Turning over is the hardest thing I have ever done. Straining, my hands as weak as a kitten, I peel myself off the rocks and fall the three feet that remain to the ground. I only wake up a few hours later.
Orange light from the setting sun throws shadows all around me. I try to push myself to my knees, feeling the wind roll over the bare skin of my back, chilling the dried blood from my cuts. I don’t have the energy to make it to my knees. My attempts to conjure my inventory window fail. Odd distortions of blue and black light appear in front of my hand. The wind rustling against my tattered shirt, I fall back into the bliss of unconsciousness.
It is morning, I think, when I stir again. The blinking eyes of a dragon spirit greet me as I come awake. The first thing I notice, other than the worry on Galea’s face, is the stiffness all throughout my body. The black veins are gone from beneath my skin, but the sickly pale pallor remains.
“Water,” I croak through dry lips.
“Here,” Galea says. I look up at the golden lizard. She holds open the inventory window with her two claws.
It takes serious concentration to reach up to the box where I have kept a bucket of water stored. The movement causes the ligaments in my shoulders and arms to pop like an old woman’s. The bucket of water falls to the rocky floor at the bottom of the cliff, half spilling, and I dunk my head inside, sucking down the refreshing coolness.
An attack of coughing shakes me when I finally come up for air, but my head is so much clearer. My entire body protests as I push myself to my knees, the popping of my stiff muscles loud enough I fear it might summon monsters out of the woods. I drain the rest of the bucket, as much of the water spilling down my chest and over my head as in my mouth. A pervasive sense of sickness lingers in my head, the aftermath of a fever, a burn behind my eyes.
“Are you alright, Mistress Charlene?” Galea asks, flying around my head as I toss the bucket to the side.
“Not dead,” I say, falling back against the big rock I landed on. Looking up, I can see sunbaked trails of crimson running down from the top of the rock. “What was that?”
Despite the question being rhetorical, Galea creates a window to show off to me.
Afflicted with Serpent’s Bite Toxin
…
…
…
…
Serpent’s Bite Toxin has been resisted! (Recovery Specialist Threshold)
With a thought, the window expands to the tallest one I have ever seen. Over eight hundred instances of the line “Afflicted with Serpent’s Bite Toxin
“How long was I out?” I ask Galea.
“Three days,” she says. “At least I estimate it to be that long. From the moment you were attacked, my functions were cut. I did not regain my demi-conscious functioning until sometime during the last night, just before I began to incorporate your soul reinforcements.”
“You leveled me up while I was in that state?”
“That is my prerogative,” she says, smiling a toothy grin.
I look down at my pathetic form, my nice shirt hanging off my body, the back completely torn up by jagged rocks. My armor is gone, taken by that son of a bitch. He even stripped my magical greaves from my feet before tossing me over the cliff, leaving me barefoot.
Staring up at the top of the cliff high overhead I feel a deep and powerful anger boil inside of me. The dreams and nightmares of the last few days are blurry. I remember staring at my paralyzed body, trying to move or do anything at all. I remember trying to cry out for help through my seizing throat only to be met with silence. I remember that look on Coriander’s face, that sneer as she told Kendon I had been the one to attack Macille.
I look down at my arm again, the traces of the black veins entirely gone. Kendon had been the one to attack that girl on the Green Mountain, I remember figuring out at least that much. Why though? Was he always a murderer, and I just couldn’t see it? No, that doesn’t feel right to me, but the fog in my brain stops me from thinking about it too much.
The nightmare in the desert of black sand stands out in my mind. I remember every detail, the sensation of the warm sand beneath my fingers, watching my brother climb up the dune ahead of me. I remember with awful clarity the envy I felt chewing up my heart as I watched him smile and struggle. It told me what I never really wanted to admit to myself.
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I was always jealous of him. Ever since Halford was a boy he had always wanted one thing in his life, one single goal, to become an adventurer. All I ever wanted was to crave something as much as he did that goal. I never did. I never could. There had never been anything in my life that I wanted so much as Halford wanted that, not until now. The most powerful feeling I recall from the nightmare, the urge that repulses the rational parts of my mind, is the absolute glee that I felt watching the despair in Coriander and Kendon’s eyes as I held what it was they most desired. If those bastards wanted to steal my life from me, I would take whatever it was they dreamed of.
“Mistress?” Galea says.
I blink, realizing that I have been staring into nothing. I set the fantasy of knocking Kendon and Coriander down aside. That wasn’t something I was going to be able to do any time soon, but I made sure to hold onto the corner of the emotion I felt then, that dark ecstasy.
“I’m fine,” I tell the spirit, making a motion to open the window that displays my personal information.
