It wasn’t long until Mikayla was showing Keldryn into Astralia’s suite. Fortunately, it seemed the Spear’s defences had timed out, as they’d reentered the ancient building without any trouble.
“I was wondering how you avoided getting eaten in your sleep,” he said to her, amazed by the well-preserved residence.
“Yeah, well, I still came way too close to dying several times,” Mikayla grumbled.
She showed him into the workshop, where the object of her frustrations over the past couple of days lay. No matter what she’d tried, she’d been unable to make the Mana Engraver even activate, let alone even attempt to Engrave anything.
Keldryn carefully danced over the piles of junk, gathering his bushy tail in his arms to make sure it didn’t knock anything over. He stared, awestruck, at the Mana Engraver. “Incredible. It’s an antique . . it works?”
“I haven’t been able to turn it on, but that’s probably my own fault,” Mikayla admitted.
Keldryn placed a hand on it that glowed with orange light, and for a moment the mechanical arms of the table tensed. He withdrew it immediately, visibly afraid to damage the two-hundred-year-old artefact. “It works,” he nodded, whispering as though he feared speaking too loudly would cause it to crumble to dust.
Mikayla tried very hard to be happy about the confirmation of her own ineptitude. “Nocturnus doesn’t want us to leave until I’ve figured out how to use this Engraver to make new Cores so that we have extra weaponry. But it’s slow going, I can’t even turn it on,” she groaned. “It could be weeks until I figure it out properly,”
“I’m not waiting here for weeks,” Keldryn asserted.
“Yeah, didn’t think so. Well, we probably don’t really need the extra weaponry, we’ll just bring what we can carry and go,”
“Agreed. Help me detach the Engraver from the floor,” the foxkin commanded, already bending down to the bolts that held it in place.
“Um. Hang on, what?” Mikayla looked at the mattress-sized array of delicate machinery and glass again to make sure they were talking about the same thing. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to carry this massive table for days through the wilderness?”
“Of course. It won’t be a bother,”
“Well maybe not if we keep our Armours running all the time, but that wouldn’t be very subtle. Or sustainable,” Mikayla’s brow furrowed. She just didn’t see what Keldryn was getting at.
There was clearly a miscommunication, as he stopped prying up the nails to cast a look of confusion at her. It took a moment, but he groaned and facepalmed. “Oh, right, I forgot this sort of thing is rare outside the Kaiju Coast. My bag is made of Kaiju leather. It’s bigger on the inside,” he explained, pulling off his small rucksack and opening it to reveal a dark void.
“You have Bags of Holding around here?” Mikayla gasped, peering within. She could see what looked like a tiny (or, perhaps, very far away) rack of survival equipment and a whole wardrobe within the bag, as well as what looked like a pile of colourful rocks whose purpose she couldn’t guess at. The bag didn’t seem to be anywhere near its total capacity; there was plenty of space to pack away everything that she’d found in Astralia’s quarters.
“Oh, so you do know what this is,” Keldryn placed the bag on the ground and pulled on a string, stretching the mouth of the bag into what looked like a doorway using built-in collapsing metal poles.
Mikayla peered in, finding that beyond the tent-like doorway was a room the size of her parents’ garage, and the rack and wardrobe were now full-size. “This is amazing. It’s like you have your own bedroom in your pocket,”
“Bedroom? No, don’t ever try to sleep in one of these. The air gets used up and you’ll asphyxiate,” Keldryn’s ears twitched as he bobbed his head thoughtfully. “I think using bags to transport prisoners officially became a war crime a few years ago,” Exasperation tinged his features at the horrified expression Mikayla had sprouted as she pictured that. “Quit gawking and help me lift this table,”
Gulping nervously at the warning, Mikayla positioned herself at the other end of the Engraving Array, cupping her hands underneath its lip and heaving.
Keldryn’s end of the table went up, but hers didn’t budge.
After a moment of grunting and wheezing, the ranger dropped his end again and raised an irritated eyebrow. “What’s your Strength score?”
“Nine. You?”
“Nine? How? You’re supposed to have ten as a minimum,” Keldryn spluttered.
Mikayla blushed. “I’m not strong,” she mumbled.
“You said you were level ten. Have you not put a single point into Strength?”
“Nope. The Armour Core runs off Mana and Health keeps me alive. Strength and Stamina don’t do much for me so far,” Mikayla shrugged.
Keldryn buried his face in his paws. “That shouty ghost should have taught you better. Okay, listen. Stats do more than just calculate your meters. Points in Strength make you stronger, let you hit monsters harder. You’re low level enough that you haven’t really noticed the difference, but you’re not going to survive without a good Strength score. Eventually your attacks just won’t do any damage. My Strength is at 23,”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Huuuuuh. Gotcha, gotcha gotcha. I did just level earlier. Show me my statistics, System!”
A blue box populated in her view.
[STATISTICS:
HEALTH: 841/1100
MANA: 362/1200
STAMINA: 631/900
STRENGTH: 9
DEXTERITY: 10
CONSTITUTION: 11
CHARISMA: 14
INTELLIGENCE: 14
WILLPOWER: 17
UNUSED: 2]
Mikayla looked over the array of values. “Two points to Strength please, system!”
[STRENGTH: 11
STAMINA: 631/1100]
“Alright, let’s try this again!” Keldryn watched patiently as Mikayla huffed and heaved and finally shoved his end of the table through the leather doorway.
