Beside the greenhouse, the ex-hero and the moustachioed scouts continued to chat silently, his gaze scrutinising one in particular.

  The young scout under the pressure of this look, under the pressure of the approaching summons to adventure, began to lose his composure. His green eyes drifted to the side, out across the fields where the other guildies laboured moving earth. A shaky hand reached towards his belt, but then, as if it'd been seeking something there for stability but failed, it travelled further into the hiding place of a pocket below.

  The retired hero teased, speaking outloud for the first time. “Is this kid normally so anxious?”

  The youngster flinched but struggled for a reply, the weight of future greatness catching in his throat.

  "Th-th-thorry," he apologised with a lisp.

  The rest of the scouts frowned, perhaps questioning the retired hero’s abysmal social IQ. Wasn’t it common sense to feel anxious when eye-groped by even the gentlest of humanists? Critics might argue that a potential hero should be above such minor fears, should embody the virtue of grit. That was in addition to the problematic lisp, which would quickly become tedious and politically insensitive once the novelty wore off. All this reasoning, however, was flawed. One or two character blemishes, at least in the beginning, provided a necessary point of relatability, and they could be ironed out in the later stages of the transformative journey.

  “Hermann’s new,” explained another scout in embarrassment.

  An out was thus given for the ex-hero's blundering over-staring and commentary. It could only be hoped that this new hero, this ‘Hermann’, would be more socially astute.

  “Ah, a virgin,” said the old, socially-challenged hero.

  He gave a satisfied wink at Hermann, perhaps recognising that the hidden talents already sighted would, if this candidate were new, only continue to blossom in the weeks or years or millennia of digital adventuring to come. The wink remained closed after, as he used one eye to study Hermann's performance records in their guild database and to confirm the potential already guessed.

  Some seconds passed. On the roof of the greenhouse overlooking them landed a vulture, which the nervous Hermann fixated on. Tinged by anxiety, he interpreted it as a sinister omen rather than a fellow seeker scouting amongst the decay for the rare heroic morsels like himself.

  “Hermann…" said the ex-hero, a smile and a second wink concluding his investigations. "Hermann The Nervous Virgin….hmm...well, there’s an easy fix for that. Why don't you lads get this young Hermann some action? Break his hymen.”

  The other scouts puzzled over the bizarre comment, and all their gazes pivoted on the nervous Hermann in search of that special quality detected by the old hero but not themselves. To them, who'd spent some weeks with Hermann, it wasn't obvious - but, then again, was heroism ever obvious? One often failed to catch it, mistaking heroes for non-heroes and vice versa.

  The old hero, having given his disgustingly-phrased but perhaps pragmatic advice for conquering anxiety through the power of love, bid the team adieu and teleported out of sight. His part in the search complete, he could now jog off on his holiday while the abandoned torch of destiny was taken up by this new kid: Hermann The Nervous Virgin.

  Now let’th get better acquainted with the newbie, who will no doubt earn our endearment in the thousandths of pageths ahead.

  Hith pre-heroic profile: Hermann, thurname yet to be determined, chathtity yet to be determined, wath a youth of 21 from the German thity of Munich, whothe well-groomed mouthtathhe thometimeths dithracted from and at other timeths emphathithed hith thevere lithp.

  A rethent recruit to The Company, he could be regarded ath the matured, narratively-convenient athhelerathion of the many amateurths applying through the tournament thith week. He had jutht been promoted from a trainee into the offithial rankths after completing a monthths-long development bootcamp. That’d theen him firtht attending lectureths at a thhool of cadetths in a different thone, followed by a thelf-thelected redeployment to Kanaru, where he’d continued learning ath part of a thmaller team while roaming the thavannah doing queth for Nerin’th Trialth. Right before thith tournament, he and the other thcoutsth had been in Hanaalcheya, two dayths thouth by boat acrothh the bay, invethtigating a dungeon from what wath prethumed to be a pre-Kanarite thivilithathion - the ancient tholdierths pretherved in the dungeon lacked the dithtinctive red thkin-tone of the modern inhabitantth.

