To Cuby, I quickly said: got a plan, need to focus.
“Woah there,” I said, dropping my Derunium Lightning Rod to hold out my hands in a placating gesture. “Just take it easy, yeah? You want to bargain, right?”
“Do I, Alatar?” he hissed, sneering.
I had opened up my inventory and was scanning its contents while still trying to stare right at Valariel—a difficult task, even if my mind could automatically read all the text in my ui. I came to the item that I wanted:
Uncommon Spell Augment Card – Intuitive Spell
Base Spellcraft: Add 2 Per step you reduce (see below)
Casting Time: Add 20% Per step you reduce (see below)
You reduce each of the oral, movement, and mental components of the modified spell by any number of steps.
And I used it to replace Warped Spell. “Look,” I said, trying to sound panicked and desperate—something I found quite easy. “Just let me know what you want, okay? Just relax!”
Hoping desperately that I was right, and that there would be no visible sign I was casting a spell at all, I cast an Intuitive Fragmented Supercharged Implosive Missile—reducing all its components brought it to 12 base spellcraft, then to 14 from the others. I had exactly enough.
And Valariel didn’t notice what I was doing.
“It’s quite simple,” he said, a malicious grin spreading across his face as his blade seemed to dig into her neck. “The bargain is that once I slit your precious friend’s throat, she’ll become an object, not a player. A thing. And I will pop us both inside, strip her worthless corpse of all its possessions, and then vanish—and you’ll never see me again.”
“But,” he said, voice seething with contemptuous delight, “—if you should happen to be sentimental as well as foolish, then I believe we can make a deal. Your chosen boon card, Alatar. Surrender to me your chosen boon card.”
My spell finished it’s absurd 260% casting time, safely stored. I began to cast a fully Intuitive Supercharged Mana Shield—a bigger base increase than for the missile, but Mana Shield had barely any base spellcraft in the first place. The real problem was the cast time—300% because I’d reduced 5 steps, off a 6 second base. My Celerity brought it down to 13.6, and I’d barely started when Valariel had made his demand.
And at the same time I had to wonder: surrender?
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.
“Don’t be coy,” said the devil. “I’m told the chosen outsiders are those who are most familiar with the game. Surrender, or she dies.”
“No, really,” I said, letting my desperation bleed into my voice. “I don’t know what you mean. I can surrender the card?”
In answer, Valariel suddenly yanked Cuby higher, and a thick line of blood began to run along his blade and down the skin of her neck.
“Hey!” I said, “Come on—it’s okay, I’ll do it, okay? I’ll do it.”
Five seconds, I told Cuby.
“Shall I give you a count?” Valariel asked. Beside him, Cuby seemed to be trying to speak—but the blade was too close, and she only made a quiet wheezing noise. He stared at me, eyes hard. “Three,” he began.
“Just tell me how to surrender the fucking card!” I said, my voice pitched with panic. Almost….
“Two,” he continued.
“One!” I said, my Mana Shield finishing, wrapping Cuby in its protective magic and pushing the blade away from her throat. Cuby wasted no time, spinning away from him and bringing one hand up to slap him across the face with a flash of light, blinding him.
He disappeared in a burst of smoke, and I wheeled quickly—only to see him appear closer to the structure. I cleared the distance between us with a Mighty Leap, equipping my last grenade—only to see Cuby doing exactly the same thing, flying through the air to land beside him and interrupting his spellcast with a concussive blast that sent him to the ground.
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He hissed, but I landed right atop him, placed a single hand on his chest—and loosed my spell, sure there was no time for him to teleport away as I discharged my spell through my palm.
And he disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
“Shit,” I said, wheeling around to find him again as I saw Cuby pull out a Health Potion. But my panic was unearned, for the system messages told me quite clearly that we had nothing to fear, for now:
Congratulations, you are now a level 8 Mage/Psychic!
You have a new Spell Augment Slot. Open your Abilities pane to choose a new Spell Augment.
You have a new Spell Augment Slot. Open your Abilities pane to choose a new Spell Augment.
Your Hit Points have increased by 70 and your Energy has increased by 130.
