Without the level up, I don’t think I would’ve been able to walk after that little scuffle. Scars covered my arms, neck and chest, more gathered by the passing day. It was becoming absurd how much of a glutton for punishment I was turning out to be. Where this newfound passion for pain came from, I had no idea, but I suspected those willpower points played into it somehow. What would happen, I wondered, if I were to spend more points in that? Would I become reckless? Or just shrug off pain entirely? What was the connection?
Still, I had a point to drop into attributes, and one into skills. With everything going on today, I wasn’t in a mood to explore any new skill, but I really wanted the MP boost that came with spending that point.
The other free point I dropped straight into constitution, figuring that would improve my survival odds, though that was a matter of perspective.
Considering everything I’d fought and survived, the strangest thing was not feeling overwhelmed by the challenge. With Ielup’s various treatments working as well as they did—and this was fucking alchemy as far as I was concerned, the kind of medical miracle work that Earth would’ve killed for—I felt oddly undisturbed my continuous run of bad luck.
I could take punishment like I never would’ve imagined just a week ago, my wounds healed remarkably quick, and I never caved under threat of pain.
I’m going insane. I must be. No sane person survives this shit and doesn’t go batty.
As always, punishing and intrusive thoughts got shovelled somewhere deep and dark, to simmer in their own juices until the pressure made my head explode. For now, I had a shield to find.
“How exactly do you think I’ll find a shield?” I asked as Crystal led us in crossing a bubbling brook, the water as high in places as my calves.
“Crystal know place. Has much loot. Human pick.”
Oh lovely. Place with much loot to pick through. I was willing to stake a sandwich on us going grave robbing. It would fit the gnark.
Eternity hadn’t said anything else since its sudden blurt of concern for me. If anything, the dragon looked to be drawn in and reserved, as if pouting actually, and I had no idea why. It had saved my life.
“Eternity, did I thank you for earlier?” I asked.
“There’s no need to thank me. There is no need to mention it at all.” The tone was the usual dry monotone, though I could feel some undercurrent that made the words ring oddly concerned.
“You broke a rule,” I hedged, voice low so Crystal couldn’t overhear me. “You have a rule about helping me and you broke it.”
“I cannot say,” came the answer, and there was a hint of warning in the words.
This went into the file: Eternity wasn’t a silent, neutral observer, not as much as it would’ve liked be. I wondered what had tipped it over. Grinning, I considered that as a mystery to solve later. If anything, I could bet it had to do with the strange visitor from Carmill Hill and Crystal’s clearing.
I got the sense Eternity wanted to add something to what I was scribbling down in my notes, but it decided against it at the last moment.
It’s all right. I’ll get to the bottom of your secrets yet. I’ve all the time in the world.
It felt good to be given this morsel to mentally turn over like a fidget toy. Not only the concern, but the extra personality Eternity had been demonstrating. Maybe that also played into its concern? Or was it something to do with the prospect of another infected dungeon? Was I actually meant to seek out and disinfect these places, and Eternity now had a clear and immediate use for me?
However, I soon had to draw out of my increasingly paranoid thoughts and focus on the moment. With a silent hiss of pleasure, Crystal revealed where she was taking us.
Trees thinned out and we emerged into bright sunlight, in the middle of a field of death. Ancient death, more precisely, because the several hundred corpses littering the ground were reduced to white bones and overcome by moss, mud, and various vegetation. On the map, we were quite a distance away from Carmill Hill’s influence, but way off from the marker I had for the next dungeon.
“What happened here?” I shielded my eyes with a hand against the glare of the sun, and took in the scene.
The forest clearing was huge, at least a couple hundred metres in diameter. On the other side I could spy tall hills climbing higher and higher, like silver waves on a stormy sea. In the clearing itself, vegetation had consumed the dead, saplings and small bushes sprouting out of empty rib cages or through hollow eye sockets. It was a disarming sight, especially as the pervading scent was one of flowers, with an undertone of musty earth.
