The ‘witch’s broomstick’ that she received as a reward is in the antique style, a dark wooden handle with real plant fibers making up the sweeping end. No more green plastic bristles for her.

  But even though it looks like it should be magical, the only major difference she can find with her former cheap one is that it’s a bit thicker and heavier, and no matter what she sweeps up or hits with it, the new bristles don’t get dirty. Even blood and guts don’t stick.

  Useful, but not three star useful. Not even one star useful.

  Presumably, there’s something she’s missing. But short of jumping off a building and seeing if it can help her fly, she doesn’t know what else it would do.

  She’d also once tried putting it down on the ground, putting her hand out, and ordering it to fly. Downstairs, where people could not see her.

  Anyway, it didn’t work.

  In other news, Wei Shengyuan has staunchly stuck to his guns about not getting in a car with her, and thus she is pushing his wheelchair the few blocks over to the river on foot.

  The second time that he dispatches a mutated dog the size of a motorcycle with a very fast moving water blade, Zan Xinyi decides to bring it up.

  “You were lying about your capabilities,” she says.

  “I wasn’t lying,” Wei Shengyuan says stiffly. “They improved.”

  “With just one core?”

  “Two cores.”

  Ah, he’d gone for the woman down the hallway after all. Zan Xinyi wonders if the corpse, once the core is removed, will finally begin to rot.

  “Wow,” Zan Xinyi drawls. “Two whole cores.”

  He can’t even cross his arms because he’s carrying their possible trade goods in a basket in his lap. Since Wei Shengyuan’s going to swim, she’s going to see about finding a boat. If there’s one around with a motor, she’ll give it a shot, and if there’s a kayak or other boat that expects manual labor she’ll make Wei Shengyuan pull her along. It’s foolproof.

  The entire wheelchair jostles as she hits a curb a bit wrong, and one wheel slips into a puddle. The resulting splash only hits her.

  “I was really excited to get my own room when I went to college,” Wei Shengyuan says, one hand death gripped to the armrest.

  “Yeah?”

  Getting a solo room’s expensive. She’d spent one miserable year in a four person dorm on campus and then promptly moved out to a shared house that was worse in almost every way except monetarily.

  “No oversight. No one controlling my schedule. I could do whatever I wanted.”

  “And what you wanted was to go to class and then do your homework and go to sleep,” Zan Xinyi says. Straight laced and rule abiding to a fault.

  “I really hate the way you say positive things. The point is, I liked being able to choose to do those things. I went for walks. I joined a club.”

  “You joined a club in highschool.”

  “The art club was not a real club. It was a shell people used to pad their college applications and then sleep.”

  Zan Xinyi had been president of that club.

  Ever since the storm ended, all of the streets have been cast into fog. It’s not particularly thick, just a hint in the distance no matter which direction you look.

  Everywhere before them and everywhere behind them, slowly fading away.

  At least it helps avoid the majority of the zombies.

  “It was real enough,” she says.

  “Well, the club I joined was realer. I joined a mushroom foraging club.”

  Now that actually sounds much faker than an art club.

  “We went hiking in the mountains, looking for specific types of edible mushrooms.” Wei Shengyuan says. “I loved it. I wish I’d kept doing it after I graduated and got a real job.”

  “What did you even do?”

  “Huh? You didn’t even know what job I had? Then why were you so rude last year?”

  “I’m rude to everyone.”

  “No, you were especially-- never mind. It’s my fault for thinking you followed normal human logic. Anyway, I work-- worked-- for a logo consultation business.”

  “That sounds like nothing. Evil eye zombie on the corner.”

  “Mutated creature hanging on the lamppost above its head. I’ll take that one. Helping companies redesign their old logos isn’t nothing, it’s a well paying job and I was good at it.”

  “If it’s that well paying, how come you were living here?”

  “Zan Xinyi, do you ever get sick of being mean to people? I had other things to spend money on, alright. Why were you living here after you were bragging about how you were going to start working for a large company and make enough money that you could retire and only play around on the stock market?”

