So yeah, none of the boars even try to attack me if I walk directly to the boss fight. It seems pretty obvious this is a bonus objective qualifier considering the boss also is passive if you let her be. Damn I wish I did this instead of rat killing first.

“There is only regret to be found-”

Yeah she actually does this whole bit every time huh? I guess she must not remember all the other times I’ve been here.. Actually will the centipede girl? Am I opening this thing for no reason? Well. If nothing else at least I know what to expect this time, so it wont be so scary…

||Skill up! Fear stalling 1->2||

Okay. No. No, it was still absolutely terrifying. I ended up crawling away this time rather than watching the whole excruciatingly slimy affair. At this rate I was starting to think I was all talk. I mean by the standards of earth maybe I had a bit more tolerance for this kinda stuff… Maybe.

“-After all these years why now-”

“I will return to my jail soon, please overlook things for now.”

“...I suppose with an otherworlder here… There’s not as much risk..”

I could hear the repetitive stab of scythe legs stabbing into mud, a relentless train of approaching horror.. I wouldn’t make it out this time. I was doomed. DOOMED!

“It seems you failed stranger… Or do you prefer Otherworlder..?”

Or not.

“I prefer my name honestly…”

Just take a deep breath, okay. Your gonna turn around, and there will be a massive centipede woman who could snap your neck in an instant. But she's definitely probably not going to kill you. So don't freak out.

I mean. It helps that shes bowing for some reason.

“Orphea at your service…”

Oh! Oh shes waiting for me to introduce myself!

“Nerian.. I’d give you my last name but honestly it doesn’t matter much.”

“It's best if you're not aware of my surname as well.”

Well, isn't this a cheery little reunion.

“I’m still not sure how to get you out of here… But I’m working on it..”

“I understand, you’ve chosen a difficult cause.. Do you mind if I treat you while you think?”

Wait, that was an option? I kinda assumed I’d rely on the bonus reward to deal with my arm. But two birds with the stone are always better in the hand or whatever they say.

“Uh. Sure. Can you use healing magic or something?”

“No. But my… Past experiences have led me to learning medicinal arts.”

She patted the dirt in front of her and I took a seat, looking away as she lifted up my arm, propping it up with some of her centipede legs while she unwound the ragged cloth used in place of a bandage. There was a bit of stinging, but I wasn’t about to question her methods. Or even look in that direction.

So how the fuck did I get her out of here? I’m actually super unfamiliar with how quests work. Mechanically. They’re like a whole pocket universe away from the ‘real’ world. So it would be ridiculous to try and get her out by physical means. And as for other means.. Well. I don’t know what happens if you try to use a quest scroll while inside another quest… Maybe that would work? Or maybe it would rip open a hole in reality… The quest giver probably knew.

“I don’t think I could be much help in your lofty objective here. But I’m curious… Are you proficient with Rot casting as well as Lightning?”

“Huh? Yeah I guess. Poison is like, my main thing I guess. I just recently wanted a more.. Punchy spell for convenience.”

“That's very… Curious. I couldn’t help but notice your resistance to Rot, so I imagined you would be an experienced caster.. But you make it sound like your a total novice.”

She noticed my Rot resistance… Well. I guess I hadn’t considered if my childhood mistakes would carry over to this world. Wait does that mean there's something poisonous around here..?!

I glanced up and down the walls, and then down to the ground, just mud and mushrooms and stuff, maybe the mushrooms had spores..? I craned my neck back to look at the boss room, but apparently I forgot I was leaning on a massive tower of purple chitin. Ah. that was probably it. Orphea must have some passive effect that I just ignored. It couldn’t be very strong since she didn’t warn me… Probably.

“Yeah I can see how you'd make that mistake.. No my.. Rot resistance. Is from something else entirely. Novice is a very appropriate term to apply to me in general. Especially with casting.”

“So it might not be.. I assumed you were pushing yourself, or panicking.. Do you know about Nima?”

That last word didn’t quite come across. I knew it meant something like. Energy. But the phonetic link at least gave me a clue.

“Is that like.. Anima?”

“So you really don’t… It's impressive that you’ve shown such proficiency with casting honestly. In fact maybe it would be best to not correct you..”

“I have a bad relationship with that logic, please just explain.”

