Randel woke up in his tent with an exceptionally awful headache. He lay on his back, eyes open, breathing hard. It wasn’t completely dark; the soft glow of his veins cast a warm light on the walls of the black tent. Why? Why didn’t his orange blood recede? It felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. Again. His clothes were soaked in sweat, making him shiver.

Groaning, he sat up and collapsed the tent around him, making Soul Seeker turn back into his left leg. He sneezed in the chilly morning air. Tall grass surrounded him, but if he looked east his destination was already visible. It was hard to miss it, really. Randel stood up, taking in the ridiculous wonder as it basked in the first rays of the morning sun.

“Skyward.”

The city called Skyward was a world tree parody. There was no better way to put it. Fortram’s rotating city segments were nothing compared to the sheer absurdity that the Pheilett created here. Every World Seed was a giant middle finger to the laws of physics, but Skyward was a true testament that the gods could be as rude to the Waking World as they pleased.

Skyward was a world tree that had been turned upside down. Enormous branches spread across the ground at the city’s base, sprouting large maple-like leaves that were solid enough to build under or even upon. The leaves and branches coalesced into a thick trunk with dark brown bark, which went up and up into the sky until it bloomed into a canopy of roots. Somewhere within those lighter brown jungle of roots lay the World Seed; the source of this madness and of the ambient mana in this area. Mana so precious that a city’s worth of people was willing to live here.

“Lots of scampering mortals.”

None of Randel had been in Skyward before, so he only knew the basics. The place had its own unnatural gravity system that pulled everything toward the tree within a certain range—making the whole thing habitable. Much like in Fortram, there were three city segments; the downsiders lived among the leaves, the upsiders lived among the roots, and the trunkers lived on the trunk. It didn’t define social classes as clearly as Fortram’s rings, since living conditions within these sections could vary greatly. The upsiders, for example, could be further divided into the cloud-gazers who lived on the very top, and the shadow-lurkers who lived on the underside of the roots.

“Cool names, though.”

It took Randel an hour to reach the outskirts of the city. The tree was so large that he had misjudged how close he had been—and now that he was standing beneath it, staring up at it, he felt small and insignificant and tired and weak. No, he didn’t just feel it; he was tired and weak. He hadn’t drunk or eaten for—how long? It was hard to remember. None of him paid attention to annoyances like hunger. No! No, he had to eat properly. He needed nutrients to build up muscles on his frame. Perhaps the reason why it took him an hour to get here was that he hobbled like a drunkard.

Randel watched the city for a while longer, trying to clear his head. A small bag of thrash fell from above and hit the topmost leaves with a loud thump. Randel couldn’t see where it came from; the roots were too high up. A minute later a small stream of dirty liquid rained upon the leaves nearby. It was followed by what looked like a single shoe. Suddenly, Skyward didn’t seem like such a beautiful place—at least not up close.

“Go,” Randel told himself. “Up, up, and up.”

He joined a line of traders on a beaten-down path toward one of the city’s entrances. He couldn’t see any walls around the city, but the gigantic leaves doubled as natural barriers well enough. The occasional gaps between them were full of guards, less so for checking traffic and more so for fending off monsters lured in by the mana-rich air. Randel got only a cursory glance before he was waved through the entrance, which was a set of giant leaves that happened to form a tunnel.

Walking through Skyward’s downside was a surreal experience; it felt like being part of an ant colony that was chewing at a tree from the inside out. Everything looked disorganized and chaotic at first glance—but upon closer inspection, they always turned out quite deliberate. Layers of leaves formed uneven floors, stacked high up on each other until they barely let any light through. The main road felt narrow and meandering compared to Fortram’s roads, and the side streets were even worse, but they all seemed sturdy and well-trodden.

“Lots of steps and ladders, though.”

Skyward’s people conquered the leaves. Houses had been built in the oddest of places, from small crevices under leaves to rickety tall towers stretched between branches. Most of the houses were made of wood; Randel recognized the dark, rough texture of the gigantic tree’s bark. Bridges connected the leaves where the gap was too wide, and lanterns hung from each leaf island to remedy the lack of direct sunlight. An earthy smell permeated the streets, coming from the tree itself; the primary culprits were the small notches on certain leaves that people used for extracting water.

People. There were many mortals scuttling about in this colony of ants. They were kinda avoiding Randel, though. All the better. Randel limped past a street merchant that suddenly fell silent. A woman dragged her child quickly out of the way. A guard heading for the city gates cast a nervous glance at him, then hurried past.

Many people. Perhaps not as many as in Fortram, but the narrow streets and bridges made the city feel crowded. As part of the Terran Empire, it was no surprise that the majority of the population was human—but the number of Avarii wasn’t too far behind. The bird-like people found Skyward much to their liking.

“Can’t see why.”

