The wind tears at her hair and Nara brushes it from her face for the hundredth time. She needs to find something, a band or a piece of leather, anything. From up here on the city wall, the wind has free reign and it uses it with enthusiasm.
She has been on the move since early morning. The wall curves in a wide arc around the city and she has walked every section that can be traversed without falling. She has counted seven breaches. Seven places where the wall has collapsed, some wide enough that a wagon could drive through, others just narrow cracks where the wind whistles. The stones at the edges of the breaches are blackened and partially melted, as if something with unimaginable heat has struck the wall.
She stops and leans against the parapet. From up here the city looks different than from the streets. Much larger than she had thought. In recent weeks she has explored the marketplace and the surrounding buildings, but from up here she can see how little that actually is. Behind the buildings she knows, entire streets stretch out that she has never set foot in. Roofs, most collapsed, some surprisingly intact, line up against each other until they blur in the distance. Here and there towers rise up and occasionally she sees the broad crowns of palms between the buildings. Palms. That surprised her at first. In New Haven such a thing would have been unthinkable, but here the sun seems warmer and the air milder, despite the season.
“That’s easily a small town,” she mutters. “If not even larger.”
She turns around and looks in the other direction, beyond the wall. Before her stretches a wide meadow, the grass knee-high and interspersed with wildflowers. At first glance peaceful, almost inviting. Then she sees them. Scattered groups of blue dots slowly hopping across the meadow. Two here, three there, slimes spread out across the landscape. From up here they look harmless, like glowing marbles in the grass.
Nara grabs her left upper arm and presses against the spot where the bruises still shimmer yellowish-green beneath her sleeve. Harmless they only look from up here.
And perhaps a kilometer beyond that, the forest begins.
The forest stands like a wall on the horizon. The trees are tall and grow so densely that the light is swallowed after just a few meters. Nara’s grip on the parapet becomes firmer. If a single slime has nearly incapacitated her, what lurks between these trees? A slime is stupid and weak and it still threw her on her back. She is no fighter. She can barely handle a sword. If anything lives in there that is faster or bigger or smarter than a slime, then she has no chance.
She steps back from the parapet, as if the forest could see her from here.
“Seven breaches,” she whispers. “Seven places where everything can get in.”
She turns away and continues along the wall until she reaches the barracks. The building leans directly against the inner side of the wall, long and solidly built. The roof is mostly intact, making it one of the better preserved buildings she has seen so far. The heavy wooden door stands open, the hinges so rusted that they cannot move no matter what.
Inside it is cool and stuffy. Nara walks slowly through the rooms. A large sleeping area with rows of collapsed bunk beds. A common area with a long table, whose legs still stand but whose top has broken in the middle. Then the weapons room.
She stops in the doorway and lets her gaze wander. Empty weapon racks on the walls, the brackets still visible, but what once lay in them is long gone. On the floor lie scattered arrow shafts, their stems broken, the feathers turned to dust. In one corner three spears lean against the wall, the rust has eaten into them so much that they would likely fall apart if handled. Several empty barrels are stacked against the back wall.
Nara taps against one of the barrels as she passes. It sounds hollow.
“Why do I expect anything different?”
She leaves the barracks and marks the doorframe with the piece of charcoal she always carries now. Intact and usable, even if nothing of value is found inside. Why she does this, she cannot quite say. It helps her organize her thoughts, transform the chaos of this city in her head into something tangible. Circles and crosses. I can use this, I cannot use that. The world should be so simple.
She takes the path back toward the marketplace. The streets here are wider than near the center, laid out for troop movements presumably, with straight intersections and few side alleys. Weeds grow between the pavement and in some places whole bushes have pushed through the stones. Her footsteps echo between the empty buildings and she hums quietly to herself, some melody that just comes to mind. The important thing is not to be silent.
She turns a corner and stops abruptly.
On the pavement, perhaps twenty meters ahead, sits a slime. Transparent, shimmering blue and roughly the size of a medicine ball. It pulses slightly, as if breathing, and in its center a small point glows, faintly but steadily.
