Chapter 41 - Break and Enter
You have been awarded 34,557 experience points. [84,322 base (+8,690 level, +9,002 camp, -67,457 non-combat class)]
I waited until I received the experience notification to think about resurfacing. The poison had worn off sometime in the past hour or so, but my limbs still felt weak and tingly despite the System telling me I was fine. The level up process helped with that somewhat, the euphoric feeling chasing away some of the cobwebs and bringing life to stiff muscles.
Level up!
You are now level 11.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 attribute point.
My achievements window was about how I expected, giving me Boss Killer, Doing your Part, and Spirit of the Warrior yet again. Though nice in that they gave me lots of stats, I looked forward to the days where my levels came from making stuff instead of… this.
The crevice down below wasn’t particularly deep, maybe about twenty or thirty feet, but the water was, in a word, nasty. The brickwork down here was no better, having a thick film of slime that sloughed off in my fingers that even my prosthetic struggled with. The only saving grace was that long years underwater had loosened things up somewhat, and the walls were an uneven mess. That left me handholds to pull myself to the surface and get my prosthetic up to the lip where I’d entered the pool. The climb up to the top was made easier by the extra points in body from Boss Killer, which I was thankful for.
Climbing is now level 7.
When my head crested the water, I spit out my diving tank and finally took a big lungful of uncanned air..
I immediately wished I hadn’t. The cavernous room was repulsive before, but whatever had happened while I was down in the water had pushed the smell into Biblical Plague territory. My eyes watered, and I fought my gag reflex as I pulled myself up onto solid ground to come to rest on the floor with a wet plop.
Fireworks, or more accurately, brightsteel sparks, heralded my return to life above water level and lit up with room. Above me, flaps of translucent organic material hung in tatters from the web of cobalt wires. Charming.
“Oh, Light and gods of old, it’s him!”
A big, gauntleted had seized my neck and hauled me roughly up to a standing position. I thought about struggling, but the deed was done before I could get a hand up.
I looked up to see Geddon there, his broad face plastered with a toothy grin. The furry giant twitched slightly, seeming to be waffling between going in for a manly hug or staying at arm’s length, but he chose the latter with a wrinkling of his nose. He awkwardly slapped me on both my shoulders instead.
“We thought you’d gone down fighting the beast, Brother Ryan, but I guess you’re holding out for a more heroic death, eh?” Geddon turned to shout. “Brother Trix. He needs healing again!”
“No. Don’t.” I spat, trying to get the… unique taste of the water out of my mouth, but it didn’t help. “I’m fine, Geddon. Really.”
“Of course you are,” he replied with a sly wink. “I just want to share this- ah- olfactory adventure with another man before it passes us by.”
I gave myself a sniff. Maybe it wasn’t the room itself that smelled terrible.
Trix was there a second later, yelling my name. “Brother Ryan! Brother Ryan!” The Volpa’s claws scrambled over the bricks and around the piles of filth the dragon had kept around itself. He came on full bore before skidding to a stop a dozen feet from me, a pained look on his face. He reached up to put a paw on his nose.
“Oh, Brother Ryan. I am-” He was beset by a series of gags that doubled him over. Worried, I took a step forward to do something for him, but Geddon stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. A second later he let go with a grimace and surreptitiously wiped his hand on his already soiled tunic.
I looked down at myself, then back to him. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to touch me either..
“No. No. Please,” Trix said after half a minute of looking like he wanted to be sick. “I apologize, Brother. I have a very developed sense of smell. I just can’t- *Mff* express how good it is to see you alive.”
“You smell like a musk eel spawning pool crossed with a slaughteryard,” Geddon explained, reaching up to cover his nose. However, he made the mistake of using the hand he’d just used to touch me. I could see his gorge rising even under his armor. He tried to hide it, but I could tell.
“Oh,” I said, trying to look sympathetic to their plight but failing. “Pardon me. As I look back on how I slew a monster of legend with one attack, there are some things I’d do differently if only to spare your delicate senses.”
Geddon started to laugh but what was supposed to be a mirthful outburst seemed to morph into something else half-way through. He made a dash to the tunnel mouth to throw up.
“Where are the others?” I asked as Geddon did his thing. “And why are you here? The plan was for you to wait for me when the rock did its thing.”
Trix looked apologetic but only just. “Sorry, Brother. The stone had been fading for some time while you were gone until it was hard to detect light from it at all unless I took it down the tunnel for some distance into the true darkness. The last time I took the stone into the dark to check it, it was entirely out of light, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it happened too abruptly.”
“You came looking for me,” I said reproachfully. “Trix, you knew that was a terrible idea. What if I’d found something dangerous?”
“That’s precisely why we came, Brother,” Trix argued.
“Not just us,” Geddon interjected as he came back to stand near me like nothing had happened. “We all came. Come on. The dragonkin sisters will have another reason to admire you after this.”
