by D. Levesque
Inside, I found a bevy of food items. Mostly vegetables and some fruit, a bag of salt, sugar. And some spices that I was not familiar with, but Leeha said they were worth taking. We had Bridget wait outside with Sara so I could put it into my dimensional bag without Sara freaking out, as I was placing item after item into it. Even Leeha and I watched it all go in with wide eyes, and big fucking grins.
We also found some dried meat. Leeha sniffed it and said it was beef. So I stuffed most of that into my bag as well, but kept some out for everyone to have right away. I also discovered four of what Leeha called water skins. They were not the canteens I was used to. These things looked more like what I had seen people using in a movie for wine, where you would hold it up in the crook of your arm and squirt it into your mouth. They were all full, but the water was tepid and stale. I fixed that by emptying them out and refilling them using the Water Fountain spell. Leeha told me to put three into my bags to test if it would keep them cold, and she kept one that she put over her shoulder, as it came with a leather strap for precisely that reason.
I am just finishing my beef jerky when we get to the large tent that belongs to Brakan. Sorry, used to belong to. His body is still there on the ground, but it looks like something has gotten to it and fed on it overnight. Feeling a sour taste in my mouth from the view of the dead body, I turn to Leeha.
“Can I get that water?”
“Sure,” she says, looking at me worriedly.
“Sorry. I guess close up, it’s worse than my imagination made it out to be,” I say, opening the water bag and taking a long squirt from it. I rinse my mouth before swallowing the cold water.
I hear a retching sound, and turning to look behind me, I see that Sara is standing next to a tent and heaving. I walk up to her and pass her the water bag once she’s done. She looks up at me, tears in her eyes from throwing up the beef jerky we just had.
“Thanks,” she says gratefully.
Sara takes a long squirt from it, spits it out, and then takes another, this time drinking it. “Sorry, I thought I had a stronger stomach than that.”
“Never saw combat or death?” I ask her softly.
“No. Except for what I did during my Magic training when I became a Fire Mage. But that was all mock battles. This,” she says, pointing to the dead body of Brakan, “is brutal.”
“And he deserved more,” I tell her, looking away from her to look at the body of Brakan. “For what he did, he deserved to die slowly and painfully, but I just wanted him dead and all of you slaves rescued.”
I place my hand on the ground and think, Earth, bury the body.
You have used a Spell command. You have used 1000 points of power.
I know it’s a lot of power, but I don’t want to ask Bridget to do it, as she would have to change into her Elemental form. Once the body of Brakan is buried with nothing remaining except some blood, and probably some brain matter scattered around, I stand up.
Sara is looking at me with her eyes wide open. “Just who are you?”
“No one special,” I tell her with a smile. I turn to Leeha. “Did we want to check his tent?”
“Oh, Hell yeah,” Leeha says with a big grin as she rushes into the tent. “We get the spoils of battle!”
“Shall we, ladies?” I say to Bridget and Sara. Bridget squeals and runs to the tent and enters it as well.
“Just what are you playing at, human?” Sara asks me with mistrust in her eyes.
I stop before I enter the tent and look back at her. “What I am planning is to change the minds of the rest of these ‘humans’ on Boromour. As the girls said, I’m different. Take it as you like. But to me, what the humans are doing is wrong, and it’s my intention to change that. But first, I have something else here that needs to be done.” I wave around the camp. “This was just in the way.”
Sara looks at me with some trepidation, but as I walk into the tent, I hear her follow me. The tent is fairly large. There is carpet on the ground with more carpets hanging all over the place. No, not carpets, blankets. They aren’t as thick as the carpets. There is a bed on one side of the tent. Damn, Brakan lived in style. Leeha is already scrounging through a large wooden chest. She sees me and throws something my way. I catch it, and I hear the sound of coins jingling together.
“Oh? What’s this?” I ask her with a grin.
“Open it,” she replies with her own smile.
I open the drawstrings of the bag and check inside. What I see makes me laugh in delight. “Holy shit. Brakan was a rich one, wasn’t he?”
