The AP-1 rolled over the terrain, with its engine almost drowned out by the chorus of rattles, clanks, thuds, sloshes, and creaks from the cargo that we'd loaded onto it.

They were near-constant sounds at this point, because we were driving over some pretty rough ground. We'd thought that we were taking the quicker route by going around the base of a hill instead of over it. What we hadn't known was that the tall grass was littered with rocks, ranging from gravel to head-sized miniature boulders. It was a downright minefield of hidden obstacles.

A figurative minefield, at least. Thankfully.

"Still no glitches." Just in case, though, I chucked a few bolts ahead of us. They disappeared into the grass without event. That was about as much as we could hope for.

"Do you think maybe we should go another way on our trip back?" Toriko asked, without taking her eyes off of her driving.

"Probably. Going over the hill has to be smoother, right?"

"I was thinking maybe we could go around the other side of it. There were some trees over there, but it didn't look too bad."

"Hmm…"

I checked my watch. The symbols on it were complete nonsense, but the position of the hands was still perfectly apparent. It was a convenient loophole in the Otherside's ability to scramble our language comprehension. Judging by that, we had about three hours until sunset.

"We should probably turn back before long, actually. We've been driving for a while, haven't we?"

"I guess you're right. I was hoping we could at least find a good vantage point to see what's around here, but…"

"We might have made it if it weren't for these rocks."

Toriko let go of one lever to shake a fist at the ground. "You'll pay for this next time, rocks."

"How are they going to pay, exactly…?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she grabbed the lever again. After bringing the AP-1 to a stop, she started executing a U-turn. It was easier said than done. We still didn't want to plow into a rock, so she kept having to maneuver around them. She ended up driving over one anyway. The movable rollers absorbed some of the shock, but the whole vehicle still shuddered and jolted. We were bounced around in our seats, only kept in place by the seat belts.

As we came down from the rock, the track dropped about ten centimeters. The AP-1 lurched to one side, rattling and clattering again. The engine sputtered in a way I'd never heard before.

"Guess it didn't like that, huh?" Toriko said.

"Yeah… this got me thinking, too. We should probably replace these seat belts. They're still the ones that came with the AP-1."

"I guess they do look pretty flimsy. If they're only supposed to keep you in place when you're crawling around at three kilometers per hour, I'm surprised they haven't broken yet."

"Don't go giving them ideas."

One of the tracks hit another rock, jostling us around in our seats. The engine gave a more pointed kind of sputter this time. Over the next few seconds, it took on a wheezing quality, like a sick animal.

With a few final growls of frustration, the engine died. The AP-1 came to a standstill.

"Well. Hmm."

Toriko switched the key to the off position, then back on. The engine whined to itself, but nothing much came out of its feeble efforts.

She did it a few more times. The engine gave a few soft noises at each turn of the key, but that was about it. It could hear her call, but it was too weak to reply.

It took a few seconds for the reality of our situation to hit me.

"I think…" My voice trembled from the thought. "… I think the AP-1 just broke."

"So… where should we start?"

We'd removed the casing from the AP-1's engine compartment, baring its innards. Looking at them in this scenario, it was pretty daunting. When Natsumi had been explaining the maintenance and repairs, it had all felt relatively straightforward. Right, yeah, of course we'll need to replace the drive belt if it breaks, and get a new oil filter when it clogs. That's intuitive enough.

Now, I was realizing that it couldn't be further from the truth. There were so many parts in there, and I couldn't even say what half of them did. The internal combustion engine was a machine so complicated that humanity hadn't really mastered it until the twentieth century. How were the two of us supposed to repair one?

"Okay," Toriko said. "Let's go through the obvious possibilities first. Just to get them out of the way."

"Good idea. Well… it has gas. I refueled it right before we left."

"And the battery isn't that old. It was trying to start too, right? I think that means that the battery has a charge. So it's not that either. … what else?"

"Uh. Well. Nothing looks obviously broken."

"Right, yeah. So… we can rule all that out. I guess that's a longer way of saying that we still don't have any idea."

