Dan forced himself back the way he came, dragging a dozen flailing beasts with him, screaming into their smothering feathers as they flapped and ripped his flesh. He made it three steps before he remembered he was gripping a medieval weapon in one hand. Still blind from all the blood in his eyes—and keeping them tightly closed to protect them from pecking beaks—he spun again, lashing out with the long sword. His motion ripped several birds free from his shoulders, and they took some of him with them as they went. Dan howled from the burning pain, but he also felt his blade strike something soft and chunky.
You have slain a turkey! You have gained 300 experience points.
Even though his eyes were closed, he could still feel the birds scattering. The nature of the confrontation quickly shifted. What had been Dan drowning in a pit of feathers and blades became something more like batting practice as he rushed to hack angry balls of feathers and claws from the air before they latched on and started pecking at his eyes. He sliced one bird practically in half, and shattered another’s wing with a strong but sloppy follow-up. Another bird latched on to his leg, but he just left it pecking at his shin while he swung wildly at the half-dozen high-flyers going for his eyes.
He was successful at killing or dismembering all but one bird that flapped its wings in his face while slashing at his neck. Unable to get a good swing while it was clinging to his head, he grabbed the malicious meleagris by its neck and sawed at its face with his rusty blade until its head was dangling by bloody threads. In hindsight, he would want to write some brutal cookie monster lyrics describing that, but in the moment, he could only think “What-the-shit?! What-the-shit?! Soooo much blood!”
Dan threw down the almost headless turkey and then shifted focus to the little bastard that was still pecking his shin. He ran his longsword through that one from top to bottom, impaling it against the ground. It came with his sword when he next lifted it, so he had to flick the blade savagely to launch it back down to the dirt.
You gained a level! You are now level 3!
He did not pay any attention to the message. His entire body felt like it was on fire, and blood was still pouring down his forehead into his eyes. He stood cluelessly for a moment, wiping his eyes and staring down at the claw marks and punctures that covered him. If he did not bleed to death in the next few minutes, he would be permanently disfigured, a walking mass of scar tissue akin to something on a Cannibal Corpse cover.
His first thought was to get back to the waterfall. The filthy birds had raked away so much of his skin that he feared becoming a walking infection. Dan shambled back upstream, groaning, and grunting as he moved. Each time a joint moved, it felt like razors were flaying the skin around it.
It was only a short walk back—less than a minute—though it felt like a mile hike, uphill, over hot coals. As Dan neared the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, he felt the stinging slices on his head and tried to convince himself they were not as bad as he had thought initially.
Whimpering as he entered the cool water, he waded under the waterfall again and let it pelt him. The weight of the water earlier had felt heavy when he was not cut to ribbons, and he was afraid it would feel like a boiling water hose pressing into his wounds.
That was not so. It felt fine, in fact. It was when he climbed out of the pool a few minutes later that he realized something very strange was happening.
Having washed away all the blood and turkey guts, he found that he was without injury. He was fine. He felt great, actually.
“What the hell just happened?” he questioned aloud.
As if some invisible power was answering his question, a new screen appeared in front of him. It was labeled Combat Log, and was composed of a series of messages that looked very much like the system messages he saw periodically, only they were denser and more detailed. They were packed inside a very simple white border and color-coded red or blue.
A turkey hits YOU for 2 points of damage!
A turkey hits YOU for 2 points of damage!
You hit a turkey for 2 points of damage!
A turkey hits YOU for 2 points of damage!
A turkey hits YOU for 2 points of damage!
A turkey hits YOU for 2 points of damage!
You hit a turkey for 13 points of damage!
Critical hit! You hit a turkey for 26 points of damage!
Your Aura of Purity heals YOU for 1 hit points.
“Aura of Purity? What is that?” Again, a new window appeared. This one was more like the stat sheet; in that it had a stone patterned background and complex images, all topped by a header that read Spells and Abilities. It contained three icons in a vertical column. One was a cartoonish graphic of two golden hands. The next was a stick figure radiating brilliant golden lines. The third was a stalwart warrior, standing tall against a backdrop of screaming skulls. They were the abilities he learned when he picked his class earlier: Lay on Hands, Aura of Purity, and Fearless. The tags beside them defined them as such.
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Dan looked down the list and found that as he focused on each of the icons, a hefty box of text appeared over it, explaining how it worked in detail.
Lay on Hands
Cost 0
1 Hour Cooldown
Range: Melee
Heal target character for 75% of your maximum hit points.
Aura of Purity
Passive
Range: 20 yards
All party members within range are healed for 1% of your maximum hit points per second.
Fearless
Passive
Range: 0
You are immune to all Fear effects.
That Aura of Purity ability was healing him all the time for 0.32 hit points per second. It did not seem like much, but it explained why he no longer looked like steak tartare.