  Zan Xinyi kicks the already downed zombie even harder before pulling out a box cutter and reaching for the skull.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “I worked for Ninecent for more than a year,” she mutters. “Is it my fault that I don’t believe in overtime?”

  “You don’t believe in overtime? What’s with your current game!”

  Wei Shengyuan’s voice is rising louder and louder, only suppressed by the way the fog keeps thickening and thickening.

  “You’re not being paid no matter how much or how little you work,” Zan Xinyi says. “And besides, I only didn’t believe in it then because I was young and naive.”

  “You were never either of those things. When I first saw you, you were beating a teacher up!”

  Ah, when was that...

  Middle school?

  Which distant relative had she been living with back then? She tries to remember, but can’t. Even the teacher is blurry and far away. Calling her to stay after class, telling her she looked just as pretty as her mother had.

  “He deserved that,” Zin Xinyi says.

  Wei Shengyuan just sighs, running a hand through his hair. It’s gotten even shaggier as he can’t cut it himself and refuses to let her. Maybe Jiang Jin could do it.

  Zin Xinyi considers their audio designer, and then touches her own long hair protectively.

  Personally, she wouldn’t let Jiang Jin near a scissors if it was her own hair on the line.

  “We should’ve also brought her along,” Zan Xinyi says. “What if her screeching breaks some of the building’s glass while I’m not there to stop her? She really seems to lack sense. Probably why she got abandoned.”

  “Was I like that?” Wei Shengyuan asks abruptly.

  “Like what?” Oh, they’re already on River Street. Almost there. She breathes in. She’d never really gone down here before. Nothing here but fish and some rusting warehouses. There used to be a chemical plant down here, maybe.

  “Did you get a weird urge to go save me? Did you not even know it was me down there?”

  “No, I knew it was you.”

  Clearly, that’s not the answer he was expecting. His hands land on the wheels, stopping them from moving so he can twist to face her.

  “Is this important, Wei Shengyuan?”

  “Yes. It is. You have to answer honestly, Zan Xinyi.”

  “I’m an honest person.”

  “But you don’t always answer honestly. You have to tell me. It wasn’t some strange urge?”

  “When I was considering what I needed to make a game, I realized I needed an artist. I could’ve used the... hunch back then to find someone, but I didn’t. Because I already knew where one was. So I went looking for you.”

  One of the things her girlfriend always complained about was that Zan Xinyi was not a physically affectionate person. And honestly, she also wasn’t vocally affectionate, so there felt like there was no affection at all. But just because it had felt like it was true doesn’t mean it actually was true.

  That’s one of the things her girlfriend had always been going on about when it came to the hospital. The whole doctor’s code of ethics. Just because you think you know the right answer doesn’t mean you get to start implementing it. You still have to prove that you’re right. Intuition isn’t enough.

  Since she’d already confessed once, is there a need to keep confessing forever? Are her emotions so changeable that it’s necessary to repeat a few phrases.

  “As long as he still has his hands, he’ll be able to figure something out, no matter what I ask. That’s what I thought. And guess what? I was right.”

  “You knew I didn’t have my...”

  “You were the one who was sending all those emails, Wei Shengyuan. You had everyone in the building in that chain.”

  “It felt like no one in the world read them, though.”

  He laughs. He wasn’t a kid who was prone to laughter, so she thinks she’s heard more of it in the last few weeks than in her entire life.

  “That’s how you knew which floor. The emails.”

  Is it that funny?

  “It felt like the minute I stopped being able to walk, everything in the world disappeared, and then it wasn’t everything in the world. It was just me. I was the only one who disappeared. Every sound I made getting swallowed by an abyss that only I could see.”

  Zan Xinyi navigates the final turn and beholds the river, black and slow.

  Beyond it, more and more of the city sits in shadow, silent and dull. But not completely dark. Not completely quiet. Sirens, wails, and shambling movement.

  Elsewhere, battles are being fought for the city.

  Here, everyone’s already assumed there’s a victor.

  “Then I failed to evacuate,” Wei Shengyuan says softly. “God, Zan Xinyi. I thought I was going to die in the dark. Drown on dry land. My corpse gnawed by rats. So I do owe you a lot, no matter what.”