"Let's start looking, I guess…"

The longer I thought about it, the more obvious it was that we were outmatched. Even if we did find something that was obviously busted, what then? We had a tool kit, but it wasn't like we were carrying a full suite of replacement parts. If the drive belt had snapped, there wasn't anything we could have done about it. We had some replacement fuel and air filters, but they were in our shed. Not a lot of help to us here, kilometers away from it.

"Maybe it could be the fuse?"

"Where's the fuse at, again?"

"It should be somewhere accessible, right? Over there, maybe…?"

With us two novice mechanics on the job, things were slow going. We'd been at it for a full hour before I realized:

"Oh. We've only got a couple of hours before it gets dark."

Toriko glanced up from the engine, frowning toward the setting sun and brushing some hair out of her face.

Smudges of grease and a film of sweat highlighted the subtle contours of muscles in her arms. Between that and the almost-stoic way that she looked into the distance, her disheveled hair glowing golden in the sunlight… Something about the sight sent a warm feeling through my chest. I, uh. I could process that later. We had other stuff to deal with right now.

"I guess we do, huh," Toriko said, oblivious to the psychic assault that she'd just conducted on me. "We were driving for at least an hour and a half to get here, weren't we?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah." I dragged my brain back to reality. "Probably more like two."

"You think?"

"I didn't check exactly when we started driving, but I think so."

Toriko pursed her lips, turning her attention toward the long line of tread marks that recorded our trip here. "It isn't like we drove that much faster than walking speed, especially once we hit this rocky part, but…"

"… but the AP-1 doesn't get tired. We'd have to move pretty fast to make it out before dark. And that's if we left right now, without taking any time to pack stuff. Then, if we didn't reach the gate in time…"

"… we'd be wandering around at night, yeah. I guess this is exposing some issues with our exploration strategy, huh?"

"Seems like it." I sighed. "So, what now?"

"Mmh." Toriko straightened up, wiping her hands on a handkerchief. "How about you keep working on this, while I set up the tent?"

Setting up the tent, something we had plenty of experience with, turned out to be a lot faster than fixing the AP-1, which neither of us had ever done. Once it was ready, Toriko even gathered firewood, built a campfire, and started considering our options for dinner.

There weren't a lot of them. When we weren't planning to stay overnight, we didn't pack much. We had our choice of cup noodles or canned soup. I still couldn't complain. That was better than a dinner of survival food, and they were both way better than going to bed on an empty stomach.

As the food cooked, she sprawled out in the grass and watched me wrestle with the engine.

"So, any luck?"

"Not really. Since we're sticking around anyway, I've started taking some parts off to look for damage, but…"

"We really do need to learn how to repair it better, huh? I wonder if Natsumi would give us more in-depth lessons if we offered to pay her or something."

"How could she teach us how to work on it, though? For her to show us how to fix things, they'd have to be broken in the first place."

"Maybe she could bring us in to work on other diesel engines or something. I bet she could figure something out."

"Then how about when we get back, you call her up and ask her about it? Since it seems like the two of you are pretty good friends these days."

"Mmhm. Maybe I will!"

Judging by her tone, Toriko hadn't noticed the edge of annoyance to my voice. It wasn't that I had anything against Natsumi. Way to the contrary, actually. She had something against me. If I so much as mentioned Akari within earshot of her, she'd immediately puff up like some territorial animal. It would have been funny, if it wasn't such a pain.

"The poor AP-1, though…" I said. "When you think about it, we're really asking a lot of it. This thing was designed to putter around in flat tobacco fields, not go off-roading."

"Do you think that's why it broke?"

"I dunno. It seems reasonable, doesn't it?"

Toriko rose to standing and walked over. She rested a hand on one of the vertical posts in the AP-1's middle arch, giving it a soft pat. "Poor thing… You did good. We're going to get you fixed up, okay?"

I smiled to myself. That was one sentiment that we shared. That first time that I realized that I'd bought a tobacco-farming machine—the first time I realized it while sober, at least—I'd worried that Toriko would think it was pointless. She seemed just as fond of it as I was, though. The AP-1 was our adorable little workhorse. Like a pet that we'd adopted together, or something. We had a moral obligation to fix it up.

