As it turned out, both Romeo and Julius were formidable fighters in their own right, even without the System’s boost. To my utter and complete surprise, Julius went toe-to-toe with Gronch. It wasn’t until Gronch pulled out his slow-but-fast movement that he finally scored a hit on the human fighter. Julius had an interesting appearance. His skin was extremely pale and dotted with many freckles that nearly buried his actual skin tone. He had orange hair of a brightness matched only by the lightness of his blue eyes. The man stood perhaps a head shorter than Gronch but was still fairly tall for a human.
While Julius was well-trained and light-skinned, Romeo was the exact opposite. Though Romeo had the same lithe musculature as Julius and was of similar height, the younger fighter’s skin was as dark as midnight. His eyes were somehow even darker as if an abyss lurked within him. He wore his thicker black hair short and without any signs of an unruly beard, unlike his older comrade who was quite fond of his growing orange beard. The two made an odd pairing.
Marisar had also tried to teach us some healing, though that hadn’t really stuck with any of us. Healing magic, I discovered, was different from heart energy with a healing attribute in this world of Graedon. The tattoos did not block it since they drew on natural energy to increase the speed of one’s recovery. It was interesting, but I’d never had any luck with magic or energy that involved creating or fixing. I promised Marisar if we lived that I would practice it every now and then. He had looked disappointed I hadn’t shown more interest. I’m sure I hadn’t looked particularly pleased that his big reveal was healing magic. I had to admit though that I was a bit curious about the difference this world held between magic and energy, and how that interacted with the slave tattoos.
As we watched Gronch take the upper hand against Julius in what was supposed to be a demonstration of the slow-but-fast movement, I tossed a glance over to Romeo. “How did you two meet?”
Romeo shrugged, not taking his eyes off the fighters. “We just happened to meet and got along.”
That sounded like a lie. “Just happened to meet?” I pressed. “And you just decided to have some random slave you just met guard your back in an arena?”
The young fighter shrugged again, still not looking at me. After a few seconds, I mirrored his shrug and let the issue go. No use forcing him to tell me something he didn’t want to, especially when the chances of him dying during one of the trials were high. At that point, the boy’s background wouldn’t matter. That didn’t stop my brain from trying to analyze the relationship between the two. Eventually, I settled on the ebony fighter being some sort of foreign highborn, maybe a fallen noble, and Julius was likely some sort of guard. A knight, perhaps. Of course, there was no way to be certain, but the way Julius seemed weirdly protective of Romeo and the way Romeo always acted with dignity about him suggested my guess was at the very least, close enough to the truth.
There was a thud and Julius collapsed, momentarily stunned as the hilt of Gronch’s hammer slammed into his temple. I winced, remembering what that felt like.
“Lady Lilliana,” Marisar said from my right, the three of us sitting against the dungeon’s wall with myself in the center. “This may be inappropriate to ask, but if we are going to fight for you, I would like some answers to my questions. How did a noble like yourself, especially one of the Lysorian Kingdom, get captured by slavers? Were you kidnapped?”
“Who cares,” Gronch grumbled with a self-satisfied smirk on his face as Romeo sprung to his feet and dashed over to Julius who still sat on the ground, massaging the side of his head. “The princess can explain herself if we all survive. First, she needs to learn the slow-but-fast movement.”
“I care,” Marisar insisted, keeping his eyes locked on me. “How can any kingdom require such a small child to fight, especially one of noble birth?” He shook his head and small droplets of water flung from his face. “It simply does not make sense.”
I placed my hand on Marisar’s shoulder and climbed to my feet. “I may be of noble birth, but it was not Baroness Silverwater who gave birth to me. Though,” I let a smile play across my lips for a moment, “I doubt the Baroness expected me to end up here.”
She probably thought I’d died in the belly of the beast king. I kept that part to myself. Both Marisar and Gronch were proving to be useful allies, but that didn’t mean I wanted them to know I’d encountered a Beast King and a Progenitor. That might lead to questions I wasn’t ready to answer.
Turning to Gronch, I rolled my shoulders and staggered my feet into my regular fighting stance. “Okay, let me try this again.”
‘You must only appear to move slowly,’ Gronch had explained to us earlier, for the tenth time, after we’d all failed to grasp even the most basic form of the slow-but-fast movement. ‘All beings leave a small path of heart energy when they move. You must spot the remnant energy and you must allow your movement to be pulled by it. Do not fight the flow, ride it.’
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The problem was none of us knew what in the four hells he was talking about. Not a single trainer I had ever worked with mentioned anything about remnant energies that shadowed physical movements. We all continued to try throughout the day, even as the white balls of energy began to flicker, the signal that it was time to return to the personal areas.
I growled when the balls of light flickered again and I still hadn’t done the movement even once. “This does not make any sense,” I raged while repeating the forms Gronch had shown us. “There isn’t any remnant energy - the tattoos sealed it all!”