Charlene Devardem
Human(Level 22 → 26)(Rank 1)
Emperor Conflux
Attributes
Vitality: 37 → 41
Strength: 26 → 30
Magic: 215 → 249
Defense: 37 → 41
Magic Defense: 30 → 34
Speed: 103 → 107
Recovery: 178 → 196(226)
Perception: 27 → 31
Presence: 0
Healing Points: 410
Mana: 2490
Stamina: 774
Free Points: 40
Seeing the drops in all most of my stats from having my items stripped away from me makes the anger and pain spark all over again. I push the anger aside; it doesn’t help me right now.
My Magic and Recovery are far higher than any other attribute that I have. A part of me wants to put all of my free points into Recovery immediately. If it hadn’t been for that attribute, that poison would have killed me for sure. I look down at the rings on my fingers, the only magical items left to me. One is my magical storage ring, something that has been invaluable to me since the start of this passage, and the other is my Ring of Regeneration. I wonder for a time whether I would have even survived if Kendon had taken the rings from me as well.
The trees at the base of the cliff are smaller, grouped more together than those at the top. The canopy climbs away from me, transitioning back towards the towering trees that stretch hundreds of feet overhead. For the first time since starting this competition, I am truly alone. I pull some jerky from my inventory and think about my circumstances.
“Galea, do you have that map still?” I ask.
Galea swims through the air and produces the map of the Passage for me. “I do not know where we are on this map,” she says.
“That’s fine.” Lines of green thread away from the wall of dungeons at the bottom of the map, the East and West encompassed by the parallel mountain ranges that run off towards the North. If the map is to be believed, there were six different dungeons that contestants in the Passage entered. If all of the dungeons contained even a single Soul Cage as one of the prizes for clearing it, then that would mean that there are likely six rank two magicians now among the competitors. I correct myself, there could likely only be five now after Jor’Mari killed that elven man.
“Did Kendon get him too?” I ask myself, remembering the black veins running up the side of Jor’Mari’s neck. “Tits and Honey, what is going on?” One thing begins to crystalize out of the fog that still presses down on my brain, I don’t think that I can trust anybody in this competition any longer.
“Can you at least determine whether we are closer to the Western or Eastern mountains?” I ask Galea.
“The Eastern ones,” she says confidently. “The length of the tree shadows as the sun rose this morning would suggest this, as well as the time it took for sunlight to hit the tree crowns directly after the sunrise. Given that the horizontal length of the Passage is approximately one hundred and fourteen miles, I would estimate that we are within forty miles of the Easternmost edge of the usable area.”
I stare at the spirit as she preens. “You made that up.”
“I did not!” Galea says, completely affronted. “It is a simple observation.”
“You said that you can only know what I know,” I say to the dragon spirit. “I certainly do not know about whatever it is you just talked about.”
“Fine,” she huffs. “Do not take my word for it. Check with your own eyes if you do not believe me.”
I shake my head at the mouthy spirit before looking back to the window in front of me. No, there is no chance that I am going to risk traveling with a group again. If I can’t even trust someone that I thought I knew well like Kendon not to try and kill me, there is no chance that I will trust a stranger not to.
“Which way is East?” I ask Galea. She points out to the trees in front of me. “I will try to make it to the edge of the Passage, near the mountain range. Hopefully, everyone else is going to try and stay clear of the borders of the Passage, and we won’t run into anyone.”
Looking back at the window, I scrunch my nose and try to consider. I no longer have the freedom of trying to decide what will be best for me down the road. I set my sights on the immediate future; I need to do what is in my power right now just to survive this insane trial. A part of me begs for me to put all of my free points into Recovery, and that is certainly an attractive route, but I don’t think that I can go that way.
What I need now, more than anything, is a way to make certain that I don’t end up being stabbed again or having someone get the drop on me. With how I have allocated my free points already, there is only one route to take, Speed. Galea waves her claws over me, a momentary light exploding away from my skin, as I put all forty free points into my speed, determined to break the Speed Threshold before I focus on anything else.
A surge of energy rushes through me as the magic of my soul enhances my Speed attribute. Knees popping, I stand and stretch the stiffness out of my legs. I have to tie my torn-up shirt at the small of my back to keep it from falling off of me. Taking a single step with the intention of jogging into the forest sends a wave of lightheadedness over me. I grunt, taking a seat against the rock once again.
“We will go when my energies have recovered,” I say.
“As you say,” Galea agrees, nodding her head. “However, I do not think that those creatures will agree with your delay.”
Snapping off a piece of jerky, I looked to where her claw points. I squint into the trees, finding a small motion among the general gloom. “Right now?”
As if conjured by my words, a monster of branches and wood steps out from behind the trees. It is a monster in the shape of a wolf, not too big really, but covered in two-inch long thorns.
Fire pours into my fingertips, my mana completely full from three days of no activity. I hold up a ball of orange dragonfire for the monster to see, smirking at the creature of wood and dry twigs. My grin begins to crack as the wooden wolf barks harshly at me, fire spreading over its form until it looks like a nightmare built from burning twigs. Three more of the burning wolves slowly pace out of the cover of the woods to the sides of the first, each lighting up in a flame of a different color.
“Why can nothing ever be easy?”