The bear stood on its hind legs, its massive head peering at me as it puffed up intimidatingly.
It was huge, a solid wall of claws and fangs. Even though I stood above it on the edge of the bowl, I knew it would tower above me on even ground. It let out another deep sawing roar of challenge that tore through the air like an out-of-control freight train.
“Ideas?” I squeaked out at Pest, my dry throat choking on the word. He didn’t respond. I glanced towards him. He was no longer there, the tickle of the bond between us was drenched in terror and panic. The little fucker had bolted. I wish I had enough brain cells at that moment to have thought to run.
With a tremendous thud that echoed to the corners of the room, the bear came down on its paws and then charged towards me. It was fast, a wave of flowing fur that almost looked beautiful in its flowing gallop. I may have appreciated it more given time, but the murderous intent dripping from the beast’s jaws made me reconsider taking too long to appreciate the nature of the bear.
I inspected it.
Name: Bear of the Berserker
Race: Elder Eurasian Brown Bear
Type: Creature
Allegiance: None
FLAGS: COGNITION_0
Health: Healthy
Energy: Full
The same species of bear as Bogart, but nearly twice his size. I took some deep mental breaths in the inspect-pause and took stock of my situation. I had a frying pan, hatchet, knife, missing companion, and shitty makeshift bow. I really needed to update my equipment soon. Money was required for that, however. Or hacks. I promised on the grave of my Great Aunt Ester that I would stop fucking around and abuse my Loki accidently given talents in the future. Though, I didn’t have a Great Aunt Ester.
This huge specimen of furry death was special, in an unflagged way. Elder and uniquely named. This was a dungeon, and therefore each challenge was a test, and tests could be passed. So that must mean I could win. Right?
The fact that the bear was linked to berserkers in title and in rune poem was not lost to me. I was a berserker too, so maybe I could use that to my advantage.
To summarize my thoughts, I was fucked. Super fucked. I should just go back to the spa and have a good evening with the tentacle monster fucked. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred gold coins.
I dropped the Inspect and tore Gloria from her harness as the bear continued its charge up the side of the bowl. It was leading with a muzzle full of large deadly fangs, ready to take a good chomp out of me.
I mimicked it, pulling back my lips in a snarl as I mentally pushed at my simmering rage. Always inside, like a pilot light, just waiting to ignite when needed. It didn’t take much coaxing to spark.
Exploding with Berserker I snapped Gloria forward to meet the bear as it was almost atop me. The pan resonated with a heavily satisfying clang and crunch as it smashed the bear in the maw. The huge beast’s momentum ripped Gloria from my hand as it plowed into me like a linebacker.
[You have taken Crushing damage.]
I went down hard, my scream of rage and pain smothered by the great furry asshole as it stumbled and fell atop me before rolling off as it skidded to a stop. I struggled to my feet in a hectic scramble as the bear rose to its own with a stagger with unsteady steps.
My breath whistled and crackled brittly, a violent fit racked my body as I painfully hacked up wet phlegm. It tasted of salt and copper as I spit the goop out. That slam must have done things to my insides better left to diagnose later. If I had a later. With an unsteady hand I pulled my hatchet from my belt.
“The hatchetman cometh motherfucker.” I said with a wheeze and advanced towards it.
The bear chuffed and complained before turning to face me again. Long streamers of drool and blood splattered against the stone as it tossed its head. It roared and lunged. I roared back and rushed to meet it. I swung my hatchet and it recoiled back avoiding my strike. I pushed forward aggressively shouting and cut at the air with my hatched, leaping towards it with each swing. It retreated, backing away from me.
This huge bear, full of deadly menace and intimidation cowered away from me. I imagined that I scented fear and it fed my berserker heart. I slashed at it again with a mighty leap, this time my blade glancing off of its muzzle.
The bear jerked up in pain and reared back onto its hind feet. I stepped in close, expecting the retreating creature to flail and flounder as I slammed my hatchet into its chest. Instead, it didn’t even flinch. If it wasn’t for the trickle of blood running down the head my hatchet then I would have thought I hadn’t even gotten through its thick fur.
I looked up, since it was a few heads taller than me, and startled as it looked back. Its eyes had gone red, and plumes of faint steam rose from its body like it had just been dunked in boiling water before being set out in the cold.
