Adam

  I heard Ash’s call before Floof barked lightly in response. She had already woken up. It had happened much quicker than I’d expected.

  “I think the carving worked. It still stings a lot, and kind of feels weird, but I feel mostly okay again,” she said as I rushed back to her side.

  “How much is ‘mostly okay’?” I didn’t want her pushing herself any further today, though I also didn’t know what the alternative would be. We couldn’t realistically leave this stronghold until it was finished off.

  I’d need to find the anchor point for that. Usually, stronghold anchor points were tied to a resident within them. Generally, it was the strongest, and under normal circumstances, I would have expected that to hold true, with it being the queen. But if what Ralph had said about how their species worked was true, then something else would be maintaining the link.

  “A lot better, I think. I feel like my dream helped, but I can’t quite get any of the details from it to come into focus. Any idea what that means?” She had the tone of a daughter who desperately wanted her father to have the answers.

  I didn’t.

  I hadn’t been able to make out what she was saying either. Strange dreams could mean far too many things in System space for me to make any good guesses. I had plenty of hopes of possibilities, but not a single one of them had anything concrete to back it up.

  But I was her father, and reassuring her was my job. “Could be a lot of things, but with how much better you’re feeling, it’s probably a good thing. Let’s not question it for now and instead get back to what we need to do.”

  “More spiders?” she asked, pushing herself to her feet. The light in her eyes was back. The glyph really had worked. Now we just had to keep up the leveling until we cured her entirely.

  “More spiders. We’ve gotta finish off this stronghold, but it should be worth it when we do,” I answered.

  “What exactly is a stronghold anyway?” Ash asked, with a sigh of annoyance. “You know, the lack of a tutorial is the biggest sign that this isn’t just some game.”

  She was right. It wasn’t a game, even if some people referred to it as one. It was a horrible series of nonstop life-or-death situations that some grand cosmic arbiter had created eons ago. Or, at least, that was how I viewed it.

  I didn’t have any magic insight about it. However the System had come to be, it was still just as unknown to me, despite how far I had gone in it. It was a mystery I’d briefly considered trying to solve, but that was a goal for a future Adam. I had far too much to secure here on this new Earth, before I could even consider anything like that.

  “Factions can claim territory within the newly integrated world. This is one of the primary goals for most of them, so they vie for control of the planet. As I told your father earlier, it’s rare for one to have a stronghold this early into the invasion, but these spiders specialize in it.” Ralph had joined us and started to explain it before I could.

  “The System gives awards to factions the longer they hold strongholds, and the more they grow them. This one can’t possibly be old enough just yet, but by the time the rankings were revealed, it would have been, and that would have given them a pretty big reward. The way they maintain these holdings is by funneling enough of their own mana into a spot and creating an anchor point,” he continued.

  “So there’s some anchor here that we need to destroy?” Ash asked, slipping it into the brief pause in the lecture.

  “Yes, and it’s likely highly guarded. Though, I question how many of them there can really be at this point. It feels like we’ve gone through a ton of spiders, given how early in the integration we are,” I replied.

  “Eggs rarely count as a person, when it comes to fielding your invasion force,” Ralph added, his lips curled downward just slightly as he said it.

  Good. It made it much easier to work with someone who didn’t consider that an acceptable sacrifice.

  Surprisingly, it made sense that horrible tactic was something I hadn’t even known about. Almost no faction was willing to waste their young like that, and the few that were tended to be undead, meaning they could easily replenish them on their new world.

  It was actually quite shocking to see a faction so willing to throw lives away. Shocking, but not anywhere near the worst I had seen.

  I shook my head. “Sadly, there is no end to the horrors some of the factions are willing to employ as long as it benefits them.”

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  “Even if this saves my life, I honestly think I liked my life more before all of this. I don’t understand why anyone would ever enjoy constantly fighting and being forced to prove themselves, just to get some weird System’s approval. Is that even how this works? Can the System approve of people, or is it just a rogue AI they treat like a god?” Ash’s questions were angry and raw. She was boiling over again from the stress. And who could blame her?

  “I don’t have any good answers there. And I doubt Ralph does either. As far as I know, the System is an unknowable force. But I do agree with you, on it being far more a curse than a benefit.” I didn’t know what else to say. She was going through the same thing I had, and there was no way anyone could have reassured me back then. Some things had to be processed on their own.

  Ralph followed up. “I have met beings, who claim to have met beings, who existed when the System was new. I’ve never quite decided if I believe them or not. As it’s never a first-person account, I’m hard-pressed to fully accept what they say. But there are those far, far above me on the System’s path, and this move I am taking here with you may turn out to entirely upend anything I’ve done until now. That means I, myself, am probably an unreliable source.”

