would have done that in his place.”

  John’s office was another dud. It looked way more old fashioned than he remembered though, which was interesting.

  He was running out of ideas and totally bored with the whole ‘find the source’ thing. The only reason he kept going after checking what felt like the twentieth room in a row was the fact that they literally had no other ideas. If they didn’t find the source, or it had no hint on a way to go back, they were stuck. While goblin-infested apocalypse wasn’t the best place to go back, the thought of having to live stranded in a world of pure dullness was horrifying. Dennis wasn’t the type of person who craved company too much, but the t-posing crowds silently observing him from above was too low even for his standards.

  Luckily, they found it. The whispers from the walls around them got just a tiny bit louder, finally giving them a sense of direction.

  “Really?” he whined, looking at the door. “The canteen?! How is that the most important place in the fort?!”

  “Maybe it’s more, like, the most loved place? The one that people think about the most?” Lily guessed.

  “Why does it matter what people think about?”

  “Who else would decide the place?”

  They opened the door.

  There, at the exact spot where the cook or whoever gave people food in the canteen, was the source. He was sure of it. That tiny spot from which you would see porridge or what have they fill your plate, promising you some rest while eating and chatting with your friends before going back to the routine of your life.

  Behind that spot stood a creature. It was huge, a humanoid almost two times as big as Dennis, a mountain of muscle and mass, barely touching the ceiling with its head. It was covered in darkness, a black human-shaped silhouette cut out from the world. Dennis’ mythic senses were quite sharp from constantly focusing, and when he saw that creature, its existence whispered to him its meaning.

  The arm of high authority.

  “You think that thing’s friendly?” he asked casually.

  The creature lunged.