The girl wore some of the nicest clothes Vivi had seen. The idea of teleporting away was forgotten as Vivi admired the outfit.

  The girl’s raincoat was black like Grandpa’s, though hers was also colorful, with bright pink flowers drawn onto the fabric. The colors shone vaguely with ether, taking in some of the girl’s aura. Dark green leaves mixed with the flowers along with a yellow glow that vaguely resembled honeybees. The colors matched the deep black of the raincoat surprisingly well, without being too showy.

  The girl’s nervous face was hidden cutely under the raincoat’s hood. Vivi was fairly certain she recognized the girl—she was the same new hunter who asked Vivi for directions toward the arena in Paradise some weeks ago. “Essi, is it?” Vivi asked.

  “Um, yes!” Essi said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt! My spirit chose the location by coincidence.” She bowed. “I’ll, um, pick a different location to channel ether.”

  “No, don’t worry about it,” Vivi said. “You can channel with me, if you’d like.”

  “With you?” Essi asked. “You’d want to channel with me?”

  Vivi’s gaze seemed to make Essi nervous, as if Vivi had some scheme in mind. The girl pinched the hem of her raincoat with her fingers. Her nervous figure was like a pretty glowstick in the rain.

  Gods, Vivi thought. She must be the cutest hunter I’ve ever seen.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” Vivi said. “You should know I’m not evil. I’d like to talk for a bit.”

  “Yes, of course,” Essi said. “If you insist, I’ll channel with you. I am in your debt from last time.”

  Her step remained hesitant as she came closer, taking shade under the same tree as Vivi.

  “Essi?” Vivi asked hesitantly.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you…” Vivi asked, pausing to think of her wording, “tell me where you got your raincoat?”

  Essi blinked. “This one?” She glanced down at her coat. After some awkward silence, she added, “My grandma made it for me.”

  “Could you turn around, please?” Vivi asked.

  “Like this?” Essi asked, showing her back to Vivi.

  The raincoat had more colorful flowers behind it, shining vaguely with ether. In Vivi’s opinion, Essi looked prettier than any lady she had seen. Looking at her raincoat evoked the same emotions as looking down at a grand landscape from atop a cliff.

  Lucius rolled his eyes in her core.

  “How did you add the flowers?” Vivi asked. “They look like they’re embedded in the fabric itself?”

  “Ah, they’re just patches,” Essi said. Her lips were drawn in a nervous smile. She seemed mildly amused, but afraid at the same time, considering Vivi’s reputation. “They’re called etherpaint patches. My grandma would know more. She’s a raincoat maker.”

  Vivi’s mouth was ajar, and she suddenly found herself jealous. She had seen fancier raincoats in Fellwater—colorful ones that stood out amongst the typical dark gloomy raincoats—but never something as pretty as Essi’s. And it was made by her own grandma?

  Maybe I can buy a raincoat from her grandma as well? Vivi thought. Would it be too weird to ask where she lives?

  “It’s pretty,” Vivi said. And that was an understatement. “Your grandma must be lovely.”

  Essi’s nervousness was slowly fading. “She’s a saint. Grandma was overjoyed when I was chosen. The raincoat was her farewell gift. It hasn’t seen much use underground, though. I’m afraid of breaking it. And it doesn’t exactly fit in with the hunters… But I do keep it in spatial storage at all times.” She smiled, as if recalling a warm memory. “You’re from the surface too, right?”

  “I’m from Fellwater,” Vivi said. “We never had raincoats as pretty.”

  Essi chuckled. She stood next to Vivi underneath the tree, and for a short while, they listened to the rain.

  “It’s a bit embarrassing, maybe,” Essi said, “but I do miss the surface. And rain…”

  “The underground could use some rain,” Vivi said.

  “Yes, it really could!” Essi said. “What do you mean rainfall has been replaced with ether and deadly monsters? What do you mean I’m supposed to gather drinking water from the river and not from the sky? What about bathing? The hunters should really try taking a bath outside in the rain for once!”

  Vivi smiled, while Lucius studied the two from her core, as if wondering how two strangers could suddenly sound so familiar. Vivi had no explanation. Something about the conversation just felt warm.

  “One day, I’ll have to bring everyone to Fenlake for a feast,” Essi said. “Maybe the Sylva Bloods could learn to be less irritated all day.”

  “I should visit your home some time,” Vivi said. “It sounds like a great place.”

