The warriors were quick to clean their strange, gray metal blades. The one with the excessively long knife issued a few orders that I couldn’t comprehend. The others deferred to him, which led me to assume he was likely the leader.
After an order from the leader, the slender man in the circle of runes disabled his barrier. He then walked from corpse to corpse, carving a rune into each of them.
The rune was simple enough that I could identify what it was doing from a distance. All it did was make the mana in the body flow in a more consistent direction. After thinking about it for a moment, I realized that this would probably prevent a wraith from forming.
As I watched the slender man walk towards the body of the pack leader, the spear wielding warrior approached me.
Like most of the others, the spearman was tall and pale skinned. His black hair was surprisingly well kept, considering the fact that he had probably spent at least several days in the jungle. His dark beard was trimmed so that it only grew around his mouth and not on his cheeks.
He smiled as he sauntered over, saying something cheerful in gibberish. Before I could think of what to say, the man bowed down with a flourish of his arms. I didn't know the meaning of his actions nor his words, but I decided to treat it as some sort of greeting.
Having someone so animated suddenly drawing near to me left me rather tongue-tied. I am fairly sure the words I managed to choke out were something like a response. I hoped they were at least.
The leader said something to the spearman in a reprimanding tone. The admonished man gave a brief reply before turning to me once more. With another flourished gesture from his hands and an odd tilt of the head, he said something to me that sounded like an apology.
It had been a long time since I had last talked to anyone. That alone likely would have made things a little difficult. Considering the fact that I had absolutely no idea what anyone was saying, I was having an understandably hard time trying to figure out how to respond.
Before I could gather my wits, the sandy haired leader stepped forwards. Unlike the spearman, this man remained at a respectful distance as he pointed at himself. “Martin.”
I was fairly sure that was one of the contacts I had tried to communicate with earlier that day. “You are Martin.” I replied, pointing at the man.
He nodded his head in another unfamiliar gesture before pointing at the man next to him. “Salvador.” He stated before pointing at me with a questioning look. “Kyo?”
I tilted my hand in a gesture for yes. Seeing the confused look on the faces of the two pale men, I decided to copy the man’s mannerism and nod. That was evidently what they wanted to see.
The spearman, Salvador, excitedly said something nonsensical while Martin stared at nothing. I was starting to wonder what sort of strange new behavior this was until a gray rectangle appeared in front of the man.
It was easy to tell that this was an interface for the system, but it was a little different from my own. It was much sleeker and nicer looking than the thick, blocky rectangle of my own interface. I watched in wonder as vivid images appeared on the transparent display.
The images showed a village full of people similar in dress and pallor to the warriors. The buildings were constructed in a way that I was unfamiliar with, and strange objects lined the streets. To the side, a wooden platform stretched out over the water.
I was fairly sure that this village was in the clearing I had spotted next to the giant lake. My suspicions were confirmed as several figures walked out of the village’s gate and into the jungle.
The seven figures, who I quickly identified as this group of warriors, traveled rapidly through the jungle. I watched days of walking quickly pass by in moments. The group encountered many monsters, even losing one of their number before running into the pack of beasts.
As the images came to a halt, the warriors looked at me expectantly. I figured that they wanted to know about my village as well.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
I wasn’t quite sure how to get my interface to display memories, but I pulled it up anyway. I noticed that my next boon was available, but dismissed it for a later time. Willing my interface to display images, I started to tell my story.
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INTERLUDE 4: The Girl from the Jungle
Martin watched the young woman as she called up her interface. Her coarse clothes were tattered and stained, with many crude patches. Her skin was darker than any Martin had seen. It was difficult to tell the exact shade of her tangled hair through all of the dirt, but Martin suspected it was very close to black.
The girl would have probably been considered rather pretty by many people, were it not for the ugly symbol burned into her forehead. Martin didn’t know what sort of cultural connotation such a mark held, but he doubted it was a pleasant one.
After a moment, the girl’s purple interface started to display hazy images. It looked like something from a memory, but not one immediately saved into the codex.
The images showed dark skinned people going about their business in a primitive village. Some people worked dough into large, flat disks. Others worked bone and stone into spears and other simple tools while another carefully bent heated gold into jewelry.
The view shifted to the side, showing a massive stone wall covered in countless layers of painted symbols. Several villagers were working from the top of some scaffolding adding more symbols to the cliff face. The symbols reminded Martin of runes, but it wasn’t clear whether or not they were magical.
The image suddenly changed to a view from the top of the forest’s canopy. In the distance, a row of cliffs towered over the treetops. The view tilted up to see a pair of monsters battling in the sky.
The two creatures were enormous. One was some form of bird using unusual magic. Unbelievably, the other was a dragon. From Martin’s side, Salvador let out a disbelieving curse at the sight.
The two monsters battled in the air, wielding enough power to level a small city. Martin wondered what exactly the battle had to do with Kyo’s village, until the dragon tackled the bird out of the sky.
After the two monsters vanished behind the cliff, the view changed once again. This time, the view showed the cataclysmic aftermath of dragon fire consuming a valley. It didn’t take the expedition leader long to figure out that the village once resided in that ruined valley.
The poor girl looked rather shaken as she dismissed the image from her interface. Considering what she must have been through, that was hardly surprising.
Martin had hoped to find a full village to establish relations with, but that evidently wasn’t about to happen. Still, the girl could still provide some very useful information. She had already been to the top of the mountain after all.
Opening his interface again, Martin displayed the memory of the light that split the sky. Kyo’s eyes widened as she watched, looking rather stunned. Martin figured the look of surprise meant she probably didn’t know about the light, but the girl soon pulled up a new image on her interface.
Unlike the previous images, this one showed the clear picture of a memory directly recorded to a codex. The setting was a long overgrown ruin of another village. A massive demon of twisted flesh and corruption loomed over the multistoried stone buildings.
The view turned around to a stone door as it opened. The last sight of the demon was a colossal foot slamming down in front of the slowly closing door.
The image changed to a hand with a glowing mark slowly etching out hundreds, if not thousands of runes in a dark room.
“Liam, come see if you can make sense of what we are looking at.” Martin called to the rune smith.
Liam looked up from the symbols he was carving into the large monster. “Okay... I'll try.”
The other warriors who had been standing guard while Liam worked followed the man over. Adjusting his glasses, Liam peered at the array of runes on the interface.
“Hmm… All fairly basic runes, but surprisingly well drawn. Let's see… Force, light, heat, shaping, harvesting, and some control runes from the look of it. It is a lot of extra work for the effect, but I would say that this array would convert all of the mana in the area into a brief, searing burst of light.” The man reported.
“Like the light from a few days ago?” Martin asked.
“No… well, kind of. Despite the large number of harvesting runes and the high ambient mana, it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to create that kind of effect, um sir.” The rune smith replied. “It would take a tremendous amount of mana to do such a thing. Tens of thousands… if not hundreds of thousands of points of mana.”
Before Martin could inquire further, the image changed again. It went from a look at the nearly completed array, to a view from behind a large stone table. A narrow strip of light ran across the ceiling as though the stone door were starting to open.
Suddenly the image filled with blinding light. The shadows of skeletal hands could be seen briefly, before even those were lost in the glare. After a while, the light faded and a blurred image showed again. It was hard to see what was going on, but it looked like the girl had staggered out past a glowing red trench and into a nearby building.
The image changed one last time, to a colossal, headless corpse lying in the center of a path of pure destruction. Martin could hardly believe what he was seeing.
As the young woman closed her interface, she was met with a stunned silence from the group. The silence was left unbroken until Norbert accurately summarized everyone’s thoughts with a choice expletive.