Chapter 26: Nocturnal Wanderings

Pacing his room in the hopes of staying awake, Miro checked on his stats to keep himself at least somewhat occupied.

He was a razor’s edge away from leveling up. The blackness at the edge of his experience bar was shrinking over the last couple of days, but seemed to Miro now to be doing so slower and slower, perhaps infinitely approaching the end without ever getting to it. Was this also another side-effect of his debuff? His mana was nearly at full, so he could have tried crossing that threshold then and there, but knowing his luck would have just as likely burned the whole inn down and foiled his own plans. He decided to wait.

Waiting turned out to be a bigger challenge than he anticipated – there was only so much he could do in this small room and Miro lamented the hours he could have spent downstairs, listening to and watching the inn tavern’s other patrons. After what seemed like a week of forced captivity, where the only thing worse than his boredom was the fatigue, he peeked outside the window and found that Silver Crag had gone to asleep. Only a handful of windows still had lamplight in them and there was no sound outside but the distant barking of a dog. This was his time.

Pushing the door to his room open, he thanked the inn’s carpenter for being diligent with the hinges that made no sound. The floorboards were less cooperative, but his room was one door from the stairs, so he didn’t have far to creep tenderly on his tiptoes while also holding his breath. He made his way down the stairs in complete darkness, measuring every step carefully with his foot and waiting for the dreaded “Debuff: Mother’s Blood” to pop out in front of him as a precursor to his foot slipping and causing him to come crashing down to the ground floor.

He made it to the bottom without breaking his neck and tugged on the door to the tavern to find that it was locked. He felt around the edges of the frame for any bolts and finding none, figured it was locked tight from the other side.

Discovering that his one planned way out was blocked, Miro started to find the darkness suffocating. He quickly turned the other way down the hallway, feeling his way in the dark by running his fingers along one wall. He thought about using his hand for light, the same way Hima had shown him the first night they met, but visions of the debuff and an exploding hand danced in his head, so he chose to hold off.

Soon, his hands found another door, and the cool air blowing from between it and the doorframe told him that it led outside.

There was a sound of creaking wood above him and it froze him to the spot and made him forget to breathe for a few long moments. The bones of old wooden buildings, much like those of people, he reminded himself, tended to groan at random times, and also guests did get up in the middle of the night to use their chamber pots. He slowly released his breath, and with added urgency inspected the door for a way out. Finding the bolt, he slid it gently open and tugged on the door. It didn’t budge.

A new surge of panic went through him. The walls were closing in around him – in his nocturnal wanderings he’d stumbled upon a maze with no exit, cursed to walk its dark hallways forever. The nightmarish scenario dissipated when his hands located another bolt, this one rooting the door to the floor. He pulled that one out as well and finally he was out in the night air, not at all wondering what kind of omen it was that his newfound independence commenced with the brief inability to work a simple door.

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Down at street level, the town of Silver Crag looked just as deep in its slumber as it did from his window. There was no one around, and though his experience with towns had been limited, he thought it was not large enough for anyone to be hanging out in the dark waiting to take advantage of those foolish enough to stay out by themselves. The joke was on any would-be robbers in any case, since Miro had nothing on him of value and even himself felt quite worthless.

He realized that beyond this point, his plans careened off a cliff like water into the gorge they’d passed earlier that day. He had no money. His only weapon was his 18 maximum points of mana handicapped by a debuff. Where would he even go? Retrace his steps and disappear into the streets of Utha? Or try to find his way back to Bondook, apologize for being such a burden all those years and try to make amends? And how would he go about getting there, having enough provisions to last a day’s walk before he would keel over from hunger? That didn’t matter, though, he assured himself; plenty of folks less capable than him made it in the world with less. The only thing he needed to worry about was putting distance between him and those who made him doubt his capabilities.

Navigating by moonlight through a frustratingly forgettable city, Miro had the unshakable feeling that he was being followed. At first, he thought that it was the natural paranoia that came with sneaking about alone between dark alleyways, but then when he’d check over his shoulder, he would occasionally catch from the corner of his eye the briefest flash of a life bar in the shadows.

It was funny how a little scrabbling sound behind him made the entire town of Silver Crag feel more nefarious. Of course, it was not so much funny, but rather that he was forced to laugh about in order to ignore the heart that was trying to beat its way out of his chest. Every shadow was darker, every window contained someone watching him pass by, the barking dog was now a snarling feral half-wolf prowling the streets in search of a midnight snack. The only consolation was that Silver Crag was relatively small, and soon he would be out in the open with no one able to lie in ambush behind corners and in doorways.

He didn’t make it all the way to the openness of the country before he found that the hair on the back of his neck stood on end in response to the life bar approaching quickly from behind. He turned around and wildly blasted a fireball at his stalker, and found himself in possession of a charred cooked rat.

“Really?” he muttered in the dark, looking at the empty health bar sitting above something he had hoped wouldn’t eventually need to be his dinner.

A moment later, the bloodthirsty system that controlled his levels announced that he gained enough experience to advance.

“Really?” he grumbled again about its preferred methods and watched the flashing message that told him he had another two skill points to assign. Hima’s training well at work, he immediately assigned the first point to his Vitality stat. About to do the same with his second point, he paused. He wasn’t planning on being a fire mage, and the debuff made it clear that this wasn’t a path that was fully open for him. He needed to focus on what he could use in the real world, and what might help him get across the Kingdom back to Bondook’s farmhouse. So instead he put his second point into Charisma, and admired his new stat sheet:

MIRO KALDOUN

Level 6 Mage

Strength: 3

Dexterity: 2

Vitality: 4

Intelligence: 2

Charisma: 4

Spells: Incinerate level 1 (cost: 0.5), Lesser Fireball level 2 (cost: 3.5)

Maximum Mana: 24

Mana regen: 3.5 per hour

Debuffs: Mother’s Blood

He missed Hima’s quick mental math, having to use his fingers to figure out that he could now use six fireballs on a full mana charge, replenishing at the rate of one per hour. It was rueful to think about how much quicker his stats seemed to have been improving with each subsequent level, and it made him wonder where he could be if he kept this up even for another couple of levels. But that last line of his stats mocked him with its viciousness and he decided that the best thing to do after all would be to turn his back on Silver Crag and with it any possibility of ever encountering “a classic quest scenario” again, and to make his way home.

And to pocket the rat … just in case.