Jade Benz

Jade had been killing it at rock paper scissors. The work she had done solving the puzzle in her head had given the ogres some self-awareness and cognitive abilities…but they were still dumb as shit. She was winning eighteen out of twenty games and the ones she lost were most likely coincidences.

Still, she had to admit it was nice having the company. They were a part of her now, she could feel it. It was weird and not really something she could put into words but, when she got them, they were…complete.

When she found the small thread connecting them and worked to remove the obstructions, they grew…bigger? That didn’t seem right, she had wanted them to be more then they were, so they became more then what they were. Ah hell.

She wondered if she could make her own self smarter by fiddling with the puzzle. Bored of the game she plopped back down in the ‘focus chair’ to take a look. It wasn’t so bad sitting in the chair now. She had no idea how long she had been stuck in here but she had had plenty of time to experiment.

Before she could regain her focus, she found herself in front of a door. She was alone and that made her frown, hadn’t she been told Tik and Tok would always follow her? She closed her eyes and followed their lines in her mind. They were right there, just…not…she grabbed a hold of them and pulled.

The shining spot of power behind the puzzle dimmed slightly but her boys popped into existence beside her. She felt better having them there, she had no idea what was going on and wanted the backup.

She looked around, trying to understand where she had ended up. There wasn’t anything behind her or to the sides except an endless field of knee-high grass, right in front of her however was a grey stone tower. It went way up; she craned her neck all the way back and couldn’t make out the top.

Dropping her head back down she looked at the door. It was a simple door of rough planks, a sign hanging on a wooden nail driven into its surface. It simply read; welcome to the tower, your goal is to reach the top.

Well, she thought, the lingering effects of the focus chair gradually fading away. This should be fun.

* * *

Grace

Grace slowly regained consciousness. She was confused, not able to remember why she had fallen asleep or why she was in pain. She opened her eyes to the forest’s gloom, its pleasant dimness something she had grown accustomed to.

She looked around trying to remember, when her eyes settled on a blurred form. It was right next to her and it made her start. Blinking several times to help bring her addled mind back into focus she looked again.

It was a being that’s form resembled that of her creator, the Erlking. He didn’t have the dignified antlers of her Erlking, but she could feel something else coming from him.

It was a feeling that she had been born to recognize. This being was a soul, and her racial memories told her the Creator’s will when it came to souls. Help them grow stronger. How that was accomplished would depend on several factors, that she also had brief outlines for.

Slowly her own memories swam back up the strange fog in her brain, she remembered that this man had helped defeat the ruin beast. How he leapt on the creature and tore into it with his bare hands replayed vividly in her mind as she looked at him inquisitively.

She could tell at a glance that his limiter was still in place. She was unsure of what a limiter was, but knew that it was a problem. Speaking of the limiter was forbidden but removing it was of the highest priority. She stared at him blankly, while memories that didn’t belong to her ran through her head.

“Oh good, your awake. I was worried that you were too small for the dose I gave you since it was designed for me and well, I’m a bit bigger than you. You are probably still really groggy, are you feeling ok?” he asked her.

She understood what he said, even though it wasn’t in her native tongue. She understood his words but their meaning had largely escaped her. She did grasp that he was asking if she was ok however. She did hurt, she had been injured but she didn’t know how badly. She looked herself over, checking for injures.

When she saw the tear in her soft hide clothes and the bandage beneath, she remembered how she had been wounded and her clan brother had been killed. Her last clan member, she was alone now. Emotion welled up in her eyes as her memories of clan life warred with those memories she had never lived, but that pushed her to act.

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Having misunderstood her reaction, the soul waved his hands back and forth rapidly as if denying something. He seemed a little worried about it to.

“No, no it’s not like that. It was the wounds’ location; I couldn’t help that. I was professional I promise I only moved your shirt enough to clean and bandage the wound. I used one of Silver’s quick heal syringes to help you recover. I didn’t think at the time that it might be more then you could handle…” he trailed off after a while his cheeks tinged a slight pink color.

Again, she understood his words but the meaning was outside her understanding. Her, memories not memories, let her know that he was concerned for her modesty. She didn’t understand the concept but knew that it mattered to him so she tried to reassure the soul.

“Grace is fine, her head feels funny is all.” She said taking in her surroundings. “Grace thanks you, but there was no reason to wait on her behalf to harvest the ruin beast.” she said, eyes alighting on the dead monster.

“Grace?...I don’t…oh is that your name? Hello Grace, I’m Benjamin. What do you mean harvest the ruin beast? Do you mean the dire boar?” He asked her in return, pointing at the monster corpse they rested beside.

