You know, with so many people in the group, we probably won’t get another chance to be alone like this.

Nolan awoke to the most wonderful memory of his lifetime, the sun strong on his face as he lay atop a bundle of blankets with a wide smile on his lazy, chapped lips.

Everybody else was still asleep, or at least it seemed so as he turned his head to stare at Nyla’s sleeping face with butterflies in his stomach. She lay on her side about three metres away from him, tangled in her own blankets as the light sound of her breaths narrated the rise and fall of her chest. He’d always thought her a gorgeous girl, an opinion that had risen to a whole other level now that he’d seen her naked. The curvature of her hips, the dimples on the small of her back, the lean muscle of her abdomen and thighs.

As he watched her steady breaths, he recalled the size and shape of her breasts, how soft they’d felt in his inexperienced hands. Thinking back on the night before, he felt that he could finally die without any regrets.

He shook such thoughts from his head. Yeah right.

Basking in the afterglow of his first time with a woman, Nolan felt so at ease that he soon drifted back into the land of perverted dreams. He woke up some time later when something fell onto his lap.

“Nyla…?” he mumbled groggily.

It was a balled up blanket.

“Seriously, Nolan. At least cover up.”

“Hmm?”

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with a yawn.

Sean, who’d evidently thrown the blanket, was giving him an exasperated look. It took a moment to realize that Alicia, Aine, and some of the other girls were all blushing, and that beneath the blanket he was hard as a spirit stone.

Esteban was still asleep, thankfully, while Ian had sat up and was now low-key laughing over his shoulder while he pretended to glance at his sister. Lyra was staring at him unabashedly, though she looked away as if she suddenly lost interest.

“You were awake, sir?”

“I told you guys, call me Sean.”

A tinge of pink touched upon Alicia’s cheeks. “Sorry if we woke you.”

“We didn’t mean to talk too loudly,” said a shorter girl named Zess, an awkward expression on her heart-shaped face. “It’s just that, none of us have ever seen a boy’s…you know.”

“Like you’re some saint, Sean.” Nolan hurled the blanket back, inwardly dying from how cringe the situation was. “It’s not like I’m not wearing any pants.”

“I don’t see the problem.” Nyla looked over at Sean as she finished stowing away her bedding. “He’s like that every morning. Aren’t all men?”

“It’s about modesty…”

“Oh my God, can we drop it?”

Once Nolan made it clear that he was over the situation, they decided to map out the next steps of their journey. Relative to the region as a whole, they had only just entered the far southern reaches of the Northern Wilderness. This was an area almost devoid of vegetation and wildlife, a topography that supposedly persisted on for hundreds of kilometres.

Their next destination was the outpost city of Tallgate, which was owned and run by the Continental Merchant’s Association. Based upon the map that Nyla’s ancestor had left behind, they had no way of knowing exactly where the town was located. Whoever her ancient relative was, the city—along with many others—hadn’t existed at the time. Luckily, they’d found a map in Griff’s bag that detailed most of the Northern Wilderness’s settled areas, along with notable landmarks and known pathways.

“Tallgate’s that far away?” said Sean. “Just how big is this goddamn world?”

Everyone had gathered to face the floating map, which Nyla supported with her spiritual sense as they considered their next steps.

“You say that as if you’re not from here,” said Alicia.

“I’m not. I’m what you guys call an Otherworlder, I guess.”

“You’re an Otherworlder?” Aine exclaimed, some of the only words that the crestfallen girl had spoken since her sister was killed by one of Griff’s men.

“I am too,” said Esteban with pride. “All of us are.” The way he spoke, it sounded as if he were in some sort of secret club.

“Us three, he means.” Nolan attempted to shift the focus back to planning out the next leg of their journey, but the moment that the newcomers learned of their origins, he was smothered by a healthy mix of excited and skeptical questions.

They wound up wasting over an hour on the subject. They talked about Earth and the peoples that used to occupy it, about daily lives, cultures and histories. Esteban spoke about his home with pride, and made it a point to make sure it was known that he came from a different region of the world than the other two. As it usually did, the topic of technology took up a majority of the conversation, though the girls had a difficult time understanding the vague concepts that they described.

“I can’t believe you didn’t mention anything about Nolan being an Otherworlder,” said Lyra, who casually shared drinks with her brother on the fringes of the group. “All this time, and I was travelling with someone from another world.”

