---Maddy---
In a clearing deep in the prehistoric woods, the last of the drones were transformed or smashed.
Looking at one another then approaching, the group of three made their way over to the pink mage.
“Hey! Do you understand us?” Jess called out directing the woman’s attention towards them.
A wide happy grin filled the woman’s face as she noticed the group, her voice coming across with an immense amount of energy.
“Hello! Travelers! Come in! Come in out of the light! I’ll make you all some tea and you can rest your legs!” She giggled while gesturing towards her furry house.
Maddy…felt something was off. She continued to approach, but tensed slightly and began studying the woman. Just because something was ‘off’ did not mean she was going to act differently – not yet at least. Maddy wanted to ask a question because the woman’s magic had been entirely different from what she was taught.
“Hello to you as well! However did you manage to turn those drones into random items?”
A flicker of confusion passed over the woman’s face before she lit up and happily responded.
“A fellow practitioner of the wild arts! Come in! Come in sister! I’d love to tell you all about my magic – I’m sure you can guess part of it. I have a transformation affinity and the transformation element. It’s much weaker against living creatures because everything has such a high resistance to transformation…but metal birds are easy – they don’t have a soul after all!”
The woman had turned as she spoke stepping into the building ahead of them.
Troy made to duck through the door after her, but Maddy grabbed his shirt from behind.
“Huh?” He turned confused and missed the frustrated micro expression flash across the witch behind him.
Continuing to hold his shirt Maddy continued to talk while making no move to step into the furry house in front of them.
“That’s fascinating. I assume you have different concepts for different things you want to turn stuff into? Why bother picking different items each time?”
The witch smiled while walking backwards. She looked perfectly friendly, her almost childish voice was innocent and faint giggles escaped her brightly painted pink lips.
“You have to have fun with magic sweety. Beside, I needed some new decorations for the living room”
This was not the time to experiment but…Maddy trusted her intuition and she trusted her new ability. There was something off. One hundred percent, this woman was suspicious. She just needed the barest bit of truth to confirm her suspicions.
Maddy pulled life mana into her brain for the first time. She directed it and sucked it into her mind – she really should have practiced first but this seemed like the safest mana option to test.
Immediately her vision changed. How Maddy perceived the world, what she focused on was altered. The faint hints of life – or death – that she could see were suddenly starkly put into view. She saw the ‘house’ for what it was – a living creature, the door its mouth. Strange looking muscles bent and twisted about its frame.
She saw her companions beside her and the woman ahead of her normally, but instead of focusing on colors or even shape, her mind overlayed them all with ghostly green blobs. At the center of each a concentrated source of life, sat greenish tendrils spreading out into their flesh. Tendrils that filled their entire bodies in an outline of the human themselves.
And, through the building – incredibly incredibly dimly – strange lumps sat.
…this wasn’t enough – she couldn’t see through the walls with how dense they were…
But Maddy knew something was off. She knew it deep within her bones. Dropping her life mana, Maddy pulled Light-life into her mind instead.
The world flashed with colours – but that hadn’t helped, so Maddy dropped and switched to dark-life.
The strange lumps hiding behind the living walls were finally revealed the world becoming a bit more monochrome.
Stuffed in different rooms of the house were…shapes. Similar to the blobs that were her and her friends.
Similar to the life of the humans she could see, living blobs were contorted into various stages of transformation – one living source halfway between that of a human and a sofa. Another source completely in the shape of a lamp, another shaped like a human with its arms and legs cut off, its torso swinging slightly just behind the wall.
Maddy’s mind felt different while she burned life mana – she felt calmer, slightly happier, more positive in general – and adding light or darkness to it had compounded that ‘difference’ her mind becoming slightly more creative and slightly more pessimistic in turn. Something she really had to test and practice with – but those changes were sidelined to what she was currently seeing. The horror hinted at right behind the walls.
I wish I had a way to talk to both of my teammates without anyone hearing – add it to the list of spells I have to make.
Troy seemed confused at being held back, while Jess had begun glancing between Maddy and the witch in her cabin in the woods. Jess looked like she was starting to understand this was probably a trap, but Maddy still wanted to get them back out of range of the house. That paw had reached past where they were currently standing when it attacked the drone –
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“She’s like something out of Hansel and Gretel or Baba Yaga myths or something.” Maddy whispered even as she took a step backwards.
“What was that?” The witch called back already in the next room. “Are you three joining me?” the witch continued, a faint giggle ringing forth as she asked.
Maddy continued to burn dark-life mana tracking shapes through the wall. The silhouette of the witch appeared to be stroking one of the partially transformed silhouettes.
“We’ll be right there!” Maddy shouted even while she backpedalled quickly – both her teammates joining her retreat.
On the side of the house, two fleshy eyes ripped out of fur with a wet popping noise. They spun wildly for a full second then locked onto the trio.
“Comeeeeeee sister. Don’t lie” The house laughed. Two arms melted out of the solid wall and began to stretch out to reach them in a grabbing motion.
Maddy swung. The world dimmed. Her scythe flashed – spells activating and burning her old reapers' slash runes – even as her mental buff was forcefully cancelled.
Maddy flipped her mana pool towards death instead of life – the source inverting and cutting off its connection to her mind.
Necrotic darkness shimmered along the edge of her blade as she swung – an afterimage creating a disk in the air along its path.
To her left Jess swiped her whip upwards – the thin cord a purple hole in reality. Both of the house’s arms were sliced off even as Troy shot his own arrow forwards – the piercing bolt aimed directly at the house’s right eye.
A shriek like a banshee rang out as the arrow passed through the eye and deep into the house – actually Maddy saw the end of it fly up out of the back of the house and up into the sky. The path of the arrow drew part of her attention as it arched up and then away into the forest. Seems Troy’s arrow was using a variation of dark void? It barely seemed to slow down in its travel. Effective.
