19. A Prisoner Who Fights Back

I wake in the middle of the night, trying to defy fate inside my dream.

It’s a recurring nightmare that’s become more frequent of late. I’m walking in the middle of downtown Vancouver, early morning or late night—it’s hard to tell for a number of reasons.

For one thing, I haven’t got my phone with me. I’m dressed in this high fantasy cosplay tied to an indeterminate IP, and I’ve got this heavy greatsword that I end up having to drag with me along asphalt. For another, there’s thick fog all around—some real Silent Hill shit—that gives me the illusion that I’m all alone in the middle of downtown Vancouver.

Suddenly, I see an object stick out of the fog in front of me. It’s the open barrel of a pistol, pointing straight at my face. I see it, and I keep walking towards it.

Soon I see the hand that’s wrapped around the pistol grip—pale, delicate, almost translucent in appearance. I keep walking until a whole person emerges from the fog.

The woman is beautiful. She’s familiar. She’s someone near and dear to my heart.

I stare past the pistol and at the familiar tenderness of the woman’s face. She stares back with a gentle smile that’s a little sad but also a little glad. Some might call it ‘bittersweet’, but I’m not sure I’d agree. At least not with the ‘bitter’ part.

She then parts her smiling lips to say something. The words are in perfect, unbroken English, but spoken in a non-Vancouverite accent I can’t immediately place.

“Are you the Conduit that was promised, or the Harbinger of calamity?”

It’s always at this part of the nightmare that I freeze. And not just because the question, despite its perfect English, is as gibberish to me as if it’d been spoken in Malik-Ennar.

No, I freeze because I know I’m being forced into a choice. Whatever answer I give, that is the reality that will come to pass, and I freeze in indecision because I don’t—can’t—know the implications of my answer.

So, I do what any commitment-averse young man would do in the same situation. Run away.

But whenever I have this nightmare, I always forget that running away is its own choice. And choice begets consequence.

In this case, the consequence is a bullet in my face. It arrives even before I can turn around to start my escape. Even before my muscles have the chance to tense. The bullet answers to my intentions…

… Like all good magic should.

I wake in the middle of the night, and the first thing I do is reach for my face.

No bullet hole. The wetness I feel is sweat rather than blood. It’s just a nightmare, like it always has been, but it still takes me a minute or two to come to terms with that reality.

Only, this time, I don’t have a minute or two. Almost as soon as I wake up, I hear commotion somewhere in the distance. And I force myself to sit up and listen.

Rugok is a town I’ve mostly experienced from the inside of a dingy jail cell. Even so, I know it’s a sleepy place with an even sleepier population—certainly not some hive of hardened criminals.

All that to say I’m currently the only inmate locked up in this ‘prison’ that doubles as the basement of the Town Watch barracks. Whenever Belpha isn’t watching me, there’s usually a guard that sits across from my cell, but for whatever reason, neither of them are here right now.

The whole basement is empty, as far as I can tell, which means the commotion is coming from somewhere else in the building. Creaking floors, thundering footsteps, muffled shouts, with some sharp metallic sounds mixed in.

It’s not a sound that’s overly familiar to me, even after being in the company of magical adventurers for some time. But I think I know what it’s called and also what it represents.

It’s called the ‘singing of steel’, and it represents things killing or trying to kill each other.

Oh shit. This isn’t another one of those glitches, is it? Even in the pitch darkness of the basement, I know I’m not inside a Portal Realm, so I can assume that whatever’s happening upstairs is real—for what that’s worth.

I don’t know enough about Rugok or really Malikor at large to guess at the source of the commotion. A monster raid, maybe? Is this the kind of world where monsters raid human settlements? And if not, could it be maybe bandits or foreign invaders or…

… Assassins?

A chill runs down a spine that’s already soaked in cold sweat. I don’t know why this last thought drew such a marked reaction from myself, but if I sit and think about it a little, the notion isn’t completely without merit.

I mean, these people—at least some of them, anyway—think I might be the ‘Reliken Nadira Apados’. I still don’t know what that is exactly, but I know it’s something that warrants being locked in a jail cell. Is it too much of a stretch to say it also warrants being the target of an assassination attempt?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Whatever the case might be, the only thing I can do is wait in the darkness, praying that the commotion would end soon and with the good guys victorious. (Who are the good guys?).

The wait feels awful. I think those of you who follow sports probably know this, but there’s very little in the world that compares to the anguish of rooting for an outcome you have no control over.

Eventually, the steel does stop ‘singing’, punctuated by a final muffled cry. This is followed by the briefest of silences before footsteps rumble anew across the floor and soon down the staircase. Whoever was victorious is now coming for me. Assassin? Monster? Friend or foe?

