Chapter 20

“Alright, I admit it. It was a good gamble.”

“I told you,” she replied in a teasing tone. “I’ve got an eye for them.”

“You had an eye for the others as well. Aren’t two of them dead already?”

“Hedging bets. No risk, no reward.”

“Mm hmm, ” the male replied doubtfully.

“He was good enough to almost take your piece off the board, wasn’t he?”

“And almost got taken off in return. What’s with that nonsense about ‘respawning’? He doesn’t truly believe he’s not really killing anyone, does he?”

“It was necessary. He had qualms. It allowed him to become comfortable enough with the process that he didn’t hesitate. Now look at him; he’s a merry little murderer with a chip on his shoulder and a taste for arson. I judged that his qualms at killing were more of a distraction than his fear of death. Now that your little friend has solved that for me, I get the best of both worlds.”

The man rolled all four eyes in distaste, and leaned back, the delicate frame of the car-sized lounger creaking beneath the immensity of his muscles.

The much smaller woman sat perched on top of the railing nearby, teetering carefully on the edge of the balcony. The view behind her was nothing special; to the pair of them, anyway, inured as they were to the wonders of their world.

“So, what do you think he’s going to do once he’s out of the tutorial?”

“Whatever the Hell he wants, Guroug. Isn’t that the point? As long as he stays hungry, he’ll find something to do… And I’m quite certain at this point that his hunger will never be quenched.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Talyssa. You could make a lot of people very, very unhappy.”

She tossed her flame-red hair, the ends of it flickering and fading like a flame, swirling about in a nonexistent breeze. “We all know the risk we’re taking, investing in a new integration. We’ve all judged the rewards worthy. Besides, the Scribe doesn’t give refunds; they knew that from the beginning.” Her smile was practically radiant. “So what if the game’s fixed?”

‎

When I awoke, everything around me was cinders and new growth. Already the first tendrils of green were pushing their way up from beneath the ground, cracking out of charred stumps, greedily consuming the energy that now blanketed the forest. Already, the most aggressive growths were trying to grow fast enough to entrap my limbs, one of them long enough to have sprouted a single thorn that it was trying desperately to cut into my flesh with.

I stared up at the sky overhead, the sunshine bright and clear above me. The sun hung high in the sky, seeming far larger than it had even been before. Assuming this was even still Earth. I doubted that just from looking toward the horizon; it stretched on farther and flatter than it should’ve been when I looked out from the tower balconies, though it was clearly still curved, mountains tapering off in the very, very far distance.

I flexed my muscles experimentally, and felt the plants around me grow more frantic, trying to restrain me with far too thin tendrils. Everything was still a little sore, but I felt like my health and magic were both full. It was barely an effort of will to focus on heating the air around myself, and with a couple seconds’ concentration, the vines around me burst into flames and collapsed into ash. I stood up, shaking the ashes off of myself, and peered around the hellscape I’d created. Not only had the trees burned, but they’d burned for so long and so deeply that many of them had split apart and fallen to pieces, coating the world in ash as fine and white as new-fallen snow. I stretched as I looked around, for once taking the time to just soak in the sensations of my new reality. I still wasn’t sure if this was some kind of fucked up dream or simulation, but… I found myself hoping that, if it was, I would never wake up.

Everything had been so plain, so boring before. I was good at what I did, but I didn’t care about the work. It made me money and kept me fed and housed. I had enough spare money to hang out with friends I didn’t really care about, eat great food, and drink to social requirements before going right back to work.

I paused for a moment in contemplation. I hadn’t eaten anything since I first arrived here, and that was… Huh.

[Trial by Fire]

Survive System Initiation

There are many paths to Power: carve your own. There are many trials within the Tutorial area that may be overcome to grant various benefits. Sponsors are watching, and your performance may curry favor with them.

Rewards will be granted based on performance within the Tutorial.

May the Scribe witness your deeds.

