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Side Story: No Destination

Nightshade had come to a hill overlooking an acid-rainy town in the [down_realm], and she was down to three umbrellas.

She tasked herself on a forced march along the one dirt road leading into the place. The rain was just a drizzle, but she could hear the umbrella sizzling. Before holes could appear, she opened the next umbrella and threw the last one away, letting it melt into the road.

She should be happier. She had woken up with the Witch of Taterity as her mark, but how strange, she didn’t feel like barging into the Tower and rubbing it in everyone’s faces. It wouldn’t bring her any satisfaction, and it wouldn’t bring her the justice she deserved.

Perhaps she just couldn’t care about them right now. Passing under the gate that had been left open, she didn’t mind the damage she was taking from the mist that came with the rain. Starting from the day she had sworn against the Tower, her journey had been long, and it was the thought of ‘The Journey’ that had given her purpose for so long.

Now that it was over, she was in dire need of company — and only now had she realized she had always been lonely.

***

She found an inn with a banner above it that said “EIQHT CLUB,” some of the letters having melted. A drop of rain leaked from the last umbrella onto her shoulder with a sizzle, and the wind was getting stronger.

She went inside, throwing the umbrella out and letting it sink into the puddles.

The innkeeper was behind the bar on the other side of the room. A mustached gentleman more refined than the typical resident of this realm, he’d fit more in a casino than a low-budget place like this.

As she made her way to the bar, two men stood from their seats and grabbed each other’s collars with throbbing veins on their foreheads.

“Huh? You wanna take this outside, buddy?”

“Rain check, you idiot! You wanna schedule this instead?!”

“Damn straight! You’ll get what’s comin’ for ya!”

The two sat down again, pouring each other drinks in a continued attempt to knock each other out some other way. The first time Nightshade had seen something like this, she’d tried to step in and stop the unnecessary violence.

It had turned out violence was always necessary. So barbaric, she recalled thinking, but now, she found it curious and, in the most academic way possible, cute.

Ah, I sound like that anthropologist from the UpRealm. Thoughts like “I don’t really get it, but go on” when watching people do offbeat things suddenly found more appeal.

“Don’t mind them,” the innkeeper said. “They have a Hobby of ‘Starting Bar Fights,’ but not ‘ending’ them.”

Nightshade snapped around to face him, nearly having forgotten he was there. She shook her head. “It’s not a bother. Space for one?”

“You’re lucky.”

He reached down under the counter and got back to her with the keys, but the moment he put it on the counter, the doors opened, and the smell of the rain melting the road wafted in again.

Someone with a cloak-and-dagger build came inside, closing the door behind them. They approached the counter beside Nightshade, and she briefly saw the face of the person under the hood — tragic, aloof, every bit the permanent expression of someone who wanted to be left alone.

Once upon a time, Nightshade would have found it pitiful. Now, she understood why some people preferred the bittersweet.

“Any space?” a woman’s voice said.

The innkeeper looked at her, then at Nightshade. “Looks like the two of you’re going to have to fight for it.”

The woman looked at Nightshade with neither annoyance nor joy, and Nightshade found that weird. People around here were either hassled or ecstatic to fight weaklings, so why did this one show no such expressions?

Whatever the case, Nightshade knew she would lose. The woman had the look of a veteran, and here in the [down_realm], Nightshade’s “somewhat strong” translated into “pitifully weak.”

Regardless, she had to fight. To refuse to fight seriously was the greatest insult. Tourists would be somewhat forgiven for not knowing about this custom, but Nightshade had been here for a while, and she had no such excuse. It wasn’t like dying was unpleasant, anyway.

She awkwardly looked at the cloak-and-daggered woman, then at the innkeeper. “Well, there’s no saying no,” she said. She put down a few coins as payment for the arena fee.

“Let’s make this quick,” the woman said. She took off her cloak and gave it to the innkeeper as payment. It turned out she was just an unwashed vagrant underneath, nothing more than a dirty tunic and a pair of boots to dress her up. The two ornate daggers didn’t match, reminding Nightshade that she was still faced with a bona fide resident of the [down_realm].

