Chapter 167: The First Token
Sen was satisfied with Roscoe’s performance, and Roscoe was satisfied with the contract. By now he suspected that one particular party member had a very good reason to avoid using portals, but he also didn’t need to worry about her transportation around the mausoleum. As long as he told her where to meet, she would find them. So their contract was renewed, and Roscoe would act as their guide until they gave up on the search.
*****
Nara lingered outside The Songbird’s Rest. She knew Rhys was inside—she could feel his aura. The amalgam of normal rank auras mixed with the music that filled the adjacent street with warm, peaceful revelry.
Chrome was wrong; She could go to a tavern at night, it wasn’t her fault. She knew her tetchy familiar was practical—what he told her was the best way to avoid potential unpleasant situations, especially if she was going to pretend to be a normal ranker. Just don’t go to bars at night. He wanted what was best for her in his own way.
He was right, but he was also wrong.
She pushed open the door to the tavern, passing through the clientele unnoticed. She sat on a stool, and waited for Rhys’ performance to end. He was an actual bard (unlike her half-assed unpaid moonlighting), and the tavern goers would tip him with coin. She discretely flipped one into his tipping box, even from her seat across the tavern at the bar.
“Efa!” she said, calling the inn and tavern’s proprietor, “A mug of your best beer for the performer.”
Efa hadn’t noticed her—she was just another customer to her, and it was a busy night. Her aura control blended her in seamlessly into the crowd like Clark Kent. Just another small city gal.
“I’ll make sure to get it to him when he comes over, dear. Any message you want on there?”
“Oh no,” Nara said, “It’s just my compliments for the performance.”
“Of course dear.”
Nara had chosen her seat intentionally. Sage told her that Rhys had a regular seat at the bar counter, and this was the seat next to that. Efa didn’t have to save that seat for him—all the regulars of the tavern knew that was the seat of the resident bard and storyteller, Rhys Glissander, the songbird of The Songbird’s Rest.
He hung his 7-pair lute on a rack attached to the walls reserved for him and settled onto his bar stool.
“Compliments of a young lady for the performance,” Efa said, pushing a mug of bear in front of him, with practiced timing despite her multitasking. She bustled away, bringing trays of hearty food out and setting them on tables. The warm aroma of braised meat wafted around the room and had Nara salivating, despite its low rank. It wouldn’t do anything for her nutritionally, but Nara still wanted to eat it.
He turned back towards the tavern wondering, which young lady? But no one made themselves known, and Efa had not indicated which.
“Ahem,” Nara cleared her throat, and allowed his aura to process her presence.
He blinked. Had she been there this entire time? Someone had been sitting beside him, she had been sitting beside him.
“What—” he sputtered a bit, using his usual suave cool, “How long have you been there?”
“Since your performance,” she said.
He blinked, surprised. “And how did you do that?”
“A little magic,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. The word didn’t quite convey the same from a world where ‘magic’ was fictional whimsy, and a world where magic was science and the power of the rich.
“If you can do that,” Rhys said slowly, “Why are you here?” Why are you letting me notice you at all? Was his unsaid query.
“I owe you an apology,” Nara said. “I hadn’t intended to scare you, but I have…sensitive memories related to physical touch.”
“A bad lover?” He incorrectly concluded. “I didn’t think you essence users could have them. You all seem so…powerful. Confident. As do you,” he quickly added, aware that his words may have implied she was not.
Any physically abusive essence user might find themselves dead, against the wrong partner. It wasn’t as if gaslighting, manipulation, blackmail, and isolation weren’t impossible, but even nervous essence users like Kiris were considerably empowered. It was more difficult, but not impossible.
“Not quite,” she said. She lifted her arm for him to see the diamond shaped scar on her wrist.
“Not quite,” he repeated, at a loss of what to say. Rhys didn’t know the significance of scars to essence users, but he knew the significance of scars in general. It could only be the mark of something painful.