Both of the monstrous arms were severed – Jess’s target in a beautiful clean cut. Maddy’s version a ragged rip that rapidly turned black as necrotic energies burnt into them – and the stumps of the long arms flailed up in surprise.
It wasn’t that easy however. The arms began to shake as new hands grew from stumps – the one-eyed house glaring daggers at them, yellow blood trailing down the one shut eye.
In the first exchange their group seemed to have come out on top but Maddy felt like she was failing. Her mana was dangerously low – the combined pool completely spent from both her mental buff and the last skill. She still had over half her life/death pool and nearly her entire light/dark pool – both draining as fast as they filled, their contents were processed and pulled towards her combined pool.
Maddy also felt like she was failing for a second, very specific reason – she wanted to shift away from melee fighting. Using her mana in a close ranged swipe felt like she was failing as an aspiring mage – she didn’t want to continue being this in danger.
“Try and hit the controller through the wall” Jess yelled at Troy pointing toward where they last saw the witch.
He raised his bow – Maddy pointed and yelled a different option. “Blind the other eye instead. You don’t want to accidentally kill her!”
Shifting slightly Troy shot a second bolt – this arrow a blinding burn as he presumably used light-void.
The shriek that rang through the air as the house was hit was louder than the last – it nearly drowned out the strange look and statement Jess made.
“She’s attacking us, isn’t she? You mentioned Hansel and Gretel? Why would you care about an evil witch? She’s basically a monster isn’t she?” Jess re asked after the shriek died down.
Was this even really a question Maddy had to answer? Were her friends really this trigger-happy – did they really want to become murderers that easily?
“I’ll tell you later, just try not to do something you might regret.” Maddy shot back even as she began to flip through options. Should they try and capture the witch? Tie her up? Maddy didn’t have any spells in that vein yet. She didn’t have any concepts she could bend towards that purpose either – she really needed to break more skills.
Could she blind the witch? Darkness or light both might be able to do so…but really it seemed like the best option was just for them to run away. The witch’s power seemed at least partly tied to that house – and seeing as how the house it self hadn’t stood up on chicken legs or anything as long as they ran they should be good. She shouldn’t be able to chase them?
“Come on, lets run away” Maddy spoke even as she jogged backwards.
“We can take her!” Jess looked annoyed but sighed and started to follow. Behind her the arms shot forward once again impacting off of a shaped barrier.
Jess had created two stretched out strips of yellow light. They almost looked like wings as they appeared behind her back and deflected the arms.
The arms continued to flail about – it looked like the witch was having trouble directing them without eyes outside of the building – and as a group the trio made it to the edge of the clearing before turning and beginning to leave the fight behind.
“What was that about?” Jess asked spinning around to walk in front of the group.
Troy seemed to melt into the shadows behind Maddy as if hiding from jess’s annoyed voice.
“Listen, in the zone completion rewards I got something called a ‘truth’. It showed me one of the guides in the tutorial completely stressed out as soon as we left. She looked like she had been controlled by something while she was around us. What if that witch is just a random innocent person being forced to act like a monster around us? Could you live with yourself if you killed her just because she was being manipulated?” Jess had grown silent as Maddy talked before sighing.
“Sorry, you’re right – thank you.” Jess almost whispered. Her already soft voice had taken on the tone of a child being chastised and it was hard to hear her properly. After nearly a minute of silent walking Jess spoke up once again. Her voice was no longer quiet – it hadn’t taken long to get over her near mistake.
“I think…I think I figured out one reason the guide you spoke of would have been stressed out. I also got a truth, it turns out we had…a tiny bit less control over leaving the tutorial than we thought.” Jess began to explain her own truth.
“You see, contractually we were completely safe in the tutorial. Endless resurrection. We couldn’t have that taken away. Once we reached the level cap of the tutorial, we wouldn’t have gotten stronger anymore but none of the achievements we had gained could be taken away either. Sounds perfect right?
“Well. What would have happened if we hadn’t consented to the last area’s stricter rules? We couldn’t have anything promised taken away right?
“That’s what my truth showed me. It turns out we were only really supposed to spend a day or two in the tutorial. An average of three days – a maximum of a week or so. Once that worst case scenario runs out the first and major problem would have cropped up.
“…the food would have disappeared. There wasn’t any way of getting more food in the tutorial – the fake farm didn’t make enough and there’s only around a week of food stored away in the restaurants and stuff.
“Endless resurrection but you would start starving to death every few days or weeks or whatever. You couldn’t handle staying in that torture for long – I’d imagine most people stuck there would be begging to be let into the next zone…it’s the same sort of situation in the last area. We were only meant to take a week or two in that zone – a few months max before it all fell apart. The zones are designed to push us further and further forcing us to accept less help each time. I’m nearly positive we will soon lose all the free gifts we’ve been given and we’ll be left completely to our own devices.” Jess trailed off for a second and then jolted as if remembering why she had started her explanation.
“Anyways what I meant to say is when I heard this it all sounded fine. The early areas are training wheels and you can’t be a freeloader forever…but I didn’t even think of the guides. The NPC’s or natives or whatever. They only had a week of food too – do you think they would be left in the tutorial through the end? I can see why someone might get stressed out if they were allowed to think about that looming deadline.” Jess’s voice grew slightly disturbed.
Were all the guides really just killed off when they left?
They couldn’t be right?
Maddy tried to imagine it. She wanted to say it wasn’t true – that just seemed so wasteful if it was…but then she thought about her ‘trial’. That had been traumatic. Could someone that had forced that sort of choice onto her really have her best interests at heart?
No. It can’t be that bad, the woman she had seen in her vision was probably just that stressed out after being controlled against her will.