“I’m more interested in hearing about this safe place you say you’ve found,” Leonard said, and several voices among the crowd spoke up in agreement. Every eye in the place was on Char, waiting for her answer.

  Declan spoke up before she could decide what to say. “We found a Challenge Zone, and when we beat it, the system gave us access to a whole city in a tree. It’s pretty awesome. The tree is enormous, nearly as tall as a skyscraper. And there’s a kiosk where you can buy things, like food and gear. The system calls it a Sanctuary.”

  Char stepped in before he could reveal any more, “And we want to gather up all of the people we’ve found to move there. The area around it seems to be free of monsters. I don’t want its location to become common knowledge, though, not until we have a chance to settle in and get it defensible.” She looked at Cory. “If Cory will vouch for you,” she watched him, and he nodded, “then I’ll offer you a chance to join us.”

  “If there’s food there, I’m in!” She didn’t see who said it, but it was followed by a chorus of agreement.

  “How do you propose to get us there with the monsters prowling around? We’ve seen those giant centipedes, and the vultures attack us every time we try to go out.” Annabel’s words were like a bucket of ice water on the crowd’s enthusiasm.

  “Declan, Lulu, and I have been able to fight everything the desert has thrown at us so far, and with more fighters, it shouldn’t be too dangerous. From the looks of the storm brewing at the biome boundary, I don’t think staying here is going to be safe for much longer, anyway. Those pines out there are dying. That storm’s going to bring them down when it breaks.” She looked Annabel in the eyes and added, “I’m not going to force anybody to do anything. It’s your choice whether to come or not, and you’ll have a few days to decide. Once I see what’s going on with Voss, we’ll come back this way. If you want to come with us, you’ll be welcome.”

  A woman in the crowd stood up and called out, “We might not be alive in three days. We’re out of water, and almost out of food!” A man stood up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. They both looked at Char with hope.

  “Well, the winds seem to be keeping the vultures away. We’ve been hiking along the boundary all morning, and they haven’t bothered us. Declan and I can go check the trucks for supplies. One of the trailers out there had the logo of a food hauler, so there’s a good chance. Just the two of us can’t fit a whole trailer full of groceries in our inventories, though, so we’ll need some help.”

  Cory stepped up immediately. “I’ll come.”

  Leonard nodded, “Yeah, I’ll help.”

  Another man with a beat-up Caterpillar ball cap stepped out of the crowd. He looked up and down Char’s petite five-foot-two frame and asked, “How’s a little bitty thing like you gonna keep us safe?”

  Char held up a hand and pushed some lightning mana into it, just enough to make sparks jump across her fingers. “It’s a new world.”

  The man stepped back, his eyes wide. “What the hell?”

  “Level twenty is where the magic starts,” Char said. The room erupted with questions.

  Annabel put her hands up and got everyone settled with a few words. Char let the sparks die and put her hand down. The older woman turned to her, “And are you willing to share how to get that magic?”

  Char shrugged, “It’s no secret. Hit level twenty and absorb a Domain Affinity Core. The hardest part is getting a Core. After that, the system will give you a spell that matched whatever Domain Affinity you picked.” There was more to it, but Char didn’t feel like giving a full lesson. She was anxious to get moving again. She wanted to get up the cliff and go set things right, and she could feel the storm building. The storm was going to be a hard deadline, and it was a tight one.

  Annabel pulled her to the side for a quiet word as Declan and Cory organized more volunteers and got ready near the door. “You got them settled like a pro,” Char said, admiring the older woman’s poise.

  Annabel snorted. “I was a hospital administrator for nearly thirty years, and before that, I was an ER nurse. I’ve wrangled everyone from belligerent drunks to soulless insurance reps. Scared people just need to see someone who seems to know what they’re doing. Even if I’m just as scared as they are.”

  Char recognized the admission as the olive branch it was. “Insurance reps, huh? If we ever go up against vampires, I know who I’ll be hiding behind, then.” Both women shared a smile, and Char felt like she’d found a good ally.

  “You’re not feeding us a line, are you? These folks can’t take false hope right now.” Annabel watched her face.

  Char gave her honesty, even though it wasn’t pretty. “The Sanctuary is real, and I’m as certain as I can be, considering the whole world is crazy now. Listen, there’s another group of survivors about three miles east of here. They’re holed up in a concrete monstrosity of a Russian apartment building. If it looks like the storm is going to break before I make it back here, try to get your people to them. That building will handle the storm better than this place will. I judge you’ve got three, maybe four days before the wrath of nature comes blowing down that cliff.”

  Annabel’s eyes widened a bit, and she went a little pale, but she didn’t let fear rule her. She took in a deep breath and got her features under control. “Do you really think the storm will be that bad?”

  “Like a hurricane.” Char let herself reach out to the storm. The Thunderbird part of her wanted to connect to it, to dance in the wind and call the thunder. She could feel the violence building in those clouds, like an animal straining at its leash, and it made her shiver. “There’s some sort of artificial boundary holding it back for now, but it’s either failing, or the storm is getting too strong to be held back. Either way, it’s going to be devastating for anything too close to the boundary when it breaks loose.”

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  There was a layer of steel under Annabel’s Southern charm, and Char saw the determination firm up behind her eyes. She nodded. “I’ll do what I can to keep them safe. Convincing them to face the monsters is going to be a hard sell.” She motioned toward the group gathering by the doors. “You’d best go on. Hungry folks don’t tend to have much patience.”

  The foray out to the trucks was stressful, with everyone watching the sky and expecting an attack that never came. The first trailer they opened had been hauling produce, and was a smelly, rotten mess, but the second had a load of mixed dry goods.

