The rest of the ride back was a blur. Yashas pushed the Humvee to nearly a hundred miles an hour, tearing down the freeway with the wind battering our faces. I barely remembered anything after that. I didn’t remember him parking. I didn’t remember us taking the elevator up. I barely recalled his introduction of the place to Richard and Arianna, the same way he’d introduced it to Aerion and me earlier.

  Even with my Vigor armor, I was exhausted. Not physically—not while I was in the armor, anyway—but mentally.

  I hadn’t slept in what felt like days, and the fatigue on my brain was something that not even my armor seemed like it could fix.

  When I did finally arrive at our bedroom and took off the suit, Vigor, all the physical fatigue had me doing a marionette impersonation with its strings cut.

  Everything I’d been holding back over the past few days crashed over me at once, and I didn’t even remember my head hitting a pillow.

  In fact, I doubted I made it that far. I was pretty sure I collapsed right there on the floor, and Aerion must’ve then dragged me onto the bed.

  When I finally woke after what felt like a thousand years, dreaming of a zombie orchestra playing classical music, I found our cavernous bedroom empty.

  I groggily got to my feet, trying to shake off that weird dream. I was unsure whether I was still dreaming or not when I put my Vigor armor back into my inventory, pulling out the Grace suit before hurriedly donning it.

  The rush of stats blew away the last vestiges of sleep, and it was only then that I realized there really was music coming from somewhere outside.

  I flexed my arms and rushed to the door, relishing the sensation of being lighter than air.

  I hated being out of my armor—hated the weakness of it. Even with my rings boosting my stats far above a normal human’s, the gap between that and the thousands of points I had while armored was impossible to ignore. And it only got worse as my builds improved.

  Thankfully, it was a rare moment when I wasn’t in them. The suits were comfortable enough to wear all day.

  The music grew louder upon opening the door, echoing softly through the two-story penthouse.

  Stepping out, I found the place far livelier than before. Upstairs, I could hear Richard and Yashas chatting and the crack of billiards balls.

  Arianna sat on a velvet couch on the first floor, playing a violin.

  I had no idea she even knew how to play an instrument, let alone that she played this well.

  I admit, I’d never pegged her as a musical type, given the rugged manner in which she carried herself. Being Vigor’s Champion had only reinforced that assumption.

  Which was a shame. They said most of your impression of a person was formed in the first five minutes of meeting them, but things like this just went to show how worthless first impressions really were.

  Not wanting to interrupt her performance, I let her be, passing her by to search for Aerion. I found my berserking lover in the library on the first floor, sitting cross-legged on the ground, eyes locked on the books spread all around her.

  Engineering manuals and architectural diagrams, by the look of them. So lost in her world was she that she didn’t even notice my arrival.

  I took the opportunity to admire her perfect elven features and the slight frown on her face as she concentrated on whatever it was she was doing.

  Here was another perfect example of the danger of assumptions. Elven princess, berserker, and a mechanical genius. Aerion was all of these things.

  She was also a massive nerd, which was probably why we got along so well. Wouldn’t have guessed any of that back when she was pretending to be a boy.

  “Hey, you,” I said, slipping in beside her.

  Aerion jolted, looking at me like I’d grown another head.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s incredible, you know? Your knowledge.”

  I frowned. “Sorry?”

  “Your world,” she said, gesturing at the open manuals. “So much information in just these pages. It’s staggering.”

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  “How would you know? You can’t read English, can you?”

  Aerion shook her head. “No. But I can interpret the diagrams, at least.” She tapped a detailed cutaway drawing of what looked to be a skyscraper tower. This tower, if I wasn’t mistaken, was called ‘Rakuen’, apparently.

  “I have gleaned much already. Though, I feel that I could spend a hundred years here and still not understand all your culture has created.”

  I chuckled, wrapping my arm around Aerion’s waist as I leaned against her shoulder. “Well, you probably already know more than most people in my world. Take me, for example. Hell, I couldn’t even list all the parts inside one of those guns Yashas uses, let alone something as complex as a maglev train or a reactor.

  “Y’know, it’s funny,” I said. “People from my world think they’re so superior to those who came before. They think they know so much. And you wouldn’t believe how many stories there are about someone like me getting transported to another world, only to revolutionize ‘primitive’ cultures with modern technology, upleveling kingdoms to create superpowers.”

  Aerion frowned. “I find it difficult to believe anyone could have that much knowledge.”

  “Well, you’re right. Most people in my world? The only thing they’d revolutionize is how quickly they died. For all our technology, we’ve forgotten the basics. Things like how to survive, gather food, build shelter. Useful things. Even if someone did survive long enough to try sharing their knowledge… forget it. The tech on my world came from hundreds of years of advancement by billions of people. Only a precious few people on Earth would know how to recreate even basic tech from scratch.”