[You have failed to resist an Intimidation attempt.]
[You are Terrified!]
A wave of terror ran through me, dosing my berserker’s fire. Well. Time to pull a Pest I supposed.
The bear let out another low rumbling and grating roar and I was off like it was a sprinters pistol.
I tried to bring the hatchet with me, but it was stuck solid, so I left it with the bear as a parting gift. I sprinted as best as my body of crunched bits would let me, my wheezing lungs burning and sharp pains cutting my insides. I ran around the edge of the bowl, and it didn’t take long before I heard the heavy staccato of the bear’s footfalls as it chased after me. As my luck have it, the bear wasn’t as fast at running in a circle as it was at a straight charge.
[Your terror subsides.]
I could think a little more clearly as the edge of fear softened. I was down to just my knife and pockets full of random junk. Clay vials, a snack bar, and my water flask were the only things I could remember having on me. Nothing that would save me. Unless I cheated. I had promised Great Aunt Ester that I would cheat more, hadn’t I?
I could manage something if I timed it just right.
I hopped and spun to a stop, taking one of the clay vials I began to throw it, aiming for the bear. Right before I lost contact with the vial, I inspected it and ripped open space with the rune-code rift. I ran through my list of flags looking for something volatile or dangerous. I put FRAGILE and DECAY on the bottle, and TOXIC, EVERBURNING, and ACID on the liquid.
After releasing the inspect-pause and finishing my throw, the bottle made it about four feet before vanishing in a brief burst of flame and acrid smoke. The berserking bear completely ignored it as it plowed through the smoke without any reaction. That mix turned into a complete dud and I hectically ripped another vessel from my pocket and started tossing it forward before trying again.
The inspect-pause state instantly drew my focus around the edges of the delightfully orange-amber info box. The periphery of the box was encased in bear. I could just see the edges of a row of teeth about to bite the hand from my body.
Focusing my attention on the inspect itself, I gave an internal groan. In my haste I had grabbed my flask. It was still filled with pleasant spa water, maybe it would enjoy a nice schvitz and give me a break. I should have enough of the hot water to make a decent sauna in the pit. Actually… a wicked thought of action I had been formulating since a certain outhouse accident filled my mind. With a simple rune-code edit I closed the window, all hell let loose. Or I should say, flooded out.
[***]
I awoke to an insistent poking. A sharp little thing stabbing in my ribs. It was a wonder that the prodding was able to rouse me through the full body pain, with a special overwhelming suffering coming from my arm.
A swath of notifications scrolled across my vision, but I only skimmed them, catching the important keywords. Dazed, and Profuse Bleeding being my current status effects of concern.
“Chairman, Chairman, quickly, this needs your attention.” Pest cajoled me.
“Huh?” I grunted weakly. The mental fog and numbness of an unresponsive body gripped me. I wasn’t doing so good. I blinked my eyes trying to clear them and struggled to focus on Pest as he insistently kept poking me. He was at my side, focusing on my pained arm.
My right hand was missing again. What the fuck was with that hand, did I need to put a picture of it on a milk box or something? I tittered at my own joke. I was defiantly a few crackers short of a salad at the moment.
The bloody stump where right hand had been wound up with bits of tattered cloth and various strings and twines. Awwww, my heart melted—or stopped—a little. Pest was such a good pal. He tried to bandage me. I bet he got a skill for his efforts. Well… maybe after his efforts, looking at the poorly done bandage and the blood leaking from it into a puddle.
It was a big puddle, pooling out from me and slipping over the edge of the bowl to mix with a soup of gore at the bottom. The remains of the bear lay down there, half submerged in the spa water from the flask and mixture of blood and bits. Its head was missing, or rather, not missing but the mouth had been split open and torn wide to such an extent that the top of its head was a hanging flap like a thrown back hood on a cloak. Heh, a bear fur cloak, made the easy way. A little clean up and some skinning and that would be a fine raiment of savagery.
My eyelids were heavy so I stopped struggling to lift them. In the comforting darkness behind them I looked at the ever-present party UI. I Ignored it more than not, focusing past it like a computer monitor that had an image burnt into the screen. But it was my only source of entertainment at the moment. I chased it around the inside of my eyelids as it fluttered around like a butterfly constantly dodging my focus. It was a struggle to get a good look at the health indicators, but the results brought a surge of confusion and anger.
