The rest of their walk was uneventful. A few minutes and no interruptions later, Adam was led through the back entrance of a tall, rectangular building that seemed like it could collapse beneath its own weight any moment. He felt more comfortable when he realized how frail the walls were – the weird arrowhead things he could create now would probably be enough to tear a hole right through if needed.
That said, he felt a lot more comfortable upon seeing his holding cell.
It was large enough to contain both a bed and a desk. Sure, they were somewhat dusty and stained, but they were there – and without being infested with bugs! On top of all that, there was even a small, albeit barred window near the ceiling.
“I am sorry for the accommodations,” Tenver said. “You won’t be here for long. The usual waiting period is around three days. After Lord Aspreay has a chance to think on your case, I’m sure–”
“Sorry?” Adam repeated, barely containing a smirk. “What are you sorry for? This place is great.” It’s larger than my old dorm room and I don’t have to share it with anyone. Realizing how strange that sounded, he added, “Thanks for earlier – for defending me, I mean.”
“You shouldn’t thank me for that.” Tenver averted his gaze, but his voice was so bitter that it laid his secrets bare. “No one should feel lucky that they weren’t assaulted by a noble guard of Penumbria.”
Adam latched on to that. “Penumbria? Is that the name of this city?”
“Yeah.” Tenver nodded slowly and hesitated. There was a sad look in his eyes now. “You must be scared. Not knowing what’s going on, what you’re being suspected of, or even your own name. Yet you put enough faith in me to come here.”
Okay, you’re really making me feel bad now. Not enough to trust the guy, but still. Adam knew his flaws, and failing to learn from his mistakes wasn’t one of them. “You...seemed honest,” he said awkwardly.
This seemed to brighten the guard’s mood. “If you think me honest, would you heed my word about one thing?”
“Of course,” Adam lied.
The guard looked at him seriously. “Don’t think too badly of Esteban,” he pleaded. “He isn’t a bad guy at heart, I swear. The issue is that he doesn’t have an ounce of noble blood in him.”
Adam stared at him blankly. “Uh, sure?” Sorry, is that vague, pureblood supremacy crap supposed to appease me?
“No, you’re not getting it! I mean...you’re not a noble either, right? If you’d managed to become a noble guard, I imagine you would be desperate not to lose your position, just as he is.”
There was something vaguely sympathetic in the middle of that sentence, but Adam was no way in hell going to bother searching for it. Some prick punching him over nothing and treating people like garbage didn’t magically become okay simply because he got something out of it.
With that said, Adam couldn’t and shouldn’t get confrontational with the only person somewhat on his side. He drew a deep breath. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
At that, Tenver shook his head. “No, no, that’s not right!” he repeated, multiple times. Adam tentatively held out his hand, gesturing that it was fine, but he might as well have been talking to a wall.
I’m beginning to wish for a Round 2 with the monsters if the alternative is talking to this weirdo. “Listen, I’m not sure what’s got you so worked up, man. You didn’t say anything wrong.”
“But I did! Just because Esteban has his reasons doesn’t mean that he was justified.”
“Are you going to let me have an opinion, or are you just going to monologue both sides of our conversation?” Adam protested. His regret set in soon as he took in Tenver’s shocked expression. Shit. I didn’t mean to be that honest. Walk it back. Walk it back! “I kind of appreciate that you’re doing that, really. I mean–”
Tenver shook his head. “No, it’s fine. Fear not, I concede your point.” He crossed his arms, chuckled slightly, and leaned against the doorway. There was a bittersweet smile on his face. “It’s a little hard sometimes,” he muttered. “Because it feels like everything is the wrong answer.”
“Tell me about it,” Adam replied under his breath.
“You’ve seen how poor this town is.”
‘Poor’ wasn’t the word Adam would have used to describe literal cancerous tumors growing out of the walls, but he nodded along anyhow.
