After everyone had decided who to help and I ensured they all knew what I had to share, people started to buy their stay in town. The small rooms that could only fit one person comfortably were the cheapest, while one like mine cost one hundred and fifty per day.

  All the houses had a bed and space to hang a sleeping net. The bigger ones also had more furniture, and the only other one equal to mine came with modern Earth technology.

  There was a fridge in there, a TV, an oven, and even an air conditioner. In the hall, a big sofa waited with a large TV in front of it.

  We all wandered about the place, moving here and there, checking things before the show started.

  I learned fairly quickly that Elk had helped his parents and no one else. Tress had chosen three elders from her village, but Mary didn’t say a word about her choices, choosing to keep walking through the house as if searching for something specific.

  After she opened the fridge for the fourth time in a row and Elk asked if she had to do it or if it would stop working, I decided to move and try talking to her.

  She leaned on the counter with her elbows and kept staring at the nothing ahead of her. The only thing in her sight was a blue light glowing from the grey fridge.

  “What’s wrong, Mary?” I got close and placed a hand on her shoulder. We were close enough for that now, I’d assume, and she didn’t move away or seem bothered. Instead, she looked up and gave me a sad smile.

  “My father…” she started, but didn’t finish, looking down at the counter, her eyes now watering.

  “I’m sorry, Mary. How can I help you? I lost mine when I was just a kid, but I know it leaves a void.” I tried to reassure her, but she looked back at me, grinning as she kept smiling.

  “It’s not that. He isn’t dead. He’s working on a colony doing ‘light work’ for five years before he can go back home and be ‘well-compensated.’” She shrugged, shaking her head. “What the hell does that mean, Zach? Light work in a colony for five years? What’s being well-compensated? These credits? I can kill monsters and send them to my family if they let me. I don’t want him to be away.”

  "I'm sorry, Mary." It was all I could say. She embraced me, her face sinking into my shirt. We were all without our armor, so I hoped she felt warmed by the hug, and her feelings could ease out.

  "You know when you killed the goblin and I freaked out? It was because of my dad... he was a bastard when I was growing up. Always drunk, always angry, always taking it out on us—and he used to laugh while doing it like a madman. After years, he finally sought help. Mom threatened to leave, and I was about to kill him. I had everything already planned."

  She let the words flow, and I didn’t stop her.

  She moved away from me and started gesturing.

  "When he came back home, I was gonna poison his whiskey and watch him die. I couldn’t take it anymore. But when he arrived that day… he didn’t drink it. He told me he was going to stop. He asked me if I could buy him a non-alcoholic beer, 'cause it was hard to quit altogether.

  "I was in shock. I wanted to grab the whiskey bottle and throw it away before he could relapse, but when I came back home, he was waiting, eating his dinner without a glass of whiskey. That night we watched The Price Is Right together and had a good time. He went to AA the next day, and he hasn’t touched a single drop of alcohol in seven years.

  "He was the one who threw the damn bottle away—do you believe it? Never knowing there was rat poison in it."

  "He had just retired. He was old, but he loved video games. He told me he’d spend all his retirement playing Madden." She chuckled at that and looked at me again, crying.

  "What did he do? Like, for work?"

  "Engineer. Electrical." She wiped her face and sniffed hard.

  "So, he’s probably doing some good—maybe exploring a new planet. We have no way to know. At least he’s alive."

  "I guess so." She shrugged, leaning against the counter once again. "I just want to make sure he won’t come back fucked in the head again, you know? Like that shit Tress gave us to drink? Hell, I’d be addicted to that!"

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  We laughed at that, and she sighed.

  "Maybe we’ll get a shot for you to see him like I saw my friend today. But we need to keep going."

  "I guess, yeah. We do," she said and patted me on the shoulder a few times. "You’re a good leader, Zach. I’m glad we found you, and I’m sorry I can be wary at times."

  "You’re fine," I told her, but before I could continue, the TV turned on by itself in the hall behind us.

  Mary rushed to the room and jumped on the sofa where Tress was already waiting. She had bought a dress from the shop—it was made of wool and fit her perfectly. She looked over the sofa toward me.

  "Are you two coming?" she asked, and then I noticed Elk was right by my side.

