Using a quill is an exercise in patience, frustration, and self-control in deciding not to smash the ink well against the nearest rock. Whoever made it look effortless in movies was lying through their teeth. You don’t just dip the quill in the ink and write, oh no.
By the time it got too dark to see what I was doing, I had ink all over my fingers—it stank of rotten eggs for some reason—and my writing desk was a mess of squiggly blobs. Crystal laughing hysterically did not help my mood.
I had to give up on my attempts when I ran out of sunlight. Sure, Eternity could’ve provided more, and Crystal’s lamp was, somewhat, enough to see by, but I thought it better to rest my eyes. I wasn’t giving up in frustration, nope.
My plan had been to try and copy the text from the shield, break it into bits, and see what did what, if anything. The interface rewarded conscious effort so I was a bit surprised I didn’t get a quill skill or something. Or maybe it was because I hadn’t managed to write a single legible thing for all my effort.
Oh well, I hadn’t managed to get what I wanted, but did understand the system better… I think. I decided on changing the tactic.
“That thing you do, with Tusk,” I began as we settled down around the lamp. “When you make him grow big. Is that rune magic?”
I had felt awkward to grill Ielup about her healing magic. She’d already done plenty for me and didn’t strike me as the kind of person who had patience for useless questions. Crystal, on the other hand, I felt no remorse about pestering.
“Crystal no know rune magic. Crystal know blood magic. Best magic. Strong magic.” The gnark grinned up at me, eyes twinkling. “Crystal can teach. For price.”
I grimaced at the very idea of blood magic. “Yeah, I’ll pass.”
Seeing the red stuff coming out of me was fine, generally. But, as I’d discovered the first time my son cut his forehead on a door handle, I do not handle other people’s blood well at all. That is to say, I fainted at the sight of his blood, and my wife had to call her mother so the two of them could take him to the ER for stitches.
What I’d seen on the riverbank popped into my mind for a moment and I shuddered. Vomit splashed the back of my throat and it took all my will to push it all away.
Doing stuff to blood was definitely something I had no interest in whatsoever. Crystal may as well have offered me dung to eat.
“But I saw you writing runes when you did your thing,” I countered. “At least they looked like runes.”
Crystal laughed and waggled a finger at me. “Human no know nothing. That no runes. That words for power. Different. Very different.”
The shield lay across my lap as I tried cleaning the grime off it. I traced one of the words engraved on its edge. “Is this a word of power?”
“No. That more complex. Rune magic no use words. Rune magic use formulae.”
Lovely. Of all the things I could’ve chosen, I had picked the one that was bound to be unintuitive to learn.
Generally, I had a good head for algorithms and formulas. Hard to do the work I used to without that. The problem was the lack of an instruction guide to work with. A good engineer knows to always RTFM: Read the fucking manual. Easier said when there’s no fucking manual at all, and the one creature that could shed light on how everything worked had directives not to.
Learning more from Crystal didn’t seem like the way to go about the whole rune thing. My method would probably result in something, if I managed to get a single result with it.
So, I had a shield. And I had a sword. And I had one more point to spend on a skill. I could wait until I reached the dungeon and orient myself based on what I’d need there, but I also wanted the MP boost. That one hurt me the most as my skill activation time was still measured in seconds. Decisions, decisions.
In the end, I took out the sword care kit I’d received from the smith, unpacked it, and set to work on my sword. The smith had said that cloudsteel doesn’t degrade easily, but it can go pretty fast once it begins. On the upside, if a cloudsteel weapon is cared for properly, it can be pretty much indestructible. I used the whetstones she’d given me, in the order she’d taught me, and allowed my mind to wander while my hands stayed busy.
I now had a goal to achieve with more tangible results than just see what’s in the dungeon. I needed a plan. “Failure to plan is planning to fail” was a saying I’d spent years drilling into my constantly rotating cast of underlings back at work. Now was no different. Industrial deployment or dungeon assault, things always went better when you had a plan to cling to.
The data I had to work with was woeful. The dungeon existed, it was infected by something, and had also infected the rest of the surrounding area. I could expect more glitch artefact creatures waiting in ambush, as well as hostile villagers if Crystal was to be believed.
“Eternity, why does a dungeon infection affect the villagers?” I asked to the soothing sound of whetstone on cloudsteel.
The dragon lay on its belly draped over my shoulder, watching with interest how I worked. It answered after some consideration. “An infection pollutes the flow of mana in the affected region. As most interfaced individuals use ambient mana in their work, they can come in contact this pollution. Physiological and psychological effects may manifest if enough corrupted mana accumulates in the body. It is not uncommon for this to happen.”
“If I purify the dungeon, or fix the damage, or whatever you want to call it, will the villagers go back to normal?”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“In due time, yes. The dungeon may need to be forcefully purged and… I cannot say more.”
Analogy time. If the dungeon was equivalent to a water pump, then I needed to first find the source of the pollution and deal with it. Then purge whatever remains in the system and restart the cycle, and I’d need to do this several times until the water ran clear. Eternity might’ve been cagey on details, but I thought I had the gist of the issue.
And I was the only one that could go inside.
That left me with one green problem and one pink one.
“I think it would be best if you gave me the key, Crystal.”
The gnark snarled and hissed from where she was trying to sort through her loot of blades. “No. Mine. No give.”
“You can’t come in with me. Far as I know, only I can go into a dungeon. I think it would be best if I went alone altogether, so you and Tusk don’t put yourselves in danger.”
“No,” Crystal objected and underlined it with a sharp sweep of her hand. The vehemence caught me off-guard. “I go. I help. Gnark princess always have plan.”
