Trails of sweat poured down my face with no sign of stopping, each drop stinging the dust-caked skin along my cheeks while tremors raced up my forearms and made my hands feel tingly, as if they were losing the ability to bend properly. The pickaxe in my grip kept striking stone again and again, each impact sending a dull ache through my wrists, elbows, and shoulders. We had been breaking big rocks into little ones for what felt like hours, maybe longer. My body could no longer tell whether it was morning or afternoon, only that the heat still pressed down on us without mercy.
I had been told to watch carefully while we worked, looking out for a scarlet-crimson ore—or simply "red rock," as some of them called it—and if I saw even a hint of it, I was supposed to call someone over so they could confirm whether it was the one we were hunting. The instruction itself had been simple enough, but after hours under that hot unforgiving sun, even remembering why I kept swinging felt like too much effort.
Every time we finished breaking down one rock spike and moved on to the next, Yuuki swept up all of the dust, sand, and fine stone fragments scraped off the rocks, dumping them into a box at his feet without pause. He worked with that same quiet efficiency he showed for everything else—no complaints, no wasted motion, just steady hands and a calm expression while the rest of us cursed under our breaths and begged the sun to finally give us a break.
Close to where we were mining, Kiriya sat on a boulder, perfectly still, surrounded by the bodies of several kobolds, a few lizardmen, and even one or two fully grown Cerberuses. Their slack jaws and half-open eyes stared up at the sky as if they had given in to the heat long ago and hadn't died because of the wounds all over their bodies. But Kiriya's own eyes never rested. They moved from shadow to shadow, tracking every little movement around us— every shifting grain of sand, every sound that might have meant something was coming. He looked less like a man and more like a gargoyle statue placed there by the godess, built to guard the area from monsters.
By the last two rock spikes, most of us had begun dropping out one by one. Our throats felt as dry and cracked as the wasteland itself. Some of us could no longer feel our arms properly; they hung at our sides like useless things attached to our bodies by nothing more than a thin strip of skin. Others didn't feel them at all, not even when the weight of the pickaxe pulled down with every swing. The world had narrowed to stone, sweat, and the hot sting in our eyes whenever we tried to blink it away.
"C'mon guys, two more and we can leave this hell! Grraawwww!" Blondy barked on the final stretch before he went at the rock like it personally owed him fifteen gold coins. He swung with a grin still plastered across his face even though his clothes were soaked through and dust had caked into every crease of his skin. For a moment, I almost believed him.
By the end, only Blondy and I remained standing, huffing and puffing like overworked beasts. We had put a big, ugly, vein-streaked beating into those rocks—swung at them until our shoulders screamed, until our grips slipped in sweat, until we thought maybe, just maybe, something red would split open from inside the stone. All for nothing. No ore came out, no matter how hard or long we had tag-teamed those last spikes.
"Are you..." I stopped, swallowing hard and taking a deep breath in before holding it for a second. When I finally let it out, the sound that left my insides was wheezy and broken—like a dying dog, or maybe like a fat dog who had just run a marathon against its own will. "...serious?"
Blondy threw his head back and laughed boisterously as he walked toward the pile of gear we'd been using, clearly already trying to convince himself this whole thing hadn't been completely pointless. "Hahahaha! It happens to the best of us." He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of one hand and leaned against his pack for a second. "You're not always gonna hit the bullseye. Sometimes it's just a blank."
He paused for a moment, then shrugged as if the whole matter had been settled in the passed and did not matter anymore. "Yeah, well... as long as it means we get enough for the blades, I'm good." He finished his drink in one go, packed away his pickaxe, then shouldered his pack, and tucked his canteen inside with practiced ease. "Now hurry up and let's get out of this wasteland before my body files a formal complaint against me."
When the group finally started walking again, I barely registered which direction we were heading. Between hours of striking rocks and the heat that had wrapped around us like wet cloth, my mind had gone soft at the edges. Was this the way back to the cave with the Gorgons? Or toward Tsige's forward base? Maybe even out toward the sea? The landscape blurred in places, shimmering with false water and impossible horizons.
Everyone around me looked equally wrecked—gaunt faces, sunburned skin, arms swinging as they walked not in a conscious or purposeful manner—except for two people: Yuuki and Kiriya.
Yuuki had spent most of the time sweeping up every last sand-like fragment from where we'd mined. His mental trick seemed to keep his body and mind relatively cool the whole time; compared to the rest of us, he wasn't sweating nearly so badly. There was something almost unnatural about it—the way he moved through the heat with steady breath and clear eyes while the sun tried its best to break everyone else down.
