Chapter 48 - Force Some Honesty
My eyes fluttered open. I was in a room, a plain room made of stone, windowless and undecorated. It was small, just big enough to stand up and take two short steps before running into a wall or three steps out of the door near the foot of the bed.
The bed I was on creaked and cracked as I shifted my weight. With how heavy I was, I wondered if I would have to be super careful about where I slept for the rest of my life. If anything, hammocks were right out as were most cots. I’d probably end up sleeping on the floor more often than not. At least I wouldn’t feel sore afterward with Exotic level recovery.
The sheets scratched and crackled as I sat upright. They peeled away from my skin and clothes, clothes I didn’t recognize, to reveal patches of the otherwise white sheets that were brown with dried blood and yellowed with dried sweat.
I reached up to rub the gunk out of my eyes, surprised to find a bandage over one of them and a big bundle of white cloth tied to my scalp. There were a lot of those, actually. Bandages were all over me from head to toe, including a big one that wrapped all the way around my stomach. All of them were more rust colored than their original bright white.
Gingerly, I peeled the one wrapped around my wrist away to find clear, unblemished skin underneath. Exotic healing was no joke.
I’m never going to get used to this, am I? Maybe if I ever do, I should start worrying.
A whiff of something savory hit me just then, which I tracked to two bowls that sat on a table next to the head of my bed. No steam came off of them, and a quick check with my fingers told me they’d been there for some time. My stomach gurgled, regardless. I took up the bowl and grabbed a spoon with a shaky hand.
I must have been in here for a good while considering how hungry I was and the dryness of my mouth, not to mention the weakness I felt. How long had I been out?
It was so quiet and still. I wouldn’t say I missed the sound of the guns, but their absence did trigger an unease in me that was hard to pin down, a sort of unsettledness akin to how I felt my first few days on Ralqir and its lack of moving air when compared to home.
Without the guns, who was holding back to scourge?
The guards probably. My friends. They shouldn’t have to, though. They didn’t heal like I did. I needed to get out there.
I frowned into my bowl.
That was it. If my guns weren’t working, I wasn’t helping, The scourge-touched were coming for me, and others were doing the fighting for me. That would not do in the slightest.
The longer I stood still, the higher the chance someone got hurt as a result.
Still, the soup was delicious, some kind of salty, vegetable blend with dark, dark broth and chunks of some kind of starch I wasn’t entirely ready to call potato. Too gritty.
The bowl was clean before I knew it, and I was on to the next one.
As I’d become accustomed to doing when I was idle nowadays, I opened up my status screen to check on things and was immediately bombarded with notifications.
Many, many notifications.
The notifications stacked up on top of one another, seeming to blink in and out of the foreground of my vision like each wanted to be the first in line for attention, but all they were doing was threatening to make me cross-eyed. I cleared it all away and started filtering by category.
Level up!
You are now level 16.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 attribute point.
Achievements awarded this level:
Spirit of the Warrior: You gained 51% of your experience this level from defeated foes as a non-combat class. [+3 spirit]
Doing Your Part: Some of your creations have been used against agents of the Scourge. [+200% experience awarded for new designs next level]
Ambitious: You have defeated a foe above your level. [+1 to lowest level ability]
Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+1 to all attributes]
Reversal: You gained 100% of your experience this level from Nemesis tagged foes. [+3 to highest attribute]
Mass Slaughter: You have defeated more than 1,000 foes this level. Combat related abilities and skills gain power 50% faster for the next level [ERROR: Ability:Volatility:class_mismatch]
My level up notifications, though numerous, weren’t surprising, but seeing the achievements laid out like this felt so strange and humbling. They all looked generally alike with the exception of level 11, which had things like Big Spender, Inventor, Soulful and the like, which made sense with all the time I spent in the lab during that level.
Reversal was a new achievement, and it was understandable that I hadn’t gotten that one up until this point. 100% of a level just from fighting just wasn’t normally achievable at my level of skill and with my class’ limitations.
The achievement itself was what people referred to as a snowball condition where a small victory quickly turned into a series of larger and larger victories over time. The fact that my highest attribute was Spirit made leveraging the influx of points more difficult, though. It was a weird stat, one I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked. I imagined if Body had been my highest stat during the fight, the bonuses could have kept me going for a long, long time as the levels rolled in.
Of course, if I was a Body guy or a combat class, I probably wouldn’t have had the experience flowing in like I had in the first place. Yesterday’s fight had been a culmination of a lot of time, preparation, and experimentation, stuff I couldn’t have done if I wasn’t what I was.