  "Yeah?" I replied, sharing a glance with Elk, who was eating some peanuts.

  "This good," he said with his mouth full.

  "And it'll make you hella fat if you keep churning them down nonstop."

  "How these little things gonna make me fat, Zach? Sometimes I think you humans are secretly stupid."

  I chuckled and moved toward the sofa. It was kinda fun to leave some things in the dark for the members of the other races. I could tell him about calories and such when it was needed. For now, I let him eat as many peanuts as he wanted without saying a thing.

  Tress was on the corner of the sofa with me at her side, Elk on the other, and Mary at the end. The two former shared the peanuts, and she said,

  "Just a little. I don’t want to get fat."

  Elk grimaced at that, ready to rant again when the show started.

  There was a recap of the previous episode—the proving grounds and all that happened there.

  It all took only five minutes until we saw the hostess on a stage explaining the rules of the Desolation Forest, the seven days to reach the city stone, and how the challenge would become harder and harder each day.

  They made sure to recap each day, highlighting what they thought was interesting enough to show.

  For the first four days, there were no images of me, my party, or anyone I knew.

  There were hundreds of different "Desolation Forests," so it was natural that some of it wasn’t shown.

  All of them had the same dungeons on the fourth day, and we watched people fighting the same drake as us—some winning, others being eaten by the gigantic snake head.

  On the fifth day, we finally got a glimpse of me fighting the Vorrak and being rescued by Mila's party. They showed the whole fight, making sure to display how brutal I'd been during it.

  I grimaced as I watched it, my stomach turning as I serrated off the Vorrak's head. The scene was gruesome and shown in detail.

  Tress took my hand and pressed it firmly when she realized I was stamping the ground, uneasy with rewatching it.

  Thankfully, they moved on from day five, showing the struggle to reach the city stone during day six.

  Apparently, the climb we'd chosen was the hardest of the seven available ones—but we had no way of knowing that.

  There was a city stone on a small island that was easy to conquer with the right skills, a city stone inside a dungeon with a difficult boss but no waves of monsters, and even one guarded by an army of goblins.

  I'm sure my party and I could've committed a small genocide against goblins to get the city stone. However, we'd "chosen" the one at the top of the mountain, and we got the steep climb with lots and lots of monsters.

  There were images of other teams getting massacred on that same hill, mostly because the parties were small—most of them composed of single-race individuals, not covering different classes and functions.

  I wasn't blind to the fact that without Tress's tribe, Emilia and her Arahaktars, and Mila, I probably wouldn't have made it all the way through or fought Max at the top.

  It was at that moment they started showing the people who got the stone, and just as I suspected, the high point of the show was my fight against Max.

  It was very rare for people to tie in the city stone dispute, so they made a huge show out of it.

  They showed flashbacks of me and Max—how we were 'friends' turned enemies and how our battles had been different. They showed Max killing a girl for no apparent reason, and I realized by their surroundings it was the night of day 4, when the cockroaches appeared, and I’d noticed one of them had disappeared.

  I was painted as a hero fighting an evil villain. There was no sympathy for Max in the show's eyes, and even if I shared the feeling, it wasn't hard to see it was rigged.

  If Barry thought I was America's Sweetheart before, after this edition, I had no idea how my popularity would rise.

  An American facing a Russian in a fight to the death—there was some 80s symbolism there that couldn’t be ignored, but I shoved it aside as they showed the fight.

  My heart pounded in my chest as the fight dragged on, and I remained silent the whole time. When I started speaking with Max, I seemed like a whole other person. I didn’t want to look anymore, but Tress took my hand firmly and placed it on her thigh, inviting me to get close.

  I let my head fall onto her shoulder.

  "You did good," she whispered in my ear as the fight ended and the hostess praised me. "You did good," Tress repeated as the show ended.

  After that they made sure to show my talk with Barry and the notifications on my vision popped. People wanting to see my live reaction, damn… I tried not to, but I shed a single tear seing his smile again. Feeling my shoulders less heavy and my mind more tranquil.

  The hostess's last words before disappearing were,

  "Stay tuned for next week's show. You'll see how the competitors prepare for the next three days before the tower arrives—and how they'll react when the rules are explained and they can finally enter the first major challenge!"