Shango’s POV: Day 7

My focus lapsed. Not for long, a moment at most, an instant at least. Just the span of a few thoughts. Hardly any time at all, really. It was, if anything, impressive that the tiny stretch of time was long enough for Solitaire to waltz over and fucking kill a man right in front of me.

I spent a while staring at the ruined mess he’d made of his head, then a while longer staring at him. Solitaire finally snapped me out of my stupor. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even flash an expression at the killing. Just knelt down beside the dead man, pulled out the other bandit’s knife, and started pressing the blade into his mouth.

That, at last, was too much.

“You fucking killed him.” I snapped, earning a glance from Solitaire. He looked irritated.

“Yeah.” He said, turning back to whatever the fuck he was doing. That gave me something else to focus on, distracting me even while my thoughts were already churning around like some damned whirlpool.

“You executed him!”

He didn’t even look up this time, only shrugged.

“I needed him dead, do you know how much human teeth sell for in time periods like this? I don’t actually, but I know for a fact there was a market for them. No prosthetics, you know?”

It was sickening, how casual he was about everything. Literally sickening, I dropped down to my knees, hurling up a streak of acrid vomit as my throat convulsed and nostrils burned. There wasn’t much left in my guts, after the hunger and last spew, but it was enough to twist them, The snow’s frigid touch barely even registered to me.

When I looked up, Solitaire was still poking away with his knife, still focused entirely on the work.

“You should get over this quickly,” He sighed, “I need help. We’re looking at close to a hundred teeth between these three and so far I’m averaging less than one per minute, I want to be here for as few hours as possible.”

“YOU FUCKING EXECUTED SOMEONE!” I couldn’t keep myself from screaming any longer, everything about this was wrong. I might have whispered for all Solitaire’s reaction.

“I did.” He replied, calm as ever. “And I’d execute another if it improved our chances of survival, these bastards were camping out and killing people who tried to gather medicine in a world with barely any at all. You want to mourn them? Do it quietly, now stop distracting me, this molar’s really deep.”

I stared at him as he worked, and Solitaire didn’t even glance back. In the end there was nothing more I could think to say. So I just watched and waited, not able to bring myself to start hacking away at the men’s mouths, but not willing to stop him either.

We did need the money, with the debt we’d accrue by having Cádo healed we’d need all the money we could get. And there were certainly worse people to get it from than this one.

Worse corpses, really. I couldn’t argue at all with taking the teeth, but the way he’d brought that hammer down…The way he’d looked at me afterwards. I cursed, grabbed a knife and knelt down beside one of the corpses, getting to work.

It was a relief when we finally finished, pockets filled with bloody, gummy teeth and hands covered in red crusts. An hour had passed. Not as long as it could’ve been. Not as long as it would have been without me. Luckily we’d had the fire nearby while we worked.

“Let’s get the sap.” I grunted, feeling drained already. More than that. Hollowed out. Somehow tearing the teeth out had been harder than fighting, or what little fighting I’d done. The kills had been quick, near-instant even, just one action and then a display to feel bad about. This had been an age of prolonged, sustained decision-making.

And my reward was a bloody, sticky, revolting cluster of dubiously valued enamel tucked away into my clothing.

We moved on for our prize, trudging along through the snow, and while we walked it occurred to me that we’d just won a damned three on two. Something about that had to have progressed us, surely.

[Appraisal]

* Class: Emperor

* Level: 1

* Condition: Fine

* Modifiers: None

* Statistics: Strength 5(3), Speed 5(3), Dexterity 6(3), Stamina 5(2), Toughness 5, Alertness 8(6), Charisma 9(8), Intelligence 9(8)

* Inventory: Jeans, shirt, jacket.

* Class abilities: Appraisal I

What the fuck.

Nothing. No mention of experience, no skill points, no stat changes, no level increase. We’d gotten fuck all from that. The bottom dropped out of my chest as I walked, suddenly overcome with the urge to find whoever dropped us into this hellhole and show them all the neat tooth extracting techniques I’d spent an hour mastering.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

We’d never seen jungua sap before, never even world-built it, but both of us recognised it when we finally found the right spot.

I’d imagined the stuff as runny and sort of amber-coloured, almost like olive oil. Solitaire, apparently, had envisioned it as purple and gluey. When we found it, it was a green, frictionless sludge.

There was something to be inferred, there. I could understand one of our two conflicting mental images taking precedence, we were the writers after all, but neither one had stuck in this case. Why was that?

Hold on, back up. How did we tend to settle disagreements in the writing room? Well, we’d argue our points, try to convince the other. Often there was a fair bit of shouting involved. Then…Someone would compromise, or more frequently everyone would, and we’d end up with something completely different than any of us originally suggested.

A synthesis.

So that was what we could expect from all the blank spots in our world-building, some new congealment of our different ideas that we could only predict by having some big argument in the exact right headspace and coinciding onto the same conclusion.

