“How much Achievement do you have left?” I asked Sallia, turning towards her after I finished processing the gains from the end of the battle.
“I have 129.64. Why? How much do you have left?” asked Sallia.
129? Why did she have so much more than me? I had only been in the city for an extra hour or two compared to her, so I shouldn’t be that much lower than her. I had even landed the finishing blow on the Skeleton! Shouldn’t I have gotten more Achievement from killing the Skeleton compared to her?
I frowned, thinking over this problem, before realizing that I hadn’t arrived with 0 Achievement. When I had arrived, I had been in possession of a measly eight Achievement. In order for our numbers to make sense, she had to have entered the Market with more Achievement than me.
I sighed, then shrugged. My companion having more Achievement than I did meant she had longer before she died of starvation, so it wasn’t a bad thing. It meant she was in less danger of dying. Even if I wished I had more, being jealous wasn’t productive. Besides, now that I knew a way to get Achievement, I just needed to work hard and earn more. So long as I could find a way to reduce the downsides of absorbing Achievement, I would love to see what else this Market currency could be used for.
“Erm… I only have 28 right now,” I said, finally answering Sallia’s question.
“Why so little? I thought you would have more than me. I got 2 Achievement for helping to kill a Skeleton foot soldier for the first time, so I thought you would get a lot more for actually killing it…”
“I got twenty for killing it.” I made a face. “I only had eight when I got to the Market.”
“Hmmm…” Sallia frowned. “Your memories are also much patchier than mine, and you have less Achievement than me as well. Do you think perhaps these two things are related? Achievement seems to be used as a soul’s… nutrition, or something of that nature. So perhaps your soul got damaged because you had so little Achievement?
“I don’t know,” I said, frowning. “Now that I think about it, while I was in the ocean of souls, I kept feeling like I was losing something every second I was immersed in the water. Perhaps my memory loss is because I spent too long inside of the ocean before coming to the Market?”
“Why would you spend so much longer in the ocean than me, though?” Sallia asked. “Wait, you also said that you spent weeks, or even months flying to the Market, while I only remember spending a few hours or days flying here. Perhaps your home world was farther away from the Market than mine, so you spent longer coming here, ‘ate’ more Achievement during transportation, and have patchier memories?”
I thought about Sallia’s theory, before shrugging. For now, it was as good a guess as any. If I was farther away from the Market to begin with, perhaps it had taken longer to ‘sense’ me and add me to the Market. I had no way of knowing if that was correct, but it at least seemed to make sense.
If so, was there a way to fix it? If I was suffering from some sort of… soul damage, could it be healed at all? I felt a weird mixture of emotions as I thought about never getting my memories back. I had people that I had cared about once. People I had wanted to see again. Now, I didn’t even know their names. If they showed up right in front of me, odds were I wouldn’t recognize them at all. I had tried not to think about it since coming to the Market, but the idea of losing so much of who I had been bothered me.
However, the sense of loss I should have felt was muted. Perhaps it was because I knew my life was on the line in this city, and I had several timers counting down to my death. Meanwhile, a bunch of skeletons roamed the city in search of people to stab. While I felt frustrated and upset about my missing memories, I could still focus on the problems at hand.
I sighed. “If I can’t get my memories back, I can’t get them back. I can keep going without them, just… keep an eye out and let me know if you find anything that might help, all right?”
Sallia gave me a less strained smile. She seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then, finally, she moved a little closer to me, and then gave me a very awkward, very gentle hug. Then, she patted my back a few times before retreating again. “I will. Let’s keep an eye out as we look through this city.”
I couldn’t help but smile a little bit. Suddenly, my situation seemed brighter than it had originally been. Even if I didn’t have my memories of my old friends and family, I had a friend here, at least. I turned my thoughts back to the present. “For now, do we have a better plan than ‘go around the city, look for some sort of information repository, and hope we run into fewer skeletons?”
Sallia seemed to sense my desire to change the subject. “At the very least, I cannot think of one.” Sallia frowned, seeming dissatisfied with leaving our fate up to chance, but we had no better ideas for now. The two of us climbed back down the drain, before I paused for a moment near the skeleton’s corpse. Then, I reached down and picked up the skeleton’s sword.
I hefted the blade with my right hand, struggling a bit to maintain the sword’s balance as I did so.
