*Crunch*

Sawyer sat bolt upright, snapping out of the dozing state that she’d been in. Her pale yellow eyes swiveled to the source of the sound that woke her up. Sawyer caught the sound of another foot-fall and quickly spotted the boots that made the noise. The offending boots were worn by another woman. An older huntress who Sawyer was currently partying up with for a long-term foray into one of Velena-Rana’s Wastelands, one of the leaders of the party that Sawyer had temporarily joined.

It had been a couple of months since Sawyer’s injury had gotten better. If there was one good thing about the adventuring lifestyle, it was the fact that picking things back up again, if you’d stopped for a while, was as easy as simply wanting to, so long as you were able-bodied and had the skills for it.

A couple of small-time gigs gathering herbs in the wilderness got Sawyer back to living with a roof over her head, and consistently having food in her belly. A few more jobs saw Sawyer with a basic kit, and new gear. Now Sawyer was aiming to either move out of the crappy motel she was currently living in, and get a proper apartment of her own somewhere, or since she was gradually getting her confidence back, she could purchase some better gear instead, so she could go after bigger jobs. Or maybe even purchase a gene-modification that would improve one or more of her stats.

“Oh, hey...You’re up. Well, it’s your turn to keep watch. Johnny’s already switched with Denise,” said the huntress.

“Nhn, thanks. Have a good sleep,” said Sawyer. Nodding and grunting as she got up out of the bedroll she’d been sleeping in, and wandered over towards the entrance of the little dry-cleaner’s shop that they’d barricaded and converted into a camp.

“Hah, no problem. That was the plan,” laughed the Huntress. Yawning as she headed towards her own bedroll.

A minute later, Sawyer found herself sitting beside Denise, another young hunter and adventurer who’d joined this little guild job in hopes of taking home a fairly decent reward.

“Hey,” said Denise.

“Hi,” said Sawyer.

They didn’t say much else after that. The night was long, and they were currently camped in a part of the wastes where the creatures were simultaneously quite sneaky and sensitive to sound. The party’s mage was able to set down protection wards to alleviate the issue, but both young elites still needed to keep their senses sharp and pay close attention to everything happening around them, out in the slowly dwindling night.

The need for silence was something of a relief. Sawyer wasn’t much of a talker. Even back when she was with her guild, and inexplicably popular, she’d been considered cold and aloof, despite the simple truth being that Sawyer was the kind who just never really knew what to say to people. Thinking on that now, Sawyer couldn’t help wondering if that was why her life had ‘detonated’ as badly as it had after she’d left the guild.

Sawyer did have basic social skills, and she could generally avoid putting her foot in her mouth, but she still suspected that the “interaction” aspect of her Charisma stat was maybe a little lower than average. There were just too many times where it felt like she was out of sync with the rest of the world, and just doing her best to try and pretend to play along. Sawyer had this gnawing feeling that she might have been able to avoid falling as bad as she had if she knew how to “connect” with people better.

These were thoughts that sometimes came into her mind every so often. Her brush with sickness and impoverishment filled Sawyer with a not-so-small amount of fear. Even though everything was fine now, she was now starkly aware that it didn’t take much for things to be “not fine”. This meant that these days, even though she was back on her feet again, her drive to succeed and build her strength, was greatly tempered by a desire to avoid ever falling into that hole again.

Looking around at the mildew, dust, and meat-moss-covered remains of the dry-cleaning shop made Sawyer think of a certain other shop she’d been to off and on, over the past couple months, while she was pulling her life together. A shop whose mysterious staff was probably worth building real connections with, if connections were what she’d need to avoid falling without a safety net again. She'd interacted with the two shopkeepers enough to get a sense that they were the type to actually value the connections they made. They were people who might actually help her if something ever went disastrously wrong. Those thoughts were put on pause, when Sawyer’s turn at watch came to an end and she and Denise went to wake up the last two members of their group and head back to sleep.

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The night passed quietly and peacefully and the group was soon on the move again. Their goal was a cluster of chimeric-ivies that periodically grew rare crimson-fruits that dramatically boosted one’s blood essence without triggering instability within one’s blight. Such fruits were a common target for Adventurer groups like theirs.

Crimson-fruits, crimson-stones, and the various kinds of red-grass had started off as means of keeping the world from descending into a cannibalistic bedlam, but had now become a key ingredient in gaining strength throughout all of Horologia. One needed crimson-fruit, crimson-stones, and the higher-tier forms of red-grass if one was going to engage with one’s blight directly, to increase one’s strength and potential. Which naturally meant that there was a huge market for such commodities.

The party’s trek through this wasteland was largely non-eventful, at least as far as Adventuring goes. . The party might have engaged in more fighting if they were out here hunting for the purpose of building up their blood-essence and absorbing the vital essence of the myriad monsters of the wastes, but this time they were just here for a simple harvesting job.

The senior hunters, who were leading this operation, really knew their stuff, which meant that the party generally only engaged prey that they knew they could take down easily and without injury, and skirted around those creatures that might cause injuries or casualties

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*Bang*

A molotov cocktail went off like its maker had intended to make a frag grenade instead. Blowing up with extreme force, and spewing way more glass and fire, than logically should have been possible.

“We’ve got bogeys, fall into formation!” cried one of the lead hunters. Firing a bolt of electricity into the crowd of devolved, feral, humanoids that were sprinting at the group from out of the shrieking trees.

It was a few hours later in the day, and the group had just managed to reach their goal, but there was of course one last hurdle in the way. An obligatory boss fight against a demonic human-mouth tree, with its body covered in human lips and human teeth, and the tumor-covered feral-humans that served the tree.

The feral humans likely lived off the sap of the tree and the flesh of whatever prey that came their way, and looking at the very human-looking bones that hung from the tree’s branches they likely weren’t picky about where they got their meat from. The next couple minutes, to half an hour, was chaotic, but ultimately, the party managed to come through in the end, with no casualties and only a few injuries.

Sawyer made a good showing for herself, by taking down nearly two-thirds of the tumor-covered feral-humans, so the rest of the party could focus on the tree. Then once the tree was dead, harvesting the fruits from the ivy that lay behind the human-mouthed tree, spread across a copse of normal trees, was pretty easy.

Just simple gardening work, with the only necessary tools being a pair of magically-sharpened hedge-clippers, and a quick sleeping spell to keep the ivy from waking up and thrashing about. There were actually even enough fruits on the ivy, that the party was able to split the extras between themselves to sell, or eat, or whatever.

Getting out of the wilderness was easier than finding their way to their target had been. The general inconsistency of one’s actual coordinates in Horologia, versus one's relative location to other places in Horologia, meant that they could have found their way out simply by keeping the last safe settlement they’d been to in mind and keeping their noses clean while they wandered aimlessly for a few. In this case, the party actually got lucky and got out two days early by finding one of the Wasteland’s designated exits.

After turning in the fruits at the guild depot in the settlement that they’d passed through, everyone confirmed that the Adventurers’ guild had set them in an invoice for the successfully completed mission on their systems, and then everyone went their separate ways. An exhausted Sawyer took an armored-bus back to the city of Coron-Glaw and decided that she’d probably be visiting that shop a little later, after all. That little job, and the extra fruit, had just made her flush in both credits, and time.