He was very quiet while he tried to find Lily. Checking corners, listening carefully to any sound he could hear, he remembered all the tricks he knew from the games with stealth missions. This was a stealth mission. He was very stealthy.

  Tracing his steps back to the courtyard didn’t sound like a great plan, but he wanted to know where exactly the Arm was fucking around right now. Did it roam the corridors? Went back to the canteen? The first step of any stealth mission was to know who to hide from. So he went back. Carefully.

  He was the avatar of carefulness. The Hunter. The Shadow. He made no noise, and probably left no smell. The apex of sneaking, he was–

  “Why are you walking weird?”

  The high-pitched squeal that filled the hallway had no source. Actually, it didn’t happen at all. After all, when a tree fell in the forest and no one saw that, was it even there? The little girl didn’t count as a witness, since who the fuck listened to kids anyway? He made no sound.

  “Shhh,” he shushed her. “Don’t make noise,” he whispered, grabbing her hand. “We need to get the fuck away from here, I think something triggered an alarm, this position is not safe anymore.”

  “Something? You just–”

  “An alarm,” he whispered louder. “Was triggered.”

  Thankfully she didn’t protest as they quickly made their way out of the compromised hallway. The only sound made from their passing were the quiet footsteps–not his–and suppressed giggling. Somehow, instead of scaring the girl, the fight did the opposite. Scraped, bruised, and with their only way out of this world blocked or outright not existing, Lily seemed absurdly happy. She was skipping along the way, playing hide and seek as he checked the corners, and generally was so joyful his teeth hurt.

  She was high as fuck.

  “Did you see where the monster went after the fight?” he asked quietly after they left the ‘crime scene’.

  “Back to the same spot,” Lily answered while tracing the cracks on the wall. “I checked it out while the monster was breaking everything and looking for you! It was really scary! And neat!”

  He shushed her and received another giggle in return. At least she got quieter.

  “There’s nothing in that spot,” she whispered, like telling him a secret. “It just feels more like a fort, and that’s it. There was nothing like those grabby cracks.”

  “So there’s no exit?”

  “Nope.”

  / - /

  Sneaking out of the fort was troublesome since it was, well, a fort. It only had one entrance, and it was connected to the inner courtyard which they were a bit wary of approaching. In the end, they just climbed the wall. Dennis was dexterous enough to not have any trouble with that, and the ability to literally carve chunks out of the wall with his bare hands made the task trivial. Unlike the last time, Lily didn’t even fall down from it, probably because she erased the concept of fear out of her mind or something, and it made her more confident with heights. They were going to the town center, to check out the last possible lead they had, the statue.

  Going from the fort to the town center was as simple as following one straight road, if Dennis’ map knowledge was to be believed. Without the need to turn anywhere he was confident they wouldn’t get lost. Or, if they would, climbing the roofs was still an option.

  It stung, really, that he couldn’t win the fight with the colossus. That was the first one since the apocalypse started. He understood logically that he wasn’t the biggest baddest guy around, with magic involved who knew what kind of bullshittery existed that he had no hopes of winning against, but logic was nothing against direct experience. Being punched through a wall earlier made breathing painful, but at least it didn’t feel like it was getting worse. And it didn’t hurt at all if he didn’t breathe, so that was also a solution, somehow.

  There was a chance that defeating the Arm would unlock a way out or something, that was the way it usually worked in games, you need to defeat the boss to progress, but Dennis just couldn’t see himself winning. Maybe if he had his buff permanently? But that was wishful thinking, he just wasn’t strong enough to protect Lily if they tried to approach the fight with her as bait. The Arm was beyond him, for now, and that meant they had nothing left to do there.

  Maybe he’ll come back after a few more levels.

  The wounds they got in the fight worked weirdly in this world. Both he and Lily had quite a few scratches and bruises, but they didn’t get worse. The bleeding just stopped after a few seconds, and the bruises, while quite concerning, didn’t grow past their initial size. They still hurt, but they didn’t hurt more as time passed. Dennis theorised that their bodies worked similarly to the way this whole world worked. The same way the houses around them were just pale imitations of the real thing, their bodies were also not as real. They bled, but the bleeding was superficial, it was just there because it was something that happened to bodies when they were damaged. Dennis was getting tired during the fight because he was supposed to get tired. Instead of actual physical processes it felt more like… More like having a health bar, and a stamina bar. Status effects like ‘bleeding’ or ‘infection’ just didn’t exist.

  This world was an imitation of the real one, a simplification. Like a game.

  Another thing he noticed on their way was the fact that they were getting exp. It was a small thing, easy to miss, but he had a very good memory, and he was pretty sure that he had less when they only got here. There was no sudden influx of it, no actions that could be linked to it. The fight with the Arm got him nothing but some cracked ribs, so this was something else. Straining his senses, he could feel himself getting changed, every second giving him an infinitesimally small mote of power. Just existing in this space made them stronger.

  That, at least, explained the goblins around the church.

  It felt different than the normal way he got exp. There was a fundamental difference to the way it worked, not just in scale, but in principle. When he killed a goblin he could clearly feel that he became more because the goblin became less. It was a transaction of power.

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  Here, there was no transaction. Nothing gave him power, there was no transfer, no source. He wasn’t even sure that he was actually getting more power. He was becoming stronger, more real, but… there was no new realness juice involved. There was no exp in the air that he absorbed. In fact, he was pretty sure that the world around him was the opposite of… exp in the air. It was infused in anti-realness juice, if a thing like that existed. It didn’t. There was nothing around them, and somehow that made him slowly become stronger.