Dan looked at the other abilities and their descriptions. He did not think Fearless worked. He was plenty afraid when he was sure he was a walking dead man back there. Lay on Hands could come in handy if something really smashed him hard. Of course, he was not quite sure how he was supposed to make it work. Was there a magic word, or a button, or what?
He held out his hand and said “Abracadabra!” Nothing happened. He also tried “Hocus-pocus!” and “Klaatu barada nikto!” Nothing happened. Almost as an afterthought, he tried simply tapping his arm and thinking about making the skill work—just like he thought about all the overlay menus to manipulate them. As soon as he tried that, his hand was surrounded by a golden glow that radiated warmth.
You use Lay on Hands.
Your Lay on Hands heals YOU for 29 hit points.
He already had maximum hit points, so that effectively just set the skill on a 1-hour cooldown with no benefit. At least he would know how to make it work if he needed it later.
Satisfied that he understood how his new superpowers worked, Dan pulled up his stats page to pump Strength again. Boom. 20 Strength. ‘Nuff said right there. He felt like the Incredible Hulk—at least momentarily.
Dan Upton
Level 3 Human Paladin
Experience to Next Level: 220 / 22800
Attribute Points Available: 0
HP: 48 / 48
Attack 14
MP: 28 / 28
Armor 2
Strength 20
Resistances
Stamina 9
Fire 0
Dexterity 12
Ice 0
Wisdom 10
Light 0
Intelligence 8
Dark 0
Charisma 15
Poison 0
Dan did take note that he had 48 hit points now. It seemed like a tiny number. He had played video games where he had 100,000 hit points.
He still had zero resistance, and had no idea how that worked, or if he would ever gain any of that. He was not sure he needed to care.
He did still care about Alternate Picking, which he found after a very brief search down the alphabetically ordered Skills page. Alternate Picking 126. He questioned the value with a grimace. He was better at Nacho Cheese Dipping? He barely even ate nachos… Quickly, he scanned down to find Power Chords 156—also debatable. He was really good at both of those things. You could not be a thrash metal guitarist without being really good at them. He started to wonder if the scale was just smaller than he had assumed. Maybe Yngwie Malmsteen only had Alternate Picking 180-something. Maybe it simply was not possible to go much higher.
As he had been pouring over the Skills page and engaging in exigent pseudo-philosophical quandaries of crucial necessity, the sky above had grown dimmer. The realization swam slowly through Dan’s subconscious as he was so absorbed in trying to guess who had a higher String Bending skill: David Gilmour or Brian May. When it did reach him all the way, he was almost startled. He looked up at the sky in surprise, and his eyes snapped straight to the focal point of what was very literally high strangeness.
It was the sun—what Derby had called the Palace of Jotar. He thought he saw it was somehow different earlier in the day, but it was brighter then, and he could not see the subtleties of its shape. Now, it was late in the day, dimming into twilight, and he could see that the subtle differences were not subtle at all.
The sun was a huge golden castle, floating way up in the sky on a chunk of rock.
It was so high—near jetliner height—that he still could not make out every detail. It looked like it had nine or ten towers interconnected by dozens of skyways. Banners flapped in the stratospheric winds over the walls, but what iconography they displayed was impossible to tell from such a distance.
The weirdest detail was how the light came from it. There was no other way to say that. When Dan looked at the sky to his left, it was visibly brighter over there than to his right, where it was a dim indigo.
“What the Hell?” he murmured. as he observed that it was quickly getting darker, even where he stood. He was about to be alone in the night, in a place were hungry bears and coyotes roamed and flocks of hell-turkeys attacked en masse during the day. By night, it could only be worse—far worse.
He looked around at his dimming surroundings and every inch of it seemed much scarier than it had only minutes before. The stream, with its slightly muddy water, was surely filled with unknown razor-toothed fish monsters. The woods must have concealed a thousand dragons. The grass—the grass which would be an inky black void under the night sky—certainly concealed swarms of scorpions. There were graboids under the ground, and babadooks in the bushes.
Suddenly shivering, Dan picked up his longsword and sprinted for Derby’s tower, wheezing between breaths, and glancing over both shoulders for night creatures calling and beasts about to strike and the demons that close in on every side. He pushed through the dark woods in a frenzy, twigs slapping him in the face as he ran, because it was the worst part of the trip and all that mattered was that he was through it quickly. Quickly he did traverse the woods, only to find something on the other side that frightened him more than any imagined monster.
Where Derby the Wizard’s tower had been, it was no longer. The tower was gone. Vanished without a trace. The clearing was simply an empty grassy field, bearing no sign any structure had ever been there at all.
And on that sight, darkness fell completely.
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After this chapter it skips straight to the start of book 2.