“It’s terrible,” Tenver continued. “Penumbria is scarcely given anything by the Empire. Food, Cleansing Liquid...we lack it all, and the Emperor barely deigns to inform Lord Aspreay when trading caravans are passing by. Why bother taking care of a frontier city, right?”
His tone grew more bitter the longer he spoke. “People here have to work themselves ragged for the mere chance to crawl through life. What classes do you think people get here? The shoemaker is having difficulty finding a disciple because shoes aren’t something people prioritize anymore. The baker that made the bread you ate earlier? He would have closed down his shop long ago if Lord Aspreay wasn’t a direct patron of him!”
Adam slowly nodded. He hadn’t expected the guard to have thoughts like those, much less discuss them openly with someone he’d detained. What, does he think I’m going to be executed so it doesn’t matter what he tells me? Adam laughed at the thought, although his laughter quickly died when he realized that was a distinct possibility.
“It burns me when I try to put myself in their shoes,” Tenver muttered. “Even if you wanted to save up enough Orbs to move to a different city or live a better life here – how are you supposed to do that? The average citizen here earns less than 30,000 Orbs a year. That’s barely enough to afford to keep a leaky roof over their head and some rice in their bowls. How are you supposed to improve your abilities? A person needs to spend Orbs to raise their Rank; elsewise, they can’t make more Orbs. Oh, you weren’t born in a family with enough Orbs to have the chance to level up calmly? Maybe go risk your life against some monsters, why not?”
He let out a sigh. “There’s no good option for people of meager means. So even though what people such as Esteban do when getting a good position is deplorable – can I really claim moral superiority when I accuse them of lacking honor?”
Two thoughts took over Adam’s mind just then.
The first, the smaller one, was a nearly distant note that the monster in the forest hadn’t spawned any sort of orbs – whatever those were – when it vanished. Did that not happen if they were sucked into his tablet?
The second, the larger one, was a surprised realization that the man in front of him wasn’t nearly as detached and easygoing as he first seemed. From the start he’d appeared gentle, almost too gentle to hold a weapon. Now his eyes were burning with an intensity that was almost ill-fitting on his handsome features.
It wasn’t that Tenver was acting earlier. He’d felt every one of his easygoing, mischievous smiles. There was just more underneath them. More colors to him than just shades of gray.
“Gotta say, I’m surprised you’re willing to be this honest with a prisoner,” Adam said, after a pause.
“I don’t think being a victim makes one a criminal,” Tenver told him. Then, after smiling, he added, “And would you believe I don’t have many friends to talk to here?”
“That shocks me.” Adam allowed himself a smile, and he didn’t have to force this one too hard. “Hey, can I ask you one more thing?”
Tenver waved both his arms dramatically and shrugged. “Why not? I’ve already said much more than I probably should, so what’s the harm?”
“Why do you care so much?” Adam bluntly asked.
The guard didn’t appear to be expecting that question. He laughed nervously for a moment and diverted his gaze to the outside of the room, tentatively looking down the hallway as if eyeing an escape route. Still, he remained. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Doesn’t sound like you’re in need of Orbs or status. You keep talking about the whole thing like it’s a distant problem that doesn’t affect you in the slightest.” And my tablet said you had a pretty high level, not to mention a weird class. “But you still seem pretty pissed off about the topic. So, I’ll ask again...why do you care so much?”
Tenver opened his mouth instantly, then stopped to ponder the question with a serious expression. When he spoke again, he was looking up at Adam with a smile. “You surmise correctly – I am from a noble family. And as you will surely guess next, people like me don’t usually serve as guards. Too dangerous, not well-paid enough. Why keep rabble and monsters in check when you can sit around and do nothing?”
“Which means you were...” Adam trailed off, looking at him expectantly.
“You really like pulling as much information as you can out of a man, don’t you?” Tenver asked with a grin. “I’d be offended if this wasn’t common knowledge. Might even take you for a spy, were you not so obviously bad at it.”
“I’ll interpret that as you complimenting my honesty.”