Nara’s hand slowly and carefully moves to the sword at her hip. She grasps the handle and pulls it from the sheath. The runes on the blade glow as always in a muted blue.
“Come on,” she mutters. “This time I make a better showing. Hopefully.”
The first time, it must have been early in the second week, she had discovered her first slime at the edge of the marketplace and in a fit of isekai-inspired hubris had decided that a slime must be the simplest entry-level monster. She was wrong. Her first blow missed the slime by a wide margin, the second one too. She had never learned to fight with a sword and the slime was faster than it looked. When she finally hit it, the blade went straight through without doing it even the slightest damage. Then the thing rushed at her and knocked her off her feet. She stumbled backward over a piece of rubble and bruised her back so badly that she had to grit her teeth whenever she breathed for two days. Only after several attempts, through pure chance, did she hit the glowing point in the middle of the slime and the thing collapsed on the spot, melting like water on hot stone. What remained was a small glowing crystal, blue and warm in her hand.
Since then she knows what matters. Hit the core.
Nara exhales and slowly lowers herself into a crouch. The slime has not noticed her yet, or at least it does not react. She has since learned that the best approach is to get close from the side and try to hit the glowing point in the middle with a quick strike. Not from above, then the slime just closes back up. Not too slowly, then it dodges. And definitely do not stand too close afterward, because these things can jump.
She creeps closer. Ten meters, five, the slime pulses evenly. She can see the glowing core, it sits slightly offset to the right.
Nara pulls back and thrusts in a quick motion. The blade enters the slime from the left, but the slime contracts at the last moment and almost evades the blow. Almost, but the blade misses the core and cuts through the lower part of the slime, severing a piece. The slime recoils and rises up as if to jump.
“No, not again,” Nara hisses and takes a large step back. The slime shoots forward and lands exactly where she was standing just moments before. She stumbles slightly but catches herself and sees the core in the moment the slime spreads flat on the ground after landing. There. She thrusts the blade downward, straight through the slime, and hits the glowing point. The slime twitches once and begins to dissolve immediately, spreading across the pavement like a puddle and growing thinner and thinner until nothing remains but a small crystal on the wet stone.
Nara stands there, sword in hand, breathing heavily. Her heart hammers.
“At least I didn’t fall down this time,” she says to the wet spot on the pavement. “I’m making progress.”
She crouches and fishes the crystal from the puddle. It is small, barely larger than a marble and radiates a pleasant warmth. Like the others. She cannot explain why, but every time she holds one of these crystals in her hand, she has the feeling that it is important. Not knowledge, more like a pull, as if something in her responds to it.
“Mana crystals,” she murmurs and turns it between her fingers. “If this really works like in the manga, then you are valuable. And if not, I just have a collection of pretty marbles.”
She puts the crystal in the leather pouch at her hip and heads back.
When she enters the tavern, Dieter greets her as always with his silent grin. His skull sits on the counter, tilted slightly to the left, as if looking out the window. She buried the rest of his skeleton together with the other bones in the first days. But Dieter kept his place. He is the worst company one can have, but still better than none at all.
“I’m back,” she says in passing. “Thanks for watching the tavern.”
The skull says nothing. As always.
The tavern looks different than on the first night. The floor is swept, the debris cleared away, the cobwebs removed. The tables that could be saved stand upright and clean against the wall. On one of them stand three clay pots with flowers she found in the ruins and planted. Yellow and white blossoms whose names she does not know, but which make the room less bleak. Behind the counter the shelves are tidied up, the few usable bottles and glasses she has found arranged neatly. The fireplace is blackened but functional. Next to it lies a clean stack of firewood.
Nara goes to the counter and takes down a small basket that stands next to Dieter’s skull. In the basket lie six glowing blue crystals, some a bit larger, some smaller. She places the seventh one with the others and puts the basket back.
