A part of a long neck of en empty bottle was peeking out of the sand, a scenery similar to that of a lost pirate island, but only if one had not seen the wider area around it, a magnificent arena made out of huge stone blocks.
"It is an unusual feeling with nothing inside, I feel so empty!" The bottle made the air resonate, its voice high pitched, barely audible.
"Who the hell cares? Is the dragon gone? What do you see?" Frei urged the bottle from under the sand, tired of waiting buried under the ground.
"You are so mean. I cannot see properly, my glass is dirty." The bottle answered angrily.
"Come on, our necks depend on it!"
"So dirty!" The bottle insisted stubbornly.
"Fine, I am sorry. Would you please tell me if the lizard is still around?" Frei changed his tone into one laced with honey.
"Oh, the glass clears and I see that there is no one around us!" Immediately, Frei's hands shot out into the air and started removing the sand.
"By the way, you were really lucky this time. Why are you so weak? Why should an awesome weapon like me stay with a loser like you?" The bottle observed as Frei's whole body was being revealed, sand falling off of his clothes.
"Sand golems do not need a weapon anyway." The bottle found itself suddenly grabbed by Frei's hand and thrown right where he had been just a second ago. Without a single word, he began putting all the sand back with the bottle at the bottom of the ditch.
"No, no, wait my powerful companion, my friend, the hero of many legends! This bottle is overjoyed to serve you and will comply with your every wish!" The bottle's frantic pleas began to pour out of the hole in the ground.
"Fine, just be silent already or my head will burst. I am surely weak, but that will change with time. I have a plan!" Frei said with confidence, scrutinizing the high walls towering in a circle around them, searching for a way out.
"Oh, he has a plan! Let's hear it!" When Frei heard his unliving companion's sarcasm, he grabbed a fist full of sand and put it over the top of the chatterbox bottle's neck.
"You won't get me!" The bottle shouted and changed into a sword, the sand that would have ended inside it falling back to the ground.
"The plan is simple. I need to rise my level and then get hold of good abilities preferably of the dark attribute." Frei considered this a good time to make a quick test if something had perhaps changed, as he had no longer any way to directly display his attributes or level.
First, he looked around and confirmed that no one was watching except for his silly sword.
Then he spread out his legs wide in a striking pose that even an anime character might consider too silly and shouted.
"Sacrificial Blade!" He slashed his hand in front of him in a wide arc like it was a sword and a black blade burning with bright red flames appeared in an instant and cut through the cold air, leaving behind sparks and unnatural shadows that gradually dimmed until fading into nothingness.
It worked! His level had to increase!
He waved his hand a few more times, using the spell in new shapes and forms, as it was not strictly a melee range spell.
Exhilarated by his success, feeling like a god himself, Frei stretched out his legs even more and started roaring, putting emphasis on every single syllable of his following word.
"BLOOD DOMAIN !!!"
"Careful not to tear your pee pee in two." He ignored a remark uttered by the sword and paid attention to what happened next.
Which was nothing.
"Damn, you jinxed it!" He pointed his finger accusingly at the sword lying nearby.
"What is more important right now is, is you pee pee alright?" Frei's gaze slowly shifted in the direction of the ditch, his movement not escaping the sword's attention.
"Ah! Of course it is! How could I have ever thought otherwise! Of course! Of. . .course?" The sword's tone changed mid sentence, when it saw that Frei was kind of more stationary than usual.
"You're stuck."
"No, of course not!"
"Alright, then let's get out of here." The sword proposed, but Frei seemed to be intent on enjoying the afternoon sun for a while longer.
"I do not want to hear it, can you do a crutch?" Frei asked, the corner of his mouth twitching. He might have put too much heart into his stunt.
"Do not move Frei." Suddenly, the playful voice of the sword turned serious.
"Why?" Frei stopped his attempts to move, staring at his companion.
"The dragon is right behind you! It was Invisible!" The sword shouted and Frei immediately catapulted himself forward in what could not be described in any other way than an inexplicable feat in acrobatics and flew in the direction of the ditch, reentering the world of the deceased, buried under the hastily gathered layer of sand.
"Ha, ha, it was a joke Frei, but you are unstuck now! You can thank me later!" The sword laughed while being cursed wildly by a muffled voice coming from under the ground.
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"Luckily for me, it seems that my level really did rise. I have not been able to cast Sacrificial Blade before." Not bothering to emerge and be annoyed by the talking bottle, Frei thought about how exactly he had leveled up. He had probably completed one or multiple quests that had been given to him by some non-player character like the man with whom he had spoken when he was on his way out of the elven lands. It was troublesome trying to complete quests he could not see, but he had no other option but to try.
"Can the sword give quests? That is something I would really like to know." He whispered and decided to pick another test spell. His plan was to try if after an extended period of time accompanied by the sword his level would rise while he was doing its bidding. Now, what he needed was a spell that he could almost cast, but not yet.
He quickly climbed out of the hole and dusted himself off. After searching his pockets, he found a book with basic dark magic for vampires that he still had with him.
It did not take him too long to find the spell he was looking for, as there were not many spells left in the basic guide, making him wonder where he was going to get higher level dark attribute spells, but the book would still serve its purpose for a time. The spell he had found was Heightened Senses. Based on the description it should improve the caster's senses for a few minutes.
"Perfect, that was the first step." Frei whispered and focused his attention back on the high wall. The sword was remarkably silent, probably offended by being ignored by Frei for some time.
