For an awkwardly extended moment, the pair of us stared at each other with slack jaws. I was around ten feet from the tigerman, the confusion in my thoughts expressed clearly on its vaguely human face. Faced with the dilemma of sentience, I was almost immediately nauseous at the implications, but I didn’t let myself spiral. I had been fighting for survival. Even as I had stalked through the forest previously, I hadn’t started most fights.
Still…
“You can talk?” We asked together. “Me? You’re the one-”
I stopped talking and my mana began to spin aggressively. The tigerman flinched and wisely shut up. I was glad, my anger had been impulsive and my health was still dangerously low. A fight wouldn’t necessarily go my way here. Each second which passed tipped the scales in my direction, but also stole my willingness to kill this thing. It… was just a kid. Damn.
“Stop talking,” I warned before starting. This was a seriously dangerous situation and I would be much safer if I just threw a Mana Bolt at the thing and ended this. Except I was injured. I might miss. It’s just a kid, like Séan or Sinéad. “Let me speak, and then you can talk when I say. Just nod or shake your head. Understand.” The Sundercat nodded slowly. “Do you know what a dungeon is, and that you’re inside one?” Another nod. “Are you going to fight me again?”
With wide eyes, the teenage tigerman shook his head quickly and vehemently. I had to stifle a laugh. This was not what I expected to start my first night in the dungeon. Maybe I was starved for company, Naea aside. Maybe I just wanted to stop ending every interaction with bloodshed, but I let the killing instinct inside me die. I would not attack this creature. “You can call me Grant. I won’t hurt you if you don’t start shit. Do you have a name?”
When the tigerman nodded but said nothing, I actually did laugh. Then I told them they could speak. “Me? My name? I’m Merownis.” The thing was shivering, a thin and bedraggled looking half-tiger. It stood at my height, which was tall enough for a human but fairly short from what I had seen of Sundercats. Fur covered its entire body, but its features were those of a humanoid. I wouldn’t have said a human, though. With the Sundercats, there was a lot of dimorphism. Maybe that was a species thing, though?
“Merownis?” I repeated, rolling the word out of my mouth. “How… feline. How did you come to be in this dungeon, Merownis?” The name was almost like the warble of an angry cat, which reminded me of Missy, and the home in Ireland I wanted to return to. The place I needed to keep safe. Knowledge was power, and I had stumbled into an interview with a monster.
The fluffy ears atop Merownis’ head wiggled nervously and he looked around, yellow eyes scanning the darkness. “Woke up. Head fuzzy but messages.” The tigerman gestured towards the air to signal System prompts. “Protect new home. Protect for long enough and this is home forever.”
“So you don’t remember a life before the dungeon?” I was intrigued. This was valuable information and from the small amount of information I had, it seemed as though dungeon monsters were not being with lives before the System arrived. They seemed to spring forth from out of the dark, mana-filled shadows. At least some of their motivation was clear. The System would reward monsters if they performed directives. I wasn’t much different, though my reward was freedom.
Merownis grabbed at his chin, pulling on the wispy hairs there. “Yes and no. Memories of a world, but I never lived there. Taller grass.” He looked around with a sad look on his face, nodding as though he had spoken some sage wisdom. “Dungeon is home. Supposed to protect it from you. I think.”
“That… makes sense.” The implication was troubling but hardly unexpected. The quest I had received suggested there was a structure to the place which wouldn’t make as much sense otherwise. The frightened Sundercat waited for me to continue, twitching slightly. It was all quite endearing, despite myself. “So, why aren’t you trying to tear me apart like the rest?
The pair of us were still standing tensely a short way away from the clearing where we had battled previously. Given the fighting and the fact I had killed his compatriots, Merownis was reasonably well behaved. Forgiving the first attack, he had been a delight. The slightly broken dialect he used had its meanings filled in with expressive gestures of the hands.
“Not sure…?” The orange-furred creature scratched its chin some more, looking genuinely confused and upset. “Talassus did something. That sword that made me black out. When I came to, I was scared and I thought I could save them if I stopped you in my confusion. Then I realised they were dead. I ran. Then you caught up with me.”
That was as good a prompt as I needed to draw the arm-length sword from the pouch.
Item - Severance
This powerful weapon is capable of both creating and severing contract bonds.
I frowned. That explained nearly nothing. How can a sword create bonds? The weapon itself was gorgeous in a way. I didn’t know swords but the balance of the blade felt perfect as I gently moved it through the air. The pommel was a dark red leather, closer to black than burgundy, and my good hand wrapped around it nicely. From the handle to my hand, there was a longing pull on my mana. As the item description wasn’t giving me much to go on, I allowed it. My energy leapt into the blade like air into a vacuum and I found I couldn’t seal the flow once it started.
Right as panic started to rise, the blade’s thirst was slaked. As the runes and patterns which made up the skill inside the sword activated in full, I tried to get a feel for how the ability worked. Unlike a skill I learned myself, this didn’t fill me with a burst of inspiration for its use. I stepped back from Merownis and they took two back from me, clearly interested but sensibly cautious all the same.
With a flick of my wrist, the sword keened through the night air with a hiss. The mana in the sword tried to do something with it, but it didn’t work, and the energy stayed within. If nothing else, the sword was sharp. I would need to practise with it, but I certainly felt knightly. More so than splaying the knives from the fan or swinging the hammer. I sighed at the same time.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
It’s not quite right.