  Through theethe preliminary adventureths, all the raw talent thcouted during hith amateur dayths had been gradually dithiplined and honed. He had, for the record of that talent, failed in hith firtht recruitment tournament and then, in a reattempt, finithhed 401thts in the one-v-one and 180th in the thixth-v-thixth with a thquad that’d thinthse redithtributed to other partths of Thaana. Thith ath far ath the guild went had been an abythmal thstart, ekthatherbating an original inferiority complexth thtemming from hith lithp. However, Hermann had a thuthpithion—a potenthially heroic thuthpithion—that hith thkillsth had grown quite thplenidly during The Trialths, nudging him clother to the elite of the elite. A fantathtic chanthe to demonstrate theethe improvementths waths being given today, during this thcout job, his firth athignment to a real bat—

  “Sakrament!” the new hero, Hermann The Nervous Virgin, cried as his squadmates jumped him and pinned him to the ground. “You lunatics, are you steaming nuts?!”

  In a moment of breakthrough via surprise, his lisp had vanished. The rapid advancement to heroic perfection was already underway!

  “You lunatics!” Hermann repeated lisplessly as he fought back, “Get your filthy hands off—”

  A hammer clunked against his helmet, rattling his skull. A squadmate held down his arm and used an axe to sever one of his hands, the thing spasming as a replacement spurted from the meat of his wrist like Hermann himself replacing our hero and being immediately cast into the blood and disorientating chaos of futuristic videogaming. Others seized his legs.

  The rest of the squad, not directly involved—yet—loomed around him at proximity that might suggest an awkwardly literal interpretation of the former hero's advice to pop Hermann's virginal cherry. It could be guaranteed, however, that Hermann's chastity was safe, protected as it was no doubt by destiny and the rules of publication, all this being merely heroic foreplay.

  The squad-leader bashed his head again. “Who are you working for, you fucking fraudulent Kraut motherfucker?! Out with it! Are you even German?!”

  “What is this you are speaking of, you racist?” Hermann wept, the heroic sexual assault opener also having a weird side-element of witchhunting. “Yes, I am indeed a 'Kraut', as you say! And for you…I am working for yo—auweh!” He cried as another squadmate trying to seize his struggling legs punched him rudely in the Bavarian crotch. “You shit-shitting asshole, stop that!”

  Ah, how smoothly slithered the Ss now that he’d broken through the first of his pre-heroic psychological limiters.

  Further abuse followed as the squad-leader shouted at him, accusing him of this and that - the particulars were not so essential. Nobody came to his assistance. The other scouts just stood above him, arms crossed to show off their muscles, tongues it might be imagined licking their lips - although, they did in fact not do this second action. One scout—to whom Hermann pleaded as his closest friend in the team, with whom he’d shared countless intimate conversations during their idle hours riding across the steppe, the pair even shaving each other's moustaches—summoned a banana and peeled this banana suggestively.

  Hermann was utterly helpless. This, it seemed, was to be the new hero’s trial by friendly fire, his teammates attempting to rape him, perhaps due to a communication error, perhaps due to their jealousy of him receiving the preferential wink of destiny.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Would Hermann actually be assaulted? Or would the old hero, discovering this abuse from wherever he’d teleported to, perhaps with a new Legendary hearing aid, return after recharging to clarify his low-social-IQ statements and save Hermann's virginity? Would the old hero be shocked when Hermann, his replacement with hidden skills, had already single-fingerdly defeated this gang of banana-eating perverts after achieving more pressure-induced psychological breakthroughs? Would Hermann thereby earn the patrician stamp of approval and a potential 1-on-1 mentorship in the art of More, with maybe some freebie starter Legendaries to accelerate him in his journey?

  Apparently not...