“Just means we are now too,” Leeha says, laughing with me. I put the bag of coins into my dimensional one.
“Oooooh!” I hear Bridget breathe in delight. I look her way, and she is holding another bag. She rushes over and, giggling, hands it to me. Looking inside, I chuckle.
“It seems that Brakan loved his stones too,” I say out loud. I take out a stone and hold it up. It’s uncut, but I can tell it’s a nice one. It’s red with what looks like a fire flame inside it. Whoa, they don’t have those on Earth!
“Oh, nice! That’s a Fire Opal,” Leeha says appreciatively.
“Worth a lot?” I ask her.
“You can say that. It looks uncut. So maybe 100 gold or so?”
“Jesus!” I say gleefully. “Sara. Catch,” I shout over to her, where she is standing on the other side of the tent looking inside a desk drawer. Her reflexes react without thinking, and she catches the Fire Opal I just threw at her.
She looks at it oddly, and then she looks at me. “For being a slave and now being free. Do what you want with it,” I tell her with a smile.
Her eyes widen in shock. “But this is worth a fortune!”
“Yep,” I tell her holding up the bag that Bridget had just passed me. “I have another ten or twelve of them in here, and some other stones as well. Besides, it wasn’t mine to start off with. But as they say where I’m from, to the victor go the spoils.”
“I’ve never heard of that saying,” Sara says, looking down at the Fire Opal in her open hand, but then she looks up at me and grins, which makes her face shine. “But I like it.” And she puts the opal in a pocket in the pants she is wearing.
I open my bag and shove the bag of stones into it. We keep rummaging around for the next half hour or so, but the rest of the stuff is pretty mediocre. Sara does find a nice dagger under the pillow that even has a leather strap to hold it around her leg. We tell her she can keep it. She spends some time admiring herself with it, and keeps taking it out and placing it back into the sheath. I notice as she continues to practice, she is getting faster and faster.
Chuckling, I look around the room to make sure we’ve checked everywhere. Some of the blankets are nice and if nothing else, they’d be helpful as pillows for me when I have the girls on either side of me. The cold we don’t need to worry about yet, since Bridget can make herself warm. Hey, maybe Leeha and I can both hug Bridget when it gets cold? Nah, I enjoy having them both hug me. Grabbing some, I start to roll them up until I have what I feel are the best four of them. I mean, I might as well get one for Sara.
Then, I look at the blanket and my bag’s pouch opening. Shit. Didn’t think that one through, did you, Alex? I guess I could try shoving it, right? So, grabbing one of the rolled-up blankets, which is the size of a fucking sleeping bag, I try to shove it into the bag, but all it does is push my pants down lower on my hip. Suddenly, I get a message which makes me grin like an idiot.
You are attempting to place an item into your bag. Do you wish to proceed?
Yes! I think. Without warning, the blanket is out of my hand, and just like that, it’s gone. That’s when I realize just how smart this thing is. I place my left hand inside my bag, and I touch one of the other blankets with my right and think of placing it into my bag.
You are attempting to place an item into your bag. Do you wish to proceed?
I can’t help it; I think yes and laugh out loud. “What?” Leeha asks me curiously from ac
ross the room. She is kneeling and looking through a pile of things.
“Nothing, I will tell you later,” I say, pointing to Sara, who is, thank God, facing away from me and throwing her new dagger at the backboard of the small bed in the tent.
Leeha shakes her head and just smiles at me, as she continues to look through the pile of stuff she has at her feet. I go back to doing the same thing I had been doing with two more blankets, and then I figure I honestly do like this carpet at my feet. I do the same thing with the carpet. By the time I am done, I have, I am pretty sure, eight blankets and four carpets. Now the tent is looking bare, or at least the floor is, as we can now see the sand that was previously underneath the carpet. Oops. I hope Sara overlooks that.
“Well, I can’t find anything else useful,” Leeha says.
“I am good too,” Bridget says, coming towards me.
“Oh, sorry,” Sara says, blushing. “I was practicing with the new dagger.”