Still, a few more swings and I had a decent feel for what the sword was attempting. My mana would be used to overwhelm the defences of another in some way. My best guess was that by making the other Sundercats its unwilling slaves, the tyrannical leader had freed them from the System doing the same. Merownis’ situation was similar to Naea’s. For Naea, she wasn’t an enemy but also wasn’t supposed to help either and received migraines or other punishment if she did. Her current absence was down to this.
“So, what happens now?” I asked the question genuinely. I needed guidance of some sort from the Sundercat. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever not to use the creature as experience points. I had done the same to others of its kind without thinking about morality. Except, those ones hadn’t talked to me.
“I am no idiot,” Merownis said confidently. “Living is better than dying. The world tells me you are my enemy. You cannot trust me because you know this. Such a thing is a death sentence.” I couldn’t argue with that, and waited for the adolescent tigerman to continue. Merownis had admitted the point freely, so I wouldn’t use it as a point against them. “There is a way, I think. For trust.”
His yellow eyes looked pointedly at the sword in my hand. “I cannot leave this place free to do as I please and you continue to heal. If I were more powerful, I would surely kill you. The blade enacts a contract between two parties. I am sensible. This is the only way.”
I was taken aback. “You would enter a contract with me?” I was a little incredulous, but my mind was already racing with the potential gains from such a thing. The Sundercat wasn’t wrong, and a bad taste started to annoy my tongue. This whole situation was bizarre. It felt like a setup.
The System takes creatures from other, “failed” planets and uses them as fodder in its dungeons. That made a sick sort of sense. The scale of the System was something I was barely scratching the surface of, but every turn made it seem more powerful. What I didn’t know was how much intent it had. Omnipotence was hard enough to wrap my head around, but the moment I was about to suffer a moral dilemma, the tools and information to handle it perfectly dropped in my lap.
The most frustrating part was there being nothing I could do about it. The only choice was to agree with Merownis’ acquiescence to the power of Severance. “I don’t have to cut you, do I?” The idea of inflicting pain to force a contract upon him. The tigerman broke into a toothy grin.
“I do not believe so, but I thank you for asking first.”
I scrunched my eyes shut tightly. “What’s the worst that can happen?” I asked into the wind.
“You could force me into brutal subservience from which I will likely never escape until your death.”
“Rhetorical question, but you’re not wrong. You’re placing a lot of trust in me, Merownis.” I held the Sundercat’s gaze and we both watched the other for any sign of doubt. I wasn’t excited to hold his life in my hands, but I wasn’t coward enough not to realise I already did. My wounds were healing at an increasingly fast rate. I could make a fist with my right hand, at this point.
Merownis knelt, bowing his head. I felt the seriousness of the movement as a tugging on my mana, the arcane power held in the sword and another, stranger sensation in my chest. Willpower. As I touched the sword to the Sundercat’s first shoulder, the pull increased to a nearly unbearable amount. The System was creating something, and it was taking a tiny portion of what I had. With a shove, I gave the System a cup when all it needed was a drop.
It was an act of petulance. Today was a hard one. I had been battered, chased to exhaustion, and now the darker spots of this magical world I had been thrust into were illuminated. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I wanted the action to be mine, and not under the control of some immense, unknown power. I had nearly no way to impact the System’s activity, but all I desired in the moment was to throw a mighty spanner in its works.
The System seemed to say, “cute. Fuck you, buddy.”
A shockwave of pure magical force expelled from me as the flat side of Severance’s blade touched Merownis’ second shoulder. The mana which had filled the blade before emptied, and then refilled again, and then drained once more. Whatever process had begun with the blade had changed into something new. I staggered, forced a step back as my head buzzed, but the young tigerman could only weather the torrential powers flowing over him. My vision swam. I could feel System prompts arriving and a continual drain on my core which I couldn’t stop.
A tidal wave was crashing into me and my strength was exploding out. All I could do was smash my Willpower into the connection being formed and try to take control. I threw my arms wide and caught the entire ocean the System smashed my way. I would not bend. I would not break. The seemingly infinite mass of power I held over my head needed a place to go, so I dropped it squarely on whatever the System was doing between myself and Merownis.
There was a cracking sound, a ripping, creaking, crashing sound. It might have been my back, the ground beneath me crumbling slightly at the weight I bore. Still, my posture was firm. I will not bend. Merownis collapsed and I sank to one knee myself, a hand on the tigerman’s back to steady me. A spark like static burned my hand and without any fanfare at all, the ordeal was over. I almost bounced to my feet as the sudden lack of pressure on my entire being made me feel weightless.
Making sure Merownis was still breathing, I shivered at how close I felt to death. My Willpower had been drained again, and the coldness that followed the lack of it felt like the true end. The blackness beyond zero health points. Whatever I had just done was not to be done lightly. Somehow, I felt as though I had been judged on an unknown scale and forgiven for something. The power that governed the System could have easily crushed me, but instead it simply tested me.
But I had passed the test. There was no doubt about that as I looked at the System prompts explaining what had happened. This definitely wasn’t what the System was trying to facilitate with Severance’s skill, but something more. There was a new pattern inside my mana channels, resting in the palm of my hand. My skill page was going to get awfully cluttered. I smiled, tasting blood on my tongue and spitting out to the side. If the gains from my side were this good, I could only wonder at how Merownis would feel when he woke up.
Skill Unlocked - Party Leader
Living in the System is generally solitary. There is only one spot at the top, after all. However, you know that there is space aplenty on the platform for yourself and allies, you need only gather the strength to get them there.
Party created.
Merownis added to party.
Inclusion in a party grants a measure of shared experience towards levelling. Bonus based on the strength of the party leader.