“Here battle,” Crystal said unhelpfully. “Old battle. Much treasure.”
Much grave robbing, she meant, but I didn’t point it out.
“All of this is going to be rusted to dust,” I said instead. “I doubt I’ll find anything good here.” Metal tools, be they for work or slaughter, do not do well when exposed to the elements for long stretches of time. Rust is pretty much the great equaliser when it came to the fate of iron.
“Stupid human,” Crystal walked through the field of corpses as if she owned the place. “No metal. Cloud steel. Mythril. Dragon weave. Graves of heroes. Graves with much treasure.”
Hard to think of the desiccated dead as anything more than worm food, and not even that. Tusk dragged the still helmeted skull off a corpse, making an almost obscene racket. He ripped it off, then batted it around, drool spraying from his mouth as he chewed on the helmet and the grey, dry bone.
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“Put that down. You don’t know what’s pissed on it,” I said, but the molerat didn’t listen.
Eternity eventually settled on my shoulder and looked around with its usual lack of interest.
“Is this alright? Taking from the dead, I mean.” I felt awkward for some reason, and wanted to fill in the silence.
Eternity puffed some smoke and flapped its wings as if shrugging. “They are dead. They do not need their weapons anymore.”
It didn’t follow up with anything, just emitted a general feeling of sad and grief.
Life must continue. I had to remind myself that that was Eternity’s main motivation, as far as I knew. A field of dead soldiers likely didn’t sit well with it.
“Do you know what they killed one another over?” I made my way deeper into the clearing, looking about for something usable.
“Yes.” Eternity breathed out a cloud of smoke. “It was silly. What they tried to defend and to conquer has crumbled to the same dust as they have. A shame.”
They weren’t human. Most of the dried-up skeletons looked insect-like, with lanky builds and at least two pairs of arms each. The skulls were greenish-grey in colour, elongated, and vaguely resembled the heads of ants from back home.
There were also some sort of hornets, crickets, and a lot of other types of creatures. Variety was high.
What they’d worn in battle was an eclectic assortment of leather, fur, and chain mail. Very little actual plate that I could see. All primitive stuff, the sort of thing I often saw in museums back when I toured the castles of Romania with my wife, ages ago.
Most of the bodies were half-buried or utterly hidden beneath the blooms, and their weaponry stuck out of the ground here and again. As expect, most of it was just scrap, rusted beyond use, or crumbled to dust. But among those bits and pieces, there were also some that looked as if they’d just been forged.
Blue blades, like mine, stuck out among the green, their tips aimed at the sky, edges glistening. I leaned down and dug one out, still clutched in a skeletal hand. I had to pry the fingers apart by force, wincing at the dry cracks of bones disintegrating.
I examined the knife in the sunlight. Cleaned and polished, it would make for a really good offhand weapon. Or a steak knife. Whichever use came first.
Tusk had grown bored of the skull and batted it away with a great swipe of his paw. He hadn’t yet deflated from his monstrous shape. Next he dragged out a full corpse and began noisily chomping on the dried, mud-caked bones.
“No, Tusk,” Crystal warned from beneath a fern-like bush. “No eat that. You get bad tummy again.”
The molerat stared at the gnark for a short time, then he threw the corpse away, grunting with disgust.
It took the better part of the day to sift through the remains, dig out bodies, and search for something that I could wear or use to defend myself. After the fifth armour set that we pried off proved to be filled with all assortments of creepy crawlies—some of which Crystal ate—I decided I would rather keep risking my skin than wear those ancient rags.
The sky turned a fiery orange, then began dimming to a bruised purple when I finally caught my second lucky break after the knife.
Near the centre of the clearing, where the fighting had been at its most intense judging by the piles of bodies, we took apart one mound of the dead. Lichen and moss had grown over every corpse, with a notable couple having yellow flowers sprouting from the empty eye sockets. Several small critters scattered when we destroyed what was, essentially, a small ecosystem. Beneath the bodies we found a whole cache of weapons and, most importantly, three intact shields. Two of them still had the arm straps fastened by bolts, and wrapped around their previous owner’s forearms.
