I shook my head, clearing away some of my darker thoughts. “No, just thinking of my class. I’m starting to accept this is my life now.”
“That is good. It is not healthy to linger in doubt.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not, given the neutral tone.
But he was right, of course, so I tried not to think too much on my reactions to events. I had gone from non-believer to build-crafting in almost no time flat, and the whiplash threatened to snap my spine in two. I could understand it was all to do with the life or death struggles I’ve faced, but the shift within troubled me.
There were bits of metal strewn about the road at the gate. Several iepurrans were out with a flatbed cart and were cleaning the place, picking up the remains of what had been quite a few glitch artefacts, as Eternity called them. Three guards, each armed with a hatchet and a spear, patrolled the area and whacked bushes, checking for any surprises. Only two of them wore the black toga, with the third being dressed in simple white.
“Why are you coming with?” I asked Eklil as we slipped into the tall grass headed towards the forest. On this side, the grass—some kind of barley—grew almost as tall as I was. My head poked above the field, but of Eklil only his ears were visible. “You’ll be in danger,” I said without slowing my pace.
“I am much sturdier than you might believe, honoured guest. It is an honour to help you achieve your goals.” He hopped by my side, hands clasped at his front, not bothered by his lack of line of sight. “And I will not have it said I left a guest unattended in dangerous times.”
Was I committing some sort of faux pas by insisting to go out in danger? I scratched absently at my cast again, and could swear I could feel the skin knitting together beneath.
“Does it bother you that I want to help?”
“It does not, no. I have left my nephew to handle the immediate village concerns while we sort out this crisis, honoured guest.”
“You can just call me Klaus, you know. I don’t mind.”
“But I do, honoured guest.” His tone lost some of the good cheer and the edge of annoyance was back. “We have not drank a third cup of tea together yet.”
“Yes, we have. This morning.”
Eklil chuckled, the sound somewhere in the area of a chinchilla bark. “That was improper tea. That was for breaking the nighttime fast. It was nourishment. You must drink with me when I prepare tea that is grown by my own hand, in my own garden, planted from seeds I have harvested myself. Then, you will be as family. And you will be Klaus.”
“I’ll take you up on that once I’m done here.”
Part of me chastised me for not doing my best. I felt I could do better.
What exactly? Everything, probably. Understanding Eklil’s culture for one thing. Somehow, I was making an ass of myself. I could probably focus less on learning the system and more on finding a better way to train. This was exactly why I needed to get back into the high, to get rid of this self-pressuring.
It was building beneath my skin, an itch that I couldn’t reach and scratch. I tried to chase it out of mind.
Even with the cast on my arm making me feel like I was lugging around a whole tree trunk, I was still making good progress. Just as the red dots showed up on the visible sector of map, they disappeared.
“Eternity?” I hissed out. “Why did I lose the dots? How do I bring them back?”
Dragon Eternity floated up to my shoulder, batting its tiny wings as it avoided the barley. “The dungeon’s ping will repeat at a thirty hour interval. Positioning data is reliable for a few hours after a ping. Duration can vary.”
“Wish you’d have timers on these things, so I could follow them.” I sulked, adding little markers on the map where the dots had been. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.
“Insight restriction,” Eternity said from my shoulder.
Clear more dungeons, get more insight, understand better what I can do, was what I got from this latest interaction. Fine, it made some sense that I wouldn’t get full access right away.
“If I let the dungeon get reinfected and then clear it, will I gain more insight?” I asked. Not that fighting another mechabear sounded like any kind of lovely prospect, but it could save me the trip to find another of the things.
“No. Reinfection leads to dungeon sealing for an unknown period. Once unsealed, a new type of glitch artefact may emerge.” The dragon floated in front of me, holding on with its hind legs to a stalk of barley. “It may be much more dangerous than a bear.”
Lovely. Just lovely indeed.
I slowed my pace to a hunched-over creep, allowing the grass to hide me. Eklil tucked down his ears and held them almost like some overly fluffy bow tie beneath his chin. I didn’t dare mention how adorable I found him just then. He might’ve taken offence.
“I want to eat after this,” I grumbled as I pressed a hand to my stomach. It was rumbling unhappily, given all that had happened, the earlier snack having only barely helped. “We’ll get these and then head back. No point going bush beating until tomorrow.”
“As you wish, honoured guest. I am merely here to lend aid, if need be,” Eklil said. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
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We emerged out into a thicket of silver-leafed trees, all of them shining in the afternoon sunlight. The light was dazzling. Flowers grew in their shade, a riot of colours that were almost painful to look upon. Eklil leaned over some and collected several petals.
Oresstria did not lack for beauty. The more time I spent just near this iepurran village, the more I recognised another feeling growing inside me. And a craving.
I was looking for angles, trying to figure how best to frame the sights, which aperture to use, how deep the focal length.
The monsters were frightening, yes. I understood they could hurt me, and they had. By all right, after getting my stomach gouged into and my arm ripped to shreds, I should’ve been a mess. But while I had [ADRENALINE RUSH], I knew I could outpace most of them and even kill them before they got near me. Really, the only danger was that I was trying to get my skills up, and that meant not relying on the system ability.
But, even with this knowledge, I was coming to crave more.
More combat, which was confusing as shit.
More beauty, which was the old photographer in me coming up for air after too long a time.
And… just more. I was eager to pick a direction and keep walking just to see what else I’d find. I had felt like this before. Twice actually.
The first time, I had been a child out exploring the surroundings of my Moldavian home village. I had been a wild child, always away from home, always trying to see how far I could go over the hills and through the forests. Funny how some things changed.