  To make an analogy, if he was a statue made of clay, killing a goblin was the same as taking some clay from it and adding to his own. Staying in this mirror-world didn’t give him more clay, but it made him more defined. Slowly, the arm-shaped pieces got some biceps, more definition, better anatomy, better efficiency. His imaginary clay-statue of himself was getting abs. It wasn’t getting bigger, but it was getting better. Following that analogy probably meant that he won’t be able to just sit on his ass until he got unlimited power, there was a limit on how much definition you can add before there was nothing left to change, but until then he sure as hell was going to enjoy some free idle leveling.

  His musings got interrupted when he saw the statue in the distance. It was, of course, some dude on a horse. Probably someone important, like the founder of the town. Dennis honestly didn’t know, and didn’t care.

  That was way too soon. According to his map knowledge, they had a good half an hour of walking left before reaching it, and yet they were already almost there. The distances in this world were shorter. Not like anything was fucking with space, but some turns just weren’t there. Whole streets were just missing.

  “Let’s slow down a bit,” he said quietly. “In case there’s another one of those freaky arm guys.”

  “Sure!” his headache replied. He was getting quite good at tuning Lily’s chattering out when she was high on magical drugs, but sometimes too much was too much.

  They tried to keep close to the houses, to break line of sight and hide in case they found another monstrosity hunting for their asses, but they didn’t see any. The town center was like a mini-park, but there was nothing special about it. The only notable feature was the relative lack of floating people above it. Come to think of it, there was also almost no one floating above the fort either. What did that mean? He was confident that those ‘flyers’ were the mathematically proven survivors that no one could find before, and that would mean… what? There were a ton of them above the church, including the pastor, and almost none above the fort and the city center. They were the missing people. Probably teleported to this mirror world at some point when no one looked, suspended in the air to chill and do nothing. If there was none above the fort, that meant that none were teleported here, right? There was no news about any missing people in the fort.

  Hmm.

  The people who were supposed to be here were dead, weren’t they?

  When the horde came, it was likely that there were a lot of people here, and he couldn’t see any places where they could easily hide. If they were killed, they didn’t get ‘missing’. No mirror world teleportation for the dead, no floating people here. That was his theory.

  In the real world, this place was probably a massacre.

  He watched carefully the few floaters that he could see. All of them were above the houses. One was above the road. His gut told him that there would be a car in that place on the road, in the real world. And those houses would have basements, he could bet on it.

  The mysterious t-posing people in this world were the ones who managed to hide in the real one. At some point, all of them got yoinked here. When?

  After the first day. He remembered survivors coming out like mushrooms after the rain when they were hiking to the fort, but he knew that not a single one was found after that. So, during the night? Why weren’t the fort people yoinked then? What was the difference?

  He couldn’t figure it out, but some puzzle pieces were connecting. He needed more information, especially since he would need to save them all.

  Obviously.

  He doubted they were t-posing in the air of their own volition.

  They moved a little bit closer to the statue before he felt a tug at his sleeve. Lily pointed quietly above one of the houses. It took him a moment to figure out which one she meant, but he noticed it without much trouble. A black shape on the roof, easy to miss because of the distance. Just sitting there, overlooking the whole area.

  The Arm of High Authority. Or something like that. He couldn’t sense the thing from this distance so he could be wrong, but it looked more or less the same as the last one. Aggroing that thing would be trouble.

  Thankfully, it was on the other side of the mini-park, with the statue between them. While Dennis couldn’t feel out the monster, the vibes of the statue were more noticeable. Even weaker than the ones in the fort, they whispered to him about rest and pride and history. Nothing interesting, and nothing important. Nothing about grabbiness or teleportation. Coming closer wouldn’t tell him anything new, just allow him to figure out the intricacies of the history that the statue whispered. Like, who that guy was. Useless.

  “Yeah, this isn’t working,” he said quietly.

  “Mhm.”

  “We need a new plan. Maybe the fact that there were lots of people above the church means something? Do we need to find another church, and not just some random landmark? Or maybe actually beating up one of those Arms would do something? You think someone did beat up one at the church? Was there one? Maybe if we break the statue it will do the cracky thing? Come to think of it, there’s no aura at the church at all, maybe–”

  “Breaking the statue won’t do anything,” Lily said. Her voice got quieter than it usually was lately. Not as aggravating. “It’s not the source, just the place where it’s most concentrated. If we break it the aura will disperse a bit, I think, but it won’t make a difference.”

  “How do you know?”

  She shrugged.

  “We still have options,” he said. “I’m really close to the next level, we could try beating up one of the Arms after I get it, see what happens. We could hike back to the city where I came from, there was a spawn point for goblins there, and I bet it looks interesting from this side. If nothing else, there’s more than three landmarks in the world, we could check those one by one until we find something. Or we can make a ladder, or a lasso, and get our hands on one of the floaters, see if we can wake them up. Maybe those guys will know something. Or–”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “Let’s find a place to rest before I become useless. There’s nothing we can do here, anyway.”

  That… sounded a bit depressing. Oh well.

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” he said. “Get a level, see if we can regenerate injuries. Like, if they don’t get worse, doesn’t that mean that the only thing they can get is better? People get better with time, but does that work here? I’m still not hungry, I wonder if we can get hungry at all. Do we sleep? Can we sleep? The t-posing people got here during the first night, I wonder if it happened when they were asleep? Or was there some people-snatching monster? How would that monster work? Nah, I’m pretty sure they just teleported, but was it at the same time, or spread out? Can we–”

  Lily didn’t listen to the end of his monologue, already on her way to some random house further away from the center. A bit rude of her, but whatever. He hurried along.

  When he entered the house, he saw her already sitting on one of those fake-sofas, in front of a fake-tv. She was hugging her knees, and he could hear quiet sobs.

  “You okay?” He tried the default question people were supposed to ask in situations like this one.

  “No,” she replied quietly. “I’m out of mana.”