Eric carefully made his way down from the dragon’s neck through the scaled slope of the dragon’s shoulder and then onto the massively muscled foreleg. He leaped down from the dragon’s forepaw, surprising himself by landing with perfect balance.
His body felt light, responsive, with none of the sense of bulk having reinforced bones and augmented muscles had given him. Years of practice had gotten him used to carrying all that extra weight around, but now the changes to his body were obvious. What happened to all those synthetics they built into me? Eric wondered, were they just subsumed by the System into his current body? His profile had labeled him Non-Standard, but that label had applied even before he had come to this dark place.
Putting aside his unanswerable musings for later, Eric bent down and pulled with both hands to get the meticulously carved bone band off the dead dragon’s foreclaw. There was a flicker of a window appearing and being put aside. Good work, Pig.
Once free of the finger the ring abruptly moved, startling Eric so much that he almost dropped the item. He managed to keep hold and, to his surprise, the bone ring spun slowly on his hands, swiftly decreasing in size until it was roughly five inches in diameter. Fascinated by the what was happening, Eric took a closer look at the still-huge ring, admiring the intricate looping carvings etched into the dark ivory.
Reacting to his curiosity, Pig changed several portions of Eric’s vision overlay without prompting, making use of the detailed information the hybrid mode was giving Eric. The ring now glowed brightly in a combination of silver-grey, pale yellow, and faint lines of delicate lilac, all enclosed by a solid band of pale blue. Tags made clear that four distinct types of aether were present in the ring, though Eric, and by extension Pig, still didn’t know enough about aether to differentiate the individual types.
You have acquired the minor free artifact Vashanka’s Ring
You must claim the ring before any of its functions can be accessed.
Was Vashanka the dead dragon’s name? Eric wondered, running his hand over one of the curving designs carved into the bone. He re-read the part about him needing to claim the ring before he could use it.
“Well, how do I do that?” Eric muttered under his breath as he turned the bone band around in his hand. Helpfully, Pig opened a new window in front of Eric, which the veteran assumed was the one he had received earlier when he had first touched the ring.
Congratulations! You have encountered your first free artifact.
Free artifacts are special items or tools that may be claimed as long as the former owner has died or otherwise relinquished its claim.
To claim an artifact for yourself, you must anoint it with a few drops of your blood.
Ah, so the artifact needed blood to be activated, huh? How positively medieval!
Eric dismissed the notification, then held the ring firmly with his left hand as he pulled out Serra’s knife from his pocket. His previous activities had blunted the edge of the knife, but Eric used the still serviceable point to puncture the skin of the index finger of his left hand. He placed the knife back into his pocket, then smeared the blood drop onto the surface of the ring.
The blood quickly disappeared, and a new notification came up.
You have claimed the minor artifact Vashanka’s Ring.
Vashanka’s Ring is a modified spatial storage device with 600 cubic meters of space that was crafted by the Void Dragon artisan Vashanka Ket-Arrogath and his mentor Balmuth Ket-Morshai.
Again, not very helpful, although the term spatial storage device sounded promising, and the stated capacity was just mind-boggling. Eric felt almost giddy with anticipation; if this ring could store so much, how much loot would it actually contain?
Eric hefted the heavy ring and slipped it over his left hand and arm. As expected, the ring adjusted its shape until it was securely encircling his wrist like a thick, two-inch wide bracelet. The loops and whorls of the design on the bone surface made it look like a mundane piece of decorative jewelry, which Eric hoped would help conceal its true nature from curious eyes. Knowledge of how to use the ring… well, bracelet now… entered Eric’s mind in a flood of information that startled him so much that he rocked back in recoil. The sensation was not unpleasant however and soon Eric knew enough to be able to use the artifact without difficulty.
Smiling in anticipation, Eric tapped the bracelet to make a pale violet window with deep black borders appear, showing a very long list of the bracelet’s contents in three parallel columns.