I finished removing a few components that were blocking most of my view of the left side of the engine, giving me my first good look at it. One big issue I was finding with this engine—since it was so much larger than anything the AP-1 was actually meant to use, there wasn't much room to work on it. Natsumi had been smart to put it in the middle of the vehicle so it wasn't confined to the original tiny engine compartment, but that still left me leaning over the tracks and around the vertical posts in the center.

There really wasn't much to see there, though. It was mostly just the side of the engine itself, covered in ridged cooling fins. Above was the air filter, or at least where it had been before I'd removed it for a better view. Toward the bottom of the engine block was a wire that ended in sort of a cap. I vaguely recalled her mentioning those wires going to the spark plugs.

Just in case, I gave the wire an experimental tug.

It pulled right off, without a hint of resistance.

Frowning, I slipped it back into position. It resisted for a moment, before sliding onto the tip of the spark plug with a click. A subsequent tug showed that it was now firmly attached. Somehow—probably during all that rocky terrain—it had worked itself loose.

From her vantage point back on the hillside, Toriko asked, "Something wrong?"

I didn't respond. Now that I knew what I was doing and didn't feel the need to check each part for damage, it didn't take long to reassemble the engine. At least, not to reassemble it just enough to run. Once it was fit for operation again, a few minutes later, I stood up, walked back to the driver's seat, and turned the key.

There was only the briefest pause before the engine growled to life.

"Well," I sighed, "I fixed it."

I sat on the slope of that hill, eating my cup noodles and staring down at the AP-1.

There really wasn't any room for debate. We would've had plenty of time to get back to the gate if we'd left right when the AP-1 broke down. If we'd left after our initial attempts to diagnose the problem, we might have made it back in time if we'd really hustled. Now? No chance, even though the AP-1 was functional again. It would probably take us fifteen minutes just to pack up and put out the campfire, and I still needed to finish putting the engine back together.

At this point, there was no doubt about it—we'd be sleeping in the Otherside tonight. All because of a single renegade wire.

After we ate and finished reassembling the AP-1, we had a bit over an hour before sunset. We decided against making some coffee over the campfire—even this late in the evening, it was pretty hot outside, and with as much trouble as we'd had sleeping in the Otherside before, caffeine didn't seem like a good idea. Besides, we'd been out moving around in that heat, too. Simple distilled water from the jugs that we hauled around tasted pretty refreshing right now.

We ended up sitting next to the campfire as we watched the sun creep toward the horizon. Already, it was barely visible past the trees in the distance.

"You know what this is missing?" Toriko said. "Something to roast over the campfire."

"You did cook dinner over it…"

"That's not roasting."

"So what, you want to, like… turn a chunk of meat on a stick over it?"

"Marshmallows! If you're sitting around a campfire, it's gotta be marshmallows. We could make s'mores."

"Marshmallows seem kind of bulky to add to our equipment."

"We could pack them sometime that we know we're going to be camping out. Camping's supposed to be fun!"

"If you say so."

"Have you ever had s'mores, Sorawo?"

"Nope."

"They're great. You'd definitely be on my side here if you had."

"It's just a toasted marshmallow and… chocolate and stuff, right? Couldn't you make that over a gas burner or something in the surface world, any time you wanted?"

Toriko shot me a pained look, like I'd just utterly betrayed her. "It's not the same."

"Why?"

"It's not the same…!"

Our bickering tapered off as the sun started sinking behind the horizon. I think we both had the sense that if anything dangerous was going to happen, that would be the moment for it. As the last slivers of light vanished, our surroundings went through the same dramatic changes that we'd seen before.

It was like somebody had flicked a switch. The sky shifted through a spectrum of blues, briefly lingering in an unnatural, vivid shade that made me deeply uneasy. The rustle of wind stirring the grass stopped. For a moment, a profound, almost unnatural silence reigned. Then, new sounds crept in to fill the vacancy. Birds chattered. A howl rolled across the landscape. Somewhere nearby, something rustled through the tall grass.