Grace wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, she was being driven. She was still herself, still had all her child hood memories but she knew that the Creator needed something from her. She was obeying the Erlking’s wishes even if she didn’t understand what was going on.

“Harvest the ruin beast’s core, to make you stronger. Grace is feeling better now, she will get it for you soul Benjamin.” She rolled to her side and climbed to her feet. She repressed the groan of pain that threatened to leak out, drawing her hunting knife as she rose.

“Now hold on a second Grace, you are still hurt. You should be resting, and how did you know I was a soul?” he hadn’t touched her, he only stood up when she had. She looked up at him, a third again as tall as she was. His body was so like that of her Creator, small variations in skin tone and facial features, also he had no antlers but otherwise the same.

She was feeling her way along by instinct, letting the words come out as they would. She felt, off, but knew that this was necessary. She mourned the loss of her last clan brother deeply, but it had to wait while she fulfilled her ancestral duty.

“Grace will show you, please be patient with her.”

* * *

Benjamin Vryce

Benjamin watched her work in silence. At first, he had attempted to communicate with her but that had proved ineffective. She had just asked him to be patient again. So he waited, watching her every action. Her normally lithe steps were hampered by the gash to her ribs. The cut wasn’t bad but her ribs were badly bruised, perhaps even fractured.

He blushed when he remembered how smooth her pale green skin had been when he dressed her wound. He may not be completely inexperienced with women, but that didn’t make him a harem protagonist just because he had entered another world.

Looking at her now, he had a hard time recognizing the woman he had helped with the one he was watching. She had cut her way into the dire boar. She climbed completely inside the hole her companion had made and moved up into the beast’s chest. She had come back out after long moments of cutting and squelching noises, holding a fist sized glowing stone.

Watching her, quite literally, crawl out of the belly of that beast messed with his sense of scale again. He wasn’t used to boar the size of a plow truck or full-grown people the size of children. She rose to her feet quickly and approached him.

“Grace asks that you wait while she finishes before touching anything.” She set the stone down after wiping the blood away with moss. Then moved up to the beast’s head. She tried cutting into the hide on the back of its neck but after her knife failed to penetrate, she once again entered the monster. Crawling into its open mouth this time. When she came out a second time, she held a bloody object in her hands. Wiping it off as well she laid it beside the stone.

This was a new development; he was extremely curious about that glowing stone. He could feel power in it, a lot of power. The weirdly shaped object she had placed on the ground beside that stone, though intricate, was of little notice in comparison.

Moving over to the body of her former companion she knelt down. She sat there with her head bowed over his body for nearly five minutes. Benjamin could understand her desire to grieve, he thought it was strange that she had not done this before climbing into the corpse of a fallen enemy. She unbuckled the straps that held the metal plates in place over his chest. That was when she started to cut into the body.

“Wait,” he said stepping up to stop her. “He was your companion, what are you doing?” Benjamin wasn’t familiar with the customs of these green folk but mutilating the bodies of their dead seemed, strange.

“Do not worry, soul Benjamin. He has passed and we need to recover his pattern and core,” Was her reply. Then she pulled a glowing stone the size of her thumb from his chest and cut another small object from the back of his head. Benjamin frowned. Both the beast and the humanoid had the objects imbedded in their bodies. There was a lot he didn’t understand here.

“What are you doing?” he asked, not for the first time. He was growing impatient to understand what she was doing here. She seemed almost robotic in her actions. Nothing like the girl he had followed for hours on hours and watched to copy her forestry skills. That girl had moved with, well, grace.

After wiping the blood off her hands as best she could, an impossible task after crawling inside a corpse, she pocketed the small intricate object, and stone, that she pulled from her fallen companion. Then picked up the large glowing stone and moved over to him.

“This is a creation core, Soul Benjamin.” She started, “It is the power source that lets us, the creations of the Erlking, function. Soul Benjamin can absorb the ruin beast’s power, simply by touching the core.” She explained.

He stared at her for long moments. He could tell there was more going on here then what she was telling him. He could feel the energy from the stone however. The feeling it gave off matched that inside his own core, the power he gathered from killing monsters.

He supposed it wasn’t unlikely that he could gain more energy from a monster by consuming its core. Did that mean he had something like this inside him? Benjamin gave Grace and the stone she held another look, thinking through his options. In the end he figured that, worse case he would die and have to redo this trial. If she was being honest with him though, there was power here, he reached out and touched the creation core.