Surprisingly, the entries were written in Galactic Standard.
“How is this possible?”
“Notifications and all System interfaces are written in the language that the adept reading it is most proficient with, sir.”
“So if a person from a Pan-Pacific world were looking over my shoulder he’d be seeing this as being written in Pan-Spech?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the System would do the same translation with spoken words?”
“I… I would imagine so, sir.”
“Since when have you been capable of imagining anything, Pig?” Eric asked half-jokingly, his head cocked to the side.
“It is… I would have to say since I became aware… just today sir.” The AI seemed embarrassed at being reminded of the changes it had undergone.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
“That was not a rebuke, Pig.” Eric said softly as he began looking through the list. “Just don’t get distracted by all the new things: Remember, I still need you to keep both of us functioning.”
“Roger sir… and thank you.”
Eric nodded at Pig’s response even as he controlled the Ring’s screen with his eyes like he would a data tablet. His knowledge dump about the ring had informed him that he could immediately zoom in to a particular item, but that required him to know what the item he was actually looking for was called.
He tried looking up medicine, but came up blank. He then tried healing, healing potion, and variants thereof, but the screen remained stubbornly blank. Finally, Eric just began looking through the incredibly long list, a process made all the more difficult by it not being listed in alphabetical order.
The listed items were also varied and eclectic, ranging from the mundane and ordinary to the obscure, many of which had fantastical-sounding names and weird titles that made determining their uses difficult. A great number of the ring’s contents were also bafflingly labeled as ‘unknowns’ with no indication that this was because of a System translation error or if the dragon itself had not identified them.
After scrolling past a row of entries labeled as ‘unknown liquid’ Eric growled with frustration. The whole search process was simply taking too much time.
“Pig, is there a way that we can search this thing faster?”
“I have the complete list, sir. What did you need to find?”
“Find something that can heal Ms. Jakobin.”
Eric glanced back to where his fellow castaway lay. Vashanka, if that was the dead creature’s name, had to have had something in there that could help with Serra’s injuries: A being of such power would inevitably have powerful enemies too. It would have prepared several items that would act as last-ditch fail-safes to use at the last extreme to somehow preserve its life. In fact, if the dragon hadn’t been in an induced coma pretty much the entire time H-X had it in their clutches Eric surmised that it would have probably used something from the bracelet to escape its captivity!
“I have narrowed the list down to seven probable items, sir.” Pig’s voice was a bit subdued, and Eric wondered if something was wrong. Again, as soon as the thought crossed his mind, Pig answered as if the question had been asked. “There are… gaps… in the knowledge base I can access to make judgements on the functionality of a given item. That database, if you will, is a combination of what your brain contains, what practical and theoretical knowledge of this universe that you have been exposed to, and the fleeting promptings of the System as you trigger its hidden decision points.”
Eric nodded, understanding Pig’s dilemma.
This universe, this system, they had become saddled with was all new, to both Pig and Eric, and the veteran soldier knew that many of their ingrained assumptions and hard-won experiences would not be directly relevant to the situations they might find themselves in. In fact, in a world of magic and seemingly arbitrary physical and metaphysical laws, there was a good chance that his previous knowledge could lead him to costly mistakes.
“We have to learn more.”
“Yes,” The AI interface agreed. “As you become exposed to more knowledge and experiences, our internal database will expand, and my predictive and extrapolatory capabilities will increase accordingly.”
“I will hold you to that Pig.”
“You can count on me, sir.” The AI’s voice firmed, and the bracelet’s window contracted to show only seven items. How had Pig learned how to do that? The knowledge Eric had gained as part of claiming the ring had shown him how to navigate its interface, but it had never given him instructions on how to do what Pig was doing so effortlessly.
“These are the items that have the highest probability of healing Ms. Jakobin. As there are no descriptions attached to the items, it is very likely that they will not work exactly as you intend them to, sir.”