“Seven,” she says and taps Dieter on the skull. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not a fighter.”
She takes a long drink from the water pouch and sits in one of the chairs. Her legs are tired from the long walk on the wall and the fight with the slime has exhausted her more than she will admit. She leans back and looks at the ceiling. The hole above the counter she has patched with boards. It keeps the rain out, mostly at least.
On the upper floor she has made one of the guest rooms half-habitable. She cleared out the broken furniture, scrubbed the floor, repaired the window shutters. The bed is her personal masterpiece, if one is generous. Four pieces of wood that she nailed together, over them a board, over that the blankets from her father’s supplies, carefully stacked. It creaks with every movement, the right side sags somewhat and once she fell through at night. But it is a bed and it is hers.
She stands and stretches. “Break is over. The garden is waiting.”
The way to the Adventurers’ Guild is short and she knows it by heart now. Through the back door of the tavern, across the small plaza, past the smithy and then left. The guild building is one of the more stable ones in the city and the enclosed courtyard behind it proved to be the best place for her garden.
Nara kneels in the bed and pulls out weeds. The stuff grows faster here than anything she has planted, as if it knows that she has no idea what she is doing. She tears out a particularly stubborn root and shakes the dirt off.
“You know what,” she says to the plants and tosses the weed onto the pile beside her. “I became an orphan at seventeen. Then I broke my back working at a gas station for years. Then a disease got me so bad that I couldn’t even go to the bathroom by myself.” She pulls the next weed and examines it briefly before throwing it away. “And then I died and was reborn in a world ruled by fanatics who condemned me to death just for fun.” She heaves herself up on a particularly stubborn clump and tears it out root and all. “So believe me, against a few weeds I can hold out just fine.”
She sits back on her heels and wipes the dirt from her hands. The seedlings she has grown from her father’s supplies stand in disorderly rows. Some look promising, others not so much. She has no idea if she is doing this right. In her old life she never had a garden. In her new one she had servants for that.
“If you were to die right now,” she says to a particularly puny seedling and pokes it carefully, “that would be extremely impolite.”
She works on, weed after weed. The sun hangs low and casts long shadows across the garden. Her hands are dirty up to the elbows and beneath her fingernails the sand will probably never come out again. But it is good work. Work that she can feel, in her hands, in her knees, in her back. Not like the lying, the endless lying, where her body felt everything and nothing at once.
“Okay, enough for today,” she says and stands up. Her knees protest. She brushes the dirt from her pants and gathers the weeds into a pile that she will clear away tomorrow.
On the way back she reaches into the washtub in the tavern’s courtyard and washes her hands and face. The water is cold and she shudders. Then she dries herself on a cloth hanging over the fence and goes back inside through the rear door.
She is just rounding the counter when she hears a rumbling and notices something unusual in the plaza.
A flickering, but not the usual, weak, steady flickering of the portal that has accompanied her like a distant nightlight in recent weeks. It is brighter, more restless, as if it is working.
Nara puts her hand on her sword and goes to the door. She opens it slowly and looks out at the marketplace.
The portal glows brightly. Much brighter than she has ever seen it. The blue pulses at short intervals and the darkness in the middle seems to move, as if something is being pushed through.
Then a figure stumbles out of the portal, just as Nara did.
A person in filthy, dark clothing. Hair hangs in strands and the hands are scraped and dirty. The clothing is torn and stained, as if the person has been sleeping in it, and not just for one night. The portal flickers once more intensely and then falls back into its usual weak glow.
The person slowly straightens up, stands on the marketplace and looks around. Her movements are stiff, as if everything hurts.
Nara stands in the tavern doorway, hand on the sword hilt, and does not move. Her heart hammers. For weeks she has been alone in this city and now someone stands there, no more than thirty meters away, on the pavement. A human. From the portal.
She narrows her eyes and tries to make out the face in the evening light, but hair hangs in front of it and the distance is too great.
Nara swallows and grasps the sword hilt more firmly.