“Eh.. Well okay then. Anima is the source of all power obviously. But for casting it's important to be particularly sparing with its usage. Since casting can take such a massive toll on raw Anima, it's common practice for a caster to first dilute their Anima into Nima before spending it to construct a spell.”

I think I got left behind here. The words all made sense. But together they kinda didn’t

“I.. Don’t really get it. You have to spend anima to cast.. Even with this Nima stuff right? Maybe I'm just stupid. But I don’t get the point of adding another step”

Hands on my arm tightened and pulled the new bandaging tight. It felt a bit.. Stronger than necessary. Tension flowing from the fingers of my caretaker down into me.

“To put it as simply as possible. The amount of Nima required to preform a spell is less than the Anima required to produce the same results.”

So.. I was wasting energy… this whole time..? And the cast tutor didn’t mention anything… That fucking hag bitch!

“But it's still a process right? There’s gotta be a reason to not do it sometimes.. Right?”

“No need to get so upset, Nerian. It’s common for novices to be perplexed by the many mechanisms of casting. Though you’re not entirely incorrect. Nima decays quickly after being produced, and generating it can be taxing mentally, so in an emergency or when surpised it has value to cast directly.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

A hand had moved to my head to pat it reassuringly. But that's even worse! I'm being babied cause I didn’t understand this obscure bullshit system of a world I know nothing about!

“It's not like I could have figured that out myself! I had to figure out casting just to survive, with no one to help me!”

“Yes, yes. That's very impressive. No one can blame you.”

Dammit. I can't stand two faced people like this. Wonderful performance for my self pity. But nobody was more familiar with the art of defeatism than me!

“I have an idea to get you out.”

“Huh?”

Well. it was actually purely a theory for now. But I wasn't just gonna sit here getting dunked on. Might take awhile but so long as Orphea wasn’t gonna attack me, this place might actually be safer then the village.

“Teach me how to make Nima, It should help a lot here.”

“Its not easy-”

“I don’t care. Or did you want to go back in the hole?”

---

Excruciating. Not painful. Not uncomfortable. Not really anything else. Just a lot. An overwhelming sensation. That's what making Nima is like. Its tearing yourself apart. The moment I got a sense of Anima for the first time. I knew it was crucial for my survival. So what do you think it feels like to tear off part of that?

It was entirely about willpower here. There weren't any pain receptors linked to the energy in your body. Maybe I was blessed by not being born here. It felt so WRONG just doing it I had a feeling that people who evolved in this world had to agonize to do this.

But what do you want me to say? I can do it. It's still pretty slow, taking even the smallest bit took at least two full seconds. Witch, as a certified card carrying gamer I can confirm, is a hell of a lot of time.

It's not like it's easier without a time crunch either. The longer you let it go on, the bigger the chance your gonna wuss out and fuck up. So even though nothing was threatening me right now, It was just as hard as it would ever be.

But like I said, I can do it.

“You’re making very quick progress.. I wonder if being an ‘otherworlder’ helps..?”

“Last I heard, it does the opposite, but that's from a continuous source.”

I'm only even replying for sake of my pride. Idk if that confluent thought skill was helping or not, but I didn’t realize until I was sitting here fucking around with casting just how hard it was to do it when someone spoke. The moment my head recognizes words it makes a mess of things, like having someone yell numbers while your doing math. In actual combat I didn't struggle too hard, maybe some kind of life or death focus? Still. Cant afford to be messing things up at a crucial moment. I might need to keep my head sharp through all kinds of demanding situations in the future.

Like for example. Using two spells at the same time.

“[biteorb]”

It starts in the middle of my clawed hand, a droplet appeared, virulent purple shimmering in the blue light of the cave. Before shaking, swelling with new purchase and jiggling as its surface held to the momentum of its rapid growth. It floated next, flirting with flight as it hung around the elevation of my nails. A perfect sphere of contact venom.

That was the easy part. The part I KNEW worked. Now to hold it while I do something risky and weird.

Rot magic was… Malleable. I never really made anything, I was just messing with stuff. That blob in my hand? That didn’t come from nowhere. Its converted. It started as a bead of sweat, and started to swallow up the moisture in the air until it became this size. I’m not even sure it would work somewhere dry like the village. But the point is, even using MAGIC. There are rules. Paths to follow. And logic within.