I checked my character sheet to see what changed and nearly fell out of the bed.
Ryan Kotes - Level 16 (?) Animator (Uncommon)
Type: Artificer (Common)
Core: Engine (Unique)
HP: 220/220
MP: 186/186
Attributes:
Body: 40
Mind: 33
Spirit: 77
Free attribute points: 0
Abilities
Shape 9 (Transmute)
Consume 5 (?)
Iron Grip 4
Devouring Grasp 5(?)
Volatility 3
Imbue 4
Trigger 4
Automate 4+
Tempered Channels 3
Knife in the Dark 22 (?)
Skills:
Climbing 7
Unarmed Combat 5 (?)
Running 5 (?)
Stealth (Gray Man) 11
Conduit 5(?)
Split Mind 9
Spear 4
Deception 5 (?)
Disguise 1
Sword 6 (?)
Pistol 4
Affinities:
Goblinoid F
Iron E
Steel F+
Magnesium F
Mendau Wood D
Limestone E
Cobalt E
Deep Lead E
Nickel E
Copper F
***Spirit: 77***
My Spirit stat had doubled overnight. The other stats had climbed significantly as well. I let my eyes sift down the screen, looking over the numbers. I had a number of question marks on the page now with milestones reached in a number of skills and abilities, and their associated prompts seemed to jump out at me when I gave them even the slightest bit of attention. I ignored them, though. I wanted the big picture right now.
***Knife in the Dark: 22***
What the actual hell?
Knife in the Dark had been something like… three?... maybe? Before yesterday the ability had been one of my lowest, but now it was far and away the largest value in its category. The last time I’d used it I-
Constance, forgive me for being an idiot.
The whole point of taking Knife in the Dark was to conduct an experiment. I wanted to see how much ‘me’ my turrets retained when I Automated them, since they were essentially using a ton of ‘my’ mana. The verbiage on the ability boiled down to “if a target isn’t paying direct attention to you, do bonus damage,” and I’d wanted to see exactly what that meant. My first test had been on the wretchwyrm under the city, but I hadn’t been in a position to think about it after it happened. There’d just been too much going on, what with me poisoned and breathing from an air tank in funky sewer water.
I went back to check the logs from yesterday.
Scourge-touched Undead takes 18 damage. (15 base, 3 Knife in the Dark bonus)(Piercing)
Scourge-touched Undead takes 21 damage. (18 base, 3 Knife in the Dark bonus)(Piercing)
Scourge-touched Goblin takes 15 damage. (12 base, 3 Knife in the Dark bonus)(Piercing)
The amount of messages just like this could have filled books, maybe reams of paper. My head spun at the sheer amount of it.
Every time my turret shot a monster, I was using Knife in the Dark and getting the bonus damage. It was no wonder the ability leveled up so quickly. I had eight turrets out there putting holes in the scourge. Each magazine held about 900 rounds, 900 attacks, not to mention those emplacements with extra magazines and someone to feed them…
That meant I had to have used Knife in the Dark at least 10,000 times in the span of a few hours, and the System counted each and every one of them as progress toward the next level. That was, in a word, ridiculous.
Oh, I’m going to exploit the hell out of this.
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First, though. I needed to get to my workshop. No, scratch that. I needed to find out what was going on, then get to my workshop. No, I needed to know if everyone was okay, what was happening outside, how our supplies were holding up. Then it was workshop time.
I snatched up the half-full bowl of soup and reached for the door handle only to have it slam into my open palm, bending it backward painfully.
“Gah!” I yelped, pulling back and shaking my hand to work feeling back into it.
Jassin in all his Skeletor-like glory, poked his head into the room, not opening the door all the way, opting to lean in through the gap like he was just checking in.
“Ah, you’re awake,” he said, not seeming surprised in the slightest to find me up, but he did seem a bit short of breath, his pale skin taking a reddish hue and a sheen of sweat barely visible on his forehead.
“Jassin. Uh. Yeah.” I replied.
“Eloquent as ever, my boy,” the Lord replied. “You’re looking well. I see you enjoy wearing bandages as much as I enjoy sabatacles.”
I looked down at the pile of dirty cloth on the floor. “They were dirty anyway.”
He smiled at that and shook his head. “Unbelievable. When I saw your injuries I was understandably cautious, but when I spoke to your holy church comrades they all said something along the lines of ‘yes, he does that’ and dismissed my concern out of hand. I didn’t believe them right away, but now that I see it, your legend is going to shine even brighter if word gets around.”