Human Adaptability increases each of your Strength, Agility, Focus, and Spirit by 2. You gain 2 stat points to distribute.
For killing a servant of evil, you receive 30 Virtue Points.
Cuby put her healing potion away. She’d leveled up as well, and was now not only full health, but free of wounds—though I had to judge this by her posture, as she was still covered in blood.
She looked like she wanted to be sick. “Is that… is that how pain is supposed to feel? Without the system?”
I shrugged. “Are you all right?”
“No,” she said, sounding on the verge of a sob. “That was horrible. I thought it was unpleasant before, but—” She shut her eyes, hugged her chest. “I thought I was going to die. Wake up in Solarius.” Then she opened her eyes, looked at me. “That was good thinking.”
“Intuitive Spell seems to have quite a few uses,” I said, linking her the ability. “But if Haroshi is going to try coming this way, we should be out of this pass by the time he gets in it.”
“Yeah,” Cuby said, staring blankly ahead, her face pale.
I stopped and regarded her. She looked like someone who was about to be sick. “Cuby, it’s okay if you want to take a break. I can keep watch.”
“No,” she said, almost muttering the word. She blinked. “No,” she said more clearly. “I’m just at the limit of my capacity.”
Her face did something also strange, then: it was as if she was trying to smile, but kept getting unsatisfying results. She’d move her mouth in an artificial, forced way, then let her face slacken, then repeat the process. “I don’t have the self-mastery I usually do,” she said quietly. She turned toward the structure and began to walk toward it. “Let’s go inside.”
“How come we leveled at the same time?” I asked, thinking that I could bring her out of her funk by doing the very thing that had worked best for myself—talking about the game, the system. We’d both leveled at the same time last level: it didn’t seem right that she hadn’t leveled before me.
“He gave a lot of XP,” she said. “And the levels take more XP after 10.”
“Oh,” I said. I looked at my experience bar to see that I was almost 20% into level 9. The devil had given considerably more experience than, say, two priests.
We reached the massive, ironbound door to find it had no means of opening from this side. I leapt up to the rampart to find a small passage leading into the mountain, but it was blocked by a smaller door, also bound in iron, which was locked.
“I can probably blast it to pieces,” I said. “But if we can get it open without breaking it, we could lock it behind us.”
“No lock picks,” Cuby said plaintively. “And I can only buy up to uncommon lockpicking anyway—I’m not sure if that would be good enough for a door that leads into a fortification, but I don’t know.”
“All right,” I said. I took off my staff and disabled my lightning affinity so that I’d deal half magic, half psychic damage with Implosive Missile, then spent a few casts dealing half-damage to part of the door where the keyhole was, slowly transmuting it to packed, glassy dust. We cleared this from the hole, then pushed open the door.
“Ugh,” Cuby said, wrinkling her nose, and sounding genuinely frustrated to the point of anger. “Enough with the unpleasant sensations!”
An overpowering scent of death emanated from the door, assaulting my nostrils and making my mouth water as if I was about to throw up. I had to be honest with myself as I looked into the blackness of the passage beyond—I was forming some expectations of what we might find in this outpost, and they were, listed in order:
Undead.
Perhaps it was cliched to expect as much from the dark passage that reeked of death, but the sneering, bargaining devil had been about as subversive as government propaganda.
“Let’s level up before we go inside,” I said. I craned my neck to look at the sheer, cut wall that rose above us, flanked on either side by steep stone. It was a shame we couldn’t get above the rampart—if a bunch of zombies started spilling out of the dark, we could’ve just left them for Haroshi.
“He didn’t drop anything,” Cuby said, still sounding weary. “Just a lot of experience and virtue.” She sighed. “I wanted the card. And I want…” she frowned, her face twitching. “I want to be happy, like normal.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a second. “I don’t like this.”
Her face got the distant expression that I knew meant she was looking through menus. I brought up my own, hoping to get this done quickly—it seemed quite likely that we’d destroyed Haroshi’s ability to recover adventuring clock in his own camp. And if that was true, he’d be right on our heels.
Which meant we needed to go into the dark, and soon.