Gene awoke with a start the next morning, not sure when he made it to his bed. He had a splitting headache that he came to realize wasn’t his own. Winnie’s thoughts were loud and agonizing as she groaned audibly and mentally, loud enough for him to hear with both senses. The group collected in Winnie’s room, much to the amusement of Eonis.

  “I told you to quit 3 drinks ago.”

  He chided the hungover Smidgen woman who could only glare in response.

  With a smirk on her face, Kyra shook her head and said, “The goddess’s healing blessings unfortunately don’t extend to hangovers. You’ll need to ride this one out in bed while the four of us take on the bounty.”

  “Three,” said Eonis, cutting in. “Gordona needs me at the guild to give an accurate survey of the lands uncovered by repelling the veil. I also think it’s to punish me for letting you do something so reckless but she wouldn’t admit to that.”

  Gene was caught off guard. He looked at Kyra and Kyrie in confusion before asking, “Will we be okay with just the 3 of us? I mean I can use a power stunt if I need but–”

  “No,” interjected Kyra, cutting him off before he could finish his thought. “No need. The three of us should be more than sufficient to take on a single elemental.”

  Kyrie nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I think between Kyra and me, we can take on Elder Elemental if we put our minds to it.”

  She frowned at his and Gene could only stare in confusion. Kyra knew to fill in the knowledge gap immediately.

  “Elementals come in four varieties for each element: Juvenile, Adult, Elder, and Ancient. They more or less seem to scale in power around the leveling benchmarks so while I appreciate my brother’s enthusiasm, at best, we could take on an adult with a full party. Anything higher would be suicidal.”

  Gene nodded along at her explanation and Winnie let out a loud groan as she turned around to say, “There’s also a fabled sixth elemental type known as the Progenitor but only one of each of those have been known to exist at a time.”

  Her stomach gurgled loud enough for them all to hear and Gene covered his mouth with his hand to stifle a laugh and said, “Thanks for the bonus lesson. Try to get plenty of fluids today.”

  The three young adventurers stood in unison and for the first time since he arrived, Gene felt like a true fantasy adventurer.

  They left Winnie in the care of Eonis until he needed to depart for the guild and head to the location listed in the bounty information. Just outside of the city gates, Gene stepped onto the sprawling plains that spread far off as far as his eye could see. Small clusters of houses with patches of farmland dotted the landscape and as they traveled on foot, Gene tried his best to relay his wonder.

  “It’s so strange,” he said as they stepped off the dirt road. “I’ve played fantasy games ever since I was a little kid and I’ve always pictured landscapes like this, down to the dirt road detail. It’s surreal to experience this firsthand.”

  His smile was broad, childish, and the twins couldn’t help but feel charmed. He had told them about his paved roads, skyscrapers, and uniformed houses. It all sounded so drab to them. Kyra prayed a silent thanks to Aliyah that she had been born in New Venturis when Gene explained clearing a paper jam from a copying machine.

  “Okay now. Let’s focus here, people,” said Kyrie, trying his best to get Gene back on track. “We have reports of an earth elemental wandering down from the mountains over into farmer Glenis Simmard’s land. According to her description, we should have a juvenile on our hands. We need to return with its core as proof of its defeat. This’ll be the perfect chance for me to try out my new skill.”

  Kyrie pumped his fist in the air, to the dismay of Kyra. Gene perked up with interest.

  “How does it work? The leveling, I mean,” said Gene. “Where I come from, our fantasy games give us a list of stats we can upgrade along with a list of skills or spells we can pick from based on our level.”

  The twins both nodded at his statement and Kyra said, “It’s much the same but also different based on your class. For Clerics, I learn one holy scripture that matches my level and gain another use of a prayer. Prayers let me generate healing light or call down a holy conflagration from Aliyah. For Kyrie, and Warriors like him, he’s locked into a skill tree with four branching paths.”

  “One path focuses on honing my mental prowess in combat and its opposite is focused on my battle powers. The third focuses on my speed with its opposite being my sturdiness. Right now, I’m pretty evenly distributed among the paths which everyone says is the worst possible distribution of skills but those people aren’t the boss of me and so I don’t need to listen.”

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Kyrie grinned at Gene and he snorted with laughter in response. He was excited to hear them speak so freely about their powers and it made him envious for the lack of complexity. He hadn’t stepped back into the margins since his last visit. He had agreed with Kyra and he knew he needed to master his current powerset before he could even begin to think about piling on more abilities. For now, he was content with what he had and he was determined to figure out as many applications and genre loopholes he could discover when putting his system against that of New Venturis.

