‘Ouch,’ was the first thought Griffin had as his outstretched arms scraped against a hard surface. A moment later, the nauseating stench of rotten biomass assailed his nostrils, even as he grinded his teeth together to hold the pained cry he so desperately wished to voice.
Adrenaline was the only thing that allowed him to snap back up to his feet without paying his lightly bleeding arms any more attention.
Griffin’s eyes glazed over the blue screen’s text as he urgently began to assess any threat in his vicinity. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, but thankfully, Griffin saw little else but two stone pathways that were bisected by a canal of brackish water; undoubtedly the source of the plethora of unpleasant smells assaulting his sense of smell.
He flinched as a grinding sound erupted behind him, involuntarily stepping back and barely stopping himself from falling inside the filthy canal.
“No…,” he whispered as the stone double doors began to close inwards without any warning, barely restraining the urge to try and reach for the cursed yet plausibly valuable gear.
A final click echoed and Griffin gaped as the two halves of the stone doors now blended together so seamlessly that it was impossible to hypothesize a hidden hideout behind them, let alone try to visually identify it without prior foreknowledge. Almost as if it was….
“Magic?” Griffin whispered.
He felt his heartbeat quicken by a notch as he was truly hit by the realization of what the blue interface was heavily implying at. An entirely novel discipline that he had never heard of before, let alone experienced himself. A source of power that operated on a set of laws and principles completely unknown to him. A study that had never been offered to him before, yet greatly interested him at first sight.
“Well,” Griffin muttered after some thought. “If I get captured and interrogated, it’s probably best that they don’t find a pile of dead cultists that I had no shot in hell at surviving, let alone beating in an unfair fight. No sir, my name is Griffin Throne, hailing from the Crown Jewel of America, the unique melting pot of all cultures and chaos, the one and only New York City. For any future magical lie detector tests, that statement is a hundred percent true. Good luck finding it on a map,” He snickered at his own childish humor, trying to take a little of the edge off the situation he found himself in.
It was then and only then, did he pay attention to the blue interface’s text.
“Zenari-Shu,” Griffin voiced the unfamiliar name. “Wonder how that’s pronounced. D- Rank magistrate of a border town, sounds weaker than the Half-Dwarf Cultist. Hrm, I suppose meeting in a place where the most influential person around can’t mess with you makes sense. Yushan Sect… means nothing to me. But a Virtuous Alignment probably means that they don’t eat souls for sustenance. That’s good,” He murmured as his mind went into over-drive, searching for the smallest of hints or clues.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
His heart dropped when he read the last line.
[As the Apostle of Greed, you are a target of great interest to both Virtuous and Sin Alightment Calling Forces.
Registering with the local authorities is ill-advised.
Good luck, Inheritor of *** ]
“And just how am I supposed to do that,” Griffin wanted to scream, now more than ever, but he ended up settling for an aggressive whisper. “Inheritor of what, you stupid troglodyte. Your user interface is absolute garbage, did you know that. I can help you fix it if you fork over my damn inheritance, even the odds a little bit.”
Griffin’s attempted bribe resulted in an unsuprising ‘no response’.
Sighing, Griffin summarized his analysis, “In a nutshell, if the local dudes catch me, they’ll hand me over to the alien border patrol. Then, the alien border patrol guys will probably ship me off to a lab, where they’ll do the exact same thing the dead cultists were planning on doing. That’s… less than ideal.”
Griffin realized that he had lost himself in his thought process, having walked forward for the past minute or so without noticing.
“I guess I really can’t do much else besides pressing forward. When push comes to shove, I just need a cover story. Amnesia, maybe? As long as the translation function doesn’t die on me half-way, I think I might manage.”
Shrugging, Griffin decided to move forward towards the first bend in the sewer.
A minute.
That was how long his solitude lasted.
It took his overtaxed reflexes a few moments to place the swishing sound he heard coming from up ahead and link it to a silhouette susurrating through the murky, filth ridden waters.
His body locked up in the heat of the moment and Griffin once again felt the distinct, thoroughly bitter taste of being caught off-guard as fear overwhelmed adrenaline.
The sheer, overwhelming terror of being crushed by a thousand pound truck, the sensation of your will, your very concept of humanity fading away at an unprecedented rate…
‘Not again,’ A single thought sliced through every bit of fear, uncertainty and panic coursing through his veins.
‘Not again, not again, never again,’ His body moved out of a desire for self-preservation, his head angling upwards as he snapped past the terror and saw the situation for what it was.
Time seemed to pause for an instant as Griffin locked eyes with a green-scaled fish-alligator hybrid, which preferred a tail fin over a tail and the conical, sharp teeth of a gator. It’s black irises seemed to belong to neither category, but Griffin didn’t have time to gawk as it came crashing down upon him.
“Maaaaaaaaagic Blast!” Griffin screamed as loudly as he could in an instinctive act of defiance as he did the only thing his outmatched body could manage.
He placed the dagger before his chest, even though he knew that the alligator head would bite his face off before his blade pierced it’s flesh.
Maybe the last ditch invocation he had chanted out would help.