"So let's make this place our base for now; it's far enough that we don't have to fear monsters ambushing us here."
Mal and Leo sat down on the ground, looking toward the towering tree. They both assumed leadership roles and the rest of the cohort seemed to be fine with that. Now they were discussing what to do next.
"What I see as most reasonable is to slowly hunt and explore. Let's start with hunting some of the wolf amalgamations. We will gain some terror cores, help the rest, if they are willing, to awaken the wisdom core, and use the rest to obtain more knots, increasing our power before we try to track some second-rank monster to ascend onto the new circle," Mal continued. "Anyway, I want to look around the walls to where reality seems to end, to see if I don't find something there. You should try to practice some shaping. I don't know why, but I feel we don't have that much time."
His investigation didn't bear any fruits. The walls looked like they were destroyed repeatedly and then repaired, meaning the people here had to face some outside enemy for a longer time and eventually succumb to them. Or not. Now that Mal thought about it, he hadn't seen any dead bodies or skeletons. There should be tons of them if the city was simply overrun by monsters and its inhabitants truly slaughtered. It seemed that the solution to the mystery of what happened in The City under the white sky wasn't so simple. He knew where to look for answers: near the dark, ominous tree rising high into the sky, in the dark cathedral, and in the throne room where the Moss King reigned over the city.
The end of the pocket dimension could be compared to the Zeno's Dichotomy paradox. No matter how far you went, it seemed you just couldn't get to the edge. Of course, mathematics has shown that the sum of an infinite convergent series was equal to a real number, so no infinite walking, but he still didn't find a better way to describe it. The spacetime continuum itself simply blocked him from walking further.
When he came back, he found the cohort in a pleasant mood and, to his surprise, they were drinking tea. It turned out that the second 'magical item' that the old man possessed was a simple old teapot. It was a very useful item, to be honest. Mal had only drunk blood since he came here, and this meant he didn't have to anymore. The old man was sharing stories, as old people do, about his late wife, their life, and how she died and was buried. However, when he mentioned that she was buried in the Central Cemetery in Brno, Mal suddenly stopped and gazed at the old man. He wanted to say something, but Medea was first.
"You live in Brno? That's such a coincidence; me too."
But Mal's head ran at full speed. He was from Brno also. There are four people who are from the same town. The chances of that happening randomly were astronomical. And he didn't even need to calculate it, as Leo immediately added that he too was currently stationed in Brno on a mission.
"This changes the whole situation," Mal started to speak as he massaged his forehead. "For your information, I too am from Brno. I thought at first we were reincarnated to some other world and that you all would be from some other random nations all around the world. To be honest, I even toyed with the idea we all don't even have to be from the same reality. I was reading a lot about cosmology and specifically about the multiverse model and wanted to try to prove it with you, but this truly changes everything."
Mal then spent another few minutes asking others—due to some scientific duty he seemed to have from the moment he was accepted to study astrophysics—on various details about his hometown to truly confirm they were actually from the same Brno in the same reality. And truly, as far as he could verify it, they were.
"I need to change my conclusion then. It seems to me that the most probable explanation is this: sometime in the night, between the tenth hour and the sixth hour, there was some clash of two realities. I read once about a cosmological model proposing that the cause for the Big Bang was two higher branes colliding with each other, but it could be plenty of other things, and that clash somehow brought us here into this reality. And I think it brought the entire city of Brno, or at least some big part of it. The others are also somewhere in this city, either alive or dead. I would wager dead."
Mal sat in silence for a bit and then quickly added, "Or I could be wrong. I can always be wrong."
The revelation left everyone in shock, and so they spent a few minutes sipping tea in silence.
Of course, Mal understood the implications of what he just said—the implication that their friends and family were probably dead, torn apart by wolves or by much worse abominations if they found themselves closer to the palace. It was depressing to think about that, and so he cleared his mind from those thoughts. They themselves were still alive, and Mal was ready to do whatever it took to keep it that way.
'Get stronger and find out more about this place.'
With that, he stood up and offered Leo a hand.
"Let's go hunt; we won't get back until we obtain a few terror cores."
