Hundreds of other cultivators appear in the same instant, and this time they seem to be in much better shape than the last time. The number of outright injuries is lower, and the count of the missing is much reduced.

  That doesn’t mean that all is well. Cries of pain ring out through the crowd, all the clearer for there being fewer of them. Many hard faces stare aimlessly in shock. One man bows down all the way to the floor and kisses it.

  The pixies float down from the sky and welcome the cultivators back, but Todd doesn’t pay much attention to their little speech. Mostly it’s just a lesson on the value of treasure out in the greater cosmos, and an incitement to seek it out to grow stronger. The pixies split apart afterwards and start making their rounds through the plaza.

  Todd and his team are half wired, half tired: filled with that bizarre restless energy that comes after skipping sleep entirely. He knows that he’s going to crash, but before he does he understands he has responsibilities to take care of first.

  The four of them lay down their bags with a clunk, and the three others set out to find the other leaders of the section.

  Nayira Seacole and Fireman Ian are in motion immediately. They seek out the wounded like sharks. Nayira binds and stitches cuts, and she sets a broken bone. Fireman Ian triages. He calls out asking if anyone has any healing pills left over.

  Todd runs back to the team’s bags and rummages through for their spares. There aren’t many left. As he delivers them over to Nayia, he scans for signs of Randall.

  He hops. It shocks him how high he can go now.

  He sees familiar faces. Sue Ann and Teo Alamilla peek out from between the crowd, towards the edge. Ducking right, he tries to look around the intervening people to spot Randall. The young Korean man is nowhere to be seen.

  Todd’s belly flutters. But Sue Ann has an expression which is only troubled, not traumatized. He doesn’t have a reason to worry yet. He approaches, navigating around other groups.

  Where is he? Todd think to himself in concern. He gets closer.

  Then Teo moves, stepping aside and revealing Randall sitting on the ground. He is in the center of his circle, crutches laying splayed across the floor.

  “Randall!” Todd shouts. He waves.

  Randall’s head turns. He frowns.

  “How are you doing? Did your mission go okay?” Todd inquires.

  “What do you want, Todd?” Randall’s voice drips with acid.

  “I just wanted to make sure you’re alright,” Todd wilts.

  “Well I’m alive, no thanks to you,” Randall spits.

  Todd’s face twists up. “That’s not fair. Joe and Candra really needed my help.”

  “Oh did they? What did you do, squirt at something?” Randall snaps.

  “No,” Todd tries to pique Randall’s curiosity, “we had to get through a mind blender room and I led them through.”

  “Oh, screw off, Todd,” Randall says. He tears up. “Just leave me alone.”

  Todd backs up. He looks to Sue Ann for support and finds a stony face instead.

  “Sorry. I’ll come back later, okay?” He murmurs.

  As he makes to leave, Teo leans forward and grabs Todd by the shoulder. The larger, older man pulls Todd aside.

  “Did you find your treasure?” Teo asks.

  “Yea,” Todd replies. “But was mostly armor and swords and stuff.”

  Teo pushes. “Hm. Was that it?”

  “There were nexus crystals and pills too. We don’t know what the pills do yet, we were going to ask the pixies. Why, did you guys get your treasure?”

  Teo chuffs. “Of course not. We could barely move from the spot we arrived at. Spent the whole time protecting these civvies.”

  “Were the monsters bad?”

  Teo adjusts his pants. “Naw. It’s just hard to cover them all at the same time,” he sniffs. “Now do me a favor and tell your friends that if I’m going to do this again, I want five thousand nexus coins. It’s too much stress for too little profit.”

  “Five thousand?” Todd chokes out.

  Teo slaps him on the shoulder to send him on his way. “Thanks, kid. You know where to find me.”

  Todd’s mind chugs as he tries to think of ways to convince Teo to change his mind. Could they appeal to his morality again? If not, then surely he could at least negotiate the number down? Maybe they could offer one of the items they found, if it wasn’t too valuable?

  Troubled, Todd makes his way over to the leadership circle.

  Soup Nina bears a long cut on her forehead that is forming an ugly scab. She has teeth marks in her arm and is unusually pale. Still, she presents to the council.

  “We counted roughly four hundred fifty people last time. Though we’re pretty sure we missed twenty or thirty just because they were moving around or in their rooms. We formed fifty eight groups, three of which took hard mode and we think around ten took normal mode. I’ll need to get going to be running a headcount and organizing the food purchasing before the groups split up. You’ll need to give me five or six helpers to get it done in time.”

  The circle approves.

  Joe lists off names of teenagers to assist Nina. “Take Abby, that toker kid, Raylene, Brett, and Felicia. Really, just grab any of the teen squad.”

  “Abby, Jingshu, Raylene, Brett, and Felicia, okay,” Nina nods. She strides off and starts shouting names. Business Jenny follows her.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “Someone needs to talk to Doctor Chowdhury,” the man with the glorious mustache offers for discussion. “We need a real doctor and she’s not helping. That other girl is doing her best, but it’s not enough.”

  “I can’t blame her, Eric. What she went through was terrible,” an older woman sympathizes. The woman wears a tapered pixie haircut with tight curls. “She needs a minute.”

  “She’s a doctor, Helen! She’s dealt with worse,” the mustachioed Eric claims.

  “She’s a damned foot doctor. She ain’t dealt with shit like this,” the short haired Helen hits back.

