How the hell had he acquired this much stuff?

  How. The hell. Was he leaving this apartment with five times as much stuff as he’d entered with, not counting the kimchi fridge, when he’d not even spent all that much time here at all?

  And packing it all up would be a pain, but it wasn’t like leaving it behind was a viable option, after all, it wasn’t actually his.

  While he was trying to decide how to store things, a loud thump echoed from the window, making him whirl around in shock, heart rate instantly doubling … and there was Tanja, standing on the balcony, hand raised to knock once again.

  Seriously?

  With a sigh, Derek marched over and opened the window, this being one of a very few normal residences whose walls she couldn’t have simply phased her hand through to open it from the inside, Isaac had had this place secured to the nines.

  Incidentally, Derek had the same ability from their shared bloodline, but he was too fragile to really use it. Anything containing mana could inflict serious damage while phased, and just about anything he might need to move through easily had enough magical energy to hurt him.

  “So, I talked to Viktoria, and you can borrow her New York apartment,” Tanja announced. “Apparently, there is some stuff she wants me to move out and store before you go in, but I think that should be doable. How are you on packing?”

  “Uh …” Derek looked around, where he had several moving boxes set up but yet to be filled, because he had no earthly idea where to even start …

  “Yeah, I’ll get the apartment ready, you pack up,” Tanja offered, then, before he could even blink, she’d already thrown herself off the balcony once more, metalic wings snapping open to carry her through the air, though even she didn’t fly more than a couple of hundred meters above the ground, not in Seoul proper.

  The city government had had the foresight to make laws about the usage of the airspace well before people flying under their own magic had been viable, and they were strictly enforced, especially as there’d been enough incidents elsewhere to prove the wisdom in having and continuing to enforce those laws.

  Of course, nowadays, a large part of the concern was simple airspeed; the shockwave someone like her could produce by going from near standstill to hypersonic in less than a second could make a real mess of just about anything that might be around.

  Even modern construction techniques could only go so far, or at least the ones used for civilian construction. Paying ten to a hundred times as much to wind up with something that could still not stand up to direct attack from a sizeable chunk of the population, or carelessness from a smaller but stronger portion, wasn’t economical or viable.

  Either way, it’d be a while before he needed to concern himself with any of that.

  Instead, he began to start to stick things that could easily be stored in them into the boxes, and pulled those that were hard to stack, or just plain fragile, into his storage ring, though after an hour, he was left standing there, staring at a melange of various items, weapons, and notes, trying to figure out where to stick them.

  His storage ring was full, but trying to stick all that stuff into a cardboard box would be a bit of an issue, especially considering how many of them were at least somewhat sharp and/or pointy. Something he especially didn’t want alongside all the various bits of paper he’d scribbled his notes on.

  Granted, most of them only held brief summaries of ideas he’d had at one time or another and felt the need to record, but he still felt the need to keep them.

  “Conspiracy theorist much?”

  Derek jumped as the voice of his sister rang out from right behind him, Tanja apparently having decided to sneak back in, entering through the window, which she’d apparently not closed when she’d left.

  “How did Mom, of all people, end up with kids like us?” Tanja asked, cocking her head to the side to read some of his notes. “A battle maniac who always vanishes and has been off in outer space for the last few decades, a madman who wants to break an impossible record …”

  “… and a valkyrie who doesn’t know what a door is despite being over a hundred years o- … whoa!” Derek yelled as he ducked under the pillow she’d chucked at his face, only to promptly catch a second one to the chin, his sister having apparently lowered herself to tapping into a significant portion of her power over a pillow fight, though she’d thankfully also pulled her strength prior to impact.

  “Oh, fuck off,” he sighed.

  “So you don’t want help transporting this stuff?”

  “Depends: are you going to keep hitting me?” Derek asked, turning away and starting to stick his weapons into a cardboard box. Moving everything to New York without her would be a pain, but still be doable. And if this was how that was going to go …

  “I’ll be good,” Tanja told him with a wink, causing Derke to roll his eyes but decide to accept things as they were. Tanja was Tanja, and she wasn’t someone who took things too far, not usually … but in his experience, she had an unfortunate habit of taking things right up to that point, and he’d probably just have to deal.

  Though it wasn’t that hard from there on. They each grabbed as many boxes as they could carry safely, then activated Fast Travel and stepped across the globe, with Derek having been given enough directions by Tanja to be able to zap himself here without having actually visited before.

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  The moment they appeared outside the door to the apartment, his sister put down the boxes and handed over a keyring.

  “So, Viktoria won’t be back for at least ten years, so that’s how long you have this place for, the only rule is: don’t do anything you can’t clean up by the time she comes back.”

  “But you did talk to her, right?” Derek asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “Grow up,” Tanja sighed. “Of course, I asked her. She’s got a new project somewhere out in the Wilds.”

  Right. The edges of human space weren’t any different from the interior on a purely astronomical level, you had your stars, you had your planets, you had your, … uh … everything else?

  But that far from Earth, from a central authority who might have stepped in if something egregious of one kind or another happened, things did tend to get a little crazy, hence the name.

  “Huh,” Derek said. “Thank her for me.”

  He’d do it himself, but communications out that far tended to be spotty, and if whatever method Tanja had used was shareable, she’d have actually, you know, shared it.

  “I will,” Tanja nodded. “Good luck, and the building better still be standing when she comes back!”