Belyad Health Symbiote
Crown of Health
Dathan Recovery Pill
Erigan-Dar Healing Ambiance Spray
Experimental Healing Elixir 22
Heaven Pillar Recombination Potion
Strong Body Serum
Going by the names of the items, Eric didn’t think any of them was what they were looking for exactly. There was even a high likelihood that giving Serra any one of the seven items could cause greater damage even if it did not kill her directly.
“Isn’t there a healing potion or miracle cure anywhere in there, Pig?”
“There are a considerable number of bottles, pots, pills, tablets, and other possible medicinal substances in the bracelet sir, though without descriptions I would hesitate to recommend them. Additionally, there are several books, scrolls, and what look like mineral-based information storage devices that may give insight to various items in the collection. Unless you take time to read through them and correlate those with the items at hand a certain degree of uncertainty will always be present.”
Eric grunted in agreement, though he did not like his options.
“There are several notebooks and bound folio’s labeled Notes sir, which I believe was the dragon Vashanka’s own writings. If you read them, then maybe we could narrow things down a little more.”
“Ok Pig.” Eric said as he dejectedly started walking back to where Serra lay. “Let’s shelve that for a moment while I think about our options.”
Heavy-hearted and disappointed, Eric folded his legs beneath him and settled beside his injured subordinate. Serra’s condition had not improved at all, although Eric couldn’t tell if she had gotten any worse. Her breathing was even but shallow, her normally dark skin was pale, and her hands twitched feebly from time to time. A thin trickle of blood from her ear had dried on her neck.
“What do you think is wrong with her, Pig?”
“Based on her visible injuries and presenting signs I would say she is in severe shock. There is also a high likelihood that she has sustained a head injury, internal bleeding, or both.”
“How much time do you think she has?”
“I would like to remind you sir that I am not a medical AI nor have I…”
“Make a guess, Pig.”
“At most twenty-four hours sir… Probably less without any medical intervention.”
That was not a long time at all.
Focus. There had to be a way to help his comrade, some way that would get her back onto her feet or conscious at the very least. All the troopers hired into the H/X Corps had received basic-level field trauma training as a matter of course, but Serra was the one person on Eric’s crew who had opted for medic certification. Just getting her conscious would be a big step to getting her fixed up. He himself had been pretty beaten up when he had first awakened but…
“Wait, Pig,” Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Eric suddenly exclaimed as his rambling thoughts seized upon an idea. “Remember what happened after that first Integration thing?”
“Unfortunately, I was not online at that point, Sir.”
“Right, right.” Eric mused, but his excitement was rising. “I’d just awakened when the System prompted me to accept Integration. When I did so there was a slight delay and then nothing much until it said Integration was achieved, and that my Gens parameters had been reworked to acceptable norms… If we can get Serra to take that first step on that chain…”
“There is a high probability that she would recover the same as you did.” Pig uncharacteristically finished Eric’s thought. Was that excitement he could detect in the AI’s tone? Was Pig’s programming changing as it adapted to the circumstances? Eric shrugged; Pig itself had said that it felt different, altered somehow, so some personality changes were to be expected.
“I have those ultradrenalin ampoules she liked to use,” Eric offered after moving beside his comrade’s broken body. “It’ll intensify the sensations of whatever pain she may be in but there’s a good chance it’ll get her conscious.”
“Conscious may not be lucid, Sir.”
“What choice do we have?”
“That is true. For what it’s worth, I agree with your assessment, Sir.”
Eric nodded firmly. Right. Nowhere to go but forward.
In preparation, Eric carefully stripped off the blood-soaked uniform Serra wore until she was dressed only in her Corp-issued undersuit. Then he tried to settle her broken limbs in as comfortable a position as he could manage. Taking a deep breath, Eric then placed the ultradrenalin case open on the floor before him. Taking two of the five remaining ampoules, Eric took a deep breath, steadied his hand, then plunged the ampoules onto the muscles of Serra’s left shoulder.