Her dark hood didn't even turn in my direction when I told her to get away, she simply obeyed first and looked after.
I also ran away with her and when I decided I was distant enough, I stopped to create new fire morbs. Melkier left the portal shortly after me and followed along.
Besides the lone guard, there were very few people nearby. Even the ghoul vendor had disappeared with all his merchandise. From what I'd read, in Margs Market you never stood to watch a fight; it was too easy for it to escalate and kill you. Not only that, although guardsmen were usually lazy bastards, when they did involve themselves in trouble, they killed mercilessly without caring if you were guilty or innocent.
Robert came out of the portal but to my surprise there was no tornado around him. There were two morbs floating above his head though, and he immediately cast the tornado spell again.
It was too late.
Daggers first threw two of her new throwing knives at the morbs, destroying them, then became a black blur, getting to Robert and stabbing him. Melkier whistled.
Unfortunately, Robert wasn't affected enough to forget to close the portal, and the purple entrance to the pocket dimension disappeared, cutting us off from the remaining zombies.
My fireballs flew. I didn't use arrows because I couldn't change their directions midway and both Robert and Daggers were moving like crazy.
He fought using his two knives and was clearly a superior fighter to Daggers. However, my spells were enough to offset the balance just slightly in her favor. She didn't need much more than that.
Robert was bleeding badly from his neck and breathing heavily. More than once, he tried to create a morb but even when successful, Daggers simply destroyed it.
Finally, the moment I had been dreading came and he teleported some twenty meters away from Daggers.
Her shadow skill was on cooldown and although she tried to throw daggers at his new morbs, this time he was ready for it and deflected them with his own weapons. All she could do was run to him.
It was enough time for him to create the tornado around him. I began to throw fireballs at it but he was already turning to walk away. Even if he apparently couldn't run while in that state, the city guard probably wouldn't take long to come. And he could create more wind morbs while inside the tornado in preparation for when the current tornado gave out.
I stopped speaking when I saw Daggers grab a heavy-looking metal stall and run with it at the tornado.
Thanks to Valia's realistic physics, which I had complained about earlier, she didn't get blown away by the wind. Instead, she hit the unsuspecting Robert right in the back of his head with the stall. The spell vanished and he yelled in pain while collapsing to the ground. Daggers jabbed her two blades into his eyes, then proceeded to stab the defenseless guy on the ground.
Blood went everywhere and in a few seconds, he wasn't moving anymore. She didn't stop though, cutting his head off to prevent him from ever being revived.
That was the end of Robert, the Great.
I was just as dumbfounded. Even if I had seen Daggers in action before, it was never boring.
Daggers became translucent and ran away. The nearby guard was even more ashen than before.
A quick search of Robert's body revealed a ring and a few other knives but nothing else.
More expensive than enchanted bags were the spatial rings. They were a little more unstable and it took a few seconds to move stuff in and out of it but they could hold much more and even better, they negated the weight of whatever was inside.
Low-Quality Spatial Ring
» Drop chance: 3%
» Slots: 100 (48 used - 52 free)
» Max stack per slot: 20
» Weight reduction: 100%
It was a low-quality one so it had a high drop chance. The reason I could take it from Robert's body wasn't luck. Robert was an NPC and Daggers had cut his head off; there was no way for him to revive so there was no 'soul' for the ring to attach to.
As soon as I put it on my finger, I got a message.
The Low-Quality Spatial Ring is now linked to your soul.
This meant it was now considered mine. Good. Next, I willed it to show what was inside.
Money: 216g 72s 98c
Items:
» 20 High-Quality Tarsteel Knife
» 4 Gourmet Burgers
» 17 water bottles
» 1 Epic Map
...
» 1 Spatial Key
Jackpot! The money was great and, more importantly, the map was there. Sadly, I didn't have any time to check all the loot now. I willed the spatial key to appear in my hand, and after a couple seconds, a violet crystal key materialized. I got close enough to the place I remembered the portal to be, then willed the spatial lock to open.
The purple portal appeared and everyone came out.
As if in on cue, I heard a horn not too far from me and the sound of hundreds of people marching my way.
Dear universe, I thought, I know you hate me, but please, pretty please, don't let me suffer a love triangle between Bear, Daggers, and Ted.
"We don't run, ugly-face!" Bear yelled. "We heroically retreat from the horde of demons after killing one of their generals."
"Yeah!" All the remaining zombies yelled in response.
Idiots. Every one of them.
