From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 86: Nice Meal

We made camp inside the building that night, the lab. The place where a man watched his wife turn into a monster and then sat next to her until he couldn’t anymore... usual cozy stuff.

It felt strange. Every outpost before this had felt functional but temporary. The open sky above always reminded you that the wasteland was right there waiting. This place had corridors, rooms, and white stone lamps that still glowed. It felt almost as good as my room in the spire.

Kira grew vine beds in the lab. She’d gotten so good at it that she could probably grow a bed in her sleep.

Phinyx was meditating in the corner. Coco found a flat surface and lay down on it immediately.

I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling, but I did not sleep for a while.

The walls here were solid and the lamps were steady, nothing was going to crawl up through the floor tonight... probably, the floor seemed trustworthy.

I’d sealed the hatch and I felt good about that decision. No mysterious basement surprises today, no ancient nuclear couplings calling to me in the night.

Before going to sleep, Finn had found a hidden room. Of course he did, the man could sense silver through walls.

He had been walking the perimeter of the lab. He then stopped in front of a section of shelving that looked identical to every other section of shelving and tilted his head.

"I think there’s something behind this." Finn said while moving his hands against the shelve.

There was.

The shelf swung inward, revealing a storage room barely large enough for two people to stand in. The shelves inside were packed floor to ceiling with sealed cans.

There were a lot of them.

Finn looked at the cans, then at us, with the expression of someone who had expected to find a small thing and accidentally found a large one. Instead of finding an interesting item, he found enough cans to build a small grocery store.

"Is this food?" Coco asked, leaning in while sniffing the cans.

I picked one up, the seal was intact. Whatever was inside had been designed to last.

"Probably, let’s open one." I said.

It took Finn’s strength to crack the seal. What came out smelled like nothing I had a name for, not nutritional paste, not anything from the orphanage kitchen.

We ate better that night than if we were still in the spire.

The terrain toward the seventh outpost was uphill.

Corruptors moved across the slopes in the distance. We could see them clearly, dark shapes against the pale stone. A couple of months ago, that sight would have made me anxious and horrified.

Now I watched them the way you watch the weather. Possibly annoying later, but good enough.

The dark water canteens did their work. The Corruptors roamed the wasteland, but we were invisible, ghosts. We were very grateful for the magical monster repellant that we definitely weren’t just trusting blindly.

Kira grew a vine on the third day when we reached the wall of a cliff. She pressed her palm to the stone and the vine climbed, thick and fast. That kind of growth still surprised me a little despite having watched her do it dozens of times.

At the top we stopped to rest for a moment and looked back the way we had come.

The canyons spread out below us. Somewhere in there, still visible, was Kira’s vine above the sixth outpost.

"It really is big." Coco said, looking at the vine top.

"We need to be able to see it from the seventh outpost, so I had to make it that big." Kira said.

On our journey towards the seventh outpost I decided to practice as we walked.

Two pebbles, one in each hand, I’d throw one into the air, catch it at the top of its arc with Switch, and suddenly be holding the second one while the first landed on my other hand. Then repeat, then faster.

It was less about the switching and more about the timing. The moment of extension, the brief window where the thrown pebble was fully airborne and at a predictable point in space. If I could land a Switch at that precise instant reliably, I could do the same thing with something that wasn’t a pebble.

The rhythm of it helped with the walking. Throw, switch, catch the other one, repeat. It was almost meditative... almost. If meditation involved throwing rocks and occasionally hitting yourself in the face.

Finn watched me do it for about an hour before he said anything.

"Is that training?" He asked.

"Timing practice." I replied without breaking the rhythm.

"It looks like you’re just juggling badly."

"In order to master Switch I need to learn to juggle with precision." I said, already throwing a pebble mid conversation.

He thought about that for a moment, then nodded as if it made sense.

At camp that night I worked my aim. Every rock in reach became a target. The ground around me looked like someone had fought a war against geology and lost, there were rocks everywhere.

I’d touch one, build the mental box, find a second rock at distance, and Switch a section between them. Wrong, adjust, try again. The consistency was improving, slowly, unevenly, one bad shot for every two clean ones.

Polish your actual weapon.

I was trying. The voice in my dreams made it sound so easy. Like I wasn’t out here throwing rocks at other rocks while my friends watched and definitely judged me silently.

On the second night I managed twelve clean consecutive switches at varying distances without a single miss.

Then I missed the thirteenth and a chunk of stone landed on my foot. It was there to remind me that I needed more training.

The seventh outpost appeared on the afternoon of the fourth day, exactly where Finn said it would be. Finn had two great talents, finding abandoned outposts in the wasteland and missing Mia loudly.

It sat on a flat ledge, sheltered by a mountain on three sides. Much smaller than the sixth outpost.

But as I set the twenty spheres spinning and reached my awareness outward, I felt something I hadn’t expected.

Not a monster.

Not an empty room.

Something small, warm, and alive was tucked into the far corner of the structure, it started moving anxiously the moment we got close.

It knew we were here.