Remaining Time: 22d 9h 12m

Has it really been seven days already? I stared at the clock in confusion, trying to patch together the previous days into some semblance of consistency. The blanket of smoke I tended to take with me had a bad habit of blocking out the sunlight and turning the world into perpetual twilight, making it difficult to actually point to any specific passage of time. I’d just been so absorbed in fighting and levelling that I hadn’t really spared much time to think about things like getting tired, eating, or marking the passage of time. Despite spending nearly a week in constant motion… I was neither hungry nor thirsty.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I sat down in contemplation, taking advantage of the feeling of no longer being rushed. I thought about my skill, [Flameheart’s Hunger] . It specifically referenced hunger, consuming. I closed my eyes, trying to feel around for the sensation of hunger or fullness that had dictated my inconsistent eating cycle for the past several years. I felt… contented, as if I had eaten enough to nourish, but not enough to stuff me. I tried to figure out what I might’ve eaten, or what sustenance I might’ve gained, when I thought back to the Greenguardian. Nespin, my brain interjected, as if trying to remind me of the guilt; oddly, there was no sense of shame or concern. He had fought well, but lost. What was wrong with that?

He had impaled my shoulder with his sword, and I had pulled the magic from it. Consumed it. I realized I had felt the energy flowing out from it and into my stomach. Not my stomach, into my core. The center of my being. It felt like a second stomach, a knot of energetic presence inside of me. The First Disciple and his daggers had been another feast of energy, glutting myself with stolen power.

I slowly willed a firebolt into existence, feeling the sensation of warmth flash into my palm. I gritted my teeth, dispelled it, and tried again, forcing the energy to move a little slower. Again. This time it was slow enough for me to feel the energy twitch outward from my center, through my heart, into my shoulder, and then down to my hand. The shifting energy still moved as quick as a lightning strike, but at least I could kind of see it happening. Again. Each attempt slowed it incrementally, making the path clearer and clearer to my inner sight. I could feel each movement as a distinct segment; from core to chest, from chest to shoulder, shoulder to hand, and from my hand into a firebolt. On my twentieth or so iteration, I realized there was another jolt of power joining it; a small bolt dropped from my skull to my heart, meeting the energy from my core to my heart. It changed it, somehow; what looked like a jagged bolt of raw lightning before became a narrower, laser-like bolt. Around the thirtieth time, I managed to pull only the energy from my core; the energy remained jagged as it passed through me, and it emerged from my hand in a shower of aimless sparks, scattering over my fingertips and the ground in front of me. The next time, I drew the power as normal, and watched the change from my mental energy joining it. It seemed that my mental energy gave the spell direction and intention, shaping it; raw power from my core, form from my mind, and direction from my hand.

I switched to conjuring my little candleflames, and saw how much stronger the mental energy was; a pencil-thick line of shaped energy that overwhelmed the string-like trickle up from my core. Ten iterations later, I could see the way the mental energy ensnared it, giving it far more form than power. When I released the candleflame to hover in the air before me, I could still see the tiny string that made the entire trip from my core to my palm, linking the flame to me.

Curiously, I pushed more energy into it… and then disconnected the cord. The candleflame shuddered for a moment, flickering and flaring brighter, before settling into a steady luminance. It remained right where I had placed it, unmoving, a steady glowing light hanging as if from an invisible string. I smiled as I conjured another, repeating the process. And another. Another.

Reaching out with my left hand, I tried to do the same with a firebolt. When I cut the string, it hung in the air, shivering fitfully in place before dissipating after a handful of seconds. The next one lasted a few seconds longer, and the one after that even longer, though I found it took a lot more energy. I focused on the balance of power and intent, nudging the scales this way and that until I found the right balance; it ate up a lot of energy, especially compared to a normal firebolt, but this one stayed for about thirty seconds before dissipating, slowly shrinking as the energy radiated out until it lacked the power to maintain itself.

I summoned one, then two, then three, watching as the strings reached out from my left hand. The bundle of strings seemed to grow thicker with each addition, and the flow of power into the firebolts slowed to a trickle, the last one barely strong enough to remain coherent, a sensation of fullness aching in the bones of my left arm.