“No matter the reason though, Rhys, I shouldn’t have done that to you,” Nara said. “I suppressed you. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t know what suppression meant, but he had felt it with his aura, unaware of it as he was.
“Apology accepted,” he said cheerfully, lightening up the mood. He dramatically inspected his body, flexing the muscles he didn’t really have, like an amateur trying to show off in front of a professional. “Everything checks out, all is well.”
“I do need to clarify one thing,” Nara said with narrowed eyes. “I’m here to make friends, not anything more.”
“Friends, got it,” Rhys said, awkwardly lowering his flexed biceps. “I understand.”
They chatted for a few hours—Nara talked about some of her experiences as an adventurer, which by now Rhys had figured out. The sights she had seen—the towering jungle of the Badlands (which he couldn’t quite believe), Sanshi, the Stone Forest Astral Space, the humid Huxin, the emerald sea of the Tier-Media.
Rhys wasn’t one to be shown up. He spoke of his own small adventures—local adventures. Sledding off a sloped roof while drunk and falling into piles of snow, which despite his poor judgement, ended well. Trekking through the streets during the blizzard, getting completely turned around, feeling that dread when you realize you’re completely lost, before one of the city watchers found him and escorted him back home or to the nearest inn safely. The ribbons of green and magenta across the sky, the aurora borealis, on a clear winter’s day. Shardshimmer falcons preening their feathers in the morning sun, light glittering off their ice crystal feathers. A massive arboreal ruig, hot breath in white puffs against the air, as he was stared down, frozen by its immense size and majesty.
She heard about the small miracles of Kallid, and she felt a little closer to home.
*****
Sen and Eufemia had hashed out a rough schedule with Roscoe—four days of mausoleum diving, then two days off. Then, after three weeks of diving, an entire week off. The week in part was to give the iron rankers time to complete contracts—the mausoleum didn’t pay out anything to the adventurers. There were no contracts to slay the monsters in there; only adventurers delved into its depths. It was also a chance for the team to try some local contracts—the mana quality was higher here, with mostly bronze and the occasional silver rank monster.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
It had been a week later, on one of their two rest days, that Nara ran into Theodore in town. She had forgotten she was trying to avoid him, and unfortunately, her black earring did make her stick out more than the average pedestrian, and Theodore had an eye for artifacts. Maybe he could literally sense them better, although that was pure guesswork.
“You,” he said with a growl. “Where have you been?”
“Where do you think?”
“The mausoleum,” he grunted out, realizing it was a stupid question.
“Duh,” she said, just to infuriate him.
She could feel the frustration rising in his aura, wafting off him like radiations of heat.
“You and me. I propose a duel,” he finally managed to say.
She crossed her arms, somewhat amused despite her annoyance at his pestering. “What for?”
“I win, and you’ll tell me about those growth items of yours.”
“But what if I win?”
His mouth clamped shut, brows furrowing as he self-assessed what he had to offer.
“...I’ll make you a growth item.”
“Don’t need it.”
“I’m offering you one so accept it! Everyone wants a growth item, and I know you must too!”
Theodore was afraid. He was afraid that if she didn’t want a growth item, that he really had nothing else to offer. He was cantankerous, argumentative, and abrasive—
“I don’t want it.”
—and his fears had been realized.
He had half a mind to throw a punch there, just to see if she’d reciprocate. It was the hot half of his mind. This time, the cool side won over, just cool enough to lower the temperature of his mind below boiling.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything from you.”
And the hot half exploded, melting the cool logic away.
With a frustrated roar, he charged forward, throwing out a moderately trained punch like a boxer. It was decent, acceptable—she saw that Jago had down his best to raise him to a standard, a standard the Adventure Society would accept.
She easily avoided it, then popped one in his jaw, bewildering him with sudden nausea and throbbing in his head. She ducked a wild punch, and, using his foot and body as leverage, unleashed a kick to the knee.
