“You, uh… okay?” Fang asked.

  Richard didn’t realize how long he’d been hugging his friend. Definitely long enough for his usually optimistic friend to see something strange about it.

  “It… happens. When you’ve… been so close to death.” Richard knew he made little sense.

  Fang’s eyes went wide. “You saw Death?”

  “Not literally, no. I just… it’s fine. I’m glad you’re here, Fang.” Richard patted him on the shoulder.

  Fang’s brows furrowed. “Fang?”

  “What?” Richard realized his mistake only after he spoke. The most logical explanation for all of this was that all changes remained surface-level. It would make sense that someone would remain the same, but something trivial, like perhaps their name, would change.

  “Sorry, uh…”

  His friend gave Richard a concerned look that was as intense as Leylah’s. “Claw.”

  “Right. Claw. I remember now.”

  The person who was the same in every way except used to be called Fang gave Richard another stare. “How badly did you hit your head?”

  “I… don’t know if my head got hit.”

  He knew that made no sense, and he could tell that the more he talked, the more confused and worried everyone was. He had to concentrate on making sure he called Fang Claw from now on. That would take some getting used to.

  “You spoke with Lucy, right?” Amber asked.

  Richard sat back in his seat. “Yeah. She slapped my face.”

  “So you did get hit in the head,” Claw said, sitting next to Richard.

  He chuckled, grabbing a cubed piece of fruit and popping it into his mouth.

  Leylah tapped the table. “Hey, I want to stay longer, but I’ve got to check in with Izzy.”

  “Alright, take it easy,” Richard said.

  Leylah was already up, walking carefully toward the door. “Never,” she said.

  Richard chuckled again, glad to see Leylah was recovering.

  “How is farming?” Richard asked.

  Amber smiled, then glanced toward Claw. “You’re looking at the most important person in all of base two.”

  Richard blinked, then glanced at Claw. “Really?”

  Claw shuffled his feet. “Well, I mean…”

  “You should have seen Elwyndor. She collapsed to her knees and started sobbing with pure happiness.”

  Richard raised an eyebrow. “Why? What happened?”

  Claw tapped the table, a humble smile on his face. “It’s… well, you know how I said in the beginning I had a feeling I could change into animals?”

  Richard remembered the conversation. It felt like years, but he knew it was about three weeks ago.

  “Well, Order’s gift restored that ability to me. And my first animal I could change into is a bumblebee.”

  The awe of it all came to him at once. “Like… a pollinator?”

  “Exactly right,” Claw said.

  Richard was shocked into silence.

  Amber pointed at Claw. “He can now pollinate more in half an hour than the rest of us farmers can in a day. He has single-handedly saved this crop.”

  Claw shook his head, but the smile remained on his face. “True, however I can only morph into a bee for half an hour, and it’s got a five-hour cooldown on it.”

  Amber shook her head in awe. “Yeah. As a basic ability.”

  “Probably also means Elwyndor is pushing those limits so the basic ability can change into an advanced one fast,” Richard said.

  Claw nodded, and Richard detected the tiniest bit of exhaustion in his friend. “Yeah, she is. I’m pushing myself as a bee for the full half an hour, and I’ve just barely finished doing it again. Elwyndor is pretty confident I can get another round of being a bee tonight.”

  Richard picked up on the exhaustion, so he cheered his friend up. “Hey, see? Order had a reason to bring you here.” Claw’s face relaxed at that, and a genuine smile crossed his face.

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Hey, my ego got bruised today, so I need to be right about something,” Richard said.

  Claw gave a loud laugh, slapping Richard on the back. “You don’t give yourself enough credit. I’ve heard legendary stories about going past the lake. No one under level fifteen has even survived it.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Yeah, well. I didn’t go past it because Marcus wouldn’t let me, so…”

  Claw shook his head. “You still went there when you were below level fifteen.”

  “I guess I should just… marvel at my accomplishments.”

  Claw chuckled as Richard took another bite as his smile faded. The thing was, it wasn’t a marvelous achievement. It was a higher being who gave him a gift more fit for a god, and Richard apparently didn’t have the best opinions of gods.

  Amber stood up. “Hey, we’ve got to get back to work, because if you scavengers have returned, that means we’ve got what we need for more fertilizer.”

  “Yeah, I’m almost done here, anyway,” Richard said as he picked up his pace with eating so it didn’t look too weird that he had more than half his food.

  Claw and Amber left, and their conversation meant a lot to him. Mostly, it meant that even though they had chosen different classes, they still came back together as their own sort of newbie group to help each other out.

  Richard spent some time walking around camp, but kept glancing at the farmlands, wondering if they needed help. He never thought he had gotten used to farming, but it certainly felt weird not to go to the farmlands anymore. Richard asked Elwyndor if they needed help, but she simply smiled a beaming smile and said that the best thing he could have done was to keep Claw alive for this long. He thought Amber was joking about Elwyndor collapsing to her knees and sobbing, but now he believed it. He figured if there was a hero of farming, Fang would be it. Or, Claw.

  That name change would take some getting used to, but he didn’t want to be suspicious.

  With the farmlands settled, Richard met up with Marcus, who was training with Savannah. Richard had barely opened his mouth when Marcus shook his head. “You’re ordered to take a break. So take a break.”