“You’re holding it wrong,” said Sallia as she grabbed the blade from my hands. “First of all, this is a two handed sword. The skeleton was trying to use it as a one handed blade, but that’s because these things are not very bright. Second of all, you’re gripping it too tightly – you’ll lose flexibility that way, and you shouldn’t be doing that if you aren’t about to deliver a downward hack with the blade. Maintaining some flexibility in your wrists before delivering a strike is the right way – like this,” she said, loosely gripping the hilt with both of her hands before she seamlessly transitioned into a tightened grip and delivered a weighty hack with the sword.
“Have you actually received training in blades?” I asked, curious. Sallia had mentioned being a noblewoman in her previous life, but she had also said that nobles were the military enforcers of the god-king and the priests. She had also mentioned a few times that she wasn’t a very obedient child, so I was rather curious about how well she could handle weapons. Right now it might be a matter of life and death for the two of us.
“I’ve spent a year or two learning swords. In my world, it was considered customary for most nobles to at least learn some basic swordsmanship and magic. Although most girls switched to etiquette classes after a year or two, depending on whether their family was planning on training them as a magic knight or marrying them off.” Sallia’s expression turned sad again for a moment. “My father tried very hard to get me to take the etiquette classes after my first year, but I managed to convince one of my teachers to keep training me after school every day. It was… enjoyable. But I also didn’t get to learn as much as I wished to.”
“In that case, how about you take the sword? In my world, nobody really bothered to learn how to use them. We used different weapons to fight,” I said, trying to pull a few more memories out of the hazy fog of my mind. Even though I was sure swords weren’t very good weapons at home, I couldn’t quite remember why. My brain kept conjuring an image of some sort of… metal tube, but I couldn’t figure out how the metal tube was supposed to be used as a weapon. It seemed much inferior to a sword or a bow, after all. I shook my head, trying to get rid of my growing headache.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Hmm. Is that so? I understand why your grip was so terrible then,” said Sallia, as she accepted the blade.
The two of us also spent a few moments looking at the skeleton’s shield, but sadly, it was a fair bit heavier than the sword. With our current strength, lugging around the shield would be too difficult for us, and it would probably be impossible to use effectively in a fight. Thus, we could only abandon the shield for now. The skeleton may have been incredibly stupid, but it was definitely stronger than us, if it could carry around this thing and still chase us through several streets.
After that, we started retracing our footsteps, making our way back towards the center of the city. This time, we had a better idea of what to watch out for, so we kept a wary eye out for any disconnected bones littering the ground or skeletons wandering the streets.
Most of the stores also had broken walls, windows, or both. Some stores were almost completely leveled, with little more than a few waist-high walls remaining of the original building. The less damaged storefronts would often have chunks of building missing, or scorch marks lining the front door. Puddles of liquified rubble just outside of a door was also a common sight here. In some cases, these puddles of lava were still hot, making me wonder what kept the temperature high after all of this time. Since I couldn’t figure out the answer, I just moved on. There were more important things to think about right now.
However, seeing all of these bizarre and uniquely destroyed buildings, and thinking back to our fight with the skeleton, I started to get a bad feeling.
Were skeletons… really able to cause all of this?
The skeleton we had met was barely intelligent. It had found us and started chasing us, before getting stuck trying to climb a drain for several minutes while we leisurely worked out a plan to safely kill it.
There was no way any number of those skeleton warriors could have possibly done the kind of damage to the city I was seeing.
Which meant there must be much scarier things lurking in the city. Or, at least there had been at one point. Part of me was still praying that they just… weren’t present anymore. But my gut was telling me that was wishful thinking on my part. If the skeletons were still laying around long after this city had fallen, there was a good chance the scarier things were also still laying around.
“Do you think skeletons really caused all this?” I asked.
Sallia stopped walking, and turned to me. Her eyes glowed and dimmed several times in rapid succession, before she shook her head.
There was no need for further words. She understood my point as well. Her lips tightened into a thin line, and the both of us began scanning our surroundings even more vigilantly than before. The sense of security I had gained after realizing we could kill the skeletons vanished, as I realized that we might not have encountered the real threats yet.
After a few more minutes of walking, Sallia tapped my shoulder, before she soundlessly pointed across the street.