There was a tight feeling in my stomach. “My friends, are they-”
“All fine. Do not worry,” Jassin said placatingly as he stepped all the way into the room. “They are well taken care of and are probably more tired of being thanked for their heroic actions than of their regular duties.”
I sighed in relief. That was one worry off my mind. Wait-
“Did you say ‘my legend?’” I asked. “I have a legend?”
“Oh, yes. The guards that witnessed you at the gate, the talkative ones at least, are abuzz about the one man army, the Rising Sun of Eclipse. Your intestines were hanging out of you when you dragged yourself up to the doors, you know. They’ve been making toasts in your honor, thinking you a martyr already. If only they knew.”
Blinking, I tried to wrap my head around that thought. The Rising Sun of Eclipse.
Right. If only they knew. Jassin didn’t choose his words lightly. I knew that even from the brief time we’d spent together on the road. He wasn’t that type of man.
“I was just leaving,” I probed.
Jassin nodded. “I gathered that, but doing so right now would be unwise. It would be wiser to keep you out of sight until it is time.”
My metal hand twitched at my side.
“Why?” I asked cautiously.
“Mostly for your sake, some for theirs,” Jassin answered. “It is important we discuss something before you decide you want to go out there.”
I looked around the room, at the bare, solid walls, ones Jassin probably thought were nice and sturdy, hard to break. I worked hard to keep the frost out of my voice. “ Does it have to be in here? I think I’ve proved that I’m here to help, right?”
“And there it is. It took you all of nine sentences.” Jassin said with a sigh. “You’re ‘here to help.’ The way you say it, so casually like you’re dying to divulge your secret and cast us into ruin.”
“No, I’m not divulging anything,” I argued. “Dying or otherwise. I just want to get back out there before someone else gets hurt.”
“Before you do that, I feel the need to impress upon you that you must use care in your words and your actions. The secret you have in your possession is the very secret that could rip our world apart, and intentionally or not, you broadcast it to all who know how to listen.” He said it so matter of factly, like it was the most obvious thing that I should be locked away and kept in the dark, like I would hurt others just by being near them.
I raised a dubious eyebrow. “From where I’m sitting, I don’t think I’m even in the top five most dangerous things on this planet, Lord Jassin. The monsters outside count as just one, by the way. I’m pretty sure of that by now. The main point is that my machines can man the walls so your people don’t have to. No secret I have can offset that.”
“Ah. I see,” Jassin considered with a series of thoughtful nods. “We are coming to this issue from different perspectives. You see a horde of angry monsters outside and believe them to be Ralqir’s greatest threat, and maybe from your perspective they would be. I will admit that flesh hungry armies of beasts are a cause for concern. However, from my perspective, you could do far, far more lasting damage to Ralqir than the mindless beasts that now lay siege to this place, and you don’t even have to lift a finger.”
“How?” I asked indignantly.
“By just being who you are, Ryan.”
Ominous, cryptic statements about me… me, a subject of which I was more than qualified to be the world’s leading expert, were fast becoming my least favorite part of my new life. “I don’t understand,” I ground out between my teeth.
“And I don’t expect you to yet, as young as you are but-”
His words stopped having any meaning. The bare walls, the blocked door, the man in front of me. All of felt like the jaws of a trap snapping closed, keeping me in the dark, alone. Hidden away. A pariah again.
“That’s bullshit!” I exploded, making Jassin twitch slightly. “Leave my age out of this and just tell me! No one’s asked for my age even when they’ve tried to kill me or use me, and you don’t get to start caring about it now. I was dropped here with zero knowledge of anything. I’m stumbling into all sorts of trouble, and I get that. But I’d do much less damage if someone would just tell me why the hell I’m such a big deal!”
Jassin worked his jaw as he thought, briefly. “Your point is taken,” he said, an apology in his eyes.
“Thanks,” I replied cooly.
“In my line of work,” Jassin continued, “you tend to assume all the players know at least some part of the game and the stakes. It wasn’t fair of me to assume this about you. I also want to take this opportunity to thank you. It should have been the first thing I did upon entering this room, but I failed at that. You had no reason to fight for us as you did, but you saved us anyway, at great risk to yourself, no less. That speaks to the strength of your character. Thank you.”
I could feel the ‘but’ coming down on me like a meteor. Jassin didn’t keep me waiting long.
“Be that as it may, if you go out there and mix with my people, you sow the seeds for centuries of hell, despite your benevolent aims. You are unwittingly reckless with your secrets, and it will potentially kill millions.”
“How?! Look at me! I’m just one guy! I kept my identity a secret on your request, and I’ve been doing fine so far, all things considered.” I countered.
