***

I felt myself land on the ground. Sand and soil cushioned my fall.

The sky was clear, save for some occasional clouds and the sun. Soft rays fell on my body and brought it never before felt gentle warmth.

I wanted to enjoy the tranquillity it brought, but I knew there’s still a journey before me. Ahead before I can be carefree, but for now the sand’s good… too good of a bed.

Can’t …stand up.

I laid my head on the ground and slept on the warm sand that was my mattress and a pillow.

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I woke up to flies buzzing around me, being irritating as always. Taking me for a corpse -tch.

My lips were dry, cracked and the sun was too sharp for my liking, too hot.

I slapped the fly that was on my neck, scratched my irritated skin and finally stood up.

Oh the sights. I sighed and stretched my hands up in the air to take it all in properly.

Miles upon miles of barren land stretched before me. Gorges and Mountains everywhere, bushes and weeds creating spots of greenery were but occasional. Growing on the near mountains that dictated how far I could see.

And so, I began walking to one of those mountains. On my way I took out the spellbook and started flipping through it.

The spell book had a function of storing learnt spells. After a mage either learnt or created a spell and engraved it into the spell book it would start gathering the necessary energy to cast it. That didn’t mean casting spells was possible only through the spell book Instead it provided an additional cast.

Inside were three spells. The bastard was a waste of space learning only three spells, yet having the possibility of filing the whole spell book.

At least these spells seemed to be useful. They were: Fireball, spark and… sensitivity increase?

You know what… I don’t even want to ask what he was using that for. But it seems at least stepped into the threshold of being a mage and didn’t stay wannabe spell caster.

The fire he burned my hands with was no spell recorded, but should have been a manipulation of elements, or energy. I tried following the instructions and visualizing the magical circles that were engraved there. But for now, every attempt ended in failure.

After all I was trying to reverse engineer my way into magic.

After hours of walking, I got to the foot of the mountain. I started climbing it when I saw a small rat burrow out from the ground.

“What’cha doing here little one?” I said as I tried to pet it, but he ran away from me right into another hole. He pushed some rocks inward as he got into the hole. I heard them clang against the ground.

What did you find little explorer?

I dug my way into what appeared to be a cave. It was no smell feat considering my barbecued arms, but I managed if you don’t take into the equation the tears that were running from the corners of my eyes.

They must be scared of me.

The inside of the cave was quite spacious. In one corner there was water dripping into a small puddle on the ground, I used it to quench my thirst. Then I found one cool corner to lay in and slept again. As for exploring and stuff like ensuring my survival I’ll take care of that later.

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I felt a prickling pain coming from my arms as I was waking up. I opened my eyes and saw the small rodent. He was nibbling on my arm, tearing chunks of charred flesh off.

“It seems you don’t value your life.” I took him into my hands and threw him away from me. “Now, we’re equal. You helped me find this cave and I fed you and let you live.”

He scurried away and the cave returned to its tranquillity. Or so I thought.

“You really are a crazy person.” I looked behind myself and saw a boy sitting against a wall, in a dark corner of the cave.

“Talking to oneself never hurts you know. Besides with whom should I have been talking if I didn’t know there was someone here.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged his shoulders and came in front of me with an extended hand. So, I shook it.

“I’m Kali!”

“Isn’t that a girl’s name?”

“Yes, it’s because I’m a girl.”

“…”

She looked at me with dead eyes “Do I not look like it?”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

My response came in the form of looking at where her breasts should be. Yaiks

“Hey! Stop looking at my chest!”

“What do you mean? There’s nothing there.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that I’m a woman.” She flared up. And started muttering under her breath something along the lines of ‘don’t hit him, calm down.’

“My name’s Eli and by the way try wearing girly clothes it’ll cover for your lack of breasts.” As I finished giving my advice, I got punched in the face.

I could have tried dodging, but I couldn’t help teasing her. Frankly I deserved that, therefore I didn’t dodge. After that we both separated and were looking at each other from the ends of the room.

I don’t know what she was thinking, but I was wondering on getting some meals, and start the day off with a full belly. Maybe afternoon or something, I don’t know.

In the end it took her about ten minutes before she stood up and started walking further down into the cave. The mantras she was chanting must have a great effect I should sometimes try them.

Having nothing else to do I followed right behind her. I must admit I’m not really that keen on eating meat and moreover the meat of my rat friend.

“By the way how old are you?”

“You’re really insensitive. You know that?”

“Yeah, I get that” I waited a bit, but she continued walking in silence. “Okay, now a serious question. Don’t you fear that I’ll try doing something to you. You must’ve seen how vile some of ours were.”

She turned around and looked me in the eyes with a smirk on her face. “I don’t fear you. After all I would be surprised if you could use those hands for jerking off. Not to say I’m even surprised you can move them.”

“I’ll take it that I heard only the second half.”

“So, I was right “She turned around and we continued walking.

“No.”

“Yes, I was.”

“No, you weren’t.”

She face-palmed. “You act just like a kid.”

“You do, too.”

“This is pointless. After all you use humour to cover your wounds.” She said and a silence returned before saying. “Yeah whatever, man. Don’t dwell on it. Rather than that come and look at this.”

