As soon as we start moving, it's into the corrupted grasslands beyond where we set camp. We fight through a few groups where Winter continues to dominate with his huge area of effect focused magic, before hitting something a little harder.

Giants, made of a pale bluish stone of some sort. They rise straight up from the ground in the tall grass, their hulking masses moving toward us and shrugging off most of the attacks directed at them. With their size, Winter's frost spells don't accomplish much, despite his switch to large frozen spear-like projectiles as long as we are tall. Even Flare's explosive fire magic isn't quite as effective as usual. They must have really high magic defense.

“These things are pretty high level!” Lara calls out while balancing on one's shoulder and beating at its head with her shortsword.

Taryn might be one of the most effective now. With plenty of time and open space to make up for his low fire rate, he puts numerous crossbow bolts into the giants' faintly glowing weak points, with clear signs of dealing significant damage with each one.

I think I do pretty well too. My normal attacks are still no good, but my specials hit really hard. I can't shoot as fast as I used to and it's isn't enough to one-shot these things, but I can still feel the impact I'm making with each shot and spell cast.

It's starting to feel like I'm catching up to the others even if I'm still the lowest level here.

Still, I spend most of my time running around rather than attacking. It helps to conserve stamina too, since I'm forced to kite the big brutes while everyone else deals damage. They refuse to ever switch aggro off of me.

Even so, they're slow, so we manage to take them down.

Pushing further, it quickly becomes clear that this is a larger corrupted zone than the previous ones. We are pretty far out in the wilderness, so the tear here has probably been open for a while. That makes me wonder, in the grand scheme of things, how are the Guardians supposed to win?

Tears can open up anywhere. Even far off lands, multiple days of travel away from the nearest cities. When they do, they start corrupting the land around them, and the damage isn't immediately repaired when the tear is closed again. Without a gargantuan, military-style organized patrol of all lands in the world, there wouldn't be any way of closing new tears fast enough to keep the damage from slowly accumulating, would there?

Well, even if this world is heavily simulated, it's still supposed to be a game, so maybe there's a limit on the amount of damage the tears can do, and they need to generate fast enough to serve as content for players to continuously take on, like the this game's version of dungeons.

“Hey, does Nirvalla have dungeons?” I ask between groups of enemies. The attacks have started to break up now, a variety of horrible creatures leaping at us a few at a time rather than in large waves. “Or, are tears like their version of dungeons?”

“Sort of,” Lara answers. “There are proper, stationary dungeons. They're just bigger tears where they warp the landscape enough to create entire structures to defend the tear.”

“There are also the Ruins,” Flare points out. “They pretty much look like towns that got destroyed and taken over by the Oblivion. Instead of tears, they have oblivion core crystals powering them. Those can't be disrupted like tears can, so they're pretty much permanent.”

“Yeah, there are those too,” Lara agrees with a nod, before Hask chips in.

“Besides those, there are places that resemble classic dungeons more. Some tears can come in underground, creating or expanding on cave and tunnel systems. They're a lot more dungeon-like, especially when they grow and start forming up structures around and inside them.”

We have to pause the conversation when Taryn calls out another wave, some kind of leaping snake creatures this time. During the brief battle, one wings its body in a wide arc barely dodging an incoming attack. It forces me to block with my bow before Mary cuts it down with her sword.

There's a group exhale when we're back in the clear, and I try to pick up where we left off.

“Alright, so it's mostly tears creating the more Oblivion dense areas like this, that's good to know. But what about the ruins? You said they were like captured towns? Is that what would have happened to Pollton? It wouldn't have just...” I shrug, “been a failed event and they would have lost the event rewards or something? Actually wiping out the town sounds a bit...”

“I think that's the scary part,” Lara is the one who admits it. “Since corruption is new, it's never happened before. So we don't actually know what happens. That's why we kind of can't afford to fail, you know?”

“I see... but then what about the ruins? What happened to them?”

“Well...” Lara hesitates at this part.

“No offense, Koru, Azra,” Winter speaks up, his voice hard and cold. “They were already like that when the game went live.”

“O-oh...” I glance guiltily at the two Nirvallans, their expressions a bit tight after Winter's callous comment. Knowing that their history and the vast majority of their own lives never actually happened must be pretty brutal.

