Through the process of baking, the cookies grew to almost twice their size.

Many details Theora had put into the petals were lost in that way. That’s what learning was like, wasn’t it? Next time, she’d make the cookies less complex, so they’d retain their flourish through the violent heating process.

And yet, Theora couldn’t help but be happy. With the help of Balinth and Hell, she’d baked cookies for the first time in her life. Even though she didn’t receive a new common Skill from it, she felt accomplished.

Still sitting in the kitchen, Theora watched them cool down. Hell had said they’d keep baking for a while even outside the oven. Theora really wanted to eat one now, but tried her best to hold back.

Would they taste good? Since Hell had instructed her the entire time, she was somewhat confident, but a hint of doubt remained.

With a sigh, Theora leaned back.

She really was watching cookies dry right now. Balinth and Hell had gone somewhere else, probably into the living room.

Perhaps Theora should go help with the Afterthoughts. Yes, the others had taken over her shift, but maybe they were in trouble? Maybe fighting against them was exhausting, and they were just putting up with it for Theora’s sake, without communicating how much it burdened them.

Dema had probably fallen well under sixty percent by now. The danger seemed to be over, and sixty percent had always been a bit of an excessive demand, but Theora just couldn’t help being anxious, even now.

At least when it came to Bell, there was no risk of her burdening herself without telling Theora. Bell would complain. That was reassuring.

In the end, Theora still went to fetch her large cloak, and pulled it over her undergarments in order to leave home. She’d never been to the market. Well, she’d seen it, and walked through it at times, when it was on-route, but she’d never traded with anyone there. Maybe she could fetch some more ingredients now. Her next free day could be a while off.

She also put some cookies from the kitchen into a small metal box, in hopes of being able to test them out a while later. Inside her cloak, they’d be kept from being thrown around due to her movement anyway.

It took her two hours to get to the market, because she got distracted by every mana crystal hall in the way, to clear them despite the guards’ weak protests.

By then, the ever-falling rain had totally drenched her.

Sometimes, Theora checked the position of her other party members. They were still running all across town together as three. Maybe she should go join them? Or were they perhaps happy to get to spend some time together without her too?

The market was a wide street branching off from the main avenue running through Hallmark. Many people had their stands there, although it did seem like a lot of spots were left empty in-between. And so, Theora asked one trader after the next for the ingredients she’d used earlier, inquired about how they were produced and where to find them. A bookstore had a small guide to baking that Theora was happy to trade for some random item she’d found in a pocket of her multidimensional cloak.

“I talked to a guard earlier,” the shopkeeper said with a bright smile. His face was really wide so he got a lot of smile in, and he had age spots all over his bald head. “Really good news, right?”

“Good news?” Theora asked.

“Oh, haven’t heard? Seems like they found culprits behind what was happening.”

Culprits. They had found heroes tasked by the System to cause the plague?

Theora’s glance went back to the small map in the party menu. Is that what these three had been doing? Using [Identify] and [Appraise] to find those responsible?

“It will end soon,” was all Theora could bring herself to say. “No more issues then.”

The man nodded, and pushed a stack of books aside from the counter so he could offer a hand for Theora to grasp. She took it. He had a firm grip through his very thin and soft skin.

“Thank you so much for all your help,” he said. “Been wanting to meet you for so long.”

These words stabbed right through Theora’s heart.

“Please don’t thank me,” she murmured, nodded, and pulled her hand back into her cloak.

She bowed down in goodbye, stowed the book away, and made back out from the storefronts’ plane into the pouring rain.

One step after the next, again and again. Quick and short strides to carry her away, right into the nearest mana crystal hall. She ignored the guards in front, and went inside.

Down the stairs, right into the ocean of Afterthoughts.

Ah… so many crystals floating all-around, with creatures pouring out endlessly. Scouring the room, Theora’s eyes fell on a few particularly strong looking individuals in a corner of the hall. They weren’t fighting each other, just devouring new out-pour.

A buzzing mess of shadows fluttered around, into and out of Theora’s view. Fuzzy edges, glitchy iridescent holes in their bodies. Many of them bumped into her, immediately bursting into a shower of azure and pink [Obliterate]-induced particles on impact. She cast it with barely a conscious thought while cutting her way through the busy hall.

All this. All this for her.

So that she could spend a few decades toying with them, and receive undue gratitude in return.

The destruction, the pain. The cruelty of having to defeat every single one of them. Excruciating.

One Afterthought in the group of strong ones immediately cast some kind of barrier Skill as she got close to the corner, leaving them no avenue to escape. A large dome sealed her in, with other creatures unable to leave or enter.

Then, as if it teleported, she suddenly gleamed at a shadowy creature looming right before her. Long limbs and claws, ranges of spiked teeth, jagged and misaligned like those of a deep sea fish creature. Thin body, no eyes, but one large patch of data missing from the side of its head. Overlaid on reality like a HUD instead of being really there, the hole glittered with the edges cast in thousands of small, orthogonally arranged chromatic bars.

The creature jumped forward and snapped its jaws into Theora’s shoulder. The first bite tore apart the cloak, the second sunk into her skin.

Hot blood poured down her body, over her chest and back, down to her legs.

Another Afterthought appeared. Cast in remnants of data belonging to a female hero or guard, it pierced through Theora’s back with a swift and easy stab. The blade emerged from the front of her stomach in crimson red.

