“Talk about an overreaction, am I right? You would have thought none of these people had ever seen a mile-long, gigantic monster made entirely of flesh and evil before!”

  “Spur,” Witherson frowned, looking none too happily at the Commander and official head of Terra as the council convened their first meeting since the battle for wave five. The battle had only taken place the evening prior, and since then, roughly seven hundred Earthers had been brought over to Edregon via the Gods’ ritual.

  They’d been understandably horrified at seeing the corpse of the epic monster wrapped around town. A corpse that had nearly killed everyone just a few hours prior.

  “What? I’m just saying,” Spur shrugged. “I mean, sure it’s a horrific abomination thousands of times larger than any creature they’ve ever seen before, but it’s dead! We already did the hard part!”

  “I’d argue the hard part will be finally getting all of it transported over to the Sacred Forest,” Alice said bluntly. “It’s going to take a lot longer than we first thought. I’ve got many of my support classes working round the clock in rotation, and James and his supply guys are literal godsends, but Golrim predicts it will take about a week.”

  “We can’t just burn parts of it?” Phil asked, the leader of the combat classes sitting back in his chair with his arms crossed as usual. “Would be easier.”

  “The dryads use monsters as fertilizer to buy themselves time until a permanent solution for sustaining their magic is reached,” Vin explained for the umpteenth time. They had a similar conversation after the battle for every wave of Earthers once it came time to deal with all the monster corpses. “Elite monsters are far more magic-dense than regular ones, so I can’t even imagine how much magic has to be packed into an epic monster of this size. Hell, there’s a chance this thing might solve the dryads’ problem once and for all.”

  “I do like the idea of having an immortal race of magical trees indebted to us…” Spur admitted, drumming his fingers atop the table. “Regardless, that’s not our priority at the moment. Vin, you mentioned last night something about the missing people from the last few waves not being dead like we’d assumed after all. Care to go more in-depth into that? And remember, none of us understand magical mumbo-jumbo like you do.”

  “Yeah,” Vin said, sitting up straighter and trying to decide how to word this. He’d had a few hours to try to gather his thoughts and put what he’d seen into words, but he’d been so tired from the recent battle that as soon as they’d gotten back to town he’d conked out for the night.

  The stronghold of slumber was a dangerous thing.

  “So recently after hitting my second prestige and becoming an Adventurer of the Arcane, I learned how to do something new. A new... trick, if you will, that we've taken to calling me looking Beyond the Veil,” he explained, careful not to explicitly mention it was a class ability. The Gods’ actively prevented those who had prestiged from discussing certain aspects of prestige classes with those at a lower level, which was why he had to beat around the bush like this. The only reason he was even able to say this much was probably because he was always showing up and unveiling some new power or another to the council, so they wouldn’t even think twice about him suddenly being able to do something new. If he’d tried to explain that classes at level 40 each came with unique class abilities, he would have simply decided not to for whatever reason, subconsciously guided away from the topic by the Gods’ own hands. “It’s… weird. It seems to let me see things I shouldn’t be able to see, and sense things I shouldn’t be able to sense.”

  “To confirm, this is what occasionally throws you into a coma that takes days to wake up from?” Witherson asked.

  “Not often, but yeah. My new class seems to revolve around making ‘arcane discoveries.’ The larger the discovery, the more experience I receive, but certain discoveries are simply too powerful. The ‘not meant for mortal minds’ kind of discoveries. While those give me massive boosts of experience, they are a tad… lethal.”

  While he and his team had been in the sky fragment, Vin had seen through the dark clouds of magic hiding the World Eaters down below; flying monsters quite literally the size of mountain ranges. He’d locked eyes with one and received an overwhelming sense of hunger, not to mention a lifetime of horrific nightmares, before falling into a coma for a few days shortly after getting to safety.

  Similarly, while experimenting with a bunch of extra skill points he’d been saving up, he’d stumbled upon the realization that he could force his Runecraft skill to continue leveling above level 20. It wasn’t until after the fact that he’d learned the skill stopped at level 20 on purpose, and that he’d accidentally used Beyond the Veil to bypass past a soft block the Gods placed in everyone’s heads to prevent them from doing exactly what he’d done. He was supposed to have gradually risen from level 20 to 25 over many years of practice and raising his attributes high enough. Instead, he’d gotten a taste of how the Gods saw the world, how everything from his flesh and bones to the very air around him was simply magic desperately rebelling against the runic prisons the Gods had cast it in.

  The memory was still a bit hazy, as the Goddess of Benevolence had placed a fresh block on his mind to help him retain his sanity and not explode into uncontrolled magic, but it had been the second time his new class had thrown him into a coma for a few days. He’d done enough damage to his body that the Goddess had strongly recommended he take it easy on his Beyond the Veil ability until he hit level 50, insinuating that by then his body should be more suited to handling the magical strain placed upon it.

  Suffice to say, his new class was far more dangerous toward himself than any other he’d seen up until now.

  “Anyway, yesterday, while we were waiting for the fifth wave to arrive, I spotted something strange,” Vin continued. “Normally, I can only feel the mana fluctuating right before everyone pops into existence on Edregon. This time, however, there was more. I saw the outlet of the ritual the Gods use to transport people.”

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  “Yes, you mentioned something about them ‘leaking,’” Spur reminded him. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Think of the ritual like some sort of giant, magical pipe connecting Earth to Edregon,” Vin tried to explain. He didn’t have the slightest clue how the Gods’ ritual actually functioned, but he didn’t need to in order to grasp what it did. “They use magic to grab the people from Earth, pump them through the pipe, and out they pop on Edregon. Make sense so far?”