In other words, we couldn’t bloody predict it. Splendid.

Solitaire wasn’t exactly happy when I mentioned by observation, and worse, he could find no fault in its logic. We got started on our way back to Jhigral, sap in hand.

We must’ve been getting used to the cold, because the next twelve hours passed by like a breeze. A hundred mile per hour breeze, mind, carrying gravel in its winds, but we’d still take that over the journeys from before. Before we knew it we were back in town, marching in past the wall, and looking at everyone with a bit less…Fear.

Seeing the place again, it felt transformed. Took me a moment to realise that the change was all us. We’d killed men, Solitaire directly, me by helping as best I could. After something like that it was hard to be scared of the dark alleys and mean looks from before.

Hard to be scared, and so much easier to focus on the other details. I felt my heart throb as I saw people lying about without homes, trying in vain to find some shelter from the snow between buildings or under debris. Just like we had.

The homeless had never been an uncommon sight where I was from, of course, but seeing this many…Seeing them this withered and starved, I was almost tempted to march over to the nearest guard and stick one of the knives we’d taken from the bandits in him.

I decided against it, something told me that would lead to an undesirable outcome.

Mercifully, we got to Corvan’s shop before I could see much more of the eternal class struggle, and entered the place’s warmth with no small amount of relief. It took a minute more before the old bastard came out to see us, again, but when he did it was almost worth the trip just seeing his face.

We might’ve walked over and started pissing on him to less surprise than that, and when Solitaire pulled out the sap, that surprise quickly turned into a deeper, more considering look. He snatched the stuff up, nodding crisply.

“Alright then.” He snapped, as if affronted to have been shocked at all, “I don’t know how you did it, but a deal’s a deal, I’ll put the worth of this towards healing your friend, and you can all work off the rest.”

Both of us nodded. I could physically feel Solitaire fighting the instinct of every cell in his body to behead and eat the magus while screaming about socialised healthcare, but mercifully my friend kept himself restrained. This time.

A tremble as I remembered what he’d done to the bandit, and then the magus was turning back to Cádo, eyes locked on him, mumbling words to himself as if we weren’t there at all. Neither of us could resist watching.

Magic, at least this world’s magic, was nothing new to us. We’d designed it for fuck’s sake. We knew how sorcerers could instinctively command something they saw as an element, we knew how wizards could learn the “nouns” and “verbs” that made up reality to twist it in particular directions. We’d never seen it, though.

This wasn’t some exposition-dump on paper, it was tangible, real, authentic magic. The arcane happening right before our eyes. There wasn’t a thing in the world that would’ve prepared us for it, certainly not removed the wonder, and so yeah, you can be damned well sure we stayed and watched while Corvan’s hands started to glow and the air around him smelled of ozone.

Healing incantations, that much we recognised, reknitting flesh back together, purging bacteria from places it didn’t belong. Even the magus probably didn’t understand half of what he was actually doing. The room trembled slightly while it all happened, the power at work being enough to bleed out into other, more tangible forms of energy. And Cádo convulsed.

Now, in hindsight, had we known that we’d be accidentally creating or influencing a world filled with actual people, we probably wouldn’t have made magical healing so agonisingly painful.

But we hadn’t known. How could we?! Do you ever catch your idle imaginings to stop yourself from accidentally manifesting an asteroid in some world you don’t even know exists? No, of course not, because that would be stupid. So we maintain that what happened next was completely not our fault, and just a horrible accident.

It still screwed us to watch, though.

Cádo was the strongest man either of us knew, and here he was thrashing around, moaning like some tortured rat. Corvan snarled at the sight, glancing at the two of us irritably.

“He’s freakishly strong.” The magus snapped. “Hold him down.”

We hesitated, almost argued, then did. It was for Cádo’s own good.

Mind you, holding down an olympic athlete is actually quite difficult. Solitaire did it easily enough, big bastard that he was, he'd also inherited some wiry, rat-like musculature from his family that made him bizarrely strong for his build. I’d inherited wiry muscles, but no uncommon pound-for-pound strength. Even one-armed, even with his ribs broken, Cádo nearly sent me flying more than once.

As the healing went on, we tired, and Cádo seemed inexhaustible. The strain was getting worse, his adrenaline-fuelled convulsions building stronger, before, at last, they started to die down. The magus sighed.

“Not reforming bone anymore.” He breathed. “Now I’m just repairing the flesh around it. We’re almost done.”

Sure enough, it was all over a minute later. We were panting, gasping, aching across half our bodies and standing with hair plastered to our scalp in sweat. But Cádo had a new colour to his cheeks- apparently an indicator that white people were no longer dying- and his inhalations were finally coming strong and unbroken.

We’d expected that, what took us by surprise, though, was when this glorious bull of a bastard actually opened his eyes, looked around and sat up not ten seconds later. Even the magus was stunned.

“So.” Cádo began, throat croaking and scraping from days of disuse. “Did I miss anything important?”