In the evening, I helped clear out the dead bugs out of the abbey and burn their remains outside using firewood that was growing scarce. Darya returned after dark from a meeting with the village chief and other village heads.
All told, most of the chickens were dead, and some cats and dogs went missing too. Nobody died, but four houses had burned down. Food stocks were meager to none. All the bear meat that was being smoked and dried was gobbled up. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be getting free food for a month as promised. At best, the meals would be rationed, and maybe skipped.
We sat by the hearth in the kitchen, and I warmed my feet by the fire. I still didn’t have any boots, but my high constitution and thick hide protected me from the worst of the cold. A heavy mood hung in the air.
“The forest doesn’t have enough game to feed some 180 villagers,” Amelia said. “And neither does the lake. It might be enough so nobody starves to death, but we’d be cutting close.”
“It’s worse than that.” Darya said. “Most of the planting seed was eaten too. There won’t be much to plant, and it’s an urgent problem.”
“Couldn’t they have stored it better so the bugs wouldn’t get to it?” I asked.
“Maybe? But you’d be surprised what narrow cracks those critters can squeeze through, especially if they smell food on the other side.”
“What are they going to do?”
Darya sighed. “Survive the Dark Night, pool the gold together, and travel to Kittrell to buy planting seed. It’ll be dangerous.”
“Wouldn’t the bugs just eat whatever is planted?”
“Nah, not the ones that show up during the Dark Night. They might trample through the fields, but they’re into flesh and blood. In some ways, the swarm is more dangerous, just not right away. They chow down on all your food, and then you starve to death over a couple of months. Thankfully, we got us a few highly proficient [Farmer] folk who make the plants extra resilient and fast growing.”
“This year has gone terrible from the very start,” Amelia said.
“We’ll be alright, don’t worry,” I said.
Amelia smiled. “I appreciate your optimism.”
“Are we still good for tonight?” Darya asked me.
I watched as Amelia raised an eyebrow at Darya’s suggestive question, and decided to play along. “We shouldn’t do it in your room, it would wake Amelia.”
“Hmm, good point. Your room then?” Darya asked.
I nodded. “That would be much better, but we’d need to keep it quiet, okay?”
“How long is it going to take?”
“Oh, at least an hour. So, you may want to bring some snacks and water. It'll be rough and fast. I’ll be going in and out without stopping.”
“Mhm, got it. We may need some light too, eh? Some of the dun-”
“Don’t like it in the dark, do you?”
“Well yeah, I wouldn’t want to be bumping around-”
“Darya!” Amelia finally spoke up, her face having grown bright red.
Darya turned to her sister. “What?”
I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer and burst out laughing. Darya glanced at me with a confused look on her face. At the same time I decided to get the hell out of the kitchen before the two could murder me. It wasn’t often that I could pull a fast one like this.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
In the nave, Luther strutted around with a posse in tow, waving his machete about like some kind of an African warlord. He was in the midst of a heated argument with another orphan, a girl with puffy eyes and a runny nose, a sure sign of allergies. She must have been pretending to be a princess or something because she wore a handmade tiara and carried herself with an air of arrogance and superiority.
They stopped barking at each other as I walked by, heading to my room. Luther and his two lieutenants stood at attention, as if I was a general inspecting troops. A few had cooking pots on their heads, and carried ladles as clubs. On the blackboard was a sketch of the abbey's floor plan, and what looked like underground tunnels. They must have been playing a war game. It was all so adorable.
Back at my room, I rested on my bed and cracked open a thick book that Amelia had lent me. It cataloged hundreds of skills, passives and relics. I delicately paged through the worn, hand-written tome and was amazed to see that it was written in English. It still surprised me that people in this village spoke a language that I could understand.
While the number of listings in the first three tiers were in the hundreds, the highest tiers had the fewest with only a dozen. Maybe there were few of them to begin with, but I suspected such top information was guarded and not well known. Most listings only had names, or general descriptions without any detailed information.
The air turned chilly as Gregor appeared, floating down from the ceiling. While I flipped through the book, he hovered behind me, looking over my shoulder. The grumpy old man had endless commentary about skills and passives. Most of it was negative or derisive. Nothing was good enough for him.
Tonight, he was sporting a red, woolen scarf around his neck. I had no clue where he could have gotten it from. Did ghosts have some sort of a spectral wardrobe they could use? He sneezed, sniffled and coughed. Apparently ghosts could catch a cold, but he assured me that he wasn’t contagious. I didn’t know which part about all this was the craziest.
He sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”
“Hmm?”
“Something like burned bread. Has Amelia been baking again?”
“Not since the morning, no.”
Gregor squinted his eyes, massaging his temples. “Oh this bloody headache just won’t let up.”
“This passive right here, called [Point Blank.] It looks pretty amazing to me. I think I’m sturdy enough to get into a close quarters fight.”
Gregor leaned in to read the description. “Hrm, it is perhaps suitable to the likes of you. But for such a passive, you would absolutely need a skill to close the distance on your opponent. As I have already made it abundantly clear, damage isn’t everything. You must acquire some kind of an instant, or near-instant movement ability, otherwise you’ll be a sitting duck. This is on top of passive and active countermeasures for ailments and status effects.”
“And how would I go about getting these very specific skills and passives?”
“At the marketplace, of course.”
“Just buy them? For how much?”
He shrugged. “Hard to say really, I haven’t been to the market in … years. Ten gold? Hundred gold? I don’t know.”
I flipped another page in the book. The possibilities were endless, and the combinations of skills, passive and relics were beyond measure. Which was the best for me? It made my head hurt just thinking about it.
I laid the book aside for another time, and went to work making another couple of wands for the midnight dungeon rush. I didn’t have the length of oak to make Heavy wands, so I decided to craft another couple of baton sized wands instead. I felt they were a good compromise between damage and power up time. It made sense to make bigger wands to me. The 1.5 second cooldown on the wands stayed the same regardless of the size, which meant that larger wands had greater damage over time if fired again and again.
The two, baton-sized wands came out at about the same length, but different in their thickness to the Bolstered Wand I made before. This difference had an effect on the wand stats, and told me that it wasn’t the length that mattered, but simply the amount of material.
* [Stout Oak Wand][100/100]
* Damage: 60
* Power up time: 6 seconds
* Cooldown: 1.5 seconds
* Speed: 20 m/s
* Duration: 1 sec
* Range: 20 meters
After finishing the wands, I went to bed to get some much needed sleep. Gregor had promised to wake me up before midnight. I asked him how he’d know the exact time in order to do that, and after some scrutiny as to how come I didn’t know such a basic thing, he told me the status screen showed the time in the top right corner.
As a result, Gregor was certain that I was suffering from ethereal brain worms that were consuming portions of my memory. I decided to go along with his idea, and he said he’ll look into some cures for my brain parasites.
From the exhausting day, I was out as soon as my head hit the straw pillow. After what felt like a mere moment, I was woken up by the sound of a creaking door.