Perhaps he could ask. Randel knew some ways to communicate with Avarii; part of him had lived as one a few lives before. His current body didn’t have color-changing feathers and his vocal organs were lacking too, but—he clutched at his head. Was it really the time for this? Why was he whistling, anyway? He didn’t know. But there were lots of Avarii around, and like the humans, they too were avoiding him. Lots of Avarii. Lots of Avarii meant lots of Necromancy, which drove the demand for that particular branch of magic down and filled the streets with a staggering number of skeleton servants. They fit this place better than their golemantic counterparts anyway; navigating the confusing mess of streets and leaf islands required a basic form of intelligence that golems did not have.

“Hey, watch it!”

A human man bumped into Randel as he stood in the middle of the main road. The man was about to yell some more, but the words got stuck in his throat when he saw the collar around Randel’s neck. He quickly moved on. Randel blinked, then stopped staring upward and made an effort to scan his surroundings. His head throbbed. People were giving him a wide berth. He already knew that, though. Was he thinking in circles?

“Maybe it’s the smell,” he said. He was ragged and dirty. These people must have mistaken him for a junkie or a homeless crook. How familiar.

“I looked down on Ryder for this!” he suddenly remembered. “Look at me now! Crummy and wretched with glowing veins all over. And hungry. I’m hungry!”

He had to eat something. His head hurt. He patted down his pockets and found some credit cards.

“Clever, very clever.”

Whichever part of him saw fit to carry some cash around was a genius. It was way too much money, though—the downsiders here wouldn’t be able to give back change. But he didn’t care. He found his purpose again. He walked into the closest inn and tossed one of his cards to the innkeeper.

“Food and a room. Keep the change.”

Upon further consideration, he should have rented a place in the upside part of the city. Whatever. He was hungry and his head ached. Thankfully, the innkeeper didn’t ask any annoying questions. All that money must have helped a lot. Randel ate and took a sponge bath. He felt only marginally better. It was time to scope out the rest of the city.

“Toward the sky.”

Getting from one point to another wasn’t easy in Skyward, especially if it involved getting from downside to upside. Fortram’s infrastructure was an efficient clockwork compared to the tangled spaghetti streets of Skyward. Seriously. Anyone complaining about inefficiencies in Fortram’s portal network should have been deported to Skyward to have a real taste of what inefficiency looked like. Randel got turned around twice before he found a proper taxi service, and he counted himself lucky that it didn’t take him longer.

Morello’s Mounts had several stations across Skyward with skeletal mounts for hire. The services ranged from the cheap station-to-station transportation to the rather costly custom journey that required a licensed necromancer to control the mount. Randel took the cheaper option and was given a mount that reminded him of a camel, except it had a more prominent tail, wider jaws, and taloned feet.

“Desert raker,” Randel said. The beast was called desert raker, he reminded himself. The skeletal mount had a comfortable saddle on its back, but the rest of its body was left uncovered. Eerie dark light held its bones together, coalescing in its hollow eye sockets in greater quantities to provide the creature visual feedback. The sight of this creature would have been considered frightening in a different place, but in the Terran Empire, it was just part of everyday life. Bones were bones—separated from the soul after death. Reanimating them wasn’t an act of desecration according to most religions in this world.

“Because it’s more convenient this way.”

Randel hung onto the desert raker’s back as it navigated the leaves of Skyward on autopilot. It took them a while to get out of the city’s downside; the mount tended to choose longer routes in favor of safety over speed. Frustrating. In many cases, a small leap between leaves would have saved several minutes of trudging to the nearest bridge.

Randel felt the gravity shift way before reaching the tree’s trunk. By the time his mount burst out of the canopy into the harsh sunlight, it was already walking vertically on a thick branch that merged into the trunk. With the entire planet behind his back and the endless sky on either side of him, Randel set his eyes on the distant jungle of roots ahead of him. Feeble and unaccustomed minds must have found this view disorienting and scary, but all Randel felt was anticipation. He was on the hunt, nearing his quarry.

Passing through the trunk was simple; its wide and straight highways were the complete opposite of the downside’s streets. There was only a tiny bit of verticality here because of the … logging, of sorts. The lumberjacks here were more akin to miners, whose job was to extract the bark – and in some regulated cases, even the wood – of the tree they lived on. Their activities formed deep valleys and even underpasses in certain parts of the trunk, clearly following some sort of pattern that Randel couldn’t quite decipher at a glance. There were houses too, sparse but present; some were made of wood, others were carved into the wood at the side of the valleys.

A while later, Randel’s mount wound around the trunk to the southern side and he found himself passing through farmlands with all sorts of crops grown on them. How all that soil was transported up here, he had no idea. Did the plants even get enough water at this angle? Did the World Seed of Skyward provide some kind of secondary miracle that made efficient farming possible? Before he could catch himself, he was already thinking about Fortram again. Could he form a level below the city that was purely dedicated to agriculture? Would it be worth the costs? Probably yes, on both accounts. Sunlight would be a problem, though. But why was he thinking about this? Fortram was a stepping stone for him, nothing more.

His head reminded him that it was hurting. Badly. He needed to think less, act more—except he had nothing to occupy himself with. Meditation. It would clear his mind. Minds. They had to mind their own business. Meditate together. Yeah, as if that would ever happen. Randel’s mount was halfway through the trunk when he heard music on his left. He touched a rune on his mount’s neck and it slowed to a halt, pulling over to the side of the highway. He then dismounted and set off to investigate.