[Ryan Wolfe – Mildly Injured]
[Alan Halloway – Heavily Injured]
[Viktor – Terminally Injured]
[Pest – Lightly Injured]
[Mave Pollaris – Fallen]
[x_x_DarkEdge_x_x – Critically Injured]
[Carmilla – Mildly Injured]
The residual berserker rage let out one last flash of flaming anger and burnt the fog away from mind.
[Your Berserker skill has unlocked a hidden talent.]
[Clarity Of Rage - This talent lets you expend some of your pent-up anger to burn away obscuring effects.]
[Your head clears.]
Things were not looking well, for anybody. Mave had fallen? What the hell happened! I couldn’t die here, numb and bleeding out, I needed to help the others.
“Pest,” I tried to say with urgency, but my words slurred and struggled to came out. “Water skin.”
“Yes!” He cracked, his fear and anxiety a sharp tingle through our bond. He rummaged around in a heap of junk that was piled next to him. His mini-rucksack was upended and a spill of random bits leaked from its mouth. He removed a flaccid sack of skin with a small wooden stopper affixed in one end. I inspected it.
Name: Waterskin
Material: Leather (Bull Scrotum)
Durability: Worn
Value: Below Average
FLAGS: TAINT
Contents: NONE
Contents Flags: NONE
I weakly flailed my stubby arm at him, and he stumbled, fumbling the floppy thing. It slipped from his little hands and hit the floor with a wet splat, like a slice of old bologna against a middle school wall. If I had the energy, I may have shuddered.
“Water…” I said to his disappointed face.
He nodded and pulled a silver canteen from a pouch on his belt. The etching of a tree of life was done so well that it seemed to sway gently across its side as the torchlight played across its shiny surface. It was the size of one of those small and circular pocket flasks that you would occasionally see in movies, or with snobby hipsters as they spiked their artisanal coffees with liqueur.
Name: Flask
Material: Polished Steel
Durability: Undamaged
Value: Above Average
FLAGS: NONE
Contents: Fruit Juice (Assorted)
Contents Flags: NOURISHMENT
Contents Efficacy: Moderate
Fruit juice? Where the hell had he found fruit juice? Or equally strange, the flask itself? The little kleptomaniac had treasures beyond measure. I really needed to pillage his bag.
He the flask with a spin to its screw top and brought it to my lips. I inspected it again and worked the rune-code with a quick edit, but it was slow going. One would hope in the inspect-pause state that the negative effects and pain would subside, but instead they stretched out infinitely.
Releasing the inspect, I tasted the juice turned healing potion. It wasn’t bad. The fire-ant sensation of healing ate across my body, but I didn’t feel it for very long as I was struck unconscious near immediately. I like to think that at that moment, like a ticking time bomb on every prime-time television show, I was on the very last second before death just at the potion hit me.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
[***]
I awoke again, this time feeling exhausted but whole. The first thing I did was look at the party interface.
[Ryan Wolfe – Healthy]
[Alan Halloway – Heavily Injured]
[Viktor – Healthy]
[Pest – Healthy]
[Mave Pollaris – Fallen]
[x_x_DarkEdge_x_x – Lightly Injured]
[Carmilla – Mildly Injured]
Mave, of course, was still down but it looked like a few others had found some method of healing. Ryan was fully healed as well, the potion dictator taking advantage of the guilds resources. I supposed I wasn’t one to cast stones, in my fully healed state from secret powers. To be fair, I only just started cheating in earnest. After this, a shower of healing potions for everyone, I promised that.
Pest was sleeping. He was as close to me as he could get without laying in the sticky congealed blood spread out around me. I got up and stripped off my jacket and used a handful of Pest’s junk to scrub as much blood from it and myself as I could. It was mildly successful. Looking at my mended, but stained jacket, I didn’t know if I’d ever get the rust-colored stains out of its bright blue.
I mentally shrugged. Fuck it, I hated the color anyway. I tossed the ugly thing into the pool of my own blood and let it soak it up. I’d dye it redcap style.
Looking around the arena-like room nothing had changed besides a set of paths on opposite walls had opened. The bear was in a grisly state, but I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. Especially since it looked to be the only loot available in this challenge room.
