Ray was guided by his guiding guard to the infirmary in the town they passed. They had commissioned a couple of the raptors to ride. Ray was still a bit apprehensive about it, and the dinosaur really did look like it was considering how well Ray would taste. Nevertheless, as the guard got on his mount, Ray followed.
The townsfolk didn’t take as much notice of him as they had done the first time, when he had come in via that large procession as part of a huge group. Or maybe they just didn’t want to offend the guard.
Whatever the case, Ray was happy to be able to look around without feeling self-conscious. Not that there was a ton to see.
The houses and other buildings were drab, colourless affairs. Some at least had interesting purposes. Ray spotted an apothecary with a bunch of herbs hanging from the ceiling, a smithy where a blacksmith was hammering away at what looked like a piece of armour, and even a small tavern, though it looked derelict just then.
“Are they subdued because of the plague?” Ray asked. “Or is it normally like this?”
The guard took a bit of time to reply. “A mixture of both, I would say.”
They saw some of the other Denizens working here and there. Lottie was helping with the construction as well. Ray paused to say hello to her, but she wasn’t very responsive. Her mood was black. Jacob had died on the spire. Ray expressed his condolences, neglecting to say that Jacob had insisted nobody was his friend, and moved on.
They reached the infirmary before long. Ray caught its odour before he actually saw the building.
There was a heavy rankness in the air. A stench of filth, blood, and corpses. And something else on top of all that. Something familiar, though he had absolutely no idea where he might have smelled it. The odour was somewhat sickly sweet but made him think of gelatine, for whatever reason.
When they reached the infirmary, Ray found there was almost nothing save a bunch of bodies. Dead, rotting bodies.
“Wasn’t this supposed to be an infirmary?” Ray asked. “You know, a place where people get treated? This looks more like a badly-tended morgue.”
The guard had a hard look on his face. “As Lord Caleb no doubt explained, there is no curing the Infected. They must be killed before they can spread their disease any further.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But the way you’ve stored them here means no one can actually use the infirmary if they’re sick in some other way. They run the risk of contamination this way, don’t they?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Once the Infected are no longer living, the infection itself becomes a lot less contagious, so far as we have discovered.”
“…huh.”
That was highly irregular and strange. Ray’s musings on that discovery didn’t last long. He was soon inside the barnlike building, close enough to actually see what happened to the dead.
It clicked then. The smell. The one that he had failed to recognize at first but could now recall where exactly he had encountered it first. It had been back at the spire, right after the Lostcaller had destroyed an entire side and revealed the pulsating, bloody, and fleshy matter underneath the spire’s surface. That had smelled the exact same.
This plague the Everstead people were suffering was the same kind of growth from the spire they were guarding.
It proved to be true when Ray actually got a good look at them. The guard removed the tarp covering the bodies, making Ray gag a little as the stench intensified.
The same pulsating, pinkish and purplish pustules and growths covered the corpses. They all glistened, wet with blood and other fluids. The way some of them had split across the belly, chest, neck, and head showed how some of the Infected had ended up dead.
Ray did notice more pointed methods of death too. Bloody stab holes, slashes across the neck, that sort of thing. Some had definitely been killed.
Intriguingly, the corpses all looked rather… Ray wasn’t sure how to describe it. Greying and white, rotting even in the areas that weren’t infected by the strange growths.
Ray tamped down his reactions. He was here for a reason. One was to observe what the infected were actually afflicted with.
The other… he turned to the guard. “Can you take me to where I can buy some health poultices or other medicine or the like?”
Nodding, the guard turned to lead him away. As he did so, Ray quietly cast Lifeblood Soulform to call up his mimic. He tasked it to get a good look at the corpses so that it could copy them later. Depending on how things went later, it might come in handy.
Ray followed the guard to the front of the infirmary, where a lone old man was taking care of a small stall. He looked at Ray with rheumy eyes.
“Uh,” Ray said. “Do you have anything like health potions or poultices? Something that can help me fix up a wound in a jiffy.”
“Potions and poultices?” he rasped. “This look like some kind of witchy brewery to you?”
“If I can’t get those here, then what can I buy?”
“Why don’t you take a look at the shelves?”
Ray frowned. The man was being uncooperative on purpose. He looked at the guard for some assistance, but the man was pointedly looking away. No help was coming from him.
The shelves held nothing other than a bunch of ointments he couldn’t even read the labels of. The handwriting was spidery and was in a language he was absolutely unfamiliar with. Ray highly doubted there was anything helpful for him here. Annoying.
“Why don’t you give him the Rejuvenating Tincture, you old coot?” someone yelled from the back.
The words came out weird, like three people had said them at once. Which turned out to be kind of true when Ray turned around to see who had spoken. He had a hard time not gasping.
