This Really Is a "Tradition" in Your Line of Work

"Will Mannis get bitten to death? The Endless One may be the Serpent of the Moving Mountains today, but it's facing a pack of wolves in full force. There are more than a dozen Wolf Calamity Lords, not to mention a Silver Wolf holding down the fort. No matter how you look at it, that's not something a sealed demigod can handle, is it?"

Tossed into the Star Gate vortex, Triss gripped Murphy's hand tightly. Unable to speak in this chaotic space, she asked him by shaping the words silently:

"Why is the usually wily Endless One so fierce today? Did you promise it something?"

"How am I supposed to explain this to you?"

Murphy's face was expressionless as he waited in the lightless Star Gate to be thrown out. He replied,

"Mannis probably wants me to owe it a huge favor. I don't know how that guy plans to escape a desperate situation like that, but I'm sure Mannis never does anything without being prepared. It definitely has a way to handle things. We're about to come out. Get ready."

The vampire governor pulled Triss into his arms, holding his wife close. Her enormous, dragon-wing-like wings folded around him in turn, shielding little Murphy.

The next moment, the two vampires shot out of the high-speed whirlpool of a starry toilet bowl and were flung through a dizzying spin into an entirely different sea of stars.

The stars here were just as vast and desolate, but unlike the cold, graveyard-like sky they had just left, scattered with mountains and fragments of land, this star sea held a whole tree.

There was only one tree in the entire starry sky.

It had been dead for a long time. With neither leaves nor branches, only its massive, weathered black trunk rose from