Strawberry's Descent

The first real test flight, Dwarven Republic to Human Kingdom, the two surface realms sitting closest together, requiring only the barest sliver of Wastelands crossing, had the whole workshop crew gathered at the launch site before dawn, Nettle's finished wingsuit strapped tight across Bram's shoulders, cloud-shield clipped snug at his chest with the new, properly-tuned release spring.

"Remember," Arista said, double-checking every buckle with the fussy precision of someone who had learned several painful lessons about not double-checking things. "Glide as long as you can, unclip with two seconds left, brace on impact. You've got this."

"I've got several fractured ribs' worth of confidence in this system," Bram said. "But sure. I've got this."

[Launch Sequence Initiated]

He shot skyward in a long, clean arc, no screaming crowd chant this time, just held breath, everyone watching as Bram's arms spread wide the moment he cleared the tension arm's reach, the wingsuit catching air properly for the first time, carrying him in a long, controlled glide toward the horizon instead of a simple ballistic drop.

He vanished from sight entirely before anyone saw him land.

"...Well," Arista said, into the silence. "Guess we wait."

The private message came through nearly twenty minutes later, far longer than Arista had expected for a flight that should have lasted, by her rough math, somewhere around the same eight or nine seconds Bram's earlier tests had clocked.

[Private Message from: Bram]"That was fantastic!! I've never felt so free in my life. Made the target with ease, actually managed the landing myself, didn't even need the shield."

Arista read it twice, grinning ear to ear, already composing a reply full of exclamation points she rarely used for anything else.

"YES. Bram!! Incredible!! Details when you're back!!"

She spent the next two hours in a state of pure, restless satisfaction, sketching improvements, planning the next test route, riding the high of an actual, unambiguous success.

Bram returned considerably later than expected, and considerably less triumphantly than his message had suggested, hauled in the back of a horse-drawn cart, wingsuit dusty, expression somewhere between exhausted and deeply unbothered by his own circumstances.

He climbed down, took one look at the catapult, and stopped dead.

"...Strawberry. Why has the catapult been rotated."

Arista, mid-adjustment on the tension arm, glanced over her shoulder with the guilty energy of someone who'd hoped this question would come up later, ideally never. "So. Funny story."

"I am waiting."

"You said you 'didn't even need the shield.' You landed the glide yourself. Which is amazing, genuinely, incredible flying, but it also means you covered way more distance than we actually planned for, because you kept gliding well past where we expected you to come down and brace."

Bram's expression didn't change, which was somehow more unsettling than if it had. "How much further."

"...We don't actually know. That's the problem. You went so far past the Human Kingdom marker that we lost the exact landing point entirely. Which means our whole distance calibration for this route is now useless data." Arista gestured at the rotated catapult with the forced cheer of someone delivering genuinely bad news as enthusiastically as possible. "So! New target. Elven Kingdom. New angle, new baseline, and this time we actually track where you land."

Bram stared at her for a long moment. Then at the catapult. Then back at her.

"The Elven Kingdom is on the other side of the Wastelands."

"It'll be fine," Arista said, already climbing up to make final adjustments to the tension arm. "Probably. Likely. Possibly."

"Those are three different words with three different confidence levels, and none of them are definitely."

"That's the spirit! Get suited up."

Bram closed his eyes, took a long, steadying breath, and looked back toward the horse-drawn cart with something that might have been genuine longing.

"...I really thought the cart was going to be my ride home for the rest of the day."

"The cart was your reward for succeeding too well. Consider it a promotion."

"I would like a demotion."

"Not an option. Wingsuit. Now. Wastelands await."

[Launch Sequence Initiated]

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Bram sailed skyward in the longest, cleanest arc yet, wingsuit catching air immediately, arms spread wide as he leveled out into a smooth, controlled glide over the churned, monster-ridden expanse of the Wastelands stretching endlessly beneath him.

"This is working!" he shouted, mostly to himself, the wind tearing most of the words away before they reached anyone on the ground. "I'm doing this! It's actually working!"

He was maybe halfway across when the sand below him shifted.

Not the ordinary way sand shifted underfoot: a slow, massive displacement, dunes rippling outward like something enormous was rearranging itself directly beneath the surface. Bram had just enough time to register the movement, just enough time to think that's new, before three separate serpentine heads erupted from the dunes in a spray of sand, each one easily thirty meters tall, jaws already wide.

[WARNING: Wasteland Hydra — Territory Breach Detected]

"Oh—"

He didn't get to finish the thought. The nearest head snapped shut around him mid-glide, wingsuit and all, swallowing him whole in a single, brutally efficient motion before sinking back beneath the sand as quickly as it had emerged, dunes settling smooth again like nothing had happened at all.

[Player Bram has died.][Cause of Death: Hydra Attack][Respawn in: 1:59]

Back at the launch site, Arista stared at the death notification for a long, stunned moment, watching the tiny distant speck that had been Bram simply vanish mid-flight without so much as a splash or a crater to mark where he'd gone.

