Part of it was the terrain. While in the forest I could’ve probably found a suitably soft patch of moss to cuddle into, here I only had flat, lumpy earth to contend with. Bones had this lovely way of poking out in the strangest places around our little camp.
After moving my spot around the lantern for the fourth time to escape the various bits of rib cage poking between my own ribs, I gave up on sleep, turned to lie on my back, and stared at the black sky above. My pack made for a suitably plump pillow at least, and the night was pleasantly cool.
I considered Crystal’s lantern and how much faith the gnark put into the thing. For my part, I couldn’t help sneaking looks towards the forest, expecting yellow eyes at the edge of the clearing at any time.
Nothing even rustled as the night was eerily quiet and utterly still.
Maybe trading for a lantern wouldn’t be the worst idea, especially as I hadn’t seen the gnark doing any sort of magic around the thing. It just worked.
What the hell am I doing?
Crystal had snuggled up into Tusk’s side after eating, and the two of them were blissfully asleep beneath the overhanging leaves of some weird fern, a mound of desiccated corpses offering a shielding wall in case of wind or rain. Tusk snored like a chainsaw ripping through wood, but I’d slept in worse noise and in far less pleasant places. I count roach-infested highway motels with rickety doors as worse than a very literal graveyard in the middle of the forest. That says something about what I’d accepted as normal in my old life.
It wasn’t the snoring, or the eerie forest silence that accompanied Tusk’s concerto. It wasn’t even the chill or the discomfort of laying on the hard earth with nothing to offer comfort. Had I been wiser, I would’ve picked some shit up while in Carmill Hill. Much as I liked the iepurran attitude of minding their own business at all costs, at least one of them could’ve pointed out what an absolute twat I was being.
Anyway, my own head being too loud kept me awake. I couldn’t tune that out as I could the molerat.
Eternity sat curled up on my chest and stared at the lamp, tiny eyes glittering. It didn’t say anything and I was happy it didn’t. My mind was doing a lot of talking all on its own.
What the hell am I doing here?
I didn’t need to do what I had planned to do. I really didn’t, in spite of what I’d told Crystal. Sneaking into a village of very likely hostile people? With no help at my back, armed with just my weapon and shield? To do… what? Find a dungeon, go into it, and probably find something worse than that bear?
Surviving the bear had been a fluke. I knew that. It was impossible not to replay that whole thing in my mind and see how I’d scraped by on desperation and a buttload of luck. A different move from the bear. An errant swipe. Its body twisting differently when it fell on me. So much could’ve gone a hair’s breadth differently and I wouldn’t be here to think about doing it again.
Moreover, these were people in the village! I was about to go in and do something that was going to impact very real lives in very real ways. If I survived to do it, of course.
Much as I tried to trust Eternity’s assessment that fixing the dungeon would somehow be a good thing because it purged corruption, I actually had no idea what my actions lead to. I operated on conjuncture and guesswork, at best on hopeful deductions.
Was the corruption bad? Maybe. It made creepy half-mechanical monsters and stank. Both bad signs, true, but what did I really know about this stuff?
Part of all my grousing was simple cowardice, I knew that. Much as I ran through the plan in my head, I could still find ways in which it could go horribly wrong.
And it was barely a plan. We had chosen a route. Tusk would be our distraction. I would be following Crystal around the village up to the dungeon, trying to stay undetected for as long as possible. Once at the well, Crystal would open the gateway, I’d go in, and from there it was bear time. Probably. Most likely a real dragon that would gnaw my face off. Or a dip in acid. Who knew?
It wasn’t even like I could take my sweet time in there either. Crystal and Tusk would try to run out of the village, but how far could they go? What if they got caught? What if I didn’t manage to do what was needed in there and they’d just be stuck waiting on me?
So many what ifs… My head spun and my heart raced. If I navel gazed any harder I’d probably twist in on myself and turn prawn-shaped as my stomach tried to self-digest.
I drew in a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. Then exhaled. And did it again. And again.
Panic is never helpful. You can’t solve stuff through panic. Panic is fun only as long as you don’t indulge. Now, you’ve had your moment of self-pity, but that’s all you get. It’s time we found solutions.
My inner voice is a bit of a jackass when I’m stressed. Right there and then I only wanted some time to wallow in my self-pity and allow the brain fog to take me. Instead, I started cataloguing what I had control over, what I could rely on, and what was going to suck.
Naturally, I could rely on myself and my skills. Even while I barely began growing into my strength, I was pretty decent with the sword and learning at a pace that felt supernatural. The more I swung the thing, the easier it became to do so, each interface reward offering a hefty dopamine hit.
Using the shield would probably work pretty much the same, and I already felt new knowledge rooting in my mind. I’d never touched a shield before, but I knew how to hold it up, how to brace my back for impact, and how to face and deflect a blow rather than cower in fear. If I was honest, I looked forward to the first real test of the thing on a live enemy.
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Had it not been such a tremendously stupid idea, I was ready to walk out of the lantern’s light and face a tree father just to see how well I could defend myself.
I had control over myself and my skills, and that heartened me. I’d done well enough so far. Almost died repeatedly, but managed to scrape by on stupid stubbornness alone, so I could probably handle whatever else came my way. Backing off from a fight was starting to feel like backing off from living. It scared the living daylights out of me that I couldn’t point out the moment that had happened.
Eternity shifted on my chest and its head turned to look up at me, tiny yellow eyes glittering in the fae dark of the night.
“You should rest,” it said, voice low. “You may not get another chance.”
It was probably right. A twinge of exhaustion dragged at the corner of my eyes and I felt the scratchy need to yawn.
“You’re being weird,” I said instead of listening, turning my eyes up at the inky black sky. “Since when do you offer advice? Up to today you barely spoke to me of your own volition.”