“And the plan is?”
“Scream and make noise. Draw villagers away. You no hurt them. If human dies, Crystal find other—”
The sound cut off while Crystal was still yapping. I blinked. Noise returned immediately after. My jaw dropped.
“You eat fly?” the gnark asked, head cocked to one side, confused. “Why stare?”
My eyelid fluttered and I had to clasp my hands together and squeeze so I wouldn’t start yelling.
“Eternity, did you just mute Crystal? So I couldn’t hear what she called me? She called me what I’m supposed to be, right?”
“You’re not supposed to be anything, Klaus,” Eternity answered, barely moving on my shoulder. “I am responsible for the momentary silence, yes. Though the me that’s accompanying you is not responsible.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I cannot say.”
And now we had a new wrinkle in our relationship. If I didn’t know any better, and I really didn’t so was reaching for meaning, I could swear Eternity was making an effort of getting around its limitations in small, yet annoyingly obtuse ways.
Eternity was a fragment. My Eternity, that is. I’d suspected it since Velin said they didn’t have the same relationship with their interface that I did; and in how it took to the dragon avatar, as if it enjoyed itself. Also, when I came out of the dungeon the first time around, the system message mentioned syncing with the main consciousness. I had that recorded in my Weird Shit file.
I recorded this newest mention as well, just to keep on hand. Eternity could’ve answered with a simple yes or a no, but had chosen a way that gave me more information.
Or maybe I was too tired after two days of excitement and reading too far into nothing. I’d sleep on it and see how I felt afterwards.
For the time being, I returned my attention to the shield and my plan. Cracking Eternity was in my to do, but not a priority now. If the fragment, or whatever it was, had meant me real harm, then it was doing a piss poor job at getting me killed. That sort of incompetence I could live with.
“Fine, you can be decoys,” I said finally as Crystal and Tusk built themselves a nest out of the junk of dead warriors. “Do you have a map of the village?”
Crystal tapped her forehead. “Map of all forest. Here. Best map.”
I lifted the cloudsteel knife and aimed the perfectly sharp tip towards her head.
“Right, then. Let’s get in there and get that map out so I can read it too,” I suggested, grinning. “Do I start cutting at the ears and open you up like a melon? Or do you prefer I crack straight from the top?”
“You not funny.”
“I try not to be. Draw me the map, please. Need to know where I’m going if I’m gonna do this stupidity.”
Stealth was not in my skill set, neither from Oresstria nor from Earth. Somehow, in all my travelling around with work, I was never required to sneak up on a robot arm. I did have to sneak by some process engineers a few times, when projects ran woefully behind schedule and I didn’t feel like getting interrogated, but that experience hardly qualified me for what I had in mind to do.
Hurting people was not in the cards, no matter who they were or what they were controlled by. I wasn’t going to go chopping heads off or forcing my way through a mob of helpless villagers just to get to the dungeon. Granted, I didn’t even know anyone in the village, but what did that matter? People are people, and I planned on looking them in the eye after all was said and done.
That meant I needed to get past them. If the place was as populated as Carmill Hill, then it would be a right pain in the ass to get where I was going.
So I waited while Crystal found a suitable patch of dirt and began drawing with a finger. My hopes withered a couple minutes into her art exercise, her idea of a map consisting of a few squiggly lines that meant nothing at all no matter how I stared at them.
“Village here,” she said, quite proud of herself as she stabbed a finger at one of the indistinct blobs. “Dungeon here.” She showed a different blob next to the first. “Rest not important.”
Lovely. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes, feeling a headache coming on.
“Is the dungeon outside the village?” I tried.
“No. Dungeon in middle of village. You no see here?” She tapped the first blob again, smudging it entirely. “This village. Dungeon in village.”
“But you drew it… nevermind.” I scooted over to her and drew a line through the dirt. “This is a road, yes? The village has a road, I assume, yes?”
The gnark nodded, squinting at my line. “No road so small. Tiny road. Road bigger.”
“Sure, but bear with me. Does the village have a gate?”
I got a nod and then drew a perpendicular line to the first. “So, here’s the gate. We go in through here?”
Again, she nodded, squinting at my drawing and tilting her head one way then the other, as if uncomprehending. Which, probably was true. I took for granted all the ways in which modern life had made reading a map so easy back home. Would a hermit in the forest understand how to picture a top down map?
“Where do we go from the gate?” I guided her along. “To get to the dungeon. Is the entrance a well or something?”
Light dawned on her face as she realised what I was doing. “Yes, well. We go to well. No water in well. But entrance there.”
What followed was me being tempted several times to chase Crystal around the graveyard to actually cut open her melon and see what sort of twisted, spongy grey matter festered inside. Because it took no fewer than fifty fucking questions, several do overs, and a whole batch of threats of bodily harm—to Tusk, because she laughed if I threatened her directly—before I ended up with a halfway decent map that I could read.
If, and this was a major IF with capital letters and all, Crystal was accurate, then I was in for a hell of a time trying to get close to the entrance. Not only was Harriet’s Heap a sprawling village, but its homes were communal, arranged in tight clusters that allowed for almost not hidden nook. There were a lot of guard posts along the wall and throughout the village itself. No matter which end we’d go in from, there would still be a lot of empty, very exposed space to cross, and the rest was trying to squeeze between tightly packed homes.
Because the village was built like a bullseye, radiating outward from a central building which Crystal described as a kind of trading post, most of it was in view of something. There were at least five layers to the whole thing, and the dungeon was somewhere in the third one, among a couple of heavily armed guard posts.
Lovely. Everything was lovely. This would definitely not end with all of us mounted on spikes…