  “You must be in a good mood,” Aerion said, giving me a wry smile.

  “Why’d you say that?”

  “You are quite talkative today. You do that when you’re happy.”

  “I do?”

  I genuinely hadn’t noticed.

  Aerion nodded, her smile turning warm.

  I shrugged. “Well, as I said, even if you understood how a gun works, you’d still need to know how to forge the metals, how to make the springs, how to build the tools that make the tools to make the parts. And all of that requires infrastructure a world like Axius just doesn’t have.”

  Aerion deflated slightly. “You saw through me, then.”

  It was my turn to smile. “I’d be a lousy boyfriend if I didn’t. You won’t be able to learn anything you could bring back to improve Axius here, Aer.”

  Aerion’s ears drooped. “I understand,” she murmured. “Still, it feels wrong not to learn as much as I can during my time here. If there is even the slightest chance it might be of use to my… is it not worth the effort?”

  I could see there was no dissuading her, so I thought it over, tapping my chin. “Then you’d better focus on something simple,” I said. “Something that can actually be adapted without needing a whole industrial revolution first. But honestly? With magic doing half the things tech does for us, there isn’t much point.”

  Aerion went back to poring over her diagrams while I moved behind her, and began massaging her shoulders. “It should be a crime for the shoulders of such a beautiful creature to get this tight,” I whispered into her ear.

  “Stop it!” she said playfully, trying to get away, but that just let me nibble her ear, which made her giggle. “You’re distracting me!”

  “Why don’t we go eat? I’m starving.”

  “You’re right,” Aerion said, exhaling. “I should not sequester myself like this.”

  I offered my hand. She took it, and I pulled her up, feeling like a true gentleman for all of one second, until Aerion shoved me into a bookshelf.

  “Revenge,” she said, poking out her tongue. “For earlier.”

  Shaking my head, I followed her out.

  — —

  “Greg! Aerion!” Yashas called from the second floor, waving us over. “Perfect timing!”

  My nose had already picked up something delicious the moment we came up to the second floor, but the Champion’s next words had me salivating.

  “I have prepared a feast of dishes from my native land in celebration of our victorious excursion,” he announced. “And I must admit your technology has enabled me to cook it better than I could have ever dreamed. Come—join us!”

  Richard pocketed the nine ball a moment later. “Looks like another win for me, Yash,” he said cheerfully. “Now, about that food…”

  Yashas set his cue onto the table with a heavy sigh. “You are too good at this, Richard. It is entirely unfair competing against you.”

  “Oh, my dear chap,” Richard said with a grin, clapping him on the back, “I did warn you. Besting me at your own game was doomed from the start.”

  But Yashas didn’t look remotely displeased. If anything, he looked amused.

  My brow quirked at his reaction. Just how long had I slept?

  The group already had a camaraderie I didn’t recall being there earlier, and based on the overflowing aroma of spices and delicious food, Yashas had to have been in the kitchen for at least a few hours.

  Shaking my head, I wandered past the guys toward Arianna, who had moved up to the second floor. She was playing a slow, melancholic song, and it didn’t take a genius to guess her feelings at that moment.

  Despite being tone deaf and nearly oblivious to quality music—musical training was the last thing on Dad’s mind—even I could tell she was a master of the art. An especially impressive feat, considering how difficult violins were supposed to be to master. I couldn’t begin to guess how many thousands of hours she must have poured into developing that level of skill.

  That alone made me reevaluate her on the spot. Anyone capable of accomplishing such a thing was to be respected. Respected and maybe feared. I could count on one hand the number of people I knew who could set themselves to a years-long goal and actually get anywhere with it.

  She finished her piece on a long, somber note, then set the violin aside with a small, pained smile.

  “Music was one of the few escapes I had from reality,” she said softly. “We needed so many of those, where I come from.”

  “I take it your world wasn’t all peaches and roses?” I asked.

  Arianna grimaced. “Hardly. I come from a time of great strife, where atrocities were the norm and where acts of kindness only got you suspicion. People died meaningless deaths every day.” She looked away, her eyes on some faraway place. “Richard tells me this is Tokyo. I’d never been, in my world. But I see this marvel of democracy and I yearn for my own country to flourish to such heights. At the same time, I cannot help but despair.”

  I raised a brow but couldn’t ask much more without giving away too much of myself.

  Luckily, Yashas clapped his hands at that moment, saving me from the predicament.

  “Come!” he said, gesturing to the dining table. “I believe it is time we all formally introduced ourselves, and what better setting than over a fine meal?”

  Aerion and I shared a glance.

  “Well,” I muttered, “this ought to be good.”