It took several minutes of gruelling effort, but they finally managed to get the table into the inside of Keldryn’s dimensional rucksack. “Whew. There. Done,” Mikayla wheezed. “I feel like I should have earned a Strength point just for doing that,”
“Earning levels for moving furniture? Yeah, right,” Keldryn snorted. “And, what do you mean, done? We’ve still got lots more stuff to pack up,”
Mikayla poked her head out through the doorway and looked around Astralia’s old workshop. “You mean . .”
“There’s plenty of room in my bag. Let’s just take everything,”
“. . Including the bed?” The gorgeous, fluffy bed had been the single most amazing luxury that Mikayla had managed to claw out of this hellish tundra masquerading as a fantasy world. She couldn’t bear to abandon it if there was any way to preserve it for future use.
Keldryn raised an eyebrow, then peered across the corridor towards the bedroom door. “Only if you can lift it,”
<=====}—o
Anza Black considered herself a decent member of the Goliath Guard.
She broke monster bones with her fists, trekked all over Old Hedrang to find monsters that needed broken bones, and waved at the little kids when they told her how cool she was for breaking monster bones. That was enough. That made her happy.
She didn’t have the energy to curry favour with the upper echelons of the Guard’s management. She didn’t believe that traipsing through ruins to look for old junk to sell was a good use of her time. She definitely didn’t have the brains to do ‘sky-ence’ to Kaiju corpses - though, she respected the people who did much more than she respected people who wasted their breath on the first two.
Did it suck to see the people who traded favours and curried blame get promoted over her? Yeah, kinda. Was it annoying that treasure hunters were lauded for recovering priceless antiques, while she killed monsters all day and only ever got the next target’s location? Well, sorta. But leadership and responsibility wasn’t something she’d ever really wanted anyway, and doing her job well was more important than chasing fame.
Which was why the talk she was having with Dean Wujing pissed her off so much. If she didn’t respect her old teacher so much, she’d have told him to get stuffed.
“So what? Some treasure hunter got into some old tower in the middle of nowhere? Who cares?”
“Well. The entire community of magical researchers who venerate Astralia’s every word and deed,” The Dean was a yaoguai, the horned race that was predominant in the southern nation of Guili. He was getting on in years, a fact attested to by his greying mane and beard, but she could still see through the Ataraxia Node’s window that his muscles were as firm as ever, pulling his blue skin taut around them.
“Yeah, yeah. Y’know what I mean. I’m based in Topwater. Cliffwatch is closer. Why ain’t you talking to them? Or anyone else here who’d actually be good at investigating whatever it was?”
Wujing rolled his eyes. “You know your colleagues pretty well, don’t you?”
“Sure. Why?”
“If I were to ask them to chase down some possible treasure hunters, who’ve almost certainly got their hands on some antiques that are definitely very valuable and quite possibly extremely dangerous. Name a single other Guardsman in either Cliffwatch or Topwater whom you would trust to report their findings accurately, who is too principled to refrain from pocketing something valuable and fudging the results,”
“Dimitri,” Anza immediately replied.
“Is a stickler. He follows the rules to a fault. He’ll arrest first and talk never if he can help it. All that we really know is that someone triggered a ward in Astralia’s Spear. It could be the most unscrupulous of treasure hunters, or it could be some lost wanderer looking for a safe place to camp. You’ve lived in the Coast most of your life, you know how weird things can be up there,” Anza chuckled, and Wujing nodded with a small smile. “For this mission, I need strength of character first and adaptability second. Investigative acumen is a distant fourth at best. We might be dealing with professionals here, after all. If we are, there’s a very good chance that you won’t find anything, and you’re the only person there whom I would believe if they told me that,”
Anza groaned. “Yeah, alright, I getcha, teach,” She’d never been able to argue with the old man. He was just so eloquent.
She paused, and a grin crept onto her face. “So you’re saying I can do whatever I want?”
“Within reason,” Wujing scowled at her. “I’m putting my faith in your judgement. Don’t let me down,”
“Aw, don’t worry, teach,” the Guardswoman grinned. “When have I ever disappointed you?”
He folded his arms, raising a wispy eyebrow. “Do you want me to get out your permanent record?”
“No need for that! Time is of the essence and all! I’ve gotta get ready to go on this super secret important mission! Bye now!”
<=====}—o
“By the way,” Mikayla watched in awe as Keldryn collapsed his bag back down. After an hour of gruelling work they’d emptied out the workshop of everything that wasn’t nailed down, unbolted and moved the larder (after a short break to have dinner, and wasn’t it nice that Keldryn had a portable stove so she could finally eat some of that meat), and packed what remained of Astralia’s wardrobe into Keldryn’s bag. All that remained was to move the gorgeous bed, and they’d agreed to do that in the morning after Mikayla enjoyed sleeping on it for one more night.
“What’s up?”
“I almost forgot to ask, but what is that supposed to be called? Bag of Holding is probably trademarked. Dimensional bag? Kaiju bag?” she tried.
“Huh? This?” Keldryn waved his rucksack at her. “It’s just a bag,”
“What? But that’s silly - then, how do you differentiate them from normal bags?”
“What do you mean, ‘normal bags’?”
“Bags that aren’t bigger on the inside,”
“Do you mean, like, pockets?”
“No. A bag. One that is exactly like that except it only has this much space in it,” Mikayla gesticulated at the bag’s dimensions to make her point.
“Oh. We don’t have those around here,” Keldryn shrugged. “Why would anyone make one of those anyway? You could barely fit anything in there,”
“Because not everyone has access to Kaiju leather!”