  When they reached the Simmard farm, it was eerily quiet. Wooden fences lay in splintered chunks and stone buildings had entire walls missing. Farmer Simmard had reported that she evacuated the area the second the ground began to rumble but standing there now, it was a ghost town.

  The three members of Silvayn approached cautiously. Kyrie thought to Gene, “Can you do an area scan? This is starting to feel like an ambush.”

  He obliged and closed his eyes to focus. A pulse of psionic energy emanated from him in waves. With his mind’s eye, he searched the farm, excluding his presence of his allies from the psychic radar. The more he used his powers, the more they felt second nature to him. He found he could pick out more nuanced details if he just focused on one aspect of the way a mind worked. Loud quick bursts of thought, soft quiet sentences, or just basic instincts all cascaded across his radar. It was thanks to this practice that he noticed the earth elemental before it struck.

  “Jump!” he shouted before a gigantic hand shot up from the ground beneath Kyrie.

  The warrior leaped the second the first consonant left Gene’s mouth. He drew his sword swiftly, turning the blade to block an incoming massive fist that knocked him higher into the air. That was no juvenile earth elemental.

  “Kyrie!” shouted Gene in shock as he watched him soar into a brush of trees in the distance.

  “Focus! It's an adult!” yelled Kyra.

  Her attention was glued to the giant figure emerging from the ground. It scrambled out of the earth and charged them with a fist raised. Gene let out a curse and rushed to Kyra’s side to shield her, but when the creature neared and threw a punch, the lithe woman dropped a hand from her staff, spun in front of Gene, and raised a hand.

  Stone collided with her palm, letting out a cacophonous clang that made Gene cover his ears from the sudden sound. He was in shock and that feeling only multiplied when Kyra spun her staff and swung it swiftly through the air, knocking the creature back across the field. He looked from the creature to Kyra, saw her gold eyes glowing, and thought back to what she said earlier.

  “You may have undersold the strong thing, earlier,” he said before zeroing in on the mind of the elemental and striking. She shrugged, looking at her staff that had snapped under the explosive blow.

  His thoughts crashed into what qualified as the mind of the elemental, shearing away higher brain functions that to his horror, the creature didn’t have. Where he expected to fell the elemental in one blow, his power only seemed to stun it and slow its movements.

  “Shit, it’s resistant,” he thought to Kyra.

  He fired off Psi Bolts in rapid succession, pelting the creature's mind in a barrage of psionic energy but all it succeeded in was slowing its approach.

  “I’m coming!” yelled Kyrie, his voice a faint whisper on the wind as he charged back into combat.

  In his place, Kyra dropped her staff and charged forward.

  “Fire won’t work on this creature and my holy spells only hurt evil beings. We have to do this the hard way,” thought Kyra as she stopped suddenly in front of the creature and put all of her momentum into a solid body blow.

  Chunks of stone exploded into the air and Kyra started raining down blow after blow into the elemental as Gene kept up his assault. The dual barrage carried on until one of Kyra’s punches merely glanced off the creature's rocky hide.

  “Shit! I’m out,” she thought as a massive fist sailed through the air towards her.

  Gene panicked. Time seemed to slow and he thought at a rapid pace. For once, his powers hadn’t proved almighty and he was lacking any real explosive power to call on aside from a power stunt. He needed to think like a telepath and in that moment, he reached out to the elemental’s mind.

  “Please, stop,” he projected and the fist froze in the air, just inches from Kyra’s face.

  They were all stunned at the moment. Kyrie came running up at a slowed pace, seeing Gene’s glowing eyes.

  “Umm….Gene? What are you doing?” asked Kyra as she took a few cautious steps back.

  “We don’t wish you any harm. We’ve merely been defending ourselves from your onslaught.”

  Gene spoke out loud as he projected his thoughts and the earth elemental lowered its hand.

  “No fight?” it thought in simplistic terms.

  “No, no fight. We came to help. This farm belonged to someone. She lives and works on this land. Why have you come here?”

  “No own land!” its thoughts were sudden and loud but it didn’t move to attack. “No own. Only inhabit.”

  “No, okay, you’re right.” Gene raised his hands defensively. “I used the wrong words. I’m sorry.”

  He waited to see if the creature would attack but instead it thought, “Sorry. My anger, uncalled for. You soft creatures use different words. I understand this now.”