Book 3: Chapter 7: Culture Swap

Evening settled over the forest like a borrowed, hand-made blanket; warm in a few places, and occasionally full of small biting insects. The trees loomed, and above the caravan camp, smoke curled lazily into the air. And, more importantly, there was meat.

Thick strips of sizzling Stonehide Gnasher were skewered on spits, juices crackling over an open flame. What had once been a nine-foot living tank pig, was now being turned into what Lance had enthusiastically dubbed “god-tier bacon.”

It smelled amazing, a mix of earthy spice, gamey richness—and to Alex’s nose—contained the distinct aroma of victory. Apparently, once one got past the part where the meat was denser than a phonebook, and tougher than Kate’s last three relationships, it went down surprisingly nicely.

The entire caravan was invited to join, merchant and mercenaries alike, and everyone enjoyed the meaty spoils. Within minutes, the entire camp had turned into a college camping trip, with people lazing about, playing music and passing around drink. Garret stood near the largest fire, his shirt half-unbuttoned, one foot on a log, gesturing dramatically with a stick of half-eaten meat like he was delivering a one-man theater performance.

“I kid you not, its tusks were like tree trunks!” he declared to a crowd of mostly unimpressed mercenaries, and a very interested Tom-Tom, who was now dual-wielding roasted skewers himself.

Lance nodded solemnly. “I measured one. Thirty feet. At least.”

Selka arched an eyebrow, “Are sure that wasn’t the tree it knocked over.”

“Details!” Garret declared. “The point is, it died gloriously, and we are now eating the fruits of our bravery.” He raised his skewer in toast. “To glorious protein!”

The mercenaries around the fire gave a scattered round cheers. Even Ghrukk gave a single, gravelly chuckle that sounded like someone dragging a dagger across loose stones. Then he went back to chewing through a rib bone like a dog.

Doran, the resident dwarf warrior, sat apart, sharpening what might’ve once been a chisel but now looked suspiciously like a weapon he had disguised as a tool. Or possibly the other way around. Alex had to admit that it was hard to tell with dwarves.

“Wasting perfectly good crafting time on pigs,” the dwarf said.

Alex, somehow always being thrust into social experiments no one else would, sat down beside him. “So…” he began, “Dwarven forging. What’s the secret to getting enchantments to stick on such highly condensed alloys?”

Doran glanced up, gave Alex a look like he’d just asked if rocks had feelings, and grunted. “Hammer hard. Don’t mess it up.”

“…Right,” Alex said. “But what about layered rune-stamping? Like, do you—”

“Stamp it. Layer it. Bang. Done.”

“Okay, but how do you—”

“Forge hot. Runes cold. Use a brush. Not goat-hair. Goat-hair catches fire.”

There was a long pause between them.

Alex nodded slowly. “You know, you’re exactly how I imagined dwarves would be. In a vaguely comforting way.”

Doran grunted again. It was impossible to tell if it was agreement, annoyance, or just general dwarf noise. Alex suspected it was a versatile sound, like “meh,” but with more beard behind it. Either way, he understood he wouldn’t be getting much from the dwarf in the way of conversation. Perhaps Zach would have been a born a dwarf is he was from here and not earth? Henry as well.

Thankfully, social rescue arrived in the form of Myrae.

The half-elf glided in with the grace of someone who had grown up around elves and copied their natural grace. “Doran’s been grumpy since before the Stone Era,” she said cheerfully, taking a seat beside Alex and handing him a cup of something warm, and not immediately poisonous-smelling.

Doran didn’t look up, still working on his chisel. “Stone Era was overrated. Everything was round and stupid.”

Myrae winked at Alex and waved. “See? Best leave the grump to himself, come.”

The two of them relocated to a quieter fire, away from the dramatic reenactment happening behind them. Garret was now pretending to fight off an imaginary second boar while Lance acted as sound effects.

For a few minutes, they sat in companionable silence, sipping warm herbal tea she had made from something Myrae called “swampmint. It sounded like a disease, but actually tasted decent. Eventually, Myrae spoke in a soft voice.

“As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I’m a half-elf. My mother was an elf, father, a human trader. They fell in love at the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong ears.”

Alex blinked. “That’s… surprisingly poetic.”

She smiled faintly. “Elves are very poetic when they’re rejecting people. It’s part of the whole ‘ancient wisdom’ vibe.”

He didn’t interrupt her, just waited in silence. Her tone didn’t give him the impression of someone looking for sympathy. It was more like someone who used to telling the truth plainly, getting ahead of the traveling rumors that surely kept close by to her throughout her life.

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“As I grew up, I learned that I was too emotional for the elves. Too slow-aging for the humans. Too graceful for the humans, too clumsy for the elves. Basically, I grew up being an exception to every rule.”

“So,” Alex said, “you became a mercenary?”

“Better than being stared at every time I went to the market for the past sixty years.”

He nodded. That made more sense to him than it should have. The fact she was over sixty years old was a surprise, though.

Myrae looked at the fire for a long moment, the flames dancing in her silver-grey eyes. “Being an adventurer is chaotic, dangerous, but its almost much more simple a life. Out here… we’re not halves of anything. We’re just who we choose to be.”

Alex exhaled, quiet for a moment. Myrae’s plight pulled the memories of his own childhood to forefront of his mind. His life of being compared to Adam, the perfection that was his twin brother, and not living up to it. He could guess being compared to the graceful perfection of an elf sort of felt like that. Meanwhile, Alex was still rather good at most things when compared to the average person, a notch of above the rest, much like the possible elven half overshadowing the human-side of Myrae’s upbringing. It was a tough place to be in, Alex empathized with the plight.