I could use my sweat to make poison, cause there was already poison in it, or at least an intent to become something different. The tendency of a body is to rot after all, it just usually happened post mortem. All I had to do was tap into that, and bam. Something incredibly dangerous.

So casting in general is like moving a muscle, its unfamiliar at first, but the more I used it, the more I got used to it. When I was a baby I probably struggled to wave my arm where I wanted. But eventually you get familiar with the motions. And boom, suddenly your grabbing and swinging and punching.

That last example is the most prudent I think. Because like punching. There's a lot of ways to use cast WRONG. I could hear Orphea tsss-ing just watching me cast. Uncomfortable watching someone fuck it up this much. But at this stage I wasn’t taking feedback. Especially when I was attempting something as sideways as this.

To finally address the elephant in the room. I wasn’t attempting to make poison, or convert it or whatever. What I was trying to do was MOVE poison. Obviously I should be able to do it. Its part of the domain of my stuff already, I could throw this orb and it wouldn’t follow an arc like a tossed ball. But just flying around wasn’t my real goal.

I could kinda envision how to move something normally, apply acceleration, and account for things like air resistance and gravity and whatever. It's something I'd been doing my whole life. Move-ing is simple. But move, to have already moved. Without that middle step. That was something wholly different.

Basically. I was trying to teleport.

Now I’ve experienced that before too. Not like I got much out of it, but I came here through a big fuckoff portal. Which must count. And using scrolls always puts me somewhere entirely new. But just being through the thing didn’t make me understand it any.

In the end. I thought of it like a game again. I’m no coder, but in video games. Making things teleport is so easy it's the default. Tell something to be somewhere else, and it's already done it. It's the transitional steps and momentum that gets complicated. So what I had to do now was just convince this poison ball in my hand that its positional coordinates were in my other hand.

“[Through the root]”

My word choice is a bit dramatic, but it’s a simple name. There's impossibly diverse circumstances for doing something like this. So I had to make it very simple. The goal is to explicitly teleport a poison of mine, through its root, me. To another part of me, in this case from my left hand to right.

Well, my left hand was empty. So now to-

SPLOOOSH!

Shit! I mean woooo it worked! BUT SHIT ITS ALL OVER ME!

While I shook my hand violently to get as much poison off as I could manage. One of the boars came running up to me. I hadn’t seen any of these things attack me under any circumstance before. So I wasn’t… Concerned. It's more like ‘what are you doing’

I'm already sitting down so the boar doesn't need to lift itself up or anything. It just charged right towards me and split open its 4 segmented mask of a pig and swallowed up my hand in its slimy core. It's actually a pretty pleasant feeling, like immersing your hand in some kind of wet pillow.

“Haa.. this is nice.. What the fuck is it doing?!”

I try to yank my hand out, but that's the bad arm if you happen to remember. I sure as hell didn’t and got a mind numbing flare of pain trying it.

“Calm down. It’s curing your poison.”

“Huh.. They can do that?”

“I’m not sure they can do much else.”

Well. That would sure explain why my poison spells have been kinda worthless down here. Soon enough the boar-slime was finished with whatever it was doing and shuffled backwards a few steps. Closing its four piece face before trotting off in a random direction.

“Anyways. The spell worked. So I’m gonna need you to eat this.. [Biteorb]”

That sure is a pregnant pause. good time to stand up from the dirt. Ahh it feels good to stretch out a bit. Okay. Just need to hope this works. It should work in theory right? I mean, once poison is IN something they’re as much a part of it as anything can be… Hopefully this doesn’t just rip out her organs or something.

“If that's how it must be.. [I submit]”

Huh.. that's a kinda weird tone on the end there..

Orphea pulled her fleshy veil up to show her face properly. It's kinda.. Strong? Not quite masculine, but well defined. She looks regal. High cheekbones, spotless pink skin. Deep purple iris’s. Her hair even down to her eyebrows was a pale yellow blonde. It kinda contrasted against the whole monstrous creature vibe honestly. If I just looked at her face, I can mistake her for a warrior queen from a storybook.