***

The innkeeper brought them down a set of stairs to the cellar. With the pull of a lever, the casks retreated into the walls, and the place turned into a fighting ring. Torches lit up in a circle, and what had seemed to be beer-stained ground at first turned out to be scorch marks.

Nightshade and the woman prayed to a tiny figurine of Enthusia placed on a pedestal to the side of the room. A blue glow descending on both of them marked the figurine as their new temporary respawn point. With this, they were ready to fight.

They stood and faced each other. Beads of sweat rolled down Nightshade’s face. The woman had already readied her daggers, and her eyes were even sharper. Nightshade’s loss was a given.

From the side, the innkeeper’s hand in the air — came down.

Pocket seeds! Nightshade threw a bag of them in an arc against the woman, who had already launched into a frontal dash, truly the best choice for a veteran fighter against a mere magical gardener.

Nightshade didn’t let that intimidate her. In fact, she had practically ascended to a higher state of consciousness…having already given up. If she was going to lose, then it was better to do things at a comfortable pace just so she wouldn’t fudge such basic magic and make a fool of herself. That’d be a fate worse than death.

She focused on her breathing, supplying magic to the seeds. Each one sprouted: first a leaf, then entire stems exploded out of their shells. The cloud of seeds became an expanding foam of piercing briars — but the activation time was slow. She expected her opponent to break through, and so she kept a second bag of seeds in hand, ready to turn herself and her opponent into pin cushions.

…But the breakthrough never came. Instead, there was a telltale blue light in the corner of her eye. No way. She turned towards the figurine of Enthusia, and the woman was there, reconstituting pixel by pixel. I…won?

“It seems Miss Witch has the might and got the right.” The innkeeper turned towards the woman. “Rematches will cost an extra fee” —

“No need.”

“Very well.”

The woman left and climbed up the stairs as the innkeeper approached Nightshade. She was still slack-jawed over how fast the fight had ended. Shouldn’t the people here be stronger than this?

“Miss, your keys,” the innkeeper said. She faced him and absentmindedly opened her palm, letting a skeleton key fall into it.

“A-ah, wuh, sorry, wait, did I win?”

“Are you, perhaps, the ‘Wandering Witch’ ?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Nightshade choked and covered her mouth. “I have an alias…” she mumbled. Among all the customs, this was the one she couldn’t fully accept. ‘Wandering Witch’ was at least descriptive, but who thinks ‘Crashing Meteor’ sounds cool, huh!

“It’s understandable since you don’t live here, but the person you fought just now was the ‘Loser.’ She has never won a battle, so you could say this was a fortunate matchup for you.”

She should have felt pity, but the Loser’s eyes had not reflected the indignity of her alias. It was just too unexplained. … It had been a while since she’s had a chat.

“Mister, I want to let her stay in my room. I’ll pay for the extra bedroll.”

“It’s a capsule room.”

“I’ll give her a shower!”

***

Nightshade rushed upstairs, but the woman had gone. The cloak was still on the counter. The two men, tipsy, pointed out the door.

She slapped down some coins and took three umbrellas from a basket, rushing into the rainshower outside.

Why would she head out into an acid bath like this! She could’ve just waited it out for a few hours! Nightshade went up and down the street. The woman couldn’t have strayed too far, but if she was walking around taking constant damage, time was of the essence. The woman might turn into a puddle, and Nightshade, not knowing where she would respawn, would never find her again.

She took out a new umbrella. After a quick lookaround, she couldn’t find anyone along the big street, so she broadened her search to the alleys. Most of them were dead ends, but there was one that kept going.

There, it was dark. The wind blew in from behind, and it was absolutely the sort of place where thieves guilds held mugging contests.

There was nowhere else for her to look. She stepped inside, taking care to keep the umbrella pointing behind her, against the wind. She called out “Hello!” every now and then, and then more often as it got dimmer.

Amid the static noise of rain, there was the clink of a glass bottle behind her. She turned around, but she kept her umbrella pointed against the wind, and she only saw the ground. A bottle rolled towards her from the bottom edge of the umbrella, sailing past her feet as it was pushed along by the wind.

It had to have rolled in from somewhere. She lifted her umbrella slightly, and she caught sight of a pair of unlaced boots, its soles melting into the ground.

