The MC World. The Twilight Forest.
They had set out yesterday, but a force this size moved at the pace its purpose demanded , and its purpose was not speed.
The Naga Gardens had been located, as had the Lich Tower. Both were marked on the maps. The issue was simply that this expedition was not built for speed-running. It was built for extraction. Ryen's standing orders were simple and absolute: strip everything of value on the way through.
And they were taking him at his word.
Scaramouche looked around at what had, until recently, been a forest. The ordinary trees had been cut to the stumps. The soil itself had been scraped back by a layer. The ore veins did not bear thinking about.
He folded his arms. These soldiers, he thought, were almost aggressively obedient. Told to strip every resource from the land, they had committed to stripping every resource from the land. There was barely enough left to constitute a floor.
One step short of loading the entire world onto a cart and taking it home.
He exhaled and settled into his boredom.
He had come here for a staff and for a decent fight. So far he'd gotten two Druid Mages, but the moment their staves hit the ground, Dashi had already scooped them up. Dashi, as current field commander of the Twilight Forest operation, technically outranked Scaramouche for the duration of the expedition, which was a sentence Scaramouche found privately unreasonable, but not worth contesting.
He sat on a tree stump and watched the soldiers work.
He had never really looked at people like this before. Power had always been the filter , you measured someone's worth by what they could do to you or for you, and people who rated below the threshold were simply background noise. He had held that view for a long time, and it had served him, and he had not questioned it.
Somewhere in the months of living alongside this particular group of humans, the filter had developed gaps.
Loyalty. Precision. Something that might have been called warmth, in the right light.
Things he had never once seen in the Fatui. Things he had long stopped expecting to find in any organisation.
He was still thinking about it when Dashi appeared beside him.
Dashi did not make a production of the fact that Scaramouche was sitting idle while everyone else worked. There were ranks above him and ranks below him, and someone who had personally been assigned to this expedition by Ryen , and who represented, indirectly, the Cryo Archon and Makoto , fell into a category where asking them to carry wood felt like overstepping.
Ryen had said Scaramouche was here to work like a regular soldier. Dashi had noted this, filed it, and elected to interpret it loosely.
"Wanderer, sir."
Scaramouche's expression flattened slightly. "Just Wanderer."
The name 'Wanderer' was not a name for all occasions. It depended entirely on who was saying it.
Makoto could say it, and he would cross the room to hear what she wanted.
Lumine could say it, and he would not hear it.
Ei could say it, and he would look at her sideways and make a point of not responding.
As for Ryen , the man could call him "Lightning Cannon" and Scaramouche would show up immediately and with full attention, and he was aware of how undignified that was, and he had decided not to think about it.
The name itself he did not dislike, not anymore. It had once been the thing he hated most about himself , because of Ei, because of everything Ei represented. That particular wound had changed shape over time. Now the only person who used it with any regularity was Makoto, and Makoto was a different matter entirely.
Ryen and the others generally called him Wanderer. When they were in a good mood, they called him Lightning Cannon, and he responded to that without complaint, which said more than he intended it to.
Dashi scratched the back of his head with the particular good-natured awkwardness that seemed to be his default setting.
"Wanderer, sir , we're going to be here for a while longer working the resources. If you're bored, you could head back first. Come back when we push further in."
Scaramouche was quiet for a moment. Then he shook his head.
"Everyone else is out. Nothing to go back to. I'll stay."
He paused, then looked toward the soldiers cutting their way methodically through what remained of the tree line.
"That said , the main world has plenty of timber. It's not exactly short on ore either. Why are you people taking the dirt?"
Dashi scratched his cheek.
"Lady Ningguang's orders, and Ryen confirmed it , the world resets each cycle, so the resources here regenerate regardless. Wasteful to leave them."
"Sumeru's about to begin the desert reclamation project," he continued. "The scale of it , if they draw everything from the main world's reserves, Lady Keqing estimated it would hollow out roughly a quarter of the continent we're currently settled on."
"Her words were that this was, quote, incompatible with sustainable development."
"The Twilight Forest resets no matter what we do to it, so we take everything here instead. Ryen is also planning to build cities in the main world's existing landmass, the natural landscape needs to stay intact."
Scaramouche looked at the cratered, scraped, systematically disassembled forest floor around him and accepted this logic without further argument.
"How long are you planning to stay in this section?"
"Today should wrap up the Enchanted Forest." Dashi ran through it in his head. "The main objective is extraction, but we have to keep advancing , a lot of resources are locked behind progression milestones. Plan is to finish this zone today, then move on to the Naga Gardens."
"Deal with the Naga, then spend a day clearing everything around the Gardens."
"Overall pacing , slow and thorough. Half a month per clear, cycling through the Twilight Forest on a two-week loop."
In practical terms, that was not a slow pace at all. Ryen's speed-run team had taken a full week just moving through. A force responsible for clearing, fighting, and extracting simultaneously completing a full run in two weeks, with a thousand soldiers, was pushing the limits of what was achievable.
Once the teams learned the layout well enough, a one-week cycle might eventually stabilise. But that was later.
Scaramouche processed none of the logistical detail with any real investment. He was not a planner. He recognised planning when it appeared, noted that someone else was doing it, and moved on.
"Do you need me for anything?"