It hesitated as if getting ready to say something, then it turned its head away and stared at the lantern again. It might’ve been my imagination, but the light seemed just a tiny bit brighter when Eternity glared at it.
Resisting the urge to get up and walk around among the long-decayed dead, I instead opened up my skill list. It gave me something else to think about rather than the ever-expanding list of stuff that would suck so bad come the morning.
System skills were the second thing I could consistently rely on, and it was high time I got a fourth one. As I was coming to learn, my skills were versatile enough that the way I’d been using them so far was rank amateurishness. With time and practice I expected I could unlock a lot more utility out of them, if not even new shapes.
Every time I activated [ADRENALINE SURGE] I had the strong feeling that I wasn’t doing something right, like there was a big well of complexity to plumb, but I only had a sieve to draw water with. Terrible metaphor, but it served.
Now, with my head resting uncomfortably on my supply pack, and Eternity acting like a moody cat on my chest, I began browsing the selection of skills my new aptitudes had unlocked.
[BULWARK]
[INCREASE BY UP TO 50% THE AREA OF PROTECTION OFFERED BY A SYSTEM SKILL, A TRAINED SKILL, OR AN ARTEFACT]
[COST: 4 MP / activation + 1 MP / 2 seconds]
As usual, the wording was spectacularly vague. What did an increase by 50% mean in this case? Would my shield be half as big whenever I activated the skill? That would make it almost twice as heavy. Would it protect people that weren’t directly behind me? Who knew? But the effect did sound as if it had merit, especially as I’ was growing increasingly aware of how much easier my life would be if I managed to not get gored at every turn.
[STALWART]
[MITIGATE INCOMING DAMAGE BY A LARGE AMOUNT AND INCREASE YOUR DEFENCE PERFORMANCE]
[COST: 10 MP / activation + 5 MP / second]
What the fuck that even mean?! And the activation cost was patently absurd. That would drain my MP in less time than it would take me to figure out what I was up against. With my measly MP pool, getting this skill, no matter how spectacularly powerful it could be—if at all—was simply not a good investment.
It did come with one particular caveat. Unlike all the other skills so far, this one looked to have follow up selections that were directly connected to it. They remained blurred, but on the list they were clearly connected.
[COORDINATED ASSAULT]
[WIELD BOTH MAIN WEAPON AND OFF-HAND WITH DEVASTATING EFFICIENCY]
[COST: 5 MP / activation + 1 MP / second]
That… meant nothing.
I sighed and groaned, looking through some of the other skills I could unlock. Where was I headed with my selections actually? Up to the moment I hadn’t been giving much real thought to my build since I didn’t expect my early points to matter in the long run.
But picking and choosing blindly, with no goal in mind? That wasn’t how I normally worked, and by now I had gotten enough of a taste of Oresstria to start considering my future.
I was about to assault a village of hostile people, whom I didn’t want to hurt. And I definitely didn’t want them to hurt me or Crystal, much as the gnark liked to get under my skin with her barbs and comments. She had led me to a nice shield, so I couldn’t stay too angry with her usual demeanour.
I picked [BULWARK] and watched my MP bar add another 15 points.
Then it kept going. Instead of blue, however, it grew a green extension that was almost as long as the whole blue part. It didn’t flash.
“The hell?”
“You have reached a threshold,” Eternity said without turning to look up at me. It kept its one-sided staring contest with the lamp. “Your next skill acquisition will come with a bonus.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What sort of bonus?”
“A permanent increase to your energy pool, as well as the ability to combine two active skills. Congratulations, Klaus.”
Considering my blue bar now represented 60 MP, I made a quick calculation regarding the boost the system was promising. With another system skill boost and the whole green bar, I would be well over 120 MP, and that was just wonderful. It made sense that I could now use two skills together.
“You… gave actual information,” I said, still riding the high of this news. “Are you really Eternity?”
“You are not amusing, Klaus,” the little dragon answered. “Your insight allows you access to interface and dungeon information. It is hardly my fault you ask faulty questions normally.”
It was hard not to snort at the annoyed tone in Eternity’s voice. Had it been a larger dragon, it would’ve maybe been terrifying. As was, I barely kept from laughing. Its monotone was all fine and dandy for its countless “I cannot say”s, but hardly fitting for annoyance.
“Lovely.”
With a heave and some contorting as to not disturb the dragon nestled on my chest, I reached over and picked up the shield. My arm fit its straps almost too perfectly, and the weight was light enough that I could hold the thing even while laying on my back.
I raised it above my head and activated [BULWARK].
Nothing happened.
No, not nothing. My MP bar drained and kept draining. I lifted my other hand and touched the side of the shield. Sure enough, there was now an invisible barrier there, paper thin, that made the whole shield much larger than its physical shape promised. It didn’t get any heavier.
Oh, this was definitely neat. An invisible extension of any weapon or gear was a sure-fire way of ruining an enemy’s day when they think you’re cornered. Heck, even if I got disarmed but had the shield, I could use the invisible edge as a last ditch trump card.
And later on, what would [IRON FLESH] do if I got it activated together with [BULWARK]? It was definitely a tantalising idea, to turn my arm into an invisible blade.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but I giggled with delight as I began considering the opportunities for skill synergy once I hit level five.
And I kept on giggling and testing the skill throughout the night, always meaning to get to sleep at some point. Maybe if Tusk stopped snoring. He did, eventually, as he rolled on his other side.
But I remained wide awake, my head aflame with possibilities and plans for the future. When the first crack of dawn opened up the sky, I was just barely dozing off.
There was no way I wouldn’t regret the night’s thinking time. Hopefully, the regret wouldn’t be entirely fatal by the time Crystal got us to where we were headed.
13 15 chapters ahead on (dropping this evening)