Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

By half past ten, we had a reconnaissance plan. Liora took it apart twice before she accepted it.

"Say the whole thing," she said.

"Approach on dry ground only. Circle the flooded perimeter, mark at least two observation points with cover and a withdrawal route, and log water depth from whatever markers remain. Find the surviving greenhouse entrances and note where I could anchor a mechanism. Deploy the crude decoys from shore. Watch what happens."

"And?"

"Come home."

"Say the second part properly."

I sighed. "Even if the decoys work, I don’t harvest anything on the first visit."

"Why not?"

"Because if they work, I’ll want to."

"Exactly." Liora jabbed a finger at me. "You’ll drag one piece of rubbish through the water, four monsters will go and inspect it, and a voice in your head will say, Well, that was easy."

"I know."

"You know while you’re standing here. That voice has killed more scouts than anything with teeth." She pushed the paper toward me. "Write it at the top."

I wrote FIRST VISIT IS EYES ONLY across the top of the page.

We ate an early meal at eleven, sitting on the plinth where the morning sun had warmed the concrete. Liora told me where she had been when the Call took her.

"Caravan road out of Hallowmere. It’s been raining for three days, and it’s the kind that gets into the pack straps." She stretched her legs out. "My pack was on my shoulder. I was mid-step, about eleven people from the front, and my brother was somewhere behind me talking about the ridge line again. Then there was a floor, a lamp, and you."

"And you return to that step."

"Same step. Same rain. Nobody will have blinked." She turned her cup between her hands. "That’s the strangest part. Not crossing worlds. Arriving back in a sentence somebody is halfway through."

At half past eleven, she changed.

Nothing from Earth could return with her. Not my shirt, the borrowed boots, a tool, or so much as a strip of gauze. Her own possessions had arrived as part of her manifestation and would go back with her. Anything she acquired here would remain behind.

Liora dressed in her travelling leathers and set her pack beside the cleared floor. The shirt she had worn all morning went over the back of my chair.

[Manifestation Remaining: 00:11:04]

"Right," Liora said.

"Right."

"I’m not going to make you promise anything." She stood in the middle of the office, her pack at her feet. "I know how the roll works. Grade first, then the repeat chance. You could Call every three days for two months and never see me."

"Yes."

"So don’t tell me you’ll see me soon. Tell me something true."

I thought about it.

"I’ll come back from the flooded zone," I said. "I wrote the rules down, and I’m going to keep them. The first visit is eyes only. If the decoys fail, I’ll leave and build something better."

"Good."

"And you’ll reach the end of that road."

"I’m eleven people from the front of a caravan in the rain. I’m hardly—"

"Liora."

She stopped trying to make it smaller than it was.

"I’ll reach safety with the others," she said. "That’s a promise you can hold me to, and I’d like to see you try."

She kissed me once, without turning it into a performance.

[Manifestation duration complete.]

[Liora Venn returned to origin dimension.]

[Return Point: Exact origin place and instant.]

[Origin-Time Elapsed: 00:00:00.]

[Blind Call natural recovery initiated.]

Her pack vanished with her. The shirt remained over the chair. Two cups stood beside the kettle, and three sealed bladders rested in their scrap-metal frames on the bench, damp and unfinished.

I stood there for a while.

Somewhere else, Liora had returned to rain in the middle of the step she had never finished. Her brother’s sentence would continue without a pause. Here, the office held the small evidence of hours her world would never acknowledge: a used cup, a disturbed bed, fresh teeth marks on my shoulder, and a shirt that no longer had an owner.

I folded the shirt instead of leaving it over the chair. Washing it immediately felt ridiculous. Refusing to wash it would have been worse. I put it with the rest of the laundry and dealt with the problem that could actually kill me.

Then I rewrote FIRST VISIT IS EYES ONLY because the first line had got wet, and started checking the hinges.

I spent the rest of that day improving the crude decoys and slept nine hours, which was the most disciplined thing I had done all week and the part I found hardest.

Two hinges bound when they were wet, so I filed and greased both. One cord had already chafed through half its diameter on a metal edge, which earned every anchor point a smoothed washer. I tested the three frames until their movements repeated reliably, then stopped. Liora’s final assessment had been adequate for finding out what you don’t know, and improving them further would only make me more willing to trust them.

Both of Pell’s field cases went into the spatial ring along with rope, cutting tools, food, water, and the medical kit. I carried the rifle and both knives on me. Nothing else.

Before sleeping, I checked the compound gates, changed the dressing Liora had applied after the prototypes bled through it, and laid the retrieval cords in separate coils. The first visit was supposed to answer questions, not create another failed expedition report. Even so, I caught myself looking at Pell’s cases twice before putting them into the ring.

I left them there. Carrying harvesting equipment did not mean I had permission to use it.

I left at first light the following morning.

The flooded agricultural zone began about eight kilometres northwest of the compound. It announced itself half a kilometre out when the ground stopped draining and the road became a causeway.

It had been ordinary farmland. That was what I had not prepared for.

Drowned crop rows ran beneath brown water in perfectly straight lines, their raised ridges still visible under half a metre of it. Irrigation markers stood at fifty-metre intervals with painted depth bands disappearing below the surface. Three markers agreed on the level: one metre ten at the field’s edge, deepening toward the northeast.

Collapsed fencing divided fields nobody would plant again. Two hundred metres out, only the cab roof and exhaust stack of a tractor remained above the water.

Four greenhouses stood along the eastern boundary, their frames rising from the fields with most of the glass gone and the rest hanging in broken panels. The first three had lost their roofs. The eastern greenhouse—the one on the failed expedition’s map—still had a foundation wall above the water and most of its western roof panels in place.

The water beneath it was darker than anywhere else.

Nothing moved across the entire flooded zone. No ripples. No insects touching down. Not one bird on eleven hundred metres of standing water.

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