It takes a little while longer fighting our way forward, before we arrive at the tear. It's quite a bit bigger than the previous ones. There are some pretty nasty Oblivion creatures around it too. Three of them, each seven feet tall, bodies composed almost entirely of rounded black shell and gray crystaline stone, with way too many legs, and each of the limbs only connected together with wriggling ropes of tentacles. Just the appearance makes me sick to my stomach. What kind of monstrous AI do they have for enemy design? There's no way a human being came up with these things, right?

Ignoring that, I draw my bow from long range and call my Assassinate attack, blowing a hole straight through the... head(?) of one. It falls instantly, the other two kind of... rolling toward us in a way that's way scarier than it has any right to be with their weird tentacle legs all terminating in gnashing, razor toothed maws.

God, if I wasn't technically asleep now, this shit would give me nightmares... I blast another hole in one of the advancing monsters at the thought, then dive out of the way as the next crashes through our group, shrieking as the others lay into it, and everything else in the area.

I take a pretty bad claw across my chest before blowing away a small monster with a counter punch, then I'm forced to dance back and out of the way of a flurry of lashing scales from the side. I keep flinging my hands out at anything nearby and quick casting my magic to kill them, but it's a rough fight.

Everyone wades into the melee, Nolen cleaving wide swathes with his heavy halberd, and Hask accomplishing something similar with his staff, despite his clearly inferior attack power. Winter drops another burst of aoe magic, but the monsters have too much room out here and he can't catch all of them like earlier. Even the ones he does hit don't die immediately, though they do come out heavily wounded and easily cleaned up after.

With a wave of Emma's hand out a shouted command, Zykael divebombs one of he huge boss-worm-tentacle-insect things. It claws straight down the length of the body and releases a small but powerful energy beam from its snouted mouth, tearing and sweeping down the thing's body before flying away again.

That's before she summons a couple larger earth golems to block off the two creatures before they can attack me. The battle goes for another couple minutes, everyone fighting aggressively to take down everything, before it can all converge on me. They take wounds themselves, but our healers are more than able to keep up with the damage since the monsters aren't really focusing on anyone they attack.

It's just up to me to survive against the ones that do make it through to give everyone time to do their work.

Once everything is down, we all remain standing, tired and panting after the extended battle. Even the higher level members of our group are low on mana, except Winter. Oddly, he's perfectly fine. it seems like his magic costs him nearly no mana to cast, or it just recharges insanely fast. Maybe that's part of his Personal Affinities?

Lara still seems alright too, though fighting with her sword outside of her Overdrive form looks pretty hard on her. She hasn't mentioned her exact level, but it's clear that she's much higher than everyone else. Whether it's healing, support, or fighting with the vanguard, she's seriously good at everything. How much time has she dedicated to playing already? Was it really alright to bring her with us when they might need her in the next invasion?

I only worry about that briefly before pushing the thoughts away to look over the big, glowing tear in reality we've finally found. At twice my height, it's much more menacing the the others. Especially when it flares up at our approach, pouring a number of creatures from its surface, before Nolen and Hask dash in and blow through them, moving at almost the exact same time.

“Woah...” I murmur. The big ones like this really are more dangerous.

“Guys, this is a mid-size,” Lara calls out, pulling her menu open. “I have a high-grade fire gem, is it alright to upgrade it? We can split the money later.” As soon as the bright red, fist-size magical gem appears in her hand, everyone stares for a second, before immediately agreeing. I'm not familiar with gems or anything, so I just go along with it.

Extending the gem out to just barely touch the swirling surface of darkness, the whole thing shrieks and churns even faster, slowly shrinking as the gem's red glow flares out brightly.

With a final, glimmering red flash, the whole gem expands, round and transparent, with a literal glow of flickering fire burning beneath its surface.

“Awesome, max charge,” Lara tells everyone before she stows the magical gem and finishes off the reduced tear with a swing of her sword. It crackles away, and the world returns to sudden silence. I feel the slight tingle as the last of the power is converted to experience, with a message appearing.

You have helped disrupt a medium tear!

Everyone waits a moment, double checking our surroundings as the dangerous feel of the area lifts, before they turn back to Lara.

“You had a gem like that?” Flare asks excitedly. “How much? I'll buy it and you can split the money between everyone!”

After some rapid back and forth haggling, he ends up passing Lara one hundred thousand gold. Followed by some more friendly arguing, before Lara gets half since it was her gem, and we split the remainder nine ways for our contribution to getting it all charged up from the tear. Apparently, larger tears are needed to upgrade higher rarity gems.

The two Nirvallans refuse the money because they claim they didn't help that much, and none goes to Flare since he was the one buying it, obviously.