It felt like he was looking at a walking starfish with reddish-gold skin, just one that had been blown up to about his size. But instead of a mouth in the centre of its body where all the arms met, there were three different mouths and eye pairs on three of its top arms. The creature was using the other two limbs like legs to walk forward.
The garb was strange too. Clad in what looked like leather straps studded with bits of metal that jingled a little as it moved. Its midsection was entirely covered with those leather-and-metal wraps.
Grumbling, the old man shuffled through a door at the back of the stall.
“Nasty old codger,” the walking, talking starfish’s top head said. “You have to really poke him to get anything out of him.”
“Um, I see. Thanks for stepping in, I guess.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
It was the head on the left side that spoke next. “No problem. You didn’t seem to be one of them, and you seemed sort of new, so I thought I’d step in.”
“Wh—who are you?”
He had almost said what are you, but that would have been the height of rudeness, so he had amended it at the last second. Not that he wouldn’t have liked an answer to his original question.
Ray looked at his guard as though the man would introduce them, but he continued pretending everything outside his immediate vicinity ceased to exist. He had even stepped back, like he wanted to get away. Ray was starting to get the feeling the guy didn’t actually like his job of tailing a Denizen.
“My name is Ram,” said the first head on top.
“Bam,” said the second.
“And I am Lam,” said the third on the right.
“Ram, Bam, Lam,” Ray said. It was a great thing he had seen quite a few odd stuff in the Tower already, so he wasn’t as weirded out as he probably should have been, talking to a three-headed starfish. “Nice to meet you.”
Nevertheless, he tried using Primordial Gauge on the guy.
[Warning!]
Primordial Gauge has been blocked by Accountant’s Scrutiny [Tier 9].
Accountant’s Scrutiny? What in the world was that skill supposed to be?
“Oh, a curious Denizen,” Ram said.
“Careful now,” said Bam. “Curiosity can get you killed.”
Clearly, he—they?—had detected his use of Primordial Gauge. It would have been a mite embarrassing at being caught red-handed, but Ray had so many questions about this whole thing, shame was very low on his emotional priority list.
Thankfully, after airing his confusion about his new acquaintance, Ram, Bam, and Lam were willing to indulge his curiosity.
“We are what you would call in your language the Holdstar,” Ram said. “The Holdstar are an omniverse-faring race and tend to have dealings and relationships with all sorts of entities. In our specific case, we three were hired by the Tower Lord as an auditor to look into certain accounting matters through the Tower.”
Ray had more questions about Ram’s race, but he asked the easier question first. “An auditor? Is there something wrong with the… accounts, so to speak?”
It wasn’t difficult to figure that this was sort of like a business venture for the Sylvans. They had come here with a certain number of resources, had possibly spent a certain amount of currency on said resources. Now, it seemed the Tower Lord wanted a proper accounting of it all.
Bam lowered his voice. “There is definitely something wrong with the Second Floor accounts. That’s why we’re here, as independent auditors looking into matter.”
“What exactly is wrong?”
“Missing purchases. Certain entries in the books not reflecting reality. Certain expenditures simply not occurring despite being reported. We suspect the usual laundering and bribery afoot.”
“Hmm.” Ray looked at the store again, the sounds of the old man bustling about in the back punctuating their conversation. “To be fair, the Second Floor is pretty different from the First. What with incorporating a real, live kingdom.”
“That’s the thing, though.” Lam said, quietest of all. “It’s not—”
“Hush, hush!” Bam said, voice loud over Lam’s. “We don’t need to tell him everything.”
“Tell me what?” Ray asked. He was appreciating being told information for free for a change. Going back to having to pay for it, one way or another, was not going to be fun.
Ram cleared his throat, and the other two went quiet. “We suspect things are not what they seem here.”
“I figured that. But what makes you suspicious?”
“Well, the Tower Lord allocates a certain budget to each of his Floor Lords to oversee a certain Floor, yes? In return, each Floor Lord must reveal their exact plans for their Floor to the Tower Lord before receiving the funds. As far as the Tower Lord has told me, the Second Floor was never supposed to be… this.”
Ray blinked. “Then what was it supposed to be?”
“Something about a scavenger hunt Objective for the Denizens and a few other things, none of which seemed to have been implemented. Instead, we have this strange, foreign kingdom incorporated into the Floor.”
“So you’re investigating how the Floor Lord got the budget to get a kingdom on the Floor?”
“Yes. Unless it wasn’t the Floor Lord at all, but the System itself that caused this. Strange anomalies certainly crop up from time to time. We just need to get to the bottom of whatever happened here.”
“Well, there you go,” Bam said with a nasty tone. “You’ve gone and done it, Ram. You told the Denizen everything. What you going to do next, turn him into another head and stick him on you too? Only place left is the backside.”
Ram didn’t answer, and as intrigued as Ray was about what he had just been revealed, his questioning was interrupted by the arrival of the old man. He came up to the counter from the back with a small satchel in his arm. It was filled with tiny glass vials that tinkled as he moved.