"...Nooooo!!" Her hands flew to her face, genuine horror written across every line of her expression. "My wingsuit!! And the shield!"

Nettle, standing beside her, turned slowly to stare at her with an expression that suggested she wasn't entirely sure she'd heard that correctly. "...Your wingsuit.and the shield"

"Do you have any idea how many hours went into that thing?! The sculpting, the joint-work, the—" Arista gestured helplessly at the empty sky where Bram had disappeared. "That was a week of your actual sewing— sculpting, sorry, sculpting genius, gone, just like that, into a hydra, of all things—"

"He died," Nettle said slowly. "Bram. Our test pilot. Just died. Horribly. Eaten alive."

"He'll respawn in under two minutes!" Arista waved this concern away with the breezy confidence of someone who had clearly internalized Ultimate mode's stakes far more than Normal mode's. "The equipment doesn't respawn! both of those things are gone forever, and we don't even get the data because the last thing that happened to it was becoming hydra lunch!"

Nettle opened her mouth, closed it again, and fisnally just sighed, rubbing her temples. "You know what, that's, actually fair. That does track with how much effort that took."

"See? SEE? You get it."

Somewhere off in the distance, the respawn timer ticked down toward zero, and Bram's voice crackled faintly over the party chat, flat and utterly done with the entire day.

"...For the record," he said, "I would also like it noted that I died. Just in case that mattered to anyone."

"We're getting there, Bram!" Arista called back, already sketching notes about hydra territory boundaries into her notebook. "First we mourn the wingsuit and shield properly!"

A long, tired pause.

"...I hate it here."

By the way," Bram added, voice steadier now, "can you make me a new shield?"

"Why?"

"Gut feeling," Bram said, entirely deadpan. "Sticking around with you seems like the kind of thing that'll make it come in handy again eventually."

Arista considered this with genuine, appreciative respect. "...That's fair. Give me half an hour."

Bram's voice came back over party chat, flat, deliberate, and clearly building toward something he'd been composing during his entire two minutes of being dead.

"Strawberry."

"Yeah?"

"Next time. You fly."

The silence that followed was, for once, entirely Arista's.

"...I'm sorry, what?"

"You heard me. Next test flight. You're in the sling."

Arista actually took a step back, one hand pressed flat against her own chest, expression somewhere between offense and genuine, wide-eyed alarm. "Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? I could die."

There was a pause on the other end of the chat, the specific, weighted pause of a man who had been launched off a giant catapult more times than either of them had bothered counting, fractured his ribs doing it, and just been eaten alive by a thirty-meter sand hydra, all in the span of a single project.

"...I could die," Bram repeated, tone completely flat.

"Yes, exactly, I'm glad you understand the risk—"

"I could die," he said again, slower this time, with the weary emphasis of a man laying out an extremely obvious point to someone determined not to see it. "I have died. Several times. Today alone. On Normal mode, with a respawn timer and full HP waiting for me on the other side."

"...You've almost died several times," Arista corrected, arms crossed. "You've actually died exactly once today. The hydra."

A brief pause, the specific pause of a man recalibrating a statement for accuracy without losing an ounce of momentum. "Fine. I have almost died several times, and actually died once, today alone. On Normal mode, with a respawn timer and full HP waiting for me on the other side."

"Right, and that's terrible, truly, I've felt awful about every single one—"

"You are on Ultimate. You have zero combat skills. You are a Blacksmith who has personally told me, out loud, that permadeath doesn't respect a good bit." Bram's tone hadn't changed at all, which somehow made it worse. "And your solution to that is to keep sending me into the hydra-infested death zone instead."

Nettle, standing off to the side, had gone very quiet, watching this exchange with the rapt attention of someone watching a court case reach its verdict.

Arista opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"...That is," she said slowly, "a surprisingly good point, delivered with an unreasonable amount of patience given the circumstances."

"Thank you."

"I still don't want to fly."

"I did not expect you to concede gracefully."

"I concede that your point is logically sound. I do not concede that I am getting in that catapult." Arista crossed her arms, already retreating toward the safety of pure stubbornness. "You're built like an actual brick wall specifically designed to survive this. I am built like a person who once nearly died to a bike bell. The math doesn't favor me switching roles here."

"The math," Bram said, "has never favored me being launched repeatedly into the Wastelands either. And yet."

A long silence stretched between them, broken only by Nettle, who finally couldn't hold it in any longer, snorting into her hand.

"...She's not going to fly, is she," Nettle said.

"Absolutely not," Bram confirmed.

"Absolutely not," Arista agreed, with the shameless, immediate honesty of someone who had, apparently, reached the exact limit of her own recklessness. "But I promise the next wingsuit will have better hydra-detection built in. That's practically the same as flying myself."

Bram's sigh was audible even through the party chat's compression.

"...I hate it here."

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