  He gave us a ridiculous-looking wide grin as he finished, accentuating his last point.

  His experiences matched my own, though there had been more hops in my game of telephone. I'd never cared much to try and chase down the truth of it either; my brother and I had been too focused on our immediate goal of changing the reality of the integrations as they were, not finding the reason they’d ever started.

  I now believe that was likely one of our gravest mistakes. But we were young when we had made that choice, and desperate to change things for the better. What we had gone through as children was something neither of us wanted anyone else to ever experience.

  We’d made far too many enemies and never enough friends. Even though both of us had been System prodigies in our own right, we were only two, against factions that had others to match us. There were countless groups that were too invested in the current ways to ever risk their power slipping, who had at best ignored us, and at worst waged open war.

  “Now isn’t the best place to discuss our pasts, or our lack of real knowledge on the System. We need to get back to work,” I said, not wanting to dwell anymore on the past at the moment. There would be plenty of that in the times to come.

  Once Ash’s future was more secure, we wouldn’t be in such a blitz against time. That was a future I looked forward to. It would be when we could finally discuss what she wanted to do, when she could be sure she would have the chance.

  Because, as much as I hated the System, there were still gifts it gave to people. And a future for Ash was one of them.

  “Yes, Adam is right. He’s about to have other things to do anyway,” Ralph replied.

  Before I could ask what he meant by that, a voice from somewhere deep into the woods called out. “Help! Please help!”

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said to the others as I took off in a run toward the call. Floof was immediately at my side. The voice had sounded young, which immediately set off my dad alert. It also threatened to again draw me back to my own memories, but I pushed those aside for the here and now.

  We didn’t have to go far to find the source of the voice. And while he was certainly young, he wasn’t remotely what I had been expecting to find.

  Inside a thick bush was a stony grey figure, a little taller than Ash. His two, large, protruding fangs, as well as the short, pointed ears, gave him away as something other than Human. He could be a member of any dozen of species I had met before, so I wasn’t sure, but the fact that he spoke English was something that caught me off guard entirely.

  Was this a trap?

  “Please don’t hurt me,” the kid said, tears running down his face.

  I let some of my guard down. This didn’t feel like a trap. Was he from one of the other planets that had been integrated into Earth? Had my fight with the spiders freed him?

  “Come on, I’ve got you,” I said as I reached my hand out to him and helped pull him free of the thicket. Several lines of dark green blood showed how many thorns he had found.

  “Thank you, but they have my family, please help,” he cried more, as he crashed into, arms wrapping around me in clear fear and relief.

  No, I was sure this wasn’t a trap. This was a terrified kid, likely attacked by the spiders.

  “It’s okay, I’ll help, I promise. Who took your parents?” I asked. While I likely already knew the answer, I wanted to be sure.

  “It was a giant red and orange spider. Mom and Dad were trying to find a place to hide and rest when it surprised us. We haven’t slept since that weird voice. They made me run, please, you’ve gotta help them.” They begged me with a voice full of tears.

  “Rock Trolls have some pretty thick skins. I suspect your parents are still alive, but probably held in the center of the stronghold with everyone else they’ve managed to capture. I’m impressed you managed to figure out the System so quickly, though. A translation class is smart thinking,” Ralph said as he and Ash caught up to us.

  That explained the English. And they were Rock Trolls, were they? I wasn’t familiar with the species, but I had met enough Trolls to know they were generally hardier than the average human.

  “Really?” the kid asked, still crying. I was sure he was a kid now, despite his size. Every troll I’d met was at least a foot taller than the average human, and their kids grew quick.

  “Really,” I said, backing up Ralph. “Now I need you to be brave and lead us to where your parents fought the spider. We are going to do everything we can to find them.”

  “That was amazing. I can’t believe we lived through that!” Alecks said, laughing.

  Adam couldn’t either. The weird frog cat thing had been hunting them for over a day, through the thick forest and up against a steep cliff. But somehow, they had managed to kill it.

  It had gotten too close to the cliff edge, and a couple well placed swings from both of the brothers had managed to knock it off. To the current shock of both of them, it hadn’t been able to cling to the cliff as it fell.

  “What’s that shiny thing?” Adam asked. As it crashed to the ground, something silverly blue had come free of its body. And whatever it was, it was glowing brightly enough to be noticed all the way up at their perch.

  “No idea, but I think we should take it,” Alecks said.

  Adam agreed entirely.

  Memories of Adam Miller before he found Earth