Alex tumbled out onto wet grass in a flail of limbs. The ground knocked the air from his lungs and he rolled a foot before slamming to a stop against the trunk of a tree with a pained grunt.

A crunch and a curse from a foot away marked Claire's arrival an instant later.

Head still spinning, Alex pushed himself upright. His heart was still hammering like that of a racehorse and the adrenaline in his veins hadn't yet realized that the fight was already over. He could still hear the screams of the Forsaken Revenant ringing in his ears.

He pressed a hand to his skull and turned to glance back at Claire.

She was currently trying to fit her arm back onto her body.

Alex blinked, then rubbed his eyes to make sure he hadn't missed something. But his vision hadn't betrayed him. Claire was squeezing her arm, which seemed to have been severed near the elbow, back into place like she was made of putty.

"It slashed me right before we came through the portal," Claire explained, noticing Alex's stare. "I managed to grab my hand on the way through. It would have been pretty damn bad if I didn't. I can't regenerate missing parts."

"Maybe you should look into being able to do that," Alex suggested, blowing out a sigh of relief. "But holy shit. What the hell is that thing's problem?"

"It followed us all the way from where we found the Blacktongue Dredge that you used to make Princess," Claire observed. "That's… concerning. I don't believe in coincidences."

"No," Alex said as he pushed himself to his feet and adjusted his tie. His shirt suddenly felt too stiff for him even though it was magically fitted to be perfect. "Neither do I. We definitely got followed. But why?"

"Did you somehow manage to piss it off? I didn't think we did much of anything but run away when it spotted us," Claire said as she stood. She brushed the dirt and grass off her clothes, then paused to look down at them. Her outfit was riddled with holes, splattered with blood, and torn apart by ragged cuts. "Damn it. Again? Have I mentioned how jealous I am of your magic clothing band? I want one."

"I'm still holding onto a core from a Riftwarped Treant in the harvester I got from the Great Tide. I'm sure we can get some credits if we pawn it off to Finley. Maybe he can get you an equivalent," Alex said. He blew his hair away from his eyes. He turned to glance back in the direction of Valley Ford.

His face paled.

Shit.

The town was gone. All that remained of it was an enormous crater, the indents of the Void Goliath's fingers forever crushed into the ground. Building and stone were indistinguishable from each other.

Alex had known it would be destroyed. He'd seen it from the Mirrorlands, after all. But witnessing it from just a short distance away felt a hell of a lot different. The city was a reminder of the sheer power that was possible to obtain in this universe…

And just how easy it was to lose everything you had. There had been people within the Great Tide family who had probably been a whole lot stronger than he and Claire were now. And now they were flattened. At least, they probably were. Perhaps some of them had managed to escape.

"You know, we've got a bit of a track record at this point," Claire said, walking up alongside Alex. "First Towntown, then Valley Ford. Towns don't tend to last long after we show up."

"Then we better hightail it back to Mirrorwane to make sure that streak ends," Alex said in a grim tone. "We're already late. I just hope Mite's managed to get started on the wall."

Claire nodded her assent. She turned and set off at a jog, and Alex fell in alongside her. Distance wasn't exactly the same between the Mirrorlands and 274-50. He was pretty sure that patches of the world were pretty much identical, but the less magical an area on 274-50 was, the less it effected the Mirrorlands and the more likely an area from a different world would be represented in that location.

Which makes me think the Mirrorlands is kind of like a patchwork quilt with some overlay where the most powerful areas of the worlds are. At least, that's my running guess. The only thing I've seen that definitely wasn't reflected from 274-50 into the Mirrorlands was the mountain that Berith lived on and the forest around it.

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Perhaps it would have been a bit faster to jog over to the next portal and slip back into the Mirrorlands for the rest of their trip back… but neither Claire nor Alex were eager to try that. If the Forsaken Revenant was still following them, showing up unprepared in the Mirrorlands and getting ambushed by both the terrifying shadow creature and a Riftwarped Monster was a great way to make sure they didn't live to see the next day.