  Essi let out an awkward laugh. Then her smile fell. “They probably wouldn’t let you, though…”

  Rain continued pouring on the forest as they said nothing.

  “I, um, tried to convince the Sylva Bloods to contact you,” Essi said. “I told them that you’re not evil, and tried to get them to seek out your runesword. I’m afraid they didn’t listen.”

  Vivi shrugged. “It is what it is. I’m on the fifth level anyway. It’ll be difficult to make deals.”

  “The fifth level?” Essi asked, head snapping toward Vivi. “You mean…”

  “Have you ever heard of Shivenar?” Vivi asked, grinning.

  “The ancient city of runesmithing?” Essi asked.

  “Yes,” Vivi said. “I’m living there. I’ve got a runesmithing store and everything.”

  Essi’s eyes glimmered lightly as she faced Vivi. “Wow. The demons haven’t killed you?”

  “They’re quite nice, actually,” Vivi said. “A lot nicer than the hunters, at least. I’ve earned over thirty million ether with sales now.”

  Essi tilted her head, doubtful. She peered at Vivi’s core, trying to be subtle, but Vivi clearly felt the tickle in her core. She didn’t try to hide the number, showcasing her full thirty million ether.

  Essi flinched, taking a step back. “Seriously?”

  Vivi merely grinned.

  “Runeswords really are great, then,” Essi said. “The hunters should be working with you. We should lift the bounty.”

  “I’m not in any trouble,” Vivi said. “My family is down on the fifth level with me, and the hunters are too afraid to head down. And if you try to attack me, I’ve got a full country of strong fighters loaded with runeswords to defend me.”

  “True enough,” Essi said with a laugh. “If I ever grow strong enough, am I free to visit your store?”

  “Of course,” Vivi said. “You’re invited. Getting down is not too difficult. You just need to avoid all of the demon king’s guards on the fourth level, and cross the blight, down to the fifth level. And you’ll also have to befriend the giant lizard at the entrance. Feed him some meat for easy access.”

  “The blight?” Essi asked. “Isn’t that… dangerous?”

  “If you consider poison and monsters dangerous, maybe,” Vivi said.

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  Essi merely let out an awkward laugh.

  “If you make it down, I’ll give you a discount,” Vivi said. “Although… if you’d like, I could let you test a runesword right now. For a small trade.”

  “A trade?”

  Vivi considered her words. “I’ll let you swing a sword for five minutes if… If you let me try on your raincoat.”

  Essi paused, blinking. “You want to… try on my raincoat?”

  Vivi felt her face grow red. “It’s just in Paradise. You won’t lose it. I’d like to, um… see how it looks on me.”

  Essi stared at her for a bit. Then she chuckled. “Sure. Since you asked nicely, I don’t think my grandma would mind.”

  She unbuttoned the raincoat, handing it over. Vivi did the same and traded her grey raincoat to Essi temporarily. They switched outfits. Looking down, Vivi saw the pink flowers glow, now from her own aura. She felt like she was surrounded by a warm blanket; one that also looked good, and could be worn not only in rain, but in a city as well.

  Essi studied Vivi. Even in the grey raincoat, she looked cute and cheery.

  “How do I look?” Vivi asked.

  “Great, of course,” Essi said. “I have a mirror if you’d like to see.”

  She reached into spatial storage, and a tall mirror appeared on her hands. Rain immediately fell atop it, adding rain droplets to the image, but Vivi could see herself, glowing in the black raincoat.

  Vivi summoned Moonlight and went into pose. The raincoat matched perfectly with the dark blade. She nodded. “Raincoats are definitely superior to dresses.”

  Lucius sighed in her core. “You’re ridiculous, Vivi.”

  Do you disagree?

  “It is a good looking raincoat, I admit,” he said, sighing again.

  “Thank you,” Vivi said. She felt sad that the raincoat would disappear after her stay in Paradise. But this was Essi’s raincoat. It meant the world to Essi, just as Vivi’s cheap ugly raincoat was the most important object she owned. Vivi would never trade it away.

  “And for my part of the deal,” Vivi said, handing Moonlight to Essi.

  The hunter didn’t look nearly as confident as Vivi. Moonlight was as tall as Essi herself. As she flowed ether through its runes, however, her eyes widened, and she shifted the sword’s weight with ease, using only one hand. “It’s light,” she noted.

  “It has a swiftness rune,” Vivi said. “It’s as light as a feather without losing any of its strength.”