Ah. These creatures were fast. So fast. The two others also unleashed their attacks — one of them radiated some kind of psychic damage Theora was too tired to properly assess, the other played a destructive melody with a black and glitch-frayed instrument. A final song, too many sounds to be issued by a single person, but here it was, echoing through the room in full. Theora could feel it strengthen the others as much as it bogged her down, her ears first ringing, then bleeding. Drop by drop, the red liquid ran down her neck.

The long-limbed creature still gorged itself on her shoulder.

The fight had been going for what, half a second now? Theora had never given them this much time before. After all, usually, she hurried.

Magda had once mentioned the guards needing to mount a full raid group to defeat a single one of the stronger Afterthoughts. A raid group… Was that another feature of the System? A different type of party?

A while ago, Bell had mentioned how high-level heroes frequently hid their true abilities from one another. That didn’t seem possible using the party-system they used now. So, maybe other features existed too. Or, these people just didn’t use parties.

Meanwhile, the creature swallowed a mouthful of her skin and flesh.

So, those were the creatures the System had let loose on Hallmark. They would tear apart the body of an average city guard within less than a second, if one ever got too close.

They existed only to spite Theora, or teach her a lesson — or maybe not even that. Perhaps it was just the natural consequence of her actions, just like a tree would fall if she chopped it down.

Theora stretched out her arms to close them around the long-limbed Afterthought. Her hands grazed over its back, the skin giving off a weird sensation where she touched. Like stroking over a thousand little bees, buzzing around their hive — but not like sound or vibration. No, the creature rippled the very core of reality.

This was it — a collection of destroyed and warped stray pieces of instructions that, through splicing and reforming, had evolved into something akin to life.

“I’m sorry,” Theora said, and hugged the creature.

While she tiptoed to embrace it fully, the rapier stabbed through her abdomen another two or three times.

Then, suddenly, a voice echoed from behind. Like spoken from a wet mouth, accompanied by squelching sounds from the trods the feet made over the ground. “What are you doing?” she asked.

Looking back, Theora saw Bell, permeating the barrier created by one of the Afterthoughts as if it didn’t exist. The girl traipsed forward, her tentacle hair reaching off in all directions, probing the surroundings.

She placed her hand on the back of the female Afterthought stabbing Theora, and with that touch, she immured the creature in a layer of calcite. Then, Bell created a smaller dome within the current one — emulating a large bubble of water, warding off the sound damage from the instrument, the melody now dispersing in dulled underwater throbs. Bell pulled the sword out of Theora, then floated up inside her liquid dome, to slash through the psychic Afterthought, destroying it in a single smooth motion.

Lastly, Bell glided back down and touched Theora’s forehead with two fingers. A gelatinous liquid proceeded to engulf Theora’s body in a protective layer, keeping the long-limbed creature from causing any additional damage with its bites.

“You’re hugging it?” Bell asked, her voice carried through the dome in a deep and muddled glug.

Theora swallowed, and let go of the Afterthought.

The gelatine around her was wet and cold, but refreshing like a cold blanket draining away all excessive heat on a hot summer day.

After coughing and wretching, Theora managed to inhale in a lung-ful of dome-liquid, then being able to breathe it just fine.

Bell stepped over to the last Afterthought, finding Theora’s gaze with raised eyebrow-like blue patches over her eyes. She seemed to be asking for permission to destroy it.

Theora just looked away, and a second later, she heard the creature sizzle and melt under Bell’s tentacle venom.

Bell turned back around, bowing down far enough to catch Theora’s downward gaze. “I recommend other activities on your day off,” she said.

Blood rose to Theora’s head. “I was just—” She broke off. “Why are you here?”

“We saw you moving to questionable spots on your day off, so I came to check on you.”

“What about the others?”

“Still busy. They are combing through town, trying to reconstruct how the assault was put together. Well, None is doing most of that, Dema is just cheering at her and supplying [Appraise] data.”

“I see,” Theora said. “And you…”

“I’m not needed. They outlevel me on both relevant Skills, and have more useful unlocks than I have too.”

Bell looked around, and then proceeded to absorb the experience left behind by the System’s stray data.

A single heroine, destroying four extremely high-level Afterthoughts at no expense, after having taken over Theora’s shifts for two days in a row already. What other people would need entire Raid groups to achieve, she had done in seconds. Theora sought out Bell’s stat sheet on the party screen.

Level 803.

Theora doubted she’d been that capable before. Bell must have gotten a lot stronger during the time she’d travelled together with Iso.

‘Getting stronger’ wasn’t something a person could just decide to do; she must have dedicated unbelievable amounts of time and will. It couldn’t be coincidence that she was the one sent to fulfil Theora’s task in her place.

And, in addition, she was a Medusa.

Theora blinked, remembering Ulfine’s words.

I’ve seen what you’ve done to the Cnidarian Tower.

The Cnidarian Tower. Located on a small patch of islands in the far south, home to the jellyfish people, most of whom spent their lives in the peace their biological immortality granted. A tower so large, it pierced the sky. A work of beauty brought forth by the timeless devotion of its people to create a place they could live in forever.

That is, until Theora had blown it up.

It was a memory she’d done her best to suppress. How long had it been? A few hundred years? Perhaps already a thousand. Brought forth by Ulfine’s probing reproach, the incident had slowly been flooding back into Theora’s mind, buried underneath a mountain of regret. Her heartbeat rose.

Theora opened her mouth, but it took a moment for the words to spill out.

“Bell, have we met before?”