The second time—
I chased that thought away, its presence uncomfortably close to the surface. I gripped my sword tighter and locked my jaw, decided to focus on the fight rather than some old pains. It wasn’t something to dwell on when a monster could pop up of any place.
And one did just that. A stalker dropped down from the tree. I heard its metallic whines long before I heard the rustle of leaves, or saw the blinding glint of chrome coming down on me. I raised my sword, allowed instinct to take over, and was promptly knocked to the ground by the beast’s bulk.
I’d hit it square in the chest, but it was much heavier than expected and, rather than push it away, I ended up rolling with it on the ground, trying to pry away its snapping jaws from my face.
It reeked. A dead, sweet and tangy stench emanated from its throat and it was all I could do not to gag.
Before it got that vice of a mouth around my face, vines errupted from the ground, bluish green, growing like some eldritch creature. In a couple heartbeats a cluster of them, each as thick as my arm, reached the creature, wrapped around its limbs and torso, and ripped it off me. They squeezed it like a grape, the half-mechanical body popping with a sickening aluminium-can crunch.
I was on my feet, sword held out, watching wearily the vines as they finished tearing apart the glitch artefact. It fell to the ground in a crumpled, broken mess of organ meat, wiring and bent metal.
“My apologies, honoured guest,” Eklil said as he emerged from a bush filled with flowers. “I had only wanted to incapacitate it for you to land the final blow. My poor creeper seems to have gotten a bit over excited.” The vines roiled around the ground and came to rest at his feet, drawn beneath the ground until only their tips still poked out of the soft soil. “I hope you will not take offence.”
First the guards were epic. Now Eklil. I grew more and more useless in this scenario by the moment, finally aware that the only thing that had stopped them from solving the issue on their own was that the dungeons was locked to others aside from me… and I had no idea why that even was.
A second unpleasant thought presented itself. Eklil had said the dungeons closer to the centre of the continent were far more dangerous. That did not spell anything rosy if someone as strong as he thought of those places as dangerous.
Oh well…
“Onward and upward,” I grumbled, more than a little miffed at losing another enemy kill to an iepurran. “Try and just restrain the next. I really need to fight it on my own.”
“I will do just so,” he said.
It might have been my imagination, but I thought I detected just a touch of a smirk beneath the words. I don’t think he was out there just to accompany me. Even village elders sometimes need a break from their responsibilities.
We were ambushed by two more squawkers. One of them I killed with the use of [ADRENALINE RUSH]. Its head came off easily enough and I then spent the next few minutes dodging attacks from the second bird. I could’ve killed it, now that I understood its limitations, but I wanted to practice my parrying. It was working.
Eklil’s vines kept the bird from running away, catching it and throwing it back at me whenever it tried to flee. It had grown wary after a time and forced me to actively poke and prod it before it would attempt a strike.
After about half an hour of torturing the poor thing, I finally grew tired of the whole show and killed it. It had gained me two [PARRY] levels and one in [HEAVY BLOW], which was welcomed. Each time I received an upgrade, I also got a nice feeling of enlightenment, as if something was clearing up for me, though I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly that something even was.
This was a little like my early days, when I was still learning the ropes at my workplace. Every time I’d get a bit of enlightenment, it would just stoke me up to try new things and experiment more. It had led to a few burned out electric cabinets and at least two robot arms attacking their fencing… but learning comes with costs.
The fourth creature lurking in the woods was a wolf—called a dray canis apparently. This one I chased down with the help of Eklil’s creepers. I kept on the wolf’s tail for a while, running among the trees, braining myself a couple times on low branches, and generally trying to level more of my [TERRAIN MASTERY] skill. It didn’t happen, but I did get another level in [SURE FOOT], which was just as well.
It was late afternoon by the time I was done with the wolf, finally having stabbed it to death—a much more difficult task than I had hoped for, and one that had required me to use [ADRENALINE SURGE]… and then watch in slow motion as the animal whimpered to death. Not my proudest moment by a long shot.
But still, I had gained several skill levels that day and I now had a much better understanding of what I was working with. The sword was beginning to feel like an extension of my arm, its near-nothing weight growing comfortable in my hand.
I whistled a tune as I returned to the village with Eklil leading the way back. It may not have been a graceful way of fighting, or a good one even, but it had been a fun one. I couldn’t really remember the last time I had fun doing physical exercise or… anything physical for that matter.
In the afternoon light, with the sun going down, the forest took on a copper hue that reflected and broke apart the evening light. What I wanted just then, more than anything, was my phone back. No, not the phone, but the camera from the phone. Or, for that matter, any camera at all just to try and grab some of these moments and save them.
For later.
The memory hit me like a kick to the shin. A smile peeked out from the folds of memory, and small fingers swiped at the screen of my phone. Brown eyes stared at the new pics I had taken on my latest trip, with questions accompanying each one. I’d stopped somewhere in P?ltini? just to grab those shots, just in time for the first winter snows.
The tune died on my lips and my mood turned sour as I grew angry with myself. I’d had fun, same as on that day six years prior. Worked a lot. Got a good sweat going. Enjoyed myself, when I should’ve tried to get home earlier.
By the time I crossed the gates, all I felt was guilt for having enjoyed myself that day, that way.
I refused Eklil’s invitation to tea and a meal. Instead, I crawled atop the pallet he’d prepared for me, drank Ielup’s yellow tonic, and slept without dreaming.
I woke to all hell breaking loose.
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