  “Whoa! Whoa,” Joe raises his palms. “I think we can all agree it’s a good idea if someone goes and sits with Doctor C for a while. Do we have any volunteers? Helen?”

  The older woman raises her hand. Her fake fingernails are a tattered mess.

  “Okay. That’s decided then,” Joe finalizes.

  A hand goes up. “How are we going to split the treasure?” the man demands.

  Joe replies in confusion, “what do you mean, split the treasure?”

  “I mean, this was a treasure hunt, right? Some people came back with treasure. How do we split it up fairly?” asks the man.

  Joe frowns. “I understand sharing the food and healing pills, but I don’t see why we would divide up the treasure too. I don’t even know how you would split it up.”

  “We all risked our lives, I think we deserve some part of what was found,” the man insists.

  A young man, this one with short braids and a jacket over his leather armor steps forward. “I’m not giving up nothing. We found it, fair and square.”

  His teammate, a young man with a fade and a nose ring pipes up. ”You got the same mission as we did. You could’ve did it too.”

  Eric the mustached man shouts, “alright, alright! Let us think about it. It could be that we could spread some armor around to the weakest groups or something.”

  There’s protesting at that idea too.

  “What I want to know,” Joe raises his voice, “is what happens next? Are we here for a while? Are the pixies sending us back down again tomorrow? We should ask.”

  The young man with the nose ring steps backward. “I can go grab a pixie. For sure.”

  “Thanks Martin,” Eric says.

  Joe watches the young man go, and then turns around. “Alright, what else do we have to cover?”

  Eric raises a hand. “What happened to Victor’s team?”

  “I don’t know, but Andrew is pissed,” Helen interjects.

  A large man wearing insect shell armguards represents the third team to take hard mode. “I think they lost someone,” he says. “Drew is angry they didn’t push through to the treasure anyway.”

  Murmuring and cusses spread through the council.

  “Shit. Is somebody talking to them?” Helen curses.

  “Walter’s on it,” the large man informs.

  They move on. What else is there to do?

  From there on out, there is a great deal of curiosity about everyone’s mutual experiences. They bounce around the circle and share. It seems like the groups that were most likely to seize the treasure were the teams that took normal difficulty. They were both more confident, and subjected to a lighter challenge. Their hauls were significantly lighter, with some coming back with untreated beast hides, or dried herbs in preserved boxes, but everyone seemed to receive at least some amount of the green pills.

  They discuss monsters and traps, and the occasional pop up sub-quest. It seems the other hard mode group was challenged to complete a puzzle with valves and steam pressure. It took them a whole day to complete, and they received a small brass hammer as a reward. It wasn’t useful for fighting everyone figures, maybe it was a crafting implement.

  That leads to a question about how the crafters are doing. There’s little news there. Most of them are so busy trying to survive that they have little bandwidth to explore other avenues. It hurts that the rewards for construction simply aren’t great compared to the ones for fighting, and the quality of their goods pales to the value of what is available in the store.

  Todd has stopped taking the time to harvest monster parts entirely. They probably wouldn’t have made it to the finish line if he had been collecting. Besides, he can’t carry all that much with him. Maybe one or two skins. It would be different if his second bag had extra-dimensional space like his [greed satchel], but no such luck.

  Todd mostly listens to the conversation, though he is the one expected to explain the confusion field at the end of his own team’s delve. Overall, the council is mostly killing time before Soup Nina returns and they can buy and apportion out food tokens. It lasts for ten minutes.

  Then, out of the blue, Jingshu the pockmarked teen smoker runs toward the group and accosts Todd.

  “Hey, there’s someone trying to steal your stuff!” Jingshu belts out.

  “There’s somebody trying to steal my stuff? Who would steal my stuff?” Todd blurts back.

  “Not just your stuff. All your stuff. I dunno, some guy!” Jingshu points backwards. He raises his voice to include Joe and Candra.

  Joe glowers up a storm. “We’ll be back,” he barks. Hopping a skip, he breaks out into a run.

  Candra and Todd follow afterward. Jingshu falls into the rear. They sprint back to their bags and when they get there, they find them rummaged through. Dozens of nexus crystals are gone, along with both bottles of pills, even Joe’s shortsword and Todd’s ixwa.

  “Shit,” Candra exclaims.

  “Did you see who did this?” Joe asks.

  “Yea. I saw him. He just walked up and started taking crystals,” Jingshu explains. “I asked him if he had permission to take it and he ran off.”

  “Could you find him for us?” Joe requests.

  Todd raises a question. “What are we supposed to do if we find this guy?”

  “Get our stuff back,” Joe asserts. “Then I don’t know. Beat him up.”

  Todd holds his tongue.

  Jingshu starts leading them in a spiral around the courtyard. His eyes dart over faces and his brow furrows.

  “Wait!” he calls out. He looks closer. “No,” he corrects himself.

  They continue on. Passing by Nayira, they greet her briefly and apologize for being busy.

  There are hundreds of cultivators in the crowd. Some are facing away, some are on the floor. A few have even returned to their rooms already. Todd begins to worry whether they will find their thief.

  Jingshu pauses. He leans. A man who is bent over looks back for one glance. “There he is! That’s him!”

  “Are you sure?” Joe asks.

  Before the young man has the chance to confirm, the suspect picks up his bag and breaks out running towards the walls.