We emerge from the gate in a forest not too unlike the one we had just left, but the trees did seem somewhat different, so I was hoping that we were back to our world. I would’ve taken out my phone to check the reception, but with how long we had been in the other world they were completely dead.

We slowly walked along in the forest, with the occasional monster attack to break up the monotony, but there was nothing that was remotely challenging, mainly three star mobs we’d become used to hunting.

Eventually, the sun started to set, and we started to set up our campsite for the night. With the ward net set up, a small fire in the middle, and some craw meat roasting over the fire to give us something warm to eat, we sat around in silence, both of us worried about if we were in our world, or if we were, where in the world were we.

I’d noticed that the game seemed to have spawned most the people nearby into Ederheim, and the portal had taken us to Kurheim, so I was hoping that in some way the locations were connected, but I couldn’t be sure until we found some sign of humanity, and that was still assuming that we were in our world.

The night’s sleep was not a restful one, waking up regularly, even with the comfortable bedding I’d purchased. Eventually, I got out of bed as the sun started to rise, and noticed Lily already awake and starting a new fire, dark circles visible under her eyes. We cooked some more craw meat mostly in silence before getting up, packing up the site, and getting back to our walk.

My worry continued to grow as we walked, but just as a very tense feeling started to rise in my chest, I spotted it. It was a road, and not of the cobblestone or pseudo concrete varieties you would see in game, it was clearly made of asphalt, glorious asphalt. I never thought I’d be so glad to see something as mundane as a road, but I was exulting inside, my shoulders sagging downward in relief.

I barely kept my dignity as I slowly walked to the road, and noticed lily with a bright smile, completely different from her normal cold attitude she tended to show. We both arrived at the road, then played a game of rock paper scissors to decide which way to go, with me losing of course, complete with a smirk from Lily. For once however, it seemed more playful than arrogant, probably due to the excitement from discovering we were back.

We continued our walk, this time following the road, and it wasn’t too long until we hit the first street sign, and I did a mental fist pump, I recognized the street name! It was a main thoroughfare that went through my town, though with our current location, I had no idea which way we should go to get back. I mentioned that I recognized the street name to Lily, and got what was almost a smile from her. We then continued our walk, when the road turned into another road, whose name I didn’t recognize, and we realized we had been heading the wrong way after all.

Feeling a bit vindicated about my choice in rock paper scissors, I gave my own smirk to Lily with a snide “Seems we went the wrong way,” only to get a light hmph, and have her turn away a bit. We then turned around, and went back to walking, punctuated by the occasional monster attack, luckily with no four star mobs, as I wasn’t totally comfortable fighting them yet, even if we’d fought one already.

Eventually, the forest around us started to fade into a commercial district, littered with different shops and gas stations. Disturbingly, nobody seemed to be out, only monsters, in a much higher concentration than they had been in the forest, and most the stores which should be well lit were dim. The occasional store had lights on, but I could clearly see the solar panels up top, it seemed the electricity grid was down, at least for our area. Even with the advent of most homes having solar panels, many big businesses hadn’t taken to having them installed, for some reason not willing to put in the initial investment even if it would save them money long term.

We fought our way through the deserted streets, and soon turned down the street that had my apartment complex on it, and what should have been a ten minute walk turned into an hour long slog, with constant fighting with monsters as the density of them increased.

I continued to worry about the lack of people, but there was nothing I could do about it for now. Eventually, we reached my apartment, and we locked the door, which had somehow been left hanging open. I was sure I had locked it before heading out to hunt around a month ago, but clearly someone had gotten in, somehow without breaking it down, possibly the landlord.

I flipped the light switch to have a pleasant surprise, it turned on! I knew that there were solar panels above each of the housing units, but I still hadn’t been sure it would be enough to power anything. I looked around my now lit home, and luckily, all of my furniture was where it should be. When I went to raid the kitchen for some proper earth food, I was disappointed, the kitchen had clearly been raided for anything that wasn’t perishable, and when I opened the fridge, a horrible smell assailed me, apparently the power that was enough for the lights couldn’t handle the compressor powering the fridge.

I closed the fridge door, and searched around some more, eventually finding some ramen in a hard to reach cupboard that I had forgotten I even had, and we were soon outside with a pot and some of the water we had in our backpacks, starting a fire to boil some water for our pitiful home meal.

The meal was a bit pitiful, but it tasted of home, and was as delicious as instant ramen could ever be. Once we had finished our meal, we packed up our gear before heading back into my apartment. We were soon discussing what was going to happen.

“I don’t know what happened to the people, but I didn’t see any bodies, they probably evacuated somewhere before the monster wave hit. Anyway, I don’t really have anywhere to go, my family is all out of state, and I have no way of finding out if they’re even ok. They were fine before the monster waves, but now I don’t know.” After mentioning that, I slowly faded into silence. Now that we were safe and back home, I was starting to come to terms with the fact that my family may not be safe. “Anyway, is there anywhere you want to go? I figured I’ll stick with you until we find some more people.”

“I need to get to the city, that’s where my father will be, and I’m sure he’s just been worried sick about me.” She hesitated a bit before continuing. “I just hope he’s safe.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine, the military was watching over the city, so it’s probably well protected.” I raised my hand to pat her on the back before hesitating, unsure if she’d take offence. Eventually, I decided that even people like Lily needed comfort sometimes, and I gave her a few pats on the back, not even getting a glare in return, Lily just staring downward with a gloomy expression.