The door to the prison bursts open, and light comes pouring in. Whoever the newcomer is, they’ve got a torch, and the orange flames dance across the basement wall before lighting upon me.

The light is blinding—probably magically enhanced—and it takes me a hot minute to actually make out the figure that’s holding the torch. But the figure speaks as they step towards my cell, which allows me to identity them by voice.

A sonorous and dignified contralto, slightly broken up by heavy breathing. It’s a voice that could belong on a Broadway stage if it didn’t fit so well on a powerful Tiefling Knight.

“Reliken Mars Carver,” Belpha speaks in a tone that almost sounds as if she’s announcing me to a crowd. “Mafanos aloà kaer. Balutar sammo?”

I use my barely rudimentary Malik-Ennar and plenty of context clues to piece together the gist of what Belpha said. We have problem. Fight problem together?

I nod faster than I’ve ever nodded in my life.

“Ras,” I croak the Malik-Ennar word for ‘yes’ for good measure.

The cell door swings open, and in marches Belpha and her impressive frame, decked out in full armor despite the hour. By now, my vision’s adjusted enough to see that she’s got a torch in her right hand, shield in her left, and two weapons slung over her back. She lowers her shield just long enough to slide one of the weapons off her back and toss it to me.

I catch the STSG by the hilt and, by some miracle, manage to hold onto it without cutting myself.

Ahhh, the STSG, how I missed thee. This is my sword. There are many like it, but this one is—actually, no, it’s a good bet that there aren’t any other swords like the STSG at all.

As I get ready to follow Belpha out of the cell, I notice that something has changed about my sword.

There’s a new weight to it. New energy. New… presence, one that communicates directly with my consciousness, with the STSG’s hilt as its conduit.

It’s the new gemstone! The transparent, quartz-like one I got from the robot Kraken. Someone (I have to assume it’s Leto) has gone through the trouble of embedding it so it’d be ready for my use. I gotta thank that someone when (if) I get the chance!

One problem, of course. I never got a chance to test out the new setup, so I’ve no idea what the Kraken gemstone is meant to do. No matter. Just gotta wing it and hope the inspiration comes to me mid-battle like it did with [Dragonclaw].

I follow Belpha upstairs to the main floor of the barracks. As soon as I do, though, I have to stop again. And it’s all I can manage not to crumple into a heap.

It’s a truly horrific sight. At least for my 21st-century first-world sensibilities.

Bodies—both humanoid and monster—lie about the floor in various states of disfigurement and dismemberment. The monsters are of a species I don’t immediately recognize, but suffice to say they brought swords to a sword fight, and said blades have done their damage.

Arms, legs, an ear, and even a whole decapitated head. Thank god it’s a monster’s, which—I dunno—might be a horrible thing to say, but in the moment, I believe it with all my trembling heart. On top of that, there are of course blood, guts, and smears of what I’m pretty sure is excrement.

And oh god, the smell! If you can believe it, the smell is even worse than the sight. It’s a small miracle that I haven’t already regurgitated the entire contents of my digestive tract, and I thank my lucky stars that the guards here have been very stingy with my meal portions.

Then the thought hits me. That these monster carcasses will soon disappear (according to some weird gimmick of this world), but the human corpses are here to stay. These people are absolutely and permanently dead.

Of all things, it’s this last thought that finally pushes me over the edge. I stab the STSG into the wooden floor, fall to my knees, and retch uncontrollably. Nothing comes out other than some foamy spittle, but it still makes my insides burn.

And I’m crying again. Hot tears of fear, anger, and humiliation. What the fuck, Mars Carver? Didn’t you get it all out of your system back inside the Portal Realm with Feverfew?

But I’m not inside the Portal Realm anymore, and my companion is no longer Feverfew the lethal yet gentle Cat Boy.

Belpha the NFL Linebacker doesn’t wait for me to get it all out of my system. Instead, she grabs me by the armpit and pulls me to my feet. I’d say her manners are rough, but also compassionate, in this leader-who-genuinely-cares-about-her-troops sort of way.

“Nur saita koranos, Mars Carver.” She pierces me with her bright-red demi-fiend eyes, burning with a fire both figurative and literal. “Ras saita balutar!”

I wipe the tears and snot on my sleeves. I grip the hilt of my sword and do my best Tiefling warrior impression as I meet Belpha’s gaze and nod.

Isn’t this what I asked for? The answer to my prayers to the Isekai gods? A way for me to fight back and defy my fate, whatever it may be.

Well, this is no time to hesitate. No, it’s time to fight back.