I pointed my hand, and released them, pointing toward a relatively intact tree… and watched it disintegrate under the barrage of impacts, one after another punching through it before dissipating. Next I drew my energy together, pouring a ton of energy and intention into a two-handed blast, trying to recreate the fireballs I’d previously used. Now that I was watching, I realized just how hungry of an attack it was. I focused on the idea of the huge ball of energy that would remain coherent until it struck something, consuming larger and larger amounts of intention to build the hard shell around the fireball.

I realized, after a moment, that it didn’t need a hard shell. I didn’t need it to specifically explode when it hit. I just needed the intention to keep it contained until it broke, and when it popped-

I thinned the shell of intention, feeling the drain slow down to a crawl, as it flooded with power. I didn’t need to create an explosion, all I needed to do was not stop it from exploding. The shell became a soap bubble, thin and transparent even to my inner sight, the roiling energy within an inferno in a bottle, waiting for the chance to escape.

This time, the tree it struck simply stopped existing, and the release of energy was enough to shatter several nearby burnt out trunks, kicking up a huge storm of ash around the detonation site.

My arms ached, the paths the power had taken feeling like overstrained muscles. I sat in a classic meditation pose, legs crossed, hands on my knees, and tried to feel exactly how that worked. I contemplated my half-empty pool of energy, and the dull headache I felt from focusing so hard. My body still felt full and vital, my stamina nearly untouched, the feeling of soreness somehow overlapping with my body, but not a physical part of it.

With my inner sight opened to the movements of magic, I turned my gaze to the world around me. The strings and streamers of power were far weaker than the intention-directed bursts that comprised my spells, but it was still there. In fact, the burning stump of the tree I’d struck with the firebolts seemed to radiate energy, the heat burning off into the air. I reached out, just like I did when I used Crystalflame, and grabbed onto that power. However, instead of solidifying it, I just pulled it toward me. It washed through the channels of my power like soothing water, warm and comforting, dulling the ache a little. It even trickled slowly into my core, a few droplets into a still pool. It wasn’t much, but it was something. And it gave me an idea.

So, there I was again, sitting, meditating, in the heart of an inferno. I’d had to travel a little ways to find a patch of trees that hadn’t already been consumed in my attack on the tower, but a forest this large always had something else to hand. It had taken some of my power to set the forest ablaze again, and a few attempts to draw energy slow enough that it didn’t simply douse the fires I’d drawn upon, but I eventually found the right balance, greedily sucking down all of the extra energy that came my way. The difference, I came to discover, between simply pulling in the energy and actually using [Flameheart’s Hunger] , was that magic items seemed to have a lot of their own intention, and resisted having energy drawn out of them except in whatever manner they were made to do so. My wand, for example, would not have energy drawn out of it except via the gem. My robes would only allow energy to be spent to repair damage to it. When I focused on them hard enough, though, I could feel the ability activate, latching onto the enchantments and trying to burn away at them, forcing open small gaps in the spell for magic to escape. I quickly let go of the wand before I did any permanent damage, and inspected it after a moment to see that the strong Intention within the item had repaired its’ shape, the flow of energy back to normal after only a handful of seconds. I knew it was possible to do more lasting harm – having seen the Guardian’s sword rust to pieces – if the ability was sustained, but it wasn’t necessarily a quick process.

My pool of energy nearly full, I stood up and extended my hands to my sides, making a fist as if grabbing onto the flames around me, and I yanked them inward.

The budding wildfire doused itself in an instant, even the embers guttering out, bereft of the will to keep burning. I stretched for a few moments, the soreness in my limbs having faded to a manageable ache, though only the rest and meditation had helped ease my headache. It seemed that mental energy and core energy weren’t compatible, and refilling one did nothing to refill the other. Still, it was enough for what I needed; for what I wanted.

In the distance, I could see the moving mountain that I had figured out to be the Greenwarden. Even moving at full speed, it didn’t look to be a short trip, so I decided instead to take my time. After all, I had a lot of thinking to do about how to use my powers.

I reached out and carefully willed the plants near me to ignite once again, embers springing into small flames with a whisper of will. I pushed them ahead of me, and set a swathe of trees alight in a handful of seconds. Once I started my attack, there was nothing subtle about it; I may as well arrive in style and at full power.