“All good,” I tell her with a laugh. “Shall we head out?” I ask them all. Nodding, Bridget goes first, followed by Sara and Leeha, with me coming out last. Then I stop just as I step out.
“Give me a sec. I forgot something,” I tell them.
I rush back into the tent and walk towards the bed, and with a grin, I place my hand on the large pillow that is there. I notice there are wood chips all over it, thanks to Sara’s practicing, so I lift the pillow up and shake it off, and then think of placing it into my bag.
You are attempting to place an item into your bag. Do you wish to proceed?
With a happy chuckle, I think, oh fuck, yes please!
Once I’m done, I go to the exit and head into the morning air, feeling a breeze from the Lake of Ruins.
“Why are you grinning like that?” Leeha asks me suspiciously.
“Later,” I tell her, and I can’t help but laugh as she rolls her eyes at me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Gazing around the camp, I wonder if we should look inside the other tents, but I think with what we got we are good. I honestly don’t even think I’ll need the gold and the stones, as I don’t want to step into another City in my life if I can help it. Not with the way they looked at Leeha.
“Shall we go see what we came here for?” I say to Bridget and Leeha.
Nodding, we head towards the large Portal that is just across from Brakan’s large tent.
“Wait, you don’t want to go there!” cries Sara, suddenly apprehensive.
“Why not?” I ask her, turning to her and noticing that she has her dagger out.
“Because that thing is death,” she says ominously.
“I know,” I tell her. “Why do you think I cleared this camp? I can’t destroy it if everyone is here getting in my way.”
“What?” Sara blurts out in astonishment.
“Part of the plan for the rescue mission that freed you was to get to that,” I tell her, pointing to the large Portal. “I was going to come to free you all, anyhow. It’s just, my priorities changed.”
“But why?” Sara asks me, confusion showing on her face. “Why would you want to go to that evil thing?”
“To destroy it,” Leeha answers. “Do your people talk about the Horde Invasion?”
Shaking her head, Sara says, “No. What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Us Elves have an oral history that is ancient, that talks of a Horde invasion of Demons. It ended up wiping out a good number of races. The only reason the current races and monsters are still alive today is something happened during a major battle, where millions of races of Boromour gathered to fight. We only survived at the last minute because something made them turn back and return into their Portal.”
As Leeha was explaining, a frown appeared on Sara’s face. “Wait, that is similar to a story we have. Though we call it by a different name. We call it The Day the Demons Came. The story tells how we Felinis almost all died. How all the races of Boromour came together to fight, including the humans,” she says with a sneer. “But that’s just a story we tell our kids, isn’t it?” Sara asks, looking at the three of us.
I shake my head. “Nope. That thing is here to open a Portal to Hell, with a Demon Horde about to spew out.” I don’t tell her that it’s not really meant to reduce the number of people on Boromour, but rather to reduce the number of Demons on Hell, or the souls that have died and have gone to a Hell world.
“And you are just going to destroy it?” Sara says, sounding skeptical. “Anyone who has touched it has died. That human Fire Mage kept spouting to us that we should feel honored to give the magical power inside us to a Portal to the Heavens.”
“What?” I ask her in bewilderment.
“He kept saying he heard an Angelic voice telling him that if he opened the Portal, a group of Angels would come down and he would become one himself.”
“Yeah, no,” I say with anger. “Trust me. This is not a Portal to Heaven. This is a Portal to Hell. There might be Portals out there that bring you to Heaven, but I can tell you that this is not one of them.” And I only know this because of the Quest I got. I can’t exactly tell her that since I would sound nuts.
Shit, what was God playing at by sending voices to Brakan? You know, the more I hear about what is going on, the more I loathe God. I mean, why would he make people suffer like this? He might have his reasons, but as I am not a powerful God looking over millions of worlds, I can’t even imagine what they would be. I might be a pawn in his plans, but fuck, I hate seeing people suffer. I’m assuming if he gave me a Quest to destroy this Portal, it must means there’s a chance. Right? Why give me an impossible Quest? Games don’t work that way. Well, unless the game is broken.