Why are you even drinking?

Ian laughed. “If you think that’s crazy, then wait until…” Seeing the look that Nolan sent him, he gave an apologetic shrug. “Then you’re right!”

“Anyway,” said Nolan, “as you can see, we’re human beings, same as you. Now, back to what I was saying about Tallgate.”

The biggest obstacle that lay between them and the CMA outpost city was a massive lake that was similar in size to an inland sea. At its narrowest point, it was about five hundred kilometres across, and five times that at its widest. Since Nolan had zero desire to chance a swim across such a vast and unknown body of water—especially on Venara—they would have to hug the coastline and go around.

“And that’s anywhere between thirty-five hundred and four thousand kilometres,” Nolan continued. “Oh, sorry. That’s a unit of measurement from our world.”

“How far do we have to travel, in leagues?” said Lyra. “Supposedly things get more dangerous the farther north you go in this wilderness, at least that’s what our father used to tell us.”

Ian snorted from behind his cup. “Whose father? How can you still call him that?”

“I didn’t say he was a good one. What the hell else am I supposed to say, anyway?”

Nolan gave a forceful cough. “It’s something like six or seven hundred leagues.”

“Why do you know such random things?” said Sean. “When I was your age, I was playing sports and chasing girls.”

“Well, sorry if I don’t have time for sports and girls between all the murder and violence.”

Talking about Earth for so long brought about a tsunami of bittersweet memories from the life that he’d left behind.

Without much money for leisure things, Nolan had spent a lot of his childhood reading his school books. At the time, he’d enjoyed learning more than anything, and had picked up an impressive amount of knowledge during his early adolescence. Combined with his near-perfect memory, he’d coasted to the peak of academics for his age group, and was among a handful of people in the Greater Collinsville Area to earn university credits as a freshman in high school. After everything he’d been through since the Interspatial Migration, he’d give anything to enjoy a coke and a burger at one of the massive parks that’d filled the sprawling city.

As the others took the discussion in a different direction, he shook the melancholic memories from his head. “Guys, we’re losing focus here. It’s important that we know where we’re going, in case we get separated.”

They eventually agreed to travel north until they hit the lake, then they’d circumnavigate it via the eastern coastline. The moment they left the lake at their backs, they would make straight for Tallgate.

Once everybody was on the same page, they ate a quick breakfast of dried meats and cheeses, and then set off toward the northern horizon. They covered about forty kilometres per hour, a relatively moderate pace that everyone was capable of maintaining.

It wasn’t long before they began to encounter other animals. Nearly all of them were in the higher levels of the Profound Entry stage, with a good deal at Integration. Large, black-haired deer and moose-sized minks were common sights, though these creatures were more wary of them than the other way around.

Why is everything so strong here? He’d heard that most creatures in the Northern Wilderness tended to demonize early on in their lives, though the animals they encountered were intelligent and cautious.

The presence of other creatures continued to grow until an abrupt pause in the population of flora and fauna in the area. They’d run from dawn until late in the evening, and had covered around five hundred kilometres by the time that they stopped to get their bearings.

The land in this region was flat and barren, as if they’d stepped onto the dead soil of a forgotten planet. The soil was grey and sickly, pocketed with lonely boulders and rounded rocks for as far as the eye could see. They hadn’t seen another living creature for over an hour, which was completely different than the dangerous wilderness they had all heard so much about.

They decided to run on until nightfall, but it wasn’t long before they came to the horrifying realization that they had wandered into the territory of a Genesis-staged animal that looked like some sort of variation of a wolverine. It was Nolan that noticed, after he created a series of platforms out of spiritual energy and followed them skyward until he stood over five hundred metres above the bleak landscape.

It wasn’t difficult to spot the beast, considering that it was several times larger than the armoured sloth that he’d killed in the Three-River Valley. It was so far off in the distance that he wouldn’t have been able to see it if not for his heightened vantage point, and so jarring was his discovery that he had to stand in place for a moment to collect his thoughts. The wolverine was so large that it made him question his distance from the ground, for even though it was dozens of kilometres away, it seemed as if it were a normal-sized wolverine within earshot.

As he stared on in incredulity, the monster that seemed straight out of a Godzilla movie slowly turned its massive head. It was looking at Nolan, who should have appeared as no more than a speck of dust at such distance.

No, it shouldn’t be able to see me, he thought with a shiver.