Kiriya made me think he had either been using water magic to keep himself cool or wearing some kind of enchanted armor with a cooling effect. He looked almost as fresh as the fresh prince of bel-air, even though he had spent most of the day in the middle of combat and still somehow managed not to look like anything had happened to him.
The next stretch might have taken an hour, or maybe three; I honestly couldn't tell anymore. In that heat, it felt like days. At certain points, I thought we were all starting to lose our minds. Whenever someone in the group began drifting away on their own—toward a shadow they mistook for shade, or a shimmering patch of ground they swore was water—Yuuki would appear beside them and gently steer them back to the group.
Then, at one point, the town of Tsige materialized out of the heat haze to my left. It rose up so clearly that I could almost see the rooftops, the walls, maybe even a flag snapping weakly in the hot wind. My cracked lips parted before I could stop them, and I started walking toward it on instinct alone, all I wanted was water—cold, clean, real water for my dry throat.
Before I had taken more than a few steps, Yuuki appeared at my side as if he been conjured there out of the heat itself.
"Tsige..." I croaked. "I can see Tsige in the distance. We'll finally get rest and water."
He didn't argue with me or call it a hallucination. Instead, his voice came steady and calm against the ringing in my ears.
"Yeah, we'll get water."
"So much we'll swim in it."
I laughed weakly at that, but even the laugh cost too much effort.
"Just imagine cool water on your skin... C'mon, let's get back." He gave me a small nod. "Let's get back and make it there as a group."
"Yeah... yeah, let's," I managed.
Slowly, carefully, Yuuki led me back toward where the rest of us were shuffling forward, one foot dragging behind the other through dust that had long since lost all meaning to our feet. The imagined town faded again once we were moving in the right direction, swallowed by haze and heat just like everything else out there.
A little later, Kiriya stopped abruptly and pointed into the distance without a word at first. Then he spoke, his voice cutting through the fatigue more sharply than I would have expected from someone who had been sitting on that boulder for what felt like hours.
"We're almost there, guys."
Yuuki raised one hand to shade his eyes from the sun and stared into the far distance as if trying to pull something out of the shimmering air itself. After a moment, he lowered his hand again.
"He's right," Yuuki said quietly. "I see something in the distance. Could be the forward outpost... or maybe some abandoned buildings." He paused, squinting harder. "But considering there are people walking in and out, I think it's the former."
For a second, none of us moved at all. The words hung there in the hot air, waiting to become real. Then something inside every one of us finally cracked open under the weight of relief, and we broke into a full sprint.
It was not much of a sprint—more like a staggered lurch forward with our arms pumping weakly and our balance failing every few steps—but it counted. Some of us tripped over uneven ground or stumbled through loose gravel and fell hard onto our knees. We got back up anyway, brushing dust from our knees and pushing ourselves forward again because the alternative was to stay down and maybe never stand again.
The people at the base—some walking in, some out, others standing guard near the entrance—must have confused or mesmerized seeing a pack of good-looking zombies shuffling toward them as fast as their bodies allowed. I don't blame them. We probably did look half-dead: clothes torn, skin caked with dirt and sweat, eyes glassy, movement unsteady.
A few guards raised their weapons halfway in response before freezing when they saw Yuuki and Kiriya coming up close behind the rest of us, waving their hands and making obvious gestures that clearly meant we're friendly, we're alive, please don't make this worse. For a moment, I could tell by the way the soldiers stood stiff and uncertain whether they should attack or just let us pass.
As we got closer, Kiriya vaulted clean over the rest of us and reached the gate before any of us did. From where we were struggling forward, all we could see was him talking to the people there, his posture relaxed enough that even from a distance it made the tension ease a little. By then, though, we didn't care about protocol or explanations. We just kept walking past them when we reached the gate, too exhausted to stop and too desperate to waste another second outside.
We made it inside without incident—barely—and then immediately got stuck on the door to the tavern. Not because anyone was holding us there, but because six or seven of us tried to walk through at the same time in that half-delirious state, our bodies bumping into one another as if we were trying to squeeze through a hole no bigger than a doorway. The door itself didn't help either, it resisting every clumsy shove we gave it trying to make it wider.
For a long moment, none of us moved far enough forward or back fast enough to clear the way. We just stood there, packed shoulder to shoulder in the frame like sacks of grain waiting to be carried inside.
Then Yuuki stepped up behind the last two of us and put his back into it. With one firm push—steady, unhurried, and somehow perfectly timed—he forced the rest of us through the door as if nothing had gone wrong at all.
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Word Count 1999
Thanks for reading this bit
If there are any grammatical errors, let me know by commenting on the paragraph.
Thank you guys. I appreciate your reading so far.
For this one I did a mix of writing it and then I finished used the LLM i got recently to add detail and went over it again. Let me know if its good or not.