  The first of the volunteers to climb up dropped to his knees, his eyes tearing up as he tore through the shrinkwrap on a pallet of apple juice drink boxes. He handed them around, and Char and Declan stood back, watching as they took a minute to celebrate their windfall.

  With five volunteers, they were able to load almost an entire trailer worth of canned goods and cereal into their inventories. There were a couple of pallets of bottled water and fruit juice. It was more than enough to feed the twenty people in the welcome center for a week.

  Char restocked her own food supplies and grabbed some extra for the folks at the mercado just in case. If everything worked out the way she hoped, they would all be one big community by the end of the week, and this bounty would keep everyone alive for a while. She knew there would be some people who would hoard food for themselves, and with the inventory storage they all had access to, there would be no way to call them on it, but as long as no one starved to death, she could live with that.

  She checked the other trucks in the lot and found cheap furniture, scrap metal, and auto parts, none of which were useful now, but she made a mental note to check any other trailers they came across, just in case they needed something later. The furniture might be useful for filling up an empty city. She could also think of plenty of uses for the other loads, but nothing that would improve their immediate survival chances.

  They got everyone back inside safely. Char shook hands with Annabel and reaffirmed her commitment to get everyone to the City Tree if they wanted to come. She endured an awkward hug from Cory, and then they were on their way.

  They checked three more cutouts, but found no other survivors. Cory had given them an idea of what to expect. His group had come through this way already. They detoured wide around a Dutch-style windmill whose blades were spinning out of control in the high wind. A beach-side refreshment stand and surfboard rental shack looked like it had been ransacked, and there were signs that someone had fought with one of the giant centipedes.

  The last one they checked was a construction site, and it was there that Char found a possible solution to their climbing problem. The small apartment building was almost finished, but its brick facade was still being added, and the building was surrounded on two sides with scaffolding.

  Getting the scaffolding taken apart was a pain. Char and Declan took turns working on it while the other kept watch. They loaded the pipes and fittings onto a two-wheeled trailer that Char unhooked from a dead pickup’s tow hitch. It was going to be annoying to pull, since lifting the tongue too high made the tail end drag, and Char was trying to decide the best way to rig up a harness when Declan cried out.

  A Voracious Myriapod had lunged up from under the ground. Smaller than the first one they’d fought, it was still large enough for its mandibles to take off an arm or leg. Declan stepped to the side and vanished just ahead of its lunge.

  Confused by the disappearance of its prey, it froze for a second. That second was all Char needed to shape an Arc spell and fire it off. For an instant, the area was filled with blinding white light and the crackle of electricity.

  Lulu came tearing around a pile of bricks. She leapt at the oversized bug and landed on its back, her red-hot claws carving through its carapace. She breathed fire into the wound. The stench of scorched chitin hit Char as she rushed forward, acrid and bitter.

  Declan reappeared next to the Myriapod, his dagger and shortsword plunging into the space between two segments just below the giant centipede’s head. He pulled the blades in opposite directions, nearly decapitating it.

  The Myriapod dropped, and the kill notification made the little scroll in the corner of her vision pulse into sight.

  Her heart pounding from the adrenaline dump, Char leaned back against the pile of bricks, her sword in her hand, unused. “Wow. That’ll wake you up.”

  Declan stared down at the leaking, scorched body. “I know this one was a lot smaller than that other one, but still… That felt almost easy. It was so slow.”

  “Hey. Don’t jinx us like that.” Char grinned at him. “Good job, kid. Remind me to give you a raise.”

  Declan looted the corpse and watched it crumble to dust. “Huh, got a bundle of Voracious Myriapod chitin. Wonder if we can make armor out of it?”

  “Maybe. This game is too stingy with the loot. I ought to send an angry email to the devs.” Lulu had trotted over to her, proud of herself, and Char scritched her ears and praised her. “Goodest of girls, Lu. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  Lulu chuffed and sent Char an image of herself standing on a mound of giant bug corpses.

  “Yeah, you’ll kill all the nasty bugs.” She pushed herself upright and walked back to the trailer and the pile of cargo strapping.

  Declan pitched in, and they got the load of pipes and boards strapped down. It was a tall load for the small trailer, but Char didn’t want to make multiple trips if they didn’t have to. She used more of the cargo straps to make a harness and tested the whole setup. She was a lot stronger, but she had her doubts about being able to move the load.

  There hadn’t been many chances to test her new strength, and she wasn’t sure what her new limits were. In the old world, she would never have considered being able to pull a load this heavy. With her arms in the harness, she slowly walked forward, pulling the tow strap tight.

  The trailer moved. It wasn’t even that hard. The baked desert clay made for easy going. Declan walked at the back of the trailer, keeping it steady and watching the load. Lulu ranged out around them, alert for more myriapods sneaking up from underneath. Feeling like the world’s smallest draft horse, Char covered the last mile to the base of the cliff.

  Unlike the boundary with the tundra, the forest biome rested on top of solid granite bedrock. The thirty feet of exposed stone was smooth, as though it had been cut with a laser. The top twenty feet or so was soil, held together by tree roots. There was a wall of fog building at the top of this cliff, but the temperature difference hadn’t been so large here, and the building clouds weren’t nearly as volatile as they were just a little way to the east.

  She used to cover more than six hundred miles a day. On a good day, she could drive seven hundred. Now, her world had shrunk down to what they could walk in a day. It was hard to wrap her head around the reality that it was probably less than twenty miles total from the mercado to the Sanctuary. That used to be nothing in the World-that-Was; a quick drive to the grocery store. Now, it was a dangerous, multi-day trek.

  With a deep sigh, she scrubbed her face with both hands, then ran her fingers through her messy, ragged hair. She didn’t have time to stand there being maudlin. They had a tower to build and people to rescue. Shrugging out of the harness, she started looking for the best place to start building. “Alright. Let’s get to work.”