“Here ye go,” the old man said. “Some Rejuvenating Tinctures. That ought to be enough.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. The man was officially tired of them.
“Thank you,” Ray said, accepting the satchel. “How much is it going to be?”
“Free of charge.”
He spat those words out like he’d been forced to do so with a burning brand stamped on his ass.
Ray, however, grinned. “Really? Totally free?” He looked around a little suspiciously. “I’m not on camera, am I?”
“What?”
That came from all three people who weren’t Ray. Well, five, if one countered Ram, Bam, and Lam as separate entities.
“Never mind,” Ray said. He disappeared the satchel into his bag of holding. “I think we’re good here.” He turned to the guard. “Time to get going.”
The man nodded, obviously quite relieved they were finally going to get a move on to the main business. That of killing the Infected.
“You never told me much about yourself,” Ram said. “O mysterious Denizen.”
Ray turned his grin onto the Holdstar. “Oh, I’m just some lowly, curious Denizen. Maybe when we meet again, I’ll have more stories to tell you about myself.”
“Certainly you have some stories about yourself from the First Floor,” Lam said. “What did you do there?”
Ray had a small series of flashbacks then. He had fought Sylvans and killed Brighthorns, cleared dungeons and taken Tower Nodes, fought and killed more Sylvans and Brighthorns, defeated an enemy Faction, killed more Sylvans… Oh, and he had killed the Lord of the First Floor too. Couldn’t forget that.
“I worked with a bunch of other people to complete the Floor Lord’s Objective down there,” Ray said with as straight a face as he could manage. “And that basically got me here. Not much to tell, sadly.”
“What was the Objective?” Ram asked.
“Nothing too difficult. Just bringing one of the wandering Brighthorns to the Floor Lord alive.”
“Ah, I see.” The trio began waving oddly. All three of its starfish arms began moving from one side to the other. Ray had to wonder if the motion caused them discomfort and they still did it anyway. “Then this is farewell for now, Denizen. May we meet again.”
Ray nodded, offered a wave of his own. “Until next time, Ram, Bam, and Lam.”
All three heads smiled, probably happy he had recalled their names.
Ray turned back to the guard, making sure to dismiss his mimic construct from within the infirmary. “Alright, let’s go.”
----------------------------------------
Their journey to where the living Infected were located took quite a bit longer. The guard informed Ray that the Infected tended to stay far away from civilization.
That made sense. With how viciously they were being treated, they wouldn’t want to be spotted by healthy people and be immediately targeted for execution. But Ray wondered if it was just that, or if it was also because they didn’t want to spread their contagion if they could help it.
Moreover, it sounded like a conscious decision. Caleb had described them more zombielike. Maybe Ray was attaching too much of an assumption to them, and their actual reason for staying away from other people was just a bestial nature driven by the need for survival.
The actual location turned out to be some woods far from any place where people stayed. In fact, by the looks of things, they had nearly travelled to the edge of the cliff. Ray could fall off and get back down to Cliff Four from here.
“This forest is full of them,” the guard said. “Once you enter, you will come across them in no time. They also tend not to run away, so you shouldn’t have any need to chase them.” He smiled, for the first time ever, though it had no trace of humour. “Unless you’re very frightening, of course.”
Chuckling a little, Ray said, “Me? Frightening? Please.”
Ray ought to ask the guard’s name, with how long they were spending time together. But also, his intent was to leave for Cliff Two as soon as he was done taking full advantage of the opportunities of Cliff Three. He was pretty sure the guard wasn’t going to follow him there. So what would be the point of asking for names, especially from a guy who clearly didn’t like Ray?
He got off his raptor mount, resisting the urge to rub his ass. Damn, he was sore after such a long ride. How did people ride for so long? Their hindquarters had to be wooden planks, geez.
Really would have been more preferable to fly, but Ray hadn’t wanted to use up any more True Mana shards than was necessary.
“Alright, then.” Ray set his shoulders. “I’ll get going.”
“To kill them, yes?”
Ray looked back. There was a shrewd glint of evaluation in the man’s eyes. Clearly, he wasn’t one to be taken in easily. Maybe that was why he was assigned to Ray in the first place.
“Of course,” Ray said. “That’s part of the deal, isn’t it? I take care of these Infected for you, and in return, you give me all the information I want.”
“Right. I’ll wait here. Once you’re done with the business, I can go in and confirm.”
“Makes sense. I’ll try to make sure all the bodies are in one place.” He grinned. “I’ll make sure I’m not, you know, too frightening.”
This time, the guard didn’t smile. Lousy ass.
It was only after Ray entered the forest that he summoned his flying eyeball. Time to find where these Infected were. Not to kill them, regardless of what the guard and his superiors wanted. Not unless it was absolutely necessary.
First, Ray was going to see if they really were mere zombies, or if he could talk.