“Uh,” My brain’s speech center sparked and caught fire. “What?”
Geddon turned back to give me a wink as he led the way into the maze of dragon refuse. “One more than the other. You’ll have a reprieve for now, but once we get you topside and into a bath, you’re going to have your hands full.”
Some kind of filmy residue squished under my boots as we passed between the piles of nasty, but after what I’d just taken a swim in, my disgust level just wasn’t going anywhere above a four. What Geddon was saying left no room to dwell on it anyway.
The big guy’s steps faltered for a moment, as if he’d just tripped on something. Then he turned back to whisper to me. “Don’t tell them I told you. I just thought you needed a warning.”
“Uh huh,” I said, paragon of wit that I was.
We turned a corner around a pile of unmentionable things, and the full body came into view just as a shower of sparks played over its pale-pink skin as they did in life. The ancient wretchwyrm died in the exact center of the room under the crystal where the red light was strongest. The flesh on the dragon’s underbelly was in tatters, falling in strips and ribbons and sagging down to the floor. The multitude of palsied limbs were all bent at strange angles, and the creature’s jaw laid slack. Long tri-forked tongues spilled out of the mouth onto the blood soaked floor.
“Hell of a way to go,” was all that came to mind, not for the first time. There had to be some kind of law back home against the kind of weapons I’d created. If not, maybe I’d have to lobby for one since I was an Exotic now. Even so, I was glad the creature was dead and not doing to me what it hinted it would.
The civilians stood huddled together far from the dragon’s corpse, the grandmother clutching the boy close and shielding his eyes, while the shopkeeper gave us a respectful nod as we walked by, smiling slightly at seeing me alive but then turning away suddenly when the smell hit him.
Sissa and Samila were both standing in front of the dragon’s corpse, near the head, Sissa with her sword in her hand and Samila crouched down to examine the beast’s face.
“Anyone know a good taxidermist?” I said in an attempt to break the ice.
The both of them turned, Samila with that little knowing smirk on her face while Sissa turned from me to the dragon and back again, wild-eyed.
Samila spoke first. “I knew a guy that could mount anything, but that’s probably not what you had in mind.”
With a clang, Sissa’s sword fell to the ground. Then, with stiff, deceptively quick strides she’d crossed the distance and wrapped her arms around me, nearly lifting me off the ground with how fierce she embraced me. She even laid her head against my shoulder despite how wet I was.
I didn’t handle it well. Paralyzed for a full second, I just stood there while she gave me a spinal adjustment with how powerful her arms were. When my brain finally caught up to what was happening, I did this awkward, arms-out, air hug thing where I wasn’t sure if I wanted to slime her more than she was already doing to herself but I also knew I needed to reciprocate somehow.
“We thought you’d died,” she breathed, squeezing me tight, not bothering to acknowledge the smell or the horrible substance that soaked my clothes and my newly sprouted hair.
Then, in a sudden reversal, she pulled away and slapped me, hard. So hard, I had to work my jaw to make sure it wasn’t broken.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“You’re so stupid. You know that? What made you think this was a foe you could fight? Don’t try to feed me an excuse. I saw your turret machine. You didn’t get caught, you planned this. Do you have any idea how lucky you are? How can you be so godsdamned ready to kill yourself?” She was at shouting volume just a few words in, and, by the third or fourth question, I started to catch on that they were rhetorical.
She went on for a good thirty seconds before she paused to catch her breath, and I felt it was probably incumbent on me to respond. I had nothing, though.
“Uh,” I began, stalling for time, but I’d just gotten done exchanging truths with the dead thing in the middle of the room. I wasn’t sure if I had the answers Sissa wanted.
Sissa had simply been waiting for me to try to answer to say more. “You jump on every sword blade, step in front of every arrow. Who asked you to be everyone’s shield? Who appointed you? Huh? You are my responsibility while we are down here, and no one gets to fucking die unless I say so. Do you understand, Brother?”
In another turn of terrifying strangeness, the guard Sergeant began to laugh maniacally. Then it turned into sobs, tears beginning to flow down her blue cheeks as the scales under her eyes darkened in tone until they were navy blue.
Everyone else just looked on in some form of shock, unable to figure out what they should do. None of us got a chance to do anything though. Sissa turned on her heel and marched back toward the dragon to pick up her sword.
I had the urge to reach out and… I don’t know… anything, but I was woefully incapable of reading this encounter.
Samila, as always, came to her sister’s rescue. “We were all worried about you, monk, and when we saw this,” she said, gesturing behind her to the dead wretchwyrm. Then she shrugged. “It’s a lot.”
“Ancient enemies,” Geddon said from my right, nodding as if the two words said it all.