There, a massive floor-to-ceiling broken window lay underneath a shop sign. Inside of it was a group of three skeletons. These three were holding onto different weapons than the first skeleton we had encountered. Two were holding spears, and one was holding onto a warhammer. All of the weapons were made out of the same greenish-purple material as the original skeleton’s weapon.
Right next to them was a nearly uncountable number of bones. It was a literal mound of bones taller than I was. I remembered the first skeleton assembling itself out of bones and shivered. If that entire pile of bones turned into skeletons, and even one had some sort of ranged weapon, we would be in a lot of trouble. Unless it did something stupid like try to use a bow as a bludgeon, but I didn’t want to base my plans on the skeletons behaving stupidly.
At the foot of the bone mound were dozens of corpses. At least half of the corpses were identical copies of a slightly chubby, angry looking bearded man with one eye. Four of the other corpses belonged to a reedy-looking teenage boy. Apart from that, there were a few corpses of other people scattered around the area.
In the back of the shop was a pile of metal cubes, each of which was nearly as tall as my waist. They glowed with a faint green light, although it was difficult for me to perceive it if I didn’t focus on it. Whenever I stopped paying attention to the cubes, the glow seemed to vanish entirely, reappearing only when I focused on them again.
The shop’s sign read ‘Tier 1 Soul Fragments! Bargain items every Transmigrator needs to thrive in the Multiverse! Generic abilities to match your keyword abilities! Welcome to Thriftmart, the One-Stop Shop for the New and Enterprising Transmigrator!’ It wasn’t exactly what we were looking for, but it was by far the most promising advertisement we had found. Unlike other buildings selling entertainment items, this building was actually related to the weird aspects of the city. For the first time, we had found a building that might actually be useful.
And, unfortunately, it was also the building most heavily populated by skeletons.
“Do we risk it?” I asked Sallia.
Sallia hefted her blade, seeming to weigh it, before she turned back to the skeletons and adopted a thoughtful expression.
“It is the first useful looking shop we have found. Also, I am noticing that the skeletons seem to be mostly clustered around buildings deeper in the city. We walked through the residential area for several minutes without a single sighting of skeletal soldiers. We found the first skeleton in the outskirts of the commercial district. Then, upon reaching the area where the higher end shops are located, we have immediately also come across three skeletons at once. I suspect the skeletons and more dangerous creatures are clustered near the center of the city, or perhaps located in the higher-end districts. And that’s also where we need to go if we want to live,” said Sallia, frowning. Finally, she seemed to sink deep into thought for several seconds, before she gave me a crazy grin. “If that is the case, giving this a try is the better option. We may as well take a risk here, instead of possibly running into whatever melted the store fronts later on. At least we’ve fought a skeleton already, and as long as we climb a building first they aren’t too big of a threat. At least, those are my thoughts.”
Despite myself, I could feel a slightly crazy grin tugging at my lips as well. “We’ve got five lives and we’re working on a timer that will run out soon. If we don’t take any risks we’ll die sooner or later. Let’s try it. How good is your swordsmanship compared to the skeletons?”
“Hmm… the first one we found was pretty clumsy, but the skeletons in the shop are holding their weapons with much higher levels of proficiency. So these ones might be stronger than the one we fought earlier. And their physical strength does seem to be above mine, based on the weight of the shield the first skeleton was carrying. I might be comparable to the strongest skeletons, or slightly stronger after factoring in weapon technique? But probably only just, and I might be underestimating these things.” Sallia frowned. “Also, my physical body is different from when I was alive. My balance is slightly off now, which could get me killed in a fight.I can still probably match them one or two on one, but more is definitely impossible. So we’re taking some risk here, but I don’t think it’s impossible to manage…”
I examined the sides of the buildings along the street, looking for another drainpipe or easily climbable building. If it worked once, it might work again, right? “That building over there - the one that looks like an apartment. It has a drainpipe that should work.”
“What’s an apartment?”
What was an apartment? The word had come to me quite naturally, but now that I thought about it, I had a hard time remembering what exactly an apartment was. I was sure it was related to housing in some way, but the specifics eluded me. After a few moments of confusion, I just opted to point at the building.
Sallia looked at it, and then her savage grin became wider. “That one is much taller. It’ll give any bricks we throw at the skeletons much more power. That’ll work.”
Since the two of us had made up our minds, we quickly started climbing the building. If we were going to pick a fight with at three stronger skeletons, we needed every advantage we could get.