My hand twitched toward my gun as my eyes sought out the sources of the nearby sounds. The plant-filled glitch city, the face dogs, the yamanoke, and those kudan… I'd only seen the Otherside at night a few times, but each and every time had been awful. Satsuki had apparently advised Toriko to only explore the Otherside during the day, and that was one of the few things that we could agree on.

"I guess we should probably head into the tent, huh?" Toriko said.

"Yeah, probably…"

Still, neither of us budged.

"What do you think would happen if we stayed out here, though?"

"Probably some monsters would show up. That's what happens at night, right?"

"But we have a campfire. In scary stories, you never hear about a monster walking right up to a campfire."

"Usually not, no… I bet a lot of stuff would start circling us, right at the edge of the light. We'd see glowing eyes staring at us out of the darkness or something. That's a ghost story feeling."

"That'd still be pretty creepy, yeah…"

Off in the distance, something made a horrible screech. Then, a creature lifted off into the air. It was hard to tell how far away it was, let alone how big it was. If I had to guess, though, it was about the size of a person. Against the rapidly darkening sky, I could make out batlike wings.

It seemed that Toriko had seen it too. After prying her gaze away from the sky, she stood up and grabbed her gun. "… yeah, let's go in the tent."

Like the other time that we'd slept overnight in our tent, we laid there and chatted for a bit.

Also like that time, the creepy sounds from outside made it hard for us to fall asleep.

This time, though, we had a new problem. Our tent was designed to hold up to rain and cold. Our sleeping bags were designed to make sleeping in the cold bearable. Just in case those weren't enough, we'd gotten a warm blanket to throw over our sleeping bags.

That was all great when it had been December. It was summer now. When I'd checked the weather before we left, it said that tonight's low would be around twenty-five degrees Celsius. All of our attempts to keep ourselves warm were now conspiring to cook us alive.

I remembered that there were zip-up vent flaps near the top of the tent, and opening those at least made the temperature a little more tolerable. We spent most of an hour experimenting with different configurations before settling on the least uncomfortable one—our sleeping bags on the ground, the blanket on top of those, and the two of us laying on top of the blanket, with nothing over us. Conserving heat wasn't exactly a concern right now, after all.

This introduced other issues, of course.

"Mmnh…"

Toriko made sleepy sounds under her breath. They were paired with the rustle of covers as she slipped closer to me. Close enough that I could feel her body heat against my back, in fact.

"You don't have class tomorrow, do you…?"

"Not until the afternoon. I'll have time to go home and wash up beforehand."

"That's good." As she spoke, Toriko lazily draped her arm around my waist and pulled herself up alongside me.

"If we're trying to stay cool, isn't it a lot easier if we aren't right up against each other…?"

"Probably. I'm pretty comfy like this, though."

"Well, cut it out. I'm all sweaty."

"So what? I like it."

Toriko moved closer. Her breath tickled against my skin. She buried her face against the side of my neck, pressing a soft kiss to it.

At least in the dark, she couldn't see my cheeks burning. On one hand, I was proud of myself. In the earlier days of our relationship, I definitely would have panicked and pulled away. Now, I was only panicking. Toriko was always so bold and unashamed in situations like this. How was somebody like me, who barely even knew my own thoughts, supposed to—

My train of thought was cut off by the feeling of something warm and wet pushing up against the side of my neck.

My muscles seized up in shock. My first thought was that some weird Otherside creature had infiltrated our tent. Only when it started sliding up the side of my neck, paired with the feeling of a soft breath, did I realize that I was dealing with something arguably even more alien than the brain-eating slug that I'd been imagining.

Is… is she licking me?!

Toriko pulled away after another moment, smacking her lips. "Bleh. Tastes like sweat."

"What did you expect?!" I rolled over and gave her a firm shove. "Back! Go over to your side of the tent!"

She giggled with delight, batting my hands away to defend herself from my counterattack. "You're the one who made that theory that the Otherside wouldn't bug us if we did that kind of thing, weren't you?"