She was looking around the corner. There were skeletons thrown all over the place, with webs covering them and the remnants of their equipment.

“Do you know what happened here?” I asked.

“If I had to guess they were most likely drowned.”

“Why do you say so?”

“They’re all bundled up in the corner and the further down we went the more water was here. Even though there isn’t a place where it is coming from.”

“So, a tropical rain?” That doesn’t explain why they didn’t run out.

“It could be, after all we don’t know anything about the nature here. Maybe it was safer for them to remain in the cave.” Kali said and started looting the bodies. Not to be left behind I did so too.

It didn’t take too long for us to take everything of value away. That got us five pickaxes, a silver ring, silver sword and a pair of silver daggers. There were other weapons in the pile, but all of them were rusted. I personally don’t mind inflicting tetanus to someone, but there’s a condition that the blade must cut for it to work.

“I’ll take the sword.” I lifted it up, but in the next second I had to put it down. The pain made it so much worse.

“How about you leave the heavy lifting to me.”

Sad the adrenaline doesn’t last longer. I sighed and let her have the sword and took the daggers.

“So, do you have a pain in your hands?”

“No, I don’t.” Meanwhile my hands were shaking and unfortunately it wasn’t from excitement.

“Stupid question. Come here.” Kali tore of some cloth strips from her clothes and was about to tie my hands.

“What are you doing?”

“I am a nurse. I’ll make it so it won’t hurt so much.”

I let her have her way and she bandaged my hands after she cleaned the cloths in a water puddle.

“I must say I like you way more, when you’re like this.”

“I would be like this if you weren’t so rude all the time.”

“I’m sorry I just-“

“It doesn’t matter, I had much worse patients than you and I still did the necessary treatment.” She giggled. “But I wasn’t that much better than my patients in rudeness.”

I had nothing to respond to that with other than a sour smile.

When she was done bandaging my arm, I took the smallest pickaxe and started digging.

“What are you doing now? Trying to test the bandages how much sweat and blood they can handle?”

“No, I’m trying to continue what they started.” I said as I was chipping at the rocks. They were coming of bit by bit; the pain didn’t help the process. But this had to be done.

“As much as I’d like to see you suffer, I must say this is pointless,”

I turned back to her. “Is this sass all because I said that your chest looks like a cutting board?” I didn’t get the answer and so I continued digging in her silence. 2:2 I had to make the score equal.

“Hey, listen we should have something like seven days before the natural disasters occur. Don’t you know this isn’t effective?” As Kali finished speaking, I smashed the pickaxe into the ground.

“What do you mean?”

“There should already be caves that were dug up. Besides we don’t know where the first layer is starting.”

That’s true we’re after all about some three hundred meters down. It can start at five hundred or maybe a thousand.

“Okay, that seems reasonable.”

We took out as much gear as we could. That meant leaving behind two of the pickaxes. I had the daggers along with a pickaxe tied with my make shift belt. Kali had the sword and two pickaxes.

Outside the cave was an afternoon. The land laid barren as before and unchanging upon miles on end.

“I think we should start walking besides the mountain while looking for others.”

She nodded at it. So, we began walking, minutes turned to hours and as everything seemed the same, I heard Kali’s voice from beside me.

“There’s someone walking on the plain.” I looked at where she pointed to and there really was a person. We started walking toward whomever that was.

“He’s got white hair. It’s a Prophesized One.” I said.

We were approaching him from behind, guarantying us that he hadn’t seen us.

“Do we follow him?” Kali asked.

“I think we should. He should know of some caves that lead to the first layer.”

“But it’s risky.”

“It’s an unreliable method looking blindly for some other caves, because if I’m not wrong, they are all covered by soil.”

I wish I am wrong.

We continued walking in silence for about half a kilometre behind him, so he wouldn’t spot us that easily. It took around an hour before we saw something like a tower sticking out on the side of the mountain. As we saw it in the distance, we both stopped approaching as that would expose us to the Delusional Ones in the tower.

Meanwhile the Prophesized One in front of us was still heading for it.

“That’s disappointing.” Kali said looking on to the distance.

“Yeah, we could have killed him on the way. Now there’s a big chance we would be spotted if we caused a commotion.” I sighed and touched my daggers; it’s a pity I didn’t try them out. As for my sharp metal piece I hid it away in my shoe – you never know when it may come in handy.

She rolled her eyes. “He would have battered us with spells before we could approach him.”

“We should wait until nightfall. I’ll sneak into the tower and see what that is all about.” I said stretching my limbs.

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“You’ll just end up hurting your hands even more.”

I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s nothing. I just am not used to people caring about me. But yeah… I’ll just scout the area and won’t try anything taxing like climbing the tower.”

She looked at me non-comically. “You were thinking of climbing that? With your hands? It seems more and more that you didn’t just hurt your hands, but your head too.”

“Really?” I looked at her with a sour smile. “You think that of me why?”

“You tell me. Who in their right mind would think about climbing that tower and why?”

“It’s a nice viewpoint…”

“That’s it?” Some people just don’t understand. I shook my head tsk, tsk.

“No there is more to it, the ability to kill people from it…”