And now pink lips peeled back to reveal dripping wet mandibles, stretching out the sides of her mouth like a rubber mask while another set pulled up where canines should be, all tipped with black spines that made my stomach turn as she swallowed the fist sized orb in a single ravenous snap!

Okay. gross. But at least I can feel the spell is still going. Since I didn’t finish ‘casting’ it. Its still in my hand in a… Metaphysical? Conjectural? sense. Okay now for part two. Beat the boss while maintaining a spell… haaa.

“Any chance you can just come down here and let me whack you so I can leave?”

I yell up into the boss room, thanks to Orphea’s chamber being open, there was a distinct echo in here now. And as the truck sized boar started to shake its head and huff across the ceiling in open defiance of gravity. I was starting to get ominous vibes.

“I cannot. I don’t know what you're trying otherworlder. But my kin’s ears are my own. I know you intend to free the prisoner. And as her jailer I cannot let you have your way anymore.”

Well, that kind of complicates things. It would be hard to do this even with the boss letting me get away with it. I guess I can just come up with some new lightning spell to deal with her later. Maybe some kind of trap I can set up beforehand..

SHHHLLLLLLLLSS!

Behind me. The opening to the rest of the quest was gone, it was just a mess of roots now. I heard some kind of yelp or something from Orphea before it finished closing. But as of now there was no sound coming in at all. And there was a gigantic boar scraping its hoof against the same wall.

“I hope you rest in peace, Otherworlder.”

My mace!

CRRRK!

Metal met flesh of the bosses head. As hard as I could into the oncoming charge, and now my weapon is splinters. It slowed the boss down just barely enough for me to dive out of the way. But I was holding a splintered piece of trash now.

I had time though. The boss had to careen to the side to not fall into the basin of the floor. Idk if she’s just afraid of getting stuck. Or if something down there scares her. But either way. It’s my only tool!

“What do you think you're doing Otherworlder? Standing so close to the deepest part of the prison will only see you become its next occupant.”

So she says. But she hasn’t risked another charge. She’s standing on the roof now. Maybe puzzling out how to hurt me? Her body is massive and probably heavy. But it didn’t seem too agile. I can’t imagine she wants to risk fighting on a metal slope. But how am I gonna retaliate from down here?

Think. Think faster. I have Epsi arc. But its super hard to hit something so far away. Especially now that she’s aggro’d. Sure it moves fast, but shes seen the trick before, so I doubt it will land… one corner of her boar mask is looking kinda messed up where I hit it. But even if I nail her with a single shot that wont finish her off… Dammit. She’s just a big version of the boars outside! There’s gotta be a way..

She is a pig monster.. And I have a strong theory as to what pisses her off… In video game logic it makes sense.. But still there's no way this will work right?

“[Biteorb]”

Haa.. Heart is pounding. Nima does a lot of heavy lifting but I’ve been casting continuously for a bit. Would I still have enough juice left to cast the final part..? Well. No use worrying about that now.

“Hah. Your rot is worthless here Otherworlder, I am the first antidote! No paultry spell would be able to infect me-AH!”

While the boss was bragging I toss the orb at the roots blocking the entrance. In moments it's hissing. Sure my poison isn’t really acidic or anything. But if you think about it, plant roots are still alive, and can very much be subject to harmful chemicals. Granted. Even magic wouldn’t let me break down roots so thick in any rush. But that's where part 2 comes in.

CRRRRAAAAAASSSSH!!

Wow. She really did it. The whole hog just slammed right through her own door. Shes shaking it off now. Turning back around towards me. Its not like it hurt her that much. But I have a feeling she’s forgotten why the door was important in the first place.

“Why you-”

“Thank you for your long years of service. I’ll never forget them.”

I couldn’t imagine how it felt from the boss's perspective. But from where I stood. A blur of purple suddenly shot over the porcine back. Orphea said some parting words. Then promptly ripped off the damaged section of the bosses face and slammed her giant stick so hard into the gooey core the splat shot out through the bosses remaining eye hole.

||Quest complete! Penalty applied: No rewards||

“God damn its so fucking dry here. [Through the root]”

Nima drained out of me like a candle being snuffed out. And I felt my still sustained bite orb fade away too. It was easy to imagine I messed up again.

That is if I wasn’t standing in the shade now.

“AHHHHHHHHHHH!”

And listening to a shrill scream.