Against all odds, after fighting against the most brutal enemy of all, his natural instincts, Seth finally made some progress with his work. Even with Astra's horrifically beautiful torture, he was a man of willpower and science, so how could he not achieve his goal?

Especially since he spent a few sleepless nights powering through while the vile temptress slept and couldn't draw his eye with her wicked ways any longer. Honestly, how many times in a single day can someone do a 'morning' work out anyways?

Regardless, he had finally figured something important out about the bracer when he heard the previously mentioned vile temptress speaking from across the log, and who was currently in the middle of martial arts katas despite the fact that her muscles must be aching.

"Can I ask you something?"

"I wasn't staring!"

"That wasn't what I was going to ask you. Besides, Yes you were."

Seth grumbled to himself, risking a glance up at Astra as he shot her an annoyed glare, which she met with a slight, smug smirk across her face before going back to what she was doing. Well, Seth saw it as a smirk, but in reality it was really just a millimetre increase at the edge of her lips and a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

After all this time trapped together basically 24/7, he no longer had any doubts about her emotions or how she displayed them. It did create a little disconnect between what others would see compared to him, however. For instance, some would see her and think she was glowering angrily at them, while Seth would simply see her concentrating hard on controlling her urge to pet something cute that she could see in the distance.

That was not a random example, by the way. With the silver lion cubs constantly roaming around their meadow, he had very quickly come to learn that expression and became quite familiar with it.

One quick look behind the mask of emotionless and intimidating glares, led him to the discovery that he should have realised when she understood all of his movie references. Astra wasn't scary, she is just a huge, awkward dork. A dork with a body that made studying impossible, but a dork nonetheless.

Not just in movie references, in everything. He couldn't help but wonder what she would be like if she wasn't the 'Storm Queen' or whatever it was they were calling her these days.

"Hmph, What's your question then?"

"I know you have the stone guards and the statues and such, but why don't you do that more often? I've only seen you do it once, and never again."

She gestured to the undead they had guarding their ramshackle group with a nod of her head. Seth sighed softly when he realised what she was talking about, once again focusing on the bracer in front of him. He stayed quiet for a few seconds, almost like he was never going to answer, before finally speaking up.

"Honestly? I don't think anyone would ever want to fight for someone who does that kind of thing. I mean, would you? Would you want to fight for someone, to die for them, who will simply defile your body and use it after your sacrifice?

Would you want to see your loved ones, your friends and family, turned into some... rancid meat puppet? It's just... It's just... disgusting. I only do it now because we don't really have any other choice."

Seth was simply glad that the bodies he was surrounded himself with, and had turned into his meat puppets, weren't decaying and rotting messes. He assumed this was down to his subconscious keeping their hearts beating and lungs full of air. He was basically acting as a machine keeping a brain dead patient alive, while also using them to fight for him.

The organs weren't needed to keep them alive and fighting for him, but at least it kept them fresh. And yeah, he could do this more often with his enemies back home, if he wasn't facing off against the melting Hemogoblins. But he knew that even if it wasn't their friends and family becoming the puppets, people would constantly wonder when it would be.

Necromancers were seen as evil for a reason. If he really wanted, he could slaughter everyone in the city and turn them into nothing but an undead, unstoppable army, all in the pursuit of power.

In fact he had no doubt that someone might be doing that somewhere in the world, Hell the Heart Eater had been doing that very thing. But it wasn't Seth, it wasn't who he wanted to be. After all, he could barely bring himself to kill one person, never mind slaughter a whole city.

Maybe deep down, despite all his power and victories, he was still that scared little office worker hiding under the desk while something else fought for him.

Astra nodded at the answer, a soft smile dancing upon her lips as she relaxed from her kata stance and crouched in front of Seth. With a single finger, she poked him in the forehead and pushed it back, so that he was forced to take his eyes off his project and look into her stormy eyes.

"That is why they follow you. Not just the power you have, but that care you have for them. They can feel it. They follow you, and some even worship you - which is a little weird - not because you're a powerful leader, but because you're also a good person.

Now. Tell me about this thing. How long until we get home?"

She laughed softly and flicked his forehead lightly, as if it was also flicking away all the morbid thoughts, before looking down at the bracer he had been working on.

Seth winced slightly, not at the flick, which barely registered and was reduced by a little black vein growing across his forehead for a brief second. Instead, he was wincing at the pain of the question itself.

"There is a slight problem with that. While this device will get us home... it just won't do it in the way I thought it would."

"..."

Astra's expression was usually neutral, with a deep frown that many took as an angry glare as if she was ready to tear out their throats and feel nothing about it. And with Seth's wonderful new perception of the odd way she expressed her emotions he saw... exactly the same thing.

Shivers immediately went down his spine, faced with her true death glare. Who the hell ever said this woman isn't scary? Whoever it was, they are a damned fool and don't know anything!

"Let me explain, alright? At first I thought this created the portals, that just makes sense right? Bracer opens a portal and the fish just walk on through. But that doesn't hold up. What about the others? Most of these don't have a bracer or a similar device, and others didn't even know a portal was there until they wandered through.

Plus, the runes just don't line up with that. I haven't figured them out completely, it's a complicated process. But I know enough to know it isn't a generator. I believe that instead of creating the portals, it's locating them. More precisely, I think it's guiding the wearer through specific portals to go where they want."

"Like an inter-dimensional GPS?"

"Exactly! While it can help us get home, or close enough, the bad news is we have to wait for the right portal to open up to get us there. With the amount of portals opening over there every second... I mean it felt like hundreds. So it shouldn't take long. However..."

Astra sighed, shaking her head as she figured out where Seth was going with his sentence. Her eyes lingering on the bracer.

"However that is every second over there, not here. Which means we could be looking at weeks here, possibly more."

"Yeah... Exactly. It's all just a matter of time. But how much time? I have no idea."

***

Just a matter of time, Bob thought. Just a matter of time until the teleporter is found. Not only was he using the humans communication network, through the gifts that they had received, but also through his connection to his Father's Spirit Animals as well as his brother Omelette. He couldn't control the Spirit Animals directly, or view what they could see, but he could talk to them, ask them to find Lee for him.

Even with his newly established connection to what people called the 'System' and it's admittance that he was his own individual being that could evolve, he still never received one of the humans gifts. Perhaps it was because he still wasn't considered 'human'.

But Bob managed without it, for with his network of humans and Spirit Animals, he found the teleporter in as little as five minutes. Yet even as he found him, there seemed to be a problem. The Teleporter refused to teleport, at least he refused to come to Bob to the church and was instead using his powers over space to contain and close the countless portals opening around the city.

It was an important job, a job that was undoubtedly saving countless lives and that only he could perform. But it also meant that it was Bob who had to travel across the city towards the teleporter.

As he rushed out of the church of his Father, leaving behind the corpse of the wolf like it was worthless trash, Bob turned into another cloud of dirt and dust before lifting into the air.

The cloud swam through the air like an eel, and with every second that passed, Bob could hear a clock ticking away inside his head. It was just a matter of time.

TICK TOCK. TICK TOCK.