The journey back was almost unfairly easy, and it was entirely because of the philosopher. Hilda Roen was not a fighter by any means, and couldn’t wield a weapon if she tried. However, being a fourth-echelon class meant that you were powerful in whatever you did by numbers alone.


    A single potion from her cured their shivers for the entire trip, gave them night vision, and more than doubled most of Marc’s stats, the exception being Luck.


    They encountered some of the zombies which proved trivial, both due to the lower number and the drastic increase in stats. They were even attacked by a Dire Squirrel the size of a great dane, but Marc was able to hold it off while Lloyd killed it with his knives. Marc promised himself that he would never underestimate any animal here again.


    On the way back, during a period of downtime, Marc realized he could ask Hilda how to make more of his Soda-potions, and she got to work looking into it. Without even opening the bottle, she had figured out exactly what it was. The potion caused the body to revert to the state it was some short number of minutes ago. Most wounds (she suggested that dismemberment and broken bones were likely out), status effects, and poisons would be reversed. She asked for one of the bottles herself for her own experimentation, as apparently it was an incredibly low level item for the effect it granted, being an only slightly weaker version of an item that was difficult for most high second-echelon alchemists. In trade, she’d give him the recipe to make more himself.


    Marc agreed, still hoping he’d get a chance to get some more sodas later.


    Three days later, they arrived once more at the gates of the city. The gates themselves were reinforced. The city had a large palisade of Dryadwood, but what was once smooth lumber now had fresh bark with large, thick thorns. Thorny vines wrapped themselves around the top of the walls in their best approximation of barbed wire. The snow had reached even Grand Vale, but it was far lighter than where they had just been.


    Upon entering the city, they saw Barry, hair freshly cut and face freshly shaved. He still wore his (in Marc’s opinion) ridiculous burlap cloak, but he looked far less unkempt than Marc had last seen him. Upon reaching each other, the mother and son embraced, before telling the trio that she’d meet Nico at the guildhall later.


    Marc and Lloyd walked through the city streets, noticing a large increase in the number of people, even in the scarcely populated Traveler Ward. They weren’t other adventurers, at least not primarily, but it seemed that most of the people within the local area retreated in to the city when a flood was coming. There were more far-flung new arrivals, including a warrior of some kind who looked exceedingly cold even under multiple layers.  Looking to Lloyd, who seemed uncomfortable in the big crowd, they decided to make a bee-line for their home base.


    <hr>


    The Society of Adventurers was packed. Unlike the rest of the faction halls that Marc had been in, this building was for administration, with housing and other purposes being secondary at best. The office staff, most of whom had a single historia and less than 10 levels, were far, far outnumbered by the people who shared their desk space for the time being. A beleaguered scribe who Marc had never learned the name of was struggling to contain his anger at the heavily tattooed adventurer brewing tea, and some of the more squeamish office staff were shying away from an adventurer that seemingly brought their own swarm of spiders into the building.


    “Archives?” Lloyd asked. Mark nodded, and, after reporting with the Questmaster, they got to the archives. They were even recognized on their entry, seemingly in a good way.


    Marc sighed as he looked on the shelves for anything that caught his eye. “So, everyone’s in town now, huh?” He pulled out a book on some famous magic weapons and started flipping through.


    Lloyd pulled out one of the books on Echelonics, the fancy word for “What class you may become on increasing in echelon”. He shrugged as he flipped to the area for rogues, far shorter than the others. “I guess,” he said, “it’s an any port in a storm kind of thing? I’d sure hate to be stuck in the wild when the flood happens.”The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    Marc nodded absentmindedly, flipping from Daybreaker the Morning Spear to The Dealbreaker and saying, “It’s not even supposed to get here for another week.”


    “I’ve heard the flood starts and stops different places at different times. Someone said its supposed to get real bad on open water.” He flipped back and forth between a few pages, looking for something that he wasn’t finding.


    “So, what next? Besides figuring out what Historia you should be getting.”


    “I don’t know, maybe do a quick hunt for some extra meat and materials? Your dumb harvesting boon would come in handy there.”


    Thinking for a moment, Marc decided to decline, “No thanks. I want to spend a bit of time in the city, look around, maybe talk to some of the other factions? Maybe even see if anyone else has heard about another Wanderer or if its just me.”


    “Marc, do you know anyone else with Esoteric specialty like you?”


    “I. . . assumed there was someone.” He closed the book and began putting it back, a new goal in mind.


    “There probably is, but everyone here is Arcane, Primal, or rare and weird like you and Fray.” Lloyd said.


    Marc began looking for a book on Esoteric. What it was, what it did, anything he could find. Lloyd, meanwhile, continued to deliberate what he could most reasonably do with the next historia.


    Hours later, they were still at it. After asking Kieran, the elven archivist, Marc went rifling through as many books on “Sources” as he could find, which largely seemed to be something primarily connected to higher echelons. While Esoteric was a Source, it was uncommon at best and outright forbidden in certain factions. More space was dedicated to countering Esoteric monsters than to understanding Esoteric boons.


    Afterwards, he decided to look into Undead more. If there was a Necromancer, and they were not isolated to Mystle, then it would be good to know what they were up against. Thankfully, the Adventurers within the Mortocracy were, unsurprisingly in hindsight, experts on the undead, and supplied a great deal of information on them. Undead all shared the expected weakness to divine magic, generally had a weakness to fire, and were almost entirely immune to anything they weren’t weak to. Regular zombies could put themselves back together from even highly skilled expert swordsmen, the only thing stopping them being either destroying the body or breaking the bones so heavily the skeleton couldn’t support the weight. Ghosts, meanwhile, needed a lot of extra work to be useful. Most of what a bad ghost hunting show would feature was the result of a failed spell, where the ghost is fully intangible. A correctly summoned ghost was a nightmare to deal with, requiring magic that could affect intangible targets, or a specific weakening talisman for each individual type of ghost.


    Lloyd, meanwhile, had given up on the traditionally martial classes. Too many of them were either the exact opposite of what he wanted to become in the future, namely they basically forced face to face combat. Seeing what Nico could do, he decided to look into Alchemist, only to find that Rogue-Alchemist had a litany of restrictions due to primarily being poisoners. Sappers, specifically, also needed to be some form of magical class or one of a few other craftsman classes like Builder or Farmer.


    Others provided more interest. Chef could grant the Butcher class, and with more Rogue mixed in could turn out to be lethal knife users, though had as much of a chance to become a Hunter. Scholar and Rogue only had one recorded class it became, the Spy, which was focused more on stealth than anything else. Magical classes tended to combine with Rogue into hybrids, which Lloyd was not very interested in, though the utility was without question


    When both reunited, it was hours later, and each was quite hungry. One of the adventurers who was visiting, a tall human who looked like he stepped off the set of a pirate movie, had prepared some kind of pasta and was distributing it. Over their noodles, and sharing a table with the heavily tattooed ogre from before, the two shared the information they had gathered.


    “So, Chef? For you then?”


    “I’m really considering it. The classes you get are also based on what you do the most, so I’m probably way more likely to get Butcher, yeah? I’ll bank on that.”


    The Ogre looked between the two like watching a tennis match, muttering “I agree” sarcastically.


    Marc turned to him, saying “You can join in if you want.” Leaving both the Ogre and Lloyd surprised.


    “You know Clanspeak?” The ogre asked. Marc nodded, not recognizing the name but knowing that he was apparently able to speak a lot of them.


    “Hey Marc,” Lloyd began, “What is it like for you with that boon?”


    “I’m speaking the same to the both of you. From my perspective its no different.”


    The three joined in conversation for the remainder of the night.