Tenver smirked, although his levity faded a second later. “I was essentially banished by my family, you know. Not entirely, but...well, I was stationed here without rank. Then given a villa and a monthly allowance to peacefully live my days out of their way. Does that answer your question?”
Adam frowned at him. “Of course not. How did that lead to you becoming a guard? You just said you had a house and an allowance, that doesn’t–”
“I couldn’t just...watch. All of this.” Tenver gestured at the empty hallways. “I understand why people like Esteban act like that. I really do. That doesn’t mean I’ll stand around and let everyone else deal with the consequences of their birth and standing.”
This sounded reasonable until Adam thought back to the monsters. The notion of someone volunteering to fight those things was downright insane to him. “You mentioned how dangerous the job is. Nothing you told me explains why you took it when you still have everything.”
“Because I don’t. I have a house, sure. Food? That too. Luxuries? About as many as anyone could obtain in a frontier city like this. Got all the Orbs I need.” Tenver’s grin faltered slightly. “But I’ve already lost everything I care about. And when you lose what matters most to you...how should I say this? Imagine monsters were attacking your city. Would you pick up your valuables before running?”
Adam shivered at the thought of losing his tablet. “Yes, of course.”
“And if it was someone else who lost their valuables instead of you?”
“I mean, I’d like to say I would try to help them...but I’m not that good of a person. If monsters were attacking, I’d probably grab my stuff, run, and hope everyone else gets away too.”
Tenver laughed. “Fair enough. But what if you didn’t have any valuables to begin with? If you have nothing to grab, then you might as well help others salvage what they can, right? I mean...” He lifted his eyes to look into Adam’s. “If I have nothing left to salvage, it seems only reasonable.”
“You have your life,” Adam pointed out. He felt the comment stab at himself. It’s different when it’s other people, he told the rebellious part of his brain.
“I don’t have much left, but many other people do,” Tenver went on. “They can’t always afford to risk their lives when they have families to feed and promises to keep. When someone who wants for nothing sees people who still need plenty – well, sometimes that person just feels the urge to act, you know? It’s part of why I’m fine telling you about all of this.”
Adam’s face tightened. He hated being able to relate to what Tenver was saying. At that moment, the only thing he wanted was to tell him to value his own dreams more, to find something else worth caring over, even if he really had lost everything. It was only fear of hypocrisy that kept him quiet.
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Instead, he managed a deadpan, “Suppose I’m lucky I got the odd, philosophizing guard to check up on me. This was a fun conversation.”
“Luck was hardly involved. People trying to sneak into the city are usually full of rot and more dangerous than a monster. Of course I was sent – everyone would love an excuse to get rid of me. And nobody likes Esteban, hah.”
On that note, without any further elaboration and showing only one final wide grin, Tenver closed the door behind him and left Adam alone with his thoughts until morning.
–
To his complete lack of surprise, Adam didn’t sleep well that night.
He sorely wanted to, but a part of him felt like it would be like taking a nap in a snowstorm. That if he slept right there, he would never wake up.
Tenver seemed like a genuinely nice person, but even he didn’t measure his words when talking about Lord Aspreay, the ruler of this rotting town. The guard had assured Adam that he wouldn’t die, but that was the extent of it. It was just as likely that this lord would keep him in a dungeon and torture him for information that he didn’t have.
Okay, what’s more likely to kill me? Being a prisoner for a little bit or venturing out into a world with monsters? He began to speculate if he could survive on his own. That wouldn’t have been possible a day ago, but now he’d eaten and gained a little bit of knowledge about this world. Sure, sleeping outside would still be dangerous, but now that he understood things better, maybe it wouldn’t be quite as impossible.
Although even that was getting ahead of himself. Considering everything he’d learned, everything he’d experienced since falling from the sky...Adam had to at least briefly wonder whether he was actually crazy.
“Eh. I’m either crazy or I’m not,” he said, aloud and to himself. “If I am crazy, I might as well entertain myself. If this is real, I better take it seriously.”