“Miss with the cloak and daggers! Is that you?” she called. She approached whom she thought was the woman, but when she was close and began to raise her umbrella, she saw a pair of pants.

She stopped. Pants — she wasn’t wearing pants. She also caught sight of a hand, but it was twitching and covered in a black mist.

Her heart raced and her feet went cold. She patted the wrong pockets for a bag of seeds before she found the right one. She kept her movements to a minimum, hoping it wouldn’t be interested in her.

The umbrella flew from her grasp, ripped away by a black hand. She watched it fly away then change direction with the wind to disappear into the sky, and now she was face to face with an anomaly of this world. A man’s head was cocooned in black bandages, and where his clothes had melted, veins of blue magic pulsated, confirming what Nightshade had feared:

The man had become an Abyssal — an aberration caused by overdoing his Hobby to a truly extreme degree. What was one doing here?

In the [down_realm] where everyone’s Hobby had something to do with fighting, entire cities would be leveled just from one person falling into Abyss, and it would take the fighting power of either a whole clan or an angel to put them under control. Being in front of one was like staring at the light of a nuclear bomb the exact moment it went off.

In desperation, she threw her seeds at it, but they wouldn’t activate. … Yeah, what did I expect? The nature of Abyss was to suck up everything around it, magic included, and magic was the only weapon she had. She had already been deregistered from the figurine in the inn’s cellar, so if she were to die…

It raised its hand. Guess I’ll die. She closed her eyes and clasped her hands together in a prayer pose, resigning herself to a fate of respawning at that last temple — a month’s trek away from civilization.

Something rang like a tuning fork, and there was a flash so bright that it pierced through her closed eyes. Carefully opening her eyes, she found the woman at the apex of a slash, making contact with the claws of the Abyssal which were inches away from Nightshade’s face. The woman’s daggers were shimmering in rainbow colors, but not just those; the woman’s hair, too, shimmered in the same way.

The Abyssal made a sound like an infant’s cry as it staggered backwards. It regained its footing and clawed from the left, and the woman deflected it diagonally downwards with one dagger, a rainbow of auroras exploding out from her weapon at the point of contact. She lowered herself to the ground and kicked up at its chin, making more auroras and sending it bending backwards.

She swept its legs and drove both daggers into its chest as it landed on its back. It gurgled and screamed like a newborn dragon, only to be silenced by a blast of black light that came out of its chest, absorbing not just light but also the sound of the wind and rain. The light whipped out like tentacles, coming together and solidifying into a pillar that shot up to the sky — thinning until it was gone.

The sound of the rain came back, and Nightshade was still just standing there, staring at the woman. Nightshade’s skin was dissolving into the magic-stuff that made up her body, but the woman’s wasn’t. She was just drenched, able to stand in the rain forever.

Nightshade had heard rumors of a group called the “Exorcisa.” They were said to be fallen angels, broken automata, and people from another world taking on the enemies of Amatoria. If such heroes were real, it would make sense for them not to be affected by a little acid rain.

She snapped out of it and opened the last umbrella, running to the woman and taking her under its shade.

***

The woman had tried to leave the inn again after her shower. Nightshade latched onto her back, but her speed didn’t decrease, and they ended up three steps from the door.

“I’ll get you your cloak back!” Nightshade pleaded. “Just chat with me for a while!”

The woman stopped, turned, and took the closest seat. She’d been so decisive that Nightshade had been left clinging on the whole time, and she’d ended up hanging from the backrest before she realized the woman had become a willing participant.

She got to her feet a little confused, walking around the table and taking the seat across from her. The woman looked at her with dead eyes. Nightshade leaned left, and the woman looked right. She leaned right, and the woman looked left.

She sat straight and pouted. It had been so long since she’d had a proper conversation, yet even after bribing someone into talking to her, she wasn’t having it! Did the world hate her so?… Maybe they shared something in common.

The woman had come in here looking like a vagrant, which made no sense in itself. This wasn’t a world where access to basic services was paywalled; one just had to ask around and there was always someone willing to give away what you were looking for.

That could have only meant that the woman had simply never asked. She’d never approached anyone for help; she either didn’t actually need help and preferred an ascetic lifestyle…or she had fooled herself time and time again into thinking that she had never needed help to begin with.