After he reemerged from the ditch, he pulled it out of the sand and walked closer to the arena's circular wall. The arena was larger than it looked and when he finally reached the wall, he tried to scratch its surface, thinking about carving out handholds for himself.
"Damn, is this some sort of magic, or is this not a simple stone?!" Frustrated, Frei ceased his attempts, the wall lacking a single scratch even after his extensive attempts. He wanted to slam the sword angrily against the wall, but remembered that he had secretly considered the sword as his quest giver for a time.
"Oh, mister sword, perhaps you would like to contribute with your ideas to solve this pickle." Frei asked with suspicious levels of politeness.
"Of course I have an idea!" The sword bragged immediately, changing into a great spear probably to look more imposing.
"Well?" Frei looked up at its tip, as if he considered it the weapon's head.
"You can move the sand, just make a ramp out of sand high enough to walk over the wall." Frei glanced in the direction of the huge sand surface, petrified.
"Do you realize how big it will be? With my bare hands?" He felt like that time back on Earth when they announced that people would receive their pensions when they reached the age of seventy. Nothing more than a sneaky attempt to cancel the pensions altogether.
"I will help you, I know this. People in the cellar used it to pick up food." The sword promptly changed into a ladle.
"What is that?! Can't you do a shovel for heaven's sake!?!" Frei nearly fainted and imagined himself being Hercules doing his labors, but he had it easy, building a sand mountain with a kitchen ladle was really something else.
"T-This, this. Let me think some more." Frei started to think earnestly, as his sanity depended on it.
In the end he found out that the flames that were a part of the spell Sacrificial Blade could be used to bake the grains of sand together to form something like a brick. He then proceeded to build the ramp out of such bricks, a feat that still took him several days, the heavy labor and the lack of anything to eat forcing him to consume the dried up blood that had been left at the spots of the massacred bodies of the one hundred. After the arduous feat, he had finally been able to stand at the top of the arena's wall and looked around, taking in the scenery that was completely unfamiliar.
"Where the hell are we? Has the stupid dragon teleported us to the edge of the world?" Frei threw up his hands in the air in a gesture of futility.
There were mountains directly opposing them and when Frei turned, there was a large body of water as far as an eye could see. Showing off, the sword in his hand promptly turned into a long pike, most likely to see further due to its height.
"Sword, what can your pike's eye see?" Frei asked and frowned, he should really name the weapon.
"Water." His trusted weapon answered unhelpfully and Frei got a feeling they should really up their game if they wanted to stay alive.
"From this day forth, you will be know as Crow. I name you as such." Frei proclaimed and the pike bent, expressing an unknown intense emotion.
"Crow? Why? How have you come up with that? Do I have wings?" It kept grasping on straws, unable to comprehend how had Frei thought of the seemingly random name.
"Crow is the smartest bird, in the same way you are the smartest weapon." He unleashed his trump card and the pike immediately straightened its pole.
"Ahhh, well. . ." Frei could feel the pike's resistance melting like snow in summer.
"Perfect, Crow, now let's see where we are." Frei did not know if the weapon was the real Crow that had been distorted in some way during the act of creation of the Fabled Universe, but it did not matter much as it had no memories and he needed to name the weapon anyway.
In their immediate vicinity there were just mountains with no clear signs of habitation, the only reason they could see anything else was their very high vantage point
After looking closer at the mountains all around them and the position of the sun, Frei took a sharp breath and a wide smile appeared on his face. The smile that froze a second later.
"Crap, I think that I know where we are." If he remembered the shape of what could be seen in the distance right, it was the top of the humongous Temple of Thousand Vows, a place where each year a thousand most promising knights from the human lands knelt to take their vows to become Knights of Soloniel. The Order of Soloniel represented the influence of angels in the human lands, its knights being named in the central temple of the city of angels Tyr'Adriael, the very city Frei was looking at.
"We should be at the northeastern edge of the continent with only the sea further north, more sea to the east, the city of angels far to the south and I don't know what directly to the west." There had been a large map in the Waldorf Castle, but he never cared much what was months of travel on foot away at the northeastern edge of the continent. He just knew that the center of human habitation was slightly to the west from Tyr'Adriael.
"Are we paying the angels a visit?" Crow was squirming like he wanted to grow even taller to better see the bright dot in the distance.
"Definitely not, the only reasonable direction for us is to go directly to the west." As a vampire, it was only natural to avoid the angels like a plague.
Frei turned his body by ninety degrees and faced what lay in front of them. In the distance there were obviously mountains like everywhere else around them, but in their immediate vicinity on the very mountain their stood, there appeared to be some strange ruins that probably were not of human origin.
Frei looked down and shifted his weight to his left foot.
"What are you waiting for? Just jump already! You are a corpse anyway!" Crow interrupted the heavy silence.
"It is not that easy, what if I die?!" Frei freaked out, he knew for a fact that high level vampires were quite resilient, but he was just a fledgeling lesser vampire with his level in single digits. Was he going to survive if his head shattered like a melon against a rock down there? Had he even enough blood to regenerate an injury of that level?
"You are a disappointment, Frei. I trusted in your dark powers." Crow complained, observing Frei that was looking all around, unable to find any way to descent from the high rim of the colossal arena.
"Let's try it, how long can you get?" He gave Crow a penetrating stare, making him feel uneasy.