Lukas sat there, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the story out of his head.

Karrakas had described the world before the Tower as a flat plane with a sky above and ground below. That sounded exactly like earth. An earth believed to be flat.

Was it all a coincidence?

Then what about the story of evil sealed in a jar and buried deep in the earth. And that one rule that someone eventually broke.

He thought about the story he’d grown up with back on earth. A world that had been whole, then broken by one person’s decision.

Evil had been released, and everything had followed after.

He couldn’t tell if the similarity meant something or if he was reaching for connections that weren’t there.

And whoever had sealed the evil away in the first place, where had they gone? If they were powerful enough to gather it all up and bury it, why hadn’t they done anything when the jar broke?

Why leave humanity to nearly die and flee into a Tower while everything they’d built was destroyed?

Maybe there was no answer to that. Maybe the person who first told the story hadn’t known either, and the question had simply been passed down unanswered alongside everything else.

Or maybe it was exactly what Melody had said. A story. Something someone made up long ago to explain things that had no explanation, and it had survived long enough to feel like history.

He almost smiled at himself.

He was sitting in a desert city on the Second Floor of a magical Tower, taking a bedtime story seriously.

Karrakas exhaled and leaned back in his chair, breaking the silence.

"If we’re doing this today," he said, "there’s something we need to buy before we go anywhere near that gate."

Melody looked at him. "What?"

"Water," Karrakas said simply.

Akira frowned. "We still have enough water to last us for a few days."

"Drinking water, yes. But this isn’t a normal hunt." He looked around the table. "We’ll be out there for hours on end without proper rest. In that heat, without enough water, heatstroke becomes a real possibility. We need enough to keep all four of us alive and functional for the full duration."

He stood, and the others rose with him.

"Let’s go," he said.

They followed him out of the inn, and he led them off the main street and through a narrower road that ran between two rows of storage buildings.

The further they walked, the quieter it got, the foot traffic thinning to the occasional worker moving between the buildings.

He stopped in front of a wide warehouse with its large front doors rolled open.

Inside, stacked in organized rows from floor to ceiling, were containers of water. Each one was identical, sealed at the top, and marked with a simple label.

A broad man stood near the entrance, checking something on a clipboard. He looked up as they approached.

Karrakas extended his hand. "Good morning."

The manager shook it. "Karrakas. It’s been a while."

"It has." Karrakas gestured to Lukas beside him. "We’re looking to buy fifty containers today."

The manager flipped to a new page on his clipboard and wrote something down. "Fifty."

He turned the board around, showing them the price per container and the total.

Karrakas looked at it for a moment. "Give us twenty percent off and we’ll take them now. No delivery needed."

The manager shook his head. "Can’t do twenty. I’d be losing out on the deal."

"Fifteen then."

"Five."

"Twelve."

"Six."

Karrakas tilted his head. "Ten. That’s our final offer. We’re paying immediately, cash to card, and we’re carrying everything ourselves. No need for delivery."

The manager tapped his pen against the clipboard. He looked at the stack of containers, then back at Karrakas.

"Don’t try to act like you still won’t be profiting from this deal," Karrakas grinned. "Just give it to us at a ten percent discount."

"I knew I couldn’t deceive you, Karrakas," the man chuckled. "Alright, ten. But only because you’re carrying them out yourself."

They shook on it.

Lukas pressed his bank card to the manager’s payment device, and the transaction was confirmed.

The manager called two workers over and they began pulling containers from the nearest stack, lining them up near the entrance.

Lukas counted as they came out. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

When all fifty were on the ground, they divided them. Melody took ten, Akira took ten, and Karrakas took ten. Lukas took the remaining twenty, with all of them touching the containers and storing them in their spatial rings.

Karrakas looked up at the sky, checking the position of the sun.

"Good," he said. "Now we need information before we go anywhere near that gate."

They walked back towards the main street, Karrakas falling into step beside Lukas.

"For a quest like this one we’re about to go on," he said, "the source matters."

He kept his eyes on the road ahead. "Brokers are useful for quick, general updates. What’s moving, what’s been sighted nearby, whether a storm is coming. That kind of thing."

"But for a twenty-four hour barefoot walk in a straight line through open desert, general updates aren’t enough. You need detailed, verified information."

"That means sandstorm patterns tracked over time, beast migration routes, known dead zones, areas where the ground stays cooler longer, that sort of thing." He glanced at Lukas. "That kind of information comes from the established powers. In our case, the Le Fay pavilion."

"How much?" Lukas asked.

"A broker will charge you almost nothing for what they have. But what they have won’t be enough." Karrakas paused. "The pavilion’s detailed report will cost a hundred thousand gold coins."

Melody’s eyebrows went up slightly.

Lukas didn’t hesitate. "Let’s go to the pavilion."

Karrakas stared at him.

"A hundred thousand gold coins means nothing if the information keeps us alive long enough to finish the quest," Lukas said. "There’s no version of this where I cut corners on that."

Karrakas nodded once.

"Good choice," he said, and turned them in the direction of the pavilion.