It didn’t break. Bronze rank bones and joints were more resilient than that, but she could tell that it had hurt. Sen could manage it, with his overwhelming strength and abilities, but she never could.
I still have a lot to learn.
Fine. If she couldn’t break his knee, she could at least throw him, and she was in a good position to do it. She turned, sweeping back one of his legs, hefted him onto her back, and flipped him onto the ground with a shoulder throw.
He thumped down—it didn’t do any damage, but the next blow did. Raja would burn with embarrassment if she knew how she internally referred to her next moves—The Raja Kick-‘er-While-He’s-Downer.
She kicked him in the head. Unlike Raja, she didn’t miss. The skull was a skull—handcrafted by nature to withstand heavy bumps and blows, a bone cage to protect the squishy pink matter that enabled consciousness. Her leather shoe wasn’t cracking bone, but she bruised flesh, split skin, and rattled the cage like Eric Andre.
Theodore groaned, gasping and sputtering from the throbbing pain in his head. Nara stood over him, then pulled what Eufemia would be delighted to know was named after her—The Eufemia Break-it-and-Buy-it.
She tossed some spirit coins onto him. Some landed on his bare furry chest, others clinked onto the ground.
“Should pay for the healing,” she said. And she left.
He lay there, dumbfounded that he had been so thoroughly ruined by someone less than two-thirds his size (and from the pounding concussion). He knew that she was more skilled than he was. But he had been trained by a gold ranker, his father, Jago...
A wave of shame washed over him. Lying on the ground, head pounding, and feeling like shit. He had just attacked someone who hadn’t accepted his challenge.
“Damn it,” Theodore sputtered out through sharp pain. “What am I supposed to do?”
*****
The silver hall was known for its unusual room structures. It had high, massive rooms, often with thin narrow platforms that floated above an abyssal pit. ‘Altitude with attitude’ and ‘falling to your death’ were the phrases of the day. It was religiously avoided by anyone without a slow-fall or flight ability, which meant that some rooms were open for the team to challenge.
Today, it was Nara’s time to shine—or fly.
The room challenge itself was relatively simple—kill all the enemies in the room, no time limit. There was even a button on the other side of the door if you felt that you couldn’t complete it—atypical, for the mausoleum. A very forgiving room, all things considered, and a very forgiving room to Nara in particular.
Nara had learnt in her battle with the pirates that she thrived in chaos. Overture and Entropy stacked her boons and afflictions, but the superior way to stack her boons and grow her afflictions was to place herself in the thick of danger. Refresh, Astral Return, Dream’s Wake, and Avatar of the Boundary greatly rewarded her for active combat.
4 of her 5 Balance Essence Abilities thrived in combat. She was starting to wonder what it implied, or how they had shaped her.
You become what you are. You are what you do.
The floating platforms were rectangular prisms, with potentially enough space to push off from the side. Some floated at odd angles—not all were parallel with the ground so far beneath her that Nara wasn’t sure it was there, or some sort of magical void. Below a certain altitude, the were no more platforms, like some sort of platform-tree line indicating below which there was no way up.
It was a challenge room. While Nara had all the advantages, its purpose was unmistakable.
She leapt and danced, the platforms were like Aliyah’s, but stationary. It was even easier for Nara to keep track of them. They held strong in the air, immovable, as if a developer had forgotten to give them physics. It was as if she had her Cosmic Path tangibility on demand.
Fuzzy, white bat monsters like flying yetis shot bolts of ice which slicked the platforms with ice, yet her feet always had solid ground. Even with the power of razor-sharp ice bullets, the stone never broke, never pocketed.
The researchers had been frustrated by the stone for hundreds of years. They could never collect any.
She sliced through a wing, her sword enhanced with maximum damage from Astral Return. The bat-yeti, unable to maintain altitude, plummeted to the abyss. Ice wisps conjured ice spikes from the platforms that attempted to pierce her from odd angles. Some managed to hit—she couldn’t divert the path of a stationary ice spike with Infinity Domain, and she didn’t have eyes on the back of her head, while she did have something very close to it, with supernatural spatial awareness. When they struck her, webs of frost crawled across her robe. She could feel it’s chill even with her protection.