We got to the gate and met around twenty defenders, half of which were on the walls and could either shoot arrows or spells at us from above. We engaged the men in plate armor at ground level as well as we could.
I became a dedicated healer and Bear became my meat shield.
The sounds of horns and people marching behind me had become louder but it thankfully didn't take long for Daggers to get the gates open. The rest of us ran through the entrance tunnel arriving safely on the other side.
She fell into my arms like a rock and we both hit the ground hard. She lost more than half her health but survived, while I only lost about a hundred HP.
As Bear had said, like heroes being chased by a demon horde after defeating their general, we escaped.
Not that I would ever let Bear know I had thought that.
We ran like crazy. After a few hours, our stamina had dropped to dangerously low levels but the guardsmen hadn't continued the chase.
It made sense. We had killed only
five of their men and only after they had attacked Daggers first. For all they knew, we had more Blackguards waiting outside the city and a disorganized chase of people of unknown power wasn't a smart thing to do.
The way Daggers had disposed of Robert, the ex-Great — now the Dead — had probably contributed to making them wary of us, as well.
There were no problems on the way back to Manhart except for one: Melkier wasn't as ignorant as I hoped and had recognized the spatial ring.
I was forced to reveal the ring's contents to everyone by using the game's system to share the information with them, and we agreed to wait for everyone to be back together before deciding on how to split things between us. I also added Robert's leather armor and spear to the ring's storage.
Whatever they might say though, I sure as hell wouldn't be giving the ring up. It was a five hundred gold item, and too convenient at that. If I had to fight them for it, I would.
I love rings, after all.
The alien thought invaded my mind as if it had been mine. It seemed that the spider ring was once again trying to influence me.
I had decided to sell it to Manhart, but I wasn't so sure now. The ring was a mystery and the lich had already sent me on a nearly suicidal mission. Even if he was a truthseer and everything he swore had to be truth, I couldn't trust him to pay a fair value for the ring. The concept of 'truth' in the game was way too flexible.
I'd have to find another way to get rid of it. The Surface world had completely honest merchant NPCs and I would have to get to the Surface eventually if I wanted to destroy Valia from the inside. The spider ring could wait.
Yes! I'll conquer the Underworld, then I'll conquer the Surface! I'll be Valia's Emperor!
Suffering annoying alien thoughts in my mind, I took the time to check the exclamation point buttons at the right edge of my vision.
Quest: Steal from Robert, the Great
F- rank
You have the map. Go back to Manhart and give it to him.
The rank of quests could change when they were updated, it depended on the difficulty of the remaining steps. The reward was supposedly calculated based on the hardest task though, which was only fair.
This one had just been downgraded from an A minus, to an F minus rank now that all I needed to do was bring the map to Manhart.
Healer trait increased to 2 (+1)
You're set on the ways of healing, mending people when they need it the most.
» +2% healing effectiveness
» Minimum extra healing: +2 HP
Trait unlocked: Sharpshooter
After continuous usage of a bow, you now see yourself as a long-range fighter first and swordsman second.
» +1 dexterity when using a long-ranged weapon
Healer. I had become a better healer.
Thanks a lot, game.
Right, it wasn't enough to make me hear the spider ring, I had to also hear Zenhit's sarcasm in my mind.
Manhart's cave couldn't have been farther away.
* * *
We got to the lich's cave much faster than to Margs Market, after only a single day of running and stopping to recover stamina.
It was now around three AM on the seventh day since I had logged back into the game. Manhart had told me I could be done with his quests in two weeks. If his next mission also took a week, his estimate would be correct.
Not that I trusted it for a single second.
What I wanted to do was get in the cave and kick his skull off of his body, then piss on it.
What I did was put a slightly upset expression on my face and enter the cave alone.
"Manhart," I said with the right amount of anger in my voice. Too much and he would get too upset at me. Too little and he would have thought he didn't owe me anything. I had to show just the right amount of annoyance or I wouldn't get anything out of being tricked.
He was sitting in the same chair as before, looking at more stacks of paper. I wondered what the hell could be written in them.
"Alas, he returns. Again." He looked at me. "Do you have the map?"
"Damn right I have the map!" I half-yelled and crossed my arms. "And I got you fifty Travelers as recruits. And what do I get in return? A goddamn trap!"
I thought he would try to defuse the situation somehow but instead he nodded his head. "And for that I'll teach you morb compounding, an intermediate magic technique which an Unbound would find no one else to teach him in the entire Underworld. I swear on that."
And just like that, he had tried to cheat me again.