  Essi went into stance, which made Vivi take a step back. Suddenly, Essi’s eyes were serious, practice taking over. And she had practiced. Her stance wasn’t nearly as solid as Anthony’s or Coshi’s, but it was certainly better than Vivi’s. Which wasn’t a surprise, considering Vivi mostly fought with brute force.

  Essi took a test swing at air. A light shockwave erupted, flaring her hair. Her eyes were wide, staring at the sword. She turned to Vivi. “This sword… it can’t be this strong in the real world too, right?”

  “It’s probably stronger in the real world,” Vivi said. “There, it actually has monsters to kill.”

  Essi, like most people who tried Vivi’s swords, was lost for words.

  Vivi grinned, and summoned her backup sword. “How about a quick spar?”

  “Eh?” Essi asked. “You’ll win! How will a spar ever be fair?”

  “I won’t go all out,” Vivi said. “Five thousand ether only, no skills.”

  Essi looked hesitant, but she nodded. “Fine. Let’s do this.”

  Vivi dashed forth with light swings. Essi defended nervously at first, as if afraid to fight back. It took until the fifth exchange of blades for Essi’s eyes to shift; she saw something in Vivi’s posture and countered.d. Practice took over, and Essi fought for real.

  Vivi found herself on the defensive, struggling to keep up with Essi’s attacks. Moonlight was good. It was Vivi’s sword, after all. Neither runesword broke, but Moonlight was clearly stronger.

  It wasn’t just runeswords that pushed Vivi back, however. Quickly, she realized that Essi’s bladework might have simply been better.

  Vivi wasn’t totally overpowered—she could keep up—but Essi saw opportunities in Vivi’s mindless attacks, parries, counters. She attacked with angles that Vivi wouldn’t have guessed possible. Like most hunters, Essi had clearly studied the blade. She knew what she was doing.

  Vivi, on the other hand, followed her usual strategy of hitting as hard as she could, hoping that her sword was powerful enough to overpower her opponent’s. Essi was better than her at channeling ether as well.

  The spar was a stark reminder of Vivi’s strengths and weaknesses as a hunter. She had a high affinity with ascension skills. If she ascended herself to even just six thousand ether, she would have had the speed to overpower Essi. At ten thousand, Essi wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  Nonetheless, they fought, and continued fighting, until Essi called for a break, saying her reserves were dimming out. She returned Vivi’s sword, and sighed at the fact that Vivi hadn’t even dimmed out a single million of her insane ether reserves. In an endurance battle, none of the hunters would beat Vivi.

  For the rest of the night… Vivi kind of forgot about practice. The rain soon subsided to a light drizzle. Vivi and Essi lay underneath the tree, just talking.

  Vivi didn’t really know what was happening. She’d never talked with anyone in such a way for so long in a row, not even with Senith, and rarely with Grandpa. She learned so much about who Essi was. Essi was the fourth child in her family after three brothers. They lived in another rain-named town in the north canton, Mistvale. Three hundred miles or so from Fellwater.

  Essi’s family was moderately wealthy, as most people in Ythar’s named towns were. Out of her siblings, Essi was never the one who was supposed to be a hunter. Her family had enough ether to send one of them to Sierra’s prestigious school of hunters, which was supposed to be her youngest brother. But after it was deemed he had a problem with obsessive drinking, Essi was sent to school in his stead.

  Vivi learned that Essi was nineteen years old now, and they both laughed at the fact that Vivi, despite being richer than the net worth of some hunting companies, was actually younger than any of the active hunters in Essi’s hunting group. Essi had also reached the first elevation, and she was proud to learn that, in that regard, she was actually ahead of Vivi.

  That boasting fell short when Vivi burned a few thousand wisps, wielding eight and a half thousand wisps at once, calmly with the protective layer active.

  “Not to mention,” Vivi argued, “I’ve spent fifteen years of my life runesmithing, not training to be a hunter. I can’t also be ahead of you in channeling ether.”

  The oddest part of the night, however, was definitely the range of topics they traversed. They didn’t just talk about hunting or their lives leading up to hunting. The conversation also passed from one random topic to the next. Essi complained about the lack of sweets and pastries in the human underground, to which Vivi grinned, mentioning how the demons ate cake not just for breakfast, but for lunch and dinner as well.