  He’s so dramatic.

  “You’re just feeling bad because you wanted to leave when you realized you could purify your own water,” Zan Xinyi says. “Don’t act like a prisoner, Wei Shengyuan. It’s just a job. Once you get a few more cores, you can switch to hybrid work if you want. Or find me a replacement. You don’t have to live with me forever-- I just need an artist.”

  His laughter cuts off.

  “It’s not that, Xinyi. I didn’t think that. I thought. ‘Oh, now there’s no excuse for me staying here forever. She’ll be thinking of getting a replacement already.’ Even though I don’t even like you. Or your game. Why did you name it that? Why?”

  Zan Xinyi raps him on the head.

  “It’s a good name,” she says. “It’s metaphorical.”

  “I don’t think that word means what you think it means. It’s a metaphor for the fact you don’t care about the game you spend every waking moment coding for?”

  Now she has to come up with a meaning.

  “Sunny Days-- it’s like remembered happiness, right. The beautiful past. Sparkle Power-- powering through tough circumstances using optimism and smiles. And then endless hell is because it’s a gacha game.” Zan Xinyi smiles. “The happiness you remember and the optimism you need will be necessary, even if they give you false hope. Because this world is an endless hell.”

  In front of her eyes a boat drifts aimlessly, set slightly off course by a corpse slumped over the side. She watches bone white fish nibble at the hand trailing in the water.

  “Let’s use that one,” she says brightly. “Come on, Wei Shengyuan! Let’s go! Dive in and drag it over here, I need to clean it out.”

  Wei Shengyuan just looks at her.

  “I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” he says. “I liked her, and she was kind to me. You had good taste.”

  “You’re talking like she died,” Zan Xinyi says. “She just dumped me, you know. It isn’t the end of the world. My life didn’t even change that much.”

  “The world doesn’t actually need to end for you to feel like it’s ending. It’s like-- I looked behind me one day, and everything was gone. I didn’t even like to draw anymore.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you don’t like to draw anymore,” Zan Xinyi says. “You have to.”

  “But,” Wei Shengyuan says. “It’s fine, isn’t it?”

  He crooks a finger at the boat, and it slowly begins to tug its way to their side of the shore.

  “After all, the drawings don’t have to be good. Let’s make an ugly world together, Zan Xinyi.”

  Zan Xinyi rolls her eyes.

  “With that intention, don’t you have too far to go? Start trying to draw more sloppily right now, Wei Shengyuan. Otherwise, I’m the only one who will be making all the ugly parts.”

  Spire's Spite: a dungeon delve where the dungeons are 'spires'. Fritz, our protagonist, had already had his first fall from grace from noble heir to gutter brat before the story begins on his second fall-- from gutter thief to the bottom of a terrifying spire. it's ten floors to get out, and each one is specifically made to take advantage of his and his party's weaknesses and turn friend into foe. I love it because I love dungeon crawls with interesting litrpg mechanics, and I love when we meet the fae and get that special bit of dark fantasy horror thrown in. Fritz does not put his best foot forward, so give it 5 chapters to let it get good before you decide it's not for you.

  The Game at Carousel-- A Horror Movie LitRPG: an eldritch existence that likes to pretend to be a destination, Carousel loves inviting in players to give it a show. To survive, players have to play through endless variants of horror movies all trying to take them out. But that's just surviving. To escape, players must do something far more dangerous than charging into unconnected films. They have to turn the town itself into their own tale-- and in that one, there's no retakes. I really like it, but if you don't find the first arc fun, you won't find any of it fun: what you see is what you get.

  Saving the School Would Have Been Easier as a Cafeteria Worker: OP MC at a Magic Academy. That's right. Cal is a transmigrator, a product of horrific childhood experimentation, a secret agent working undercover, and a pretty good cook. The story follows him as he becomes a student, and while he's got nothing to learn in terms of schooling, he becomes more and more attached as he finally, for the first time in his life, gets to hang out with people his age who aren't completely insane. It's good for him.

  Wei Shengyuan is...