Yeah, that tracked. He’d act the same in either scenario.
That was good enough for him.
“With that in mind, the next step is...yeah, let’s test how sturdy this place is.”
While Adam had theorized that he could tear open walls with his Stained Ink, he wasn’t fully certain that it would work. There was a decent chance the cell was made to contain people like him – if more people like him existed – and an even better chance that he just didn’t know how to use the weapon proficiently enough.
To his surprise, both questions came up in his favor.
Summoning a small arrowhead within his palm without launching it forward was actually a much easier task than shooting it out as he’d done when first gaining his power. It was like flexing a muscle, or extending his tongue in a certain direction.
More importantly, the Stained Ink – sharpened into a razor-sharp arrow – cut through the wall like a laser. He didn’t need to apply any pressure in order to slice through solid stone. A moment later, he felt the cool twilight air brushing against his face.
Adam hastily stopped cutting. He hadn’t expected it to be that easy. Idly, he contemplated escaping right then and there, then chose otherwise. Part of his reason for agreeing to be imprisoned here was that he wanted a safe space to test his abilities. If he experimented out in the wild and passed out, odds were good that a monster would sneak up and eat him alive.
Should figure out the limit of that. Let’s see...how far can I push myself?
Earlier in the forest, Adam had realized that whenever he shot ink out of his body, its loss made him feel exhausted and light-headed. It was hard to tell with how hungry he’d been, but the tiredness seemed to stay with him for much longer than when exercising. He had a theory, but testing it was going to suck a little bit.
Adam studied the whirling ink around his wrist. “Are you...my blood?”
It made sense if he thought about it that way.
He knew that he still had normal, red blood inside of him. That much was clear when he was attacked by those monsters. But...when he’d activated the ability, his bleeding stopped and shooting it out like a projectile made him feel light-headed. If his blood was turning into ink when he used it, everything added up.
Somewhat.
The fact that he felt perfectly normal even after summoning the ink to use as a whip, as if the blood hadn’t left his body at all, made the theory feel shaky. But this was an undefined magical ability, so maybe that was just how things were meant to work here.
“Well, here goes nothing,” Adam muttered. Before he could have second thoughts, he brought the sharpened ink toward his wrist, opening a slight cut.
No blood came out.
Instead, a dark, flickering sort of liquid that he’d come to recognize as Stained Ink seeped through his skin, trickling down from the top to the bottom of his wrist, and sealing the wound afterward. The pain was still there, but his light-headness had barely changed. Probably because the amount of ink-blood he drew was small enough.
That...told him a lot.
Enough that he was starting to lose the plot on exactly what it told him. Best to write it down somewhere; everything always felt easier to understand that way.
Lacking any kind of paper to work with, Adam shrugged, picked up his tablet, and started a notetaking file. He wasn’t a fan of using his drawing pen to take notes – better to separate workflows – but considering the situation, he was willing to adapt.
NOTES ON THE STAINED INK
— My ink is my blood. I don’t know what the exact ink-to-blood ratio is, but it seems close to 1-to-1 or 1-to-2.
—The ink can heal wounds, but it disappears afterwards. This means that I can reduce the lethality of certain wounds, but the blood loss would probably kill me anyway. Limited uses?
—I can change its shape and state. I can make the ink into a whip, a sword, and any kind of weapon in between. It can be snappy like a vine or sharp like an arrow.
—The blood ‘comes back’ after I turn the ability off. I can make pretty much any shape with the ink, but once it’s gone, it doesn’t feel like I lose the blood.
—No blood leaves my body if there is still a connection. If it’s still connected to me, it’s as if the ‘blood’ was still running through my veins.
Adam smiled at his notes when he finished. Things were so much easier for him to contextualize when he broke them down into separate pieces. Essentially, what mattered most was that the ink could heal him from injuries, but not save him from blood loss.