Soon we were going to bed, Lily refusing my offer to have my bed, making me thankful I wouldn’t be the one sleeping on the floor, and we set up the ward net before heading to sleep, both of us sleeping in the same room in case of any sort of emergency.

I slowly drifted off to sleep, so comfortable to be back in my own bed, even if we were going to have to find out what we were going to do in the coming days.

I woke up before Lily, and snacked on some of the travel rations we had packed before waking her up. She got up looking disheveled, and seemed to flush a bit as she noticed the state she was in, glaring at me until I left the room for her to get ready. I’d only ever seen her after she’d gotten ready in her tent, so I was quite surprised at how she had clearly been getting herself ready before leaving her tent.

We were soon packed up and started our walk, but not before picking a ton of leaves off of my plants, which had somehow survived without me watering them, to make more potions. We were going to head to the city, hoping that was where everybody had evacuated to. Our walk was punctuated with monster attacks, but we had enough time to rest between fights, our endurance making sure we wouldn’t get too exhausted.

We’d made it a decent distance, when I spotted something in the distance, and pointed it out to Lily, the both of us hoping it was what it seemed to be. As we approached, we soon realized that our hopes had been answered, it was a group of people out hunting monsters, though they seemed to be having trouble with even the three star monsters, struggling as a group to fight them off.

Lily and I soon got closer, casting frostbite on the molts they were in a fight with, not wanting to be accused of kill stealing even if this was out of game. I shook my head, that was a weird thought to have, expecting people to get annoyed at help, but I wouldn’t put it past some people, thinking pointedly of Lily.

When they had finished off their mobs, they hailed us, and we closed in to talk.

“Thanks for the help, those things are always trouble. I haven’t seen you guys with the militia, where did you come from?”

We just arrived in this town recently, we came from…” I hesitated, I wasn’t totally willing to tell someone that we’d been living in the game world, even if they could probably infer it from our backpacks and armor. “Out of town,” I lamely finished, feeling as awkward as I probably sounded.

“It’s rare to see anyone that survived from out of town, we’ve got a gathering of people at the town hall, would you mind coming with us? We would appreciate the help.”

“We’re heading to the city, we have no time for visiting the rest of you,” Lily commandeered the conversation.

I glared at her for a bit, I wasn’t particularly interested in joining the group either, at least for now, but I would have appreciated her saying so with at least a bit more tact.

“We would like some information though, what happened to all of the people?” I asked.

The guy seemed to get a massive glare on his face after our refusal, but it was gone as soon as I saw it, and he was soon replying to my question.

“Most of the town evacuated to the city, but a decent chunk of us are staying near and in the town hall. You should come join us.”

I thanked him, but refused his offer to come with him and started walking away, when he grabbed my shoulder, saying “you really should come with us though, it can be quite dangerous out there alone,” clearly leering at Lily while he did so.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I simply took a large step forward, dragging him almost completely off his feet with the large amount of strength I had over him, something he clearly didn’t expect from his expression.

I hid my grin a that, he’d probably expected me to be the average mage from my spell casting earlier, and then I continued to walk away, the man glaring at us as we left.

“Well that was… Bizarre.” I mentioned to Lily.

“Hmph, He clearly didn’t recognize his place.” She responded in a haughty tone.

I shook my head, and we continued our walk, easily dispatching the monsters that we ran into, though I kept spotting the group that we had run into, seemingly following us for some reason. I shook off the feeling that something was off, and simply continued hunting, and when the sun was getting close to setting, I stopped seeing them.

Deciding to listen a bit to the off feeling I got, we continued on for a while after the sun set, and I noticed something I hadn’t paid attention to before. I could see much more clearly in the dark than I had been able to before. I’d wondered what the senses stat did, and it seemed I had a partial answer. I wondered then if my vision had gotten better as a whole. I hadn’t noticed anything particularly different, but then again the increase in it had been very gradual.

Deciding to think about it tomorrow after I got some rest, we set up the campsite and went to bed, slowly meditating myself into my not quite sleep.

The next morning we got up and continued our trek, easily handling any monsters that we ran into , but about halfway through the day, I started to spot another group of people, who just happened to stay within a reasonable distance of us. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to follow us and just doing a very poor job of it, or if they just felt safer being near other people, but regardless, I pointed them out to Lily, mentioning that we should probably try and ditch them, and we sped up to get away from them.

We quickly lost them, as they had to spend much more time on the monsters, and when we wanted to pull some distance we could just run around the monsters, our agility high enough that we could just outrun them.

After we stopped seeing them for a while, we slowed back down, only to run into another group. This time, they were even more blatant in their shadowing of us, but again, they were relatively slow, and we easily left them behind.

The rest of the day passed with me starting to be quite nervous. I didn’t know how much order there still was after the monster waves, and I’d read enough apocalypse fiction that I wasn’t going to trust that group whatsoever.

We eventually stopped seeing anyone, and went to bed, but not before setting up our ward net, glad that it would hide us from anything not looking specifically for the campsite, humans included. I wasn’t sure precisely how it worked, but monsters and humans would seem to just naturally walk around it, though I’d seen a few adventurers notice my campsite even with the ward net up.

The night was not a restful one, even with my meditation calming me down to my pseudo sleep, and in the morning I was greeted by Lily, who clearly had slept around as well as I had. We packed up quickly, Lily complaining about having to pack her own stuff up, and were soon on our way, looking around more carefully than before.