  After young Hermann failed to yield a satisfying answer to the nonsense interrogations of his bullies, they stripped him to his underwear. Things might have progressed horrifically from there, but the squad-leader, beginning the action by shapeshifting into a muscled chimpanzee, got too frisky in the opening touches and accidentally ripped Hermann's arms and legs out at the socket. The others were instantly turned off by the sight and, cancelling the assault, they instead kicked him a few times before beating an exit. The former confidant, Hermann's closest buddy, gave one departing insult, dropping the banana peel on his face, which Hermann was tragically incapable of removing due to the amputations that'd replaced his lisp as a new infirmity.

  His sausagified torso remained there alone, cruelly abandoned in the fields. Hermann, persecuted and traumatised, wishing no more of this hero business, deleted his character on the spot.

  His carcass sucked emptied of the soul was inspected by the vulture, flapping down from the greenhouse. It pondered his German features, his aristocratic nose and his striking green eyes and his toothbrush moustache, and it perhaps wondered where the heroic assessment had gone wrong again.

  Was a replacement, truly, this difficult to find?

  Squawking its frustration, it flew off to continue its quest. A flock of seagulls landed soon after it, and they ravenously stripped the discarded virgin down to his skeleton.

  Two more skips meanwhile had brought the retired hero to a different group of scouts. They met outside a miniature earthen structure, which resembled a castle but may in fact have been another agricultural device like those being built around the dilapidated farms. After a second humanitarian speech in silence, he gifted this new group a unique, tent Legendary, demonstrating its deceptively-capacious interior and a toggleable camouflage magic.

  The purpose of this charity, wrongly presumed at first to be another ceremonious dubbing of his successor, would be revealed a few minutes later as he and the vulture in pursuit carried on.

  The further north the journey travelled, the more desolate turned the scenery. As he exited the estates that'd been fed by artificial irrigation, the land reverted to its more natural steppe ecology. Some sickly dwarf shrubs grew by the riverbank. Aside from those, he was pressed in from both sides by a vacant sea of grass, rustling grey and blue in the moonlight. A few shadows in the distances told of other travellers, some alone, others in tiny bands. The wildlife was gone, but their presence was recalled by trails of hoofprints and sun-crispened dung heading east for the continent’s interior.

  In this open space, whenever he paused to gather charges, he produced a second shield, the unliftable clunker of wood and bone that moved dirt for tunnelling. He used this to practise and re-practise the building of campsites. These, completed within seconds, were impressively stealthy, most of their space subterranean, the unearthed material shaped into a minimalist above-ground profile. An onlooker seeing them—or not seeing them—would understand why he’d donated the camouflaged tent Legendary, that other item having been made redundant.

  The design of the campsite, following some stock pattern, was modified slightly with each skip and rebuild, creating extra room to stretch his legs, opening windows for a better view of nature. The roof mutated the most, changing into a termite-hill-esque tunnel, which simultaneously left enough vertical openings for the operations of his charging shield, powered by the moonlight, but also restricted the glow laterally, such that the effect was only visible at a few metres. This was, no doubt, a courtesy learned from the previous encounter with the elderly couple in case he met any more retirees out using the savannah to stargaze - nobody wanted their evening spoiled by some dipstick flashing a strobe like this was a rave instead of the tranquil outdoors.

  Once this redesign was finalised, he added his spooky amputated arm Legendary for automated spellcasting to the weapon juggle. The dead goddess’s bejewelled fingers took to imitating his earth-shaping gestures in an effort of memorisation. The movements were at first clumsy, lacking their former orchestral grace. With every new attempt, however, the arm improved, and in no time it was practising the construction on its own while he zig-zagged around the steppe, depositing a trail of campsites. These camps, although breaking the cardinal rule of outdoorsmanship to leave no trace, would make excellent free lodgings for any future travellers confined to a slower pace; this likely reflected a high-level humanitarian calculation, the ex-hero prioritising the well-being of others over the ecological conservation of a barren grassland.

  It was around this point—after journeying for half an hour and putting all sight, stench, and memory of Suchi many horizons behind him—that the scenery became less barren. Where a bountiful nothing had been and should have continued to be, there were people once again – lots of people.

  The first appeared in small teams of riders, galloping in circles with their binoculars on the lookout for something, perhaps for wild game.