“My people will give you a title for this,” Samila continued. “Or burn you at the stake. Depends on which ones you tell.”
I shook my head. “Listen, I don’t know what this is about. I…” I hesitated. What could I tell them?
“Listen, I don’t know Ralqir. Not the way you people do, at least,” I began.
Samila rolled her eyes. “Obviously.”
“Yes. Everyone is in agreement that you are woefully ignorant of the wider world,” Trix agreed. “We’ve all noticed.”
I nodded. “Thank you, Trix.”
“And your knowledge of peoples and history is also far short of any school worth its accreditation,” the Volpa continued.
“You’re the dumbest smart person I know,” Geddon added helpfully.
“Right, well-”
“We’ve talked it over, and we think you ride that line between bravery and being too stupid to realize what you’re doing,” Samila stated flatly.
“Listen, all of you,” I pleaded, pausing to choose my words as best I could. “Where I come from, things are very different. Everything was… small, but it was everything. I had a family and a people. That was all there was, all I aspired to have, even when I did things that I thought were bigger than myself. Now that I’m here, there’s all this history and culture and people that I know precious little about, and so many things I’ve never learned.”
It felt dirty keeping things so vague with my party- my friends, especially after having to be so candid with the man-eating wretchwyrm thing. The words felt hollow leaving my mouth, but, at the same time, felt safer for everyone involved.
“Since I came here, I’ve been on the run or on the attack. I’ve nearly died a few times.” My voice dropped to a whisper, my mouth suddenly dry. “I’ve had to kill people. Someday I’ll have to stop and think about that.”
“Brother?” Trix questioned, but I ignored him.
“I’m out of my depth here, but the only thing I am absolutely sure of is that you are all worth whatever sacrifice I need to make, not that I’m keen on dying in the process. I’m just not willing to see anyone else die for me or instead of me. In the grand calculus of things, I feel like there are worse ways to live.”
I paused, looking up from the blood-slime pool I’d begun to stare into and catching Sissa rejoining the group, fully composed again. I cleared my throat and forced a smile onto my face.
“I’m also, probably, only alive and sane because I don’t know exactly what I should and shouldn’t be afraid of. So, please, tell me what is the deal with big, pink and squishy over there.”
Sissa grasped onto the question like it was a lifeline, going right into the good stuff. “When Ralqir was thrown into the maelstrom, the planet was awash in the maelstrom’s light. It scoured the surface of our planet and forced us all underground. That was the Purge. You know that much, yes?”
I nodded. I’d pieced something like that together so far, but I was happy for the confirmation.
“Well, dragons were no exception. They were the gods of our planet since the beginning, but even they could not stand in the light for more than a few hours at a time. Even then, displaced from their rightful seat in the cosmos as they were, their power was too great. The world could not sustain them anymore. So, for all our sakes, they chose to sleep.”
Samila took up the story as well. “Our sire is one of those. A blue. Not all of the dragons were content to hibernate themselves into obscurity, though.”
“Yes. Some of them, such as this one, took the wound the Purge dealt them and let it fester,” Sissa said, sparing a glance for the hulking, slimy corpse over her shoulder, like she was making sure it was still dead.
“They are evil, corrupting creatures. All of them. Dragons were the holiest, most powerful beings on Ralqir before the purge, but not all of them were good or wise. These… the wretchwyrms, instead of letting their era pass in peace, chose to diminish themselves, go underground and gnaw at the fabric of reality out of spite.”
I peered over at the dragon’s face, the empty eyes and gaping mouth. I couldn’t imagine it ever being a “dragon” dragon. “An evil god, huh? Am I going to have… I don’t know like a cult or something out for my blood for doing this?”
Samila spat and her eyes hardened. “No. Don’t say that. It wasn’t a god, not even an evil one. It was one, eons ago, but godhood is in what you are and what you do. This thing gave that up to become something else, lesser in every way.”
“Did you- uh- talk to it?” Sissa asked haltingly.
I nodded.
Her expression grew concerned. “What did it say?”
I took a deep breath before answering. “A lot of things, mostly about me and my… about my home. It talked about crystals and collectors and spells and symbiotes and-” I began, my mind wandering back to the half-revelations it had used to pry information out of me. “It was angry, maybe not at me but at my people. It seemed to know a lot, but everything it said was frustratingly vague and riddled with contradictions.”
“Believe nothing it said,” Sissa said with absolute conviction. “They only exist to corrupt. Whatever it told you was to hurt you.”
“It wanted to exchange truths,” I explained. It knew, or maybe guessed, about so much. My origins, the wandering threshold, the System. It could tell despite having never been to my universe. What did that mean? What did it mean by symbiotes? Did it mean the System? Maybe. The System didn’t seem to have any influence over my mind in the way the dragon seemed to think it would. Did it happen as I grew in power? Then there was the presence of another animator here on Ralqir. They had to be old and extraordinarily powerful if they controlled all this. How long had they been here?