I dragged out what I knew from video game lore to be a kite shield, though I also knew from a lot of fantasy reading that it was actually called a heater shield. It was tear-shaped, black, and engraved with a script I couldn’t read. The paint on it hadn’t flaked at all with the passage of time, nor had the tiny, golden letters that covered its outer edges.
“Crystal claim the rest,” the gnark said triumphantly.
I waved her off. “Yes, yes, take whatever, they’re not mine. I think I’m keeping this.”
The moment I got the straps on my arm and hefted the solid piece of metal, something clicked in my head.
[CONGRATULATIONS]
[YOU HAVE GAINED ACCESS TO A NEW BRANCH OF YOUR SWORD APTITUDE SKILL TREE]
[NEW BRANCH ADDED: SWORD AND SHIELD APTITUDE - INITIATE]
Huh. Neat. So, just taking up a weapon would open the skill tree for it? In that case, I stuck the sword into the ground and lifted the knife up, holding it in what I assumed was a fighting grip. I considered striking a pose, but the text popped up before I got to do it.
[CONGRATULATIONS]
[YOU HAVE GAINED ACCESS TO A NEW BRANCH OF YOUR SWORD APTITUDE SKILL TREE]
[NEW BRANCH ADDED: BLADED OFFHAND WEAPON APTITUDE - INITIATE]
Neat again. Several skills showed up in grey, most of them to do with using both sword and knife, or using the knife together with the shield. Cool stuff. To start training them, I’d have to try and figure what they were and use in battle.
The shield showed up in my inventory list, helpfully named.
“Heater shield of thorns?” My eyebrows rose as I turned the shield over and held it up with both hands. I tried to make out the writing, but the language was alien.
No, that wasn’t right. Not alien but like that feeling when you almost make out a shape in some pattern, or when you suddenly see a figure in the storm clouds. If I focused and squinted, I could just make out what the text said, as if the words stood on the tip of my tongue.
It hit me after several minutes of making faces at the dull black surface: I was getting echoes out of my [CRAFT: RUNE] skill tree, the one I hadn’t touched yet. The feeling waxed and waned, as if waiting for me to reach out and grab… what?
“Human, we rest here.” Crystal shuffled closer, clanking and clanging as she barely carried her overlarge backpack. Tusk was by her legs, stumbling about, deflated to normal size. “Here is good. I set ward. Yes? No wandering.”
I shook my head and came out of my daze, then looked around. Night encroached, the shadows of the trees lengthening. A shudder ran straight up my spine as I thought I could see glistening eyes where the foliage and tree became one solid wall of darkness.
Well, it was at least true that on the field we could see anything approaching. But the thought of sleeping in what was effectively a mass grave sent my skin crawling. Still, weighing up the pros against the cons, I decided I could do with a bit of discomfort if that meant I wouldn’t wake up with more headcrabs raining down on me. Or tree fathers.
I almost missed the mechabirds at this point. At least those had been easy to kill and kinda silly-looking.
Now that I had the shield and Crystal was busy setting up a lamp that she somehow got out of her bag, I found a suitably lumpy place to sit down—turned out to be the chestplate of some ancient hero—and stared at the shield.
I had one more point for a skill, and a shield that got my rune senses tingling. It was time I stopped pussyfooting around the other half of my class and explored what I could manage with runes. Or glyphs. The writing looked less like what I considered proper runes, the Nordic variety, and more like some kind of free-flowing script. Elvish came to mind, but it wasn’t as pretty as that.
When the candle inside the lamp caught flame and the feeling of peace enveloped us in the small bubble of what Crystal claimed to be safety, I set the shield down against another corpse mound, and decided to experiment.
“Trade you a sandwich for something to write with,” I offered.
Crystal beamed and immediately jumped into her pack to pull out an inkwell and a black feather, both neatly wrapped in leaves.
“Crystal made ink herself. Made quill too. Trade?”
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