  She waved and promptly vanished, leaving Derek standing there in the hallway outside “his” new apartment.

  He put down the boxes, opened the door, and headed in.

  The inside … well, it was basically the same as Isaac’s had been. A big, open room devoid of all but the largest pieces of furniture, with all the usual trappings of modern living being carried around in spatial storage to whatever housing one was at any given time.

  After all, the twins, specifically, had a lot of homes, on all sorts of different planets. They liked going on colony expeditions, helping out with the usual things needed to set one up, until they’d eventually build themselves a home somewhere cool and/or interesting.

  Either way, time to unpack and then go explore!

  ***

  New York City was, in many ways, the center of the world. One of immense historical and cultural significance, being the background to hundreds of works of art and literature, and the location of the UN, which was slowly but surely becoming a united government for all of humanity. Earth’s humanity, that was. Even the colony worlds that weren’t explicitly “we govern ourselves, everyone else can shove off” rarely paid more than lip service to it, and enough people on Earth understood the issues of overexpansion that the point wasn’t pressed.

  Of course, the colonies’ tune tended to change when crises happened, according to the media, but Derek had yet to be off planet anywhere other than the family estate on Mars.

  Nor did he know what the city used to look like in the past, outside of the occasional set piece in an ancient movie.

  The point was that, well, today’s New York was weird.

  Many cities, including Munich, London, Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington DC, had been largely rebuilt since the arrival of the System, only a handful of buildings remaining the same while everything else was recreated in an infinitely superior form, their appearance becoming hyper-modern in places, regressing into beautiful, quasi-medieval works of art.

  Not the so-called “Big Apple,” though. It was as though even the potholes had been declared of historical importance, with the entirety of the metropolis staying as it had been in the past, only with a handful of upgrades and visual changes.

  Towering skyscrapers seemed to stretch all the way into outer space, while a literal ant’s nest of subway tunnels that spread beneath the surface, the streets themselves sometimes leaving him feeling as though he were walking along the bottom of a deep ravine, rather than through a metropolis built for human habitation.

  The only major change was the city’s public library, which had been expanded into a vast spire that rivaled the Empire State Building for height, becoming The Tower, Earth’s foremost academy for magic.

  Granted, he couldn’t actually see it from anywhere save Viktoria’s apartment or its base, despite its sheer size, the deep “ravines” that were New York’s streets often left him with a rather poor view.

  Even so, he couldn’t help but walk with a spring in his step. Despite all the places there were in the world, many of whom he’d actually visited, there was just something about New York, something that went beyond mere aesthetics and history.

  Because there were older cities, there were larger cities, there were even wealthier ones, Singapore chief among them, yet none of them left him in a similar state of happiness.

  Now, while Derek had promised himself not to go as over the top in the initial shopping spree as he had in Seoul … well, that lasted all of five seconds.

  Nearest bodega, nearest actual supermarket, nearest IHOP, best food cart, all of those were things that had to be found, and that process inevitably led to him “using their services,” as it were, and then stuff spiraled.

  Several hours later, Derek found himself on the couch, feeling like he’d eaten twice his own weight in food.

  Yep, this was starting to become a bit of a pattern, wasn’t it?

  ***

  And, the next day, he once again explored the city, in a larger radius, with Ye-in along for the ride. She wasn’t going to switch academies, obviously, but Seoul Academy was currently on a break, and the Earth’s Fast Travel capabilities practically begged to be used any time one had the time to spend a few days elsewhere.

  About an hour in, exploring the nearby area had somehow ended with them in the Central Park Zoo.

  “So, what are you going to do next?” Derek asked.

  She shrugged. “One more year at the academy, pick whatever [Class] is looking the best, then see how well I can integrate the [Skills] from that into my fighting style while I figure out a way into space. Just like I’ve always wanted. You?”

  Derek mirrored her shrug, then glanced towards the pen in front of them, where a snow leopard was currently sleeping, using its tail as a pillow.

  “Get a legendary [Class], get the Aspects needed for [Alcubierre Bubble] so I can take a starship FTL, and then figure out a way to wind up on a starship.”

  Of course, having his own starship would be best, but that was also unrealistic, and practice on any spacecraft would help him get first-hand experience, all around.

  As for the Aspects … he’d take whatever way he had to.

  Buying them outright would be the easiest, but also beyond his means, after all, the family fortune was the family fortune, not “Derek’s personal piggy bank.”

  Earning them by killing the monsters himself was impossible, as the creatures in question were Tier 10, meant to pose a challenge for people in the fifth Evolution, which went from Levels 151 to 200.

  There were solutions, though. For example, people wishing to explore unique [Class] paths were willing to help those with unique starter [Classes] with material support, academies in particular.

  And even if Derek didn’t get a legendary [Class], there’d always be the option of signing up with the Navy in some capacity. For example, the UN Navy was willing to subsidize the Aspects for those who would sign up as naval auxiliaries. Or serve as an explorer and cartographer under the auspices of said organization. Or support their actions in some other way.

  All told, there were options, and which ones he’d take would heavily depend on what happened between now and when he actually needed them.

  After they left the zoo, they found themselves in a fairly random pizzeria, and things somehow turned to more “imaginative” planning for the future.

  You know, the usual “what if we discover a paradise world,” and stuff like that.

  It was fun, though in the back of his mind, Derek found himself feeling, ever so keenly, how unlikely it was for any of that to come true ...