"Not urgently," Dashi said. "The concern is more about downtime on your end. We have the numbers and the equipment to handle most of what comes up." He paused. "Though the Twilight Forest has a habit of producing situations that aren't covered in the plan. Having you here is a significant margin of safety."
As he said it, he reached into his pack and held out a staff.
"This came off one of the Druid Mages earlier. Advanced-tier. Lightning attribute. We haven't fully catalogued what spells it carries."
"You came here for a staff, didn't you?"
Scaramouche's hand moved before the rest of him caught up.
Then it stopped.
He looked at Dashi. "Staves go to central collection when we leave. That's the rule."
"We haven't left yet," Dashi said, with the uncomplicated pragmatism of someone who had thought this through in advance. "Temporary use during the operation. The higher-ups won't care."
Scaramouche took the staff.
The moment his fingers closed around it, his Delusion erupted. A current of elemental energy flooded through him , not aggressive, not alien, but resonant. Like something that had been waiting to be held by the right hand.
In this world, it would not reach its full potential. The system's ceiling was different here from the main world.
But even within these limits, he could feel the shape of what it would become when the restraints came off.
And this was only advanced-tier.
Beyond this: Master-tier staves. Master-tier staves that could be further enhanced. Beyond the staves themselves, the full Witchcraft School bundle , spells stacked onto spells, effects layered until the original casting was barely visible underneath the additions.
He tried to extrapolate what his ceiling looked like with all of that in hand, and the number did not resolve clearly. It was simply large.
He understood now, in a way he had not quite grasped before, why Lumine and the others looked at their Visions with the mild indifference of people who had already moved on to better things. A staff was not weaker than a Vision. It was a different kind of power entirely , and it had none of the incompatibility risk that came with a Vision that did not match its wielder. The Vision could push back. The staff would not. Whatever it held, it held for whoever carried it.
The staff was his. Whatever it could do, it would do for him.
His grip tightened.
After a long moment, he glanced at Dashi. Something in his expression had shifted , not softened, exactly, but unlocked.
"Thank you."
Dashi waved it off with a cheerful ease that suggested he had not expected any other outcome.
"Don't mention it. We're counting on you out here , the Dusk Forest has teeth. Numbers and weapons take you far, but there are situations that numbers alone can't resolve. With you here, a lot of those situations just stop being situations."
"That said , I'll need the staff back before we exit. Centralised collection, then Ryen and the others handle final distribution."
Scaramouche nodded, his attention already half inside the staff.
The Lightning element stirred in the wood as he held it , not loudly, but persistently. A call he wanted to answer immediately.
He held off. For now.
"Before we leave, it goes back to you."
Dashi produced a second item from his coat , a book , and offered it across.
"Lady Ningguang's team compiled this. It covers the spell catalogue for the Twilight Forest, cross-referenced by staff type. The spells bound to that staff aren't fully mapped yet. This should let you cross-check."
He turned to leave.
"I've got things to deal with. I'll leave you to it."
Scaramouche watched him go, then settled in, the staff across his knees and the book open in his lap.
The first thing he turned to, naturally, was the Master-tier spell list in the Twilight Forest Witchcraft bundle. They were not quite what the full Witchcraft School produced in its original form , not as strange, not as absolute , but the power in them was real enough to make his chest tighten.
Especially the Choking Fog. Necromancy school. The kind of spell that exceeded reasonable expectations.
He remembered Lumine mentioning it once , that she had used it to pin the Raiden Shogun in place. If it could trap the Shogun, it carried a threat to Archons generally. That was not a small claim.
He looked at it for a moment longer than he needed to, then moved on with something approaching reluctance.
Advanced-tier staffs could not use Master-tier spells. That was the ceiling, and the ceiling was firm. He let it go.
The advanced-tier offensive spells he skimmed past quickly. Damage was already handled. He did not need the staff to add more of it.
The utility spells, on the other hand.
He stopped on the Lich Ward.
A barrier. He had been on the receiving end of a triple-stacked Ward from Lumine , three staves, three barriers, layered , a few days ago. The memory produced a faint involuntary tension in his shoulders. He had not been ready for what that felt like from the outside.
But that experience had also left him with a very specific, very settled conviction about what he wanted when it was his turn.
He flipped through the entries. This staff did not carry the Lich Ward.
He found instead a Life Curse , restorative magic, recovery-typed. Functional. Genuinely not bad.
He noted it, moved on, and accepted that the Ward would wait.
The rest of the staff's native loadout was unremarkable. Competent. Not particularly suited to him.
This was not a problem. The full Twilight Forest spellbook had been recovered. When he returned to the main world and formally received a staff from distribution, he could flag the issue with Ryen and request a different configuration.
As for how to ensure Ryen agreed to this particular request,
Aunt Makoto existed for a reason.
Scaramouche had learned, over the course of their acquaintance, that there was no strategic situation in which he could not rely on her completely. This was one of a very short list of things he held without ambivalence.
He set the book aside and looked out at the soldiers, who had not paused once in all the time he had been sitting here.
He sat with it for a moment. Then he stood, put the staff away, and picked up an axe from a nearby tool pile.
Dashi had given him the staff to use. Common decency , and, in fairness, his own reason for being here in the first place , suggested he should probably contribute something in return.
Besides which, he had signed on to work. Somewhere in the chain of rationalisation, it was still nominally a labour assignment.
He walked over to where the cutting was thickest, rolled up his sleeve, and got to it.