I blinked, coming out of my spiraling thoughts and gave a little, half-hearted shrug. “It gave as good as it got. That’s all.”
Why did the brightsteel react so badly to me? To us, I guessed. I watched as the tendrils tried to connect with the crystal again, the violent outburst of sparks that hurt to watch directly.
Sissa reached out and grabbed my hand, giving it a squeeze. Her grasp was warm, gentle but firm. When had someone last taken my hand like that?
She looked into my eyes, a pained look on her face like I was the one doing the crying just a minute ago instead of the other way around. “Listen, Brother Ryan. You can’t trust anything it said. Even the truths you thought you heard are probably not what you think they are. These things are incapable of doing anything good, even simple things like telling the truth.”
That struck me as only partially true, maybe some kind of cultural bias. What it had said fit so well with certain parts of my life.
Then again, maybe I had been taken in by the thing’s riddles and vague hints , filling in the gaps so the dragon never had to.
I still felt like there was something there I needed to think over.
Brightsteel. Why does it do that?
Whatever the wretchwyrm had said about them, I was almost entirely sure another Animator was here on Ralqir, and they’d been reduced to what I was seeing here, a husk that only knew to Shape and to grow, to collect mana for something. A slave to some kind of design.
It sounded like torture and mutilation to me.
Something stank on Ralqir, and it wasn’t just me.
I mentally added another person to my list of people to be saved.
—------------------------
I had to take apart my fat cobalt turret before we left, which meant everyone had to stand around waiting for me while I did it. I wasn’t about to give up good material, though, not after it saved my life and could be used to do it again. I was able to save the smart card, but its connections to rest of the triggers and such would need to be reconnected once I brought the whole thing out of spatial storage.
There was one other thing too.
Loot Ancient Wretchwyrm? Y/N?
Corrupted Dragon Bone x 18 - Bones of an ancient wretchwyrm of the planet Ralqir. Bodies of magical beings such as dragons are a product of their terrible will and these bones reflect that. This wretchwyrm chose a life of filth and loathing over a dignified hibernation after its world underwent a great upheaval. The bones are pitted and brittle but emanate a strong presence closely tied to hunger, desperation and darkness. One would do well to use these bones with care.
The smugglers’ arrows, crossed out as they were, still lead back and back, further into the tunnels. We were cautious in our approach but less so than we were before. The dragonkin ladies insisted the wretch wouldn’t have left anything else alive down here for miles, but I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t want to have come this far only to trip over the finish line.
Eventually, however, we found ourselves at a dead end, facing a black wall with a semi-circle painted on them in flaking, faded yellow.
Hello, quellstone, my old friend.
Since we didn’t have a key, I needed to work some magic. Unfortunately, I was out of wood, so I ended up consuming the goblin herb pouch I’d looted from the ambushers outside the city. That gave me enough just to get a spike of steel through the gaps in the quellstone. Then I set about expanding the width of the metal, atom by atom from the inside. Grueling work but not quite as bad as I remembered thanks to my greater control of my mana. I still felt the pull, but it wasn’t as irresistible as before. Still painful and alarming, for sure, but more manageable.
It probably helped that I wasn’t charging it to blow, not in this confined space at least, especially given how we’d come across quite a few collapses.
The tedious process of thickening the steel rod took about an hour, but, eventually, I was rewarded with a sharp *crack* and the weaker of the quellstone bricks gave way, crumbling to the ground as it lost its shape.
An alarming amount of light blasted out of the hole I made. Real, actual light.
There was a voice too.
“Stop what you’re doing!” Came a muffled shout from the other side. “Stand back and make no sudden moves!”
We all looked at each other, all hearing the exact same thing but not quite believing it. For the first time in forever, we’d heard a voice that didn’t belong to the eight of us.
“Stand back!” The mystery voice commanded.
We did. What else were we going to do?
Then, the bricks seemed to peel back, rearranging themselves in a folding pattern. They seemed to collapse into each other like chunky black liquid then into the wall on the other side, click clacking until we were looking at a smooth, arched entryway into-
Someone’s bedroom.
Two beds on either side of a nightstand were pressed up against our threshold. A bookshelf hung on the wall on the opposite side of the room filled with bound papers and expensive looking leather tomes held up by metal bookends. Some kind of banner hung over the door, black with silver trim, a white bird on an equally white branch.
There were also several armed guards with crossbows pointed our way. Their grim, unblinking expressions gave them an air of veterancy or at least professional bearing. Their fingers were wrapped tightly around the crossbows’ triggers.
Their commander, an unshaven Miur with some kind of insignia on his shoulder and a red-blotted bandage over one eye, addressed us.
“Lay down your weapons and get inside, lest this breach be the death of us all.”