  “We’re following,” Alice nodded. “But this godly pipe sprung a leak?”

  “Basically. We know from my conversation with the Goddess months back that Edregon’s construction was rather last minute, relative to the speed Gods tend to work. Edregon and the new System itself were both thrown together rather haphazardly, leading to a few minor issues here and there.”

  One of those issues had been the brand-new System attempting to reward Vin for finding a new world the moment he’d appeared on Edregon, granting him a ridiculous amount of experience before he’d even done anything. He’d gotten a free passive point out of the experience as the Gods immediately took it all back and tried to buy his silence, along with a threat that they’d kill him if he didn’t take his point and keep quiet.

  That was probably the first moment he realized the Gods were a bit of a mixed bunch.

  “Because of the speed at which they devised everything, the pipe isn’t as structurally sound as it was intended to be,” Vin continued. “This is a magical bridge spanning not just worlds, but entire universes. With each wave of people that is sent through, it’s eroded a little more. Wave four was the final straw, as we saw how nearly a quarter of the one thousand people never finished the trip. The pipe must have finally eroded to the point where it began spilling them here and there during the journey.”

  “So they’re potentially alive out there, just scattered across Edregon?” Spur asked, looking hopeful.

  “Well… not most of them,” Vin admitted, wincing at how the Commander’s face fell. “From what I saw, the majority of the pipe resides within another dimension entirely. For the sake of this metaphor, let’s say ninety-five percent of the pipe isn’t even in our dimension. All the people who spilled out within that first ninety-five percent…”

  “Almost certainly died as they appeared in space, or on Venus, or who knows where,” Witherson said bluntly.

  “Yeah… but, that’s only ninety-five percent of the pipe!” Vin hurried to add. “There were some people who spilled out the final stretch, once it was within our dimension again, and I witnessed their magical signatures tossed around in different directions as they ‘sprayed’ out of the side of the pipe. I have no idea where they ended up, but they should be alive and in one piece. For now.”

  “How many of these people did you see?” Phil asked.

  “It all happened rather fast so I can’t say with certainty, but I think it was about fourteen people,” Vin admitted. No regular human would have been able to count the spilled mana signatures so quickly and accurately amidst the entire ritual going on, but Vin hadn’t exactly been dumping so many of his attribute points into focus for nothing.

  “Fourteen missing survivors of the two hundred and ninety-seven Earthers who failed to make the journey,” Spur said, letting out a weary sigh. “I was hoping for more, but I suppose it’s better than none.”

  “Then the question becomes, how many resources do we devote to trying to find these missing Earthers?” Witherson asked. “There’s no telling how far they landed or if they're even still alive a few hours later. What if they’d landed in the death fragment, or in the center of Lumel’s lake? I can’t imagine a level one Earther with no idea of what’s going on has much of a chance of surviving on their own on Edregon.”

  “This isn’t like learning that other countries from Earth are sending people to their own fragments,” Spur said, frowning at the head of the crafter classes. “Those groups might be hundreds or even thousands of fragments away. But these are our own people, and from what Vin said, it sounds like they might only be a few fragments away from where they were supposed to land. We can’t just abandon them.”

  “Do you have any way of tracking them down?” Alice asked, eyeing Vin up like he was a pi?ata filled with surprises. “You’ve got a few dozen magic spells under your belt now, right? Alka says there’s all sorts of crazy stuff you can do.”

  “I could try putting together a spell to find them… But the issue isn’t a lack of spell, it’s a lack of range. I’ve tried overloading my ‘sense spells’ with mana before, it doesn’t end well. The last time I did it the information was too much and it quite literally killed me, only my divine boon saved my life.”

  In exchange for swearing a vow of benevolence, Vin had been granted a divine boon from the Gods that gave him one ‘get out of death’ free card each day. His restriction was that he couldn’t attack or harm anyone unless they attacked first or he was saving a life, but he was largely a pacifist anyway, so the trade was more than worth it.

  Shia had her own divine boon that allowed her to find the location of something she thought she needed once a week, but her restriction was that if she chose to use it, she needed to travel to that location. Even Reginald had his own divine boon, though Scule wasn’t very happy about it. Reginald had a boon of loyalty, which would allow the rat to trade his own life for Scule’s should the petian ever keel over and die. Scule had made it quite clear how he felt about this particular boon, and it had become one of those things that none of them talked about.

  “You don’t have any way of empowering your sensing spell to encompass entire fragments?” Spur needled. “Come on, you’ve been all over Edregon! You must have seen something like in your journeys.”

  “There was one thing I saw that was similar,” Vin admitted, thinking back to the first time he’d run into the infernals. “Madam Trebella gave me a charm capable of detecting curses from entire fragments away in order to track down the divine warrior. I couldn’t wrap my head around how she’d expanded the sensing magic at the time, but I’m a much higher level now, with a lot more experience. I think if I saw something like that again, I might be able to puzzle it out.”

  “But Madam Trebella is gone,” Alice pointed out. “Her opening a portal back to the old universe and her old world caused her entire fragment to be removed from Edregon. Even if her people survived by being teleported to the Underside and then ferried over into Alka's abandoned fragment, you can’t exactly ask her for help anymore.”

  “No, but that doesn’t matter anyway,” Vin said, sighing as he realized he knew exactly who he was going to have to ask for help.

  “In fact, the infernal I need to talk with already moved himself into Terra without even asking.”

  existence of the new class abilities of the second prestige, he's largely golden.

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