“Been doing fine, you say,” Jassin prodded, putting his hands on his hips. “Have you? I have spoken with your ‘friends’ from the Undercity, the innocents you rescued as well. They’ll sing your praises until the light burns us all to ash, but ask them who you are or anything personal and they become quiet as mice, almost as if they have something to hide. Their stories would never stand up to more than casual scrutiny.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “Sounds like a normal response to interrogation to me,” I said.
“They suspect you, Ryan. They might not know what you are, but they suspect you are not what you seem. They suspect you, yet they protect you,” Jassin mused angrily, pausing to look pensively at the floor. When he spoke again, his tone was a bit more gentle. “I imagine that was something you earned rather than something asked for, but they are betraying themselves and their loyalties when they speak for you. It is not something you should put them through.”
I opened my mouth to say something but stopped. The lies I was forced to tell, they hurt me to tell them, yes, but I hadn’t considered what I was implicitly asking of the others, even if they didn’t fully believe what I told them. I’d kind of hoped we’d just moved past the expository part of our relationships already.
Did they not ask anymore because they trusted me or because they didn’t want to hear the non-answer they knew I’d give?
“They seem like good people, loyal companions, but if you are as careless among others as you are with them, your secret will be out,” Jassin warned, as if that were the worst thing that could possibly occur.
“Would that be so bad?” I asked, my voice just above a whisper.
“Yes!” Jassin hissed, his eyes flashing and the vein in his forehead popping out.
He took a step back, closed his eyes, and breathed as he fought to get himself back under control. He looked exhausted in that moment, the lines on his face more pronounced than before, his eyes sunken, skin hanging off of his bones like he’d aged years in the span of a couple weeks.
“That is what I have been trying to impress upon you, Ryan. Your origins must be kept a secret, but…”
He steepled his fingers and frowned in contemplation for several seconds before finally continuing.
“I am also unwilling to imprison you like others have. Here is my proposal: You do not have to believe me forever. Believe me for an hour,” he implored me.
“Just one hour. Then you can decide if you want to thrust your presence onto the world, damn the consequences. Let me show you why I ask this of you, and, as a bonus, it would involve leaving this room,” he finished, turning slightly in the direction of the door.
I followed the gesture with my eyes, trying not to let the carrot part of the Miur Lord’s offer obscure the stick. I wanted a nibble of that carrot first, to make sure it was real.
“What did you plan to do with me once we entered the city?” I asked pointedly.
Jassin’s face assumed the perfect amount of restrained embarrassment. “To keep you safely away from other practitioners and have this very conversation.”
“I’m not stupid, Lord Jassin," I said. I had points in Mind now, so it was technically true… probably.. "We could have had this conversation in private on the road, but you decided to string me along until we could get to your university. What, exactly, was your plan for your captured human?”
Jassin’s expression darkened at the casual mention of my species, and he reached behind him to shut the door quietly. The door latched closed with a nearly inaudible click.
Then the Miur Lord stepped closer, speaking in a low, dangerous voice almost in my ear. “What would you like me to say? That I was one of the very few and very privileged people in the world that even know what a human is? That I would have liked to get you into a lab where I could take you apart and put you together again over and over to see precisely what the Dark Lord saw? What if that had, indeed, occurred to me? Would that change things? Would having a villain in your story help you internalize your position? Would that make it simple enough for you?” His hard eyes flashed, and his nostrils flared.
I’d touched a nerve, apparently. Good. I wasn't going to get honesty from a mask.
Shaking my head, I leaned in to make sure he knew I wasn’t intimidated. “I wasn’t looking for simple. I was looking for true.”
“Good” he spat. “If you ever discover a simple truth, I advise you to distrust it immediately.
He took a deep breath, seemingly looking for the right words.
“My position as headmaster is only the most recent in a long line of tasks assigned to me by my queen, Ryan. She has asked me to be many, many things. All of them, without exception, required a complete rearrangement of my life and a new skillset to be mastered. For each role, I studied, sometimes for years, to become what my queen needed, slipped into my role as an actor slips into hers, deeper even. I became my part. This role, however, required nothing from me at all. In fact, it was one I would choose to do if my queen no longer had need of my services. Headmaster, Scholar. No more dirty taverns or blood soaked decks. No sabotage, knives at my throat, or dismembering of corpses. This was going to be a reward for years of service.”
His eyes bored into mine, the intensity of them making me want to look away, to allow for some breathing room, but I didn’t allow myself that reprieve. I wasn’t backing down. Not yet. Not when he seemed ready to be candid for once.