I trudged down to it and waded into the thigh deep pool. I was forced to use the energy sapping instant cast version of my skills for skinning and part harvesting. I didn’t have the strength or tools to otherwise handle the bear in the thigh deep bloody soup it lay in. The skill managed to net me the skin and bear claws, it seemed the teeth were too damaged to be considered valuable enough to harvest.
Before taking the skin and leaving the pool of spa water and our intermingled blood I cut some pieces of meat from the bear. As I cut the meat my knife sizzled and burned like a pan over a fire. A steady black curl of smoke rose from the cut as the knife slipped through the meat with almost no resistance. The piece came away with a charred edge that stank of acid burn. My stink knife was acting like a true acid knife now, and that gave me all sorts of evilly imaginative ways to turn it into a tool of destruction.
After escaping the bloody mire, I began working with the skin. Turning the course fur inward left the sticky and gooey flesh side facing outwards. The hood held the top half of the bear’s head and after pressing the face flat with eye holes sewed closed it presented a truly macabre visage.
I tried to clean up the flesh side by running my knife along it, but no matter what I did I couldn’t activate the hidden acid talent. I inspected it again looking for any hint as to why it wasn’t working.
Name: Knife
Material: Iron
Durability: Worn
Value: Treasure
FLAGS: ANOINTED(LOKI) – (VIKTOR), CORROSION_RESISTANT, DURABLE, MENDING
It was the same, only now lacking the ACID flag. Why had it changed? I fiddled with it for quite a while and couldn’t get it to change it back. I even tried shouting anime style attack move names. I got nothing.
I had to settle with scraping the skin with the blade. With my inexpert hand at the task, it only gave it an even rougher look and added to its savage barbarian appearance. The only thing it was missing were some huge bear fangs affixed around the edge of the cloak. I had to settle with a bear claw cloak pin to close it at the neck.
On inspection it truly surprised me.
Name: Bearskin Cloak of the Berserker Spirit
Material: Bear of the Berserker Skin
Durability: Worn
Value: Priceless
FLAGS: ANOINTED(Loki) - UNIQUE, BLESSED(BERSERKER_ENDURANCE), CHOSEN_ARMOR, MENDING
I was floored, this item was amazing. I had been expecting a half-destroyed bear skin rug or something. Instead, I had a priceless, unique and named item, and that was before I had even improved it. I felt completely justified in my side hobbies of creation and crafting and not just cheating wholesale.
I’d have to grill Halloway about unique items. He was a great source of information if I asked pointed questions, otherwise he didn’t seem too great at sharing things that I felt were important. Such as the possibility of truly awesome and overpowered unique items. Not to mention the important little tidbit that someone could craft them. Halloway was like a wiki, you had to know what to search for. Hallopedia, so handy everyone should have one.
Finished with the messy jobs, I did another Pest junk-loot scrub and donned my newly dyed jacket and the Berserker cloak. I couldn’t see myself, but I could imagine that I was looking rather menacing.
I nudged Pest awake and collected up Gloria and my hatchet. The bow was a lost cause, somewhere in my tussle having been lost and then trampled, it had broken into multiple pieces. I could have used some of my energy to repair it but I wasn’t too bothered, the bow was a tool more than a weapon in my hands anyway. No matter how I had joked about being the best archer I didn’t have any plans to follow the archer’s path.
The bear figurine had suffered a similar fate, but one look at Pest’s big pleading eyes had me expending some of my dwindling energy fit it back together. It worked, but now the figure had some defects and looked like a ceramic coffee mug that a child had hastily glued back together to avoid parental wrath.
The flask took some looking for me to find. If it wasn’t for its current bright pink form, I am not sure if I could have found it before giving up. It was in a far corner, covered with gore that could have been parts of the bears missing lower jaw or bits of my hand. A quick fix in the rune-code had the flask returned to normal, but now emptied of any water. I didn’t have much use of it at the moment, so I stuffed it into Pest’s bag of goodies. With its loss I was out of drinkables, and therefore out of potions to hack. Pest’s little hipster flask was our last life-line if worst came to worst and no matter how I reasoned or begged he was firm in the negotiation and refused to let me hold it.