Things were difficult for almost everyone in this world. Alex thought about his life as a soldier, a twin, a system-chosen anomaly from another world. About how none of that really fit, most days he was just holding the pieces of himself together with stubbornness and a vast amount of grit. Everyone had ideas about what he was supposed to be, and how he was supposed to act, even back on Earth.

But Myrae found a way to ignore all that, to just be herself, be Myrae.

“I like that, it’s simple,” he said at last.

Myrae chuckled. “Simple things tend to be true.”

Behind them, Garret shouted, “THEY HAD A CATAPULT!”, and the mercenaries burst into laughter, the noise overshadowing their conversation entirely.

Alex smiled and sipped his tea as he watched his friends. Garret performing his theatrics, with Lance as backup. Allie laughing along with the show as Eric shook his head in embarrassment. Devon sat off to the side, working his glyph stylus on a long object that looked suspiciously like a rifle to Alex. Peter and Henry stood watching, each with a mug in hand, whispering to each other. Cole was off to the side, talking with Rynel. The two men leaning in rather close to each other as they whispered.

Alex didn’t say it out loud, but for a brief moment, surrounded by laughter, and firelight, and people who didn’t actually belong, but had decided to be together anyway…it felt nice.

He thanked Myrae for the tea and joined back with his friends. It was already getting late at that point, and the camp had begun to grow quiet in the same way a tavern bar does when the last song is sung and someone’s just finished throwing up outside.

The fires all crackled in low pops, reduced to glowing embers to dim lights. The stars above had finally gathered their courage and crept through the clouds, peeking down on the sleep-weary band of worldstriders, mercenaries, and one very full kobold who was now sleeping in a hammock of gathered and tied-together jackets anchored by two precarious towers of empty stew pots.

Alex eased down onto his bedroll, still mulling over Myrae’s words in his mind. Not the dramatic parts about ancient prejudice and elven rejection, though those had weight, but the subtle truth about a shared simple existence beneath it all.

“Out here, we’re not halves of anything. We’re just who we choose to be.”

In his mind, Obby stirred like a dog who’d been napping with one eye open. But suddenly smelled a snack. “You liked her.”

Alex blinked up at the stars. Not like that, he replied in his mind.

“I didn’t say you wanted to kiss her. I said you liked her. Like someone who gets it, who understands your meatsack worries.”

Alex rolled onto his side. Yeah, I think I did. It’s nice talking to someone who has humanity, and not an evil sentient rock.

“Not evil.”

Sure your not.

Obby left it there, letting Alex lay in silence. He stared up at the stars for a while, still in awe of the large void that rested above them. Eventually hours passed and footsteps crunched nearby. A mercenary, with a mustache that belonged in a different century, gave Alex a nudge with his boot. “Hey. You’re up for lookout.”

Alex groaned the way only someone who had just laid down and gotten comfortable could groan. But still, he dragged himself to his feet, buckled on his bracers, and wandered toward the edge of camp where two other mercenaries already stood, one leaning against a tree, the other staring up at the moon with a strange expression, like the moon itself was mocking his mother.

As he walked up, they gave him nods. One even offered him a piece of dried fruit, which he declined with the wary suspicion of someone who knew a kobold had been handling the rations not too long ago.

He stood among them mostly in silence, eyes scanning the dark line of the forest. Occasionally, something rustled too far away to truly worry about. The other two mercs kept to themselves. Which was fine by Alex.

Mostly, he talked to Obby about his various upgrade plans.

So, if I reverse the layering on the lightning glyphs and weave them directly into the muscle tissue—

“You’ll get muscle seizures. Again. And the vibrating groin problem. Again.”

I fixed that.

“You say that every time. And yet in the projections we run, your pants still catch fire.”

He nodded absently, mentally sketching out enchantment patterns on his arm with his fingertips.

There was always a next project on Alex’s mind when it came to gaining more strength. Something to improve, tweak or change, because the System hadn’t exactly handed him a skill tree and a game manual. He was building his way forward, one glyph enchantment, one etched scar, one aching scream-filled night at a time. Eventually, the conversation in his head dimmed, replaced by memories that had been waiting behind the very flimsy built barrier he had erected in his mind some time ago.

The barriers holding all the sentimental memories of home.

His mom’s laugh. His dad’s awful, burnt, grilled cheese. His childhood dog. His victories and defeats in school sports events. The day he joined the military. Henry’s bare grin when they both got caught sneaking into the officer’s canteen after hours during bootcamp. His first day joining Eric’s squad. His brother, Adam.

Did he miss Adam? He knew he should, that was a normal feeling to have. He thought of the promise he’d made to Garret, spoken to him what felt like years ago now, but burned into his bones: “I’ll get you back to your brother. No matter what.”

And not just Garret. But, Allie. Lance. Peter. Even Kate—for all her posturing and brass-polished edges—had someone they missed. Loved ones who probably assumed they were dead. Or worse, forgotten. He missed his parents, for sure, but memories and thoughts of his brother still came with baggage. The thought nestled behind his ribs like a smoldering piece of coal, not hot anger, but close.

Restless, Alex found himself wandering. His body moved before his brain had caught up, feet quiet on the forest floor as he drifted just beyond the campfire’s light. He didn’t go far. He could still hear the occasional snore, and the murmur of a caravan guard shifting in their sleep. But the trees swallowed light around him like hungry cultivators all their own, and soon only moonbeams from above, and his own shadow, followed him.

He found the pond without really trying.

It was small, round and shallow, fed by a trickling brook that gurgled nearby. The surface rippled gently, reflecting fractured light like scattered coins in a wishing well. Alex stood there for a while. Watching… not thinking. Then, as sure as a shift in the seasons, he felt a presence brushing against his aether senses from behind. He new immediately it was not threatening, but familiar.

“Hey, Holly.”

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