Morb compounding was the act of fusing more than one morb together to cast a spell, just like Robert had done. It might be useful for NPCs to learn it beforehand, but players didn't need it; when we unlocked a spell that required compounding, it would work out by itself.
Worse still, by how quickly he had said it, he had probably thought about it beforehand and considered me an idiot that would take that deal.
My face got uglier and I bluffed. "Manhart. I thought we could work together. But I see now that you have no respect for your chosen General. It's time we parted ways."
He probably hadn't been expecting that because he took a long time to answer.
"Very well. As reparations for tricking you, I'll give you this." He took one of his necklaces off, one with a black star medallion, and tossed at me.
Dark Star Necklace
Rare
An item given to acolytes when they become official members of the Dark Cultists.
» +10% to darkness element effectiveness
I tossed it right back at him. "Nice try. An item that will identify me as a member of an unknown organization and probably set me as a target for all the enemies these Dark Cultists might have."
That I was sure as hell he hadn't been expecting because he opened his jaws and said nothing for a while.
"What do you want?" He asked eventually.
"Give me passage to Ter'nodril now and I'll do your second quest when I come back from there."
"Impossible," he said instantly. "You shouldn't even go there."
I sniffed. "What I should or shouldn't do is none of your concern. We have a deal."
"We do," he said reluctantly. "But I'll only help you get there after the second quest."
Well, it had been worth a try. "Gravity magic," I said.
"After the second quest, too," he said.
I had to give it to him, he knew how to keep me in his services. I didn't know what items he had, so it made it hard to ask for them. Therefore, I would settle for the next best thing; money.
"I want a thousand gold coins," I said. "And information."
The flames in his eyes flickered in a way that made me think he was laughing at me in an unkind way.
"You don't deserve that much money," he replied. "Tell me what you want to know and depending on the cost of such information, I'll give you a few extra gold coins."
It was a commitment at least. He could've just said no, since I had already completed his quest anyway.
"Okay," I said. "What do you know about the Fallen Spider Queen?"
His eye-flames flickered in a hundred different ways in a few seconds before settling on amusement. "You found her ring."
Shit.
"What ring?" I couldn't directly lie to him but deflecting wasn't impossible.
He didn't answer me but got up from his chair, put his hands behind his back, and started to pace around the room instead.
"I'll tell you what you want to know," he said with a solemn voice, "but you won't receive any gold from me. What I'm about to say is known only to very few circles and most of them are forbidden to teach it to outsiders. I swear on that."
"Huh?" The sudden change in Manhart unsettled me. "Why can you teach it to me?"
"Because I'm a Paladin of Ilishia. I was chosen to be her champion and it comes with both power and responsibilities. Among other things, it allows me to pass o
n any knowledge at my own discretion. Paladins are known through all Valia as the best keepers of knowledge."
So, it wasn't bad character design that had made him change his attitude like that. That's what Manhart really was, at his core: a dutiful paladin. Or so he wanted me to think.
"Alright. Speak." I said.
"In time immemorial," he began with a weird ethereal voice, "in a war fought for forgotten reasons, the gods battled each other. The Mother didn't like it and punished those who started the war. They fell from the Mother's grace and became the Fallen gods, forbidden from ever leaving Valia.
"You must understand that gods love traveling through the universe. Being confined to a single world is one of the greatest punishments for them. Most of them understood how much they had angered the Mother upon receiving punishment and settled in, waiting for her forgiveness. However, some of them thought they had been wronged and began to scheme against her.
"It's said that the Mother had never been so disappointed in her entire existence. Still, she loved her children and couldn't bear to destroy them. She further punished those scheming gods to be locked in objects of power. They'd only be able to interact with the world through vessels who found these objects. Your Fallen Spider-God Ring is one such object."
It did fit what I knew about Valia's lore but there was a huge hole in the story.
"A god in the ring? Really?" I said. "The Fallen Spider Queen didn't seem that godly to me."
"Of course not," he replied. "The Queen was too young and the original power of her body was too low. She wasn't the complete, matured, incarnation of the Spider God, only a weak vessel. If enough time had passed without the Power Hunters finding her, even Ter'nodril could be lost."
"Power Hunters?" I didn't recognize that term.
"They claim the objects of power are too dangerous a threat to Valia and aim to find and lock them away," Manhart explained. "I suggest you don't let them know you have the ring with you; they believe it leaves a taint in the soul that only death can cure."
Great. Power Hunters could appear at any time and try to kill me. Just what I needed.
Unbound Deathlord: Obliteration (The Unbound Deathlord Series Book 2) Page 11