It was a shot in the dark, but maybe, just like herself, the woman hadn’t spoken to anyone in the longest time.

The rain hadn’t let up. “Sorry for asking you. It’s just that I haven’t talked to anyone for a really long time,” Nightshade said. “Do you know the old temple, about a month’s trek from here? Yeah, I went there and came back. It’s a two-month roundtrip. If you hadn’t saved me back there, I would’ve had to spend another month getting back here!”

Nightshade chuckled her bad luck away. The woman was resting her chin on her palm, hiding her mouth with her fingers. Her gaze was pointed diagonally down.

“It just feels weird to be back in civilization, you know? Everyone’s going on with their lives like normal. I mean, I haven’t even seen anyone around here. There wasn’t a guard at the gate, and everyone’s indoors just waiting out the rain. Walking in here was like…I just found a fancy cave to wait out the rain in, you know? It feels like I haven’t gotten anywhere, and I’m still on my way.”

Nightshade had shaken her head, widened her eyes, and waved in the air in every manner of gesture and expression. The woman hadn’t moved a muscle.

“I feel like I’ve already long passed the place I’ve always wanted to go to, and I got the answer to a question I’ve always asked — but it just wasn’t what I expected at all! I don’t even remember how I got there.” She chuckled. “Ah, but it wasn’t a bad answer. Fighting you a while ago made me think about it. You didn’t look like the type who needed to fight to prove you’re strong. You were really cool, you know? Your alias” — she shrugged — “it doesn’t fit you at all.”

“Of course it does.”

It surprised Nightshade that she would speak at that moment and with those words, but she shook her head. “But you saved me back there! Of course you’re strong!”

The woman looked down at her hand. She flexed her fingers, but dissatisfaction mounted on her face. “That can’t be true. No matter how much time I spend, I don’t grow stronger.”

She has a growth condition? “Did…the Exorcisa give you a troublesome condition?”

The woman snapped towards her and blinked twice. “You don’t make any sense. I’m not anyone. Why did you even look for me?”

Nightshade opened her mouth, but an answer wouldn’t come out. She had only been curious about the woman at first, but she ended up talking about herself, and she even overstepped her bounds and asked the woman about a past that she obviously wouldn’t want to bring up. Why was hindsight always late to the party?

When the silence had gone on for a second too long, the woman stood up. Desperation took grip of Nightshade and she reached out for the woman’s arm, gripping it tightly enough to surprise both herself and the woman, who turned around and glared at her.

The hostility never reached her. It had been in the moment of action that she had finally found the best words for herself, and the more she thought about it, the more true it became — true enough that a simple glare couldn’t blow it away.

She released her grip, unable to meet the woman’s gaze. “Sorry. I-I just don’t want to be alone.”

The woman’s glare lessened into a stare. “You don’t have a Hobby of lying, do you?”

Nightshade chuckled. She felt see-through. “I’d end up saying ‘no’ either way, right?”

The woman looked at the empty table, and after a moment, sat back down with her. She said nothing.

“Thank you,” Nightshade said, “and sorry.”

“For how long?”

“Huh? I can be apologetic for the rest of my life if that’s” —

“How long have you been alone?”

“Oh.” She paused to think about it. Time sure flies. “Five hundred years. Maybe.”

“Superficial relationships and never staying in one place.”

Nighshade nodded sullenly. “Yeah.”

“How far have you traveled?”

“Er — all the major cities and most of the towns. Why?”

“I will not be joining you” —

Nightshade sad.

“Rather, I will hire you as a guide” —

Nightshade happy. She nearly jumped from her seat, and she cupped her cheeks and swayed as she smiled. “Really!”

“We’re not sightseeing.”

“Ohh, I see, I see.” She covered her mouth. “It’s a hush-hush job, right?” She leaned forward. “You’re gonna hush someone?”

“It’s you.”

Nightshade completely ignored how irate she was and put out her hand with a smile. “I’m Nightshade. You can pay me in listening minutes.”

The woman shook her hand. “Lei-rei. You get five minutes a day.”

Nightshade laughed. She, who no longer had a destination, now had someone who would listen to her stories — with whom to go on a journey in this besieged paradise.