We were packed back up and headed out of the arena-like space when a loud explosion of fanfare and bright light staggered and blinded me. My ears rang and I had to clench my eyes closed until the flash blindness left me. Interestingly enough, it didn’t come with a corresponding status effect.
“Oh,” I said dryly as I opened my eyes. A shower of colorful paper confetti was raining down, each piece dissolving as it hit the floor. Standing amongst the spectacle was Loki, in all his glory.
He wore a very skin-tight one-piece costume, revealing all the shapes of his muscular frame, including some bits I’d rather not see. Overgenerous bits in my opinion, but enough of that. The print of the costume resembled a houndstooth pattern, but the shape altered to a galloping eight-legged horse. The coloration was split down the middle with the right half being green and orange and the left purple and gold.
He had shoes of the same colors with long curled ends like a holiday elves. His neck had a large and floppy ruff shaped like a many-pointed star, each tip hosting a jingling bell. His final bit of foppery was a glossy cane, the clashing colors twisting up its length to be tipped with an egg sized golden ball carved into a lantern. I felt he needed a matching jester’s cap, but he seemed to be without.
“Behold, it is I,” he announced joyfully, while twisting at his mustache, which I noticed was waxed brilliantly.
“And a vision of wonder you are.” I replied flatly as my exhaustion weighed on me. He gave me a skeptical look before continuing.
“My benevolent countenance is here to tend to your newest list of complaints. Oh, my apologies,” he said with a titter. “I misspoke, I am of course referring to your list of reports not complaints.” He paused for a moment and seemed to finally take in the room, my state of dress, and, after a few steps to peer over the edge of the bowl, the bear corpse. “My word, this scene looks delightfully savage. I see you have overcome the personification of the berserkers. This trial I am quite proud of, I will let you know. It is not a pseudo-generated location as most dungeons are, but one I took a hand in crafting myself.”
“No wonder it was so… wonderful,” I said dryly. I was struggling to keep the subservient facade with my benefactor et abductor. I don’t know why I was compelled to bother with it on this visit, but it felt right. It isn’t like he didn’t know I was faking it. He had seen me as I was. “It was a near impossible fight, but I somehow did it.”
“That was quite the feat.” He congratulated me as he took in the corpse of the bear. “It seems you are making good use of your Improvised Weapon skill with that cooking implement.”
“Improvised Weapon?” I asked with suspicion. “Do you mean Unconventional Weapon Use?”
“Of course, I do not. I say what I mean.” He said haughtily before surprising me with an explanation. “Improvised Weapon is the skill for using those things not intended to be used as a weapon, such as your pan there. Unconventional Weapon Use is more akin to your bow being used to bludgeon the bear as if it were a ruffian’s club. That is not what you did with it, is it?”
“Sorry, my lord. I would never intend to accuse you of speaking falsely.” I said emulating his foppish speech pattern. It didn’t last long, “And yea, no, my bow was crushed when that fucker bear plowed over me like a steam roller with a grudge. I don’t have a skill called Improvised Weapon. I thought that Unconventional Weapon Use was for improvised weapons.”
“Assume? You seem to assume quite often Alpha Tester Viktor. You know what they say about assuming.” He said before looking between me and the bear’s corpse before letting out a weary sigh. I seemed to make him do that at least once every time he chose to visit with me.
He stepped close to me and opened my rune-code rift. For the first time, I took in the fact that he didn’t need to touch me to make that happen. Just as I was about to focus on his interaction with the rune-code, he interrupted me.
“Hold this,” he said and offered his cane to me. I tried to take it gingerly, but it fell heavily into my hands, and I was shocked by its weight. Instead of the weight of a nicely lacquered cane with an ornamental top, it had the heft of a lead pipe filled with concrete. It was longer than I had considered as well, fit for his taller frame and not mine. A cane to him, it was more a thick and heavy walking stick to me.
I couldn’t not inspect it, could I?
Name: Trickster’s Lantern
[This isn’t yours.]
It was blocked, much as his information was. But the feel of the cane was good in my hands. The weight wasn’t just physical, it was more. It pulled my arms down towards the earth, but at the same time fed them the strength to lift it. My grip tightened and my knuckles went white with strain as I clutched it.
