I Thought I Was Collecting Systems, Not Overpowered Wives

The road out of Renodin gave way to farmland, then scrubland, then nothing that deserved the name "road" at all by the third day, until the team found themselves picking their way across a stretch of cracked earth that stretched to every horizon in the same unbroken shade of rust and bone.

"This is technically still the border region," Sylvia said, checking Baldric’s borrowed map against the sun’s position for the third time that morning. "The actual Wastelands proper start another two days out, assuming the old cartography’s accurate."

"Assuming," Yuki repeated, kicking a loose stone that skittered across the hardpan with a sound entirely too loud in the surrounding silence. "I’m noticing we do a lot of assuming on this trip."

"Welcome to unmapped territory," Harriden said, scanning the empty terrain with the same wary attentiveness he brought to actual combat. "Assumptions are all anyone has to work with out here."

Claire had taken to muttering under her breath every hour or so, cross-referencing the landscape against her own notes on ambient mana readings, her expression growing steadily more troubled as the day wore on. "The mana density out here is strange. Not dangerous, exactly, just... off. Like something’s been slowly leaching the natural balance out of the land for a very long time."

"Off how?" Kael asked, falling into step beside her.

"Hard to describe precisely. Imagine a wound that never quite finished healing, just scarred over wrong. That’s roughly the sensation my instruments are picking up." She glanced at her readings again, frowning. "It’s getting stronger the further we go."

[Confirmed,] the system offered, quiet in the back of Kael’s mind. [I’m detecting the same pattern. Whatever’s responsible for it, the effect intensifies gradually rather than sharply, which suggests we’re approaching a source rather than a boundary.]

’The Lust System?’

[Possibly. Or something adjacent to it. I’d caution against assuming a single cause, though the timeline lines up conveniently enough to make coincidence unlikely.]

Adian, walking a short distance ahead with the loose, unhurried gait of someone entirely unbothered by their surroundings, called back over his shoulder. "For what it’s worth, I’ve crossed through territory like this before, centuries back. Places where something old has been sitting still long enough that the land itself starts to remember it."

"That’s not remotely comforting," Yuki said.

"It wasn’t meant to be comforting. It was meant to be useful information."

"Feels like the same thing you say every time something horrifying comes up."

"Perhaps I simply find horrifying things useful."

They made camp that evening in the lee of a low rock formation, the only meaningful shelter they’d encountered all day, the fire built small and carefully shielded against the empty dark stretching around them in every direction. Conversation stayed quieter than usual, the vast unbroken silence of the Wastelands pressing down on even Yuki’s usual restless energy.

"You ever get used to places like this?" Kael asked Harriden, the two of them taking first watch together while the others settled for what rest they could manage.

"No," Harriden admitted. "You just learn to function despite the discomfort. There’s a difference."

"Comforting."

"I never claimed otherwise." Harriden’s gaze swept the darkness methodically, blade resting loose and ready across his knees. "For what it’s worth, the discomfort’s useful. Keeps you sharp. People who get too comfortable in places like this are usually the ones who don’t make it out again."

Kael considered that, turning his attention back to the darkness beyond their small fire’s light, the strange weight Claire had described earlier settling more clearly into something he could almost feel himself now—a faint, persistent wrongness threaded through the very air, subtle enough to dismiss as imagination if he hadn’t already been told to expect it.

Sylvia joined them partway through the watch, unable to sleep despite her evident exhaustion, settling beside Kael with her own blade drawn and resting across her lap. "Can’t shake the feeling we’re being watched," she admitted quietly.

"Same," Kael said. "Nothing’s shown up on any scan the system’s run, though."

[That’s accurate, for whatever reassurance it provides,] the system added. [No detected presences within scanning range. Though I’ll note the ambient interference Claire identified earlier may be affecting scan accuracy more than I’d initially accounted for.]

’So we might be missing something.’

[It’s possible. I wouldn’t panic over it, but heightened caution seems warranted regardless.]

The night passed without incident, the strange watched feeling never quite resolving into anything concrete, though none of them managed particularly restful sleep despite the exhaustion of the day’s travel. By morning, the team broke camp quickly, eager to put distance between themselves and whatever unnamed unease had settled over the previous night’s rest.

"Two more days, if the map holds," Sylvia said, shouldering her pack. "Assuming we don’t run into anything that changes our plans first."

"With our luck," Claire said, "I wouldn’t bet on that assumption holding very long."

"When has it ever," Yuki agreed, falling into step behind her.

They set out again into the rust-colored emptiness, the sun climbing slow and merciless overhead, the strange scarred wrongness in the land growing, subtle but unmistakable, with every mile they put between themselves and the last vestiges of familiar, civilized territory.

Around midday, they stopped to rest in the thin shade of a rock outcropping, water rationed carefully according to Claire’s earlier calculations. Yuki, never one to tolerate silence for long, broke the quiet with a question that had clearly been sitting with him since the previous night.

"Hey. Serious question. If this Lust System thing turns out to actually be some kind of goddess, do we fight it, or do we try to talk to it first?"

"Depends entirely on what we find," Sylvia said. "We don’t even know if it’s hostile yet. Everything we’ve heard so far is secondhand rumor filtered through fear."

"Fear usually comes from somewhere real, though," Harriden pointed out.

"True. But fear also exaggerates. The Concordance feared the Sleeping Ruin enough to bury an entire kingdom’s worth of history rather than confront it directly, and that turned out to make things considerably worse, not better."

Claire, still poring over her mana readings between bites of dried rations, glanced up thoughtfully. "For what it’s worth, whatever’s out here doesn’t feel actively malicious. Just... old. Heavy. Like standing near something that’s been carrying a weight for a very long time."

"That’s an oddly specific read for an instrument reading," Adian said.

"Call it scholarly intuition. I’ve been wrong before, but not often."

Kael found himself turning the question over as they resumed walking that afternoon, the notion that whatever waited for them might not be a simple monster to defeat, but something considerably more complicated—wounded, perhaps, rather than wicked. It wouldn’t be the first time Azure Blake had discovered a threat wearing the shape of something the world had simply misunderstood.

By the time the sun began sinking toward the horizon, painting the cracked earth in long shadows and deepening rust tones, the team had covered considerably more ground than Sylvia’s original estimate, the strange pull of the land itself seeming, if anything, to hasten their steps rather than slow them.

"We’re close to something," Kael said quietly, more instinct than certainty. "I can’t explain it better than that."

"I feel it too," Sylvia admitted. "Get some rest tonight. Tomorrow, I suspect we’ll understand a great deal more than we do right now, whether we’re ready for it or not."

—

End of Chapter—