  Minutes later, the topic somehow steered to dungeons and Vivi’s life in Zand—every detail of which shocked Essi, until Vivi mentioned how she trained her accuracy with her spirit’s powers by fishing in an underground river filled with fish, which led to Essi’s own tale from a fishing village on the second level, where they exterminated an underground shark so the village could continue safely fishing again.

  At one point, Essi asked Vivi about Lucius—if Lucius really was as scary and troublesome as everyone claimed. Vivi said that Lucius was definitely the cutest spirit she had ever seen. Lucius wasn’t overjoyed, popping out of Vivi’s core to argue that he was not cute, but abyssal and cavernous, and very mighty, and that he was certainly more majestic than whoever Essi’s spirit could be.

  Essi’s spirit, Willum, in the form of a blue talking cloud, showed from her core as well, not to argue, but to immediately apologize to Lucius for offending him. Willum was a nervous little thing, who fought back against Lucius’s insults by apologizing and praising Lucius. This seemed to confuse Vivi’s spirit greatly, and after a few minutes of exchanges, Lucius accepted Willum as his great servant.

  Essi and Vivi both chuckled, watching their respective idiots fumble around their words. They seemed to be growing friendly as well.

  Quickly, Vivi realized that the sky itself had changed color. Rain had long passed, and the bright sun was peeking out behind clouds. The shade was shifting, and a ray of sunlight cast down on their previously shadowed tree.

  “Oh dear,” Essi said, flinching up as sunlight hit her eye. “How long has it been now?”

  “It has been three hours and forty minutes,” Willum said softly.

  Essi stood and patted down Vivi’s grey raincoat. “That was nice. Thank you, Vivi.”

  Vivi stood as well, though didn’t know what to say. It felt like the night would never end. Just like that, they had to head back to the real world?

  “I have an early wakeup,” Essi said. “Sorry. Let’s meet again, Vivi. And sorry for interrupting your practice.”

  “And sorry for stealing your raincoat,” Vivi said.

  “I’ll ask my grandma to make one for you as well,” Essi said with a chuckle. Then she paused, face sobering, and added, “Oh. There’s, um, one thing I didn’t mention today. I kind of didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “What is it?” Vivi asked.

  “Have you seen the storm map?” Essi asked. “Of the surface?”

  “The surface?” Vivi asked, raising her eyebrows. “The surface has a storm map?”

  Essi summoned a scroll from spatial storage and unrolled it. Vivi recognized it as the map of the surface right away. “Yes,” Essi said. “For the first time in probably centuries, the storms are brewing on the surface as well. Three have been found, as well as surges. At least on the upper levels, this is the worst storm season in ages.”

  Vivi studied the map. Two of the storms were brewing in clearly desolate parts of the world, with at most a few cities nearby. One of the large dots, however, was right next to Ranewal: Fellwater’s nearest city.

  “This one is a red storm,” Essi said, pointing at it.

  “That’s close to home. Fellwater is right there.” Vivi lifted her head and asked, “Who’s taking care of it?”

  “Three hunting groups,” Essi said. “The Lifeweavers are the main force, including Veronica. Then there’s Swordblessed, and the Sylva Bloods’ main hunting group. I’m also assigned to this storm, but I’ll be stationed in Swampsilk, the nearest town, to protect it from any stray monsters.”

  “You should be able to defend it, right?”

  “We should,” Essi said. “But… I’m also a little concerned. The hunters aren’t using ether sticks. They’re hoping to gain a skill from this. Even though the storm brews right next to a city, they’re still maximizing the profit. In fact, they’re crafting a surge hazard for Veronica to defeat.”

  “I see,” Vivi said. “They can take care of it with three hunting groups, right?”

  “Yes, they are confident,” Essi said. “But it doesn’t feel right. There’s tension between the Sylva Bloods and the Swordblessed hunting group. Even though we’re supposed to be protecting humanity… our goals seem to be to gain ether. No matter the cost.”

  Well, that’s not exactly a surprise, Vivi thought.

  Essi looked worried, as if she hoped Vivi would have something reassuring to say. “The hunters are greedy, but they aren’t that stupid,” Vivi said. “If they think they can earn skills, they’ll fight the storm. And meanwhile, you’ll defend the villages for me, will you? Don’t let anything into Fellwater.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Essi said. “Thanks, Vivi. I hope we meet again.”

  “We will,” Vivi said.

  Essi smiled again. A slightly bittersweet smile. “See you, Vivi!”

  Then her figure disintegrated to ether as her connection to Paradise was cut.

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