He read over the list once more, coming to further conclusions. If he turned his ink into a large weapon – say, a sword – and it broke, that would be equivalent to experiencing major blood loss. Wouldn’t go well for him. Tiny arrowheads seemed safer. The blood loss would be guaranteed in that case, but much smaller than what would happen if he lost a sword-sized amount.
Either way, that was probably enough for him to write about his Stained Ink power.
What about the world itself?
There was a lot to unpack there. Where was he? How had he gotten there? What the hell had happened in the old man’s art shop that–
Adam drew a deep breath. “I’m getting overwhelmed. Better break it down again.”
He turned to his tablet and started another heading.
NOTES ON THE PAINTED WORLD
—I sucked that monster into my tablet and stole his powers. Since then, I couldn’t steal any more powers from other monsters.
— There must be something different between the time I drew that one monster and the other attempts. What was different that time?
—This is probably another world. Nothing here makes sense. Being teleported into another world through a painting is absurd, but the alternative is worse.
—It’s not just me, everyone appears to have “Ranks” and “Talents.” No idea if my power is unique yet, but I would wager so considering how no one else has a tablet.
—You appear to increase your abilities by using “Orbs” which you can gain from beating up monsters or...just working, apparently.
—“Orbs” appear to be the currency for everything in this world, not just leveling up.
—30,000 Orbs appears just enough to barely make a living in this town. I’m not sure if that refers to a single person or a family.
— The amount of Orbs needed to rank up appears to change by Rank, but I’m not sure by how much yet. After checking my tablet, it sounds like I need 40,000 to Rank up.
— No one else has a tablet so I’m not sure yet how they can see their level or class.
— I’m not positive on this, but based on how Tenver was talking I don’t think they can see each other’s Talents or Rank.
—Monsters appear commonplace, but for some reason no one wants to hear about them out loud in the town.
— The Invisible Wall checkpoints, and the mention of merchant caravans must mean people have ways of traveling somewhat safely.
—The Invisible Wall appears to be controlled by the Lord of this city. It might be related to his Talent, if magic is involved.
—“Stained” and “Rot”—the tumorous decay that seems to affect things like that creature, my Arrowheads and the streets of this city...yeah those things appear to be common. Whatever the hell they are.
— Not every city is as fucked as this one. I hope.
Was there anything else? Ah, yes, one very important point.
— My tablet appears to have infinite battery.
It was bizarre, but Adam was willing to let that last one go unquestioned. He’d take his wins where he could get them at this point.
“Well,” Adam said to himself, as he finished the list. “Seems like I should just peace the hell out of here right about now. Got all the information I need, got some food, got some rest...yup, I’m good. Should be able to survive outside if I can find a merchant caravan. Then I can enter a city without attracting too much attention. Not a single reason to stick around and meet the Lord who–”
Tenver’s voice rang in his head. ”When someone who wants for nothing sees people who still need plenty...”
Adam froze and cursed at the absurd notion that started forming in his head. He couldn’t bring himself to care too much about living or dying – everything was just too...much to have fully registered. Even though he accepted that everything here was real, it still didn’t feel like it.
But accepting the possibility of dying didn’t mean throwing away his life for no good reason.
Not like I can influence anything around here just by throwing away my life, he firmly told himself. That isn’t selfless; that’s suicidal and idiotic. It sucks that people here are apparently being raked over the coals, but I’m powerless to help.
Even if I hate that they’re being fucked over by the LITERAL ruling class.
A literal damned Ruler class. Not that different from back on Earth, but the shamelessness somehow made it more annoying.
“There’s nothing I can do for them. Nothing that this would accomplish for either them or me. I should just leave. Dying just because I’m curious to meet this Lord Aspreay would be beyond stupid.” Adam glanced at the crack he’d cut in the wall earlier and extended his sharpened Stained Ink at it once more. He’d barely touched the brick when he suddenly stopped. “Wait a minute...”
He looked over at the list he’d written one more time. Just then, an idea occurred to him. It was merely an idea, and an untested one at that. But if he was right...
Well, well, well...maybe there is something I can do after all.