Gronch shook his head from his personal area. “Remnant energy ain’t sealed, girl. It can’t be. It ain’t part of us but of the world.”
“That doesn’t make any sense either!” My frustration was clearly building. I should have spent the past two days training my heart energy and newly formed core. I was a mage, wielder of the world’s energies. What was I doing trying to learn close combat techniques within a day?
The lights blinked, longer this time. I had around ten minutes left. Fuck.
A lanky man approached me from the dimmed distance, his torn clothes and deadpan gray eyes sent the familiar goosebumps up the back of my neck. When I’d first resurrected him, the slave had looked fine. Healthy, even. Normal.
As the days progressed, however, he’d gotten progressively worse. His skin had gone gray, withered, and wrinkled. The fight and determination in his eyes had slowly faded into a monotonous stare. Whenever he spoke we were greeted by an inhuman rasp that was like grating steel.
It was incredibly disturbing. Raising the undead never did that. The undead always rose as living skeletons of whatever the creature was. Occasionally, if the undead was powerful enough, it would retain some of its previous physical appearance.
Never had I managed to raise anything with individuality and sentience. Then, to watch it slowly dissipate from the… man… was particularly horrible. The thought of simply killing it had occurred to me. In the end, I let it keep living, or whatever state it was in. I needed to learn more about my new abilities, even if it was at the cost of this man’s suffering beyond death.
“Let me help, my Queen. You must survive the trials tomorrow,” came the gravelly voice of the resurrected, coming to kneel at my feet, his eyes cast down to the floor. “You must open your mind to the energies around you, not strangle it.”
I wanted to shout at it that its words didn’t make a lick of sense either. I didn’t get the chance. The resurrected being rose to its feet in a single swift motion and then placed his thumb on my forehead, his thin, elongated fingers curling suddenly around my head.
An unfamiliar power washed over me. It wasn’t an uncomfortable energy. Rather, it felt right. Like it was a power that belonged to me but wasn’t my own.
“Accept my energy, my Queen,” the resurrected said, his body becoming increasingly gaunt as power flooded me. As his power flooded me, I realized. “You must survive, my queen. This should open your senses using my knowledge.” The dying being looked up at the ceiling and whispered something into the nether, then it simply folded like it had no bones to hold it up as the final strand of his energy swam into my core.
“What in the Gods’ names,” Marisar gurgled. I heard his wet, shoeless feet slapping against the stone ground approaching me. I didn’t look, my eyes wide as a rainbow of colors silhouetted the form of the fallen man from before he had fallen. Then the colors slowly fell, mimicking the resurrected’s fall.
“Holy Hells,” I cursed in amazement, finally turning to Marisar who was similarly followed by a delayed silhouette of colors. “Is this remnant energies?” Marisar sank to a squat next to the fallen resurrected. I didn’t bother. The moment the final bit of energy had finished sinking into my core, something had snapped inside of me and I’d know the man I’d resurrected had returned to the beyond. When I looked at him now, the reddish-white soul flame I’d seen hovering over him and Gideon earlier was nowhere to be seen. Snuffed out of existence.
I didn’t know how I knew that. I just knew.
The white balls of light overhead blinked once again. This time, they did not flicker back on.
“What do we do with the body?” Marisar whispered. Even though I knew he was only a few feet to my right, I couldn’t see him and the disembodied sound of someone talking from out in the nothingness was disconcerting.
“We have to leave it,” I said, trying to remember which direction my personal area had been in. “There’s not much we can do about it anyways but to leave it.”
“Did you… kill him?” Marisar asked in an even smaller whisper.
I shook my head. Then, realizing he couldn’t see me, I said, “No, I didn’t do anything. You heard him - he gave me his energy. I think he gave me all of it until he collapsed.”
“I have never seen someone give away all their energy like that. I did not believe that was possible.” I could feel the Selenian on the verge of tears. I patted his shoulder. Or was it his head? The lack of light made it hard to tell. “Let’s figure out where our beds are before someone tries to kill us.” He didn’t say anything but I could tell by the sound of wet skin slapping stone that he was up and moving.
“Over here, ya idiots,” Gronch barked, his thick foreign accent coming up even stronger than usual when he attempted to say the word "idiots." “Follow my voice. And if anyone’s planning on attacking because you can hear my voice, I will rip your fucking head off your Gods’ damned shoulders.” Silence. Then Gronch spoke again and I made my way toward it, followed by Marisar’s constant wet slapping.
I knew Marisar was thinking about the life lost right before his eyes. I shook my head, my disagreement covered by the dark. Life was not fair or kind. Some would die, and some would live. In this current place, most of us would die, and if we stopped to lament each death, we would all die.
And now we were one man short for the trials.