“I shouldn’t be doing this.”

He had to climb over some shallow ridges of bark until he spotted them; a procession of about thirty or so people and their mounts, flying colorful flags, sounding trumpets and drums, marching toward topside on a parallel road. A political campaign, perhaps? At the head of the column rode a blonde knight in shining armor—literally shining armor, as if sunlight was trapped under its heavy plates. Even without seeing the man’s neck, it was easy to tell that he was a Player. His plates and the white horse he rode were a dead giveaway.

“Horses don’t exist in Nerilia.”

Randel’s first impression of the knight was nothing too positive. He disliked posers, and he disliked this man in particular because he looked much like Simon the pyromancer. Arrogant. Randel winced, massaging his temples. He stood out like a sore thumb and the procession was going to pass him by. He had to move. He turned around and was surprised to find that other people had gathered to watch too. Farmers. Children. Passersby with their mounts. Randel turned again and saw that the procession had reached him already. How did they get close so fast? How long had he been standing here? The music had stopped and the knight was giving a speech.

“—invite you to the Midnight Fest tonight, where the villain’s weapon will be sealed once and for all. A new era is upon us. No longer shall evil Reapers get away with their sins! Under my wings, Skyward will—”

Randel rubbed his eyes when he saw the evil weapon the knight was talking about. A large obsidian black scythe lay across his horse’s back, just behind the knight. Black all over, with a glowing orange gemstone embedded where the shaft met the blade. A demonic weapon like Soul Eater.

“Is it true that you killed the witch?” someone among the onlookers shouted.

“I locked the villain in prison,” the knight replied. “Her fate will be handed to the High King himself. Reapers should not be judges over life and death, not even over lives as wretched as this villain’s.”

“Why are you called Reapers, then?!”

“We take lives. But we do not judge.”

“Nice twist,” Randel muttered. His eyes wandered back to the black weapon. His own obsidian leg was quite visible, but unless he moved it the orange lines wouldn’t spread over it. And so Randel stood still, looking like a half-wit, listening to the back and forth between the knight and the gathered humans. No one noticed the similarities to the scythe.

The knight’s procession was kind of lame, honestly. Marching through the sparsely populated trunk, holding speeches to a handful of people—was he really hoping to gain popularity this way? So slow, so inefficient … yet at the same time, the Mad Painter had never held any speeches at all. Perhaps he should have. He had always been more of an operating from the shadows type of a person, which didn’t inspire too much trust. No—why would he want to inspire trust? He didn’t need trust for what he was set out to do. Still, a victory speech after he had saved the city from the giant worms would have gone a long way.

The knight’s attendants watched Randel suspiciously. His Player collar was clearly visible, but the knight either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Randel eyed the black scythe some more. One thing he couldn’t quite understand was why it looked like a scythe. Sure, it looked big and impressive. Fitting for a Reaper, if one didn’t mind stereotypes. But practical? No. It was not a weapon to fight with.

“It is, however, a good spectacle.”

Tanaka. According to Randel’s Quest, the shadebound Player residing in Skyward was called Tanaka. She had been defeated and imprisoned by this knight. Apparently. It coincided quite well with Randel’s arrival—which could have been, of course, immediately obvious to anyone with the same Quest as him. To all the other shadebound Players.

Randel tilted his head, regarding the knight in a new light. Did he genuinely defeat Tanaka, or could it be that he was her agent? Was this perhaps one of Tanaka’s tricks? Only she would be able to shape her weapon into a scythe, and why do that unless she wanted to grab attention? Whatever Tanaka’s scheme was, she clearly wanted to appear as if she had already been defeated. Was she afraid? Randel licked his dry lips.

“Wait.”

Another thought occurred to him: this was too easy. Had Tanaka’s shades really thought that he wouldn’t see through this? They were underestimating him. That thought left him somewhat angry. Annoyed.

“Shades and their arrogance. Name a more iconic pair.”

This was going to be a battle of wits. Although Randel had seen through Tanaka’s first layer of deception, he had to wonder if there was more. He had to find out. The one advantage he had over Tanaka was that Randel had more to himself. More minds to think things through. More minds with more knowledge.

“And look where that got me!”

Randel blinked. He was standing alone at the side of the road. Distant music drifted into his ears. Had he just imagined that knight and his procession? Surely, he hadn’t started hallucinating. That would have made no sense.

No, he knew what happened. He must have zoned out for a bit. The knight had already moved on, and so had the onlookers. Back to business. Randel walked back to his mount and clambered into the saddle. The sun shone from a different angle than before—was it afternoon already? Randel was losing time. He had to hurry. His plan hadn’t changed much, really. The High King’s ball. While he was at it, he would try to find out more about Tanaka too.

“A battle of wits,” he mumbled as his mount trudged on.

Squinting, he took another glance at the sun. The sun that had climbed across the sky while he was deep in thought.

“It’s going to be a battle of wits.”

Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t as much of an advantage as he had first thought.