Two figures were slowly walking across the street. The taller, muscular man walked in a rhythmic, taut pattern, with his hands moving from the front to the back. Everything about him showed discipline and carefulness. The other man walked with much bigger movements of his legs. He intuitively made bigger pauses between the right step and the left step. One of his arms was in a pocket of his long coat and the other casually rested on the hilt of the umbrella he used as a walking stick.
If there were two opposites, Strictness and Leniency, these two men seemed to impersonate them perfectly.
"How will we fight?" asked Leonard. It was long since they had spoken, and it was as much an informed question as an icebreaker for conversation.
"Yes, I thought about it too. It's more of a question of confidence. I am pretty sure you can fight with a knife a hundred times better than I can; to be honest, I never really liked them. It always seemed to me that when you wanted to hit someone, you just also had to get hit yourself, but maybe that was my lack of skill."
"Yeah, sorry, but yeah, it was. You can easily hit someone without letting him hit you," Leo couldn't help but clarify.
Mal answered with laughter. "I am also very sure that I can handle a sword better than you. Well, I have an umbrella, but that's the same thing. And I am also certain that it's much better to fight with a sword than to fight with a knife. Reach and so on, you get me."
"So you want to be in front with a sword as the main damage dealer while I pump them with bullets. Yes, that sounds good."
"It would be a real shame not to use that pistol of yours when it literally can't run out of ammo. But we will see how effective it will be in actually piercing the skin of the abominations."
They were looking for door frames with traces of claws. Well, Leo was, anyway. This was his territory, and as much as Mal wanted to be able to do everything alone, he didn't have the prerequisite knowledge.
It didn't take them long to find one such house. They quickly looked at each other, discussed the last remaining strategy, and then silently went inside. Mal already cast his spell to re-glue his tendons, and his walk changed. They were slowly ascending to the second floor. Leo seemed to stop every five seconds and listen. Mal also tried to hear what Leo was hearing, but he didn't register anything. Listening to loud music every time he went out had damaged his hearing a little, but hey, you must sacrifice something. Making a mental note to develop a spell for better listening, he followed Leo further.
They found the wolf in one of the rooms on the third floor. It didn't notice them yet. Mal slowly walked around the corridor to the second door leading into the room. Once he was in position, Leo fired three quick shots in short succession. Two of them bounced off its skin and one drilled a few centimeters into the creature's hide. It turned toward him and got ready to jump and kill him. But two seconds before that, Mal was already on the move, words filled with will on his lips.
"Make my blade sharper, so that by my will it can kill. Such I command you, Maledictus!"
And when the wolf noticed him, it was already too late. Mal committed to an expertly performed downward cut, and the head of the creature fell to the ground.
Leonard was kneeling above the wolf with his military knife and was slowly but very precisely extracting the Terror Core from its heart. Mal, meanwhile, walked across the room, gazing at the walls. He then casually strolled through the doors and through the corridor into another room. Yes, he wasn't exactly as careful as he could have been, but he had just killed his third wolf with ease, so he didn't feel worried.
It was then that he stopped. His boot stepped onto something that was still a little wet. When he recognized what it was, he called for Leonard.
"It's not too old. Can't be more than three days." They were now standing above it. Mal thought he had recognized it correctly, but now that Leo confirmed it, he was sure. On the floor was human blood soaked into the old carpet. There was a lot of it. Whoever lost it lost more than they could afford. The blood continued as a path, and when they followed it into the next room, they found its owner—or rather, its owners. Three dead men were laying on the ground. Their bodies were mutilated and torn apart. It was pretty clear what had happened to them. They went in, found the wolf, and it killed them.
Mal knew he had been very unorthodox from a very young age. He had a scientific sense burning in him, and he needed to confirm something. He slowly walked to one of the bodies laying on its back and stabbed deep into the man's dead body with his umbrella.
Leonard was startled for a moment and then grabbed him by his shirt.
"These are dead people! Why would you disrespect their corpses even more?"
Mal didn't answer but rather pointed with his umbrella into the man's body. Deep inside him, within his now opened heart, lay a pure white stone. A Wisdom Core.