I turn back to the Portal and eye it warily. How the hell am I going to destroy something that like? I can’t touch it, as I know very well. Peter was very adamant about that. Touching it equals death. But it’s not like me shooting 36 magical arrows at a time will do anything to it. Peter was very precise in his words. He said to overload it. But how do I overload it without touching it?
I walk forward with all three girls following me. Stopping about ten feet away from the large Portal, I start looking for any weak points I might be able to use. I start to circle it and realize that the back looks exactly like the front.
The girls, I guess, can tell I am thinking a mile a minute since they don’t ask me any questions. How would I go about this if I was on Earth? I would probably nuke the shit out of it. Travel thousands of miles away and send a nuke, if I had access to one. I mean, that works in the movies, right? The heroes somehow get a hold of some nukes and blow everything up. But there’s no access to nukes on Boromour.
I wonder if Fire can burn this thing. I turn to Sara. “Can you send a Fire Arrow at the Portal, please? I want to see if it does any damage.”
“Sure,” Sara says. She lifts her hand and a Fire Arrow appears next to her, and she sends it zipping off to hit the Portal. At least that’s what I had hoped would happen, but once it gets about a foot away from it, the arrow bounces off what looks like a force field. Not that I can see the force field. I just see her arrow explode in a thousand sparks.
Lifting my hand, I cast Earth, Earth Hammer, and I have six Stone Hammers hovering next to me, three on either side.
You have used the spell Earth Hammer. You have used 10 points of power.
I send them speeding towards the Portal, with the same results. They slam into a force field. I wonder if that is what made Brakan think he was accomplishing something by feeding someone with magic to the Portal. The shield would destroy them, but in the process, maybe the magic from the now-dead Mage caused the Portal to hum, and he thought that meant it was charging it? Fuck, I should have kept him alive, but in order to gain access to this Portal I needed his followers to leave, and they wouldn’t have left if he was still around. Hindsight is shit, and I suck at it. Oh well.
Maybe I can bury it? Can I use Earth to bury it so that it can’t open? But the Horde would most
likely dig their way out. That might delay them, but for how long? No. The Quest said to destroy the Portal to stop the invasion, so that’s what I have to do.
“I would kill for some dynamite!” I shout in irritation.
“What’s dynamite?” Leeha asks me curiously. That’s when I notice the word had come out in English.
“It’s something that is used to make a large explosion. If I was to say, wrap this thing with it,” I point to the Portal, “it would be destroyed. I think. However, I am not sure since it seems to have a shield around it. Peter said I needed to overload it. Even If I had dynamite, I would need a ton. A nuclear bomb would be better, but that causes radiation. I would prefer a fusion bomb, but then this whole Lake would disappear as well, and probably the surrounding area for a good 50 miles.”
“Hmm,” Leeha says hesitantly. “You’re throwing words around again,” she continues, looking at Sara pointedly.
“Crap. Yeah, sorry about that. I just wish there was a way to touch that thing and pump magic into it to overload it. But the second I touch it, I’m dead, just like all the other Mages that Brakan has thrown at it. You saw the bodies, the fear on their faces? It doesn’t look like they went peacefully.”
“What if I was to touch it?” Bridget says suddenly.
I turn to Bridget and look at her keenly. “You think that because of what you are, that you can survive?”
“Well, it feeds off a Mage’s magic, correct?”
“And since your magic comes from me, you think it won’t affect you?” I say, working it through.
“What are you both talking about?” Sara asks suspiciously.
I turn to her and think, Mind, Sleep for one hour, and she falls sideways and hits the sandy beach, out cold.
You have used a Spell Command. You have used 1000 points of power.
Bridget and Leeha look at me with disapproval on their faces. “What? I will make it up to her,” I tell them defensively.
“I am sure you will,” Leeha says with a snicker, leering at me.
“I needed to talk out loud and having to explain everything to her right now would be a pain. Now,” I say, turning back to Bridget. “You think that if you touch the Portal, I can push power through you?”