***

"So… your domain. You summon an old lady?" Alex said as he and Claire jogged over the flowing hills and left the remains of Valley Ford in their wake. It had been around an hour since they'd gotten back from the Mirrorlands, and they'd been running ever since.

Such a feat would have been completely impossible just a little more than a week ago. Alex would have been doubled over wheezing with a rodent trying to claw its way out of his stomach after the first thirty minutes. Now, this wasn't even enough to wind him.

"Right now, yeah," Claire replied. "But that's definitely far from the extent of it. The Withered Lady is just one of the court members. When I unlocked my Partial Soul Manifestation, I saw several seats around me. The only one that was taken was hers."

"So you crimped my style. You're a summoner now."

Claire rolled her eyes. That was a rather impressive feat considering the speed they were both moving at. "Hardly. It's not like I summon them to fight for me. It's more like I call on their power."

"Pretty damn versatile."

"We'll have to see what other members I manage to get. I don't know how I'm supposed to actually upgrade a domain. Maybe it just happens naturally as you get stronger, or when you go from a partial manifestation to a full one? No clue. The knowledge I got from the Nightmarch doesn't really stretch that far in levels. It was pretty focused on family-related shit."

"Anything useful for us?"

"Probably," Claire admitted. "But there was a lot of it, and I don't know what parts are relevant on 274-50 as well as Ayrin. A lot of their information was specific to my planet because of their plans to conquer it. They were really focused on Ancestries."

"So I guess we should keep an eye out for any potential mega-dungeons," Alex said.

"Like we wouldn't have already," Claire said through a laugh. "I doubt the gates of hell themselves would have been enough to keep you from kicking them in to get to a massive dungeon."

"It has been a while since I've done one," Alex mused. "I wouldn't want to get lax."

"Let's try to keep our town from destroying itself or getting attacked by the Outworlders first, shall we?"

Alex grunted. "Yeah. That might be a good idea."

They both started to run faster.

The trip back to Mirrorwane went about as smoothly as it could have. Alex and Claire stumbled across a number of monsters on the way. They dispatched all of them with ease. Nothing they fought on the way back posed any real threat compared to what they'd gone up against in recent times.

Alex couldn't help but wonder what regulated the strength of the monsters in an area. There had to be some rhyme or reason to cause stronger ones to congregate. Nothing he knew about the System implied it was so hands-on that it would be personally seeding areas with "level-appropriate" monsters. Read ahead and get updates by visiting M^VLEMPYR.

My guess would be they're drawn to some natural resources. How do monsters get stronger? Whatever that mechanism is… that's what lures them. Maybe Rhyss will know. I feel like I could find a way to spin that question in a way in which it relates to my town.

He didn't have to wait too long to ask. As night was setting on the fourth day since they'd set out, Alex and Claire finally returned to forest that housed Mirrorwane. They slipped through the trees on their way back to the town — but something had changed.

Alex's eyes widened as he and Claire came to a stop.

Ringing Mirrorwane was a pile of scrap. Mounds of bone and scale littered the outside of the town as if it had magically transformed into an enormous trash heap while Alex and Claire had been gone.

It was a complete mess.

And standing in front of it, watching Alex and Claire approach with a sheepish look on his face, was Mite.

"Welcome back," Mite said, clearing his throat and scratching at the back of his head.

"What did you do to my town?" Alex asked as they came to a stop. "Did you give up on building the wall halfway through?"

"No! Of course not. This is all preparations," Mite said. "I did everything I could while I was waiting for you to get back. And you've got good timing. So… do you want the bad news or the good news first?"

Claire's eyes narrowed. "What did you do?"

"Why do you assume I did something wrong?" Mite asked defensively. He glanced over his shoulder. "Is it all the shit behind me?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Start with the bad news."

"This is going to start rotting in about a day," Mite said. "It'll also smell. Like, really bad. Something like a dozen rotten eggs dropped in a vat of vinegar. There were too many components from the Gorgonaga that wouldn't fit in my storage. Even if I'd distributed them among the town members to hold in their storages, there wouldn't have been enough. The Region Boss was just too big… so I had to start building the wall earlier than I wanted to. And now, if I don't finalize it soon, all of the components are going to be completely wasted."