Boyd awoke in the same cavern he had passed out in. It was still littered with dead bodies, but everyone else was gone. He picked himself off the ground, dusted off his clothes, and then surveyed the situation.
He was still clad in the same blue jeans and Def Leppard t shirt he had been wearing for the past week, now soaked in layers of dirt and blood. The shirt and jeans were nearly tattered at this point, but he didn’t have access to other clothes. Eventually he’d need to find a tailor, but he wasn’t sure where one bought jeans in The Maze.
Life 52/111. You are blinded in one eye. You have suffered a grievous wound. This will not regenerate. You are bleeding internally. You are Maimed. You are suffering from Swordsoul Sickness, this has unpredictable effects.
Boyd used Manatap to heal himself back to full health. His face hurt, and he slowly realized that was being said was true. His vision was limited, and when he tried to blink it felt fundamentally different. He reached up and felt the spot where his eye was supposed to be, but it was painful to touch and there was clearly no eye in there. He felt like he could cry, but then realized he wasn’t sure if he could cry without an eye, which just made him sadder. Making things even worse, when he reached for Souldrinker, he realized it was gone. It was broken. Fleon had split it in half. Whatever power it once held was gone.
He was now half blind, and completely lost inside some sort of alien space combat simulator that he could actually die in. Paranoia and anxiety immediately crept up inside him and he realized he was very likely about to die. His immediate reaction was to call out for Fleon, who had become his security blanket of sorts, before he remembered that Fleon was also the one who plucked his eye out and left him for dead.
He was alone.
For the first few minutes, he simply rubbed his hand over his eye and tried to cope with the loss. He could still open and close his eyelid, but it had no effect. In his state of panic and delirium, this became a game of sorts for a few minutes wherein he would flick one eye open and then the other, only to be met by darkness. It was enough to calm his nerves, even though it was effectively just confirmation that he was blinded.
Boyd crept along the edge of the caverns. There were small bits of light shining through the walls. It didn’t make sense these would exist, but nothing so far had made sense. “What would Walker do?” Boyd asked himself.
It was the first time he had thought of his old pal Walker Williams. Walker was the more outlandish of the two. Whenever stupid ideas came up, Walker usually was capable of making them stupider and more dangerous without fail. While this was best evidenced by his unintentional murder/suicide that precipitated this event, there were many more events that fueled this theory.
There was the time they bought weed to sell, whereupon Walker laced it with PCP he stole before selling it. He subsequently misidentified the portion they had dipped in the PCP, smoked a substantial quantity of it, and proceeded to go on a multi-state bender that ended up with a near fatal car accident for the two of them. The bright spot was that they did make a substantial amount of money as their product was deemed to be irrationally effective since they never disclosed it was wet.
There was the time Walker had decided to “go straight” because he was “in love”. The woman in question was a 39 year old stripper who subsequently fleeced him of everything of value from his life over the next few weeks. She then left him and moved back in with her boyfriend. They were arrested for burglary shortly after and Walker’s belongings were returned along with a number of items he claimed in the ensuring legal dispute that were not actually his property. Once again, an accidental net gain based purely on luck.
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Walker and Boyd got factory jobs together, but their combined ineptitude led to a worker’s comp claim within the first month. That was the money they used to buy the aforementioned weed. They never returned to work citing emotional trauma.
In short, Walker could take a bad idea and make it worse, almost immediately, just by being himself. While this occasionally backfired into being an accidental win, often times it went extremely bad, hence Boyd’s current situation.
While this was obvious to almost everyone who met him, Boyd never saw things quite that way. He judged things based on results, not intent. The facts of the matter, as he saw it, were as follows: 1) Walker was clearly adept at making money; 2) he had a good heart and just needed to find the right woman; and 3) capitalism was a matter of survival of the fittest and thus Walker had only done what any other good capitalist would do.
Boyd thought for a minute and realized that things actually couldn’t get too much worse. In reality, he could not come up with a single positive thing for his current situation. It would’ve been an ideal scenario for Walker to work his magic on. With literally nothing to make worse, it would’ve been an incredible challenge, the ultimate opportunity in what could be described as “fuck-up-ery”.
As it was, Boyd was forced to figure out his next steps himself.
He needed to find this town the magic lady told him about. He needed food. He needed a place to sleep. He needed almost everything one could need.
SYSTEM: You have been affected by a Mer-Dragon’s Roar.
He was frozen stiff even before he heard the roiling growl from the depths of caverns. The noise overwhelmed him, shaking him to his very core. He was paralzyed by sound, and couldn’t imagine what could possibly make such an insidious noise. He was about to shit himself completely and utterly incapacitated, before he suddenly felt a sense of calm overtake him.
SYSTEM: Fear effect removed. You are unable to be affected by Fear for 10 seconds.
Fuck. He needed a weapon fast. It wouldn’t matter against whatever a Mer-Dragon was, but this place was littered with random evil shit that was likely to tear him into pieces.
In what was mostly dark he felt around hoping to find something, anything that he might use. He was hoping for a sharp rock, or even just a stick of some sort. Something he could at least swing. He scanned the area as best he could until a twinkle caught his eye. His old sword lay broken against the wall. He approached it, wondering if a broken magical sword was half as useful as a whole one. It still had what he thought of as the stabby point and the slashy side, but it was split down the middle. The blade was thinner and inconsistent. It was chipped topped to bottom and looked like even a small hit would send it further shattering into smaller pieces. Small bits of light and metal indulated at the chipped edges. It looks like writhing worms. Occasionally a flash of white light left the sword as a shot. He reached out and grabbed the hilt.
SYSTEM: You have acquired a Shard of the Drinker. This is a portion of a fantastically powerful weapon previously used by Demondread, the Lichian Exarch, and Boyd Bridges, an ordinary and unremarkable human. Demondread instilled the weapon with unholy power based on its ability to use defeated Souls for terrifying might. Boyd didn’t do anything with it of note. While this was once a fantastically powerful weapon, it has become extremely unstable when it was broken by Fleon, High Paladin of the Filary. The weapon is unbonded but has the potential for incredible power. It is in the process of being reshaped. It will reshape to the will of its new owner. It is currently leaking Souls. It is not useable.
Boyd threw it in his backpack. It might have a use sometime, and he wasn’t holding too much else.
He had no torch and no sense of direction. Having never really understood what constituted north, he pointed a random direction, lifted his finger to the air in the hopes of detecting the wind inside a cave and then decided that North was the direction that felt most cold on his finger. He marched that way, one hand on the cave wall, the other hand on his pack.
“Hell, I might die in this place, but I’m gonna go down swinging.” Boyd said as he steeled himself for the next part of the journey, and dreamt of Oklahoma.