Jassin went on:
“It was strange, actually, not having to be someone else. I didn’t even know what I was anymore after so long. I was still coming to grips with the strangeness of it when the universe dropped, unannounced, a potentially world-ending extradimensional creature, a living, breathing legend, into my lap. A young man, not a devil.”
Jassin sighed and closed his eyes, the picture of weariness. He reached up and rubbed one of his temples as he calmed.
“When I realized what you were, it was too late. A different me would have done what was needed without hesitation, but that wasn’t who was in the carriage that day. Just Trayalo Jassin did not have it in him to kill the boy he’d just met.” Jassin admitted tiredly. “Now, we’re living with that decision, you and I.”
We stared at each other in what was maybe the first truly honest moment between us since the day we’d met. The man looked like he was carrying a great deal. I could understand that.
I broke first, swallowing the ball of righteous anger that had been building in my chest. “You’re proposing a field trip, then, Headmaster?”
Slowly and with great effort, Jassin seemed to come back, to slip his mask of confidence back on. He straightened and rolled his shoulders to work some of the tension out then smoothed his hair. Within seconds, he was composed again.
“If you classify walking down many, many flights of stairs as a field trip,” he said.
“Maybe I could use the exercise,” I allowed. I wanted out of this room, and if that was going to come with answers, I was on board with that.
Jassin nodded slightly, turning to leave before thinking better of it and holding out a hand.
“Sorry. I nearly forgot. First, we need to get control of… all of this.” he declared with an energetic flourish that seemed to encompass the entire room.
“What?” I asked, looking around to see what the man was talking about.
A little smile tugged at the corner of the nobleman’s mouth. “Your aura. I mentioned it once before, if you’ll remember. We need to get your aura under control.”
“How about we stop pretending I should know anything about my aura, and you tell me.”
“Yes. Of course. Zero knowledge. I suspect your previous statements about your absentee master were true, in a way. Your aura is your field of influence, an external manifestation of your magical presence, and we need to do something about it. Right now it is on display for all to see. When we met, it came off annoying and rude, but now… it’s like standing next to an open furnace. I could feel it before I even entered the square yesterday, and I guarantee other practitioners are having a much harder time than I.”
“A hard time?” I asked with a raised eyebrow. “Is having an aura bad?”
“No. No. We all have them, but we restrain them, a simple matter of holding it within. It’s almost second nature by the time you’ve had your dominion for longer than a few years. My practitioners, however, the ones who are still alive and functional after our ordeal, are students, barely coming into their dominions. Your aura is… disruptive for them.”
“I’m not doing anything to hurt anyone-:”
“Nothing like that. It is your presence that is disruptive. When we met, I thought it was residual magic from the creature you slew or perhaps a flaw in your spirit, but your aura has changed in quality since then. It is hard to describe to a layman. Let me see. Imagine a terrible storm, violent and dangerous, but no matter how you try, you cannot perceive the storm with your senses. You know it is there. The wind whips at your face. Houses tumble by. Ancient trees are uprooted and cast down. The effects are plain to see, but you cannot seem to bring your mind to process the storm. That is the type of aura you have. Distracting to say the least. Discombobulating. If you were any other student, I would put you up in a centralized location in the Spire and make the new practitioners hone their magic in your proximity. It would be an excellent way to train their focus. However, I must work with what I have right now, and I need them at their best.”
“Fine,” I replied with a shrug. “What do I do?”
“Hold this. It should mute the effects somewhat. Are you healthy now, Ryan? Have you healed fully?” Jassin asked.
“Uh. Yes. Pretty sure I’m intact.”
“Unbelievable. Very good. I apologize for how unpleasant this may be.”
Jassin took a sack from his belt and opened the cords on top, upending it to dump something round, cold and dark into my hand.
“Quellstone?” I asked rhetorically. I knew what it was. I just didn’t like it. Quellstone was in my top five least favorite stones, a real contender for the title if things kept going like they were.
Jassin squinted at me, moving his eyes over my face, down to the stone, and back, leaning slowly from side to side as if he was trying to see from different angles.
“Better have another,” he said after some thought.
Out came another piece of quellstone. I noticed Jassin himself didn’t seem to want to touch it. He was careful to dump the pieces directly from the bag into my hand.
Again, Jassin squinted at me.
Then, with a frustrated sigh, he emptied the bag into my waiting hands, eight stones in all.
Jassin shook his head. “Unbelievable. This will just have to do. Keep those next to your skin and think small thoughts while we walk.”
“No problem,” I grumbled, my hand already going numb.