My chest filled with… I couldn’t describe it precisely. It was as if I was an empty vessel, dry to the bone, and this thing was filling me with a pressure and passion. Heat traveled from my fingers to travel up my arms and bring a flush to my face. I wrung the cane in my hands, twisting at it, not knowing why. My heart thudded in my chest hard enough that I could feel my pulse throbbing. Strength and something like determination and satisfaction suffused into my mind.
Loki began speaking again, and his voice hit me like a stone thrown through a glass window. My feelings of power and control shattered as if they were sharp and brittle. I struggled to control my trembling body as I focused on his words.
“…you learned your lesson about undue criticism regarding the difficulties of name conventions?” He asked me with a pointed look.
“Wh… What?” I stammered, not understanding what the hell we was talking about.
“The skill names, you dullard.” He snapped peevishly, noticing my lack of focus on him. What an attention whore.
“Oh… Yes. I’m sorry. I was in the wrong. Your names are great, and I was just being an asshole.” I said, my voice uneven as my exhaustion felt even deeper after the strange moment. The residual thumping of my heart beats pulsing through my hot face. Luckily, lies were easy and didn’t take much of my failing energy to use. “These new names are fantastic as well. You should consider keeping them.”
“Well, I am converting back to the original names now. It is too troublesome to track two names for the same skill while adjusting your avatar,” he said as he tapped along at the runes. “Maybe in the future there will be alternate System themes to choose from, but that is a stretch goal as of this moment.”
“That sounds neat.” I said. Some of the skill names had given me a laugh, but for the most part they were dumb. Though, I’d totally keep Tree Assassin over Logging, Prison Wallet over Concealment, and a few others.
“You do indeed seem to have unintentionally discovered a small conflict within the skills, which I will rectify now,” he said as he snapped the rune-code rift closed.
[Congratulations! You have unlocked the Improvised Weapons skill!]
[Congratulations! You have gained one and a half stat points to allocate!]
[Stat points have been automatically allocated to Wits!]
[Congratulations! Improvised Weapons has increased to Level 2!]
[Congratulations! Improvised Weapons has increased to Level 3!]
“Nice!” I exclaimed, completely distracted from the strange feelings that the cane gave me by the pleasant surprise of three new skill levels and two stat points all at once. Wits weren’t my preference of point allocation, but I had been called witless enough to not scoff at them. I took a quick peek at the skill info.
[Improvised Weapons]
Unlock Conditions – Use something not classified as a weapon to deal a significant or killing blow to your enemies.
[lvl 1] – You can use a common item as an effective weapon against your enemies.
[lvl 3] – You can use an uncommon item as an effective weapon and have a better chance of dealing damage with it. DON'T TRY TO BE LIKE JACKIE! THERE IS ONLY ONE JACKIE!
“Now, about your most recent slew of complaints.” Loki continued while I read and materialized his familiar little memo sheets.
“Reports,” I helpfully corrected, and he paused in his scrutiny of the sheets to glare icily at me. I grinned back at him.
“The dyslexic and illiterate. I do find it difficult to believe that at the day and age the Chosen are collected from brings forth illiterate participants, but it seems to be a more valid concern than I would have estimated. Some Chosen have indeed had a very rough time during their introduction process. The System is seen in one’s native language, but as of yet no spoken component has been implemented. That will be rolled out in the next major update.” He helpfully explained. He was doing that explaining thing a lot today. I wondered if he realized it.
“People with dyslexia however, I know of certain typefaces that will allow them to parse text better, so that shall be adjusted accordingly and released as a minor patch. Good catch.” He again caught me by surprise with his compliment.
“Cheating draugr,” he went on before I could bask in his praise. “This is an interesting observation. On one hand, the draugr exerted some rule-breaking properties in their disregard of the dungeon’s traps. On the other hand, it increased the difficulty of the encounter, and therefore it possibly increased the enjoyment of the overall experience. What would you say?”
“Well…” I trailed off. Now he wanted my opinion on something? I wasn’t sure what happy pills he was snorting, but I wanted some. After a moment of recovering from my shock I raised my hand up. “I burnt my hand off with acid in one of the most horrific experiences of my life… afterlife.”
“But was the experience overall more enjoyable with that added difficulty?”
“No. Not even a little bit.”
“That is rather unfortunate, however for us gods, it was much more enjoyable.”
“Us? I thought it was just you?” I asked.
