I land on a roof. It is made from stone, presumably the local stone by its look. That is heavy. It will support my comparatively small added weight. I see nobody outside. That makes sense. Two of the buildings have two stories. They’ll make better watchposts than the wall. Those corpses do not look like the crows have been on them. That is, if crows eat goblins. I don’t know about that. Anyway I still think this post was attacked recently.
I wait 10 minutes. Then I use an idea I just have had. I use my mirror spell to look through a window whose shutters are broken. Nobody inside. The windows have no glass. I fly into a work room. The floor is wooden, so I keep my weight reduced lest it creak. This room seems to have been used for repairing tools. I wait a few minutes to find out whether my entry has been noticed and then advance. The ground floor is full of vats and features a stairway into a cellar. I think I am in the building used for making cheese. That suggests that the I am standing on lots of cheesy goodness.
Do I really want to do this? I think of the people depending on me. They defended me. I will do this. But if I go down there I am committed. There is no second exit. I could not fly away. If somebody enters I will have to fight my way out. I make myself a spear, just in case. Somebody may be in the cellar. I hear nobody, but that means nothing.
I decide to go for a dramatic entry and fly down the stairs, spear extended in front of me. I almost ram myself into a board full of juicy round cheese wheels. Let’s see how many I can fit into this spatially extended backpack. Most of their weight is negated, as is their mass. It feels like the negation of mass is less complete, though. Turning a corner with this thing is a problem.
Holding up my right hand to shade my face after the semidarkness of the cellar I run into a young man bounding down the stairs. There is some kind of tool in his right hand which he brings up while he yells something I don’t understand. The spear in my left hand comes up while his hand comes down. I can get my head out of the way, but his improvised weapon strikes my left shoulder. In the first few seconds it doesn’t even hurt while I hear a snapping sound. My spear finds his belly, his hands clutch the shaft and he topples alongside me down into the cellar.
I stop feeling. In fact I lose control of my body. I do feel the warmth of a healing spell and the numbness of a pain block. My body draws Marental’s sword. My left arm is rigid. My body tries slipping off the backpack, but stops when I hear a sound a human body should not produce. A bearded man with a wood chopping axe is running towards me through the snow. My body falls into a stance with slightly bent knees, right foot back and angled outwards, while the sword goes into a guard position I identify as plow. I feel myself casting a spell, which causes a feeling of painful, icy rigidity in my left shoulder. My left hand goes to the pommel of the sword. I feel mana going into the sword.
The frantic attacker swings his axe. I step to the right, my left hand rotates the sword by 90 degrees. His axe misses me narrowly. My left hand flips the blade, as it hits his wrist, then slightly angles forward and flips back, hitting him in the throat. The draw of mana increases and the blade tears out his throat up to the spine. I am sprayed by dual jets of blood, while the attacker collapses. Nevertheless my body goes into ox guard, while my left hand goes back to my side and the spell fades.
My wards generate an interesting effect. The blood does not stick to me. It slowly trickles down from my body. I keep standing. I should feel extremely spooked. Instead I am kind of calm. Until a wave of pain from my shoulder hits me. The pain block cannot protect me from magical abuse I inflict myself. Tears cloud my vision.
I want to protect myself. I should feel horror at killing two people in less than five minutes. No, let’s be honest. I murdered them to steal their food. I just feel nothing. I construct a shelter, just upright and much larger. It takes most of the rest of my reserves. I start drinking neutrinos. Strength pushes out numbness. I conjure a shelf behind me and sit down. That allows me to add a raised floor keeping the snow out. Carefully I extract myself from the backpack. I extent the shelf and lie down. I fall asleep.
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Branislava is walking to the gate to take the evening watch. Her companions have removed her from the schedule of night watches, but as short on people as they are, they can’t spare her the day watches.
She arrives at an empty chamber, whose gate is slowly swaying in the wind, a bit a snow having been blown into the chamber. That rules out her cousin changing the baby or having gone to relieve herself. She pokes her head out of the gate. Nobody. She retreats and sounds an alarm.
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I am back in my featureless dreamland.
I am not all that surprised to see a version of myself in a combat stance staring into infinity.
He does not react, as I approach him. „Hello Myself“ I address him „I am intrigued to meet you.“. He turns towards me. „I was supposed to do a job.“. „You certainly did a decisive job“ I answer. „I was not made to do that. Incidentally you created the need to do this job by your foolishness. You had made a necessary decision, but tactically you should have carried that backpack in your hand and operationally you should have dealt with these people before you cut off your own route of retreat.“. I hang my head. I know he is right. „You are another aspect of my mind.“ I state after a delay. He nods. „I am the assassin. An incomplete assassin. You called me up by deciding to initiate a hostile action. I am useless now.“ he explains. „We are one. How about you release our body“ I ask. „The useless shall not be sustained“ he replies in a monotonous voice.
I look into his eyes. As if he were not there. I hesitate. For minutes. Then I embrace him. „Why?“ he howls and dissolves into clouds I inhale.
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Zewrepa sounds like a bagpipe trampled by a rhinoceros. „These spikes were made by sacrificing all the people in her village, including her husband and most our relatives.“ Helena explains. Zewrepa adds something like a flute melody. Then she shakes herself. „We need to go out to look for her. The snow has probably covered her tracks, but we can hope. For that reason I will go out alone first. If I see nothing I will signal for you two to also come out. We will swarm out downhill. We’ll have to risk calling out her name if we become separated. She has no chance of surviving the night outside given the weather. Let’s go. We are wasting the last daylight.“ Zewrepa orders.
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I pick up the sword now aware of the cleaning function included in its enchantment which I promptly use. It seems to me that my healing spell does not directly work on bone, because its inorganic matter is strictly speaking not alife, though the bone as a whole of course contains living cells, which allow me to affect bone indirectly, hence slowly.
I need to approach this in a scientific manner. I fixed bone already, but I did not really use any elegance. If it were wood I could in a sense slowly shape it, though just recreating an unbroken version would be far easier. Can I restore it, on a purely temporal basis? Yes, that works. It does not feel warm like healing does. It is rather an electric, tickling feeling that does not remove the pain.
I create myself a new, though shorter spear and a separate table to let my backpack rest upon when I dissolve the shelter.
I am standing in the shadow. The valley floor is already dark, but the summits around me are still lit. Should I just fly away? I consider it. There may be more resources here and nobody has moved the corpse I have made. I decide to search the premise.
There is a man shivering on straw in a wooden bed. The fire in the hearth will soon run out of fuel. I can feel it. The man is not lucent. The room which looks like a combined kitchen, bedroom and living room, the only heated room among the cottages, holds dried vegetables and mushrooms strung up under the roof.
I am even pacing a little. I could heal him. And then? Try to lie to him about what happened claiming that I just arrived? And what if he finds out. I exhale. I put a hand on his head and errect a pain block, leaving the sepsis, that, as my senses inform me, will kill him in a few hours, untreated.
With difficulty I slip back into the backpack and fly away slowly. Visibility is poor.