She cleansed it with Boon Conversion, and flakes of frost fell from her robe as she spun heaven and earth. The tug of gravity reminded her of the direction of the abyss.
Annoying ice weavers spider-man’d through the air on webs, slinging webs made of ice, or attempting to cut with ice sickles. They were unable to hide in the room, missing the boreal forests where they usually manifested, so they adopted the only option they had left. Their blood was similarly freezing—a poisonous spray of super-cooled blood that immediately evaporated on contact with the warmer air (compared to their body temperature) and afflicted Nara.
A little bit of damage was advantageous to her, so she kept a few stacks of it around, triggering various abilities automatically. She tried to kill the rest of the ice weavers at a distance, finishing them with a powerful bow shot, or at least with transcendent damage which transformed their body as they died into an aurora of blue, gold, and silver light.
Chrome was at odds with aerial battles, and stuck around in her aura, providing an increase to his subsumed benefits thanks to Soul Legion. He also controlled those glowing golden swords, glowsticks, Nara called them, which irked Chrome that her on-the-spot nickname had been so apt. Big glowstick and his little glowsticks.
She, of course, made sure not to remind him of the detestable nickname in combat, else she’d find herself frantically directing two little glowsticks while juggling everything else, like a clown who juggled deadly weapons instead of sticking with cheap rubber balls.
Combat finally drew to a close—most flying enemies had plunged to their deaths, monster screeches echoing down a chasm Nara suspected was dimensionally altered. She wouldn’t get close enough to check, fearing a gravitational alteration as well. The other half of enemies, such as the ice-flame wisps that upturned their noses at the need of wings to fly, or the spiders that crept on walls, were killed one way or another, swatted like the pests they were. The pests that stood before her prize.
She approached the pedestal. They were uniform in size, and quite large—they had to be large enough to fit heavy suits of armor. They were always made of the same carved crystal that resembled ice, as if it were perpetually melting, yet eternally cold. It was the same ice the tokens that ‘unlocked the chest’ were made of.
She looked down at the plaque, reading it’s contents.
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Item: [Raiment of the Eternal Storm] (bronze rank [growth], legendary)
Classification: armor, clothing
Description: A cloth and leather battle robe that maintains flexibility while granting increased protection. Its cloth is crafted from the threads of storm wind, the embroidering of spun lightning, and the leather of dark nimbus.
He saw the storm, and he was the storm.
Effect: Increased resistance to damage. Moderate effectiveness against all physical damage types.
Effect (Iron): Strong winds increase rate of stamina and mana recovery. Glide through the air; highly effective at riding the wind for a moderate mana-per-second cost. Can reduce weight to slow fall at a reduced mana cost. Ignore or ride the effects of strong wind.
Effect (Bronze): Increased resistance to elemental damage and afflictions. Moderate control of nearby air for a moderate mana-per-second cost. The cost of the iron rank effect is reduced to low mana-per-second.
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Without a second thought, she pressed her token against the display case. The mausoleum token melted into the material masquerading as glass, and with it, the glass melted away.
It had floated in the case, as if suspended by invisible fishing wire like a magician’s trick so that it may be seen with all of its glory. It still floated there, unmoving, and waiting patiently to be claimed.
When Nara plucked it from the air it still felt light in her hands. She could almost feel the wind that coursed through the silver-white fabric of the robes, brushing against her hands as her fingers brushed against it. The golden embroidery of waves of wind snapped and tingled, glowing faintly with electricity. The leather jerkin of the torso of the robe was dark. She realized the intricate pattern on it was actually rolling storm clouds, which shifted over time, like swirling patterns of dark mercury.
She never had any doubt that these robes were meant for Encio.