  Richard sighed and walked back out of the armory. Taking a break meant some quiet time. Time to reflect on everything that happened. Being alone with his thoughts. Facing the fact that Chaos had given him a gift that was so insanely powerful that he had a responsibility to tell someone. Eventually. He should tell everyone everything, but the fate of Dennison and Ike returned to him in full force. Richard might be kicked out of base camp. He didn’t understand his gift at all. How could he jump to different timelines? And the curse from Chaos? He pulled up his skill tree to see it there, noticing that it had dropped from 10% to 9%. Did that mean things would go back to normal when it reached 0%? Even though a percentage was gone, there were still slight differences. The percentage had to be some twisted version of a cooldown, but nothing would change back. Maybe it showed how much the timeline would change. That seemed to be right.

  He wasn’t sure if he wanted to study this in depth because he didn’t want to keep dying, but if he was going to understand what kind of “gift” Chaos gave him, he needed to do some more research. Only when it happened, though. He didn’t want to walk out of the walls and see what happened when he died. He still had a strong sense of self-preservation.

  Richard tried to shut off his mind as he rested. He tried not to think of the worst-case scenarios of what one hundred percent from the Chaos curse would mean. He wouldn’t worry about it because he couldn’t allow himself to. It would drive him crazy. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if his very friends’ personalities shifted. He focused only on what he knew. In this timeline, Dennison and Ike had still tried to attack him, and were kicked out of base two. It reminded him of how much power Dmitri had, and Richard was concerned about the corrupting power one extremely overpowered gift could give someone.

  Richard touched his head, filled with a powerful desire to go to bed and sleep until breakfast.

  It gave him a nasty shock when he saw three new people walking around base two. He was almost embarrassed, wondering if this was yet another surprise from the Chaos curse before he realized he recognized two people. They were the ones who had sprinted into the safety of the walls that morning. These three were the newbies that everyone expected to come once Richard and his group had chosen their class. He stared at them all with a slight frown. There were only three. Order must have known how desperately they needed numbers. Was there another person somewhere recovering, or were they only getting three people for the next two weeks?

  “Hey,” Richard said after he realized he’d been staring at them way too long. Only one newbie, a man, had been watching him curiously; the other two were looking around base two and the different buildings, trying to remember what they were for. Richard walked up to them. “I’m Richard. What’s your names?”

  The man who had been staring at him stuck out his hand. “I’m Kian from Earth.”

  “Ah, hello. I’m from Earth, too,” Richard said.

  Kian’s eyes brightened at that. It wasn’t much, but some foundation of similarity made surprisingly fast friends in an apocalypse.

  The other two newbies were the man and the woman he saw running this morning. That mutual experience must have bonded them. The man held out his hand.

  “I’m Felix from Callro.”

  Richard forced his face to be completely neutral. The horrible experience Leylah went through only a few short days ago made the tiniest wince in his eyes, but he kept his smile bright. “Hello, Felix.”

  “And I’m Sara from Shudesh,” the woman said.

  Richard was surprised that, even though he’d been here two weeks, he expected a bit of stereotypical behavior in these three. He knew it wasn’t right to think about that, and he also knew that some of Shudesh’s information came from Chaos himself. Every planet had a wide variety of people, but he still expected Sara to have a rigid schedule already planned. Felix, he half expected to want to be a guard already, but he knew it was because he spent so much time with Leylah. After all, Marcus was also from Callro, and he wasn’t a guard. It wasn’t like he expected Kian to push back against anyone’s authority.

  “Hello to you all. Welcome to base two. I’ve only been here a little over two weeks. I hope you have a… uh… calmer two weeks than I have,” Richard said.

  He shouldn’t have said that, and judging by the faces they made, he should stop talking altogether. He noticed Dmitri walking toward the group from a distance and smiled at the newbies, knowing he wouldn’t have to be the leader. These three probably had a hard enough time adjusting to their new normal without realizing that they were in for a hell of an experience. He certainly wished the next two weeks were calm for him, but he was hiding a mountain of questions behind a smile he wasn’t sure was calm anymore.

  “Richard, how are you feeling?” Dmitri asked as soon as he was within earshot.

  “Just looking for things to do. It feels weird not having anything,” Richard said.

  Dmitri laughed. “I understand. When we used to have an off-season as farmers, I was going out of my mind figuring out what to do next.”

  “‘Used to?’” Felix asked before glancing at Sara.

  Sara shrugged.

  “So… these are the newbies, huh?” Richard asked.

  “Yep.”

  “This is… it?” Richard wanted to double-check that there were only three, but he wasn’t sure how to say it. Instead, he said something else that made the three newbies once again glance nervously at each other.

  “These three, yes.”

  “Great.” Richard tried to save what he said. “That’s excellent.” He gave them all a thumbs-up. “Really excited you’re here.” He tried to sound like he believed it. He really did. But the truth was he expected at least six or seven newbies to show up. There being fewer newbies than in Richard’s group was hard to come to terms with.

  Richard turned around, feeling the stares of the newbies. He didn’t know what Order was thinking, or Chaos. Whoever was responsible for bringing these people here. How was this it? Maybe he was being harsh. Perhaps one of them would become as important as Claw had become in farming.

  Then again, he couldn’t trust Order and Chaos. At all. And he hated that he was becoming their pawn.