  The former hero—being a lover of humanity but only at a distance—veered his path away from these hunters, likely not wanting to ruin the pleasant solitude of retirement with requests for autographs and heroic apprenticeships etc. His passage coincidentally went unnoticed thanks to the continued camp-building practise of the auto-casting arm.

  Although he may have dodged the riders and the rest of humankind, a vulture in search of the next hero might separate from his path and fly straight on, recognising from above that these first people had only been the outer satellites of a much larger, much more promising gathering.

  A kilometre beyond the hunters appeared groups of dozens of cowboys. These were managing herds of grazing goats and cattle, inspecting for ticks, replenishing troughs with magically-conjured water, resting under ponchos by animal-dung fires. Flying deeper past these came larger groups of hundreds at their own miscellaneous tasks: hammering at forges, praying at their altars, debating in their circles, hacking through a herd of arrow-riddled antelope, dumping fly-blown corpses onto a pyre before a vulture could get a scrumptuous gizzard-full. Those hundreds—soaring higher yet and deeper yet—condensed with each other into caravans of thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, until they’d achieved such a mass that a stranger standing on the ground might spin in any direction and see no end.

  But from the sky, the whole could be admired. Eleven million bodies had so far spread across this part of the steppe, and more were trundling hither in their wagons from the other blood-red cities of Kanaru sleeping to the west and to the east.

  As far as people went, they had little in common besides their rags, the millions consisting of both players and NPCs under motley flags, shaped in different morphologies and speaking different tongues. Yet there also presided over them all some obscure fact of unity, perhaps just in their random choice to collect here in the middle of nowhere.

  The purpose of the gathering lacked any obvious explanation. There had been that mention earlier by some rejected heroes of a party. If this was said party, however, the atmosphere was not particularly party-like. The mood seemed far too sedate for a party. Aside from the activity on its periphery, most in the bosom of this gathering were sleeping, only a few drowsy children sneaking about the camps to spy upon their fathers kneeling in their vigils. There was also little in the way of party music, party bangers, or party jams, except at one site, where the heart-beat pulsing of a bongo accompanied a woman gyrating for a crowd of silent men, her dance strangely mesmerising, her appearance mesmerising as well, the woman dressed in a mesmerising sarong and her mesmerising eyes concealed by a finger-thin, deliciously-mesmerising serpent wrapped into a blindfold while her arms waved in mesmerising bidding to the star-bejewelled heavens of mesmerisation.

  The vulture, attracted by the woman’s summons, swooped down. It landed on her head, claws gripping to a crown of flowers braided through her hair. As she swayed to the drum rhythm, it pecked first at the snake and then, when that was eaten—and when she put up no protest—her eyeballs. She just let it go freely at her eyeballs, continuing to sway rhythmically as their meat was pulverised in the sockets and the resultant mush inhaled.

  “I can see The Desert as it drifts towards us,” proclaimed the woman while the vulture blinded her, an inky stream pouring down her cheeks. “Tomorrow’s Sun portends our reunion with The Ancestor of Ancestors, but there is a choice in the path by which we meet. The first path would have us perish, flowing as this blood and filtering on down through the dunes, beneath whose weight She rests until the closure of this Seventh Cycle. The second path would have us shovel the dunes aside and raise Her immortal body from Her tomb of sand. Either way, She calls for sacrifice. Which of you will hide your veins from Her? Which of you will spare your arms for Her? Which of you believe yourselves too precious and too holy to seek out your Mother in The Desert?”

  The men around her, watching all this wordlessly, thumped their spears in unison across their chests, the shafts clanking off the metal of their armour.

  This vulture was startled by that racket out of its consumptive reverie. At a sudden realisation of the danger around itself, it regurgitated a glob of eyeball back onto the woman’s face. It beat its wings in a hasty takeoff, rejoining the sky and the endless search for a replacement hero to deal with these uncanny times.

  Who knows? Maybe that hero was hiding somewhere in this gathering…somewhere around this party...