Some math brings that to around five thousand five hundred gold each. Lara gets fifty, and even though that sounds like a lot to me, it turns out that's still underselling the real value of the gem.

It's a nice chunk of money. We've killed hundreds monsters on our journey so far, and I've collected about five thousand gold. It would be more, but we are splitting everything twelve ways. At least I have money now.

Meanwhile, Flare looks like a kid with a new toy, no care for the massive amount of gold he just dropped. Then he rounds on me. “Mei, you can do item mods, right? How good are you?”

“U-umm?” I stammer. “Not very? I've only done it a few times.”

“That...” he looks conflicted, before hanging his head and sighing. “Guess I'll have to wait then.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Item Modification is mainly used for socketing magic gems,” Lara explains while Flare nods rapidly. Oh right, I remember reading about that.

“If I socket this into my focus, I'll get a big fire damage boost out of it.” He shifts his robe aside to show the fancy charm hanging off of his belt, with a conspicuous slot right in the middle that looks perfect for holding just such a gem.

Now that I look closer, there are a pair of similar red gems embedded in his cape, where it clasps together in the front, and even the dangling earrings he wears have a couple tiny ones in them.

Just... how much fire damage does this guy have...?

We move on, aiming east once more. I can feel how we're coming up to the town. We're on the last leg of our journey for today. That's good, because the sun is quickly falling toward the horizon behind us. Such short days here, I think to myself. It's only approaching noon back on Earth.

We'll have one more day after reaching Mebin before our travels will get complicated, since everyone surely has work or school during the week. With the Nirvallans safe in town and a traveling group composed of only Guardians, it makes things easy. Everyone logs off and disappears.

So how the hell is this going to work with Mai, forced to stay on Nirvalla, all alone until everyone gets back? It's not like she can continue the journey without them either, can she? They'd wind up logging back in a day behind her.

I ask about that, and no one has a good answer. Most likely, Mai will have to camp out on off days. As long as she doesn't move around all too much, she probably won't attract monsters, but it's still dangerous. And if she gets overwhelmed, she'll wind up respawning miles and miles away from where everyone else will log back in.

The only bright side: as long as she keeps the stream running, we can all look in on her current status whenever we want. Not something we could do with a Nirvallan forced into the same situation.

Wait, while she's streaming, I can actually see Mai. I never thought of that before. It's not exactly the same as getting to meet her, but if I use the chat, maybe I can talk to her...

With that silver lining around our upcoming traveling complications, we trek on.

“I swear...” Mark sighs when we see it. As soon as we clear the large swath of gray, corrupted grass from that last tear, we hit more.

“Mebin is near the border without any proper road to the capital, so not many Guardians come out this far,” Lara explains for me. “So you can even find tears this close to town out here. Not many Nirvallans are willing to become adventurers to deal with them, with how dangerous it is for them.”

“Mm,” I agree seriously.

In the middle of us talking, Taryn curses. “Shit!” His crossbow snaps up from his side, and he fires off into the grass. There's a swish, then I barely catch sight of something small and dark moving rapidly away.

“God damn siren. Everyone get ready for a fight.”

“Siren?” I ask, looking around as everyone draws their weapons and restocks potions on their belts. Lara even casts a large series of buffs across all of us, practically emptying her mana pool in the process. “Will this help?” I ask, before doing a spin and posing. My trigger activates, and they get the Aura buff.

Without batting an eye at my display, Mark says, “They're like a warning siren for all the other Oblivion to come and attack us.”

“That's why I always try to take them down, but I missed that one in the grass,” Taryn groans. “Sorry about that, guys.”

“No big deal, I'm sure we can take whatever they throw at us,” Lara encourages everyone. We slowly inch forward from there, taking on the waves of various monsters that appear. It's pretty tiring to fight with only short breaks from one wave to the next, but like Lara said, we manage. After all, even though that siren ends up calling all the monsters around the tear to us, it's a small tear, so there aren't anywhere near the numbers the larger one had.

With all of the Oblivion creatures cleared out, we reach the tear and close it. Despite the steady experience gains from all the fighting, I still haven't leveled up again; I feel like I must be really close now. Others have leveled already.

This also puts into perspective the sheer quantity of experience those special events and quests gave me, to be able to level up multiple times in a row like I did. Even if I was lower level at the time.

With the tear gone, we see Mebin just up ahead. To our left, the ground pitches up in a steady rise northward, into the mountains, and the town we see on the horizon lies at the base where the land flattens out. We pick up the pace to make it there before sundown.