"I don't care!" Just to drive my point in, I sat up, snatched my pillow off the ground, and swatted her with it.

"Oh, that's how you wanna play it, huh?!"

Toriko's pillow soon smacked into me in retaliation.

What had to be the first-ever pillow fight in the Otherside ended after only a few minutes. There wasn't really a lot of room for maneuvering in the little tent, and after our pillows smacked into its walls a few times, we had some legitimate concerns about breaking something. Besides, all that movement really wasn't helping us cool down.

That seemed to finally satisfy Toriko's need to make camping fun. After that, we both fell asleep before much longer. Maybe she'd been right about the mood keeping us safe, because we woke up in pretty normal sleeping positions, rather than curled up in terror like that first time. I still thought that had a lot more to do with the pillow fight than the… licking.

We unzipped the tent and stepped out into the early morning light. We probably looked pretty funny like that—our hair and clothes still messy from sleep, stretching and yawning, with guns in our hands. After all, there wasn't any guarantee that something wasn't waiting out there, ready to pounce on us.

There wasn't, though. Here in the daytime, the Otherside was safe once more. Or, well. As safe as it ever was. Compared to the night, that was a huge improvement.

Neither of us had classes until the afternoon, so there was plenty of time to get ready. Instead of rushing right back, we settled in for breakfast. Breakfast, in this case, was coffee and CalorieMate. The campfire had burned itself out overnight, but if it was just coffee, we could prepare it on the gas burner.

"You know…" Toriko said. "It sounds like something from a commercial, but I think coffee really does taste better when you drink it outside while watching the sunrise."

"Does it?" I tried a sip of mine. "Hmm. It just tastes like coffee to me."

"Maybe you just don't have my refined palate."

"Or maybe you're imagining things."

"No way." She turned to look out over the surrounding area. We weren't that high up, but we still had a pretty good view. "But… we did pretty good, right? The AP-1 broke down and we were stuck here overnight, and neither one was a big problem. We're not half-bad at this."

"It's definitely a lot better than we would have done back at the beginning, huh? Like, that first time we wandered into the Otherside at night… those Marines probably would've had a breakdown if they found us sitting around a campfire eating instant noodles instead."

"Well, we wouldn't have the tent if we just wandered over here."

"We could still start a fire though, right?"

Toriko leaned over and dug into her bag. After a moment, she thrust her hand in the air, holding the fire starter kit. "Affirmative!"

"Still… I've been thinking. Maybe we should brush up on our wilderness survival skills a bit. Things went okay this time, but what if the AP-1 had gotten trashed? Something like that would destroy our supplies, too."

"Or if we just wandered over here and didn't have the AP-1 at all... If we really want to be safe, I guess we need to be able to survive without bringing anything in from the surface world, huh?"

"Going that far is probably a bit much, but yeah, basically. So… maybe we should try camping out sometime? In the surface world, I mean."

Toriko's head snapped up. Her eyes were practically glittering as she looked toward me. "You think so?"

"Well, yeah. How else are we going to practice this stuff?"

"Fishing!" she immediately blurted out. "We should camp somewhere that we can go fishing, too."

"Why fishing? We never see any fish in the water over here. Besides, if we lost our supplies, that would include our fishing poles too."

"If we get good at fishing, we'd still be better off if we needed to improvise. And we have seen rivers and lakes. I bet the fish are just hiding, like those deer."

"Then they'd be creepy mutants like those deer, too."

"They're probably still edible, though."

"Fine. We'll go camping and fishing."

"Deal!"

As we packed up the tent, Toriko was already excitedly talking plans. She wondered if we could find an inflatable raft small enough to haul around on the AP-1, with the fishing poles that we were clearly going to get. She wanted to get a dutch oven for cooking, too. And, of course, she wasn't going to be content with just marshmallows. If we were roasting stuff over a campfire, we'd need to pack hot dogs, and hot dogs would necessitate buns, and then...

Toriko, you really are such a kid sometimes…