“No longer! My family has chosen to take notice of this entertainment afterlife.” He said with a tone that dripped in self-satisfaction. I now knew where his good mood must have come from. “A small portion have even seen fit to take the seats I have prepared for them and join the tower itself. The domains that I had been monitoring in their stead will now have the full attention of the real god.”
“That sounds good?”
“Yes, it very much is. While I am perfectly capable of taking up each deities’ domain on my own, it is not something I necessarily enjoy doing.” he said as he disappeared the memo’s and took his cane away from me. I tried to hold onto it, but it was no contest. The cane was ripped from my hands and took the last bit of powerful confidence and warmth it gave me. I was chilled, my heart slowing and a shiver racing through me as if the spirit had been sucked out of my avatar body.
“Being less divided in my attentions and more focused on my own comfortable domain and the progression of the tower is a great benefit.”
“What did you mean, entertainment afterlife? Games are grand, but my hand melting off and nearly being violated by a tentacle monster is not my version of fun.” I asked as he manifested an alcohol swab packet and went ahead to rub his cane clean in front of me. He roughly scrubbed it up and down, trying to remove my human stain.
“It is grand entertainment for us to watch your struggles. Already small wagers on the success or failure of the Chosen have begun. Soon larger wagers will loom and before you know it, they will be picking favorites and demanding sole rights to certain champions.”
“What do you even bet? Money?”
“As a matter of fact, I have a bottle of fine vintage Brennivín riding on your parties’ results for this dungeon.” He grinned.
“And what result did you bet on?” I asked, maybe those extra points in Wits showing some use already.
“The obvious one.” He said and his grin grew to that too wide predatorial one that reminded me that he was the father to a wolf. “And the bottle is just for fun, a bit of a laugh to be had at Magni’s expense. He hates the stuff. The real currency is renown. That intangible currency of respect and sovereignty that creates the real hierarchy amongst my family and those like us. The real power in our circles.”
“Renown. If you bet renown, and that is what determines your station amongst each other, wouldn’t the subject of the bet being brought to the wagering gods attention also gain some power of position and renown of their own?” I asked, my Wits getting serious a workout with that theory.
“You are remarkably close to a truth there, Senior Alpha Tester Viktor. Afterall, what pantheon doesn’t have a story of a man who raises from the gutter to enter into the hallowed halls to claim his own seat amongst us?” He said and was different in that moment. Even with his strangely friendly and informative behavior this day included, all the other times we had interacted he brought a superiority that just made you want to punt the big bastard. But at that brief moment, the slimy aristocratic persona sloughed off of him and he stood.
Accompanying his brief drop of façade, a tear in space opened completely silently. It was like the rifts used to peek the rune-code. Within this particularly large rift wasn’t the familiar dark stone with etched blue runes, but a nebulous place of flowing waist high fog that clung to the ground. The fog swirled and tossed with small eddies in a constant flow like a herd of invisible creatures were galloping around through it.
Standing amongst the fog were silhouettes of figures that shone with a white light that projected a beautiful kaleidoscope of pearlescent colors as it passed through the fog. The figures were made from all different shapes and sizes, some of them human shaped and some decidedly not. I couldn’t make out their features as they resembled a space where something had been cut roughly from the space, rather than filling it in. Like an old stop motion film, the silhouette holes would flick into new positions or stances as they moved around amongst each other.
Some shone bright enough to hurt my eyes, while others were so dim that they looked ready to wink out.
One figure of the moving tableau was in front of me. A power flowed from it like waves and crashed against me like an angry sea. I didn’t move as each pulse bashed into me, through me, but whatever part of me was behind this fleshy avatar, the thing that he had been pulled from my dead body, felt it.
The being stood resolute, and a weight was settled around it as if the entire universe leaned in close, hovering around our shoulders in rapt anticipation of any order the thing demanded. A god. A true god, unfettered. Finally, once and for all proving beyond a shadow of a doubt to me on a base level that I was dealing with the real thing and no contrary stubbornness I could bring to bear would change that.
Loki. And instinctually I knew of him. He wasn’t the trickster god often portrayed, nor was he the god of fire, spiders, war, fertility or any number of things that foolish people tried to link to him.
Loki was the god of change.
Change with a bit of panache.
I nearly pissed myself.